The Digital Image and Reality: Affect, Metaphysics and Post-Cinema 9789048538652

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The Digital Image and Reality

The Digital Image and Reality Affect, Metaphysics, and Post-Cinema

Dan Strutt

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Studio Aszyk, London. Cover design: Kok Korpershoek, Amsterdam Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6298 713 5 e-isbn 978 90 4853 865 2 doi 10.5117/9789462987135 nur 670 © D. Strutt / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2019 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

Contents Acknowledgements

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1. Cinema’s Foundational Frissons The Arrival of the Digital Image at the Station A Futurist Cinema of Attractions What is Post about Post-Cinema? But is it Art? From Cine-thinking to Digi-thinking Technology and Reality

9 9 13 21 26 30 34

2. The Affective Synthesis of Reality by Digital Images A Great Evolution A Question of Cause and Responsibility Cinema and Affection Passive Synthesis and the Spiritual Automaton Do We Need a New ‘Digital’ Image Type – A ‘Cinema 3’? The Digital Revealing of Reality Interstellar’s Ontological Revealing The Digital Pharmakon Plasticity and Politics

41 42 44 48 51 58 60 64 67 72

3. ‘A Digital Frontier to Reshape the Human Condition’: Virtual Border Spaces and Affective Embodiment in Tron and Enter the Void 79 Overcoming Spatial Realism 83 Digital Emergence 85 Tron: Legacy 90 Enter the Void 94 Troubling the Threshold 97 The Digital Border Zone and Cinematic Ethics 101 Signs of Art at the Limits of Humanity 105 Conclusion 109

4. Dynamic Digital Spaces, Bodies, and Forces 113 ‘Moving’ Pictures: Scientific vs. Aesthetic Truths 118 Formal Dynamics of the Digital Image 123 Movement, Space, and Kinaesthesis 131 The Body in Movement: Digital Dance 136 The Kinetic Dynamism of the Epic Digital Battle Scene 143 The Digital Neo-Baroque 148 Rethinking Cinema through Digital 3D 151 Conclusion 154 5. Reality Sutures, Simulation, and Digital Realism The Malleable Mediated Mind Rethinking Suture Resemblance and the Mimetic Faculty Metaphor and Embodied Simulation Kinetic Synaesthesia and the Photographic Image Virtuality, Plasticity, and Play Avatar and Digital Naturalism Source Code and the Quantum Mind

159 163 167 172 174 177 184 188 193

6. A Digital Nihilism: Ethical Reflections 199 Autonomous Art and the Disappearance of Utopia 202 ‘A Business, a Pornography, a Hitlerism’ 205 The Everyday Art Object of Industrial Design 208 Bernard Stiegler’s Ethical Prognosis 211 ‘A Chaotic Scribble’ 214 The Active Subject in Digitality 219 Digital Nihilism and Ontological Plasticity 221 Conclusion 223 Bibliography 227 Index 241

Acknowledgements This text has been a labour of love for many years spent in research and study at Goldsmiths and thus I have several people to thank: those who have carried me through a process which can, at times, be very isolating; and those who have directly influenced the development of the ideas that I present. First of all I need to thank Rachel Moore and Pasi Väliaho, the former who championed me through the AHRC funding process some 10 years ago, and both of whom gave early shape and focus to my intellectual ambitions through their careful supervision and encouragement. I’ll also be eternally grateful to Angela McRobbie, who has been my patron and advocate for some 15 years now, and who has always had my back both intellectually and professionally. I’d like to give credit also to Patricia Pisters and Luciana Parisi, who bewildered me with their critique back in 2013, and yet who ultimately helped me realise the strength of my own work. More recently, Sean Cubitt and James Burton have generously given valuable feedback toward writing this final version, offering support which has buoyed me to the finishing line. Finally, I’d like to thank Lisa Blackman, who has looked out for me as a friend as well as a mentor, and who has ensured my stability at Goldsmiths in a way that has been absolutely invaluable throughout the writing process.

1.

Cinema’s Foundational Frissons Dan Strutt Abstract This introduction lays out the coordinates of the book’s main philosophical contention – that the world is perceived and felt to be different under a general condition of digitality as a form of ‘digi-thinking’. It establish a synergy between digital visual media and theoretical physics and suggest that current screen culture, rather than being only orientated to spectacle, actually equips us with new skills in perception for a world of experience which is increasingly virtualised. The chapter refers to a set of embodied effects specific to the digital image; of flying, floating, swarming, morphing, and glitching, within the context of recent cinematic content such as Interstellar (2014) to set the scene of a contemporary digital imaginary. Keywords: Post-Cinema, Futurism, Cinema of Attractions, Deleuze, Heidegger, Ontology

The transition from the diegesis of the film to the social realm of the multiplex, even the emergence from video or DVD viewing to the familial space of the living room, is not without a certain frisson. The border state too has its significance, especially in the diminution of intensity coupled with a heightened alertness to whatever quirky events might occur outside the theatre. An aura of wholeness persists, fading, as you make your way home. (Cubitt, 2005, p. 269)

The Arrival of the Digital Image at the Station As many accounts would have it, the first screening of the Lumière brothers’ film L’a rrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat in 1895 had quite the impact on the audience. Indeed, it has been called cinema’s founding myth, that the audience, overwhelmed by the apparent reality of a full-size

Strutt, D., The Digital Image and Reality. Affect, Metaphysics, and Post-Cinema, Amsterdam University Press, 2019 doi 10.5117/9789462987135_ch01

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train rolling towards them, screamed and ran to the back of the room.1 In many ways, one can easily imagine this naïve group of ordinary people, whose prior knowledge of reality could only be accounted for by natural perception, suddenly confronted by a large image which they simply could not appropriate into their understanding of the way the world works. This ‘virtual’ reality of cinema, apparently indiscernible from the real, thus induced shock, astonishment, and panic as they scrambled to get away from the massive moving object that would surely crush them. We can see that their reality, in this moment, was fundamentally challenged and changed. Leaving the screening that day, they had to live in a new world in which such images exist; in which both the nature of images, and the nature of reality, are transformed, such that new skills in cognition/perception must be adopted to discern the difference. In some small way, their consciousness had evolved. Of course, as has been well established, the above story is apocryphal, the original mythology – perhaps marketing strategy – of the transcendent power of cinema (it is possible that this film was not even part of the Lumières’s first screening, and was not in fact shown until 1896). Indeed, contrary to the image conjured of a train accelerating directly toward the audience as if about to enter the room, the train glides off to the left of the screen before calmly pulling to a halt (without anything like the direct audience confrontationalism of, for instance, James Williamson’s The Big Swallow from 1901). However, whether true or not, this event’s myth status does not mean that it does not resonate with a more fundamental truth about media. There is no doubt that some novel kind of conscious experience occurs when confronted by a new media form. However, this need not be the outright shock or astonishment of an earth-shattering, terror-inducing tectonic shift in cognisance, but something more like, as Sean Cubitt puts it in the opening quotation of this book, ‘a certain frisson’. Even so, such moments make a difference. As intensity fades, and as we leave the screen space and return to the more familiar environment of the streets and our homes, we quietly and unconsciously adjust our realities to what we have experienced. The train here becomes an apt metaphor for the challenge to consciousness that emergent media technologies present. First, the train is cinema 1 Both Tom Gunning (1990) and Stephen Bottomore (2000) examine various reports of audience reactions to early film in an attempt to document what Gunning calls a ‘myth of origin’, also known as the ‘train effect’, after the alleged shock reaction of viewers to the Lumières’s film.

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itself; later, it is cinematic sound; then, it is colour; and, even later, it is 3D. The train is then digital – literally in the opening scene of Martin Scorcese’s Hugo (in Digital 3D), as both an homage to, and cinematic in-joke about, this myth of origin (see Elsaesser, 2013). As Timothy Scott Barker describes in Time and the Digital (2012), the arrival of the actual locomotive technology in industrial society (not yet as metaphor, nor as image) habitually altered notions of time and space. Not only did it collapse travel distance and duration, but also perceptually framed, through the train window, a new spatio-temporal understanding – a kind of incipient proto-cinema. For Barker, the train is a ‘technological event’ like the telephone, television, digital networks, and digital image production – a technology which fundamentally alters human experience by restructuring communication, and which ‘not only makes the unseen seen, but adds another sensory object to our experience of the world, changing the way we think about our visual reality and also about movement and time’ (ibid, p. 8).2 These events do not distance us from reality, but rather reconfigure our metaphysical consciousness such that reality is ‘mediated’ differently. This ‘event’ – the cinematic image of a train arriving at a station, albeit apocryphally, brought a new perceptual experience to the modern age, of an object moving through perspectival space, yet one that is not actually physically present. In the moments afterwards, the spectator must have become aware, not only of the primary non-presence of train, but also of the presence and functionality of the screen and projector which yielded this illusory effect. The cinematic apparatus here presented its own spatial and temporal reality which had to be immediately incorporated into habitual modes of perception and understanding. This may not have occurred as a traumatic shock to the system, but rather a kind of droll surprise – a sharp intake of breath, a raised eyebrow. Sueng Hoon Jeong, in his Cinematic Interfaces, reflects on this event as the origin, not only of a virtual reality, but also of a fundamental tension of embodiment at the interface of the screen. He notes: ‘Lumière’s first train film suggests that cinema might have come into being through a kind of intercourse between the self-destructive and self-defensive power of the screen’ (2013, p. 91). He suggests that the cinematic image is originally about this flickering tension between our embodied sense of the reality within the screen (a suturing effect), our awareness of the illusory apparatus (desuturing), and, at the same time, the birth of a primal fantasy, or perverse 2 The event for Barker is understood via Badiou – defined as a cluster of circumstances resulting in a ‘rupture in Being’ and a subsequent re-centring of our subjective relation to truth (2012).

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desire, for penetration ‘into and through’ this interface. This is an ontological tension – one that plays along the boundary of our consciousness of the different domains of reality which we experience. As with the other examples of this interface-breach that Jeong gives – of Sadako climbing through the TV screen in the horrif ic climax to Ringu (Hideo Nakata, 1998), or the slicing of the eyeball as a de-suturing slash through the screen/ retina in Un Chien Andalou (Dali and Buñuel, 1929) – the feeling that the train might burst through the screen forms an original ontological sublime, both pleasurable and disturbing in equal measure, and which continues to this day to stimulate thought about objective and subjective metaphysical realities. From the origins of cinema we then move to the object of this book – to the post-cinematic image (a complex of notions of contemporary images that are both continuous and discontinuous with 20th-century film theory) and to a set of images more specifically brought about by the digital – by digital processes, on digital screens, and with digital themes. These are images which institute new ontological tensions and pleasures, while perhaps leaving the original ones intact, or alternatively re-versioning or ‘re-launching’ them (as we see in the conclusion to Chapter Two). In the films which I have explored in the writing of this book, such as Source Code (dir. Duncan Jones, 2011), Avatar (dir. James Cameron, 2009), and Interstellar (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2014), as well as in digital imagery beyond narrative film form and outside the media mainstream, we have ‘events’ that stand for the emergence of a different technological apparatus (and interface), and thus a new technological condition that, like the train arriving at the station, synthesises a distinct mode of ‘being-in-the-world’ (a Heideggerian holistic mode of thinking, seeing, and feeling ourselves within a tangible reality). This ‘synthesis’ does not necessarily occur in a moment of bodily violence, terror, or erotic arousal (potentially horrific for Žižek [1989]; potentially an ecstatic, masochistic ‘passionate abandonment’ to the machinic body/interface meld for Jeong [2013, p. 94]). Rather, it proceeds through an accumulation of seemingly disconnected images, of cinematic moments as fragments or frissons, of pleasurable or uncanny affects; images which indeed fade from consciousness as we make our way home from the multiplex (or even from the living room to the kitchen), but that also take root in our psyche. This book is thus to be read as a series of trains arriving at a station – a collection of metaphysical shifts arriving at the platforms of our collective consciousness.

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A Futurist Cinema of Attractions Of course, any digital frisson can easily be dismissed as part of a commodity culture of ‘technological’ cinematic experience – a culture of Debordian spectacle which amounts to a degradation of culture, and to facile forms of cultural engagement. The oft-cited films that are emblematic of digital cinema (The Matrix, Avatar, Tron, etc.) are objects of a commercial entertainment market and, as such, for reasons including the mode of attention, the space of their consumption, the industrial mode of production, or the synthetic affections they afford us, they seem to have little value as objects of art. They are junk food, regularly consumed and enjoyed though we know that they are, cumulatively, bad for us. With these films taken as individual texts, you can’t deny that this attitude may have a modicum of truth – they are often defined by their gimmicks, their smart intertextual references, their celebrity star-power. However, to look at them collectively, drawing links to other visual practices beyond the traditional cinematic form, they start to form a matrix which seems to express a distinctive shift in sensibility – resulting in a changed ‘structure of feeling’ (Shaviro, 2010)3 or ‘regime of the sensible’ (Rancière, 2006). More simply put, together they seem to form a more permanent and generalised change in ways of thinking, seeing, and feeling that is no mere whimsy, and perhaps, I will suggest, even offers us a new philosophy. Despite certain shifts away from past cultural elitisms, an attitude endures that a divide exists between the objects of popular culture and serious artistic practice in terms of their ‘contribution’ to society. It is fairly acknowledged that most digital innovation happens within an industrial entertainment (and industrial-military) context due to the cost of development, and so digital CGI and simulation are often perceived as the product of a cynical economic motive rather than an aesthetic or social one (Belton, 2002; Gurevitch, 2010).4 A socioeconomic divide exists between the audiences of the multiplex and the ‘arthouse’ cinema, with the at-scale commodity 3 This phrase is used in Steven Shaviro’s sense in his book Post-Cinematic Affect in which he states: ‘I am therefore concerned, in what follows, with effects more than causes, and with evocations rather than explanations. That is to say, I am not looking at Foucauldian genealogies so much as at something like what Raymond Williams called “structures of feeling” (though I am not using this term quite in the manner that Williams intended). I am interested in the ways that recent film and video works are expressive: that is to say, in the ways that they give voice (or better, give sounds and images) to a kind of ambient, free-floating sensibility that permeates our society today, although it cannot be attributed to any subject in particular’ (Shaviro, 2010, p. 2) 4 For reflection on the role of military technology in our contemporary entertainment culture, see Lenoir and Lowood’s ‘Theaters of War: The Military-Entertainment Complex’ (2003).

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film often seen by the latter as dragging culture down: ‘digital Hollywood denegates culture’ (Cubitt, 2005, p. 270). More ostentatiously social or philosophical content, however, seems to fulfil an idealised ethical role, challenging audiences towards contemplation and attending to the ‘spiritual’ growth of society (in a secular sense). However, throughout this project, in analyses of the ontological problematics and new spatio-temporal and metaphysical dynamics of new popular digital screen content, there is an attitude that these things do make a lasting and profound ethical difference no matter what taste cultures surround them. In this way, I ask people to look again at the familiar ‘low’ culture and popular genre works within a digital culture – with their clichéd narratives, predictable crescendos, and overly neat closures – to see what else emerges ‘passively’ from these images. We are still, as a culture, accustomed to reading and critiquing popular media in a conventional, narrative way, such that we often brush aside the affective tonalities of the action set-pieces, shotcomposition, and synergies of sound and movement as mere trinkets. The true ‘meaning’ of a film often seems so obviously based within the narrative and its characters. From this point of view, the film ceases to be seen as a fusion of many logical and affective elements as polysemous levels of meaning (rather like saying the meaning of a song is only in the lyrics rather than in the musical composition). Digital effects as ‘superficial’ elements feel like affective lures and illusion through distraction, which deludes weak minds into thinking that they’ve had a worthwhile experience. However, there is a developing academic critique that instead sees these digital effects as valuable non-narrative experiments in sensation/perception. In the concepts of theorists such as Scott Bukatman (the kaleidoscopic image, 2003), Scott Richmond (the proprioceptive aesthetic, 2016), Aylish Wood (the digital encounter, 2007), Kristin Whissel (digital effects emblems, 2014), and Angela Ndalianis (the digital neo-baroque, 2005), we have a focus on effects which are supra-narrative, and yet meaningful in alternative modes of sensory engagement.5 Within this critique, I also see these ‘free-floating intensities’ not as tricks,6 but as nodes within a rhizomatic structure of affects and 5 Also of interest are Stephen Prince’s Digital Visual Effects in Cinema: The Seduction of Reality (2011), Michele Pierson’s Special Effects: Still in Search of Wonder (2002), Lisa Purse’s Digital Imaging in Popular Cinema (2013), Stephen Keane’s Disaster Movies: The Cinema of Catastrophe (2006), Nicholas Rombes’s Cinema in the Digital Age (2017), and Lisa Bode’s Making Believe: Screen Performance and Special Effects in Popular Cinema (2017). 6 Here I reclaim Jameson’s apparently damning description of the meaningless affections of ‘the newer cultural experience’ as ‘a whole new type of emotional ground tone – what I will call intensities […] free-floating and impersonal […] dominated by a peculiar kind of euphoria’,

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effects which together, at a cultural level, form a new grammatisation of space, time, matter, force, and intention – as a new ‘regime of the sensible’.7 Of course, in talking about a concentration of images of digital distortion and manipulation of time and space, we easily find ourselves in the territory of the science-fiction and science-fantasy film genres in which they seem to occur the most. For some critics, the digital technological film still conjures an image of past waves of schlock B-movies defined by gimmick and hype (an attitude Thomas Elsaesser documents in his essay ‘The Return of 3D’, 2013). However, even these have undergone an academic re-examination and re-valorisation in the digital era through Tom Gunning’s notion of a ‘cinema of attractions’; a theoretical filter through which contemporary digital effects are instead seen as an Eisensteinian ‘montage of attractions’. This attitude rescues cinema from ‘the hegemony of narrative film’ to its original state involving an immediate and direct address to the spectator, revels in the exhibitionist possibilities of the technological apparatus, and celebrates the ‘frisson’ (Gunning, 2006). Philosopher and feminist theorist Rosi Braidotti, in her article ‘Posthuman, All Too Human: Towards a New Process Ontology’, makes the interesting observation that ‘low culture genres’ of fiction are ‘mercifully free of grandiose pretensions – of the aesthetic or cognitive kind’ and are thus a ‘more accurate and honest depiction of contemporary culture than more self-consciously “representational” genres’ that function according to a more realist aesthetic imperative (2006, p. 23). She states that ‘minor, which is not to say marginal’ genres such as science-fiction and cyberpunk celebrate hybridity and mutation (or at least do not make them abject) and thus are more likely to present us with speculative and dynamic images of evolving and transforming relationships in our post-human present. Sci-fi here becomes a privileged genre that is un-afflicted by the burden of realism, and that is free to explore new dimensions of (post-)human experience. However, there is an alternative perspective to genre that I wish to pursue to frame my analysis, which is both broader than that of sci-fi or a cinema of attractions, and yet more pointedly political, philosophical, and ethical in nuance: a futurist cinema. This is, in the first instance, a cinema of futurism and instead deploy it as a positive description of original and novel moments untethered to recognisable structures of thought. This is a sentiment also pursued by Pansy Duncan in her The Emotional Life of Postmodern Film: Affect Theory’s Other (2015), who cites Shaviro in also ‘earmarking Jameson approvingly as one of affect theory’s unexpected allies’ (p. 42). 7 Grammatisation, from Bernard Stiegler, is a major concept for this analysis and will be later explored in depth, but in brief can be described as the process of formalising symbolic fluxes and flows into discrete letters, words, and codes such that they can be reproduced and shared.

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with a small f, simply meaning a cinema which, as Braidotti notes, revels in future possibilities for existence at the limits of humanism and of the anthropocene epoch. This can be framed through the work of legendary ‘visual futurist’ Syd Mead, who has addressed sociocultural realities through a prism of future vision in films such as Blade Runner, Aliens, Star Trek, Tron, and Elysium, oft quoted as saying: ‘I call science fiction “reality ahead of schedule”‘ (Hollingham, 2017). Futurism here is a process of speculative worldbuilding, often necessitating the mimesis of impossible things – flying cars, artificial intelligences, alternate galaxies, alternate dimensions. However, far from being so detached from reality as science-fantasy, this practice of projecting possible future worlds is now increasingly viewed as a pragmatic methodology and strategy for technological disruption in the real world. As Slate magazine documents, Spielberg’s production designer for Minority Report (2002), Alex McDowell, now runs an academic programme at the University of Southern California called the World Building Media Lab, where narrative futurism is used as method to ‘change the future’. He describes: We have control over the narrative here. We want a different outcome. So, let’s create a narrative—a fictional world space with multiple narratives—that is moving in the direction we want it to go. Extrapolate that forward over the near horizon, then thread our discoveries back into the present and use that to change direction in our present and move towards a new future. (McDowell, in Bankston, Slate, 2017)

The stated purpose of McDowell’s project is not just to devise new technologies to capitalise upon, but also to construct ethical future visions: ‘solving real-world problems, ranging from creating future scenarios for Fortune 100 companies to envisioning possible solutions to the refugee crisis and environmental catastrophes’ (worldbuilding.usc.edu). This futurist methodology can take on a more directly political nuance in films such as Black Panther (2018), which, according to its director Ryan Coogler, offers a brand of technological afro-futurism to the cinematic mainstream (Loughrey, The Independent, 2018). Cultural critic Mark Dery first recognised and named this aesthetic of afro-futurism in 1994, in his article ‘Black to the Future’: Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures? […] Furthermore, isn’t the unreal estate of the future already owned by the technocrats, futurologists,

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streamliners, and set designers – white to a man – who have engineered our collective fantasies? (Dery, in Loughrey, 2018)

The solutions offered here are alternate realities as utopian fantasies, but nonetheless, as aesthetic images, they represent an empowered resistance to hegemonic forces that represent Western superiority in no less of a fantastic (but racist) mode. This does not, perhaps, as the critical Frieze magazine recently pointed out, produce direct social and economic change, due to the fact that serialised diegetic fictions such as Black Panther always have to retreat and reset to a believable objective reality in each subsequent installation, forestalling their potential radicalism (Canavan, 2018). However, in the ‘undeniable power of a utopian vision of transcendent Afrofuturism’, imaginative images can disrupt historical narratives in rich metaphorical modes that enrich a present sense of future potential (ibid). An example of this is in the widely blogged metaphor ‘vibranium is melanin’, where the symbolism of Black Panther’s fantasy metal that is both an incredibly hard material and limitless energy source carries a metaphorical resonance of the potency of black skin colour. Here, for many of these online commentators, a futurist image creates a real-world sense of empowerment for young black people, who can (metaphorically) intuit their blackness as a superpower. Cautiously, we can start to think that the futurist fantasy fiction that is observed in this analysis provides rich metaphorical activity which addresses actual political and philosophical problematics – a pragmatic methodology for working through real historically engineered limits to thought. The second Futurism I address is with a big F. This is the avant-garde aesthetic and philosophical movement founded by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in 1909. In his own words: ‘the enthusiastic glorification of scientific discoveries and of the modern mechanism’ (Marinetti, 1914, p. 150). This movement advocated the technological development of society towards extreme measures, celebrating the modern, the fast, and the machinic, and condemning the old and traditional through a violent and destructive aesthetic which was often powerfully anti-humanist. Cinematic form, for the Futurists, was in many ways a symbol of what the broader movement stood for – dynamic, energetic, and ‘authentically modern’ (Lista, 2017, p. 20). It was also profoundly post-human, or post-anthropocentric, looking towards a future in which objects and machines took aesthetic and ideological prominence. In the Futurist cinemas of both Italy and Russia, images of the urban landscape as a complex animated organism featured alongside ordinary objects rendered as aesthetic and animate – beautiful robots, or everyday objects come to life – a ‘cinema of machines’ (ibid, p. 24).

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While pure Futurism requires perhaps a level of abstraction and avantgardism that might seem unfamiliar in a contemporary digital post-cinema, there are thematic preoccupations that seem roughly continuous. First, there is the idealised cinematic form of the ‘hypo-structural and irregular model of vaudeville’ – a series of sketches and artistic performances un-constricted by rational narrative, and reproducing a rapid free-wordist approach which should multiply potential thought (ibid, p. 29). This type of structure of kinetic set-pieces loosely bound together by narrative resonates well with the concept of a contemporary digital ‘cinema of attractions’ which defies logic. However, secondly, the foremost thematic continuity is in the prioritisation of the formal possibilities of the technological apparatus towards a particular aesthetic end – the potential to stretch representation to a point of metaphysical distortion. This medium-specific creation of cinematic breaches in integrity and coherence was emphasised by Marinetti, with an explicit focus on spatio-temporal breaks and disruptions: For Marinetti, the only object of cinema is cinema itself because the de-realization of the image, neutralizing ‘the laws of intelligence’, means the liberation of time and space, that is to say, of the categories a priori that, according to Kant, determine human experience. In other words, only cinema can fully realize the eighth principle of Manifesto di Fondazione del Futurismo: ´Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed´. (ibid, p. 27)

There is a profound anti-phenomenalism, anti-rationalism, and posthumanism to be found in this Futurist manifesto within the fantasy of a machine-view which can ‘throw the brains of spectators into unreality zones’ (Ginna, in Lista, 2017, p. 28).8 This chimes with the concept of a digital post-cinema which often aims to flip perception, distort representation, and interrogate metaphysical assumptions despite the apparent lack of a coherent ideological critique or meaningful philosophy. It aligns with what William Brown has called a contemporary ‘Supercinema’, which de-prioritises human perspective for a kind of non-anthropocentric or anti-humanist perception (2012, p. 53). This anti-humanist ambiguity of embodied perception, Brown identifies, is the character of digital cinema – with precursors in 8 As we will see, this is also profoundly Deleuzian, as through his ‘logic of sense’ and of nonsense there develops a futurist poetics which is described by Helen Palmer in her Deleuze and Futurism: A Manifesto for Nonsense (2014).

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the Modernist avant-garde, but which ‘crystallizes’ with digital technology. However, as I later discuss, we cannot really move too far away from a (human) phenomenological view, as even this non-anthropocentric perception still always operates as a metaphor for human corporeal proprioception, even when it intends to be other. Instead, we indulge what Ian Bogost has called an ‘alien phenomenology’, operating self-reflexively from an alternate alien/other perspective, but always using anthropomorphic metaphors for the existence and processes of objects and things with a stated purpose of attempting to trouble the limits of the human capacity to know and understand a priori (2012). Thus, a digital supercinema may be better thought of qua Bogost as a futurist alien cinema, indulging speculative thought about unfathomable complexity, beyond human comprehension, in inaccessible realms, and yet still in recognisably human worlds. But I then have to ask if I claim too much metaphysical prescience for commercial movies that are often perceived as ‘dumb’? While some critics have praised Michael Bay’s Transformers series of films as experimental cinematic masterpieces comparable to the work of Douglas Sirk (Bennett, 2015) or Ridley Scott (Brody, New Yorker, 2017), we have to wonder if this is not with some kind of tongue-in-cheek irony. It is still true that much resistance to the idea of digital effects as socially and culturally meaningful comes from those who would still believe that art has to be an autonomous ‘special’ field of practice – a pure space of disciplined activity which exists outside of economic and political fields.9 Thus, while Futurist cinema along with Dada and Surrealism was a profoundly Modern critique of traditional modes of representation, digital special effects and science-fiction cinema is not commonly seen as such. However, this concept of the autonomous artwork seems to be more and more anachronistic in a late-capitalist creative economy in which even the most avant-garde art object has the potential to be supremely commodified. In resisting the dualism in which there is an ideological mainstream and a transgressive brand of artistic avant-garde, film philosopher John Mullarkey points out that both American cognitivist David Bordwell and continental metaphysicist Gilles Deleuze (traditionally diametrically opposed in terms of theory) fall into the same type of fixed essentialism in 9 The conception of a dialectical aesthetics as described in the aesthetic theory of Theodor Adorno, and decades later by Jean Francois Lyotard, holds that the artwork should be a force of pure negation. For Adorno, this quality of negation is called ‘antinomy’; for Lyotard, it manifests within the notion of the sublime, though both tend to make the artwork something transcendent and thus insoluble into any common culture.

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making distinctions between a classic Hollywood cinema as essentially normative, and an avant-garde art-cinema as essentially transgressive. Deleuze, in his opposition of the cinematic movement-image to the timeimage, further deploys this dialectic in a mode that is historicised in such a way that the critical, pure image type of the time-image came into being only after World War Two due to a metaphysical crisis of faith.10 Mullarkey instead proposes that these categories are not fixed or strictly historicised, but rather always processual, overlapping, and shifting: ‘This becoming of film – its processual complexity – is its only essence (which is to say that it has no essence)’ (2009, p. 10).11 We can perhaps now see an evolving field of contemporary culture in which Braidotti’s opposed fields of low-culture genres and the ‘grandiose pretensions’ of high-culture realist aesthetics are actually very mutable, and that this is not only attributable to a capitalist imperative. I hasten to add that this position does not relinquish the idea of an autonomous, sublime art, nor of art as negation, but simply notes that now it is possible that aesthetic disruptions, or lines-of flight, occur not in another realm of liberated practice but rather exactly within the public mainstream or common culture domain. The task then is to recognise these events for what they are, or what they have the potential to be. So what then are my true objects of study? They are digital, postcinematic images which are futuristic, Futurist even, technologistic perhaps, but not simply, or only, science fiction. While this whole book attempts a more nuanced investigation into the question of what qualifies as a digital post-cinematic image, I propose here an abrupt (and possibly incomplete) definition. They are images which come into being through the new formal possibilities that are afforded by digital capture, editing, and post-production technologies. This is, in a way, a f ield of potential images, contingent upon the possible manipulations of code within both hardware and software assemblages. But these structural and formal 10 See, for instance, Deleuze and World Cinemas (Martin-Jones, 2011) which identifies various ‘non-continuous’ image types put forth in early cinema, including time-images and ‘attractionimages’, and further criticises the narrow European focus of Deleuze’s study to focus on a more global context of multiple political crises and upheavals which affected other national cinemas. 11 This issue around Deleuze is also addressed by Damian Sutton in his Photography Cinema Memory: The Crystal Image of Time in which he states that the mainstream Hollywood and European avant-garde exist as a spiralling interdependence, like the genetic material or DNA of cinema (2009, p. 40), and by David Deamer in Deleuze’s Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images in which the two regimes of the cinematic image make up a ‘heterogeneous complexity’ (2016, p. 70).

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aspects within the image are meaningless without a mind to engage with them, to actualise them, and a body to tense and release in the processes of affection and emotion, perception and cognition. I thus identify, in concordance with the work of other theorists, a set or taxonomy of visual effects which are fully articulated through a set of embodied affects, that are distinctive of the post-indexical, post-cinematic image, and which can be roughly summarised as: simulations of spatial information of depth and expanse; modulations of time in loops, phases, and parallels; maximalist complexities of form and movement at the limit of comprehension in, for example, swarm and machine effects; breaches of physical form such as morphing and glitching; and recognisably corporeal sensations of flying and floating in and through space. These are aspects of, no doubt, a spectacular cinema of attractions with all its associated thrills and frissons, but also of a cinema that is grounded in a mode of de-naturalising natural (human) perception. They are special effects, but contextualised by a specialness which offers a dynamic, holistic, and richly metaphorical vision of possible futures, and which can be ethical and political at the same time as being aesthetic.

What is Post about Post-Cinema? Steven Shaviro develops a strong sense of a post-cinema in his 2010 book of the same name. He hastens to add that this is not ‘post-’ in the sense of progress, or towards some teleological goal of a ‘total cinema’ (calling on Bazin’s concept of the perfect mimesis of reality to disavow it), but rather that filmic cinema is now ‘surpassed’ in a new ‘cultural-technological regime’ into which he incorporates: […] production, editing, distribution, sampling, and remixing of audiovisual material […] in a wider range of contexts than ever before, in multiple locations and on screens ranging in size from the tiny (mobile phones) to the gigantic (IMAX) […] within a complex of social, economic, and political developments: globalization, financialization, post-Fordist just-in-time production and ´flexible accumulation´ (as David Harvey calls it), the precarization of labor, and widespread micro-surveillance. (Shaviro, 2011)

While many of these aspects of the cultural and political economy of a post-cinematic regime are relevant to this field of research, it is not at the

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heart of this project’s work on the image itself – the ‘audiovisual material’, and the altered modes of engagement with that material. Instead, I aim for an aesthetic, ethical, and ontological mode of analysis, and, as we will see, this cannot help but end up also being political, albeit in perhaps a more abstract sense than that of Shaviro’s political economy. Indeed, many would say, ever since the foundation of academic film theory, that you simply cannot consider screen content without a broader sociocultural or economic framework. While this enquiry does not neglect these concerns, it approaches them from the materiality of the image itself, rather than seeing the image as fixed within the amber of political superstructure. The changes to consciousness and experience instigated by the digital shift can be seen negatively as the effect of powerful machiavellian forces working through media channels and technologies. This view can lead to a pessimistic attitude towards the affections specif ic to the digital, denigrating them as, at best, shallow and apolitical, and, at worst, a form of insidious brainwashing. By instead seeing the new technological forms of visual mediation as an emergent automatism driven by the material qualities of the hardware and software itself, we start to appreciate that, alongside processes of control, there are also some unpredictable outcomes. By following this direction of thought, we could surmise that technology itself was imposing its will upon us (a technological determinism), but this does not accurately reflect a field of non-human activity in which there is no clear intentionality. The technological forms of mediation function automatically and ambivalently as a filter or refractor for immanent thought, imagination and insight. It is still us, the human entity, that thinks, feels, and imagines, but now more than ever before through a prism of digital representation, casting new images of thought, and creating new systems of affective resonance. Inevitably, some theorists and critics brush the change to one side and see it as an unbroken continuation with the cinematic, exhibiting a habitual continuity with the indexical processes of film such as focal depth, framing, and composition. Lev Manovich, for instance, defines digital cinema thus: ‘We can f inally answer the question “What is digital cinema?” Digital cinema is a particular case of animation that uses live-action footage as one of its many elements’ (2016, p. 29). He here understands that cinema has come full circle in a history which began with animation and special effects, and he sees no decisive break with past photographic image forms. Others also dismiss the special effects and bodily affects of post-cinema as remediations of the same image types which have been there from the Lumières onwards, but this can often seem to be too simple a dismissal of

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both quantitative and qualitative differences between analogue and digital forms. For example, film critic Roger Ebert famously called (digital) 3D ‘a waste of perfectly good dimension’ as, ‘when you look at a 2D movie, it’s already in 3D as far as your mind is concerned’ (Ebert, 2010), and although this was said at an early moment in the current era of Digital 3D technology when it still seemed just a profitable gimmick, the position seems to deny outright any difference in representation between 2D and 3D formats. Since then, ‘auteur’ directors have moved into 3D filmmaking, and the uses of the technology have become more nuanced and expressive, such that few can deny the effective new grammar of 3D for both narrative and aesthetic uses. Digital 3D is but one exemplary event of a new emergent digital visual regime at f irst dismissed by critics as a cheap rehash of a previous phenomenon, but later embraced for the original narrative, affective, and aesthetic effects it affords, rather than for more cynical commercial reasons. Christopher Nolan’s time-bending space adventure Interstellar (2014) presents an interesting case study here. In many ways an elegy to the analogue, the film embraces select ‘qualified’ digital effects whilst simultaneously distancing itself from them. One of the biggest points of public discourse about the film was the ‘real’ science behind it, by which the digital cinematic effects were portrayed as proximate to actual ‘natural’ cosmic phenomena. The scientific consultant for the film, theoretical physicist Kip Thorne, apparently laid down two guidelines for Nolan: ‘First, that nothing would violate established physical laws. Second, that all the wild speculations […] would spring from science and not from the fertile mind of a screenwriter’ (in interview with Clery, Science, 2014). The main achievement of this method was the creation of the film’s black hole ‘Gargantua’, which features largely in the narrative, and was generated as a 3D simulation in ways that apparently constituted original scientific research. ‘For me’, Thorne says in his book The Science of Interstellar, ‘these film clips are like experimental data’ (2014). No one knew exactly what a black hole would look like until they actually built one. Light, temporarily trapped around the black hole, produced an unexpectedly complex fingerprint pattern near the black hole’s shadow. And the glowing accretion disk appeared above the black hole, below the black hole, and in front of it […] I never expected that […] Eugénie just did the simulations and said, ´Hey, this is what I got.´ It was just amazing. (Kip Thorne, in interview with Rogers, Wired, 2014)

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Figure 1. Black hole Gargantua in Nolan’s Interstellar (Paramount/Warner Bros, 2014). Allstar Picture Library / Alamy Stock Photo.

These exciting and highly affective images of the black hole (Figure 1) thus represent a certain amount of technological advancement, in which, for the first time, graphic simulations were generated according to complex mathematical algorithms as a form of computational physics research. However, despite the simulation being created in a programme called Mathematica, it was then sent to visual effects studio Double Negative where it was coloured, enhanced, and rescaled in clearly creative digital processes. Thorne explains: ‘The computer code was just the beginning. Oliver handed it over to an artistic team who added the accretion disk and created the background galaxy that Gargantua would lens’ (2014). This kind of mixed methodology leads Scientific American’s Lee Billings to critically note: ‘not all of the science is treated equally in the film’ although he permits that in Thorne’s book ‘[He] is even-handed in his treatment of the film’s science, admitting where artistic license was substantial and where it was used barely at all’ (Billings, 2014). There is thus both a complexity and an inconsistency in the ontological dynamic that Nolan establishes in Interstellar, of analogue authenticity and ‘natural’ science versus digital visual ‘wild speculation’. He presents the viewer with a diegetic digital technological future rendered through the digital synthesis of aesthetic imagery, in which we literally leave the

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material universe behind and launch into a virtual, theoretical dimension (the tesseract which exists with the brane fifth dimension), while simultaneously offering a narrative and thematic disavowal of digital effects as ‘imaginary’ flights of fancy and furthermore the romanticisation of its opposite (in the symbolic fetishism of paper books and analogue wristwatch that ultimately save humanity). A tension between the truth value of science and that of aesthetic expression or ‘artistic licence’ lies at the heart of this film, opening up a problematic discourse about the existential import of such images. However, as I will later explore, this dichotomy between science and aesthetics is perhaps a false one in the contemporary moment of media technology. The digital images of Interstellar reach a level of sophistication whereby abstract notions of metaphysics are no longer merely suggested or evoked through visual effects, rather they are simulated in ways that become more and more ontologically prescient. Digital representations of the physical, material universe, even (or especially) when this is of theoretical phenomena as in Interstellar, often entail some level of destabilisation of recognisable physical forms and forces in imaginative and aestheticised modes. It seems a given that this will be experienced as different from a directly observable world represented as largely stable and predictable, such that we subsequently might view the world in a more probabilistic mode through the digital lens. This raises common-sense questions about how deep (if at all) these ‘special’ effects penetrate into actual everyday experience. That is to ask if and how we successfully police a conscious division between experience of the actual, and experience of a digitally mediated virtual? Is it negotiated cognitively and actively, or rather ‘felt’ in a more corporeal and intuitive way, or both, and is there a certain amount of cognitive dissonance between these two types of knowledge? I ask how these images resonate in an ontological sense with other abstracted, theoretical, or embodied knowledges of the physical universe, and if there is a (sub-)conscious synergy between our cultural imaginations and theoretical physics in the genesis of new ontological horizons? In this work, I thus aim to explore how these dynamics of actual versus virtual experience, abstract knowledge versus embodied experience, and scientific versus artistic expression – all considered as different classes of ‘image’ with regard to our consciousness of them – impact us through the nexus of our affective corporeality. In elevating the digital image to a level of serious ethico-aesthetic analysis, I aim to establish an understanding of a form of digital rationality – a ‘digithinking’ that is a post-cinematic mode of thought, and which resonates with contemporary scientific knowledge, artistic expression, and with

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wider social and cultural change. Within contemporary patterns and trends of representation, I will trace a regime of sensibility beyond Cartesian rationality, which creates a probabilistic space for original perception/ affection/action, and which ultimately constitutes a digital ontology. This is to be an affective ontology of the digital, both an individual and communal non-conscious apperception of metaphysics within our contemporary technological epoch.12

But is it Art? In 1985, Andy Warhol somewhat surprisingly launched the Commodore Amiga’s Propaint programme by live-digitising a video-camera image of Debbie Harry, and using the paint fill tool to create one of his iconic colourblocked images (Figure 2). ‘This is kind of pretty’, Warhol said as he added the last touches to the image – ‘I think I’ll keep that’ (Reimer, 2007). There is no doubt that this was a marketing stunt to give legitimacy and auratic power to the new home computing system, but this belies a genuine strong interest from Warhol in the aesthetic qualities of digital imagery. He continued to work with the software to produce several images which are now held at the in the archives of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh (Stintson, 2014). But does this qualify the image he produced here as culturally and aesthetically significant, or was it just a moment of novelty, and a pale simulacrum of his screen-printed or photographic works? The dominant perspective of the digital image as crass commercial spectacle and as tacky ‘special effect’ emerged in the 1980s, a natural extension of mass media critique initiated through the Frankfurt School of Adorno and Horkheimer, enhanced by Althusser’s Marxism, and through which a first generation of academic media theorists found commercial media forms to be ideologically repressive and interpellative. The study of mass media and their social, cultural, technological, cognitive, and corporeal effects was initially defined by recourse to social hierarchy, ideology, and control. Postmodern cultural theorists of the late 20th century stayed within this rubric, and as such their analysis of new digital media forms and cultures which emerged in the 1980s (in which Deleuze himself can be included) fell easily into the same dynamics, with digital processes of bricolage and simulation, and the breakdown of linear media forms, fitting neatly into 12 Metaphysics as understood here no longer is the realm of gods and creation myths, but rather of physical forces, materiality, quantum states, dimensions, intentionality and causality.

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Figure 2. Andy Warhol’s front cover of Amiga World’s ‘Creative Issue’ from January 1986 (IDG Publishing) © 2019 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by DACS, London

post-structural discourses of crises of faith in objective truth.13 If cinema was the modernist medium of crafting meaningful (albeit ideological) narratives about time and existence, then digital media corresponded directly with 13 This critique is most aptly epitomised by that of Fredric Jameson in ‘Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’ published in New Left Review in 1984, in which it was described how, under the conditions of postmodernity, all discourse has been merged into an undifferentiated whole, and difference itself has been commodified.

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existential crises and a breakdown of meaningful connection. Intoxicating and violent, superficial, ubiquitous, and spiritually bankrupt, the images of the MTV generation were popularly and theoretically seen to be socially corrosive and existentially vacuous.14 However, as MTV producers became movie directors, and as ‘avant-garde’ artists became known for digital work, some cultural critics started to develop an eye for a digital potential for poetic expressivity beyond the clichéd postmodern – a specifically digital aesthetic.15 Simultaneously, in film theory, there was a developing backlash against Althusserian, semiotic and psychoanalytic post-structural analysis, and a drift towards ideas of the body and haptic film theory through the works of Brian Massumi, Vivian Sobchack, Laura Marks, and Steven Shaviro. There was also a return to the richness of early cinema and early 20th-century film theory in the work of Tom Gunning, Miriam Hansen, Yuri Tsivian, and Scott Bukatman. Moreover, there was a new attention paid to Deleuze’s metaphysical and philosophical film theory as laid out in his Cinema books.16 These theoretical perspectives became interested in formal and structural elements of sensation and spectacle, with the emphasis shifted away from the politicised governing concepts of representation and identification towards more aesthetic and affective modes of analysis. Cinema is now better understood to possess a dynamic vitality which allows it to transcend the optical distance in which politicised theories of the ‘gaze’ were based, and, for the last 30 years, theorists have reconsidered engagement with screen images in a more affective, synaesthetic, and tactile mode. Within this context, ‘affect’ emerged as a potent concept allowing a dynamic dialogue between various opposed and essentialist schools of thought on cinema and their respective methodologies: between the Anglo-American Cognitivist theoretical approach of David Bordwell and the European culturalism of Foucault and Deleuze;17 between theories of 14 This view of the theorists of postmodernity filtered down into popular culture through iconic images provided by literature and f ilms along the line of the character and milieu of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis (1991). 15 Respected video artists from the 1980s such as Bill Viola, Tony Oursler, and Pippilotti Rist quickly moved into digital media. Digital fine art has been relatively slow to take off, though some artists such as London’s Gilbert and George have now moved into a completely digital form (Bayliss, 2012). 16 Cinema 1: The Movement Image was f irst published in 1983 and was translated in 1986; Cinema 2: The Time-image followed in 1989. Amongst authors reflecting on these books were David Rodowick (1997) and Greg Flaxman et al. (2000). 17 Bordwell’s firmly empirical approach seeks to measure cognitive responsivity to media texts to discern their psychological impact, and harbours a disdain for the larger social, cultural, and metaphysical analyses that largely interest European theorists (Plantinga 2002).

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a popular mainstream cinema as in opposition to an esoteric avant-garde (more distinctly located within a fine-art discourse and methodology); and between a celebratory futurism revelling in post-human possibilities of new technologies, and the brand of bleak postmodernism which mourns the demise of meaning. Affect effectively bridges the gap as both a psychobiological and cultural-philosophical phenomenon and concept, functioning in diverse ways across diverse genres and audiences, and as an important modality in a digital age which sees a proliferation and heightening of media immersivity and intensity. The shift in image discourse around affect engaged with an intuited sensation that the projected images are not simply and firmly indexically tethered to real objects that we already know (as a mode of representation) but can offer a novel experience of reality. The theoretical and critical shifts of the mid to late 1990s came at the same time as a wave of CGI films that had an emphatic focus on novel sensation and awe-inducing effects. Spectacular and effect-laden films were certainly not new, with spates of biblical and mythological epics and short-lived and titillating diversions in the 3D horror and sex genres of the 1950s and 1980s.18 However, in the 1990s, there seemed to be a new emphasis on epic scale and visceral drama in the multiplex cinema, in part fuelled by the continuing challenge posed to big-screen cinema by home-video and home-cinema formats.19 The more spectacular of these films had sentimental themes, mythological narratives, and grandstanding effects, seemingly a form of disposable culture for the lowest common denominator – while auteur directors continued to make the thinking-man’s films. But when gamechanging films such as Titanic (dir. James Cameron, 1997) and The Matrix (dirs. Lana and Lilly Wachowski, 1999) came about, theorists started to pay critical attention to a maturing digital ethos in the cinematic mainstream. It is hard to deny the negative aspects of a digital commercial culture – the targeted manipulation of desire via the harvesting of personal data only one conspicuous example – but we need to give credit to the ethical potential of an accelerated culture in which ‘virtual’ diversity proliferates beyond forces of control. Through the prism of a Deleuzian concept of difference 18 In the films of Harryhausen and Cecil B. Demille, and later in 3D films of the 1950s and 1960s such as Creature from the Black Lagoon and The Stewardesses, and then again in the 1980s with Jaws 3D and others. Epic special effects ‘event’ films of the 1990s included disaster movies Deep Impact, Armageddon, Independence Day; historical epics such as Saving Private Ryan, Titanic, and Braveheart; and sci-fi fantasy including Jurassic Park, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and the reboot of the Star Wars series. 19 On the effects of home video on cinema, see, for instance, Barry R. Litman and Linda S. Kohl (1989).

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and repetition, in this book, I aim to emphasise how the digital media forms repeat and change images in ‘plastic’ modes of modulation and mutation which are often beyond human intent. Our accelerated digital culture is then re-inscribed as being focused towards future possibility and unbounded creativity, with positive ethical attributes. In Chapter Two, I show how digital processes of repetition and distortion are put to work aesthetically in a very Deleuzian manner in Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void, and, in Chapter Five, through the work of Gianni Vattimo, I elaborate the ethical side of this ‘digital nihilism’ by stating that, despite efforts to control and brand virtual diversity, it still proliferates out of control in original and transgressive ways. Throughout this project, I attempt to develop an eye for objects of a digital screen culture that are not partitioned off from the popular realm of consumption, and which proliferate and multiply in heterogeneous spaces. These images are not only in multiplex cinemas, but also enter our homes on multiple screens in our living rooms, bedrooms, and kitchens, and further appear on buildings throughout our cities in the form of public projections and advertising screens. These images fold themselves around material objects and are inset into corners, walls, and floors, perceptually distorting the contours and edges of our familiar spaces. Together, they form a constantly present other dimension, just next to us, looming above us, or around the corner, where consistency and predictability break down, like another world pressing against our own, trying to lure us in. Is this an invasion, as many see it to be? Or is it really the projection of our own imagination in ever closer proximity to reality, both nightmarish and heavenly, which threatens, or perhaps promises to rupture the boundaries between worlds?

From Cine-thinking to Digi-thinking I ascertain a fundamental ontological difference that the digital shift in visual technologies instigates, within a growing area of film-philosophical reflection that is developing in many analyses of digital interfaces, engagements, and interactions. In the most significant work on digital media, cultural theorists such as Patricia Pisters, Thomas Elsaesser, Mark Hansen, and David Rodowick stand out in noting an ontological shift and a new state of, and understanding of, thinking, being, and acting within a digitally mediated world. These theorists describe a decisive departure from the indexical relation of the image to reality that was instilled by photographic/ filmic processes, and elaborate an emergent aesthetic sensibility cultivated

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by the new digital arrangement of images, image processes, and image components. Gilles Deleuze’s cinematic theory is the starting point and, in many ways, the heart of this project. For him, cinema instituted an emergent ‘cine-thinking’ entailing a particular kind of thought about time and space, in the same way perhaps as the train (discussed at the beginning of this introduction) instigated a kind of ‘train-thinking’ (Alliez, 2000).20 So what then can we ascertain as a separate and distinct ‘digi-thinking’ in our contemporary moment? The material qualities of film seem to lend themselves to the manipulation of time – movement in space here is, after all, an illusion given by a sequence of still images on a film strip that are shown in quick succession. Subsequently, we ask how the relative immaterial materiality of digital data – where form and force can be infinitely folded and morphed in illusory modes – might lend itself to the contemplation and manipulation of other types of metaphysical qualia. If material filmic processes of cutting and splicing celluloid frames together exposed our habits of linear temporal perception, or memory’s relative elasticity, then the material digital processes of immaterial simulation seem to render all metaphysical notions, including, but not limited to time and space, as intensely plastic in a way that draws all forms of linearity into doubt. If film is perceived as primarily a temporal medium, then the digital seems to be this and more.21 I am interested in how reality (as a contextual human understanding of underlying metaphysical schema) is produced or synthesised within the context of digital post-cinematic media. This question becomes one of how we as spectators are affected by contemporary media images in our cognitive and imaginative capacities, and, then, of how these media in their structure and content critically reflect upon mind, reality, and their own processes. These issues are not separate, but rather meet within a conception of existence as effectively synthesised by processes of consciousness, by which we are all producers of images, both mentally and culturally, individually and socially – i.e. we are all primarily engaged in processes of understanding and reproducing reality. In the famous words of Deleuze (in interview with 20 Cine-thinking is actually elaborated from Deleuze’s concept of a ‘camera-consciousness’ and described and examined in Éric Alliez’s chapter ‘Midday, Midnight: The Emergence of Cine-Thinking’ in The Brain is the Screen. 21 Both Damian Sutton (2009) and Timothy Scott Barker (2012) still focus on the primacy of cinematic time in their relative approaches, albeit with the temporal dimension becoming more chaotic and differential in the digital form. Movement, the body, gender, and materiality as concepts are always subservient to the overarching dimension of temporality.

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Cahiers du Cinema in 1986): ‘the brain is the screen’. This does not necessarily deny an objective reality, but posits that we are essentially image receivers, an actualised image amongst others, but a ‘special kind of image’ capable of making innovative ‘virtual’ connections between images (Flaxman, 2000, p. 35).22 Though we may not mentally create reality per se (as is the view of a pure transcendental phenomenology), we do almost certainly craft ‘aesthetic’ images out of it. Deleuze’s notion of a ‘camera consciousness’, which emerges in the Movement-Image to explain the relation between our metaphysical awareness and the mediated images we consume, aligns well with Walter Benjamin’s notion in The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproduction of a distracted mass whose apperception is moulded through the historically and technologically located media they consume. This is the process of an non-conscious absorption of ‘abilities’ to tackle what Benjamin calls ‘the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history’ (1999), abilities that Deleuze might put in more metaphysical terms as our spatio-temporal, sensory-motor perceptual schema. These perceptive abilities as inhabited, embodied ways of seeing and feeling the world are, to Benjamin, appropriated in an ‘absent minded’ way in an age of moving images, as opposed to the engaged, contemplative engagement demanded by the static artwork; thus, the authority of, and reverence paid to, the organisation of human sense perception in the auratic work is disrupted. However, Deleuze in his Cinema books goes further than this to suggest that film does not just influence our metaphysical understanding of reality in our specific historical technological location, but stands in as a model for the whole of Western thought on the relationship between philosophy and time, and, by implication, power (Flaxman, 2000, p. 4). In this model, as re-examined by Gregory Flaxman in the introduction to his edited volume The Brain is the Screen, time is initially subjugated to space in the cinematic movement-image and thus can only be understood through a spatial metaphor, and this amounts to a normative regulation of thought. In the time-image, however, cinema fulfils its inherent potential for Benjamin’s dismantling of auratic authority, and time is freed from its imprisonment by spatial relations. For Flaxman, the movement-image is directly traceable back to ancient Greek philosophical thought which expressed time as existing actually and externally as divine space. The 22 Flaxman succinctly states: ‘In the Movement-Image, Deleuze says that the brain is a very special kind of image, one that opens up an interval in the modulations and variations of the universe. This interval propels what we call thinking’ (2000).

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time-image then relates to the shift in thought started with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason by which time becomes seen for the first time as phenomenal, interior, and durational, as an ‘a priori form of intuition’, and not as existing externally (ibid, p. 4). Flaxman elaborates how this morally charged shift in Western thought was then reflected by the cinematic shift: The ´regime´ of the movement image bespeaks a process of regulation that Deleuze ascribes to a ´sensory motor schema´, a neural network that ´affectively´ contains the image-flux: the images procured are recognisable, capable of being linked to other images along a methodical, and ultimately normative, chain. The sensory motor schema is the mechanism of our relation to the world of images, the result of which is narrative, but this narrative must be understood as having been underwritten by a moral exigency, the promise to make good, common sense. (ibid, p. 5)

This rupture in the moral regime of images, for Deleuze, becomes manifest in the cinema of the post-Second World War period, which exhibits a crisis of faith in rational, causal containment or order through showing discontinuous spaces, times, and narratives. The clear, consistent, and predictable perception of reality and causality given by the movement-image was, at this time, seen by filmmakers to be expressive of the type of fascist moral certainty that had led to the Holocaust.23 In the 1950s, a new morality, a new philosophy, and thus a new cinematic image, was needed. Deleuze states that with the time-image’s disruption: ‘Cameraconsciousness raises itself to a determination which is no longer formal or material, but genetic and differential. We have moved from a real to a genetic definition of perception’ (1986, p. 85). This genetic and differential mode (a significant phrase which I repeat throughout this project) pushes us (a determination) into new realms of consciousness, rather than merely reflecting and representing ‘common sense’ perception. The time-image ceases to be simply a recapitulation of the rational/moral dynamic in Western thought, as the technological apparatus of cinema now takes an active and determining role in sculpting a transformation. To Deleuze, as to Mullarkey (2009), cinema can become in itself a practice of philosophy, which not only represents abstract thought, but manifests a potential to be its own distinct language of philosophical thought that proceeds through visual and aural intensive affectivity. Camera-consciousness, through images, thus raises 23 As discussed by Deleuze in his conclusion to The Time-Image, and by Peter Canning in ‘The Imagination of Immanence’ in Flaxman’s The Brain is the Screen (2000).

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itself from a passive-reflective to an active-determinative status and becomes a refraction of thought on reality. It does this most effectively through the tactile, synaesthetic medium of moving-images which mobilises us to think actively about time and space, but still foremost through a passive state of direct affective immersion. Cinema thus is seen as the medium which best expresses the progress of Western philosophical, metaphysical thought, but then also becomes, in the specific historical conditions of the 20th century, the technological circumstance which is the catalyst for a paradigm shift. Within this understanding, the change that occurs in the technological shift from analogue cinematic media to the digital could present us with a further evolutionary transformation, another determination potentially amounting to a next paradigm shift. With the digital, we see an emergent tendency towards even more profound and sustained disturbances in any rational, methodical ordering of images and this can be seen, as with the time-image, to be a further ‘ethical’ fracturing of dogmatic metaphysical authority. This would imply then that, with the idea of camera-consciousness, Deleuze speaks not just about a subject who exists within a specific, technologically defined cultural condition, but rather of a subject who is continually reproduced or reframed within some immanent field of potential thought that is mediated and affected by the structural and formal aspects of different media forms. The technology reflects and refracts in ways specific to its form, affectively capturing the image-flux, and determining processes of consciousness in both regulatory and liberational modes.

