Ebin - Pub - The Digital Image and Reality Affect Metaphysics and Post Cinema 9789048538652

The Digital Image and Reality
The Digital Image and Reality

Affect, Metaphysics, and Post-Cinema
Dan Strutt
Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: Studio Aszyk, London.
Cover design: Kok Korpershoek, Amsterdam

Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout
isbn 978 94 6298 713 5

e-isbn 978 90 4853 865 2
doi 10.5117/9789462987135
nur 670
© D. Strutt / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2019
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of
this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise)
without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.
Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations
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advised to contact the publisher.
Contents
Acknowledgements 7
1. Cinema’s Foundational Frissons 9

The Arrival of the Digital Image at the Station 9
A Futurist Cinema of Attractions 13
What is Post about Post-Cinema? 21
But is it Art? 26
From Cine-thinking to Digi-thinking 30
Technology and Reality 34
2. The Affective Synthesis of Reality by Digital Images 41

A Great Evolution 42
A Question of Cause and Responsibility 44
Cinema and Affection 48
Passive Synthesis and the Spiritual Automaton 51
Do We Need a New ‘Digital’ Image Type – A ‘Cinema 3’? 58
The Digital Revealing of Reality 60
Interstellar’s Ontological Revealing 64
The Digital Pharmakon 67
Plasticity and Politics 72
3. ‘A Digital Frontier to Reshape the Human Condition’: Virtual

Border Spaces and Affective Embodiment in Tron and
Enter the Void 79
Overcoming Spatial Realism 83
Digital Emergence 85
Tron: Legacy 90
Enter the Void 94
Troubling the Threshold 97
The Digital Border Zone and Cinematic Ethics 101
Signs of Art at the Limits of Humanity 105
Conclusion 109
4. Dynamic Digital Spaces, Bodies, and Forces 113
‘Moving’ Pictures: Scientific vs. Aesthetic Truths 118
Formal Dynamics of the Digital Image 123
Movement, Space, and Kinaesthesis 131
The Body in Movement: Digital Dance 136
The Kinetic Dynamism of the Epic Digital Battle Scene 143
The Digital Neo-Baroque 148
Rethinking Cinema through Digital 3D 151
Conclusion 154
5. Reality Sutures, Simulation, and Digital Realism 159

The Malleable Mediated Mind 163
Rethinking Suture 167
Resemblance and the Mimetic Faculty 172
Metaphor and Embodied Simulation 174
Kinetic Synaesthesia and the Photographic Image 177
Virtuality, Plasticity, and Play 184
Avatar and Digital Naturalism 188
Source Code and the Quantum Mind 193
6. A Digital Nihilism: Ethical Reflections 199

Autonomous Art and the Disappearance of Utopia 202
‘A Business, a Pornography, a Hitlerism’ 205
The Everyday Art Object of Industrial Design 208
Bernard Stiegler’s Ethical Prognosis 211
‘A Chaotic Scribble’ 214
The Active Subject in Digitality 219
Digital Nihilism and Ontological Plasticity 221
Conclusion 223
Bibliography 227
Index 241
Acknowledgements
This text has been a labour of love for many years spent in research and
study at Goldsmiths and thus I have several people to thank: those who
have carried me through a process which can, at times, be very isolating;
and those who have directly influenced the development of the ideas that
I present. First of all I need to thank Rachel Moore and Pasi Väliaho, the
former who championed me through the AHRC funding process some 10
years ago, and both of whom gave early shape and focus to my intellectual
ambitions through their careful supervision and encouragement. I’ll also be
eternally grateful to Angela McRobbie, who has been my patron and advocate
for some 15 years now, and who has always had my back both intellectually
and professionally. I’d like to give credit also to Patricia Pisters and Luciana
Parisi, who bewildered me with their critique back in 2013, and yet who
ultimately helped me realise the strength of my own work. More recently,
Sean Cubitt and James Burton have generously given valuable feedback
toward writing this final version, offering support which has buoyed me to
the finishing line. Finally, I’d like to thank Lisa Blackman, who has looked
out for me as a friend as well as a mentor, and who has ensured my stability
at Goldsmiths in a way that has been absolutely invaluable throughout the
writing process.
1. Cinema’s Foundational Frissons
Dan Strutt
Abstract
This introduction lays out the coordinates of the book’s main philosophical
contention – that the world is perceived and felt to be different under a
general condition of digitality as a form of ‘digi-thinking’. It establish a
synergy between digital visual media and theoretical physics and suggest
that current screen culture, rather than being only orientated to spectacle,
actually equips us with new skills in perception for a world of experience
which is increasingly virtualised. The chapter refers to a set of embodied ef-
fects specific to the digital image; of flying, floating, swarming, morphing,
and glitching, within the context of recent cinematic content such as
Interstellar (2014) to set the scene of a contemporary digital imaginary.
Keywords: Post-Cinema, Futurism, Cinema of Attractions, Deleuze,

Heidegger, Ontology
The transition from the diegesis of the film to the social realm of the multiplex,
even the emergence from video or DVD viewing to the familial space of the living
room, is not without a certain frisson. The border state too has its significance,
especially in the diminution of intensity coupled with a heightened alertness to
whatever quirky events might occur outside the theatre. An aura of wholeness
persists, fading, as you make your way home. (Cubitt, 2005, p. 269)
The Arrival of the Digital Image at the Station
As many accounts would have it, the first screening of the Lumière broth-
ers’ film L’a rrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat in 1895 had quite
the impact on the audience. Indeed, it has been called cinema’s founding
myth, that the audience, overwhelmed by the apparent reality of a full-size
Strutt, D., The Digital Image and Reality. Affect, Metaphysics, and Post-Cinema, Amsterdam
University Press, 2019
doi 10.5117/9789462987135_ch01
10 The Digital Image and Realit y
train rolling towards them, screamed and ran to the back of the room.1 In
many ways, one can easily imagine this naïve group of ordinary people,
whose prior knowledge of reality could only be accounted for by natural
perception, suddenly confronted by a large image which they simply could
not appropriate into their understanding of the way the world works. This
‘virtual’ reality of cinema, apparently indiscernible from the real, thus
induced shock, astonishment, and panic as they scrambled to get away from
the massive moving object that would surely crush them. We can see that
their reality, in this moment, was fundamentally challenged and changed.
Leaving the screening that day, they had to live in a new world in which
such images exist; in which both the nature of images, and the nature of
reality, are transformed, such that new skills in cognition/perception must
be adopted to discern the difference. In some small way, their consciousness
had evolved.
Of course, as has been well established, the above story is apocryphal,
the original mythology – perhaps marketing strategy – of the transcend-
ent power of cinema (it is possible that this film was not even part of the
Lumières’s first screening, and was not in fact shown until 1896). Indeed,
contrary to the image conjured of a train accelerating directly toward the
audience as if about to enter the room, the train glides off to the left of the
screen before calmly pulling to a halt (without anything like the direct
audience confrontationalism of, for instance, James Williamson’s The
Big Swallow from 1901). However, whether true or not, this event’s myth
status does not mean that it does not resonate with a more fundamental
truth about media. There is no doubt that some novel kind of conscious
experience occurs when confronted by a new media form. However, this
need not be the outright shock or astonishment of an earth-shattering,
terror-inducing tectonic shift in cognisance, but something more like, as
Sean Cubitt puts it in the opening quotation of this book, ‘a certain frisson’.
Even so, such moments make a difference. As intensity fades, and as we
leave the screen space and return to the more familiar environment of the
streets and our homes, we quietly and unconsciously adjust our realities
to what we have experienced.
The train here becomes an apt metaphor for the challenge to conscious-
ness that emergent media technologies present. First, the train is cinema
1 Both Tom Gunning (1990) and Stephen Bottomore (2000) examine various reports of audi-
ence reactions to early film in an attempt to document what Gunning calls a ‘myth of origin’,
also known as the ‘train effect’, after the alleged shock reaction of viewers to the Lumières’s
film.
Cinema’s Foundational Frissons 11
itself; later, it is cinematic sound; then, it is colour; and, even later, it is 3D. The
train is then digital – literally in the opening scene of Martin Scorcese’s Hugo
(in Digital 3D), as both an homage to, and cinematic in-joke about, this myth
of origin (see Elsaesser, 2013). As Timothy Scott Barker describes in Time and
the Digital (2012), the arrival of the actual locomotive technology in industrial
society (not yet as metaphor, nor as image) habitually altered notions of
time and space. Not only did it collapse travel distance and duration, but
also perceptually framed, through the train window, a new spatio-temporal
understanding – a kind of incipient proto-cinema. For Barker, the train
is a ‘technological event’ like the telephone, television, digital networks,
and digital image production – a technology which fundamentally alters
human experience by restructuring communication, and which ‘not only
makes the unseen seen, but adds another sensory object to our experience
of the world, changing the way we think about our visual reality and also
about movement and time’ (ibid, p. 8).2 These events do not distance us
from reality, but rather reconfigure our metaphysical consciousness such
that reality is ‘mediated’ differently.
This ‘event’ – the cinematic image of a train arriving at a station, albeit
apocryphally, brought a new perceptual experience to the modern age, of
an object moving through perspectival space, yet one that is not actually
physically present. In the moments afterwards, the spectator must have
become aware, not only of the primary non-presence of train, but also of the
presence and functionality of the screen and projector which yielded this
illusory effect. The cinematic apparatus here presented its own spatial and
temporal reality which had to be immediately incorporated into habitual
modes of perception and understanding. This may not have occurred as a
traumatic shock to the system, but rather a kind of droll surprise – a sharp
intake of breath, a raised eyebrow.
Sueng Hoon Jeong, in his Cinematic Interfaces, reflects on this event as
the origin, not only of a virtual reality, but also of a fundamental tension of
embodiment at the interface of the screen. He notes: ‘Lumière’s first train
film suggests that cinema might have come into being through a kind of
intercourse between the self-destructive and self-defensive power of the
screen’ (2013, p. 91). He suggests that the cinematic image is originally about
this flickering tension between our embodied sense of the reality within
the screen (a suturing effect), our awareness of the illusory apparatus (de-
suturing), and, at the same time, the birth of a primal fantasy, or perverse
2 The event for Barker is understood via Badiou – defined as a cluster of circumstances resulting
in a ‘rupture in Being’ and a subsequent re-centring of our subjective relation to truth (2012).
desire, for penetration ‘into and through’ this interface. This is an ontologi-
cal tension – one that plays along the boundary of our consciousness of
the different domains of reality which we experience. As with the other
examples of this interface-breach that Jeong gives – of Sadako climbing
through the TV screen in the horrif ic climax to Ringu (Hideo Nakata,
1998), or the slicing of the eyeball as a de-suturing slash through the screen/
retina in Un Chien Andalou (Dali and Buñuel, 1929) – the feeling that
the train might burst through the screen forms an original ontological
sublime, both pleasurable and disturbing in equal measure, and which
continues to this day to stimulate thought about objective and subjective
metaphysical realities.
From the origins of cinema we then move to the object of this book – to
the post-cinematic image (a complex of notions of contemporary images
that are both continuous and discontinuous with 20th-century film theory)
and to a set of images more specifically brought about by the digital – by
digital processes, on digital screens, and with digital themes. These are
images which institute new ontological tensions and pleasures, while
perhaps leaving the original ones intact, or alternatively re-versioning or
‘re-launching’ them (as we see in the conclusion to Chapter Two). In the
films which I have explored in the writing of this book, such as Source
Code (dir. Duncan Jones, 2011), Avatar (dir. James Cameron, 2009), and
Interstellar (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2014), as well as in digital imagery
beyond narrative film form and outside the media mainstream, we have
‘events’ that stand for the emergence of a different technological apparatus
(and interface), and thus a new technological condition that, like the train
arriving at the station, synthesises a distinct mode of ‘being-in-the-world’ (a
Heideggerian holistic mode of thinking, seeing, and feeling ourselves within
a tangible reality). This ‘synthesis’ does not necessarily occur in a moment
of bodily violence, terror, or erotic arousal (potentially horrific for Žižek
[1989]; potentially an ecstatic, masochistic ‘passionate abandonment’ to the
machinic body/interface meld for Jeong [2013, p. 94]). Rather, it proceeds
through an accumulation of seemingly disconnected images, of cinematic
moments as fragments or frissons, of pleasurable or uncanny affects; images
which indeed fade from consciousness as we make our way home from the
multiplex (or even from the living room to the kitchen), but that also take
root in our psyche. This book is thus to be read as a series of trains arriving
at a station – a collection of metaphysical shifts arriving at the platforms
of our collective consciousness.
A Futurist Cinema of Attractions
Of course, any digital frisson can easily be dismissed as part of a commodity

