Fast Forward: The Future(s) of the Cinematic Arts 9780231850971

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Fast Forward

Fast Forward The Future(s) of the Cinematic Arts

Holly Willis

WALLFLOWER PRESS LONDON & NEW YORK

A Wallflower Press Book Published by Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2016 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Wallflower Press® is a registered trademark of Columbia University Press A complete CIP record is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978-0-231-17892-1 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-231-17893-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-231-85097-1 (e-book)

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Cover design by Elsa Mathern

Contents

Acknowledgments

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Introduction The State of Things

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Chapter 1 Past, Present, Future: Situating Post-Cinema

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Chapter 2 New Practices / New Paradigms

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Chapter 3 Live Cinema

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Chapter 4 Urban Screens / Screened Urbanism

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Chapter 5 Books to Watch, Films to Read, Stories to Touch: New Interfaces for Storytelling

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Chapter 6 Virtual Reality and the Networked Self

135

Conclusion

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Notes Bibliography Index

163 169 186

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Fast Forward is for Ginger, Quiller and Steve, who remind me of the value of the slow, the here and the now

Acknowledgments

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ast Forward: The Future(s) of the Cinematic Arts emerges directly from my experience in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California where, since 2006, I have had the good fortune to be in the presence of filmmakers, writers, animators, media designers and scholars imagining new directions for the cinematic. As such, the book is fully informed by conversations, meetings, lectures and other interactions with faculty and staff colleagues, as well as students. I want to especially highlight the participants in the Envisioning the Future Group, a cluster of faculty whose meetings had the quality of being nearly secret, the time stolen; at their best, these meetings prompted moments of both brilliance and joy. The school’s research labs have also been very generous in sharing ideas and knowledge, and in shaping a culture of exuberant, magnanimous exploration. I want to thank in particular Scott Fisher, Mark Bolas, Andreas Kratky, Alex McDowell, Gabriel Peters-Lazaro, Henry Jenkins, Marsha Kinder, Tara Mcherson, Jen Stein and Jeff Watson, who have all specifically helped me imagine the futures of the cinematic. John Seely Brown has served as a source of constant provocation and imagination, while Dean Elizabeth Daley has offered generous and ongoing support. The book also benefitted greatly from the input of students in my ‘From Cinema to Post-Cinema: History, Theory, Practice’ course in Fall 2015. In addition, this book would not exist without the creativity and generosity of the artists who have not only produced experiments in posthuman, post-cinematic art, but who have shared their ideas with me in conversations and interviews. Similarly, the discussions, abundant input, edting and unflagging encouragement of my colleague and partner, Steve Anderson, were essential in helping produce and shape the ideas presented here.

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Introduction: The State of Things

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e tell stories, and our stories tell us. They give us insights into who we are, where we are going and where we will be in the near future. Right now, a little more than fifteen years into a new century, we, and our stories, are in the midst of transformation. Or rather, we and our stories continue to be in the midst of transformation. Cinematic storytelling in particular is in flux. No longer confined to the movie theatre or home entertainment system, moving images are now found on cell phones and computers, inside cardboard viewers and high-tech goggles, on giant screens throughout major cities and ensconced in museums, galleries and arts spaces all over the world. Films are now rarely shot on celluloid film with cameras; they are instead captured digitally, as data, and that data is often wrangled by a team of experts who bring with them new forms of expertise and shifts in long-standing filmmaking workflows. Screenings no longer necessarily unspool within the darkened theatres of the past. They may instead entail engaging multiple screens while wandering in a gallery setting; or experiencing hybrid works that meld film and live performance; or parsing the permutations of a story while clutching a mobile device and traversing urban streets and squares; or donning a head-mounted display and stepping this way and that in a virtual story world. In short, a host of new storytelling experiences is emerging, expanding upon the forms, genres and paradigms that have governed international film and television industries for the past century. Cinema, the primary mode of storytelling for the twentieth century, is being reconfigured for the twenty-first century through a process of dismantling and a proliferation of screens, stories, performers and viewers, all of which are reconsidered and re-mobilised toward new ends. The dismantling and reconfiguration take place in conjunction with a host of other contemporary experiences that endeavour to invoke new forms of subjectivity in a culture transformed by computation and algorithms, databases and archives, sensors and surveillance. What is the subject in this culture, and how is it conjured, called

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forth and engaged by the myriad displays and interfaces that surround us? What roles do screen-based storytelling, immersive media environments and spatial navigation play in the dialogic intersections of stories and subjectivities? Further, is attention to the subject, the focus of enquiry for many film theorists of the last century, even an appropriate target of analysis for our current moment?1 Fast Forward: The Future(s) of the Cinematic Arts explores this time of transition, investigating a set of diverse media projects that together contribute to a redefinition of moving image storytelling. These are works that experiment with expressions of time and space, and, in the process, disassemble the temporal and spatial codes of classical Hollywood cinema, and the illusion of coherence that they engender. These are also works that manifest their experiments in spatial and temporal terms, disrupting the very apparatus or dispositif of cinema and its traditional modes of production, distribution and exhibition. The result of these gestures – reconfiguration, rearrangement, reinvention – will be the focus of this book. So, too, will be a consideration of the why: why are our stories changing? And what? If we and our stories are deeply imbricated, what can our stories tell us, and how might we tell different stories? I argue throughout this volume that the reasons for this rampant dismantling and reconfiguration include the need for new expressions and experiences of identity and subjectivity in a world that is increasingly mediated by networks and, as such, escapes our ability to perceive and comprehend it using tools and abilities of the past. It is a world characterised by an array of participatory media platforms and the ever-evolving habits of communication they produce; a world controlled by new forms of power, monitoring, tracking and surveillance; and a world in which to be human is to be culpable, to say the least; obsolete to say the worst; or posthuman, to gesture toward our suddenly seemingly mandatory ethical obligations in relation to the various sentient others around us. While many of the projects discussed in this book share multiple lineages – including the histories of video art, Net art, video games, expanded cinema, visual music, theatre and even painting – for my purposes, the cinematic apparatus remains central as both reference and point of departure. The cinematic, then, will serve as a fulcrum around which to organise, delineate and respond to these changes. Projects emblematic of the reimagining of cinema include those of artists such as Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Douglas Gordon and Doug Aitken, who are re-siting the cinematic in galleries, museums and even throughout the city; they include artists such as John Carpenter, Nonny de la Peña and Erik Loyer, who are exploring the role of the participant’s body and gesture in the experience of moving images; they include transmedia artists such as Lance Weiler, who are extending stories across multiple platforms and venues; they also include the innumerable artists now probing augmented and virtual reality, and beginning to develop a new storytelling vocabulary based on haptic, embodied experience rather than the linear logic of editing; they include a rekindled attention to storytelling through audio with artists deeply attuned to this often neglected aspect of story experience; and they include artists sifting through iterations of live cinema, fusing performance, sound and moving image. In all of these

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cases, artists are testing the boundaries of the cinematic to explore reconfigurations of storytelling experience, and in the process, helping elucidate the qualities and characteristics of life within a decentred global network.2 This volume is also inspired by the creative and often speculative experiments and investigations undertaken by diverse media-making collectives and research labs across the United States. These efforts include the enquiries and projects at the intersection of data and research undertaken by the Office of Creative Research, with Ben Rubin, Jer Thorp and Mark Hansen; permutations of gestural interaction and collaborative interfaces crafted by Oblong Industries, founded by John Underkoffler; and the ongoing investigations of the body, media and interaction undertaken by Golan Levin’s Studio for Creative Inquiry. What are the questions driving this creative research and critical practice? What kinds of projects are emerging? And what do the storytellers, artists and designers involved in this process have to say about their investigations? Given both this specificity to story, cinema and practices of research, and the fact that change continues to unfold all around us, this study offers a snapshot, capturing some facets of a moment as storytelling forms morph and change. Context Fast Forward joins a collection of several other books published in the last decade dedicated to understanding the shift from traditional filmmaking techniques to digital filmmaking, and to parsing the larger philosophical context, and consequences, of this movement. These include Markos Hadjioannou’s From Light to Byte: Toward an Ethics of Digital Cinema (2012), in which the author bluntly asks, ‘What is cinema?’ His answer involves contemplating the myriad ramifications of the technological shift as digital media replaces celluloid film, altering in the process aspects of the production, distribution, exhibition and reception of moving images. The author also asks, ‘What is different in the way digital movies depict the world and engage with the individual?’ (2012: ix). What is different in how they engage with individuals? With these questions, Hadjioannou deftly captures precisely the fundamental nature of the shift. However, he goes further, delineating some of the qualities of a new form of cinematic storytelling when he writes, ‘The viewer gains the potential ability to roam around the image as if it were navigable’ (2012: 106); with this statement, he is attributing a form of passage to the image, one that both underscores the pervasiveness of the spatial metaphor and presages the navigable qualities of virtual and augmented reality. Indeed, Hadjioannou is most compelling when he offers inventive modes for considering the digital image at this liminal moment. He explores ‘the digital as an image of thought which reconfigures understandings of the movie image on the basis of ethical concerns raised with regard to the individual’s existential positioning in the world’ (2012: 36; emphasis in original). More specifically, he writes convincingly of the power of the space created by filmmaker Lars von Trier in his film Dogville (2003), highlighting the fact that by eliminating architectural structures and a clearly understood setting, the

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director ‘causes the image to become a plane of interactions between the characters’ (2012: 134). Hadjioannou here underscores a shift in attention from representation as it is generally understood to reckoning with the relational. He goes on to explore time, and, as with his chapter on space, finds a way to think beyond the technological to an understanding of the event and its potentialities. In reference to both time and space, the author discerns opportunities to leave behind indexicality as the marker of ethical authenticity, positing instead nuanced ways to understand ‘the reality of mediating technologies’ (2012: 176). Franco Casetti comes to a similar conclusion in his exploration of the future of cinema in The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come (2015). He does so initially by looking to the past and citing theorists as varied as Béla Belázs, Ricciotto Canudo and Blaise Cendrars, and making use of their often prescient wisdom regarding the ‘cinema to come’ before it was even cinema as we know it. He pairs this rich, early history with the work of contemporary theorists and historians, citing Mary Ann Doane, Raymond Bellour and Jacques Rancière, among others. To organise his exploration of possible cinematic futures, Casetti uses the words relocation, relics/icons, assemblage, expansion, hypertopia, display and performance, demonstrating how shifts in film production and audience reception signal not the death of cinema but its redefinition. The result is a broad context for understanding contemporary shifts, with specific attention to the myriad possibilities as cinema is activated within new sites and spaces; as it forms a dialogue with contemporary art; as spectators take it and remake it; and as attendance becomes a kind of performance, with spectators enjoying a sense of tactility with images that brings us full circle to the flip books at cinema’s origins. Casetti captures an essential trait of contemporary cinema, namely its mutability, and his taxonomy offers a fruitful parsing of cinema as it is manifested in fluctuating forms of practice: distribution becomes exchange; exhibition becomes siting; reception becomes performance; seeing becomes touching. Other writers focus on the ontological specificity of digital cinema. In The Orientation of Future Cinema: Technology, Aesthetics, Spectacle (2013), for example, Bruce Isaacs asks, ‘Is the image created out of digital code cinematic?’ (2013: 24; emphasis in original) thereby entering a decade-long discussion dedicated to understanding the specificity of the digital image elaborated by theorists as diverse as David Bordwell (2006) and D. N. Rodowick (2007). Isaacs argues that we need a new vocabulary for explaining ‘the unique power of images in our culture’ (2013: 61), a power that is now, because it is digital, fundamentally different than it was in the past. To begin to build that vocabulary, Isaacs suggests that we consider the digital image in two new ways: as an ‘itinerary’ and as an ‘image-in-itself ’. He intends these notions to take us beyond the movement-image and the time-image theorised by Gilles Deleuze, and he invites us to consider this new image as ‘not purely denotational, nor purely representational’ (2013: 68), but instead, as synthetic and uniquely able to fascinate. To illustrate this idea, Isaacs points us to an apt scene: ‘When Nolan’s Parisian streetscape in Inception transforms before our eyes, we contemplate the image not of the city, not of a Paris

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we may have visited, but of cinema and its capacity to astonish the senses’ (2013: 69). This, says Isaacs, is what contemporary cinema can and should do: offer spectators the opportunity to contemplate a synthesis of technology and design in a state of astonishment. Steven Shaviro has similarly attended to the impact of contemporary cinema, using the term ‘post-cinema’ to designate this new realm in his long essay, ‘Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales’ (2010a).3 Overall, Shaviro assesses the impact of digital technologies and the emergence of what he calls ‘a different media regime’ (2010a: 2) with attention to effects, evocations and structures of feeling. Rather than tracing the genealogy of digital cinema, he instead explores the ways in which specific digital works are expressive, productive and indicative. He writes, ‘These works are symptomatic, in that they provide indices of complex social processes, which they transduce, condense and rearticulate in the form of what can be called, after Deleuze and Guattari, “blocs of affect”’ (ibid.). He goes on to argue that these works are ‘machines for generating affect’ (2010a: 3) and as such, we can imagine them playing a key role in the construction of contemporary subjectivity. He writes, ‘Just as the old Hollywood continuity editing system was an integral part of the Fordist mode of production, so the editing methods and formal devices of digital video and film belong directly to the computing-and-information-technology infrastructure of contemporary neoliberal finance’ (ibid.). Shaviro develops an intriguing argument about the role of investment and emotion, but overall, his attention to the nexus of media forms, contemporary culture and subjectivity illuminates a pathway for considering the fragmentation of the cinematic as it participates in the restructuring of subjectivity for new needs. He also situates cinema within the context of neoliberalism, highlighting its continued imbrication within infrastructures of power. The term ‘post-cinema’ is perhaps most associated with Raymond Bellour’s work on intermedia and video installation. While many American critics have used the advent of video and digital technologies to bemoan the death of film, Bellour has for many years instead queried and valorised the transformation of cinema as it mingles with television and computers, as it moves from theatres to museums and galleries, and as it undergoes ‘an unprecedented expansion of intermediate operations’ (2012: 10). He has described and analysed ‘the explosion and dispersal’ of cinema, as well as the ways in which it has been ‘redistributed, transformed, mimicked and reinstalled’ (2008: 406). Indeed, Bellour is fascinated by the resultant ‘confusion’ and ‘impurity’, and much of his work has explored the efforts of artists who share his interest in this movement among forms – cinema, video, language, painting – and between images, the still and the moving image, the freeze-frame and the blurred image. Rather than isolating the specificities that delimit media forms, Bellour is intrigued by the connections, arguing that the greatest attribute of video has been its ability to open passageways, and to encourage incorporation and transformation. This interest in the ‘impurity’ of media forms serves as the foundation for a series of recent texts dedicated to exploring the intersections of various media forms. Within

INTRODUCTION

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cinema studies, for example, Impure Cinema: Intermedial and Intercultural Approaches to Film (2014), edited by Anne Jerslev and Lúcia Nagib, represents this desire to query the concept of impurity. This collection of essays borrows its title from an article written by André Bazin in 1951 entitled ‘Pour un cinéma impur: défense de l’adaptation’. While Jerslev and Nagib acknowledge that the first translation of Bazin’s essay into English in 1967 with an altered title – ‘In Defence of Mixed Cinema’ – blunted the impact of the word ‘impurity’, they defend the use of the term with the goal of ‘applying it, on the one hand, to cinema’s interbreeding with other arts and media, and on the other, to its ability to convey and promote cultural diversity’ (2014: xviii). The anthology maps a series of cinematic projects that merge with other media forms, examining tensions and overlaps, and perhaps more importantly, insisting on the necessity to historicise intermediality. Similarly, a flurry of publications and conference events examine the concept of intermedia. Ágnes Pethö’s Cinema and Intermediality: The Passion for the In-between (2011) addresses an array of intersections uniting cinema and the other arts, including painting and literature, but she is most interested in parsing the passage or qualities of the in-between. Pointedly, in her opening, she queries the reticence among other film scholars to engage with intermediality, wondering, perhaps rhetorically, why the blurring of boundaries among disciplines implicit in the employment of semiotics and cognitive theories within the context of cinema is deemed acceptable, while the hybridity and concomitant interdisciplinarity of intermediality is not (2011: 24). It is axiomatic to point out that cinema is bolstered as a discipline when it is deemed relevant within established humanities contexts, but suffers when its boundaries blur, ‘impurity’ itself acknowledging the problem. Other enquires related to intermediality emerge from the perspectives of theatre and performance. The work of the Intermediality and Performance Research Group at De Montfort University in the UK, for example, is engaged in a series of research projects at the intersection of media and performance, while the Intermediality in Theatre and Performance working group, which was founded under the umbrella of the International Federation for Theatre Research in 1998, has published two important texts: Intermediality in Theatre and Performance, edited by Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt (2006) and Mapping Intermediality in Performance, edited by Sarah Bay-Cheng, Chiel Kattenbelt, Andy Lavender and Robin Nelson (2010). While the work engaged in and studied here includes moving images, the orientation is rooted in the concerns of theatre and performance. However, as is perhaps very clear already, the boundaries among disciplines are blurring, and there is much to be gained in learning from diverse perspectives.4 While the shift from analogue to digital filmmaking within the film industry has in some ways covered over these shifts – we still talk about ‘films’ when referring to feature-length moving image entertainment, for example – the move toward the postcinematic requires an imaginative reconfiguration of not only the words we use but the conceptual foundation from which we work. Garrett Stewart suggests as much in the

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opening of Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema: ‘At least since the 1995 centenary of motion pictures, and more spottily before, we have watched a filmic medium’s original serial imprint yielding to computerized adjustments at every level, from the generation to the editing of projected images’ (2007: 2). He continues, ‘Increasingly, the temporal transit (mechanical) of the image, frame by frame, gives way to its temporal transformation (electronic) within the frame’ (ibid.). This shift alone – from transit to transformation – bears scrutiny, and Stewart’s study offers a careful reading of films that embody this shift. As is already apparent, I too sense that the transformations taking place need to be addressed, not only in our terminology, but in imagining the potentials of the cinematic in this new configuration. Dale Hudson and Patricia Zimmerman take up this task explicitly in Thinking Through Digital Media: Transnational Environments and Locative Places (2015), which opens by echoing Stewart, noting that digital media objects are mutable, malleable and responsive, and as a result, produce different sorts of relationships between the maker or designer and an audience. Building on and responding to these diverse and insightful investigations of contemporary cinema, this volume draws together a deliberately eccentric range of media art practices, each of which speaks to different aspects of our current moment of transition. Rather than focusing on narrative feature filmmaking, or one particular alternative to that form, this study instead looks toward the myriad permutations of the cinematic. This book, then, is explicitly devoted to exploring media manifestations of both the post-cinematic and the posthuman as a critical and an ethical imperative. As such, this investigation is cheerfully unbounded by both genre and media platform, tolerating incongruity in the interests of exploiting the insights offered by stark juxtaposition. A Manifesto and a Report Fast Forward is also both a manifesto and a report. It is a manifesto in the sense that it makes a passionate plea for the continued use of the word ‘cinematic’ to characterise the proliferation of media-based storytelling formats and platforms within a context of blurred boundaries and new territories. Why retain ‘cinematic’? The word comes from cinematograph, the term coined by the Lumière brothers in the 1890s to describe the box that served as both camera and projector for making and showing movies. As the devices for capturing and sharing images proliferate, often – like the cinematograph – combining disparate possibilities within a single device, we return to the multipurpose machine at the beginnings of cinema. Giuliana Bruno offers another reason to retain the term. As she has pointed out, the word ‘cinema’ is also derived from the Greek word kinema, meaning both motion and emotion. ‘Film moves, and fundamentally “moves” us, with its ability not simply to render affects but to affect materially, in transmittable forms and intermediated ways’ (2015: np). Cinema continues to move us, more so now perhaps than ever.

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We commonly use ‘cinematic’ to refer to the majesty of large-scale moving images. ‘Cinematic’ often means big, awesome, magnificent. However, after the transition from analogue to digital technologies and the emergence of a host of new tools and platforms for making, disseminating, sharing and experiencing cinema, we need to redefine the term, and in the process reimagine the roles cinema can play in helping us understand new experiences and articulations of cinematic space, time, story and audience. The redefinition conjures a post-cinema. If we take this challenge, ‘post-cinematic’ can expand to refer to deeply embodied experiences that engage us not only through sight and sound but through our entire bodies; it can expand to encompass the design of richly detailed virtual worlds that become environments not for telling stories but for creating the conditions for stories to emerge; it expands to mean robust participatory situations in which the audience helps create the artwork, one that might be generative and dynamic, unfolding in real time; it expands to mean experiences that move beyond the screen to become immersive, pervasive, mobile and playable. In this redefining, ‘post-cinematic’ recalibrates our understanding of time and space, identity and agency, helping us navigate through a world characterised by instantaneity and multiple layers of reality. In short, for my purposes in this volume, ‘post-cinematic’ expands to provoke a new definition: the post-cinematic brings the art and practice of crafting meaningful experiences of story, information and knowledge into attunement with contemporary culture. As we engage – and are engaged by – a networked culture, our post-cinematic artworks help bring to the fore the conditions of networked existence, too often occluded or ignored. They help call attention to the networked body, networked space and networked time, and, in the gap between what was and what could be, invite agency and attention despite the disenfranchisement, distraction and amnesia of contemporary culture. Fast Forward is a report in the sense that, rather than predict the future, it instead offers a snapshot of a particular moment in the flux of cinema as the apparatus – the entire ‘arrangement’ of cinema – morphs in divergent directions. While the book’s title hints at a timeline and even a teleology, it also references the past and an era in which ‘fast forwarding’ specified the accelerated movement of magnetic tape in order to skip forward, to get to the next thing, along a linear line. ‘Fast Forward’ also echoes ‘feed-forward’, a term in computing that reminds us of the pervasiveness of networked systems and the call to imagine human experience in relationship to a world now characterised as sentient.5 ‘Fast forward’ also gestures toward the claim that in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, we are experiencing an unprecedented acceleration of the rate of change, an acceleration experienced in Western culture primarily through the swift comings and goings of technologies and devices. Because one of the core tenets of this book argues that we are also in the midst of a cultural reconfiguration of time and space, such that they are multiple and mutable, Fast Forward serves as an appropriate title, capturing the myriad layers of temporality and acknowledging as well a diversity of media formats.

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Arts-Based Research As both manifesto and report, the book emerges from the rich context of the research labs within the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. The school is home to more than a dozen research initiatives, each dedicated to exploring the futures of cinema, storytelling and what faculty member Mark Bolas dubs ‘storymaking’ within the context of a major research university. One of the challenges for art and design programmes within research universities is that they are often expected to conform to notions of research based on scientific enquiry. Or they may be expected to fall within the boundaries and practices of qualitative research undertaken within the humanities. However, in the context of exploring the futures of the cinematic, investigators are imagining research that is arts-based, practice-based and, in some cases, based in the iterative methods of design research, with one goal being to query what role this form of research might play in producing new knowledge. Since 2000, the number of university programmes centred on practice-based research in the areas of art and design has grown, as have the attempts to codify, define and re-define notions of ‘practice’ and ‘research’ within a scholarly setting.6 This study adds to these redefinitions, taking as its topic an elaboration of research in what I will characterise as speculative spaces. The term ‘speculative spaces’ is inspired by the work of Nigel Thrift and reoriented in this context to refer to a form of research curiously reimagined, research engaged with cinematic poetics understood broadly and research deeply situated. Thrift’s notion of non-representational theory argues that human thinking and cognition only account for a small portion of how we know, and that indeed, we need to be attentive to modes of understanding distributed across the body. The term ‘speculative spaces’ gestures toward this form of knowing and also designates a practice that is responsive to what is being called the ‘spatial turn’ (see Thrift 2006; Warf and Arias 2014), and it is performative. It is research that understands speculative spaces as fundamentally networked, embedded in layerings of virtual and material, which we engage through a form of conceptual blending. These speculative spaces have begun to emerge as artists and designers push against the boundaries, practices, habits and expectations of research that have characterised the activity for two centuries, arguing for the benefits of imagination and creativity. Artists and designers are not alone in their dissatisfaction with traditional definitions of research. As they struggle to articulate the merits of creativity, process and even wonder as integral attributes of legitimate research practices over and against what they perceive to be an all-too instrumental insistence on prediction and control, scientists, too, have sought redefinition, as is evident in the impact of The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies (1994). Co-written by Michael Gibbons, Camille Limoges, Helga Nowotny, Simon Schwartzman, Peter Scott and Martin Trow, the book distinguishes between two modes of research. Mode 1 is deemed disciplinary; Mode 2 is understood to be transdisciplinary. Mode 1 is seen to be homogeneous in nature and hierarchical in

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structure while Mode 2 is considered heterogeneous, heterarchical and transient. In short, Mode 1 preserves a form of scientific research from the past, while Mode 2 advocates for a mode much friendlier to those in the humanities and looks toward an interdisciplinary future. This is all to say that the desire to reimagine research is not specific to artists and designers, nor to the humanities. Nor is it necessarily a new direction. Indeed, in light of this quest for redefinition with attention to the roles of contemporary art and design, Helga Nowotny argues in the foreword to The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts (2011) that we appear to be returning to the Renaissance and its cheerful acceptance of art-based research. She writes, ‘To put research (back) into the arts, to (again) make visible and explicit the function of research in the arts and in the act of “creating knowledge” (Seggern et al. 2008) is a truly ambitious undertaking, because it takes up a vision and a project that originated in the Renaissance. After centuries of separation, it promises to close a loop’ (2011: xix). Rather than closing a loop, I will argue that the tactical and ongoing remaking of research as it is taken up through the practices of artists and designers performs a continual opening in a movement that can only be understood as processual, active and performative, and a movement designed specifically to catalyse spaces for the speculative. I use ‘spaces for speculation’ to designate spaces that are only tentatively and temporarily bounded, spaces that are in motion and spaces that are better characterised as what Sean Cubitt calls the phase of the vector; he writes that in our current culture we are addressed ‘no longer as termini but as media: as people who make sense, but only as nodes in interweaving trajectories of signification’ (2005: 91). He continues, ‘It is no longer a matter of recognition, of deciphering what is already encoded. Rather it is a matter of reinterpreting, of adding a new spin to a trajectory that has not yet realized itself ’ (ibid.). Taken as a characterisation of not necessarily a research method so much as a research stance, then, speculative spaces also conjure a mode uniquely aligned with our current culture, which, too, is characterised by mobility, navigation and a continual unfolding. To offer a definition, then, to accompany the post-cinematic: arts-based research is research carried out by scholar/practitioners – including but not limited to artists, designers, curators, architects, writers and musicians – who, through their practice, are able to contribute new concepts, methods and models in order to participate in the production of original knowledge. Arts-based research recognises the diversity of methods appropriate to research; the plurality of objects of study; and the array of values associated with these diverse research methods and objects. Arts-based research is also by nature interdisciplinary; it often involves close collaboration with partners from diverse fields, and practitioners must therefore be attuned to diverse methods and adept in communication and modes of collaboration. Arts-based research within the context of USC’s School of Cinematic Arts also recognises the power of critical making, understanding that a robust research question may arise through practice as much as practice may be used to pursue a particular

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research question.7 The School of Cinematic Arts’ arts-based research is profoundly creative; it acknowledges the power of the imagination, tacit knowledge and embodied knowing. With regard to topics, this arts-based research is dedicated to the exploration of emerging forms of media-based storytelling; user experience; and emerging tools and technologies. Finally, the School’s arts-based research is rooted in critical theory, framing the research process within the context of power, emancipation and a deep questioning of the ethical and ideological implications of knowledge and change within the realm of the cinematic. The labs specific to the School of Cinematic Arts include the following: R5 Ļ5 )#&5(0#,)('(.&5 #5 65/(,5#,.),-5)..5#-",5(5 (5.#(:5 the lab investigates context- and location-specific mobile and spatial storytelling, as well as ambient storytelling made possible by catalysing communicative agents – such as the sensors in a building – that may not traditionally be recognised as partners in the generation of narrative. MEML’s projects have included a collaboration with Steelcase to imagine the workplace of the future and another with BMW to explore ambient narrative in the context of a car and driving. MEML is also a partner in the Emergent Cities working group, dedicated to exploring urban experience as it is increasingly mediated. R5 Ļ5 (-.#./.5 ),5,.#05"()&)!#-65&535(&&5#&&65,#(!-5.)!.",5ŀ&'5 and game industry artists with computer and social scientists to study and develop immersive media for military training, health therapies, science education and more. ICT is also home to the MxR Lab, which, under director Mark Bolas, is dedicated to improving the ways in which humans and computers interact, with specific attention to the boundaries between the virtual and the real. ICT/MxR Lab projects include investigations of ways to increase the field of view for headmounted displays; techniques for enabling natural walking within an immersive virtual environment through redirection; and the rapid generation of personalised avatars and virtual humans. The work with virtual humans centres on designing VR experiences to aid war veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress. R5 Ļ5,.#05 #5(5"0#)/,&5&."5(.,65#,.535 ,#(.#(5).-#-65 serves as an incubator for designing tools and experiences that borrow from the entertainment industry to address problems in behavioural science, medicine and public health. Recent projects include Brain Architecture (2015), a board game used to demonstrate the impact of genes, environment and behaviour on children, and VR-based sensorimotor play therapies used in rehabilitation. R5 Ļ5,(-#(.5 #5 65#,.535.05
(,-)(65-/**),.-5(5&.#5,(!5) 5 fugitive research, emphasising low-resource, high-impact experiments that embrace the unstable and transitory nature of media, technology and humanity. The Lab is home to the Hypercinemas Research Group, exploring immersive media and emerging modes of image capture, including aerial, high-dynamic range, ultra-high definition and high-frame rate cinematography.

INTRODUCTION

11

R5 Ļ5 '5 (()0.#)(5 65 #,.5 35 ,35 /&&,.)(65 2*&),-5 2*,#'(.&5 forms of game design in cultural realms including art, science, politics and learning. GIL projects include a suite of games titled Collegeology dedicated to creating playful ways to explore the college application process for students who might not normally be exposed to college as a possible path after high school. The GIL is also home to Fullerton’s own project, Walden, an adaptation and reimagining of Henry David Thoreau’s book as virtual space that not only recreates the Walden Pond environment through four seasons, but embodies the thematics of the book in the mechanic of the game. R5 Ļ5 &,5 65 #,.5 35 ,5 ",-)(65 2*&),-5 (15 ),'-5 ) 5 -")&,&35 publishing aimed at easing the current economic crisis faced by many university presses while also serving as a model for media-rich digital publication. R5 Ļ5 "(!5 %#(!5 #5 65 &5 35 ,'35 !(65 )(/.-5 ,-,"5 )(5 storytelling techniques most effective for fostering positive social and environmental change, with a focus on demonstrating the power of drama to communicate important information. R5 Ļ5(.,.#('(.5"()&)!35(.,65&535(5#&&#'-65-,0-5-55,#!5.)5 the entertainment industry, bringing together executives from the film and game sectors, consumer electronics and technology to explore the future of production, distribution and consumption of entertainment media. Current areas of interest for ETC include the development of guidelines for tools and processes for cloudbased content creation and production; explorations of ultra high definition image capture; and the business aspects related to VR. R5 Ļ5),&5/#&#(!5 #5 65&535
&25 )1&&65'*&)3-51),&5/#&#(!5 as a design practice to both prototype possible futures while also honing and refining world building itself as a practice (see chapter two for an articulation of the world building process). Recent projects for the WBML include Dry City 2035, a fictional world designed to allow an interdisciplinary team to speculate on a future in which water has become privatised. With the Leviathan Project, the lab explored potential the expansion of Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan young adult novel trilogy as a platform for developing augmented reality and virtual reality experiences of emergent worlds. R5 Ļ5 #5 (-.#./.5 ),5)#&5"(!65&535 #"&53&),65*,)/-5
-5(5 documentaries designed to promote specific causes. Recent projects include a series of video interviews for the Motion Picture Association of America describing jobs in the entertainment industry to inform young people of career opportunities and a PSA made in collaboration with Save the Children to highlight the significance of early childhood education. R5 Ļ5 /(.5 65/(,5."5&,-"#*5) 5(5%#(!,65#-5."5(1-.5,-,"5 lab at the School of Cinematic Arts and explores virtual reality production using Jaunt cameras and cloud-based tools and technology.

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Together, these labs work toward an expanded definition of the cinematic, pursuing not only new modes of experience and new ways of telling stories, but emerging applications for cinematic experience in the realms of health, science, business, publishing, politics and more. Redomainings One of the inspirations for the research practices within the School of Cinematic Arts comes from a process that activates research through disparate disciplines in a process of ‘redomaining’, a term borrowed from W. Brian Arthur and his book The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves (2009). Arthur distinguishes between innovation and a process in which a technology is instead ‘domained’ differently: This distinction is important. Innovations in history may often be improvements in a given technology – a better way to architect domes, a more efficient steam engine. But the significant ones are new domainings. They are the expressing of a given purpose in a different set of components, as when the provision of power changed from being expressed in waterwheel technology to being expressed in steam technology. (2009: 73)

In a perhaps overly literal rethinking of this term, I am intrigued by the ways in which one domain or discipline may be creatively reimagined through the needs and desires of another. This process also resonates with the notion of ‘boundary objects’, as articulated by Susan Leigh Star (2010), denoting objects or concepts that support different interpretations when moved from one intellectual community to another while still retaining their core meaning. Both concepts – redomaining and boundary objects – serve as productive tools for unsettling habits and proclivities that become ingrained over time within disciplines, as well as a means for sidestepping the common binary distinction between scientific research and creative production. Through an attentive exploration of the evolving workflows, paradigms and constituent elements of the cinematic arts, I hope to demonstrate a set of unique and compelling alignments that in turn situate and elaborate a research practice for art and design. In short, one of the overriding questions guiding this project asks what practice-based programmes in art and design can borrow or learn from the activities of a research community dedicated to the future of the cinematic arts? Why Now? In a 1981 essay, Bruce Archer defines design research ‘as a form of systematic inquiry performed with the goal of generating knowledge of the form/embodiment of – or in – design, composition, structure, purpose, value and meaning of human-made things and systems’ (quoted in Bonsiepe 2007: 27). In 1993, Christopher Frayling

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13

published Research in Art and Design and parsed design research into three categories: i) theoretical-conceptual research into (or about) design; ii) methodological-instrumental research for design; and iii) experimental-hypothetical research through design. And in 2007, Henk Borgdorff, after carefully delineating diverse terms, adds this definition, focusing on art: Art practice qualifies as research when its purpose is to broaden our knowledge and understanding through an original investigation. It begins with questions that are pertinent to the research context and the art world, and employs methods that are appropriate to the study. The process and outcomes of the research are appropriately documented and disseminated to the research community and to the wider public. (2007: 8)

In each of these cases, art and design are asked to accommodate research, rather than the other way around, and the emphasis in each of these delineations is on clarity and distinctions. However, so much of the work many of us do within the still rather narrowly construed disciplines of academic institutions has begun to blur and overlap. This is due in no small part to the fact that interdisciplinarity is increasingly a requirement given the complexity of the issues before us. It is also due to the prevalence of technology in art, design and media studies, and the ways in which it, too, tends to cross disciplinary boundaries and invite collaboration. Therefore the first answer to the question ‘Why now?’ is that we cannot overlook the pressures placed on art and design to redefine research to account for the specific forms of knowledge they produce; nor is there any escape from calls to codify design research in more traditional forms in an attempt to legitimise it. However, I believe there is room for more poetic articulations. The second response to ‘Why now?’ has to do with formulating a poetic response to the spaces around us. Our world is changing rapidly as an information age transforms fundamental ideas related to time and space, cognition and identity, and communication and participation. The practices of gathering, sharing, analysing and visualising information have impacted not simply consumers but most human acts, from walking in the city to reading the newspaper. They have also disrupted how we understand the basic frameworks we use to order the world. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh captures this impact, writing in 2002 that ‘the change in media culture has been so violent and so extraordinary, that people seem to be floating and slightly disoriented in figuring out the institutional framework, the discursive framework, the spatial framework and the architectural framework within which artistic practices can still be viably placed’ (in Buchloh, Cooke and Rajchman 2002: 101). Yet a third answer to the ‘Why now?’ question has to do with the evolution of the posthuman. Indeed, the dismantling and reconfiguration of the cinematic responds to our need for experiences that reckon with new forms of subjectivity transformed by the collision of technology and culture. Who is the audience in a culture increasingly permeated by computation and media? Who is the subject of the cinematic experience?

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And how are subjectivity and identity manifested and reshaped by an emerging era of screen-based storytelling? Posthumanism The rise of pervasive computing and locative media, as well as the emergence of things in the world around us that are gaining the ability to recognise and respond to an expanding range of stimuli, add to this dizzying sense of transformation. They converge to lend credence to the characterisation of our time as what N. Katherine Hayles has dubbed the ‘posthuman era’. Like the post-cinematic, posthumanism has gained currency over the last ten years within both literary and media studies. From scholars as diverse as Michel Foucault, Judith Halberstam, Donna Haraway and Hayles, we understand the concept of the human to be a historically specific and contingent construct, one that is in the process of becoming something else, namely the posthuman.8 In the first pages of her book, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (1999), Hayles refutes the notion of the ‘natural’ self, replacing it with the posthuman subject, defined as ‘an amalgam, a collection of heterogeneous components, a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction’ (1999: 3). She similarly dismisses cherished concepts of agency, desire and will, replacing them with a ‘distributed cognition located in disparate parts that may be in only tenuous communication with one another’ (1999: 3–4). However, she does not dismiss the body, but instead, registers her concern with the implications of the body in some understandings of posthumanism, pointing specifically to the realm of post-war cybernetics that tended to disregard embodiment altogether. Donna Haraway’s ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (1985) and her book, When Species Meet (2007), together also help make the case for a decentring of the human in the structuring of the world with a focus first on the cyborg and the productive potential of the coupling of organic and inorganic, or humans and machines, and second, on animals and the presumptuousness of placing humans at the centre of a world that includes other living things. Cary Wolfe’s What Is Posthumanism? (2010) echoes many of the critiques of the modernist subject, exploring what it means to refuse the traditional binaries, starting with human/nonhuman, that characterise humanism, and to consider different conceptualisations of knowledge. The book’s introduction offers an excellent history of posthumanism as a term, beginning with the author’s use of it in 1995 to discuss the work of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela and systems theory. Wolfe highlights Neil Badmington’s edited collection of essays Posthumanism (2000), and offers a useful contextualisation of the term based on the many contributions of scholars over the last fifteen years, writing that posthumanism comes both before and after humanism: ‘Before in the sense that it names the embodiment and embeddedness of the human being in not just its biological but also its technological world’ (2009: xvi). However, the term comes after humanism…

INTRODUCTION

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in the sense that posthumanism names a historical moment in which the decentring of the human by its imbrication in technical, medical, informatic, and economic networks is increasingly impossible to ignore, a historical development that points toward the necessity of new theoretical paradigms (but also thrusts them on us), a new mode of thought that comes after the cultural repressions and fantasies, the philosophical protocols and evasions, of humanism as a historically specific phenomenon. (Ibid.)

As posthumanism is deployed by different theorists for differing purposes, several have opted to highlight the term in relation to critical theory by using the phrase ‘critical posthumanism’. David Roden, for example, reflects on the use Badmington makes of the term, helping distinguish two very different approaches to the posthuman. He writes, ‘Badmington proposes a different – critical – posthumanism as a philosophical corrective to humanism. Rather than dreaming of the uploaded minds or intelligent robots to come, critical posthumanism attempts to understand and deconstruct humanism from within, tracing its internal tensions and conceptual discrepancies’ (2014: 9). For the purposes of this study and a reimagining of the cinematic, I turn to Rosi Braidotti and her articulation, also, of a critical posthumanism. She offers a particularly useful definition of the term in The Posthuman (2013), distinguishing among three strands of posthuman thought. These are the perspectives that emerge from moral philosophy, science and technology studies, and her understanding of critical posthumanism, which builds on what she calls an anti-humanist philosophy of subjectivity, and which she will dub ‘critical post-humanism’ (2013: 38). In her introduction, Braidotti situates the need for posthumanism, writing, ‘We need to devise new social, ethical, and discursive schemes of subject formation to match the profound transformations we are undergoing’ (2013: 12). She goes on to define posthumanism in the book’s first chapter: ‘In my own work, I define the critical posthuman subject within an eco-philosophy of multiple belongings, as a relational subject constituted in and by multiplicity, that is to say a subject that works across difference and is also internally differentiated, but still grounded and accountable’ (2013: 49). Braidotti continues, ‘A posthuman ethics for a non-unitary subject proposes an enlarged sense of inter-connection between self and others, including the non-human or “earth” others, by removing the obstacle of self-centred individualism’ (2013: 49–50). Overall, then, Braidotti is making a strong argument for the need to define and articulate new formations of subjectivity, primarily as an ethical act attuned to the transformations taking place around us. In her description, the subject is relational; it is part of a flow; and it is interconnected with multiple others. She writes, ‘As far as I am concerned, the challenge of the posthuman condition consists in grabbing the opportunities offered by the decline of the unitary subject position upheld by Humanism, which has mutated in a number of complex directions’ (2013: 54). Brian Rotman builds on these renderings of the posthuman, shifting to the postliterate, writing in his Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts and Distributed

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Human Being (2008), ‘A post-literate self is emerging, patterned not on the word – stable, integral, fixed, discrete, enclosing a unique, interior meaning, ordered, sequential – but on the fluid and unordered multiplicities of the visual image’ (2008: 95). Rotman describes the emergence of a new kind of computational culture as we shift from serial computation to parallel computation. Seriality foregrounds linear order and sequence, and activities such as counting, listing and telling. It privileges cognitive organisation within the individual thinker. In contrast, parallelism foregrounds presence, simultaneity and co-occurrence. The parallel mind is always social, culturally situated and technologically mediated; the individual cognition, in the words of Timothy Lenoir writing in the book’s foreword, ‘requires symbiosis with cognitive collectivities and external memory systems’ (2008: xxvii). Rotman posits not ‘individual linear thinking’ but ‘distributed bio-social phenomena’ and ‘collective thought processes and enunciations, that cannot be articulated solely on the level of an isolated, individual self ’ (2008: 92). Rotman is describing a new form of subjectivity that I believe aligns with the myriad reconfigurations of the cinematic in the post-cinematic moment. The argument of Fast Forward is that, as posthumanism has taken shape over the last decade, so too has a body of media-based artworks that grapple with new forms of subjectivity and interpellation. Wolfe’s description of our ‘imbrication in technical, medical, informatic, and economic networks’ (2009: xvi) points to new forms of experience and identity in these artworks as they deploy aspects of the cinematic but complicate notions of spectatorship, character identification, narrative structure and point of view. Within traditional cinema, these elements form a specific system or apparatus that contributes to the production of a unified form of subjectivity, one that is surprisingly powerful, but also mythic. In contrast, the new configurations in dispersed media projects offer explorations of terrains of imbrication, and experiments with alternative modes of experience.9 In short, this volume explores the homology between cultural practices and post-cinematic experiments, considering key ideas such as navigation, mutability, layerings, impurity and hybridity, as well as the movement from representation to computation, from the denotational to the algorithmic. And to return to ground: I can only engage these questions from where I stand, within the research context within the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. The Future Group USC’s School of Cinematic Arts is certainly not the only location for this kind of investigation, and indeed, Fast Forward benefits from interviews and site visits with other institutions and labs, as well as the various production companies, design firms and artists’ organisations dedicated to exploring emerging forms of storytelling. However, I cannot pretend that the book is not rooted in a particular place and time. I wrote it for this reason: over the last seven years, I have had the good fortune to be surrounded by people experimenting with the concepts, tools and practices of

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contemporary image-based storytelling, within a context, too, that recognises an ethical imperative to evaluate our pedagogical practices. Indeed, for five years, the School of Cinematic Arts was home to the Envisioning the Future Group (eventually shortened to just the Future Group), tasked with assessing the school’s current state and readiness for change in the near future. Specifically, the group pondered three questions: ‘What’s next?’; ‘What is on the horizon in our ever-expanding field – in technology, culture, business and higher education – that we should be trying to anticipate?’; and, ‘Are we truly meeting the needs of our students?’ With representatives from each of the School’s separate divisions, the group was chaired by Steve Anderson during the first year of ideation and consensus building, and by me for the next two years, which focused on refining and implementing the group’s mandate across the school. The group was encouraged to conduct its work ‘in the spirit of open horizons and free imagination’, but to also ‘deliver specific, actionable proposals’ in the area deemed most pressing, namely interdivisionality. Why did we imagine that the School of Cinematic Arts needed to change? Because the entertainment industries were also changing. At that moment, Avatar (2009), a film boasting a radically divergent filmmaking workflow, had just been released and there was a sense that we needed to understand the array of shifts in practice the film represented. In addition, unknown filmmaker Federico Àlverez had just been offered a $30million deal based on his five-minute, $500-budget YouTube short titled Panic Attack (2009). These two poles – the industrial mode of production which was moving in entirely new directions, and the world of amateur media-making driven by a DIY ethos, increasingly accessible tools and the ability to compete with any major studio in terms of audience reach – represented just two positions on an increasingly exciting and disruptive spectrum that we simply were not yet acknowledging in our curriculum. We sensed an urgent need to understand and instruct our students in boundary-crossing modes of moving image expression. These modes include transmedia storytelling and communication, and the ability to parse the creative, commercial and collaborative changes now impacting Hollywood at a rapid rate. We recognised that filmmaking knowledge must comprehend not merely the production of singular great works, but synergistic systems comprised of films, websites, games, toys and related assets across multiple platforms. While many students may continue to thrive as artists with very specific skills, we recognised that many more could also profit from a technical and conceptual hybridity, becoming what faculty member Michael Patterson dubbed a ‘new paradigm creative’, by which he meant an artist who understands the power of working seamlessly across the increasingly porous boundaries that once divided liveaction, animation, graphics, sound and text. We also wanted to honour the skills of students coming to our classes. Students arriving on campus at that point in 2009 were accustomed to communicating quickly and widely with their peers and diverse ‘publics’, giving them the expectation that education should be agile and similarly support real-world impact. These students also tend to learn more within informal learning contexts than they do in classrooms,

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and they are mobile, networked and always connected.10 They also form identities that, in incorporating rich virtual lives, are very different from those of pre-digital generations, and they expect education to similarly support networking, collaboration and participation. Many of us assume that, because these students grow up in a media-saturated culture, they are somehow fully literate with respect to an array of digitally-enhanced practices. They are, of course, both more and less skilled than we imagine. Finally, while many faculty members enjoyed the benefits of project-based learning as a natural outgrowth of hands-on filmmaking practices, we understood that it was still incumbent upon us to continue to explore the myriad ways in which we might continue to engage new students most effectively, paying specific attention, for example, to issues of collaboration, participation, criticality, networked sophistication, global understanding and an ethical stance suited to our current culture. In order to put these ideas in practice, we opted to engage in a form of experimental pedagogy. How might we radically reimagine learning in the context of the School? Faculty member Perry Hoberman asked how we might change the culture of the School from one of courses with individual projects to a large-scale project to which students (and possibly courses) might attach. In other words, how might we apply some of the conceits of a post-cinematic ethos to teaching and learning? Reality Ends Here Our response to this question was the creation of a pervasive game called ‘Reality Ends Here’ for incoming undergraduate students designed explicitly to encourage cross-divisional collaboration. Although successful gateway experiences have proven notoriously elusive across higher education, with limited student engagement, we hoped to channel the often extraordinary participation seen in other large-scale collaborative story experiences, including alternate reality games (ARGs). ARGs are game experiences that use multiple media platforms to create an alternate reality within which players work together to uncover clues and solve problems. The participation of players has a direct impact on the unfolding and outcome of the story. World Without Oil (2007), for example, invited players to experience a fictional global oil crisis across many weeks, and participants worked in teams to solve problems as if the issues were actually taking place.11 In Superstruct (2008), participants explored the future, looking ten years forward to the challenges that will face us in the contexts of the environment, politics and health.12 Jeff Watson, then a doctoral candidate in the Media Arts + Practice PhD programme conducting research on ARGs, agreed to take on the job of designing the game, working with Tracy Fullerton, a game designer and chair of the Interactive Media and Games Division at the School of Cinematic Arts, and Simon Wiscombe, a game designer and graduate of IMGD.13 While the original idea was to create an ARG with a mysterious and elaborate narrative, the team realised that it would be more fruitful to create what Watson called a ‘serendipity engine’ engineered to spark

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unexpected meetings and collaborations among students. Following the logic of some of the most successful large-scale games, Watson explained that rather than creating a formal course, we needed an informal experience; rather than forcing participation, we would need to make participation optional; and rather than touting the project, it would need to remain secret. As such the first public face of the game was suitably enigmatic: a website featuring a countdown clock with the first day of classes being the zero point. Hints referencing the game were disseminated; for example, the URL for the website was written on slips of paper and inserted into random fortune cookies in the lunches served during the regular school orientation events. Students began to gather clues, compare notes and post enquires on the School’s student Facebook page. As classes began in the fall of 2011, random students were given packets of ten cards, which were designed to connect with those of other players to form increasingly challenging creative assignments or ‘deals’. These assignments are meant to be quick, low-tech exercises that encourage collaboration; obtaining additional cards means connecting with additional students, which in turn produces larger projects that garner more points. The various assignments were designed to require some basic familiarity with the different divisions, so that students began to see what each division teaches, and learned how to meet and connect with other students in those divisions. Prompts might ask for a comic book, short video, storyboard, impromptu public performance or sequence of photographs, for example. Each assignment is then inflected by often amusing constraints. A sequence, for example, might ask for a comic book on one card, while the constraints cards might require that the comic book involve social justice, a search for freedom, body horror and the School’s Library. A successful project would address each of these elements. Once a group of students has completed a card combination or deal, they then ‘seal the deal’. This means going in person to the ‘Game Office’, where students justify their projects relative to the card combination, on camera, explaining how their project meets the criteria of the prompt. These justifications, along with the deal and the project created, are then uploaded to the online portion of the game. The justifications have proven especially compelling pedagogically, and are often very humorous. Once the deals are uploaded, a secret ‘Future Committee’ comments on the projects, offering feedback. The projects are voted on each week, with the best earning odd and unusual prizes – one group of winners in the first year of the game shared hors d’oeuvres with acclaimed cinematographer Dante Spinotti and his wife at their home, for example. Overall, the game has successfully galvanised the freshman class, uniting them with faculty and staff from all divisions, as well as with School of Cinematic Arts alumni, who interact with the students on a regular basis. The game produced an ‘ecology’ of teaching and learning that integrates students, faculty, staff and alumni, bringing together clusters of people in ad hoc learning experiences. Finally, the game instilled a sense of the values of the school, championing creativity and collaboration. These were core to the very mechanic of the game’s infrastructure.