Technology and Reality In the next chapter, I expand my understanding of some basic concepts of reality and our consciousness of it, through the prism of a philosophical notion of technology – more broadly of technics (from Heidegger’s perspective on the ‘essence’ of technology). However, here it seems necessary to provide some introductory overview of these concepts. I do take the position that we all, necessarily, assume a naïve view of reality – the view that it actually exists objectively beyond our perception of it, and outside of our attempts to understand it.24 Without this view of a stable objective reality, we simply could not function in the world. However, it is a given that our perception and conception of reality is highly partial and framed within 24 This concept of a ‘naïve view’ of reality as a ‘direct realism’ is developed by David Gamez in his What We Can Never Know: Blindspots in Philosophy and Science (2007, pp. 33-35).

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culturally and psychologically specific parameters. This insight has been clearly ascertained through phenomenological, psychological, and, more recently, neurological discourses.25 One does not need to have an extreme sceptical phenomenological perspective to understand that reality is not always as we perceive it and that processes of culture, and the human mind, can twist material reality quite out of shape under certain conditions. I ascribe to the position emerging from Socrates and Plato – through Heidegger, Derrida, and Stiegler – that all the forces which shape our ability to conceive of the world are, in the broadest sense of the word, technological. In that we interact with the world at the basest level of survival of our organism – i.e. the acquisition of food or shelter – any mode of drawing things forth from the world can be considered as techné. For Heidegger (1977), the concept of techné originally expresses both tooled handcraft and other forms of poesis as a ‘bringing forth’ – as modes of shaping the world through the manual creation of objects, or through expression (in both functional modes of communication and artistic expression). These techné give order and shape to the world, and occupy almost all of our mental and physical energy in our engaged activity within the world. For Bernard Stiegler (1998), extending Heidegger’s thought, even the biological becomes part of a technical process, as structures of control are imposed upon physical gesture so that they form meaningful systems. The body is understood as technologically cyborg since the development of the first tools, because it adapts and evolves according to the technological systems with which it engages. For Stiegler, to be human in the first place is to be a technical being – it is what defines us. Accepting this, I follow Heidegger and Stiegler in positing reality as generated through technological means, both in our ability to interact with the world, and in our ability to understand and communicate about it. But, as the technologies that we invent give shape to the world, they also give shape to us. Naïvely again, humans have conventionally thought that the technologies that we employ are there to help us gain control of our environment as assistive prostheses of our own bodies and minds, seldom realising that these same technologies also shape the environment for us, and provide subtle limitations to our existence. We adapt to technology in many small ways, and yet, through time, this draws us into ever-greater 25 Neuroscience now has become one of the most influential recent developments in social and philosophical theory, the findings of which are investigated through many scientific, social science, and humanities texts. See, for instance, Maurizio Meloni’s ‘Philosophical implications of neuroscience: The space for a critique’ (2011).

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distance from the way we were before. However, as both Derrida and Stiegler point out (in a revision of Heidegger), this is not some process of us growing farther and farther away from some originary and ideal natural state, as each technology, despite being in one way limiting, also opens up new conditions for action, thought, and expression. ‘Nature’ is thought of not as the beginning point of a linear progression, but instead as an underlying immanent and virtual flux, a field of potentiality from which actualised modes of being are continually drawn from within certain technological parameters. Each technology, as pharmakon, is thus an enabling framework as much as it is also a limiting structure. Within this view, digital processes are the latest technological condition of humanity which frame our world view, from our individual capacity to imagine potential futures as fictional (cinematic) images, to actual tangible scientific progress. Faith, science, and art can thus all be seen as co-defining; aesthetic fabulations going hand-in-hand with empirical discovery, both consequences of the given technological condition. Seeing things this way, it ceases to be any mystery why a digital post-cinema experiments with images which twist time, space, force, and materiality at the same time as physicists reached to discover the Higgs Boson ‘god’ particle that gives mass to the ‘immanent flux’ or ‘pea soup’ of the other elemental atomic particles.26 Both processes fundamentally dwell on the same ontological futurist problematic. The dynamics of influence between artistic imagination and scientific discovery can be described in different ways – as anticipating or inspiring each other – but, by tracing both back to the same technological condition the philosophical division between them is, to a certain extent, collapsed.27 In subsequent chapters, I address the issues outlined above, through reference to specific films and practices within a contemporary digital visual 26 In July 2012, at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Switzerland, the discovery of the Higgs Boson was announced. In much of the press around the announcement, the particle was referred to in the context of the Higgs Field – an invisible force that explains how the universe moved from a nascent ‘intergalactic atomic pea-soup’ state to one composed of stars, life, and planets. This provides an interesting analogy for the philosophical concept of immanence. 27 There is an idea that much scientific discovery is anticipated in works of science fiction. See, for instance, ‘The Science Fiction Effect’ by Laura H. Kahn (2012). In the concept of fabulation (deployed philosophically by Bergson, extended by Deleuze and, more recently, John Mullarkey) inexplicable facts (of the senses) are made sense of through the imagination. This concept is held to explain early forms of theism in the invention of an intentional force behind natural processes, but also explains artistic creativity. Furthermore, holding to a Bergsonian concept of intuition as inspiration following the inhabitation of facts – rather that the intellectual and rational examination of facts – fabulation could be seen to be the true process of scientif ic discovery as creative problem solving (Bergson, 1977, orig. 1935).

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culture. I stress that my objects are not cherry-picked for purpose, nor are they random, but rather have emerged during the writing of this text, since 2010, as conspicuous tangents or events within digital visual culture (with the exception of the 1982 film Tron, though this explicitly relates to its 2010 update in Tron: Legacy). Out of these images, I have drawn dynamic links between content, affect, and technological circumstance to make observations about what I can describe as the digital, affective syntheses of metaphysical reality in contemporary media. These links fall into three areas which I address in three separate chapters: the dynamics of digital virtuality, the structural dynamics of digital images, and the dynamics of consciousness. Before tackling these dynamics through image analysis, in Chapter Two, ‘The Affective Synthesis of Reality by Digital Image’, I expand on the issues and theorists laid out in this first chapter, which fall into four broad areas: the philosophy of technology, processes of affection and cognition, theoretical approaches to the digital image, and ethics and aesthetics. I expand on three philosophical concepts that prove useful in understanding how our consciousness of metaphysical qualities develops and is maintained within the mind/body, and the technological condition for their affective synthesis: these are Stiegler’s ‘grammatisation’, Hume and Husserl’s ‘passive synthesis’, and Deleuze’s ‘spiritual automaton’. It is these concepts, framed by Deleuze’s notions of cinematic aesthetics/ethics and Heidegger’s technics, that largely structure this work, and it is through these notions that I add complexity and nuance to an often vague, multidisciplinary conception of ‘affect’. In Chapter Three, ‘A Digital Frontier to Reshape the Human Condition’, I begin analysis by looking at the films Tron (1982), Tron: Legacy (2010), and Enter the Void (2010). Identifying the challenge to metaphysical consciousness posed by digitality as an ontological problematic, I ask how these films engage aesthetically with digital systems and processes to sculpt anthropomorphic metaphors for this problematic. In this process, I identify two approaches to the challenge of digital virtuality roughly represented by each film: one in which an idea of the emotional and tactile body is restored to the impersonal domain of the digital, and another in which the body is discarded and abjected as consciousness enters an immaterial dimension. What emerges as similar, however, is the affective tone of the represented middle space between worlds, the boundary or frontier space in which metaphysics are suspended in an immanent flux. I ask what these digital images, reflecting on the material conditions of their own creation, express about the way we can position ourselves within a digitally connected world.

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Do we move into a post-human, object-orientated form of vision through which we abandon the body, or do we instead reinterpret the corporeal in a more dissolute sense of digital embodiment. Chapter Four, ‘Dynamic Digital Spaces, Bodies, and Forces’, focuses on how exactly metaphysical awareness is synthesised within the formal aspects of digital systems of image capture and presentation, and how these might be understood within a much broader view of the evolution of consciousness. I look to the examples of the dance and the battle scene, raised within digital cinematic culture to the status of the ‘spatio-temporal-energic’ image tour de force in which structural relations of kinesis are heightened and stretched. This analysis is grounded within a genealogy of technical advances (from the f irst ‘moving’ images, to spatial simulations, and to digital 3D and digital slow motion), and within a theory of consciousness which speaks to how fundamental our proprioceptive sense is to our grounded dynamic presence in the world. What emerges is an experimental aesthetic and a new spatio-temporal image regime (seen in the neo-baroque folding of objects and spaces), expressed through structural and formal relations within the digital image. In my analysis, this is an aesthetic which collapses the distinction between the scientific truth of detail, and the artistic truth of expression, into a new ‘digital naturalism’. In Chapter Five, ‘Reality Sutures, Simulation, and Digital Realism’, I extend the issues raised in the previous two chapters surrounding our cognitive engagement with images in our conscious shaping of the world around us. I look at the concept of suture as how we aesthetically and affectively interface with images, asking how (and if) we successfully police the boundary between actual and virtual in experience. This discourse then engages with the discovery of mirror neurons, with a simulation theory of mind, the metaphorical structure of memory, and the mimetic capacity to establish that we are, in a non-pejorative sense, influenced and conditioned by the images we consume to inhabit certain fields of immanent possibility intuitively and corporeally. Within digital images, this field of possibility is rendered plastic, subject to reformation, modulation, and regeneration, and I argue that this encourages a more plastic mind in which actuality and virtuality fuse. By then looking at the films Avatar and Source Code, I illustrate how the real is exploded and reformed, with the virtual, quantum flux supplanting notions of stable reality not just within the image, or just within our phenomenal experience of the world, but potential in every metaphysical sense of the real world. Finally, in Chapter Six, ‘Digital Nihilism: Ethical Reflections’, I turn to the more pragmatic political concerns of the project, asking whether we can

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ascertain an ethics of the digital image. I address the concerns of Deleuze and Stiegler about the potential for insidious affective conditioning of desires, alongside their stated need for creative thought, political engagement, and new industrial practices within a condition of neoliberal cultural capitalism. I suggest that the digital in fact breeds a cognitively active consumer who capably negotiates affective lures, and creatively and playfully (though not necessarily intentionally) synthesises new metaphysical awarenesses as ontological truths. While both see an indirect form of activism through the resistance and transgression of images, for Rancière (2006), this issue is ‘meta’-political and, for Pisters (2012), it is a form of ‘micro’-politics. These ideas comes together through my use of Vattimo’s concept of a ‘mellow nihilism’, which dispels rigid metaphysical notions for a new ‘weak’ ontology which is open and plastic, strategic rather than complacent. I move to establish a clear notion of an ontological plasticity within contemporary digital image culture.

2.

The Affective Synthesis of Reality by Digital Images Dan Strutt

Abstract This chapter expands on the issues and theories previously introduced, categorising them into four broad areas: philosophy of technology; processes of affection and cognition; existing digital image theory; and ethics/aesthetics. It clearly articulates Heidegger and Stiegler’s theory of technology and make direct links to contemporary visual culture. The affective turn in image theory is then discussed (largely indebted to the influence of Gilles Deleuze) and explicitly connected to parallel transformations in digital image production and distribution. The chapter finishes by integrating contemporary aesthetic theory with social and ethical issues, to suggest that an advanced digital visual culture has real and tangible benefits for our shared metaphysical awareness of the world. Keywords: Digital Pharmakon, Plasticity, Cinema 3, Spiritual Automaton, Stiegler, Deleuze

It was no longer a question of knowing where the centre was, the sun or the earth, because the primary question became ´Is there a centre or not at all?´ All the centres, of gravity, equilibrium, force, revolution, in short, of configuration, were collapsing. It was at that point that a restoration of centres undoubtedly occurred, but at the price of a profound change, of a great evolution of the sciences and the arts. (Deleuze, 1989, p. 143)

Strutt, D., The Digital Image and Reality. Affect, Metaphysics, and Post-Cinema, Amsterdam University Press, 2019 doi 10.5117/9789462987135_ch02

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A Great Evolution In my approach to the digital, post-cinematic image, I roughly follow the path taken by Gilles Deleuze in his Cinema books, which is to discern how ontological and metaphysical matters of reality, time, and space – ‘all the centres of configuration’ – are expressed and contemplated through the content and structure of cinematic media. While other earlier film theorists such as André Bazin and Jean Epstein also described the intrinsic capacity of film to capture and harness something of the essential nature of reality beyond normal perception, this was often coloured with a kind of quasispiritual belief in the sanctity of film, and, indeed, of reality. Deleuze instead created a kind of quasi-scientific taxonomy of film images, classified in their capacity to represent different forms of thought, without recourse to some ambiguous transcendence but rather to reality as fluid and changeable.1 He then articulated a cinematic mutation that de-centres ‘the ideal of the true’ – a modern, secular evolution in our sense of metaphysical configuration that negates any given ‘natural order’. In the quote above, analogised to the seventeenth-century philosophical crisis of truth we call The Enlightenment. In his Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Deleuze calls this ‘the powers of the false’ – image schema which not only challenge established knowledge of metaphysical ‘centres’, but also reveal new possible centres, perspectives, thoughts, and expressions thereof (1989, pp. 126-156). Today, Deleuze’s film philosophy has a special appeal to theorists of the digital, not only due to this general mutational and evolutionary role of cinematic images, but also due to their inherent strength to render ‘virtuality’ – a concept central to his film theory. The term ‘virtual’ is, however, used in different ways in the context of the digital; in the notion of a digital virtual reality (VR) as giving a reality effect to representation, or in a more properly Deleuzian sense, of images which suggest an outside and beyond to the ‘actual’ or seemingly natural sense of reality. This second sense is of course not specific to the digital, especially given that the digital image was barely nascent during the time of Deleuze’s writing on cinema. Analogue media did, at times, express an almost proto-digital virtuality through techniques such as graphic animation processes, superimpositions, chemical processes direct on the film material, and pro-filmic refractions within the shot – for instance, using mirrors (giving Deleuze the analogy for his virtualising 1 For recent introduction and explanation of Deleuze’s cinematic taxonomies, see David Deamer’s Deleuze’s Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images (2016) and Richard Rushton’s Cinema After Deleuze (2012).

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‘crystal-image’ as a hall of mirrors). However, within a digital media paradigm, the potential for sustained virtualisation, multiplication, and refraction of reality increases exponentially, such that it often becomes explicitly aligned with the quality of virtuality. This is perhaps primarily due to a technological shift away from indexicality, the direct and physical relation of the film material to the object it captures via light and chemical reaction. While the post-indexical image often remains faithful to certain appearances, codes, and grammars of photographic realism, it is simultaneously, through digital production and post-production processes, set free from this direct relation to actuality to explore the realms of the imagination freely. However, this is an ontological imaginary which does not stand in direct contrast to the real (for instance as pure fantasy), but rather is increasingly indiscernible from it. We can thus think about these virtualising capacities as not only facilitated by digital technologies, but rather as inherent to a specifically digital aesthetic in that it is explored, experimented with, and celebrated in certain ways that were foreshadowed in analogue media, and yet, fully realised, are unique to our contemporary digital image culture. Before embarking upon an analysis of the exact forms and functions of these images in the subsequent chapters, I first need to address a clear and fundamental question around the issue of cause of what can be discerned as a ‘digital shift’ in image production and content, framed by the question: Which came first, the digital aesthetic or the digital technological apparatus? If the digital image truly generates its own emergent ‘mutational’ ontology – a collapse and restoration of ‘centres of configuration’ – then what drives this process? In other words, do technological assemblages of digital image creation confront us as if they have their own mind, to challenge us and force us to think new thoughts? Or is this simply impossible and/or a dangerous notion of technological determinism which denies human agency and responsibility?2 This issue of cause and responsibility is important as we move through this discourse because, as we explore later through the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and Bernard Stiegler, there is a fundamental question at stake about the essence of humanity, and the role of technology within that – i.e. are technology and humanity (as cultural or social, even biological) separable in any meaningful way, or are they essentially synergistic?. I aim to work through some conflicting perspectives with regard to this issue – and a clear theoretical ambiguity in the work of Deleuze himself – before offering a balanced analytical approach towards the new digital ontology. 2 These issues of the technological automatism and determinism of media were addressed as early as 1974 by Raymond Williams in Television, Technology and Cultural Forms.

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A Question of Cause and Responsibility In The Virtual Life of Film, David Rodowick describes the shift from analogue to digital in terms of a loss of analogy and indexicality, and how this now gives us a decisively different, but ‘difficult’ ontology of film. He articulates how digital images ‘confront’ us with something like Deleuze’s powers of the false: Here we confront a new kind of ontological perplexity – how to place or situate ourselves, in space and time, in relation to an image that does not appear to be ´one´. On electronic screens, we are uncertain that what appears before us is an ´image´, and in its powers of mutability and velocity of transmission, we are equally uncertain that this perception has singular or stable existence in the present or in relation to the past. (Rodowick, 2007, p. 94)

However, despite, or perhaps because of, this insecure ontological status of the digital image, Rodowick describes how analogue cinematographic techniques and syntactical codes persist, where digital processes mimic the filmic ‘deeply recalcitrant cultural norms of depiction’ despite a lack of necessity (ibid, p. 94). Norms such as focal depth, framing, and editing are technical imperatives within film’s material form, but are now only used in digital post-cinema in a habituated mode to maintain a certain level of culturally ingrained familiarity with cinematic photo-realism. Lev Manovich (2001, 2007, 2016) is one of the more influential theorists who focuses on these habitual forms in the new digital aesthetics, and he takes a schematic, material, and formal approach to ‘mapping’ their coordinates, by focusing on design software, interface, and the interactive style of image production (an approach he refers to as ‘digital materialism’). I follow Rodowick’s incisive summation of the value of Manovich’s work, which gives due credit to the ways in which he offers researchers ‘points of navigation for understanding digital automatisms’ and to how he stresses the continuing usefulness of certain concepts of frame, image, screen, and representation which are ‘dear to f ilm and art theory as baselines for comprehending changes’(2007, p. 130). However, Rodowick notes that, in stressing these continuities, Manovich maintains a fundamental miscomprehension: ‘Manovich believes that the concept of representation is a stable one, whose function with respect to images is augmented with respect to computational processes’ (ibid) He instead insists that we have to interrogate the changed ontological status of contemporary images,

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moving beyond ‘the cinematographic ideal’ to ask about the new effects of the post-cinematic image as structures formed by immaterial code, and rethinking the core terms of analysis which might correlate with analogical procedures of image creation. Rodowick clearly points to a profound difference that cannot be captured by existing concepts, and that is yet to be properly understood. Cinematic ‘Realism’ becomes denaturalised by Rodowick as just a set of habituated aesthetic standards or norms stemming from analogue processes, which are now being subtly conditioned and altered in digital image culture by the automatisms of a new technological medium. Alongside the ontological perplexity or ambiguity within digital photo-realism, there is also an apparently automatic drift away from Realism itself toward the fantastic, as: The key point of reference now will be to mental events – not physical reality moulded to the imaginary, but the free reign of the imaginary in the creation of images ex nihilo that can simulate effects of the physical world (gravity, friction, causation) while also overcoming them. (ibid, p. 104)

Digital images, despite continuing to use codes of realism which serve to orientate us in space and time (or merely simulating them), ‘naturally’ (or by their own automatism) seem to tend towards playing with, transgressing, and overcoming these codes of realism. While cinema has always indulged the notion of the virtual, it is now underwritten by an essential, existential virtuality due to its substrate in mathematical abstraction, and, for Rodowick, this change of the relative (im)materiality of the medium seems to cause the subsequent aesthetic and thematic changes (ibid, p. 9). This break with analogue realism is also the conceptual thrust of film philosopher Patricia Pisters’s book The Neuro-Image, in which she defines a new image regime which is preoccupied with ‘literally showing us the illusory and affective realities of the brain’ (2012, p. 26). She analyses a digital screen culture which is fixated on creating ‘brain-screens’ on which narratives of mental breakdown, trauma, and psychosis are played out in ways that contemplate and complexify our habits of perception and awareness of reality. These images are rhizomatic, fractal constructions (within the frame, between frames, and between screens) which flout conventional rules of space-time to ‘restore the infinite’ within finite (realist) images (ibid, p. 25). However, unlike Rodowick, Pisters does not read this new image type as a direct consequence of digitalisation even though this is where it is

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‘situated’, stating that, while the development of digital technology may run parallel to the emergence of a new type of cinematic image, it does not in any way determine it: Film as f ilm is indeed profoundly marked by digital culture, but the internal changes in f ilm aesthetics (from database logic, to changed relations of time, to the cinema’s more illusionary and affective powers) were already present before the digital age and thus are not dependent on digital technology per se. (ibid, p. 26)

Pisters thereby sees evidence of database logics, networks, and re-mixability in films such as those of Alain Resnais, as anticipating digital image arrangements in analogue forms, and she takes this as evidence that the technology itself is not the primary condition of the aesthetic and ontological shift to the neuro-image. Indeed, Deleuze states the same of his cinematic Time-Image: ‘The fact is that the new spiritual automatism and the new psychological automata depend on an aesthetic before depending on technology’– noting that, if there is an original regime of images, it comes before the potential of technology to fully realise it, or indeed to destroy it (1989, p. 267). He then proposes a clear temporalisation and causal process whereby his emergent regime of images, the time-image, roughly corresponds with a 1950s postwar cultural and ontological crisis in belief: The modern fact is that we no longer believe in this world. We do not even believe in the events which happen to us, love, death, as if they only half concerned us. It is not we who make cinema; it is the world which looks to us like a bad film […] Cinema must film, not the world, but belief in this world, our only link. (1989, p. 171)

Here, the cinematic apparatus is a very humanist endeavour, merely reflecting our belief, or crisis of belief, in the world. It does not create a world, it merely creates an aesthetics of belief. Pisters’s Neuro-Image then notes a next crisis in ‘belief in this world’ on which her late 20th-century transition to the regime of the neuro-image is dependent (2012, p. 300). She gives two exemplary events, the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and the 2001 World Trade Centre terrorist attack, not as direct causes, but as related to ‘an assemblage of conditions that are connected to the transition’. First, the waning of empire and renegotiation of political divisions occurred within a process of rapid globalisation; second,

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there was a collapse of the distinction between actual and virtual in the hyper-mediatisation of the terrorist attacks. However, it does in many ways seem problematic to separate these images/events (or rather the assembled processes and circumstances to which they refer) so clearly from the global and digital technological conditions in which they are both steeped, that of the uncertainty, plurality, and instability of perception which Rodowick notes as the ontological features, or perplexities, of the non-indexical digital image. In dialogue with Pisters and Deleuze, and in an attempt to stake a claim that technological change itself is indeed deeply implicated in determining contemporary aesthetic and ontological changes, I would suggest that there is a technical condition, conceived of as an ‘essence’ of any given technology, that lies immanent or latent within the actual technological forms and processes (of hardware and software in the case of the digital) until it reveals itself to our consciousness through error or experimentation. What the technology starts out to be, as imagined in advanced of its creation (usually in an instrumental mode – for instance, seeing cinema within a Realist teleology) then mutates and evolves into something new and unanticipated in our consciousness of it. In other words, we do not know what a technology does, or is capable of, until it has already taken a turn in its evolution, and only when it has already exerted its affective draw upon us can we reflect upon the change that was made. Deleuze states this himself: It is here that Tarkovsky’s wish comes true: that ´the cinematographer succeeds in f ixing time in its indices [in its signs] perceptible by the senses´. And, in a sense, cinema had always done this; but, in another sense, it could only realize that it had in the course of its evolution, thanks to a crisis of the movement-image. To use a formula of Nietzsche’s, it is never at the beginning that something new, a new art, is able to reveal its essence; what it was from the outset it can reveal only after a detour in its evolution. (Deleuze, 1989, p. 43 – my emphasis)

At the turn of the nineteenth century, we anticipated cinematic technology’s capture of time and movement as a more transparent, scientific reflection of reality (via the proto-cinematic work of Jules Marey and Eadward Muybridge), yet only later were we able to acknowledge that it had actually altered our time perception rather than simply reflecting or deepening it. Indeed, all new expressive technologies from Technicolor, to Dolby sound, to Digital 3D are presented within a narrative of advancement towards a more

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seamless visual and aural realism (Bazin’s total cinema), and only later are we able to realise that they have in some way transformed perception and the very notion of the real by offering up a different mode of representing and experiencing it – a ‘new art’. While Deleuze clearly states that the aesthetic of the time-image comes ontologically prior to any technological advancement which might permit the efficient creation of such images, he simultaneously and apparently contradictorily endows these technologies with the automatistic power to ‘relaunch’ the time-image, to remake or reinvent them in original ways in a ‘genetic and differential’ mode (1986, p. 85). If cultural crises and historicised ontological conditions are the causal factors in any given aesthetic shift, then these are merely facilitated by the available expressive technologies. On the other hand, we can see that whatever aesthetic uses these technologies serve, they also synthesise their own vital affectivity in emergent ways. Deleuze, despite dismissing the notion that the technological forms themselves could determine either aesthetics or consciousness, also apparently recognised the potential for emergence through the machinic automatism of the media apparatus, that might confront us with a disruptive image that we must assimilate into a new and original image of thought. This automatism of the cinematic and digital apparatus can be thought of as its technological ‘essence’ in that it calls forth a certain mode of being; it ‘reveals’ the world in a certain way, and changes us (our culture and our belief in the world) in the process.

Cinema and Affection If we accept that screen images do not simply reflect human thought and culture, but also impact upon it in mutational ways, we have to ask: How exactly do we theorise about images as events, ‘entities’, or automata which affect us? The broad remit of academic film theory since the 1970s was to answer this question by focusing on the sociocultural resonance of the representative image on the screen, and on how we psychologically identify with its characters and narratives. This approach endures today in a culturally broad way with both media and armchair critics alike predominantly thinking about cinematic objects as texts to be used and read in an instrumental mode – as entertainment or education. However, to consider the mode in which either film or digital images impact us in ways that might generate new metaphysical thought, we need to lay down some fundamental notions of how our conscious mind engages with media

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images beyond semiotic and psychoanalytic notions of representation and identification. Since the publication of Deleuze’s Cinema books in English in the late 1980s, followed by the early works of Steven Shaviro (1993), Brian Massumi (1995), Vivian Sobchack (1992), and Laura Marks (1999), we have had a growing discourse based on a shift from seeing moving images as merely a reflection of social and individual realities towards a conception of them as primarily having a strong bodily or haptic address. This new strand of film theory reflected a distinctive turn away from cultural constructivism and the constitution of the political subject through discourse and reflected a turn to the body and to the concept of sensuous, haptic engagement. It stressed the ambiguous and complex feelings and pleasures stirred by engagement with images that cannot be simply explained through processes of identification and interpellation. Cinema is now better understood to possess a dynamic vitality which allows it to transcend the optical distance in which politicised theories of the ‘gaze’ were based (often with an explicit challenging of these earlier theories as deterministic and hegemonic, even within their own critique of ideology), and for the last 30 years theorists have reconsidered engagement with screen images in a more affective, synaesthetic, and tactile mode. These theorists offered the germinal concepts for an affective media theory that understands how images are received at a level of awareness by which we feel them to be effectively real, triggering primitive forms of reactivity like bodily tensing, sweating, adrenalin release, or laughter. Affect systems are seen as running parallel and simultaneous to systems of understanding and analysis – the higher-level cognitive functions through which we clearly know that we are engaging with a representation. The underlying systems are often understood as, in many ways, more powerfully autonomous in their primitive force than the higher mental functions of intellect. Affect, then, as a conceptual device, deals with a form of knowledge or awareness that is subconscious or non-conscious, and which generates a kind of automatic corporeal reactivity – it is knowledge of the world as a ‘gut’ sense. It also speaks to a type of corporeal cognition that is synaesthetic, in that it responds to unprocessed and undivided sensory data that has not yet been separated into distinct modalities. In his book of the same name, psychotherapist Daniel Stern views these synaesthetic expressions as ‘vitality forms’ – experiences which are full of intense and excessive affect without yet meaning anything (in the sense that we might classify emotions and cognitive behavioural responses as meaningful or understandable responses to stimuli). In Stern’s view, these vitality forms are a fundamental dynamic

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Gestalt which are processed through affect systems as a form of corporeal awareness without conscious analysis (Stern, 2010, pp. 4-5).3 Affect theory re-inscribes consciousness as a complex process dispersed throughout the body, brain, and even culture (as a form of collective shared memory); in this aspect, it moderates purely mental, purely social, and purely biological models of being in the world. It is a psycho-biological concept, but without any notion of biological determinism. It instead portrays the body as a centre of indetermination and as the locus of potential becomings. Affect thereby takes on an implicit ethical role. Through the fracturing of rigid and habitual structures of thought through intense affects, conventional knowledge structures are disrupted to reveal something new. Affect is thus often also associated with pure creativity: the novel, the new, and the emergent, bubbling up into conscious thought as intuition or inspiration, and thus has a broad appeal as a profoundly transdisciplinary concept, appealing to new technological practices, social-scientific discourses, and neuro-cognitive understandings, phenomenological, and psychoanalytical discourses, as well as being deployed in social and cultural critique of individualism and neoliberalism. Affect as notion has now been inserted into almost all the humanities disciplines as a complexifying and liberating theoretical force which yields new research methodologies and original insights into subjectivity, culture, and society. While it does not and cannot simply replace or supplant political and critical theory, it adds nuance and enriches existing theory and practice. It is mainly through the work of Deleuze in his Cinema books that a philosophically informed notion of affection arrived in the examination of film images, stemming from the work of Baruch Spinoza, Henri Bergson, and C.S. Peirce. His film theory developed as a natural extension of a larger philosophical project to account for the history of Western thought and consciousness – how it is expressed and reproduced in affective, as opposed to simply intellectual and written, modes. These books also introduced the idea of the communal expression of a metaphysics of time and space as being, in part, a technical process, by interrogating the unique relationship cinematic technology has with processes of consciousness. What emerged from these works was an understanding of the automatic, passive reproduction of modes of ‘mechanical’ thinking through media apparatus that have deeply inflected contemporary film theory, as much as affect theory in general. 3 As Daniel Stern refers to a dynamic, affective, and holistic experience as a Gestalt, body theorist Lisa Blackman refers instead, in her book Immaterial Bodies: Affect, Embodiment, Mediation, to ‘brain-body-world entanglements’ (2012, p. 1).

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However, in the view of new media theorist Mark Hansen, Deleuze made a fundamental error while dealing with the concept of affection in his Cinema books. Hansen states: Deleuze finds himself compelled to bracket Bergson’s embodied conception of affection – affection as a constitutive impurity of this bodies perception – and to offer in its place a formal understanding of affection as a specific permutation of the movement-image. Affection as a phenomenological modality of bodily life gives way to affection as a concrete type of image – the affection-image. (Hansen, 2006, p. 6 – original emphasis)

Hansen critiques Deleuze´s attempt to fix affection and make it concrete, what he sees as a formal understanding. He feels that this does an injustice to the philosophical concept of affection as given to us by Bergson – that of affection as a fluid disruptive process within habitual recognition rather than being a ‘special’ type of image. Hansen’s issue with Deleuze actually highlights a problem that runs through much affect theory, in as far as he sees that affect is here being ‘bracketed’ as a tangible object of study. This mission seems destined to fail as affection cannot be seen as a discrete thing in its own right, rather it is a constitutive component of a holistic and dynamic process of cognition. However, despite Hansen’s critique of Deleuze’s positioning of affection as a facet of a limiting visual regime, it seems that Deleuzian film theory – perhaps Deleuzian theory in general -- is really all about affection and the affective synthesis of reality. His film theory gives us a taxonomy of cinematic constructions and devices that each synthesise a non-conscious affection of certain metaphysical qualities – of time and space principally, but also of more ambiguous qualities of the repetition of difference, virtuality, and immanence. He shows us how, through film, we have the reproduction of a specific form of thought through a visual expression of formal and material relations – either linear, causal, and coherent (in the movement-image), or discontinuous, ambiguous, and complexified (in the time-image) – though both work primarily in a passive mode of affective synthesis by which the mind does not actively think about these things, but absorbs them.

Passive Synthesis and the Spiritual Automaton With his Cinema books, Gilles Deleuze surprised many by offering his own idiosyncratic film theory and analytic strategy (Rodowick, 1997, p.

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x). In these two texts, he did not attack or refute political f ilm theory, but instead crafted a more philosophically grounded and metaphysical formal analysis and typology of film images. Deleuze’s drawing together of Bergson, Spinoza, and Peirce’s writings in A Thousand Plateaus (with Felix Guattari, 1987) continued into the Cinema books, with a broad reach extending from perception and consciousness to metaphysical concepts. However, in the Movement-Image and the Time-Image, these ideas were attached specifically to media, and to cinema’s unique relationship with processes of consciousness. Deleuze’s concepts of ‘passive synthesis’ and the ‘spiritual automaton’, applied in the cinematic context, prove invaluable for the expansion of understanding of affective processes and how they feature in the ontological shift to digital media. In thinking about how media technologies generate a distinct metaphysical regime of what is visible, of what is understandable, and of what is expressible, we must understand that this process functions below a level of fully conscious awareness. This is to say that it is so peripheral to our core consciousness that it is ingrained and habitual, permeating the relationships between objects in the world and our own bodily senses, both inwardly and outwardly directed. These processes are so encompassing in our day-to-day interactions with the world that they move from the social or cultural milieu in which they are sustained into our very personal procedural and semantic memory, and act as the neurological foundation to all activity and subsequent reflection on our actions. This foundation is subconscious and automatic, positioned in the brain somewhere between the primal motor automation of the ancient ‘reptilian’ brain and the higher cognitive function of the cerebral cortex. The concept of ‘passive synthesis’ becomes useful for this project in thinking phenomenologically about how technologies of expression synthesise a metaphysical model of reality – an affective dimension of automatic responsivity which sculpts perception and cognition at every level. Passive synthesis, a concept from Hume and Husserl via Deleuze, anticipates contemporary discourses of affection. Media, as a technological system, gives us the rule by which we synthesise reality, but this process occurs passively and automatically outside of our conscious awareness or control. We inhabit the moving image in a distracted way, and, as such, we absorb knowledge about the world in the form of intuitive skills and aptitudes in perception. 4 If the active mind is intellectual, logical, and 4 This point about the non-conscious ‘distracted’ absorption of skills is also developed in Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1999).

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analytical, the process of passive synthesis is automatic and embodied. The process of the passive synthesis of time, then, is in the embodied phenomenal experience of duration as completely natural and perfectly obvious as regards the active mind, even though our awareness of it has been, in a sense, artificially generated. These apparently natural experiences of time are synthetic constructs, possibly to an extent phylogenetically inscribed in our primitive reptilian brain, but also ontogenetically acquired and held kinaesthetically within the affective body through lived experience. Neither a common sense, natural order of the world, nor a logical deduction through observation, many modes of inhabiting the world are developed passively, internally, and non-rationally. The way that media affect us can thus be thought of, distinct from semantic processes of representation and identification, as a non-conscious processing of sensory data through associative and metaphorical links, through motor, muscle, and procedural memory, and through the laying of neural pathways. The modern concept of passive synthesis emerges from Husserl’s use of it in his Analyses Concerning Passive and Logical Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic (2001, original 1891).5 As Husserl’s translator Anthony Steinbock describes in his introductory notes, he ‘overburdens the term with a significance that is at best multivalent, and quite often cryptic and vague’, and yet passive synthesis emerges as crucial to an understanding of sense experience, affection, and the process of associative memory (ibid, p. xxxviii). Steinbock describes passivity in Husserl as the route to a genetic account of how cognitive activity is largely unconsciously motivated, a dimension of experience by which ‘a present perception passes over into a retentionally lingering perception and fades back as a fundamental form of the past, linking up with previous retentions, motivating pretensions or futurally directed intentions’ (ibid). This describes a ‘primordial’ process by which memory as retention of previous sense experience synthesises our unconscious perception of things as things, that is, as intelligible, meaningful wholes. Objects acquire a consistency and regularity in our perception through passive, non-conscious association, connection, and harmonisation with previous experience, creating synthetic unities. Passive synthesis therefore describes the ambiguous and un-thought process of corporeal affection, the way objects and processes are given to us pre-consciously, the passive experience of the object before it has been constituted by an active

5 Though it is noted that Husserl developed his phenomenological notion from Hume’s earlier psychological use (Ansell-Pearson, 2002, p. 227)

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mind, the passive experience of the object before it has been constituted by an active mind. Something is pre-given insofar as it exercises an affective allure on me without being grasped by me as such, responsively or egoistically. Here, this ´something´ received the appellation ´objectlike formation´, that is something that exhibits the basic structure of an object, but is more elementary than an object the full-fledged sense or has not yet exhibited objectivity. (Husserl, 2001, p. xlii)

Passive synthesis as concept explores the affective mode in which the mind absorbs sense experience without analysis, before this data is concretised through association and experienced at a higher level of attentiveness. For Deleuze, passive synthesis becomes the primary affective mode of being in the world, and the concept extends and develops throughout his work, at first as an aesthetic mode of semiosis (in Proust and Signs), then as the generation of sensations of temporality and identity (in Difference and Repetition), before later describing the constitution of reality itself as the connective, disjunctive, and conjunctive syntheses (in Anti-Oedipus) (Faulkner, 2004). His use of the concept is triadic, with three primal passive syntheses as signs or images with an affective dimension which gives shape to all experience of the world. Deleuze theorist Keith Faulkner usefully aligns the three ‘signs’ of Proust elaborated in Proust and Signs with the three passive syntheses of time described in his later Difference and Repetition, and, in doing so, further elucidates the dynamic triadic function of the concept as it later applies to the Cinema books. These signs/syntheses are: ‘worldly’ signs of recognition and habit (aligned with the first synthesis of time); ‘signs of love’ as virtual objects of desire and the imaginary dimension of the past (a second synthesis); and ‘signs of art’ which ‘do a violence to’ these first two habitual or imaginary ways of perceiving the world (a third synthesis). We see through Faulkner’s analysis that, by ‘signs’ Deleuze is not just referring to literal signs of language, but to an affective register of images which pervade our preconscious and unconscious mind, and we can then track the genesis of Deleuze’s thinking to the more abstract metaphysical concept within the much further-reaching cinematic model of the time-image. The dynamic triadic concept then becomes useful in thinking about how medium-specific ‘signs’ (first literary, then cinematic, then digital) as affective images are either harmonised with our common sense and routine perception of relations of time and space – the recognisable

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contours of everyday reality – or if they pose a problem for perception which we have to then negotiate aesthetically and creatively. Each of these signs then, to Deleuze, affect a certain relation of our minds to the passing of time in the way that they cause us to relate to certain events in the present, whether that be in a habitual, dismissive mode; in a retrospective, nostalgic mode; or in an aesthetically engaged, actively creative mode. These images are passive syntheses that are phenomenally imperceptible, unthought, as ‘an internal impression which develops solely in visions and rudimentary actions’ (Deleuze, 1989, p. 263). Drawing on Freud, Faulkner goes on to suggest that this synthesis occurs not only at a phenomenal, mental level, but also in actual physical changes in the neural substrate of the brain, taking seriously the proposition that these metaphysical entities become physically embodied in us (Faulkner, 2004, p. 107).6 One can then start to see why cinema was of particular interest to Deleuze, and why he surprised many people by releasing his two-volume Cinema books as a philosophical study. Cinema emerged as a privileged medium for our consciousness in that, due to its temporal form and illusory expression of movement, it can very tangibly synthesise the experience of time, deconstructing the passive processes and drawing them into our cognitive awareness. Simultaneously, film is a well-adapted tool for active experimentation. By initially mimicking our passive and ‘natural’ editing and framing cognitive functionality, cinema ironically has the potential to subvert and expose the process by which this passive synthesis functions. The regime of the cinematic movement-image spatially rationalises and captures durational time through the ‘sensory-motor schema’ of movement through space. The time-image then arrives in Deleuze’s analysis to undermine this regime and unhinge time from relations of space and movement, giving a ‘direct image of time’ as a third synthesis, and thus becoming a ‘will to art’ in causing a disjuncture, or rupture, in habitual modes of perception. Rendered as cinematic signs, these passive affects can more easily pass into cognition and the possibility of being actively expressed in language. In the 1950s transition to the regime of the time-image, Deleuze saw an emerging critique and disruption of time-consciousness by film directors who wished to interrogate the nature of memory and temporal reality through the cinematic form. However, though these cinema creators deliberately and actively sculpted syntheses of time and action through 6 This is a point developed more fully later through Catherine Malabou’s work on neural plasticity.

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representational images (as intentional, imagistic ‘utterances’), Deleuze also saw these images assume a vitality of their own as affective automata, ‘passively’ and automatically connecting with other affections within a collective cultural subconscious and synthesising a new way of feeling and a new image of thought which seems independent of any one individual authorial intention. Deleuze conceives of this vitality of the image as a ‘spiritual automatism’ or ‘psycho-mechanics’ of cinema (1989, p. 262). The complexity of the cinematic spiritual automaton is articulated by Deleuze in the Time-Image, through the words of Artaud, in direct comparison to a ‘dream-cinema’ defined as ‘a censure or repression brought together with an unconscious mode of impulses’ (ibid, p. 165). In contrast to the dream which bubbles up involuntarily from the unconscious, the spiritual automaton is, for Deleuze, more like automatic writing: ‘not an absence of composition, but a higher control which brings together critical and conscious thought and the unconscious in thought’ (ibid). Deleuze uses the metaphor of the daydreaming vigilambulist versus the sleeping somnambulist to explain this distinction further: it does not involve the total absence of or relinquishing of control as if we were asleep and dreaming, but rather an automatic motor control that works passively beyond our conscious awareness in a waking state. Cinema as spiritual automaton represents an idea that we are not in full conscious control, that an affective power is passively exerted over us.7 In this way, we can see that our own creations challenge us with a power that we never figured for them, and, in their intensity, the images confront us with our powerlessness to think: What cinema advances is not the power of thought but its impower, and thought has never had any other problem. It is precisely this which is much more important than the dream: this difficulty of being, this powerlessness at the heart of thought. What the enemies of cinema criticized it for (like George Duhamel, ´I can no longer think what I want, the moving images are substituted for my own thoughts´) is just exactly what Artaud makes into the dark glory and profundity of cinema. (Deleuze, 1989, p. 166)

7 This is also addressed by Rodowick, who draws on Cavell’s The World Viewed, to note that: ‘A medium in this sense is not a passive or recalcitrant substance subject to artistic will. It is itself expressive as potentiae, or powers, of thought, action, or creation. But these powers are variable and conditional. In exploring their potential we discover the conditions of possibility of a medium; in exceeding or exhausting them we may in fact create a new medium, and new powers of thought and creation.’ (2007, p. 45)

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It is this ‘profound’ substitution of our thought by the cinematic image that makes Deleuze identify a ‘camera-consciousness’ which ‘raises itself to a determination which is no longer formal or material, but genetic and differential’ (1986, p. 85 – my emphasis). This is to say that the technology of cinema at first reflects or mimics certain formal aspects of perception, but then, in its autonomous vitality, passively yet decisively enters into and alters our consciousness. It proves itself as a spiritual problematic as it challenges our capacity to think about and understand the world, and, in this, it assumes a sublime effect: ‘the image must have a shock effect on thought, and force thought to think itself as much as thinking the whole’ (Deleuze, 1989, p. 158). He continues: ‘It is the material automatism of images which produces from the outside a thought which it imposes, as the unthinkable in our intellectual automatism’ (ibid, p. 179). I argue that the ‘unthinkable’ image has now, within contemporary digital post-cinema, become the dominant or default mode of aesthetic expression, not just as a trend of cultural postmodern playfulness and ironic detachment but because of a contemporary ontological condition (though not, perhaps, a cultural crisis of faith). This condition is instigated by rapid digitalisation, going hand in hand with a secular awareness of the limits of our knowledge of the physical world that entails wild speculation in theoretical physics as to the structure of the universe. The images created in digital media as computer-generated and 3D-simulated worlds thus prove to be the next stage in the evolution of images from the cinematic time-image. They now provide not only fragmentary moments of rupture in the sensory-motor schema of the movement-image, but instead offer fully realised, sustained, and coherent other worlds with in which predictable metaphysics are surpassed. In films such as Christopher Nolan’s film Inception (2010), Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void (2010), and Duncan Jones´s Source Code (2011), reality opens up to new levels, new ruptures, new cracks, and new sensations, going deeper and further from recognisable reality, until we feel the genuine peril of losing all connection to what we know. As film’s materials, processes, and technologies have their own automatisms – in grains of silver which capture light on the screen, in transparent celluloid that can hold an image through which light can be shone, and in the conjuring of movement by the linear sequencing of images on the film strip (just as, for instance, oil painting has its own automatic qualities in the brushstrokes and textures of the paint), digital visual technologies have a texture and a modality that we are still experimenting with in ways of which we do not know the outcome. They are more than the sum of the instrumental representational or artistic uses put to them. The digital image

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thus has a vital automatism which ‘has its own logic’ and ‘constructs its own objects’ (ibid, p. 262).

Do We Need a New ‘Digital’ Image Type – A ‘Cinema 3’? In identifying a digital post-cinematic image which is a decisive evolution from the analogue image, it is tempting to identify and name an original image type which may succeed and surpass Deleuze’s time-image in contemporary importance as a ‘Cinema 3’ (this is what Patricia Pister suggests through her alignment of the Neuro-Image with a third synthesis of time). I have to wonder though whether this is entirely necessary, or if all that is needed is an update or ‘relaunch’ of the aesthetic impulse of the time-image into the 21st century? This relaunch is in fact called for by Deleuze in his conclusion to the Time-Image, as a call to arms against the death of cinematic ethics in the face of the ‘electronic image’ (1989, p. 267). To determine whether we need a new cinema, or simply a relaunch, we should examine exactly what this impulse is for Deleuze; as the third synthesis of time, as a will to art, and as powers-of-the-false. In Deleuze’s third synthesis of time, there is always a fault or complication in the repetition of difference which constitutes what we think of as ‘identity’. This fault is usually an unconscious error in repetition which accidentally generates something new – exposing a falsehood or flaw in stable identity, and which subsequently forces a change in our ways of perceiving and conceptualising the world. The third synthesis is about the repetition of difference which thus becomes passively modified or ‘disguised’, through ‘clothed’ repetition, mutating into something undefined, new, and future-oriented. To Deleuze, the time-image, in its rupturing of spatio-temporal continuity, is understood to undermine the mindless ‘bare repetition of difference’ of the movement-image, disrupting any easy process of recognition and thereby requiring a perceptual creativity. This, for Deleuze, is the objective of art: ‘to put it simply, the work of art does something that dreams do: it creates new combinations by combining disparate images and thereby expands perception’ (Faulkner, 2004, p. 51). The time-image is thus a ‘sign of art’ associated with the third synthesis of time, exposing the flaws in recognition inherent in both the first and second syntheses of time. It undermines and disarms the habitual sensory-motor schema of the movement-image, and, in this disruptive effect, encourages a mode of critical attention.

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In my analysis of a digital post-cinema I would say that the intense malleability of space-time in digital images creates affective states which initially disrupt recognition, but then stimulate an aesthetic, creative response as new potential states of becoming. Because of this, I would suggest that these types of images are already firmly placed within Deleuze’s third synthesis of time as the condition for the new or of a future-oriented sensation of duration. If the time-image then initiated the third synthesis, this aesthetic impulse is simply continued and expanded in digital media in a way that does not necessarily transform the aesthetic impulse of the time-image even while it dramatically re-energises it. However, the digital image can be seen as an emergent and original image type which ontologically surpasses the time-image, in that it is a shift away from duration as the principle metaphysical sensation of reality, towards a more plural metaphysical notion of materiality, dimensionality, causality, agency, energy, and force (where it is not only the dualism of space and time which drives ontological thinking). Therefore, instead of identifying a new type of image, we can talk about the category of the time-image being relaunched to describe more of a heterogeneous metaphysical affective flux. To reflect this expanded sense of metaphysical discontinuity, we could refer to this as a flux-image, or perhaps, reflecting Catherine Malabou’s discourse on plasticity, a plastic image, in which not only space and temporality, but also all other concepts are drawn into question (perhaps also tactically moving beyond the clichéd [for some] Deleuzian concepts of flux and becoming). This plastic image seems to be, in many ways, what Deleuze is reaching for conceptually in the latter part of his Time-Image towards an essence of multidimensionality, and yet in a way that he cannot fully articulate due to the practical, technical impossibility of its representation. He instead speaks of ‘simultaneity of incompossible worlds’, and ‘multiple peaks of present’ in a way which seems to accurately foreshadow the kind of digital contortions which are now familiar in a post-cinema in which immanent quantum indeterminations supplant more simple notions of time travel and teleportation (1989, p. 275). However, despite this speculative plastic image, I will not be deploying a new vocabulary here, since, as stated, I doubt the real theoretical need for a Cinema 3. Instead, I refer only to ‘the digital post-cinematic image’ as clearly within the aesthetic and ethic impulse of the time-image, as a sign of art, and in the extended, relaunched sense that Deleuze himself describes. Though I do not ascribe to a specific need to suggest a successor to the time-image, it does seem important to note that what differs decisively from Deleuze’s moment is that its aesthetic impulse has now evolved to

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become culturally dominant and pervasive in contemporary popular culture. This means that, in becoming the new default image regime, it ceases to be perceived as revolutionary, associated with elite art practice and the avant-garde, or on the margins of culture (as it still seemed to be for Deleuze), and is instead the typical fodder of mainstream digital media. This disturbs any easy duality between a normative mainstream and a transgressive or ethical avant-garde will to art (or a high-culture/ low-culture divide), as it could be said that in digital media the regime of the time-image is just as normative as classical narrative f ilm. The profound reflexivity over metaphysical dynamics that is now common in contemporary digital media, and the subversion of the conventional linearity of the movement-image are often critically dismissed as a fairly mindless ironic stylistic devices or as pure spectacle. However, I propose that these ‘subversions’ which increasingly become the standard are still the automatic and emergent properties of the ‘genetic and differential’ digital technologies, with a malleability that is extensive if not infinite within the rapidly evolving technological landscape. Creative workers and technicians in digital-image creation are continually experimenting and innovating to see what is technologically possible, with new tools, ever greater processing speeds and storage capacities. They are constantly seeking the truly novel and rarely dryly reproducing the same in ever-shortening cycles of technological innovation. These digital images, though perhaps now familiar, still retain an element of resistance in their multiplicity, a sublimity which cannot be reduced to simple cliché, gimmick, or capitalist commodity prerogative. The ubiquitous but experimental ethic and ethos of the digital image thus still serves to refract and distort thought affectively, constantly reinventing itself to yield original dynamic forms through which we can rethink the real (in a way that older media could never achieve). What we can perhaps subsequently describe is a normalisation of the sublime in contemporary digital aesthetics.

The Digital Revealing of Reality To augment Deleuze’s notion of the passive synthesis of metaphysical consciousness, now aligned with the digital condition of image production, I turn to a broader philosophy of technology through Martin Heidegger’s concept of techne, and to Bernard Stiegler’s more direct technical address to digital media technologies. This actually helps us to think further beyond the

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thorny issue of cause and responsibility (tackling the notion of technological determinism) by assuming the perspective that all technologies – from basic tools to complex machinery such as the cinematic apparatus – alter us as humans, and make fundamental changes to the way we interact with the world. Heidegger’s primary concern in his essay The Question Concerning Technology is to show that technology is not simply what we normally think of it to be in a modern industrial age – an instrument or a means to an end, whether that end is a material need, or towards sociocultural progress. Rather, he positions all technologies as modes of ‘revealing’, ‘unconcealing’, or ‘bringing-forth’ of the world. In this intellectual move, he asks us to question what it is about modern technologies that diverges from an original mode of revealing as ‘poiesis’. Originary modes of techne as poiesis are those by which we actively make our world either through ‘the activities and skills of the craftsman, but also [through] the arts of the mind and the fine arts’ (Heidegger, 1977, p. 13). However, where craft practice opens up the world and reveals what could be considered immanent aspects of reality, for Heidegger, modern machine technology (as it has evolved and diverged from handicraft skills) has mutated into a ‘setting-upon’ and ‘challenging-forth’ of this same immanence. This is a regulating, ordering, and rationalising process which ceases to reflect upon the immanence of nature as physis through any organic process of discovery, and instead sees the world already ordered as ‘standing-reserve’ or raw resource from which our needs should be extracted. While this perspective holds a clear appeal to a contemporary environmentalist notion of an ecological balance which is disrupted by human exploitation, this was not the nuance that Heidegger focused on, as he was concerned with what this damaging process does to us as humans. He states: Thus when man, investigating, observing, ensnares nature as an area of his own conceiving, he has already been claimed by a way of revealing that challenges him to approach nature as an object of research, until even the object disappears into the objectlessness of standing-reserve. (Heidegger, 1977, p. 19)

Heidegger describes here that by engaging in this mode of thought – of the world as a rationalised and understood object – we fail to understand that we too become objectified, we too have already been claimed by the same way of approaching the world. The essence of modern technology sets us in a frame of mind to see the real as standing reserve, and that includes ourselves and

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our fellow humans. He calls this effect of technology on us ‘enframing’, by which we are drawn into a calculating and objectifying mode. This critique extends to the physical sciences and their Cartesian representations of the world as structured and categorised and hierarchical systems of information. He remarks that nature becomes un-representable other than as an ordered system of information, and that this mode of thinking of nature as figure or data is so abstracted it becomes hopelessly disconnected: ‘its realm of representation remains inscrutable and incapable of being visualized’ (ibid). This is the enframing of nature – an abstraction through information/data that conceals its true essence. Within this habit of representing the world, for Heidegger, lies the ‘ultimate danger’ or ‘precipitous fall’ – that we too become standing reserve, and that we become irredeemably detached from ‘truth’ or the real as a kind of originary immanence.8 The ‘saving power’ within Heidegger’s view is that we come to see this process of enframing at work. This requires salvaging and reconnecting with that other mode of revealing which does not impose a rational system on the world, and through which we can reveal and confront this true ‘essence’ of technology: the arts. We can see here that the arts assume a general force of negation within his model, by which not just the fine arts but also the arts of the mind, i.e. philosophy, are trusted with the power of combating enframing processes, and thus are seen as the redemptive force that will save humanity. Art and other poetic and aesthetic strategies, as opposed to industrialised and mechanised technologies, thus hold the ‘saving power’. They have an oppositional dynamic force which allows nature to reveal itself naturally in its own essence. This resonates strongly with modernist and postmodern aesthetic theory from Adorno’s antinomy to Lyotard’s sublime, and with concepts of an experimental avant-garde, in which art is seen as a privileged autonomous realm, if not the only dialectically negative political force which can drive social change. However, towards the end of The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger offers another tantalising but relatively undeveloped possibility which seems more apt for our contemporary society (underdeveloped in aesthetic 8 This idea also forms the basis of Bergson’s attack on ‘intellectualism’ as the scientific mode of rationalising the world as logical and predictable. This, he insists, is a ‘misuse of mind’. Of interest is the 1922 text The Misuse of Mind: A Study of Bergson’s Attack on Intellectualism by Karin Stephen, in which it is stated: ‘The business of philosophy is not to explain reality but to know it. For this a different kind of mental effort is required. Analysis and classification, instead of increasing our direct knowledge, tend rather to diminish it […] The better we explain, the less, in the end, we know’ (2000). This sentiment seems well in line with Heidegger’s incitement to examine the ‘essence’ of technology.

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theory but also in the philosophy of technology generally), and which also relieves the crude dialectic of art and rationalism which is otherwise present in the essay (and which can seem hopelessly outdated in advanced cultural capitalism). He states: The Saving Power: Whether art can be granted this highest possibility of its essence in the midst of extreme danger, no one can tell. Yet we can be astounded. Before what? Before this other possibility: that the frenziedness of technology may entrench itself everywhere to such an extent that someday, throughout everything technological, the essence of technology may come to presence in the coming to pass of truth. (Heidegger 1977, p. 35)

Here, Heidegger suggests that that art as dialectical force may not be the only final hope for humanity, but rather that technology could become so ubiquitous that it would in some way spontaneously contribute to the revealing of its own essence. This possibility seems more adapted to a world in which digital technology is truly entrenched in every field of human activity, and in which the level of technological mediation has indeed become so ‘frenzied’ that it might indeed be said to reflect upon and question its own ontological essence. Heidegger gives us a way of thinking about technologies as not physical entities, devices, or instruments, but rather as modes of relating to the world which put us into a particular habit of perception, representation, and action with regard to reality. In subtle ways, industrial technologies draw us into a state of being which spreads beyond our direct relation to the technologies themselves and permeates our general mode of relating to the world, to others, and to ourselves. They can obscure the world from us, and even actively silence or obscure alternative modes of understanding, awareness, and engagement. Only by being observant to this technological process can we come to think differently. We have to ask then, following Deleuze’s lead, if cinema is not the preeminent technological form which not only represents reality in an instrumental mode (an industrial, commercial, representational mode), but also has the aesthetic potential to elevate itself to a type of reflexive revealing which exposes our modes of enframing the world in Heidegger’s ethical sense. Is cinema Heidegger’s ‘other possibility’, and is this not perhaps what Deleuze suggests in the Time-Image? Or, is it in fact digital technology, specifically the craft of the post-cinematic image, undeniably frenzied and everywhere entrenched, that actually now holds the promise

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of a revealing or unconcealing that might bring the essence of technology into our consciousness?9 We can read the film philosophy of Deleuze as describing the distinctive technical modes in which the moving image brought about the possibility to reveal time in a way that was not possible before – giving a ‘direct’ or ‘pure’ image of time in the time-image. Time here was ‘unconcealed’, in a specific way, by a specific technological apparatus. Prior to this, in the movement-image, time is ‘enframed’, ordered, and rationalised through its enslavement to movement through space. The time-image therefore reveals the essence of time – duration – allowing us to reconnect with its truth, and further revealing the technological essence that allowed time to become so enframed. This is not a revealing which is the crude exposing of a lie or deceit, but is instead the poetic crafting of an alternative image which simply reflects on an immanent metaphysical truth in a different way. As Deleuze states: ‘This is not a simple principle of reflection or becoming aware: “Beware! this is cinema”. It is a source of inspiration. The images must be produced in such a way that the past is not necessarily true, or that the impossible comes from the possible’ (1989, p. 131). Here, cinema’s ‘powers of the false’ are not a simple force of negation, but rather the power to create a new type of image which undermines the technical enframing of reality, but in a way that inspires new creative thought.