culture of ‘technological’ cinematic experience – a culture of Debordian
spectacle which amounts to a degradation of culture, and to facile forms of
cultural engagement. The oft-cited films that are emblematic of digital cinema
(The Matrix, Avatar, Tron, etc.) are objects of a commercial entertainment
market and, as such, for reasons including the mode of attention, the space
of their consumption, the industrial mode of production, or the synthetic
affections they afford us, they seem to have little value as objects of art. They
are junk food, regularly consumed and enjoyed though we know that they
are, cumulatively, bad for us. With these films taken as individual texts, you
can’t deny that this attitude may have a modicum of truth – they are often
defined by their gimmicks, their smart intertextual references, their celebrity
star-power. However, to look at them collectively, drawing links to other visual
practices beyond the traditional cinematic form, they start to form a matrix
which seems to express a distinctive shift in sensibility – resulting in a changed
‘structure of feeling’ (Shaviro, 2010)3 or ‘regime of the sensible’ (Rancière,
2006). More simply put, together they seem to form a more permanent and
generalised change in ways of thinking, seeing, and feeling that is no mere
whimsy, and perhaps, I will suggest, even offers us a new philosophy.
Despite certain shifts away from past cultural elitisms, an attitude
endures that a divide exists between the objects of popular culture and
serious artistic practice in terms of their ‘contribution’ to society. It is fairly
acknowledged that most digital innovation happens within an industrial
entertainment (and industrial-military) context due to the cost of develop-
ment, and so digital CGI and simulation are often perceived as the product
of a cynical economic motive rather than an aesthetic or social one (Belton,
2002; Gurevitch, 2010).4 A socioeconomic divide exists between the audiences
of the multiplex and the ‘arthouse’ cinema, with the at-scale commodity
3 This phrase is used in Steven Shaviro’s sense in his book Post-Cinematic Affect in which
he states: ‘I am therefore concerned, in what follows, with effects more than causes, and with
evocations rather than explanations. That is to say, I am not looking at Foucauldian genealogies
so much as at something like what Raymond Williams called “structures of feeling” (though I
am not using this term quite in the manner that Williams intended). I am interested in the ways
that recent film and video works are expressive: that is to say, in the ways that they give voice (or
better, give sounds and images) to a kind of ambient, free-floating sensibility that permeates our
society today, although it cannot be attributed to any subject in particular’ (Shaviro, 2010, p. 2)
4 For reflection on the role of military technology in our contemporary entertainment culture,
see Lenoir and Lowood’s ‘Theaters of War: The Military-Entertainment Complex’ (2003).
film often seen by the latter as dragging culture down: ‘digital Hollywood
denegates culture’ (Cubitt, 2005, p. 270). More ostentatiously social or
philosophical content, however, seems to fulfil an idealised ethical role,
challenging audiences towards contemplation and attending to the ‘spiritual’
growth of society (in a secular sense). However, throughout this project,
in analyses of the ontological problematics and new spatio-temporal and
metaphysical dynamics of new popular digital screen content, there is an
attitude that these things do make a lasting and profound ethical difference
no matter what taste cultures surround them.
In this way, I ask people to look again at the familiar ‘low’ culture and
popular genre works within a digital culture – with their clichéd narratives,
predictable crescendos, and overly neat closures – to see what else emerges
‘passively’ from these images. We are still, as a culture, accustomed to reading
and critiquing popular media in a conventional, narrative way, such that
we often brush aside the affective tonalities of the action set-pieces, shot-
composition, and synergies of sound and movement as mere trinkets. The
true ‘meaning’ of a film often seems so obviously based within the narrative
and its characters. From this point of view, the film ceases to be seen as a fu-
sion of many logical and affective elements as polysemous levels of meaning
(rather like saying the meaning of a song is only in the lyrics rather than in
the musical composition). Digital effects as ‘superficial’ elements feel like
affective lures and illusion through distraction, which deludes weak minds
into thinking that they’ve had a worthwhile experience. However, there
is a developing academic critique that instead sees these digital effects as
valuable non-narrative experiments in sensation/perception. In the concepts
of theorists such as Scott Bukatman (the kaleidoscopic image, 2003), Scott
Richmond (the proprioceptive aesthetic, 2016), Aylish Wood (the digital
encounter, 2007), Kristin Whissel (digital effects emblems, 2014), and Angela
Ndalianis (the digital neo-baroque, 2005), we have a focus on effects which
are supra-narrative, and yet meaningful in alternative modes of sensory
engagement.5 Within this critique, I also see these ‘free-floating intensities’
not as tricks,6 but as nodes within a rhizomatic structure of affects and
5 Also of interest are Stephen Prince’s Digital Visual Effects in Cinema: The Seduction of Reality
(2011), Michele Pierson’s Special Effects: Still in Search of Wonder (2002), Lisa Purse’s Digital
Imaging in Popular Cinema (2013), Stephen Keane’s Disaster Movies: The Cinema of Catastrophe
(2006), Nicholas Rombes’s Cinema in the Digital Age (2017), and Lisa Bode’s Making Believe: Screen
Performance and Special Effects in Popular Cinema (2017).
6 Here I reclaim Jameson’s apparently damning description of the meaningless affections
of ‘the newer cultural experience’ as ‘a whole new type of emotional ground tone – what I will
call intensities […] free-floating and impersonal […] dominated by a peculiar kind of euphoria’,
effects which together, at a cultural level, form a new grammatisation of

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

in future possibilities for existence at the limits of humanism and of the
anthropocene epoch. This can be framed through the work of legendary ‘visual
futurist’ Syd Mead, who has addressed sociocultural realities through a prism
of future vision in films such as Blade Runner, Aliens, Star Trek, Tron,
and Elysium, oft quoted as saying: ‘I call science fiction “reality ahead of
schedule”‘ (Hollingham, 2017). Futurism here is a process of speculative world-
building, often necessitating the mimesis of impossible things – flying cars,
artificial intelligences, alternate galaxies, alternate dimensions. However,
far from being so detached from reality as science-fantasy, this practice of
projecting possible future worlds is now increasingly viewed as a pragmatic
methodology and strategy for technological disruption in the real world. As
Slate magazine documents, Spielberg’s production designer for Minority
Report (2002), Alex McDowell, now runs an academic programme at the
University of Southern California called the World Building Media Lab, where
narrative futurism is used as method to ‘change the future’. He describes:
We have control over the narrative here. We want a different outcome.

So, let’s create a narrative—a fictional world space with multiple narra-
tives—that is moving in the direction we want it to go. Extrapolate that
forward over the near horizon, then thread our discoveries back into the
present and use that to change direction in our present and move towards
a new future. (McDowell, in Bankston, Slate, 2017)
The stated purpose of McDowell’s project is not just to devise new technolo-
gies to capitalise upon, but also to construct ethical future visions: ‘solving
real-world problems, ranging from creating future scenarios for Fortune
100 companies to envisioning possible solutions to the refugee crisis and
environmental catastrophes’ (worldbuilding.usc.edu).
This futurist methodology can take on a more directly political nuance
in films such as Black Panther (2018), which, according to its director
Ryan Coogler, offers a brand of technological afro-futurism to the cinematic
mainstream (Loughrey, The Independent, 2018). Cultural critic Mark Dery
first recognised and named this aesthetic of afro-futurism in 1994, in his
article ‘Black to the Future’:
Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose
energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces
of its history, imagine possible futures? […] Furthermore, isn’t the unreal
estate of the future already owned by the technocrats, futurologists,
streamliners, and set designers – white to a man – who have engineered

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

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

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

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

Adorno, and decades later by Jean Francois Lyotard, holds that the artwork should be a force of
pure negation. For Adorno, this quality of negation is called ‘antinomy’; for Lyotard, it manifests
within the notion of the sublime, though both tend to make the artwork something transcendent
and thus insoluble into any common culture.
making distinctions between a classic Hollywood cinema as essentially

normative, and an avant-garde art-cinema as essentially transgressive.
Deleuze, in his opposition of the cinematic movement-image to the time-
image, further deploys this dialectic in a mode that is historicised in such
a way that the critical, pure image type of the time-image came into being
only after World War Two due to a metaphysical crisis of faith.10 Mullarkey
instead proposes that these categories are not fixed or strictly historicised,
but rather always processual, overlapping, and shifting: ‘This becoming of
film – its processual complexity – is its only essence (which is to say that
it has no essence)’ (2009, p. 10).11
We can perhaps now see an evolving field of contemporary culture in
which Braidotti’s opposed fields of low-culture genres and the ‘grandiose
pretensions’ of high-culture realist aesthetics are actually very mutable,
and that this is not only attributable to a capitalist imperative. I hasten
to add that this position does not relinquish the idea of an autonomous,
sublime art, nor of art as negation, but simply notes that now it is possible
that aesthetic disruptions, or lines-of flight, occur not in another realm
of liberated practice but rather exactly within the public mainstream or
common culture domain. The task then is to recognise these events for
what they are, or what they have the potential to be.
So what then are my true objects of study? They are digital, post-
cinematic images which are futuristic, Futurist even, technologistic
perhaps, but not simply, or only, science fiction. While this whole book
attempts a more nuanced investigation into the question of what qualifies
as a digital post-cinematic image, I propose here an abrupt (and possibly
incomplete) definition. They are images which come into being through
the new formal possibilities that are afforded by digital capture, editing,
and post-production technologies. This is, in a way, a f ield of potential
images, contingent upon the possible manipulations of code within both
hardware and software assemblages. But these structural and formal
10 See, for instance, Deleuze and World Cinemas (Martin-Jones, 2011) which identifies various
‘non-continuous’ image types put forth in early cinema, including time-images and ‘attraction-
images’, and further criticises the narrow European focus of Deleuze’s study to focus on a more
global context of multiple political crises and upheavals which affected other national cinemas.
11 This issue around Deleuze is also addressed by Damian Sutton in his Photography Cinema
Memory: The Crystal Image of Time in which he states that the mainstream Hollywood and
European avant-garde exist as a spiralling interdependence, like the genetic material or DNA of
cinema (2009, p. 40), and by David Deamer in Deleuze’s Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the
Taxonomy of Images in which the two regimes of the cinematic image make up a ‘heterogeneous
complexity’ (2016, p. 70).
aspects within the image are meaningless without a mind to engage with
them, to actualise them, and a body to tense and release in the processes
of affection and emotion, perception and cognition. I thus identify, in
concordance with the work of other theorists, a set or taxonomy of visual
effects which are fully articulated through a set of embodied affects, that
are distinctive of the post-indexical, post-cinematic image, and which can
be roughly summarised as: simulations of spatial information of depth and
expanse; modulations of time in loops, phases, and parallels; maximalist
complexities of form and movement at the limit of comprehension in, for
example, swarm and machine effects; breaches of physical form such as
morphing and glitching; and recognisably corporeal sensations of flying and
floating in and through space. These are aspects of, no doubt, a spectacular
cinema of attractions with all its associated thrills and frissons, but also of
a cinema that is grounded in a mode of de-naturalising natural (human)
perception. They are special effects, but contextualised by a specialness
which offers a dynamic, holistic, and richly metaphorical vision of possible
futures, and which can be ethical and political at the same time as being
aesthetic.
What is Post about Post-Cinema?
Steven Shaviro develops a strong sense of a post-cinema in his 2010 book

of the same name. He hastens to add that this is not ‘post-’ in the sense of
progress, or towards some teleological goal of a ‘total cinema’ (calling on
Bazin’s concept of the perfect mimesis of reality to disavow it), but rather
that filmic cinema is now ‘surpassed’ in a new ‘cultural-technological regime’
into which he incorporates:
[…] production, editing, distribution, sampling, and remixing of au-

diovisual material […] in a wider range of contexts than ever before, in
multiple locations and on screens ranging in size from the tiny (mobile
phones) to the gigantic (IMAX) […] within a complex of social, economic,
and political developments: globalization, financialization, post-Fordist
just-in-time production and ´flexible accumulation´ (as David Harvey
calls it), the precarization of labor, and widespread micro-surveillance.
(Shaviro, 2011)
While many of these aspects of the cultural and political economy of a