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Perhaps more significantly, the game is an instance of the post-cinematic, in which ‘cinematic’ is understood in its broadest sense to include the crafting of diverse media forms, from storyboards to music videos, in an attempt to communicate ideas through time and space. It is also deeply collaborative and participatory, urging students to reimagine the status of the auteur; and it strives to conjure learning experiences driven not be requirements and authority but enquiry, imagination and passion. The game also invites students to leave their divisional identity as a screenwriter or director or animator to consider the qualities of the new paradigm creative. Finally, with the game, the School’s faculty also divested a certain amount of control, acknowledging the potentials of peer-to-peer learning and decentring the traditional source of instructional authority. Each of these characteristics aligns with those that characterise the post-cinematic. Fast Forward, then, continues from here: from a decidedly local, subjective and deeply situated perspective, not only within USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, but within the city of Los Angeles and within the United States. I include work that I have had the good fortune to see and engage with – this is vital for writing about sitespecific, interactive and installation work – with the result that any attempt to render a broad and comprehensive context is thwarted immediately. The book also reflects the critical limitations faced when writing about the work of one’s colleagues, friends and even students. That said, I hope that the proximity serves a productive role, too. Overall, I hope to chart the homology noted earlier, not merely to celebrate innovations in storytelling through querying the intersections and overlaps between media art and culture, but to consider the ways in which our art experiences condition us to be productive entities within a neoliberal context, one that shares so many of the defining characteristics of media art. As we cheerfully navigate densely mediated experiences; as we enjoy the mutability and transformative capacities of computational media; as we revel in the synthetic image, in the impurity, hybridity and layerings of realities: are we blithely succumbing to a new regime, or discovering new ways to be human?

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Chapter 1 Past, Present, Future: Situating Post-Cinema

I

n this volume, the post-cinematic designates the art and practice of bringing experiences of story, information and knowledge into attunement with contemporary culture. This definition includes ‘art’, and it includes ‘practice’, here meant to echo the definition put forward by Raymond Williams in the context of technological determinism. Williams explains in an essay titled ‘From Medium to Social Practice’ (1977) that a medium is neither abstract nor autonomous but always social; it is a practice.1 However, within the context of the posthuman and the post-cinematic, practice proliferates, blurring the boundary between amateur and professional, artist and audience, public and private. Further, practice gains a new valence within a culture best characterised as neoliberal, a culture within which all aspects of life are construed through financial terms, from creativity to learning, from notions of the self and identity to those of governance. Practice in this context is instrumentalised just as often as it catalyses joyful expression. This is also a culture characterised by the financial turbulence wrought by neoliberalism, and the acceleration of technological change that yields a woozy sense of the new and the old, the current and the obsolete. Here, too, practice shifts; in this context, it requires constant updating, renewal, ‘professional development’. Without attention, practice can become an ongoing process of just keeping up. Finally, we inhabit a culture that Gilles Deleuze has designated as one of control. In ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’ published in English in 1992 in the journal October, Deleuze makes a distinction between societies of discipline and a new regime, the society of control. He notes that while discipline rules through enclosures and physical walls, control rules through ever-changing modulations, ‘like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point’ (1992: 4). A society of control is dominated by information, and this has specific ramifications for how we understand individuals. The body in a control society is known not through its physiology or materiality as

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in a disciplinary society, but rather through its records, its presence within databases and through the increasingly prevalent biometrics designed to further measure and quantify it. Once again, practice in this context shifts to figure the ways in which we are ‘practiced’, our data enumerating our every action. This book argues that these cultural shifts are registered through post-cinematic artworks in which, as with earlier moments of transformation, the cinematic engages with and renders new engagements with time and space, feeling and knowing, being and experience. The ‘post’ in ‘post-cinematic’ is significant, too, not in positing a break within an intractable progression, but in designating continuities and entanglements. Piotr Woycicki argues that post-cinema tends to ‘interrogate and challenge our perceptions of dominant cinematic conventions’, most often through a form of intermedia practice that integrates differing media forms. However, in describing the ‘post’ of ‘post-cinema’, he articulates two meanings: ‘One view is simply that as with most “post” terms it represents a historic shift that comes after the cultural dominance of cinema has ended’ (2014: 15). He goes on, however, to suggest another meaning of the term. ‘The other perspective … is to articulate post-cinema as a cultural trend that is a reaction to cinema’s ongoing culture of dominance’ (ibid.). Citing Lyotard’s notion of the post-modern as a reaction to modernity, with its ensuing incredulity toward master narratives, he suggests that so too is post-cinema a reaction to cinema, writing that it is an ‘“incredulity” towards the great narratives of classical realist film, but also as stretching that incredulity to cinematic conventions and forms through which the narratives were constructed, forms that are increasingly dominant in our contemporary culture’ (2014: 16). While many examples of post-cinematic artworks may indeed refute the dominance of cinema and embody that refutation formally, the ‘post’ in post-cinematic is also indicative of an intermeshing that defies a teleological perspective. Indeed, it is telling that I cite a definition of the post-cinematic from a book about theatre and performance: the intermedial nature of so much contemporary media practice suggests that is not productive to imagine a linear continuity stretching toward the ‘post’. Instead, we need to welcome the divergences and intersections, the crossing paths and discontinuities.2 In this sense, then, ‘post’ can recognise that the boundaries that distinguish an earlier cinema, a current cinema and post-cinema are decidedly blurry, and that each moment morphs into and informs the others. Indeed, a post-cinema remains deeply, even obsessively, tied to its past. As Wendy Brown has written, ‘“Post” indicates a very particular condition of afterness in which what is past is not left behind, but, on the contrary, relentlessly conditions, even dominates, a present that nevertheless also breaks in some way with this past’ (2010: 21). Although she is describing the state of post-Marxism, Brown captures the complex imbrication of past, present and future within cinema as well as at the juncture of analogue and digital. She continues, ‘In other words, we use the term “post” only for a present whose past continues to capture and structure it’ (ibid.). Similarly, Florian Cramer, in dissecting the ‘post-digital’, places it within the context of movements such as post-punk, post-communism and post-feminism, wherein the line between eras

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blurs. These terms ‘describe more subtle cultural shifts and ongoing mutations’, he writes (2015: 15). In this sense then, post-cinema is present cinema conditioned by the past, a so-called new cinema obsessed by the old. It is a cinema whose enactments and experiments often reference and restage moments from the past while simultaneously striving to do justice to what it means to be human now and in the near future. Laura Mulvey asserts that the bifurcation of cinema between past and present has a particular genesis. ‘It was during this watershed period, marked aesthetically by Postmodernism and politically/economically by neo-liberalism, that cinema fell back into a “then” of a past based on celluloid recording and projection, in opposition to the “now” of a present media proliferation into complex relations with other technologies’ (2011: 72). Mulvey here references not simply the increasing mutability of visual storytelling forms thanks to the affordances of the digital, but the consolidation of power within media industries into a handful of conglomerates. Mulvey goes on to highlight the political significance of ‘old’ and ‘new’ at a moment when ‘conservative politics embrace the “new” and the “old” left has to try to keep the utopian aspirations of the past alive’ (ibid.). There has been a reversal within a neoliberal context, such that conservatives, historically aligned with tradition, instead tout the future, and radicals, generally understood to be forward looking, seek to keep hold of the past. Mulvey acknowledges the various factors that contribute to an entrenched binary between old and new, citing developments such as globalisation, post-Communism, post-Fordism and religious fundamentalism, as well as the array of new technologies that affect filmmaking, distribution and viewership practices. Indeed, as Mulvey has explored extensively in Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (2006), the shifts in viewership afforded by VHS and DVD viewing practices alone prompt an array of activities that differ from those of the past when viewers had no access to the film itself. ‘A pause, or a stop, in the flow of a story may also enable a return to narrative within a different perceptual framework and awareness of its formal structures and aesthetic properties’ (2011: 75). She adds, ‘Out of the interaction between celluloid and new technologies, as the concealing mask of narrative falls away, the presence of the past inscribed onto film is enhanced’ (2011: 76). For Mulvey, then, there is a homology between the techniques that allow us to return to the stilled moments within a narrative to scrutinise the intersections of past and present and a historical shift in which traditional political perspectives become reversed. Stuart Klawans, in his essay ‘Traces of Light: Reflections on the Future of Film, or: How a Dying Medium Has Come Back to Life’, published in 2015 in the 150th anniversary issue of The Nation, echoes Mulvey and her sense that the political trajectories of the left and right have switched direction. He writes: ‘The very language of progress has atrophied. The best-publicized adversaries of neoliberalism no longer speak of marching into the glorious socialist future; instead, they spiral backward, seeking to recover the purity of a vanished and largely imaginary caliphate’ (2015: 196). Similarly, James Schamus queries past, present and future in a speech presented to the German Film Academy in November 2014 entitled ‘23 Fragments on the Future

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of Cinema’, later published on the Filmmaker Magazine website, in January 2015. Citing Louis Lumière’s 1895 remark that cinema ‘is an invention without a future’, Schamus argues, ‘Cinema congeals around its individual heroes and heroines precisely this obvious refusal of the idea of a collective, co-created future’ (2015: np). Schamus reminds us that cinema participates in the ideological positioning of audiences and, in its traditional narrative structure, endlessly rehearses its endings. In this sense, then, cinema has no future. Its temporality has always already been known. Schamus goes on to offer a chilling image of the cinematic in the era of information: Value is created not in the exchange of time and attention for entertainment, but in the production, manipulation and control of the consumer-data generated when the subject lives within this world of immediate data points. In this world, all money and power flows through those with the algorithms: our job as producers is simply to feed enough operationally viable fantasy points into the infrastructure so it can sustain itself as the source of fantasy and identity for its subjects. (Ibid.)

Schamus references the ways in which the algorithms that transform our quotidian interactions online become fodder in the production of predictions precisely of future desires and behaviours: With regards to the future of the cinema, my point is that everything now converges on the refinement of these technologies of the future and of consumerbaby behaviour prediction, while the definition of the ‘future’ becomes increasingly shrunk down to a micro-order of milliseconds of decisions about what to click, view, sign, vote for or purchase. (Ibid.)

Schamus points to the use of consumer data to create algorithms that contribute to the creation of new series. Specifically, in 2013, Netflix relied on data gathered over many years to create the hit television series House of Cards (2013), and subsequent articles in the press revealed the tremendous attention the company pays to data in conceptualising, creating and marketing its in-house productions. This scenario – of films generated by data – along with the rapidity with which film has become nearly obsolete, has provoked a wistfulness for film, made manifest in a series of projects that chart the transition from the era of film to the era of the digital. Lisa Purse elaborates on this point in Digital Imaging in Popular Cinema (2013) looking at the context of Hollywood filmmaking. She writes, ‘The prospect of end-to-end digital film production has prompted a nostalgic return to cinema’s celluloid history, most explicitly through homage’ (2013: 3). She goes on to highlight The Aviator (2004), Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004), King Kong (2005), Sin City (2005) and several other films to demonstrate the paradoxical use of digital tools to simulate earlier, cinematic aesthetics.

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Garrett Stewart echoes Purse’s observation in Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema (2007), which addresses ‘not what can be done with the digital, but what the digital has already done to cinema. And more than this, how cinema has seen fit to picture its own transition’ (2007: 1). Stewart’s expansive study examines a long list of European and American movies, focusing specifically on the ways in which the shift from analogue to digital filmmaking is figured narratively through the treatment of the temporal.3 In this study, I argue that post-cinematic artworks, in their rearrangements of industrial cinema’s conventions of time and space; in their evocations of new forms of identification, engagement and problem-solving; and in their conjuring of the self not necessarily as subject but as interface; enact – sometimes elegantly and sometimes clumsily – the paradigmatic transition between the culture of discipline and that of control, between the culture of representation and that of information. The sense of acceleration referenced previously designates the ontological and epistemological turmoil we experience through a process of decentring emblematic of the post-human and the fact that we are facing the loss of the distinction that previously celebrated cognition as a uniquely human attribute; it is the dizziness that attends a sense of spatial and temporal reimagining, in which the linear is displaced not by something as prosaic as the nonlinear but by the networked, and, as such, in the words of David Berry, a highlighting of ‘synchronic dispersal over the diachronic unfolding’ (2008: 366). This sense of turmoil is decidedly not new or unique, nor are the experiments that characterise the post-cinematic. Andrew V. Uroskie charts a similar series of disruptions in Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art (2014), writing specifically about the attempts by diverse artists in the 1960s to imagine alternative sites, configurations and purposes for cinema: At the very historical moment in which cinema’s specificity and autonomy as a modern art had finally been unambiguously legitimated, the expanded cinema sought to throw everything back into question. Not content to restrict cinema to an autonomous and isolated purity, these artists sought to harness and exploit cinema’s historical and conceptual multiplicity in order to intervene within a diverse new range of situations and contexts. (2014: 52)

Many theorists and historians have chronicled previous moments of tumult.4 For this context, however, Fred Turner’s Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism From World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties (2013) is particularly useful. Turner uses the term ‘democratic surround’ to designate ‘a new, multi source, environmental kind of media’ deployed as a way ‘to call for a society in which individual diversity might become the foundation of collective life’ (2013: 9). However, rather than writing about contemporary media, he is writing about media in the 1940s, starting with the work of the Bauhaus and moving steadily through the 1960s in order to chronicle the

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creation of a body of work dedicated to using media to promote democratic identity. The democratic surround, then, ‘was not only a way of organizing images and sounds; it was a way of thinking about organizing society’ (ibid.). Turner does not focus on representation in his analysis; instead, he is interested in the ways in which these media forms solicited attention. ‘To listen to the radio, watch a movie, or wander among a roomful of sounds and pictures was to rehearse the perceptual skills on which political life – fascist or democratic – depended’ (2013: 10). The goal of the multimedia artworks that Turner describes was to promote a form of democratic unity based on a sense of individuality. Describing the artists and social scientists dedicated to this movement, he writes, They imagined an environmental mode of media making that would promote the development of that individuality, and which would offer Americans opportunities to practice it together. In museum exhibitions and classrooms, in stuffy meeting halls and grandly airy national pavilions, Americans built media surrounds in which the democratic character theorized by psychologists and anthropologists could become the basis of a more egalitarian, more tolerant, more open society. (2013: 291)

The progressive imaginary conjured by the ‘democratic surround’, however, has given way to the ‘surround’, to a mode of existence in which attention, rather than being solicited through an egalitarian proliferation prompting choice is instead fractured and fragmented, with ‘choice’ reduced to ‘likes’. So, yes, there are prior examples of cinema’s rearrangement, but they were prompted by a differing historical moment, economic agenda and cultural imaginary. To more carefully trace the paradigmatic transition we are witnessing now, I turn to the work of five artists in order to engage a series of questions and concerns in the post-cinematic/posthuman present, namely: i) What is the role of ‘medium’ within contemporary discourse? How does it relate to practice in the context proffered by Raymond Williams? This is a question asked by perhaps the most vocal and insistent artist dedicated to film as specifically a medium, namely Tacita Dean. ii) How do we conceptualise alternative categories for thinking about what it means to be human within the posthuman context? If we are embedded in an assemblage that integrates the natural, cultural and technological, how do we understand notions of the self and subject, of agency and intentionality? David Gatten’s work offers an opportunity to consider the implications of spectatorship within this context. iii) What does the fusion of formerly opposed entitles look like? As organic merges with inorganic, human with animal, what do we have? David O’Reilly’s animations and Davide Quayola’s visualisations explore this terrain through the creation of fusional hybrids.

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iv) What are the implications of our media as they become environments rather than representations? Marco Brambilla’s spectacular 3D collages engage with this question, presenting opportunities to consider the environmental shift. These questions inform the rest of this book too, but at a moment of wonderfully diverse permutations of the cinematic, these five artists hover at key boundaries, and therefore offer compelling limit cases for considering our transitional moment. Delays and Revolutions: Tacita Dean In August 2003, wandering through the vast expanse of the Venice Biennale, visitors may have experienced Mario Merz (2002), Tacita Dean’s exquisite eight-minute portrait of the 77-year-old Italian artist. The film was situated in the Italian Pavilion, just around the corner from one of Andy Warhol’s screen tests featuring the gentle face of another elderly artist, Marcel Duchamp. Work by Richard Prince, Matthew Barney and Dan Graham were also in the mix, all of it part of a section of the Biennale titled ‘Delays and Revolutions’, showcasing work by more than forty international artists with the explicit goal of eschewing a linear history in favour of detours, delays and returns. In the deceptively simple and quiet film, the light gently shifts, birds sing, bells chime. The artist sits. He contemplates a pinecone, and eventually gets up and walks away from the camera. Across just a few minutes, Merz’s face shows bemusement, impatience, resolve, serenity, keen interest and confusion, and in the dense flurry of 16mm grain, we can almost feel the texture of the wispy trees behind the white fluff of his hair, the angular line of his nose, the swoop of eyebrows, the scowl. And we know that this is a portrait of time, loss, beauty and death, which is to say that it is a film that embodies the ineffable and the serendipitous. This is also film as sculpture, as soundscape, as meditation and encounter. And it is film as only film can be. These fundamental and unique qualities of film as a medium have now become Tacita Dean’s primary concern. The Berlin-based British artist was born in 1965, studied painting, and since the early 1990s has worked in multiple forms, including photography, sound and, in some of her most intriguing work, chalk. She began making and exhibiting her films in museums and galleries in 1992 and has made more than thirty conceptually intriguing films to date. Many of these films are dedicated to temporality and contemplation. Fernsehturm (2001), for example, is a 44-minute film that captures the slow rotation of a restaurant located at the top of a tower in Berlin as the sun sets. The film points to cycles, repetitions and returns as the restaurant’s gradual revolution suggests both historical time and the shifting perceptual capacities available as the light changes and the windows, translucent during the day, become opaque, reflecting the interior space as the daylight fades to dark. Similarly, The Green Ray (2001), a two-and-a-half-minute looping 16mm film, chronicles the setting of the sun over the ocean. Dean was anxious to capture the fabled ‘green ray’ supposedly

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evident when certain conditions – light, atmosphere, weather – align properly. She shot the film in Madagascar, and while she claims that the green ray cannot be seen in any single frame of the 16mm footage if you examine the footage, it is evident – at least to some – when viewed with the film running through the projector at 24 frames per second. The Green Ray is often set up in a gallery space, the projector with the film threaded through it poised on a pedestal; for the show titled The Dying of the Light: Film as Medium and Metaphor at MASS MoCA (29 March 2014 – 1 February 2015), the piece was staged in its own small gallery enclave, with a button to start the projector if it had stopped. What is significant about The Green Ray is not so much the ray itself but the sense of wonder and anticipation evoked as you watch, both of which are fundamental to cinema as a medium. We witness the passage of time, evident in the gradual slipping away of the sun beyond the horizon, as well as the more expansive sense of time palpable in the wear and tear visible as we see the 16mm film itself looping repeatedly through the clanking projector. As in many of Dean’s films, one becomes acutely aware of the temporal passage from past to present, and a querying of the elusiveness of the ‘now’. As digital video has increasingly eclipsed celluloid as the format – most often of necessity, but also of choice – for both moviemakers and artists, Dean has become one of the most vocal and passionate advocates for film as an irreplaceable and precious medium. She began her advocacy campaign in 2006 due to the closure of the lab in Chalon-sur-Saône from which she was accustomed to purchasing black-and-white 16mm film stock. Appalled by the impending closing, Dean decided to document the plant’s last days using precisely the increasingly obsolete medium it had produced for decades. Titled Kodak (2006), the film captures the entire production process, starting with the application of the bluish estar base as it was stretched thin to create film emulsion. In 2011, Dean was trying to complete a series of films at the Soho Film Lab in London for an exhibition, only to discover that the lab’s new owner, Deluxe, had decided to stop printing 16mm. In a letter in The Guardian which was published under the title ‘Save Celluloid, for Art’s Sake’, Dean wrote, Many of us are exhausted from grieving over the dismantling of analogue technologies. Digital is not better than analogue, but different. What we are asking for is co-existence: that analogue film might be allowed to remain an option for those who want it, and for the ascendancy of one not to have to mean the extinguishing of the other. (2011: np)

Dean’s consternation about the seemingly imminent demise of film gave impetus to her next project when she was invited in 2012 to create a piece in London for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. The project was inspired in part by a 1944 novel by French writer René Daumal titled Mount Analogue, which stops mid-sentence because the writer died before he completed it. Dean considered the book to be ‘an analogy of

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the impossible’ (2014: np). She was inspired both by the book’s ability to imagine an elsewhere, as well as the tall, vertical mountain that is its subject. The mountain was translated into the vertical shape of the installation Dean created in the Turbine Hall titled FILM (2012). The piece appears to be a giant filmstrip suspended within the hundred-foot-tall space. Dean created the film using film, and refused to do any post-production, preferring to return to the techniques of early cinema, when the art form was new and artists experimented with innumerable techniques in-camera. Dean’s own experiments focused on aperture gate masking, a process that involves placing variously sized mattes in the aperture gate to block out parts of the frame, shooting some footage, rewinding the film camera roll, removing or repositioning the matte and shooting again, thereby creating a collage of time and space within the frame. The process is labour-intensive and relies extensively on chance. Many of the images in FILM were passed through the gate a dozen or more times, and the result is a dense collage of imagery. Dean touted the serendipity inherent in aperture masking, and what she dubbed the ‘blindness and the faith’ of the process which in turn ‘courts disaster but also miracles, and these are some of the things I love about film’ (ibid.). The resulting project is an eleven-minute loop that was projected in the Turbine Hall that includes images of sprocket holes, giving the film the appearance of a giant filmstrip suspended in the towering hall. The project took full advantage of scale within the space to produce a sense of awe. FILM was accompanied by a book that includes over 75 brief essays on the significance of analogue film by stakeholders as varied as Peter Hutton, Amy Taubin, Jonas Mekas, Bruce Sterling and Sharon Lockhart. Dean continued to explore aperture masking in her next film JG (2013), which brings together the artist’s fascination with Robert Smithson’s earthwork Spiral Jetty (1970) and J. G. Ballard’s story ‘The Voices of Time’ (1960). Both artworks explore time as a theme, and indeed, Smithson may himself have been inspired by the story, which is, in Dean’s words, ‘about a man running out of time’ and includes a character who creates a mandala out of cement in the basin of a lake (ibid.). Using the cheerfully enigmatic directions left by Smithson to find his artwork, Dean had tried unsuccessfully to find the Spiral Jetty in 1997 (and created an audio piece about this experience titled Trying to Find the Spiral Jetty that same year). Dean had also sought permission from Ballard several times to create an adaptation of his story. He repeatedly refused, but finally relented in 2007, writing a letter to Dean that encouraged her to treat the Spiral Jetty as a mystery that her film would solve. That provocation launched the making of JG, a 26-minute film shot in central California and Utah that scrutinises myriad forms of time, from the epochal time evident in the materiality of the landscape – its textured rocks, layers of crusty salt, expanses of sand – to the temporal juxtapositions produced through the stencilling and layering of aperture masking. The masking technique achieves a form of temporal montage as Dean sets moments captured at different times side-by-side, one temporal sequence next to, below or layered with another temporal sequence.

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While she has been repeatedly encouraged to use digital techniques to far more easily obtain the multiple images within a single collaged frame, Dean has been adamant about the unique qualities of film as they relate to time, space and materiality, and she remains committed to serendipity’s role in the art-making process. Her practice highlights the consciousness of time that film conjures, with each roll of film stock allowing only a certain length of time for shooting. She also relishes a very physical form of editing and ‘the physical resistance of the material’ (ibid.). Dean’s campaign to preserve film has included petitioning and lobbying UNESCO to designate film as a protected medium, an effort that continues on the savefilm. org website, which features a manifesto, a list of supporters, and news on projects specifically related to film, filmmaking and cinema. In her own work, Dean has begun to explore the melding of film and live performance; her piece Event for a Stage (2014) combines the performance of an actor, Stephen Dillane, sound gathered from everyone within the space of the performance and live filming. Clearly, what Dean harbours in her cultivation of the medium of film is the set of practices analogue filmmaking engenders: the specificity of film stock, film processing and filmmaking with the physical layering of spaces and times. In this way, Dean represents one side of a spectrum within the cinematic arts dedicated to its analogue materiality, the indexical relation of the image to its referent and to film and its unique capacities. As we experience the shift between paradigms, as we acquiesce to the structuring premises of the digital, we are still drawn to the analogue and the material, as well as to Dean’s advocacy and filmmaking that resist what feels inevitable. As such, her work sustains a set of practices and questions that illuminate the boundaries between information and film, between data and images, between a photo-chemical process and real-time processing and capture. In refusing to accept the digital for her own practice, Dean’s work sustains what might otherwise be occluded as the digital displaces film; her work stubbornly refuses to forget cinema’s past, a past that in itself retains a particular notion of history. Returning to Mario Merz, with this lovely film, we experience what epitomises so much of what we understand to be the cinematic: representation; spatial and temporal coherence; the document with its direct link to the world; and a singular perspective. This is not a project related in any way to simulation, transmission or processing, to name only a few of the terms associated with the logic of information. Instead it is the indexical document of a human being, replete with the traces, textures and all but imperceptible nuances that as yet elude the capacity of computer-generated imagery to simulate. It is the cinematic. It is film as only film can be. Extravagant Shadows: David Gatten In 2012, Chris Stults of the Wexner Center for the Arts curated a three-part show of films by experimental filmmaker David Gatten. Titled ‘Texts of Light’, the retrospective also included Gatten’s recently completed digital feature film, The Extravagant Shadows

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(2012). The fourteen-film showcase travelled across the United States throughout the year and presented the work of a filmmaker deeply concerned with the materiality of both the cinematic and the digital, and curious about the more unusual affordances of each. In these films, Gatten shows us his fascination with words and things, with language and meaning, and with knowing and being, and he makes us aware of time and space in new ways. Stults reflects on this aspect of Gatten’s work on the first page of the catalogue accompanying the show, writing, ‘It stands to reason that in the midst of a moment described as a “post-medium” age, David Gatten’s work seems to come from another era’ (2011: 3). Gatten’s films are decidedly, lovingly and essentially cinematic, created with attention to emulsion and sprocket holes, and presented in a darkened theatre space for communities of viewers who gather to share a cinematic experience. The video, however, is something else altogether. It continues some of the concerns of the earlier films, but it is adamantly and lovingly digital, attending to the qualities of the digital medium and appreciating its particular attributes. In this way, the show offered an opportunity to trace an artist’s transition between modes. Gatten earned his MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has served as a lecturing fellow and artist in residence at Duke University’s Arts of the Moving Image programme for several years while also spending time in an old mining cabin in Colorado’s Four Mile Canyon where he makes his movies and presents screenings for the community as part of the Four Mile Film Society. Since 1999, the filmmaker has been intrigued by a series of texts written by William Byrd II, a historical figure in colonial America known for his very large collection of books. The result of Gatten’s fascination with Byrd’s work is a nine-part film cycle. In one of the films in the project, Gatten builds on two pieces of writing by Byrd. The first is The History of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina, which details Byrd’s journey as he surveyed the boundary between North Carolina and Virginia in 1728. The second text is an account of that trip titled The Secret History of the Dividing Line, which satirises the journey. The two aligned texts afforded Gatten a unique opportunity to consider the nature of words, texts, histories and boundary lines, and these elements become the material for a twenty-minute film titled Secret History of the Dividing Line (2002). In the film, a black screen is criss-crossed by stark, white lines while a timeline noting a series of dates suggests the passing of time. The lines that dissect the screen are so striking that they create an after-image effect, and viewers begin to see lines that are not actually present. As the film progresses, viewers also begin to see the texture of the lines, which expand into rifts and fissures akin to a jagged landscape. The film also includes words, but they pass by often too quickly to fully read or comprehend, blending instead into the visual and topographical landscape. The film becomes an almost tactile evocation of boundaries, and a celebration of the evanescence of language and history. In other films, Gatten has explored the use of everything from cellophane tape and dust (for the 1996 film Hardwood Process) to the scraper on his cement splicer for making ragged lines (as in the serrated landscapes in Secret History of the Dividing

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The Extravagant Shadows (2012) by David Gatten

Line) to water (for the series titled What the Water Said (1998–2007)). These handmade works, very much rooted in the physicality of film as a medium, serve to historicise our current state of transition through reflections on earlier moments of radical change. They also, in their conflation of materials, suggest trajectories of continuity rather than a radical break between past and present. Gatten’s first digital project, The Extravagant Shadows, was begun in 1998, building on his early interest in computers. Gatten was initially compelled to use video because he wanted to explore extremely long takes and slow fades, and between 1998 and 2012, as he researched diverse approaches, he watched multiple video formats come and go. In 2012, Gatten finally reconceived the entire project and chose to reshoot it using a Nikon DSLR. A song by Merrilee Rush opens The Extravagant Shadows, the singer’s haunting voice achieving a wistful grace in the darkness and establishing a subtle yearning that will permeate the remainder of the three-hour film. We listen to the entire song in the dark, setting the stage for the orchestration of the senses that Gatten so nimbly achieves. Once the song has ended, a row of books appears, their spines each a stately shade of red, blue or green and their titles mostly recognisable: The Count of Monte Cristo, Nicholas Nickleby, The Love Letters of Abelard and Heloise… A wisp of something wipes across the frame, and the image goes a bit soft. A figure begins to take shape, an ephemeral apparition, the torso of the filmmaker himself, who appears to be just a little way off in the distance, standing to face the audience. Then, amazingly, from what appears to be the front of the screen, on the same side as the audience, a paintbrush appears grasped in a hand, very close up; swiping from top to bottom, the hand spreads a wash of light yellow paint across the image. Gradually, the paint dries, the shade of yellow gently shifting tone as it transitions from wet to dry. When it looks as if it is

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fully dry, the hand reappears, this time wielding blue paint, and applies the thick, wet pigment across the surface of the image. The paint dries. And so it goes, and will go, for many more minutes. While this description, rife with repetition, may suggest a tedious display – indeed, it is hard not to imagine the filmmaker responding with humour, perhaps to an overheard comment, about watching paint dry – the sequence is anything but dull. To be sure, the film encourages a contemplative engagement and attention to detail. But it also satisfies that conscientious consideration; when words begin to appear, fading into view and then away again, it is as if the film has suddenly become almost too rich to bear. The first lines read, ‘The idea is one of contingency. Everybody must feel that something has been missed, because electing one course of life precludes any other. But what in my case has been missed?’ What indeed? The ensuing panels of text are long, and feature philosophical musing and snippets of stories of love and loss created in dialogue with the work of Henry James, Maurice Blanchot, Stefan Zweig and Wallace Stevens. James’s ‘The Birthplace’, for example, tells the story of a young couple who discern some sort of spirit in the house where they are living, while ‘The Jolly Corner’ portrays a man as he considers the decisions he has made, and what his life might have been had he chosen otherwise. These tales resonate through the texts of The Extravagant Shadows. The Extravagant Shadows, or more precisely the experience of viewing The Extravagant Shadows, serves as an emblem for thinking about both the ontological and phenomenological questions at the heart of the future – which is also to say of course, the past and present – of media. The film brilliantly layers a deep awareness of what is happening off-screen with what we are seeing onscreen and with what we imagine to be the digital manipulation of the image with the addition of the text. We manoeuvre among these differing registers, putting together the pieces, seeing the filmic and profilmic in relation to each other. In an interview with Aaron Cutler, Gatten commented on his desire to prompt this sort of active engagement: ‘I want the chief activity to be that of the viewer approaching the screen, and for the meaning of the work not to be inherent, but rather to be a product of someone’s engagement with it’ (Cutler 2013: np). In this way, the film represents a concatenation of disparate spaces and times, both physical and virtual, and it requires that we remain cognisant of the differing spaces and practices of production, an awareness enacted immediately through the ways in which Gatten plays with our perception of space along the z-axis of the screen. The fluid negotiation of these different registers of experience embodies what it means to inhabit a digital culture, but rather than inviting the distraction and browsing that so often characterise the digital interface, the video provokes a profound experience of presence. We are called forth as subjects, and as beings uniquely able to make connections, to understand relations, and to produce meaning. We are no longer spectators, witnesses, viewers, readers or users. We become entirely present, and in so becoming, are thrust into awareness of all the times – outside the theatre, outside the spaces of the film – when we are not.

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This experience is core to understanding the transformation from earlier forms of cinematic experience, and the futures that are possible. The project grapples with the acts of storytelling, writing, authoring and representation, calling each into question. It shows us that we are moving from a representational culture constituted primarily through narrative, discourse and the image, all of which were encountered by readers or viewers, toward a differently constituted culture, one in which cultural objects are technologies, and the reader or viewer is more a participant, co-constituting the work, often in collaboration with others. In these works, then, we are reconfigured, and we may be called forth as a more engaged and active agent of understanding and reception. You Are Being Generated: David O’Reilly If Gatten crafts lushly large-scale and lavishly beautiful images, LA-based Irish animator David O’Reilly does the opposite. His metier is whole-heartedly the digital, and his aesthetic is suitably garish, glitchy and chaotic. His characters are ungainly, with big, hollow eyes and unbalanced bodies, and the infernal worlds they inhabit resemble nothing less than some sort of video game junkyard or late-night, televisual channel-hopping hell. His stories tackle very human themes of despair and grief, in bold strokes and short-form, and all of this hallucinatory bombast functions quite well at the diminutive scale of the mobile device or desktop screen. What I am trying to say is that David O’Reilly inimitably conjures the contemporary, and the seeming chasm between gaudy pandemonium and sublime recognition is gracefully bridged. He queries both signal and noise, refuting the presumptive clarity of the information age with depictions of the noisy static of entropy and disorder that more adequately characterise a networked realm. The result of his investigation is a series of short pieces that are both deeply recognisable and yet often quite shocking. Born in 1985 in Ireland, O’Reilly worked with the London-based design collective Shynola, where, in collaboration with the small team, he began to develop his own visual style and unique approach to animation. The artist moved to Berlin in 2007, and subsequently to Los Angeles. While he has worked on a number of prominent music videos, his most high profile project to date was Spike Jonze’s film Her (2013), for which O’Reilly designed the animated sequences featuring the swearing, plump holographic video game character. O’Reilly’s works in 3D animation, but instead of the sheen and high polish of Hollywood 3D, O’Reilly’s work is pared back and stripped down. In place of gleaming perfection, O’Reilly offers glitchy mayhem. At the same time, though, he seems to boast an almost contradictory desire for story and its attendant emotional arc and power. To better explain this breadth, he includes among his references comic book artist Chris Ware and French filmmaker Robert Bresson. WOFL 2106 (2008), one of O’Reilly’s early works, features a small creature bounding through a graphically compelling black-and-white forest. The creature discovers his mother’s bloody body in the snow, and is suitably horrified. What makes the piece so

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powerful is that it suspends the viewer between a sense of empathy and bewilderment as the story continues to grow increasingly strange. Somehow, O’Reilly is able to productively juxtapose absurdity and emotional connection. ‘This place is weird,’ says the main character in O’Reilly’s twelve-minute RGB XYZ (2007); the short piece traces the boy’s journey away from home to the big city. The urban world is pure graphic pandemonium, with chaotic colours, sharp lines and jarring angles, a city that might have been imagined by Piet Mondrian on acid. The characters speak with computer voices, and the sound design overall emerges from the junkyard of a corrupted hard drive. However, despite the mayhem, there are moments of calm and quiet as the boy travels beyond the city. The short piece’s final scenes featuring the city in grey-scale are mesmerising. If these two pieces are about the ennui of being alone, Please Say Something (2008) shifts gears to tell the story of a relationship, in this case between a cat and a mouse. The city is featured once again in this piece, drawn in sweeping lines and odd angles, with the camera prowling through the space unhinged from any constraint. However, the animation’s brilliance is in putting emotional weight next to visual chaos. The story slows at various points, and the couple shares moments of intimacy, despair, love and defeat. Halfway through the piece, for example, the cat and mouse lie in bed. Gazing up at the ceiling, the cat asks, ‘Do you think it will always be like this?’ and we can feel her despair viscerally. With his crude, gawky characters and garish colours, O’Reilly still manages to balance a vision of our networked world and the attempts to connect emotionally despite all that gets in the way. Writing about Please Say Something in an article called ‘Basic Animation Aesthetics’, O’Reilly says, ‘My central idea in constructing the world of the film was to prove that something totally artificial and unreal could still communicate emotion and hold cinematic truth’ (nd: 2). The animator goes on to argue that coherence and harmony are worthwhile values, but the brilliance in his own work is found in stretching the line between coherence and incoherence, between synthesised worlds and a sense of emotional reality. In his 2011 short The External World, O’Reilly seems to have tested himself, introducing as much noise as he possibly could in order to disrupt the emotional signal of the central story. Composed of episodic vignettes that cycle in and out of the main storyline, we nevertheless return repeatedly to a grim boy haplessly playing the piano while his stern father disciplines him with slaps across the back of the head. The various other scenes travel in diverse and often hilarious directions, but we return over and over to the boy and his father, right up to the end when the boy performs his sombre piano solo on a stage, and the oddball characters gathered in the audience weep. It is yet another riveting example of O’Reilly’s acumen, mining such emotional intensity from seemingly so little. In 2013, O’Reilly turned his attention to creating what he called an ‘ambient game’. Titled Mountain, the game is dedicated more to exploring emotional landscapes than levelling up and begins with a series of prompts that takes the participant through states

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of sadness, beauty, love and patience. Then a text reads, ‘You are now being generated’. What is being generated is at once a mountain, but also ‘you’, a participant serene enough to pause, wait and watch. Someone content to witness creation, to hear notes of music and to watch the fading light. Mountain prompts a kind of meditative stance, a stance highly unusual both within the genre of video games and the ways in which we engage with our mobile devices. Once again, O’Reilly deftly engages in an aspect of contemporary culture with which we are all deeply familiar, but then does something entirely different. In this case, in a world of amped up graphics and cut-scenes, O’Reilly shows just how powerful even the most low-fi, anarchic experiences can be. O’Reilly appears to be extending the premises of Mountain in a new game titled Everything, which as of this writing has not been released. Describing the game, O’Reilly writes, ‘In Everything, every single thing is a playable character; if you can see it, you can be it.’ He continues: ‘The game lets you see the entire universe from the point of view of the thousands of things in it. In other words, there is no distinction between you and the world, or between a level and a character. All these things experience and interact with the world differently.’ Here, O’Reilly engages with the qualities of the posthuman, exploring alternative experiences and perspectives of being by moving away from the expectations of traditional player expectation and decentring the human. Like Gatten’s work, O’Reilly’s pieces illuminate another facet of contemporary culture, especially in underscoring the fact that it is less that we generate media and more apt to say that we are being generated by media. This has perhaps never been more true. Speculative Spaces: Marco Brambilla Entering a gallery space, donning 3D glasses, and standing before an immense, moving image tableau, you see Dirty Harry striding purposefully across one corner of the image as rockets catapult overhead, and dozens of characters from dozens of movies – Star Wars (1977), Apocalypse Now (1979), Salo (1975) and so on – writhe in a huge landscape, with Prokofiev’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ providing the soundtrack. This is Marco Brambilla’s Evolution (Megaplex) (2010), a side-scrolling, baroque landscape composed of movie clips collaged together in a dense tapestry that invites repeated viewing in order to glean the florid detail present in the piece. Brambilla, a Milan-born, New York-based media artist, has created a body of work that explores some of the fundamental techniques characteristic of the post-cinematic, in particular working with the temporal and spatial foundations of cinema, and using notions of appropriation, remix and the database to consider new expressions and experiences of subjectivity in a world increasingly mediated by electronic networks. He has also adopted stereoscopic 3D as one of his tools, but rather than striving for the verisimilitude of so much of the film industry’s use of stereo, Brambilla has gone in a different direction altogether. Brambilla’s work participates in a genre of avant-garde media that crafts compelling meta-commentaries on the state of cinema. His work also demonstrates a shift from the linear to the simultaneous that is representative of

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Creation (Megaplex) (2012) by Marco Brambilla; courtesy of Michael Fuchs Galerie

contemporary culture. Taken together, the projects prompt a movement from spectacle to speculation, and to the creation of what I dubbed ‘speculative space’ in the previous chapter. While stereoscopy pre-dates even the birth of cinema, it has had only limited impact in the history of art films. Brambilla’s Megaplex series, composed of three large-scale video collages, suggests an arguably non-cinematic direction for stereoscopic 3D art and design, in which the objective is more about a new language of moving image art designed to take viewers inside a spectacular, almost hallucinogenic space. The series begins with Civilization (Megaplex) (2008), a multi-layered tapestry of interconnecting images that scroll upward to create a journey that seems to move from hell to heaven. The three-minute video contains more than three hundred different looped videos arrayed on a slowly moving landscape. In this piece, Brambilla tackles nothing less than heaven and hell in a dazzling vertical video tapestry reminiscent of the worlds rendered by painter Hieronymus Bosch. The second work in the series is Evolution (Megaplex), a stereoscopic three-minute loop, which attempts to present the entirety of human evolution on a huge, sidescrolling mural. Like its predecessor, Evolution samples the history of Hollywood’s most bombastic moments in a hyper-remix project with each mini-sequence either drawing you into some vertiginous spiral or popping out at you in 3D space. Stereo 3D in this context adds spectacle to spectacle, and the result is simply dazzling. Creation (Megaplex), from 2012, expands on the first two projects to create the most dense and stereographically complex project in the series. The piece features 1,500 stereoscopic video elements arrayed along a swirling vortex that describes both creation and destruction. While the project makes use of existing cinematic imagery, it distances itself from the conventions of remix video. Where remix aesthetics have

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historically thrived on the cut, Brambilla is, in these projects, dedicated to exploring the aesthetics of looping and simultaneity. Brambilla’s three pieces participate in a form of cinematic meta-commentary that has a rich history in the context of avant-garde cinema. The projects stage a return to cinema, rifling through its history to appropriate specific instances. This is not unique – Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010), to cite just one example among dozens, also combs through the history of cinema to find references to time in order to create a 24-hour ode to cinema and temporality. Similarly, the genre of internet video known as super cuts, in which a fan aggregates formally similar scenes through an exhaustive search of a body of work (every POV shot in Breaking Bad; every cocktail in Mad Men, etc), is also part of this movement. However, the realms of video art and art cinema over the last fifteen years have produced an abundance of works that return to existing cinematic imagery in order to scrutinise, explore, examine and interrogate both the image itself and the apparatus that produces it. For Brambilla, the return to cinema is constituted through the juxtaposition of moving image loops, and these loops are situated within larger loops, and so on. The viewers of Brambilla’s work are not the pensive spectators described by Laura Mulvey, musing over a single image; we are instead agents of perception and association, recalling the disparate contexts from which the loops have been taken; we are considering the placements of these loops and the ramifications of their spatial arrangements; and we are considering all of this in relation to a larger narrative and moving image tableau. In short, we are called on to be reflective and to participate in a reading of the images, but to do so specifically in motion, through time and repetition. Brambilla’s three works in the Megaplex series also shift from the linear sequence to a spatialised simultaneity that is more akin to information architecture and a sense of visual immediacy than to cinematic storytelling. As such, the projects reflect the intersection of the interface with cinema, where the interface emphasises the immediate and the present, co-presence and co-occurrence, with spatial montage serving as the primary mode of visual organisation. In this way, the projects challenge the standard linear grammar of time-based work, suggesting metonymy and agency as the keys to insight about the cinematic form. The result is a distinct form of pleasure in crossing boundaries and inhabiting a new kind of space that is only tentatively and temporarily delimited. These are images in a perpetual state of becoming, within spaces that are speculative. Why is this attention to spatial montage significant? Given the bombast of Brambilla’s visual style, it would be easy to dismiss these projects as mere spectacle. However, as we watch these pieces, we seem to enjoy a disembodied gaze, a dematerialised world and a seductive experience of pleasure and affect. And these are the things that we often complain about when we talk about – and dismiss – the digital. However, this kind of dismissal does not allow for a critical response engendered by the work, one that underscores our sense of the relationship between embodiment and information. Wearing the 3D glasses necessary for the full impact of the final two projects, we do

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not succumb to an informatic space, but instead, experience a different arrangement of the body in relation to technology, the virtual and the epistemological. Meaning is produced at the interstices of the technologies both onscreen and worn on the body, but only via the mediation of the body within a complex system of relations. We need to expand our own understandings of emerging media; these forms are not just changing or augmenting existing forms; they are altering the epistemological foundations and paradigms that we use to understand the world and our place in it. The viewer of Brambilla’s work is not merely a viewer; he or she becomes an element within the larger assemblage, and meaning occurs through an awareness of this complex machine. To view Brambilla’s work as mere spectacle rather than as a space for speculation too easily cedes our power of critical reflection to a dominant, but inaccurate, paradigm of media. Davide Quayola Trees on a hillside sway gently in the wind, their branches and leaves moving back and forth in graceful arcs. Gradually, the images begin to blur, the colours swirl together, and the edges lose their lines. Everything sharp becomes soft, everything distinct merges, everything deep becomes flat; colours coalesce into painterly abstraction. Cut to the same scene, the wind still provoking motion, and the movements this time come to resemble thick brush-strokes and the frame contains now a painting, one that is making itself before our eyes. Cut to the same scene, reduced to grey-scale with small blips, jots of colour like glitches dotting the landscape. These are some of the moments in the Italian artist Davide Quayola’s Pleasant Places (2015), a large-scale video projection piece in which the London-based artist uses computational techniques to consider the work of Vincent Van Gogh, using images from the landscape of Provence. To create Pleasant Places, Quayola foregoes both the precision of image analysis and the clarity of cinematography in order to engage the tension between representation and abstraction, figure and ground, signal and noise. If clarity and precision are the typical domain of the digital, Quayola gives us fuzziness and ambiguity, toggling between clarity and obfuscation not only to demonstrate emergence and dematerialisation but to enact a central trope of everyday life in the networked regime: everything dissolves into bits; the material world transmogrifies, yielding to an algorithmic reordering. The medium Quayola employs is thus an active medium, one, in the words of Alexander Galloway ‘whose very materiality moves and restructures itself ’ (2006: 3). Pleasant Places is certainly not a game, but its materiality does move and restructure itself, inviting us to parse the pleasures of the landscape, the moving image and the algorithm, in tension and together. With a series called Forms (2012), Quayola collaborated with media artist Memo Akten to investigate the motion of the human body. Claiming the inspiration of Eadweard Muybridge, Harold Edgerton and Étienne-Jules Marey, the artists make the generally invisible forces and directions of energy visible, tracing trajectories of

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Pleasant Places (2015) by Davide Quayola

somatic power through the movement of abstract shapes. Although the images remain entirely non-figural, the motion of the human body is immediately apparent; it is as if the body has disappeared and what remains are rendered traces of its energy in motion. If O’Reilly and Brambilla salute a sense of digital excess, Quayola brings us full circle, returning to the contemplative engagements with one’s medium that we saw in Dean and Gatten. His moving image pieces inspire a distinct visceral pleasure; with Pleasant Places, the shift from representation to abstraction is felt in the chest, as if the release from representation does indeed open up opportunities for alternative languages, not entirely of the visual. Each of the artists explored here straddles the digital/analogue divide in some way; Tacita Dean, in her passionate advocacy for film, powerfully illuminates what will be lost if we cede all moving image practice to the digital; David Gatten demonstrates the ways in which the digital affords a set of aesthetic constraints and possibilities which, when explored with unabashed curiosity, renders a sensibility counter to all that the digital and the networked connotes; David O’Reilly fully inhabits the digital, rapaciously scratching and scraping its surfaces to find hints of lyricism; Marco Brambilla traffics in the hyperbole and excess of a visual culture in which images are made and remade, mixed and remixed in an incessant maelstrom. And Davide Quayola surveys the calm after the storm, finding beauty and contemplation in the computational.

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This somewhat prismatic framing of the past, present and future of the cinematic suggests vectors of analysis and contemplation that weave through the rest of this book, even as we lurch far beyond time based media and back again. The paths of exploration begun by the artists in the chapter hint at the shape of the ever-widening spiral we will traverse, but they also provide a centre of gravity and a reminder of what is to be lost and gained. It is neither the breathless hyperbole of the ‘new’ that drives us, nor nostalgia for a probably imaginary past, but a vision of the cinematic form whose roots tangle together the past, present and future of media, art and practice.

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Chapter 2 New Practices / New Paradigms

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liding through the woods, trees diaphanous and white, the forest apparitional and eidolic rather than solid and sturdy, more intimation than image: here in a disembodied traversal we witness the alluring power of an aesthetic of detection and tracing. It is an aesthetic of delineation and layering, of light sent and returned, measured and analysed. It is an aesthetic that, in its often wispy sparsity, belies its growing precision and accuracy. And it is an aesthetic that profoundly underscores the movement from the regime of representation to that of information, and in this moment, as the technology gradually improves, we witness the glitchy in-between stage that produces a surprisingly appealing form of imagery. We might imagine these images to constitute a momentary visual trend, captivating in their ephemerality, but they might also speak to nostalgia for the present, a present understood to be at once oriented toward the project of unrelenting surveillance looming on our near horizon and the as-yet unrealised totality of control. There is pleasure in the gesture and its failure, there is beauty in the foundering endeavour. At least for now. The moving image sequence I reference here is drawn from the work of ScanLAB Projects, a London-based creative studio whose work employs techniques of 3D scanning for an array of projects, from architectural scans to those that capture swathes of the Earth for environmental purposes. The images are captured through the use of Lidar, which stands for ‘light detection and radar’ and refers to a process of remote sensing using a laser to brighten an area, which is then measured and analysed. Lidar is just one of many technologies that are transforming what we understand to be the cinematic image. These shifts reverberate well beyond image capture to include a series of compelling and dramatic alterations in many of the most fundamental aspects of the film industry and its forms, most of which have remained relatively stable for nearly a century. The standard gauge for professional filmmaking was 35mm, established by Thomas Edison and the Lumière Brothers at the birth of cinema. The

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frame rate, too, set to 24 frames per second, was determined in the 1920s both to accommodate sound and to create a seamless illusion of motion. The steps in the filmmaking process were quickly codified and aligned with the assembly line, the better to support a burgeoning commercial industry that would require repetition and shared resources to increase profits. Disruptions of the basic cinematic workflow occur at regular intervals, but the advent of digital filmmaking in the late 1990s marked a dramatic shift. The cameras, process of capture, editing techniques, visual effects, distribution strategies and exhibition options have all changed. These developments have in turn offered filmmakers new creative possibilities. For example, in the simplest terms, the low cost of videotape in comparison with film stock meant that filmmakers and their cast members could rethink performance expectations. Similarly, the ever-increasing storage capacity of both cameras and the drives used in the filmmaking process were exploited for experiments with temporality. Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002), for example, was created from a single, ninety-minute shot captured directly to a hard-drive. These shifts – small and large – are myriad, and they invite a widespread rethinking of the basic vocabularies of ‘film’ and ‘cinema’, ‘live-action’ and even ‘animation’. As Stephen Prince points out in Digital Visual Effects in Film (2012), ‘Cinema, according to a predominant model, is a photographic medium oriented toward live-action in which filmmakers arrange performers and events before the camera during production, with the camera used as a recording mechanism to capture an accurate facsimile of what has been placed before it’ (2012: 2). He continues, presenting a reorientation that has yet to fully inform film culture, despite the changes happening all around us: [M]odels of cinema – those that attribute the medium’s properties to a base in photography – provide an insufficient account of the ways that cinema operates in a narrative mode and as a medium amalgamating different image types and categories. (Ibid.)

