Digital Folds, or Cinema's Automated Brain

Course Description: This required M.A course is an advanced journey through the theoretical debates on film and media aesthetics. We will explore the ontological status of Cinema, its relationship to other media forms and its transformed nature in the digital age. The technological basis of cinematic and media practice will be central to the framing of aesthetic concerns. At the end of the 19th century, technologically mediated moving images ushered in a fundamental transformation in the spheres of public life and human experience. The aesthetic question no longer remained limited only to the formal and stylistic features of a tangible object but to a transformation of sensory perception. When viewed from the vantage point of the contemporary digital age, new issues come to the fore. In this journey from celluloid to the digital, the moving image will be positioned as a form of modern magic, as an indexical art, as an inter-medial surface, as a historical archive, as collage, as assemblage, and as a site of terror, thrill, and enchantment. We will focus on key theoretical formulations and specific historical conjunctures along with close analysis of filmic and media material. The course is only open to those who have already done Introduction to Film Studies.

In the past decade, the discourse around digital cinema has flourished and given birth to a long series of ontological and phenomenological reflections around the status of the medium in the digital age. Can digital cinema still be called ‘cinema?’. Does cinema conserve its indexical nature, or is digital cinema just a simulation? What are the effects of the proliferation of screens, and the consequent loss of the centrality of movie theaters as the place for consumption of moving images? With my essay, I would like to investigate the status of digital preservation within the world of digital cinema. How is digital preservation different from analog preservation, if at all? And how are digitally restored moving images different from a film shot digitally? If a digital image is a simulation of reality, rather than a trace left by it (as the analog image supposedly was), what is the status of the digitization of an analog photographic image? I will argue that digital preservation forces us to reconsider the analog-digital opposition, and provides a framework through which to rethink not only the present state of cinema, but also its past and the future of its history.

Leonardo. Supplemental Issue, 1990

The Handbook of Visual Culture, ed. Heywood and Sandywell, 2011

I As we celebrate one hundred years of filmmaking since the release of Raja Harishchandra in 1913, the Indian film industry seems to be in a déjà vu of sorts. Just as cinema during Phalke was breaking fresh technological grounds, cinema today appears to be breaking newer grounds with a new technology of digital cinema. One is likely to observe many parallels between Phalke's times and now, with similar dilemmas, similar despairs and also similar possibilities and exuberances. The arrival of digital cinematography, in more than one way changes the way cinema responds to society and produces and circulates culture, just as once the arrival of the technology of cinema changed the Indian viewing culture. The change in technology that the digital cinema brings about produces some major changes in the kind of cinema that gets made and viewed and accordingly also interact and partake in the constitution and the politics of the society in which it is made and watched. The aim of the present paper is to understand the major changes in the viewer politics which the digital cinema is likely propagate.

Upon being invited to take part in this symposium I gave myself to musing over the theme, "Repetition as an Aesthetic/Epistemological , which has great resonance in my forays into the intersections between philosophy and movingimage culture. Cinema is a rich subject for this inquiry: an industry that was born from the assembly-line era of mechanical reproduction, that quickly secreted codes and conventions of aesthetic language, and that is archived in spools and on disks meant to be projected in a uniform manner. And, yet, today I want to take to speak of the impossibility of repetition, and how this is connected to the potential of film expression and to certain concepts central to the field popularly known as filmphilosophy. If time moves and the universe's molecules redistribute, can anything actually repeat? If I ask this question again, it will not be the same. With temporal change, flux and impermanence are the only absolutes. Bearing witness to this essential condition of all things existent in time is the great magic and intrigue of cinema: the film reel moves in a spiral, not a circle. Repetition is impossible.