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

forms. For example, film critic Roger Ebert famously called (digital) 3D ‘a
waste of perfectly good dimension’ as, ‘when you look at a 2D movie, it’s
already in 3D as far as your mind is concerned’ (Ebert, 2010), and although
this was said at an early moment in the current era of Digital 3D technology
when it still seemed just a profitable gimmick, the position seems to deny
outright any difference in representation between 2D and 3D formats.
Since then, ‘auteur’ directors have moved into 3D filmmaking, and the
uses of the technology have become more nuanced and expressive, such
that few can deny the effective new grammar of 3D for both narrative and
aesthetic uses. Digital 3D is but one exemplary event of a new emergent
digital visual regime at f irst dismissed by critics as a cheap rehash of
a previous phenomenon, but later embraced for the original narrative,
affective, and aesthetic effects it affords, rather than for more cynical
commercial reasons.
Christopher Nolan’s time-bending space adventure Interstellar
(2014) presents an interesting case study here. In many ways an elegy to
the analogue, the film embraces select ‘qualified’ digital effects whilst
simultaneously distancing itself from them. One of the biggest points of
public discourse about the film was the ‘real’ science behind it, by which
the digital cinematic effects were portrayed as proximate to actual ‘natural’
cosmic phenomena. The scientific consultant for the film, theoretical physi-
cist Kip Thorne, apparently laid down two guidelines for Nolan: ‘First, that
nothing would violate established physical laws. Second, that all the wild
speculations […] would spring from science and not from the fertile mind of a
screenwriter’ (in interview with Clery, Science, 2014). The main achievement
of this method was the creation of the film’s black hole ‘Gargantua’, which
features largely in the narrative, and was generated as a 3D simulation
in ways that apparently constituted original scientific research. ‘For me’,
Thorne says in his book The Science of Interstellar, ‘these film clips are like
experimental data’ (2014).
No one knew exactly what a black hole would look like until they actually
built one. Light, temporarily trapped around the black hole, produced an
unexpectedly complex fingerprint pattern near the black hole’s shadow.
And the glowing accretion disk appeared above the black hole, below the
black hole, and in front of it […] I never expected that […] Eugénie just
did the simulations and said, ´Hey, this is what I got.´ It was just amazing.
(Kip Thorne, in interview with Rogers, Wired, 2014)
Figure 1. Black hole Gargantua in Nolan’s Interstellar (Paramount/Warner Bros, 2014). Allstar Picture
Library / Alamy Stock Photo.
These exciting and highly affective images of the black hole (Figure 1) thus
represent a certain amount of technological advancement, in which, for
the first time, graphic simulations were generated according to complex
mathematical algorithms as a form of computational physics research.
However, despite the simulation being created in a programme called
Mathematica, it was then sent to visual effects studio Double Negative
where it was coloured, enhanced, and rescaled in clearly creative digital
processes. Thorne explains: ‘The computer code was just the beginning.
Oliver handed it over to an artistic team who added the accretion disk and
created the background galaxy that Gargantua would lens’ (2014). This kind
of mixed methodology leads Scientific American’s Lee Billings to critically
note: ‘not all of the science is treated equally in the film’ although he permits
that in Thorne’s book ‘[He] is even-handed in his treatment of the film’s
science, admitting where artistic license was substantial and where it was
used barely at all’ (Billings, 2014).
There is thus both a complexity and an inconsistency in the ontological
dynamic that Nolan establishes in Interstellar, of analogue authenticity
and ‘natural’ science versus digital visual ‘wild speculation’. He presents
the viewer with a diegetic digital technological future rendered through
the digital synthesis of aesthetic imagery, in which we literally leave the
material universe behind and launch into a virtual, theoretical dimen-

sion (the tesseract which exists with the brane fifth dimension), while
simultaneously offering a narrative and thematic disavowal of digital effects
as ‘imaginary’ flights of fancy and furthermore the romanticisation of its
opposite (in the symbolic fetishism of paper books and analogue wristwatch
that ultimately save humanity). A tension between the truth value of science
and that of aesthetic expression or ‘artistic licence’ lies at the heart of this
film, opening up a problematic discourse about the existential import
of such images. However, as I will later explore, this dichotomy between
science and aesthetics is perhaps a false one in the contemporary moment
of media technology. The digital images of Interstellar reach a level of
sophistication whereby abstract notions of metaphysics are no longer merely
suggested or evoked through visual effects, rather they are simulated in
ways that become more and more ontologically prescient.
Digital representations of the physical, material universe, even (or es-
pecially) when this is of theoretical phenomena as in Interstellar, often
entail some level of destabilisation of recognisable physical forms and forces
in imaginative and aestheticised modes. It seems a given that this will be
experienced as different from a directly observable world represented as
largely stable and predictable, such that we subsequently might view the
world in a more probabilistic mode through the digital lens. This raises
common-sense questions about how deep (if at all) these ‘special’ effects
penetrate into actual everyday experience. That is to ask if and how we
successfully police a conscious division between experience of the actual,
and experience of a digitally mediated virtual? Is it negotiated cognitively
and actively, or rather ‘felt’ in a more corporeal and intuitive way, or both,
and is there a certain amount of cognitive dissonance between these two
types of knowledge? I ask how these images resonate in an ontological sense
with other abstracted, theoretical, or embodied knowledges of the physical
universe, and if there is a (sub-)conscious synergy between our cultural
imaginations and theoretical physics in the genesis of new ontological
horizons? In this work, I thus aim to explore how these dynamics of actual
versus virtual experience, abstract knowledge versus embodied experience,
and scientific versus artistic expression – all considered as different classes
of ‘image’ with regard to our consciousness of them – impact us through
the nexus of our affective corporeality.
In elevating the digital image to a level of serious ethico-aesthetic analysis,
I aim to establish an understanding of a form of digital rationality – a ‘digi-
thinking’ that is a post-cinematic mode of thought, and which resonates
with contemporary scientific knowledge, artistic expression, and with
wider social and cultural change. Within contemporary patterns and trends
of representation, I will trace a regime of sensibility beyond Cartesian
rationality, which creates a probabilistic space for original perception/
affection/action, and which ultimately constitutes a digital ontology. This is
to be an affective ontology of the digital, both an individual and communal
non-conscious apperception of metaphysics within our contemporary
technological epoch.12
But is it Art?
In 1985, Andy Warhol somewhat surprisingly launched the Commodore

Amiga’s Propaint programme by live-digitising a video-camera image of
Debbie Harry, and using the paint fill tool to create one of his iconic colour-
blocked images (Figure 2). ‘This is kind of pretty’, Warhol said as he added the
last touches to the image – ‘I think I’ll keep that’ (Reimer, 2007). There is no
doubt that this was a marketing stunt to give legitimacy and auratic power
to the new home computing system, but this belies a genuine strong interest
from Warhol in the aesthetic qualities of digital imagery. He continued to
work with the software to produce several images which are now held at
the in the archives of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh (Stintson,
2014). But does this qualify the image he produced here as culturally and
aesthetically significant, or was it just a moment of novelty, and a pale
simulacrum of his screen-printed or photographic works?
The dominant perspective of the digital image as crass commercial spec-
tacle and as tacky ‘special effect’ emerged in the 1980s, a natural extension
of mass media critique initiated through the Frankfurt School of Adorno
and Horkheimer, enhanced by Althusser’s Marxism, and through which a
first generation of academic media theorists found commercial media forms
to be ideologically repressive and interpellative. The study of mass media
and their social, cultural, technological, cognitive, and corporeal effects
was initially defined by recourse to social hierarchy, ideology, and control.
Postmodern cultural theorists of the late 20th century stayed within this
rubric, and as such their analysis of new digital media forms and cultures
which emerged in the 1980s (in which Deleuze himself can be included)
fell easily into the same dynamics, with digital processes of bricolage and
simulation, and the breakdown of linear media forms, fitting neatly into
12 Metaphysics as understood here no longer is the realm of gods and creation myths, but
rather of physical forces, materiality, quantum states, dimensions, intentionality and causality.
Figure 2. Andy Warhol’s front cover of Amiga World’s ‘Creative Issue’ from January 1986 (IDG
Publishing) © 2019 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by DACS,
London
post-structural discourses of crises of faith in objective truth.13 If cinema was

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

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

(more distinctly located within a fine-art discourse and methodology);
and between a celebratory futurism revelling in post-human possibilities
of new technologies, and the brand of bleak postmodernism which mourns
the demise of meaning. Affect effectively bridges the gap as both a psycho-
biological and cultural-philosophical phenomenon and concept, functioning
in diverse ways across diverse genres and audiences, and as an important
modality in a digital age which sees a proliferation and heightening of
media immersivity and intensity. The shift in image discourse around affect
engaged with an intuited sensation that the projected images are not simply
and firmly indexically tethered to real objects that we already know (as a
mode of representation) but can offer a novel experience of reality.
The theoretical and critical shifts of the mid to late 1990s came at the same
time as a wave of CGI films that had an emphatic focus on novel sensation
and awe-inducing effects. Spectacular and effect-laden films were certainly
not new, with spates of biblical and mythological epics and short-lived and
titillating diversions in the 3D horror and sex genres of the 1950s and 1980s.18
However, in the 1990s, there seemed to be a new emphasis on epic scale and
visceral drama in the multiplex cinema, in part fuelled by the continuing
challenge posed to big-screen cinema by home-video and home-cinema
formats.19 The more spectacular of these films had sentimental themes,
mythological narratives, and grandstanding effects, seemingly a form of
disposable culture for the lowest common denominator – while auteur
directors continued to make the thinking-man’s films. But when game-
changing films such as Titanic (dir. James Cameron, 1997) and The Matrix
(dirs. Lana and Lilly Wachowski, 1999) came about, theorists started to pay
critical attention to a maturing digital ethos in the cinematic mainstream.
It is hard to deny the negative aspects of a digital commercial culture – the
targeted manipulation of desire via the harvesting of personal data only one
conspicuous example – but we need to give credit to the ethical potential
of an accelerated culture in which ‘virtual’ diversity proliferates beyond
forces of control. Through the prism of a Deleuzian concept of difference
18 In the films of Harryhausen and Cecil B. Demille, and later in 3D films of the 1950s and 1960s
such as Creature from the Black Lagoon and The Stewardesses, and then again in the 1980s with
Jaws 3D and others. Epic special effects ‘event’ films of the 1990s included disaster movies Deep
Impact, Armageddon, Independence Day; historical epics such as Saving Private Ryan, Titanic,
and Braveheart; and sci-fi fantasy including Jurassic Park, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and the
reboot of the Star Wars series.
19 On the effects of home video on cinema, see, for instance, Barry R. Litman and Linda S.
Kohl (1989).
and repetition, in this book, I aim to emphasise how the digital media forms
repeat and change images in ‘plastic’ modes of modulation and mutation
which are often beyond human intent. Our accelerated digital culture is then
re-inscribed as being focused towards future possibility and unbounded
creativity, with positive ethical attributes. In Chapter Two, I show how
digital processes of repetition and distortion are put to work aesthetically in
a very Deleuzian manner in Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void, and, in Chapter
Five, through the work of Gianni Vattimo, I elaborate the ethical side of this
‘digital nihilism’ by stating that, despite efforts to control and brand virtual
diversity, it still proliferates out of control in original and transgressive ways.
Throughout this project, I attempt to develop an eye for objects of a
digital screen culture that are not partitioned off from the popular realm of
consumption, and which proliferate and multiply in heterogeneous spaces.
These images are not only in multiplex cinemas, but also enter our homes on
multiple screens in our living rooms, bedrooms, and kitchens, and further ap-
pear on buildings throughout our cities in the form of public projections and
advertising screens. These images fold themselves around material objects
and are inset into corners, walls, and floors, perceptually distorting the
contours and edges of our familiar spaces. Together, they form a constantly
present other dimension, just next to us, looming above us, or around the
corner, where consistency and predictability break down, like another
world pressing against our own, trying to lure us in. Is this an invasion,
as many see it to be? Or is it really the projection of our own imagination
in ever closer proximity to reality, both nightmarish and heavenly, which
threatens, or perhaps promises to rupture the boundaries between worlds?
From Cine-thinking to Digi-thinking
I ascertain a fundamental ontological difference that the digital shift in