Not only do we need to reconceive and re-name aspects of the process, but we need to understand shifts in the basic filmmaking workflow, with workflow here defined as the steps in a process designed to capture, store, manage, manipulate and output the material necessary for a movie. David Stump offers another definition of workflow: ‘I define workflow as the process whereby images, audio and metadata are recorded, backed up, distributed and safeguarded’ (2014: np) adding that ‘there are infinite combinations of hardware and software that can be used for these purposes’ (ibid.). It is in the infinity of combinations that we find both an opportunity for creativity and cause for headache. Scott Arundale and Tashi Trieu underscore the significance of defining each project’s unique workflow: With the explosion in the number of cameras, codecs, software and hardware platforms, it is abundantly clear that no two workflows are identical. Therefore,

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the filmmaker/producer/supervisor must define a workflow going forward and remain flexible enough to be able to adapt and change it where necessary due to innovations and technological advances, or alternately to avoid bottlenecks should they arise. (2014: 23–4)

These workflows are not yet fixed; instead they are fashioned anew for each project. The shift to digital capture has opened up a bewildering array of options in each of the parts of the process such that even the ability to design an appropriate workflow has itself become a much-needed skill. These emerging workflows also introduce entirely new steps into the filmmaking process, as well as the need for new crewmembers. For example, film sets are now home to Data Wranglers (or loaders) responsible for making copies and back-ups of the data captured by the camera, while Digital Imaging Technicians (DITs) work closely with the cinematographer to achieve the look desired for the project. As Arundale and Trieu explain, the Digital Imaging Technician ‘is responsible for making sure the signal from the camera and previously recorded data goes through the proper chain of conversions, look-up tables (LUTs), and colour correction processes’ (2014: 80), while also serving as a liaison with camera manufacturers, rental houses and post-production facilities. While in previous decades, the various departments on a major production, including camera, editorial and sound, worked relatively autonomously, digital workflows blur these boundaries, and the DIT is often the figure who moves across these disparate departments to ensure an efficient and consistent workflow for all involved. The Data Wranglers and DITs are just two in an increasingly long list of new terms and practices that characterise digital filmmaking at this moment. However, there are larger conceptual shifts as well. In this chapter, I examine several of these shifts and techniques in order to consider how they resonate with changes in emerging cultural practices, the posthuman and the post-cinematic. Rather than offering an exhaustive survey, I hope instead to consider the significance of selected practices that suggest alterations in how we understand the cinematic in the twenty-first century. Previsualisation Throughout most of the history of cinema, filmmakers have planned the visual design of their projects beforehand, through elaborate sketches, photographs, storyboards and even animated sequences, known as animatics, rip-o-matics or story reels. However, as special effects have gained prominence, the need to plan for and test these sequences before production begins has similarly increased, and filmmakers are increasingly developing more elaborate strategies to prepare for production. Previsualisation has emerged as one such strategy, and is just one of many new terms to enter pre- and postproduction workflows. Others include pitchviz (a visualisation used to pitch a project before it has been made); techviz (a visualisation designed to depict information related to the camera, lighting and design for a film to help understand the technical resources

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required for a production); and postviz (a visualisation that combines effects shots and production photography to indicate options for a finished film). Previsualisation is defined by the Joint Technology Subcommittee on Previsualization, a collaboration between the Visual Effects Society (VES), the Art Director’s Guild (ADG) and the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC), as ‘a collaborative process that generates preliminary versions of shots or sequences, predominantly using 3D animation tools and a virtual environment. It enables filmmakers to visually explore creative ideas, plan technical solutions and communicate a shared vision for efficient production’ (Okun and Zerman 2015: 46). This definition is also used by the Previsualization Society, founded by and dedicated to those who are engaged in previsualisation. Previsualisation is becoming increasingly popular and complex – the previsualisation planning for Brad Bird’s Tomorrowland (2015), for example, lasted a year (see Martin 2015: np) – and companies dedicated specifically to handling this phase of production have emerged. Halon, founded in 2003 by Daniel Gregoire, is a leading previsualisation company based in Santa Monica, California, and known for its work on dozens of major films and commercials. The Third Floor, a Los Angeles-based firm founded in 2004 by Chris Edwards, is another major force in previsualisation. Gregoire and Edwards are both founding members of the non-profit Previsualization Society, dedicated to promoting previsualisation as an art form. When describing the techniques of previsualisation, Chris Edwards likens the process to the development of early storyboard art by Alfred Hitchcock, who used extensive drawings to help direct action-filled sequences in films such as Psycho (1960) and The Birds (1963). The practice evolved so that filmmakers such as George Lucas might create animatics, or test sequences of Jedi flights using Barbie and GI Joe dolls, just to get the feel for a sequence visually. On early films, Lucas also has used rip-omatics, which borrow video clips from other movies to illustrate the overall gist of a sequence. While the practice in the past was generally restricted to action sequences, according to Edwards, the process is increasingly part of many movies. The previs process includes creating 3D assets, blocking basic camera moves and capturing possible shots. According to Mike Fink, a USC faculty member and visual effects specialist, previs is most important in helping demonstrate potential problems with difficult shot set-ups or riggings in challenging locations: On Clockstoppers, we used previs to determine motion control moves well before we got to the location. This was very important on that show because the motion control had to fit in some very tiny spaces. We modelled the rig, and placed it on the virtual set so that we knew beforehand that everything would fit’ (2003: np).

Edwards dubs all of this ‘shot design’, and says that the tools that facilitate shot design enable more effective collaboration: ‘Animators, filmmakers and game developers are all using the same digital tools and this leads to increased collaboration and efficient transmedia production’ (2012: np). He says his team of artists must be very versatile

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in the use of new and emerging tools and yet also skilled in classical filmmaking. ‘They’re directors-in-training; they’re editors-in-training; they’re cinematographersin-training; and they understand modelling and textures’ (ibid.). The material generated in the previs process ends up becoming ‘an animated blueprint or design document’ (ibid.), Edward continues. What is so significant, however, is that this material begins to establish not only the visual look and feel of a film as it is derived from the concept art, but it also begins to craft the actual shots, the cutting and even the audio. Parts of the film, then, are made before production actually begins. As Fink explains, the use of previs can disrupt some of the traditional workflow expectations: The director of photography is the person on a film who has the responsibility to set shots and help the director decide on lens, camera and lighting choices in his attempt to tell a story. […] But I often have scenes previsualized months before the DP is hired. The DP, and any others involved in helping the director tell the story, must be brought into the previs process as early as possible so that there are no surprises, and no bruised egos, along the way. (2003: np)

Previs is also in many cases supplanting the traditional storyboard as the technique for planning and mapping a live-action feature film, and is definitely the tool adopted for any kind of special effect.1 In essence, with the increased significance of previs, the entire workflow of traditional filmmaking gets turned inside out, the linear sequence is reimagined, and many of the decisions we assume to be the province of the director and/or cinematographer are made by shot designers. While this shift is not in itself constitutive of the post-cinematic, it points to the rearrangements within the linear tradition, while also suggesting the growing prominence of computer-based design in the filmmaking process. Transmedia Story Design If previs is disrupting the linearity of the traditional filmmaking workflow, a relatively new concept – transmedia design – disturbs traditional notions of the film and its ancillary products. Transmedia design prescribes a design process that, instead of viewing the film as the centre and everything else as peripheral, imagines a unified multi-platform design method attending to the numerous directions of a story as it travels across diverse media forms. While still gaining traction as a widespread industrial practice, transmedia design has a long history and plausibly compelling future. In Playing With Power in Movies, Television and Video Games: From Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1991), Marsha Kinder coined the term ‘transmedia’ to reference a form of intertextuality that characterised television shows and games as they borrowed from, referenced, and, in various ways, acknowledged existing movies. Kinder’s understanding of intertextuality is based on Julia Kristeva’s use of the term,

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which argues that every text participates in a larger signifying system. Kristeva writes that texts are ‘mosaics of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another’ (1980: 66). Texts are systems that rely on and are constituted by other systems. Kinder builds on this idea to explore the ways in which entertainment entities constitute precisely this ‘mosaic of quotations’: ‘Thus, even before children go to the cinema, they learn that movies make a vital contribution to an ever-expanding supersystem of entertainment, one marked by transmedia intertextuality (1991: 1; emphasis in original). Kinder continued to use the term ‘transmedia intertextuality’ throughout her book to name the dialogic connectivity among the varying components of a broad entertainment system, and it is this understanding of the term that inspired further development by Henry Jenkins, who has offered the most elaborate and extensive expansion of the term to date. His use deviates from that of Kinder, however, in that he is specifically referencing a growing trend within both the entertainment industry and among independent media makers to find ways to craft stories across diverse platforms in part in order to take advantage of the proliferation of networked screens all around us. He defines transmedia storytelling it in this way: Transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally, each medium makes it own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story. So, for example, in The Matrix franchise, key bits of information are conveyed through three liveaction films, a series of animated shorts, two collections of comic book stories, and several video games. There is no one single source or ur-text where one can turn to gain all of the information needed to comprehend the Matrix universe. (2007: np)

As transmedia storytelling has gained traction, Jenkins has continued to refine the definition, expanding it even further in order to accommodate a spectrum of creative and commercial practices. Writing four years after posting his initial definition, Jenkins reflects the diffusion of the term across multiple uses of media: Transmedia storytelling describes one logic for thinking about the flow of content across media. We might also think about transmedia branding, transmedia performance, transmedia ritual, transmedia play, transmedia activism, and transmedia spectacle, as other logics. (2011: np; emphasis in original)

Here, Jenkins acknowledges the spread of the term, and the ways in which other practices, from branding to activism, might mobilise across disparate media platforms. With regard to storytelling, however, what is most striking about transmedia is how it can deepen a story experience, expanding it across multiple reception contexts and allowing for increased audience participation. In so doing, however, the story also calls attention to the structures and linkages underlying its diverse media platforms. In

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other words, where we once looked to cinema viewership as the definitive experience of immersion, understood to be the sensation of being fully absorbed within a story world presented in a dark theatre on a massive screen, the defining characteristic of transmedia immersion may include the ability to stitch together narrative elements from a diverse range of sources and viewing experiences. Here, immersion is realised through various forms of engaged but dispersed experience, including the often intensive, collaborative problem-solving that invites teams of strangers to work together to solve puzzles and unlock layers of a story, as in the widely celebrated alternate reality game, I Love Bees (2004). In addition to inviting players into a hybrid, science fictional story world of alien invasion, I Love Bees provided narrative backstory that anticipated Bungie’s release of the video game Halo 2 (2004), thereby blurring the boundary between advertising and entertainment. Transmedia immersion may also include the ability to drill down into particular aspects of a story by moving from an online fictional series, to web-based interview material, to real-world resources, as in East Los High (2013), an online dramatic series in its fourth season on Hulu at the time of writing. The show has been heralded for its inventive use of transmedia design to connect the realms of fiction and nonfiction in order to help its teen audience ask questions about sexuality and solve real world personal problems. Rather than a monolithic understanding of immersion, then, we begin to acknowledge a spectrum of engaged experience that is not predicated on that of the movie theatre. Immersion now may imply engagement, participation, collaboration and contribution, acts that seamlessly traverse the real and fictional worlds. Frank Rose explores the concept of immersion directly in The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories (2012). According to Rose, an audience that is now characterised by its ability to multi-task and to juggle disparate digital tasks while also connecting with friends and family via Facebook, Instagram and text messaging seeks not coherent, linear stories but total immersion in hyperconnected worlds. Our sense of mediated interconnectivity sparks the need for new story forms, as Rose explains: ‘a new type of narrative is emerging – one that’s told through many media at once in a way that’s nonlinear, that’s participatory and often gamelike, and that’s designed above all to be immersive’ (2012: 3). Rose uses the term ‘deep media’ to characterise these manifold story worlds. Once again, however, this sense of immersion shifts from being a sensory experience that we know from cinema to one that engages participants in the act of parsing, connecting, investigating and piecing together. Jay Bushman, the transmedia producer and a writer for The Lizzie Bennett Diaries, helps continue to delineate the definition of transmedia by distinguishing between franchise transmedia and integrated transmedia. Franchise transmedia creates a system in which there are movies, books, video games and comics that all function together to form a seamless story. The Marvel movie universe, for example, studiously avoids contradiction and the Marvel properties all work together to maintain a coherent story world. In contrast, integrated transmedia uses a single story that spreads across

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multiple media forms. In the franchise transmedia realm, each piece can stand alone; you do not need to have experienced one element to understand another element. With integrated transmedia projects, the pieces are not stand-alone; they are fragments of the larger story world. The logic of franchise transmedia tends to follow the logic of large-scale entertainment entities, while integrated transmedia tends to be smaller and more flexible. Christy Dena adds even more to a delineation of transmedia story design by outlining four different approaches to the design of a transmedia project. The first approach designates projects in which disparate story elements across different media platforms contribute distinct story elements to the larger project; in the second, the disparate media elements contribute to the telling of a single story; a third paradigm is one in which storytellers decide to expand on an existing story, building it out across different media platforms; and the fourth constitutes those projects that are designed to be transmedia from the beginning. In contrast, Colin B. Harvey, in ‘A Taxonomy of Transmedia Storytelling’ (2014), uses legal relationships as the basis for parsing transmedia, focusing on intellectual property; this approach allows him to acknowledge the complexity of user participation, both official and unofficial. As transmedia gains traction, differing creative groups adopt the form. Writing a series of short essays in 2011 on Aca-Fan, Jenkins’ blog, Brian Clark outlined three specific transmedia creator communities: i) those who are creating extensions of existing media properties; ii) those interested in the branding potential of transmedia design; and iii) those involved in issues-oriented activism. In all three cases, the goal is to deploy transmedia design in order to extend participant engagement over time, but the quality and outcome of that engagement clearly differ among these three communities. If we shift perspective a bit, however, and consider transmedia story design from the perspective of television, which has changed dramatically over the last decade, we arrive at a different understanding of its potentials. Janet Murray sketches this vector in an address to the 2012 EuroiTV proceedings on interactive TV and video entitled ‘Transcending Transmedia: Emerging Story Telling for the Emerging Convergence Platforms’; using what she has dubbed ‘the four representational properties of digital environments’ (2012: 9), namely the procedural, participatory, spatial and encyclopaedic affordances, Murray imagines the near future of television and the design potentials it offers. She highlights high resolution interactivity, and the possibility for creating greater immediacy in fictional worlds, as well opportunities for citizen journalists to contribute media to live events. She also predicts the evolution of immersive story worlds that more seamlessly transition participants from one platform to another. Calling attention to the fact that television produces both a sense of intimacy and collectivity, Murray also imagines the future of transmedia story design to include greater opportunities for audience members to experience a sense of collective viewership. The affordances of digital media are more fully developed in Murray’s, Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice (2011).

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With regard to the actual practice of transmedia story design, transmedia production remains a relatively new process. However, a consistent step in the design process is the development of a transmedia ‘bible’, a document that attends to all of the components within a transmedia project. Gary P. Hayes offers a useful guide in a publication entitled ‘How to Write a Transmedia Production Bible: A Template for Multi-Platform Producers’ (2011). The document steps through each stage in the process, from identifying plot points and user scenarios to describing the forms of engagement the project seeks. The most useful component of the guide for those new to transmedia may be the ‘user journey’, which uses a timeline to chart the expected points of engagement for participants. This component underscores the fact that a transmedia production is a performance that unfolds in time and calls attention, too, to the fact that the performance is very much a collaboration with the participants who engage with the project. In this way, transmedia story design joins a collection of new workflows that respond to shifting platforms and potentials in contemporary story experience, while also resonating with processes that are increasingly collaborative and participatory. World Building Invited in 2015 to muse on the future of film for a round-up in the Hollywood Reporter, Nicholas Negroponte started by looking to the past: ‘We used to believe that the medium was the message, that if you told the story in print, in film or on radio, the interaction between form and substance was such that story-telling was done by people well versed in each medium – three different interpretations’ (in Kilday 2015: np). As we shift into a form of filmmaking that is increasingly computational, however, images become far more mutable; indeed these images become essentially information in a database. With this in mind, Negroponte continues his fantasy of future storytelling: Now imagine that, rather than writing, recording or filming a story, you model the situation in a computer. That model is like the DNA of the story from which multiple forms can be rendered. Want to see it as a movie? Want to hear it while driving? Want to read a book about it? In each case, when you choose, it is automatically rendered in that medium, with the skill sets of great directors, wonderful actors, postproduction excellence – but no people, just computers. (Ibid.)

Negroponte imagines a world in which the recording of stories has been replaced by the modelling of situations. What does it mean to model a situation, one that allows divergent story experiences to emerge?2 The notion of modelling a situation comes close to that of world building as it has been developed by creative director Alex McDowell who has, since his design work on Minority Report in 2002, sought to refine a nonlinear storytelling workflow designed specifically to create a world – or situation – from which multiple stories across diverse

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platforms can take shape. World building offers another conception of the filmmaking workflow, shifting from the relatively linear process codified and streamlined in classical Hollywood production that generally begins with a script, moves step-bystep in a relatively stable pathway through funding, pre-production, production, postproduction, distribution and exhibition. If there are ancillary entities – an associated game, graphic novel or music – they are generated after the film is completed. World building, in contrast, represents a creative workflow within the filmmaking and broader narrative media process that is nonlinear and builds from a world to a story, and indeed, allows each imagined world to generate multiple stories across multiple platforms. Rather than starting with a script, acquiring funding, entering post-production, then production and so on, world building insists that we start by designing a world, and then allow the stories that may be nascent within that world to emerge, honed for multiple media platforms. McDowell imagines that this process could transform media industries, and it is significant in the context of this volume as it offers yet another example of a series of paradigmatic shifts, in this case moving from a linear step-by-step workflow to a contextual, collaborative process. It also is in step with shifts in narrative structure itself, which is increasingly more concerned with the representation of space. As Sean Cubitt points out with respect to many films of the 1990s and 2000s, ‘space has usurped the privilege of time. Narrative is diminishing in importance … while diegesis, the imaginary worlds created by films, becomes more significant’ (2002: 26). From 1990 to 2013, McDowell was an award-winning production designer known for his work on many feature films in addition to Minority Report, including The Lawnmower Man (1992), The Crow (1994), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), Fight Club (1999), The Terminal (2004), Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) and Man of Steel (2013). Each of these films boasts an inventive visual style that is at once ambitious and decidedly cohesive, and McDowell’s efforts on each have contributed to his rethinking the role of design in the film production process. While McDowell brings a visionary approach to world building in the context of Hollywood, the concept predates his efforts to be sure. The history of literature is rich with examples of worlds that seem to generate stories. The Odyssey, for example, conjures a very rich world within which an epic tale unfolds. Similarly, the worlds created by J. R. R. Tolkein are extremely robust, and science fiction as a genre tends to privilege world building.3 However the role of worlds in discussions of narrative continues to grow. This fact is underscored by the publication of Storyworlds Across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology (2014), edited by Marie-Laure Ryan and Jan-Noël Thon. In the introduction, the editors explain that this work builds on Ryan’s Narrative Across Media: The Languages of Storytelling (2004), with the replacement of ‘narrative’ with ‘storyworld’ registering their sense that the notion of ‘world’ has gained significance over the last decade. Similarly Daniel Yacavone’s Film Worlds: A Philosophical Aesthetics of Cinema (2008) considers the ‘world-like structures and experiences of narrative film’ (2015: xiii) in the broader context of film theory and philosophy.

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McDowell’s use of world building is at once far more specific and expansive. He began to define the term and the process it designates through his experience on Minority Report. Rather than being given a script as the framework from which to begin to imagine the project’s production design, McDowell and the film’s writer started working on the project the same day. They began their creative process with a simple brief from Steven Spielberg about an apparently benign near future that is revealed to be undermining basic civil liberties in a dangerous way. The challenge for both was to conjure a realistic vision of that story’s world. ‘I said that if there’s no script, let’s look at the global context of the story, and start thinking about it that way,’ McDowell said in interview (in Willis 2011a: np). To begin to imagine that world, an interdisciplinary group of people with diverse areas of expertise was convened. The group included Neil Gershenfeld, who helped imagine the ways in which the pre-cogs in the story would be entangled with the city; Harald Becker, who designed the cars used in the film; Stewart Brand, the editor of the Whole Earth Catalogue; novelist Douglas Coupland; John Underkoffler, who designed the film’s gestural interfaces and is the founder of Oblong Industries; architects Greg Lynn and Frank Gehry; Jaron Lanier, who developed some of the first virtual reality technology; Cdr. Shaun B. Jones of DARPA; and Peter Calthrope, an urban planner. The team started with Washington D.C. imagined fifty years in the future, and from there, extrapolated a story. What are the story drivers? And then what are the social and political drivers? Then they used an array of tools to create photo-realistic images of that world, basically visualising the narrative environment as design fiction before the story existed. While it was a practical necessity to have the director sign off on things that were not yet in a script as they progressed, it was also for McDowell a prototype for a new filmmaking process that focused first on context, and then moved through a nonlinear workflow to develop a story. McDowell found the process on Minority Report revelatory. It was efficient; it used new techniques that were very productive; and it crafted a set of social relationships among participants that he had never seen before on a film set, and which proved very beneficial to the story. He dubs this kind of filmmaking ‘sculpting in space’. Design, rather than being marginal to script and performance, becomes instead the central hub from which everything else emerges. He says of the process, ‘It’s more storydriven’, but it can also account for the increasing complexity of very large-scale digital productions such as Avatar, where a design environment that can account for all the information needed by every department is found (ibid.). McDowell illustrates the workflow using a mandala-like diagram to demonstrate the complexity of what he calls the ‘narrative design process’, an endeavour that he further characterises as a ‘progressive, non-linear workflow adopting and adapting to a digitally-based process that is fundamentally changing our industries’ (ibid.). He also describes the process of world building as a holistic approach that takes narrative as its core, and develops ‘the logic of the world from the narrative’, and continues to build a world based on this logic:

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World Building Design Mandala (2016) by Alex McDowell and the World Building Media Lab

With this approach, one can then extract any and all design and storytelling, the wayfinding and experience for the audience, and develop the narrative outcome of any problem you throw at the world. The logic that comes out of this immersive world building approach to the design will answer its own questions. (Ibid.)

In order to extrapolate the specific contributions of design to new workflows, McDowell founded the World Building Media Lab and the World Building Institute, both located within the School of Cinematic Arts at USC, and he is the founder of 5D Global Studio, dubbed ‘a multi-platform, cross-discipline design studio that builds worlds: future reality not science fiction’. All three entities are dedicated to world building as a fundamental creative process. Since joining the USC faculty in 2011, McDowell has continued to work with collaborators from the realms of architecture, urban planning, opera, theatre, neuroscience, engineering, biology and more to explore the practice of world building more fully; this work has taken form as international workshops as well as via largescale events in which hundreds of people come together for a weekend-long design investigation. These events began with the 5D ‘The Future of Immersive Design’ conference, which took place on the California State University campus in Long Beach in 2008. In reference to the conference, McDowell explains, ‘The neural sparking between left brain and right brain is at the core of 5D – we are moving into a landscape where art and science, design and engineering are inseparable. At their intersection the new laboratory for the future of our narrative crafts lies’ (in Blitz 2009: np). The two most recent of these events (at the time of writing) were both titled ‘The Science of Fiction’, hosted in 2013 and 2014 in Los Angeles. Both events created circumstances for the robust exploration of world building’s potentials. The first event divided participants among six groups to explore Los Angeles in the near future after

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the water level has risen, flooding parts of the city. The topics addressed by the groups included new forms of architecture, transportation, design and biology, with the goal not simply of imagining the world of the near future, but more specifically refining the world building collaborative process. McDowell described the event in his opening remarks as the ‘anti-TED’. In contrast with TED talks, which provide a forum for inspirational speakers, world building acknowledges that the audience members often know more than the people on stage; in this way, there are as many participants as leaders. John Seely Brown offered additional context during the event’s framing, suggesting the larger potentials for world building beyond narrative and asking, ‘How do you create a toolkit for change? How do you really begin to think about contexts, moving beyond cities into whole ecosystems?’ He encouraged the audience to be willing to design for emergence rather than fixed entities, and to focus on practices and systems that might contribute to the world building process. The second ‘Science of Fiction’ event refined the world building process, in this case expanding on the efforts of McDowell’s students who had been imagining the world of Rilao, a city formed through the imaginary collision of Rio de Janeiro and Los Angeles. The event further adopted the use of an inventive system of prompts developed by School of Cinematic Arts faculty member Jeff Watson to at once constrain the imaginative process and guide it in particular directions. Once again, the audience was divided into groups and tasked with imagining the near future, with a focus on articulating an existing context that participants could engage. Through these massive, participatory events, McDowell continued to extrapolate the processes that might engineer a storytelling workflow, defining world building as an experiential, collaborative and interdisciplinary philosophy, one that integrates imagination and technology with the goal of creating a story space that can frame every aspect of the process, from inception through iteration and prototyping, into making and finishing. He also identified the characteristics and steps in the world building process: R5 ),&5/#&#(!5#-5)",(.9515-.,.535-.&#-"#(!5."5&)!#5) 5."51),&85 R5 ),&5 /#&#(!5 #-5 #'',-#095 #.5 --'&-5 ."5 )'*)((.-5 ) 5 ."5 -.),35 1),&65 offering a means for becoming embedded in the world being created. This aspect of the process is vital. R5 ),&5/#&#(!5#-5)&&),.#05(5#(.,#-#*&#(,395#.5#'!#(-55,./,(5.)5.,#&5 storytelling, to the aggregation of stories from multiple storytellers, passed on through generations. No longer subject to the single author, world building supports spherical storytelling where the viewer’s gaze is liberated, and narrative is embedded in every aspect of the world. R5 ),&5 /#&#(!5 #-5 -&&95 #.5 #(0)&0-5 ŀ(#(!5 ."5 )/(,#-5 ) 5 ."5 1),&5 #(5 5 manner that is fractal. The world can be as small as the house in Fight Club or the terminal in The Terminal and still be a world. The world, then, is any coherent space where stories take place.

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During the second ‘Science of Fiction’ event, McDowell also offered new terms for the conventional components of story, noting that ‘character becomes agent; environment becomes context; and viewpoint becomes author, audience, user or viewer’, adding, ‘The tension among these is core to every story, and forms the basis of the fluid development of every world.’ The world building methodology has been developed iteratively through McDowell’s teaching; given his penchant for collaboration, it is no surprise that McDowell frequently collaborates with other educators. For the fall 2013 iteration of his graduate world building studio, for example, architect Ann Pendleton-Jullian participated, helping codify the world building process even further. He has also co-taught with Peggy Weil, and each iteration of his course has involved connecting with at least one other international course. In these design studios, the students move through a fourstage process that constitutes the world building practice. The first step asks a ‘What if ?’ question. This part of the process is expansive and conjectural. For Minority Report, the ‘What if ?’ question asked, ‘What if we were living fifty years in the future?’ The second step in the world building process is to establish a series of logic points. For Minority Report, the logic points included the following: the future is not the dystopic world we frequently imagine, but rather a more benign future; the setting is Washington D.C.; there are pre-cogs who have the ability to predict a crime before it occurs; and the city exists within a fifty-mile radius because that is as far as the precogs can sense. The third step calls for the elaboration of domains that will help answer the ‘What if ?’ question, but within the constraints suggested by the logic points. Here, experts in urban planning, security, technology, architecture and so on can contribute. To establish a powerful origin for the story world, the team needs to explore everything from physics to topography, from behaviours to social structures and language. This stage also involves crafting physical artefacts that might be a part of this world. Experimentation, imagination and design are leveraged to help understand the landing points for the story. The fourth step captures the visual and conceptual parameters of the world in a story bible. In addition to the stages of world development, the world building methodology entails exploring a horizontal plane, which constitutes the broad definition of the points of logic, as well as a vertical plane, which entails detailing the specifics of the world by drilling down into key topics. ‘In this way, each core sample makes the world more robust through its examination of subject with respect to context of the world as a whole,’ explains McDowell (in Willis 2011: np). He continues: And we look carefully at scale across the horizontal and the vertical – the scale of the individual, the community and the world at large; and finally we run narratives through the world, looking to understand the impact of the individual, of each aspect of the world, at every scale, all exacting influence of the progress and development of the character. (Ibid.)

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McDowell has gone on to deploy world building beyond the entertainment industry. He used world building to imagine the future of a small village in Saudi Arabia, for example, with the goal of establishing a fully sustainable community. Entitled Al Baydha Village, the project planning for the village drew on elements of cinematic visual design and interactivity to create a virtual work within which the research team could stage possible future scenarios and visualise possibilities for the participants. These components were also deeply grounded in research – architectural, agricultural, tribal and cultural – so that everything imagined for the future was rooted empirically within the context of a sustainable community and permaculture. World building, with an emphasis on understanding context as well as content and its dedication to a participatory, collaborative process, resonates with the key elements of a posthuman ethos. World building is an endeavour deeply connected to diverse systems, and rather than relying on the singular vision of a writer or director, privileges collective vision; rather than relying on a linear unfolding, it works best through simultaneity; and rather than crafting a primary object at the centre, usually a film, with ancillary projects hovering on the edges as if in orbit, it creates the potential for multiple story forms to emerge in conjunction. McDowell continues to hone this process, exploring emerging virtual, augmented and mixed reality platforms and their dramatic impact on contemporary storytelling: With the explosion of VR in the past three years, I argue that we have entered not only the posthuman but the post-cinematic era, where spherical, 360-degree narrative world-space produces the absolute rending of the single author’s control over the viewer’s gaze. These new media, whether they persist in this form or become quickly and radically modified, have already disrupted the form to such an extent that we all need to reconsider our core creative capabilities. World building, which by definition defines a spherical holistic basis for the logic of its emergent narratives, is likely to be the basis of new creative practice. (Ibid.)

Finally, world building is also a process that respects the increasing significance of the audience. Rather than remaining passive consumers, audiences are increasingly involved in the processes of creation. We can also draw analogies between world building and a networked culture. The qualities lauded in world building – its emphasis on the nonlinear, the collaborative, the participatory and the dispersed – certainly echo those characteristics that constitute a networked culture. To what extent does this alignment contribute to the creation of subjects who readily acquiesce to this culture? In an essay entitled ‘Remembering the Technological Unconscious by Foregrounding Knowledges of Position’, Nigel Thrift describes an emergent ‘embodied phenomenality’: This new phenomenality is beginning to structure what is human by disclosing ‘embodied’ capacities of communication, memory and collaborative reach in particular ways that privilege a roving, engaged interaction as typical of ‘human’

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cognition and feed that conception back into the informational devices and environments that increasingly surround us. (2002: 186)

Thrift is querying the ways in which computing, in becoming ubiquitous, contiguous and synergistic in its relationship with humans, contributes to a standardisation of space – space that can now be tracked and traced. This standardisation of space, in turn, interpolates its human occupants not as individuals but as necessary components of large-scale data flows and patterns. In some ways this decentring of the individual from the narrative of consumer culture resonates with the systemic focus of world building; on the other hand, it threatens a kind of depersonalisation that is antithetical to world building’s core investment in the potential centrality of any given component of the world as the focal point of its own micro-narrative. Within such a totalising system, individual tactics of resistance are, as the saying goes, futile. Except at a speed and scale that rivals that of the network itself, we can neither game such a system nor escape from it. It is within just such a milieu that the hunger for a return to long-challenged notions of individuality and authenticity drives some of the most compelling methods of performance and directing. Self as Source: The Technique by Joan Scheckel In the heart of Hollywood on a smallish street just north of Santa Monica Boulevard, there exists an expansive, open studio space that serves as the home for a burgeoning creative community – for directors, writers, actors and other artists seeking a new form of storytelling that connects directly to their own experience. Hundreds of participants have struggled to find and articulate meaning in the sunlit room, sweating, leaping, running, dancing, moving, thinking and learning. All of this work is dedicated to tapping into the untapped practices of knowing through the body; in connection to others; and by via a form of storytelling attuned to a new century. The space serves as the home to the Technique, an embodied experience of narrative creation designed to elicit stories by tapping into the self – one’s own experiences, passions, fears, mysteries – as the source for storytelling. Created and honed by Joan Scheckel for more than twenty years, the Technique has become a magnet for artists seeking new, genuine ways to imagine stories in the twenty-first century both individually and in community with other artists. Scheckel, who is herself a director, writer and producer with a background that also includes work as an actress and singer, has guided many of the most vital new voices in contemporary cinema to find this form of storytelling. These artists include Jill Soloway, who studied the Technique and then collaborated with Scheckel to create her award-winning feature film Afternoon Delight (2013). Continuing her collaboration with Scheckel and the Technique, Soloway further tapped into her own experience and launched the ground-breaking Amazon series Transparent (2015–), on which Scheckel serves as Consulting Producer. Guided by Soloway and Scheckel, the entire Transparent team uses the Technique, from the directors, writers

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Joan Scheckel, instruction in The Technique (2012)

and actors to the cinematographer and crew; this broad immersion by the entire team in a new process gives the show its sense of intimacy and dance-like flow. Writer-director Niki Caro has also studied the process and invited Scheckel to use the Technique to both script doctor and workshop her Academy Award-nominated film Whale Rider (2002). Mike Mills is also a student-turned-collaborator. Scheckel served as executive producer on his feature Beginnners (2010), which earned an Academy Award for Christopher Plummer as Best Performance for an Actor in a Supporting Role. Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris studied with Scheckel and collaborated with her on Little Miss Sunshine (2007). The film earned two Academy Awards, as well as the AFI’s award for Movie of the Year. The list of screenwriters and directors who have studied the Technique with Scheckel includes artists as diverse as Rupert Sanders, Mark Romanek, Sacha Gervasi, Richard Press, Alison Maclean, Jake Scott, Patricia Cordoso, Bryce Dallas Howard, Sarah Shapiro, Mark Ruffalo, Nick Jarecki and Miranda July. The list of other films that have benefited from exposure to the Technique is similarly disparate, and includes Jesus’ Son (1999), Real Women Have Curves (1999), Rocket Science (2007), Never Let Me Go (2010), The Future (2011), Arbitrage (2012), Snow White and the Huntsman (2012) and unReal (2015). With all of these projects and artists, Scheckel’s goal was to integrate meaning, action, feeling and structure through a carefully honed process. Rather than looking outward to existing screenplay structures and mythic paradigms, whether it is the three-acts embraced by Hollywood or the hero’s journey, the Technique begins instead by turning inward, looking to the self as source, not for

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subject matter necessarily, but for meaning: ‘How do we access something so elusive as the inner life, that feels in the unknown, the unseen, the ungraspable terrain of the soul and the mind? … This self speaks in silences and whale songs, helpless gestures and unbidden vulnerabilities, slips and sighs, dreams and spasms, shudders, stillness and surprise. How do we bring that to form?’ Scheckel asks (in Willis 2013: np). The Technique is dedicated to tapping the self as source, and then guiding that inchoate material into an appropriate form. The form is not dictated from the outside, but instead, emerges from the theme; the form comes to embody the theme. Scheckel refers to the theme as the Nugget, noting that structure is built from that nugget, not just intellectually but through actions that one can both feel and do. A great deal of the work in gleaning the brilliance of the Technique is in helping artists discover and then articulate that often hard-to-discern core. There are four other elements core to Scheckel’s teaching. First, essential to the Technique is establishing a visceral connection with the body.4 Workshops begin with an intensive physical workout called the Receptivity Warm-up, designed to ground the body, starting with treading the feet, then gradually moving the attention downward from the head to the feet by using slow circles in each direction from the head down to the shoulders, opening the rib cage, circling the hips, knees, ankles and then again grounding the feet, using the floor to feel all facets of the foot’s shape and its firm connection to the floor. After enough time awakening the connection to the body, participants begin to move around the space, visually receiving their surroundings and each other with a gaze that seeks to connect. This deep receptivity with the body, the environment and the other participants allows the group to co-create the environment for the work to come. Where much of contemporary filmmaking pedagogy is cerebral and focused on telling stories through proper structure, a structure received from tradition, the Technique instead works from the body to enable a means for discerning and welcoming a sense of radical openness and presence, and while there is attention to each participant’s own sense of self, there is simultaneously connectivity with the group and work space. Structure emerges from the self, and from the story; it is not forced into the story paradigms that already exist. Scheckel has articulated the 34 aspects of the Technique to elicit the openness required for discerning one’s story, which then expands to focus awareness on the process of seeing. Too often, most of us have forgotten how to see the world around us; the Technique aims to reawaken this ability, deftly illustrating to participants the ways in which their perceptual capacities are diminished and offering practices to reawaken awareness and attention. Second, rather than focusing on conflict, which is the machine that propels much of Western storytelling, Scheckel instead advocates for contrast. As she teaches in her workshops, classical Hollywood filmmaking drives toward crisis; dramatic tension is produced through conflict; and the meta-narrative in all of these stories concerns the struggle for power. Scheckel, however, invites storytellers to explore the more elaborate and nuanced vocabulary of contrast. Contrast, according to Scheckel, works through

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rhythm and shape. Rather than catalysing oppositions, it seeks to develop a much broader palette of structuring potentials, opening up the possibilities for articulating the inner life. Scheckel likens the reductive capacity of the conflict-based structure to having a brilliant mind but only a five-word vocabulary with which to communicate. Her goal is to expand our options and in this way, to present a greater vocabulary for understanding truth, connection and the complexities of our emotional lives. The third key component of the Technique is based on properly identifying the Nugget for one’s story. If, as Scheckel believes, storytelling is the expression of the inner life that craves to be known, seen and shared, and if our work as humans is to derive meaning through a radical sharing of experience, we need to identify our theme with precision. She works from the premises above, such that the theme must be experienced through the body – it must be felt as much as known – and it is not based on conflict. The theme means bringing together meaning, structure, action and feeling. Rather than being an abstract concept or clever cerebral metaphor, the theme must be done and felt. The theme is also not what the characters are talking about. Instead, it refers to what they are doing and feeling structurally in the movie. According to Scheckel, every theme has a structure embedded within it, and this needs to be felt through all levels of the mise-en-scène. So, the clearer storytellers can get about the thematic intention, the more precise and illuminating they can become with the structural actions of the movie. The Nugget, once determined, will in turn dictate blocking, pacing, the world and the relationships in the project. The major tool storytellers need for this work is the awareness that action and feeling are linked. Scheckel’s Technique moves from the Nugget to an interlocking set of elements – including character, blocking, pacing, beats, the emotional logic and rhythm – with more than 34 possible levels to consider in crafting the story. The fourth key component in the Technique is action. For Scheckel, action and feeling are inextricably connected. ‘I feel something, so I do something. I do something and I feel something. You cannot separate the two,’ she says. ‘However, when we go to think about the actions in the storytelling process, too often we separate from feeling’ (ibid.). Scheckel defines action in this way: Action is that which calls story and performance into being. It is the process of exploring carefully selected verbs that you can both do and feel in order both to viscerally understand the essence of your story and to engage the process of bringing that story to life. It entails investigating verbs, physically, emotionally and intellectually, testing them, feeling their impact on your body, and gauging that impact for its resonance with the story you are trying to tell. (Ibid.)

And again, understanding action requires being consciously attuned to your body. While the Technique aims to reconnect students to their bodies and their inner lives, Scheckel does not relinquish the role of the intellect. In teaching the Technique,

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she frequently quotes Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares: ‘At the bottom of every process of obtaining creative material for our work is emotion. Feeling, however, does not replace an immense amount of work on the part of our intellects’ (2003: 101). The work engaged by participants hoping to understand the Technique requires a willingness to tap into the body and the inner self, but then to sharpen an awareness of craft through the hard work of thinking. The impact of the Technique can be transformative. Indeed, the emotional authenticity of Soloway’s Transparent derives from the Technique. Soloway has said this herself, explaining during a keynote address to a Film Independent Forum in October 2014 that prior to Scheckel’s teaching, she lacked a technique for filmmaking; Scheckel gave her the tools she needed. Soloway went on to explain in her lecture that the Technique ‘can be very simply boiled down to the question: “What are you doing to get what you want?’” She continues, It’s a question I learned to ask of a character – what are they doing to get what they want – in this movie or sequence or scene or beat or moment. It can also be asked of the cinematographer – what does the camera want? The props, the art direction, the light, all of these elements should be doing something. They should want something. (In Ohanesian 2014: np)

For Transparent, Scheckel worked not only with Soloway, but the entire cast and crew, and even executives at Amazon. Describing this early rehearsal process, cinematographer Jim Frohna says, ‘The time spent was not about running scenes, but about exploring character, relationship and emotion – all with music and through movement’ (in Valentini 2014: np). He explains that as they moved beyond rehearsal and into production, this sense of connecting to the project through feeling and action continued: This whole approach to filmmaking is intuitive and allows that same sense of exploration and ‘play’ that we used in rehearsal to be carried over to the set. For Transparent … Jill and I don’t feel the need for a storyboard or often even a shot list. Here, the actors don’t have marks and they are not restricted by a lighting set up because we generally light for the whole scene. As well, I like to operate the main camera and work, as Jill would put it, like the ‘unseen player’. (Ibid.)

The experience for the Transparent team underscores the holistic vision of the Technique, and its applicability across multiple art forms. ‘Birthed in theatre, expanded in film and now catalyzed in the episodic form, the Technique has met its time,’ Scheckel notes; ‘Transparent shows that new rhythms and stylistic tonalities are allowable’ (in Willis 2016: np). Further, Scheckel’s approach acknowledges the intra-subjective nature of collaborative art-making, and insists that the industrial, linear process that characterised filmmaking of the last century simply does not align with our current moment. Further, the Technique is not merely for writers, directors and actors, but

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can be employed by anyone seeking a connection to the self as source for authentic storytelling. As she continues to share the Technique, Scheckel is deeply committed to catapulting us beyond the strictures of a story structure that may have worked for another century but is inadequate to the needs of the post-cinematic, posthuman era within which we exist. Like many of the examples included already in this book, she moves between an emphasis on the material and the embodied, and relinquishes an outmoded understanding of narrative based on conflict and power Post-photographic ‘It’s time to stop talking about photography,’ Stephen Mayes announced in a post to the Time Magazine website on 25 August 2015, calling attention to computational photography and its difference from analogue photography on a national platform. Using an unfortunate metaphor about childhood development, Mayes distinguishes between analogue photography and the act of data capture, which is what happens when we use our smart phone or digital camera to take a picture. While the acts may resemble each other in some ways, they are radically different. He writes, ‘The smartphone’s microphone, gyroscope, accelerometer, thermometer and other sensors all contribute data as needed by whatever app calls on it and combines it with the visual data. And still that’s not the limit on what is already bundled with our digital imagery’ (2015: np). While Mayes may not have written the clearest analysis of what he dubs the ‘next revolution’, the article underscores the growing cultural realisation of the shift in visual culture and the practices of image capture. Filmmakers and visual artists have begun to exploit this shift, moving toward what’s been dubbed the post-photographic. One of the earliest examples of this direction is music video director James Frost’s video for Radiohead’s ‘House of Cards’. The 2008 video did not use cameras to capture image but instead was created in collaboration with director of technology Aaron Koblin and scientists at UCLA, who used high-tech scanning and laser systems to capture and then visualize 3D information of the band’s lead singer, Thom Yorke. The resulting images are gritty bits of seemingly evanescent data that embody the song’s sense of longing. The video also suggests the significance of digital information as an aesthetic form, and points to the fact that photography isn’t what it used to be. Where photographs were once records of light captured on emulsion, the contemporary digital photograph registers data, some of which originates with reflected light striking a sensor, but the rest of the process is strictly computational. Contemporary cameras and photographs are part of a reconfiguration that moves us from the realm of representation to that of information and algorithms. Similarly, although virtual cinematography may resemble traditional cinematography in some ways, it was founded on – and functions via – an entirely different logic. Photogrammetry designates one main category for understanding the post-photographic through the deployment of remote sensing for generating images. Using

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processes of sensing, measuring, recording and analysing, photogrammetry is defined by Shaun Foster and David Halbstein as ‘the process of using photography to determine geometric measurements of objects’ (2014: 2). More specifically, they note that photogrammetry ‘is the science of extracting reliable measurements from two-dimensional (2D) images, usually photographic’ (ibid.). They also define stereophotogrammetry as ‘estimating 3D coordinates of an object by comparing multiple photographic images taken from different positions’ (2014: 3). To clarify: photogrammetry is akin to taking a picture with the main exception that instead of capturing a single image, you instead capture multiple images; these multiple images understand where they are spatially relative to all of the other images, allowing you to then stitch the images together to create a mosaic or composite image that contains a high degree of detail, both representational and topographic. Photogrammetry was first undertaken in the 1850s, and the various histories of photogrammetry list dozens of experimenters who participated in advancing the tools and techniques in this new field. In the 1850s and 1860s, for example, Aimé Laussedat, a French scientist, developed some of the first techniques of photogrammetry as he attempted to use aerial photography – by taking pictures from tall buildings and from balloons – to create more accurate topographical maps. Laussedat is also credited with creating the phototheodolite, which combines a camera with a surveying tool that measures horizontal and vertical angles. A stereoscopic component was introduced in 1901 when Henry Fourcade developed a tool for capturing stereoscopic photographs. The Austrian Society of Photogrammetry was established in 1907, and the first International Congress for Photogrammetry took place in 1913, providing a venue for scientists to share information and mapping techniques. Peter Collier (2002) divides the history of photogrammetry into three more phases following the initial explorations of Laussedat and his contemporaries. It advanced during World War I as the need both to gauge the location of enemies as well as to assert national borders came to the fore. The invention of powered flight brought further advances to photogrammetry during the 1920s for a third phase, and in the 1930s, which constitutes the fourth phase, techniques for aerial mapping were further refined and codified. Paul Debevec’s The Campanile Movie (1997), created as part of his PhD research at the University of California, Berkeley, deftly demonstrates the basic principles of photogrammetry and their early application within the film industry. The film is made by combining a series of photographs of the prominent clock tower overlooking the UC Berkeley campus with photogrammetry. Debevec, now a faculty member at USC, and his colleagues took photographs of the tower from a variety of angles; they also used a kite to capture images otherwise unobtainable. Geometric data was extracted from the images, and then a software application called Façade was used to integrate the 3D model with the photographs; from there, Debevec created a virtual camera move, playfully shifting between a 3D model of the tower and the tower itself, cheerfully confusing the two. The short film was screened in the Electronic Theatre at

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SIGGRAPH in 1997. Debevec’s work had an instant impact in Hollywood, suggesting a pathway to the creation of bullet-time sequences in The Matrix (1999) two years later. Contemporary photogrammetry has many uses. For example, School of Cinematic Arts faculty member Eric Hanson, co-founder with Greg Downing of xRez Studio, a studio dedicated to ultra-high-resolution imaging based in Santa Monica, California, used photogrammetry in 2007 for the Yosemite Extreme Panoramic Imaging Project; the goal was to capture a gigantic snapshot of the massive walls of Yosemite National Park in order to study deadly rock fall events, and perhaps to develop a means for predicting their occurrence. To create the Yosemite image, twenty photographers were stationed throughout the valley in strategically located sites; working simultaneously, each photographer captured five hundred overlapping images. These image collections were then ‘draped’ over a terrain model of the valley, combining the photographic quality of an image with the cartographic accuracy of a mapped topography. This combined information created a three-dimensional spatialised image. For the final step in the process, Hanson used a virtual camera to ‘fly’ through this composite, three-dimensional valley to craft a massive single image which essentially builds on the ten thousand individual frames captured by the twenty photographers. ‘We created a landscape photograph devoid of perspective, a first in landscape photography,’ Hanson explained in interview (in Willis 2014: np). Used primarily in the last century for geographic mapping purposes, photogrammetry has emerged as a key process in 3D computer graphics and visual effects sequences in films, as well as in virtual cinematography and modelling more generally. The technique makes what was once a very labour-intensive process of 3D modelling far simpler and faster by using the information gathered through photogrammetry to generate 3D models. Photogrammetry has also become an increasingly DIY activity, thanks to easily accessible resources. Microsoft’s Kinect, for example, was offered with the Xbox 360 game console in 2010, uniting a camera, an infrared projector that serves as a depth sensor, and a microphone. By analysing visual information generated by the camera and depth information generated by the infrared sensor, the Kinect allows users to interact with the computer through gestures. But it also serves as tool for capturing your own volumetric data. The DepthKit, formerly known as the RGBD Toolkit, was designed specifically to take advantage of this attribute of the Kinect. Created by James George, Alexander Porter and Jonathan Minard with support from the Frank-Ratchye Studio for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University, Eyebeam Art + Technology Center and YCAM InterLab, the kit brings together the depth sensing capacities of Microsoft’s Kinect or the Asus Xtion Pro with the photographic capacities of an HD DSLR camera to capture imagery that integrates photographic and spatial attributes, and allows artists to produce compelling, volumetric video images that become navigable when imported into a 3D environment. Other relatively low-tech software and hardware solutions exist for DIY experimentation with the conjunction of images and data through photogrammetry. Autodesk’s

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123D Catch is billed as ‘a free photogrammetry software tool’ that converts sequences of between twenty and forty images to create a 3D mesh. Similarly, Kinect Fusion creates 3D renderings of space and objects, but it does so in real time. And Google’s Project Tango promises to unleash a generation of smart phones equipped with depth sensing and motion tracking technology that will make volumetric data capture as ubiquitous as photography using smart phones. In combination, these technologies all serve to catalyse a transformation of cultural expectations related to the synthesis of data and images. Once occupying separate realms, sometimes dubbed ‘data’ and ‘metadata’, the combined technical and conceptual apparatus of photogrammetry dissolves the distinction between these two, resulting in fully navigable 3D spaces that are not just ‘photorealistic’, but are genuinely ‘photographic’. One particularly literal instance of this union is Photosynth, a platform originally developed at the University of Washington and later acquired by Microsoft research laboratories. When debuted publicly, Photosynth was a revelation, demonstrating the previously unheard of capacity for a computational system to recognise and define spatial relations among very large and diverse collections of images. Released free online, Photosynth allowed users to explore public image archives such as Flickr spatially, diving through layers of overlapping images and zooming back to see the underlying point cloud data and interpellations of the original camera positions from which each image was captured. If Aaron Koblin’s Lidar-based video for Radiohead marks one extreme of a transformed workflow for image making in the absence of cameras and lenses, then tools such as Photosynth and Eric Hanson’s Yosemite project constitute the other extreme, where lenses and points of view are multiplied beyond human comprehension. The result is a necessary synergy between the capacities of human perception and the computational processing of visual information into hybrid data-images. Previsualisation, transmedia story design, world building, the self as source and the post-photographic: these practices highlight five instances wherein the workflows of cinematic storytelling that we know so well lean instead toward the post-cinematic, with the relatively linear and codified industrial practices giving way to different paradigms. These are practices that tend toward an ethos of collaboration and participatory engagement, toward a decentring of the auteur and singular vision, and in the final case, a questioning of the notion of vision altogether. They signal shifts, and opportunities for opening up new forms of making and thinking.

