LITTLE MOVIES now available online at:

http://jupiter.ucsd.edu/~manovich/little-movies

Lev Manovich
About "Little Movies" (1997)

"Little Movies" is a lyrical and theoretical project about the
aesthetics of digital cinema, and a eulogy to its earliest form –
QuickTime. Beginning with the supposition that every new medium relies
on the content of previous media, "Little Movies" features key moments
in the history of cinema as its logical subject.

As time passes, the medium becomes the message, that is, the "look,"
more than the content of any media technology of the past is what
lingers on. "Little Movies" reads digital media of the 1990's from a
hypothetical future, foregrounding its basic properties: the pixel, the
computer screen, the scanlines. In the early 1890's the public
patronized Kinescope parlors where peep-hole machines presented them
with the latest marvel – tiny moving photographs arranged in short
loops. Exactly a hundred years later, we are equally fascinated with
tiny QuickTime movies – the precursor of digital cinema still to come.
Drawing a parallel between these two historical moments, the "Little
Movies" are explicitly modeled after Kinetoscope films: they are also
short loops.

The project was begun in 1994 when the World Wide Web was just beginning
to gain mass exposure. From the beginning, my intention was to create
cinema for the Net. I wanted to turn the network limitations into a new
aesthetic. Is it possible to create films with the resolution of 1
pixel? Is it possible to have a meaningful and an emotional experience
under 1 MG in size?