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

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

and described and examined in Éric Alliez’s chapter ‘Midday, Midnight: The Emergence of
Cine-Thinking’ in The Brain is the Screen.
21 Both Damian Sutton (2009) and Timothy Scott Barker (2012) still focus on the primacy of
cinematic time in their relative approaches, albeit with the temporal dimension becoming
more chaotic and differential in the digital form. Movement, the body, gender, and materiality
as concepts are always subservient to the overarching dimension of temporality.
Cahiers du Cinema in 1986): ‘the brain is the screen’. This does not necessarily
deny an objective reality, but posits that we are essentially image receivers,
an actualised image amongst others, but a ‘special kind of image’ capable of
making innovative ‘virtual’ connections between images (Flaxman, 2000,
p. 35).22 Though we may not mentally create reality per se (as is the view
of a pure transcendental phenomenology), we do almost certainly craft
‘aesthetic’ images out of it.
Deleuze’s notion of a ‘camera consciousness’, which emerges in the
Movement-Image to explain the relation between our metaphysical
awareness and the mediated images we consume, aligns well with Walter
Benjamin’s notion in The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproduction
of a distracted mass whose apperception is moulded through the historically
and technologically located media they consume. This is the process of an
non-conscious absorption of ‘abilities’ to tackle what Benjamin calls ‘the
tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at the turning points of
history’ (1999), abilities that Deleuze might put in more metaphysical terms
as our spatio-temporal, sensory-motor perceptual schema. These perceptive
abilities as inhabited, embodied ways of seeing and feeling the world are,
to Benjamin, appropriated in an ‘absent minded’ way in an age of moving
images, as opposed to the engaged, contemplative engagement demanded
by the static artwork; thus, the authority of, and reverence paid to, the
organisation of human sense perception in the auratic work is disrupted.
However, Deleuze in his Cinema books goes further than this to suggest that
film does not just influence our metaphysical understanding of reality in
our specific historical technological location, but stands in as a model for
the whole of Western thought on the relationship between philosophy and
time, and, by implication, power (Flaxman, 2000, p. 4).
In this model, as re-examined by Gregory Flaxman in the introduction
to his edited volume The Brain is the Screen, time is initially subjugated to
space in the cinematic movement-image and thus can only be understood
through a spatial metaphor, and this amounts to a normative regulation of
thought. In the time-image, however, cinema fulfils its inherent potential
for Benjamin’s dismantling of auratic authority, and time is freed from its
imprisonment by spatial relations. For Flaxman, the movement-image
is directly traceable back to ancient Greek philosophical thought which
expressed time as existing actually and externally as divine space. The
22 Flaxman succinctly states: ‘In the Movement-Image, Deleuze says that the brain is a very
special kind of image, one that opens up an interval in the modulations and variations of the
universe. This interval propels what we call thinking’ (2000).
time-image then relates to the shift in thought started with Kant’s Critique of
Pure Reason by which time becomes seen for the first time as phenomenal,
interior, and durational, as an ‘a priori form of intuition’, and not as existing
externally (ibid, p. 4). Flaxman elaborates how this morally charged shift
in Western thought was then reflected by the cinematic shift:
The ´regime´ of the movement image bespeaks a process of regulation

that Deleuze ascribes to a ´sensory motor schema´, a neural network that
áffectively´ contains the image-flux: the images procured are recognis-
able, capable of being linked to other images along a methodical, and
ultimately normative, chain. The sensory motor schema is the mechanism
of our relation to the world of images, the result of which is narrative,
but this narrative must be understood as having been underwritten by
a moral exigency, the promise to make good, common sense. (ibid, p. 5)
This rupture in the moral regime of images, for Deleuze, becomes manifest
in the cinema of the post-Second World War period, which exhibits a crisis of
faith in rational, causal containment or order through showing discontinu-
ous spaces, times, and narratives. The clear, consistent, and predictable
perception of reality and causality given by the movement-image was, at
this time, seen by filmmakers to be expressive of the type of fascist moral
certainty that had led to the Holocaust.23 In the 1950s, a new morality, a new
philosophy, and thus a new cinematic image, was needed.
Deleuze states that with the time-image’s disruption: ‘Camera-
consciousness raises itself to a determination which is no longer formal
or material, but genetic and differential. We have moved from a real to a
genetic definition of perception’ (1986, p. 85). This genetic and differential
mode (a significant phrase which I repeat throughout this project) pushes
us (a determination) into new realms of consciousness, rather than merely
reflecting and representing ‘common sense’ perception. The time-image
ceases to be simply a recapitulation of the rational/moral dynamic in Western
thought, as the technological apparatus of cinema now takes an active and
determining role in sculpting a transformation. To Deleuze, as to Mullarkey
(2009), cinema can become in itself a practice of philosophy, which not only
represents abstract thought, but manifests a potential to be its own distinct
language of philosophical thought that proceeds through visual and aural
intensive affectivity. Camera-consciousness, through images, thus raises
23 As discussed by Deleuze in his conclusion to The Time-Image, and by Peter Canning in ‘The
Imagination of Immanence’ in Flaxman’s The Brain is the Screen (2000).
itself from a passive-reflective to an active-determinative status and becomes

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

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

clearly ascertained through phenomenological, psychological, and, more
recently, neurological discourses.25 One does not need to have an extreme
sceptical phenomenological perspective to understand that reality is not
always as we perceive it and that processes of culture, and the human mind,
can twist material reality quite out of shape under certain conditions.
I ascribe to the position emerging from Socrates and Plato – through
Heidegger, Derrida, and Stiegler – that all the forces which shape our ability
to conceive of the world are, in the broadest sense of the word, technological.
In that we interact with the world at the basest level of survival of our
organism – i.e. the acquisition of food or shelter – any mode of drawing
things forth from the world can be considered as techné. For Heidegger
(1977), the concept of techné originally expresses both tooled handcraft
and other forms of poesis as a ‘bringing forth’ – as modes of shaping the
world through the manual creation of objects, or through expression (in
both functional modes of communication and artistic expression). These
techné give order and shape to the world, and occupy almost all of our
mental and physical energy in our engaged activity within the world. For
Bernard Stiegler (1998), extending Heidegger’s thought, even the biological
becomes part of a technical process, as structures of control are imposed
upon physical gesture so that they form meaningful systems. The body is
understood as technologically cyborg since the development of the first
tools, because it adapts and evolves according to the technological systems
with which it engages. For Stiegler, to be human in the first place is to be a
technical being – it is what defines us.
Accepting this, I follow Heidegger and Stiegler in positing reality as
generated through technological means, both in our ability to interact
with the world, and in our ability to understand and communicate about
it. But, as the technologies that we invent give shape to the world, they also
give shape to us. Naïvely again, humans have conventionally thought that
the technologies that we employ are there to help us gain control of our
environment as assistive prostheses of our own bodies and minds, seldom
realising that these same technologies also shape the environment for us,
and provide subtle limitations to our existence. We adapt to technology in
many small ways, and yet, through time, this draws us into ever-greater
25 Neuroscience now has become one of the most influential recent developments in social
and philosophical theory, the findings of which are investigated through many scientific, social
science, and humanities texts. See, for instance, Maurizio Meloni’s ‘Philosophical implications
of neuroscience: The space for a critique’ (2011).
distance from the way we were before. However, as both Derrida and Stiegler
point out (in a revision of Heidegger), this is not some process of us growing
farther and farther away from some originary and ideal natural state, as
each technology, despite being in one way limiting, also opens up new
conditions for action, thought, and expression. ‘Nature’ is thought of not
as the beginning point of a linear progression, but instead as an underlying
immanent and virtual flux, a field of potentiality from which actualised
modes of being are continually drawn from within certain technological
parameters. Each technology, as pharmakon, is thus an enabling framework
as much as it is also a limiting structure.
Within this view, digital processes are the latest technological condition
of humanity which frame our world view, from our individual capacity to
imagine potential futures as fictional (cinematic) images, to actual tangible
scientific progress. Faith, science, and art can thus all be seen as co-defining;
aesthetic fabulations going hand-in-hand with empirical discovery, both
consequences of the given technological condition. Seeing things this way, it
ceases to be any mystery why a digital post-cinema experiments with images
which twist time, space, force, and materiality at the same time as physicists
reached to discover the Higgs Boson ‘god’ particle that gives mass to the
‘immanent flux’ or ‘pea soup’ of the other elemental atomic particles.26 Both
processes fundamentally dwell on the same ontological futurist problematic.
The dynamics of influence between artistic imagination and scientific
discovery can be described in different ways – as anticipating or inspiring
each other – but, by tracing both back to the same technological condition
the philosophical division between them is, to a certain extent, collapsed.27
In subsequent chapters, I address the issues outlined above, through
reference to specific films and practices within a contemporary digital visual
26 In July 2012, at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Switzerland, the discovery of the Higgs
Boson was announced. In much of the press around the announcement, the particle was referred
to in the context of the Higgs Field – an invisible force that explains how the universe moved from
a nascent ‘intergalactic atomic pea-soup’ state to one composed of stars, life, and planets. This
provides an interesting analogy for the philosophical concept of immanence.
27 There is an idea that much scientific discovery is anticipated in works of science fiction. See,
for instance, ‘The Science Fiction Effect’ by Laura H. Kahn (2012). In the concept of fabulation
(deployed philosophically by Bergson, extended by Deleuze and, more recently, John Mullarkey)
inexplicable facts (of the senses) are made sense of through the imagination. This concept is
held to explain early forms of theism in the invention of an intentional force behind natural
processes, but also explains artistic creativity. Furthermore, holding to a Bergsonian concept
of intuition as inspiration following the inhabitation of facts – rather that the intellectual and
rational examination of facts – fabulation could be seen to be the true process of scientif ic
discovery as creative problem solving (Bergson, 1977, orig. 1935).
culture. I stress that my objects are not cherry-picked for purpose, nor are
they random, but rather have emerged during the writing of this text, since
2010, as conspicuous tangents or events within digital visual culture (with
the exception of the 1982 film Tron, though this explicitly relates to its
2010 update in Tron: Legacy). Out of these images, I have drawn dynamic
links between content, affect, and technological circumstance to make
observations about what I can describe as the digital, affective syntheses
of metaphysical reality in contemporary media. These links fall into three
areas which I address in three separate chapters: the dynamics of digital
virtuality, the structural dynamics of digital images, and the dynamics of
consciousness.
Before tackling these dynamics through image analysis, in Chapter
Two, ‘The Affective Synthesis of Reality by Digital Image’, I expand on the
issues and theorists laid out in this first chapter, which fall into four broad
areas: the philosophy of technology, processes of affection and cognition,
theoretical approaches to the digital image, and ethics and aesthetics. I
expand on three philosophical concepts that prove useful in understanding
how our consciousness of metaphysical qualities develops and is maintained
within the mind/body, and the technological condition for their affective
synthesis: these are Stiegler’s ‘grammatisation’, Hume and Husserl’s ‘passive
synthesis’, and Deleuze’s ‘spiritual automaton’. It is these concepts, framed
by Deleuze’s notions of cinematic aesthetics/ethics and Heidegger’s technics,
that largely structure this work, and it is through these notions that I add
complexity and nuance to an often vague, multidisciplinary conception
of ‘affect’.
In Chapter Three, ‘A Digital Frontier to Reshape the Human Condition’,
I begin analysis by looking at the films Tron (1982), Tron: Legacy (2010),
and Enter the Void (2010). Identifying the challenge to metaphysical
consciousness posed by digitality as an ontological problematic, I ask how
these films engage aesthetically with digital systems and processes to sculpt
anthropomorphic metaphors for this problematic. In this process, I identify
two approaches to the challenge of digital virtuality roughly represented by
each film: one in which an idea of the emotional and tactile body is restored
to the impersonal domain of the digital, and another in which the body is
discarded and abjected as consciousness enters an immaterial dimension.
What emerges as similar, however, is the affective tone of the represented
middle space between worlds, the boundary or frontier space in which
metaphysics are suspended in an immanent flux. I ask what these digital
images, reflecting on the material conditions of their own creation, express
about the way we can position ourselves within a digitally connected world.
Do we move into a post-human, object-orientated form of vision through