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Chapter 3 Live Cinema

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erhaps one of the most striking embodiments of the post-cinematic/posthumanist conjunction occurs in a practice known as live cinema, in which artists dismantle and reconfigure the elements of the traditional cinematic apparatus in order to craft an event that straddles the boundary between mediated experience and live performance. Dubbed a ‘beautifully located oxymoron’ by Douglas Kahn (2011: 256), live cinema concretises the conflicting impulses of contemporary culture – the desire for presence in a world seemingly growing more and more evanescent, and the contradictory appeal for dispersal, divestiture and dissolution so much a part of networked existence. For Kahn, ‘the oxymoron derives from the fact that cinema is a form of inanimate storage’ and as such, live cinema becomes, oddly, a ‘performance of a recording’ (2011: 258). However, this conception of live cinema does little to illuminate a number of works that complicate liveness and which, I argue, work to limn the boundaries of the cinematic as well as existence itself within a networked culture. Live cinema specifically expands beyond the performance of a recording in order to query the relationship between live and recorded, and to muddy – or even refuse – the boundary between the two. Pushing a bit further, viewing this work within the context of a networked culture, we must note that the formerly distinct act of making a recording has been supplanted by the activity of designing the conditions for an ongoing and ambient form of processing. In place of optical media we have technical media, and in place of the ‘things’ of media past – videos, movies, DVDs and other objects – we have instead systems, networks, assemblages and environments. In short, in the context of computers and computation, we shift from objects to processes, and from notions of a singular identity to a kind of intra-subjectivity. Artists have responded by creating works that stage and enact the transition from one paradigm to another, and which call attention to the challenges we face in this upheaval. In this chapter, I will explore the work of four artists working in the realm of live cinema

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with the goal of illustrating the issues raised as we make the – often uncomfortable – passage from one mode to another. I define live cinema as the staging of a live event that includes the presentation of moving images and sounds for an audience with a performance component that calls attention to presence and liveness, as well as to the specificities of site, space and time. The images and sounds may be pre-recorded and mixed live, or generated in real time, but a core element within live cinema is that the project is not complete until it is performed, nor is it precisely repeatable. Indeed, despite the range of performance styles or genres gathered within this admittedly expansive definition, three aspects come to the foreground in solidifying a definition: first, the works insist on the live interaction of artwork, performer and audience and suggest a desire for the singularity and specificity of the event; second, they propose an interrogation of forms, asking us to contextualise the event within histories of cinema, video, performance, theatre, art and music, and to consider – or reconsider – the boundaries that we understand to delimit each form; and third, the works often play on the tension between the liquidity of information and the materiality of the things around us. They equivocate between the sense that we exist in a world characterised not by concrete spatial boundaries and fixed temporal coordinates, but instead by a mobile, accelerating experience of fluidity and flows, and yet we can feel the chairs on which we are seated during the performance. These three characteristics, then, hover at the boundary of cinema’s specificity and its reconfiguration through digital media, as the materials specific to cinema – light, the projector, filmic emulsion – become mutable digital artefacts easily retooled for new uses.1 The current live cinema movement is presaged by earlier generations of artists who shared a similar desire to mix live performance and moving images in a body of work Gene Youngblood dubbed ‘Expanded Cinema’ in his book of the same title published in 1972.2 Looking further back, as Paul Arthur notes in an introduction to a special issue on paracinema and performance in Millennium Film Journal, the earliest history of cinema, prior to its transformation into ‘a thoroughly rationalized commodity’ (2005: 3), included myriad formations of image-based experiences, including the use of fake railroad cars as the settings for Hale’s photographic tours, as well as Abel Gance’s three-screen design for the projection of Napoleon (1927). With the codification of the cinematic apparatus and the rise of the narrative feature film as cinema’s primary object, experiments with live projection were relegated to the margins. However, this so-called marginal live cinema activity between the 1940s and 1990s was embraced by many avant-garde filmmakers, and indeed, Arthur offers a long list of participants who experimented with live projection performances: Jordan Belson, Harry Smith, Jack Smith, Barbara Rubin, Andy Warhol, Carolee Schneeman, Owen Land, Paul Sharits, Michael Snow, Pat O’Neill and Malcolm LeGrice. Arthur goes on to use the terms ‘paracinema’ and ‘performance’ to characterise this work, noting that they refer to ‘complimentary, and often overlapping, sets of practices’ (2005: 4). In Between the Black Box and the White Cube, Andrew V. Uroskie delves in great detail into two examples of what we could call live cinema. Specifically, he explores

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Robert Whitman’s Prune.Flat. (1965), which the artist dubbed a ‘theater-piece’ (2014: 136), as well as Stan VanDerBeek’s Movie-Mural (1968), a project Uroskie says ‘actively promoted an interpenetration of live and mediated activity’ (2014: 156). Further, Movie-Mural in particular, through its spatialisation of the projection and its real-time performative capacity ‘recast our understanding of spectatorship beyond the traditional model of communicative reception’ (2014: 169–70; emphasis in original). He continues: ‘Rather than broadcasting content for their audiences to receive, VanDerBeek, Cage and Cunningham together sought to orchestrate an environmental situation within which unanticipated forms of communicability and correspondence might spontaneously erupt’ (2014: 170). In this way, these early examples of live cinema were more akin to Happenings than to traditional film, and yet, in Uroskie’s descriptions, the projects are rife with projections, scrims, screens and media. With his book, and several others exploring these earlier eras of cinematic experimentation, we are finally beginning to comprehend the extent of cinematic experimentation of previous decades. The Spectatorial Imaginary Taking hold – literally – of the projector, and by extension, the larger phenomenological attributes of the cinematic experiences, constitutes one gesture for the live cinema artist. Normally occluded, even hidden away in a special room, the projector comes to the fore in this genre of live cinema experimentation. The projection work of Ken Jacobs exemplifies this direction. He often stages live performances in which he manipulates the projector (or multiple projectors) in order to create experiences of what he calls ‘deep space’. Jacobs has also experimented with live shadowplay, creating stereoscopic performances using nothing more than stage lights equipped with polarising filters to cast shadows on a rear projection screen. In other cases, Jacobs enlists the audience to participate in transforming their experience from 2D to 3D by shifting a neutral density filter affixed to a wooden chopstick from one eye to the next. For Opening the 19th Century: 1896 (1990), for example, Jacobs reprinted footage shot in 1896 by the Lumière brothers, such that the disparate original tracking shots now move in a single direction; for the first half of the eleven-minute film, the directionality within the frame is from left to right; in the second half, the directionality shifts so that things move from right to left; to achieve this sense of movement in the frame, some of the shots were placed upside down. For the screening of the project, audience members are instructed when to shift the filter from one eye to the next in order to create the illusion of volume, even though none of the usual apparatus of stereoscopy, such as polarising or anaglyph filters, is present. According to Federico Windhausen, the sense of depth created by this use of simple neutral density filters in conjunction with lateral movement is called the Pulfrich Pendulum Effect. Experimenting with early 3D glasses made for television, Jacobs found that the eye covered with a filter processes signals more slowly than the uncovered eye. ‘This mismatch in time,’

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explains Windhausen, ‘between images that are seen by the naked eye and those that are delayed using the filter, can be exploited to produce depth effects’ (2011: np). With this project, Jacobs aimed to recapture what he believes is the sense of wonder felt by viewers in 1896 as they first experienced cinematic motion. Jacobs also sparks a sense of curiosity and intense perceptual play with his Nervous System projects in which he would pair two analytic projectors capable of sustained freeze frames and single frame advance, each projecting from the same short strip of images; he would then toggle back and forth across the images, frame by frame, playing the images like a DJ to produce a dense flickering dance of movement that seems to extend outward into space. In these live cinema events, cinema and its singular properties are brought to the fore – the projectors are literally positioned in the auditorium rather than sequestered in a sound proof booth – and celebrated in exquisite detail. What we witness as spectators is both the dance of images that seem to hover well in front of the screen, and a deep awareness of the presence of Jacobs, whose embodied effort is more than apparent within the space of the audience. After 25 years with the dual-projectors of the Nervous System, Jacobs reconceived his apparatus, creating the Nervous Magic Lantern, which he describes as ‘strikingly low-tech’ (2011: np). It uses a spinning propeller placed in front of a beam of light; Jacobs then puts objects in the path of the light, explaining that we get ‘an uncanny 3-dimensional illusion … an illusion of voluminous things moving in great depth as seen from all angles’ (ibid.). Jacobs continues to perform with this device, recreating the magic of moving images from more than a century ago. Similarly, artists Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder focus on the particularities of cinematic performance, with attention paid to the physicality of light in space. The artists approach their events very much as performances and do not use a written script as a roadmap, preferring instead to understand the event as a ‘temporal passagework’. They also focus specifically on the role of the spectator and explain their process in poetic terms. ‘To set up the spectatorial imaginary: to assume the role of the one who arrives early, the one who arrives late, in the middle (always in the middle), and who is always already leaving early. To identify with all aspects of this hesitancy that knows nothing but beautiful radical indecision’ (in Willis 2008: np). Recoder’s ‘Available Light/Liminal Lumen’ project aligns both with the work of Minimalism and of the Light and Space artists such as James Turrell, reorienting the viewer’s attention from the play of moving images on a single plane to the thick, heavy beam of light that slices through a room when a projector is turned on. Light becomes physical, and viewers begin to question the assumed relationship between viewer and screen, and to the space within which one experiences the artwork. Rather than being sutured into a fantasy story and its image-space, we feel compelled to interrogate the space of the projection, to experience it and feel it in a visceral, tangible way. Gibson and Recoder also specifically investigate the concept of projection. Writing in a brief essay titled ‘Projecting Projection’ (2012), they articulate a poetics:

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An aesthetics of projection performance is an apprenticeship to this dedicated custodian of darkness (of nothingness, of disappearance, of invisibility, of transparency). To work or labour in utter darkness is one thing (i.e., to make a bare something out of a bare nothing), but to shape and reshape the intermittent im/ palpability of this void through the tyranny of cinematic time is another thing, one which incessantly haunts in its stubborn resistance to resistance. To break free from this temporal tyranny of narrativised time – or at least to slip beneath its gaze – a shift in the projective location presents itself as a possible exit, though by no means an escape. (2012: 61)

For Gibson and Recoder, projection performances are explorations of time and space and these explorations remain confined with the parameters of the cinematic, but the cinematic becomes redefined – or perhaps re-remembered – in a new configuration of light, space, time and presence. These instances of live cinema mobilise ‘liveness’ in service to the often occluded role of the projector, which in traditional cinema remains invisible. What’s at stake in the revealing the apparatus in this way? First, the projector is recognised as an integral part of the larger assemblage producing an event as a relational experience. Second, the projector, in its previously muffled invisibility, serves as a metonymic reference to all that is hidden in traditional cinematic experience, which relies, even ontologically, on the erasure of its processes. And third, the projector instantiates a particular physicality of the cinematic now lost in the digital era when every computer and smart phone serves as an exhibition space and projectors are increasingly left unused. As such, the projector becomes an emblem – of a particular understanding of time, space and presence; of labour, hidden or exposed; of the machine, the assemblage, the system and that which is normally elided; and of materiality. While these characteristics suggest what may be at stake in live cinema from the context of the cinematic, Gloria Sutton offers a different explanation of the impetus driving live cinema. In The Experience Machine: Stan VanDerBeek’s Movie-Drome and Expanded Cinema (2015) Sutton examines the rise of Expanded Cinema live projection performances like those of VanDerBeek, arguing that they were motivated by network-based models of communication. This perspective counters those that trace the evolution of Expanded Cinema primarily within the parameters of avant-garde film and, on occasion, art. In sketching this alternative context and its attention to emerging modes of communication, she writes, ‘These include the developments of fiber-optic cable and satellite networks that allowed for the real-time transmission of images over vast geographical distances’ (2015: 8), adding that this genealogy is therefore not indebted to technical developments within the context of cinema, nor is it tied to the rhetoric of revolt that characterised the engagement with video during that era. Instead, Sutton aligns Expanded Cinema work with cybernetics and systems theory, and points to a concomitant ethos adopted by these artists characterised by collaboration and transparency. Exposing the projector, then, is part of that commitment to

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transparency. Perhaps more significantly, Sutton underscores the union of computation and cinema – a pairing yielding exciting experiments now – in one of its first iterations. To Construct, Manipulate and Alter Reality The emphasis on the projector, light and the physicality of the cinematic space is only one characteristic of live cinema. To make a rather large leap, we can trace the lineage of contemporary live cinema practices along other pathways. To take one example, the more musically oriented VJ performances certainly fit the definition of live cinema, but they extend from the realm of live music performance and concert visuals rather than the history of cinematic experimentation. Some of the major VJs of the last twenty years include artists such as Hexstatic, comprised of Stuart Warren Hill and Robin Brunson, who in 2000 released an album entitled Rewind as both a CD and CD-ROM, with synchronised videos accompanying each track and tools for remixing the videos. California-based Vello Virkhaus began his VJ career by forming a company dedicated to live visuals called OVT, and later, in 2002, formed V Squared Labs, a company dedicated to creating large-scale concert visuals for major artists including Beyoncé, Coldplay and Mary J. Blige, as well as a major show for Amon Tobin in 2015. Others include D-Fuse, Addictive TV and the Light Surgeons. Early VJ performances, those in the late 1990s, moved between enhancing live music performances and bringing a sense of performativity to the selection and combination of visual elements akin to the curatorial activity of a DJ with music. In many cases, VJing was seen to be merely illustrative, offering pretty pictures to accompany music. However, VJing can be far more involved. As D-Fuse/Michael Faulkner notes in his book VJ: Audio-Visual Art and VJ Culture (2006), VJing has been denigrated through misapprehension: Artists view it as eye candy for the clubbing generation; musicians view it as a secondary accompaniment to their music. At best, VJing is regarded as audiovisual wallpaper, not worthy of serious consideration. Yet, to my eyes, the best VJs are creating a new, fluid interface between sound and image – one that is genuinely mould-breaking and aesthetically invigorating, and one that deserves to be recognized as a twenty-first century art form. (2006: 9)

Faulkner’s book offers an overview of the artists who are crafting this innovative work. VJing has several defining qualities: it is a live performance, and it involves the creative selection, combination, sampling and/or remixing of existing footage for a live audience, often in collaboration with musicians.3 VJing also often involves a very direct connection to the music, even digitally transposing audio and video signals or generating imagery that directly references the music. In this capacity, VJing can look to the long history of visual music and filmmakers as divergent as Oskar Fischinger and Len Lye, known for their interest in creating visual experiences of sound.

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Yet another lineage could be traced from the work of Jordan Belson, who served as the visual director for the Vortex Concerts at the Morrison Planetarium in San Francisco between 1957 and 1959, where he curated shows using multiple projections to create spatialised experiences of visual music. Belson’s interest in consciousness and how it might be explored through film was shared by other artists who contributed to Expanded Cinema and the desire to create an intensive, immersive experience in relation to moving images in the 1960s and 1970s. Belson’s work with the Vortex Concerts was continued in a similar vein in the 1960s with the light shows of the film collective Single Wing Turquoise Bird. The group was known for designing multimedia light shows for bands such as Cream and the Velvet Underground, as well as for more experimental musicians, including Terry Riley and Pauline Oliveros. The members of the group created their shows by combining multiple 16mm projections – between ten or twenty, and sometimes more – to project onto a single screen. The projectionists would also mix coloured chemicals in dishes on the surface of an overhead projector and add gels, or even mask the edges of the projector lens using their hands. When the group used slide projectors, they would move between slides at differing speeds, using dimmers and sometimes producing a strobe effect that could in turn create the illusion of dimensionality.4 Contemporary live cinema that is music-oriented also builds on the work of John and James Whitney, who, in the 1960s, experimented with the use of computers in creating multi-screen geometric films based on pattern and repetition in both image and sound. Avant-garde filmmakers such as Norman McLaren and Stan Brakhage are other precursors, thanks to their interrogation of film as a medium, and their experience with single-frame work and the creative possibilities of retinal impact. Live VJ performances also reference Expanded Cinema experiments of the 1970s, in which filmmakers tried to craft an immersive ‘synaesthetic cinema’, one that used graphics to create a new kind of vision, which in turn was supposed to lead to a new kind of consciousness. Here, again, we can draw a tenuous connection, linking the desire for the meditative states induced by the abstract computer animations of the Whitneys with live VJ events featuring large-scale, immersive visuals. Former Transmediale curator Jan Rohlf suggests that the interest in the interplay among sound and colour, light and images, and their relationship to consciousness serves at once as a link to the efforts of Belson, the Whitneys and Youngblood, but notes a difference: From a general perspective one might argue that with the digital revolution of the 1990s, questions concerning the function of our sensorial organs and the way our psychic apparatus processes and interprets the signals received by our senses gained a new urgency and relevance … This happened mainly because the new digital technologies provide radically enhanced possibilities to construct, manipulate and alter what we consider as our reality. (In Willis 2006: np)

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The attention to considerations of reality is extended in the work of artists engaged in generative audio-visual performances in which sounds and images are generated in real time; the idea of a recording, something created and then re-played, as was noted by Douglas Kahn, is replaced by artworks that are emergent, and that do indeed occur ‘live’, but the notion of ‘liveness’ is not in the presentation of sound in front of an audience, but the generation of sound in front of an audience. The work of Davide Quayola, discussed in chapter one, is exemplary here. In addition to his installation work, Quayola has begun designing his own software specifically to generate imagery from sound. Working in collaboration with Natan Sinigaglia and Pedro Mari, Quayola created a real-time visualisation of György Ligeti’s sonata for violin solo. PartituraLigeti (2012) visualises the sound of a viola as it is transformed into a dynamic, graphic score. One of a series of six pieces that all translate music into abstract geometries and forms, the piece transposes the long, lingering tones made by the stringed instruments into a series of intertwining, coloured lines that writhe and warp in rhythm with the sound. Quayola has said that he is interested in creating his own visual language in this work, and he does so, moving within a history that includes Oskar Fischinger’s lifelong quest to visualise music; here, however, the music is not represented visually but produced visually.5 The sound produces its own images. For Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda, sound also serves as the foundation for visuals. For example, in a live performance called Test Pattern (2008), sound is converted directly into black-and-white patterns projected on a very large screen. The project is part of the artist’s series of pieces called ‘datamatics’, which explore the visualisation of the invisible data that surrounds us. Test Pattern is part of a ‘system that converts any type of data (text, sounds, photos and movies) into barcode patterns and binary patterns of 0s and 1s. The project aims to examine the relationship between critical points of device performance and the threshold of human perception, pushing both to their absolute limits’ (Ikeda 2008: np). The goal of Test Pattern, then, is to constitute a machine for generating affect. While interest in perceptual experimentation and formal correlations between sound and image have motivated an eclectic range of live cinema work, other artists have focused on the potential for live performance to explore strategies of visual reinterpretation that are expressly political. Building on the rich history of appropriation art and culture jamming, live cinema performances such as DJ Spooky’s remix of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) seek to highlight the overt racism of the original film, critiquing it through fragmentation, repetition and densely mediated digital effects aimed at a politics of reversal. Like Oscar Micheaux’s Within Our Gates (1919), which offered a narrative response to Griffith’s epic that resonated with the racial volatility of the post-World War I era, DJ Spooky’s Rebirth of a Nation, which he began to perform in 2004, appropriates and recontextualises whole sequences from Griffith’s film in order to critique them against the backdrop of continuing racial tensions in the U.S. nearly a century later. Originally commissioned for a series of international media festivals and performed live more than fifty times around the world, Rebirth of

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a Nation was re-released on DVD with music performed by the Kronos Quartet in 2015, again resonating with public protests against racially motivated violence and the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Also mixing cultural politics with strategies of appropriation, VJ Um Amel (Laila Shereen Sakr) created a series of live cinema performances during and in the immediate aftermath of the ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings of 2010–12. Sakr’s performances are characterised by rapid-fire and densely-layered visuals depicting events and iconic images emerging from the revolts across the Middle East, while also drawing on the artist’s unique English and Arabic language repository of social media and analytics, R-Shief. In her Egyptian Body Politic: Adaptation of #Tahrir (2011), for example, VJ Um Amel mixes her own voice with music and sound layered over YouTube videos, animations, and a live video feed, as well as text and analytics from millions of Tweets revealing patterns of social media mapped onto these historic events. While VJ culture, with its potential to explore both formal and political registers, represents the evolution of one form of live cinema, I turn now to the work of artists who investigate a different set of configurations of the cinematic, explicitly reimagining the apparatus of ‘cinema’ in order to experiment with altered forms of interpellation, knowing and being within a networked culture. Mia Makela: Live Cinema Is Not Cinema Mia Makela, a Finnish artist who performs under the name Solu, is one of several international visual innovators dedicated to live cinema with attention to the ways in which the cinematic experience becomes a performative event unfolding in real time. Makela’s work is often moody, ethereal and dream-like, presenting cinema as a space of the imaginary, coming before narrative and language to enact experiences of affect and the sensorium instead of logic and story. Her style ranges from minimal abstractions to multi-layered compositions in dreamlike narrative journeys. Makela began performing with visuals in 2001 at festivals around the world, and she has written and lectured on the history and forms of live cinema internationally. She bases her practice on her love of editing, which is not in service to a story but rather oriented toward the crafting of an entire environment. In ‘The Practice of Live Cinema’, Makela writes that ‘live cinema is not cinema’ at all (2008: 1), suggesting instead that live cinema is formed in the ways in which an artist choreographs transitions between sequences of story. David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997) serves as a reference point, with its eerie shots of the highway at night, the asphalt stretching out in front into the dark. According to Makela, these shots ‘are the basic material for live cinema performances: the transitions, the movements, the pure visual beauty and intrigue, the atmosphere’ (ibid.). Makela goes on to list the components necessary to constitute live cinema, namely projection, the performer or creator, an audience, and the space and time of the performance. More specifically, according to Makela, live cinema acknowledges projection, often calling attention to the placement of the

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projector – or multiple projectors – and the materiality of the technology and the light. Live cinema also involves a performer, or performers, who participate in the event, contributing another element of the performative. The audience is vital for live cinema, and artists engage the space between performance and audience in radically different ways. Finally, the spatial and temporal elements of live cinema also vary depending on the performer and venue. In her parsing of the space of live cinema, Makela distinguishes among digital spaces generally; the space of the desktop and the interface to the software that the performer engages intimately during the performance; the performance space; the projection space, which, in leaving behind the requirement of traditional cinema’s flatscreen explores new arrangements of audio-visual experience; and the physical space, which for Makela designates the shared space of audience and performer. In terms of parsing the temporal aspects of live cinema, Makela is less clear, but makes a key point that what we understand to be ‘real time’ is inexact at best; the ‘live’ in live cinema can reference the fact that real time images are produced and received simultaneously. For Makela, this can mean generating visuals in real time, or even using a live camera as part of the input for a performance. In her attention to the specifics of live cinema, Makela has made a major contribution to the field. Her performances further this work, helping enact her ideas in tangible experience. With the performance of Kaamos (2007–8), for example, we enter a dream space of sunlight, moonlight, water and the passage of seasons. Images pulse and disappear; we see glimpses and small circles of imagery as we move through a forest. There is rain, and a sense of stuttering beauty aligned with the music as we follow a figure on a journey. Makela offers an experience of narrative from which the narrative has almost been completely dissolved, leaving us not with the memory of a story so much as with an experience of an emotional field. For the performance of Kaamos, however, Makela is nearly invisible, and it is difficult for an audience to know what constitutes the ‘liveness’ of her performance. Indeed, viewers are sometimes completely unaware that the visuals are being mixed in real time; the event is understood – or rather misunderstood – to be the projection of an experimental film rather than the unfolding of a live performance. In this way, one of the crucial aspects of the performance is elided. While Makela is certainly correct in underscoring the ways in which our understanding of ‘live’ and ‘real time’ shift, it is precisely at this nexus that the post-cinematic and posthuman reside: what indeed is ‘live’? And why at this particular moment do we care? Layering Realities: Miwa Matreyek and Cloud Eye Control Los Angeles-based media artist Miwa Matreyek begins to answer this question with her work, which blends elements of theatre, performance, animation and cinema to create live events that layer multiple projections, recorded music and the image or silhouette of her own body moving through the projected images (see Koch, Pantenbug

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and Rothöhler 2012). The result is a powerful experience for an audience as we simultaneously marvel at the enchanting animated worlds she creates and attempt to imagine how the entire performance is functioning. Matreyek specifically catalyses a series of questions for the audience: What is real? What is animated? What is projected? What is shadow? Matreyek’s work is dedicated both to the formal and conceptual possibilities of animation and collage, as well as to breaking down the languages of diverse art forms. Nearly a decade ago, while a student at California Institute of the Arts, Matreyek began a collaboration with fellow student, Chi-wang Yang, exploring among other things the potentials of front and rear screen projection. They named their collaboration Cloud Eye Control and were later joined by Anna Oxygen. As a team, they began designing live performances that united their overlapping skills in interactive multimedia, projection, animation, musical composition and performance. One of their early pieces is Ocean Flight (2005), which includes video footage of a person running; the footage is captured live during the performance on one side of the stage, but then projected onto another screen on the opposite side of the stage, where it is collaged together with yet another projection and another live performer. The mix of projection and live performance produces a dizzying and captivating kind of vertigo as one tries to unravel the relations between live-action and projected imagery. The piece creates an image machine within which the performers are thoroughly enmeshed; the boundaries between human and backdrop give way to an undifferentiated field in which performer and image merge. Commenting on Flight Pattern, Yang says, ‘In some ways, this could be done so much better through some sort of green screen and a real-time compositing effect. But the intention is very much to physicalize media and to actually start to layer and give body, depth and live presence to media and the body’ (in Willis 2015: np). He continues: The intention was to try to create a circuit, a process so you see the camera, you see the computer station, then you see the camera capturing the body, and then you see that body showing up on the screen in front of you, and then you see that body being layered in front of media, so the idea is to create a whole traversal, a virtuosic transmission or movement of the body. It seems so pedestrian now to travel across the ocean, so the idea is to show that what we now think of as spectacular transversal transportations are virtual ones through networks and mediation. (Ibid.)

Here Yang clearly articulates the larger conceptual agenda of the group, with its desire to enact the intersections of lived bodies and networked systems. Matreyek, in her own work, also extends these ideas. Her MFA thesis project is entitled Dreaming of Lucid Living (2007). In this piece, the artist explores sleight of hand and specifically attempts to create a continuum between the virtual and the real. The project combines playful and yet visceral animated collages – ornate drawings of skeletons, for example, that seem to come from a children’s book – which are projected.

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Matreyek then layers the silhouette of her own body within the projections. She also creates entirely black-and-white images such that her own silhouette can mingle among the projected images and the viewer simply cannot tell what is the shadow of the artist and what has been previously animated. In all of her work, Matreyek moves in carefully choreographed synchronisation with the animations, becoming part of the machine of the cinematic event she is creating. One of Matreyek’s more recent pieces is This World Made Itself (2013). Like the other works noted here, the project integrates projected imagery and performance. It begins with animated images of molten rock and the formation of oceans and landmasses, and then moves on to the origins of life. Richly detailed and colourful – and yet entirely surreal – the imagery looks as if it were borrowed from a children’s encyclopaedia from the 1950s. Matreyek’s silhouette once again intercedes in the projected imagery, creating a mythic female presence moving gracefully through the prehistoric scenes. We see her swimming in an ocean of fire, walking through tall grasses, traipsing across mountains. In Matreyek’s work, the performances create a doubled story and the same can be said of Cloud Eye Control’s projects as a whole. Matreyek explains: ‘We like to say that there are the two narratives. There is the story being told, cinematically, as a composition on the screen and around the screen, but there is also the narrative of the staging and the theatricality, and actually seeing how these things come together to make the cinematic space’ (ibid.). Viewers engage with a story that unfolds on-screen, but at the same time we are highly attuned to how that narrative is being staged, how the images are being made, and how meaning hovers between the representational narrative and its enactment. We are caught between these two realms, but rather than experience a sense of frustration or alienation, the duality is pleasurable. This pleasure, I would argue, is a pleasure of both the post-cinematic and the posthuman. Matreyek’s work rejects the production of the viewing subject of classical Hollywood cinema in which highly codified forms of visual design, mise-en-scène and editing craft a fictional coherence, not just of time and space, but of the viewing subject in relation to a protagonist. This viewing subject aligns with the subject of modernity, which presumes that the subject is whole, coherent, unified and fully engaged, even produced, by the narrative. However, in Matreyek’s work, pleasure does not occur in relation to the suturing of the audience member into an on-screen narrative. Instead, we are engaged in a process of interpretation and an attempt to understand the assemblage producing the experience we witness. We are no longer content with merely a story; instead, we query the machine, and the ways in which human and non-human interact, and we take pleasure – though perhaps anxious pleasure – in the blurring of boundaries. If the projection and narrative form two points of enquiry, so, too, does the artist’s body, which becomes ephemeral in its role as silhouette and shadow. While classical Hollywood cinema tends to produce both a coherent protagonist and a clear mode of identification, Matreyek’s work instead presents a body with blurred boundaries, one

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often entirely coincident with the mediated environment within which it is situated. This is a body – and a subject – that is produced in relation to the world; the self is not an isolated entity, but an ongoing conjuring with its environment. And indeed, Matreyek does little to hide the fact that she is behind the screen. In some instances, it is possible for viewers situated to the left or right of the centre of the screening space to glimpse evidence of her presence. Once again, the pleasure is not in being fully tricked, but rather in the oscillation between knowing and wondering, and in witnessing the dissolution of the body’s boundaries as it melds with the mediated world. Returning to the work of Cloud Eye Control, in 2009, the trio created a fantastical live cinema work called Under Polaris, which brings together animation, live music, projection and performance to tell the story of a woman’s journey to the North Pole in order to deposit a seed carrying the essence of humanity in the deep ice where it will remain safe. With this project, Cloud Eye Control began to work at a larger scale, creating a piece that is at once spectacular and mythic in terms of its narrative, while also highly controlled in its staging, and yet at the same time cheerfully handmade. Indeed, the performance boasts what artist Jem Cohen calls a kind of ‘primitive enchantment’ (in Lim 2013: np), referring to the simple magic of light, shadow and the illusions that are possible with these basic elements. Overall, the project helped continue to refine the working vocabulary for the trio of artists as they navigate among three very different art forms, namely animation, theatre and music. It also was large enough in terms of scope to allow them to more fully engage with the design of an entire world with multiple levels of reality, and to explore with more complexity the role of the body in relation to the mediated environment. As Yang explains, ‘We often have multiple layers of screens on stage, and also multiple layerings of densities in order to create multiple first plane, second plane, and third plane layers’ (in Willis 2015: np). Yang notes that the layering of screens replicates the live compositing effects that are possible, creating illusions that are very powerful, as when the protagonist is paddling across the ocean: Also, by not ever really using a terminal surface like a screen in the cinematic paradigm, the image is always put in relationship to a body on stage. Even when the screen is placed in the background, it is never the final, terminal surface that we are accustomed to in the cinema. We are always putting the body in relationship to images in space. (Ibid.)

In their introduction to Performance and Technology: Practices of Virtual Embodiment and Interactivity (2006), Susan Broadhurst and Josephine Machon note that the two quintessential elements in mediated performance are the digital and the corporeal. They go on to argue that these two foci demand a new mode of analysis and interpretation, one that ‘foregrounds and celebrates the inherent tensions between the physical and the virtual’ (2006: xvi). Further, they point to ‘the immediacy of the physical/virtual body’ and understand this immediacy to be vital (ibid.). The work of Miwa Matreyek

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Half Life (2015) by Cloud Eye Control; image by Eugene Ahn

and Cloud Eye Control explores this tension between the physical and virtual, most often through the body and its reconfiguration through media. The body is at once entirely physical, but also subject to projection and reconfiguration via the media with which it interacts. The imbrication of body and technology continues full force in Cloud Eye Control’s Half Life (2015), their most ambitious project to date. The story emerged from reports following the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear crisis and is rife with anxiety about ecological disaster and a world in turmoil. The opening image shows two buildings side by side; satellites dot the rooftops and, on occasion, a shade within a window rises or lowers. Viewing the image prior to the start of the performance, it is difficult to know the status of the image – still or moving? Layered or flat? As the performance begins, the screens – four of them – rise. A woman appears, and, for the remainder of the performance, we will watch her negotiate a series of spatial relationships with the world around her, some large, some small. A swirl of paper and trash cavorts around her as she walks through a dystopic wasteland; meteorological mayhem with lightning tosses her backwards; she is doused in rainwater while standing in a fantastical forest; and she is nipped by fish swimming past her as she wades in the ocean. Each of these image sequences melds the human body with an animated world, suggesting a new definition of animation with reference to its etymological root to ‘instil with life’. Other sequences, however, veer far from the natural world to the technologised milieu, placing the woman within a matrix of measurement, statistical analysis and control. This imagery is data visualisation, and the body is integrated into its systemic reduction. Matreyek, explaining the larger mise-en-scène of the performance, says, ‘We have basically created a cinematic environment that the performer is inside of. In other scenes, though, the screen is treated like a surface in the domestic space, like a big

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user interface’ (in Willis 2015: np). This interface is represented graphically, but it also includes scenes when footage is captured that appears to be web-cam images. In one particularly visceral sequence, the woman discovers something on her face. Looking closer, which the audience sees as two giant projections of real-time image capture, she peers at her cheeks and chin, which begin to distort, becoming disfigured, discoloured and horrible. The image poignantly captures a desperate sense of anxiety, but the sequence gains its intensity precisely through the familiarity of the video image. Matreyek continues to explore the rendering of space in the group’s performances: We are constantly recomposing the stage to create new relationships between the body of the performer, the space and the projections. Some moments are staged in a more a panoramic environment, to show that she is kind of lost in this world, as opposed to other scenes, in which there are ways that the screens compose a room or container that the performer is inside of; they become her psyche. (Ibid.)

In this way, Cloud Eye Control pays specific attention to the relationship between the body and the various screens and projections that constitute the story world. What they render, then, is a new habitus, to borrow from the terminology of Pierre Bourdieu, who understood the habitus to be a set of practices and dispositions that are at once deeply social and embodied. The world of Half Life, with its differing layers of spaces and screens, provides a depiction of a world in which to be embodied is to be enmeshed; to be embodied is to be is to be screened. Cinematic Entanglements: The Work of Mariano Pensotti While Miwa Matreyek and Cloud Eye Control render a vision of the body in relationship to a mediated world, Mariano Pensotti, an Argentinian artist whose work combines cinema, visual art and theatre, considers the post-cinematic, posthuman concept of identity. His projects include Sometimes I Think, I Can See You (2010) in which four writers with laptops sat in a train station writing words that appeared on four screens in the station. Passers-by became part of the narrative, at once performing within the fictions created by the writers and witnessing their reconfiguration on the screens. Much of Pensotti’s work explores this intersection, considering the connections among disparate media forms, merging text and image, theatre and cinema. Pensotti’s Cineastas (2013) is a theatrical work with elements of the cinematic that tells the story of four filmmakers and their individual movies, focusing on the intersection of personal lives and the stories the filmmakers desire to tell. The project is set within a two-tiered stage, with the ‘real’ lives unfolding on the lower level, and the often more lurid cinematic stories taking place on the upper level, with bright lighting and sound effects. What makes the project compelling in the context of the posthuman and the post-cinematic are the ways in which it adopts the elements of cinematic language – split screen, voice-over, temporal elisions – and the manner in

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which the characters – there are five – seamlessly transition from body to body, each actor adopting different roles as the story unfolds. The primary thematic concern for Cineastas is the relationship between fiction and reality, with the director asking on the project’s website, ‘Do our fictions reflect the world, or is the world a distorted projection of our fictions?’ How, he wonders, do the stories the filmmakers tell through their films impact their lives? And how do the specifics of their everyday lives affect their films? We might extend his enquiry to consider the ways in which the structures of storytelling affect our understanding of self, knowing and being. How does the transition to a form of theatrical/cinematic experimentation that eschews unified characters and coherent meaning to produce something more akin to a machine of storytelling contribute to the elaboration of the posthuman experience? Cineastas juxtaposes the so-called real and the fictional, with an on-stage narrator helping bridge the gaps, and the actors taking turns playing the diverse roles needed to complete what are essentially eight different stories. These eight stories become reconfigurable assemblages, churning through segments of narrative; and the bodies of the actors become figures within a constantly unfolding environment in which character identity is transient at best. The layerings of fiction and reality give way to simply a layering; we come to experience not a story, or even eight stories, but the machinery of experience and the production of meaning as an ongoing enactment choreographed among an array of selves and the world. The world is not merely inhabited, with the space serving as inert backdrop; instead, the world and the characters both are produced through their interactions. Indeed, in place of an unfolding story, Cineastas presents a richly textured tableau or even a backdrop where experience unfolds through the interactions of actors and space. Despite the fixity of the run-time of the performance and the physical confines of the set, temporal and spatial continuity give way. In their place is a sense of profusion and possibility. The structure of the narrative also points to the posthuman and post-cinematic in its recursive embedding of stories within stories. As the eight narratives unfold, they mix and merge, not so much in a hierarchical embedding that would move from one plane upward or downward to another plane. Instead, there is a sense that the levels exist interchangeably on the same plane. The history of embedded narrative is rich and much theorised. Tzvetan Todorov, for example, writes, ‘Embedding is an articulation of the most essential property of all narrative. […] For the embedding narrative is the narrative of a narrative. By telling the story of another narrative, the first narrative achieves its fundamental theme and at the same time is reflected in this image of itself ’ (quoted in Clarke 2008: 97). Similarly, Italo Calvino finds the layering of narrative to be constitutive of narrative itself: ‘Literature does not recognize Reality as such, only levels’ (1987: 120; emphasis in original). This layering of levels and the fluidity of characters as the actors play diverse roles contribute to a sense of ontological flux. Characters are not anchored to bodies; they morph and return. It becomes impossible to engage the project through a process of

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character identification, or to contain the stories within a cohesive whole. Instead, we remain at a distance, lacking the privileged position in classical filmmaking, as well as all the assurances of unity and coherence once promised. Cineastas disrupts the centrality of character identification by blurring the boundaries of character identity, both conceptually and physically. Describing posthuman subjectivity, Tamar Sharon writes: Modernist thought assumes that the body is the unambiguous locus of the self (agency, consciousness, mind), the ground of identity, a vessel occupied by and at the disposal of an animating, wilful subjectivity. […] It is specifically within a bounded, molar body-asorganism that the modern subject is located because it acts as the boundary, limit, edge or border of subjectivity, that which divides the subject both from other subjects and from objects in the world. (2014: 136)

Similarly, in describing affect and bodies, Lisa Blackman writes, ‘Rather than talk of bodies, we might instead talk of brain-body-world entanglements, and where, how and whether we should attempt to draw boundaries between the human and non-human, self and other, and material and non-material’ (2012: 1). The use of bodies in Cineastas releases the subject from the single body, creating something much more akin to Blackman’s brain-body-world entanglements as the boundaries among humans, and those between human and non-human slip and merge. The individual body gives way as the nexus of subjectivity; in place of the bounded modern subject, there is instead divestiture and dispersal. From Narrative Pleasure to Parallax Play: The Work of Janie Geiser Like Miwa Matreyek and Mariano Pensotti, artist Janie Geiser disrupts the boundaries among media forms, preferring to mix and match to create hybrid works dedicated to conjuring atypical experiences of story and engagement that, like the work discussed above, eschews traditional forms of pleasure, identification and unity in favour of a form of posthuman subjectivity. Known both for her work in puppet performance and experimental filmmaking, Geiser’s live cinema work explores the melding of performance, puppetry and projection, and in the process, contributes to the emergence of a new intermedia language. Clouded Sulphur (death is a knot undone) (2013) is a hybrid puppet performance project with live video projection that borrows from Bunraku, a form of traditional Japanese puppet theatre. Specifically, Geiser was inspired by the seventeenth-century playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon, who was the first to use the dramas of everyday people, rather than those of emperors or elites, as the foundation for his puppet theatre. His The Love Suicides at Sonezaki, for example, was based on a real incident, and became a tremendous success among audiences. Inspired by Chikamatsu’s attention to the everyday, Geiser conducted research, looking for a real event that could form the foun-

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dation for her own puppet theatre work, one that would perhaps resonate in a way akin to those of Chikamatsu for contemporary audiences. She selected the tragic tale of young Brenda Sierra, and the resulting piece explores the kidnapping and murder of the fifteen-year-old East LA sophomore, who left her home for school one October morning in 2002 only to disappear completely; her body was found in the dusty hills of Crestline near the San Bernardino Mountains a few days later, her death prosaically attributed to a blow to the head. While there is speculation about why she might have been murdered, no one has been indicted in the case. Set in a darkened theatre space, the action of Clouded Sulphur takes place on a large hillside that slopes downward and fills most of the small theatre space across one horizontal side of the room. The hillside set is raised to waist level, on a platform, and two narrators sit on another raised platform to the right of the stage, while the musician performs on yet another elevated scaffold to the left of the stage. The small audience sits in several long rows along the opposite side of the long wall, so that the experience overall is extremely intimate, as if you are sharing the space of death and loss with the puppets and their handlers. The puppets have carefully crafted wooden faces with wide eyes and angular noses, and arms, legs, hands and feet that are hinged to allow very nuanced, delicate movements. There are three characters: Brenda, her sister Fabiola and her brother Julio; Brenda wears a red hoodie that matches the sweatshirt worn by the real girl when she was killed. Each puppet is handled by three people who, working with extreme precision, are able to produce strikingly subtle and lifelike movements in the figures. The puppets do not seem human necessarily, but it is difficult not to experience them as utterly alive given the nuance of their movements. As Brenda crawls slowly backwards down the hillside in confusion, or as Fabiola collapses to her knees to claw feverishly into the dirt with her bare hands, you want to reach out and hold them, to offer some solace and protection. Barring that, you simply want to weep. Helping create the overall environment, one that does not merely tell a story but creates an immersive experience, the narration – spoken by the narrator – consists of elusive fragments, a poetic patchwork of details and history, while the music crafts an elegiac mood that is haunting without being overbearing (the piece was written by playwright Erik Ehn and the music composed by Valerie Opielski). Projections showing a live feed from a camera trained on a detail of the larger performance appear on the landscape, magnifying certain key moments or offering further texture and emotion. Within the matrix of performers, images, music and narration, the human is decentred or displaced by the wooden puppets, who form the centre of attention, but this centre is at all times a nexus. We watch the figures, and they are lit to be viewed, while their handlers, dressed in black, remain in the edges of shadows. Perhaps most importantly, voice is severed from bodies; the puppets do not speak, nor do their handlers. The narrator speaks from across the room and above. Writing about the Bunraku form in Empire of Signs, Roland Barthes highlights this separation. Bunraku, he writes, ‘shows the gesture, lets the action be seen, exhibits

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simultaneously the art and the labour, reserving for each its own writing’ (1983: 54). He adds that this showcasing of both the art and the labour achieves the distanciation recommended by Bertolt Brecht. Barthes continues, noting that the ‘distance is made explicable by Bunraku, which allows us to see how it can function: by the discontinuity of codes, by this caesura imposed on the various features or representation, so that the copy elaborated on stage is not destroyed but somehow broken from within (ibid.). This ‘discontinuity of codes’ and the ‘caesura’ signal a key component of the posthuman, namely the experience of viewing the entire storytelling system as system. The distanciation affords an awareness of not merely the main character and her experience, but the entire world of the story, from the puppet handlers and their expressive attention to the bodies of the puppets, to the narrator, musicians and projections, all of which contribute to telling the story. Geiser’s next puppet-based performance was Fugitive Time (2014), which is composed of multiple moving planes, video projections, shadows and disparate times and places to explore the story of a woman with tuberculosis who is moved to a sanatorium. The space of this project is far more mutable than that of Clouded Sulphur, and makes use of rolling scrim panels akin to those seen in hospital rooms; they are moved throughout the performance to reconfigure the space as a constantly shifting environment. In addition to forming walls, the screens also function as surfaces for video projections, which show imagery of Los Angeles, hills and trees, as well as archival photos of the tents and cottages that were part of an LA sanatorium from the past. In this case, the projections are much more elaborate than in the earlier piece, creating

Fugitive Time (opening scene) (2014-15) by Janie Geiser; image: Vincent Richards

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momentary fictional spaces, travel scenes and evocations of landscape. As such, the projections conjure the cinematic, producing new times and spaces. However, they never engage spectators as traditional film viewers; instead, they produce a series of transitory story worlds that come and go. Both Clouded Sulphur and Fugitive Time bring together many different media elements – beguiling puppets, elaborate sets, projected video, evocative lighting, sumptuous music and live performance – to create experiences that are themselves between worlds. Neither just live theatre, puppet show, video screening or story, the projects cross boundaries and invite audiences to experience intense moments of identification and emotion in formats that are unfamiliar and unpredictable. Traditional identification is also disrupted. Rather than connecting with recognisable characters as we do in a film or play, we work to identify with wooden faces and lanky puppet bodies. Rather than enjoying the predictable rhythms of the conflictdriven three-act structure, we cobble together bits and pieces of narrative to make the stories whole. Rather than settling back to watch a feature film or play, we lean forward, working to make sense, to feel, to know. It is not the often spectacular merging of disparate elements that explains the power of Geiser’s work, and it is not the ardent pathos of the stories she chooses to tell. Instead, Geiser leverages all these different elements into a new arrangement, and what she achieves is a new form of collective thinking and experience, one that seems perfectly suited to our current moment. In Geiser’s work, and live cinema projects that engage specifically with the postcinematic, we witness a shift from narrative pleasure to parallax play. The traditional pleasure of immersion within a singular, all-engaging story world gives way to the play involved in viewing the entirety of the storytelling assemblage. No longer are we swept away into another world; instead, we exist in a parallax experience of witnessing not just the story but also exploring its edges and mechanics. Rather than finding pleasure only within the story, we now enjoy understanding how the story is produced. Rather than suspending disbelief, we enjoy an awareness of suspension itself. In other words, rather than cheerfully acquiescing to the story and its conditions, we enjoy precisely the suspension between real and fictional, world and model, due in part to the immediacy of what we are witnessing. Writing about contemporary performance in an essay entitled ‘Digital Culture’, Andy Lavender describes ‘the simultaneous coexistence, the mutual play of what might appear to be two distinct media – the screen and the stage – and the ways in which their very co-relation produces effects of immediacy that are deeply involving – more, deeply pleasurable – for spectators’ (2010: 56). In the work of Mia Makela, Cloud Eye Control, Mariano Pensotti and Janie Geiser, the singular protagonist that dominated the classical narrative film is displaced by the environment, the system and the assemblage, and we are called on to reckon with all parts equally. Ralf Remshardt addresses the centrality of the system: ‘In a posthuman performance paradigm, spectator and performer both relinquish their positionally determinate (dialectical) claims to presence and reconfigure themselves as dynamic, interdependent parts of an emergent system’ (2010: 135). The system includes

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performers and spectators, but also projections, screens, objects, moving sets and other material entities, all of it harnessed into a system designed to celebrate relational interconnectivity. As Remshardt writes: ‘Posthuman refuses to close down the available connections, intersections, and nodes; rather it insists on making them visible and articulating the need to (re) connect with them’ (ibid.). Jan Rohlf, in discussing the futures of live cinema, eloquently imagines the merging of once separate entities: When artist and machine are short-circuited as unstable systems, when sound is output as light and specific qualities of this light are fed back into the soundgenerating process by the artist, when performer and machine interact, when the artists’ decisions are confronted with autonomous generative processes controlled by the machine: with all of this we get an idea of how man and machine find new modes of perception that are only possible through our interaction with the technical medium. Live cinema performances thus contain relevant questions about the subject’s relation to and its role as an integral part of its technical surrounding. (In Willis 2006: np)

The post-cinematic and the posthuman: together, each completes the project of the other, attempting to reckon with experience, identity and subjectivity in a networked culture. As cinema is reinvented as an intermedia form, and as we come to terms with a world in which the human is no longer the centre, artists contribute much to a conjuring of new arrangements, attunements and practices of being through works that call us forth in new ways.