Interstellar’s Ontological Revealing To reflect on the possibility of a digital cinematic ‘revealing’, and to discuss a problematic case study, I return to Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar from 2014. In this film, and in its public discursive rhetoric, we saw cinematic strategies towards image-making being conceptually opposed to ‘real’ quantitative scientific research, whereby the latter was promoted as being the unique selling-point of the film. This discursive strategy articulated how the fantastic images of the film – of the black hole Gargantua, of the wormholes and alien planets – were not simply sprung from the fertile imagination of a scriptwriter and effects studio, but were instead grounded in scientific observation and calculation. I described in the introduction how 9 This notion of cinematic revealing is explored by Vivian Sobchack through slow motion, in her chapter ‘Cutting to the Quick: Techne, Physis and Poiesis and the Attractions of Slow Motion’, in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (2006), ed.Wanda Strauven. I conduct my own analysis of digital slow motion in Chapter Three.

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this film seems to break down and complexify any clear boundary between art (imagination) and science fact in terms of representing metaphysical forces, and thus seems to offer an original image type. This film’s creators have clearly reflected deeply on the ontological status of their images, and have generated complex mathematical simulations which reflect a level of scientific truth, rather than wild speculation or vivid imagination. Director Nolan places ‘real’ values even on his fully computer-generated representations – not analogue, not pro-filmic, but with an apparently similar set of moral values put in place by the involvement of theoretical physicists and scientific visualisation labs in the visual design of the film. As a director, he has valued a kind of analogue authenticity as the internal logic of many of his films, and in his public profile, he actively campaigns for the continued use of traditional film formats in the face of their digital usurpers. He has, in the past, explicitly distanced himself from the use of digital effects – rejecting digital illusionism within fiction and insisting upon capturing the actual pro-filmic event; for instance, the infamous truck-flip in Batman: The Dark Knight (2008). He also consciously rejected Digital 3D, despite its popularity, with Interstellar, and privileged film formats in presentation of the film by controversially penalising digital-only venues by allowing the film to open one day early in analogue film theatres (McClintock, 2014). However, Interstellar’s scientifically qualified data visualisations of the black hole Gargantua are aesthetically rendered in digital post-production, opening them up to a level of access and appreciation which the much dryer scientific simulation imagery could never have achieved (Thorne, 2014). Thus, we have to ask what status reality actually has within the ontology to which Nolan seems to ascribe, which distances itself from the ‘fake’ digital, and reifies the ‘authentic’ analogue. Is there greater authenticity here, greater naturalism, or is Nolan just creating a (rather disingenuous) narrative about scientific authenticity in science fiction (which he himself cannot even deliver on)? Within a discourse of scientific truth versus a fanciful sci-fi inauthenticity, we must ask if this is science-driven cinematic art, or rather cinema-driven scientific visualisation? Is the real science a mere supplement here for a fairly standard cinematic image which predates the digital (or even just a marketing strategy), or is it really the driving force of a new digital imaginative strategy of image creation? One could argue that the digitally advanced images of Interstellar attain a new level of digital ‘revealing’ which marks a significant turning point in the historical development of moving images. When scientific data visualisation becomes truly aesthetic and cinematic as in Interstellar, do we

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have an original mode of revealing by which some deeper truth or essence is revealed – an original regime of images? Does this qualify as a poetic image that allows a natural truth to ‘shine forth most purely’, breaching the purely scientific enframing of nature by truly merging it with a properly sublime aesthetic form of revealing? Furthermore, is it an example of the moment when the digital image starts to think reflexively upon its own ontological status, its own process of revealing, its own essence, at a moment in which we are more broadly drawn into a ‘questioning’ of the nature of technological mediation? Do special effects thereby become more ethical, more meaningful, when they are no longer ‘just’ pretty pictures? This is perhaps idealistic. Interstellar is surely an original postcinematic image, and the image of the black hole is undeniably hypnotic – an effect certainly enhanced by the awareness that there is a complex basis of truth behind and within the image. But then we have to ask if it is more, or actually less, evocative than other similarly affective images which have previously fired the public scientific imagination.10 Is there any difference in terms of our metaphysical consciousness between an image which imaginatively evokes a relatively intangible and unobservable entity such as a black hole, and an algorithmic simulation based on real data? Then, if this image is indeed a new, original kind of revealing which serves as an expansion of metaphysical consciousness, then we have to wonder if that is really how Nolan intended it. Within his image logic, we can see that he indulges a nostalgia for some abstract ‘authenticity’ that, in a sense, betrays the real expressive potential of his own digital visualisations. We can perhaps conclude that Nolan’s own rationale is in fact redundant, if we instead consider the images independently, detached from the discourse that immerses them, are a unique product of a digital technological automatism. If this is really a film that makes large steps to break down this boundary between scientific simulation and aesthetic evocation, it can be said that it does this through its own material automatism, over and above (or despite) the intention of the film’s creators. Does this type of post-cinematic image then actually constitute an original, virtual image of thought? And is this perhaps the consequence of technology becoming so embedded, convoluted, and ubiquitous that it spontaneously starts to reveal its own essence? 10 Past analogue representations of theoretical objects include, for example, The Black Hole (dir. Gary Nelson, 1979), 2001 (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1968 – notable for its slit-screen animation effects), and more recent organic effects have selectively been used in in The Tree of Life (dir. Terence Malick, 2011) and The Fountain (dir. Darren Aronofsky, 2007), in which purely digital effects could otherwise have been used.

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Granting this ‘saving power’ to the digital image is perhaps still a little premature despite these interesting advances in visualisation. Critical theorists including Bernard Stiegler and Sean Cubitt still strongly emphasise the tendency of digital media to function in exactly the mode of ordering and standardisation of the world, which is nothing other than an ‘enframing’ mode, and especially while even the creator of these images actively disavows their revealing power by placing his trust in the analogue. Stiegler is a key theorist who here extends and develops Heidegger’s ‘extreme danger’ scenario into the realm of digital media, believing that our current technological regime provides almost crippling odds against the redemption of humanity.

The Digital Pharmakon As previously noted, Heidegger discusses ‘representational thinking’ as a mode of rationality into which we are drawn as an ‘enframing’ of reality. He states: Where everything that presences exhibits itself in the light of a causeeffect coherence, even God, for representational thinking, can lose all that is exalted and holy, the mysteriousness of his distance. (Heidegger, 1977, p. 33)

For Heidegger, thinking representationally is part of the scientific and machinic sensibility cultivated by modern technology, in a mode that distances us from any pure thought about mysterious complexity or holy ambiguity by imposing upon it an abstract symbolic system. Bernard Stiegler, fusing this idea with Derrida’s conception of grammatology, develops a theory which more directly tackles representation and communication as it has changed and evolved alongside our technological evolution. His theory, developed through his five-volume Technics and Time series, allows us to position cinema and digital media better alongside Heidegger’s industrial enframing technologies as technical conditions which give shape to our capacity to think, perceive, and act. Any given system of representation, from speech to written language to the cinematic image, is seen equally as a technology which synthesises a particular actualised mode of being in the world. This is to say that thought itself is mediated by a technological system, and that our own thought processes are conditioned and modified by this system. However, in Stiegler’s Derridean (also Foucauldian) aspects, he diverges from Heidegger’s moral stance in stating that there is no original, pure, or

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transcendent ‘real’ state away from which technology draws us (and certainly no mysterious or exalted Godhead). Rather, all ways of thinking, feeling, and representing (communicating) are originally technical and impure. This means that where Heidegger posits the ‘ultimate danger’ to humanity is that everything we think and feel would become completely enframed by our technological circumstance (such that we forget our original selves), Stiegler takes this enframing as a fundamental given of the human condition. He states that there is no original relation of man to nature (physis), and no essence or truth of human experience beyond the tools which we create to interact with and describe the world. As such, Stiegler is instantly more ambivalent about the nature of thought within any given technological state, since there is no natural state outside of technology to which we could escape. On this distinction between Heidegger and Stiegler, philosopher Stephen Barker succinctly states: Stiegler asserts that the human is the product, not the ´cause´ of technical evolution, an evolution whose grounding concept is ´technics.´ […] For Stiegler, the world is not ´to hand,´ as it is in Heidegger; rather, ´the hand learns from the tool´. This idea of technics is diametrically opposed to Plato’s anti-technical worldview and to Heidegger’s phenomenological one, acting as both a deconstruction and a critique of both. (Barker, 2009)

Digital technologies thus offer only the most recent enframing process of many in a sequence, processes from which we learn how to be human in a foundational sense. Rather than ‘enframing’, Stiegler refers instead to a neutral process of ‘grammatisation’ – a concept succinctly defined by his translator Daniel Ross as ‘the process by which fluxes are reduced to discrete, formal, symbolic and reproducible elements’ (2009).11 As speech is a grammatisation or formalisation of movements of the jaw, tongue, and larynx, writing is a grammatisation of speech through largely abstract gestural figures. Photography and cinema follow, as formalisations and actualisations of movement, time and expression which can be shared as communication. Each successive grammatisation is a relatively passive process of connection and systematisation of a flux of vital and dynamic affections of movement, sound, or light into a new matrix of meaningful gestures. These gestures, structured like a language but also beyond language, can be thought of as 11 Daniel Ross is also co-director/producer of the BBC film The Ister (2004), which reflects on Heidegger’s theory of technics and which features Bernard Stiegler himself.

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generative of reality as such, in that they mould the way we think, or are able to express thought about our existence. For Stiegler, a grammatisation is the ‘technical’ context for the production and transformation of human nature. There is, in fact, no human nature before technics, as we are technical beings, conceived, perceived, affected, and affecting through technological, grammatical systems. They are technologies of expression which together completely and utterly encompass what is perceived and understood. Grammatisation thus proves to be a productive way to approach how digital technologies, in their distinctiveness from prior media forms, generate an original set of dynamic relations which structure understanding and awareness of ‘everyday’ reality. Grammatisations synthesise reality as we are able to grasp it, and individual consciousness is formed by and through it, though each individual brain is ‘but one apparatus within a circuit of apparatuses through which the psychic connects with the social’ (Barker, 2009). Aspects of our individual consciousness are shared culturally as a form of collective memory which Stiegler calls ‘tertiary retention’. This tertiary retention is over and above the primary and secondary retentions of, respectively, core-consciousness memory – which we employ when we read a book and manage to remember the beginning of the sentence by the end – and individual memory – the stored personal experience that we conventionally think of as memory. Collective memory and knowledge that is shared technically through ‘hypomnemata’ (the actual material forms of mediation, from writing to cinema) ultimately produce us as subjects.12 ‘Experience’, for Stiegler, is already, as it is occurring, a matter of technics, since even the most personal memories we hold are structured grammatically, shaped by their associative links with the social in processes of individuation. This makes intuitive sense if we think about how much of our inner experience – personal and private memories, dreams and fantasies, inhabited notions of body, time, and space – are, to a great extent (and despite what we may hope for), arranged generically, shaped by shared cultural narratives and by the media we consume, be it literary, televisual, cinematic, or digital. As such, sane and socially engaged citizens share archetypal dreams and fantasies and share common perceptions which will always nonetheless feel deeply personal. This is not only about language and how we put words to 12 The forms of hypomnemata as tertiary retention are the primary subject of Stiegler’s third volume of Technics and Time, namely Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise (1998) which focuses on the mnemo-technical conditions by which knowledge and ways of life are passed down from generation to generation.

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our own experiences, but also about all subjective, passive, and automatic mental processes of image creation and sharing, conditioned by the social, technological means by which memory is recorded exterior to the body. The recording process is an exterior process of grammatisation by which personal, social, and cultural memory is technically inscribed in the forms available (hypomnemata). Not just ‘the media’, but all available forms of communication, mediation, and relationality ultimately mould what it is to be and feel human, from oral and written transmission of experience through language, to affective and representational image constructions in art, photography, TV, and cinema. The ‘cinematic’ technologies (in their most broad sense, including television) have proven to be the dominant form of grammatisation of the 20th Century, and indeed they still dominate (even if, as discussed at the beginning of the chapter, only in habituated forms despite alternate possibilities). The conventional cinematic inscription of movement, gesture, and affect which now amounts to much of Western culture and cultural memory has synthesised an experience of humanity and existence constituted in time and space. Distinct from the expressive form of literature before it, cinema is a particularly adaptive expression of human attention and awareness in that it mimics, or seems well synchronised with, our own processes of consciousness as the capacity to filter, organise, and cognise visual and auditory sensory data in both direct experience and in memory (Stiegler, 2010, p. 28). The direct mimesis of cognitive processes and the ubiquity of screens and images in our everyday lives means that this mode of expression, this grammatisation, penetrates every level of our psyche, including our collective social psyche, such that we now think, dream, and interact ‘cinematically’. Stiegler, reminiscent of Deleuze’s notion that ‘the brain is the screen’, thus conceives of consciousness as analogous to a cinematic post-production suite: ‘Consciousness´ would then be this post-production center, this control room assembling the montage, the staging, the realization, and the direction, of the flow in primary, secondary, and tertiary retentions, of which the unconscious, full of protentional possibilities (including the speculative), would be the producer. (Stiegler, 2010, p. 28)

Furthermore, the cinematic as industry and institution has also integrated itself into the pace and ordering of our post-industrial, individualised society, offering itself as work and leisure, and shaping us as subjects of consumer capitalism. Daniel Ross notes that, as cultural collective memory and method of ‘psychic individuation’, cinema has offered us a ‘specific form of thought,

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a specific form of aesthetic, and thus a specific form of politics’ which may extend to the ‘hyper-synchronisation of consciousness’ (Ross, 2007). For Stiegler, the industrialisation of consciousness, which he calls ‘industrial populism’, reaches its zenith in a digital grammatisation, amounting to a didacticism regarding the available modes of cognition always directed towards profit gain. The digital ‘psychotechnologies’ of a late-capitalist culture are dedicated to the almost perfect conditioning of perception and desire such that we have reverted to basic programmable drives. We are moulded as consumers according to the needs of programming industries who control the ‘mnemotechnical’ systems of media. Despite this bleak analysis, Stiegler attempts to believe in, and to act upon, the principle that a seed of ethical renewal exists. In more recent work, he aspires to a transformation of contemporary capitalism and a ‘psychopolitical’ awakening, which we must at all cost assume is possible (Stiegler, 2014). He bases his hope for the ‘re-enchantment of the world’ upon the idea that any given technological system is a pharmakon – essentially ambivalent, and potentially both poison and remedy. He elaborates: We propose that (1) every technique is ´pharmacological´ in the sense of being potentially harmful or beneficial; (2) in the absence of a definition of a ´therapeutics´ – what the Greeks named a meléte and a épimeleia (discipline, solicitude, care), which presupposes a technique of the self – a pharmakon becomes necessarily toxic. (Stiegler, 2014, p. 20)

Through this, we can perhaps start to complexify Heidegger’s notion of an ‘alternative’ saving power – that technology becomes so entrenched and ubiquitous that it might result in the coming to pass of truth, and the revealing of the essence of technology. The essence of technology is described by Stiegler by its pharmacological characteristic, and only by establishing a culture of disciplined attentiveness to its potentially poisonous nature can crisis be averted and its healing power be reclaimed. Crucially, this is done via the technologies themselves, and not through their contradiction or Luddite destruction. Stiegler thus declares a manifesto calling for a new political culture which is attentive to the potential toxicity of digital technics: […] a new cultural, educational, scientific, and industrial politics capable of taking care of the world […] a politics, which during our time is also a political economy, is first of all and above all else a system of care that consists in establishing ways of life (and a culture) that knows how to deal

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with the given pharmacological (technical and mnemotechical) state. A culture is that which cultivates a careful relation to the pharmaka that compose a human world, and thus which struggles against their ever possible toxicity. (2014, pp. 18-20 – original emphases)

This politics of care for the world is to be achieved through the restoration of ‘spirit’ and what Stiegler calls an ‘industrial politics of technologies of spirit’. While the concept of spirit could here seem a little abstract or mystical, he clarifies its meaning as a kind of ‘motive of life’, and as a restoration of reason and orientation which is lost in a contemporary culture of programmable desires and drives. His translator further clarifies the complexity in the French use of spirit, used to mean not only the conventional sense of an immaterial substance ‘as such affiliated with the intellectual, religious and moral faculties of man’, but also: […] a synthesis of the psychic and the social, as well as the intellectual and historical life of man, being tied up in the vicissitudes of processes of individuation in which one becomes who he is, and in processes of transindividuation whereby we become who we are. (2014, p. viii, translator Trevor Arthur’s foreword)

Thus, an ‘Ars Industrialis’ – a new political economy and industry of spirit – is offered instead as a saving power, that will reveal the pharmacological essence of technology, specifically that of the digital as a mnemotechnology. However, for Stiegler this cannot arise spontaneously and automatically from the technology itself, but is a battle that must be fought through organised action. As pharmacology tends towards the poisonous, it must be actively resisted.

Plasticity and Politics In Deleuze´s analysis of cinema, and in Heidegger’s ‘other’ possibility, a seed of transgression and renewal is found within the technical medium itself, even if this potential is not initially apparent at its birth. Stiegler then adds nuance to this, noting that any ethical spiritual automatism of the digital is immanent within its technical form, but has the potential to become toxic if due political attention and discipline are not applied. The time-image thus emerged from within the cinematic medium to disrupt the didacticism of the movement-image, creating a tear in the naturalistic suture of conventional

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constructions of narrative space, and thus of transcendent and linear time. In Deleuzian thought, this disjuncture then becomes strategically political as it forces a negotiated, aesthetic reaction, becoming a ‘sign of art’ in encouraging new creative ways of thinking. However, while the time-image establishes an evolution in the grammatisation of the cinematic technologies, it exists for Deleuze as the exception to the rule of convention, or as a flaw in the total dominance of the classical, normative movement-image. Yet, with the arrival of digital technology it feels that this crack in the smooth complexion of linear cinematic reality has now become a gaping chasm. The digital aesthetic now seems to have made the fracture and breakdown of the linearity of the movement-image its generic trademark within a proliferation of cinematic time-images. We have to ask then if this current phatic role of the digital means that we are not paying due attention? Is the digital aesthetic being deployed strategically and politically? To a superf icial extent, the digital aesthetic is simply just the folded and de-spatialised images described by Deleuze as aspects of the ‘electronic image’ or the database aesthetic described by Manovich or Pisters. However, to go deeper and to become ethico-political, these aesthetic and formal dynamics must instigate a transformation of image culture which foments new critical engagement. New forms of tangible social and cultural engagement are achieved in digital media, I suggest, through the re-contextualisation of ‘real’ images, and through the greater technical ability to represent fragmented and de-realised worlds as an affective counterpoint to our habitual perception and cognition activity. We must critically question what we see, not only on the screen, but increasingly in the ‘real’ world as our skills in perception are persistently challenged by the proliferation of new technologies of augmented, virtual, and mixed realities. To reference Stiegler’s analogy given above, we must become more present and aware of our situation in the post-production centre of both individual and collective consciousness. In processes of what Stiegler calls ‘the grammatisation of the visible’, the digitisation of media results in the breaking down of images into discrete elements within a database. Instead of being passive consumers of piped linear image sequences, we increasingly must search, reorganise, and correlate images in reflexive activity which not only increases our agency and abilities of analysis, but which also undermines any delusion of smooth continuity that cinema may have offered us (Ross, 2007). On one hand, this may make us more anxious, stressed individuals in a world where nothing can simply be understood to be real, but, on the other, we can see this as a form of empowerment – making us more capable of inhabiting and

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even producing plastic realities, and endowing us with new habituated skills in cognition. In ways that resonate nicely with Stiegler’s ideas of the processes of consciousness and of individuation, as well as the idea of some political agency and reflexivity within these processes, philosopher Catherine Malabou develops a concept of an ontological plasticity. Throughout her work from her PhD thesis on Hegel’s dialectics through to more recent work on psychoanalysis, neurology, and ontology, she proposes a new materialism, from the neuron to the atom, by which both the phenomenal world and objective reality – ‘the material organisation of thought and being’– are characterised by a quality of plasticity (Malabou, 2010, p. 61). She states in conclusion to her book Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: I believe that I have shown how, from a philosophical point of view, plasticity refers both to the process of temporization at work in the heart of subjectivity (Hegel) and absolute ontological exchangeability (Heidegger) and also how, from the scientific viewpoint, plasticity characterizes a regime of systematic self-organization that is based on the ability of an organism to integrate the modifications that it experiences and to modify them in return. (Malabou, 2010, p. 61 – my emphasis)

She proposes a kind of secular Spinozan monism, seeing all matter and thought defined by a quality of plasticity and a process of plastic formation and re-formation (rather than by Spinoza’s God/Nature as infinite substance). Though cinema is not Malabou’s primary focus, in her brief dealings with it, through Deleuze and Resnais’s cinematic brain landscapes in her What Should We Do with Our Brain, she describes how she sees cinema as a kind of productive metaphor for the plasticity at the heart of subjectivity. She notes our initial ignorance to this: ‘We are perhaps always and necessarily blind, at first, to our own cinema’ (2008, p. 39), but proposes that the very form of cinema can be a powerful tool in bringing plasticity to our conscious mind, empowering us to modify our lives.13 Plasticity becomes a particularly apt concept through which to reflect on the plastic ontology presented to us through a digital post-cinema and by simulated realities (reducable themselves to a single substance of binary code), and to relate these directly 13 In a 2015 Vimeo interview clip ‘Catherine Malabou on Cinema’ in association with the film Love in the Post by Joanna Callaghan (Heraclitus Pictures), she does reflect on cinema’s centrality in a certain tangent of thought about consciousness, citing Deleuze to note how it ‘deconstructs’ consciousness through affects, in the same way as philosophy might do through writing.

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to metaphysical concepts of time, space, energy, and materiality. We see that digital images construct reality as essentially plastic, and with its own automatisms and vitalities tend toward the ever-better representation of a plastic universe. Patricia Pisters, in The Neuro-Image, identifies her eponymous image type as blossoming within digital culture, increasingly modelling reality as a plastic brain-world subject to neuro-pathological ruptures. On the neuroscreens of digital visual culture, narratives of psychosis and schizophrenia play out, and events do not attempt to represent the ‘real’ world but show instead our cognitively fragmented, faulted, and misfired mental topologies. She then describes in the closing sentences of her introduction that these breaks, discontinuities, and folds of the neuro-image synthesise a profound metaphysical plasticity which can become ethical and political: Perhaps, against the odds, the multiple and heterogeneous screens that surround us with schizoid franticness, instead of removing us further from reality, may come to our salvation. […] This book endeavours to see how art, science and philosophy can come together to turn our contemporary madness into metaphysics and into micro-political forms of resistance that are the basis of any change. (Pisters, 2012, pp. 32-33)

In an ethico-political vein, Pisters’s work places the brain and its neurons as a central condition for a new image ontology which can be resistant and potentially redemptive within its ‘schizoid franticness’. However, Malabou expresses the plastic ‘arrangement of being’ not as a state of schizophrenic disorder or madness (what she calls a ‘schizology’) but rather contrastingly as new order and organisation: ‘the unity of our time’ (2010, p. 7). Thus, while Pisters provides a clear and purposeful move away from psychoanalytic and Marxist film theory of neurosis towards an ethical Deleuzian schizoanalysis, in doing this, she selects the brain as ‘the most striking example’ of a new plastic arrangement of the real and uses it as her model. However, this is perhaps only one (neural) pathway which can take us through the looking glass of a fully ontological plasticity. As Malabou states: Plasticity refers to the spontaneous organisation of fragments. The nervous system presents the clearest, most striking example of this organisation. As a concept plasticity is also endowed with a dythrambic gift for synthesis enabling me to perceive the form of fragmentation and find my spot within it. (Malabou, 2010, p. 7 – my emphasis)

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I instead move towards a digital metaphor for ‘the form of fragmentation’, rather than a neural one. This is not a blurring of the virtual and the actual within mental, phenomenal experience (leaving objective reality intact), but a fundamental decomposition of the divide between. Not the development, modulation, breakdown, and regeneration of neural processes which is still anthropocentric in tone, but a metaphysical shift which sees the physical world itself in a virtual ‘quantum’ soup of subatomic particles, bits of data, neural synapses, dark matter, 0s and 1s.14 Fully accepting Malabou’s ontological plasticity is to go so far as to say that the world changes in real terms through our ability to imagine and represent it. Thought, matter, and force shape each other through technological processes of mediation. The digital image is no longer a simple crack or rupture in thought (as Deleuze thought of the cinematic time-image and through which the Futurists aimed strategically to destroy traditional representation) but rather it is a new dynamic and plastic ontology which is new order, genesis, and synthesis – a plenitude. Plasticity thus runs conceptually to the very heart of this project, which is to tie corporeal processes of affection/perception/cognition, technology, metaphysics, and ontology together within our contemporary media landscape. Reality should be perceived as a mediated or grammatised system which is subject to change, not completely fluid or relativistic, but instead plastic and capable of ‘taking or receiving form, moulding or giving form’. Malabou states: ‘there is perhaps no reason to talk of the plasticity of Being—as if plasticity were some kind of quality—but of saying that Being is nothing but its plasticity’ (2010, p. 36). Plasticity is therefore the quality of immanence, the complexity of virtuality, and the condition of technicity, which is actualised in grammatised but changeable technical forms. It is Being without the need of a transcendent dialectic Other to which to refer. We can now achieve an ideal image of the spiritual automatism of a new digital image regime. One which influences a new ethico-political and aesthetic landscape though an affective, passive synthesis of new metaphysical landscapes that force a critical questioning and yet open attitude to a world with many fluid and shifting qualities. This is, however, still an ambiguous ‘pharmacological’ potential, to be taken with a healthy 14 Pisters addresses Malabou’s theory in a 2011 blog response to What Should We Do with Our Brain? at www.patriciapisters.com/, in which she can ‘see parallels between the concept of plasticity and the neuro-image in that both attempt to address the challenges of our contemporary brain-world’.

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dose of Stieglerian cynicism. What I must examine then, going forward, is the promising ethical effect of the new dynamics of consciousness given through digital images, where this promise demands clear activity, participation, and learning so that we might become more conscious of the cinema of our own reality.

3.

‘A Digital Frontier to Reshape the Human Condition’:1 Virtual Border Spaces and Affective Embodiment in Tron and Enter the Void Dan Strutt Abstract By looking at the films Tron, Tron Legacy, and Enter the Void, this chapter identifies the challenges to metaphysical consciousness that are posed by the digital. I ask how these films engage aesthetically and imaginatively with digital systems and processes and identify two approaches to the ontological problematic of digital virtuality: one in which an idea of the feeling body is restored to the impersonal and immaterial digital dimension, and another in which the body is discarded or abjected. It is asked what these digital images, reflecting on the conditions of their own creation, express about the way we can position ourselves within a digitally connected world, and conclude that we experience an intuitive ontological breakdown between ideas of ‘data’ and of ‘matter’ within a digital liminality. Keywords: Emergence, Signs of Art, Post-Human, Liminality, Tron, Enter the Void

The grid, a digital frontier. I tried to picture clusters of information as they moved through the computer. What do they look like? Ships? Motorcycles? Were the circuits like freeways? I kept dreaming of a world I thought I’d never see, and then, one day, I got in.2 1 The ‘plug line’ written for the book of the same name in Tron: Legacy. Textual excerpts from the script for Walt Disney Pictures’s motion picture Tron: Legacy used by permission from Disney Enterprises, Inc. © Disney. 2 Kevin Flynn’s opening voice-over from Tron: Legacy. Textual excerpts from the script for Walt Disney Pictures’s motion picture Tron: Legacy used by permission from Disney Enterprises, Inc. © Disney. Strutt, D., The Digital Image and Reality. Affect, Metaphysics, and Post-Cinema, Amsterdam University Press, 2019 doi 10.5117/9789462987135_ch01

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These are the opening lines of the Disney-produced film Tron: Legacy (dir. Joseph Kosinski, 2010). ‘The Digital Frontier’ is the name of the book written by the character Kevin Flynn after his experiences in the digital game dimension of the original 1982 Tron movie (dir. ‎ Steven Lisberger). While this phrase might sound similar to ‘Space: the final frontier’ – the tagline of the Star Trek TV and movie series – space, it seems, can no longer be seen as the final limit to our knowledge in the 21st century. In the Tron movies and within popular scientific discourse in general, we have moved beyond spatial or geographical frontiers, and even, I would suggest, beyond the temporal and mental frontiers of the subconscious mind and memory that defined the psychoanalytically informed discourses of the 20th century, towards more purely ontological frontiers concerned primarily with the underlying nature of reality. It seems that, in our contemporary pop-cultural absorption in contemporary theoretical physics, there are, in fact, frontiers everywhere around us, not in our perception of objective reality, but rather actual dimensional boundaries which lie behind or next to our own (in brane cosmology and theories of quantum probability), in the ‘dark matter’ which lies between our galaxies and perhaps our atoms (Nexus Theory), or between two-, three-, four-, and five-dimensionality within a ‘holographic universe’ which posits space, volume, and time as illusory (Talbot, 1991). These new ontological limits to understanding increasingly preoccupy the mood and aesthetic of our current sci-fi and fantasy TV and film culture, no longer simply about aliens, time travel, and apocalyptic events (as toward the end of the 20th century), but rather about wormholes, alternate timelines, parallel dimensions, and genetic superpowers to manipulate time and space.3 This chapter primarily suggests that this thematic preoccupation is not simply reflected in the content of digital images, but may actually be instigated by the technological changes in image production, such that the ontological frontiers of our time are in fact generated and determined by our digital capacity to express them. In this chapter, I explore, through two digitally inflected films which emerged together in 2010 – Enter the Void (dir. Gaspar Noé) and Tron: Legacy (dir. Joseph Kosinski) – the link between the new conceptual challenges brought about by the peculiar affectivity of digital imagery and our contemporary cultural imagination of trans-dimensionality and plastic 3 There are only a few 20th century forerunners to our current fixation on alternate realities. Notably, on TV, in Quantum Leap, Twin Peaks, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, though the real aesthetic shift seems to occur around 1998-1999, with Sliding Doors (dir. Peter Howitt), Run Lola Run (dir. Tom Twyker), and, of course, The Matrix.

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reality. This link is expressed as a ‘digital frontier’ – understood better perhaps in Deleuzian language as an ‘ontological problematic’ or ‘limit to thought’ (without the colonial, gendered baggage that frontier thinking might carry). The frontier is an ontological liminality explored through computer-generated aesthetic fabulations of digitally inflected spaces, our bodies and actions within them, and the transitional zones between actual and virtual. Rather than thinking simply in dualistic terms of an actual ‘real’ world versus a digital virtuality, we instead elaborate an abstract space in-between realms where a cross-pollination occurs; a seeding of the real by the virtual, and a bleeding between dimensions. This is also an investigation into how, as the Tron quote states above, we ‘try to picture’ the liminal (non-)space of the frontiers right in front of our noses. How do we imagine it, how do we visualise it, and how do we intuit our presence within it? For the tiny minority of us humans that are theoretical physicists, such metaphysical notions may be tackled through the abstract language of mathematics. However, being neither a physicist nor a mathematician, I must picture it imaginatively via the media I have been exposed to – visualised (at times clumsily) through computer simulation and digital imagery. Going further, I ask: Do our means of visual expression of such abstract and speculative realms impact on our experience and intuition of reality in a more generalised, universal way? In other words, I question whether or not the forms and aesthetics of the media technology we have at any given moment directly affect our shared metaphysical imaginary, and therefore give shape not only to our creative fantasies, but also to our more tangible societal, global capacity for technological and scientific progress? In 1920, philosopher Henri Bergson argued that true inspiration in positivist scientific progress arrives not as a clinical deduction, but as a kind of emotional intimacy with the object of study, describing: ‘Intuition is a simple act […] it is a synthesis, not an analysis, not an intellectual act, for it is an immediate, emotional synthesis’ (in Gunn, 2015). Is our intuition of reality, and the ways we then try to picture it, not honed and conditioned in our collective consciousness through the imagery that surrounds, conditions, and affects us? Through Heidegger’s questioning of the ‘essence of technology’, we can conceptualise that the technical means that we have to mediate or ‘reveal’ the world (from primitive crafts, to language, to photography and beyond) shape our ability to think, to perceive, and to imagine what reality is like (Heidegger, 1977). Within a regime of digital visualisation, are we then really still limited to analogising digital processes as ships and freeways as the protagonist of Tron does? Are we still limited to picture or to imagine

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these processes as similar to real world objects, or does the inherent (im) materiality of data allow us to think beyond these very temporally and spatially recognisable entities towards more ambiguous forms? By the end of this chapter, I suggest that we in fact now think and intuit in the opposite metaphorical direction – that the ships, motorcycles, and freeways of the real world increasingly come to feel digital in as much as they seem likely to glitch, be corrupted, or hacked in a liminal space between actuality and virtuality. Somewhere within this metaphorical interchange, is a new ontology born? In as much as, according to psychologists Lakoff and Johnson (1980), metaphor is actually the only way to phenomenologically experience external reality, we move via the work of Bernard Stiegler towards a technical media theory that suggests that our epochal forms of expression (as mnemo-technologies) fix and share metaphorical relationships, shaping our knowledge, our ways of learning, and thus of living. We can then, perhaps, reach an understanding of a functional and dynamic digital ontology that is affectively embodied, acting upon our consciousness though the technical work of visual expression within a digital medium. I posit a working definition of a ‘digital ontology’ as the categories and relations of Being as they are inflected by digital communication and image production in both its representative and non-representative elements. These digitally inflected image relations affect and are affected by concepts from theoretical physics in a synergistic fashion, such that what is here called post-cinematic and what is scientific fuse in our collective metaphysical consciousness (for Stiegler as a tertiary retention). While I do not doubt that there are special persons for whom the abstract language of mathematics serves perfectly well as a visualisation tool, increasingly -- at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, on the Curiosity Rover which rides through the Mars landscape, from the Rosetta spacecraft which rode Comet 67P/ Churyumov-Gerasimenko, in other scientific visualisation practices, and, as I have argued, in Christopher Nolan’s film Interstellar – we are struck by scientific images which are becoming more purely cinematic, constituting both qualified positivistic research and aesthetic originality. I suggest that, under the new image regime of the digital, art and science are ontologically conflated, and what emerges is a specifically digital understanding of the fundamental metaphysical state of the universe – a digital ontology. But this understanding is not only a digital metaphor for the constitution of the universe (though it is that as well), rather it is a suggestion that, in our experience, the universe is digital in the same Deleuzian cinematic sense that we perceive a direct image of time when it is not contained within a

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spatial metaphor. It is not a representation of time; it is time itself, generated by the image-relation of crystalline and chrono-signs (Rodowick, 1997, p. 41). In the same way, the digital image, with the loss of the cut, the frame, and even the camera, not only breaks free from space but also cinematic time, towards a pure experience of metaphysics in flux. Furthermore, this is an embodied experience of metaphysics and, through an increasingly affective interface (in digital 3D, HFR, HD, or digital IMAX), we can feel this otherwise abstract ontology. Indeed, this is perhaps the only way to experience such a transportational moment of flux without being within the very corporeal conditions of drug intoxication, meditation, psychosis, or near-death. Deleuze himself attempted to look beyond the temporal distortions of the time-image (as the co-existence of past, present, and future) towards a multidimensionality or layering of presents, yet I posit that his pure ‘crystal image’ can be understood better in the 21st century through concepts of contemporary theoretical physics, and specifically through the digital image as its ideal expression.

Overcoming Spatial Realism Despite the material potential of the digital image to refract or de-compose reality in images of metaphysical flux, and indeed the possibility that this can be sustained for the duration of a whole film, what we usually still see are fragments of flux as moments within relatively photo-realistic diegetic and narrative worlds that are familiar and recognisable. In many approaches to digital post-cinema, including William Brown’s Supercinema (2013), Sean Cubitt’s The Cinema Effect (2004), and Rodowick’s The Virtual Life of Film (2007), an emphasis on three-dimensional spatial continuity is persistently noted as the primary reality-cue within the digital image amongst a ‘nested hierarchy of cues that correspond with our understanding of these phenomena in daily life’ (Rodowick, 2007, p. 102). These reality-cues persist as encoded perceptual conventions from analogue cinema, deployed strategically within the digital image to orientate us in a believable diegesis before it can be meddled with. But, as Rodowick points out, despite this sometimes reactionary impulse towards a recognisable photo-realism, digital cinema cannot restrain its inherent tendency to exaggerate in ways that distort and mutate: Having a modular structure composed of discrete elements whose values are highly variable, the powers of the digital image derive from

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its mutability and susceptibility to transformation and recombination. Yet the criteria of perceptual realism reinforce, even exaggerate spatial coherence. They strive to be more spatially similar and more replete with spatial information than photography itself. (ibid, p. 103)

There is a paradoxical concept of the real here, an almost perverse hyperrealism replete with a density and exaggeration of spatial information which panders to a ‘rather restrictive and circular concept of realism’ based principally on geometrical relations, but that, through natural inclination or automatism, it cannot help but transform. Rodowick summarises: ‘The key point of reference now in the ontology of the digital will be […] the creation of images ex nihilo that can simulate effects of the real world (gravity, friction, causation) while also overcoming them’ (ibid, p. 104). This point is echoed by William Brown, who notes that digital cinema has its own unique ‘continuous’ logic that cannot help but ‘push beyond the human understanding of space’ (2013, p. 51). Thomas Elsaesser similarly suggests that, with digital images, the dominant impression of reality comes not through the creation of a spatialised perspective or narrative linearity, but in a segmented or ‘liquified’ hyper-reality: The key digital effects in such a comparison […with reality suture through formal continuity strategies] would be the impression of hyper-reality, which would lead to an impression not of movement but of metamorphosis; that is, not only in the form of morphing and shape-shifting, but also as a constitutive instability of scale, mobility of point of view, and inherent ´liquidity´ of the (visual) representation (Elsaesser, 2014, p. 33 – my addition).

Elsaesser suggests that our imagined presence and sense of reality in the digital image is not wholly spatial, or even temporal, but exists in a kind of floating presence from an unreliable perspective and within a fluid space -- a distinctive departure from the conventional cinematic rules of suture through linear and casual movement. The digital ability to overcome the linear determination of space is noted also by Markos Hadjioannou in From Light to Byte (2012), stating: As space expresses the transformative convergence between fields and figures where the subject changes according to her continual development, and space (as manifold, smooth and hodological) mutates according to the

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variety of the interrelated forces, the digital is equipped with the potential to overcome its determining codification. This is what is expressed in the transformative expression of the morph, the incongruous simultaneity of compositing, and the incalculable variations of interactivity. (Hadjioannou, 2012, p. 214)

Hadjioannou describes how causality (narrative as well as physical) within well-defined cinematic space is disrupted by a digital instability or incongruity within the image wherein the viewing subjects have to exert their own agency to negotiate with the expressive ‘code’. We can thus perhaps start to think of a particular variety of digital image alluding to a contingent non-space, an image from inside Schrödinger’s box, where both spatial and temporal linearity seem ambiguous, paradoxical, or in flux – a ‘pure’ image of quantum probability that requires a human mind to fix and actualise it. This is, in a way, the central plot device of Marvel’s Dr. Strange (dir. Scott Derrickson, 2016), in which a highly intelligent and overconf ident surgeon has to relinquish his egoistic, restrictive ‘scientif ic’ knowledge of linear reality to exceed the determining codif ication of space and time, and to travel between dimensions. This is rendered very literally in wildly hallucinogenic digital sequences in which space folds into crystal images of maximalist complexity. It is most emphatically expressed in the f irst ‘Eureka!’ scene of the f ilm when Dr. Stephen Strange is pushed out of his material body by Tilda Swinton’s ‘the ancient one’, and the recognisable room space around him stretches and catapults him through the roof, into space, and into a sequence of increasingly complex fractal liminal spaces. Framed narratively within a spiritual ‘astral plane’, these spaces are really digital image-making processes flexing their virtual muscles, twisting reality-cues as best they can, qualif ied by Swinton’s voice-over monologue on of the nature of objective reality: ‘You think that this material universe is all there is? What is real? What mysteries lie beyond the reach of your senses? At the root of existence mind and matter meet. Thoughts shape reality. This universe is only one of an inf inite number.’

Digital Emergence However, it is not entirely right to say that a digital image such as Dr. Strange is ontologically virtual in the same way that we could describe a quantum state, as it is indisputably fully actualised, discrete, and rule-governed by

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algorithmic, numerical determination. Though it may allude to virtuality, it is, at the end of the day, fixed. Hadjiannou ultimately drives this point home as the crux of his critique, stating: As the digital confines change to the rapid calculations of bytes and algorithms, the image loses the ability to make available the astonishing new bursts of change and the boundless potential that comes with every different encounter in the world. (ibid)

Despite this numerical basis for the digital image, I would argue that there is evidence for exactly these bursts of change and emergence, and that potential for astonishment is not so simply confined. There is a metaphorical resonance between the ‘quantum state’ as ‘liquid’ (flux) and the material state of the digital – a state in which data and algorithms are indeed wholly discrete and controllable, but also in which contingency can play a major role – both in the code itself and within our mental engagement with codeas-image. Rather than being truly fixed and unchangeable, factors of noise, inefficiency, and digital plasticity mean that we can experience image mutation, evolution, and emergence, generating original affective states within the encounter, which can indeed be astonishing. 4 Like Hadjiannnou above, Sean Cubitt, referencing Stiegler, in the preface to his The Practice of Light, begins a bleak analysis of the potential for digital emergence: The efficiency gains of standardization […] risk increasing the level of noise in the system, while discouraging that radical change which is the hallmark of emergence. The result is a culture that constrains us to innovation within parameters already historically established, and steers us away from inventing the disturbing and exciting new. (Cubitt, 2014, p. 4)

However, he implores us always to be open to recognise the ‘both disturbing and liberating virtual potential’ within even the most instrumental applications of digital visual technology, requesting that we are: […] never to abandon to habit or cynicism the ability to wonder at the intricacies of each mediation; and to embrace, even against all the odds, 4 gacym; tThat there is an organic evolution within the software and an emergent intelligence of unforeseen and incomprehensible complexity is a main narrative theme of the 2010 Tron: Legacy film.

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the hope that, if we have built ourselves a demeaned perceptual repertoire, even within its structured regime there are inefficiencies, frictions, noise and contradictions that can still generate the genuinely new, and that beyond its borders, other modes of seeing and being seen promise to emerge. (Cubitt, 2014, p. 16)

This theme of emergence as the ‘genuinely new’ also develops in the work of media theorist Aylish Wood on software and user interface in her Software, Animation and the Moving Image (2015). She describes a distribution of agency between user and software, a ‘complex entanglement’ that is simultaneously limiting and enabling. While the animation software offers certain parameters for free creation, much of the actual work of the animation is conducted by automatic algorithmic activity which the animator simply monitors to remove the obvious traces of its automatic nature (ibid, p. 56). At first, this seems restrictive to creativity, but she goes on to describe -- through theoretical discourse with Ian Bogost, Lev Manovich, and William Brown -- how the agency of the software, with both logically designed and relatively contingent elements, intrudes upon the aesthetic of the image (ibid, pp. 79-80). She quotes animator Liz Skaggs: ‘You are not creating these images in your mind, you are using some other tool set, a graph or box or squares or controllers, different things’ (ibid, p. 56). These tool-sets as the technical materiality of the software, involving modular structures and algorithmic automation, start to affect the image in unintended ways – a ‘distinct type of movement’ that Wood refers to as digital contours, unique to the digital image and ultimately beyond the creative intention of the animator (ibid, p. 84). This complex entanglement can be seen as a kind of co-creation that problematises any simple notion of authorial agency, and thus can create the conditions for the emergence of a new image type. For Wood’s analysis these digital contours come to constitute a kind of post-human vision, what might otherwise be seen as a hyper-realism but, drawing on William Brown, is instead described as ‘an unexpected level of realism when viewed from the perspective of contemporary physics’(Brown, quoted in Wood, 2015, p. 92). Through developing the metaphorical equivalence of the digital with quantum physics through a non-human, or ‘morethan-human’ perspective, Brown articulate a kind of ‘object-orientated’ and non-anthropocentric digital realism that he dubs Supercinema (Brown, 2013). Wood’s digital contours, then, are the automatic manifestations of a post-human technicity, exceeding the limits of intentional human creation, and potentially offering something ‘genuinely new’ as a kind of supra-realism that, in turn, exceeds human perception.

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However, this post-human vision is still, from a phenomenological perspective, always going to be from the imagined vision of an actual human eye, even though it might be an experience beyond the observable world. We must project an idea of our sensory body into this space – an embodied but totally virtual experience. For Elsaesser, this imaginary embodied vision is, in fact, the reality effect of all moving images since their inception: The ´reality-effect´ is a consequence of the impression of movement, which, in turn, is complemented by the impression of presence, strengthened by sound, but also providing one of the typical subject effects of cinema; namely, the impression of being included in the image and endowed with a special kind of ocular-sensory, embodied identity. (Elsaesser, 2014, p. 32)

The experience of ‘inclusion’ within the moving image is one of an apperceptive, kinaesthetic presence within the image – though, as I explain in the next chapter, this is not necessarily bound by a schema of an actual physical body. This point is well exampled by a current culture of quasicinematic digital visualisations within the physical sciences in the form of, for instance, molecular animations and cosmological simulations. The addition of perceptual qualities of colour, point of view, and camera movement to these images (where none actually exists) makes them more tangible to our embodied sensory array, it makes it feel more ‘real’ to an imagined sense of corporeal presence next to or within what are often completely abstract and highly complex datasets. This is, I feel, the posthuman vision which William Brown refers to in action, Elsaesser’s cinematic ‘ocular-sensory, embodied identity’, a hypothetical sensorium, projected into inhuman environments. This method of research and training in the physical sciences has in fact been hailed as facilitating many scientific breakthroughs in meteorological, cosmological, medical, and biological research fields.5 However, fundamental to my argument that the digital image creates a transformative experience of reality is that the digitally embodied experience is generated not only through these scientifically quantified, standardised, discrete, and modular operational systems, but also through 5 See, for instance, Erik Olsen, ‘Where Cinema and Biology Meet’, The New York Times (15 November 2010) and Clay Dillow, ‘How the World’s Most Powerful Visualization Lab Turns Hard Data into Scientific Cinema’, Popular Science (21 January 2011).

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a set of ‘inefficiencies, frictions, noise and contradictions’ as technical automatisms which generate ‘the disturbing and exciting new’ (Cubitt, 2014). To Aylish Wood, perhaps going further than Cubitt’s recognition of distinctive ‘other modes of seeing and being seen’, engagement with the digital image is the addition of ‘another affective dimension to our experience of moving images’, which stands out as an emergent quality or contour of the digital image (2015, p. 10). Even in the scientific visualisation of cold hard data, something unanticipated emerges in an affective sense – it transforms impersonal code into an aesthetic, cinematic experience that elevates it beyond even the intention of the image creator – an immanent beauty within the binary. In the two post-cinematic examples that follow, Tron: Legacy and Enter the Void, the affective sensorium is set within a kind of liminal digital space at different levels of embodiment. Thematically, the unobservable structure or ‘programming’ of the space shows an agency which forces a mutation, deviation, or evolution – a plasticity which resonates with both a digital ontology and contemporary theoretical physics. The films were both released in the summer of 2010, and for this reason they provide, for the purposes of this chapter, a simple organic point of coincidence through which to gain thematic access to an understanding of how contemporary processes of digital image creation might shape our cultural imagination of metaphysical notions. Both films demonstrate an attempt to approach the ontological problematic of the digital affectively, as described above – our ability to imagine presence and perspective within a digital space, and to feel and move through its digital contours. In the first, Tron: Legacy, the attempt is explicit – the character’s bodies are directly digitised into a game programme. In the second, Enter the Void, it is more of a metaphorical movement – the streets of Tokyo are gradually digitally distorted to represent a space in between life and death, past and present, corporeality and mind, and sanity and psychosis. The distinctive digital contours of each film visually render the space as liminal, as a boundary zone through which we move. Both films essentially deal with a disembodied consciousness, but, whereas one f ilm returns this consciousness to digital corporeality within emphatic space as a kind of reassuring moral restoration of the Deleuzian sensory-motor-schema, the other explicitly explores the spatio-temporality of his ‘any-space-whatever’ as an ocular-sensory consciousness drifts disembodied in a derivé through a confused space-time. From the comparison of these two films we get an idea of the complexity of thought about digitality as an altered form of Being.

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Tron: Legacy Deleuze states that: ‘Cinema, considered as psychomechanics, or spiritual automaton, is reflected in its own content, its themes, situations and characters’. He exemplifies this by pointing out out that the ‘French School’ preoccupied themselves with films about clocks and clock-makers, as the Soviets did with images of industrial machines, in a dynamic by which the technicity of cinema as both time-based medium and industrial activity were metaphorically, thematically, and reflexively represented in its content (1989, p. 263). I thus look to 2010’s Tron: Legacy (Figure 3), and indirectly also to the original 1982 Tron as its thematic precedent, as reflective of thought on the problematic of a digital technicity as spiritual automaton or psychomechanics. These two films provide a reflection on the ontological problematic of a digital era, a problematic that has altered and evolved in the 28 years between the two films’ release; namely, our struggle to imagine a digital system, such as a game, as an organised virtual space which functions without ‘mind’ and yet seems to interact with us intelligently. To this end, the original Tron film creates a ‘real’ physical world out of the abstract digital non-space of data and algorithms, with digital systems conceived of as ‘ships, motorcycles, circuits like freeways’ and with programmes anthropomorphised into either caring, doubting subjects or controlling, power-hungry autocrats. Tron: Legacy then pays homage to the creative vision of the first film while updating and complexifying the underlying concepts to be more appropriate to an advanced digital culture. While in many ways just a graphic update of the 1982 Tron world, it also expands on the metaphorical content of the first film – that of the game system as an anthropomorphic microcosm of society – introducing the idea that this utopian simulation of society could have evolved and changed through time, becoming the ‘digital frontier that can re-shape the human condition’ (as cited in the title of this chapter). Both Tron films clearly set up two dimensions: the real world and the world of the programme – ‘The Grid’. There is, however, a clear thematic overlay of the two worlds. The opening sequence of both films shows the digital superimposed upon the real world – we drift through grid patterns in a digital non-space, before we slowly start to recognise the streets and lights of the ‘real’ urban space beneath and beyond them. The concept expressed here can be seen as a confusion or interchangeability between the ontological landscapes of the film, and this in turn suggests that the fantasy themes presented in the diegesis may have ‘real world’ implications – i.e. a critique of corporate capitalism as controlling and confining true potential

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Figure 3. Poster art for Tron: Legacy (© 2010 Disney).

by Machiavellian means. The affective dynamic through which this relation is expressed is in an aesthetic de-familiarising of the recognisable urban cityscape, as we come to feel that just above and below the façade of our perceptual real-world is an alternate digital dimension just waiting to break through. Further metaphorical imagery arrives in the films through the relations of matter-as-data and electric-charge-as-life-force rendered as affectively embodied, with corporeal energy visualised as ‘resolution’, corporal punishment taking the form of a leeching of this energy, reward being a gift

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of new power influx, and death presented as ‘de-rezzing’. Death manifests in Tron as a fluctuation of colours, a pixilation, and then a fading (in the death of the character RAM), and, in Tron: Legacy, as a shattering into metallic ‘pixel’ cubes. The rendering of these digital concepts as corporeal metaphors, expressed through relations of resolution and dissolution in the imagery of the film, generates an affection of the instability of matter, and of the the formal continuity of the atoms of the body with the pixels or bits of code of the digital environment. In another sequence from Tron, Kevin Flynn discovers here that he has the godlike power to reassemble digital matter into one of the ‘recogniser’ ships. RAM remarks ‘You shouldn’t be able to do that!’ as the module in which they are standing elevates into the air, and the ship’s components levitate up to take their place on the craft. This brings RAM to the realisation that Flynn is indeed a ‘user’, one of the god-like creators of their world, and we share in his rapture as the ship re-assembles around them. The magical ability of the protagonist to manipulate space and matter becomes an affective metaphor for our actual human power to create (or programme) omnipotently in the digital world. In Tron, as also notably in The Matrix (dirs. Lana and Lilly Wachowski, 1999), the protagonist learns that matter itself in the digital simulation can be created, reformed, and destroyed at will by acquiring this knowledge. A scene of particular interest in Tron is the uploading of Flynn into the digital game world. In this ‘digitisation’ scene, the protagonist dematerialises with a laser and travels through a vivid digital non-space of grid patterns and ‘worm hole’ vortexes, to rematerialise within the game world. There is a sense of floating weightlessness in the space between the real world and the digital game space, and a real corporeal affection of a disembodied perspective dispersed within a digital liminality. Perhaps perplexingly, they did not include an equivalent scene in the 2010 update of the film Tron: Legacy, despite the irony that actor Jeff Bridges was actually digitised in the making of the film so as to render a virtual, younger version of his character in the digital dimension – Flynn’s AI avatar Clu.6 The journey between spaces is instead rendered as within an instant, a change maybe 6 In interview with Den of Geek magazine, the producers of Tron: Legacy, Justin Springer and Steven Lisberger, discuss this irony: ‘Justin Springer: In Tron there’s a famous scene of Jeff Bridges being digitised and put inside a computer. And when we began working on Tron: Legacy, and we started to create Clu, we put Jeff in front of a laser and basically digitising him to go inside the system. [laughs] Steven Lisberger: […] and I’d made that up! That was a pain in the ass 28 years ago! JS: Jeff was like, “This is wild, man!”

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Figure 4. The malevolent Master Control Programme of Tron (© 1982 Disney).

diegetically qualified by faster contemporary data transfer and processing speeds, but in fact explained by the director to be a deliberate choice both not to compete with the scene of the first film, and to portray it from the perspective of the character, ‘through Sam’s eyes’.7 Despite their differences, and there are many, both Tron films provide an affective relation of space, matter, and force as a way of stimulating metaphorical thought about digital immaterial processes – by simulating an environment where they become materialised. These dynamics are expressed through an idea of the body, where human corporeality, rather than, for instance, machines or alien lifeforms, is the image onto which these dynamics are traced. Immaterial data and programmes are literally ‘embodied’ and anthropomorphised into humanoid entities for easy identification despite the unfamiliar environment (for example, the antagonist Master Control Programme takes the form of a human head/face rendered in raster wire frame – Figure 4). This is also the case with films such as The Matrix (dirs. Lana and Lilly Wachowski, 1999), Lawnmower SL: And then the technicians that were doing the scanning didn’t appreciate the irony. I said, “Don’t you realise I just made that up all those years ago!” and they said “You made it up, so of course it came true this way.”‘ (Den of Geek) 7 Tron: Legacy director Joe Kosinski: ‘From the beginning we kind of didn’t wanna do that, cause it was done so well in the first one. I wanted this experience to be different, so I liked the idea that you kind of experience it with Sam and it’s a quick thing.’ (collider.com)

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Man (dir. Brett Leonard, 1992), and Ghost in the Machine (dir. Rachel Talalay, 1993) in which data assumes human form in the digital dimension. Our ‘inclusion in the image’ is achieved through simulating digital spaces and empathising with these characters through their real presence and their emphatically tactile interactions with each other and with the spaces they inhabit.