which we abandon the body, or do we instead reinterpret the corporeal in
a more dissolute sense of digital embodiment.
Chapter Four, ‘Dynamic Digital Spaces, Bodies, and Forces’, focuses on how
exactly metaphysical awareness is synthesised within the formal aspects of
digital systems of image capture and presentation, and how these might be
understood within a much broader view of the evolution of consciousness. I
look to the examples of the dance and the battle scene, raised within digital
cinematic culture to the status of the ‘spatio-temporal-energic’ image tour de
force in which structural relations of kinesis are heightened and stretched.
This analysis is grounded within a genealogy of technical advances (from
the f irst ‘moving’ images, to spatial simulations, and to digital 3D and
digital slow motion), and within a theory of consciousness which speaks
to how fundamental our proprioceptive sense is to our grounded dynamic
presence in the world. What emerges is an experimental aesthetic and a new
spatio-temporal image regime (seen in the neo-baroque folding of objects
and spaces), expressed through structural and formal relations within
the digital image. In my analysis, this is an aesthetic which collapses the
distinction between the scientific truth of detail, and the artistic truth of
expression, into a new ‘digital naturalism’.
In Chapter Five, ‘Reality Sutures, Simulation, and Digital Realism’, I
extend the issues raised in the previous two chapters surrounding our
cognitive engagement with images in our conscious shaping of the world
around us. I look at the concept of suture as how we aesthetically and af-
fectively interface with images, asking how (and if) we successfully police
the boundary between actual and virtual in experience. This discourse then
engages with the discovery of mirror neurons, with a simulation theory of
mind, the metaphorical structure of memory, and the mimetic capacity to
establish that we are, in a non-pejorative sense, influenced and conditioned
by the images we consume to inhabit certain fields of immanent possibility
intuitively and corporeally. Within digital images, this field of possibility
is rendered plastic, subject to reformation, modulation, and regeneration,
and I argue that this encourages a more plastic mind in which actuality and
virtuality fuse. By then looking at the films Avatar and Source Code, I
illustrate how the real is exploded and reformed, with the virtual, quantum
flux supplanting notions of stable reality not just within the image, or just
within our phenomenal experience of the world, but potential in every
metaphysical sense of the real world.
Finally, in Chapter Six, ‘Digital Nihilism: Ethical Reflections’, I turn to
the more pragmatic political concerns of the project, asking whether we can
ascertain an ethics of the digital image. I address the concerns of Deleuze and
Stiegler about the potential for insidious affective conditioning of desires,
alongside their stated need for creative thought, political engagement, and
new industrial practices within a condition of neoliberal cultural capitalism.
I suggest that the digital in fact breeds a cognitively active consumer who
capably negotiates affective lures, and creatively and playfully (though
not necessarily intentionally) synthesises new metaphysical awarenesses
as ontological truths. While both see an indirect form of activism through
the resistance and transgression of images, for Rancière (2006), this issue is
‘meta’-political and, for Pisters (2012), it is a form of ‘micro’-politics. These
ideas comes together through my use of Vattimo’s concept of a ‘mellow
nihilism’, which dispels rigid metaphysical notions for a new ‘weak’ ontology
which is open and plastic, strategic rather than complacent. I move to
establish a clear notion of an ontological plasticity within contemporary
digital image culture.
2. The Affective Synthesis of Reality by
Digital Images
Dan Strutt
Abstract
This chapter expands on the issues and theories previously introduced,
categorising them into four broad areas: philosophy of technology;
processes of affection and cognition; existing digital image theory; and
ethics/aesthetics. It clearly articulates Heidegger and Stiegler’s theory
of technology and make direct links to contemporary visual culture.
The affective turn in image theory is then discussed (largely indebted
to the influence of Gilles Deleuze) and explicitly connected to parallel
transformations in digital image production and distribution. The chapter
finishes by integrating contemporary aesthetic theory with social and
ethical issues, to suggest that an advanced digital visual culture has real
and tangible benefits for our shared metaphysical awareness of the world.
Keywords: Digital Pharmakon, Plasticity, Cinema 3, Spiritual Automaton,

Stiegler, Deleuze
It was no longer a question of knowing where the centre was, the sun or the
earth, because the primary question became Ís there a centre or not at all?´ All
the centres, of gravity, equilibrium, force, revolution, in short, of configuration,
were collapsing. It was at that point that a restoration of centres undoubtedly
occurred, but at the price of a profound change, of a great evolution of the
sciences and the arts. (Deleuze, 1989, p. 143)
doi 10.5117/9789462987135_ch02
A Great Evolution
In my approach to the digital, post-cinematic image, I roughly follow the

path taken by Gilles Deleuze in his Cinema books, which is to discern how
ontological and metaphysical matters of reality, time, and space – ‘all the
centres of configuration’ – are expressed and contemplated through the
content and structure of cinematic media. While other earlier film theorists
such as André Bazin and Jean Epstein also described the intrinsic capacity
of film to capture and harness something of the essential nature of reality
beyond normal perception, this was often coloured with a kind of quasi-
spiritual belief in the sanctity of film, and, indeed, of reality. Deleuze instead
created a kind of quasi-scientific taxonomy of film images, classified in their
capacity to represent different forms of thought, without recourse to some
ambiguous transcendence but rather to reality as fluid and changeable.1 He
then articulated a cinematic mutation that de-centres ‘the ideal of the true’
– a modern, secular evolution in our sense of metaphysical configuration
that negates any given ‘natural order’. In the quote above, analogised to the
seventeenth-century philosophical crisis of truth we call The Enlighten-
ment. In his Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Deleuze calls this ‘the powers of the
false’ – image schema which not only challenge established knowledge of
metaphysical ‘centres’, but also reveal new possible centres, perspectives,
thoughts, and expressions thereof (1989, pp. 126-156).
Today, Deleuze’s film philosophy has a special appeal to theorists of the
digital, not only due to this general mutational and evolutionary role of
cinematic images, but also due to their inherent strength to render ‘virtuality’
– a concept central to his film theory. The term ‘virtual’ is, however, used in
different ways in the context of the digital; in the notion of a digital virtual
reality (VR) as giving a reality effect to representation, or in a more properly
Deleuzian sense, of images which suggest an outside and beyond to the
‘actual’ or seemingly natural sense of reality. This second sense is of course
not specific to the digital, especially given that the digital image was barely
nascent during the time of Deleuze’s writing on cinema. Analogue media
did, at times, express an almost proto-digital virtuality through techniques
such as graphic animation processes, superimpositions, chemical processes
direct on the film material, and pro-filmic refractions within the shot – for
instance, using mirrors (giving Deleuze the analogy for his virtualising
1 For recent introduction and explanation of Deleuze’s cinematic taxonomies, see David
Deamer’s Deleuze’s Cinema Books: Three Introductions to the Taxonomy of Images (2016) and
Richard Rushton’s Cinema After Deleuze (2012).
The Affective Synthesis of Realit y by Digital Images 43
‘crystal-image’ as a hall of mirrors). However, within a digital media paradigm,

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

situate ourselves, in space and time, in relation to an image that does
not appear to be óne´. On electronic screens, we are uncertain that
what appears before us is an ímage´, and in its powers of mutability and
velocity of transmission, we are equally uncertain that this perception
has singular or stable existence in the present or in relation to the past.
(Rodowick, 2007, p. 94)
However, despite, or perhaps because of, this insecure ontological status

of the digital image, Rodowick describes how analogue cinematographic
techniques and syntactical codes persist, where digital processes mimic
the filmic ‘deeply recalcitrant cultural norms of depiction’ despite a lack of
necessity (ibid, p. 94). Norms such as focal depth, framing, and editing are
technical imperatives within film’s material form, but are now only used
in digital post-cinema in a habituated mode to maintain a certain level of
culturally ingrained familiarity with cinematic photo-realism.
Lev Manovich (2001, 2007, 2016) is one of the more influential theorists
who focuses on these habitual forms in the new digital aesthetics, and
he takes a schematic, material, and formal approach to ‘mapping’ their
coordinates, by focusing on design software, interface, and the interactive
style of image production (an approach he refers to as ‘digital materialism’).
I follow Rodowick’s incisive summation of the value of Manovich’s work,
which gives due credit to the ways in which he offers researchers ‘points of
navigation for understanding digital automatisms’ and to how he stresses
the continuing usefulness of certain concepts of frame, image, screen,
and representation which are ‘dear to f ilm and art theory as baselines
for comprehending changes’(2007, p. 130). However, Rodowick notes that,
in stressing these continuities, Manovich maintains a fundamental mis-
comprehension: ‘Manovich believes that the concept of representation is
a stable one, whose function with respect to images is augmented with
respect to computational processes’ (ibid) He instead insists that we have
to interrogate the changed ontological status of contemporary images,
moving beyond ‘the cinematographic ideal’ to ask about the new effects
of the post-cinematic image as structures formed by immaterial code,
and rethinking the core terms of analysis which might correlate with
analogical procedures of image creation. Rodowick clearly points to a
profound difference that cannot be captured by existing concepts, and
that is yet to be properly understood.
Cinematic ‘Realism’ becomes denaturalised by Rodowick as just a set
of habituated aesthetic standards or norms stemming from analogue
processes, which are now being subtly conditioned and altered in digital
image culture by the automatisms of a new technological medium. Alongside
the ontological perplexity or ambiguity within digital photo-realism, there
is also an apparently automatic drift away from Realism itself toward the
fantastic, as:
The key point of reference now will be to mental events – not physical
reality moulded to the imaginary, but the free reign of the imaginary in
the creation of images ex nihilo that can simulate effects of the physical
world (gravity, friction, causation) while also overcoming them. (ibid,
p. 104)
Digital images, despite continuing to use codes of realism which serve to

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

run parallel to the emergence of a new type of cinematic image, it does not
in any way determine it:
Film as f ilm is indeed profoundly marked by digital culture, but the

internal changes in f ilm aesthetics (from database logic, to changed
relations of time, to the cinema’s more illusionary and affective powers)
were already present before the digital age and thus are not dependent
on digital technology per se. (ibid, p. 26)
Pisters thereby sees evidence of database logics, networks, and re-mixability