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Chapter 4 Urban Screens / Screened Urbanism

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n November 2014, media artist Refik Anadol transformed the interior of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles with light and moving images during a performance of Edgar Varèse’s Amériques led by conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen. From the exterior, the concert hall appears to be a handful of scattered scraps of curved paper haphazardly flung up by the wind, and its architect, Frank Gehry, has in the past alluded to his fascination with the intersection of architecture and cinema by noting his desire to ‘put feeling, passion and emotion’ into his buildings, and to construct ‘through motion’ (quoted in Sorkin 1998: 261). Anadol, who originally planned to create a complex series of projections on the exterior of the building nevertheless made Gehry’s enthusiasm for motion manifest through the projection performance inside the hall. Amériques, which was written between 1918 and 1921, is described by music historians as a reflection of the composer’s life in New York City (see Perlis and Van Cleve 2005). Varèse himself strived to create works that ‘would permit the delimitation of what I call “zones of intensities” … differentiated by various timbres or colours or different loudnesses’ (quoted in Murray 2011: 149). Anadol played with this idea – of the musical piece as city symphony – in his moving image supplement to its performance. Borrowing elements from the history of visual music by attempting to make the sound of the orchestra come alive, Anadol transposed the dynamic audio collisions of his sound source into similarly vigorous visuals in a series of dazzling abstract animated sequences. However, Anadol extended this visual music farther by integrating the conductor himself, whose movements were captured by a Kinect 3D camera system and projected among the other moving images. To engage the conductor even more intimately with the imagery, sensors tracked his heartbeat and fed the subtly visceral information into the projection system, helping to reimagine the extraordinary space not as a placid if beautiful architectural backdrop for the performance, but as an integral, almost organic participant, merging human and nonhuman,

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Visions of America: Amériques (2014) by Refik Anadol

sound and image, light and space. The imagery dramatically altered audience perception of the space of the concert hall, seeming to dissolve walls only to then have them reappear in reconfigured form. Anadol, who was born in Istanbul and earned an MFA in Design Media Arts through the University of California, Los Angeles, is an advocate for creating these large-scale projections, and considers his work to be a new form of storytelling in a post-cinematic context, a form he dubs ‘media architecture’. Anadol is joined by dozens of other artists internationally who similarly conjoin sound, image and architecture to create multimedia events deeply imbricated with the built environment and the spaces of the contemporary city. This chapter explores the proliferation of this practice, and the expansion of both urban screens and environmental media, broad terms that characterise the ways in which contemporary urban space is fully mediated, by the large screens that adorn buildings, the devices carried by its inhabitants, and the multiple cameras, projection surfaces and informational layers that constitute the topology of contemporary cities. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, our urban spaces have become interfaces for mediated experiences, and as people walking, driving, bicycling or moving through the city on trains and buses, we engage with a highly complex information space. As the city continues to gain sentience, with the ability to watch and control its inhabitants through surveillance technologies and various videotaping and sensing mechanisms, we participate in our own subjugation, trading traffic information and restaurant recommendations for the data collected on our habits, movements and predilections. In our trajectories through a city’s streets, we move from individual subject to networked object. We morph from viewer to viewed. Unknowingly, we connect with diverse networks, and then, perhaps knowingly, negotiate innumerable

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interfaces. We are hailed not as subjects so much as produced as data, such that the contemporary experience of the city for each of us enacts a continual flux of pseudo identity and subjectivity through ‘choice’ and ‘recommendation’, our information generating consumers. Sean Cubitt creates a taxonomy of urban screens in his essay ‘Large Screens, Third Screens, Virtuality and Innovation’, distinguishing among first screens (TV monitors in public space), second screens (large-scale LCD screens used primarily for advertising) and third screens (the handheld screen of mobile devices). He goes on to explore the tension between big and small screens, but highlights the situation of city-dwellers with their third screens: ‘This new individual is at once a performance undertaken under the imperative “Express yourself ! Output some data” and the data image that each of us usually unwittingly creates as we pass through the networks of money, employment, taxes, medicine, purchases and browsing’ (2013: 85). He continues, ‘This regime of files, from which we try to protect ourselves with the ideology of privacy, is in fact the self as it has been produced in the surveillant regimes of capital and government’ (ibid.). As we grow accustomed to the data-driven, real-time city, we would do well to understand its infrastructural ramifications. What constitutes the space of the city? As Scott McQuire, Meredith Martin and Sabine Niederer, the editors of the Urban Screens Reader, write, ‘Urban screens of various scale – from the small handheld screens of mobile phones to the large screens dominating the streetscapes of global cities – exemplified a new urban paradigm produced by the layering of physical space and media space, resulting in what has been variously called “Hertzian”, “hybrid”, “mixed”, “augmented” or “stereoscopic” space’ (2009: 10).1 McQuire, writing in his own book, Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Space (2008), concurs, pointing to the contradictory status of so many of our media tools: ‘The democratization of digital video cameras, which resembles Vertov’s dream of a mobile army of kinoks moving through the city, is equally the condition for the increasing submission of urban space to networked surveillance’ (2008: 99). Julian Bleecker and Nicholas Nova refuse the desire to fetishise the city and its real-time data, urging us instead to ‘stretch out the space of possibility and the space of possible imaginings’ (2009: 10). In ‘A Synchronicity: Design Fictions for Asynchronous Urban Computing’, a Situated Technologies Pamphlet published in October 2009 by the Architectural League of New York, the authors demonstrate a clear lack of interest in how data delivered immediately and orchestrated bureaucratically in a top-down approach may ‘help’ city-dwellers, and instead ponder the potential for more speculative and poetic layers of information. They desire a city that is not static and fixed but rather in process. In the later part of the conversation that constitutes the text of the pamphlet, Bleecker describes a series of objects that were designed to provoke alternative, even poetic, interactions with the city, moving beyond the expected and the screen-based: ‘We’re in the realm of epistemological monkey-wrenching broadly conceived’ (2009: 34), noting that he is interested in ‘creating objects that shift meanings and provide new, unexpected points of view’ (ibid.). As an example of this

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playful monkey-wrenching, Bleecker’s Drift Deck (Analogue Edition) (2008) provides a method for navigating the city serendipitously through a set of often whimsical instructions printed on cards; participants view a card, and follow the instructions, which do not include way-finding instructions but suggestions for interacting with fellow pedestrians. Similarly, Mark Shepard’s iPhone app Serendipitor (2010) invites users to provide a starting point and a destination; from their, a map is generated, but rather than valuing efficiency, the aleatory itinerary instead privileges the potential for discovery and surprise. Since 2005 when it named a conference in Amsterdam, the umbrella term used to designate moving images in the spaces of the city is ‘Urban screens’. However, there exist other curious neologisms as well that name the intersection of moving images and the built environment, including the terms coined by New York Times critic Roberta Smith, namely ‘archivideo’ and ‘videotecture’ (2007: np), and Giuliana Bruno’s ‘architexture’ (2007: 38). Indeed, writing about the intersection of cinema and architecture, Bruno remarks in reference to museum and gallery installations that the spaces of moving images become ‘a place for the love of place’ (ibid.), underscoring what is for her a decidedly affective component in the intertwining of moving images and architecture. Further, in her book Surface (2014), Bruno invites us to understand screens not as the fixed geometry of rectangular grids we normally associate with the term, but instead as the myriad surfaces comprised of various materials and part of the architecture all around us. In her analysis, these screens – from fabric and canvas to fields of light and walls – deserve renewed attention, with a corollary expansion of our definition of the term, especially within the context of the city. In interview, Bruno remarks, ‘At the moment of its obsolescence, the film medium is reinventing its pre-cinematic roots, which are in live urban space and museum culture’ (in Oppenheimer 2014: np). This reinvention takes shape in the innumerable projections that illuminate buildings at night, as well as architectural design that increasingly creates facades that are screenlike. The Walker Museum’s 2005 expansion, for example, added an exterior mesh-like façade and series of screens, helping blur the boundary between inside and outside, as well as between images and information. In contrast, Anna McCarthy’s term is ‘ambient television’ (2001), a phrase that designates the myriad screen-based information sources found at gas stations and airports and, increasingly, in taxicabs and on public buses; as screens that are far more instrumental than emotional, her term is suitably apposite. My point here is simple: ‘urban screens’ designates a process and a production, not a thing. Combining Bruno’s expansive understanding of screens with the more instrumental designation prompted by ‘ambient television’, I argue that these screens encourage us to cede the distinctions formerly delineating aesthetic pleasure, viewing practices, navigation, walking, browsing, talking and shopping. They address us as subjects deftly negotiating the flows of information and experience around us. To some extent, this is nothing new. Billboards and television similarly addressed spectators who cheerfully negotiate myriad forms of attention. However, within the context of a

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networked screen ecology, screens now participate in a public space integrating private, corporate and other interests.2 While corporate concerns, particularly those devoted to advertising, dominate urban screens, artists and designers have increasingly claimed the city as their own, creating large-scale projects, interactive artworks, locative media pieces and more set specifically within the city as site. These digital media works align with the shifting practices of a networked culture and may offer alternative experiences that in many cases subvert the more instrumental objectives of their corporate counterparts.3 Rather than tackle the entire realm of media-based art in public space, a topic well covered in several existing books, this chapter instead continues to search for the reconfigurations of the cinematic, in this case looking to public screens.4 What is the meeting place between what we might call the cinematic with the increasingly mediated world around us in urban space? Where do the elements of cinema intersect with those of display and information? Some would argue that this proliferation of media is decidedly not cinematic. Beatriz Colomina in her essay ‘Multi-screen Architecture’, for example, suggests that the profusion of screens in the city constitutes an information space that requires a new form of perception: The state of distraction in the metropolis, described so eloquently by Walter Benjamin early in the twentieth century, seems to have been replaced by a new form of distraction, which is to say, a new form of attention. Rather than wander cinematically through the city, we now look in one direction and see many juxtaposed moving images, more than we can possible synthesize or reduce to a single impression. (2013: 41)

What would it mean to ‘wander cinematically’ in the city in a post-cinematic world? As early as the 1930s, Sergei Eisenstein asked this same question: The word path is not used by chance. Nowadays it may also be the path followed by the mind across a multiplicity of phenomena, far apart in time and space, gathered in a certain sequence into a single meaningful concept; and these diverse impressions pass in front of an immobile spectator. In the past, however, the opposite was the case: the spectator moved between a series of carefully disposed phenomena that he absorbed sequentially with his visual sense. (1989: 116)

Eisenstein here aligns montage and the pathway travelled by the spectator in viewing an image sequence, placing cinema in a lineage with architecture.5 And in recalling the past, when the spectator moved through images, he also describes the present when visuality and mobility are increasingly linked. However, if the subject of the past wandered the city as a flâneur, enjoying a form of individuation through the potential

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of consumption, the subject of today, device in hand, navigates the city, and this navigation is not necessarily driven by curiosity nor is it characterised by an absorption in the phenomena around him or her; instead, we tend to navigate docilely, dutifully following the instructions provided. The Cinematic City However, what is cinematic in the city offers an opportunity to fathom our current condition. So, more precisely, what is the relationship between cinema, architecture and the city at this moment? Catrien Schreuder attempts to parse the differences between moving images in the city and the cinematic image: ‘Whereas the visual idiom of film generally aims to “carry away” the viewer in a story, art is traditionally more focused on the experiencing of a specific moment’; she goes on to say that video art tends to privilege the moment: ‘Video art makes viewers aware of the time, of the work, and their own viewing behaviour’ (2010: 47). However, while many video art installations do encourage exactly this reflection on what Kate Mondloch has dubbed ‘the activated spaces’ of moving image artworks, by which she means ‘the conceptual and material point at which the observing subject meets the technological object’ (2010: xvii), so many more engage the elements of narrative that we understand to be cinematic, making it difficult to sustain Schreuder’s distinction broadly. Francesco Casetti takes up the same question in his essay ‘What Is a Screen Nowadays?’ (2013) asking if it is even possible for cinema – with its fixed format and fondness for complex storytelling – to participate in the cityscape now enlivened with urban screens. He lists three specific challenges that he sees with regard to cinema’s presence in urban space. First, he argues, film remains too close to reality in its penchant for realist narrative to function effectively in the context of the space of the city; second, it retains an affinity for organic unity and worlds that are ‘dense and coherent’ (2013: 33), also making it less viable in the urban landscape where viewers are mobile and easily distracted; and third, film remains tied to a traditional system of broadcasting, as films are meant to travel along pre-established routes to engage audiences in predictable spaces. However, he goes on to acknowledge that this is changing as cinema encounters contemporary culture. He writes that film now has adopted what he calls ‘the logic of the display’ (2013: 34). He adds, ‘It is no coincidence that the worlds represented on the screen are increasingly fluid, or that the stories are increasingly inconsequential or that the settings are often unstable and the scenes are increasingly composed of collages and mosaics’ (ibid.). Here, Casetti identifies a key conceit that I would like to develop in this chapter: it is not that cinema is moving into the space of the city and adapting to its requirements through a proliferation of screens. Instead, it is the city and its concomitant spatial concerns that are inhabiting the cinematic, displacing film’s temporal emphasis not only with a spatial logic, but the logic of twenty-first century cities increasingly defined by GPS coordinates, tagging, mapping, navigation and cartography. As such, then, I

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do not merely refer here to cinema’s formal qualities and both the visual and narrative instability noted by Casetti that describe many contemporary feature films. Instead, it is the layerings of the city and the cinematic that intrigue me. This layering echoes the provocative doubling rendered in China Miéville’s novel The City and the City (2009), which in its very title denotes the sense of stratified palimpsest. In Miéville’s story, two sections of a city subsist side by side, but the ability for inhabitants to see and interact with the opposite side is strictly regulated, requiring inhabitants both to ‘un-see’ each other, and to ignore the spaces deemed other. Further, the space that is shared between each city is designated as such through the term ‘cross-hatching’. It is a hybrid space. So, the city and the cinema: the key point is that both now engage less with representation and more with computation. Both now align less with the singular and more with the hybrid. We can view the city as scriptable and queryable; the city as sensed, measured, instrumentalised; the city as platform, the city as living, responsive entity: this city, and its similarly reconfigured partner in cinema, becomes a new configuration. Rather than investigate ‘urban screens’, then, I want to consider a form of ‘screened urbanism’, by which I mean a form of the cinematic uniquely imbued by the imaginary of the city.6 Screened urbanism is cinema conditioned by the nomadic poetics of pedestrian navigation. Screened urbanism is cinema constituted through data sensed – implacably, inexorably – as it emerges from the quotidian actions and daily routines of the city’s inhabitants. Screened urbanism is cinema as it enacts new forms of public space and invites different practices of identity formation, participation and shared imagination. And screened urbanism traffics in a proliferation of unstable boundaries, slyly postulating arenas similar to the ‘crosshatched’ sections shared by the two cities in Miéville’s novel. In short, rather than merely illuminating the cityscape with screens, screened urbanism illuminates the screening of the city, integrating the practices of contemporary urban existence into the realm of the cinematic. How does screened urbanism function? The word that comes to explain a method for screened urbanism mind is ‘layer’. Screened urbanism undertakes the active process of layering, of choreographing disparate thicknesses and strata together. Etymologically, layer comes from Middle English leyer, leyare, which refer to someone – a layer – who places stones or bricks. A layer, then, is a lay-er, suggesting an equivalence of noun and verb, of the thing and the making of the thing; the resultant doubling produces an act, event or performance that occurs in real-time. However, there is more to this evocative term: layer also suggests a single thickness of some material; it is an item of clothing worn under or over another; it is a horizontal deposit: a stratum; it is an item in a hierarchy; and it references the act of cutting, dividing or arranging in layers. Some of the synonyms for layer include overlay, fold, cover and thickness. And film. A layer is a film. Layers are also used in software design as a way to organise code; they are used in image processing to manipulate disparate image elements; and they are used in mapping in order to distinguish among different systems or to chart change across time. As such, ‘layer’ offers a productive term for articulating the practice of screened

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urbanism, generating a method that serves as an allegory for the layering of disparate levels of computation and information in the world around us. A series of short-form videos – so often harbingers of larger cultural events – depict this sense of screened urbanism and its enactment through layering, rendering the hybridity and mutability of urban space as it becomes networked space. Not coincidentally, many of these projects begin with or engage with trains, recalling a predominant visual trope in cinema at the turn of the last century (and oddly echoing the cultural fascination and the structuring of industrialised consciousness so elegantly explained by Wolfgang Schivelbusch in Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (1987)). The train – with its mobility and structural affinity with the physicality of film, returns now, at the shift into the twenty-first century. Michel Gondry’s music video for the Chemical Brothers’ ‘Star Guitar’ (2002), for example, pictures the landscape passing by a train window as a constantly morphing vista responding in time to the music, each bridge, telephone pole and building appearing and reappearing not to represent the real but to perform a musically-generated cartography of the specifically digital imagination. In Tim Hope’s evocative Jubilee Line (2000), people journey through the city in an entirely constructed train rendered as a series of lines and shapes, the somatic joining with the digital in a curious embodiment of anxieties about who and where we are in an increasingly mediated world. The world of Jubilee Line is clearly a layered environment, distinguishing humans from infrastructure, live-action from illustration. Patrick Bergeron’s LoopLoop (2008), a magisterial feat of animation, employs sound warping and time shifts to organise images captured on a train-ride from Hanoi to Vietnam. Bergeron stitched the video’s thousand images into one long panoramic image, which he then arrayed – or layered – within the frame to produce a profoundly mobile subject. What we witness in this short video is the layering of disparate times and spaces, which are reconstituted to produce an alternate understanding of memory and the past. Finally, the time slice experiments of Australian artist Daniel Crooks, especially his experiments with trains, as in Train No. 10 (onward backwards) (2012), present a city in perpetual evolution, its times and spaces offering up new relationships and permutations at every second. The city seen in Crooks’ work is very much a sampled, layered city, an algorithmically generated city, presenting an aesthetic of the real-time (even if the video itself documents of generative work that occurred in the past). As Scott McQuire writes in a statement about cinema that could apply directly to these videos, ‘The abrupt cut of montage has been displaced by the real time melt of morphing, and the sequential narrative ordering of images on a single screen by the simultaneous viewing of multiple “windows”’ (2008: 89). In all of these pieces, the city morphs, bends, transmutes. It enters the frame of the cinematic, bringing along a set of spatial and temporal contours and layers that are eminently elastic and mutable. In this way, this collection of videos hovers at the intersection of representation and computation, tracking the shift from one mode to the other, in transit across the transformation unfolding around us. The collection also

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Train No. 10 (onward backwards) (2012) by Daniel Crooks; image courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwarz Gallery

begins to inform the term ‘screened urbanism’ by positing the city not as stable place but as a layered, shifting, sifting concatenation of spaces. Disorientation Is Not a Negative Thing While many contemporary short videos offer a formal reckoning with screened urbanism, a number of artists are working to articulate a more dynamic form of this process. For example, Los Angeles-based media artist Doug Aitken boasts a body of work that, for the last decade, has deployed the city as a medium, moving beyond the constraints of cinema’s traditional arrangement to consider the city as an active agent in the work. Further, with his massive project titled Station to Station (2013), Aitken joins the artists mentioned above in honouring the expressive capacity of the train, in this case using a real, physical train, which hurtled across the country, covering four thousand miles from its starting point on the east coast and the Atlantic Ocean to its end point at the Pacific Ocean. The trip spanned 23 days in September 2013, and the train carried primarily a group of artists who performed at stops along the way. Aitken recorded hundreds of moments on the journey, and many of these were streamed live to an online audience, and he also created 62 one-minute films that together comprise a feature film. In addition, he staged a thirty-day multi-performer event in 2015 at London’s Barbican Centre, documenting the various happenings in fifteen-second films. Discussing the impetus for the project, Aitken highlights a sense of urgency and a desire to unite disparate art forms: ‘I felt that there was a necessity to create a platform for experimentation’ (in Kuo 2014: np). He wanted to encourage a form of playfulness and spontaneity, and to enhance a sense of possibility. The train

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helps this mandate immensely as it produces a sense of destabilisation, change and mobility; the participants worked in a nomadic situation, outside the normal confines and constraints of institutional structures. Honouring chance, serendipity and process over planning and regimentation, Aitken hoped to spark active discovery and ‘works made in real-time’ (ibid.). One of the most compelling projects to emerge from this large art event was the collaborative projection experiment conducted by Aaron Koblin and Ben Tricklebank, which involved using Lidar scanning technology. Koblin was intrigued by the idea of working with a train, and more specifically with the combination of the train’s physicality, and the play of space, time and perception provoked by train travel. Expanding on their work for Radiohead’s ‘House of Cards’ video (2007), Koblin and Tricklebank used lasers, hoping not necessarily to gather information but to trace change across time. So, rather than scanning the environment, which is typically what one does with lasers, they instead created the conditions within which they could capture images out of data as the data charted change. In other words, the pair plotted images onto the tracks while the train was in motion, using one of the unique capacities of lasers, which is their ability to precisely plot each pixel. This makes the projection process far more definitive than other forms of projection. The pair worked through one long night in July 2013, projecting an array of abstract and geometric images, as well as phrases, onto the railroad tracks, and then photographing the resulting traces of light. In this way, the project juxtaposes multiple times and spaces, as one environment, itself a record of temporal transformation, was placed over another environment; the documentation of the process produced the image.7 Overall, the Station to Station project sought to catalyse the world around us as potentially expressive. The train, for example, wasn’t simply a vehicle for transportation; it became, in the artists’ words, ‘a generative light sculpture that responds to the environment around it’, reacting to the measuring of speed, light, temperature and the landscape passing by (Nomadic Light Sculpture video, 2013). And rather than simply making a movie about the event, Station to Station became ‘a living project exploring modern creativity’. They continue, ‘What began as a train journey has evolved into a platform for non-commercial creativity and cross-collaboration between different mediums’ (Station to Station video, 2013). Critics have chastised Aitken for not including more women artists as participants, and the Barbican event was criticised for a lack of cohesiveness. However, for my purposes, the project offers a platform for further developing the notion of screened urbanism in which the logic of the networked city reconfigures the cinematic. Here, the cinematic becomes mobile and networked; it becomes data-driven and tracked; and it grapples with the intersection of human and machine, representation and computation, and the folding of one environment over another. This is cinema literally in transit, in motion and performative. This is cinema adamantly dedicated to layering, to integrating the act of creativity and the results of that act. Koblin and Tricklebank’s process, which literally placed one environment over another, enacted precisely this provocative layering.

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Station to Station emerges from a long history of creative experimentation by Aitken. Since 1999 when his video installation electric earth marked him as a powerful new contributor to gallery-based installation, he has been dedicated to limning the boundaries of the cinematic, not via traditional filmmaking but through a spatial and temporal reimagining. His is a practice that makes use of some of the major attributes of the cinematic, including visual design and scale, and his work often boasts the elegance and polish we associate with industrial filmmaking. However, Aitken’s work eschews the coherence and linearity of Hollywood narrative, opting instead for what he calls ‘broken screen narratives’, by which he means narratives that are layered, fragmentary and nonlinear; Aitken’s stories, which are perhaps better described almost as atmospheres or environments, are invariably dispersed spatially throughout a gallery or museum setting. And visually, layering plays a central role. Nearly all of his projects contain moments in which the image suggests a layering of spaces, or they emphasise a filtering effect produced by a layer of cloth, smoke or glass. Further, the splintering of his stories across multiple screens never leaves any single screen or story component in isolation; instead, Aitken carefully choreographs the screens and their stories, layering actions and story elements from one screen onto the next. In order to understand the larger history and context of this particular trajectory of story and space, Aitken published a collection of conversations with other filmmakers, artists, designers and architects in Broken Screens: Expanding the Image, Breaking the Narrative: 26 Conversations With Doug Aitken (2005). Aitken describes the project as at once a manifesto, communal dialogue, tool for stimulation and, in short, a challenge to the idea that disorientation is a negative thing; he also deflects critics by admitting that the book is dedicated to raising questions rather than answering them. Taken together, the conversations suggest the potentials of this form, but more than that, they offer an archive of statements, comments and connections that explain Aitken’s own body of work. A germane example of the broken screen narrative is found in Aitken’s video installation Blow Debris (2000), which features a fractured story displayed across nine projectors in three rooms. Viewers follow a group of nude wanderers in a desert landscape littered with detritus – rusting shopping carts, smashed televisions, gutted vehicles – and, as they meander about in the dusty sand, their lips dry in the hot wind, you can almost feel the heat and aridity. Initially isolated, the characters gradually come together, and they find themselves increasingly confined, either by the frame, or within smaller spaces in the environment. A sense of intensity begins to build through sound and pacing, and then an explosion literally blows the entire scene into debris; papers flurry up into the air, and objects topple over; a lamp explodes, and everything is fluttering in delirious slow motion; and then the directionality of time reverses, and the scene is replayed backwards, chaos reshuffles itself back into order. However, the humans are now gone. With this gesture, Aitken achieves a kind of psychic vertigo, and we register the ways in which time is wrenched out of its teleological line, and space, already fractured, is reconstituted. As such, Blow Debris articulates a perceptual experi-

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ence poignantly characteristic of the late 1990s, and the sense that even far away in the desert, an ominous power looms. The fragmentation continued with Aitken’s 2005 project entitled The Moment. For this piece, Aitken united a series of vaguely linked moments that capture people in a state of flux – as they move from sleep to wakefulness, for example. They also inhabit seemingly indeterminate non-spaces. These moments are dispersed across eleven screens suspended from the ceiling of a gallery space. The screens were positioned at eye level and in a gently curving S-pattern, with mirrors on the backs of each screen. The video footage of people intermingle with shots of empty parking lots and the arching lines of telephone wires stretched across the sky. Anonymous grids of mirrored skyscraper windows and empty bedrooms intersect with close-ups of eyes, skin and torsos. The actions of the differing performers were choreographed to synchronise at certain points, calling attention to shared resonances across the divide of spaces and time. Aitken conveys isolation and loneliness while at the same time suggesting that we are all linked in our habitual actions. As viewers walked through the space, they alternately encountered a screen and then a mirror; they would see an image of another person, and then an image of themselves. In this profusion of surfaces and screens, the project suggests liminal, refracted moments, places hovering between other places, and a shared psychic vulnerability. We encounter ourselves as images integrated with those around us, separate individuals encased within our own screened image, and once again, a sense of juxtaposition and a layering of disparate registers of reality come together. In all three of these projects, Aitken joins a generation of other video artists in inspiring a mobile spectator willing to traverse the spaces of the gallery in order to obtain a full understanding of the project.8 It is impossible to sit in one place and glean the full impact of any of Aitken’s earlier video installations; similarly, it is impossible to walk around the piece and glean the full impact as one’s decision to see one aspect requires missing something else occurring elsewhere. In this way, video installation’s epistemology insists on the resolutely limited knowledge available at any given moment. While these projects explore configurations of narrative across multiple screens inside the gallery or museum, Aitken expanded on this increasingly prominent practice in 2007 with his project Sleepwalkers (2007). This massive piece was staged on eight exterior walls around the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden between West 53rd and 54th Streets at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in January and February 2007. Like The Moment, the project showcases a series of scenes in the lives of several characters, with performances by Tilda Swinton, Donald Sutherland, Chan Marshall, Ryan Donowho and Seu George. The stories are presented in thirteenminute segments that loop throughout the evening, and interconnect more through temporal alignment than narrative interaction. The sequences are structured to follow the passage of a single day, from sunrise to an ecstatic culmination at the end of the day. The images include a large orange sun at dawn; people sleeping; clouds; taxis; trains; blocks of colour; the city’s denizens, walking briskly; elevator doors; and the city street,

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seen from high above. And the action is simple: the characters wake up, and we see each of their heads, then their hands, their showers and their morning beverages. The actions are also choreographed: All hands flip a light switch, for example, or a certain visual trope takes over, and we see all of the cups from above, or a series of wheels or the sun repeated on every screen. In this way, the video asserts its connection to a database logic, and the video is structured precisely through the selection and combination of linked shots. Rather than emphasising a story with a protagonist, we witness a collection of characters, each of which is interchangeable. And the logic extends to emphasise alignment over narrative unfolding; further, the beauty of the piece is the choreography of images as they move from screen to screen across the decidedly dispersed space of the installation, and through the time of a single day. Aitken’s proficiency resides both in creating a visual polyphony and upending expectations regarding scale. Indeed, what was perhaps most striking about the piece was the contrast between its scale and intimacy. At night, building walls were brightened by the gigantic faces of the characters; quotidian habits became tremendous gestures; the prosaic became profound both through visual style and sheer size. In this way, Aitken demonstrates one version of the reversal I propose in shifting from urban screens to screened urbanism. Rather than illustrating the continued prominence of urban screens, the project screens the city; it gives form at once to the fantasies and fears that accompany the reshaping of the personal and the social by screening those fantasies and fears directly onto the city’s architecture. The taxonomy of habits and routines enacted by each character – the same, but different – and the suggestion of ritual and disruption: all of these serve to unite the materiality of the city with the corporeality of the body, both of which, within the logic of the network, are subject to massive change and cause for anxiety. Two years later, Aitken staged yet another large-scale outdoor video installation, Frontier (2009). The project reverses the directionality of Sleepwalkers, positioning the projections on the interior of an architectural space instead of on the exterior. The building was constructed specifically to house the project and features geometric cutouts in the walls and no roof. Located on Isola Tiberina, an island in the centre of Rome, the project was first seen from above as viewers traversed a bridge; entering the piece, viewers would see images projected on all four sides of the rectangular space, with one man (played by Ed Ruscha) wandering through disparate landscapes. The images include washes of colour, bits of text and myriad objects, while the sound is an associative mix of music and sound effects. Throughout the evenings when the project was viewable, live performers punctuated the event – for example, an auctioneer rattles off a litany while someone else wields a twirling rope. Frontier is certainly yet another iteration of a broken narrative (although here ‘narrative’ really is a stretch), and the piece joins those of the others in the Aitken oeuvre both in its tonal resonance and in performing a kind of screened urbanism. Indeed, it is no accident that the piece opens and closes on images of Ruscha, sitting pensively in a movie theatre, images flickering on the screen. The juxtaposition of the cinema

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and the city, the staging of one form of viewership through another: Frontier asserts a boundary between a cinema past and a cinema present, and a viewer traversing the space in between. We witness the man who wanders; the man who is weary; and the man who watches. Here, the cinema is screened; it is layered onto the post-cinematic; it serves as reference and reminder; it is literally a layer, layer as horizontal deposit: a stratum. It is the thing that allows for a frontier to take shape at all. Finally, in his 2011 project, Mirror, Aitken begins to grapple with the city not merely as the built environment but as the smart city, a space within which IT infrastructure comes to the fore to deploy data and analytics to enhance efficiency. A city’s analytics can be used to predict, map, monitor or alert; they contribute to systems of zoning, traffic and policing. The smart city reflects on itself, monitor and optimising, processing and analysing. Invited to create a permanent installation for the exterior of the Seattle Art Museum, Aitken developed a display that includes vertical strips of LED lights and a screen that spans a single story and wraps around the museum’s northwest corner. Aitken collected video footage for the project from many areas across the state of Washington; this footage is stored on a server and fragments are selected to screen based on sensor data monitoring various activities in the city, including the weather and pedestrian traffic. Like the train in Station to Station, then, the building participates in the performance of the video project, transposing data into imagery. ‘With Mirror, I was interested in the idea of creating a living museum, a downtown building that could change in real time in relation to the environment around it,’ Aikten has said (in Careless 2011: np). He continues: ‘It’s like an urban earthwork. Seattle is a very complex and fascinating city, and Mirror was an attempt to reflect the simultaneity of the culture and landscape you find there’ (ibid.). In using the term ‘urban earthwork’, Aitken achieves his own kind of reversal. Where the history of American land art and earthworks describes art that emerges directly from natural resources, such as the black basalt rock and water that comprise Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), Aitken’s materials are LEDs, video, data and sensors, which assuredly constitute a new and different understanding of the natural. However, if we understand the ‘new nature’ to be the computational layer that subsumes us all, Aitken’s project engages with that realm to be sure; while the binary between nature and culture has already been critiqued and continues on only as a comforting myth, a bold restaging of nature at the centre of IT infrastructures does indeed prompt a rethinking. And the environment to which Aitken refers is not the wind, sun and rain so much as the ways in which those elements are sensed and transposed. This returns, then, to the disorientation Aitken opts to valourise in his work: to the extent that contemporary existence in a networked world with its accelerated flows promises a kind of disorientation, perhaps one response is to enhance that disorientation, even to produce it as a new sensorium. In this way, then, perhaps as Aitken argues, disorientation is not a bad thing. Mirror continues Aitken’s consideration of screened urbanism, here specifically employing computation, sensing and the database to design a project that reflects what

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Saskia Sassen has dubbed the ‘global city’; she describes the contemporary city as ‘an amalgamation of multiple global circuits that loop through it’ (2006: 4). She continues, ‘What remains physical in the city is transformed by the fact that it is represented by liquid instruments’ in a dense, digital infrastructure (2006: 6). If much of the activity that occurs in a global city is indeed completely invisible as the flow of electronic information and finance all around us, the screen – or the building wall that acts as a screen – remains obstinately visible, framing and demarcating what threatens on the one hand to overwhelm or on the other hand to disappear altogether. Mirror makes manifest the invisible flow of data around us, creating in the process a machine for distributing and enjoying our own production as data. Shifting the Sensorium If Station to Station offered up a real train in order to posit not an artwork but a platform, the staging of an adaptation of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1974) as an opera set in the vast hallways of Union Station in downtown Los Angeles allows me to carry this trope forward yet one more step. The reinvented Invisible Cities (2013) united the talents of composer Christopher Cerrone and an eleven-piece chamber orchestra; experimental opera director Yuval Sharon of the Industry; and choreographer Danielle Agami of Ate9 Dance Company, who worked with eight dancers from the LA Dance Project. Together, they created a seventy-minute opera experience that merges multiple layers of reality within the train station as dancers enact the vignettes of Calvino’s text for both a public unaware of the performance, and for paying ticket holders, who have arrived at the station specifically to witness the project and who listen to the opera on wireless headphones as they wander throughout the station. The improbable cities of Calvino’s book are situated spatially, and while this project does not boast the obvious link to the cinematic evident in Aitken’s work, it nevertheless, once again, presents spectatorship as a mobile endeavour, a process commenced, a walk taken. However, what is perhaps most striking about the event is its reimagining of the spectator, who is at once alone, with the separation from others instantiated by the headphones, but united in the sonic experience; the audience members form a group, but it is a group whose parameters are quite loose, and yet the concurrence of experience – being alone together in public – generates its own form of intimacy. The paying spectators share a secret; the inquisitive bystanders, in contrast, share a sense – possibly – of curiosity but just as likely of irritation at the disruption of their own sense of time and space within the station. Sharon followed Invisible Cities with another ambitious city-based project in 2015 titled Hopscotch. The project is also adaptation, in this case of Argentine writer Julio Cortázar’s 1963 novel of the same name. Renowned for its unusual structure and stream-of-consciousness writing, the novel created the starting point for a rather different sort of broken narrative, one in which the story is spread out across downtown Los Angeles and accessed via a fleet of limousines that taxied participants from one

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part of the story to the next. The project included 126 participants who were a mix of actors, musicians and dancers, and each ninety-minute performance included three separate trajectories – the red, yellow and green routes – and audience members were divided up into groups of four to experience the piece together. Like opera and theatre, the story unfolds in real time and changes with every iteration; however, those travelling in different cars witness an entirely different perspective, with some of the city’s inhabitants inadvertently entering the story, and everything from weather conditions to traffic having an impact on how events unfold. In this way, both Invisible Cities and Hopscotch reference The City and the City, layering differing ‘realities’ over each other and playing with the productive power of the overlap. Sharon’s work also echoes that of Aitken; both artists feel compelled to bring together a variety of art forms; for Sharon, that means mixing opera, theatre and performance, and while his projects participate in the cinematic only tangentially, they bring to the fore questions regarding the boundaries of the cinematic. For Hopscotch, each of the itineraries was captured live on video and streamed to a central hub where an audience could witness the entire spectacle at a distance. Is this an example of screened urbanism? I argue that it is. Both of these projects exemplify the re-making of the city as a platform, and both highlight the vivacious role the city can play as it blends and merges with storytelling. If screened urbanism is also dedicated to a blurring of boundaries, with a nod to the crosshatched sections between realms in Miéville’s work, Sharon’s projects ply this aspect to great effect.9 If Sharon’s work is more city than cinema, the artists who comprise Blast Theory – Matt Adams, Ju Row Farr and Nick Tandanavitj – have worked to imagine a rather different configuration of screened urbanism with a bit more attention to the cinematic. For more than a decade, the UK artists have created a series of projects that they dub ‘locative cinema’. For their project titled Can You See Me Now? (2001), the team designed a game experience set both in the streets of a city, and online, with players participating remotely in conjunction with the players in the city. Online participants were instructed to move through the streets virtually, and to avoid detection if possible. Meanwhile, the city’s participants were dubbed runners, and they were tracked by satellites and carried mobile devices that allowed them both to see where the online players were and to be seen by those players. The goal was for the runners to discover the online players, and then to take a picture; the amusing aspect of the game was that, of course, the images would show an absence, rendering only the city and not the online player, who was only present virtually.10 With A Machine To See With (2010) originally commissioned by the Sundance Film Festival, the Zero One Festival and the Banff Center for New Media, participants engage with a pre-scripted narrative delivered via their personal cell phones; the calls direct people, who are walking through the city, to different locations while telling a story that is designed to enlist assistance in a bank robbery. According to Adams, the team explicitly set out to investigate the ways in which cinema can exist within the city, with participants moving through the streets and

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engaging with objects and the people around them. He says that they began by looking at specific films for inspiration, including Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974). We went on to look at what activities we thought were interesting in the city and we realised that surveillance or observing a building were the kind of things that you can do that exist on the boundary between being a normal citizen and being a criminal; that standing and watching something, and particularly since 9/11, have become more nuanced things. (In Dias 2012: np)

The project also used Jean-Luc Godard’s Made in the USA (1966) as a reference, prompting an interest in the group for exploring the heist genre. In the story, participants are eventually guided to a final interaction, which brings them into contact with another participant in the game; in this way, the story world is breached, and participants are called on to acknowledge each other, strangers engaged in a story in the city. Like Invisible Cities, A Machine To See With blurs the boundaries between art and life, between diegetic and nondiegetic. The story, normally ensconced on a screen or within the magic circle that demarcates the boundaries of an art or game experience, troubles the boundary, illuminating the edges that we tend to take for granted. In Mobile Screens: The Visual Regime of Navigation (2012), Nanna Verhoeff states that in order to understand the new screen regime, we need to acknowledge not only visuality but mobility: ‘I argue that navigation is a primary trope in (urban) mobility and visuality’ (2012: 13). She continues, ‘One of the most striking characteristics of screen-based interfaces is the possibility for people in transit to co-create the map of the spatial arrangement in which they are operating’ (2012: 14). She goes on to name the conjoining of mobility and spatial representation ‘performative cartography’: In the visual regime of navigation, that which is depicted, such as maps and panoramic views, emerges simultaneously with someone’s interaction with a screenbased interface. This simultaneity of making and image makes movement itself a performative, creative act. Movement not only transports the physical body, but affects the virtual realm of spatial representation. This implies a temporal collapse between making images and perceiving them. In other words, the navigational paradigm … entails a shift of focus from texts or objects to relations, practices and processes. (Ibid.)

Blast Theory mobilises a form of performative cartography in that their projects can only take shape through the audience’s performative movements, with every movement affecting the story or game. In a very overt way, then, our subjugation to the regime of surveillance is made clear, but we are invited to engage in the process not for instrumental reasons but for pleasure. Further, what is produced to engage participants

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is not a text or object but a platform for participating in a practice or process, which are in turn immediate and unfold in real time. With regard to the term ‘locative media’ used to describe work akin to that of Blast Theory, I follow Teri Rueb in preferring the term ‘mobile experience’. As she points out in ‘Restless: Locative Media as Generative Displacement’, ‘locative media’, coined by Karlis Kalnins in 2002, served as ‘a way of distinguishing cultural uses of mobile media which critiqued the notion of “space” as an a priori or absolute abstraction and reinscribed “place” as a culturally specific and historically grounded concept’ (2015: 241). Rueb goes on to define ‘mobile experience’ as ‘the broad domain of everyday experience that is mediated by location-sensing technologies, including commercial and industrial productions” (2015: 242). She then adds, ‘Mobile experience involves the use of mobile media which engender a shifting of the sensorium that emerges as a result of our habitual use of these technologies in everyday life’ (ibid.). Each of the projects by Yuval Sharon and Blast Theory undertake this shift of the sensorium, involving people in performative, deeply mediated and yet also participatory and live events that signal alternative uses for the city, which becomes a place of cinematic playfulness and storytelling. Habitual acts and patterns of thought fall away, and the city is produced anew. Holograms for Freedom If Aitken, Sharon and Blast Theory have dedicated their efforts to staging conceptual and aesthetic enquiries regarding the intermixing of the cinematic and the city, activists have appropriated this nexus to enact a very different agenda. Media artists around the world design events and projects specifically engineered to engage participants in forms of powerful criticality by bringing attention to consumerism and power, as well as to embodiment and mediation, and the inextricable relationship between bodies and spaces. These projects tend to resist media as spectacle, instead highlighting the role of media and networked connectivity as it dictates, circumscribes and in, some cases, even hinders the production of spaces conducive to inhabitants of the city. Krzysztof Wodiczko creates projection works for public space, often working at a very large scale. His work investigates – and castigates – power as it is embedded in the built environment and the very design of the cities within which we live.11 Some of the artist’s most recent work, however, conjoins the intimacy of the face-to-face encounter with questions of identity, belonging and community. Between 20 and 27 April 2015, for example, he staged the John Harvard Projection, using videotaped interviews with students at Harvard University. He asked the students about their experiences on the campus, and their sense of community. He then used the well-known statue of the university’s founder, John Harvard, as the surface on which to project precisely mapped video clips of his interview subjects. Ephemeral faces and bodies appear, doubling the statue’s visage and concretising at once the shared identity of the Harvard ‘student body’ while at the same time rendering the gaps. The voices, too, of the students were audible as they talked about their experiences at the university. In this way, Wodiczko

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queries the interconnectedness of the body politic and the political body, and the very visceral effects of community with its inclusions and exclusions. How does a campus represent its student body? Wodiczko had created a comparable piece in 2012 when he used Abraham Lincoln’s statue in New York City’s Union Square as the backdrop for video footage of fourteen American war veterans from the Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Once again, the result was a series of almost ghostly apparitions mapped onto the statue that establish a dialogue between past and present, physical and virtual; in yet another work, then, layering figures centrally. Viewers of this piece must question the relationship between the statue and its ephemeral layer: what does the one say to the other? How does the one inflect or transform the other? What is gained in the layering? I want to connect Wodiczko’s John Harvard Projection to a seemingly disparate project, one that happened to take place nearly simultaneously: a group of artists working in Spain also used projection to call attention to inequity. More specifically, they staged a protest in the streets of Madrid by deploying holographic images. The event was organised by Javier Urbaneja, who worked in association with a production company called Garlic to help with the technical logistics, and a group called No Somos Delito (We Are Not a Crime), which is a consortium of organisations united in resisting the limitations imposed on public protest. Together, the organisers undertook a complex media production designed to denounce what was then a new Spanish Citizen Security Law that would prohibit public demonstrations near the parliament in Madrid. To create the holographic project, the consortium established a website called Holograms for Freedom to invite participants to record messages that could be played in conjunction with the holographic imagery; they also invited participants to write notes that could be used on the protest posters to be collaged into the project. The group then staged and performed a simulated protest in a city near Madrid specifically for cameras, creating imagery that could be easily transferred to the street in Madrid. The organisers next dutifully requested and received a permit for what might have appeared to be a conventional film shoot for the Madrid event, and they placed a large screen on the street at their chosen location. On the evening of 10 April 2015, they then projected the hologram, which looked like a ghostly parade of protesters in the street, projecting the audio as well to amplify the sounds of the many voices who had contributed to the website. In this way, the participants obeyed the new law and refrained from disrupting public space with their physical bodies. Simultaneously, however, they managed to transfer the symbolic act of protest from the deployment of physical bodies in space to the representation of those bodies; they were thus able to enact the protest anyway. The project beautifully – and tactically – enacted a form of mediated resistance with the ghostly projections effectively illuminating the shifting of boundaries of the contemporary body, the mutability of urban spaces when the city serves as an interface, and the modulations of power. Through a process of dematerialisation, the group

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was able to make literal the evanescence of the public under threat, while at the same time deftly stepping around the prohibition. Not only was the tactic inventive and, as a result, newsworthy, it also exemplifies the role of the mediated. Where normally the city’s inhabitants are surveilled and subjected to the rule of invisible power, in this case, city-dwellers similarly used media tactically, sending their images into the streets to protest. In both the recent work of Wodiczko and the Spanish collective, the projections resisted easy recognition and appreciation. Unlike so much of the media screened in public space on myriad urban screens, Wodiczko’s projections require time and engagement in order to parse the video, to understand the images and sound, and to begin to formulate an appreciation for the layering central to the projects. In turn, viewers are invited to consider the juxtaposition of the video images and the statues that serve as their ‘screens’. The framing, mapping and alignment of Wodiczko’s pieces function to establish connectivity, drawing out correspondences. At the same time, the gap between the materiality of the projection and that of the statue underscores differences that must be acknowledged and parsed for meaning. Viewers explore the dialogic relationship between the projected image and the statue, and more specifically, the ways in which the images both require the statue while simultaneously revising the statue’s symbolic meaning. More abstractly, the projections also reference contemporary experience and the ways in which so much of our lives are lived in layered spaces integrating virtual and real. These mixed reality spaces often remain unexamined; both sets of projections prompt us to consider how the spaces around us are codified, organised and even produced within a context of what Adam Greenfield dubs ‘ambient informatics’, which he defines as ‘a state in which information is freely available at the point in space and time someone requires it’ (2006: 24). Similarly, both projects are attentive to material things. For Wodiczko, the statue is central to the artwork, and we are called upon to interrogate the ways in which this object functions before, during and after its transformation via projection. What role does the statue play? And how does this role shift through projection? In the Holograms for Freedom project, the substitution of the hologram for the body queries the role of corporeality and asks what constitutes a representative body. It also signals that our gestures of agreement and our roles in participatory governing can take diverse forms across the physical and digital. These projects are also acutely aware of site; they were staged in specific physical locations to achieve specific ends. However, in their ephemerality, they reference the ways in which our city spaces are overlaid by software, which remains invisible but increasingly determines a city’s functioning. The projections connote layers of invisible activity, but they refuse to relinquish this space entirely to corporate interests. Instead, they inhabit it and, in the process, prompt alternative narratives for participants. Taken together, these projection-based pieces engage a public within a space of reflection; produce disruptive or alternative narratives within that space, specifically

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through a form of projection and layering; and make legible what too often remains invisible. They also provide an infrastructure for the civic imagination, a term that Henry Jenkins (2014) has developed to describe the design of images that can be deployed across a variety of media forms to spark participation and a vision for the future. Through their use of projection, each of these pieces demonstrates the ways in which public space, physical objects and digital and networked media intersect to create not the solid world, but instead a series of shifting boundaries. The projections in Cambridge and Madrid meet the society of control with a mechanism best suited to it, namely projections that, in the words of Deleuze, ‘transmute from point to point’ (1992: 4). Double Exposure Returning to Refik Anadol, whose artwork launched this chapter, the artist has begun to work with different cities – Istanbul, San Francisco and Los Angeles, for example – to create what might be christened the city symphony for the twenty-first century. In Istanbul in 2011, Anadol was invited to create an artwork using an old building designated for demotion located on the city’s famous Istiklal Street, which is nearly a mile long and is traversed by millions of people. Old-fashioned trolleys travel down the centre of the street, which is otherwise open only to pedestrians. ‘What would happen,’ Anadol asked, ‘if I recorded all the sounds, in a cumulative way, and worked with the idea of a frozen sculpture, augmented by projected light, to give a kind of intelligence, memory and culture to the sculpture?’ (in Willis 2015: np). Anadol did exactly this: for three days, he recorded audio along the street, choosing times when the street was quiet and when it was loud with visitors; he then transformed the audio into a threedimentional sculpture fastened to the building. Using nine projectors, Anadol then transformed the sounds he had collected into visuals, and used the visual information to create new facets for a layer that was projected over the physical sculpture. The very large site-specific mediated sculpture became a major attraction during its exhibition, and served as an audio-visual mirror of the streets and its inhabitants, reflecting traces of people and the place, but transforming the material at the same time into something visually exquisite. In a similar way, Anadol has created a massive generative sculpture for the city of San Francisco, where he was commissioned by the Kilroy Realty Corporation to translate data from the city’s OpenData resource into a stunning artwork. The piece is a media sculpture that is perpetually in motion, responding to factors such as wind, humidity, energy consumption and even noise from the airport. The piece is visible from the street, and people come to visit it at night, standing on the sidewalk to watch its various permutations. ‘It’s like going to the cinema,’ Anadol has said, ‘but it’s in public and in real time’ (ibid.). Similarly, Anadol has created a 3D model of the city that visualises the real-time tweets of the people in San Francisco, and he is hard at

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work on a massive media wall designed for the Los Angeles Transit Centre. With these projects, Anadol is crafting portraits of the city derived from data; they are projects that at once augment the more instrumental monitoring and administering of the city promulgated by IT infrastructures, offering an aesthetically pleasing translation, or they are works that transform the city itself into an art generating platform. Drawing on the spectacle and scale of the cinematic, they posit a new form of screened urbanism, a form of cinema manifested primarily through layering, navigation and motion, taking for granted that we are all wearing or carrying devices that enable our own tracking, and that what we engage we also produce. As artists explore the potentials of data – employing a conductor’s heartbeat as he leads the orchestra as a factor for visual spectacle or the speed of the wind as it whistles through the streets as imagery on a giant outdoor screen – what is achieved? Does the beauty of these computational urban artworks, as they translate a city’s data into the city’s art, ameliorate a more critical response to the collection and use of this data? When we look at this work, what do we ‘like’? We respond to the beauty, colour, scale, and motion, and the thrill of something so prosaic as data conjuring such beauty. Writing about the planning of contemporary cities as part of the Urban Age Conference, Richard Sennett explained that despite access to advanced tools and materials for designing and building, the typical city’s visual forms and social functions tend to be over-determined by and subordinated to ‘a regime of power that wants order and control’ (2006: np). He continues: ‘What’s missing in modern urbanism is a sense of time – not time looking backward nostalgically but forward-looking time, the city understood as a process, its imagery changing through use, an urban imagination formed by anticipation, friendly to surprise’ (ibid.). While the examples of screened urbanism discussed in this chapter may lack an overt critical agenda, they certainly do understand the city as process, and they conjure a city in which the regime of power is accented by the power of aesthetic experience. As exemplars of screened urbanism, however, they also conjure a spectator in relation to the city and the artwork, a spectator, then, that is woven into the modulations of the city. How should we comprehend, shape and participate in this relation? Screened urbanism, as cinema that enacts new forms of public space and possibilities for identity formation, participation and shared imagination enables and invites provocative responses.