(Peer-reviewed Book) Yearbook of Moving Image Studies [YoMIS] Germany , 2018

One of the aims of this article is to demonstrate that the experiential aspects of images involve the dichotomy between illusion and reality. This aim is achieved by elucidating the contemporary analyses and the interpretations of artifacts that stimulate visual perception. In addition, this article illuminates the aesthetic and historical aspects of images, regarding them as artistic ideas and architectural achievements. In doing so, it also highlights the most significant elements that perpetuate themselves in the configuration and the perception of the moving image. Also, it evaluates the way the public arena influences the transformation of art and the interplay between values and cultures. Initially, the article examines some theories that seek to analyze these transformations by focusing on the development of the image. Using concepts such as mimesis and catharsis, the theories characterize the evolution of the image as a form of innovation. Furthermore, the present article considers reasons that Walter Benjamin’s (1892-1940) analyses of perception and the significance of “aura” regarding technical reproducibility and the thought of Bertolt Brecht and Jean Baudrillard are all influenced significantly by the oeuvres of Kant and Hegel. The work of these theorists is used to analyze the processes involved in the creation of images and in the understanding of the concept of “imagination” with respect to “illusion.” In effecting such an evaluation, the article suggests that the meaning of images may be understood in relation to their time-space dynamics. Equally essential is an emphasis on concepts such as reasoning and aesthetic judgment because these notions present themselves as abstract elements that lie beyond everyday truths. In addition, a clear understanding of these concepts leads to a better appreciation of the phenomenon of appearance and of the contemporary socio-political realities that are shaped by technological convergence. YoMIS is a double-blind peer-reviewed, an interdisciplinary publication by Research Group Moving Image Science, Kiel University of Applied Sciences and MSD Münster School of Design | Germany Editors: Lars Christian Grabbe, Patrick Rupert-Kruse, Norbert M. Schmitz Marburg: Büchner-Verlag eG, 2018 ISBN 978-3-96317-137-6 Cites as: Wagner, Christiane. 2018. “Art and Perfect Illusion: From Architecture to Cinema. On the Era of Technological Convergence.” In Image Evolution. Technological Transformations of Visual Media Culture. Yearbook of Moving Image Studies, edited by Lars C. Grabbe, Patrick Rupert-Kruse and Norbert M. Schmitz. Marburg: Büchner-Verlag, 34-57.

Cantoni, Lorenzo & James A. Danowski (eds.), Communication and Technology (Handbooks of Communication Science, vol. 5), Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2015

The relationship between cinema and technology has been present since the very inception of motion pictures, looking to offer a more immersive and believable experience. This chapter presents a comprehensive compilation of key scholarly literature – mainly in the English language – while identifying some of the theoretical issues, emerging concepts, current and further research, as well as lists of references with regard to this topic. In order to accomplish this task, it is divided into three main sections. The first one focuses on the relationship between the arts and technology, and specifically between cinema and the arts, and between cinema and technology. The middle section draws a brief historical sum- mary on the technological development of the (audio)visual media, moving from the primitive canvas to the first photographic plates and from the birth of cinema to the digital image. Finally, the third part is a synthesis of some of the most relevant theoretical and critical issues regarding the imbrication of art, technology and cinema, all of it in the words of well-known experts and scholars. An epilogue with some final thoughts closes this chapter

Critical Quarterly, 2009

AM Journal of Art and Media Studies

In the 1960s and 1970s the Clement Greenberg’s Modernist ideology of ‘purity’ played a central role in the definition of ‘avant-garde cinema’ as a serious, major genre of film. This transfer between ‘fine art’ and ‘avant-garde film’ was articulated as ‘structural film’ by P. Adams Sitney. This heritage shapes contemporary debates over ‘postcinema’ as digital technology undermines the ontology and dispositive of historical cinema. Its discussion here is not meant to reanimate old debates, but to move past them. Article received: March 12, 2018; Article accepted: April 10, 2018; Published online: September 15, 2018; Original scholarly paperHow to cite this article: Betancourt, Michael. "‘Cinema’ as a Modernist Conception of Motion Pictures." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 16 (2018): 55−67. doi: 10.25038/am.v0i16.254