Enter the Void I now turn to explore a contrasting though similarly de-realised and virtualised digital cinematic environment that nonetheless takes a radically different approach to the digital ontological problematic -- Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void (Figure 5). This is a 160-minute ‘psychedelic melodrama’ (Hart, 2010) – an intense visual journey which seems, unlike Tron, to explore more literally the temporal themes of Deleuze’s time-image. Its length announces it as a durational and experimental piece, not exactly mainstream fodder (though not quite an art film), which is at times thrilling, erotic, and also possibly annoying in its seemingly mindless repetition of events and shocks. Peter Bradshaw, in his Guardian review, remarks how this truly seems to be an original (post-)cinematic image: Some may find Enter the Void detestable and objectionable, though if they affect to find it ‘boring’ I will not believe them. For all its hysterical excess, this beautiful, delirious, shocking film is the one offering us that lightning bolt of terror or inspiration that we hope for at the cinema. (Bradshaw, 2010)

The film is also interesting since, despite not making the digital its explicit theme, according to the director every single scene was digitally altered, rendering it distinctively unreal or ‘virtual’, though often not in any clear, discernible way. Noé says two thirds of the film was post-production: ‘It’s the most CGI-intensive specialty film I’ve ever seen’ (Harris, 2010). The spaces of the film are of the real world and, despite some wildly hallucinogenic scenarios fascinatingly seen from the mind’s eye as if traced onto the back of the eyelids, the spaces are initially recognisable and seen from the first-person subjective perspective of the protagonist. However, this subjective point of view is dramatically altered when he is shot in the chest by drug enforcers in a toilet stall, and, as the flickering images of his dying eyes slow and fade out, he leaves his embodied first-person perspective, and

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Figure 5: Poster for Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void (Fidélité Films/Wild Bunch, 2010).

we, in his position, assume a ‘witness’ view of a disembodied and voiceless consciousness. He first sees his own body beneath him and then swiftly moves through the roof of the building, through the streets and into a floating omnipresence in the lives of those around him. For some two and a half hours of the f ilm, his disembodied gaze glides above the streets of Tokyo, through walls and down drainpipes, and eventually between

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dimensions of past, present, and future as the divisions between times and spaces become gradually less stable. Throughout these sequences, the urban environment of Tokyo becomes gradually more and more mutated, de-realised and luridly coloured through digital distortion, towards a disorienting climactic reincarnation scene leading from a neon-glowing love hotel to a hospital birthing room. In an inversion of Tron, instead of projecting the idea of a body into an imagined or virtual space, we have the removal of the body from any tangibly real spatial continuity to achieve a radically different kind of corporeal affectivity. The bodies of the actors are purposefully abjected – literally in an abortion scene in which we see a foetus crudely discarded in a kidney dish, and thematically as the gaze of the main protagonist floats above and looks down onto his own dying body. The performances of the actors seem disengaged, cold, and distant, and whenever tactility and intimacy develops – and indeed any identification or empathy with the characters in a scene – the sequence is punctuated by traumatic and violent jolts of action, such as in a car-crash ‘flashback’ which is repeated over and over. Instead of the tactile emotional affectivity of the connected bodies of Tron, which serve the purpose of making the immaterial dimension of digitality feel more human, we have instead a detached, drifting, and strangely inhuman inhabitation of the ‘real’ world, where traumatic events and heightened melodrama are rendered eerily cold and neutral. In between and intertwined with the representational images of the film’s diegesis, we find a multitude of digitally generated flashes of coloured lights, aimless floating aerial street shots with the movement of vehicles like toys below, the layering of mundane but de-realised sex scenes, and hallucinogenic flourishes of alien tendrils intruding into psychic space. However, seemingly the most crucial and defining shots in this film are the transitional movements between spaces characterised by a disorienting swinging motion of the camera and the entering of the camera´s gaze into various tunnels and enclosed spaces, not entirely unlike the transition between worlds in Tron.8 The film presents us with multiple any-spacewhatevers, in streets, homes, hotels, and clubs, as seemingly disconnected spaces without narrative purpose and through which the action floats, and it is these transitions and transformations that in the end principally 8 In a curious coincidence, Tron is cited as a stylistic influence not because of the digital imagery, but rather, as Noé states in Wired: ‘Everything seems like it’s made out of neon lights. When people smoke DMT, they say, “Oh I thought I was in the movie Tron”. Everything is made out of bright lines’ (Hart, 2010).

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define the feel of the film.9 The brushstrokes of digital manipulation and modulation are in every shot, and the aesthetics of the digital here permit the powerful rendering of a transition into an altered state of consciousness between living and death in a heightened affective form.

Troubling the Threshold What both of these films – Tron: Legacy and Enter the Void – present us with is an image of an imagined virtual reality as a liminal state of being. What interests me is not so much the ontological implications of the state itself within the diegesis, be it dream, death, drugs, or psychosis, but instead the digitally influenced aesthetic forms used to generate this sense of an altered dimension at the threshold of intelligibility. In Tron, we have a representation of an immersive virtual environment where space and materiality are initially questioned and dissolved, but then ultimately reconstituted as social relations of desire, power, and resistance, and always played out against the materiality of the human body. Inversely, in Enter the Void, time and space, as well as desire and power are folded towards a dissolution of purposeful action in a disembodied, drifting, and aimless hypnagogic state in some disorienting non-space. These are both expressions of a threshold consciousness which are affectively constituted through digital imagery. They are aesthetic responses to the digital ontological problematic presented by digital technicity itself, and these two expressions offer different answers to this problem. This is not to say that the boundaries between actual and virtual were not explored in analogue cinema, though in the aesthetic conventions of classical Hollywood cinema, as also in ‘art’ or avant-garde cinema, they are usually fairly clearly demarcated.10 This was done by use of representational devices such as the fracture or cracking of the ‘looking glass’ (in, for example, Jean Cocteau’s Orphée, 1950) or by falling into some kind of ‘rabbit hole’ or vortex as gateway or portal, along with aesthetic devices such as the graded-film look of the flashback or the shift into technicolour 9 For William Brown, these transition shots are facets of the films ‘anti-humanism’ (2013, p. 65). 10 There are, of course, a couple of striking exceptions to these conventions from 20th-century film, for example, Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (1948), in which a large portion of the film is of unclear virtual or real status. However, even in this film, there is an inconspicuous moment (when she steps through the paper silhouette of a man) that does seem to mark the division between fantasy and reality.

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as cues (as in Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz, 1939, and Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death, 1946). The boundary can also be rendered through jarring and complex graphic analogue effects, achieved with animation and superimposition (for instance, the dream sequence in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, 1958) or simply through eccentric montage (e.g. David Lynch’s descent into the radiator in Eraserhead, 1977). These devices and effects clearly point to the different temporal or virtual status of the images as we become immediately aware that we are entering into an alternate universe or altered state of consciousness, be that a dream world, psychosis, drug-induced hallucination, or death. They were sometimes fairly clumsy, sometimes magical, but were always limited by the technological constraints of the necessity of having a pro-filmic actual event or filmic chemical process (such as colour-grading). While it can be seen that these are essentially proto-digital aesthetic styles (and this is the position taken in Pisters´s analysis of the work of Alain Resnais in The Neuro-Image), I suggest that, in reaching something like its ideal form in digital media (sustained for some 160 minutes in Enter the Void), this leads to a profoundly different framing of the underlying problematic – the boundary zone – which is specifically digital. While CGI effects can simply and quickly mimic all of these analogue effects, in the digital’s automatic and emergent qualities, we see an exponential growth of modulations and mutations in the creation of ever more clearly realised, yet in many ways unrecognisable, alternate worlds. While digital imagery affectively heightens these transitional moments between dimensions as we see in Enter the Void and in Tron, even more than this, they have the capacity to blur the boundary as if the two are merging and blending. Thus, we have the real world, the recognisable and conventional cinematic milieu of reality, becoming changed and twisted; or, indeed, we have the alternate world breaking through into our own. The boundary zone becomes not merely a transitional space, but swells to become the ontological whole. The tension at the threshold between worlds becomes one of the main dynamics in contemporary digital cinema and television as a thematic and aesthetic preoccupation. Instead of well-contained moments within the sort of surreal or hallucinogenic dream sequences that serve as a disruptive break in the linear narrative in the classical Hollywood image, the digital permits the entire film world to become a twisting and changing maze in which there is no clearly defined reality external to the images. With the breakdown of any clearly marked boundaries between the ontological domains of the film, we must affectively negotiate and inhabit these images before attempting to draw out any explicit conscious meaning.

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Figure 6. Lucy. Director Luc Besson. (Europacorp, 2014). Entertainment Pictures / Alamy Stock Photo.

However, perhaps this is still an ideal only occasionally achieved. In much mainstream content, we are still habitually reassured of the real world, of linearity, or continuity, and of the potent activity of the (often male) body. It is hard to deny, however, that the cinematic mainstream does increasingly exhibit a veritable obsession with digital distortions of the real world. In a second ‘snapshot’ of coinciding releases during the summer of 2014, we could see several different fabulations which make the stark ontological dualisms of Tron: Legacy and Enter the Void seem even a little outdated. In Transcendence (dir. Wally Pfister, 2014), the dying Johnny Depp’s consciousness is uploaded into a computer programme from which he becomes serenely godlike and can subsequently assemble and disassemble matter in the real world. In Luc Besson’s Lucy, Scarlett Johansson’s brainpower is increased exponentially by an experimental drug, so that she can see and pluck digital data from the air and can also control matter with the power of her mind (Figure 6). In The Congress (dir. Ari Folman, 2014), Robin Wright plays a fictionalised version of herself, a serious actress whose perfect likeness is digitised into a ‘virtual’ actor that is owned and used by the studio in a tacky and commercial science-fiction film franchise ‘Rebel Robot Robin’ (ironically, this fictional digitisation process is the same that actually happened to Jeff Bridges for Tron: Legacy). She later learns that her image has been developed as a digital avatar within an alternate simulated dimension, ‘Abrahama City’, where the paying public can experience being inside her body. She enters this digital ‘animated’ dimension to attack and destroy the studio, but gradually loses touch with reality as the two dimensions of the real and animated become increasingly confused. In an apocalyptic future, she awakes again in the real

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Figure 7. Poster for Ari Folman’s The Congress (Brigit Folman Film Gang, 2013).

world to find that the animated virtual dimension has caused its total atrophy, as most people have chosen to live in other bodies in the virtual dimension. In all of these 2014 film examples, real spaces and real forms dissolve into pixels and bits. This is not some alternate dimension manufactured to explore aesthetically a digital liminality, but rather our everyday world portrayed to be in flux, where real spaces and objects themselves become virtualised via the metaphor of the digital. It is no coincidence that in the UK distribution posters for all three of these films, we can see matter (a face, a word) dematerialising and breaking into pixels and code (Figure 7). The metaphorical transference is that reality itself becomes a digitally rendered boundary space – perhaps a digital simulation, or maybe just materially unstable. It often seems that, in contemporary digital postcinema, there is a practical obsession with enhanced superpowers to manipulate physics within and between this and other dimensions. 11 11 Marvel Studios, now owned by Walt Disney Studios, is the highest-grossing film studio in Hollywood, leading to a spate of articles in 2018 asking ‘Is Marvel Killing the Movies?’ (Heer, Shephard, and Livingstone, 2018).

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These powers function, in perhaps a less explicit way than in Tron, as metaphors for the powers of the player/user/programmer within a digital dimension, but now with these powers to act transferred into the recognisable everyday world. They offer purposeful, embodied action, but in ‘real’ worlds that are drawn into metaphysical doubt, becoming less stable, and more like the computer simulation – a breakdown of the boundary between ontological realms. It is this resonance of digital imagery with the ‘realism’ of theoretical physics from a post-human perspective that inflects our current mainstream entertainment culture, filling it with images of the world as physically and temporally malleable and subject to change. I have to question if this is just an imperfect metaphor of the digital manipulability of pixels for quantum states, or if, as an extension of Heidegger’s technics via Bernard Stiegler’s grammatisation, we can understand that this is our shared mode of contemporary metaphysical questioning within our technological epoch. The ontological status of the digital image and its unique qualities, techniques, and processes both as hardware/software but also as metaphorical and affective resonances, are the structural system through which we speak of such things, and as such both enable and limit our capacity to think and imagine the reality of the metaphysical.

The Digital Border Zone and Cinematic Ethics Deleuze’s film theory is nothing if not an ethical project, taking cinematic images as engaging a mode of expanding possibilities for thought and for life: as a form of becoming. The time-image thus encourages an active reading, experimentation, and enquiring mode of thought which challenges and dispels the moral absolutism that comes with linear and directly causal actions within the movement-image. He names the ‘powers of the false’ within the time-image as those that interrupt and overturn the normative cinematic image, exposing not only the falsity and pretension of the movement-image, but also synthesising a new active way of thinking within a new image relation. For David Rodowick, this aspect of Deleuze’s ethics in his Cinema books is fundamentally Nietzschean: The Nietzschean moral universe defines an ontology of descent and ascent, destruction and creation, a base will to power fueled by ressentiment and the will to truth, and a creative or artistic will that affirms life and its powers of transformation, while seeking out possibilities for enhancing

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these powers and this life. Between these two wills lies the deepest ethical problem: the problem of choosing a mode of existence defined by the possibility of choice. (Rodowick, 2010, p. 103)

Thus, the cinematic image, to be ethical, must challenge us, shatter our sense of power over the meaning of the image, and then offer up a possibility for creative choice – for re-creation. We must experience our own powerlessness and find a way out of it without ever attempting to reclaim total control, and this is an ongoing process of becoming. Considering Stiegler and Cubitt’s questioning of the potential of the digital to offer us a truly new and transformative image, we have to ask the ways in which the digital image – its thematic preoccupations and problematics, and the specific forms of experimentation and questioning that arise within it – might qualify as ethical. Specifically, does the image of the digital frontier/ontological border zone engage with a form of ethical philosophy as becoming, and as engaging with immanence and creative evolution? To explore this, I need to look closer at Deleuze’s image typology in his Time-Image to ascertain how we can better position and classify the digital image within his Nietzschean cinematic ethics. Deleuze noted a distinction between the first time-image, the recollectionimage or dream-image, and the second image of time, the crystal-image (1989, p. 98). In the recollection-image, we have an image out of time, though well contained and contextualised by an overarching coherent construction of linear time. In this image, we are made aware (not necessarily within the moment but certainly later to the ‘attentive’ viewer) that we are leaving linear time and that time has ‘forked’. As Deleuze describes: The relation of the actual image to recollection-images can be seen in the flashback. This is precisely a closed circuit which goes from the present to the past, then leads us back to the present. Or rather, as in Came’s Daybreak, it is a multiplicity of circuits each of which goes through a zone of recollections and returns to an even deeper, ever more inexorable, state of the present situation. (1989, p. 48)

In films such as Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Tarkovsky’s The Mirror (1975), or David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), films well known for their temporal contortions, there are extended moments of dreamlike disorientation which nonetheless lead back to a present moment and linear narrative (even if we have to do some mental athletics and repeat viewing to achieve this understanding).

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This also applies to the dream-image: ‘The dream-image is subject to the condition of attributing the dream to a dreamer, and the awareness of the dream (the real) to the viewer’ and thus the boundary is still always marked and maintained by the explicit tethering of the altered states to a character who is doing the dreaming in a diegetic reality (ibid, p. 58). These shifts in and out of the present situation are then often marked by stylised cinematic renderings or transitions to alert us to the changed temporal status of the image. In the crystal-image, however, we feel disoriented in time, unable to work out exactly where present actuality lies in the shifting between memory, present, and future. We find ourselves here in a direct time-image of a different kind from the previous one: no longer the coexistence of sheets of past, but the simultaneity of peaks of present […] This second type of time-image is to be found in Robbe-Grillet, in a kind of Augustinianism. In his work there is never a succession of passing presents, but a simultaneity of a present of past, a present of present and a present of future, which make time frightening and inexplicable. (ibid, p. 101)

As noted previously, digital imagery seems ever more suited to this blurring of parallel presents in a kind of dimensional complexity. While these dimensional zones can be purely temporal as Deleuze imagines them, the post-cinematic image actually seems to dwell less on its temporal status as past, present, or future, and instead delves further into a type of multidimensionality of worlds within worlds and parallel timelines. Deleuze does himself actually speculate on a shift away from the primacy of the temporal dimension in stating: ‘Perhaps there is a way to go beyond this split in the large circuit, through states of reverie, of waking dream, of strangeness or enchantment’ (ibid, p. 59). Are we then now at least closer to this reverie state in the sustained digitally rendered border zone? It is not that Deleuze was completely silent on the issue of the digital, referring instead to an ‘electronic’ or ‘numerical’ image which was, during the writing of the Time-Image (before 1985) only just ‘coming into being’. The electronic image, that is, the tele and video image, the numerical image coming into being, either had to transform cinema or to replace it, to mark its death […] The new images no longer have any outside (outof-field), any more than they are internalized in a whole; rather, they have a right side and a reverse, reversible and non-superimposable, like

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a power to turn back on themselves. They are the object of a perpetual reorganization, in which a new image can arise from any point whatever of the preceding image. (ibid, p. 265)

Here, Deleuze poetically evokes a multiplicity of images, unstable in their spatio-temporal organisation, malleable and complex. In the practically infinite flexibility of represented reality within the digital image, it feels as though this is exactly what we are presented with: virtual domains and imagined dimensions as simultaneous presents, and worlds within worlds under perpetual reorganisation. When the boundary between worlds ceases to be policed by a clearly defined Rubicon, we are free to linger and creatively explore the border zone, and one has to wonder if this is not exactly the enchantment and ‘state of reverie’ which he anticipated as being ‘beyond’ the crystal image. But has this indeed transformed/replaced/ destroyed cinema? Certainly, it has transformed it, in that we speak here of a digital ‘post’-cinema and a specifically digital aesthetic which is here merely foreshadowed by Deleuze’s images. The digital aesthetic of the blurred boundary zone seems broadly in line with Deleuze’s Nietzschean ethics, amounting to an abolition of any moral will to control, and a profound openness to new becomings. However, Deleuze expressed ethical concern about this digital organisation of images, asking to what ends it might be used. But we are all the time circling the question: cerebral creation or deficiency of the cerebellum? The new automatism is worthless in itself if it is not put to the service of a powerful, obscure, condensed will to art […] I am afraid that the new methods may invalidate all will to art, or make it into a business, a pornography, a Hitlerism. (ibid, p. 266)

Deleuze’s concern is that the new digital techniques which open such aesthetic possibilities must be strenuously retained for art’s oppositional work, not becoming subject to the types of commercial standardisation and rationalisation by which Stiegler and Cubitt indict digital media. Here, there persists an ethical insolubility between the goals of commercial entertainment and art, with standardisation and rationalisation on one side, and an elevated and obscure sublime on the other. I have suggested that there is a way to move beyond this divide, to restore an ethical image even within mainstream and normative digital post-cinematic content.

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Signs of Art at the Limits of Humanity Digital images can qualify as ‘signs of art’ in that they offer up something new, maybe uncanny, occasionally traumatic, sometimes absurd. However, in terms of the ethical dissolution of the continuous, causal, spatio-temporal relations of the movement-image, what we are actually presented with in Tron and Tron: Legacy is a fairly consistent world of causality and intentionality, riddled with extended representational metaphors for the freedoms, faiths, and anxieties of conventional morality. This is, in truth, more the territory of the sensori-motor-schema of Deleuze’s action-image, and seems hardly radical in its organisation, with clear markers as to where the boundary between the actual and virtual worlds of the film lie and are traversed. Yet, despite this representational coherence, on an affective level, we become for a moment, especially in the digital transition between worlds, dissolved in an immateriality which resonates metaphorically with our abstract knowledges of atomic fields and virtual digital worlds. The films offer the repetition of conventional constructions of space as clear markers of realism, and yet, in this repetition, there is the distortion, mutation, and displacement characteristic of Deleuze’s third synthesis of time which hampers any dismissive or simple recognition. Within these simulated realities, we negotiate an imaginary relation with our bodies; we project our virtual bodies across boundaries and through portals into the strange and curious new environments to see how it feels, and, consequently, we feel different. The digital image brings in an original automatism in its structural and affective relations, which are more about simulation, modulation, distortion, and ‘elastic reality’ (Rodowick, 2007, p. 170). Enter the Void then appears comparatively to be a digital time-image tour de force. It seems to be exactly what Deleuze tantalisingly refers to as the ‘electronic-image’, with its folding, drifting, and aimless repetition; we have layer upon layer of points of view, from the hallucinatory, to the godlike, to the intimately and emotionally implicated. We feel as if all the events of these characters’ short lives are spread out like a screen database in front of us, and that we are negotiating hyperlinks between desires and traumas, dragged this way and that by temptations and the harsh interjections of memories in the psyche of the protagonist as his life; past, present, and future (leading up to his reincarnation or rebirth) all co-exist in the moment of his death. These diegetic events, negotiated by the hyperlinks of impossible camera movement and digital effects, come to seem exactly like Deleuze’s description of the electronic screen, as ‘an opaque surface on which are inscribed “data”, information replacing nature, and the brain-city, the third

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eye, replacing the eyes of nature’, as the disembodied consciousness of Oscar roams through digital omnidirectional space (1989, p. 265). The film thus principally expresses an ontological relation to the digital, which, in contrast to the Tron films, explores its immateriality, the impossibility of touching it. I am not sure, however, that Noé anticipates that Enter the Void will be lauded as a cinematic metaphysical breakthrough in line with Deleuze’s idealised ‘re-launching’ of the time-image. He states nihilistically that it is about the vacuity of humanity, and that is not about life, memory, and the afterlife, but rather about the fantastic dream of some loser who was stoned out of his mind when he died. Praised for its technical innovation and surreal vision, it is also attacked for its puerility, cliché, and pseudo-philosophy – all reactions that Noé perhaps anticipated and invited.12 So, while successfully creating a severe disruption of genre form, he seems almost to parody and ridicule the time-image. Is this what digitality can afford us, a satire of metaphysics itself? What I believe Enter the Void presents us with is exactly a Nietzschian future vision or ‘eternal return’ – that which Deleuze equates with the pure essence of creativity in his third synthesis. Dwelling on death, rebirth, and the apparent futility of existence, the film expresses a strong nihilistic sensibility to the extent that it even ridicules its own spiritual affectations. For Nietzsche’s theory of the ambivalent constancy of energy in the universe, when we are confronted with the absence of a teleology of moral progress, any meaningful action, will, morality, or faith in the identity of things become false gods. For Deleuze too, the third synthesis of time is imagined exactly as a nihilistic crisis of faith in the ‘bare’ repetition of difference at the moment when a mutation occurs, a rupture which draws identity and structure into question. This requires an abandonment of any secure ego perspective as we are forced to think anew about what was taken for granted, but is now rendered unrecognisable. While seemingly a violent confrontation to habitual perception, the concept of eternal return is, to both Deleuze and Nietzsche, also the pure nature of creative becoming. It comes to be the central tenet of Deleuze’s ‘will to art’ in that it demands creativity and further synthesises the ‘new’ and a passive sensation of the still-to-come – a freedom and a liberation from structure. Enter the Void’s digital layering, repetition, distortion, and the consequent intensification of affect serves to expose the falsity and pretension of 12 The film was described by The Village Voice reviewer as: ‘A lame fusion of stoner lifestyle, sexual fetish, and philosophical inquiry […] A mash-up of the sacred, the profane, and the brain-dead’ (Longworth, 2010).

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cinematic chronological time and to fracture any structural predictions the viewer might have. If the third synthesis of time makes evident the faults in the repetition of difference, then the repetition and digital manipulation in Enter the Void -- which repeats the same action from different, often gyroscopic camera angles, and hallucinogenically alters the image until it gradually morphs into a different reality -- makes evident the breakdown of any firm perspective to the point of ridiculing or satirising it. This leads to an instability of perception: just when viewers think that they can orientate themselves in some kind of narrative, they are confronted with another jarring shock or mundane any-space-whatever which serves to return them to the standard bemused and drifting state which the film demands. Viewers do, however, become intoxicated with this immersive vision of an afterlife which is also an image of a drug-addled consciousness, in which viewers consequently becomes quite temporally disoriented and unsure of how long they have been watching. Within these images, however, potentially lies a more radical evolution in the time-image through digital processes; it ceases to be simply about temporality or the relationship of time to space, but rather becomes about consciousness itself. This can be seen as not belonging to a temporal relation of past and present, but can instead be analogised to online and offline models of reality. Some theorists have directly pursued the ethics of this digital aspect of the time-image through Deleuze’s own work on the brain, consciousness, and the brain-screen, likening the networked organisation of digital images to neural connectivity. Patricia Pisters gives name to the Neuro-Image, and notes how the digital image is in ways akin to neural complexity and plasticity, with this metaphor offering a productive point of analysis. Thus neuro-images have a direct effect on our brain’s ability to transform through new neural connections, but also stand as a model for our mental capacities through representing a multiplication of images, illusionistic suspensions of logical possibility, and schizophrenic breakdowns of order. Through this, Pisters offers a redemption of contemporary cinema, as she sees a peculiarly Deleuzian, and thus Nietzchean, ethics working through contemporary cinematic content. Images of madness, illusion, and hallucination offer a ‘schizoid’ culture within the ‘digital turn’, which forces an affective power of creation and a future vision. This becomes political as she moves to describe neuro-images as micropolitical forms of resistance, ‘turning madness into metaphysics’ as the basis of cultural and individual change (Pisters, 2012, p. 33). An alternative to this analogy of the digital to the neural is the aforementioned parallels of digitality to quantum states and to a new popular

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comprehension of uncertainty and probability by which our activity of observation actually influences the observed object. Though deeply connected, a distinction to be noted is that, while the neuro-image uses the human brain as a productive model and metaphor for a complex ontological plasticity, the resonance of contemporary theoretical physics with the digital seems to be more than simply metaphorical. Rather, it is a next step away from humanistic and phenomenological notions of cinema’s effects towards the purely ontological by which the image generates and interacts with the actual in apparently post-human mutational modes. The neuro-image takes us down the truly ontological path of reflecting upon reality as a rule-governed simulation, subject to noise, interference, mutation, and emergence, and thus with the potential for radical affective shifts. This feels like a more ethical nuance, due to the fact that the digital shift in worldview can come not from us as humans observing and changing our brain-image with regards to a relatively stable and objective reality, but rather by being confronted by actual physical complexity and instability within the world, and being fundamentally displaced as the centre of reason within that world. Or rather, it is not our egoistic mental microcosm that is the source of social/political change, but rather a complex ecology beyond our sensory body towards which we are powerless that generates a collective politics of humility. Thus, the digital border zones of Tron, Enter the Void, Lucy, The Congress, and Transcendence offer not only a problem for us to reflect on states of human consciousness, but a truly ontological problematic which is beyond the human brain. These digital images of metaphysical flux offer a novel perspective upon an ontological plasticity, playing with notions of quantum possibility and multidimensionality beyond sensory capacity, at first seeming to displace any kind of direct lived human experience, but then secondarily offering an original and transformative embodied and affective experience. William Brown’s ‘post-human realism’ dislocates the human biological sensorium into a purely technical system, where we are offered perspectives beyond normal human subjective vision and thus beyond any privileged viewpoint – what he calls ‘the non-anthropocentric character of digital cinema’ (Brown, 2013, p. 51). This can be seen negatively, and rather melodramatically, as loss of connection to ‘real’ human experience, but we need to remind ourselves that there is no truly inorganic perception, merely alternate metaphorical modes of thought about reality which might indulge the imagined perceptual realities of objects and things as counterpoints to habitual cognition. This is then seen positively as an ethical enhancement of human perspective towards a new physical realism in which we are

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stripped of our mastery of the visual field – perhaps a ‘quantum’s-eye-view’ that ironically sees human experience as rather small and insignificant. This seems to be the principle, for instance, of Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life (2011), which leaps from the domesticity and family drama of small-town America to an astounding reverie sequence of cosmic creation – and then back again, in a reflexivity of human identity, purpose, desire, and will within the much larger universal context. For speculative realist Ian Bogost, this non-anthropocentric ontological view is an ideal to be upheld, holding that, in a ‘flat ontology’, we might be able to create an alternate order of things that is not simply subject to our ability to make sense of them (2012, p. 19). He describes an ‘alien phenomenology’ as a practice by which we must speculate, through metaphor, about the processes and operations of objects and things. It is important here to note that this is not imagined in a mode by which we can truly understand or communicate with things (e.g. rocks, computers, or aliens), but instead a philosophical methodology to intentionally fabulate in a creative mode in order to attempt to disrupt human-imposed hierarchies of Being. However, as Bogost notes, and as I develop in the next chapter through Maxine Sheets-Johnstone’s evolutionary embodied consciousness and in Chapter Four through Lakoff and Johnston and Walter Benjamin’s notions of metaphorical and mimetic consciousness, there is no true post-anthropocentrism here. Bogost states: ‘Metaphorism is necessarily anthropomorphic, and thus it challenges the metaphysician both to embrace and to yield to the limits of humanity’ (ibid, p. 74). This is, I think, what digital cinema offers, whether the neural, the digital, or the plastic is offered as a productive metaphor for human experience – a futurism which constructs worlds based on speculative narratives, as ‘instructive and humbling signs’ of alternative experience or competing realisms at the limits of humanity (ibid, p. 34).

Conclusion Border-zone images like those of Tron and Enter the Void, in the history of cinema, have always posed an affective metaphor for the different ontological landscapes of memory, psychosis, hallucination, or near-death experience at the limits of intelligible human experience – and this metaphysically liminal category is now inclusive of the digital. These affective metaphors of liminality act as a tangible and visceral starting point for any higher-level imaginative contemplation – a passive synthesis of metaphysical notions. This could mean that the boundary dimension of matter, time, space, and

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force in flux could then be considered to be nothing specifically digital, but rather an enduring limit and problematic for thought about exceptional spaces and states beyond our direct corporeal experience. However, the digital becomes distinguishable from other images in that, in their interrogation of reality, they do not simply refer to a perceptual, dreamlike, or ‘neuro’ image that is distinct from the stable, actual world. Rather, they explicitly confound actuality itself, exploding it into a quantum probability of dimensional paradoxes, without ever descending into meaningless stochasticity or chaos. While the digitality of an image as a tangible form of representation can function, as in Tron and Enter the Void, as a malleable but ultimately instrumental metaphor for mental or ontologically liminal states, there is always the possibility for a transformed mode of experience from the image’s own materiality. Through the glitch, through data being hacked or corrupted, through Cubitt’s ‘inefficiencies, frictions, noise and contradictions’ (2014, p. 16), we have a form of metaphysical plasticity in which the image, beyond human intent, transforms itself into something new with regard to our consciousness. The more that the expressive function is trusted to the automated functions of algorithmic calculation, the more likely that something unanticipated emerges – a fault or error in the processing, or simply an unpredictable affective nuanceted. As Aylish Wood observes, the creative act is not entirely under our control but is a complex dynamism of agency between user and software/hardware. The emergent affective and aesthetic elements of digital automatisms do not always reveal themselves in mainstream entertainment content, instead originating in other more primitive, artistic, or experimental forms. Nonetheless, these emergent elements are potent affects that are picked up and carried into public consciousness by the popular cinematic form – from the déjà vu ‘glitch’ in The Matrix, to Lucy’s frightening morphing disassembly of the atoms of her own body, to the supernatural horror of the hack in Unfriended (dir. Levan Gabriadze, 2014). In each of these images, and in many more in current circulation, an ontological threshold is disturbed and a liminal space is created through the harnessing of an emergent and digital visual affects. While for some it may seem tragic that these transformational affects must arrive into our awareness in commercial forms of advertising or entertainment spectacle, we have to ask if this packaging detracts from their potency in destabilising our ontological landscapes. Furthermore, the digital post-cinematic image with its 3D, HD, HFR, and IMAX format variants opens up this liminal space affectively and immersively as never before; such that we might imagine that we can

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touch it, interact with it, and inhabit it. It creates an uncanny embodied metaphorical transference that the real world around us – visible reality, linear temporality, and materiality – is actually itself in flux, and this is in turn reflected in our contemporary collective cultural imagination in an ongoing cycle. In this way, the digital ontological problematic, the digital frontier, ceases to be simply about the digital itself and becomes a form of reflexivity on ontological consciousness itself – our own ability to reflect on our awareness of the ontologically real. As humans, we discourse on these spiritual problematics in the only way we know how, through the fabulation of simulated virtual realities, and, through this fabulation process, we might discover new ways to think differently, affectively and analytically, corporeally and mentally, creatively and scientifically. The digital elaborates a new frontier to this thought.

4. Dynamic Digital Spaces, Bodies, and Forces Dan Strutt

Abstract This chapter focuses on affective tonalities within recent digital systems of image capture, creation, and presentation. It looks to examples of dance in Digital 3D and the epic battle scene, as images in which structural relations of space and kinesis are heightened and stretched. This analysis is grounded within a genealogy of technical advances (from the f irst ‘moving’ images, through to VR digital simulation) and within theory of how fundamental our proprioceptive sense of the world is to our sense of grounded physical presence. What is identified is a digital experimental aesthetic and a new spatiotemporal image regime (seen in the neobaroque folding of objects and spaces, in glitches and morphs), expressed through plastic structural and formal relations within the image. Keywords: Digital Dance, 3D, Kinaesthesis, Neobaroque, Jules Etienne Marey, Edward Muybridge

While the last chapter addressed the existential, ontological problematic of the digital by reflecting on the thematic, metaphorical relations generated between body and space at the virtual/actual boundary in post-cinema, this chapter focuses more directly on the technological and formal aspects of the digital image, and the affects which are specific to them, in a more schematic mode. In other words, I move from digital effects as affective emblems of certain metaphysical questions of our time, towards a more structural analysis of emergent affects of the digital image.1 In doing this, 1 See Kristen Whissel’s Spectacular Digital Effects (2014) for an interesting analysis of how digital effects can operate semiotically as emblematic of the broader narrative metaphysical concerns.

Strutt, D., The Digital Image and Reality. Affect, Metaphysics, and Post-Cinema, Amsterdam University Press, 2019 doi 10.5117/9789462987135_ch04

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I take a genealogical view of new architectures and topologies of space and the affective dynamics of movement, rhythm, and gesture of forms within these spaces, not as a typology, but as a means to ask how they have impacted on our awareness of metaphysical qualities. These structural dynamics are expressed in content which includes the renderings of bodies, objects, and ‘vitality forms’ in computer-generated imagery as well as in hybrid modes mixing computer-generated animation and live action, and also incorporates the technological forms of presentation such as digital 3D and digital IMAX that impact upon these dynamics. ‘Vitality forms’ are defined by psychologist Daniel Stern as abstract, phenomenal sensations of intensity which incorporate time, force, movement, space, and intentionality but which are not only expressed through the movement of a physical object or body, but also through sound, shape, colour, or any other aesthetic experience, or indeed any ‘happening’ which expresses ‘energy, power or force in motion’ (Stern, 2010). In discussing new technological modes of image creation and presentation, this notion of an abstracted sense of kinetic proprioception as general energy or intensity proves useful for this analysis of digital effects, as it moves between describing actualised and recognisable bodies and objects in image forms, and more virtual and non-conscious sensations of force as metaphysical affects. In describing new affections of metaphysical notions that are specific to post-cinematic screen images, I aim to elaborate an emergent intuition of presence and possibility within the world. These are heightened, distorted, and ‘hyper’-spatial relations within digitally generated imagery which offer distinctive impressions of time, movement, and force as bodies and objects move within the image/frame. These impressions are generated primarily through a haptic, bodily address, which, instead of positioning the media ‘user’ in a passive and static spectatorial position at optical distance from the image, involves them in an ever more immersive kinetic play of bodies and surfaces in which the frame collapses and affects of corporeal intensity are palpably felt. In contrasting digital effects with analogue media, do digital effects offer a real progressive shift in affections of physical/metaphysical forces, or is their impact merely relative to what we are habituated to at the moment of emergence of any new media technology? This is to ask if the affective force of the digital image is, in this time, in any way qualitatively different to something like the effect of, for instance, early cinema on a viewing public accustomed only to still images. The comparison seems an obvious one and yet the question is not so easily reducible to a historically relativistic position. One needs to appreciate broadly that, with each technological

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shift in visual modes of expression comes about a new synthesis of perceptual reality and thus of metaphysical awareness. This is not a progressive teleology of aesthetic expression leading to greater enlightenment (i.e. greater knowledge of the Real), but it is rather an evolving and dynamic symbiosis between (technological) forms of expression and thought about reality.2 As the birth of cinema reflected changes occurring in modern life of industrialisation and urbanisation and the experienced compression, systematisation, and re-articulation of time and space at that historical moment, digital media seems to reflect more contemporary existential concerns of post-industrialism, secularism, and theoretical physics.3 To say that there is a historical specificity to our cognitive reactions to technological emergence is not to imply that they are simply determined by culture, but rather that they go hand and hand in a complex interrelation. My aim is to document what original image/affect dynamics emerge in digital media as compared and contrasted to any previous time. Some of these dynamics appear to be the extensions of aesthetic impulses from the utopian hopes of early cinematic pioneers finally brought to fruition by digital possibility, while others seem to offer something truly emergent, unanticipated, and original. While it is always productive to examine the genealogy of visual media in archaeological modes to ascertain the historically consistent drives and impulses which affect contemporary visual media – for instance pointing out the repetitive claims to revelation that new technologies consistently make – this can be quite a reductive

2 The discourse of a progressive teleology of media posits cinema as the convergence of all previous aesthetic forms towards an ideal form of realist representation, with digitalisation as a continuation and honing of this process. It further posits 3D stereographic imagery as the next technological breakthrough after moving images, colour images, and cinematic sound on a trajectory to mimic perfectly natural perception (critiqued by Thomas Elsaesser in his 2012 article ‘The Return of 3-D: Logics and Genealogies of the Image in the 21 st Century’, which I discuss below). The realist narrative is boldly critiqued by Jean Louis Comolli in Machines of the Visible, wherein he points out that technological advancement towards realism is not purely technical but is instigated by ideological notions of what constitutes the real, an ‘ideology of resemblance’. He states: ‘What is at stake in the historicity of the technique are the codes and modes of production of ¨realism¨, the transmission renewal or transformation of the ideological systems of recognition, specularity truth-to-lifeness’ (Comolli, 1980, p. 133). 3 Cinema theorists such as Tom Gunning (2006) and Scott Bukatman (2003) have analysed the social context of cinema at its birth, asking who ‘used’ it and for what social purposes. Pasi Valiaho (2010) also examines how early moving images expressed new scientific and medical discourses of the body of the time, re-articulating bodily rhythms and durations, and thus also shifting corporeally rooted thought about reality.

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process, as it dismisses the truly novel to focus only on its precedents. 4 There is an imperative to recognise and focus on the original or emergent without dismissing it as bare repetition, or worse still disparaging apparent differences as damaging to the integrity and sanctity of prior media forms. Therefore, I aim not to cultivate a crude opposition between analogue and digital media, but to assess the difference that the digital makes, and one would find it hard to deny that there is a difference in the visual content of our cinematic images of the last 35 years of our modern digital era. At first, the emergent technologies of expression, in whatever era, with whatever technology, have a pronounced novelty to them. They shock or surprise audiences, and invariably a mythology arises around these first shocks; as it did with the ‘train effect’ of the Lumières’s The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station, and as it did with ‘Avatar syndrome’ some 114 years later.5 This ‘frisson’ effect of new technology thus does not change through the centuries, but its effects and affects quickly become accepted, habitual, and part of the prevailing ‘default’ expressive regime. Any sense of revelation quickly dissipates as the images become part of the normative structure of media content. For this reason, we must be observant as to which subtle changes these historically specific shifts do make to our awareness of the world, the differences in kind which affect consciousness, since we so quickly become habituated to them, and so quickly forget how the world seemed different before. I initially engage in a short analysis of each of the two main technological shifts in the history of the moving image: first of the proto-cinematic photographic images of movement by Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne Jules Marey and the scientific and aesthetic impact they had; and then of the emergence of the first digital images within mainstream cinematic media and their distinctive formal features and affectivity. My point is to show that both these technological shifts instigated their own specific dynamic modes of expression of reality that have been developed upon and carried

4 For example, in the historical work of theorists such as Ian Christie (2011), Stephen Prince (2011), and Andrew Darley (2000), true novelty and originality is consistently de-emphasised since it was essentially foreshadowed by something similar in the past. This playing-down of novelty is also an approach taken when dismissing new technological progresses in special effects and in presentation platforms: a ‘we’ve seen it all before’ attitude. Roger Ebert, for instance, stated in Newsweek (2010): ‘Whenever Hollywood has felt threatened, it has turned to technology: sound, color, widescreen, Cinerama, 3-D, stereophonic sound, and now 3-D again.’ 5 Both mythologies here circulate around the audience´s struggle to discern reality from screen content. ‘Avatar syndrome’ is discussed in the following chapter.

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forth in subsequent moving images.6 These expressions of reality arrive as revelation, before quickly becoming incorporated into their own seemingly common-sense visual regimes in an almost phatic mode. Even though their original affective power still persists, they become too easily recognised and dismissed. Each of these two image regimes perhaps can be best defined formally by their spatial or topological features, and these formal aspects structure (but do not necessarily contain) the organisation of affects of temporality, force, and kinesis. Furthermore, each image regime positions the viewer, audience, or user within a spatial dynamic, varying between one of relative contemplative or analytical distance, or of immersive closeness and interaction. As users of the image, we are affected by and drawn into these spatial dynamics which imbue us with a sense of presence within the screen image, affected by the means of presentation (e.g. cinematic, televisual, D3D, or IMAX) and by the syntheses of space and movement within the screen image. While elaborations of space do seem to be the principal distinctive factor in the digital screen image, these three dimensions cannot be abstractly considered without the changing dynamics of movement or bodies and objects within them, and furthermore, the technologies used to capture or render these dynamics. Thus, with each screen combination of these factors, we have a technical relation of figure and ground, synthesising an affection of motion or energy, and – dependent on compositional and structural aspects of the frame and represented space – normally reflecting some conventions of the law of physics (gravity, entropy, thermodynamics, etc.). However, within the digital image, these rules can be malleable, changeable, and breakable. We experience an aesthetic pleasure at the stretching, disruption, and suspension of our models of physical possibility. We enjoy an interactive experimental play with the image through which we can explore a new sensibility of bodily presence, form, and power; this kinaesthetic 6 These synthetic dynamics can be thought of as a form of ‘sensori-motor schema’, identified and described by Deleuze in the concept of the action-image. Deleuze articulates this further: the main characteristic of the movement-image is to contain and subjugate temporality within dynamics of continuous space and linear and causal action (1986). While Deleuze valued the liberation of time from its rational spatial containment by the action-image in cinematic time-images, in digital screen media, these sensory-motor-schematics can instead be a kinetic confusion of complex spaces, surfaces, and bodies, which expands our potential affections of time, movement, and force. These are affects foreshadowed but not fully described by the time-image, not the clear separation of time and space, or the total annihilation of rational space, but instead often an almost hyper-coherent or increasingly complex constitution of a unified space-time.

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sensibility, to a certain extent, is honed by the different technological means of image capture and presentation. I then move to analyse why experimental aesthetics are significant for consciousness. By using the work of Maxine Sheets-Johnstone and Erin Manning (2009), I ask how the kinetic dynamics between bodies and spaces are foundational in understanding our presence and position in the world, and how this is in turn foundational to conscious thought, in Sheets-Johnstone’s words, a ‘thinking in movement’ (2009, pp. 56-58). Having established the pivotal importance of these ‘spatio-temporal-energic’ dynamics for consciousness, I then look to very contemporary examples within digital screen culture which express these dynamics: first, through dance and its inherent and explicit use of the body to explore space – recently enhanced with digital 3D technology – and then through the epic battle scene and its showcasing of heightened digital effects of movement and space in digitally enhanced environment. This leads me to discuss what I see as the distinctive emergent features of digital spatial dynamics, with the digital ‘neo-baroque’ style going hand in hand with digital 3D to define a new digital image regime. I engage with exponents and critics of this new image regime through theories and writings from Angela Ndalianis, Sean Cubitt, and Thomas Elsaesser, identifying a decisive shift in digital screen media which proves to be a difference-in-kind as regards our ways of metaphysically positioning ourselves in the world.

‘Moving’ Pictures: Scientific vs. Aesthetic Truths The British photographer Eadweard Muybridge is often credited with creating the first ‘motion pictures’, bridging the gap between photography and cinema with his invention of the zoopraxiscope in the 1870s.7 His original commission was to document the gallop movement of a horse to solve the argument of whether the animal’s hooves all left the ground at the same time. To do this, he set up a row of quick-capture cameras, which were triggered by threads tripped as the horse rode past. The result was a series of closely sequential photographs which could be animated by being shown in quick succession. For this purpose, Muybridge invented his own screening device, with the images on a spinning glass disc through which light was projected. 7 A contentious issue, with many claiming to have ‘invented’ the moving image, when in truth the invention was the product of several working in the field. For background, see The Man who Stopped Time (Clegg, 2007) or Marta Braun’s Picturing Time (1992).

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Similar perceptual animation effects had been achieved with the zoetrope (using illustrated rather than photographic images) for over a thousand years in the East, while in the West it had only emerged in its modern form in the 1830s. However, in the 1870s, Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope proved to be the first projected image of movement which could be used for public display rather than only for the individual user. Simultaneously, in France, Étienne-Jules Marey had embarked on similar research to capture the movement of humans and animals by capturing multiple successive images of a body in motion, using his chronophotographic gun, which took 12 images per second within a single frame. Though these images could not be animated in the same way as Muybridge’s, they nonetheless conveyed a vivid impression of motion, force, and temporality (Braun, 1992, pp. 43-47). The images that resulted from these two early pioneers of the ‘moving’ image were the first to capture real movement in an indexical fashion using photographic technology. It is clear that, previous to this, human perception was incapable of grasping the minutiae of movement, unable to know the motion of the insect’s wings, of invisible air flows, or of a horse’s hooves. As such, this was initially solely a project of empirical scientific research, but it quickly developed into an object of public fascination, opening the minds of the public to previously hidden complexities of biological and physical realities. It had an aesthetic appeal in its new formal expression of a short moment, expanding time, stretching an infinitesimal duration into a form which could be studied or explored at leisure. In this way, a new visual technology managed to impact upon the common perception of time and force in a way which took the viewer into the immanent heart of movement through an aesthetically pleasing affection of real motion (Braun, 1992, p. 254). While Marey’s impetus was always the scientif ic documentation of movement and force within disciplines of anatomy and physics, Muybridge tended towards a more aesthetic goal. For Marey, the technology served only to increase our positivistic knowledge of the world, and he had no interest in the inherently illusory nature of perception (Figure 8). Perception was a faulty and unreliable process which held us back from adequate objective knowledge of the world, and the chronophotographic technology he devised was intended to ‘supplant the insufficiency of our senses’ and to surpass the limitations of the eye (ibid, p. 255). Muybridge, within a pseudo-scientific auspice, tended to the more theatrical, and crafted images which were often narrative, titillating, or impressionistic, rather than carefully documented research (Figure 9). He engaged in the swapping out of individual shots in a sequence to conceal gaps or inconsistencies and to give a better impression

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Figure 8. Jules Ettienne Marey’s pictures ‘for the analysis of motion’ (National Science and Media Museum/Science and Society Picture Library)

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Figure 9. Eadweard Muybridge’s ‘Animal Locomotion’ (National Science and Media Museum/ Science and Society Picture Library)

of smooth motion, and his aim was always to create a more pleasing and aesthetically acceptable final result (ibid, p. 238). As Marta Braun states about Muybridge: ‘He saw himself, and always referred to himself as an artist’ (ibid, p. 54). Between the divergent goals of Marey and Muybridge, we can clearly see an aesthetic dualism which actually develops with each and every new technological means of visual expression since the development of photographic media. The first tendency being towards a greater exposition of an underlying reality underwritten by a rationalist fervour to understand and document. The second tendency was directed towards reflecting on and experimenting with perception and expression itself, heightening or exaggerating normal perception for a stimulating and/or entertaining effect. The same dualism developed in early cinematic work, between the long-shot everyday naturalism of the Lumière brothers, and the magical illusionism of Georges Méliès. These impulses can now be seen as clear separate trends within digital media: between the intense high-definition and slow-motion detail of, for instance, BBC wildlife documentaries, and

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the exaggerated special effects of sci-fi and fantasy. However, though the first tendency towards a perfect and transparent actuality may hold as its true goal a positivistic or naturalistic expression of the world, it also has an distinctive aesthetic stylisation to it, albeit of a different order to the second tendency, whose explicit goal is to challenge perception for ‘artistic’ purposes. Both, however, present us with a version of reality: one based on detail – a truth of science; the other based on ensemble – a truth of art (this distinction is made by Sizaranne, referenced by Braun, 1992, p. 275). Both truth tendencies must therefore experiment with technological possibility to give us an expressive re-presentation of the world as we have not seen it before, and thus they both offer us something new for consciousness as an aesthetic effect. However, digital visual technologies present a new and complexified dynamic between these two aesthetic impulses. What the digital rearrangement of pixels permits in a way that simply was not possible before is a naturalistic precision, an indiscernible or seamless consistency to images that otherwise might expressionistically juxtapose perceptual realism. This seems to fold the distance between the two ‘truth’ tendencies, as we can see the same affective intensity harnessed by both fact and fiction. Increasingly, there is an ontological indiscernibility of the scientific document from the image which deliberately exaggerates to toy with perception. Digital processes twist and blend the complex detail of reality into dissonant hyperrealities which have an uncanny effect in their proximity to the real. This is very different from the convenient ‘artistic’ distortions of Muybridge’s photographs, which served an impressionistic or subjective truth; and it is also distinct from Méliès´s work, which served to titillate and surprise with its boldly stated illusionism and physical impossibility. Instead, the digital generates an uneasy discordant naturalism which synthesises new affects of the real – a truth fused of both scientific detail and artistic ensemble. Within conventional understandings of cinematic history, mainstream entertainment cinema grew to be more preoccupied with telling stories in a narrative literary tradition rather than with creating innovative expressions of space, movement, and temporality, and this tendency was more explicitly pursued as a goal in and of itself in avant-garde and experimental film practice.8 While this mainstream/avant-garde dualism does not do justice to the subtle and complex intersections and cross-pollinations between the two practices, it seems, that in the late 20th century and early 21st century, 8 For a survey of this tendency of traditional film theory between ‘normative and polemical classifications’, see Elsaesser and Hagener (2010, pp. 2-4).

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given the new tools that make it possible, digital screen media shows us a direct re-orientation towards an experimental approach to exploration of movement and temporality. This observation becomes particularly clear when we consider that the revelatory and germinal digital temporal effect of ‘bullet time’ in The Matrix – which freezes and slows time almost to a halt as we swing around the action 360º in the time it takes for a bullet to cross the room – is in fact a direct digital update of Muybridge’s nineteenthcentury multi-camera technique, augmented and smoothed by digital image interpolation software. However, while this might seem like a simple return to or recurrence of a previous image regime, the relation posed towards time and movement within digital media becomes noticeably different when we consider that these effects do not pertain to document or index details of an external reality, but instead aim to play with our sensibility about what is, in fact, natural or real – not just within our perception (as may have been the focus of avant-garde image movements influenced by 20th-century theories of mind), but also interrogating objective physical reality (influenced by contemporary theoretical physics and existential philosophy). The emphasis under the new digital image regime becomes the modulation, mutation, and distortion of space, form, movement, and time to expose different sensations of the real; to push and challenge any stability of ‘continuous aspect’ perception.9 This then becomes the real departure for digital visual technology from the analogue, a near perfectly lucid mimesis of reality, but without the claim to objective truth, an image oxymoron of naturalistic abstraction. We see the world not revealed in greater detail, but through a looking glass which challenges recognition without rendering unrecognisable.

Formal Dynamics of the Digital Image The structural dynamics of these digital aesthetic effects which simulate and refract the markers of perceptual reality, and which generate a kind of metaphysical uncanny, are, in a more specific sense new topologies and constructions of space, and the potential to break with consistency and stability of body, object, and surface in a photo-realistic, rather than merely

9 In the Wittgenstein sense, the stable ‘aspect’ of the cognition of things is continuous in that physical reality generally conforms to expectation (Mulhall, 1990).

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perceptually suggestive, fashion.10 First, as previously discussed, digital screen media often works within an often emphatic or hyper-architecture of space, in both digital CGI and in digital (D)3D, and this heightens and twists our perception of the dynamics of movement within spaces (Rodowick, 2007, p. 103).11 Secondly, the objects and forms which move in these spaces become themselves subject to mutation, as they are able to stretch, dissolve, and morph into other forms, so the idea of the movement of a predictable and consistent form through time itself alters. Though it maintains a temporal dimension, this destabilisation of form seems to become about more than just the opening up of a temporal moment of passing for closer analysis/contemplation (as with analogue image capture in the style of both Muybridge and Marey). Rather, it experiments with our ideas of space and material form, and with our presumptions about causality and possibility in physical reality. It challenges the rule-bound expectation of metaphysical consistency that is in no small part based on our habituated awareness of conventions of representation of form, movement, space, and time as established in photographic and cinematic media. It introduces a new and novel reflexive image relation which in turn introduces a new intuitive sense of possibility, becoming a form of visceral, kinaesthetic play and learning. To elaborate on these novel relations of space, motion, and form, I now wish to provide a short historical survey of the emergence of the use of computer graphics in mainstream media, with a view to establish which germinal affects they generate at this early stage in their development, and further to highlight how they distinguish themselves from photographic media.12 With each new technical process described, we see how a new synthesis of hardware and software is engaged by the artist-technician in an experimental, DIY mode, before being appropriated into an entertainment mainstream. In this mode, effects are generated that tap into primordial, even mythical, embodied sensations of flying, floating, and distorted perception,

10 Such perceptually realistic effects of disruption of form could be achieved in analogue media by superimposition, cross-cutting, or even in animation, though I wish to make a point about the seamlessly detailed and uncanny photo-realism of these same effects in digital media. 11 As Rodowick discusses in The Virtual Life of Film (2007, p. 103), lacking a direct indexical relation to reality, the digital image primarily synthesises spatial effects as ‘reality markers’ to strive for a perceptual realism: ‘They [digital images] strive to be more spatially similar and more replete with spatial information than photography itself.’ 12 This is perhaps a similar ‘survey’ mission to that conducted by Andrew Darley in Visual Digital Culture: Surface play and spectacle in new media genres (2000) and Stephen Prince in Digital Visual Effects in Cinema: The Seduction of Reality (2011), but to very different ends.

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foreshadowed in other artistic practice but here rendered as never before, opening up new reflections upon these experiences.13 In 1977, we saw the first use of a three-dimensional computer graphic in cinematic media in Star Wars, in a scene in which the fighter pilots are briefed about the forthcoming attack on the Death Star using a raster wire-frame graphic simulation (Netzley, 2001). Having previously collaborated with John Whitney, Sr. in programming the abstract and experimental computer-generated film Arabesque, the computer animation artist Larry Cuba was employed to create this rather more concrete spatial simulation effect for the film. In the image, the PoV assumes the position of a pilot flying very smoothly and steadily down a canyon-like trench to a point where a shot must be fired at a small target in order to destroy the Death Star. This simulation foreshadows an actual scene in the movie in which a 40-foot constructed model of the trench was used, and in which there is an increased spatial and kinetic complexity due to in-air battles, explosions, and multiple and less stable camera angles (ibid). The effect of the graphic simulation in the film is in stark contrast to this pro-filmic sequence; it has a calm and almost hypnotic quality in the fluidity of the motion and the sensation of weightless propulsion. The three-dimensional spatial depth of the image is emphasised by the sense of smooth motion towards a perspectival disappearing point in the distance, as the walls of the trench rapidly fall away from the sides of the frame. The CG animation effect is comparable here to hand-drawn animation, but with an intense 3D depth and fluidity of movement that is quite distinctive. Similar raster wire-frame model animation effects were subsequently used in Alien in 1979 (dir. Ridley Scott), and the affective tone of their smooth, weightless motion foreshadows much more contemporary spatial effects such as the (ironically analogue) first-person subjective ‘spider-cam’ in Spiderman (dir. Sam Raimi, 2002) – in which Spiderman swings down New York City streets – and to most contemporary CG flight scenes, for instance in Tron: Legacy and Avatar.14 It can be seen 13 Scott C. Richmond in his Cinema’s Bodily Illusions: Flying, Floating and Hallucinating also focuses on exactly this set of phenomenal sensations and how they are rendered digitally to modulate proprioception (2016). 14 The seemingly impossible analogue ‘spider-cam’ effect for Spiderman (2002) was produced by John Dykstra (who was also the special photographic effects supervisor on Star Wars) and earned him an Oscar nomination. He notes that it was effective within the hybrid media forms within the movie: ‘We used a cable-mounted camera called a Spider-Cam to photograph the real world. […] The camera went about 4,000 feet from 22 stories high down to a foot off the ground and back up again. That was a pretty amazing feat. But that was the way we captured some of the images that represented New York without having to make them all digitally’ (Wolff, 2004)

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that, from the very first mainstream use of CG effects, created by technicians previously employed in avant-garde film, an innovative affection of space and movement was generated that was recognisable yet distinctively digital. These early spatial simulations set the standard and showed the strength of the technology in generating these intensive sensations and, as such, they have become a familiar and generic image currency in CG-animated imagery. While the CG-simulated spaces in these films have a direct referent in a recognisable space (a landscape or cityscape), another use of early graphic effects generated a truly novel sensation of movement. This was the creation of non-spaces or immaterial spaces more similar to the abstract shapes and flowing forms of the aforementioned experimental CG animation of John and James Whitney. In the opening sequence of the Disney film The Black Hole (dir. Gary Nelson, 1980), we saw again a digital raster wire-frame model of an object, but this time as a virtual representation of flat two-dimensional space, punctured into a third dimension by the eponymous black hole. To the sound of a haunting John Barry waltz, the disembodied perspective very slowly drifts around the rim of the hole before falling into the darkness within. While this is a very simple and slow effect, it is dramatically affective in its synthesis of movement, space, and sound. Two years later, in Tron, we were given a similar affective tone in the transition between the two worlds of the film as Flynn’s digitised consciousness travels through a digital ‘worm-hole’ and floats through an abstract non-space before arriving in the game world. It is this early impetus to create imagined virtual spaces without a clear physical referent that also emerges as a trend in digital screen media and was developed through films such as Lawnmower Man (dir. Brett Leonard, 1992), Stargate (dir. Roland Emmerich, 1994), and Contact (dir. Robert Zemeckis, 1997), contextualised by a character being placed in immaterial digital space within a virtual dimension, or through space and time travel. What this provides is a perceptually realistic affection of presence and motion within a virtual space without recognisable landscape contours other than a tunnel or tube which twist and turns, or free-floating ‘objects’ which fly past to signify movement through space. Foreshadowed in analogue media by the astounding slit-scan ‘stargate’ sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1968), this rabbit hole, vortex, or wormhole effect continues to be a strong and persistent affective chord typical of digital visual effect, that of kaleidoscopic journey through ill-defined space, usually as a transition between other more spatially recognisable worlds. This affective chord becomes even further enhanced in 3D, in movies such as Thor (dir. Kenneth Branagh, 2011) and The Green Lantern (dir. Martin Campbell, 2011), in which travel between galaxies is rendered in even more immersive and kinetic detail in astounding vortex shots.