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Chapter 5 Books to Watch, Films to Read, Stories to Touch: New Interfaces for Storytelling

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ead a sentence: white words on a black backround. Now use your fingers to open up the sentence, spreading apart the space to read two more lines of text. Separate the text once again to bring forward another set of words in what seems to be an unfolding story. And once more, pry the text apart, revealing yet another layer of words beneath the surface, and this time they are individual terms flashing in quick succession, requiring a new kind of focus and attention. In a matter of seconds, participants have used their fingers not only to enjoy an unsual reading experience, but to engage in an uncommon and perhaps even joyful interaction with a screen-based device. This experience is just one of many multilayered reading events that comprise Pry (2015), an iPad-based hybrid video/novel by the design team Tender Claws (Danny Cannizzaro and Samantha Gorman, a student in USC’s Media Arts + Practice PhD programme). Blurring the boundary between reading and watching, the project as a whole integrates still and moving images, sound and text in a story that unfolds through the reader’s touch as we pry, pinch, caress, spread and swipe text and images on the screen. Pry expands the language of gesture for interactive reading experiences, but, perhaps more significantly, it explores the metaphoric potential of the interface, wherein to pry open the text is to peer into the protagonist’s mind while to squeeze the text shut invites us to look outward on the world. In this expanded taxonomy of gesture, we query a host of boundaries: What does it mean to touch a movie? To watch a word? To read an image? When does something normally legible become something visible? And what do we call this project, one that invites reading, viewing, touching and listening? This chapter explores a series of projects that revel in the kind of hybridity embodied by Pry, projects that invite participants to experience the nexus of moving images, text, graphics and typography as they become accessible through an interface. What is a book when it gains some of the attributes of the cinematic? And what is cinematic

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storytelling as it encounters the book? What are both the book and the movie when they are reimagined through the structuring tropes of navigation, interaction and user experience that are part of how we understand the interface?1 This is fraught territory, to be sure, from the perspective of both literature and cinema. First, reading remains a profoundly signficant cultural activitiy, at once marking individuals as literate or illiterate and signifying a society’s claim to basic educational competence. A spate of recent publications suggest that reading is endangered, and with it a way of life. The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time (2010) by David L. Ulin and The End of Reading: From Guttenberg to Grand Theft Auto (2010) by David Trend, for example, all evince a nostalgia for an era when books and reading were physical, text was stable and reading was a deeply embodied act undertaken in quiet concentration. No touching, prying or watching here, thank you! These books might remind us of earlier moments of fretful speculation, including Rudolf Flesch’s 1955 book and Time Magazine article ‘Why Johnny Can’t Read’, as well as the 1975 publication of ‘Why Johnny Can’t Write’ by Merrill Sheils in Newsweek, which blamed television for the decline in the literacy of young people. This anxiety continued in the 1980s, which saw a flurry of apprehensive reports perhaps best captured by the title of the National Commission on Excellence in Education’s influential report, ‘A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform’ (1983). More recently, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has focused a great deal of attention on literacy, issuing a series of reports charting the reading practices of Americans. In 2004, Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America documented an alarming decline of reading in all age groups across the country, especially among 18- to 24-year-olds. The report stated that this erosion was an indication of ‘an imminent cultural crisis’ that reflected ‘a culture at risk’ (2004: xiii). Even when this decline is reversed, as in the 2010 report titled Reading on the Rise: A New Chapter in American Literacy, an ongoing sense of crisis remains. The anxious discourse is frequently exacerbated by digital media and its putative negative impact on reading. Indeed, recent literacy crises are often aligned against the notion of ‘multiliteracies’, with the understanding that new technologies erode traditional reading and writing. Dana Gioa, then the NEA Chairman, wrote in the introduction to the 2010 NEA report, ‘A decline in both reading and reading ability was clearly documented in the first generation of teenagers and young adults raised in a society full of videogames, cell phones, iPods, laptops, and other electronic devices’ (2010: 2). What would critics of the impact of media on reading make of the emergence of visual elements within the pages of a series of recent novels? Wolfgang Hallet explores several of these books in ‘The Rise of the Multimodal Novel: Generic Change and Its Narratological Implications’ (2014). Citing works such as Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005) and W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001), Hallet notes that the multimodal novel ‘breaks up the discursive linearity and textual coherence of the novel and transforms it into a hypertextual ensemble of different types of symbolic representations that the

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reader must interrelate’ (2014: 166). More provocatively, he suggests the waning of a longstanding hierarchy that has privileged the word: ‘It relativizes the role of language in the processes of meaning making and communication; it destroys the (philological) illusion and simplification that stories, knowledge and epistemologies exist in verbal form only’ (ibid.). Similarly, the dissolution of boundaries has been the topic of scholars of electronic literature, who, for two decades have worked to contextualise and theorise the form, and to conduct close readings of literature as it is reimagined through the digital. I am thinking specifically of the work of N. Katherine Hayles, especially in Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary (2008), John Cayley and many of the participants in the Electronic Literature Organization.2 However, electronic literature is characterised by its computational nature and what Hayles dubs ‘intermediality’ to capture the interactions between a participant and an interface. ‘Computation is not peripheral or incidental to electronic literature but central to its performance, play, and interpretation’ (2007: 99), writes Hayles, who goes on to define intermediation as the dynamic interaction between human and computer in the construction of the text as a generative act. If novels that integrate visual elements and electronic literature both embody a melding of forms, so too do recent experiments with augmented reality. The December 2009 issue of Esquire magazine, for example, was touted as the first ‘living, breathing, moving, talking magazine’. The issue’s cover features an image of Robert Downey Jr. sitting atop a black-and-white graphic symbol designed to be held up to a webcam to produce sequences of moving images seemingly floating in front of the screen in 3D. The result of the first symbol’s connection is an explosion of letters floating up off the page in a flurry around the bemused actor, as if the magazine in its former, material condition had dissolved into the air around us. This image – of a man standing in a storm of dissolved words – poignantly captures a moment in twenty-first century culture as the confrontation between books and moving images continues to play out, and the tentative boundaries dividing the two realms persist in blurring. Indeed, the image becomes a demonstration of what Sven Birkerts, in The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, highlights when he writes in the opening pages about rapid change and a concomitant sense of longing for a now lost, more sedate world: ‘The stable hierarchies of the printed page – one of the defining norms of that world – are being superseded by the rush of impulses through freshly minted circuits’ (1994: 3). Esquire’s augmented reality experiences definitely disrupt the stable hierarchies of the printed page, underscoring obliquely the changing conditions of textuality as it literally engages digital technology. Although the magazine’s flurry of letters is less a compelling reading experience suggesting new potentials of reading and writing, and more an illustrative conceit designed to suggest the magazine unbound, it introduces a series of questions that about reading, writing and viewing in a digital culture that prefegure those raised by Pry. If the demise of the printed book and an attendant sense of unease form one vector in a network around contemporary text and images, so too does the blurring of bound-

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aries across disparate media forms. Esquire’s augmented reality gimmick underscores the changing conditions of textuality in a digital culture, and at the same time reminds us of the centuries-long struggle to define the specificities and boundaries of different media forms, including the book, painting, sculpture, photography and film. Reading the Image, Imaging the Text From the perspective of cinema, words onscreen offer yet another vector for considering emerging practices of reading and watching. Indeed, the history of experimental cinema includes within it a rich sub-history of works that employ typography onscreen to create kinetic reading experiences that blur the boundaries between the acts of reading and viewing. Examples of films and videos that provocatively use text include Marcel Duchamp’s Anemic Cinema (1926) which pairs puns in scrawled handwriting with graphics in order to juxtapose the illusory three-dimensionality of cinematic space with the flatness and materiality of the screen; Bruce Conner’s groundbreaking found footage film A Movie (1958) which intersperses snippets of text that function to accentuate Conner’s scathing critique of Hollywood cinema and spectator identification; Hollis Frampton’s Gloria (1979), a text-based rumination on memory and loss; Su Friedrich’s feminist undermining of seamless visual pleasure through text that is scratched into the emulsion of her autobiographical Sink or Swim (1992); and Jeffrey Shaw’s The Legible City (first version presented in 1989) which expands to include the role of text within the immersive writing ‘spaces’ of new media artworks. Kinetic and screen-based text in the hands of artists is at once read by a viewer and viewed by a reader within a dynamic flux of interpellation. Unlike static text, onscreen text commands a particular kind of reading while at the same time disrupting the easy binary division separating words and images; narrative identification is disturbed, but in its place comes a perhaps even stronger – if significantly different – form of performed decipherment as viewers become readers, but readers whose ability to read is constrained by the parameters of space and time. These issues become particularly prominent in the 1980s and 1990s, when the influence of poststructuralist theory had an impact on work made by many artists. As theorists queried the death of the author, the possibilities of the open text and the mutability of interpretation, filmmakers and video artists used words on screen as a way to destabilise the presumed coherence and fixity of both text and image. James Benning’s American Dreams (Lost and Found) (1984) is a highly structured collage that explores the intersection of text and image. The film is based on a set of baseball cards featuring images of, and statistics related to, Hank Aaron from the beginning of his career in 1954 through breaking Babe Ruth’s home run record in 1974. These are presented one-by-one in chronological sequence, with attention to the front of the card and then its reverse. These images are accompanied by a hand-written text that moves from right to left along the bottom of the screen. This text consists of selected entries from the 1972 diary kept by would-be assassin Arthur Bremer,

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who sought to kill then president Richard Nixon but, after facing many obstacles, decided instead to shoot presidential candidate George Wallace that same year. These two forms of imagery are accompanied by an audio track that features pop songs from the same time period, as well as audio recordings of speeches also made in that twentyyear span. The film is riveting. The typography moves rather quickly, making it uniquely challenging to look away; further, the cards are visually and historically intriguing, and the combination of the four different semiotic registers of information suggests that meaning coalesces in the interstices as written word, image, song lyric and spoken word align here and there to spark insights. However, these are not insights simply put forward by the filmmaker. Instead, their possibility is generated, and it is the individual viewer/reader’s own decisions and attention that will determine what insights are made. Scott MacDonald has argued that one may read the visual complexity of American Dreams as an analog to history itself: ‘Our love of conventional film has a lot to do with our desire for a simple, coherent understanding of our experience and its relation to history’ (1993: 96). Benning’s film and its rush of information reminds us that we can never know or perceive everything around us; we select targets for our attention, and in so doing, miss a good percentage of the perceptual information around us at any given moment (see MacDoanld 1986). American Dreams combines the textual with the graphic, creating something more akin to a kinetic graphic novel or comic book, or perhaps even presaging what would become the very familiar form of the interface. The frame is less a static container for discreet pages of text, and more a dynamic space of constantly shifting events through the combinations of words, images and music. It is difficult not to recognise the similarity in disparate registers of information on a typical desktop, which at any given time includes a web browser, pages of text and interfaces to various forms of social media. However, rather than understanding Benning’s complex frame as a space of innumerable distractions, we are instead driven by the temporal flow to remain readers, but highly attuned readers actively engaged in producing meaning. Indeed, the text produces us as reading subjects, ones battling against the forward flow of time to achieve understanding in spite of the excess information we are given. We actively strive for synthesis of various elements among the different registers in order to arrive at our own unique interpretation. We are also asked to distinguish among a complex network of voices, both literal and metaphoric. We experience Bremer’s voice through his diary, but this diary has been literally transcribed by Benning, who worked from a published text that in turn had adapted Bremer’s handwritten pages into print. Benning returns the text to the handwritten, which is in turn rendered on screen. This graphical inscription unites Bremer’s and Benning’s handwriting and invites speculation about the filmmaker’s possible identification with the persona of the assassin. Overall, then, American Dreams offers an example of a film that tells a series of stories while also crafting the story of

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its own telling. The film produces a kind of performed reading that is at once a form of enunciation producing a reader, while also a visual form contributing significantly, through the specifics of design, to a far more complex act. The film, then, begins to explore the notion of the figural, showing that, just at the moment that text interpellates its subjects, design has always already instigated a viewing, and the ‘reader’ hovers at the interstices among reading, viewing, observing, seeing, knowing and being. Gary Hill’s 44-minute video Incidence of Catastrophe (1987) offers a very compelling case of the exploratory investigation of the merging of text, typography and moving images, especially because the video’s narrative thematises these elements as well. The video is loosely based on Maurice Blanchot’s short novel, Thomas the Obscure, originally published in 1950, and the story traces Thomas’s experiences with reading and gradually growing disaffected with the world around him. Rich with images of pages, books, text and typography, the video demonstrates Hill’s interest in the materiality of the book; his camera dwells on the curve of the page, the deep, darkening line marking the book’s centre, and the distinction between black type and the near transparency of paper. We also hear the book, the rustle of pages, the texture of paper as it is touched by skin. Overall, however, the video explores the nature of reading, focusing specifically on the ways in which the act of reading produces a reader. In the video, text and reader not only interact, but they engage in a dialogic construction through dual processes of interpellation. The result, however, is that Thomas gradually devolves in the face of the inimitable power of the text, merging with the landscape, which becomes textual, and then sprawling on the floor in front of an overwhelmingly large wall of specifically electronic text. With this reference to the video image, Incidence of Catastrophe points to a core cultural anxiety related to the immersive power of new media, and more specifically, to the dissolution of the material substrate of artforms, including cinema, in light of the growing power of electronic media. Further, the video captures a history of anxiety regarding the relationship between words and images, the risk of impurity sparked by their confusion, and the rupture provoked by the shift from an industrial culture to one organised by information. If Benning’s film produces a hybrid viewer/reader and Hill’s video registers an intermedial stage between text and video, Dutch graphic designer Mieke Gerritzen registers the impact of the Internet and tackles the role of information in her project titled Beautiful World (2006). Gerritzen, who is deeply interested in typography and reading, created this project as a demonstration of the fundamental characteristics of a critical reading and writing practice in a networked culture. The twenty-minute video is composed of scraps of text gathered from dozens of essays written by digital media scholars and critics. The sounds are composed of appropriated audio clips and the images consist of highly structured graphics characteristic of the artist’s visual style that attempts to craft a global language of symbols. The video is explicitly structured as an argument made through an interface. Chapter themes are introduced along a scroll-bar that appears to be navigated by an unseen user who selects topics from a diversity of headings. Used online as a way-finding struc-

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ture, the trope of the interface has become common in television graphics that try to emulate this system. The structure of Gerritzen’s argument is such that comprehension occurs not so much through a singular reading as through an active negotiation of disparate registers of information. Beautiful World is characterised by a sense of discursive excess that blurs the boundary between the reading of words and the reading of symbols, which indeed comes to resemble a universal language. Beautiful World, then, asserts a different kind of materiality than that of Incidence of Catastrophe, through its relentless imbrication and interconnection with graphical symbols and iconic imagery. The text is insistently positioned as typography, highlighting the visual aspects of the letter shapes and fonts, which morph and mutate. In this way, Gerritzen’s video points to the tension between linear modes of reading and browsing within a space of networked information. It also begins to suggest not simply that writing is always in a sense designed, but, as we continue to inhabit a digital culture, it shifts to take into account the structure of information. Writing becomes information architecture and as such requires some understanding of the notion of the database. In this way, Beautiful World illustrates another vector of designed reading, one closer to the impulses of graphic and information design, and the weaving of pathways through a deluge of data. In short, text in the realm of moving images functions to disrupt the logic of a reigning orthodoxy – of narrative, advertising, print, language, the visual – and in so doing, crafts a space of ambivalence that runs parallel with the role of print in a culture increasingly organised by electronic textualities. Similarly, the database in the context of the cinematic suggests an alternative logic, one nicely leveraged by the affordances and aesthetics of interactive media. Each of the works considered here provokes attention to medium and materiality, as well as to technology. They spark a perceptual reorganisation and invite us to query what it means to read, to watch, to see and to know. What is the difference between reading and watching in the context of electronic and web-based media? What are the limits and overlaps of these practices? And what role does the interface play as the location for information exchange? A Dynamic Space: The Interface This question was taken up more than 25 years ago with a spate of CD-ROM projects that exemplify attempts to reimagine our relationship to media generally, and to the pleasures of new reading and viewing practices specifically. These exciting early works included Adriene Jenik’s multi-layered Mauve Desert (1997), which was an adaptation of Nicole Brossard’s novel of the same name, mixing video, text and still images to create an iconic poststructuralist work with a multilayered collage aesthetic. Linda Dement’s delirious and subversive Cyberflesh GirlMonster (1995) similarly wrangled moments of poetic epiphany from snippets of story and scans of flesh. Christine Tamblyn’s theoretically sophisticated Mistaken Identities (1995) and She Loves It, She

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Loves It Not (1993) both insisted on alternative forms for scholarship that considered affect and the productive potential of a kind of meandering through spaces of information. Lucia Grossberger-Morales’s historical Sangre Boliviana (1994) united the personal and the historical, using an image of the Virgen de Guadalupe de Sucre at its centre and inviting participants to find connections to the experiences of the artist’s past and notions of homeland; the splintering of a static notion of history suggests that we can only understand the grand narrative of History as a fiction. Taken together, this early work was a testament to the power of tactical media practices of feminist media-makers in the 1990s and was thrilling for its insistence on an aesthetic of the handmade, which constituted a refusal of both the machine finish of the computer and the dynamism of early motion graphics. Although this particular group of projects emanates primarily from the realm of feminist film, video and criticism, it aligns with experiments in electronic literature that were taking place at the same time. Examples of early hypertext works include Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story (1987), Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden (1992), Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl (1995), as well as Olia Lialina’s My Boyfriend Came Back From the War (1996) and My Body: A Wunderkammer (1997). Laurie Anderson’s Puppet Motel (made with Hsin-Chien Huang) (1995) captures Anderson’s ongoing interrogations of the boundaries between sound and image, as well as her interest in crafting a redefinition of performance as the creation of a participant’s experience. While these projects certainly differ in relation to their discplinary contexts, from the vantage point of the present, they signify a far-reaching compulsion to query the shifting parameters of text and reading while bringing to the foreground issues of interaction, navigation and exploration. They also explicitly grapple with how to enable a shared production of meaning; how can the text and reader be co-constructed, in relation to each other and in process? This impulse connects to the past and the Dadaist emphasis on the event rather than the object, as well as to the future and the shift toward participatory art practices.3 In addition to reconsidering reading and the production of meaning, each of the projects noted above worked to craft an interface that would engender a critical subject motivated to discover more in a united effort toward understanding. As a result, taken together, these early experiments with the design of interactive reading practices asked how we might reimagine the relationship between the computer and the participant, and answered that question by positing the participant as an inquisitive, critically engaged person with the desire for greater understanding. The production of this new critical participant constituted one of the primary goals of the Labyrinth Project, an intiative launched by Marsha Kinder at the University of Southern California in the mid-1990s. The Labyrinth Project was a practice-based research effort that brought the cinematic arts to bear on interactive, navigable experiences through the design of projects that crafted new forms of engagement and interaction with media scholarship. More specifically, these projects explored a host of new interfaces, as well as the potentials of the database as both metaphor and literal struc-

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turing device for narrative experience. How can we most artfully imagine the relationship between a participant and a database of potential narrative content? Kinder’s first project was Blood Cinema (1996), a media concordance designed to accompany her book of the same title and offering film clips with bilingual narration to enhance her analysis of Spanish cinema. Inspired by the project’s potential, Kinder founded the Labyrinth Project a year later with a design team that included Rosemary Comella, Kristy Kang, Andreas Kratky, Jim Tobias and Scott Mahoy. The team’s ensuing eleven projects vary enormously, from the exploration of the work of fiction writer John Rechy in Mysteries and Desire: Searching the Worlds of John Rechy (2000); to the consideration of the history of Los Angeles in Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles, 1920–1986 (2003), made in collaboration with Norman M. Klein and based on his book The History of Forgetting: The Cultural Erasure of Los Angeles (1997); to an example of interactive science education made in collaboration with Jean Chen Shih with A Tale of Two Mao Genes: The Biology and Culture of Aggression and Anxiety; to two projects designed to explore the work of filmmakers Nina Menkes with The Crazy Bloody Female Center (2000) and Pat O’Neill with Tracing the Decay of Fiction: Encounters With a Film by Pat O’Neill (2003). Each of the projects adopts a different interface and form of navigation tied to the central conceits of the individual project and its creators. The process of determining the interface was deeply collaborative and involved considering appropriate figures or metaphors suited to the content of each project, as well as the implications of specific formal gestures. Bleeding Through, for example, makes extensive use of a series of dissolves in which layers of history ‘bleed through’ each other, suggesting the layering implicit in the project’s theme. Similarly, in Tracing the Decay of Fiction, ‘tracing’ becomes a mode of enquiry as well as navigation. For this project, O’Neill and the Labyrinth design team engaged in a form of transmedia design, creating the DVD-ROM at the same time that the filmmaker was making his 2002 film The Decay of Fiction. This interactive project uses the Ambassador Hotel as a site upon which to spatialise the narrative, which participants engage by moving along – or tracing – the pathways made by O’Neill’s camera, or, if they prefer, using the architectural plans of the building’s designer, Myron Hunt. In both instances, participants are keenly aware of the way the space of the hotel is produced, with attention to halls, doorways, windows and so on. The project also captures the elegiac quality of the hotel, which was where Robert Kennedy was assassinated in 1968, and where the Manson jury was sequestered in 1970/71. The spaces seem redolent with a haunted history – both real and that imagined by Hollywood in countless films and TV shows – and the filmmaker and team of designers, in addition to mobilising ‘the trace’ also used the notion of ‘decay’ to powerful effect as a driving metaphor for the project. In a dramatic flourish, the physical structure of the Ambassador Hotel would be demolished just three years later, to be remembered mostly by its on-screen traces. The Labyrinth Team also investigated media installation as a mode for sharing and exhibiting work. The Danube Exodus: The Rippling Currents of the River (2002), for

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example, is an interactive multi-screen installation based on The Danube Exodus (1998), a film by Hungarian filmmaker Péter Forgács. Known for his extensive work with home movies as the raw material for historical documentaries, Forgács used imagery shot by Captain Nándor Andrásovits for The Danube Exodus; it documents journeys up and down the river in 1939 and 1940 as Jews fled Nazi persecution. During the same period, on different voyages, Captain Andrásovits ferried German passengers to areas protected by the Third Reich. The installation reimagined these journeys, spatialising them within the gallery space with five screens and a dense sound design. The result was a sense of immersion, and a visceral understanding of overlapping pathways of exodus. Participants could navigate among sections of the project through a central touchscreen interface. The person selecting the pathyways became a performer of sorts, with his or her choices shaping the experience of other gallery visitors. In this way, the project immersed participants in the sights and sounds of the river journeys, and through its staging on several screens and via the touchscreen, enacted a performance of enquiry that is central to the Labyrinth team’s areas of investigation. Indeed, within each Labyrinth project, the design of the interface establishes a mode of scholarly argument, at once instigating a poetics of the visual, aural and haptic, and inviting enquiry, scrutiny or, perhaps more modestly, awareness of the role of the interface itself in structuring experience and knowledge. Rather than celebrating ease or transparency, then, these interfaces seek to become emblems of scholarly enquiry and new modes of reading and viewing, which are embodied by the participant as he or she engages with the work. The attention to the interface in these projects, many of which mobilised existing cinematic work, marks a vital connection between traditional cinema and interactive media, between relatively passive viewing experiences and those that require active navigation. Structuring that navigation – devoting attention to the production of a navigating subject as opposed to a viewing subject – continues to be a central concern at the intersection of cinema and interactive media. These questions have a long history. As early as 1998, Scott Townsend was contemplating what he dubbed a ‘crisis in our understanding’ of the design of information in an essay titled ‘Unfolding the Surface of Information’. Just as filmmakers were exploring text in motion, Townsend was considering the idea that information must be reconceived as mutable. Do we need new definitions of text and information, he asked, due to the ways in which online information is distributed, and the ways in which it depends on immediacy? – ‘The historical understanding of “information” as being static, materialistic in the sense of the creation of the physical artifacts of print, and linear has been superseded’ (1998: 5). Townsend points to the fact that web-based information centres on creating an interface that is immediate: there is what he calls ‘a participatory event between user and computer with an emphasis on the present’ (1988: 7). There is also a certain dynamism or destabilisation in the information – there is no guarantee of the design given the diverse devices on which it will be seen. He continues: ‘Immediacy has its greatest impact on the user where external and internal linkages create a collective environment

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of information without the concept of “end” and closure associated with traditional written narratives, substituting an indefinite deferral by navigating through the index’ (1988: 8). He also suggests that montage-based organisational forms that challenge the standard linear grammar of print-based culture invite us to use metonymy and its attention to contiguity as a fruitful way of thinking about the communication of information in a digital culture. Metonymy makes meaning through chains of association rather than likeness. Each of Townsend’s characteristics – immediacy, dynamism, spatial montage, metonymy – point to productive qualities for considering the intersection of cinema and interactive media wherein the search for new interfaces conducive to powerful and joyous encounters continues to characterise a primary goal among storytellers working across media forms. While the Labyrinth Project considered the intersection between cinema and the database, Vectors Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, USC’s online, peer-reviewed interactive journal co-edited by Tara McPherson and Steve Anderson, queried the intersection between scholarship and the web. Founded in 2005, the journal paired scholars with designers to collaborate on a series of theme-driven issues designed to explore new forms of scholarly argument for authors, and new forms of reception and user experience for what used to be called the reader. For the entire team involved – editors, designers, scholars – the project represented an experiment in reimagining the potentials of scholarly activity and communication. Because the design of an interactive media project was a new process for most of the scholars invited to publish in Vectors, the project included a pedagogical component in the form of a month-long summer institute in which scholars encountered the history and theory of interactive authoring and began to frame their investigations through a process that reimagines their reader as a user navigating a space. After the institute, each scholar continued to collaborate with the designer and editor in an iterative design process, with the scholar beginning to understand the affordances of web-based authoring and the designer beginning to understand the nuances and complexities of the scholar’s argument. The key moment of the process, however, occured when the scholar encountered the dynamic, relational database that forms the backbone for Vectors, and began to map his/her argument as a series of inter-related nodes. In this way, Vectors invited a reconfiguration of scholarly practice at the most basic level, a key component of which was the overt dissolution of front-end and back-end thinking. Scholars had to think about their work via the affordances of a database, and they had to engage the database directly, first considering methods for modularising their argument, and then defining relationships among the modules within the information architecture of the project. In addition, they considered user experience and interface design. This process was often a challenge for participants, for whom humanities scholarship was based primarily on developing a precise, linear argument that was stronger for its cohesiveness. The database required another logic altogether. However, when a scholar begins to think

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through the relational database structure, he or she begins thinking differently, not just about how to work in the database, but how to do research and how to compose. In digital scholarship as imagined through Vectors, then, there was a paradigm shift related to what scholars do in the process of crafting an online scholarly experience. Rather than writing, they instead begin to consider the orchestration of information and interaction within a project.4 Vectors published seven issues between 2005 and 2013. Realising the challenges of sustaining a journal that required such intensive collaboration, the Vectors team turned their attention to the design of a platform that would facilitate easier access to the tools of media-rich authoring by creating Scalar. The design of Scalar was guided by the larger purview of the Alliance for Network Visual Culture, and the increasing prominence of the digital humanities suggested the need for a tool that would enable scholars to consider their work within new genres of scholarship. Rather than simply enabling traditional humanities scholarship, the tool would prompt computational scholarship. In its current form, Scalar provides an opportunity to integrate text, images, sound and video; more significantly, however, it encourages nonlinear forms of argument formation by facilitating new arrangements among the components of a project. Within Scalar, authors can create not only text, but other categories of material, including media, pathways, tags and annotations; more significantly, the all carry equal weight. None is more significant in a top-down hierarchy and all can contain each other. As such, the possiblities for composing are opened up dramatically, and projects begin to resemble distributed or curated pathways rather than linear experiences. Most importantly, in contrast with a Vectors project that was created through deep collaboration with designers and programmers, authors using Scalar are responsible not only for the scholarly content of their project, but for its design, user interaction and information architecture as well. In short, then, both the Labyrinth Project and the Vectors/Scalar projects represent strategies for rethinking scholarship in the humanities that differ from those most often signified by the terms ‘humanities computing’ or ‘digital humanities’. Rather than focusing on the domain of research, where efforts in text encoding, archival digitisation, machine vision and statistical analysis of primary sources have suggested new modes of enquiry, these efforts seek to expand the vocabulary of scholarly expression as it mobilises the visual, affective, interactive and collaborative potentials of the cinematic. Searching for New Interfaces for Storytelling Launching the interactive music video The Wilderness Downtown (2010) created by Chris Milk, I watched a character run headlong down a street in the dark. Suddenly, a proliferation of windows appeared, birds flew from frame to frame, and I felt as if I were running along East 35th Street in the suburban neighbourhood where I grew up – a wide block at the base of the foothills in San Bernardino, California. As the

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perspective turned, I saw my house, the homes of former neighbours, and then the street from above. I hadn’t seen the area in 25 years, even in pictures, and suddenly to seem to be there, twirling through a space at once from the past but also of the present, was riveting. Rendered and composited in real time, these images joined with the music – Arcade Fire’s ‘We Used to Wait’, a song about the past – elicited a palpable sense of both longing and wonder, and while I did not dramatically alter the imagery through my interactions, the use of spatial montage created a sense of first-person point of view. Moreover, the project made an asset of the desktop with its multiple frames, and it used the Google Maps API. Neither of these elements is particularly artistic or aesthetically pleasing in themselves, and yet the experience with The Wildnerness Downtown, quite unexpectedly, approached the level of the transcendent encounters with video art and avant-garde cinema that had guided my studies in graduate school and assured me that there is indeed a reason to look to art for ontological grounding. To be sure, an eerie premonition that this project’s vital feature – personalisation – would become commonplace quickly followed, and along with it, the recognition that it was only a matter of time before our seemingly independent social media networks would be integrated through algorithms in order to produce fodder for robotic storytelling. In today’s neoliberal culture where boundaries between personal and professional are in a perpetual state of erosion, the computer tends to produce not a delighted, joyful user, but a worker, with non-instrumental moments consisting of distracted clicking. After The Wilderness Downtown, I had a newfound respect for my laptop computer and a hopeful sense that it might indeed be possible to generate moments of intimacy and aesthetic pleasure that were entirely new. It is this sense that motivates the central questions for the remainder of this chapter: What kinds of projects make use of the cinematic to create alternative relationships to our personal computers, tablets and mobile devices? How do they counter the computer’s role as the site for ever-increasing hours of labour? How do they produce new interactions that move beyond shopping and socialising toward engagement and contemplation? In other words, how are artists crafting new interfaces for story experience and expanding our understanding of the cinematic? Media artist Jonathan Harris has dedicated a good portion of his career to answering this question with a body of work exploring the intersection of cinema and webbased storytelling, specifically working to understand the shift from viewer to user and from completed temporal object to navigable interactive experience. In 2007, he launched an online interactive project titled The Whale Hunt in order to imagine a new interface for storytelling based on nine days that he spent with an Inupiat family in Barrow, Alaska. Harris joined the family in spring, timing his visit so that he would be able to participate in the family’s annual whale-hunting excursion, and he recorded the entire trip in a sequence of more than three thousand photographs taken at a minimum of one every five minutes beginning at the airport in New York prior to his departure. Through these photographs, he introduces the members of the family, their

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The Whale Hunt (2007) by Jonathan Harris

home, his own sleeping quarters, and, once on the trip, the hours spent waiting and watching until a whale is spotted, killed and butchered into chunks of meat. Harris might have made a very compelling, linear documentary film about his trip. Instead, he used his collection of images to try to imagine new forms of user interaction. With the resulting project, the very first experience after the title page is to see the entire collection of images onscreen at once; we also witness the response to the cursor as it hovers over a single image, magnifying it as it seemingly pushes the other images away. This small but powerful gesture immediately announces the capacity of the cursor in the piece, and by extension, the power of the participant exploring the project, selecting and isolating elements within the larger experience. From this initial interaction, we also have the ability to see all of the images that comprise the project at once as they are spread out in a responsive grid, with the beginning of the project marked by the first photograph in the upper left corner of the screen, and the end marked by the final image, in the lower right corner. From here, the project lets participants configure the story in multiple ways. To start, one can change the database of images from the grid structure to a mosaic, timeline or pinwheel, which immediately calls attention to the visual impact and connotations of each. The interface then encourages a kind of customisation wherein the images can be filtered by a series of constraints, including the cast, concepts, context and cadence. The ‘cast’ constraint allows users to filter for each of the seventeen participants, as well as for the first and second whale killed in the project; the ‘concept’ category includes fifteen topics, including ‘blood’, ‘boats’, ‘buildings’ and ‘wildlife’, while ‘context’ addresses the

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seven main locations for the project. The ‘cadence’ constraint allows users to set the pace of images as they scroll by, from slow, with a new photo appearing every five minutes, to racing, with 25 photos every five minutes. In this way, viewers can create a bespoke journey through the project and focus on specific elements of reletive intensity from within the larger story. After the constraints have been set, the images slip by from right to left, moving sequentially through the database and filtering out those that are not part of the participant’s constraints. Moving through the images sequentially, one is immediately aware of the many repetitions of photographs. For example, a sequence showing Harris asleep in bed, a lump under a green blanket, repeats a series of nearly identical images, the only change being an occasional glimpse of a hand or arm. Harris assiduously honours the algorithm he has given himself to dictate the constraints of the project, and it is in the unexpected pleasures of the mundane that make the story seem rich. Had this been a traditional documentary film, these lengthy strings of repetitive images, which appropriately render the time spent sleeping, waiting and watching, would have been edited out; in the online project, they document time in a very particular way. Ultimately, however, the project’s filtering inspires an approach to the project that undermines the complexity of the ritual being shared with Harris; filtering is attentive to the contrivance rather than to the story being told. In short, it enables a kind of facile interaction that is emotionally incongruous with the subject matter. Indeed, the filtering option is better suited to two other non-narrative projects by Harris made in collaboration with Sep Kamvar, We Feel Fine (2006), which scrapes the web to find blog posts with the words ‘I feel’, and I Want You to Want Me (2008), which visualises materials taken from online dating sites. In both cases, the opportunity to filter the information is intriguing and in some cases, results in serendipitous insights. However, there is far less at stake in creating pathways through social media posts than there is in documenting a significant cultural ritual. The Whale Hunt announces its weighty subject matter in its very title, upping the ante immediately on the emotional tenor of the piece, and we expect the project to deliver on the complexity launched from the beginning. In contrast, with both We Feel Fine and I Want You to Want Me, we begin with the insubstantial, the inconsequential; to discover something meaningful within this context is a surprise and delight. Despite the incongruity between the filtering options and the subject matter, the interface for The Whale Hunt as a structure remains compelling, and the sense of simple pleasure in seeing the project’s entirety in a glance is powerful. Indeed, the grid of every image in the project that appears upon first opening the piece speaks to the desire for wholeness of the database, a desire evidenced in a number of projects that explore cinema in a similar fashion. Many other projects employ the grid as a structuring device, and in some ways, it connects directly to the cinematic in that video frames are also now easily viewable as a grid in various editing and visualisation programmes. As such, the grid suggests an ability to grasp the entirety of something immediately; it calls attention to the fact of

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the database as an underlying principle; and it insistently announces the necessity to attend to structure. In a world overrun with images, the grid assuages anxieties about data deluge by containing and organising the plenitude. The grid also posits a sense of coherent relations between space and time. The choice of interface has profound implications in mediating the experiences of reading, viewing, navigating and otherwise interacting with an interactive project. In ‘Humanities Approaches to the Interface’, Johanna Drucker describes the interface as a dynamic space, ‘a zone in which reading takes place’ (2011: 9) The interface is not something we look through, as we would a window, or something we look past. Instead, ‘interface is what we read and how we read combined through engagement. Interface is a provocation to cognitive experience’ (ibid.; emphasis in original). The interface, then, is not a thing but the staging of an experience within which the desire to separate ‘form’ from ‘content’ makes no sense. Drucker also insists that ‘interface theory has to take into account the user/viewer, as a situated and embodied subject, and the affordances of a graphical environment that mediates intellectual and cognitive activities’ (2011: 8). Both of these aspects – the interface as event and the interface in relation to a situated and embodied subject – are central to understanding the power of the growing array of interactive and online digital projects, both narrative and documentary. These are projects that carry forward the list of adjectives already used to reference the expanded cinematic form in previous chapters: mutable, contingent, relational and often generative. And, as with so many of the projects already discussed, they presume a participant rather than a viewer; they conjure a potential opening for the post-cinematic; and, in their emphasis on an ecology of production and engagement, they also have the potential to create practices of collaborative co-creation. The interface acts as the marker of the shift from linear cinematic storytelling to interaction, and as such, plays a very significant role in ordering the experience of participants, emboding the structural capacity of the project and signalling metaphorically the parameters of engagement. The precise shape of the interface must be interrogated in all its diversity and particularity. The Timeline While Harris adopted a grid as the primary interface for The Whale Hunt, other artists have opted for the timeline. Tommy Pallotta and Femke Wolting’s Last Hijack (2014), for example, combines a linear, feature-length documentary film with an interactive supplement. The interactive component creates a dual perspective as the project toggles between two primary points of view, that of Mohamed Nur, one of the Somali pirates who illegally overtook a freighter in the hijack of the project’s title, and Colin Darch, the British captain of the ship. The entire project is organised along a timeline, with each date offering multiple perspectives from both sides of the experience. In this way, the project provides participants with the opportunity to move through the story stepby-step as the drama unfolds, or to choose the points of view they want to hear instead.

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The footage shifts between animated or illustrated segments used to depict events and live-action talking heads footage as those involved with the event recount their experience. The effect of these differing visual styles is to underscore the ways in which all stories are manufactured – live-action is as constructed as a drawn illustration. At the same time, rather than remaining characters, or worse, caricatures, the two men are also very real, their faces conveying emotions quite clearly. The timeline as a structuring device presents a clear organisational system, which, for Last Hijack, is enhanced graphically as each segment within a particular time slice is indicated with a circle either above the timeline, designating the Somali perspective, or below the timeline, pointing to a non-Somali perspective. We understand, too, that time is a central conceit of the piece. An attack staged by pirates is not a quick event, at least in this case; it is drawn out, and involves days and weeks of waiting, planning and negotiating, all of which is emphasised by the timeline structure. The timeline also works ideologically to underscore the veracity of the project by situating it within specific moments in history. In addition, the timeline provides a perspective that acknowledges the tension between story and discourse. While the project presents the construction of a story out of a sequence of events, the opportunity for revision underscores the discursive potentials of the underlying narrative system, a potential clearly indicated by the radical differences between the two major perspectives in the piece. The Map ‘To ask for a map is to say, “Tell me a story,”’ Peter Turchi writes in the opening pages of Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer (2004: 11). Maps narrativise the spaces they represent, and in the context of web-based storytelling, immediately invite acts of exploration and navigation. Like the grid, the map proffers a sense of order over that which would otherwise be unstructured, and functions powerfully as a metaphor for the projects it organises. Even in some of the earliest web-based projects, filmmakers were beginning to understand not simply narrative, but narrative design, with attention to the ways in which participants might interact with a story that is organised – and then encountered – spatially. How does one distribute a story across a space? And how can it be accessed through divergent pathways? Maya Churi’s early web-based projects, including Letters From Homeroom (2000) and Forest Grove (2005), invite participants to make their way through each story in a nonlinear fashion, moving from space to space and discovering story materials within each space. Letters From Homeroom uses the diverse rooms in a high school as a series of settings for participants to explore. In contrast, Forest Grove used a map, as well as an architectural scale model of the community, as ways to structure the interface and the unfolding of the story. The multiple valences achieved through mapping have inspired numerous artists and designers to experiment with spatial interfaces. For example, the London-based

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design firm Six to Start, known for designing alternate reality games, collaborated with the Penguin publishing house to create a series of interactive online stories in a project called We Tell Stories. Six contemporary authors were invited to reimagine six classic stories borrowed from the Penguin archive. Each of the resulting six projects used different platforms. For Charles Cumming’s The 21 Steps (2008), which borrows from John Buchan’s 1915 story The 39 Steps, the designers employed an early version of Google Maps to create a fast-paced story literally mapped across the city that participants trace from story node to story node. Moving across the map, we see the path of the protagonist as a moving blue line while reading about his exploits in small annotation boxes. One of the pleasures of the project is precisely in recognising the original Google maps framework as it is rescripted through narrative. Bruno Latour’s online project Paris: Invisible City (2006) also uses a map as the interface, creating a dense weave of trails throughout the city in order to explore a set of themes. Designed by Patricia Reed, the web-based interactive essay has been dubbed by Latour a ‘sociological opera’ with the aim of having participants ‘wander through the city, in texts and images, exploring some of the reasons why it cannot be captured at a glance’ (2006: 1). The project, offered in part as a gift to the city of Paris, is divided among four ‘acts’ – traversing, proportioning, distributing and allowing. Each of these acts is in turn divided into several ‘plans’ or stops on an itinerary indicated by a line as if on a map on one half of the screen; on the other, usually a set of images and a section of text. In some cases, the images are distributed in a network connected by lines; in others, participants are invited to click through image by image. The text appears in chunks, to be scrolled through, with each section being both a stand-alone comment and a component within the larger pathway. In the ‘distributing’ section, for example, the project moves through twenty sections, each a rumination on the design of the city and the ways in which objects and pathways condition certain kinds of movement and activity. By turns pragmatic, indignant, philosophical and joyful, the writing produces an intimate investigation of the city, augmented well by the images, which register the city’s past, its architecture and its details. Overall, the map interface offers a means for registering the edges and parameters of something that might otherwise seem too vast to comprehend. However, the map also insists on observing the ways in which objects, people and places are positioned in relation to each other; nothing stands alone, but is instead inflected by the social. This argument is evident visually, and gradually becomes clear through the text. In this way, the project embodies the ways in which the interface is not a separate element but is instead the very structuring device for the project. A combination of topographical mapping and GPS tracking data provides the setting for Bear 71, an interactive web documentary funded by the National Film Board of Canada. ‘Think of us refugees’, says Bear 71, who tells the story of her life as she roams through the valley in the park near the town of Canmore, Alberta after being tagged at age three by Banff National Park rangers, who attach an RFID sensor to a collar around her neck, puncture her ears with tags and name her with a number.

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Bear 71 (2012) by Leanne Allison and Jeremy Mendes; image courtesy of the National Film Board of Canada

Co-directors Leanne Allison and Jeremy Mendes used the abundance of video surveillance footage and tracking information to create a moving interactive documentary to communicate her story, and the result, narrated by Mia Kirshner, is a powerful indictment of the hypocrisy of humans in assuming that simply cordoning off a small space for ‘nature’ is sufficient to protect and sustain the lives of animals who live in proximity to humans. As the project unfolds through a combination of narrated video sequences, trailcam surveillance vignettes and a navigable, 3D topographical map, Bear 71 highlights a number of challenges faced by animals in an increasingly colonised wilderness, including the fact that bears rely extensively on their sense of smell in order to eat and to navigate. In a heartbreaking sequence, Bear 71 complains that it is difficult to navigate by smell in a valley full of unnatural odors – spray deodorant, dog food, marshmallows and hash browns, to name only a few. It becomes increasingly clear that the surveillance and tracking technologies used to monitor animals like Bear 71 – ostensibly for their own safety as well as that of the humans with whom they increasingly cohabitate – offer only a one-way sense of control and mastery. In the end, the control of space – to say nothing of the option of resistant navigation – is available only to humans, not animals. The map in this case underscores the human agenda to name, colonise and control space. Further, while the rhetorical agenda of Bear 71 is to make an emotional and ethical plea for understanding and awareness of the needs of non-human creatures while suggesting at the same time just how little we know about the habits, abilities and needs of these creatures, the project oddly ends up reinscribing the centrality of the human. For example, rather than suggesting a radically alternative sense of knowing

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and being of the bear, we instead are given a very human bear; this humanness is inscribed through her voice, the interpretation of her actions, and the assignment of motivation, planning and learning, all of which are entirely construed through the tropes of human storytelling and indentity formation. The map, extends the centrality of the human, functioning as a tool to illuminate the human drive to colonise, which is the source of the critique in the project. The InfoSpace If Bear 71 articulates the power relations implicit in technologies of mapping and tracking of the natural world, Jonathan Harris’s Network Effect (2015), made in collaboration with artist and engineer Greg Hochmuth, turns to the power exerted by networked information in the everyday lives of humans. The project marks a shift in Harris’s enthusiastic embrace of the Internet as a space for fostering a sense of community, connection and wonder. Whereas his earlier works reveled in the profusion of information available at any given moment – and in several cases he mobilised this glut as the primary content of the work – Network Effect is designed instead to demonstrate the mind-numbing effects of excessive networked interaction. Like The Whale Hunt and We Feel Fine, Network Effect invites users to choose the material to view from ten thousand videos and audio from ten thousand sentences, tweets, graphs and other sources of information. ‘The videos activate our voyeurism, the sound recordings tempt us with secrets, and the data promises a kind of omniscience, but all of it is a mirage’, the creators warn on the project’s website. Rather than crafting experiences of whimsical pleasure, Network Effect is jarring, ugly and frenetic. Clicking on any of the hundred activities that organise the material – such as swim, listen, tremble, wave, strip and catch – delivers snippets of internet video and audio related to the topic. Viewers can choose an information source to view, which, in addition to the audio-video clips includes a set of headlines, definitions, information and tweets related to each of the hundred terms. The result is a cacophony of disconnected human expression. In order to underscore their growing unease with networked interactions, Harris and Hochmuth chose to limit access to the site to a number of minutes proportionate to the average lifespan of people living in the area of the IP address used to access the site, typically around seven minutes. Harris and Hochmuth’s critique seems at once sobering and self-righteous, inserting an important corrective in the lazy habits of our everyday participation in data space, while veering dangerously close to chastising users for their curiosity and trust in the project’s makers. Indeed, the project at once feeds on and critiques our attention economy. This conjuncture is chracteristic of contemporary online documentary, a fact highlighted by Jon Dovey in an essay entitled ‘Documentary Ecosystems: Collaboration and Exploitation’: ‘The new documentary ecology is taking form in a landscape characterized by the particular dynamics of the attention economy, and by the need to create engagement with the media products that this economy creates’ (2014: 19). Much of Harris’s work engages

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with the activities that characterize the attention economy, but with a twist, either prompting experiences of surprise, as in We Feel Fine or dismay as in Network Effect. While the interface for Network Effect enables only a small amount of agency for participants in controlling the data deluge, the idea of creating the parameters for curating this flow aligns with the larger act of authoring in the context of media. In Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies, Noah Wardrip-Fruin uses the term ‘expressive processing’ to designate the ways in which the former work of ‘authoring’ is now really a process of ‘defining the rules for system behavior’ (2009: 3). Wardrip-Fruin is referring specifically to digital fiction and computer games, but ‘expressive processing’ is a productive term for reconsidering new forms of reading, writing and mediated experience in online works generally. In this understanding of processing, authoring is no longer necessarily analysing and synthesising the results of research in essay- and book-form, but now includes the act of curating data flows; we act as data jockeys, crafting systems and processes through which to organise, manage and then manifest and share these flows. We can extend this notion to teaching and learning as well: educators and learners might understand the educational endeavour in a digital culture as one of crafting systems that unite data and processes, all of which underlie an interface, which in turn is designed for communities of users. And of course, this notion subtends to some extent each of the webbased documentary projects outlined so far; each seeks to craft a system through which participants can have some agency in organising and managing the data that comprises the project. As Dale M. Hudson and Patricia R. Zimmermann point out in Thinking Through Digital Media: Transnational Environments and Locative Places, however, there are very real limitations in the interactive capacities in online projects. ‘This kind of reaction-as-interaction remains largely one way, not really altering a somewhat passive experience’ (2015: 58). While Network Effect seems to offer a snaptshot of the web at any given moment, a very different kind of information space is proferred by Clouds (2013) by James George and Jonathan Minard. Clouds is a downloadable interactive documentary featuring interviews with forty artists, designers and theorists talking about their work. George and Minard shot the intervews using the RGBD toolkit, which conjoins a Kinect system with a DSLR camera, allowing for an image that features the representational qualities of a traditiona camera with the three-dimensional volume captured by the Kinect. This technology is not ‘professional grade’ – it is literally a hack – and the 3D images are very rough, hovering between image and information within a virtual space. Further, the interviews are inter-cut with visual sequences rendered by code created by the participating artists. In this way, Minard and George interweave the tropes of code and computational design with those of image and representation. The project is organised around a series of questions, each of which opens up to an array of responses. Rather than offering an existing set of video clips that the user accesses according to individual interests, the project is instead executed in real time; it is literally being produced as the participants move through it. This small shift is significant;

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the project is an application rather than a film, video or web-based project, and this, too, aligns with the larger goals of the artists, namely to create an emergent conversation in concert with a participant. Clouds also demonstrates the growing mutability of media; it has been presented as an interactive installation in which participants use gesture to navigate, and as a head-mounted VR experience in which the direction of the view shifts the experience. Finally, it exists as open source code, inviting user reconfiguration. The project deftly suggests one direction for the future of cinematic storytelling as it intersects with computational capacities: cinema as open, generative, reconfigurable and revelatory. While I have focused on the interface, other scholars have very productively explored the forms of interaction available in online media experiences. Sandra Gaudenzi, for example, provides a taxonomy of documentary interactivity in her thesis, The Living Documentary: From Representing Reality to Co-Creating Reality in Digital Interactive Documentary (2013). She highlights four modes: R5 ."5)(0,-.#)(&5')5#-5\#(-*#,5355.3*5) 5#(.,.#0#.35.".51(.-5.)5,*,)duce the interaction between two human beings, or a human in aphysical space’ (2013: 41). R5 ."5"#.""#%#(!5B),5"3*,.2.C5')5#-5)(5#(51"#"5*,.##*(.-5#(.,.51#."5."5 project by making a series of choices from a closed database. In these projects, Gaudenzi points out, the user can only explore. ‘The author is not a facilitator as she is in the conversational mode, but a narrator that experiments with levels of choices within a controlled narrative framework’ (2013: 53). R5 ."5*,.##*.),35')5#-5-,#535/(4#5/-#(!55/#&#(!5'.*"),95\Ļ5 author decides on the tools and rules and lays down the first layer of bricks, but there is room for collaboration and expansion’ (2013: 56). The participant explores, and then can expand upon the project. In this way, the creator becomes a database designer and the participant’s actions have a direct impact on the project. R5 ."52*,#(.#&5')5, ,(-52*,#(-5.".5#(.!,.5&).#05'#5(5-5 such are entirely dynamic and hybrid. Gaudenzi writes, ‘By moving through this new constrained space one can generate new understandings, and new forms, of both the environment and the participant. […] It is this bi-directional transformative effect of the experiential documentary that we can observe as its characteristic form’ (2013: 63). Her supplement to Bill Nichols’ venerable taxonomy of documentary modes – now more than 25 years old – offers a glimpse of the continuing evolution of documentary forms and the models by which we may productively understand them in relation to other forms of networked media. Conspicuously absent from her taxonomy are the two most cinema-specific modes outlined by Nichols, devoted to the expository and observational modes, in which the filmmaker operates from a position of omniscience and of passive observation respectively. Whatever else online media may be, it is rarely defined by omniscience nor passiveness in either intent or execution.

