About Research Film Studio

The UCHV Research Film Studio offers an opportunity for Princeton University students (Campus Productions) and faculty (Local Spirit Initiative) to develop their research ideas through short films as well as other publications of immersive and mixed media and supports the students’ coursework for Kiss’s studio classes. The Research Film Studio regularly invites award-winning film directors for the Princeton students and professors to learn about the art of filmmaking.

RFS

What is Lorem Ipsum?

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

The Film Forum started in the fall of 2005. It is dedicated to the discussion of films that not only delight us in the spectacular ways cinema most naturally does but also leave us puzzled, challenged, unsettled, or even irritated.

What is Lorem Ipsum?

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry’s standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

Visit Site

In 2018, Erika Kiss, Sigrid Adriaenssens, Chris Tully and John Higgins launched a faculty initiative in Princeton University that recognizes the increasing importance and opportunities of sensory learning, research and teaching through film and digital media. The first projects of the Local Spirit Initiative include co-teaching ‘Environmental Film Studies’ a Princeton course designed by Erika Kiss and the development of short research films and other immersive and mixed media teaching aid. Several award-winning film directors, who visited our campus, advise the faculty group’s filmmaking.

RFS Courses

This course uncovers the roots of racial injustice in Hollywood; the secret, but cardinal role Woodrow Wilson played in Hollywood.

The responsibility of film studies is to assist this creative struggle with sophisticated and openminded film curation and canon formation

Together with guest professors and filmmakers, we will study the interface of environmental and film studies through examples from masterpieces of cinema and our own short research film exercises.

Campus Productions

Campus Productions is the student chapter of the Research Film Studio that grew out of an extracurricular filmmaking workshop co-taught by the award-winning director, Bence Fliegauf and Princeton professor, Erika Kiss in the fall of 2019.

Angelus Novus

TIME, SPACE, EXISTENCE EXHIBITION 2023
Palazzo Mora, Venice, Italy

Quantum-Cinematic Storytelling via 360-degree Filmmaking

The conventional languages of verbal and even geometrical representation are not suited to communicate quantum thinking in a perspicuous and persuasive manner. Pure quantum states have no external interactions and no sense for the direction of time therefore cannot be conceptualized from a single fixed-point perspective. Single fixed point of view emerges from observing the tangible functionalism of classical physical systems. Quantum thinking, however, requires the imagination to give up the single fixed perspective of the classical observer and assume a dynamic, 360-degree, non-anthropomorphic, or environmental perspective to break with the common sense and tangible object fetishism habitual to the mind and use our imagination counterintuitively to be able to capture systems of non-tangible relationality.

What we need for quantum thinking is the new architectonic rhetoric of 360-degree filmmaking that allows environmental perspective and relational and non-directional spatial-temporal conceptions.  Our research film communicates concepts of quantum physics perspicuously and persuasively not only between experts but also from experts to the public. The innovative virtual reality filmmaking will use cinematic storytelling based upon architectonic-geometrical as opposed to verbal-conceptual thinking. Our architectonic dramaturgy is drawn from the dramatic staging of scientific demonstrations, experiments and dramatic animation of digital simulations of quantum phenomena.

ANGELUS NOVUS – Études for Cupola in Instinct and Algorithm

Inspired by Klee’s iconic angel of innovation and Brunelleschi’s legendary dome of the Santa Maria del Fiore, the Form Finding Lab and the UCHV Research Film Studio of Princeton University together with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill will present an installation of a study on cupola-assembly with a projected cinematic fresco designed to assist sensory learning about architectonic invention.

Klee’s Angelus Novus (1919) breaks with the classical object-oriented conception of space bound by the orthogonal standard of fixed single point perspective. Klee’s angel of innovation – being plunged into the unbound space-time continuum – is condemned to incessant renewal by balancing between biological (mimetic) and machine intelligence (technē) as depicted by the three overlapping yet transparent optical planes each respectively outlining the human form, a bird and an airplane.

Our exhibition will show that architectonic invention in the interface of biological and artificial intelligence – or instinct and algorithm – does not only drive evolutionary adaptation to the shared spatial-temporal conditions of our existence but is also ultimately responsible for shaping our common sense that seeks stability in architectonic – geometrical and conceptual – patterns in an incessantly readjusting balancing act while in movement.

The architectonic invention of the cupola, for example, must have contributed to the conceptual challenge that slowly upturned the reassuring common sense knowledge that the Earth was as flat as the floor of one’s home. The full dome provides human imagination sensory assistance to contemplate the spherical framing of human existence with no fixed, orthogonally framed perspective. The dome instead intimates a higher order of dynamic balance in a curved grid. Our installation in the garden of Palazzo Mora will make perspicuous for our audience the architectonic master-trope of Brunelleschi’s self-balancing cupola that not only adapts to gravity but conquers it by implying its architectonic opposite: levity. We will install a design-trope of a self-balancing dome adapted to the space of the palazzo’s garden as an opportunity for deep spatial sensory learning.

Architectonic innovation can never stop recreating the sensus communis in a reliably disciplinary manner in order to reflect the ever-extending scientific understanding of the spatial-temporal articulation of our shared home, the universe. This is why our interdisciplinary Princeton University research group will present our “interthinking” about the adaptive and constitutive evolution of architectonic invention in the medium of a cinematic fresco projected on a partial dome structure. The fresco-film will juxtapose the scientific story about the architectonic creation of the early universe with the story about the invention of the self-balancing masonry dome.

The Curious Adventures of William Monroe Trotter

A Research Film Studio Production awarded by grant from Princeton Histories Fund

Home Beyond Good and Evil

Walter Benjamin, Thesis on the History of Philosophy

A Local Spirit – Research Film Studio Production.
Erika Kiss, Sigrid Adriaenssen, Chris Tully, John Higgins,

Democratizing Film – with John Nein and Carlo Chatrian

RFS Students' Work Collection