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The first digital effect of a transformation of material form within the image is to be found in Star Trek: Wrath of Khan (dir. Nicholas Meyer, 1982), with the ‘Genesis Effect’ (Price, 2009). Again highly spatialised, this CG animation sees a planet transform from a barren moon into a verdant Eden in a one-minute sequence which time-lapses as our perspective spins around the planet, seeing an atmosphere develop and the oceans fill with water. Here, for the first time, we saw the impressive digital transformation of a relatively photo-realistic landscape as opposed to the more basic raster wire-frame simulation. Then, with the development of morphing technology, we were in Willow (dir. Ron Howard, 1988) presented with the indexical photographic image of an object that shifts in its material properties and in elaborate detail to become another object – a first real and visceral breach of photo-realistic form by digital processes (Netzley, 2001, p. 239). In this scene, we see a goat smoothly elongate its neck to turn into an ostrich, its forelegs rising up and spreading to become wings. The bird form then shrinks into a tortoise, swells again into a tiger, before finally shifting into human form. In the following years, further groundbreaking morphing effects were used in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (dir. Steven Spielberg, 1989), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (dir. James Cameron, 1991), and in Michael Jackson’s music video Black and White (dir. John Landis, 1991). Comparable effects had previously been achieved in analogue media using simple cross-fades and superimposed composite sequences of static shots, each of which differed slightly from the previous, and essentially a form of stop-motion animation (a good example being Lon Chaney’s 1941 Wolfman transformation) (Sobchack, 2000, p. 133). However, the new digital interpolation technology permitted fluid transitions of more dramatic changes in form of moving rather than static objects, that were technically impressive and affectively potent at the time. As Vivian Sobchack points out in her book Meta-Morphing (2000), though morphing technology has now settled into the background as a visual effect, and has maybe even become somewhat clichéd through its overuse, it still maintains a surprisingly uncanny affectivity, especially in its mutation of photo-realistic images of the human body. While morphing as a novel and spectacular visual effect faded from popular use in cinema and television within only a few years, its use persists in more subtle ways today. For instance, it is often used to create a smoother slow-motion effect with footage that was shot at the standard 24 frames per second, digitally transitioning between individual frames using optical-flow interpolation technology to avoid the staggered motion that would otherwise be achieved. This is the technique used in The Matrix bullet-time set-pieces to enhance the

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fluidity and smoothness of the motion effects by inserting extra digitally created frames between the actual shot frames. More recently, we have seen the mainstream emergence of a certain variety of digital ‘glitch’ effects as a mind of interesting modification of the morph’s material instability, in high-budget television content such as Starz American Gods and USA Network’s Mr. Robot. Glitch art, known also as data-bending, data-moshing, or image-hacking is a product and process of the deliberate distortion of code, rather than the smooth transitions of the morph, rendering images with ‘tumorous blobs of digital distortion’ in which recognisable forms break into pixels and become smeared, blurred, or otherwise disjointed (Manon and Temkin, 2011). The glitch is an irregularity, a breakdown in form, which appears like an accidental breach in the order of the image and offers a quite peculiar aesthetic and affective effect. Building on an artistic legacy of hardware circuit-bending such as that produced by Nam Jan Paik, and on the aesthetic of artists such as Ant Scott and Iman Moradi, glitch art modifies software-based images toward a specific set of distortion effects and, subsequently, to affects of the digital breakdown of form. It is interesting that the glitch effect originates in an accident, a truly emergent technological form based on an error in the software, the hardware, or in the code itself. We are perhaps familiar with such accidental effects when our TV freezes or a YouTube video fails to load correctly, and the pixels seem to melt or flow together in extraordinary shapes and colours, distorting the human figure or landscape with striking and garish digital abstraction. As Hugh S. Manon and Daniel Temkin describe in their Notes on Glitch: The nascent glitch artist is seduced by a chance encounter: one witnesses, perhaps for the first time, the momentary failure of a digitally transcoded text—a fractured JPEG image, for instance, or a compressed video file losing traction with itself. The error is perceived as provocative, strange and beautiful. (2011, note 8)

This sublime moment of the chance encounter triggers a desire to reproduce or emulate this transcendent moment of chaos. However, this creates a conundrum centred around how the glitch forms, while referring to an accidental event, must be tamed, repeated, and reproduced within a design mode – an intentional error for aesthetic effect. The glitch in pure form is an unpredictable, chaotic, and ‘aleatory’ mode, that, when appropriated in the mainstream, becomes controlled and moderated as a set of aesthetic effects strategically deployed to duplicate the affective resonance of the original. In the aforementioned examples, glitch effects are narratively

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Figure 10. Glitch distortions of ‘technical boy’ in Starz´s American Gods (2017).

supported by, in the case of American Gods, the character ‘Technical Boy’ being a supernatural being who exists in and of data – a new media god who can manipulate code to alter his appearance (Figure 10). In Mr. Robot, the protagonist Eliot Alderson embodies two personalities, and, concordant with the theme of computer-hacking that runs through the narrative, the transitions between these two distinct realities within his psyche are represented by the glitching and fragmentation of his perception, giving a hallucinatory effect. Here, as with glitch techniques deployed in the cinematic mainstream in The Dark Knight (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2008) and in Cloverfield (dir. Matt Reeves, 2008), the effect symbolises or is emblematic of disorder, anarchy, and confusion. In other examples, such as Kanye West’s video for Welcome to Heartbreak (dir. Nabil Elderkin, 2009), the glitch technique serves to provide a level of abstraction appropriate to the interweaving orchestral melodies and samples, for a kind of epic layering and dissolving of imagery which becomes intensely transporting. From the messy and disorganised origins of glitch imagery, the techniques are increasingly co-opted and deployed for specific aesthetic and narrative purposes, and yet nonetheless, as Manon and Temkin note, any appreciation of the form stems from: ‘a belief in an originary and pure accident’, and in ‘an invitation to chaos’ (2011). In some ways similar to the glitch, and yet even more truly uncanny, we have seen recent experiments with ‘neural networks’ such as the Deep Dream image-generator, a curious side effect of software development in artificially

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intelligent automatic facial and pattern recognition. The algorithmic recognition process, when run in reverse in several iterations on photographic imagery, yields utterly surreal and psychedelic imagery, the result of which are only starting to emerge in the popular mainstream since Google’s 2015 Deep Dream project (in which the code was released as open source). Photographic or video images are treated to a form of automatic recognition based around a specific type of form, for instance, dogs or an eye, and they are altered such that that faces, spaces, and bodily forms morph and change into these other recognisable forms. The effects were recently deployed in a music video for California band Foster the People Doing it for the Money (released August 2017), and for MGMT’s When You Die (released December 2017), directed by Hallie Cooper-Novack and Mike Burakoff, who, with Jamie Dutcher, developed their own Glooby software to render some extraordinary and disturbing imagery. They describe on music website The Line of Best Fit: ‘the video utilises an amalgamation of AI Style Transfer technology techniques, making use of artificial neural networks to impose the stylistic qualities of an image onto video footage’ (Day, 2017). The powerfully hallucinogenic affects of this technique of digital abstraction may in time come to seem like just another gimmick, but in these first mainstream, and yet still experimental forms, it seems both shocking and highly original. Throughout the development of early CG animation, to recent digital morphing and glitching techniques, we can chart the early emergent structural and formal aesthetic trends which moved from experimental, DIY, and avant-garde practice to very familiar generic defaults within the new image regime of digital screen media. These effects have evolved over the last 40 years into seamlessly organised worlds in which human actors move in new ways. What is digitally added is a new dimension of corporeal presence within virtual space through new three-dimensional depth effects, an original sense of movement and force within these spaces, a sensation of the material mutability of body and substance, and a changed sense of temporality. All these effects emerged over a period of years and now converge and coalesce in films such as The Matrix, which self-reflexively play on the idea of digital virtual simulation, thus incorporating all possible variations on the altered affections that the digital can afford: time is sped up and slowed down (in the martial arts training scenes and bullet-time scenes); space and physical forces such as gravity are breached in powerfully affective ways (in building jumping and flying scenes); matter is mutable, with bodies and objects subject to changes in form (with the shape-shifting agents’ morphs and the bending spoon); and the digital glitch is thematised in the now idiomatic phrase ‘a glitch in the matrix’.

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These digital effects were and are technically impressive, viscerally felt, and cognitively astounding in a way that is surely comparable to the dawn of photographic illusions of movement in 1895. However, they have achieved such a greater level of uncanny photo-realism that their affective impact no longer plays on our perceptual weaknesses to create illusions (predicated in the aesthetic tendencies of Muybridge and Méliès), but rather is based in a near perfect and detailed mimesis of nature, that nonetheless cannot help but to surpass and distort natural perception. There is a smoothness and glossiness to these effects, which, while being proximate to the real, maintain a hyper, uncanny, or exaggerated relationship towards it. They are undeniably immersive and intensive in a way that qualitatively differs from what has preceded them in analogue media, and they push at the boundaries of the recognisable, and of everyday consciousness. What I suggest is that these new mass-mediated affections of space, time, energy, and materiality engender a qualitative shift in our embodied intuition of these metaphysical notions, in the same way as photographic moving images did in their own time, both reflective and generative of the experience and discourse of existence as they amalgamate within a certain historical moment. At a time when there is talk of the immanent death of the analogue image, and as we become increasingly corporeally and mentally immersed within a total ubiquity of the digital image, I propose that we passively become habituated to a sense of digital possibility.15 While in the next chapter, I directly tackle how we are affected at a fundamental level of mental awareness by these mediated images, I first wish to assess how the kinetic dynamics of the body in space are foundational to a metaphysical sense of position and presence in the world, and how this might be affected by shifts in the digital expression of these dynamics.

Movement, Space, and Kinaesthesis A creature’s corporeal consciousness is first and foremost a consciousness attuned to the movement and rest of its own body. When a creature moves it breaks forth from whatever resting position it was in; it initiates 15 This view of the analogue image’s demise is reflected on in the work of artist Tacita Dean ( Higgins, 2011), as well as discussed through the press – for example ‘Hollywood Says Goodbye to Celluloid’ in The Telegraph (Allen, 2011), in which the author remarks: ‘Celluloid will become a curiosity in art house cinemas determined to keep traditional film going.’

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movement, and in ways appropriate to the situation in which it finds itself. The inherent kinetic spontaneity of animate forms lies fundamentally in this fact. Kinetic spontaneity can be analysed in terms of kinaesthetic motivations, a species-specific range of movement possibilities, a repertoire of what might be termed ´I cans´, and – by way of proprioception and more particularly, of kinesthesia – a sense of agency. (Sheets-Johnstone, 2009, p. 181)

Interdisciplinary theorist Maxine Sheets-Johnstone develops an evolutionary perspective on the emergence of consciousness through tactile and kinaesthetic bodies. She describes this perspective as at odds with the philosophical discourse around consciousness as a higher-order cerebral capacity of only the more noble forms of life, mounting a direct attack on cognitivist and linguistic theories of mind, which, in her view, ‘arrogantly distort’ in favour of an anthropocentric view of the world (2009, p. 170). In her essay, ‘Consciousness: A Natural History’, she gives an intricate analysis of life on earth from the simplest organisms, to articulate an idea that all animate forms are conscious in the sense that they have some sensory organs which gather information on both the external world and the movement of their own bodies (as proprioception) (ibid, p. 149). Animate forms are ‘topological entities: changing shape as they move and moving as they change shape’ (ibid, p. 179), meaning that all organisms are adaptable, selfmonitoring, context-dependant creatures ‘in a spatial, temporal and dynamic sense’, and that this is necessary for survival (ibid, p. 180). Consciousness for Sheets-Johnstone develops directly out of the evolutionary internalisation of external, tactile proprioceptors into internally mediated systems. These internalised systems maintain a stable awareness of one’s own body with its possibilities and constraints within the environment in a way that is able to predict and spontaneously react to context. This evolutionary trajectory of corporeal awareness from purely reactive external tactile senses, inwards to a proprioception of body and a kinaesthetic set of ‘I cans’ within a primitive ‘mind’ is, for Sheets-Johnstone, the precondition for an emergent sense of self, which is the foundation of more complex higher consciousness functions. Thus, our sense of identity, existing as a discrete entity within a spatial and temporal dynamic continuum is firmly grounded in a corporeal sense of position within physical context. Sheets-Johnstone ascertains that these kinaesthetic dynamics are foundational to our sense of self-awareness and awareness of the world, and intimates that there is no easy separation between simple corporeal awareness and the higher mental functions by which we might position

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ourselves in the cosmos through metaphysical awareness. Her understanding of an internal corporeal awareness of physical possibility – a phylogenetic, intuitive orientation towards metaphysical properties developed through a natural evolution of animate forms – proves useful as I assess the impact upon consciousness of digital images of space, movement, form, and time. It prompts me to ask how our kinaesthetic and proprioceptive senses are impacted by visual and aural stimuli, causing an adjustment in our subconscious awareness of environment and ‘I cans’ in a deeply ingrained and corporeally inhabited way. Considering the common contemporary discourse which now sees human evolution as primarily technological rather than physical/biological, we can see that the increased, accelerated, and more immersive mediation of reality in a digital age could result in a changed dynamic sense of physical presence within the world.16 Furthermore, with the shift in digital media towards a more immersive, haptic, and stereoscopic image regime, we can see that our sense of corporeal awareness might be affected more profoundly than with previous analogue media, which could be said to have existed at more of an ‘optical’ distance from the body. Our internal proprioceptive and kinaesthetic systems, at the foundation of metaphysical consciousness, is technical in an evolutionary sense. Within her analysis of the kinaesthetic foundation of consciousness, Sheets-Johnstone develops a notion of dance and play as rhythmic motion activity which dynamically reflects the spatio-temporal and rhythmic coordinates of our world (2009, p. 321). This sees dance as movement which is not directed toward a specific task within everyday reality, but instead towards ‘the qualitative structure of movement’, which she describes as such: The creation of any dance is the creation of a spacio-temporal-energic dynamic that not only is anchored in movement itself but is thoroughly unique, that flows forth with its own particular surges and fadings, expansions and contractions, intensities, attenuations and so on. (SheetsJohnstone, 2009, p. 317)

The sensations of these corporeal kinetic dynamics are described as ineffable, beyond linguistic description, and yet tangibly felt. Because of 16 This concept of humanity’s cyborg evolution is captured by the work of technological futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil (2005), who suggests that, with technology growing exponentially by 2020, we will have computers powerful enough to simulate the human brain, and that, by 2029, they will surpass our intelligence.

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this, they have always been culturally recognised as meaningful beyond any goal-directed activity, and there is a natural propensity to appreciate them in an aesthetic sense, as a pure mode of expression. These ‘sublime’ affects are intuitively felt to connect one to the ineffable vitalities of life, and thus dance and rhythmic motion has always had a traditional connection to spiritual or ritual use throughout human history. She quotes the musicologist Curt Sachs to elaborate this primal expression of metaphysical notions: ‘Rhythmical patterns of movement, the plastic sense of space, the vivid representation of a world seen and imagined – these things man creates in his own body in the dance before he uses substance and stone and word to give expression to his inner experiences’ (Sachs, 1963, in SheetsJohnstone, 2009, p. 309).

The body and the movement of muscles and limbs are here perceived as the first medium, our first technology of expression of the way it feels to be in the world. This is a mode of expression of experience that is universal, even pan-species, that starts in a very personal way in the body with childhood play, but which develops into an aesthetic semantics at a relational and at a culturally mediated level. These kinetic semantics are dynamic movement patterns which are shared by species or groups, and used to express the ‘the ineffable qualia of life’ – aesthetic expressions of the affection of forms and structures, physical and meta-physical (ibid, p. 324). In digital media, the form of communal sharing of these expressions is changed, vital forms and gestures are modified, and new affection of ‘spatio-temporal-energic’ force is generated, in a fashion not dissimilar to the work of Marey and Muybridge in their own times. Cultural theorist Erin Manning, in her book Relationscapes (2009), extends this idea of relational movement and the relation between movement and thought more explicitly beyond the expressivity of the human body and into purely aesthetic experience. The expression of vitality forms here become paint, celluloid, and glass, which capture bodily sensations of motion metaphorically, and work within a semantics of kinesis even if they are in the form of static media. Through analysis of ‘kinetic images’ by Australian aboriginal painters, sculptor David Spriggs, animator Norman Mclaren, and f ilmmaker Leni Reifenstahl, Manning asks what sense of movement is contained within the works and what sense of motion the observer gets from them. She emphasises the haptic address of these analogue artworks, looking at the expressed dynamics

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between topological space and movement, and how these touch us in intensive, affective, non-representational ways. Through the philosophy of Alfred N. Whitehead, Manning sees that these affects of motion are not simply reactions to f ixed impressions of movement as actualised forms, but rather set an incipient thought process into motion, giving rise to new sensations and intuitions as aesthetic responses to the images. Through Manning’s analysis, we can see how our body is always caught in a relational flux of not just other objects and bodies within extended ‘actual’ space, but also of virtual intensive expressions of space-time and motion which can affectively impact upon us in corporeally felt ways as if they were actually in the extended space around us rather than on a screen. The way we inhabit and orientate our bodies within the world is thus relationally constituted by interaction with images (the creation of images as well as their consumption) as well as through ‘actual’ or unmediated spatio-temporal experience. Scott C. Richmond explores this same issue in a context more specific to this analysis of digital images in his excellent Cinema’s Bodily Illusions: Flying, Floating and Hallucinating (2016). In doing so, he takes us from the modernist experiments in cinematic motion of Duchamp’s Anemic Cinema, Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Cuarón’s Gravity’s digital effects through a phenomenological understanding of a cognitively embodied mesh of visual perception and corporeal proprioception. He describes (as does Sheets-Johnstone), through the work of perceptual psychologist James Gibson, the evolutionary role of proprioception in the formation of subjectivity. He posits a notion of ecological perception in which there is never the ‘pure’ optical perception of a quality like a colour or shape, or indeed of time and space. Rather it is always relational, ‘cutting across the classical senses’, not just towards an idea of our body, but to a more abstract, holistic idea of embodied self – an ‘ego-reception’ or ‘self-sensitivity’ (ibid, p. 108). Cinema, he describes, is foundationally designed with a ‘proprioceptive vocation’ to toy reflexively with this actual embodied sense in virtual technical modes: ‘The cinema stages the problem of my presence to the world and its fundamental technicity’ (ibid, p. 21). Cinema’s ‘proprioceptive aesthetics’, for Richmond, plays along its technical possibilities in a direct address to the body: Proprioceptive aesthetics operates, then as a manifold in which three terms are constantly referred to each other: body, world, technics. It is an aesthetics of the body in its materiality and intensities, and aesthetics of worlding in its indeterminacy and incompletion, and an aesthetics of

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technics in which the cinema’s operation as a technical system is made palpable. (2016, p. 17)

Here, we see a fusion of Sheets-Johnstone’s evolutionary corporeal consciousness with Heidegger and Stiegler’s technics and Deleuzian affect: ‘The cinema is a place where we encounter – perceptually and proprioceptively and so also reflexively and affectively – technics in the mode Stiegler describes, to which Hansen give the felicitous name: the cinema appears as a technics of the flesh’ (ibid, p. 165). I position my analysis of kinetic digital images in much the same way; as a technics of the flesh, yielding spatio-temporal-energic dynamics generative of emergent sensations, thoughts, and intuitions about movement, space, force, time, and material form. The new technical condition of the digital rendering of bodies and forms in motion within digitally generated spaces, and the digital capture and presentation of spatio-temporal dynamics in formats such as D3D and IMAX generate new affections of corporeal and metaphysical potential. These directly affect the individual, but, as culturally shared and technologically mediated forms, they start to become like a shared grammar of dynamic and vital forms and gestures, a technological grammatisation of metaphysical coordinates. To extend this analysis to the actual objects of contemporary digital screen culture, I look first at the example of dance in digital 3D, and then extend this to rhythmic dynamic kinesis in the more general sense within digital screen media to assess what novel affection of a sense of corporeal kinetic agency can be seen to be offered up by the new technologies. These digital dynamics provide new coordinates within which to orientate our embodied kinaesthetic awareness, a changing set of ‘I cans’ within the physical world.

The Body in Movement: Digital Dance Wim Wenders states in the Guardian article ‘The Great Leap Forward’: ‘I can safely say that 3D and dance are made for each other’ (Mackrell. 2010). In making his Pina: dance, dance otherwise we are lost (2011), he confessed that he had struggled to f ind a visual vocabulary to conceive of a mode to produce the film he had envisioned for some 25 years, primarily being unable to recreate the element of space with which to bring Pina Bausch’s dances to life on screen. He elaborates: ‘Space is the dancers very own medium. With every gesture, with every step, they conquer space – and cinema has never been able to give us access to that’

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(Wenders, in Mackrell, 2010). It was not until 2007, when Wenders saw his first modern-era digital 3D (D3D) film, that he managed to visualise how the film could be made: ‘With 3D, I was finally convinced we could enter the dancers’ very own realm […] As a spectator, you’re involved like never before: you feel the essence of movement – motion and emotion’. (Wenders, in Mackrell, 2010)

The central thrust of this article by Guardian dance journalist Judith Mackrell is that, for the choreographer and the filmmaker, before D3D, dance has never worked well on screen. She states: ‘However artfully filmed, the dancers always look diminished in two dimensions, like specimens trapped behind glass, and it’s all but impossible to capture the emotional and physical impact of live performance’ (2010). This ‘diminishment’ of dance on film is seen as a consequence of the screen’s flattening of the stage space and the necessary wide-angle camera distance from the dancers. This generalisation does, perhaps, come with a few conspicuous exceptions – notably Powell and Pressburger’s 1948 film The Red Shoes. As an exception, The Red Shoes works so effectively in 2D due to the exaggerated sense of space conjured by a stark contrast of emphatic depths on the screen. The dance starts with a paper-flat, two-dimensional, shallow stage space through which the character Vicky Page dances, but, as she goes emotionally deeper into the dance, her reality starts to fragment, the stage space becomes dramatically deeper and more extensive. Three-dimensional spatial effects of extended perspective clearly breach the stage space, and finally even the film studio space is ruptured when we see waves crashing into the stage, and the sea stretching off to the horizon in a cleverly composited image. This depth effect is achieved with elaborate cinematic set-building, backdrops, and composited film effects, something generally not achievable when trying to capture stage-choreographed performance. These are aesthetic, melodramatic enhancements of cinematic space with a magical and uncanny quality which strengthen the emotional and physical impact of the dance. However, with digital 3D (D3D), stage space is rendered with an increased spatial depth without cinematic artifice, endowing the same sublime and dramatic impact to captured live dance performance. As choreographer Wayne Eagling states in the same Guardian article: ‘Ballet has never worked for me on screen; it always looks so flat. I wanted to see if it could look any better, and this (3D) is promising […] It’s good,

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very lifelike, almost as if you are watching from the front of the stage.’ (Mackrell, 2010)

This lifelike sense of proximity, detail, and depth nonetheless creates its own uncanny affectivity in its spatial immersiveness, as if we ourselves are within the dance. Added to this augmented spatial depth, the dancers’ bodies themselves also seem less flat in 3D, as Mackrell poetically notes about Eagling’s piece Men y Men: The dancers’ bodies jump into gilded high definition, the flesh on their bare chests and arms looking solid and bright. Their movements acquire sculptural volume, pirouettes no longer appear like flat pinwheels, but revolve with a deep spiralling expansiveness. Best of all, there is an illusion of air around each body, restoring the dancers to their proper element; space. (Mackrell, 2010)

This observation rings especially true with Wenders’s film Pina. There is an energetic and muscular tonality to the dancers as they move to and from the camera, and rarely a distant, static camera shot, which would flatten the image. Instead, the camera moves around, towards and through the dancers in intimate choreographed moves of its own (Figures 11 and 12). The viewer´s closeness and corporeal presence within the dance in Pina is most obviously comparable to the highly visceral dance scenes in Darren Aronofsky’s recent (2D yet highly digitally inflected) film Black Swan (2011, the films released only three months apart). Black Swan, which visually and thematically references The Red Shoes, plays out an intense psychodrama through its dances, primarily expressed through an intensity of facial expression and the fragmentation of the dancer’s body. While there is plenty of movement from handheld camera shots, there is little spatial or sculptural depth here, with a shallow depth of field blurring out the background stage space, and only rare wide shots of the full body of the dancer. The mid-shot and close-up cinematographic choice of Black Swan serves principally to highlight the inner mental environment of the character expressionistically rather than the actual movement of her body.17 While this might seem similar in tone to The Red Shoes, the expressionistic 17 This choice of camera shot may also have been used out of necessity, to conceal the relatively untrained movements of the actress, Natalie Portman. The wide shots are at such a distance as to conceal the fact that a trained double was used (with a suggestion that Portman’s face was

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technique here is quite different, synthesised through ‘magical’ digital special effects (the sprouting of black feathers), and through intense close-up facial ‘affection-images’, rather than through affects of space and bodily movement in a deep figure/ground relation.18 For Black Swan, the dances are instrumental only as affective climax to its psycho-drama narrative, and the choreography seems actually somewhat redundant within this equation. While the effect is nonetheless cinematically breathtaking, it is of a very different order to the images of both Pina and The Red Shoes, which use expansive spaces within which we read the full body of the dancer for a register of dynamic tension, and in which the facial expressions, while not insignificant, are of marginal importance. The set stage spaces of Pina are rendered with visceral texture, with splashes of water, jagged stone, and moist brown earth seeming to have a choreographic role as the dancer move with and against them. The 3D effect is even more pronounced in Wenders’s exterior locations, which synthesise an emphatic depth through a central disappearing point far in the distance, serving to exaggerate the perspective (Figure 13). Occasionally, these exterior environments are also in motion, creating a mobile dynamism of dancer, space, and object. While the film is absorbing even in 2D presentation due to its deep-focus cinematography and kinetic dynamism (as home-video audiences will attest to), the digital 3D projection of Pina brings a quite enhanced sense of expansive space and force of presence in which the frame of the screen seems to dissolve completely. Dance seems particularly effective in 3D because the increased mobility of the ‘actors’ gives licence to play and experiment with these enhanced spatial effects. The dancers stay within an inherently contained space defined only by the time it takes to cross it in choreographed moves (without running off into the distance or out of shot). There is thus a tensional dynamism between the dancers and the limits of their bounded space; between figure and ground, as our attention flickers and shifts in the stark contrast between foreground dancer and immense background depth.19 This heightened spatial contrast and digitally grafted onto another dancer’s body), and the dance scenes are predominantly mid-shots of Portman’s upper half (Markovitz, 2011). 18 There is one intense and famous face close-up in The Red Shoes, signalling the transition from the real world into mental space. It is not, however, a feature of the whole film as is the case with Black Swan. 19 This results in, what is called by dance theorist Marc Boucher, a ‘kinetic synaesthesia’, a complex sensation of being in motion ourselves due to diverse elements and dynamic tension within the ‘gestalt’ of the experience (2004).

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Figures 11 and 12. The dynamic figure-ground relations of Wim Wenders’s Pina: dance, dance, otherwise we are lost. Dancers Fabien Prioville and Azusa Seyama, photograph by Donata Wenders (Neue Road Movies, 2011),

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Figure 13. The emphatic spatial depth of Wim Wenders’s Pina: dance, dance, otherwise we are lost. Dancer Cristiana Morganti, photograph by Donata Wenders (Neue Road Movies, 2011).

kinetic dynamic, in D3D and in high definition, creates a unique aesthetic effect, leading one dancer in Eagling’s company to remark: ‘It’s so intense, it looks like we do in real life, only better’ (Mackrell, 2010). This leads one to think that, just possibly, the experience of dance in 3D is even better than seeing it live on stage, with the greater mobility of perspective from a moving camera position, an almost tactile closeness to the dancer, and an enhanced spatiality – cumulative affects which result in a more intimate and engaging experience. 3D could be, as the Guardian article states, ‘a revolution’ in terms of presentation and reproduction of dance, and, as such, it has been picked up in the mainstream mostly in loosely narrative urban-dance films like StreetDance 3D and Step Up 3D – though, broadly speaking, there is not much variety in content.20 However, 3D is not the only revolutionary digital effect brought to dance. As part of Carlos Acosta and Zenaida Yanowsky’s recent dance performance Premieres Plus at the London Coliseum (August 2011), there was a slow-motion film Falling Deep Inside by Simon Elliott, shot digitally at 800 frames per second and projected onto a mesh drape covering the whole curtain area. In a close-up of 20 On 3D dance and specifically Step Up 3D, see Miriam Ross’s ‘Spectacular Dimensions: 3D Dance Films’ (2011).

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the dancers’ legs, it is astounding to see the minute detail of muscular movements at the intense level that the digital slow motion and high def inition brings to the image. The f ilm’s producers relate this detail to ‘physical emotion under the skin before the movement’ (IMDd.com), as if emotions exist as subtle muscular tensions before being expressed through action, exactly the type of potent pre-acceleration and incipient motion described by Erin Manning in Relationscapes. The short f ilm takes us into the infinitesimally small moment of an affective corporeal state before actualisation as physical expression, an over-full moment of intensity and tension. Another piece, David Michalek’s Slow Dancing, in which the movement of various genres of dance were projected onto multiple screens in extreme slow motion, similarly permits us to see the barely perceptible gestures and movements of the dancer’s body in a great level of complexity (Figure 14). This footage was shot at 1000 frames per second but was further slowed and smoothed through optical-flow morphing interpolation (by Apple’s Shake software). Both projects seem, like Marey and Muybridge in their time, to open up an immanent dimension of movement through new technological mediation, which changes the way we perceive the dancers’ performances.21 We attain a much greater appreciation of the complexity of muscular form, the nuance of balletic technique in line and extension, the more sculptural aspects of the dancing body, and even of the textures and subtleties of costume and lighting through these mediations. We can, in Manning’s words ‘feel the palpability of the imperceptible’, as we come to appreciate the dance in a new aesthetic light, opening us up to dance performance’s sublime ‘petites sensations’ (Manning, 2009, p. 88). As Judith Flanders of theartsdesk.com describes Slow Dancing: Dancers […] appear, at first, to be merely vast posters. Then a gesture; a second; soon the viewers realise that they are watching the creative act itself: here is the essence of those two intangibles, art and technique, merging together to produce performance. (Flanders, 2010)

21 This sentiment is echoed in Vivian Sobchack’s ‘Cutting to the Quick: Techne, Physis and Poiesis and the Attractions of Slow Motion’ (2006), in which she states ‘The operations and effects of slow-motion visibly and sensually interrogate those accelerations [of quotidian time] in what seems a “revelation” – not of immobility or stillness, but of the “essential” movement of movement itself’ (p. 342).

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Figure 14. The large, intensely slow-motion figures of Michalek’s Slow Dancing at Trafalgar square in London (2010).

Here, Flanders describes a new aesthetic appreciation of the ‘intangibles’ of dance, which she compares to a witnessing of the pre-actualised moment of ‘the creative act itself’. Digital technology has, in these circumstances, permitted a new affection of the energetic force, form, and temporality of the dancer’s body, understood to be like witnessing the ephemeral moment of artistic creation, an empowering notion indeed.

The Kinetic Dynamism of the Epic Digital Battle Scene Having described how the potential kinetic expression of an actual body in extended space is decisively altered in the digital image, we can now expand the analysis of a digital transformation of rhythmic movement to other images of motion-in-space which are not so instantly ‘corporeal’. Cinema theorist Anne Rutherford, in ‘Cinema and Embodied Affect’, makes the point that we do not need the image of an actual body to identify with to experience a corporeal effect (2003). She refers instead to all the other relational aspects on the screen which have a visceral impact: architectural space, depth, colour, lighting, camera shot, composition,

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confusion of noises and lights, angles and rhythms; a complexity of factors within the image. This is an image with no centre, no focal point (a body) […] the surface of the shot is conceived on a hundred different planes […] the tensions and dynamisms of the image can effect a bodily agitation. I am thrown into another dimension, my viewing body fragmented, dispersed, disoriented. I experience a shot in my stomach, as if my stomach turns over. (Rutherford, 2003)

Rutherford’s dynamic interrelation of image elements resonates well with Erin Manning’s analysis of both still and moving images, breaking them down into rhythms and lines of force within topological space which evoke ‘force taking form’, incipient sensations of movement (if not actual motion) that express an expansion of possibility for bodily actualisation beyond actual human form. While these sensations might not always be so intense as to disorientate, they present our consciousness with an affection of kinetic energy as a metaphor for actual bodily movement, which we kinaesthetically process. Even when actually watching dance, we often do not see bodies moving with one another in recognisable ways, but rather more abstract lines and forms moving in and around one another in a pure kinetic confusion; a kinetic synaesthesia of ill-defined forms: twisted and distorted, juxtaposed against other bodies, partially obscured, moving at speed, and simply becoming abstract shapes. Many other media forms -- in cave drawings, Picasso’s oils, or in film -- can be seen inherently to contain an abstracted sense of vital force beyond that which is literally represented as movement, a kinetic affectivity which impacts upon our minds and bodies to give us a specific impression or intuition of space-time.22 The digital then gives us a further dimension of heightened fluidity and complexity, a visual density of kinetic imagery created in the post-production suite that is even harder to grasp with our conventional embodied perceptual models. The rhythms and forces at work in the digital image take on a new intensive dimension as bodies fragment and change shape amid a confusion of objects and within malleable spaces, enhanced within immersive formats where the boundaries of the frame dissolve. Within digital post-cinema, we can see emergent kinetic images as innovative impressions of space-time, developing from the first digital images 22 The two mediums of cave painting and f ilm are affectively brought together in Werner Herzog’s recent 3D film Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2011).

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in mainstream media that I described above to the present day. These are novel syntheses of action and scene, figure and ground, sound and light, from a microscopic to an epic scale that would simply not be achievable in analogue media due to labour and production cost, or indeed purely material constraints. They exhibit kinetic dynamics which are entirely specific to the digital, and though these types of cinematic sequences may have been foreshadowed in analogue media, they seem now to be defined by the digital effects used to render them. While some generic standards of analogue action are merely revised, updated, and transformed by digital processes into infinitely more complex kinetic sequences, such as the chase scene (e.g. the Thanator chase in 3D in Avatar) and the flight scene (e.g. the kaleidoscopic affects of the wormhole sequence in Zemeckis’s Contact), a particularly novel and original kinetic image in contemporary digital media is the epic battle scene. The epic battle scene seems to be the digital spatiotemporal-energic image tour de force and, as such, it proliferates in narrative digital-effects cinema. While there are many critical discourses about the ideological effect of the fusion of military imagery and entertainment in video games and movies, and the subsequent normalisation of extreme screen violence, it can be seen that the battle scene simply presents filmmakers with the best context to showcase highly kinetic and complexified digital effects, where, exactly as in dance, there are multiple or multitudinous bodies and objects moving at speed within dynamic spaces.23 It has thus become one of the the best diegetic devices to experiment with grandstanding digitally rendered affections of motion, space, and temporality. If, as Sheets-Johnstone suggests, dance is the most straightforward and primal mode of expression of our relational sense of space and potential movement, the digital battle scene takes this and multiplies it thousand-fold, as multiple bodily forms flow against one another in an intricate choreography of camera movement, rhythmic action, and bloodletting. In landmark digital films such as Avatar, Tron, and the Matrix, but also in every recent ‘blockbuster’ digital-effects film -- the Transformers series, supernatural narratives such as Immortals, every superhero movie (recently, Guardians of the Galaxy, Thor: Ragnarok, Justice League), and even increasingly in most epic ‘period’ movies such as Hero, Gladiator, or Nolan’s Dunkirk -- the battle scene is pivotal not only (or not at all) for 23 Kristen Whissel (2014) dedicates a whole chapter to the ‘digital multitude’ within her analysis of ‘digital effects emblems’, describing these effects as emblematic metaphors for apocalyptic anxiety. She shows how they thus serve a narrative purpose, affectively symbolising the central narrative themes evoked by the film.

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the narrative, but for the expectation of an audience who, in this analysis, come to the cinema to be astounded and exhilarated not primarily by the violence, but rather to engage with the highly affective kinetic ‘action’ afforded by digital technology. In many such films, the digital effects are all but invisible, though the elaborate choreography of movement is often completely produced by computer-controlled camera movement and digital post-production. While the dramatic centrality of the fight scene has always been the case in the mainstream genre film – with swashbuckling adventure yarns and martial arts movies – in the digital age of entertainment, we have a far more heightened dynamic of space, time, and force, on a much larger and more immersive scale, entirely due to digital effects. The digital battle sequence also seems to become, at least in part, less about the tense narrative dynamics of winning and losing, where we might directly identify with a protagonist’s will to victory, and instead is regarded more aesthetically as the source of impressive effects of scale, technical skill, and impossible detail. These effects are temporal, with the speeding up and slowing down of objects and bodies spinning and flying through the air; spatial, with 3D effects and epic computer-generated sets; and amplify force and energy, as gravity-defying stunts are performed and objects are projected impossibly through the air. For example, in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, we see digital hordes of warriors swarming over the elaborate bridges and embattlements, the gravity defying motions of Legolas as he jumps onto one of the mammoth creatures, or the movement of the catapults and their projectiles, all of which present a certain heightened and intense rhythm and fluidity of motion within an extensive space.24 The corporeal tensing and arousal in watching these scenes is arguably not simply to do with our will (through identification processes) for a specific character to emerge victoriously, but rather because we feel sensually incorporated into the force and flow of the movements. In another example, in Michael Bay’s Transformers series, we have some of the most disorienting battle scenes ever seen, with pivoting camera angles and a visual density, maximalism, and complexity of detail in the moving machine parts that boggle the mind. Within this kaleidoscopic disorientation, we seem unable to follow which character is battling which; instead, it is the immersive 3D kinesis of form,

24 These complex crowd effects were generated by a computer programme MASSIVE (Multiple Agent Simulation System in Virtual Environment) developed by the filmmakers themselves, which generated crowds of ‘artificially intelligent’ individuals who make their own decisions based on behaviour patterns (McCarthy, 2006)

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flow, detail, and rhythm, allied with the booming sonic landscapes, that provides the visceral exhilaration. The visceral effects of this kind of action are necessarily of a flux between corporeal tension and anxiety – the viewers’ muscles twitching and their bodies turning to the direction of the screen action – and then almost simultaneously, an aesthetic wonder at the fluidity, speed, and scale of the action. We switch between complete immersion, and then, at one step back, a sense of wonder at the technical mastery expressed in the shot.25 This affective flux is often managed through digitally stylised and phased slow-motion effect, wherein the viewer has a momentary respite from the kinetic hyperactivity of the scene to savour the composition of a shot – usually a body flying gracefully through the air in some dance-like spin – before we are flung back into the high-speed action at less of an ‘optical’ distance. For many, this kind of tension and anxiety is not a pleasurable experience, though for others the exhilaration, disorientation, and intensity are the primary sensations to be savoured and are worth the ticket price alone.26 These exaggerated images demonstrate an impulse forever to amp up the pace and complexity of digital effects, placing total emphasis on affective intensity and immersiveness, occasionally at the cost of emotional empathy or within politically dubious representation, and often leaving the audience cold.27 However, used as well-placed and appropriately qualified set-pieces, they add a new affective dimension to the spatio-temporalenergic coordinates of narrative and genre screen media which opens up a new metaphysical horizon within our available modes of expression. They bypass the distanced analytical gaze for a visceral intensity which can intoxicate, breaching stable notions of presence, and, as described by Rutherford above, creating a fully embodied reaction – ‘a bodily agitation’. What emerges is a clear aesthetic impetus to push the technology to an ever increasing novelty and spectacle, to generate increasing breaches of expectation and suspensions of physical/biological possibility. This impulse 25 This effect is analysed by Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin (2000) as being the flux between immediacy and hypermediacy. 26 Scott Bukatman highlights the escapist pleasures of a kaleidoscopic loss of orientation within the hyper-rationalisation of space-time which typifies the modernist experience (Bukatman, 2003). 27 For an example of highly stylised action at the cost of political correctness, see Zach Snyder’s Sucker-Punch (2011), which was generally criticised for its offensive faux-feminism: ‘These so-called heroines are inherently weak characters who fail themselves and each other as sisters, friends and confidants. Even in their fantasies of revolt they bow down to the male gaze, stripped of both agency and voice’ (Bartyzel, 2011).

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towards fixating on technological form and detail within media, and on the increasing immersiveness and interactivity with the screen image within a peculiar spatial and formal logic has come to be known as the digital ‘neo-baroque’. I now ask how a baroque aesthetic has come to be associated with recent digital developments, and what this means in terms of a decisive shift towards a new regime within digital image culture.

The Digital Neo-Baroque The baroque aesthetic’s first priority since the seventeenth century, according to cultural theorist Angela Ndalianis, has been that of exhibition, virtuosity, spectacle, and active audience engagement (2005). It is the pleasing element of illusion, complexity, and the consequent sense of wonder which has always been intimately linked to the possibilities afforded by new technologies, whether in art, architecture, music, furniture, or film. The baroque style has also consistently been called upon by philosophers as much as art historians in narratives of the disruption, reinvention, and rebirth of more rigid and inflexible hegemonic regimes of representation, and therefore also of thought: from Walter Benjamin, Heinrich Wölfflin, and Eugenio d’Ors in the early years of the 20th century, to Deleuze, Christine Buci-Gluckman, and José Antonio Maravall in the later 20th century (see Deleuze, 1993). In the 21st century, the baroque aesthetic has again become prominent specifically in reference to digital images through the work of Ndalianis, Cubitt (2005), and Timothy Murray (2008). As Ndalianis describes, the baroque ocular regime was and is ‘an order that calls upon systems of classical or Renaissance perspective in order to overturn, investigate, or complicate their rational, self-contained visual and narrative spaces’ (Ndalianis, 1999). Classical representational systems such as the Renaissance invention of or rediscovery of perspectival depth were characterised by a static, centred, and passive viewer position, whereas the baroque fractures this closed system, delighting in toying with habitual expectations of centre and order. As Ndalianis explains further: The spatially invasive nature of baroque and neo-baroque spaces instigates participatory spectatorial positions through dynamic compositional arrangements. With borders continually being rewritten, neo-baroque vision provides optical models of perception that suggest worlds of infinity that lose the sense of a centre, which are associated with classically ordered space. Rather, the centre is now to be found in the position of the spectator,

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with the representational centre changing depending on the spectator’s focus. Given that neo-baroque spectacle provides polycentric and multiple shifting centres, the spectator, in a sense, remains the only element in the image/viewer scenario that remains centred and stable. (Ndalianis, 1999)

The baroque has at many times been used as a derogatory term by those who valued the clarity and transparency of the Renaissance style, and was criticised for its excessive ornamentation, redundancy, over-complexity, or obscurantism. However, in the neo-baroque, these exact tendencies are ethically contrasted with the perceived Modernist artistic elitisms of detached rationalism and simplicity based on purity and function. In celebrating exuberance, theatrical melodramatics, and heightened sensory stimulation, it thus has always been seen as more direct and accessible – a less esoteric and more populist form (Jay, 1988, p. 16). The term thus seems apt to critique a contemporary visual culture that emphasises the possibilities of new digital technology to create viscerally affective architectures of space-time while revelling in its own technical mastery. The perceived baroque stylings of many digital effects-driven narrative films and their associated computer games and theme-park rides are, for Ndalianis, all primarily oriented towards a complete spatial immersion and interaction, extolling visceral affect and excess without elitist pretension. For Sean Cubitt in The Cinema Effect, technological neo-baroque films are less like linear narratives than formal puzzle spaces. He describes: ‘Spatialisation takes over from narrative the job of managing the film’s dynamics. Movement here is sculptural, architectural, or geographical rather than temporal, and space itself is malleable’ (2005, p. 224), noting further that: ‘The film world seeks an audience that will realize it by uncovering its secret algorithm’ (ibid, p. 242). Narrative here is merely ‘decorative’, and what we are instead given in films like Nolan’s inception, Duncan Jones’s Source Code (2011), Interstellar, and The Butterfly Effect (dir. Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber, 2004) is multiple folded space-times posed as a formal problem for the logical mind to square off. The aesthetic pleasure here is in discovery and exploration of the film’s affective tricks and illusions, revelling in an Escheresque distortion of conventional Euclidean modes of representation of space and time. For Cubitt, however, the artificial coherence of these film spaces is ultimately unsatisfying, particularly in the use of clichéd closure delivered by the weak narrative devices of coincidence or destiny. However, their continuing popularity testifies to their appeal as an invitation to play, with an emphasis on formal affects rather than in the quality of the narrative, characters, or denouement.

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Figure 15. Example of digital projection-mapping’s distortion of physical space and shape. 555 Kubik (2009), Galerie der Gegenwart, Hamburg by Urbanscreen.

Beyond narrative cinema, but very much still in the ‘Escheresque’ tradition, a current neo-baroque trend in digital visual culture worth noting is projection-mapping. This is a relatively new digital projection technique (emerging around 2007) that can turn almost any three-dimensional object into a screen. Software packages such as Madmapper, VVVV, Resolume, and many others are used to warp and wrap projected images to make them fit perfectly on multiple irregularly shaped screens – the multiple surfaces of a three-dimensional object, or on immersive multi-screen set-ups which wrap and surround an audience. The result is a projection installation that can make it seem as if a solid inanimate object is moving, flexing, throbbing, glowing, crumbling, or even exploding. The screen-object can be anything, from the very small (a training shoe used in an advertisement for the brand New Balance) to the very large (a whole tower block at London’s Millbank for brand Nokia, and the disused Battersea power station for Bombay Sapphire).28 The best uses of this technology have been mainly restricted to marketing purposes and for large-scale live music and club visuals (for example, in the stage shows of dance-music acts Amon Tobin and Etiénne de Crecy) due to 28 These images and their like can be readily found on YouTube and similar video-sharing sites, indeed their marketing efficacy often depends on the images being virally distributed and shared though these platforms.

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the expense of production, however, as the technology becomes cheaper and more affordable to smaller scale artists, it is increasingly being used for more creative purposes. More sophisticated software mapping systems are now being developed to track and map moving objects in real time, yielding intensely uncanny and beautiful projections onto faces, bodies, or objects in motion. Given the right conditions – complete darkness and powerful projectors – the results can be impressively affective, as physical form is apparently folded and collapsed, walls are opened outwards or rendered transparent, and faces are transformed into other objects (Figure 15).29 With urban projection-mapping, dramatic distortions of space, matter, and form, as digital neo-baroque illusions are taken out the cinema or living room and relocated onto the surfaces of the urban environment as public events. They take the familiar landscape of the city and alter its materiality, turning monoliths into screens, and solid concrete and brick into fluid substances. Within a neo-baroque aesthetic sensibility, these images revel in the illusions afforded by the new post-cinematic digital technology, and draw us into a new mode of perception, adding an original new virtual dimension to public space.

Rethinking Cinema through Digital 3D The habitual perspective-based, photo-realistic mode of spatial perception can seem the most transparent and ‘naturalistic’ way of representing the real. The baroque flouts these rules, demanding that we look again, shift our perspective or viewer position, and actively enter into the representation. Rather than reflecting a classical concern for the static, closed and centralised, the neo-baroque system is dependent upon dynamic forces that expand, and often rupture borders. Differentiation, polycentrism and rhythm are central to neo-baroque storytelling strategies and, as with examples of seventeenth century baroque, neo-baroque entertainment media of the late twentieth century introduce ´a taste for elliptical form provided with real centres and multiple potentials’. (Ndalianis, 1999)

This critique of classical systems of representation/perception has been manifested at several times in history by 3D stereoscopic technologies. Where the monocular regime of vision comes to represent a way of seeing at a distance of Cartesian analysis and judgment, the stereoscopic image has 29 For a genealogy of digital-video mapping’s early development, see Krautsack (2011).

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been seen as neurologically bypassing this ocular distance and confronting the viewer with a haptic, immersive address.30 As Thomas Elsaesser addresses in his essay ‘The Return of 3-D: Logics and Genealogies of the Image in the 21st Century’, early forms of stereoscopic viewers emerged around the end of the nineteenth century for a wide array of uses, and were seen as a popular challenge to the bourgeois regime of expression as seen in Renaissance perspective painting (2013). Later in the 20th century, avant-garde art movements such as Futurism, Cubism, Dada, and Surrealism kept stereoscopic vision alive as an ideological critique of normative static perspective. Marcel Duchamp in particular experimented extensively with stereoscopic pairs, with a philosophical dedication to disruption of what he called the ‘retinal effect’ of distanced perception, extending his own conviction in the deep connection of human perspective to ethical modes of thought: of ‘visuality as an underlying structure of thought and creativity’ (Adams, 2015). However, the most recent incarnations of digital 3D have been dismissed by some as an unnecessary gimmick and ‘a waste of a good dimension’, which merely disturbs the proper, classical cinematic experience (Ebert, 2010). As Elsaesser documents, film critics such as the late Roger Ebert in the US and Mark Kermode in the UK see 3D technology recurring every few decades as a somewhat tacky and superficial side-show experiment in titillation, while the serious business of cinema carries on regardless. This is, in some ways, historically accurate, with 3D effects previously featured mainly within traditionally low genres of horror and pornography (e.g. Creature from the Black Lagoon, Stewardesses) (Lane, 2010), but, with the emergence of digital 3D and the relatively recent contributions to 3D cinema of auteur directors such as Ang Lee (Life of Pi, 2012), Ridley Scott (Prometheus 2012), Wim Wenders (Pina, 2011), Martin Scorcese (Hugo, 2011), and Werner Herzog (Cave of Forgotten Dreams, 2010), masters of the analogue film form are taking up the new technology for apparently artistic reasons, rather than for novelty value. The new uses of the technology makes continuous aesthetic sense when we consider that films such as Pina and Cave of Forgotten Dreams explicitly and reflexively thematise the expression of kinetic bodies (of dancers and cave-painted figures respectively), using D3D to achieve a 30 For Martin Jay, the monocular regime entails an emotionally distant, dispassionate, and domineering gaze, and, in analysis of Buci-Glucksmann, he writes: ‘She emphasises [the Baroque’s] rejection of the monocular geometricalisation of the Cartesian tradition, with its illusion of homogeneous three-dimensional space seen with a god’s-eye-view from afar. […] the Baroque self-consciously revels in the contradictions between surface and depth, disparaging as a result any attempt to reduce the multiplicity of visual spaces into any one coherent essence’ (1988, pp. 16-17).

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heightened visceral aesthetic effect in much the same way as established ‘body genres’ of horror and pornography (Williams, 2012).31 However, in current usage, 3D body-shock effects have shifted from being foregrounded in tokenistic and titillating ‘things flying towards the screen’ de-suturing moments, and have moved towards a more embedded and narrative usage. As Martin Scorcese observed about the making of his 3D film Hugo (2011): Every shot is rethinking cinema, rethinking narrative – how to tell a story with a picture. Now I’m not saying that we need to keep throwing javelins at the camera, I’m not saying that we use it as a gimmick, but it’s liberating […] But it has a beauty to it also. People look like… like moving statues [sic]. They move like sculpture, as if sculpture is moving in a way. Like dancers. (Scorcese, in Kermode, 2010)

While Scorsese still ultimately falls into the Realist system of believing that the new image regime of D3D bridges a gap between real perception and screen representation, he also sees that, rather than merely replicating natural perception, something new here is added, a new aesthetic effect which has the effect of heightening and altering our sensation. He likens it to the Cubist rendering of a ‘cinematic’ temporal dimension, saying: ‘a painting can’t turn […] if you look closely at some of the portraits from cubism at the time, you’ll find a portrait of a woman that is actually a projector’ – meaning that the image rotates around the subject, ‘projecting’ a sense of the cameras movement (ibid). Like Duchamp’s experiments in stereoscopy,32 and Marinetti’s Futurist cinematic experiments in anamorphic deformation in Vita Futurista (Lista, 2018, p. 28), we see that these images, while evoking a third spatial and a fourth temporal dimension, are far from perceptually naturalistic, giving instead quite a distorted view of reality (Marinetti described his cinema as a ‘drama of lines to obtain emotions of new extrahuman logic’, ibid). While perhaps not as confrontational as Cubist or Futurist experiments in vision, we can see, through a ‘new wave’ of auteur digital 3D films, that 31 In genres where an immersive corporeal affectivity has perhaps always been the primary goal -- dance, horror, porn, and gaming -- the qualified use of 3D seems strongest. See articles: ‘China Goes Wild for 3D Porn Films’ (Child, 2011) and ‘Caligula Director hints at 3D Porn Remake’ (Brooks, 2010). The 2011 release of the Nintendo 3DS saw the first widely distributed autostereoscopic (no glasses required) screen media, which, according to reviews, sees a perfect and un-gimmicky integration of the technology into heightened game play (Cowen, Super Mario 3D Land review, 2011). 32 The various dimensions of which are documented by Shearer (2005), Richmond (2016), and Adams (2015).

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many of its sculptural and corporeal affects do indeed ‘rethink cinema’ in that they not only offer up a more haptic address, adding a dimension of affective depth which is more intensive and immersive, but within this also create a novel experience of reality which still can seem very much experimental, breaking new ground even within the commercial confines of mainstream and narrative media.33

Conclusion I have argued, using examples from the very first digital spatial, temporal, and material impingements into the moving image, through different dynamics of movement in screen space – in dance, in immaterial spaces, and in the epic battle scene – through baroque architectures of space and the 3D technology used to render them, and through the flexion and distortions of real-world form with projection-mapping, that we now have a well-evolved and qualitatively different image regime from that which came before. The new digital screen technologies synthesise original sensations of space and time, materiality, force and rhythm, generating new dynamic landscapes which comes to feel like a very real part of our world. Furthermore, I have tried to establish, through the work of Sheets-Johnstone and Erin Manning, that this technological shift in spatial and kinetic expression could have a real impact on evolutionary phenomenology, from corporeal proprioception and other anthropomorphic kinaesthetic dynamics, to abstract thought about metaphysical properties – for Scott Richmond, a ‘technics of the flesh’ (2016). At first, these technological shifts compensate for the deficiencies of the human perception, in the work of Marey and Muybridge through to Michalek’s Slow Dancing and BBC wildlife’s complex digital time-lapse tracking shots, opening new micro-sensations of existence (at the same time, creating uncanny perceptual experiences), but then these sensations surpass human perception altogether, become simple lines of force and flight in maximalist hyper-baroque architectures of space. As previously described, for William Brown (2013), this amounts to anti-humanist and 33 In 2016, Film Forum cinema in New York ran a 3D Auteurs film festival, screening 3D films from cinematic history (Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder alongside more schlock horror) alongside the new films considered exemplary from the last ten years, such as Gravity (dir. Alfonso Cuarón, 2013) and Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller, 2015), as well as those by Ang Lee, Ridley Scott, Scorcese, Wenders, and Herzog et al.