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

ing our belief, or crisis of belief, in the world. It does not create a world, it
merely creates an aesthetics of belief.
Pisters’s Neuro-Image then notes a next crisis in ‘belief in this world’ on
which her late 20th-century transition to the regime of the neuro-image
is dependent (2012, p. 300). She gives two exemplary events, the 1989 fall
of the Berlin Wall and the 2001 World Trade Centre terrorist attack, not
as direct causes, but as related to ‘an assemblage of conditions that are
connected to the transition’. First, the waning of empire and renegotiation of
political divisions occurred within a process of rapid globalisation; second,
there was a collapse of the distinction between actual and virtual in the
hyper-mediatisation of the terrorist attacks. However, it does in many ways
seem problematic to separate these images/events (or rather the assembled
processes and circumstances to which they refer) so clearly from the global
and digital technological conditions in which they are both steeped, that
of the uncertainty, plurality, and instability of perception which Rodowick
notes as the ontological features, or perplexities, of the non-indexical digital
image.
In dialogue with Pisters and Deleuze, and in an attempt to stake a claim
that technological change itself is indeed deeply implicated in determining
contemporary aesthetic and ontological changes, I would suggest that
there is a technical condition, conceived of as an ‘essence’ of any given
technology, that lies immanent or latent within the actual technological
forms and processes (of hardware and software in the case of the digital)
until it reveals itself to our consciousness through error or experimenta-
tion. What the technology starts out to be, as imagined in advanced of its
creation (usually in an instrumental mode – for instance, seeing cinema
within a Realist teleology) then mutates and evolves into something new
and unanticipated in our consciousness of it. In other words, we do not
know what a technology does, or is capable of, until it has already taken
a turn in its evolution, and only when it has already exerted its affective
draw upon us can we reflect upon the change that was made. Deleuze
states this himself:
It is here that Tarkovsky’s wish comes true: that ´the cinematographer

succeeds in f ixing time in its indices [in its signs] perceptible by the
senses´. And, in a sense, cinema had always done this; but, in another
sense, it could only realize that it had in the course of its evolution, thanks
to a crisis of the movement-image. To use a formula of Nietzsche’s, it is
never at the beginning that something new, a new art, is able to reveal
its essence; what it was from the outset it can reveal only after a detour in
its evolution. (Deleuze, 1989, p. 43 – my emphasis)
At the turn of the nineteenth century, we anticipated cinematic technology’s

capture of time and movement as a more transparent, scientific reflec-
tion of reality (via the proto-cinematic work of Jules Marey and Eadward
Muybridge), yet only later were we able to acknowledge that it had actually
altered our time perception rather than simply reflecting or deepening it.
Indeed, all new expressive technologies from Technicolor, to Dolby sound, to
Digital 3D are presented within a narrative of advancement towards a more
seamless visual and aural realism (Bazin’s total cinema), and only later are
we able to realise that they have in some way transformed perception and
the very notion of the real by offering up a different mode of representing
and experiencing it – a ‘new art’. While Deleuze clearly states that the
aesthetic of the time-image comes ontologically prior to any technological
advancement which might permit the efficient creation of such images, he
simultaneously and apparently contradictorily endows these technologies
with the automatistic power to ‘relaunch’ the time-image, to remake or
reinvent them in original ways in a ‘genetic and differential’ mode (1986,
p. 85).
If cultural crises and historicised ontological conditions are the causal
factors in any given aesthetic shift, then these are merely facilitated by
the available expressive technologies. On the other hand, we can see that
whatever aesthetic uses these technologies serve, they also synthesise
their own vital affectivity in emergent ways. Deleuze, despite dismissing
the notion that the technological forms themselves could determine either
aesthetics or consciousness, also apparently recognised the potential for
emergence through the machinic automatism of the media apparatus, that
might confront us with a disruptive image that we must assimilate into a
new and original image of thought. This automatism of the cinematic and
digital apparatus can be thought of as its technological ‘essence’ in that it
calls forth a certain mode of being; it ‘reveals’ the world in a certain way,
and changes us (our culture and our belief in the world) in the process.
Cinema and Affection
If we accept that screen images do not simply reflect human thought and
culture, but also impact upon it in mutational ways, we have to ask: How
exactly do we theorise about images as events, ‘entities’, or automata which
affect us? The broad remit of academic film theory since the 1970s was
to answer this question by focusing on the sociocultural resonance of
the representative image on the screen, and on how we psychologically
identify with its characters and narratives. This approach endures today
in a culturally broad way with both media and armchair critics alike
predominantly thinking about cinematic objects as texts to be used and
read in an instrumental mode – as entertainment or education. However,
to consider the mode in which either film or digital images impact us in
ways that might generate new metaphysical thought, we need to lay down
some fundamental notions of how our conscious mind engages with media
images beyond semiotic and psychoanalytic notions of representation and

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

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

ception of affection – affection as a constitutive impurity of this bodies
perception – and to offer in its place a formal understanding of affection
as a specific permutation of the movement-image. Affection as a phenom-
enological modality of bodily life gives way to affection as a concrete type
of image – the affection-image. (Hansen, 2006, p. 6 – original emphasis)
Hansen critiques Deleuze´s attempt to fix affection and make it concrete,

what he sees as a formal understanding. He feels that this does an injustice
to the philosophical concept of affection as given to us by Bergson – that of
affection as a fluid disruptive process within habitual recognition rather
than being a ‘special’ type of image. Hansen’s issue with Deleuze actually
highlights a problem that runs through much affect theory, in as far as he
sees that affect is here being ‘bracketed’ as a tangible object of study. This
mission seems destined to fail as affection cannot be seen as a discrete
thing in its own right, rather it is a constitutive component of a holistic and
dynamic process of cognition.
However, despite Hansen’s critique of Deleuze’s positioning of affection
as a facet of a limiting visual regime, it seems that Deleuzian film theory –
perhaps Deleuzian theory in general -- is really all about affection and the
affective synthesis of reality. His film theory gives us a taxonomy of cinematic
constructions and devices that each synthesise a non-conscious affection
of certain metaphysical qualities – of time and space principally, but also
of more ambiguous qualities of the repetition of difference, virtuality, and
immanence. He shows us how, through film, we have the reproduction of a
specific form of thought through a visual expression of formal and material
relations – either linear, causal, and coherent (in the movement-image), or
discontinuous, ambiguous, and complexified (in the time-image) – though
both work primarily in a passive mode of affective synthesis by which the
mind does not actively think about these things, but absorbs them.
Passive Synthesis and the Spiritual Automaton
With his Cinema books, Gilles Deleuze surprised many by offering his
own idiosyncratic film theory and analytic strategy (Rodowick, 1997, p.
x). In these two texts, he did not attack or refute political f ilm theory,
but instead crafted a more philosophically grounded and metaphysical
formal analysis and typology of film images. Deleuze’s drawing together
of Bergson, Spinoza, and Peirce’s writings in A Thousand Plateaus (with
Felix Guattari, 1987) continued into the Cinema books, with a broad reach
extending from perception and consciousness to metaphysical concepts.
However, in the Movement-Image and the Time-Image, these ideas were
attached specifically to media, and to cinema’s unique relationship with
processes of consciousness. Deleuze’s concepts of ‘passive synthesis’ and the
‘spiritual automaton’, applied in the cinematic context, prove invaluable for
the expansion of understanding of affective processes and how they feature
in the ontological shift to digital media.
In thinking about how media technologies generate a distinct meta-
physical regime of what is visible, of what is understandable, and of what
is expressible, we must understand that this process functions below a
level of fully conscious awareness. This is to say that it is so peripheral to
our core consciousness that it is ingrained and habitual, permeating the
relationships between objects in the world and our own bodily senses, both
inwardly and outwardly directed. These processes are so encompassing
in our day-to-day interactions with the world that they move from the
social or cultural milieu in which they are sustained into our very personal
procedural and semantic memory, and act as the neurological foundation
to all activity and subsequent reflection on our actions. This foundation is
subconscious and automatic, positioned in the brain somewhere between
the primal motor automation of the ancient ‘reptilian’ brain and the higher
cognitive function of the cerebral cortex. The concept of ‘passive synthesis’
becomes useful for this project in thinking phenomenologically about how
technologies of expression synthesise a metaphysical model of reality – an
affective dimension of automatic responsivity which sculpts perception
and cognition at every level.
Passive synthesis, a concept from Hume and Husserl via Deleuze, an-
ticipates contemporary discourses of affection. Media, as a technological
system, gives us the rule by which we synthesise reality, but this process
occurs passively and automatically outside of our conscious awareness or
control. We inhabit the moving image in a distracted way, and, as such,
we absorb knowledge about the world in the form of intuitive skills and
aptitudes in perception. 4 If the active mind is intellectual, logical, and
4 This point about the non-conscious ‘distracted’ absorption of skills is also developed in
Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1999).
analytical, the process of passive synthesis is automatic and embodied. The

process of the passive synthesis of time, then, is in the embodied phenomenal
experience of duration as completely natural and perfectly obvious as
regards the active mind, even though our awareness of it has been, in a
sense, artificially generated. These apparently natural experiences of time
are synthetic constructs, possibly to an extent phylogenetically inscribed
in our primitive reptilian brain, but also ontogenetically acquired and
held kinaesthetically within the affective body through lived experience.
Neither a common sense, natural order of the world, nor a logical deduction
through observation, many modes of inhabiting the world are developed
passively, internally, and non-rationally. The way that media affect us can
thus be thought of, distinct from semantic processes of representation
and identification, as a non-conscious processing of sensory data through
associative and metaphorical links, through motor, muscle, and procedural
memory, and through the laying of neural pathways.
The modern concept of passive synthesis emerges from Husserl’s use
of it in his Analyses Concerning Passive and Logical Synthesis: Lectures on
Transcendental Logic (2001, original 1891).5 As Husserl’s translator Anthony
Steinbock describes in his introductory notes, he ‘overburdens the term
with a significance that is at best multivalent, and quite often cryptic and
vague’, and yet passive synthesis emerges as crucial to an understanding of
sense experience, affection, and the process of associative memory (ibid, p.
xxxviii). Steinbock describes passivity in Husserl as the route to a genetic
account of how cognitive activity is largely unconsciously motivated, a
dimension of experience by which ‘a present perception passes over into a
retentionally lingering perception and fades back as a fundamental form
of the past, linking up with previous retentions, motivating pretensions or
futurally directed intentions’ (ibid). This describes a ‘primordial’ process by
which memory as retention of previous sense experience synthesises our
unconscious perception of things as things, that is, as intelligible, meaningful
wholes. Objects acquire a consistency and regularity in our perception
through passive, non-conscious association, connection, and harmonisation
with previous experience, creating synthetic unities. Passive synthesis
therefore describes the ambiguous and un-thought process of corporeal
affection, the way objects and processes are given to us pre-consciously, the
passive experience of the object before it has been constituted by an active
5 Though it is noted that Husserl developed his phenomenological notion from Hume’s earlier
psychological use (Ansell-Pearson, 2002, p. 227)
mind, the passive experience of the object before it has been constituted
by an active mind.
Something is pre-given insofar as it exercises an affective allure on me

without being grasped by me as such, responsively or egoistically. Here,
this ´something´ received the appellation óbjectlike formation´, that is
something that exhibits the basic structure of an object, but is more
elementary than an object the full-fledged sense or has not yet exhibited
objectivity. (Husserl, 2001, p. xlii)
Passive synthesis as concept explores the affective mode in which the

