Lev Manovich and Andreas Kratky have completed Soft Cinema, a work at the intersection of database forms and film, which generates films algorithmically from a database of narrative elements, visuals, sounds, etc. The “upstream” motion from newer forms to older ones – the remediation of vidoegame tropes back into film, for example – had largely been worked along the surface of the texts, by evoking the experiential logics of the new media into onto the experience of film (e.g., repetition and learning in Run Lola Run).

And of course, video games have drawn on cinematic methods (often problematically, sometimes well); to redraw cinema on the material basis of new media – on algorithms and databases – is another matter.

MIT Press is releasing the book + DVD; also, this Saturday, at the Chelsea Art Museum in Manhatten, the release presentation (execution?) of the work will be accompanied by a panel. I’m not going to be able to go, unfortunately, but it looks intriguing..

There’s more information at the soft cinema site.