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non-anthropocentric cinema, but we can see through the above analysis that we are always still dealing with a human proprioceptive phenomenology, only one that moves metaphorically and emblematically into Malabou’s plastic ontology, Bogost’s alien phenomenology, or Marinetti’s ‘extrahuman’ logics. As a final point, and to support the argument that we are here involved in a real technical evolution of corporeal consciousness, I would like to call on a couple of empirical studies to demonstrate how malleable our sense of the real actually is within the new immersive technologies, studies that suggest that what we often think are fixed, consistent, and unchanging physical qualities of the world are actually relatively fluid within our metaphysical consciousness. The first of these studies tested the ability of participants to project objects intuitively into a fourth dimension through their immersion in a virtual reality simulation. The researchers state: Representations of space and time are deeply rooted in human thinking, reasoning, and perception of the world. However, living in a physical world of three dimensions, humans have their perceptual and cognitive systems tailored for sensing, storing, transforming, and reasoning about three-dimensional (3-D) objects. (Ambinder et al, 2009)

The researchers aimed then to prove that our ability to conceive of, and to intuit, fairly complex higher dimensional space can be dramatically and quickly expanded by quite minimal exposure to three-dimensional virtual (VR) simulation. They describe: It is a long-lasting question whether human beings, who evolved in a physical world of three dimensions, are capable of overcoming this fundamental limitation to develop an intuitive understanding of fourdimensional space. […] Here we show evidence that people with basic geometric knowledge can learn to make spatial judgments on the length of, and angle between, line segments embedded in four-dimensional space viewed in virtual reality with minimal exposure to the task and no feedback to their responses. […] These results suggest that human spatial representations are not completely constrained by our evolution and development in a 3-D world. (ibid)

The researchers suggest that, by developing and using new technologies of representation, we can relatively easily adapt to a new intuitive sense of space

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and time. They note that, while this was previously hypothesised, it was not possible to test until virtual reality created the possibility of inserting test subjects into a spatially coherent ‘other dimension’. In the second empirical study, again using virtual reality, researchers claim to have altered embodied thought and behaviour by ‘transferring men’s minds into a woman’s body’ (Sample, 2010). In a VR simulation, men could look down and see a woman’s body beneath them in place of their own. During one experiment, virtual embodiment was strengthened when a second (simulated) female approached and touched the participant’s arm in VR – a virtual image reinforced by actual physical sensation when a researcher in the lab simultaneously touched the participant in the same spot. Later, the participant flinched and their heart rate jumped when being struck by the virtual character in the simulation. The researchers stated: If you can temporarily give people the illusion that their bodies are different, then the evidence suggests it also affects their behaviour and the way they think. They can have new experiences: a person who is thin can know what it’s like to be fat. A man can have experience of what it’s like to be a woman. (ibid)

While here they principally describe an empathetic identification effect, thinking that a man could ‘feel’ like a woman, the signif icance of this research seems to be about the malleability of our mental image of our own bodies and its capabilities from only a little exposure to an altered sensation of corporeal presence within a technological simulation. The research suggests that corporeally immersive technologies can instigate a suspension of disbelief and an erasure of cognitive dissonance to the extent that the participants can have a strong physical reaction in response to an event occurring to their virtual bodies projected into a virtual world. The researchers thus conclude that ‘our minds thus have a very fluid picture of our bodies’. What these two examples evoke (without, I hasten to add, categorically proving) is the idea that, through digital simulation – through virtual representations of bodies and their positioning within a virtual reality – we can easily alter what actually proves to be fairly plastic mental models of reality. This can be a heightened intuition of the world’s metaphysical properties, or a different kinaesthetic sensation of our own bodies within the world if indeed, following Sheets-Johnstone’s thought, the two sensations can be separated at all. In digital screen media – through CGI, D3D, digital mapping, digital

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HD, digital slow motion, morphing, glitching, and deep-dream software, and with new emerging technologies – we have an immersivity and intensity of physical detail which can afford us emergent and original sensations of abstract bodies within abstract spaces and the energic force with which they move. This is best perceived as a playful, interactive learning process, even though it often proceeds through experimentation which can occasionally seem bizarre, redundant, superficial, or gimmicky. However, there can be no doubt that these effects amount collectively to a new image regime, and the impact of this new image regime on a generation that was born into a digital era is only beginning to be understood.

5.

Reality Sutures, Simulation, and Digital Realism Dan Strutt

Abstract This chapter begins by first complexifying the psychoanalytic concept of ‘suture’ as a theory of how we aesthetically and affectively interface with images, asking how we police the boundary between actual and virtual in our experience of the world. By working through notions of mirror neurons, the simulation theory of the mind, the metaphoric structure of memory, and mimetic capacity, it establishes that we are influenced and conditioned by the images we consume to inhabit certain fields of immanent possibility intuitively and corporeally. Within digital images, this field of possibility is rendered plastic, subject to reformation, modulation and regeneration and it is argued that this foments a more plastic mind in which actuality and virtuality fuse. Keywords: Suture, The Mimetic faculty, Metaphor, Embodied Simulation, Kinetic Synaesthesia, Play A psychologically tested belief of our time is that the central nervous system, which feeds its impulses directly to the brain, the conscious and subconscious, is unable to discern between the real, and the vividly imagined experience – if there is a difference, and most of us believe there is. Am I being clear? For to examine these concepts requires tremendous energy and discipline. To allow the unknown to occur… and to occur… requires clarity [sic]. And where there is clarity there is no choice. And where there is choice, there is misery. (The Swami in The Monkees’s 1968 film Head, dir. Bob Rafelson) Everything is backwards now, like out there is the true world, and in here is the dream. (Jake Sully [Sam Worthington], in Avatar, 2009, dir. James Cameron)

Strutt, D., The Digital Image and Reality. Affect, Metaphysics, and Post-Cinema, Amsterdam University Press, 2019 doi 10.5117/9789462987135_ch05

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In Avatar, we are presented with a direct analogy for the suturing of our mind into a digital screen ‘virtual’ reality. The main character Jake Sully’s consciousness is projected into the body of his avatar, and his experience of reality is mediated through his conscious connection to an alternate body in an alternate world. As we enjoy the pleasures of 3D immersion and identification within a fantastic alien world from our cinema seat, Sully is similarly transported from his disabled body restrained within a capsule into an enhanced and empowered blue body in which he can perform amazing physical feats. Sully’s projection of consciousness proves to be an apt metaphor for the process by which we mentally invest in and virtually inhabit the images we see on the screen. We see characters in situations performing impossible tasks, in situations we can never hope to be in, and we experience these scenarios in some vicarious way, our bodies tensing and releasing, laughing and crying, even jumping and turning in our seats as the bodies and objects move on screen. The difference is that, while the character Sully knows the simulation is real and deadly serious, we as mature spectators maintain a conscious knowledge that it is just an imaginary projection presented for our pleasure.1 What this means is that we can engage in metaphorical ‘imaginary’ relations with the images on the screen; a playful creative engagement through which multiple simulation and mirroring cognitive processes are mobilised without serious mental risk. This is acknowledged by modern film theorists such as Jean-Louis Comolli, who ascertains in his ‘Machines of the Visible’ essay (1980) that we are not imbecilic passive consumers; we willingly ‘play the game’ and fool ourselves for the pleasure. We are accomplices in the illusion. While children seem less able to police the boundary between virtual and real in terms of the suggestive metaphorical power of the screen image, shrinking in real horror or gurgling with delight, adults have entered more firmly into a symbolic order detachment from the imaginary screen reality. We are told that these illusory images cannot really affect us, and we feel that our engagement with them is an intentional act within which we maintain our own agency at all times. However, we have all, I imagine, experienced the odd unsettling cinematic moment when our firm grip on ‘exterior’ reality is shaken in such a way 1 This actual/virtual safe cognitive distance is acknowledged and toyed with in many films involving the transposition of consciousness into virtual realms. For instance, in Brainstorm (dir. Douglas Trumbull, 1983), Tron, and Total Recall (dir. Paul Verhoeven, 1990), through expository dialogue the audience is informed that ‘virtual’ death within the simulation equals brain death in reality.

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that, even as we leave the cinema, we feel the screen reality impinging on our own – a threatening shadow, a seemingly unnatural sparkle of light, or a ‘glitch in the matrix’ sensation of déjà vu. Can we then really say that we have complete conscious control over the images we consume, and exert that control to police the boundary between the virtual and the real perfectly? Anyone who has had a particularly vivid dream which references the mood, tone, or embodied experience of watching a movie, or indeed a dream in which we actually enter into the film diegesis, can attest to the fact that, however we consciously position the experience of spectatorship, some of it gets ‘under our skin’ and bleeds into our subconscious mental processes. Going even further than this, I move towards an understanding that the virtual screen image is not a thin reproduction of reality which causes occasional interference in our ‘natural’ perception, but is actually in a sense more real (in its harmonic and ordered rendering of reality) than the chaos of actual experience. The screen image is a register of our ways of seeing, the image of our actualising processes of mind that extract meaning and model from the multiplicity of sensory input. Thinking this, we can start to understand that, perhaps it is not the screen reality that impinges on our own reality, but rather that it is external reality that is checked for validity against the virtual, simulated image. This chapter aims to address how images come to enter into our consciousness, at what level(s) of consciousness they enter, and what alterations they passively make when they take up residence in the neural substrate of our memory. In our exposure to these images as spectators and consumers, I ask in what ways we process them as part of our systems of recognition, cognition, and patterns of abstract thought about reality. Not only in youthful developmental processes but also throughout our adult life, there is a plastic structuring and restructuring of associational, procedural, and semantic memories of ‘virtual’ media experience as much as of ‘real’ experience, cemented in the synaptic connections of the brain. To a large extent, we perceive the world through our understanding and awareness of the content of, and connections between, mediated images. This means that the changing technological forms of mediation of reality, from the novel, to fine art painting, to cinema and television, will each generate a habituated mode of recognising and processing sensory input and relating it to other experiences within various intuited ontological dimensions. I move towards seeing digital post-cinematic images as synthesising a distinctive relational mode of thought about reality; a reality in which there is an uncertainty about reality itself, and an intuition that our sensory experience of the world and its objects is not the whole story. Digital media seem to tell a different story

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about the subtle vitality of matter and space which lies just beyond normal ‘real’ perception, but which can nonetheless be tangibly and corporeally felt. While the major discourse of mind of the 20th century was that of the unconscious network of meanings connected through symbolism and signification (for Lacan, ‘like a language’), in the 21st century, we move to a neurological understanding of the modular structure of mental processes in which cerebral meanings and embodied affections are subtly co-triggered.2 Neural synapses form through our early development, but, as has been noted in recent research, further re-form and develop in new ways as our experience broadens and accumulates (Malabou, 2010). By offering up an unstable image of a reality in flux, digital screen media seem to reflect this greater self-transformative power of the brain, as much as of the world and matter itself. New understandings of neurology, as also of physical reality through quantum physics and cosmology, intertwine with the capacities of the new technologies of representation to create synergistically a new complex and heterogeneous ontological model of metaphysical properties of time, space, force and matter. In this chapter, I suggest that our mind (as a holistic, embodied, and distributed central nervous system inclusive of the brain) adapts and changes to account for the symbiosis between these new contemporary knowledges and digital technologies, re-orientating the senses to see and feel differently.3

2 Sigmund Freud in fact began his career as a neurologist, but evolved towards theoretical neurology and psychology before founding psychoanalysis as a therapeutic practice. It was his turn to psychology which instigated the 20th-century preoccupation with the unconscious mind. Now the current ‘turn to neurology’ in humanities and social science in the last 20 years seems to come on the tail of new technologies of brain-imaging and measurement (the digital scanning techniques of MRI, CT, EEG, etc), but also arrives as a fashionable critique of social and cultural theory influenced by psychoanalysis. This ‘neuro-hype’ does, however, threaten to overwhelm more politically informed analysis – leading to recent conferences in Berlin and London to discuss the opportunities and pitfalls presented by the new prominence of neuroscience: Neuro-Reality Check: Scrutinizing the ‘neuro-turn’ in the humanities and natural sciences. Workshop at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. December 2011; also, The Neurological Turn, at The Future of Medical History Conference, Hosted by The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL, July 2010. 3 This is a theme that Katherine Hayles develops in her work, in which she identifies a new transformed cognition in digital culture: ‘There is a mounting body of evidence to suggest that different media wire the brain in different ways […] The neurological re-wiring takes place quickest when small repetitive tasks are repeated over and over, reinforcing synaptic pathways and encouraging the associated neural nets to grow — as, for example, clicking a mouse, scanning a web page, etc’ (Hayles, 2010).

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The Malleable Mediated Mind Through psychological discourses of conditioning, we are perhaps familiar with the notion that we become quickly inured to certain stimuli in such a way that we respond automatically and habitually, without thought or analysis. But, while this process has conventionally been empirically measured through behavioural or physical response,4 how does one research the conditioning of more ambiguous awarenesses such as the metaphysical sense of presence, order, and consistency in the universe that cannot be so easily monitored? Throughout childhood, imaginative and mimetic play tests the limits of our intuited boundaries and continuities of space, time, and force (as anyone who has fallen out of a tree can attest). We then learn about many more abstract metaphysical notions through our exposure to and engagement with media images; for instance, weightlessness in space, the density of matter at the big bang, neutrons colliding in the CERN particle accelerator, or the speed of light. We engage with these through media images modelled as if they were directly experience-able by our ocular-sensory bodies. Our changing technological capability to generate these images then shapes our ability to visualise them imaginatively, adding different affective dimensions to the imagined, intuited experience. The media we experience therefore provide us with a palette of imaginative sensory and affective schema through which we can simulate abstract experience – future experiences, the experiences of other people and things, or impossible experiences. The question here becomes how, at a less-than-conscious level, do we discern between virtual and abstract memory and the more directly experienced procedural and embodied motor memory? Neuropsychologists Mark Solms and Oliver Turnbull, in their book The Brain and the Inner World, describe that perception is sculpted by habituated models of reality derived from early learning experiences (2002, p. 159). We usually see what we expect to see, based on the passive synthesis of previous experiences, which entails the simultaneous activation of both direct and abstract knowledges as they were ‘encoded’ in the modules of the brain: ‘…as a set of experiential 4 In Pudovkin’s 1926 film The Mechanics of the Brain, we see documentary footage filmed in Pavlov’s laboratory of experimentation on animals and small children to prove physiological and behavioural conditioning. More recently, we have seen much contested, but popularly known, research conducted on physiological desensitisation to violence as a form of conditioning, specifically after exposure to violent media in the form of video games or films. See, for instance: ‘The effect of video game violence on physiological desensitization to real-life violence’ (Carnagey et al., 2007).

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episodes, as a set of abstract facts, and as a set of habitual response’ (Solms and Turnbull, 2002, p. 157). They explain how memories are simultaneously stored in these different ways in different modules of the brain. If one part of the brain is then damaged, the memory can live on, albeit altered, leading to situations in which a patient can abstractly remember the act of performing a skilled motor task, but cannot actually manually do it anymore – their semantic memory remaining intact while their procedural memory of the same act is damaged/removed. These multi-modal memories structure our habitual mental responses in a relatively undivided way. This means, in principle, that our minds are activated in subtle and complex subconscious and affective ways by memories of things that happened to us directly, as well as by memories of ‘virtual’ or simulated experiences we may have had through media or in dreams, and these can be separated only by drawing the mental process into a higher level of analytical consciousness. Perhaps we have all had this kind of momentary memory confusion when sensation and semantic memories are mixed and the gaps are falsely filled in by our imaginations – where we imagine for a second that we have actually experienced something that we only heard about or witnessed. Of course, in extreme circumstances, this confusion extends to a pathological delusion – of alien abductions or superpowers, but for most of us, this is a rather more whimsical experience. What this testifies to is that mind and memory are considerably more plastic than is often conceived of in some developmental psychology and neurology, and that, beyond the initial synaptic concretion of association networks in our early years of learning, there is still a vast amount of necessary adaptability in the brain (evidenced by slow degenerative disorders like Rasmussen’s encephalitis, wherein the brain has time to transfer most functions over to healthy parts). There are many popular cultural discourses of neural flexibility and adaptability, most pronounced of which is brainwashing, usually positing that, through exposure to media (or propaganda) in an eroded or weakened metal state, we can essentially be ‘re-programmed’ to believe in false memories, or to delete existing memory. This concept is normally used to refer to the manipulation or erasure of cultural values or belief systems, but what about our physical and metaphysical senses, our sense of position and presence in the world or in the universe? Our practical and pragmatically naïve everyday experiences of reality is that space and time exist in empirically real terms, outside of our comprehension of them, in enduring transcendent form. Since Kant, however, we have had what Ian Bogost calls the ‘infamous introversion’ that is the bedrock of Western philosophy – that these metaphysical constructs

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exist a priori, not objectively real, but rather ‘ideal’ – as mental schema to coordinate the information gleaned from our senses (2012, p. 5). Then, from Einstein’s neo-Kantian position, we understand that time and space are relative and unfixed qualities subject to the position and speed of an ‘observer’. By these principles, as synthetic mental structures, intuitions of time and space are constantly tested against sensory experience, and they are subject to modification within changing environmental factors. You could perhaps say that this is evidenced by the cultural existential shifts in the experience and understanding of time and space from industrial modernism to globalisation that have been scrutinised by writers of modernism and postmodernism, from Georg Simmel and Virginia Woolf to Fredric Jameson and David Harvey.5 What is shown through these various theoretical and cultural relativisms is that space and time are really merely an adaptable (human) phenomenological model of understanding existence, rather than of things that exist objectively. ‘Ontological Realist’ Markus Gabriel summarises this viewpoint: Space-time is an object under investigation from the standpoint of certain limited physical models that were never designed to be metaphysical accounts of a big container comprising everything there is. And if they were, then the physicists who understood them in this way were wrong. (in interview with Graham Harman, 2015)

Gabriel asks us to step away even from Kant’s transcendent idealism and Einstein’s relativism, as blinkered views on what ‘exists’ that stem from the tradition that it is humans who can exclusively access existence. Bogost implores us, in no uncertain terms, to flee from the ‘dank halls’ of the mind’s prison ‘that seeps from the rot of Kant’ (2012, p. 4). From a speculative realist position, we should not rely on any abstract model that tells us what Being is through any universal a priori categories. If we accept this, we can move towards asking how different paradigmatic technological media forms affect us; our metaphysical sense, our memories, conditioned and colonised by the images by which we are surrounded. Does media representation of the fundamental forces of the world – time, space, energy, and materiality – subtly alter our perception of these qualities in a lasting and deeply ingrained way? In our phenomenal experience of the world, do we really manage to police a clear boundary between ‘real’ and 5 Paul Virilio describes exactly a kind of brainwashing or neural ‘brainstorm’ brought on by the contemporary folding of space and time (Virilio, 1988).

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virtual experience? Or, at an affective level, is the boundary between actual waking experience and the virtuality of screen-mediated experience (as also of dreams) more blurred or intermingled than we might think? At an embodied level of cognition, I suggested in the last chapter that we have a sympathetic reaction to media images through the activation of simulation processes in the subconscious mind/body. This is the intense corporeal reactivity which we all might experience when watching, for example, a horror movie, an empathetic relationality understood at an affective level of identification through the activation of bodily knowledge – rather than identification at the more analytical level of cognitive awareness which has been more conventionally identified in 20th-century film theory.6 At this level of embodied metaphorical association, neural bonds are formed – a passive synthesis of corporeal associational and metaphorical memories which then lie dormant, waiting to be triggered again through subconscious patterns of recognition. Each technological medium lays down its own structural syntax of a mimesis of reality that we learn to read, negotiating the initially abstract and complex significations, rhythms, and connections until they become familiar. From these negotiations, we automatically synthesise embodied understandings and organising frameworks by which we cognise not only media but also reality. Understanding that we must consciously maintain a boundary between our perceptions of the real and the virtual, requiring some structure and stability in our mental schema to do so, I wonder whether our increasing fascination with fracture and discontinuity in digital media representation fundamentally changes our sense of the world in a way that is either quantitatively or qualitatively distinct from previous analogue and photographic media forms? Directing this question to culturally definitive films such as the Matrix, Avatar, or Inception, one is led to ask if there is a paradigm shift in our collective consciousness towards a less ‘naïve’ version of reality – a destabilising and consequent restructuring of mental schema. Furthermore, this leads me ask whether digital mediation in fact more accurately reflects the essential virtuality of our abstract thought processes 6 The Psychoanalytic theory of Christian Metz and Jean-Louis Baudry held that film spectatorship was egoistic, useful to us in feeding our fantasies, even though this was perceived to be driven by unconscious motivation. Elihu Katz’s ‘Uses and Gratifications’ theory later focused on more consciously active and intentional uses of media for individual social and psychological requirements. Both, however, engaged primarily in analyses of processes of identification and representation through narrative and character devices as if we were ‘reading’, rather than simply ‘experiencing’ film, and the pleasures and uses they described seem more cerebral than corporeal (Katz, Blumler, and Gurevitch, 1974).

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due to its verisimilitude in presenting imaginative simulations of the world? Do digital screen media, then, in their generation of simulated realities, and seen through the prism of recent discourses of neurology, perception, and physics, generate a new metaphysical sensibility, a new digital ontology? To investigate further perspectives on how our psychic engagement with screen images impacts upon our sensibilities and intuitions surrounding our being-in-the-world, I first turn to examine the traditional notion of suture in cinematic theory towards expanding and rethinking its meaning to encompass an affective closeness to the image that twists the distinction between real and vividly imagined experience. I then move on to concepts of mimesis, simulation, and synaesthesia as other acknowledged modes of mental engagement with reality, shifting these into the context of digital images by drawing on recent neurological research on mirror neurons. By doing this, I aim to complexify ideas of the way we virtually inhabit the image, imagining the actions and objects on the screen as actually occurring to a simulated image of ourselves in ways that become subtly fused with deeply embedded mental schema.

Rethinking Suture The ultimate gap that gives rise to suture is ontological, a crack that cuts through reality itself: the whole of reality cannot be perceived/accepted as reality, so the price we have to pay for ‘normally’ situating ourselves within reality is that something should be foreclosed from it: this void of primordial repression has to be filled in – ´sutured´ – by the spectral fantasy. (Žižek, 2001, p. 71)

Suture is often understood as the process by which the dissonant ontological gap between fantasy and reality is closed in the spectator’s mind, permitting us to identify fully with a realistic and believable depiction of reality. It is seen to be the technique of how we are intentionally guided into the reality of the fiction on the screen by the guiding will of the film producer. It is, according to Slavoj Žižek amongst many others, a ‘grammatical’ visual device in narrative cinema used to achieve a sensation of subjective investment without feeling manipulated or overwhelmed by the ‘reality’ of the fiction. While it sutures us into the diegesis, it also consoles us that the fiction we are experiencing as real and immediate is a manipulation that we are willingly party to, not one that controls us. For Žižek’s ideological critique, this process also reflects our relation to (actual) political reality; we are aware that we

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are seeing the world through narrative constructions (ideology), but, by including this awareness in the narrative – by deliberately representing the limit of the narrative order – we feel that we are party to the (hegemonic) process, so that we then can return to being absorbed in it since we are not at risk (ibid, p. 32). The tension of an unseen force controlling events, that might force us to step out of the fiction, disinvest and question the construction of the fiction, is a gap that must be ‘sutured’ closed, with an appeasement that it is just ‘part of the process’ and that all is well. Suture is necessary because there can never be a fully contained totality in the illusion; the Other, the Real, the breach in the symbolic order that exposes the truth about the constructed-ness of the fiction always bleeds in through the cracks. As such, for Žižek, the suture is never complete, we are never fully immersed in the diegesis but caught in the crack between, and attempts to ‘foreclose’ intrusive reality must always be a matter of trickery. While this analysis is astute and well grounded in a form of Marxist transcendental idealism, it struggles too much with the limitations of representation; the focus is always on the outside of the image as antagonistic and an experienced sense of distance or ‘lack’ between self and image -- rather than a productive fusion or creative immersion of subject and image. For Žižek, the image is the symbolic order with a monolithic authority, and the Real is outside of the image, antagonistic and traumatic, needing to be disguised and sutured through ideological ‘spectral’ fantasy. He posits an idealised notion of suture as a compensatory structural device, and oversimplifies the actual engagement of the viewer into a formula which requires that viewers are first completely immersed, and then not (because they abruptly becomes aware that the image is constructed), with a subsequent crisis in subjectivity which needs to be sutured. It is founded on a notion of the existence of real threats to a viewer’s subjective position in watching a film, and further on the real need for the text to dominate. While it seems certain that particular visual constructions do function to make the action appear more seamless and believable, it seems likely that cognitive engagement with the image might be more complex and fluid than is presented in Žižek’s Marxist-Lacanian formula. In the following sections, I aim to articulate that there is a nuanced process of subconscious negotiation through metaphor and embodied simulation occurs when we are immersed in a screen image. If there is ever a failure of suture, where we disinvest, it is simply because there is not enough metaphorical activity to connect and draw us into the virtual world of the image. It seems we can actually deal with a high level of cognitive dissonance in watching an image, running several systems of recognition, immersion, and identification within our

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conscious mind at any one time without experiencing the kind of jarring or traumatic break which Žižek suggests.7 This can be (and I would say usually is) an almost playful process of willing engagement and disengagement with metaphorical and sensory material from the image. In light of this, we need to rethink the use of the term suture to explain the more complex and deeply implicated way that we manage the boundary between real and virtual experience, in the consumption of media, but also between reality and dream/fantasy. Instead of thinking in terms of shot constructions and montage as syntactical ‘tricks’, we can talk about affective immersion within the image where the frame disappears and we experience the reality within the image as ‘virtually’ real. This roughly follows Stephen Heath’s early rethinking of suture in Questions of Cinema (1985) beyond the more rigid ideological framings and restrictive or dogmatic uses of the term. Heath insists that there is a complexity to cinematic images which cannot be confined to just one form of structural analysis, instead positing a connotative plurality or fluidity of meaning through analogy and symbol, and through many other structural and stylistic techniques not limited to the classical ‘suture’ two-shot structure (Magrini, 2006). It could be said that there is a strong imperative to do this work of the rethinking of suture as mental interface specifically within the context of digital screen media. Due to the heightened immersion in digital effects and digital presentation systems such as IMAX and D3D, and a specific type of image which reflexively dwells on fantasy and virtuality at the cost of indexicality, it seems that screen reality is at once more immediate and yet more self-conscious about its ontological status. Within these highly constructed images, it seems that the ‘real world’ symbolic order outside is drawn into question in increasingly complex yet playful ways, and the levels of metaphor become even more heterogeneous as the virtuality of reality becomes of central thematic and aesthetic importance. We find ourselves wholly investing in increasingly unrealistic and unbelievable images, moving freely between the symbolic and imaginary in complex ways which seem to do away with the notion that we require any sort of stable and safe subject position. Suture thus becomes an issue not of concealing or patching an inherent lack, but rather of managing our mental and corporeal investment and immersion in hyper-real and hyper-immersive affective images. 7 For Bolter and Grusin (2000), this dissonance is conceived of as a flickering between immediacy and hypermediacy – between transparent immersion and awareness of the constructed nature of the image – not as conflicting but rather as coinciding perceptions which permit a sensory investment in the image while maintaining a safe cognitive distance.

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In film theorist Francesco Cassetti´s analysis, belief in the projected reality as indexically or plausibly real is not, and never was, the primary function of suturing devices. Rather, the suture functions to maintain the integrity of the screen diegetic reality, even though we know it is illusory. He states: ‘What matters is the presence of a multifaceted and multi-layered discursive strategy, one that assembles the chain of discourse, thus providing a pervasive sense of mastery and a flawless sense of reality, even if it is illusory’ (Cassetti, 2011, p. 105). Suture is thus seen as a matrix of rhetorical devices which render the reality coherent without us having to invest in it as real, rather experiencing it as an integrated metaphorical and mimetic world in which we can invest. In digital images, Cassetti then states that we are given coherent worlds without indexical qualities, but which nonetheless have clear reality cues as ‘suturing points’; his examples suggest that these can be in naturalistic movement, or in raw ‘surveillance’ style camera shots.8 Our suture into a transparent realism, to Cassetti, was never natural but based on a certain conventional construction of screen reality, and this relation does not fundamentally change with digital media. This coherent discursive world-building sensibility ties in strongly with the futurist strategies of Douglas Trumbull and Syd Mead in films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Tron, and Blade Runner (that I first mentioned in the introduction), methods that are now being used in real-world research scenarios to explore potentially disruptive ethical and technological futures. The imperative here is not that we have a sense of mastery over a perfectly continuous ‘author-directed’ reality, but rather that in methodologically designing a world that is, as the World Building Media Lab at USC describes, ‘a holistic […] well-researched, richly-detailed world’, we can then suture ourselves into its simulated speculative reality in a deep way, inhabiting it such that it ‘becomes a platform for visionary and predictive imagination – emerging logically, organically and coherently from the coding of its design’ (worldbuilding.usc.edu). These worlds are complex and textured fictions that can be imaginatively explored not for the purpose of delivering ideological narratives, but rather to envision possible future solutions to pressing social and environmental issues intuitively through emerging technologies. Is this perhaps the potential ethical future of the digital image itself – one which does not create fixed monads in which authored narratives can play out, but rather fictional but rule-governed virtual simulated worlds (in interactive

8 In Chapter Two, I described emphatic spatiality within a set of ‘reality cues’ as markers of photo-realism, and yet which often supercede perceptual realism in uncanny hyper-real ways.

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film, VR, AR, or in game formats) in which new narratives can emerge in an autopoietic mode? While Cassetti offers a discursive, ‘grammatised’ style of suture within narrative film which moves beyond the purely ideological and formal sense, Seung-Hoon Jeong, in his book Cinematic Interfaces, goes further to radically rethink and re-conceptualise suture through the digital metaphor of the interface, creatively appropriating a concept of ‘interfaciality’ to retrofit it through traditional film concepts that pertain to the modern concept of suture, such as apparatus, gaze, signification, and embodiment. He states: ‘[…] Suture is no longer a suspicious ideological mechanism, but a productive agency for renewing film theory’ (Jeong, 2014, p. 15). Interface here becomes an extremely fluid but productive concept for thinking about image engagement beyond spectatorship and consumption, and towards a real fusion of inner and outer worlds, virtual and actual, subjective and objective, human and inhuman. As Jeong reiterates, suture is traditionally seen as a tool of a stable diegesis achieved through the erasure of the ‘enunciative’ mechanism or apparatus such that cinema becomes ‘the ventriloquist of ideology’ (ibid, p. 33). But, he notes, de-suturing moments (such as those described by Žižek’s ‘real tears’ – freeze frames, close-ups, etc.) do not break suture, rather they ‘effectively insinuate the dominant mechanism of human consciousness without destroying it in avant-garde ways’ – to ‘acknowledge a subjectivity in the act of reception’ (ibid, p. 37). Suture is seen as essentially unstable (as it is also for Žižek), and yet this is not traumatic, but rather a productive interface where we creatively negotiate our own subjectivity within virtual realities. The interface is a space of continual suture and de-suture within fluctuating realities: Interfaciality proliferates in self-reflexive and self-encompassing ways between the strictly material interface, the fantasy interfacing with the extradiegetic outside, and the film as a fantastic interface installed in our social reality. The specific interface per se then sutures one shot to another, and thereby desutures the shot/reverse-shot structure; fantasy sutures the character into the intradiegetic outside, thereby desuturing the diegetic inside; film sutures the spectator into the entire diegesis, thereby desuturing one’s sense of reality of reality boundary. (ibid, p. 49)

Jeong offers a ‘Chinese boxes of interfaciality’ offering connection between ‘different dimension of the image (deigesis, enunciation) or of the subject (reality, the Real)’ (ibid, p. 50). As the technical image-interface (the

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apparatus or ‘enunciative mechanism’) changes from cinematic to digitally grammatised forms and contents, so in turn the negotiated dynamics of subjectivity and reality also change: cultural and historical content becomes reorganised from classical cinematic linear narrative and diegetic forms into virtual database worlds such as YouTube (that Jeong defines as cultural interfaces); screens become permeable membranes and immersive interactive spaces that complexify the distance of cinematic interface (perceptual interfaces), such that the body is now a sensory interface in and of itself, without which the ‘image’ does not manifest or have any independent existence (the embodied interface) (ibid, pp. 4-6). Each of these technological shifts offers different dimensions of interfaciality that in turn impact on a dynamic human metaphysical consciousness. While productively reconfiguring cinematic concepts through digital, immersive, and interactive media forms, Jeong’s theory really offers a broader phenomenology and ontology of aesthetic experience, and of life in general. He asserts that experience is interface, such that being embodied and embedded in the world depends fundamentally on interfacial processes. It is, simply, connectedness (ibid, p. 8). In a sense then, interfaciality is merely another term for processes of consciousness; a productive new-media metaphor that serves as a catch-all for all aspects of reality and subjectivity. In this light, I now look beyond the screen image to what cognitive, affective, and neural processes occur at the interface with reality as world image in an evolutionary, developmental, and neurological sense, before I return to address digital images through these concepts directly.

Resemblance and the Mimetic Faculty The concepts of suture and interface articulate the process by which we directly engage with screen images and feel them to be in some way affectively real, as we imagine the events on screen to be happening to a virtual self within a mentally simulated environment. This virtual environment into which we project our subjectivity seems to exist between ourselves and the screen, with input from the ‘reality’ of both, a subconscious negotiation space where we make sense of sensory input through complex metaphorical and synaesthetic cognitive processes. The simulation is not a fully detailed representation in the mind, but a line-sketch of reality – a cluster of irrational, often dissonant, related mental schema which our perception is constantly being checked against for validity. It is constructed though metaphorical processes, an ‘as-if’ model of reality by which hazily felt details, ideas, emotions, or moods are

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activated from embodied procedural and semantic memory, allowing us to recognise familiar patterns and correlate them with our previous experiences. In this section, I analyse how a process of embodied perception through mental simulation is deeply intertwined with recent neurological theories of relationality, empathy, and sympathetic cognition in general (inflected by the important ‘discovery’ of mirror neurons in the 1990s), and then more specifically how this is involved with aesthetic ‘creative’ engagement with images. Affective elements experienced in media or performance impact upon mental simulation in the same complex evocative ways as sense input from ‘reality’, through processes of conceptual and affective metaphor vehicles, which trigger perceptual simulations as imaginary visions of what something might be like if were happening to us (Ritchie, 2008). This analysis helps us to explain, for instance, the kinetic affective intensity of dance discussed in the last chapter through the idea that we have a developed virtual sense that we are moving ourselves (Boucher, 2004). Around 85 years ago, in The Doctrine of Similar, Walter Benjamin began to describe an affective relational connectivity between our minds and others in his description of the primal phylogenetic and ontogenetic human impulse to mimic (1979, orig. 1933). This impulse, he describes, can account for all ‘higher human functions’ – essentially saying that all abstract thought is founded on the ‘mimetic faculty of perception’ by which we can see metaphorical similarity between things (ibid). This develops initially through mimetic play (the impersonation of objects and people) and through ‘magical correspondences’ (Benjamin gives astrological interpretation as an instance of this), by which the perceived sensuous likeness of things to human actions or processes is analysed and acted out (ibid). From Benjamin’s other short essay on the subject, On the Mimetic Faculty, anthropologist Michael Taussig extracts the observation that: ‘Man’s gift for seeing resemblances is nothing other than a rudiment of the powerful compulsion in former times to become similar to and behave mimetically’ (Benjamin, 2005, p. 691). He thus describes a primitive drive to ‘get hold of’ or connect with something other than oneself by creating anthropomorphising metaphors that we can perceive as similar to ourselves: ‘a two-layered motion of mimesis – a copying or imitation, and a palpable, sensuous, connection between the very body of the perceiver and the perceived’ (Taussig, 1992, p. 21). To imitate, to perceive a metaphorical likeness, or to simulate an idea in one’s mind of being something else is also a compulsion to feel like, or to feel close to, another object or person. This mimetic faculty, seen as a phylogenetically developed part of human cognition and abstract thought, allows us to understand how fundamental

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an empathetic and affective closeness with others is in processes of communication. The observed activity of mirror neurons at an interspecies level shows that that we are evolved as a species to mirror and model the actions and mental states of others, even other species, and it seems presumptuous to think that this occurs only with things that are physically present in front of us rather than virtually present on the screen. Our natural and subconscious processes of cognition involve, first, the activation of metaphorical processes of recognition of resemblances and, secondly, the simulation of ‘being’ other, the similar, as a virtual experience of this relation. Seeing resemblances seems so cerebral, a cognitive affair with the worldly. How on earth then could it be the rudiment of ´nothing other´ than a ´compulsion´, let alone a compulsion to actually be the Other. What does this say about thought, let alone the ability to discern resemblance? Doesn’t it imply that thinking is, like theatre, a configuration of very object prone-exercises in differentiated spaces, in which the thought exists in imagined scenarios into which the thinking self is plummeted? (Taussig, 1992, p. 33)

Thus, all thought is seen (through Benjamin) as a struggle to feel what something might be like by imaginative association, by simulation and metaphorical processes. Theatre, art, and cinema are thus the forums through which thought can be extended into physical space, rather than remaining as purely mental simulation.

Metaphor and Embodied Simulation Metaphor is central to creativity because it involves the ability to detect unity in variety. Although usually thought of as a linguistic device it has been argued to be a core element in artistic photography, film, dance, sculpture, and painting […] Metaphor is an important component of ordinary language used by adults to build up and use their conceptual systems in understanding the everyday world. Consequently creative processes, in terms of metaphoric understanding and symbolic play, share much in common with ´ordinary´ psychological processes. (Sietz, 1997, p. 374)

Metaphor is often only thought to be a function of language, or of the generation of evocative images in a poetic mode in literature or cinema,

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but it can better be thought of as an ordinary process of consciousness, understanding, and communication (it is an Aristotelian perspective that metaphor is merely an embellishment of language: Sietz, 1997, p. 377). It is often abstract, irrational, and, in fact, impossible to explain using language: [It is] the ability to link disparate perceptual, affective and conceptual domains. These include the perceptual domains of movement, colour and shape; cross modal or ´synaesthetic´ ability to perceive likeness in different sensory modalities; a rudimentary physiognomic experience (the attribution of affective properties to visually perceived objects) […] The capacity to link the psychological and physical domains, and to compare the abstract properties of two different things lacking in physical resemblance. (ibid, p. 374)

Metaphor is the cognitive mechanism which permits diverse symbolic thought and is thus posited as the foundation of creative thought (Modell, 2003, p. 25). Metaphorical vehicles – images or phrases which triggers a process of metaphorical association – lead to mental simulations and associational networks which are individual and idiosyncratic, though there are equally shared generic metaphors as cultural archetypes in a collective consciousness which may work in similar ways for everyone. This is, of course, how creative evocation works, through the triggering of imaginative associations between different sensory modalities in original modes that might challenge and enrich our thought. Given a ‘metaphor vehicle’ -- for instance, the expression ‘her bedroom was a tomb’ -- any number of simulators could be triggered dependant on context: associational memory of other images or previous experiences of being trapped in cold, quiet, dark places, entailing sensations of damp, dark places, specific sounds, and even shivers running up one’s spine – cross-modal and synaesthetic semantic and corporeal associations becoming synthesised into an embodied state. This embodied virtual simulation process functions as much through ordinary perception and understanding as much as in creative interpretation, with simulators working through metaphorical associational processes to make the world seem coherent by filling in details and evoking comparisons that permit recognition, classification, and evaluation at a basic level of consciousness (Ritchie, 2008). The process of embodied cognition through metaphor interweaves fragments of relevant associational and procedural memory (previous affective and perceptual experiences as well as motor impulses), synesthetic elements, language, emotions, and abstract concepts (including cultural

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and social belief systems). These elements emerge passively, bubbling up involuntarily within our mind during normal perception, and, while they can converge at a higher level of cognition and conceptualisation to form judgment and associational meaning, they are constantly running at a subconscious level during all cognitive processes, allowing us to engage in the apparently simple process of recognition.9 Philosopher David Gamez (2007) interestingly suggests that dreaming is exactly this same kind of mental simulation process running in an ‘offline’ capacity; meaning that we do not stop mentally simulating these model routines of reality even when sleeping (though while we are asleep we are without the data input from the outside world to check against the simulation). What we experience in dreams is a kind of disjointed or fragmented simulation of reality evocatively charged with mood and emotion, but often through illogical metaphorical links and weird associations. With language being, for many, the most obvious source of metaphorical meaning, many studies since Lakoff and Johnson’s germinal text Metaphors We Live By have looked specifically into the link between language and embodied simulation, describing how we create a simulation of the activity described in language in normal communication (Ritchie, 2008). It is suggested that if an action is described to us verbally, we usually imagine the performance of that action through a simulated image of ourselves, while also simultaneously simulating an experience of being the speaker or writer of the words and what their thought process might be, and then correlating between these two simulations. Far from language having developed as simply an abstract system of representation which serves as a trigger for simulation, it is thus likely that language and metaphorical mimesis co-evolved. Psychoanalyst Arthur Modell can be seen to roughly follow Benjamin’s trajectory of thought in his essays On the Mimetic Faculty and The Doctrine of the Similar in analysing the development of language as itself being a natural result of this process of metaphorical mimesis as simulation. This evolution started with a primitive relationship of gesture to metaphor in that we ‘feel’ another person’s gestures and instinctively mimic them both physically and mentally (as simulation). Then pre-linguistic communication evolved into more complex metaphorical gestures, and ultimately to spoken and written language as an advanced system of abstract combinatory metaphors for actions and their emotional valence. Thereby 9 These issues are explored in depth in a series of essays in the book Embodied Cognition and Cinema (2015), edited by Maarten Coegnaerts and Peter Kravanja; of particular relevance is María J. Ortiz´s chapter ‘Film and Embodied Metaphors of Emotion’ (pp. 203-220).

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the same simulation of action/emotion which goes on imaginatively, and unconsciously, during conversation is an extension of a non-verbal relational thought process which formed the basis of gestural ‘conversation’ even before the development of language as expressive tool (Modell, 2003, p. 188). Modell suggests that this is further evidenced in that the first observed mirror neurons were found in the Broca’s area, understood neurologically to be the centre of language production (ibid, p. 184). Gesture and language can thus both be understood as communication technologies which subliminally trigger shared metaphorical associations, at a fundamental level permitting intersubjective understanding. Similarly, the syntactical structure and style of cinematic images can be seen as a further evolution of the ability to mimic and to perceive similarity, by which we are ‘sutured’ into the intentional action of others. This is Bernard Stiegler’s concept of grammatisation, re-articulated through Benjamin, and again through more recent simulation theories of mind including those incorporating the functionality of mirror neurons. The technological means of communicating and storing memory as an exterior artefact (both written language and cinema here are seen as forms of external tertiary memory) come to def ine the way in which we can think about and perceive, i.e. simulate mentally or even just imagine, how the universe is and what our relationship to it might be (Stiegler, 2010). Deleuze established this in his Cinema books, that the sensory-motor mental schematics f ixed in the movement-image contain and restrict thought by framing the modes by which we can simulate reality. Digital screen technologies then constitute a next stage in the evolution of technological forms, perhaps opening a world in which the mimetic imagination has few(er) restrictions.

Kinetic Synaesthesia and the Photographic Image Seeing that all communication technologies, including language, work in this way in grammatising forms of embodied simulation, we can move towards an analysis of photography, cinema, and post-cinema in which images are understood to trigger a set of metaphorically related images at a subconscious level. This starts, as with language comprehension, with the involuntary reflection of the image in a mental simulation in which we virtually experience the image content ourselves. This is usually friction-free in continuity style narrative film, as natural corporeal modes of movement and perception are directly simulated by the camera shot and editing style. If the image content or movement is then fragmented or less recognisable,

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our cognitive process extracts patterns based on metaphorical association to synthesise an image which we can comprehend. However, both processes of normal perception and the disruption thereof are simulated in media representation, and where the image is deliberately modified to disturb easy recognition, the spectator can understand this as the simulated embodied experience of intoxication or altered mental states. This is, in a way, the power of cinema, to take mimic normal cognitive processes, to direct them, to deconstruct them, and sometimes to twist them ever so slightly to simulate slow or miscomprehension, hyper-comprehension, paranoia, or psychosis. Research shows that subjects shown two photographs of the same figure in motion but in two different positions, automatically connect the two positions with a simulated virtual movement (Hagendoorn, 2003).10 This is a principle of gestalt psychology, that the brain synthesises a complete image out of spatial and temporal cues, generating recognisable form where none is explicitly presented. As a form of organising perception, it is clearly implicated in the impression of movement given by the early ‘moving’ images of Marey and Muybridge, and also in the convention of continuity editing, where the cut between shots of a continuous action occurs at the point of greatest motion, thereby concealing the edit (Nelmes, 1996, p. 74). The conclusion drawn is that part of the brain is dedicated to motor imagery, creating a virtual simulated model of the kinaesthetic feeling of motion, but without the actual proprioception of movement. This was described in psychological analysis as motor-action mirroring behaviour well before the recent discovery of actual neurons dedicated to this mirroring action. These mirror neurons are apparently activated in exactly the same way as if we were performing the action ourselves (Modell, 2003, pp. 183-192). It highlights the integral role of simulation in creating a coherent field of consistency in the way we understand reality.11 Sensory input is always correlated with simulated mental schema, and furthermore to a simulated idea of our bodies within a given environment. Modell suggests that the activity of mirror neurons in the mental simulation of the actions of another person is just one ‘matching mechanism’ in the brain that explains relational intersubjectivity. While the sets of 10 He refers to empirical research by Zoe Kourtzi, Nancy Kanwisher (at MIT), and by neuroscientist Jennifer Stevens et al. (1999), which monitored brain activity in the watching of still images of actions, and in the juxtaposition of two still images of differing body positions in which movement between them is imagined. 11 This cognitive observation also seems to provide a neural basis for Deleuze’s discussion of ‘the interval’ in his Cinema books. Classical Hollywood seems to bank on our brains ‘filling in the gaps’ to achieve a seamless flow through time and space.

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mirror neurons so far researched seem specifically related to a sympathy with the intentional action of another, we may also have systems for the mental mimesis of inanimate objects, and for empathy with the emotional or physical states of others, for instance, pain or joy (ibid, p. 187). This lends weight to the idea that we constantly generate an ‘as-if’ simulated model of reality in our brain which functions metaphorically and mimetically, policing a boundary between being the same-as and being different-from both physically and mentally, but which always positions an idea of our body as virtual sounding board in all simulated situations.12 This observation is carried directly into film analysis by none other than one of the discoverers of neural mirroring mechanisms, Vittorio Gallese, who notes that: Embodied Simulation can better explain the activity of the viewer as a ´cinesthetic subject,´ allowing us to cope with our subcognitive responses to film in a different and more elegant manner. ES can also shed new light on the ´mode of presence´ of cinema. Since ES is characterized by the capacity to share meaning of actions, basic motor intentions, feelings and emotions, it is clear how relevant could be its role in the experience of many ´action-packed´ movies able to elicit subcognitive or cognitively impenetrable responses, or in the studies on film immersion based on the perception of viewer’s presence in the diegetic world or on self-location in a virtual world. (Gallese and Guerra, 2012, p. 193)

Starting from corporeal motor action and the sharing of simulated models of bodily presence, Gallese and Guerra also develop an understanding of the mirroring of the emotions and beliefs of others at a neural level within a broader set of ‘shared behaviours’ which are needed to engage fully with the film diegesis. They note that ‘When a movie gives up its goal-orientation or its action potential, as in the case of 1960s new waves, we have to share other attitudes, wondering about director’s hidden intentions and feeling a bit excluded from its environment’ (ibid, p. 199). Later, they state: ‘The refusal of the POV shot and the absence of any reverse angle shot (in Antonioni) impair the viewer’s ability to project herself on the movie, to share attitudes and behaviours with the characters, to empathize with the environment’ (ibid). The implication here is that the mirroring of attitudes or emotions is 12 This connects to Antonio Damasio’s idea that consciousness itself cannot exist and evolve without a physical body, or at least a simulation of a physical body which is integrated into the environment; there is no disembodied consciousness (Damasio, 2008).

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of a secondary order to the more immediate and direct bodily responsivity of the sharing of action signs, and this in fact broadly correlates with the Deleuzian-Bergsonian belief in the dominance of the action over other modes of thought in the movement-image. However, Gallese and Guerra seem to reveal something of a normative limitation to their thought, which is that images have to correlate directly with perceptual sensory-motor reality for us to be able to simulate it effectively in an embodied mode. Thus, we are physically and emotionally ‘excluded’ from a film when its meaning is not easily sensed in a corporeal mode. This does not seem to account for a multiplicity of embodied feelings that occur outside easily recognised ‘shared behaviours’, and diverse corporeal engagements with truly virtual images that make no literal sense. Deleuze’s ethical crystalline images of time are then seen as ‘impairments’ to embodied simulation, rather than enhancements. In Cinema and Embodied Affect (2003), cinema theorist Anne Rutherford already seems to move beyond the dependence on an actual body in embodied simulation, although she notes that it is indeed obvious that we would easily identify with a body on the screen as a direct metaphor for our own. She articulates this through Linda Williams’s research on body genres such as porn and horror and how we normally and naturally experience a strong and direct embodied reaction to the presence of bodies on the screen. However, Rutherford expresses a desire to think about how we experience an embodied reactivity to movement and action which is not simply and directly of the body. She refers to the other synaesthetic components within the image such as space, colour, lighting, composition, noise, angles, and rhythm, which can equally generate a strong visceral experience without the presence of a direct analogue for our own body: ‘this is an image with no centre, no focal point (a body) […] the tensions and dynamism of the surface of the image can effect a bodily agitation’ (ibid). She describes how the kinaesthetic sense of her own body seems disrupted as her simulated body is absorbed synaesthetically into the virtual screen image. The density of sensory input triggers an intense confusion which draws her out of her own physical body into a virtual, but still embodied sensory state. We are forced to ask how the brain mirrors such affective imagery; do we actually need to have a coherent kinaesthetic idea of the body in our simulating processes, or can the body instead become merely planes and forces, an abstract virtual experience of an extended body-without-organs not spatially contained by limbs and joints? Furthermore, I move to ask if the digital image’s grammatisation of these affective components is not more predisposed to these synaesthetic effects

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than perhaps the more corporeally normative sensory-motor images of the film medium.13 Rutherford’s synaesthetic flux of movements, lights, and sounds is referred to by dance theorist Marc Boucher as ‘kinetic synaesthesia’, suggesting that visually perceived movement can be experienced as kinaesthesis (2004). He describes a multimedia environment wherein a dancer moves through a projected set, and the ‘tangible movements of the dancer integrates with the virtual movement of an image, creating a dynamic tension between figure and ground’(ibid). Because of diverse elements and dynamic tension within the ‘gestalt’ of the experience, we experience a complex sensation of being in motion ourselves, which seems essentially to be a heightened embodied simulation in which different sensory modalities are triggered, and which is experienced as a corporeal exhilaration. We feel as if our own bodies are dispersed between the movements of the dancer and the other images, lights and sounds, and this gives us an experience of aesthetic pleasure. The aesthetic pleasure here seems to relate to the loss of control over sensory input rather than the mastery of it, and the inability to exert the intellect over this input – to rationalise and recognise it. This is not, however, an experience of disembodied mind cut adrift from a tangible idea of a body within ‘impaired’ embodied simulation, but rather a fully corporeal experience of a disorganised, fragmented sensorium untethered to a clearly defined body image. It is this dissolution of the boundaries of the body that feels like a creation, an aesthetic intensity (Boucher, 2004). Cinema pioneer Jean Epstein emphasises the role of synaesthetic sensation as part of his creative process in his 1921 text La Poésie de Aujourd’hui, in which he describes the ‘vague illogical sensations’ that emerge from the ‘non-linguistic, non-rational cognitive mode’ (Liebman, 1980). Clearly influenced by the discourse of psychoanalysis of his time, Epstein saw the subconscious as embodied knowledge that the intellect suppresses, a disorganised, subtle, and dimly felt, but emotional and sensitive side of human consciousness from which inspiration can arise: Synaesthesia is the physiological side of the subconscious, basically, everything is synaesthesia […] The mass of multifarious and confused sensations is so weak and rapid as to be no more perceptible individually 13 Nicholas Rombes’s Cinema in the Digital Age (2017) interestingly explores how digital film in particular explores the aesthetics of imperfect images that disturb easy recognition, marked by blurry or pixelated images, shaky camera work, and other elements. He articulates this as a ‘secret desire’ for disorder within the otherwise perfect digital image.

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than the pricks of two points of a compass placed too close together. (Epstein, 1921, in Liebman, 1980, p. 121)

Epstein highly valued the synaesthetic suspension of logical analysis within an ‘intellectual fog’ to achieve a heightened sensitivity to powerful metaphorical connections from a more primitive part of the mind (also activated during dreaming). For film historian Malcom Turvey, this equates to what he calls Epstein’s ‘cinema of immanence’ in contrast to the ‘cinema of transcendence’ implied by the Screen group of theorists, and, by extension, Žižek, in following their conception of suture theory. Rather than perceiving the camera as the disembodied eye of a transcendent subject with an analytic and dissecting gaze, the camera, for Epstein, penetrates into the immanent heart of a complex physical state, caught up in the visceral forces of the action on the screen (Turvey, 1998, p. 34). This is an intimate and intense sympathetic relation to the object on screen which reveals a hidden and complex ‘soul’ of the world. It always entails an emotionally charged resonance which wraps around an object, not just a process of recognition, but one of a revelation or ‘physical incarnation’ of immaterial entities to the eye. Epstein feels this to be intoxicating: The face of the world may seem changed since we, the fifteen hundred million who inhabit it, can see through eyes equally intoxicated by alcohol, love, joy, and woe, through lenses of all tempers, hate and tenderness; since we can see the clear thread of thoughts and dreams, what might or should have been, what was, what never was or could have been, feelings in their secret guise, the startling face of love and beauty, in a word, the soul. (Epstein, 1988, p. 318)

Epstein’s almost mystical notion of a synaesthetic mind-meld with the world on screen can perhaps be more clearly thought of as a model of ‘ecological’ perception, which posits normal vision as a complex kinaesthetic and synaesthetic process of cognition (Modell, 2003, p. 185). All sense perception must be understood to be affectively embodied and synaesthetic before it is subdivided, processed, and edited into separate sense categories. We never then truly watch images from an ‘ocular’ distance, but rather we are always mentally negotiating with an environment of surfaces, objects, and qualities which are pertinent to our body. Furthermore, following Epstein, Modell, and Gallese, we see that this synaesthetic model of perception allows us to understand how emotion and ‘feeling’ enters into normal cognition. Anne Rutherford notes how each associational image is also redolent with

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memory and imbued with hazily felt meaning; her example is the image of a cliff, which not only has meaning as a ‘falling off place’ but might also have associations with other models of ‘dangerous’ or ‘fearsome’ places (2003). Emotional resonances form part of our embodied synaesthetic perception as pre-conscious simulation before they converge on a higher perceptual and conscious level – if, indeed, they ever manage to do so. This model of perception posits an indivisible, non-dichotomous inhabited bodily state as a gestalt, and mirroring processes as simulation activity are thus a multi-modal synaesthetic mimesis, a primitive urge to ‘become’ other in both a corporeal motor-sensory mode and an intimate emotional empathetic involvement. It would be tempting, especially when talking about the heightened emotional evocation of cinematic images, to think that we are talking only about experience which is potentially sublime in its emotional charge, such as the aforementioned cliff which will give rise to an emotional experience of wonder, awe, and fear. However, we can see that even the mundane aspects of ecological perception have an affective metaphorical resonance which can be simply aspects of dimensionality, verticality, horizontality, or rhythms, forces, or dimensions that we become aware of in the spaces around our body as synaesthetic intensities with an emotional dimension. We can see then that all images are inflected with emotional meaning, but initially, at our first cognitive contact with them, without sentiment. Massumi, in the Autonomy of Affect (1995), defined affects as pre-emotional, not yet qualified as emotions (through the work of intellectual association), but here and for Massumi, emotion simply describes intensity as part of a synaesthetic haze; the cliff instils a sensation of an embodied emotional force rising within the gut, but this is not yet analysed as the recognisable, ‘qualified’ human sentiment of ‘fear’. For Arnold Modell, more in line with Epstein than Massumi, the higher-level cognition of ‘sentiment’ is what he calls ‘feeling’, as contrasted to the baser, more bodily cognition of emotion which he considers to be essentially unconscious (Modell, 2003, p. 134). Anne Rutherford adds nuance to the division between emotion as affective synaesthetic resonance and emotion as sentiment by making an interesting distinction about Brechtian distanciation. She explains that Brecht’s estrangement effect is normally understood as forcing an emotional distance between the subject and the text, denying the kind of empathetic emotional identification that is encouraged by the ideological and soporific ‘suturing’ effect of the conventional Hollywood media (perhaps equivalent to Gallese and Guerra’s ‘impaired’ embodied simulation in Antonioni) (2003). Instead, she reinterprets this process as repositioning immersion to be based on affectivity rather than sentiment. By denying emotional empathy

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on the level of sentimental identifications which are ‘passive and habitual’ and of ‘pathos’, we are instead forced into a reflexive relationship with the sensual state; we are not swept away into escapist, cathartic fantasy, but rather become more aware of our visceral bond to the environment and swept into our immersive, affective, interfacial space. I have spent much of this chapter moving between perspectives on normal perception and cognition, and cognitive engagement with mediated images, to emphasise the way that our ‘everyday’ reality is largely structured at a subconscious level of passive synthesis by the mediated images which surround us. Reality is thus thought to be ‘mediated’ even in normal perception through technological grammatised forms. Our processes of consciousness are shaped and honed by the images we consume and the connections between them, and the technological form of the creation and sharing of these images impact upon the ways we can think about, imagine, and communicate about existence. Each technical media form brings about a new matrix of connections – semantic, metaphorical, simulated, and synaptic – which together constitute an ontological shift which subtly realigns the sensorium to have an altered intuitive sense of the metaphysical qualities of the world. I now move on to apply these ideas more specifically within digital media, to analyse how this most recent shift in media technology seems to move towards an acknowledgement, and a deeper reflexive understanding of these above issues. The media form itself can be seen to be a reflection on the synaesthetic confusion of the senses and the malleability of our sense processing capabilities, playing with ideas of mental simulation and virtuality in both explicit and implicit modes.

