Friday, January 2, 2004
Kuleshov effect: meaning is too contextual for metadata
Danah Boyd has posted an interesting rumination on the "Kuleshov Effect," wherein a still image is freighted with opposite emotions by adding different soundtracks to it. The most interesting question this raises for me is: how can we expect "accurate" tagging of the subjective content of an artistic work ("Happy boy," "Pretty dog") when there are such fundamental conditionals dependent on context?
Lev Kuleshov was a Russian filmmaker. Because of the political climate of Russia, he was left without access to actual film. Instead, he constructed films by splicing film and telling his story in a collage-esque manner. In addition to his style of film, he's known for something called the Kuleshov Experiment. In this experiment, an image of a man's face is shown juxtapositioned with various other images immediately following. Viewers thought that the man's emotion changed even though it is exactly the same shot.Link
posted by Cory Doctorow at 02:22:33 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments