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

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

also saw these images assume a vitality of their own as affective automata,
‘passively’ and automatically connecting with other affections within a
collective cultural subconscious and synthesising a new way of feeling and
a new image of thought which seems independent of any one individual
authorial intention. Deleuze conceives of this vitality of the image as a
‘spiritual automatism’ or ‘psycho-mechanics’ of cinema (1989, p. 262).
The complexity of the cinematic spiritual automaton is articulated by
Deleuze in the Time-Image, through the words of Artaud, in direct com-
parison to a ‘dream-cinema’ defined as ‘a censure or repression brought
together with an unconscious mode of impulses’ (ibid, p. 165). In contrast
to the dream which bubbles up involuntarily from the unconscious, the
spiritual automaton is, for Deleuze, more like automatic writing: ‘not an
absence of composition, but a higher control which brings together critical
and conscious thought and the unconscious in thought’ (ibid). Deleuze
uses the metaphor of the daydreaming vigilambulist versus the sleeping
somnambulist to explain this distinction further: it does not involve the total
absence of or relinquishing of control as if we were asleep and dreaming,
but rather an automatic motor control that works passively beyond our
conscious awareness in a waking state. Cinema as spiritual automaton
represents an idea that we are not in full conscious control, that an affective
power is passively exerted over us.7 In this way, we can see that our own
creations challenge us with a power that we never figured for them, and,
in their intensity, the images confront us with our powerlessness to think:
What cinema advances is not the power of thought but its impower,
and thought has never had any other problem. It is precisely this which
is much more important than the dream: this difficulty of being, this
powerlessness at the heart of thought. What the enemies of cinema
criticized it for (like George Duhamel, Í can no longer think what I
want, the moving images are substituted for my own thoughts´) is just
exactly what Artaud makes into the dark glory and profundity of cinema.
(Deleuze, 1989, p. 166)
7 This is also addressed by Rodowick, who draws on Cavell’s The World Viewed, to note that:
‘A medium in this sense is not a passive or recalcitrant substance subject to artistic will. It is
itself expressive as potentiae, or powers, of thought, action, or creation. But these powers are
variable and conditional. In exploring their potential we discover the conditions of possibility
of a medium; in exceeding or exhausting them we may in fact create a new medium, and new
powers of thought and creation.’ (2007, p. 45)
It is this ‘profound’ substitution of our thought by the cinematic image

that makes Deleuze identify a ‘camera-consciousness’ which ‘raises itself
to a determination which is no longer formal or material, but genetic and
differential’ (1986, p. 85 – my emphasis). This is to say that the technology
of cinema at first reflects or mimics certain formal aspects of perception,
but then, in its autonomous vitality, passively yet decisively enters into
and alters our consciousness. It proves itself as a spiritual problematic as it
challenges our capacity to think about and understand the world, and, in this,
it assumes a sublime effect: ‘the image must have a shock effect on thought,
and force thought to think itself as much as thinking the whole’ (Deleuze,
1989, p. 158). He continues: ‘It is the material automatism of images which
produces from the outside a thought which it imposes, as the unthinkable
in our intellectual automatism’ (ibid, p. 179).
I argue that the ‘unthinkable’ image has now, within contemporary digital
post-cinema, become the dominant or default mode of aesthetic expression,
not just as a trend of cultural postmodern playfulness and ironic detachment
but because of a contemporary ontological condition (though not, perhaps,
a cultural crisis of faith). This condition is instigated by rapid digitalisation,
going hand in hand with a secular awareness of the limits of our knowledge
of the physical world that entails wild speculation in theoretical physics
as to the structure of the universe. The images created in digital media as
computer-generated and 3D-simulated worlds thus prove to be the next stage
in the evolution of images from the cinematic time-image. They now provide
not only fragmentary moments of rupture in the sensory-motor schema of
the movement-image, but instead offer fully realised, sustained, and coherent
other worlds with in which predictable metaphysics are surpassed. In films
such as Christopher Nolan’s film Inception (2010), Gaspar Noé’s Enter the
Void (2010), and Duncan Jones´s Source Code (2011), reality opens up to
new levels, new ruptures, new cracks, and new sensations, going deeper and
further from recognisable reality, until we feel the genuine peril of losing
all connection to what we know.
As film’s materials, processes, and technologies have their own automa-
tisms – in grains of silver which capture light on the screen, in transparent
celluloid that can hold an image through which light can be shone, and in
the conjuring of movement by the linear sequencing of images on the film
strip (just as, for instance, oil painting has its own automatic qualities in
the brushstrokes and textures of the paint), digital visual technologies have
a texture and a modality that we are still experimenting with in ways of
which we do not know the outcome. They are more than the sum of the
instrumental representational or artistic uses put to them. The digital image
thus has a vital automatism which ‘has its own logic’ and ‘constructs its
own objects’ (ibid, p. 262).
Do We Need a New ‘Digital’ Image Type – A ‘Cinema 3’?
In identifying a digital post-cinematic image which is a decisive evolution

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

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

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

consciousness, now aligned with the digital condition of image production,
I turn to a broader philosophy of technology through Martin Heidegger’s
concept of techne, and to Bernard Stiegler’s more direct technical address to
digital media technologies. This actually helps us to think further beyond the
thorny issue of cause and responsibility (tackling the notion of technological

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

his own conceiving, he has already been claimed by a way of revealing
that challenges him to approach nature as an object of research, until
even the object disappears into the objectlessness of standing-reserve.
(Heidegger, 1977, p. 19)
Heidegger describes here that by engaging in this mode of thought – of the

world as a rationalised and understood object – we fail to understand that we
too become objectified, we too have already been claimed by the same way of
approaching the world. The essence of modern technology sets us in a frame
of mind to see the real as standing reserve, and that includes ourselves and
our fellow humans. He calls this effect of technology on us ‘enframing’, by

which we are drawn into a calculating and objectifying mode. This critique
extends to the physical sciences and their Cartesian representations of the
world as structured and categorised and hierarchical systems of information.
He remarks that nature becomes un-representable other than as an ordered
system of information, and that this mode of thinking of nature as figure
or data is so abstracted it becomes hopelessly disconnected: ‘its realm of
representation remains inscrutable and incapable of being visualized’ (ibid).
This is the enframing of nature – an abstraction through information/data
that conceals its true essence. Within this habit of representing the world,
for Heidegger, lies the ‘ultimate danger’ or ‘precipitous fall’ – that we too
become standing reserve, and that we become irredeemably detached from
‘truth’ or the real as a kind of originary immanence.8
The ‘saving power’ within Heidegger’s view is that we come to see this
process of enframing at work. This requires salvaging and reconnecting with
that other mode of revealing which does not impose a rational system on the
world, and through which we can reveal and confront this true ‘essence’ of
technology: the arts. We can see here that the arts assume a general force
of negation within his model, by which not just the fine arts but also the
arts of the mind, i.e. philosophy, are trusted with the power of combating
enframing processes, and thus are seen as the redemptive force that will
save humanity. Art and other poetic and aesthetic strategies, as opposed to
industrialised and mechanised technologies, thus hold the ‘saving power’.
They have an oppositional dynamic force which allows nature to reveal itself
naturally in its own essence. This resonates strongly with modernist and
postmodern aesthetic theory from Adorno’s antinomy to Lyotard’s sublime,
and with concepts of an experimental avant-garde, in which art is seen as a
privileged autonomous realm, if not the only dialectically negative political
force which can drive social change.
However, towards the end of The Question Concerning Technology, Hei-
degger offers another tantalising but relatively undeveloped possibility which
seems more apt for our contemporary society (underdeveloped in aesthetic
8 This idea also forms the basis of Bergson’s attack on ‘intellectualism’ as the scientific mode
of rationalising the world as logical and predictable. This, he insists, is a ‘misuse of mind’. Of
interest is the 1922 text The Misuse of Mind: A Study of Bergson’s Attack on Intellectualism by Karin
Stephen, in which it is stated: ‘The business of philosophy is not to explain reality but to know
it. For this a different kind of mental effort is required. Analysis and classification, instead of
increasing our direct knowledge, tend rather to diminish it […] The better we explain, the less,
in the end, we know’ (2000). This sentiment seems well in line with Heidegger’s incitement to
examine the ‘essence’ of technology.
theory but also in the philosophy of technology generally), and which also
relieves the crude dialectic of art and rationalism which is otherwise present
in the essay (and which can seem hopelessly outdated in advanced cultural
capitalism). He states:
The Saving Power: Whether art can be granted this highest possibility
of its essence in the midst of extreme danger, no one can tell. Yet we
can be astounded. Before what? Before this other possibility: that the
frenziedness of technology may entrench itself everywhere to such an
extent that someday, throughout everything technological, the essence
of technology may come to presence in the coming to pass of truth.
(Heidegger 1977, p. 35)
Here, Heidegger suggests that that art as dialectical force may not be the
only final hope for humanity, but rather that technology could become
so ubiquitous that it would in some way spontaneously contribute to the
revealing of its own essence. This possibility seems more adapted to a world
in which digital technology is truly entrenched in every field of human
activity, and in which the level of technological mediation has indeed become
so ‘frenzied’ that it might indeed be said to reflect upon and question its
own ontological essence.
Heidegger gives us a way of thinking about technologies as not physical
entities, devices, or instruments, but rather as modes of relating to the
world which put us into a particular habit of perception, representation,
and action with regard to reality. In subtle ways, industrial technologies
draw us into a state of being which spreads beyond our direct relation to
the technologies themselves and permeates our general mode of relating to
the world, to others, and to ourselves. They can obscure the world from us,
and even actively silence or obscure alternative modes of understanding,
awareness, and engagement. Only by being observant to this technological
process can we come to think differently.
We have to ask then, following Deleuze’s lead, if cinema is not the
preeminent technological form which not only represents reality in an
instrumental mode (an industrial, commercial, representational mode),
but also has the aesthetic potential to elevate itself to a type of reflexive
revealing which exposes our modes of enframing the world in Heidegger’s
ethical sense. Is cinema Heidegger’s ‘other possibility’, and is this not
perhaps what Deleuze suggests in the Time-Image? Or, is it in fact digital
technology, specifically the craft of the post-cinematic image, undeniably
frenzied and everywhere entrenched, that actually now holds the promise
of a revealing or unconcealing that might bring the essence of technology

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

problematic case study, I return to Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar from
2014. In this film, and in its public discursive rhetoric, we saw cinematic
strategies towards image-making being conceptually opposed to ‘real’
quantitative scientific research, whereby the latter was promoted as being
the unique selling-point of the film. This discursive strategy articulated
how the fantastic images of the film – of the black hole Gargantua, of the
wormholes and alien planets – were not simply sprung from the fertile
imagination of a scriptwriter and effects studio, but were instead grounded
in scientific observation and calculation. I described in the introduction how
9 This notion of cinematic revealing is explored by Vivian Sobchack through slow motion,
in her chapter ‘Cutting to the Quick: Techne, Physis and Poiesis and the Attractions of Slow
Motion’, in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (2006), ed.Wanda Strauven. I conduct my own
analysis of digital slow motion in Chapter Three.
this film seems to break down and complexify any clear boundary between
art (imagination) and science fact in terms of representing metaphysical
forces, and thus seems to offer an original image type.
This film’s creators have clearly reflected deeply on the ontological status
of their images, and have generated complex mathematical simulations
which reflect a level of scientific truth, rather than wild speculation or
vivid imagination. Director Nolan places ‘real’ values even on his fully
computer-generated representations – not analogue, not pro-filmic, but with
an apparently similar set of moral values put in place by the involvement of
theoretical physicists and scientific visualisation labs in the visual design
of the film. As a director, he has valued a kind of analogue authenticity as
the internal logic of many of his films, and in his public profile, he actively
campaigns for the continued use of traditional film formats in the face
of their digital usurpers. He has, in the past, explicitly distanced himself
from the use of digital effects – rejecting digital illusionism within fiction
and insisting upon capturing the actual pro-filmic event; for instance,
the infamous truck-flip in Batman: The Dark Knight (2008). He also
consciously rejected Digital 3D, despite its popularity, with Interstellar,
and privileged film formats in presentation of the film by controversially
penalising digital-only venues by allowing the film to open one day early
in analogue film theatres (McClintock, 2014).
However, Interstellar’s scientifically qualified data visualisations of the
black hole Gargantua are aesthetically rendered in digital post-production,
opening them up to a level of access and appreciation which the much dryer
scientific simulation imagery could never have achieved (Thorne, 2014).
Thus, we have to ask what status reality actually has within the ontology
to which Nolan seems to ascribe, which distances itself from the ‘fake’
digital, and reifies the ‘authentic’ analogue. Is there greater authenticity
here, greater naturalism, or is Nolan just creating a (rather disingenuous)
narrative about scientific authenticity in science fiction (which he himself
cannot even deliver on)? Within a discourse of scientific truth versus a
fanciful sci-fi inauthenticity, we must ask if this is science-driven cinematic
art, or rather cinema-driven scientific visualisation? Is the real science a
mere supplement here for a fairly standard cinematic image which predates
the digital (or even just a marketing strategy), or is it really the driving force
of a new digital imaginative strategy of image creation?
One could argue that the digitally advanced images of Interstellar
attain a new level of digital ‘revealing’ which marks a significant turning
point in the historical development of moving images. When scientific data
visualisation becomes truly aesthetic and cinematic as in Interstellar, do we
have an original mode of revealing by which some deeper truth or essence