Virtuality, Plasticity, and Play A child not only plays at being a grocer or a teacher, but also at being a windmill or a train. The question which matters, however, is the following: What does a human being actually gain by the training in mimetic attitudes?’ (Benjamin, Doctrine of the Similar, 1933) Metaphor, like pretend play, involves suspension of reference to the everyday world; hence, the referent (e.g. an imaginary horse) is termed non-ostensive, making possible a new creative reference, a remaking of reality. (Seitz, 1997, p. 376)

Metaphorical symbolic play is how we developmentally hone our cognitive abilities as children, remaking our own perceptual reality into imaginary

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worlds in experimental and creative modes. In digital post-cinematic media, we are similarly often presented with the remaking of reality, be that a creation of a completely synthetic reality or simply an amendment or adjustment to a more ‘indexical’ version of reality, often in a very playful, imaginative mode. A contemporary popular cultural discourse is that children do not actually need to use their imaginations anymore in a digital age where ‘junk’ fantasy is given to them on a silver platter through sedentary screen-based entertainment at the cost of ‘real’ outdoor play. On the other hand, it can be seen that, within a media culture saturated with hyper-real and increasingly immersive screen environments which creatively simulate imaginative worlds and alternate dimensions, there is an even greater capacity for metaphorical interactivity as a form of virtual play – grist to the mill of imaginative play, so to speak. The question here then becomes whether this digital shift makes a real developmental difference for the creative imagination of the child. Animation as entertainment has traditionally filled this aesthetic role in the child’s development, and in many ways CG imagemaking, as has been noted, actually has more in common with animation than with photographic media (Rodowick, 2007; Manovich, 2001; Cubitt, 2005). However, what we have been introduced to with the digital image is the complete hybridisation of animation and live-action to the extent that the fantastic monsters, supernatural creatures, and anthropomorphised animals and objects that were the staple of animation in the 20th century can now become more and more photo-realistic, set within more perfectly coherent and yet more complex worlds. The more reactionary cultural critics form strong value judgments about this, discerning good and bad imaginative content in terms of the loss of that most abstract moral value of ‘childhood innocence’, while projecting their cultural anxieties onto the minds of children.14 Rather than harking back to some golden age of developmental play in the great outdoors, it is perhaps more productive to think about the imaginative play of the human mind in general (not only in childhood), and how it has been changed and updated in the last 30 years through new visualising technologies. There is no doubt that we still engage in mimetic play as a fundamental human drive, but the forms of this play have dramatically changed. 14 In a letter to The Daily Telegraph, 110 teachers, psychologists, children’s authors, and other experts call on the government to act to prevent the ‘death of childhood’, stating: ‘Since children’s brains are still developing, they cannot adjust to the effects of ever more rapid technological and cultural change’ (Fenton, 2006).

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As Catherine Malabou notes in discerning between developmental, modulating, and reparative plasticity, the brain does not cease to change at a neural level after its initial formation in childhood, but in fact continues to adapt and regenerate in ‘an ongoing reworking of neuronal morphology’ (2008, p. 25). New neural networks continue to be laid down, and modulating neural pathways can lead to fundamental changes not only in identity and personality but also potentially in metaphysical notions. In Malabou’s book The New Wounded (2012), she examines neuropathological cases at the more extreme ends of the spectrum, to demonstrate how complex yet fragile our subjective ontological groundedness is at a neural level. In an interview with theologist Noëlle Vahanian, she explains how delicate our subjective awareness, which seems to run to the core of our being, can actually be: Neurobiologists make us conscious of the fact that metamorphosis after brain damage is at every moment possible; there is something like a break of the subject which is not death, which is another kind of possibility. To be destroyed as a subject when you suffer from a concussion, for example, means that you become someone else. The possibility of becoming someone else at every moment and for everybody equally – for even if we know that certain people are more likely to be the victims of such damage, we also know that everybody may undergo this kind of destruction at any moment – this possibility alters how we conceive of the subject. The fact of being mortal is one thing, and the fact of being plastic means being able to be totally transformed and become somebody else. (Malabou, in Noelle, 2008, p. 9)

Accepting the fragile integrity of what we think of as ‘self’, we can perhaps take the idea of metaphysical metamorphosis further to suggest that, even without severe brain trauma, disease, or degeneration, the brain is flexible enough to modulate certain fundamental structures not only of subjectivity, but also of ontology. Theorists of the mind including Freud, Hayles, and Deleuze have contemplated these shifts as material, structural changes in the brain which may occur throughout life – a certain amount of neural plasticity which can even extend into old age.15 Rather than through sudden 15 Without wishing to cite specific scientific studies in a way that implies that I might understand them fully, there is much current empirical work on neurogenesis and the relative neuroplasticity of the aging brain, and how effective modes of training and conditioning are in staving off dementia and other age-related neurological disorders. See Futurism magazine’s article ‘New Study Suggests Adult Brains Might Grow New Neurons: Research breathes new life into a decades-old scientific debate’ (Robitzski, 2019).

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trauma, there can be a slow accumulation of subtle changes and adaptations based on exposure to novel experiences and intense affection that creates new neural circuitry in the brain. Patricia Pisters describes in her analysis of Malabou’s work that the digital image exhibits a neural plasticity of its own within processes of reprogramming and regeneration (2011). She notes that contemporary cinematic images ‘no longer represents the world as seen through the eyes of a character, but rather films are direct expressions of character’s mental worlds’ – giving Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (dir. Michel Gondry, 2004) and Inception (2010) amongst her examples (ibid). These films’ protagonists become neurologically displaced through psychopathology, and the conventions of physical reality within the image become infinitely malleable, questioning metaphysical certainty as time and space are confounded. As I discussed in Chapter One, the link between digital technology and neural plasticity here seems analogical, but, through Malabou, we can start to understand how we can raise the relationship explicitly to an ontological level in a ‘new materialism’ of decay, regeneration, and re-formation (possibly also of algorithm, glitch, and noise) – a material ontology that extends from the brain and digital media to the atomic organisation of matter. We can then see that the digital image has an automatic propensity towards experimentally representing a monist plasticity which may mirror not only the neural plasticity of the brain but also the quantum plasticity of existence per se (for instance, of theoretical forces such as the Higgs field). In digital post-cinema, the world is indeed materially plastic, bodies are subject to transformation and mutation, objects are dematerialised, and space and time are extended and folded. In reflecting and refracting notions of a material ontology of plasticity through digital images, it seems that we might be drawn closer to grasping intuitively this aspect of Being. Could the brain then, exposed to a level of passive synthesis of ontological plasticity through the metaphorical and mimetic material of digital images, in fact assert its own active plasticity to a greater extent? The plastic brain here is seen to be an immanent field of potential, and while this could seem to return us to a child-like state of passive vulnerability and malleability, for Malabou, the ethical quality of plasticity is definitively adult, active, and capable of intentional resistance. We can then perhaps see that imaginative, metaphorical, and symbolic play as aesthetic engagement with images can be an intentional form of embodied learning which stimulates the modulating capacity of the brain to re-present the self and the dynamics of becoming within a plastic world. Taking this into account, I now look at two films which indeed digitally play with a plastic notion of reality, offering

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up affections and reflections of the ability of an active neural plasticity to mould and change reality.

Avatar and Digital Naturalism Digital media theorist Pat Power argues in his essay, Animated Expressions: Expressive Style in 3D Computer Graphic Narrative Animation, that there is a flawed aesthetic logic in digital animation’s drive for ever greater photorealistic verisimilitude (2009, p. 109). He describes a Realist teleology of technological innovation which holds that every new animation technique should be seen as drawing ever closer to a ‘common goal’ of the perfect recreation of an external reality – with single-point perspective, naturalism of movement through motion capture, and realistic water, ocean, cloud, and gaseous effects coalescing into what he calls a ‘naturalistic agenda’. To critique this agenda, he points out that Aristotle’s original conception of mimesis comprised an element of stylisation or exaggeration, which plays with the nature of mind and perception to invite cognitive aesthetic interactivity. This observation is given a neuro-aesthetic dimension by Power as he describes research by Ramachandran (2004) and Zeki (1999) which shows that expressive and stylised imagery (that does not just aim for an unproblematic naturalism) gives heightened multi-modal neural stimulation. Unlike simple recognition, this invites active engagement through problem-solving and metaphor, which expands the viewer’s imagination and activates areas in the limbic system associated with emotional reward (ibid, p. 115). Power gives as positive examples the animation styles of Richard Linklater’s Waking Life (2001) and Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir (2008), which, through impressionistic and expressionistic animation techniques, create a poetic psychorealism that emphasises emotional resonance over the straight mimicking of ‘natural’ perception in a seamless fusion of live and computer-generated imagery (ibid, p. 118). This, he explains, involves the activation of multi-level neural systems associated with aesthetic appreciation, rather than just primitive and lower-level recognition systems. Power highlights that the striving in mainstream animation culture for an aesthetic of naturalistic completeness actually denies a kind of expressionist interactivity with the image, and therefore a creative reaction. He then positions stereoscopic digital 3D, specifically in the case of Avatar, as the fruition of the naturalistic agenda in which a seamless hybridised synthesis of live-action and computer animation is achieved (ibid, p. 123). Beyond pioneering digital 3D capture, Avatar’s innovations also involved

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the simultaneous filming and motion-capture of live actors, which, along with high-speed processing power, allowed the director to see an image of the character’s computer-animated face in real time during the live filming. The film’s motion-captured naturalistic detail of minute expression animated into the faces of the CG Navi people clearly aims to increase emotional empathy through direct facial affectivity despite their altered appearance.16 For Power, this level of ‘technological sophistication’ of motion-capture, 3D filming, and projection is positioned against more expressive forms, and thus reflects a kind of normative, conformist, and limiting naturalism, such that he ultimately calls for a kind of reactionary less-is-more approach to digital animation. Interestingly, Power wrote these observations directly in anticipation of the release of Avatar in 2009, and had not yet seen the film. Now, almost 10 years on, and as we anticipate the 2020 release of the sequel Avatar 2, and the subsequent three additional films each showcasing new levels of technological sophistication (including higher frame rates and underwater motion capture), it seems appropriate to reassess Power’s analysis. I find Power’s opposition between digital naturalism and stylisation/ expressionism problematic, since realistic, naturalistic portrayal in digital media rarely actually results in ‘normal’ perception, always being either enhanced, modulated, or in some other way affected by digital processing. As previously described, the technology through which the real is filtered always endows it with an expressive quality, whereby the meticulously realistic portrayals of elements such as time, space, and forces such as gravity always seem to change something subtle as a mutation or perversion of perceptual realism. The digital image is apparently unable to help itself from overcoming the ‘determining codification’ of the real through its own automatisms (as per my argument in Chapter Three, articulated via Rodowick, Brown, Cubitt, and Hadjioannou). We can see a hyper-realistic quality even in Jules-Etienne Marey’s chrono-photographic studies of movement, where the perfect revelation of the minutiae of corporeal kinesis stands to our ‘natural’ perception as highly expressive – and this is both 16 Lisa Bode, in her Making Believe: Screen Performance and Special Effects in Popular Cinema (2017), considers the nuances of actors’ screen performances in light of digital effects and alterations. She describes how the digital augmentation of facial expressions often seems to disrupt authentic performance, hence the perceived need and subsequent drive for greater realism. However, she notes that, in f ilms such as Avatar and Beowolf, the naturalism of the actors’ performances is, for this reason, massively overstated, to create a discursive value of authenticity, where, in reality, the CGI completely dominates the performance (Bode, 2017, p. 19).

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enhanced and changed through digital technical processes. Epstein too notes this in his analysis of the close-up, where the camera, in capturing the exterior appearance of things in intricate detail, reveals them to be entirely mysterious, with a hidden interior life (1977).17 We can see that, even without the explicit use of exaggeration or stylisation as modes of artistic expression, and through instead trying to attain scientific accuracy and precision detail, we still achieve an evocative aesthetic ambiguity to the image. There is no such thing, in this understanding, as a ‘naturalistic’ representation; media technology always perverts, distorts, or reconfigures; it is always an abstraction to some extent. Though naturalistic in some modes of corporeal kinetic perception, Avatar at the same time seems highly stylised, expressionistic, and synaesthetic in others, with baroque architectures of space, enhanced and emphatically digital floating and flying movements, and fantastic hyper-perspectival CG-animated landscapes. Like the Rotoscope technique of Linklater’s Waking Life that is praised by Power, we have affectively naturalistic movement and expression but with many unrecognisable elements that simultaneously challenge perception. What we instead see is a hyper-reality that is proximate to the photographic but always with an uncanny resemblance. This is a ‘digital naturalism’ which algorithmically mimics the perceptual habits of photographic naturalism, and yet always goes beyond. As Manovich explains: Computerization virtualized practically all media creating and modification techniques, ´extracting´ them from their particular physical medium of origin and turning them into algorithms. This means that, in most cases, we will no longer find any of these techniques in their pure original state. The media techniques became ´supercharged´ and amplified; their range and application were extended; and their controls were made explicit, formalized, quantif iable, and programmable. (Manovich, 2007 – my emphasis).

17 Here, Epstein poetically describes the rapture of detail in the close-up: ‘Muscular preambles ripple beneath the skin. Shadows shift, tremble, hesitate. Something is being decided. A breeze of emotion underlines the mouth with clouds. The orography of the face vacillates. Seismic shocks begin. Capillary wrinkles try to split the fault. A wave carries them away. Crescendo. A muscle bridles. The lip is laced with tics like a theater curtain. Everything is movement, imbalance, crisis. Crack. The mouth gives way, like a ripe fruit splitting open. As if slit by a scalpel, a keyboard-like smile cuts laterally into the corner of the lips’ (1977).

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Manovich points to the fusion of different media ‘styles’ and aesthetics within the digital realm, where everything exists simply as a set of adjustable variables, creating aesthetic chimeras, and within which photo-realism exists as just another abstracted set of values. When fused with CG animation, as in the case of Avatar, a new ‘impure’ aesthetic emerges, which, while it does indeed move towards a perfect aesthetic continuity and coherence, cannot simply be placed on a teleology towards complete photographic naturalism. Instead, we have a heightening, amplification, and perversion of analogue realisms, the aesthetic affects and effects of which are just starting to be understood. In discourses of cinematic realism, the technological capacity of the medium to bring us into closer contact with aspects of reality was praised. Bazin placed the highest value on the wide-angle, long shot with high depth of focus so that the eye could roam ‘naturally’ around the shot (2005). However, realism here becomes a problematic term (as if it was not enough already). Sean Cubitt notes that ‘every realism is a selection, an abstraction’, and that even Bazin acknowledged this. He continues: ‘Today, deep focus and staging in depth are the norm for blockbuster event movies, most of which have only the most tangential relation to Bazinian realism’ (Cubitt, 2010). In contemporary D3D, we could technically have an infinite depth of field – our eyes being able to focus at different depths and roam in and around the screen space. However, despite this potential, in Avatar, the depth of field is often limited to guide the viewer’s attention within the diegesis, perhaps also serving as a marker of the film camera technology even though often no ‘camera’ actually exists in this context. We also have long takes, but rather than the fixed relation to reality of the un-edited Bazinian long take, we have instead a type of montrage within ‘the depth of the image’ whereby individual pixels or component elements are adjusted in infinite manipulability.18 With Avatar’s motion-capture innovations, this intra-shot modification process is possible even in real time and with verité style camera movement – a form of ‘augmented reality’ (similar techniques are now disturbingly applied in deepfake style videos).19 These 18 For discussion of this definition of montrage, see Deleuze’s Time-Image, where he states: ‘Sometimes montage occurs in the depth of the image, sometimes it becomes flat: it no longer asks how images are linked, but “What does the image show?” This identity of montage with the image itself can appear only in conditions of the direct time-image’ (1989, p. 41). 19 Deepfake, a portmanteau of ‘deep learning’ and ‘fake’, is a machine-learning (AI) humanimage synthesis technique that seamlessly and in real-time superimposes images of recognisable faces onto source video. It has been effective in both pornography and with political figures, such that it has been banned from the website Pornhub due to its use in revenge porn. In April

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analogue-style realist modalities of long take and depth of focus, along with motion-blur, lens-flare, and handheld camera movement are recognisable features of photographic image-capture that suture us into a recognisable cinematic experience even though their material nature has essentially changed. In a strictly technical sense, we feel at ease at the interface with the representative reality of Avatar because these photo-realistic markers are given to us, even though the experience of blue people on an alien planet in 3D could otherwise be quite cognitively jarring. However, it is perhaps interesting to conceive of the possibility of a film like Avatar being made in a way that discharges these habituated photo-realist pretensions with a focus on digital technical automatisms and experimental possibilities. Would it be intelligible? Whereas photographic analogue media exerted a claim to objectivity in their recording and documentation of the world, the digital has never previously made such a claim. In the past two decades, CG fantasy films have largely focused on the alien, extraordinary, and unreal exactly because truly photo-realistic simulation has simply been too difficult to render accurately through purely digital means. However, through motion-capture and 3D technological innovation, Avatar brings a new moment of realistic technical simulation of human emotional expression and movement by twisting photo-realistic aesthetics, certainly a technological ‘event’ as much as the previously discussed Interstellar and even L’a rrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat. In Avatar’s mimesis of reality, we have images that are manipulated in real time to enhance and complexify any real or pro-filmic referent in such a way that a psychorealistic boundary of embodied simulation is perhaps crossed. Despite the heavily critiqued naïve sentimentality, pseudo-ecological politics, and dubious racial stereotyping of the film’s narrative, we have to look at its affective aspects to ask why its interfaciality is so rich. Given Patrick Power’s critique above, I wonder whether it provokes a strong neuro-aesthetic response, stimulating multi-modal synaesthetic stimulation? Or perhaps, in a more philosophical analysis, it generates an anti-intellectual affective ‘cinema of immanence’ from which new perceptions, concepts, and connections can arise? While obviously Avatar is, to an extent, merely an escapist fantasy film, and elements are clearly supposed to be imaginatively realised, the hybrid visual effects of a digital naturalism here are intended to be ‘better 2018, director Jordan Peele and Buzzfeed creator Jonah Peretti created a deepfake using Barack Obama, as a public service announcement about the danger of deepfakes in fake news and in wider political culture.

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than reality’. This is expressed thematically in the narrative through the existential depression that is experienced by the protagonist Sully, who feels that his big blue avatar has become more real to him than his disabled body. Then, interestingly, as multiple media sources and blogs documented at the time of the f ilm’s release, there was a parallel experience in the ‘real’ world dubbed the ‘Pandora Effect’, whereby viewers experienced obsession and depression after watching the film (Thomas, 2010). When we consider that this was due to the fact that their own reality was perceived as underwhelming after ‘visiting’ the planet Pandora, we can wonder what it is about the film that has a particular potency – surely not simply a case of an evocative narrative and characters, but rather a specific technics of intensity of embodied simulation that is experienced as transformative. In the following analysis of Source Code, we see another film that actively reflects on this idea that a digital simulated image-reality could actually be better than our own, raising ontological questions about embodied agency and intentionality in digitally simulated spaces (if indeed we do not already inhabit a digital simulation).

Source Code and the Quantum Mind In Duncan Jones’s Source Code (2011), we are again, as in Avatar (and also Tron), presented with a disembodied consciousness projected digitally into a different body in another world. In this case, the other world is an alternate dimension or quantum reality existing ostensibly only as data within a computer programme. This data, the titular ‘source code’, has been extracted from the mind of a man at the moment of his death, and contains an eight-minute captured simulation of the spaces and characters surrounding this man leading up to the terrorist attack in which he dies. This simulation is run over and over again between the programme and the brain of our protagonist Captain Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal), with the source code permitting him to take on the mission of discovering who planted the bomb such that a further terrorist attack might be averted. However, within this simulation, and despite being told that the events that occur within have no bearing on the ‘real’ world, our hero starts to believe that he can actively alter the course of events. The simulation is so real, and his ability to act within it so decisive, that he refuses to believe that he has no real agency or power to influence events. On his last upload to the source-code programme, he requests that his ‘real’ body – which we discover to be only an intact brain stem on life-support in a lab – be terminated, in the hope

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Figure 16: Source Code’s digital rendering of a reality simulation (Summit Entertainment, 2011) © 2011 Studiocanal S.A. SCL.

that this alternate simulated reality proves to be real. This hope proves to be well founded, and he later has the opportunity to tell his ‘operator’ in the lab that the source-code programme does something that they never would have expected; it creates an alternate quantum reality. The most digital effects-driven set-pieces in the film, other than the bomb explosion which engulfs our characters in flame and tears them apart, are the transitions between ‘bodies’ that Captain Stevens experiences. In these shots (and in the movie poster – Figure 16), we see a splintering of Stevens into geometric shards and lines spreading across the screen like the contours of a digital-model rendering of a landscape. Later in the film, we see these effects mixed with distorted and distended shots of a scene at the end of the movie in the ‘alternate’ future, and images from Stevens’s memory of the accident which maimed him in Afghanistan. This is accompanied by similarly digitally distorted sounds and voices. The effect is one of Stevens’s body being stripped of its flesh, exposing the digital framework underneath, as if he himself is a digital simulation. In a further transition back to ‘reality’ mid-way through the film, he is looking at his female companion and seems torn between realities; her face flashes and becomes digitally distorted into the familiar ‘shard’ geometric vertices of a virtual skeleton, as a voice calls

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to him from the real world in the lab. The clear implication is that Stevens and the alternate dimension exist only as code within a digital flux, but that ‘reality’ is intruding upon the virtual. Later in the film, this relation flips, such that the virtual starts to interrupt and break down what we originally thought was real. Though this is not a fully CG-animated film as Avatar is, the digital effects here allow expression of, and are emblematic of, the single major underlying conceit of the film, the ontological underpinnings which imbue the film with a distinctive affective tone.20 The radical sceptical philosophy toyed with in this narrative, and expressed through the digital effects used, is that the universe/reality might exist purely as simulation within a brain or computer. It is not made clear in the denouement which of these substrates reality actually resides in – whether the programme continues running in the computer, in the brain of the now not-killed brain-body he inhabits in the source code, or indeed elsewhere. As in Avatar, our protagonist’s real body ultimately dies, and his consciousness is transposed into another body, such that consciousness here is seen as embodied, but extractable and movable as data, information or electrical activity. Going further down this road though than Avatar, reality in Source Code is truly understood as how we imagine it to be – consciousness creates reality. This is reinforced in the plot when Captain Stevens initially perceives himself to be trapped in some kind of escape pod in the real world, before he learns that this environment is merely a projection of his imagination. The body, and embodiment itself, here is really posited to be as much a part of the simulated hallucination as the environment in which he understands his body to be. Matter, here, is in fact illusory, projected outwards from a disembodied mind. We are then also given a sense that time itself is an illusion; during Steven’s transitions in between brain and source-code programme, and in the boundary zone between, we see flashing images of not only his past, but also of his future within the new reality, in a confusion of memory, present, and future. The implication is that all Being is illusion/simulation, and that the past, present, and future of all quantum possibilities exist within a metaphysical flux. Being digitally transported between alternate realities, Stevens exists for a moment within this immanent plane. The film seems to move 20 I think this is the case with many such films which are maybe not so ostentatiously ‘digital’; for instance, Black Swan, Donnie Darko, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. These films pivot on their digitally inflected ‘emblematic’ key moments, not only on the effects within the image, but by their reflection on an ontology which could be said to be instigated by a shift to the digital.

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thematically towards some kind of holographic universe theory, as proposed by Michael Talbot (1991), by which the whole of the information of the universe is contained within each tiny fragment, and that matter and energy as much as time and space are merely projections from some underlying dimension of reality, such that we cannot think of things as separate parts or entities, as each part relates back to the whole. The whole universe is imagined in this way as pure information, organised by holographic principles and projected from an external source, and this is analogised to a simulation within a computer. Source Code thus becomes an imaginative vision of an entire dimensional universe contained, or triggered, by a short string of code. While holographic theory seems fantastic and somewhat mystical, as physicists currently struggle to fathom quantum mechanics, it has actually recently gained real support, at least as a source of speculative debate (as reported in Griggs, 2011 and Chown, 2009). As a principle for sceptical philosophy, it also expresses something about the nature of perception, simulation, and neurology, and this is played out thematically in the film. The film asks: What if reality is already a virtual simulation and our bodies are also part of this simulation? The irony of the narrative is that Captain Stevens already thinks he is in a highly elaborate digital-training simulation, but is then told that, even though it is indeed a simulation, it is also actually real. In a further twist, he is told that the place where he thinks he is corporeally present (the capsule) is actually a figment of his imagination, not even part of the programme, and his real body is elsewhere. The concept that is played with here is that virtual simulation and reality are existentially one in the same, such that the internal dimension of the brain generates reality per se, but not in complete isolation, as there is actually a world out there that our senses react to, even if that ‘world’ is only pure information and not matter and energy as we perceive it to be.21 Going further even than the radical skeptical philosophy of Source Code, research by neurophysiologist Karl Pribram (as described by Talbot) posits that the brain itself is a hologram: Pribram believes memories are encoded not in neurons, or small groupings of neurons, but in patterns of nerve impulses that crisscross the entire brain in the same way that patterns of laser light interference crisscross 21 This implication tethers to a long tradition of thought about ‘Indirect Realism’ supported by Bertrand Russell, Thomas Metzinger, Gregory Mulhauser, Steve Lehar, and Richard Dawkins, amongst others (Gamez, 2007, p. 34).

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the entire area of a piece of f ilm containing a holographic image. In other words, Pribram believes the brain is itself a hologram. […] If the concreteness of the world is but a secondary reality and what is ´there´ is actually a holographic blur of frequencies, and if the brain is also a hologram and only selects some of the frequencies out of this blur and mathematically transforms them into sensory perceptions, what becomes of objective reality? Put quite simply, it ceases to exist. […] We are really ´receivers´ floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency, and what we extract from this sea and transmogrify into physical reality is but one channel from many extracted out of the superhologram. (Talbot, 1991)

This mirrors insights from both Deleuze (the brain-screen) and Stiegler (consciousness as a post-production centre) that I described in Chapter Two. Reality here is created by observation, and we observe what we are conditioned to recognise by the grammatised forms of tertiary memory by which knowledge is stored and shared. What then interests me is how Source Code introduces these concepts and uses digital processes of computation and algorithmic programming to stand as a metaphor for neural activity. It moves between the idea of consciousness as disembodied data within the machine, and as embodied in the flesh, as if they are equivalent or non-contradictory within a digital ontology. This is a film not only informed by digital themes, but also constructed by digital processes, and thus generates a very plastic idea of an ontologically grounded subject. As both Pisters (2012) and Rodowick (2007) note, the digital image, cut adrift from any analogical relation to physical reality, turns to mental landscapes and reflections of cognitive schema. In a further twist, the digital itself comes to stand for the material of consciousness – not simply an analogy of computer to brain as in discourses of artificial intelligence, but rather of all physical reality, including corporeality, being pure information processed as simulation within a ‘quantum mind’.22 This is a move away from a conventional materialistic view of reality towards a pure metaphysical consciousness which is completely immaterial, and this move seems to be paralleled, reflected, and even generated by the digital images’ ontological shift away from any material or direct connection to physical reality. In a complex symbiosis, the digital image spins its own quantum realities like ‘source codes’, and these increasingly seem to fuse with and become indiscernible from the ‘real’ world. 22 The ‘quantum mind’ as concept came about as a reflection on the mind/body dualism caused by observation interference in early quantum experiments (Walker, 2000).

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Source Code gives us a complex metaphysical problematic expressed through an emblematic digital metaphor. Subjectivity, memory, and temporality are digitally expressed as plastic and folded, without recourse to mystical or magical explanation, and in a way that reflects current scientific discourse on quantum indetermination. This effect is achieved not through the film’s pseudoscientific exposition but rather through (digitally) expressing affective relations of perception, memory, consciousness, and embodiment. Reality is represented as practically indivisible from simulation, and, in the same way as Captain Stevens maintains faith in the simulation, the image is rendered real in as much as we feel we can act from a simulated embodied perspective. Stevens’s embodied will-to-action then acts as metaphor for our engagement with cinematic images. It is our embodied investment in the simulated possibility of intentional action within the screen reality that sutures us into it. We are Stevens in his darkened chamber, projecting our consciousness into the alternate dimension as if we were him. We mirror his actions and emotions, and model his intentions as if we were in the source code ourselves. In this process, we are also drawn into his questioning of the ontological levels of reality and quite possibly we see the world through new eyes as we emerge from the cinema, thinking about what it means to change our destiny within our given reality. However, as philosopher David Gamez notes, we cannot ultimately sustain this mode of seeing the real world indirectly as ‘source code’ in our everyday experience, despite its potential cognitive empowerments: The problem with indirect realism is that although we are forced into it (by logical conclusion), it is also an extremely counter-intuitive claim. Although it is easy to say that the world is a virtual reality generated by the brain, it is almost impossible for us to really see everything around us, everything that we take to be the natural world, as a virtual reality model. Someone who could sustain this terrifying vision would be on the brink of madness […] Supporters of the brain hypothesis are doomed to oscillate between naïve and indirect realism. (Gamez, 2007, p. 35)

And this is why the feeling fades as we must inevitably return to our naïve realism. However, we have still had this virtual experience, and our embodied reality, our plastic brain, has been subtly changed by it.

6. A Digital Nihilism: Ethical Reflections Dan Strutt Abstract In conclusion, this chapter moves to more pragmatic political concerns, asking whether there could be positive social outcomes for the digital shift in image culture. The ethical concerns of Deleuze and Stiegler about the logic of late capitalism and the potential for insidious affective conditioning of desire are addressed, alongside their stated imperative for creative thought, political engagement, and new industrial practices. It is suggested that the digital actually generates a cognitively active subject that negotiates affective lures creatively, and who playfully synthesises new metaphysical awareness. Finally, the chapter brings together Vattimo’s ‘mellow nihilism’ with Malabou’s ontological plasticity, to dispel rigid metaphysical notions for instead a ‘weak’ ethical ontology which is both open and plastic, but strategic rather than complacent. Keywords: Utopia, Heterotopia, Nihilism, Plasticity, Rancière, Vattimo

By way of conclusion, I wish to examine the digital and post-cinematic shift in image generation and engagement in terms of the kinds of utopian and dystopian visions which circulate around new media forms in general, visions which are regularly charged with a moral exigency. These ethical prognoses concern themselves with questions about our future, and the tone often refers to underlying Western enlightenment beliefs in the advancement of human knowledge – a linear teleology of progress. Accordingly, one can be positive, negative, or ultimately ambivalent about the changes the digital makes. Positively, these changes guide us into a new era of aesthetic play which liberates our sensorium, realigns our notion of the real, rewires the

Strutt, D., The Digital Image and Reality. Affect, Metaphysics, and Post-Cinema, Amsterdam University Press, 2019 doi 10.5117/9789462987135_ch06

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brain, and stimulates our creative capacities.1 Negatively, it corrodes our imagination, is tied into nefarious networks of subtle governmentality, strips us of our narratives for life, and dissolves the political intellect into a sea of free-floating and short-lived intensities. Ambivalently, it is simply different – a different way of thinking, a different mode of attention, a different sense of the world – and prognoses for the future are deferred, or at least left open. I have attempted to examine the digital shift in a neutral way, and yet as a child of a digital age – perhaps just as my parent’s generation, the children of the 1950s New Wave, might feel about TV, or as my grandparents and great-grandparents might have felt about moving, technicolour, or talking images – I am excited and moved by the changes I see, and thus I must actively moderate my enthusiasm. Acknowledging the excesses of negative critique which fatalistically write the epitaphs of art, history, mystery, communication, and creativity, I temper my desire to redress the balance, and thus rather than wildly celebrating recent developments in digital screen culture, I must aim for an ambivalent but optimistic tone. This has led me towards what has been named (in describing the work of Gianni Vattimo) a ‘mellow nihilism’ within our digital age, or what could be described as a digital nihilism (Oventile, 2004). What this entails is a refusal to ascribe to any idealised version of reality (a past golden age or future utopia), instead choosing to see the immanent possibilities and pharmakological potential of the situation that we do in fact have. While I do not offer up any ideal image of media futurity, I also choose to believe that all is not lost, and that, within a digitally mediated reality, the automatistic features of modulation, discontinuity, and plasticity can cultivate a profound metaphysical openness. I do thus perhaps end up subscribing to a teleology of progress, but one coloured by a fundamental denial of foundationalist thought. By drawing together the ‘meta’ and ‘micro’ political aspirations of some of my main theorists, I hope to explain this position adequately. The more pessimistic sociocultural critiques of digital media forms tend to filter down to one underlying condition – advanced capitalism. Indeed, most would-be celebratory theorists of new media temper their enthusiasm with a cautionary note about concerns for the future of the politics of communication and representation, the environment of creativity, 1 Here, I refer to my use of Catherine Malabou and Patricia Pisters in the last chapter, through which I aligned a digital metaphysical plasticity with the quality of neural plasticity to suggest that, at a neural level, we (humans) are re-formed by the media we consume, and re-conditioned to acknowledge fundamentally that the world and our brains are indeed plastic.

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or the quality of analytic thought. In many ways, it would be lax not to do so as this is the ethical object of media studies: its social, cultural, and ontological meaning expressed in concern for the future of human existence. As Benjamin notes at the beginning of his essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, within any observation and theorisation about ‘developmental tendencies of art under present conditions’, there should be a prognostic value, and these prognoses can indeed have value as a ‘weapon’ (against Fascism, and for a revolutionary politics of art, in Benjamin’s own time) (1999, p. 218). As the new forms of image-capture, -creation, and -presentation that I have discussed (D3D, Digital Slow Motion, CGI, digital mapping, etc.) emerge and proliferate within an environment of hyper-capitalism and all that that entails – spectacle, homogeneity, celebrity, cliché – it can sometimes seem impossible to see them as anything other than objects fixed within the economic superstructure, and any affective pleasure or cognitive enrichment is instantly undermined by the object’s position within commercial culture. However, it was in exactly the incipient conditions of this modern capitalist age that cinema originally emerged as an apt way to witness and interpret the dramatically modern developments in ways of living and thinking. The technology initially presented itself as artistic counterpoint to social and economic change and has since, at all times, been imbued with some utopian hopes of social change and future vision. Through the work of early filmmakers and film theorists such as Eisenstein, Vertov, Epstein, and (later) Bazin, we see a belief in how the artistic mode of film had the transgressive potential to alter significantly social and political conditions. Imbued in early cinematic theory was a technological futurism of cinema’s revelatory potential, expressing a political commitment to an ethical future in which cinema as an autonomous art form crafted an aesthetic utopia. For Eisenstein (1977), cinematic montage graphically and materially gave us a Marxist dialectic, synthesising the tertium quid or ‘third thing’ as an ideological concept absorbed by the spectator affectively and intuitively. For Vertov (1984), the Kino Eye exposed a deeper truth of actuality through bringing documentary footage to the masses, and through this relation to the cinematic apparatus, humanity could be elevated through greater affinity with the machinic. For Epstein and Bazin, the cinematic technology had the potential to reveal a deeper truth of detail or existence through, respectively, the close-up and the unedited and naturalistic long take. For each of these theorists, something about the potential of the mechanics (apparatus) and mass appeal (distribution) of cinema led them to believe that social and cultural change could be instigated by the revelations provided. Through an

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active mode of aesthetic engagement with film images, we would discover some deeper truth about existence, and social, political, and spiritual life would be enriched. The gravity of modern fatigue, industrialisation, and urbanisation did not escape these optimists, but the technology of cinema was seen as potentially revolutionary. When the Frankfurt School then indicted the products of mass culture, they at least held up the cinematic avant-garde as a potentially oppositional, redemptive force. Now it can often seem that this dialectic is dissolved, with all cultural forms, whether ‘artistic’ or ‘popular’, existing purely for the purposes of profit.

Autonomous Art and the Disappearance of Utopia In late modernism, we have a cultivated suspicion of the aesthetic utopias imagined by the historical avant-garde, leading as it did to the dual excesses of totalitarianism and commodification. Positioned as provocation, the avant-garde arts promised emancipation and new social order, but what actually occurred was at first the rigid aesthetic ideology of fascism (the rather embarrassing fact that Italian Futurism converged directly into fascism, Bertetto, 2018), and latterly, the dissolution or absorption of avantgardism into the cultural logic of neoliberal capitalism, leading, in the view of many theorists, to standardisation and homogeneity. In an advanced age of digital mass communication, what many critics see is the abandonment of any ethico-aesthetic regime, and instead the hyper-synchronisation of aesthetic modes controlled by certain powerful corporate forces through new communication technologies. In other words, art as an autonomous realm ceases to exist, and thus, as a consequence, any ethics of aesthetics is also perceived to die.2 For Bernard Stiegler (2010), as for many other roughly ‘postmodern’ theorists who, on the surface, ascribe to this way of thinking (for example, Jameson, Baudrillard, or Virilio), the outlook is bleak as we become increasingly separated from the real, and thus also from any aesthetic and political reflection upon the real. 2 The excellent new book by Josephine Berry, Art and (Bare) Life (2018), explores this question through concepts of biopolitical power and individualised creativity. She notes, in conclusion: ‘Standing as we are at the brink of art’s total integration and hence total meaninglessness, it’s hard to see any way ahead that doesn’t look to renew the avant-garde demand to realize art as a praxis of life and thereby abolish its separateness. Yet if we are to renew this cry, it can only be on condition that the life referred to be understood in its broadest, most sociogenic and biogenic senses; where folding and errancy, intention and mutation, are able to range widely, without systematically precluding and always renewing one another’ (Berry. 2018. p. 321).

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However, this diagnosis of the death of art focuses too much on a singular idea of utopia, crafted through the imagination of a dialectic relation between commercial culture and the autonomous, political avant-garde (in the Marx-inflected aesthetic theory of Adorno, and later, that of Lyotard). Walter Benjamin, in his own time, seemed a solitary voice standing against this resistance to a rigid superstructural thinking in refusing to indict the new mass images as part of advanced capitalist ideology, instead seeing a new democratised popular image form, and a new secular and political function of art in society.3 More contemporarily, the prerequisite opposition of art to commercial culture for any possible ethical future has been again challenged by Jacques Rancière and Gianni Vattimo. For these philosophers, as I describe below, the dialectic is not so clearly delineated, and a commercialised cultural logic does not simply spell the end of creativity or of the political artwork. In the objects of a contemporary design culture, both Rancière and Vattimo see a profitable yet artistic field of cultural production, which, like architecture, carries both a use value and an aesthetic value. These art objects are not held at optical distance and appreciated as beautiful but essentially useless, but are instead blended into everyday life, forming part of a new politico-aesthetic regime which does not require shock effects or provocative confrontationalsim, and yet which does not simply equal a bland homogeneity. As Vattimo states: Mass culture has by no means standardized aesthetic experience, assimilating the whole of the ´beautiful´ to the values of that community which has felt itself to be the privileged bearer of the human – European bourgeois society. Instead, it has explosively brought to light the proliferation of what is ´beautiful´, assigning the word not only to different cultures through its anthropological research, but also to ´subsystems´ within Western culture itself. In fact, the utopia of an aesthetic rehabilitation of existence through a unification of the beautiful and the everyday has come to an end in parallel with the end of the revolutionary utopia of the sixties,

3 This is the general theme of ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ essay, that a popular form of art within a context of commercial production can still have the value of a revolutionary weapon. In the preface to the essay, Benjamin insists that we must address our actual art culture optimistically, rather than only thinking about an idealised form of art in an imagined better situation. He suggests that, by focusing on positive theses, rather than on criticism, about the developmental tendencies of the specific objects of contemporary art culture, there is a revolutionary potential (Benjamin, 1999, pp. 217-218).

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and for the same reasons, namely the explosion of systematicity and the unintelligibility of unilinear history. (Vattimo, 1992, p. 67 – my emphasis)

Contra Bernard Stiegler et al., and rather than standardisation and hypersynchronisation, for Vattimo, we have a relative ‘heterotopic’ explosion of heterogeneity and diversity, wherein heterotopia defines both a plural, diverse utopia, and also a liminal space outside of (but not in opposition to) hegemonic control. Aesthetics here becomes redefined as an immanent field of multiplicity, of many different ways of perceiving beauty and sublimity, rather than as a transcendent, autonomous, or auratic sphere beyond understanding, and, as such, it becomes radically open: Utopia has disappeared, even from aesthetics, with the advent of a certain ´universality´ in the channels different models of value and recognition have found to express themselves. […] A mass aesthetic experience has taken shape in the combined voices raised by communitarian systems of recognition and communities that show, express and recognize themselves in different myths and formal models. (ibid, p. 68)

This could seem like an abandonment of a strong guiding ideology, towards a bland cultural relativity and universality, or a de-politicisation of the aesthetic sphere. This attitude is countered by Jacques Rancière (2006), in his perspective on aesthetics as a matter of everyday existence, which is necessarily political yet does not deal in utopian or dystopian visions. While Benjamin stated that any attempt to aestheticise politics must end in war, it seems this is because he subscribed to the utopian and dialectic vision of an aesthetics of negation (1999, p. 241). By this belief, any attempt to impose an aestheticised utopian vision will become an imperialism or a fascism as it strives to overwrite the arts’ ethical dialectic. Instead, for Rancière, aesthetics is inherently political, as it is always part of the system of what is comprehensible and expressible and thus any system of expression is ordinarily charged with ideological values and power struggle. Thus, ‘normal’ perception and cognition of reality is at a fundamental level both aesthetic and political. For Stiegler, this is also true; that the everyday matter of sensation and expression is grammatised into circuits of attention and memory through a process of political negotiation, but, where Rancière posits this as a benign and ambivalent process of conflicting forces (2002, p. 151), Stiegler sees the balance firmly tipped in the direction of control (2011). For Stiegler, it is a question of technology, as digital media refine the manipulation of aesthetic

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modes of sensibility and affection, towards a biopolitical controlling of both public and inner life. His translator Daniel Ross states: What Rancière fails to think is that aesthetics, that is, sensibility and feeling, has become the very means by which every aspect of life is calculated and controlled, through the invention of aesthetic and affective technologies configured toward synchronising experience, and therefore desire, and therefore behaviour, to the point of becoming ´counter-productive,´ that is, to the point of threatening the destruction of desire itself, and therefore politics, if not indeed economics. (Ross, 2009)

Indeed, Rancière has been accused (by Alain Badiou) of having a merely symbolic commitment to politics, offering not reflections on real political situations, but merely ‘motifs’ for an escapist ‘meta’-politics, or for ‘lazy posturing of the “my art is my activism” kind’ (Davis, 2006). Thus, the issue of the political reality of contemporary digital technologies, a crucial question for both Stiegler (and Benjamin in his own time), seems inadequately theorised by both Rancière and Vattimo. Though Vattimo celebrates new global communities and communication – which could have a technological reading – neither he nor Rancière seem to move beyond pure and broad concepts toward a pragmatic political and ethical reading of modern digital objects of commercial culture.

‘A Business, a Pornography, a Hitlerism’ To then frame the technological question of this project within this context of utopian/heterotopic vision, we must ask whether the specific machinations of a digital visual culture are or are not political, inasmuch as they may have social or political consequences. And, if they are political, are these consequences in any way independent or resistant to the hegemonic logic of advanced ‘informational’ capitalism? This is to work towards asking if there can truly be said to be any ethical outcome for recent developments in digital media. To examine this, I look at the ethical discourse of technology through the theorists who specifically target it, before moving to look at examples of specific technologies, and finally returning a reading of Rancière and Vattimo through a more specifically technological lens. It is Deleuze that set this enquiry in motion, by giving an impression of a technological medium of expression which, in its structural elements, at first expresses existing modes of perception and of metaphysical intuition,

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and then later comes to expand and alter them in an ethically and socially productive way: ‘[…] a determination at first formal and material, and then later genetic and differential’ (1986, p. 85). First, it reflects the trajectory of Western thought in form and materiality, then, as spiritual automaton, it comes to determine or refract this mode of thought – thought and technological means of expression co-defining each other in a synergistic process of becoming (this draws close to Heidegger’s concept of Gestell or ‘enframing’ in The Question Concerning Technology). The movementimage, for Deleuze, is based on a closed moral system founded on a singular teleology of progress – the outcome of a Western metaphysical legacy culminating in Cartesian rationalism. Through mythical narrative function and action/reaction sensory-motor-schema, it generates symbolic threats as alien, enemy, or other to an established moral order, and deals with them through clear causal actions to provide closure as a return to moral order. The time-image, then, is an open and ethical entity. It synthesises a fracture within the Western tradition of transcendent continuous time, opening us up to an experience of pure duration – a direct image of time. What this presents us with is instead a ‘radical ethics of multiplicity […] affirming and exploring the ruination of the sensory-motor-schema of the heroic-communal relational action-image’ (Canning, 2000, p. 350). By this strategy, any closed model of truth, any moral dualism is abandoned for experimentation with image relations and thus with affection and perception. For Deleuze, only the cinematic technology, the moving image as a temporal medium, can represent and then further instigate this shift by achieving its own spiritual automatism. Deleuze then, in his conclusion to the Time-Image, states that the aesthetic principle of the ‘electronic image’ pre-exists the digital technology which brings it to its ideal form (1989, p. 266). He identifies this as an impetus expressed in the time-image, an aesthetic of ‘superimposed layers, with variable outcrops, retroactive relations, heavings, sinkings, collapsings’, with a ‘right side and a reverse, reversible and superimposable, with the power to turn back on themselves, perpetual reorganisation […] in omnidirectional space’ (ibid). Nonetheless, he expresses a strong concern that this impulse should, within the digital, form part of a new will-to-art, a ‘cerebral creation’ and a new aspect of the time-image – not being made into ‘a business, a pornography, a Hitlerism’ and thereby becoming ‘a deficiency of the cerebellum’ (ibid). The pure time-image, he states, calls into existence an original regime of images which liberates time from its subservience to movement, and while the ‘new methods’ of electronic media offers potential for a will-to-art, he foresees that it will either be invalidated through being

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appropriated by commercial forces, or relaunched as a reinvigorated ethical aesthetic: Electronic images will have to be based on still another will to art, or on as yet unknown aspects of the time-image. […] It is the time-image which calls on an original regime of images and signs, before electronics spoils it or, in contrast, relaunches it. (Deleuze, 1989, p. 267)

The prerequisite for this relaunch of a will-to-art is, for Deleuze, the emergence of a ‘pure speech act’, a ‘creative storytelling which is as it were the obverse side of the dominant myths, of current words and their supporters, an act capable of creating the myth instead of drawing profit or business from it’ (ibid, p. 270 -- my emphasis). Only by a dissolution and destruction of any existing moral rational order can we bring about this relaunch ‘emerging from the debris of the end of the world’ (ibid). Here, Deleuze reveals his Marxist dialectical and utopian politics of aesthetics. Only through ‘art beyond knowledge, creation beyond information’ can a ‘redemption’ be achieved (ibid). He explicitly equates the interests of profit and business with a rationalism and ‘Hitlerism’ which is so deadly to creativity that it must be completely obliterated. For Deleuze, pure time, pure immanence, and pure difference is the force of negation to spatialisation, transcendence, and identity. Only through the annihilation of the latter can one achieve the former. However, the revolution never came, and instead we have had, since the time of Deleuze’s writing, a cultural evolution which comes to fruition under a digital and informational capitalist regime. This evolution is the near complete fusion of art and commerce in postmodern digital culture in which the consumer is increasingly an active, skilled, and informed reader and decipherer of complex images and objects, which are tangible, useful, and entertaining and yet which play along the boundaries of rational comprehension due to their own automatism. In this work, I have endeavoured to discover images which are either an extension of the aesthetic principle of the time-image (in Enter the Void’s any-space-whatevers, Inception’s dream-images, or Pina’s durational dances) or indeed which innovate in original ways that could be constitutive of its relaunch (in Avatar or Source Code’s digital rendering of images of metaphysical flux and neural plasticity, Interstellar’s perfect scientific/cinematic simulation aesthetics, and in the baroque mutability of form and matter in glitching, morphing, and projection-mapping practices). These images achieve ethical effects in ways that may slip through the gap in Deleuze’s closing of the door on creativity,

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by expressing ‘another will to art, or an as yet unknown aspect of the timeimage’ (1989, p. 266 – my emphasis). The contemporary truth is that a real, un-idealised art object can hardly exist outside of, or oppositional to, the economies of production and creation in late capitalism, even though it may still fulfil the condition of an ethical will-to-art.

The Everyday Art Object of Industrial Design As Benjamin noted in 1936: ‘The tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history cannot be solved by optical means, that is, by contemplation alone’ (1999, p. 240). Instead, these tasks must be lived through, inhabited as part of everyday experience, and the necessary skills in perception are thus received and learned in a distracted state, requiring little direct attention. For Benjamin, cinema was the principal medium by which the modern subject tackled these tasks, but we can take his analysis beyond cinema to cover other artefacts of mainstream culture, such that art is reinstated as a democratic public exercise with which we engage without aura, ceremony, or ritual. So where does this form of aesthetics exist in contemporary commercial culture, if not cut adrift from it as a transcendent and unresolvable sublime realm of avant-garde expression? Can we say that our contemporary entertainment culture equips us with the skills in perception that we need at this given point in our history? Rancière sees that, in industrial production, through design, we are given objects – as much as in the exclusive art sphere – which ‘are committed to doing something else than what they do—to create not only objects but a sensorium, a new partition of the perceptible’ (2002, p. 140). In these everyday objects, we have a form of ‘applied art’ through which we see a mode of ‘collective education’ in a symbolic economy of common life. He states: He (the designer) thinks of himself as an artist, inasmuch as he attempts to create a culture of everyday life that is in keeping with the progress of industrial production and artistic design, rather than with the routines of commerce and petty-bourgeois consumption. (Rancière, 2002, p. 140)

This belief in an ethos of design integrity which overrides cynical profit motive is also developed by Vattimo, where he sees an ideology of design – ‘the dream of an aesthetic rehabilitation of everydayness by an elevation of the forms of objects and the appearance of our surroundings’ – closing

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the gap between the everyday and dialectic utopianism (1992, p. 64).4 Thus, Vattimo, like Benjamin and Rancière, sees that, in a modern economy of commercial industrial design, in the playful generation of the novel and new, we have a form of will-to-art which is meta-political in a way that is deeply integrated and implicated in our day-to-day lives. But can screen media be said to be such a design object in this metapolitical sense? From Benjamin, we seem to get an idea of the film as a practical entertainment object with complex higher functions, comparable to architecture’s simple value of shelter while simultaneously also being one of most ancient and nuanced forms of aesthetic expression (1999, p. 240). It is indeed hard not to see how architecture is inherently political, especially when the significance of a building is often manifested in an exterior facade which can ostentatiously command attention and respect by announcing the gravity of the human activity which goes on within (e.g. in churches, justice courts, town halls). Yet this significance is not noted only in an ‘optical’ mode of the observation of exterior appearance, but rather by the formation of particular habits through tactile appropriation and corporeal apperception by moving within the building’s spaces in quotidian use. The same quality could then be claimed for the objects of a more ordinary media culture, within ‘a symbolic economy which would display a collective justice or magnificence, a celebration of the human abode replacing the forlorn ceremonies of throne and religion’ (Rancière 2002, p. 140 – my emphasis). For Rancière, this is no less political for being more everyday, mainstream, and imbricated with our less reverential tasks of perception and cognition. Thus, we can start to see post-cinematic media as having a dual nature; a sociocultural use-value as an entertainment form, and yet as also an aesthetic object which we inhabit, and which, in Rancière’s analysis, generates its own ‘partition of the perceptible’. Certainly the moving-image today, diffused into multiple formats and platforms, and convergent again into a notion of a digital image, still fulfils this purpose and function. As an industry, it is engaged in the cyclical production of entertainment media, images through which we absorb knowledge about the tasks that currently face perception and cognition. It is also an industry of artists: scenic artists, production designers, photographers, actors, and post-production artists. These workers and technicians do think of themselves as artists working within a creative industry, even while producing objects which are the disposable forms of a cultural economy which plans obsolescence so that the new and novel can be constantly regenerated. Through 4 Vattimo’s example of Bauhaus architectural style shows how an ideology of design became equated with revolutionary Marxism.

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this system of production design, a ‘meta-political regime’ or symbolic economy is synthesised and developed. Though this regime might not necessarily inhere in each individual object, it does emerge as a matrix between them, and constitutes a clear regime of representation as a ‘grammatisation’ of reality. In thinking of digital screen media as objects of industrial design, and as art objects of the everyday variety, we can see that they do not need to be enduring, radical, auratic, and canonical to be significant, but instead can form part of the matrix of the perceptible in a temporary or even disposable way. Vattimo states: Aesthetic theory has yet to do justice to the mass media and the possibilities they offer. It is as if it were always a matter of ´saving´ some essence of art from the menace the new existential state of mass society presents not only to art, but also to the very essence of man. Reproducibility is thought to be irreconcilable with the seemingly indispensable demands for creativity in art. This is due only in part to the fact that the rapid diffusion of information tends to render every message instantly banal. Above all, it is because the reaction to this depletion of symbols is the invention of novelties that like those of fashion, that have none of the radicality seemingly necessary to the work of art. (Vattimo 1992, p. 57)

He points out that conventional aesthetic theory poses a failure to theorise adequately our actual experience or enjoyment of art in late modernity and in mass media, which is, he explains, based on ‘oscillation and disorientation’, and on ‘minimal and continual variation’ (ibid). This presents us with a constantly changing media landscape which, like fashion, can indeed seem banal and superficial, but which actually presents us with a softer, more fluid, and playful version of reality, and thus in real ways can still disrupt forms of manipulation and control (ibid, p. 59). Superficiality, novelty, and even disposability here cease to be simply pejorative qualities, and instead refer to a more pleasurable, less oppressive, and more democratic culture of everyday life. While there is a clear environmental issue with the wasteful accumulation of obsolescent commodities of our digital but still very much material disposable culture, and though we must also be observant to the material consequences of a supposedly immaterial digital culture, it seems that abundance, multiplication, and proliferation is not inherently unethical.5 5 Sean Cubitt explores the tangible environmental effects of digital technologies, which can be glossed over in discussions of the immateriality of digital media, in his excellent Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies (2016).

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In Vattimo’s analysis, it relaxes strong, monolithic, and autocratic notions of reality, towards a ‘weak’ metaphysics which is more plural, ambiguous, and open – conditions conducive to free thought and creativity. Vattimo thus comes across as a broadly optimistic postmodern theorist, countering the bleaker analyses of mass culture from certain modernist and postmodernist critics. Nonetheless, as previously stated, my discourse here is about technological mass media, an equation of Benjamin’s notion of technological reproducibility and Heidegger’s more abstract notion of the whole technological apparatus as techné (1977). The more contemporary discourse of Bernard Stiegler thus allows us to balance this theoretical formulation with the recent shifts in digital technologies, and to the industrial and commercial machinery behind it.

Bernard Stiegler’s Ethical Prognosis Stiegler’s vision begins more ambivalently than Deleuze’s concept of an ethical time-image. He sees that thought, knowledge of how to live, and even feeling for one another is originally technological (2010b).6 Technologies here are recast not as tools, but in the Heideggerian sense as modes of ordering things through which to reveal the actual. Language as technology describes the world and gives a sense of it, and we are impelled to do this work of describing by the simple existence of the technology. All modes of expression, including all media technologies, but also all modern manufacture technology, in this view serves the same purpose, as modes of ordering the sensible/perceptible, taking the raw material of the world and processing it to make it coherent to us, and so we can then use it. Thus, very much in line with Rancière´s and Vattimo’s views expressed above, industrial production is perceived the same way as artistic creation – as poiesis – as a type of activity which brings something into being and thus ‘reveals’ it.7 Stiegler, uniting Heidegger with Derrida’s Grammatology, comes to describe a process of ‘grammatisation’ which is not so explicitly confined to an idea of language as Derrida’s concept, but instead comes closer to 6 This is the subject of Stiegler’s Taking Care of Youth and the Generations (2010b) in which he analyses how marketing technologies have affected the youth and family relations. 7 While this describes the more tangible manual activity of humanity, the same could be applied to processes of cognition. Spinoza and Bergson both describe how we are compelled to organise primary affects into recognisable patterns. For Spinoza, the activity of mind is to contain affects to create positive emotions. For Bergson, almost all of our mental capacity is focused on recognition rather than a pure experience of the now.

