Between 1919 and 1927 Mary Hallock-Greenewalt (1871 1951) filed eleven patents, primarily containing innovations in electrical lighting, while performing as a piano soloist with both the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh symphony orchestras. Some of these patents describe complex systems of electrically switched lights, remote controlled motors that can switch filters and change gobos in lamps, and a central switching board capable of manipulating all the lamps at the same time. Her various patents were formal descriptions of the elements (including a system of notation based on scores for music) that created a new, technological art form. These components were all created to produce the carefully orchestrated graduations of colored light that are the foundation of her system of visual music, which she named Nourathara combination of Arabic words meaning essence of light.
I was looking at the newest Adobe Photoshop software the other day and noticed that it does not seem to support the Adobe file format known as "FLM" or film strip. I guess Adobe only wants people to make video as video, (the ability to make video changes in the same way you can with a film strip isn't video enough I guess), and all the weirdness that the .flm format offered were just too non-commercial. Too bad. I'm glad I still have my obsolete software.
Once again this shows how the obsolete just has more options and abilities than then most recent, top-of-the-line pro software: afterall, the pro software is set-up so you can do things weird.
Here is an example of agnotism: this news story makes it clear the extent to which powerful organizations will use their money and connections to attack, undermine and discredit their critics.
The term absolute film differentiates the fully abstract films produced in Germany from the related, also abstract films, produced in Paris such as Ballet Mchanique. Both groups of work are commonly grouped together as Dada cinema. This collection of films by Walther Ruttmann, Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling are the oldest fully abstract motion pictures still known to survive. While all lived in Germany and produced their films at around the same time, they did not constitute a group or movement. The first productions by Ruttmann date to the years following the end of World War I, during the lead up to the onset of the German hyperinflation following the collapse of the Reichsmark in July 1922.