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Another key tool in understanding the proliferation of interactive documentary is offered by a 2015 report by the MIT Open Documentary Lab for the MacArthur Foundation titled ‘Mapping the Intersection of Two Cultures: Documentary and Digital Jornalism’, which explores the topic not from the perspective of filmmaking but from journalism, asking how these two differing realms can share ideas. In it, the authors outline several key points gleaned from their research that also presents a toolkit for makers. The suggestions include: R5 !#(51#."5."5/-,65(5-#!(5(52*,#(5.".51#&&55**,)*,#.5.)5.".5/-,8 R5 .5."5-.),35.,'#(5."5 ),'85".5*&. ),'5),5."()&)!351#&&5*,)/5."5 best experience for that particular story? And what kind of materials are available to communicate the story? These elements should contribute to the decision about the story’s ultimate form. R5 )&&),.85
-5 0#-/&5 -.),3.&&#(!5 '),*"-5 #(.)5 (15 )(ŀ!/,.#)(-65 #.5 )Ŀ,-5 5 unique opportunity to partner with others to engage with differeing techniques and tools, as well as perspectives. R5 "*5)(0,-.#)(-95/#(-5,5#(,-#(!&35#(.,.#(!51#."5*,)$.-65(5."#-5 interaction provides a powerful avenue for helping create understanding in a way that is participatory. The report goes on to identify the convergences between documentary filmmaking and journalism as both a coalesce around mobile, immersive and participatory media. Returning to the Touch Much of Los Angeles-based artist Erik Loyer’s body of work considers the ways in which surfaces, screens and interfaces might provide new opportunities for storytelling, exploration and wonder. Since his earliest works of web art, Lair of the Marrow Monkey (1998) and Chroma (1999), Loyer has consistently explored the relationship among interface and story, rewarding curiosity and patience over the efficiency and simultaneity that dominates conventions of interaction design on the web. Since moving into mobile design, Loyer has created a series of projects for mobile phones and iPads that continues to entice users to experiment with gesture and movement in order to explore new ways to engage with characters and storytelling. With Ruben & Lullaby (2009), we meet two young characters as they have their first argument. Participants can direct the story by gently tilting their device from side to side; this shifts the story from one character to the other. If you shake the device, you increase the story’s emotional intensity; in contrast, gently stroking the screen mollifies the characters, decreasing the tension in the scene. In this way, Loyer encourages users to engage directly with affect, and to do so through specifically embodied gestures. The result is a curious sense of intimacy as we hold the characters in our hands, and help them navigate a prickly emotional

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Strange Rain (2011) by Erik Loyer

situation. We rub, shake and tilt our device, but we do so with the desire to move the story, and the relationship between the two characters, forward. A few years later, Loyer created a project called Strange Rain (2011) in which rain drops fall down from the sky and seem to hit the screen you are holding as if it were a window or windshield. The shift in perspective that results makes you want to hold the device up toward the sky to enhance the effect of the drops or suggest a portal to an alternate universe of eternal precipitation. As the rain hits the screen, the drops

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transform into words, and a story begins to develop. If you touch the screen, the drops gather there, and each touch prompts notes of music. Loyer – perhaps too modestly – has dubbed the game a ‘relaxing diversion’ in the story’s introduction, and he has created several modes to allow for varying kinds of interaction. In the ‘wordless’ mode, players enjoy only the rain and music. In the ‘whispers’ mode’, players see individual words that evoke thoughts. And in the ‘story’ mode, we meet a character named Alphonse, who stands outside a hospital, pondering questions related to life, death, purpose, God and all the other vexing subjects we bump up against when someone we love is hurt. The game is designed to allow us to ‘play Alphonse’s thoughts like an instrument’, notes Loyer on the website for the project, and it is a testament to the artist’s skillful design that the project hovers on the delicate boundary between wanting to score ‘achievement’ points by taking the time to discover all of the areas of the story, and simply letting the story unfold as it will. Familiar conventions of game design encourage us to approach these projects with the desire to solve a problem, collect rewards or achieve a goal quickly; Strange Rain encourages extended interaction and the rewards feel integral and open to interpretation; indeed, as the story continues, the imagery and events become increasingly ambiguous and surreal. By inviting us to interact through tapping, dragging and caressing, the project also plays with the intimacy we feel toward our mobile devices, subtly making us aware of the tactility of our interactions. This gentle, compelling and beautiful artwork invokes a dreamy state that is more poetry than narrative and allows us to experience the pleasures of both forgetting about – and revelling in – our mediated relationship to the natural world. As cinema meets the online interactive experience via the desktop or mobile device, it encounters opportunities for crafting new forms of storytelling. The interface represents the most overt marker of the intersection between the two forms, and carries with it the opportunity to engage us expansively or intimately; to move us toward action or distraction; to engender pleasure or anger; and to produce an ethically, emotionally and ideologically situated participant.

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Chapter 6 Virtual Reality and the Networked Self

I

n Alejandro González Iñárritu’s gradiose film The Revenant (2015), a hunter named Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) is left for dead by his fellow trappers in the wintery woods of Canada in 1823 after being mauled by a bear. The remainder of the film chronicles his travails as he struggles – nearly silent and often alone – initially just to survive in the vast expanse of snowy tundra, then to recover and, ultimately, to hunt down the man who killed his son. He tumbles over a cliff, flails through icy river rapids, and nearly freezes to death in a series of agonising physical trials, prompting critics to question the extremes of contemporary American cinema (see Lang 2015). Both disturbingly violent and extraordinarily beautiful, the film serves as a compelling emblem for our current moment in the history of cinema in at once referencing the origins of cinema and pointing to its possible futures; in gesturing toward divergent media formats; and in auguring cinema’s contributions to these forms, including virtual reality. Iñárritu has said, albeit with some contradiction, that he wanted to ‘shoot this film in the most traditional and original of ways’ and to honour that which affects him most as a filmmaker, namely, ‘cinema itself: images over words. […] This is the true power of cinema: visual storytelling’ (in Hainley 2015: np). Indeed. If, during the dotcom boom, the mantra was ‘content is king’ in order to sustain the significance of some semblance of cohesiveness in storytelling craft in the face of the proliferation of distribution options introduced by the Internet, this emphasis on visual storytelling is the new incantation, repeated to distinguish cinema from virtual reality and a host of other emerging forms. The Revenant was shot on a 65mm digital camera and the filmmakers employed an increased frame rate to better capture the available light in the film’s Canadian locations, shooting for only a few hours each day. Reports about the film’s production echo those of the plot itself, detailing the extreme conditions produced by very low temperatures, the constraints of shooting in far-flung locations and the hardships endured by

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the film’s cast and crew alike (DiCaprio reportedly opted to eat raw bison’s liver for one pivotal scene in order to sustain the integrity of the film, for example) (see Miller 2015). These articles tend to underscore Iñárritu’s desire for veracity, for the authentic. Indeed, in one article, Iñárritu states, ‘We have lost the taste for the real’ ( Jonathan Romney 2015: no page). In short, then, Iñárritu’s goal was to return cinema to the real, and in doing so, to rekindle our interest in it. This desire is embodied in everything from the triggering of a real avalanche toward the film’s conclusion, to DiCaprio’s breath which, on several occasions when the camera was close to the actor’s face for a close-up, fogs the lens, blurring our view and insistently reminding us of the implacable physicality of both the humans in front of the camera, and the technology being used to represent them. The result of these extraordinary measures is stunning. The snowy landscapes sparkle and glisten, the trees soar above us and the sky, with its expanse of white clouds, is breathtakingly vast. The camera swoops far above the landscapes, and then down among the trees with a thrilling and powerful grace. In this sense, the film is utterly cinematic, with ‘cinematic’ here referencing the awe-inducing powers of the moving image with regard to majestic cinematography and attention to detail; the expanse of the image in which sprawling landscapes were in many cases inhabited by a tiny human figure; and the fluidity of the camera, able to move with seamless grace within this tremendous space. In a somewhat similar vein, in Ridley Scott’s The Martian (2015), an astronaut is left for dead by his fellow astronauts and large sections of the film centre on his experiences, alone, trying to survive in the unfriendly environment of Mars. And similarly, in Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity (2013), we again find an astronaut alone, fighting for survival, in a film less interested in nuanced plot structure and traditional storytelling and dedicated instead to touting the extraordinary visual and technical capacities of cinema. While The Martian weaves a conventional rescue narrative around the more experiential segments of the films – images of vast landscapes, the sky, and the body in its confined spaces – Gravity and The Revenant more assiduously render the lives of their protagonists alone, reducing narrative to armature, preferring to focus more specifically on embodied experience. Through Hugh Glass in The Revenant, we experience the bear’s attack in visceral close-up and a wildly moving camera; we crawl with him on the snowy ground as he initially begins his pursuit; and we witness some of the most powerful scenes – the disembowelling of a horse – from a dispassionate distance. However, we also frequently just sit with Glass in the landscape. In each of these instances, the camera embodies not so much Glass’s perspective but his emotional state, from the frantic terror of the mauling, to the almost manic determination to avenge a murder, to the pragmatic activities necessary to stave off death and finally to the more placid moments of wonder. As such, the camera serves as an extension of Glass’s own perceptual system, inviting us to participate in his experience, and this, rather than the story, constitutes the logic of the film. It is as if we are not watching a

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film tell us a story about something that happened in the past but instead experiencing events unfold with Glass, in the present. In summary, with all three films, the awesome and extraordinary are aligned with the vastness of nature, whether in the wilds of the 1820s, or in more contemporary imagining of outer space. These films are stately celebrations of the cinematic as nature. In addition, these films relinquish the complexity of narrative structure and plotting, leaving them for the realm of televisual experience. In place of this narrative complexity, they turn to the depiction of affect and experience, and as such – in their attention to the seemingly boundless world all around us as witnessed by someone with greatly limited mobility – the films achieve an interesting thing: they sidle up to the technology gunning to overtake cinema, namely virtual reality. Gravity and The Revenant, engaging in a reduction of narrative storytelling and focusing on the plight of a single individual and his or her visceral experience: is this not the situation of the contemporary VR viewer who, with goggles on, stands alone, twisting and turning to view an immersive landscape that, in its expansive quality, can also produce a sense of wonder and awe?1 (Or at least, that’s what it is intended to do – so many current VR projects still fail in this effort!) But why would these films emulate VR? In part, they may simply strive to suggest that cinema can still render an extraordinary visual experience better than the clunky visuals currently available for view through uncomfortable goggles in the early stages of twenty-first century VR. In some cheerfully contradictory way, they achieve the experience of the virtual through the cinematic. However, the films also function as fantasies. In The Cinema Dreams its Rivals: Media Fantasy Films From Radio to the Internet (2006), Paul Young explains his concept of media fantasy films, that they ‘are expressions, in different periods and under different conditions – conditions determined by differences in new rival media and the fantasies they sponsor – of an ongoing institutional defence of classical form, address and spectatorship’ (2006: xxviii). While Young argues that every film in some ways makes a claim about its medium, media fantasy films most explicitly grapple with the sense of rivalry as media forms jostle for power at critical historical moments. To continue the enquiry into the role of Gravity and The Revenant in relation to virtual reality, both serve as media fantasy films in blurring the boundaries between classical Hollywood filmmaking and VR, offering the intensive experience of and identification with a singular protagonist characteristic of cinema, while at the same time allowing us to inhabit – and almost explore – a vast landscape, which is one of the primary tropes of contemporary VR. Taken together, the two films also span the polarity of cinema, from animation to live-action. Where Gravity touts its virtual constructedness and has even been dubbed an animation due to its extensive use of CG, The Revenant insists on its cinematic heritage. In this way, ‘cinema’ covers an incredible territory. In this chapter, I will explore several re-emerging media forms, including 360-degree cinematography, stereoscopic cinema and virtual reality, but to get there, I will start with the role of the mobile and increasingly virtual camera in cinema, which I believe

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serves as a precursor to VR. I will also address the topic of presence, so much an arena of interest in contemporary life. And I will bring these ideas together to query the role of narrative in these forms, as we experience a cultural moment in which narrative, if not waning, is surely morphing into new forms or being supplemented and challenged by other storytelling structures. As such, the work I will address responds to the shifting needs of a culture characterised as both posthuman and post-cinematic. What place do character, identity, temporal and spatial coherence have in these works? The Camera Continuum Perhaps one of the most striking characteristics of digital cinematography is its newfound mobility and capacity for shot duration. Camera mobility was greatly enhanced with the introduction of the Steadicam in 1975, allowing filmmakers to communicate spatial transitions in single takes by moving the camera fluidly through space. Whereas spatial organisation in earlier filmmaking was established through cuts or deep focus, or on occasion, via split-screen techniques, the Steadicam enabled the ability to communicate spatial positioning via movement (see Schraa 2007). Many contemporary films expand on the fluidity of the Steadicam, jettisoning the sense of the camera as the bulky, heavy object it once was; we witness a weightless manoeuvrability as the camera effortlessly traverses spaces. However, often, what we are witnessing may not be the movement of a physical camera but instead the point of view captured by a virtual camera moving through a body of information. The experience of mobility was exponentially increased with computer-generated imagery (CGI), which not only made movement easier, but allowed the ‘camera’ to travel places that in the past were physically impossible. As Michael Schraa points out, A virtual camera can extend into spaces that are impossible or prohibitive for a physical camera. Virtual cameras can go through walls; they are not hindered by gravity or tied to a means of physical propulsion. They also offer unprecedented control over camera movement so that all 360 degrees of rotation are made available at any given speed. (2007: np)

Virtual cameras are not especially new – they were presented at SIGGRAPH in the late 1990s – but they have become far more prevalent in contemporary Hollywood filmmaking, in part due to their familiarity within the context of game design and play.2 Virtual cameras often make use of motion or performance capture. For several years, USC’s School of Cinematic Arts has been lucky enough to have a 46-camera Vicon System to use for performance capture, and it was here that I first began to understand the shift in filmmaking paradigms. The system consists of an array of the cameras placed on a grid around the perimeter of a large, high-ceilinged room. In the middle of the room is a grey square marked on the carpeted floor, which designates the ‘volume’ that can be captured by the camera array. Performers clothed in black

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suits with reflective markers perform inside the volume, and their actions are captured from 46 different perspectives. This information is fed into a computer, where it can be used to have the performer appear to be something else – an animated dinosaur, for example, with the markers capturing specific reference points in space. In this case, the performer ‘drives’ or performs another character, which is seen onscreen; or the performance within the volume can be stored and later placed in a sequence. In either case, at a later point, the material can be ‘navigated’ by a virtual camera. The camera moves can be explored, practiced and repeated until the right ‘shot’ has been crafted. In explaining the system, Eric Furie, the School’s Digital Systems Specialist and the instructor for a performance capture class, explains that in traditional live-action filmmaking, production integrates the directing of performance, lighting, make-up, camera work and all of the other crafts simultaneously. However, with motion capture, these components are broken down and treated individually. In addition, directing becomes more akin to theatrical directing. ‘The volume is essentially a black box theatre,’ Furie observes. ‘The lighting can be changed later, as can the make-up. If I want to include the camera perspective at the same time as a reference – and there are benefits to doing that as most actors like to know where the camera is – I can do that. But there is nothing to prevent me from coming in after I’ve recorded the performance and “shooting” the scene thousands of times over until I get the shot that I want’ (in Willis 2011: np). Furie goes on to explain that motion capture essentially merges production practices, animation techniques and interactive design. ‘It steals from each, and feeds back into each’, he says (ibid.). The Vicon System is akin in some ways to the Light Stage systems that emerged from research by Paul Debevec at UC Berkeley and later at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies beginning in the late 1990s. Through an iterative process, the Light Stage system has evolved from early attempts to light a human face from all directions in order to acquire what Debevec calls the ‘4D reflectance field of the actor’ (2012: np.) to stages that integrate a lighting array that captures multiple facial expressions in diverse lighting situations. The third Light Stage used 156 coloured lights distributed across a geodesic sphere that allowed the imagery captured through the system to be composited with already existing scenes; the innovation here was that the Light Stage imagery would match the original imagery’s illumination. The sixth Light Stage is large enough to illuminate an entire human body. It employs 6,666 led lights and features a rotating treadmill. A project titled ‘Relighting Human Motion’ (2006) was designed to capture not just the human face but the body in motion. According to Debevec, it ‘recorded actors walking and running on a rotating treadmill inside the stage at 990 frames per second, under a basis of 33 repeating lighting conditions from a vertical array of three high-speed cameras’ (ibid.). The goal for this iteration of the Light Stage was to create imagery that could be integrated seamlessly with existing footage. The material produced by the various Light Stages has been used in a long list of films, including Spider-Man 2 (2004), King Kong (2005), Superman Returns (2006) and Avatar, among others.

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What is significant about the Vicon and Light Stage systems is the degree to which they posit a different logic of image capture from that of the traditional camera with its associated filmmaking practice. Rather than a single camera, or even two or three cameras, capturing a scene from specific perspectives, both systems enable the capture of an entire space and the objects within it. The ‘camera’ move can then be created from that information. As David H. Fleming and William Brown point out in reference to James Cameron and Avatar, ‘We have here, then, a complete reversal of traditional filmmaking: rather than build a set or find a location through which the camera then moves, Cameron instead moves his camera through low-definition images that are then made into high-definition images for the finished film’ (2015: para 25). Here we have a shift away from the vision of the filmmaker, and by extension the human, to an all-encompassing vision that flattens the hierarchies established so assiduously with the traditional camera. Returning to traditional filmmaking practices, the mobility exploited by the virtual camera was presaged by the growing manoeuvrability of the physical camera and a visual style characterised by motion, whether fluid and achieved through longer takes, or chaotic and achieved through rapid cutting. David Bordwell has identified what he dubs an ‘intensified continuity’ in response to the sense that many contemporary films appear to lose the temporal and spatial coherence created through cinematography and editing characteristic of the classical Hollywood style. He argues, however, that these films represent not a break with past visual forms of temporal and spatial structuring within narrative but a continuation: Far from rejecting traditional continuity in the name of fragmentation and incoherence, the new style amounts to an intensification of established techniques. Intensified continuity is traditional continuity amped up, raised to a higher pitch of emphasis. It is the dominant style of American mass-audience films today. (2002: 16)

Bordwell goes on to identify four specific strategies through which this intensification occurs: rapid editing, with shot lengths growing steadily shorter; bipolar extremes of lens lengths; a reliance on close shots; and wide-ranging camera movements. He further develops these four strategies in The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies, where he also describes the ‘prowling camera’ and the prolonged following shot ‘in which the camera tracks a character moving along a lengthy path’ (2006: 134). Bordwell traces this use of the camera from the 1930s, with films such as Scarface (1932), through the 1950s and Touch of Evil (1957), up to contemporary music videos, such as that for Björk’s ‘Hidden Place’ (2001) and he highlights the fact that cameras during the first decade of the twenty-first century move more than ever, and suggests that this is due in part to the desire to boost a scene’s energy: ‘Camera movement also separates the planes of the image and creates a more voluminous pictorial space’ (2006: 136). Finally, he cites cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, who explains

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that this technique ‘gives you the third dimension, which is the way movies should be. If you lock down the camera, it’s like looking with one eye’ (2006: 137). While Bordwell insists that the roving camera, as well as the long take, continue stylistic choices established decades ago, the use of the long take in a film such as Iñárritu’s Birdman (2014), with the majority of the film captured in what appears to be one, single, fast-paced shot, exemplifies the desire to bring the audience into the protagonist’s temporal and spatial experience both intimately and haptically. It also represents an aesthetic in which we vividly sense that a world exists before us, and the camera is tracing a path through that space, a space that is seemingly continuous. Rather than taking the continuous space of the profilmic event and breaking it into shots which are reassembled to guide viewers to experience a scene in a particular way, the prowling camera offers a pathway through a continuous space, with point of view attributed either to a character or to something else, perhaps something in the world. As those who have dedicated their filmmaking practice to world building assert, the world of the story gains in significance in this mode of filmmaking. Akin to Birdman, Gus van Sant’s Elephant (2003) similarly includes very long tracking shots; in this film, although the camera moves far more slowly than that of Birdman, it traverses a story space in a manner reminiscent of first-person shooter video games, following just behind specific characters and visualising the world very close to what the avatar in the game might see. In this way, the world in the film seemingly exists for us to explore. Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void (2009) takes this tendency to an extreme, with a camera that initially assumes a first-person perspective – we even see the character’s eyes blinking – to become an entirely disembodied camera capable of impossible perspectives, at points floating high above the city and moving with breath-taking fluidity. This shift from one visual logic to another is charted by William Brown in Supercinema: Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age: Although Edward Branigan … and Stephen Prince … argue that image conventions in digital cinema remain, broadly speaking, perspectival (in that they mimic human perception), the changing scales of digital cinema, which shifts from the micro (brain cells, bacteria in drops of water) to the macro (galaxies), and which conflates inside and outside, in fact suggest that digital cinema moves beyond human perspective – and not just across shots (something cinema has long since been able to achieve), but in single shots that combine these perspectives as if they were a part of a single continuum. (2013: 1141)

Brown highlights the camera movement in the opening moments of Fight Club (1999), where the film ‘shows a continuity of space that is digitally enabled and posthuman, in that the camera passes through empty space as well as the objects that fill it with equal ease’ (2013: 928). He continues: ‘And in Fight Club, the posthuman continuity that sees humans, objects and empty space all seemingly sharing an equal ontology, in that

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the (virtual) camera does not distinguish between them, offers us, as a result, a conception of space that is different from the fragmented spaces of analogue cinema’ (2013: 936). Notably, Fight Club is touted as the first film to use photogrammetry, mapping together physical and virtual spaces to create a composite. The difference that Brown begins to sketch points to the imbrication of cinematic and game spaces which come together in virtual reality, along with a host of technologies that map representational and informational spaces together, with the ‘spectator’ becoming at once an agent within a continuous space who sees, but more significantly, is seen and tracked. The films and videos that deploy the long take and the prowling camera prepare us for an emerging paradigm within which we merge with the world around us in a posthuman decentring deftly aligned with a culture dedicated to producing subjects as interfaces, subjects as elements within a network. The speculative implications of this merging are vast. They suggest a compelling model of posthuman storytelling experience that does not presume the human as the central axis for both agency and perspective. They illuminate possibilities for imagining the world as an ecosystem within which the relations among all things constitute a primary force, and a potential grounding for story through affect and senses beyond the visual. However, they also point to the ways in which the network becomes the centre, and being tracked, we serve the system. As Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker write of individuals within a control society, It is a question not of being individuated as a ‘subject’ but instead of being individuated as a node integrated into one or more networks. Thus one speaks not of a subject interpellated by this or that social force. One speaks instead of ‘friends of friends’, of the financial and health networks created by the subject simply in its being alive. (2007: 60)

The task, then, is to imagine a productive form of individuation as a node within a network, one that is not reducible to our, often inane, interactions online. What Is a Camera? And what do we call the camera if it is no longer actually a camera? Ryan Pierson tackles this question in ‘Whole-Screen Metamorphosis and the Imagined Camera (Notes on Perspectival Movement in Animation)’ (2015). He begins by describing the movement of the camera in a sequence that occurs early in Gravity, when Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) is floating in space. As Stone is drifting, she is tumbling over herself like a rotating planet, and as the camera approaches her, it begins, seamlessly, to tumble with her; approaching closer, it passes through the glass of her helmet, studying her eyes as they dart frantically; approaching even closer, it turns itself around to look outward, darting

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about as Stone’s eyes were just doing, at the space that it was comfortably occupying a moment ago. (2015: 7)

The camera, then, both achieves a kind of mobility that would be impossible for a physical camera, and it provides a perspective that at one moment is decidedly disconnected from a particular viewing subject and then comes to inhabit a first-person point-of-view. Pierson goes on the query the conundrum of what he dubs ‘the camera in quotes’, writing that the camera has become more ‘animated’: I mean ‘animated’ here in two senses: in the technical sense that it is produced synthetically rather than recorded photographically, and in the sense that it has the kinds of strange powers we normally attribute to cartoon characters. Consequently, we don’t quite know how to talk about the moving camera. (2015: 7)3

Pierson here identifies one of the fundamental qualities associated with contemporary filmmaking practices in which shifts in digital tools remain so far removed from the working methods of many filmmakers that we lack the language to even describe or define new practices. As live-action and animation blur together, and as previously dissimilar practices – such as those of film production and game design – come to resemble each other, the language must evolve as well. Mike Jones also addresses this dilemma in ‘Vanishing Point: Spatial Composition and the Virtual Camera’ (2007), once again within the context of animation. ‘The entity of the camera becomes not an apparatus of moving image capture but rather a spatially specific vanishing point of perception’ (2007: 228). Further, ‘The physical camera has long been associated with the “eye”, as a simulation of the “eye” in an alternate world (either anthropomorphically or otherwise) and in doing so is rooted to a physical and tangible exploration and depiction of space that obeys rules of physics’ (ibid.). He adds in contrast that the virtual camera ‘moves beyond this into new conceptualizations of space and the viewer’s connection to, or immersion in, it’ (ibid.), and suggests that the virtual camera ‘becomes a simulation of “I” rather than “eye”; a simulation of viewerderived presence in space rather than an anthropomorphically based viewing apparatus’ (ibid.). Jones explores several examples of the seemingly omnipotent power of the virtual camera, citing the opening shot of Angels in America (2004), as well as the impressive shot in the opening scenes in Fight Club, and a shot in Panic Room (2002) in which the camera travels in one apparently seamless take through a stairwell, into a room, across a table and ultimately inside the lock on the door. As Jones points out, these cameras ignore the rules of diegetic space. ‘The camera does not share the spatial conventions or restrictions that all other depicted cinematic elements such as characters, environs, physical objects and events in the scene do’ (2007: 236). He goes on to make an intriguing point using the example from Panic Room: the camera’s perspective, in moving beyond the rules governing physical space, must inhabit a different spatial

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logic. The camera, he writes, ‘can be viewed as a point-of-view shot from the perspective of the house and its holistic internal space’ (2007: 237). The so-called camera does not occupy space; it is of the space: ‘The POV of the virtual camera’s exploration itself becomes an act of “seeing what the space sees” rather than what the characters can or might see’ (ibid.). This assessment of the role of the camera clearly has very significant implications for the ways in which viewers watch films, shifting away from forms of cinematic identification produced in previous generations of cinema viewership in which shot and editing conventions created a complex but stable system: This can be seen as a substantial and even dramatic shift in cinematic awareness of experience whereby we move from a position of cinema as a scenic/spatial simulation of the abstracted ‘eye’ to a fundamentally new conceptualization that is, in essence, an emulation of a spatially abstracted ‘I’ – a consciousness of presence, a spatially removed perspective but one nonetheless intimate and evoked as nondiegetic viewer observation. (2007: 238)

The camera, in this logic, no longer represents an authorial perspective, he argues. It does not communicate a story through the logic of ‘this is what happened’. Instead, it communicates in the present, ‘this is happening’. Rather than being shown something, we simply see. Jones next links this experience to immersion. However, we might extend the notion of ‘seeing what the space sees’ to the posthuman, which requires a similar decentring of the human, and we might, again, link this emphasis on the environment with the logic of virtual reality, which presumes a viewer primed to discover his or her own point of view. The challenge for so many of us interested in image-based storytelling is fathoming a shift from one system of representation to another. Thomas Elsaesser has written lucidly on digital cinema and the virtual, and outlines precisely this conceptual challenge: The difficulty (and confusion) arises because in the case of (photographic, analogue) cinema, we are operating within an ocular-perceptual frame of reference (where technical images only know an ontology of realism/illusionism, real/fake, and whose epistemology is true/false). Within this field, we are bound to see the virtual (as in VR) as part of the ocular-perceptual register, which corresponds to the logic of photographic cinema, regardless of whether we see its representational mode as ‘perspectival’, ‘flat’, or ‘multi-focal’. Thus, in the digital, we do not have an ocular-perceptual ontology; instead we have a digital ontology, which is that of the dynamically variable, scalable. (2014: 300)

He goes on to suggest that the logic of the virtual may end up simply absorbing the logic of the cinematic. He writes provocatively that as this digital logic extends cultur-

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ally to become pervasive, we will experience a shift in temporality: ‘The virtual in this sense may even create a modality, a temporality, a tense, which the visual does not know at all, but which brings the virtual closer to language, rhetoric and formal logic than one might initially supposed’ (2014: 301). He continues: In addition to the (algorithmic) logic of ‘if … then’ conditionals and the hypothetical mode ‘what … if ’, one would also want to argue that one of the implications of this new cultural logic of the virtual is the prevalence of the tense of the future perfect. The future perfect is a tense that refers to a completed action in the future. When one uses this tense one is projecting oneself forward into the future and looking back at an action that will be completed some time later than now. (Ibid.)

Elsaesser goes on to argue that VR operates through a fantasy of the real, despite the fact that it is based on the body’s movements (or at least the movement of the head); as such, it requires a grammar, which means that it ‘belongs to the realm of the semiotic as much as the phenomenal’ (2014: 302). This leads him to state that ‘the virtual is a tense, namely, that of the conditional’ (ibid.). What does it mean for the virtual to be in the tense of the future perfect? Here Elsaesser captures the underlying logic of the algorithm; however, he also illuminates the ways in which the experience produced within a VR environment is generative and dependent on the actions of the participant. Before moving on, I want to highlight one last point about the disappearing camera. David H. Fleming and William Brown use the notion of the skeuomorph in ‘A Skeuomorphic Cinema: Film Form, Content and Criticism in the “Post-Analogue” Era’ (2015). For Fleming and Brown, the skeuomorph refers to ‘an object or form that anachronistically retains ornamental features or design cues from an earlier technological era or method of production, and which no longer have any functional purpose’ (2015: para 4). Katherine Hayles (1999) has used the example of fake stitching on a vinyl car seat that visually resembles the real stitching in leather seats but, in the vinyl, is functionally useless. It serves only as a comforting reference to a past object. In contemporary cinematography and the shift from analogue to digital, rather than celebrating the differences between the two modes, the goal more often has been instead to emulate the analogue by ameliorating evidence of the digital. The early history of digital cinema was based precisely on this desire to overcome what were deemed the inadequacies of the visual quality of video. However, the skeuomorph functions in a more specific way relative to filmmaking equipment as the devices used to capture visual information begin to take new forms and shapes. These devices are not cameras in the same sense that film cameras were cameras. They may not be large box-shaped devices with long, round lenses. They do not record, but instead capture. And there is no substrate onto which anything is recorded. One of the devices used on Avatar, for example, was called a ‘swing-cam’ and while it was an entirely digital recorder, it was explicitly devised to resemble a twentieth-century film camera. The device, however, was radically different in form

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and function from the object it was designed to emulate. It had no lens, for example, and rather than recording images or scenes, it was instead able to ‘navigate’ through the three-dimensional volume within which it was capturing information.4 Adapting to that paradigm is challenging for many artists, however. Fleming and Brown use the notion of the skeuomorph to suggest the implications of this challenge: ‘Indeed, many of the skeuomorphic features that contemporary digital cinema retains/displays highlight the aetiological or atavistic link between digital cinema and its twentieth century, analogue predecessor; these links being for reasons of “fashion” rather than “function”’ (2015: para 9). This in turn leads to an impoverishing of abilities in understanding the digital. ‘Skeuomorphic features of digital cinema are also deceptive in that they disguise the true nature and power of this precisely new medium as they diverge and diversify’, note Fleming and Brown (ibid.), who go on to assert that contemporary audiences and filmmakers have not gleaned the ability to understand emerging forms. The question before us now, then, is to what extent contemporary VR experiences are themselves skeuomorphic? Just as The Revenant and Gravity overlap with VR experiences, how are the tropes and features of the cinematic inflecting and constraining VR? As we move from leather to vinyl, what can be discovered in the new material? Virtual Reality ‘Virtual reality did not spring, like Athena from the forehead of Zeus, full-blown from the mind of William Gibson,’ Katherine Hayles wrote (1996: 11), gently reprimanding those who might too easily designate a single impetus or source for something as manifold as virtual reality. Her comment references Gibson’s ‘cyberpunk’ novels from the 1980s, including Neuromancer (1984), which helped imagine the near future through fiction, and introduced many of the key concepts, including cyberspace, that augured our culture’s introduction to the Internet. Today, we might feel obliged to dutifully echo Hayles’s comment and say that the next generation of virtual reality did not spring from the mind of Palmer Luckey, who, in 2012 at the age of 19, sold his hand-made VR headset to a group of investors, who in turn sold it to Facebook in March of 2014 for $2 billion, launching a new round of enthusiasm for VR and the development of tools and experiences in the medium. The reminder Hayles puts forward unites these stories, however, underscoring what should be obvious, that the evolution of a technology is always far more complex than simply the desire or imagination of an individual. Further, the ‘new’ is often understood as such only through wilful amnesia in which the publications, technologies, projects and critiques from the past rest undisturbed. This is especially true in 2016, when public relations efforts to celebrate the arrival of VR require an amazing degree of repression and the maintenance of a particular idea of the viewing subject from another era, all of which we might generously attribute to the exigencies of a world known for its precarity; a future characterised as unknown but most certainly unfamiliar; and

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a sense of self quickly losing its uniqueness and sovereignty as the things around us gain cognition. From this perspective, the stories of Luckey’s luck that have graced innumerable magazines in 2014 and 2015, including The Smithsonian, Time, Vanity Fair (with photography by Annie Leibovitz) and Forbes, among others, are predictably giddy and understandably repetitive tales that, disregarding Hayles’s plea, imagine the origins of VR springing fully formed from the mind of the barefoot teenager. (Indeed, Time’s cover image from its 6 August 2015 issue featuring Luckey leaping up from the sands of a California beach while wearing his Rift goggles was so silly that it was widely lampooned and humorously reimagined.) However, what this playful narrative reinscribes in the context of VR is the significance of the individual, with Luckey’s Oculus Rift offering a tool that, at least to begin, imagines singular viewers wearing singular headsets in a logic that remains centred on the eye at its centre, on the ocular regime. The point I want to make here is simple: the story of VR that currently resides at the forefront of cultural consciousness is of a boy genius who became a billionaire with a tool devoted to the eye. This story not only forgets the near past, but obscures the radical implications of VR, which centre precisely on a very different story, namely that we have entered a new paradigm characterised not by the singular individual and the photographic, but by the collective construed in relation to context, the network and a frame of reference made possible by the posthuman. Definitions Virtual reality has been defined and described in many ways, as have a host of terms coincident with VR, including embodiment, presence and immersion. The histories of VR invariably begin with the nineteenth-century panoramas comprised of 360-degree painted scenes (see Grau 2003). In 1999, in a major assessment of VR projects and initiatives nationally, Frederick P. Brooks defined VR as an experience in ‘which the user is effectively immersed in a responsive virtual world. […] This implies user dynamic control of viewpoint’ (1999: 16). In 2016, the term has become quite diffuse, especially as companies and their systems – the Oculus Rift, Sony’s PlayStation VR and the HTC Vive, for example – compete for domination in the entertainment market, while organisations as diverse as The New York Times, with its NYT VR initiative; VRLA with its bombastic tradeshow events; and the New Museum’s 2016 Triennial titled ‘Surround Audience’ each suggest slightly differing definitions of and visions for the term. Generally, however, a VR experience includes the following elements: R5 5#-*&35-3-.'5.".5�,-5)'*/.,7!(,.5#,.#)(&5-)/(-5(5#'!-5 to a participant. Brooks adds that the visual display should ‘block out contradictory sensory impressions from the real world’ (ibid.); R5 5!,*"#-5-3-.'5.".5(5!(,.5#'!-5.55"#!"5 ,'5,.65!(,&&35of5 *-:

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R5 5.,%#(!5-3-.'5-)5.".5."5*,.##*(.]-5"5')0'(.5(5#,.#)(&#.35(55 tracked, along with hands and body in some systems; R5 (5 ) .(5 -)'5 %#(5 ) 5 "*.#5 %5 -3-.'65 1"#"5 '#!".5 #(&/5 !&)0-5 ),5 handheld objects which can be tracked and visualised on screen. VR systems at the moment include those experienced through head-mounted displays, the cumbersome device placed over the head with a mask akin to what one wears for undersea diving; and CAVEs, which stands for Cave Automatic Virtual Environment. CAVEs were invented by researchers in the Electronic Visualization Lab at the University of Illinois in 1992. They are rooms in which rear-screen projections on the walls create an experience of immersion. The cave experience can accommodate more than one person and also requires that participants wear stereo glasses that control the images for each eye. At present, because of the emphasis on the commercial marketability of VR for in-home entertainment, CAVE systems as well as other elaborate, large-scale, rear projection apparatuses such as Tsukuba University’s Large Space, occupy a different realm of the VR industry that is largely confined to universities and research facilities. In a quick, now canonised list of VR’s inventors, Ivan Sutherland is credited with creating the first VR prototype. He also wrote a key essay in 1965 entitled ‘The Ultimate Display’ exploring the design for a kinaesthetic display that would attend to multiple senses. He writes, ‘If the task of the display is to serve as a looking-glass into the mathematical wonderland constructed in computer memory, it should serve as many senses as possible’ (1965: 1). Myron Krueger is credited with first using the phrase ‘artificial reality’ in a 1974 dissertation which was later published as a book in 1983, while Jaron Lanier, of VPL Research (VPL stands for Visual Programming Language) is credited with using the term ‘virtual reality’ first. Morton Heilig developed the Sensorama system in the 1950s, which is widely regarded as a precursor to VR in its aspirations. The work done at NASA Ames was also significant. Scott Fisher, who had worked with Alan Kay at Atari as a research scientist, joined the Ames Research Centre in 1985, and until 1990 served as the founder and director of the Virtual Environment Workstation Project (VIEW), which is credited with innovating many of the first VR technologies, including 3D audio technology, headmounted displays with stereoscopic imagery and an adaptation of the dataglove. His essay, ‘Virtual Environments, Personal Simulation and Telepresence’ (1991) describes a world in which people will easily connect, communicate and collaborate through what Fisher dubbed ‘telepresence’ and VR systems. Fisher’s vision for VIEW, and VR generally, was similar to that of his predecessors in wanting to include multiple senses. In this regard, Fisher was inspired by Heilig, a cinematographer whose vision of an immersive movie experience was one of the driving visions for VR. The Sensorama was patented in 1962 and resembled an arcade game that offered participants not simply a short movie experience, but one in which the seat moved, odours surfaced and the wind blew as was appropriate to the images on display. Heilig was never able to sell

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his device, so it languished, but his vision of a multi-sensory movie experience lives on. Heilig also developed an early head-mounted display called the Telesphere which resembles many of the current HMDs (see Jordan and Packer 2002; Delaney 2014). Some of the written texts from the 1990s on VR also remain surprisingly timely. Howard Rheingold’s Virtual Reality: The Revolutionary Technology, for example, describes VR in this way: Imagine immersing yourself in an artificial world and actively exploring it, rather than peering in at it from a fixed perspective through a flat screen in a movie theatre, on a television set or on a computer display. Imagine that you are the creator as well as the consumer of your artificial experience, with the power to use a gesture or word to remould the world you see and hear and feel. (1991: 16)

In addition to articulating the key element of VR – namely that ‘you are the creator as well as the consumer’ – Rheingold also identified the three qualities that characterise VR in a list that continues to inform most contemporary descriptions, including the one above. His three qualities include immersion; the ability to walk around in the three-dimensional space of the project while choosing your own point of view; and the ability to manipulate the world in some way.5 VR in the 1990s was a rich, robust area of exploration – in technologies, story structures and experience design. To be sure, it was also an era rife with hyperbole about both the potentials and threats of VR. As Ellen Strain argues in ‘Virtual VR’ (1999), the elegant cinematic depictions of VR oversold the technology to audiences who were then dismayed when they encountered the clunky reality of VR in the 1990s. Steve Anderson echoes this thesis in his online archive ‘Technologies of Cinema’, which aggregates dozens of clips from film and television that illustrate how VR was depicted in Hollywood. Several of the most significant projects of the 1990s were designed by women. Placeholder (1992), by Brenda Laurel in collaboration with Rachel Strickland, Rob Tow and Michael Naimark, for example, is widely lauded for its thoughtful and productive exploration of the potentials of VR for crafting a narrative experience. The project networked two participants, who were then directed through audio by a persona designated as ‘the goddess’ during the experience. The piece included three different environments – a cave, a waterfall and a river – based on three locations near Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada. The participants could become any one of four animal characters – spider, snake, fish and crow – chosen from aboriginal tales, and they could wander within the space of the project and explore. However, it was not until they had intersected with one of the animals that they would begin to enjoy a richer experience; once the intersection occurred, participants experienced a shift in movement, vision and perception. Placeholder served as a powerful prototype for exploring presence, the role of the body, and world building, that is, the design of a narrative within a virtual space. It also

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proceeded by first creating the environment of the story, understanding that in VR, stories literally ‘take place’. In their expansive description of the project and its goals, Brenda Laurel and Rachel Strickland note: We thought of Placeholder as a set of environments imbued with narrative potential – places that could be experienced and marked through narrative activity. When a person visits a place, the stories that are told about it – by companions, by rock art or graffiti, or even by oneself through memories or fantasies – become part of the character of the place. Stories give us ideas about what can be done or imagined in a place; learning that a particular canyon was an outlaw’s hiding place, for instance, or remembering a child saying that a particular rock resembled an old woman’s face will certainly influence our experience of that place. It’s hard to experience a natural place without remembering or constructing some stories about it. (1994: 124)

In this description, the role of the storyteller working in the context of VR is not necessarily to tell a story but to craft a rich and robust world within which stories can occur; these are stories that are then made, rather than told, by participants through their experience in the world. The onus of storytelling thus shifts from an author, writer and director to the participant; the work of the artist is to craft a world worthy of participation. Placeholder is but one example of the powerful experiments with VR in the 1990s, which also include the work of Char Davies with Osmose (1994–95), which used the breath as a means for navigation, and Éphémère (1998), as well as Yacov Sharir and Diane Gromala’s Dancing With the Virtual Dervish: Virtual Bodies (1994). Each of these projects relied on blurring the boundaries between abstract and concrete, presenting landscapes and movements that were at once ethereally detached and deeply embodied. Rather than striving for live-action experiences as extensions of the cinematic, these projects began with the body and queried its role in the production of meaning. VR was also theorised in the 1990s, with hearty critiques alongside technologyoriented research papers. Simon Penny, for example, wrote an essay titled ‘Virtual Reality as the End of the Enlightenment Project’ following what he describes as ‘the now legendary Virtual Reality panel at Siggraph ’91’ exploring the cultural context that gives rise to VR and pinpointing a collection of key themes that continue to resonate today, namely embodiment within the context of virtual reality, the experience of space, cognitive plasticity and the politics of interactivity. Simon Penny writes, ‘The developers of VR have (unwittingly?) inherited a humanistic world view (an attitude to life and a way of making pictures) which places the eye of the viewer in a position of command, a privileged viewpoint on the world’ (1992: np). He goes on to ask a series of questions that remain: ‘What if VR had developed along pictorial principles other than renaissance humanism?’ and ‘What if VR developed in a culture with a different attitude to the body?’, concluding with an arch description of VR in the 1990s:

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This readiness for VR has been prepared (most recently) by Disneyland, Hollywood, Liposuction and Nintendo. Conceptually vacuous theme parks, anesthetizing cinema, interactive games that perpetuate the myth of the individual and the cult of violence-as-liberty. And perhaps most significantly, the acceptance that the body may be customized at will like some kind of hotrod. (Ibid.)