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Rancière’s politicised ‘regime of the perceptible’ and Heidegger’s ‘revealing’ or ‘enframing’. Grammatisation ‘names the process whereby fluxes are reduced to discrete, formal, symbolic, and reproducible elements’ (Ross, 2010), and language is perceived as only one technological form amongst many. In Stiegler’s Technics and Time 3, the focus comes to bear specifically on the more subtle and affective digital visual media technologies which, within advanced capitalism, become prostheses for memory (2010). In Stiegler’s view, digital media offers up a new technical condition of expression and thus a new grammatisation. Though technologies cannot be seen as culpable, they define the modes of knowledge-sharing available to us. They have been integrated with humanity in cyborg ways since the first primitive hominid communication. The hope for the new digital grammatisation is that it might involve the social and political retelling of stories and the sharing of knowledge and experience in new communities and through new aesthetic forms. For Deleuze (1989), this should be a radically new creative storytelling, in novel forms, which contributes to the destruction of the myths of the past. Stiegler, however, moves towards a bleaker prognosis when it comes to digital media. He sees that, in the objects of mass communication – through cinema, television, and digital technologies – there has been a slow process of homogenisation by which there is a degree of similarity in all aesthetic forms of communication (Ross, 2009). What this amounts to for him is a deliberate and cynical programming of aesthetic modes of engagement, that is to say affective media, to condition and influence desire with the aim of controlling behaviour. The digital mass media thus provides the most efficient and effective form through which commercial interests can distribute images which ‘synchronise’ desires, simplifying and emboldening them, and reconditioning them towards forms of consumption which regress to instant ‘drive’ satisfaction. In Stiegler’s dystopian vision of a digital mastery of affective governmentality, desire and aesthetics will both ultimately be destroyed as we are habituated into automatic, programmed modes of attention/engagement and consumption/ satisfaction, regressing us to the id state of the ideal consumer (ibid). In this way, the new digital grammatisation can be easily perceived as a sophisticated method of biopolitical governance. For Stiegler, the ‘programming industries’ which produce the technical means of recording memory (i.e. the media/marketing industries) have a vested interest in controlling consciousness on the level of unconscious drives. This is done by controlling our attention through psychotechnologies of ‘spectacular innovation’, tricks, and gimmicks which ‘short-circuit’ the longer systems of attention by which knowledge and memory are shared inter-generationally (Stiegler, 1998,

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p. 21). Longer circuits of generational transmission of knowledge are also necessarily technical and grammatised, but work through more traditional ‘programming institutions’ (as contrasted with the ‘programming industries’) such as family, education, and community. Programming institutions nurture desires based on shared knowledges, and it is this process that, for Stiegler, is interrupted, bypassed, and short-circuited by the immediate affective allure of the digital marketing technologies. Humanity is unable to mature and even regresses towards a condition of passivity by which we are unable to take responsibility for our desires (Barker, 2009, p. 8). One could, in this instance, accuse Stiegler of being simply a fatalistic postmodernist, harking back to some belle epoche of oral history, community, and family. However, within his broader philosophy, there is no idealised or utopian ‘human’ state, just a neutral field of technological forces. For each grammatising process, there is a controlling and disciplining which can seem like a reductive process, but, in the liminal phase of this process, there is also a transformational, transgressive potential which must be recognised to be seized. For Stiegler’s translator Daniel Ross, as for myself, if we accept the bleak condition of which Stiegler speaks, there is then an ethical imperative to see what possibility for redemption lies within: We must take up the question of what new potentials arise from the new processes of grammatisation elaborating themselves today, and ask whether these potentials can be harnessed toward the cultivation of new practices under a new industrial model with the goal of re-aestheticising politics (but in the best sense, such that this is not at the expense of political reason, but rather forms the very motive of reason itself). (Ross, 2009)

We must recognise and contemplate the value of the seeds of transformation which already exist within the current digital processes of grammatisation. Within digital screen culture, I have had cause to reflect on those objects, images, and practices that I feel are specific to the digital and which constitute a new aesthetic. Within this aesthetic, I have attempted to describe the adjustments and modifications to an imbued metaphysical sense which could amount to a new ontological world view. This evolved digital sensibility is acquired in Benjamin’s ‘distracted’ sense, becoming a matter of habit, and manifesting as ‘skills of perception’ by which we tackle the new tasks demanded of us at this point in history (1999). Furthermore, we can hope that these aesthetic advances, emerging automatically from the new technological processes, do qualify as ‘an as-yet unknown aspect of the time-image’, thus constituting a relaunch of the will-to-art.

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I have hoped to prove that digital technical expressions are increasingly complex, rich, and stimulating in their immersive affectivity and metaphorical resonance, and also present an ethical possibility for new industrial practices of making and sharing experience. I have argued here that these practices potentially function even within the conf ines of industrial control to empower and motivate creative and political awakenings. To demonstrate this, I now return to look at some of the discourses and forms previously discussed in this project, specifically to address the critiques of contemporary D3D technology and the neo-baroque digital film, and then to assess the ethical potential of these new forms of presentation.

‘A Chaotic Scribble’ As discussed throughout this book, the contemporary images of the current digital visual regime lead to new constructions and impressions of space, time, and energic force. This is achieved through new and evolving systems of image capture, post-production, and presentation, exemplified by new digital 3D projection (D3D) and projection-mapping formats which have risen to prominence within digital screen culture in the last ten years. What this entails is a return to, or perhaps a reinvigoration of a visual regime which flouts conventional narrative tradition for technological novelty and spectacle, formal and structural experimentation, immersion and interactivity. For many theorists, the fluidification of Euclidean spatiotemporal coordinates stimulates a loosening of the bonds of a crushing modernist rationality which continually stresses coherence and continuity (as I have referred to through the work of Tom Gunning, Gilles Deleuze, Scott Bukatman, Martin Jay, Thomas Elsaesser, and Angela Ndalanis). However, coming as these images often do through the mediation of digital postproduction and presentation, because their effects aim primarily towards illusion rather than a humanistic social realism, and finally because they are almost infinitely marketable as experiential commodities, many critics cannot help but see them as anything other than as spectacle or simulacra fixed within a postmodern commercial culture.8

8 The concept of simulacra as identified by Baudrillard is attacked by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition, in which he disagrees with Baudrillard on the status of the copy without original referent. He re-appropriates it as an ethical concept which confronts the identity of the ‘original’ and transforms it (2004, pp. 154-156).

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As Thomas Elsaesser points out in his article ‘The Return of 3-D: Logics and Genealogies of the Image in the 21st Century’, in an ironic turn, the stereoscopic media technology that has historically existed as a critique of monocular and bourgeois visual regimes (including the complex viewing positions of the original sixteenth-century Baroque art style as well as 20thcentury Dada and Cubist art movements) becomes the new normative image regime in the digital era, and this carries certain ethical risks. In becoming ubiquitous, the current 3D technology potentially becomes simply the new default mode of mass-media commercialism, and, as such, becomes party to the ideological cultural flows associated with that. On a further, more worrying note, as immersive affectivity is ever heightened in new digital technologies, it seems that what is lost is exactly the sense of cognitive distance from the image content that would allow an analytical/political mode of reception. The haptic closeness to the image which originally stood as critique of a rationalist and Realist optical regime is here seen as having been appropriated by commercial interests as an insidious form of influence. Affective media here is portrayed as a neurological bypassing of our rational-critical faculties and this potentially allows us to become overly influenced (Elsaesser, 2013). While this sounds like the familiar paranoid fears of mass hypnosis and subliminal messages which have circulated since mass media first came about, this takes a more sinister turn when we consider, as Erin Manning does in Relationscapes, the powerfully immersive and affective tone of explicitly political propaganda. In Manning’s analysis, she uses the example of Leni Reifenstahl’s work for the Nazis, specifically Olympia, identifying the powerful suture of the ‘biogrammatic’ images of the human form stemming from the emotional and relational connections cultivated by the rhythmic and intensive imagery. She notes that the pre-conscious impact of these politically charged, highly affective images of perfect bodies moving in perfect motion can be considered even more powerful than the content-driven semiotically charged propaganda with which we might be more familiar (Manning, 2009). The explicit goal of the Nazi propaganda machine to conquer hearts and minds through affective media extended somewhat logically into experiments in 3D with films So Real you can Touch It and Six Girls Roll into Weekend. The technology and aesthetic of stereography, which only a few years earlier had formed part of an avantgarde critical art movement, was thus appropriated as a potential propaganda tool of the Nazi aesthetic cultural movement (Child, 2011). While the new affective and immersive digital imagery can be quite easily critically positioned either as a revolutionary critique of closed inflexible

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thought, or inversely as an order of sinister and insidious commercial control of our desires, it can also, in cineastes Roger Ebert and Mark Kermode’s school of thought, be simply written off as somewhat irritating, redundant, and superfluous.9 Film theorist Sean Cubitt seems to subscribe more to this latter point of view than either of the former when he says, in The Cinema Effect, that contemporary technologically driven neo-baroque visual media is just so many modular stylistic devices which thrive on an insular formal excellence at the cost of intelligence or social understanding through meaningful connection (2005, p. 242, 269). On the subject of cinema, he states: Contemporary cinema is more ambitious than contemporary philosophy, but neither undertakes to understand the universe any longer […] The film world is a windowless monad, a simple structure unafflicted by connections to the rest of the world, entirely inward. (Cubitt, 2005, p. 242)

He laments that, as the form of contemporary visual media becomes desperately self-referential, and any ‘evolution of the spirit’ is set aside in a series of cognitive solitaire games that experiment without ever reflecting on the ‘actual’ world, which is here perceived as social reality. These displays of technological virtuosity become, for Cubitt, only formally and aesthetically pleasing images which provide a soporific relief from the ‘chaotic trudge’ through the real world, a superficial distraction from philosophical contemplation (ibid, p. 244). We are stripped of our will, subordinated to the image, and worse still, subjugated to the corporate ideological power behind its construction. However, even Sean Cubitt yields to a moment of magical transportation in his analysis of The Abyss. He refers to the ‘drifting reverie’ of a mesmerised gaze as we watch a CGI alien´s watery-tentacle slink its way through the hallways of the submerged ship. He notes that our attention is dreamlike and distracted as we flicker between awe at the visual effect and total immersion in the fiction, and evocatively states that this ‘leads us towards 9 While Ebert and Kermode both dress their critique up with scientific concerns about picture brightness, nausea, and headaches, the real thrust of their argument is about the perceived quality of such films in which they hark back to ‘golden age’ narrative cinema (Ebert 2010). Kermode states: ‘The thing these movies have in common is that they are essentially trash – sleazy, crass and exploitative and owing more to the carnival sideshow tradition than to any history of narrative cinema. As such, they are perfectly suited to the phoney-baloney gimmickry of 3D, in the same way that Polyester suited Odorama and The Tingler needed the hidden seat buzzers of Percepto to put a spark into its audiences’ collective arses’ (Kermode, 2010).

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firstness’, a Peircian firstness which is pure affective absorption. Clearly, through his language, Cubitt values this novel experience, referring to it as ‘that wonder which is the proper, conceptless affect of firstness’ (ibid, p. 242), but then undermines it as a ‘seduction’ and a ‘hypnotized subordination to the magic of illusion’ (ibid, p. 256). He describes how The Abyss, through its innovative digital special effects, presents an ‘artificial though not synthetic’ experience, but this mesmerised state is not creative or inspirational; rather, it is an abuse, a fake, which leads us away from consideration of life or reality, deeper into a self-satisfying, meaningless monad which is nothing more than the magical power of the commodity form; a ‘virtual satisfaction of virtual needs’ (ibid, p. 269). The sublime affective state of conceptless firstness alone is not enough for Cubitt. It is ultimately an empty experience as it does not engage culturally, socially, or philosophically. We must have higher-level analysis, the activity of the intellect as processes of secondness and thirdness for an experience of firstness to become in any way significant. He states that ‘Mere firstness would produce nothing but a chaotic scribble’ (ibid, p. 81). Further, Cubitt notes: Presenting itself as if it were Peircean firstness, in fact Hollywood today offers its audiences a mirror in which their aspiration toward being is rewarded with the vision of the absolute object, secondness without the possibility of thirdness that can arise only from a socialized system of texts and spectators. (ibid, p. 269)

Here, like Stiegler, Cubitt asserts that our technological circuits of attention have been hot-wired by commercial influences to take any desire for ontological analysis and understanding and give it a false satisfaction, a quickly fading sensation of wholeness. It ‘addresses only the present instant, doomed by its dependence on the cutting-edge to radical obsolescence’ (ibid, p. 271). He accuses mainstream cinema of duping its audience: ‘Despite the narrative’s attempt to make the corporate state the villain of the piece, The Abyss mesmerizes its subject into descending into the depths from which the magic arises’ (ibid, p. 256). While the ‘pre- or alinguistic nature of the digital sublime’ promises an escape from ideology, it results only in a denial of ideology, a willful blindness (ibid, p. 269). For Cubitt, the enlivening affects supplied by cinematic digital screen media, while thrilling, fade quickly into nothing since they are essentially meaningless. He dismisses any enduring individual or cultural effects of engagement with the digital image, saying instead that we are merely

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engaging in ‘a transformed mode of play, prizing intensity over intelligence’ (ibid). However, if we cease to see the purpose of contemporary media – indeed of any media form – as the crafting of timeless or iconic objects of social import, we can see them rather as an active and dynamic process of play and learning, which, rather than simply making intensity its prize, actually experiments ethically in forms of metaphysical embodiment, and addresses the ontological issues which with our world currently confronts us. It does not matter so much if they come to seem dated or obsolescent like so many toys and games of our childhood (as, for example, with the morphing effects previously discussed), because, in the rapid proliferation of images and technologies, these objects of contemporary screen culture become part of a shared cultural currency, part of our communal ‘tertiary’ memory. These digital visual ‘intensities’ have served their purpose, forming a matrix of metaphorical associations that passively synthesise a sense of what it is to live in a digital age. I have tried to prove through this work that these digital objects of firstness as affects supplied by digital screen cultures and practices, be they sensations of space, time, force, or materiality do indeed synthesise aspects of secondness and thirdness as new concepts and perceptions, though not directly through content-driven and representational methods. I have also posited that this is not simply a denial of or escape from ideological processes, but a fundamental destabilising of the metaphysical foundations which support any rigid ideological belief. While the method might be playful, experimental, and therefore sometimes apparently banal or superficial, the new grammatisation of affective fluxes through digital mediation do in fact generate new desires, new practices, and a new existential condition. It seems that there is a distinct need to develop this mode of analysis further while the popular realm of image critique (that of Ebert and Kermode) seems stuck in a ‘cinephiliac’ attitude which celebrates a specific type of autonomous auteur cinema perceived to be under direct attack .10 There is a different attitude and mode of analysis for the images of a digital and commercial image culture, which instead develops the idea of a mentally agile viewer able to negotiate with multiple virtual simulations of reality in processes that refract and reconstruct thought about reality.

10 For the epitome of this type of analysis, see Sontag’s essay The Decay of Cinema, 2002, pp. 117-122.

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The Active Subject in Digitality The central ethical issue as developed in this chapter becomes one of activity or passivity, whether the spectator within a commercial digital visual culture is an active, interactive, and educated consumer who acts on a playful impulse to step out of the rational ordinary, or a disengaged dupe, a gullible individual whose desires have been conditioned towards base drives requiring instant gratification, and whose consumption is automatic and without fulfilment. Entering into this argument, Mark Hansen establishes that the subject in digital culture is more active than ever. He summarises: As I see it, digitisation requires us to reconceive the correlation between the user’s body and the image in a more profound manner […] The image has itself become a process and, as such, has become irreducibly bound up with the activity of the body. (Hansen, 2006, p. 10)

Without space and time as given transcendent qualities in new media in the form of linear timelines and continuous spaces, Hansen describes how the human body (by which he also means the brain) must actualise durational space-time through a negotiation with the profusion of data into which we are immersed (ibid, p. 253). Hansen therefore articulates how, in a digital age, rather than our minds becoming ‘soft’, our embodied processes of cognition are achieved through increased and complexified activity. Cultural theorists Luciana Parisi and Steve Goodman, however, go further than this in criticising the anthropocentrism of this concept of ‘activity’, wherein the human mind/body is positioned as nexus for all potential actualisation. They prefer to construct an ecological model in which the activity of the human is only a part of an autopoetic system. Their article, ‘Rhythmic Nexus: The Felt Togetherness of Movement and Thought’ (2008), posits the idea of technology synthesising its own fluid and immanent dynamic as an ‘extensive continuum’, or quantum flux, into which we as humans fit. This idea integrates well with both Stiegler’s grammatisation, Deleuze’s spiritual automaton, and Bogost’s alien phenomenology, moving the emphasis away from the human, and onto an immanent flux of possibilities for expression framed by digital hardware and software. As we, as a digital culture, move towards a synthetic but autopoietic continuum of creation, we see the emergence of a new aesthetic entailing ethical experimentation with virtuality, alongside the generation and multiplication of metaphysical anomalies (Parisi and Goodman, 2008). We can see this aesthetic tendency in many of the objects of post-cinematic

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digital culture that I have examined in this work, where space and time are distorted into liminal zones and other worlds. It can seem like artists and filmmakers, in honing technical skills of hardware and software operation and manipulation, have a well-developed sense of the spiritual automatism of the digital, engaging in a work of revealing rather than of intentionally sculpting new forms. In this work, it can often feel as if there is indeed a different dimension or quantum flux which is proximate, surrounding us, or on the other side of some portal waiting to be explored rather than created. There seems an ethico-aesthetic imperative to experience this immanent flux and to speculate on our potential human interaction with it. As a culture, we ask: What are the possibilities for post-humanity emerging from this digital ether? Parisi and Goodman point out that, in the logic of late capitalism, commercial interests have inevitably taken note of this aesthetic shift towards indetermination, and try to pre-empt or guide the future potential desires to secure and future-proof capital – efforts towards containing, controlling, and predicting desires in what they call an affective ‘ecology of allure’: A new stratum of topological control directly inciting mental, physical, and affective activities is deployed by ubiquitous clusters of adaptive software enabling the installation of smoothening platforms of pre-emption, a distributed ecology of allure – where allure describes the attractional power generated by contrasting eternal objects or virtual worlds selected by actual occasions. This pre-emptive power operates through the contagious activity of futurity in the present, of potential space-times serving as attractors to actual occasions. For example, artificial agency of markets that install lures to feeling, thereby pre-empting a desire yet to come. (Parisi and Goodman, 2008)

This concept of the insidious affective allures of digital psychotechnologies – as creating an illusion of subjective choice while actually steering desire – is very much the mode of analysis followed by Stiegler. However, for Parisi and Goodman, this attempt to attract and allure for the purposes of market control must ultimately fail, since: Such pre-emptive strikes, instead of blocking or slowing a novel future from happening, speed up the production of novelty. (ibid)

They state that attempts at control and pre-emption actually feed the multiplicity, causing it to grow rather than controlling outcomes as intended. The

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pre-emptions contribute to, feed, and accelerate an aesthetic of virtuality rather than channelling it into specific modes of consumption. This, for the authors, is an ethical outcome, as the proliferation of possibility and multiplicity becomes self-perpetuating. Industry has had to change, to become more open, more responsive, and more accommodating to customer demand, despite their simultaneous attempts to limit choice and to channel desire through tactics of affective ‘allure’. We can summarise that valid anxieties surround new digital media and their potential for control of passive minds through an affective, immersive, non-conscious hot-wiring of desires. At best, this process softens minds, and is corrosive to meaningful social and political engagement; at worst, it can be implemented as part of a fascist biopolitical governmentality. Inversely, the human mind is seen as more astute, more active than ever, intellectually and corporeally negotiating a minefield of affective lures and seductions, and capable of generating ever-more novelty through the processes of perception/actualisation. This is not, as in Deleuze’s vision of cinematic ethics, a cultural revolution of total fragmentation or discontinuity which entails the dissolution/destruction of prior forms, but rather a proliferation of plural continuities as different dimensions within the new aesthetic, a discovery of different rhythms, structures, and flows. Moralistic, singular, and monolithic thinking is weakened within an exponential virtualisation that appears to have its own agency and automatism. It is ethical in its playful aesthetic experimentation, not orientated towards anything other than exploring and extending what is means to be conscious. It is in essence a freeing, nihilistic aesthetic.

Digital Nihilism and Ontological Plasticity Returning to Vattimo, we can now weave together his brand of optimistic postmodernism with a specifically digital aesthetic, and with a new digital ontology which entails the weakening of ‘strong’ metaphysical notions. Vattimo pursues what he calls ´weak thought.´ Resigned to imprisonment in metaphysics, this thinking hopes gradually to bend metaphysics toward dissolution. Weak thought questions “strong” claims, truth assertions brandishing as their ultimate warrants anachronistic, termite-ridden metaphysical cudgels. The trick to weak thought is to work strategically with the erosion of foundations rather than to react futilely against this nihilistic trend. (Oventile, 2006)

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The postmodern digital age thus finally puts the last nail in God’s coffin, and what we are left with is a nihilistic fluidity and immanent plurality. The digital ontology that we move towards becomes analogous with a liberal, tolerant, and democratic society, and a digital nihilism entails wholeheartedly embracing the moral ‘crises’ of postmodernism. Vattimo suggests that this kind of nihilism is not some acceptance of relativism leading inexorably to political apathy, but instead that it can be strategic, eroding the foundations of metaphysical presumption. Here, digital images can be seen to have a clear strategic role in devising, reproducing, and disseminating a new ethics; in the glitch’s uncanny affects of the fracturing of reality, in superpowers, in multiple dimensions and the border spaces between them. In the representation of the ‘relaxation’ or dissolution of metaphysics, all fundamentals of the physical world are drawn into doubt, twisted and folded. Everything becomes unfixed, unfounded: from physical structures, spaces, and objects; personality, memory, and mental processes; to reality, physical laws, and possibility (and various combinations thereof). The liminal impossible, the uncanny and the fabulous are no longer the material of biblical miracles and the holy sublime, but are now the secularised content of digital distortions and modulations. The death of god and metaphysics in crisis thereby becomes inextricably linked to a new digital aesthetic regime and a new regime of the sensible – entailing the death of ‘art’. This typifies the digital aesthetic that I have here identified, an aesthetic that dynamically reveals a world rather than just representing it. Vattimo also makes this connection: The aesthetic experience of mass society, the giddy proliferation of ´beautifuls´ that make worlds, is likely to be significantly altered by the fact that even the unitary world of which the sciences believed they could speak has revealed itself to be a multiplicity of different worlds. It is no longer possible to speak of aesthetic experience as pure expressivity, as a purely emotive colouring of the world, as one did when the basic world was regarded as a given, open to scientific method of science. (Vattimo, 1992, p. 69)

I would argue that this aesthetic experience of which he speaks – a shift beyond expressionism to the synthesis of new naturalisms – only comes into full fruition in a digital regime of the perceptible, because only now can one adequately give an image of the multiplicity. While this might have been foreshadowed or suggested in analogue media with the crystal images and ‘irrational’ cuts of Deleuze’s analysis, it now bursts into full

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photo-realistic expression. As I have examined, the digital post-cinematic image accurately reflects the essential virtuality of our abstract thought processes due to their verisimilitude in presenting imaginative simulations of the world, and further generates a digital naturalism which juxtaposes against perceptual reality, even while it mimics its qualities. Digital naturalism as aesthetic impulse thus exhibits an ontological plasticity. This notion of an ontological plasticity breaks down the division between neural activity, the activity of the body, and the activity of particles and forces in the world. Aesthetic experimentation is the plastic activity of the brain (and body) to reform the world as we sense or perceive it. In the view of a Spinozan monism, there is no dichotomy between intension and extension; matter and the way we think about it are one substance (Spinoza, 2002). The same rule applies to quantum theory’s understanding of the role of the observer. Digital plasticity is therefore the full realisation of this dynamic, which entails the making-redundant of previous scientific and theological paradigms about the world, and the empowerment and freedom to remake the world outside of these mental bonds. For Catherine Malabou, plasticity entails an activity, an agency – the power to regenerate, reform, and transform – conceptually opposed to a flexibility associated with bending and yielding to ideological domination and with merely receiving rather than giving form. Plasticity is in essence strategic and active (like Vattimo’s strategic ‘weak-thought’). Flexibility is presented by Malabou as the passive mental condition of consumerist capitalist which actually conceals or suppresses plasticity to the extent that ‘we do not know what we can do with our brains’ (Malabou, 2008, p. 12). However, I suggest that now, even within late capitalism, there is ethical aesthetic experimentation with modes of existence and observations of reality that reflects and foments a true ontological plasticity where thought becomes more active, creative, and experimental.

Conclusion I have tried to establish the existence of a type of ‘digi-thinking’ analogous to Deleuze’s cinematic ‘camera-consciousness’, but specific to the materiality of digital image technology. This entails an examination of the essence of digital technology, which gives shape to us and our interactions with the world in as much as we use it in an instrumental mode (as memory prosthesis, of expression, of design). The first footnote to Heidegger’s essay The Question Concerning Technology outlines the difficulty in translating ‘essence’ from

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the German word ‘Wesen’. The translator states that: ‘it does not simply mean what something is’, but also ‘the way something pursues its course’, ‘comes to presence’, or ‘endures as presence’ (1977, p. 3). This essence is seen as digital screen media’s spiritual automatism, which draws us into a mode of conscious thought and awareness distinct from that given to us through analogue media. Digi-thinking is thus to be conceptualised as a mode of metaphysical consciousness that is affectively synthesised through the automatisms of digital visual technologies, and which permeates thought, perception, and activity. From Stiegler, via Derrida, we understand that technologies act as a pharmakon, with an enabling potential to simulate new realities, but also a harmful potential to limit and stultify thought. For the technology of film, in Deleuze’s analysis, the spiritual automatism of the screen image took these two clear directions: the movement-image drew us by affective allure into the power of representation – ‘from the beginning linked to the organization of war, state propaganda, ordinary fascism, historically and essentially’ (1989, p. 165); the time-image then confronted us with the un-representable – ‘the sensory-motor break makes a man a seer who finds himself struck by something intolerable in the world, and confronted by something unthinkable in thought’ (ibid, p. 169). Similarly, with digital media, we also see the two faces of the pharmakon. On the one hand, we have the tendency to ever greater systematisation and rationalisation in digital visualisation and database aesthetics – the figurative, linear relation of things in the philosophical tradition of the movement-image (which, for Stiegler and Cubitt, equates to increasing standardisation and homogenisation). On the other hand, we have the extension or relaunch of the regime of the time-image through the technology of the digital, in which its spiritual automatism gives us a new virtual ‘unthinkable’. Within the field of digital humanities, we now see developing new strands of enquiry which see this ethical power of the digital image – new affective strategies of resistance, new links and relations synthesised by the new organisations of information. In my analysis, and in the manner of Deleuze’s Nietzscheanism, the ethical power of the digital image is in its nihilism. As he states: For it is not in the name of a better or truer world that thought captures the intolerable in this world, but, on the contrary, it is because this world is intolerable that it can no longer think a world or think itself. The intolerable is no longer a serious injustice, but the permanent state of a daily banality […] Which, then, is the subtle way out? To believe not

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in a different world, but in a link between man and the world, in love or life, to believe in this as in the impossible, the unthinkable, which none the less cannot but be thought. (Deleuze, 1989, p. 170)

Deleuze proposes the irony that it is only through acknowledging the powerlessness of thought, or of belief, that we can think and believe anew. This powerlessness of thought must then entail a return to the body, to sensation and to the possibility of action. What is certain is that believing is no longer believing in another world, or in a transformed world. It is only, it is simply believing in the body. It is giving discourse to the body, and, for this purpose, reaching the body before discourses before words, before things are named. (ibid)

Thus, the aesthetic of the time-image addresses the body first, in ways that disrupt higher-level analysis. The digital image also, as extension and relaunch of the time-image, is first and foremost focused on affective intensity in a way that often make it seem mindless. However, in my address to these images, I look closely at the specific affections they yield to reveal their incitements to mindfulness. From cine-thinking, we move to a new digi-thinking, also cultivated passively within the body. I proposed in my introduction that the cinematic time-image is formally inclined to reflect and refract temporality due to the very linear materiality of photographic images chemically fixed on a roll of film. Film offered an affective experience of time – cinematic time – that could not have been foreseen before its invention, and Deleuze was enabled to think about temporal experience due to the material phenomenon of film. At the moment of writing the Time-Image, he could then only speculate on the affective experience of the digital-image (or ‘electronic-image’ as it was translated), as he had not yet fully experienced it. Now, 30 years on, we can engage more fully with the affective experience of the digital, and what emerges is not only temporality as fundamental to experience, but rather something more expansive in metaphysical resonance. Plasticity presents itself as the fundamental quality which is affectively revealed through the formal substance, image content, and processes of digital media. From ‘pure’ temporality, we move to plasticity as fundamental to the experience of the digital image, and this is due to the relative immaterial materiality of information as data. This is something that is revealed and actualised through digital images in a way that could not have occurred before their existence. Rather than a pure image of time, constantly escaping definition, we are confronted with

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a pure image of metaphysical flux. While theoretical physics is occupied in the work of putting name to this experience of quantum flux, the work of affective expression of the same quality is taken up by digital screen media. This work does not seek, however, to define and name, but rather to express various metaphysical unthinkables as affective confrontations to thought. In my analysis of the objects of a digital post-cinematic culture, I argue that what is expressed is a profoundly sceptical attitude to reality and corporeality, not in terms of perceptual realities as mental images but rather in actuality. These are images of virtuality that, due to their technical, automatic qualities, wrestle out of our conscious control. What is returned to again and again in Interstellar, Pina, Avatar, Source Code, Enter the Void, and Tron, as with D3D and projection-mapping practices, is visual experimentation with notions of the body, of matter, of sensation, and of the possibility of action within a reality which is defined only by its plasticity. Through these digital images, emerges an ethic of exploration in an unstable, virtual, and sublime world, where we confront thought’s impower, and yet, through a sense of wonder and awe, find this to be an empowering position.



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Rutherford, Anne, ‘Cinema and Embodied Affect’, Senses of Cinema, 25 (2003), http://sensesofcinema.com/2003/feature-articles/embodied_affect/ (accessed 4 April 2019). Sample, Ian, ‘Virtual Reality Used to Transfer Men’s Minds into a Woman’s Body’, The Guardian, 12 May 2010. Shaviro, Steven, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). Shaviro, Steven, ‘Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales’, Film Philosophy 14:1 (2010). Shaviro, Steven, Post-Cinematic Affect (Winchester, UK: O-Books, 2010). Shaviro, Steven, ‘What is the Post-Cinematic?’, blog post, 11 July 2011, http://www. shaviro.com/Blog/?p=992 (accessed 30 December 2017). Shearer, Rhonda Roland, Gregory Alvarez, Robert Slawinski, Vittorio Marchi, & Stephen Jay Gould, ‘Why the Hatrack is and/or is not Readymade’, Tout-Fait: The Online Marcel Duchamp Studies Journal, 1 December 2000, https://www.toutfait. com/why-the-hatrack-is-andor-is-not-readymade-with-interactive-softwareanimations-and-videos-for-readers-to-explore/ (accessed 30 December 2017). Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine, The Corporeal Turn: An Interdisciplinary Reader, (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2009). Sietz, Jay A., ‘Metaphor, Symbolic Play and Logical Thought in Early Childhood’, Genetic, Social, And General Psychology Monographs, 123:4 (1997) pp. 373-391. Sobchack, Vivian, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). Sobchack, Vivian, ‘“At the Still Point of the Turning World”: Meta-Morphing and Meta-Stasis’, in Meta Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quickchange, ed. Vivian Sobchak (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). Sobchack, Vivian, ‘Cutting to the Quick: Techne, Physis and Poiesis and the Attractions of Slow Motion’, in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Wanda Strauven (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006). Solms, Mark & Oliver Turnbull, The Brain and the Inner World: An Introduction to the Neuroscience of the Subjective Experience (New York: Other Press, 2002). Sontag, Susan, ‘A Century of Cinema’, in Where the Stress Falls (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002). Spinoza, Baruch, ‘Ethics’, in Spinoza: Complete Works, ed. by Michael L. Morgan, trans. Samuel Shirley, (London: Hackett Publishing Co., 2002). Springer, Joe & Steven Lisberger ‘Interview: Justin Springer and Steven Lisberger, co-producers of Tron: Legacy’, Den of Geek, 2 December 2010, https://www. denofgeek.com/movies/21185/interview-justin-springer-and-steven-lisbergerco-producers-of-tron-legacy (accessed 30 December 2017).

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Stephen, Karin (orig. 1922), The Misuse of Mind: A Study of Bergson’s Attack on Intellectualism, (London: Routledge, 2000). Stern, Daniel N., Forms of Vitality: Exploring Dynamic Experience in Psychology, the Arts, Psychotherapy, and Development (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Stiegler, Bernard, Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth & Georges Collins (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). Stiegler, Bernard, Technics and Time 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise, trans. Stephen Barker (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010). Stiegler, Bernard, Taking Care of Youth and the Generations, trans. Stephen Barker (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010). Stiegler, Bernard, The Decadence of Industrial Democracies, trans. Daniel Ross & Suzanne Arnold (Cambridge: Polity, 2011). Stiegler, Bernard, ‘Die Aufklarung in the age of Philosophical Engineering’, trans. Daniel Ross, in Digital Enlightenment Yearbook 2013, eds. M. Hildebrand et al. (Amsterdam: IOS Press, 2013). Stiegler, Bernard, The Re-Enchantment of the World: The Value of the Human Spirit vs. Industrial Populism (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014). Stintson, Elizabeth, ‘An Amazing Discovery: Andy Warhol’s Groundbreaking Computer Art’, Wired, 28 April 2014. Sutton, Damian, Photography Cinema Memory: The Crystal Image of Time (Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press, 2009). Talbot, Michael, The Holographic Universe: The Revolutionary Theory of Reality (London: Harper Collins, 1991). Taussig, Michael, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (Abingdon: Taylor and Francis, 1992). Thomas, Liz, ‘The Avatar Effect: Movie-goers feel depressed and even suicidal at not being able to visit utopian alien planet’, The Daily Mail, 12 January 2010. Thorne, Kip, The Science of Interstellar (New York: W. Norton & Company, 2014). Turvey, Malcolm, ‘Jean Epstein’s Cinema of Immanence: The Rehabilitation of the Corporeal Eye’, October, 83 (1998), pp. 25-50. Vahanian, Noelle, ‘A Conversation with Catherine Malabou’, Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, vol. 9, no. 1 (2008), pp. 1-13. Valiaho, Pasi, Mapping the Moving Image: Gesture, Thought and Cinema circa 1900 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010). Vattimo, Gianni, ‘From Utopia to Heterotopia’, in The Transparent Society, trans. David Webb (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992). Vertov, Dziga, Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O’Brien, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984). Virilio, Paul, The Vision Machine (Bloomington & London: Indiana University Press & British Film Institute, 1988).

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Index References to images are in bold. Titles of films are shown in Small Caps 3D (D3D) projection 214, 215 dance in 137–8 3D films 29fn18, 126, 215 Avatar 188 Cave Of Forgotten Dreams 144fn22, 152 Ebert on 23, 116fn4, 152 Hugo 153 Life of Pi 152 Pina: Dance, Dance Otherwise We Are Lost 139, 140–1, 141, 152 Adorno, Theodor, on antinomy 19fn9, 62 Frankfurt School 26 aesthetic dualism, and technologies 121–2 aesthetic theory, Vattimo on 210 affect and the body 50 and creativity 50 as synaesthetic reaction 49 systems, and cognitive functions 49 affect theory and the body 50 and film theory 50 of media 49 afro-futurism, Dery on 16–17 alternate realities, films 80fn3 analogue effects, Nolan 65 analogue image, demise of 131fn15 animation styles Waking Life 188 Waltz With Bashir 188 Aronofsky, Darren, Black Swan 138 art Adorno on 19fn9 applied, Rancière on 208 Benjamin on 203 and commerce 207 death of 202–3 Lyotard on 19fn9 will-to-art, Vattimo on 209 Barker, Stephen 68 Barker, Timothy Scott, Time and the Digital 11 baroque Ndalianis on 148–9 see also digital neo-baroque battle scenes films 145–6 kinetic images 145

Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers 146 Transformers 146 Bay, Michael, Transformers 19 battle scenes 146 Bazin, André 42, 191 Being as illusion 195 plasticity as 76 Benjamin, Walter on art 203 On the Mimetic Faculty 173 The Doctrine of the Similar 173, 184 The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproduction 32, 201 Bergson, Henri, on intuition 81 Besson, Luc, Lucy 99, 99 Billings, Lee 24 the body and affect 50 and affect theory 50 Bogost, Ian 19, 109, 164, 165 Bordwell, David 19, 28 Boucher, Marc 173 on kinetic synaesthesia 139fn19, 181 Boundaries, breakdown 98 see also liminality Braidotti, Rosi, on low-culture fiction genres 15 brain, as hologram 196–7 brain damage, and metamorphosis 186 Branagh, Kenneth, Thor 126 Braun, Marta 121 Bridges, Jeff 92 Brown, William 18, 84, 154 post-human realism 148 Supercinema 83, 87 Bukatman, Scott 14, 28 Cameron, James Avatar 12 digital 3D 188 digital naturalism 188–93 montrage 191 motion-capture 191, 192 Pandora Effect 193 suture concept 38, 160 Terminator 2: Judgment Day, morphing 127 The Abyss 216–17 Titanic 29

242  Campbell, Martin, The Green Lantern 126 Cassetti, Francesco 170, 171 CGI 29 emergence 125–7 films 125 simulated spaces 125–6 ‘Cinema 3’, need for 58 see also digital post-cinematic images cinema affective approaches 28–9 multiplex vs arthouse 13–14 and plasticity 74 as practice of philosophy 33–4 as ‘spiritual automaton’ 56 ‘train effect’, founding myth 9–10 see also digital cinema; digital post-cinema; futurist cinema ‘cinema of attractions’ 15, 18 ‘cine-thinking’ 31, 225 Cocteau, Jean, Orphée 97fn10 cognition embodied, and metaphor 175–6 and ‘passive synthesis’ concept 55 cognitive functions, and affect systems 49 Comolli, Jean Louis, Machines of the Visible 115fn2, 160 consciousness and creation of reality 195 embodiment/disembodiment 197 and kinaesthesia 132–3 projection of 160 Coogler, Ryan, Black Panther 16, 17 creativity and affect 50 and metaphor 174, 175 crystal images characteristics 103 Deleuze on 103 Cubitt, Sean 9, 10, 67, 191 on The Abyss 216–17 The Cinema Effect 83, 149, 216 The Practice of Light 86 cyberpunk films 15 Dalí, Salvador & Luis Buñuel, Un Chien Andalou 12 dance, in 3D 137–8 Deep Dream, image-generator 129–30 Deleuze, Gilles 19–20 ‘camera consciousness’ notion 32, 33, 34 on crystal images 103 film theory 31, 51–2 Hansen’s criticisms of 51 on images 103–4 movement-image 20, 32, 33, 51, 58, 64, 72, 73, 101, 117fn6, 177, 224 ‘passive synthesis’ concept 52, 54–5, 60 on recollection images 102 ‘spiritual automaton’ concept 52, 56 taxonomy of film images 42 ‘the brain is the screen’ 32

The Digital Image and Realit y

time-image 33, 42, 46, 48, 55, 55–6, 58, 64, 73, 101, 211 works Cinema 1: The Movement-Image 28fn16, 32, 52 Cinema 2: The Time Image 42, 52, 56, 58, 59, 63, 102, 103, 206, 225 Difference and Repetition 54 Proust and Signs 54 Deleuze, Gilles & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 52 Derrickson, Scott, Dr. Strange 85 Derrida, Jacques grammatology 67 Grammatology 211 Difference, and repetition 29–30 Enter The Void 107 ‘digi-thinking’ 31, 223 and mindfulness 225 see also ‘train-thinking’ digital aesthetic 73 emergence 28 digital cinema, Manovich on 22, 44 digital contours and post-human vision 87–8 Wood on 87 digital dance 136–43 digital effects, theorists 14 digital emergence, potential for 86–7 digital frisson 13, 15 acceptance of 116 digital frontier 81 digital images affective force of 114 ambivalence about 215–16 analogue pre-cursors 46, 97–8 Elsaesser on 84 formal dynamics 123–31 of metaphysical flux 83, 108 neural plasticity 187, 225 and reality 45, 60–4 as ‘signs of art’ 105 The Matrix 123 see also digital post-cinematic images digital naturalism, Manovich on 190–1 digital neo-baroque 148–51 characteristics 151 films 149 projection-mapping, example 150–1, 150 digital nihilism 30, 38–9, 200 of Enter The Void 106 and ontological plasticity 221–3 digital ontology, definition 82 digital post-cinema 18 kinetic images 144–5 writers on 83 digital post-cinematic images 12, 59–60, 63–4 definition 20 liminality 110–11 manifestations 21

Index

and reality 31 remaking of reality 185 digital screen culture, ubiquity 30 digital simulation, reality as 100–1 digital virtual reality and indexicality 43 meaning 42 dreams, and reality 176 Duchamp, Marcel 152 Eagling, Wayne 137–8 Ebert, Roger, on 3D films 23 Eisenstein, Sergei 201 Elderkin, Nabil, Welcome To Heartbreak, glitch art 129 Elliot, Simon, Falling Deep Inside 141–2 Elsaesser, Thomas on digital images 84 ‘The Return of 3D’ 15, 115fn2 152, 215 embodied simulation, Gallese and Guerra on 179–80 emergence 12, 48, 85-7, 108, 115 Emmerich, Roland, Stargate 126 emotion as affective synaesthetic resonance 183 as sentiment 183 enframing (Gestell) concept, Heidegger 62, 206 entertainment culture, and role of military technology 13 Epstein, Jean 42, 190 La Poésie de Aujourd’hui 181 on synaesthesia 181–2, 182 fabulation, and scientific discovery 27fn27 fascism, and Futurism 202 Faulkner, Keith, three syntheses of time 54 film theorists 28, 42, 49 film theory and affect theory 50 Deleuze 31, 51–2 films analogue to digital shift 44, 45 and ‘passive synthesis’ concept 55 with temporal distortions 102 films (list) 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick) 126 A Matter Of Life And Death (Powell & Pressburger) 98 Alien (Scott) 125 Aliens (Cameron) 16 Avatar (Cameron) 12, 38, 160, 188–93 Batman: The Dark Knight (Nolan) 65, 129 Black And White (Landis) 127 Black Panther (Coogler) 16, 17 Black Swan (Aronofsky) 138 Blade Runner (Scott) 16 Cave Of Forgotten Dreams (Herzog) 144fn22 152 Cloverfield (Reeves) 129

243 Contact (Zemeckis) 126 Dr. Strange (Derrickson) 85 Elysium (Blornkamp) 16 Enter The Void (Noé) 30, 57, 80, 89, 95, 105–6, 106–7 Eraserhead (Lynch) 98 Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (Gondry) 102, 187 Falling Deep Inside (Elliot) 141–2 Ghost In The Machine (Talalay) 94 Hugo (Scorcese) 153 Inception (Nolan) 57, 187 Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade (Spielberg) 127 Interstellar (Nolan) 12, 23–5, 64–7 Lawnmower Man (Leonard) 94, 126 Life Of Pi (Lee) 152 Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers (Jackson) 146 Lucy (Besson) 99, 99 Minority Report (Spielberg) 16 Mulholland Drive (Lynch) 102 Olympia (Reifenstahl) 215 Orphée (Cocteau) 97 Pina: Dance, Dance Otherwise We Are Lost (Wenders) 136, 152 Ringu (Nakata) 12, 193–8 Source Code (Jones) 12, 38, 57, 193–8 Spiderman (Raimi) 125 Star Trek: The Wrath Of Khan (Meyer) 127 Star Wars (Lucas) 125 Stargate (Emmerich) 126 Terminator 2: Judgment Day (Cameron) 127 The Abyss (Cameron) 216–17 The Big Swallow (Williamson) 10 The Black Hole (Nelson) 126 The Congress (Folman) 99, 100 The Green Lantern (Campbell) 126 The Matrix (Wachowski) 29, 92, 93, 123 The Mirror (Tarkovsky) 102 The Red Shoes (Powell & Pressburger) 97fn10, 137, 138, 139 The Wizard Of Oz (Fleming) 98 Thor (Branagh) 126 Titanic (Cameron) 29 Transcendence (Pfister) 99 Transformers (Bay) 19, 146 Tree Of Life (Malick) 109 Tron: Legacy (Kosinski) 37, 80, 89, 91, 92, 93, 105 Tron (Lisberger) 16, 37, 80, 90, 92, 105 Un Chien Andalou (Dalí & Buñuel) 12 Vertigo (Hitchcock) 98 Waking Life (Linklater) 188 Waltz With Bashir (Folman) 188 Welcome To Heartbreak (Elderkin) 129 Willow (Howard) 127 Wolfman (Siodmak) 127 see also under the director for more detail

244  Flanders, Judith 142–3 Flaxman, Gregory 33 The Brain is the Screen 32 Fleming, Victor, The Wizard Of Oz 98 Folman, Ari The Congress 99 poster 100 Waltz With Bashir 188 Frankfurt School 202 Futurism cinema 17 and fascism 202 Marinetti on 17, 18, 153 post-human 17 futurist cinema 15–16 Gabriel, Markus 165 Gallese, Vittorio & Michele Guerra, on embodied simulation 179–80 Gamez, David 176, 198 ‘Gargantua’ black hole, Interstellar 23–4, 24, 65, 66 gestalt psychology 178 glitch art artists 128 Batman: The Dark Knight 129 Cloverfield 129 examples 128–9, 129 Welcome To Heartbreak 129 Gondry, Michel, Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind 102, 187 grammatisation concept definition 68–9 digital 71 and reality 69 Stiegler 15fn7 68, 177, 204–5, 211–12, 213 ubiquity of 70 grammatology, Derrida 67, 211 Gunning, Tom 28 ‘cinema of attractions’ 15 Hadjioannou, Markos 86 From Light to Byte 84 Hansen, Miriam 28, 219 criticism of Deleuze 51 Heath, Stephen, Questions of Cinema 169 Heidegger, Martin enframing (Gestell) concept 62, 206 techné concept 35, 61 The Question Concerning Technology 61, 62–3, 206, 223–4 Herzog, Werner, Cave Of Forgotten Dreams 3D 144fn22 heterotopia, and utopia 204 Higgs Boson ‘god’ particle 36 Hitchcock, Alfred, Vertigo 98 hologram, brain as 196–7 Howard, Ron, WILLOW, morphing 127 Husserl, Edmund

The Digital Image and Realit y

Analyses Concerning Passive and Logical Synthesis 53 ‘passive synthesis’ 37, 52, 53 Steinbock on 53 illusion, Being as 195 images Deleuze on 103–4 moving 119, 120–1 see also crystal images; digital stereoscopic images; images; plastic image; postcinematic image; recollection images indexicality, and digital virtual reality 43 intuition, Bergson on 81 Jackson, Peter, Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers, battle scenes 146 Jeong, Sueng Hoon, Cinematic Interfaces 11, 171, 172 Jones, Duncan, Source Code 12, 57, 193–8 alternate quantum reality 194 consciousness, treatment of 197 poster 194 reality as simulation 195 Kant, Immanuel, 164-5 Critique of Pure Reason 33 kinaesthesia, and consciousness 132–3 kinetic effects 145 kinetic images battle scenes 145 digital post-cinema 144–5 kinetic synaesthesia 144 Boucher on 181 Kosinski, Joseph, Tron: Legacy 80 Kubrick, Stanley, 2001 A Space Odyssey, stargate sequence 126 Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By 176 Landis, John, Black And White, morphing 127 language and grammatisation 69 and mimesis 176–7 as technology 67, 211 Lee, Ang, Life Of Pi, 3D 152 Leonard, Brett, Lawnmower Man 94, 126 liminality digital post-cinematic images 110–11 films 109–10 metaphors of 109–10 Linklater, Richard, Waking Life 188 Lisberger, Steven TRON 80 Master Control Programme 93 Lumière brothers cinema’s founding myth 9–10, 116 as virtual reality 11, 121

245

Index

Lynch, David Eraserhead 98 Mulholland Drive 102 Lyotard, Jean Francois, on the sublime 19fn9, 62 McDowell, Alex, on narrative futurism 16 Malabou, Catherine ontological plasticity concept 74, 186, 223 Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing 74 The New Wounded 186 What Should We Do with Our Brain 74 Malick, Terence, Tree Of Life 109 malleability of memory 163–4 of reality 155–7 see also plasticity Manning, Erin 118, 144 Relationscapes 134, 142, 215 Manon, Hugh S. & Daniel Temkin, Notes on Glitch 128 Manovich, Lev on digital cinema 22, 44 on digital naturalism 190–1 Marey, Étienne-Jules, animated pictures 119, 120, 189–90 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, on Futurism 17, 18, 153 Marks, Laura 28 Massumi, Brian 28 Autonomy of Affect 183 Mead, Syd, on science fiction 16 media, affective theory of 49 Méliès, Georges 121, 122 memory, malleability of 163–4 metamorphosis, and brain damage 186 metaphor characteristics 175 and creativity 174, 175 and embodied cognition 175–6 and reality 82 Seitz on 184 Meyer, Nicholas, Star Trek: The Wrath Of Khan, time lapses 127 Michalek, David, Slow Dancing 142 slow-motion figures 142, 143 military technology, role in entertainment culture 13 mimesis Aristotelian 188 and language 176–7 and perception 173 and resemblance 172–4 mindfulness, and ‘digi-thinking’ 225 mirror neurons 174, 177, 178–9 Modell, Arthur 176, 178, 183 morphing Black And White 127 Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade 127

Terminator 2: Judgment Day 127 Willow 127 motion, affects of 135 movement-image 47, 55, 57, 60, 105 Deleuze 20, 32, 51, 64, 73, 101, 117fn6 224 MTV generation 28 Mullarkey, John 19, 20 Muybridge, Eadweard ‘Animal Locomotion’ 121 zoopraxiscope 118 Nakata, Hideo, Ringu 12 narrative futurism 16 Ndalianis, Angela 14 on neo-baroque 148–9 Nelson, Gary, The Black Hole 126 neo-baroque 12, 38, 118, 148-51 Noé, Gaspar Enter The Void 3 0, 57, 80 bright lights 96 CGI effects 94 difference and repetition 107 digital nihilism 106 disembodied consciousness 95–6 poster 95 review 94 third synthesis of time 106–7 time-image exploration 94, 105–6 Nolan, Christopher analogue effects 65 Batman: The Dark Knight 65 glitch art 129 Inception 57 Interstellar 12, 64–7 ‘Gargantua’ black hole 23–4, 24, 65, 66 ontology flat 109 digital 26, 43, 82, 84, 89, 167 of film 44 Nietzsche 101 and plasticity 76, 108, 187, 223 and digital nihilism 221–3 Malabou 74, 186, 223 Parisi, Luciana & Steve Goodman ‘affective ecology of allure’ 220–1 ‘Rhythmic Nexus’ 219–20 ‘passive synthesis’ concept and cognition 55 Deleuze 52, 54–5, 60 and film 55 Husserl 37, 52, 53 origins 52 passive absorption of 52–3, 53–4, 55 see also third synthesis perception and mimesis 173 and synaesthesia 182, 183

246  Pfister, Wally, Transcendence 99 pharmakon, ambivalence 71–2, 224 phenomenology alien 19, 155, 219 evolutionary 154-5 transcendental 32 Pisters, Patricia 187 The Neuro-Image 45, 46, 75, 98, 107 plastic image 59 plasticity as Being 76 characteristics 74, 75 and cinema 74 empowerment of 74 essence of 223 metaphysical 110 neural 186, 187, 225 and reality 76, 226 see also malleability; ontological plasticity post-cinema meaning of ‘post’ 21–6 Shaviro on 21 see also digital post-cinema post-human vision, and digital contours 87–8 Powell, Michael & Pressburger, Emeric A Matter Of Life And Death 98 The Red Shoes 97fn10, 137 Power, Pat, Animated Expressions 188 Pribram, Karl, on brain as hologram 196–7 proprioception 132, 154 aesthetics 135–6 corporeal 19, 132 kinetic 114 and subjectivity 135 Raimi, Sam, Spiderman 125 Rancière, Jacques 203, 204, 205 on applied art 208 realism Bazin 48 cinematic 45 direct 34fn24, 170 hyper- 84, 87 indirect 198 perceptual 122 photographic 43-4, 131 post-human 108 psycho- 188 spatial 83 social 214 reality creation of, and consciousness 195 and digital images 45, 60–4 and digital post-cinematic images 31 as digital simulation 100–1 and dreams 176 and grammatisation 69 malleability of 155–7 and metaphor 82

The Digital Image and Realit y

naïve view of 34–5, 164 and plasticity 76, 226 remaking of, in digital post-cinematic images 185 as simulation 195, 198 and technologies 35 see also realism; alternate realities; virtual reality recollection images characteristics 102 Deleuze on 102 Reeves, Matt, Cloverfield, glitch 129 Reifenstahl, Leni, Olympia 215 resemblance, and mimesis 172–4 Resnais, Alain 46 Richmond, Scott C. 14, 154 Cinema’s Bodily Illusions 135 Rodowick, David 45, 84, 101–2 The Virtual Life of Film 44, 83 Ross, Daniel 70–1, 205, 213 Rutherford, Anne 182–3, 183 Cinema and Embodied Affect 143–4, 180 Sachs, Curt 134 science fiction films 15 Mead on 16 scientific discovery, and fabulation 27fn27 Scorcese, Martin, Hugo, 3D 153 Scott, Ridley, Alien, CGI effects 25 Seitz, James E., on metaphor 184 sentiment, emotion as 183 Shaviro, Steven 28 on post-cinema 21 Post-Cinematic Affect 13fn3 ‘structure of feeling’ 13 Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine 109, 118, 145 ‘Consciousness:A Natural History’ 132 Siodmak, Curt, Wolfman, stop-motion animation 127 Skaggs, Liz 87 Slate magazine 16 Sobchack, Vivian 28 Meta-Morphing 127 Solms, Mark & Oliver Turnbull, The Brain and the Inner World 163 spatial realism 83–5 Spielberg, Steven Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade, morphing 127 Minority Report 16 Spinoza, Baruch, monism 223 spirit concept, Stiegler on 72 ‘spiritual automaton’ concept cinema as 56 definition 56 Deleuze 52 Steinbock, Anthony, on Husserl 53 stereoscopic images 133, 151–2 in art movements 152

247

Index

Stern, Daniel on synaesthesia 49–50 on vitality forms 114 Stiegler, Bernard 35, 202 grammatisation concept 15fn7, 68, 177, 204–5, 211–12, 213 on spirit concept 72 Technics and Time series 67, 212 on tertiary retention 69 stop-motion animation, Wolfman 127 subjectivity projection 172 and proprioception 135 suture concept 38, 167–72 Avatar 160 instability of 171 as interface 169, 171–2 meaning 167 purpose 167–8 Žižek on 167–8 Swinton, Tilda 85 synaesthesia Epstein on 181–2, 182 and perception 182, 183 Stern on 49–50 see also kinetic synaesthesia Talalay, Rachel, Ghost In The Machine 94 Talbot, Michael 196 Tarkovsky, Andrei, The Mirror 102 Taussig, Michael 173 techné concept, Heidegger 35, 61 technologies and aesthetic dualism 121–2 enablement frame and limiting structure 36 post-evolution appreciation of 47 and reality 35 technology, language as 211 tertiary retention, Stiegler on 69 third synthesis of time 54, 55, 58–9, 105 Enter The Void 106–7 and time-image 59 Thorne, Kip, The Science of Interstellar 23-5 time as divine space, in ancient Greece 32 Kant on 33 time-image 20, 32, 34, 46 Deleuze 33, 42, 48, 55, 55–6, 58, 64, 73, 101 Enter The Void 94 ethical 211 ethics of 101–2 films 207 and original regime of images 206–7 and the third synthesis 59

train, as technological event 11 ‘train effect’ founding myth of cinema 9–10, 116 and ‘train-thinking’ 31 ‘train-thinking’ and ‘train-effect’ 31 see also ‘digi-thinking’ Tsivian, Yuri 28 Turvey, Malcolm 182 universe as digital entity 82 holographic theory of 196 utopia, and heterotopia 204 Vattimo, Gianni 200, 203–4, 205, 222 on aesthetic theory 210 weak thought 221 on will-to-art 209 virtual embodiment, study 156 virtual reality projection to fourth dimension 155–6 and the ‘train effect’ 11 virtuality, analogue media 42–3, 97–8 see also digital virtual reality vitality forms definition 114 Stern on 114 Wachowski, Lana & Lilly, The Matrix 29, 92, 93 digital images 123 Warhol, Andy Debby Harry image 26 front cover of Amiga World 27 Wenders, Wim on 3D and dance 137 Pina: Dance, Dance Otherwise We Are Lost 136 3D projection 139 dancers 140–1 ‘The Great Leap Forward’ 136 Whissel, Kristin 14, 113fn1, 145fn23 Whitehead, Alfred N. 135 Williamson, James, The Big Swallow 10 Wood, Aylish 14, 110 on digital contours 87 Software, Animation and the Moving Image 87 World Building Media Lab 170 Zemeckis, Robert, Contact 126, 145 Žižek, Slavoj, on suture 167–8, 171, 182 zoopraxiscope 118