Other scholars voice concerns as well: Sandy Stone queried the role of the body in ‘Will the Real Body Please Stand Up’ (1991), for example, and Stephen Wilson captures many of the major questions from that era in chapters six and seven of Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science and Technology (2002). However, what should be clear already is that some of the first attempts to construe virtual experiences were motivated by a deep interest in the body and its permutations; by a reimagining of the parameters and even definition of space; and by a posthuman desire to consider the world from a non-human perspective. Mapping Immersive Video Like other genres of the post-cinematic explored so far, contemporary virtual reality hovers at the intersection of multiple realms, with applications in the military, medicine and science, as well as cinematic storytelling and gaming. Indeed, game designers are perhaps the most comfortable with design for VR due to their familiarity both with 3D design and navigation, as well as with procedurally generated environments. However, for filmmakers, VR represents a radical shift in orientation, whether they opt to work in animated space or live-action; in either case, the structuring of time, space, perspective, identification and narrative all require reimagining. Steve Anderson (2016) has helpfully mapped a technology-agnostic array of immersive platforms and projects clustered under the VR rubric in terms of degrees of interactivity, fixed or elastic time bases, the ability to procedurally affect project content, and distinctions among lens-based and computer-generated imagery.6 While many still strive to create the full-body sensory immersive experience imagined by Heilig, others are exploring more agile or casual experiences that deploy common devices such as tablets and mobile phones. In order to speak coherently about the diverse array of work being marketed – or mis-marketed – as ‘virtual reality’, it is important to engage the specific affordances of each project’s particular flavour of ‘VR’. The remainder of the chapter explores four different approaches: t
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7JEFP This category contains projects that make use of the increasing ease of shooting 360-degree live-action video. Exemplars include work created by Chris Milk and other artists in partnership with his company VRSE, which is responsible for a series of pieces in which the viewer uses a computer, tablet, phone or VR headset to witness a 360-degree live-action scene with the viewer at the centre. The viewer’s actions do not

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Evolution of Verse (2015) by Chris Milk and VRSE

affect the project or the time base of the story; however, one is free to explore any part of the spherical image by means of a tablet, phone or head-mounted display. One of the first projects made available from VRSE is titled Evolution of Verse (2015), directed by Milk and made in collaboration with Annapurna Pictures and Digital Domain. The three-minute experience features a pre-rendered 360-degree CG environment of a lake surrounded by mountains at dawn; soft piano music plays and birds chirp. Then, in what must be an homage to the Lumière Brothers, a train comes rushing through the water toward the viewer, and as it approaches impact, it explodes into a flock of black birds that swirl up and away into the bright blue sky; the birds in turn become colourful streamers in a glorious visual display as the sun begins to set behind the hills; the image fades to black and then, in what must be another homage, this time to 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), we see a plump baby, ostensibly a foetus floating unencumbered by something as mundane as a maternal body and the confines of a womb and illuminated from behind, umbilical cord translucent and floating upward. The baby turns, smiles and reaches its hand outward, seemingly pushing through the screen. The dual gestures here toward the origins of cinema and the origins of man endeavour to bolster a new technology and at once underscore familiar repetitions of contemporary immersive media while sustaining the gender politics of contemporary mainstream cinema. Depictions of the foetal imagery, especially showing babies as if they are suspended in outer space, were well critiqued in the 1980s as feminists responded in particular to the now nostalgic notions of humans as disconnected, solitary individuals (see Petchesky 2000), the erasure of the maternal body, and the cultural work done in aligning the foetus in utero with the man in space, floating free (see Rothman 1986). The ‘man in space’ is now the immersed viewer, disconnected and solitary, floating free but for the bothersome tether. The previous generation of work created by artists such as Laurel and Davies and their investigations of the ways

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in which we might design immersive experiences that include the body in compelling ways has been lost to history; Evolution of Verse both demonstrates the strangely obstinate attempt to remain within the ocular regime, and inadvertently thematises the political position this disembodied vision represents. No wonder so many of the subsequent VRSE projects would strive to assert a direct connection to other humans! Indeed, in November 2015, VRSE partnered with The New York Times to explore the possibilities of immersive media in the context of the newspaper. On 5 November, the paper released a series of projects documenting the lives of three refugee children in the context of sixty million people displaced by war. Hana is a twelve-year-old Syrian girl who lives and works in Lebanon with her family in a refugee camp, not knowing when or if they will be able to go home; nine-year-old Chuol is from the South Sudan and has fled from his home with his grandmother and exists by hiding in a crocodile-filled swamp; and eleven-year-old Oleg lives in his rubble-strewn town, destroyed by war, in the Ukraine. The stories are described as ‘virtual-reality films’ but are, again, 360-degree videos. To facilitate the viewing of the projects and the paper’s larger NYT VR initiative, the newspaper distributed Google’s cardboard viewers in the 8 November 2015 issue of the paper; the Google viewers closely resemble the DIY cardboard viewer called the FOV2GO created by participants in USC’s MxR Lab three years earlier and distributed for free at the 2012 IEEE Virtual Reality Conference. The three 360-degree videos resemble traditional video shorts in form and content; cuts are enabled by dips to black, and shots are composed at a medium distance from the action to encourage the viewer to look around beyond the main subject. Indeed, the main innovation in the three projects is the ability to turn and view the surrounding environments. The height of the frame usually retains the proportions of a human adult, and the acts of turning left and right, as well as moving up and down, presume a focal point that aligns with the human head. That the projects are described as immersive suggests the breadth of experience encapsulated by the term. These lens-based live-action 360-videos, as well as the CGI world of Evolution of Verse, are not responsive to the user; instead, the imagery is pre-rendered, the timeline is fixed, and the only interaction available to the viewer is to spin around to look at different parts of the captured environment. The success of projects like this is determined by the extent to which the choices available to the viewer justify the use of the 360-degree apparatus. In VRSE’s spherical video document of the Millions March, directed by Spike Jonze, for example, the ability to take in the auditory and visual experience of participating in an historic protest is powerful indeed, and suggests the value of this medium for documentaries that seek to convey an experience of presence within complex, decentred events. Inverting this logic, spherical narratives that could just as easily have been conveyed through standard cinematic conventions may verge on gimmickry and ultimately detract from the intended viewer experience. In addition to VRSE, the Oculus Story Studio, announced publicly at the Sundance Film Festival in 2015, is mining the terrain of 360-video experience. A relatively small, in-house production unit of the VR hardware manufacturer, Oculus, OSS is devoted

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to a cinematic mode of production that is nearly unique among the current generation of commercial VR content creation. Where a majority of industrial production is dominated by the games industry, key players on the technical and creative teams at OSS, including Saschka Unseld, Ramiro Lopez Dau and Max Planck, are all veterans of Disney’s Pixar animation studio. As such, the studio is committed to inventing a new language for immersive storytelling that nonetheless retains the characteristically nuanced graphics of a high-end animation studio while respecting the severe limitations of real-time image rendering by means of a game engine. With their first two shorts, OSS stuck with easily recognisable genres and simple, short-form stories. Each project begins with a gentle introductory period designed to allow viewers to ease into the experience; we are invited to watch the curtains part and the lights go down in a cinema theatre, for example. With its debut short, Lost (2015), viewers find themselves in a darkened forest just before daybreak; a lone firefly flutters through the dark, capturing and directing the viewer’s attention and allowing just enough time for the sense of presence in a lush tropical environment to give way to curiosity about the story that will unfold. As the narrative emerges, involving a robot named N8 (pronounced ‘Nate’), viewers find little reason to take advantage of the 360-degree story world that surrounds them. Indeed, Lost treats the environment outside of a conventional narrative proscenium as an unnecessary distraction from the intended viewing experience; while viewers can choose to focus on specific figures or parts of the story as it unfolds, there is virtually never a reason to look away from the primary action or express curiosity about the surrounding environment. A focus on narrative action and character also drives OSS’s second short project, Henry (2015), a story about a lovable hedgehog who wants nothing more than to hug a balloon on his birthday. Here, the legacy of the team’s Pixar roots is easily recognisable as Henry manages to evoke a range of emotions, from joy to sorrow. Like Lost, viewers have no appreciable control over either the events or the time base of the story. During the ‘settling in’ period, for example, time variations are limited to slightly shorter or longer durations, depending on the viewer’s behaviour – an agitated viewer (as determined by head movements) will be given more time to settle into a proper viewing state, while a calm one will be rewarded with commencement of the action. Opportunities for viewers to procedurally affect the actions of the story are likewise kept to a bare minimum; at key moments, a viewer who is paying close attention to the correct part of the screen may be rewarded with eye contact and an intimate, wordless exchange with Henry at a key moment in the story. Unlike the majority of game-oriented VR content producers, OSS is not looking to create the killer app that will drive sales of one particular delivery system over its rivals. The studio has a different mandate, namely to bring artistry and inspiration to VR as a medium of creative expression and engaging storytelling. The problem is that, in so doing, it is fighting against the very properties that make immersive experiences unique, treating the prospect of user agency and meaningful interaction as distractions rather than creative variables to embraced or shaped. In the end, OSS may well

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discover a successful formula for the language of storytelling in VR, but in all likelihood, it will look a lot like the good old language of cinema. t
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$(* This category of VR allows the participant to move within the space of the project which is pre-rendered. This terrain has been effectively mobilised in the work of Nonny de la Peña, one of our students in the Media Arts + Practice Ph.D. programme at USC. Given her background as a journalist, de la Peña has named her body of work ‘immersive journalism’, and she is dedicated to exploring the ways in which the elements of journalistic storytelling and VR can come together, particularly with regard to empathy. Her research asks how empathy might be affected as participants engage with real-world stories. De la Peña begins her projects with audio from real events; she then adds corresponding computer-generated images. In the seven-minute project titled Hunger in Los Angeles (2012), for example, an audio recording of people standing in a food bank line in downtown LA provides the framing. The 3D visual world and animated characters were rendered in Unity, prompting many to refer to the project as a game. But Hunger in Los Angeles is not a game; it is a navigable space in which a participant, wearing a head-mounted display equipped with markers, is able to look and listen while walking around within a defined volume. Half-way through the experience, a person in line suffers a diabetic seizure and collapses; the other people in line try to help but they are also still hungry and anxious not to lose their places in line. In the distance, the sound of a siren blares. The participant exploring the project is able to walk among the people in line, and can even hover next to the suffering victim, but, like a ghost, remains powerless to act. In this way, the immersiveness of the project creates a profound experience of care, sympathy and immediacy, but juxtaposes it with helplessness. Even though the visuals are low-resolution and the animations are nonnaturalistic, the audio, and the knowledge of the audio’s veracity, prompt the sense of empathy that de la Peña seeks to achieve. Made in 2012, still the early days of the current VR wave, the project demonstrates the ability of the still unwieldy media technology to craft a significant experience. Each of de la Peña’s subsequent projects similarly steps into a dramatic situation, placing participants in the story world to serve as a witness to the events unfolding. Each uses audio recordings as the anchor and framing device, and each allows some degree of physical movement (depending on the installation of the project). Project Syria (2013) places participants on a street in Aleppo in Syria, where a child sings just as a bomb explodes nearby. One Dark Night (2015) recreates scenes related to the last moments of Trayvon Martin’s life, and Across the Line (2015) brings participants into the midst of an anti-abortion protest outside a health clinic. De la Peña is very much concerned with presence, and has been working with Mel Slater, who has spent many years conducting research on presence, immersion and sense of place in relation to virtual reality. In ‘A Note on Presence Terminology’,

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Hunger in Los Angeles (2012) by Nonny de la Peña, composite image by Peggy Weil

Slater distinguishes between immersion and presence, using immersion to refer to an objective assessment of what a technology delivers: ‘The more that a system delivers displays (in all sensory modalities) and tracking that preserves fidelity in relation to their equivalent real-world sensory modalities, the more that it is “immersive”’ (2003: 1). Presence, in contrast, is for Slater ‘a human reaction to immersion’ (ibid.). The experience of presence is subjective. Slater goes on to show how the form of a project and its content relate to presence as well; we may become interested or involved in a project, but that refers to its content. Our relationship to the project with regard to presence centres on its form: ‘Presence is about form, the extent to which the unification of simulated sensory data and perceptual processing produces a coherent “place” that you are “in” and in which there may be the potential for you to act’ (2003: 2). De la Peña’s projects are unique in that they rely primarily on sound and physical movement to

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produce a coherent sense of place, when the majority of VR producers focus primarily on the visual register. Hailed also for their ability to produce a sense of presence, again, despite the limited visual sensory data, de la Peña’s projects suggest that the visual need not be the primary sensory modality for VR. Taken together, the success of de la Peña’s work is a testament to the capacity of audio to override the visual in producing a sense of presence. Many other artists exploring VR share de la Peña’s interest in the notion of empathy. BeAnotherLab, an interdisciplinary team of artists and researchers, for example, created a project titled The Machine To Be Another (2015) as an experiment to explore physical identity. It uses the Oculus Rift, multiple cameras and human actors to create situations in which a participant can seem to experience another body. Once engaged in the project, the participant looks down to see different leg that are different from his or her own, and a torso, hands and arms; the goal is to spark a sense of curiosity about what it might be like to live in this body. In some ways, the project builds on the work of Jaron Lanier from the 1980s when he explored the extent to which virtual bodies could be made as strange as possible but still be accepted by participants as their own. Lanier dubbed this ‘homuncular flexibility’ (2006), and it is a topic currently being investigated by Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, among others. t
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'MFYJCJMJUZ Modestly billed as a ‘walk in the woods’, Way to Go (2015) was produced by the National Film Board of Canada and directed by Vincent Morisset and debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in 2015. Offering viewers an experience that lasts anywhere from six minutes to ‘maybe forever’, the project models a uniquely elastic but unidirectional timeline that allows viewers a surprising degree of freedom simply by being able to control their speed. As the project starts, we are invited to follow a simple animated figure with an expressionless, cube-shaped head as it walks, runs or flies through a forest along a path next to a stream. For the first few minutes, the viewer’s progress is limited to a single path signified by a white line on the ground; we can go fast, slow or stop, but we can’t go back. The space of the forest is pictured in nearly monochrome, spherical, video and as we look around in any direction, the cube-head figure remains framed in our field of view. As we move further into the space, the live-action images give way to an entirely computer-generated 3D environment with an increasingly saturated colour scheme that we understand might just go on forever. Viewable either in a browser or an Oculus Rift, standard controls allow participants to walk, run or stop, all the while being able to look around the spherical forest environment. If our gaze tilts up above the horizon, the cube-head takes to the air and soars overhead until we look back down. In addition to the animated figure, we quickly notice that we are accompanied by a black-clad live-action figure who also has a cube for a head. We realise that this must be our camera operator, but his or her presence is ingeniously integrated into the diegesis of the world by virtue of having a cube for a head and the fact that, in the course of our walk, we encounter multiple other

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figures with cube-shaped heads, both animated and live-action, who accompany us for portions of our adventure. Although lacking anything that could be regarded as a game mechanic, Way to Go rewards viewers for their curiosity and patience. Further, while it would be possible to simply race through the woods, running or flying as quickly as possible, viewers who pause occasionally or allow themselves to explore the environment will be rewarded by unexpected pleasures. At one point, the cube-head strays off the path that we, as viewers of a live-action video sequence, know we cannot leave, and disappears below the surface of the stream. If we stop and simply observe the running water, we see the cube head staring back at us from under the water until the stream itself bursts into a rainbow of colour that rushes downstream. Further on, the live-action video sequences and the narrow path we are constrained to follow give way to an entirely computergenerated forest environment that pulses with psychedelic colours and textures reminiscent of the video world in which we were previously immersed. However, with Way to Go, it is at the intersection of live-action, animation and CG that the project achieves something unique and exemplary for the current generation of VR content. By keeping narrative elements – and viewer expectations – to a minimum, a deceptively simple environment is shown to conceal a wealth of treasures and surprises. By limning the boundaries between human and animated character, live-action and procedurally generated images, and by gently bending the ordinarily immutable limitations of live-action video, Way to Go hints at the potential of this medium to rethink the nature of both story and immersive experience. While explorations of the landscape form a genre in contemporary VR – Rachel Rossin’s I Came and Went as a Ghost Hand (2015) explores glitchy landscapes situated between the virtual and real and Daniel Steegmann Mangran’s Phantom (kingdom of all the animals and all the beasts is my name) (2015) invites participants to explore the Mata Atlântica rainforest in Southern Brazil both come to mind – Way to Go’s flexible timeline hints at one direction for imagining the future of storytelling within VR. While films within traditional cinematic storytelling unspool at a fixed speed, with a good portion of cinema’s artistry devoted to choreographing the temporal unfolding, what if we imagined a form of storytelling that allowed time to be stopped, rewound or fast-forwarded as part of the narrative design?7 So it would seem that cinema is striving to be VR as VR is striving to be cinematic and both are contending with a world that has shifted from images and the realm of representation to data and the realm of the network. The shift, however, is uncanny: it cheerfully barrels forward at breakneck pace in some realms but remains anxiously repressed in others such that we do not even yet share a language for talking about virtual cameras. A networked culture needs, wants and crafts stories of the networked self, requiring differing methods for rendering the deeply layered spatial and temporal experiences we share daily. Whereas the impetus for many VR projects in the 1990s centred on a reimagining of the role of the body, projects fifteen years later combine

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the post-cinematic and the posthuman in order to conjure and contemplate distributed bodies and an awareness of the growing sentience of the world around. The camera itself registers that sentience metaphorically in so many films, and the participant within the flourishing array of VR projects becomes the camera, registering the space and time of the story world, tracing the path of a narrative with the body. While The Revenant, in its diminution of narrative, imagines the hero alone, the post-cinematic and posthuman, at its best, will in contrast increasingly explore the relationships among people and things. Returning to the definition of the post-cinematic from the beginning of this book – the art and practice of bringing experiences of story, information and knowledge into attunement with contemporary culture – the qualities of VR that align it with the post-cinematic and the posthuman will be those that allow it to thrive.

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Conclusion

T

he argument throughout this volume has posited a homology between the posthuman and the post-cinematic, and claims that post-cinematic artworks serve as emblems of a culture in transition, rendering new understandings of time and space; evoking new forms of identification, engagement and problem-solving; and conjuring the self not necessarily as subject but as interface. The core transition is from the culture of representation to that of information, from the visual to the networked, from the seen to the tracked. As cinema becomes post-cinema, we witness the gaps and fissures and unruly disarray, enjoying a period of inelegance and potential. Further, the posthuman and the post-cinematic presume that we are embedded in a cultural assemblage but acknowledges the imbrication of selves and systems, of agency alongside generative processes. As we experience our entanglement with these processes and systems, we seek stories that perceive, decipher and explicate our struggle to engage and embody these new realities. All around us, the logic at the moment shares four specific qualities that align with cinematic experimentation as outlined it in this book: R5 /,5/(,-.(#(!5) 5-*5-"# .-5-5#.5#-5)#ŀ5)'*/..#)(&&365(5)/,5#&35 practice now often includes navigating the world around us, mobile device in hand, mapping our world as it in turn maps us. With this comes a series of structuring metaphors related to coordinates, tagging, mapping, navigation and cartography. /,5 ')0#-5 ()15 ,5 1),&-:5 )/,5 0#1#(!5 #-5 )'#(!5 5 *,)--5 ) 5 (0#!.#(!:5 and our stories are the ones that we tell of our own experiences of traversal and exploration. Further, this shifting sense of space is seen in postcinematic artworks that merge with theatre in live cinema and with architecture in forms of screened urbanism; that appear online and on mobile devices as new configurations of media experience; and that reconfigure our relationship to data in virtual environments. R5 /,5 /(,-.(#(!5 ) 5 .#'5 -"# .-5 -5 #.5 #-5 &-)5 )#ŀ5 )'*/..#)(&&365 (5 15 experience a move away from the timeline that so neatly arranges past, present and

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future toward time as presence, performance and exchange. This is an era of acceleration, but also of duration, of elastic time flows and of layering; it brings with it a powerful desire to halt, disrupt, compress and re-image time within the stories we tell. The post-cinematic expressions of time cheerfully expand and compress time; they allow us to make our own temporal experiences; and they map time across disparate experiences. R5 /,5 ,&.#)(-"#*5 .)5 *,.#5 @5 ,.5 *,.#65 ."#(!5 *,.#65 ,-,"5 *,.#5 @5 shifts as we engage with these qualities in our own ways of being. Practice becomes participatory and collaborative, manoeuvring through new conceptions of the spatial and temporal. Post-cinematic practice shifts, too, and the experience of making media invites an expanded palette of social relationships that move well beyond the hierarchies of traditional industrial filmmaking. R5
(5 ŀ(&&365 )/,5 -#,5 .)5 5 -(65 ",5 (5 %()1(5 ,'#(-5 *)1, /&65 1#."5 (5 increased attention to fostering a sense of presence; this conjoins with the realisation of the limits of not only our perception but the blinders of perspective. More and more we are encountering conflicting world views, as well as alternative modes of sentience. Within the post-cinematic, presence remains a vexing and intriguing term and the focus of tremendous investigation, especially within the context of virtual reality. While the title Fast Forward can be read as an imperative, I hope to have demonstrated the need not for the ‘new’ at the expense of the ‘old’ or the ‘fast’ in place of the ‘slow’. Rather, I hope that this book embodies not only a sense of the partial, limited and located viewpoint asserted in the Introduction, but also a willingness to acknowledge the layering of historical moments and the uneven temporal flows that characterise so much of the media practice taking place now. Rather than compelling us fast forward, then, the book also pauses and rewinds. This study also frames its argument from the context of the university generally, which is a space within which many of the facets of a neoliberal culture are experienced #(5 )0,.5 ),'-5 (5 -5 -/"65 '(5 @5 ."#&&35 @5 5 ,,.#/&.#)(5 ) 5 ."5 /(#0,-#.3]-5 mission and vision on the part of faculty. It comes, as well, from within a programme dedicated to the integration of theory and practice, with an awareness that the divide between the two was never as great as presumed. From here5@55&)&5-#./.51#."#(5 a well-established and well-funded school of cinematic arts which itself sits inside the 1&&-5) 55,-,"5/(#0,-#.35&).5#(5 )-5
(!&-5@5#.5-'-5(--,365/,!(.50(65 to underscore the insidiousness of the neoliberal agenda. To end, then, I ask this question: Is there a way to borrow from the practices of contemporary cinematic storytelling at this moment of flux to imagine new times and spaces for the university that at the same time enact and engage with the rethinking necessary for a posthuman philosophy? Similarly, can we borrow from the creative activities that we see emerging all around us in the context of the post-cinematic to imagine new practices in teaching and learning, in thinking, sharing and making?

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It is challenging to open up the imagination this way in the context of the contemporary university in which both time and space are increasingly controlled and monetised. Many universities have adopted a language dedicated to the ‘new’ and to ‘the future’, touting an entrepreneurial spirit that is supposed to connote innovation, but that actually designates the university’s corporate aspirations. University leaders now baldly speak of ‘products’, ‘services’ and ‘customers’, of ‘economies’, ‘global markets’, ‘long-term liabilities’ and so on. With this increasing corporatisation of the university comes the subsumption of every activity within the scholarly endeavour to the needs of capital. We see this perhaps most pointedly in relation to time: time within the university is increasingly submitted to the requirements of finance. Rather than being generative, imaginative or provocative, time is money. Eli Meyerhoff, Elizabeth Johnson and Bruce Braun examine this situation in their compelling essay, ‘Time and the University’ (2011). They indicate how faculty are constrained in the twenty-first century university, tied unequivocally to merit reviews that structure their productivity and time, and they are increasingly measured, audited and reviewed. Time is limited, and the generative, imaginative time spent in the company of others is nearly absent: ‘As university administrators seek to achieve efficiencies, often by increasing responsibilities while reducing the resources necessary to fulfil them, time is perceived to be ever more scarce’ (2011: 486). As these conditions continue, we tend to forego the potentials of collective and collegial collaboration, and too often we acknowledge success primarily in individual terms in a situation in which the achievements of one often means the negative impact on another. Meyerhoff, Johnson and Braun explain that it is ‘no surprise that one of the predominant emotions of the neo-liberal university is resentment rather than pleasure’ (2011: 493). To reimagine the university we need to acknowledge its multiple time-frames: the long duration of its history against the 24/7 demands of an entrepreneurial era. We need to remember that time is a social construct that shifts as needed, and we can play a role in the temporal experience of the university. We also need to reckon with our experience of new kinds of spaces: layered, multiple, augmented, fractured. What will be the space of the university given these layerings? And we need to engage these questions as vital and necessary acts of the imagination, an imagination that works within the framework of our values. Can we imagine new times and spaces? To conclude, then, and to rephrase this book’s opening sentence, I would write not that we tell stories as our stories tell us, but that we make stories and our stories make us. Here, I have grappled with this making and in the process found that, as we explore new forms of storytelling, we are also exploring the boundaries and parameters of who we are, how we are and why we are.

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Notes

Introduction 1

2

3 4

5 6

7 8

See Dale M. Hudson and Patricia R. Zimmermann, Thinking Through Digital Media: Transnational Environments and Locative Places (2015) for more on the merging of formerly distinct media forms into digital media ecologies. See Tania Leighton’s (ed.) Art and the Moving Image: A Critical Reader (2007); Tamara Trodd’s Screen/Space: The Projected Image in Contemporary Art (2011); Erika Balsam’s Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art (2013); and Andrew V. Uroskie’s Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art (2014) for an exploration of the role of cinema in contemporary art. The essay was later published as a book, Post Cinematic Affect (2010). We could also include here Steve Dixon’s Digital Performance (2007); Jennifer ParkerStarbuck’s Cyborg Theatre: Corporeal/Technological Intersections in Multimedia Performance (2011); and Piotr Woycicki’s Post-Cinematic Theatre and Performance (2014). See Mark B. N. Hansen, Feed-Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First Century Media (2015). See, for example, Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt (eds), Practice as Research: Context, Method, Knowledge (2007); Christopher Crouch and Jane Pearce, Doing Research in Design (2008); Hazel Smith and Roger T. Dean, Practice-Led Research, Research-Led Practice in the Creative Arts (2009); and James Elkins, Artists with PhDs: On the New Doctoral Degree in Studio Art (2009). See Matt Ratto (2011) and Garnet Hertz (2012) for more on the definition of critical making. See Michel Foucault; Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979) and Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston’s Posthuman Bodies (Unnatural Acts: Theorizing the Performative) (1995).

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9

10

11 12 13

I should note that my conjunction of posthumanism and cinema here differs from the characterisation of posthuman cinema as a genre concerned with the loss of identity within narrative cinema as seen in Scott Loren’s ‘Posthumanist Panic Cinema: Defining a Genre’ (2012). See Randall Bass’s ‘Disrupting Ourselves: The Problem of Learning in Higher Education’ (2012) for more information on the power of informal learning in undergraduate education. Ken Eklund, World Without Oil, Alternate Reality Game, 2007; http://worldwithoutoil. org/ Institute for the Future, Superstruct, Alternate Reality Game, 2008; http://www.iftf.org/ our-work/people-technology/games/superstruct/ Read an interview conducted by Henry Jenkins with the game’s core design team, Jeff Watson, Simon Wiscombe and Tracy Fullerton, available at: henryjenkins.org/2011/ 10/a_virtual_bullpen_how_the_usc_1.html

Chapter One: Past-Present-Future: Situating Post-Cinema 1

2 3

4

My reference to Williams here also echoes another reference, namely the framing offered by Michael Renov and Erika Suderburg for their collection of essays, Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices (1995). This direction is also advocated by Mark Williams in an essay titled ‘Rewiring Media History: Intermedial Borders’ (2009). See Kristen Whissel’s Spectacular Digital Effects: CGI and Contemporary Cinema for further elaboration of the ways in which contemporary cinema figures these changes. She adopts the term ‘effects emblem’, writing ‘I define the “effects emblem” as a cinematic visual effect that operates as a site of intense signification and gives stunning (and sometimes) allegorical expression to a film’s key themes, anxieties and conceptual obsessions – even as it provokes feelings of astonishment and wonder’ (2014: 6; emphasis in original). See, in particular, in this context Scott Bukatman, Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century (2003).

Chapter Two: New Practices / New Paradigms 1 2

3

See ‘Storyboarding in the Digital Age’ in Storyboarding: A Critical History, Chris Pallant and Steven Price (2015). Game designers, who are interested in understanding how stories might be generated, are very interested in this question, and are busy exploring topics such as pattern recognition and the tension between player agency and game control. Philosopher Nelson Goodman wrote extensively about aesthetics and the potential for art to aid our understanding of reality for many years during the last century. However, he also wrote specifically about the role of art in construing the world. In Ways of World-

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making, for example, Goodman writes, ‘The arts must be taken no less seriously than the sciences as modes of discovery, creation, and enlargement of knowledge in the broad sense of advancement of the understanding, and thus that the philosophy of art should be conceived as an integral part of metaphysics and epistemology’ (1978: 102). He also articulates his sense of the significance of world making: ‘Works of art can participate in world making precisely because they have symbolic functions’ (ibid.). See Virginia Pitts, ‘Writing From the Body: Kinesthetics and Entrainment in Collaborative Screenplay Development’ (2013), for a discussion of the approach to embodied collaborative processes.

Chapter Three: Live Cinema 1

2

3

4 5

See Michael Lew (2004) ‘Live Cinema: Designing and Instrument for Cinema Editing as a Live Performance’, for another definition, and David Fodel (nd), ‘Live Cinema: Context and “Liveness”’. See, also, Steven Ball, David Curtis, Duncan White and A. L. Rees (eds) (2011) Art, Performance, Film; Andrew V. Uroskie (2014) Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art; and Gloria Sutton (2015) The Experience Machine: Stan VanDerBeek’s Movie-Drome and Expanded Cinema. See Timothy Jaeger (2006) Live Cinema Unraveled: Handbook for Live Visual Performance, in which he lists a series of ‘codes’ that characterise the form, including mixing, sampling, the use of filters and spatial montage within the frame. For more on Single Wing Turquoise Bird, see David E. James (2005) ‘Expanded Cinema in Los Angeles: The Single Wing Turquoise Bird’. See William Moritz (2004) Optical Poetry: The Life and Work of Oskar Fischinger and Cindy Keefer and Jaap Gundemond (2013) Oskar Fischinger: 1900–1967 for more on the work of Fischinger.

Chapter Four: Urban Screens / Screened Urbanism 1 2

3 4

See Erkki Huhtamo, ‘Messages on the Wall: An Archaeology of Public Media Displays’ (2009), for a history of early billboards and urban signage. See Anne Friedberg’s ‘Urban Mobility and Cinematic Visuality: The Screens of Los Angeles – Endless Cinema or Private Telematics’ which explores ‘the tension between the material reality of built space and the dematerialized imaginary that the cinema always provided’ (2002: 186). See Rita Raley’s Tactical Media (2009) for a discussion of political and activist media practices in public space. For more information on video art in public space, see Catrien Schreuder’s Pixels and Places: Video Art in Public Space (2010); for more on installations in public space, see Erika Suderburg’s Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art (2000) and Art Works: Place, by Tacita Dean and Jeremy Millar (2005).

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See Giuliana Bruno’s work as she further traces these intersections, focusing specifically on that of the cinema and the museum in Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts (2007) and more recently in Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality and Media (2014). 6 A series of recent conferences focus on the intersection of media, technologies and the city. Hybrid City, for example, hosted its first event in 2011, with the goal of ‘exploring the emergent character of the city and the potential transformative shift of the urban condition, as a result of ongoing developments in information and communication technologies (ICTs) and of their integration in the urban physical context’. Detours: Poetics of the City is a Montreal-based project designed by Taien Ng-Chan that invites participants to explore the city using reimagined transit maps with the goal of highlight ‘personal engagements with the city’. Social Cities of Tomorrow (2012) was a conference and workshop dedicated to reimagining the ‘smart city’ as a ‘social city’ organised by the Mobile City and Virtueel Platform in Amsterdam, while Coded Cultures: The City as Interface staged a series of media art events in the city in order to ask questions about the city and its relationship to media in Vienna in 2011. 7 See ‘Using a Laser as the World’s Most Powerful Paintbrush’, 10 September 2013 (available at: http://www.wired.com/2013/09/station-to-station-light-echoes/). Also see documentation of the entire Station to Station project in Station to Station (2015) by Aitken. 8 Given the abundance of new works on film and video installation, as well as interactive installations, I chose not to focus on this form in this volume. For more on the topic, see Maeve Connolly, The Place of Artists’ Cinema: Space, Site and Screen (2009); Mieke Bal, Thinking in Film: The Politics of Video Art Installation According to Eija-Liisa Ahtila (2013); Erika Balsam, Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art (2013); Katja Kwastek, Aesthetics of Interaction (2013); Nathaniel Stern, Interactive Art and Embodiment: The Implicit Body as Performance (2013); and Catherine Elwes, Installation and the Moving Image (2015). 9 While Invisible Cities and Hopscotch are included here based on their intersection with screened urbanism, and the other projects in the book relate directly to moving images, there exists a long list of theatrical works that engage spectators very directly by having them move through the space of a performance, or participate in the story itself. See Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More (2011); Then She Fell (2012); and Siobhan O’Loughlin’s Broken Bone Bathtub (2015). 10 Lance Weiler and Nick Fortugno are exploring collaborative and participatory storytelling that is staged both online and on the street with their new transmedia project, Sherlock Holmes & the Internet of Things (2016). Weiler describes the project in an article entitled ‘The Alchemy of Things’ noting that it is a radio play ‘but re-imagined for the twenty-first century. […] It is a layered project that works to explore collaborative practice at the same time as it’s experimenting with a new grammar for storytelling’ (2015: np). 11 See Krzysztof Wodiczko, The Abolition of War (2012), for the artist’s critique of ideology of war in contemporary culture. 5

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Chapter Five: Books to Watch, Films to Read, Stories to Touch: New Interfaces for Storytelling 1 2

3 4

See Michael Betancourt’s The History of Motion Graphics (2013) for a survey of the intersection of typography and moving images. For more on the intersection of literature and digital media, see Loss Pequeño Glazier’s Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries (2008); New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts and Theories, by Adelaide Morris and Thomas Swiss (eds) (2009); Roberto Simanowski’s Digital Art and Meaning: Reading Kinetic Poetry, Text Machines, Mapping Art, and Interactive Installations (2011); C. T. Funkhouser’s New Directions in Digital Poetry (2012); Lori Emerson’s Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound (2014); and Jessica Pressman’s Digital Modernism: Making It New in New Media (2014). For more on participatory art practices, see Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (2012). Based on their experience with Vectors, Anderson and McPherson co-authored an essay entitled ‘Engaging Digital Scholarship: Thoughts on Evaluating Multimedia Scholarship’ (2011).

Chapter Six: Virtual Reality and the Networked Self 1

2 3

4 5

In describing the bear mauling in The Revenant, Leonardo DiCaprio says of Iñarritu, ‘What he creates in that sequence is almost like virtual reality’ – Yvonne Villarreal, ‘Leonardo DiCaprio says that Revenant Scene “Was Incredibly Difficult To Do”’ (2016). In addition, Iñarritu describes the film as a ‘360-degree emotional experience’ in Mandalit Del Barco’s ‘Iñárritu Delivers a “360-Degree Emotional Experience” in The Revenant’ (2015), NPR. Robert C. Powers chronicles virtual filmmaking techniques in Hollywood in ‘The ‘Virtual’ Rebirth of Cinema’, Animation World Network, 5 May 2008. See Lev Manovich’s essay, ‘Image Future’ (2006), for a discussion of the ways in which previously distinct elements of cinematography, graphic design, typography and animation as well as 3D animation combine with new computer-based techniques gradually merged in the personal computer, and, in the process, created a new hybrid aesthetics: ‘This aesthetics exists in endless variations but its logic is the same: juxtaposition of previously distinct visual languages of different media within the same sequence and, quite often, within the same frame’ (2006: 26). See Anne Thompson (2010), ‘How James Cameron’s Innovative New 3D Tech Created Avatar’, Popular Mechanics, for a detailed exploration of the cameras used on Avatar. Other early key texts on VR include Michael Heim’s The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality (1993), Janet H. Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (1998) and Margaret Wertheim’s The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet (2000).

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6 7

For another taxonomy of VR, see Muhana A. Muhana, ‘Virtual Reality and the CAVE: Taxonomy, Interaction Challenges and Research Directions’ (2015). The elastic timeline is a topic of exploration in USC’s MxR Lab within USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies. The larger research agenda has included work on increasing the field of view for head-mounted displays, techniques for enabling natural walking within an immersive virtual environment through redirection, the rapid generation of personalised avatars and virtual humans. The work with virtual humans centres on designing VR experiences to aid war veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress. Harun Farocki critiqued this particular area of research in his 2009 video Immersion, and the video is in turn discussed by Pasi Väliaho in Biopolitical Screens: Image, Power and the Neoliberal Brain (2014). The lab also works on immersive display technologies generally, but in the space of the MxR lab, Vangelis Lympouridis has been investigating the control of temporality, wondering how a participant in a VR experience might easily decelerate time in order to explore something within the world more carefully.

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Index

Aca-Fan 50 Across the Line 155 aesthetics 24, 25–6, 38, 41, 52, 63, 71–2, 91, 105, 109, 117, 122, 141, 164–165n.3, 167n.3; aesthetic of delineation 43; aesthetic of detection 43; aesthetics of interactive media 116; aesthetics of projection performance 71; aesthetic of the real-time 95; cinematic aesthetics 25 ; collage aesthetic 116; remix aesthetics 38 afternoon, a story 117 Afternoon Delight 58 Ahtila, Eija-Liisa 2 Aitken, Doug 2, 96–103, 105 Al Baydha Village 57 algorithm 1, 17, 25, 40, 63, 95, 122, 124, 145 Àlvarez, Federico 18 ambient television 91 American cinema 135 American Dreams (Lost and Found) 113–14 Amériques 88–9 Anadol, Refik 88–9, 109 Anemic Cinema 113 Angels in America 143 animation 18, 27, 35–6, 44–5, 47, 75–80, 88, 95, 126, 137, 139, 142–3, 154–5, 157–8, 167n.3; animated collages 77; animated images 78; animated shorts 48; animated space 151; computer animations 73; definition of animation 80; 3D animation 35, 46 Arbitrage 59 ARGs 19

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Arthur, Paul 68 artificial reality 148 Arts-based research 9–13 audience 4, 7–8, 14, 18, 22, 33, 36, 48–50, 54–7, 68–9, 74–8, 81, 83–4, 86, 89, 93, 102–4, 132, 141, 147, 149; American mass-audience 140; contemporary audiences 84, 146; ideological positioning of audiences 25; live audience 72; online audience 96; teen audience 49 avant-garde 37, 39, 68, 71, 73, 122 avatar 11, 141, 168n.7 Avatar 18, 53, 139–40, 145 Aviator, The 25 Barthes, Roland 84–5 Bauhaus 26 Bazin, André 6 BeAnotherLab 157 Bear 71 127–9 Beautiful World 115–16 Beginnners 59 Bellour, Raymond 4–5 Belson, Jordan 68, 73 Benning, James 113–15 Birdman 141 Birds, The 46 Birth of a Nation 74 Blast Theory 103–105 Bleecker, Julian 90 Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles 118 Blow Debris 98–9

boundary objects 13 Brambilla, Marco 28, 37–41 Breaking Bad 39 Brecht, Bertolt 85 Bresson, Robert 35 Broken Screens: Expanding the Image, Breaking the Narrative: 26 Conversations With Doug Aitken 98 Bruno, Giuliana 7, 91 Bunraku 83–5 Byrd II, William 32

Conversation, The 104 Crazy Bloody Female Center, The 118 Creation (Megaplex) 38 Creative Media and Behavioural Health Center 11 Crooks, Daniel 95–6 Crow, The 52 Cuarón, Alfonso 136 Cubitt, Sean 10, 52, 90 Cumming, Charles 127 Cyberflesh GirlMonster 116

Calvino, Italo 82, 102 Campanile Movie, The 64 Cannizzaro, Danny 110 Can You See Me Now? 103 Carpenter, John 2 Casetti, Francesco 93–4 Casetti, Franco 4 Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE) 148 CG 137, 152, 158 CGI 138, 153, 155–7 Change Making Media Lab 12 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory 52 Chikamatsu, Monzaemon 83–4 Chroma 132 Churi, Maya 126 Cineastas 81–3 cinematic: cinematic aesthetics 25; cinematic heritage 137; cinematic imagery 38–9, 43; cinematic meta-commentary 39; cinematic space 8, 72, 78, 113; post-cinematic 5, 7–8, 15, 17, 19, 21–3, 26–7, 37, 45, 47, 57, 63, 66–7, 76, 78, 81–2, 87, 89, 92, 101, 125, 138, 151, 159–61 City and the City, The 94, 103 Civilization (Megaplex) 38 Clock, The 39 Clockstoppers 46 Clouded Sulphur (death is a knot undone) 83–6 Cloud Eye Control 76–81, 86 Clouds 130–1 Cohen, Jem 79 collage ; animated collages 77; collage of imagery 30; collage of time 30; multilayered collage aesthetic 116; 3D collages 28; see also video collages Collegeology 12 computer-generated imagery see CGI

Dancing With the Virtual Dervish: Virtual Bodies 150 Danube Exodus: The Rippling Currents of the River, The 118 Data Wranglers 45 Davies, Char 150, 152 Dean, Tacita 27, 28–31, 41 Debevec, Paul 64–5, 139 de la Peña, Nonny 2, 155–7 Deleuze, Gilles 4–5, 22, 108 Dement, Linda 116 democratic surround 26–7 DiCaprio, Leonardo 135–6, 167n.1 digital: digital/analogue 41; digital camera 63; digital cinematography 138; digital image 3–4, 63; digital filmmaking 3, 6, 26, 44–5; digital as an image of thought 3; digital spaces 76; digital technologies 5, 8, 73 Digital Imaging Technicians (DITs) 45 documentary: feature-length documentary 125; interactive documentary 128, 130, 132; linear documentary 123; taxonomy of documentary 131; traditional documentary 124; web documentary 127, 129, 130 Dogville 3 Dreaming of Lucid Living 77 Drift Deck (Analogue Edition) 91 Dying of the Light: Film as Medium and Metaphor, The 29 East Los High 49 Edwards, Chris 46 Egyptian Body Politic: Adaptation of #Tahrir 75 Eisenstein, Sergei 92 electric earth 98 electronic literature 112, 117 Elephant 141 Elsaesser, Thomas 144–5

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Entertainment Technology Centre (ETC) 12 Enter the Void 141 Envisioning the Future Group 18 Éphémère 150 Event for a Stage 31 Evolution (Megaplex) 37–8 Evolution of Verse 152–3 expanded cinema/Expanded Cinema 2, 26, 68, 71, 73 expressive processing 130 External World, The 36 Extravagant Shadows, The 31–5 fantasy 25, 51, 70, 137, 145; media fantasy 137 Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas 52 feminism 113, 117, 152; feminist film 117; post-feminism 23 Fernsehturm 28 Fight Club 52, 55, 141–3 FILM 30 Fischinger, Oskar 72, 74 Fisher, Scott 11, 148 5D Global Studio 54 Flight Pattern 77 Forest Grove 126 Forgács, Péter 119 Forms 40 Fourcade, Henry 64 Frontier 100–1 Frost, James 63 Fugitive Time 85–6 Fullerton, Tracy 12, 19 Furie, Eric 139 Future, The 59 Game Innovation Lab (GIL) 12 Gance, Abel 68 Gatten, David 27, 31–5, 37, 41 Gaudenzi, Sandra 131 Gehry, Frank 53, 88 Geiser, Janie 83–7 George, James 65, 130 Gerritzen, Mieke 115–16 Gershenfeld, Neil 53 Gibson, Sandra 70–1 global city 102 Gloria 11 Godard, Jean-Luc 104 González Iñárritu, Alejandro 135–6, 141, 167n.1 Google maps 122, 127

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Gordon, Douglas 2 Gorman, Samantha 110 Gotsis, Marientina 11 Gravity 136–7, 142, 146 Green Ray, The 28–9 Gregoire, Daniel 46 Grossberger-Morales, Lucia 117 Guattari, Félix 5 Half Life 80–1 Halo 2 49 Hanson, Eric 65–6 Hardwood Process 32 Harris, Jonathan 122–5, 129 Hayles, N. Katherine 15, 112, 145–7 Heilig, Morton 148–9, 151 Henry 154 Her 35 Hill, Gary 115 Hill, Randall 11 Hill, Stuart Warren 72 Hitchcock, Alfred 46 Hochmuth, Greg 129 Hollywood 2, 5, 18, 25, 35, 38, 49, 52, 58–60, 65, 78, 98, 113, 118, 137–8, 140, 149, 151 hologram 105–7 Hopscotch 102–3, 166 House of Cards 25 House of Cards (video) 63, 97 Humanism 15–16, 150, 164n.9 human/nonhuman 15 Hunger in Los Angeles 155, 158 I Came and Went as a Ghost Hand 158 identity 2, 8, 14–15, 17, 21–2, 25, 67, 82, 83, 87, 90, 94, 105, 109, 138; democratic identity 27; loss of identity 164n.9; physical identity 157; questions of identity 105 Ikeda, Ryoji 74 I Love Bees 49 imagery: cinematic imagery 38–9; circles of imagery 76; collage of imagery 30; computer- generated imagery 31, 138, 151; digital imagery 63; foetal imagery 152; generate imagery 74; holographic imagery 106; iconic imagery 116; projected imagery 77–8; stereoscopic imagery 148; see also hologram impurity 5–6, 17, 21, 115 Inception 4

Incidence of Catastrophe 115–16 Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) 11, 139, 168n.7 Interactive Media and Games Division (IMGD) 19 interface 2–3, 26, 39, 76, 81, 89–90, 106, 110–27, 130–2, 134, 142, 160; digital interface 34; fluid interface 72; gestural interfaces 53; interface as a dynamic space 125; screen-based interfaces 104; spatial interfaces 126; touchscreen interface 119 Invisible Cities 102–4, 166n.9 Invisible Cities (book) 102 I Want You to Want Me 124 Jacobs, Ken 69–70 Jaunt Lab 12 Jenik, Adriene 116 Jesus’ Son 59 JG 30 John Harvard Projection 105–6 Jonze, Spike 35, 153 Jubilee Line 95 Kaamos 76 Kahn, Douglas 67, 74 Kamvar, Sep 124 Kinder, Marsha 47–8, 117–18 Kinetic 113–14 King Kong 25, 139 Koblin, Aaron 63, 66, 97 Kodak 29 Krueger, Myron 148 Labyrinth Project 117–21 LA Dance Project 102 Lair of the Marrow Monkey 132 language of symbols 115 Lanier, Jaron 53, 148, 157 Last Hijack 125–6 Latour, Bruno 127 Laurel, Brenda 149–50, 152 Lawnmower Man, The 52 Legible City, The 113 Letters From Homeroom 126 Leviathan Project 12 Lialina, Olia 117 Lidar 43, 66, 97 Light Stage systems 139–40 Little Miss Sunshine 59

live cinema 2, 67–87, 160 live theatre 86 Lizzie Bennett Diaries, The 49 LoopLoop 95 Lost 154 Lost Highway 75 Loyer, Erik 2, 132–4 Love Suicides at Sonezaki, The 83 Lucas, George 46 Luckey, Palmer 146–7 Lumière brothers 4, 7, 25, 43, 69, 152 Lynn, Greg 53 Machine To Be Another, The 157 Machine To See With, A 103–4 Made in the USA 104 Mad Men 39 Makela, Mia 75–6, 86 Man of Steel 52 Marclay, Christian 39 Mario Merz 28, 31 Mari, Pedro 74 Martian, The 136 Matreyek, Miwa 76–81, 83 Matrix, The (franchise) 48, 65 Mauve Desert 116 McDowell, Alex 12, 51–7 Media Institute for Social Change 12 Megaplex (series) 38–9 Micheaux, Oscar 74 Miéville, China 94, 103 Milk, Chris 121, 151–2 Minard, Jonathan 65, 130 Minority Report 51–3, 56 Mirror 101–2 mise-en-scène 61, 78, 80 Mistaken Identities 116 MIT Open Documentary Lab 132 Mobile Environmental Media Lab (MEML) 11 Moment, The 99 Morisset, Vincent 157 Mountain 36–7 Movie, A 114 Movie-Mural 69 moving image 1–6, 18, 24, 39–41, 43, 68, 70, 73, 88, 91, 93, 110, 112, 115, 136, 143, 166n.9; juxtaposition of moving image 39, 92; language of moving image 38; large-scale moving images 8; magic of moving images 70;

INDEX

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moving image cont. moving image tableau 37; presentation of moving images 68; realm of moving images 116 Mulvey, Laura 24, 39 My Body: A Wunderkammer 117 My Boyfriend Came Back From the War 117 Napoleon 68 narrative: first narrative 82; generation of narrative 11; Hollywood narrative 98; larger narrative 39; narrative of consumer culture 58; narrative design 126, 158; narrative design process 53; narrative environment 53; narrative pleasure 83–7 narrative structure 17, 25, 52; non-narrative 124; meta-narrative 60; micro-narrative 58; on-screen narrative 78, 98; pre-scripted narrative 103; representational narrative 78; spherical narratives 153 neoliberalism 5, 21–2, 24, 122, 161 Nervous Magic Lantern 70 Nervous System (projects) 70 Net art 2 Network Effect 129–30 Neuromancer 146 Never Let Me Go 59 Noé, Gaspar 141 Nomadic Light Sculpture 97 No Somos Delito 106 Nova, Nicholas 90 Nugget 60–1 Ocean Flight 77 Oculus Rift 147, 157 One Dark Night 155 O’Neill, Pat 68, 118 Opening the 19th Century: 1896 69 O’Reilly, David 27, 35–7, 41 Osmose 150 OSS 153–5 Pallotta, Tommy 125 Panic Attack 18 Panic Room 143 Paris: Invisible City 127 Partitura-Ligeti 74 Patchwork Girl 117 Pensotti, Mariano 81–3, 86 performative cartography 104

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Phantom (kingdom of all the animals and all the beasts is my name) 158 photogrammetry 63–6, 142 Photosynth 66 phototheodolite 64 pitchviz 45 Placeholder 149–50 Pleasant Places 40–1 Please Say Something 36 Porter, Alexander 65 post- ; post-cinema 5, 8, 22–42, 160; post-communism 23–4; post-digital 23; post-feminism 23; post-Fordism 24; post-literate 16–17; post-Marxism 23; post-medium 32; post-photographic 63-6; post-punk 23; post-war cybernetics 15; post-World War I 74; see also cinematic Post-Analogue Era 145 posthuman/posthumanism 2, 7, 14–17, 22, 26–7, 37, 45, 57, 67, 76, 78, 81–3, 85–7, 138, 141–2, 144, 147, 151, 159–61, 164n.9; critical posthumanism 16; posthuman concept of identity 81; posthuman era 15, 63; posthuman ethos 57 Postmodernism 23–4 poststructuralism 113, 116 post-traumatic stress 11, 168n.7 postviz 46 POV/point of view 17, 37, 39, 138, 141, 144, 149; first-person point of view 122, 143 Previsualisation 45–7, 66 Project Syria 155 Prune.Flat. 69 Pry 110–12 Psycho 46 Pulfrich Pendulum Effect 69 Puppet Motel 117 puppetry 83–6 Quayola, Davide 27, 40–2, 74 Radiohead 63, 66 , 97 reality games 19, 49, 127; see also ARGs real-time image 81, 154 Real Women Have Curves 59 Recoder, Luis 70–1 Revenant, The 135–7, 146, 159, 167n.1 RGB XYZ 36 Rocket Science 59

Rossin, Rachel 158 Ruben & Lullaby 132 Russian Ark 44 Salonen, Esa-Pekka 88 Sangre Boliviana 117 Scalar 121 Scalar Lab 12, 121 ScanLAB Projects 43 Scarface 140 Schamus, James 24–5 Scheckel, Joan 58–63 School of Cinematic Arts 9–13, 17–21, 54–5, 65, 138, 161 screened urbanism 88–109, 160, 166n.9 Secret History of the Dividing Line 32 Sensorama 148 Serendipitor 91 Sharon, Yuval 102–5 Shaviro, Steven 5 She Loves It, She Loves It Not 116–17 Shepard, Mark 91 Shereen Sakr, Laila see Um Amel SIGGRAPH 138 Sin City 25 Sinigaglia, Natan 74 Sink or Swim 113 skeuomorphic 145–6 Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow 25 Slater, Mel 155–6 Sleepwalkers 99–100 Smithson, Robert 30, 101, 147 Snow White and the Huntsman 59 Soloway, Jill 58–62 Solu see Makela, Mia Sometimes I Think, I Can See You 81 spatial turn 9 speculative spaces 9–10, 37–40 Spielberg, Steven 53 Spinotti, Dante 20 Spiral Jetty 30, 101 Station to Station 96–8, 101–2 Station to Station (video) 97 Steegmann Mangran, Daniel 158 stereophotogrammetry 64 stereoscopic: stereoscopic cinema 137; stereoscopic imagery 148; stereoscopic performances 69; stereoscopic photographs 64; stereoscopic space 90; stereoscopic 3D 37–8

storytelling: journalistic storytelling 155; media-based storytelling 7, 11; robotic storytelling 122; screen-based storytelling 2, 15; storytelling workflow 51, 55; visual storytelling 24, 132, 135; see also interface Strange Rain 133–4 Strickland, Rachel 149–50 Sundance Film Festival 103, 153, 157 Superstruct 19 Surface 91 Sutherland, Ivan 148 synaesthetic cinema 73 Tamblyn, Christine 116 Tango (Project) 66 Technique, the 58–63 techviz 45 Terminal, The 52, 55 Test Pattern 74 This World Made Itself 78 Thomas the Obscure 115 Thoreau, Henry David 12 3D: Hollywood 3D 35; Kinect 3D 88; Stereo 3D 38; stereoscopic 3D 37–8; 3D animation 35, 46, 167n.3; 3D art and design 38, 151; 3D assets 46; 3D audio technology 148; 3D collages 28; 3D computer graphics 65; 3D environment 65, 157; 3D glasses 37, 39, 69; 3D images 130; 3D modelling 64–5, 108; 3D scanning 43; 3D space 38, 66; 3D topographical map 128; 3D visual 155 360-degree videos 153 Thrift, Nigel 9, 57–8 Tomorrowland 46 Touch of Evil 140 2001: A Space Odyssey 152 Train No. 10 (onward backwards) 95–6 Tracing the Decay of Fiction: Encounters With a Film by Pat O’Neill 118 Transient Media Lab 11 transmedia design 47–51, 118 Transparent 58–9, 62 Tricklebank, Ben 97 Trying to Find the Spiral Jetty 30 Turrell, James 70 21 Steps, The 127 typography 110, 113–16, 167 Um Amel 75

INDEX

191

Underkoffler, John 3, 53 Under Polaris 79 unReal 59 Urbaneja, Javier 106 urban space 89–95, 106 Uroskie, Andrew V. 26, 68–9 VanDerBeek, Stan 69, 71 Varèse, Edgar 88 Vicon System 138–40 Victory Garden 117 video art 2, 39, 93, 99, 113, 122 video collages 38 video games 2, 47–9; first-person shooter 141; genre of 37 Virkhaus, Vello 72 virtual cameras 138, 158 Virtual Environment Workstation Project (VIEW) 148 virtual reality 2, 12, 53, 135–58 visual music 2, 72–3, 88 Visual Programming Language (VPL) 148 VJ 72–3, 75 VJing 72 VR 11–12, 131, 137–8, 144, 145–55, 157–9, 168n.7 VRSE 151–3, 57

192

FAST FORWARD

Walden 12 Way to Go 157–8 We Are Not a Crime see No Somos Delito Weiler, Lance 2, 166n.10 We Feel Fine 124, 129–30 Whale Hunt, The 122–25, 129 Whale Rider 59 Whitman, Robert 69 Whitney, James and John 73 Wilderness Downtown, The 121–2 Williams, Raymond 22, 27 Within Our Gates 74 Wodiczko, Krzysztof 105–7, 166n.11 WOFL 2106 35 Wolfe, Cary 15, 17 Wolting, Femke 125 world building 12, 51–8, 66, 141, 149 World Building Media Lab (WBML) 12 World Without Oil 19 Yang, Chi-wang 77, 79 Yosemite Extreme Panoramic Imaging Project 65–6 Youngblood, Gene 68, 73 Zsigmond, Vilmos 140–1