is revealed – an original regime of images? Does this qualify as a poetic
image that allows a natural truth to ‘shine forth most purely’, breaching the
purely scientific enframing of nature by truly merging it with a properly
sublime aesthetic form of revealing? Furthermore, is it an example of the
moment when the digital image starts to think reflexively upon its own
ontological status, its own process of revealing, its own essence, at a moment
in which we are more broadly drawn into a ‘questioning’ of the nature of
technological mediation? Do special effects thereby become more ethical,
more meaningful, when they are no longer ‘just’ pretty pictures?
This is perhaps idealistic. Interstellar is surely an original post-
cinematic image, and the image of the black hole is undeniably hypnotic
– an effect certainly enhanced by the awareness that there is a complex
basis of truth behind and within the image. But then we have to ask if it
is more, or actually less, evocative than other similarly affective images
which have previously fired the public scientific imagination.10 Is there any
difference in terms of our metaphysical consciousness between an image
which imaginatively evokes a relatively intangible and unobservable entity
such as a black hole, and an algorithmic simulation based on real data?
Then, if this image is indeed a new, original kind of revealing which serves
as an expansion of metaphysical consciousness, then we have to wonder
if that is really how Nolan intended it. Within his image logic, we can see
that he indulges a nostalgia for some abstract ‘authenticity’ that, in a sense,
betrays the real expressive potential of his own digital visualisations. We
can perhaps conclude that Nolan’s own rationale is in fact redundant, if we
instead consider the images independently, detached from the discourse that
immerses them, are a unique product of a digital technological automatism.
If this is really a film that makes large steps to break down this boundary
between scientific simulation and aesthetic evocation, it can be said that it
does this through its own material automatism, over and above (or despite)
the intention of the film’s creators. Does this type of post-cinematic image
then actually constitute an original, virtual image of thought? And is this
perhaps the consequence of technology becoming so embedded, convoluted,
and ubiquitous that it spontaneously starts to reveal its own essence?
10 Past analogue representations of theoretical objects include, for example, The Black Hole
(dir. Gary Nelson, 1979), 2001 (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1968 – notable for its slit-screen animation
effects), and more recent organic effects have selectively been used in in The Tree of Life (dir.
Terence Malick, 2011) and The Fountain (dir. Darren Aronofsky, 2007), in which purely digital
effects could otherwise have been used.
Granting this ‘saving power’ to the digital image is perhaps still a little
premature despite these interesting advances in visualisation. Critical
theorists including Bernard Stiegler and Sean Cubitt still strongly emphasise
the tendency of digital media to function in exactly the mode of ordering
and standardisation of the world, which is nothing other than an ‘enframing’
mode, and especially while even the creator of these images actively disavows
their revealing power by placing his trust in the analogue. Stiegler is a key
theorist who here extends and develops Heidegger’s ‘extreme danger’ sce-
nario into the realm of digital media, believing that our current technological
regime provides almost crippling odds against the redemption of humanity.
The Digital Pharmakon
As previously noted, Heidegger discusses ‘representational thinking’ as a

mode of rationality into which we are drawn as an ‘enframing’ of reality.
He states:
Where everything that presences exhibits itself in the light of a cause-

effect coherence, even God, for representational thinking, can lose all
that is exalted and holy, the mysteriousness of his distance. (Heidegger,
1977, p. 33)
For Heidegger, thinking representationally is part of the scientific and ma-

chinic sensibility cultivated by modern technology, in a mode that distances
us from any pure thought about mysterious complexity or holy ambiguity by
imposing upon it an abstract symbolic system. Bernard Stiegler, fusing this
idea with Derrida’s conception of grammatology, develops a theory which
more directly tackles representation and communication as it has changed
and evolved alongside our technological evolution. His theory, developed
through his five-volume Technics and Time series, allows us to position
cinema and digital media better alongside Heidegger’s industrial enframing
technologies as technical conditions which give shape to our capacity to
think, perceive, and act. Any given system of representation, from speech
to written language to the cinematic image, is seen equally as a technology
which synthesises a particular actualised mode of being in the world. This
is to say that thought itself is mediated by a technological system, and that
our own thought processes are conditioned and modified by this system.
However, in Stiegler’s Derridean (also Foucauldian) aspects, he diverges
from Heidegger’s moral stance in stating that there is no original, pure, or
transcendent ‘real’ state away from which technology draws us (and certainly
no mysterious or exalted Godhead). Rather, all ways of thinking, feeling,
and representing (communicating) are originally technical and impure. This
means that where Heidegger posits the ‘ultimate danger’ to humanity is that
everything we think and feel would become completely enframed by our
technological circumstance (such that we forget our original selves), Stiegler
takes this enframing as a fundamental given of the human condition. He
states that there is no original relation of man to nature (physis), and no
essence or truth of human experience beyond the tools which we create
to interact with and describe the world. As such, Stiegler is instantly more
ambivalent about the nature of thought within any given technological
state, since there is no natural state outside of technology to which we could
escape. On this distinction between Heidegger and Stiegler, philosopher
Stephen Barker succinctly states:
Stiegler asserts that the human is the product, not the ćause´ of technical
evolution, an evolution whose grounding concept is ´technics.´ […] For
Stiegler, the world is not ´to hand,´ as it is in Heidegger; rather, ´the hand
learns from the tool´. This idea of technics is diametrically opposed to
Plato’s anti-technical worldview and to Heidegger’s phenomenological
one, acting as both a deconstruction and a critique of both. (Barker, 2009)
Digital technologies thus offer only the most recent enframing process of
many in a sequence, processes from which we learn how to be human in
a foundational sense.
Rather than ‘enframing’, Stiegler refers instead to a neutral process of
‘grammatisation’ – a concept succinctly defined by his translator Daniel
Ross as ‘the process by which fluxes are reduced to discrete, formal, sym-
bolic and reproducible elements’ (2009).11 As speech is a grammatisation
or formalisation of movements of the jaw, tongue, and larynx, writing
is a grammatisation of speech through largely abstract gestural figures.
Photography and cinema follow, as formalisations and actualisations of
movement, time and expression which can be shared as communication.
Each successive grammatisation is a relatively passive process of connection
and systematisation of a flux of vital and dynamic affections of movement,
sound, or light into a new matrix of meaningful gestures. These gestures,
structured like a language but also beyond language, can be thought of as
11 Daniel Ross is also co-director/producer of the BBC film The Ister (2004), which reflects on
Heidegger’s theory of technics and which features Bernard Stiegler himself.
generative of reality as such, in that they mould the way we think, or are
able to express thought about our existence. For Stiegler, a grammatisa-
tion is the ‘technical’ context for the production and transformation of
human nature. There is, in fact, no human nature before technics, as we
are technical beings, conceived, perceived, affected, and affecting through
technological, grammatical systems. They are technologies of expression
which together completely and utterly encompass what is perceived and
understood. Grammatisation thus proves to be a productive way to approach
how digital technologies, in their distinctiveness from prior media forms,
generate an original set of dynamic relations which structure understanding
and awareness of ‘everyday’ reality.
Grammatisations synthesise reality as we are able to grasp it, and indi-
vidual consciousness is formed by and through it, though each individual
brain is ‘but one apparatus within a circuit of apparatuses through which the
psychic connects with the social’ (Barker, 2009). Aspects of our individual
consciousness are shared culturally as a form of collective memory which
Stiegler calls ‘tertiary retention’. This tertiary retention is over and above
the primary and secondary retentions of, respectively, core-consciousness
memory – which we employ when we read a book and manage to remember
the beginning of the sentence by the end – and individual memory – the
stored personal experience that we conventionally think of as memory.
Collective memory and knowledge that is shared technically through
‘hypomnemata’ (the actual material forms of mediation, from writing to
cinema) ultimately produce us as subjects.12 ‘Experience’, for Stiegler, is
already, as it is occurring, a matter of technics, since even the most personal
memories we hold are structured grammatically, shaped by their associative
links with the social in processes of individuation.
This makes intuitive sense if we think about how much of our inner
experience – personal and private memories, dreams and fantasies, inhabited
notions of body, time, and space – are, to a great extent (and despite what we
may hope for), arranged generically, shaped by shared cultural narratives
and by the media we consume, be it literary, televisual, cinematic, or digital.
As such, sane and socially engaged citizens share archetypal dreams and
fantasies and share common perceptions which will always nonetheless feel
deeply personal. This is not only about language and how we put words to
12 The forms of hypomnemata as tertiary retention are the primary subject of Stiegler’s third
volume of Technics and Time, namely Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise (1998) which
focuses on the mnemo-technical conditions by which knowledge and ways of life are passed
down from generation to generation.
our own experiences, but also about all subjective, passive, and automatic
mental processes of image creation and sharing, conditioned by the social,
technological means by which memory is recorded exterior to the body.
The recording process is an exterior process of grammatisation by which
personal, social, and cultural memory is technically inscribed in the forms
available (hypomnemata). Not just ‘the media’, but all available forms of
communication, mediation, and relationality ultimately mould what it is
to be and feel human, from oral and written transmission of experience
through language, to affective and representational image constructions
in art, photography, TV, and cinema.
The ‘cinematic’ technologies (in their most broad sense, including televi-
sion) have proven to be the dominant form of grammatisation of the 20th
Century, and indeed they still dominate (even if, as discussed at the beginning
of the chapter, only in habituated forms despite alternate possibilities).
The conventional cinematic inscription of movement, gesture, and affect
which now amounts to much of Western culture and cultural memory has
synthesised an experience of humanity and existence constituted in time
and space. Distinct from the expressive form of literature before it, cinema
is a particularly adaptive expression of human attention and awareness
in that it mimics, or seems well synchronised with, our own processes of
consciousness as the capacity to filter, organise, and cognise visual and
auditory sensory data in both direct experience and in memory (Stiegler, 2010,
p. 28). The direct mimesis of cognitive processes and the ubiquity of screens
and images in our everyday lives means that this mode of expression, this
grammatisation, penetrates every level of our psyche, including our collective
social psyche, such that we now think, dream, and interact ‘cinematically’.
Stiegler, reminiscent of Deleuze’s notion that ‘the brain is the screen’, thus
conceives of consciousness as analogous to a cinematic post-production suite:
‘Consciousness´ would then be this post-production center, this control

room assembling the montage, the staging, the realization, and the
direction, of the flow in primary, secondary, and tertiary retentions, of
which the unconscious, full of protentional possibilities (including the
speculative), would be the producer. (Stiegler, 2010, p. 28)
Furthermore, the cinematic as industry and institution has also integrated

itself into the pace and ordering of our post-industrial, individualised society,
offering itself as work and leisure, and shaping us as subjects of consumer
capitalism. Daniel Ross notes that, as cultural collective memory and method
of ‘psychic individuation’, cinema has offered us a ‘specific form of thought,
a specific form of aesthetic, and thus a specific form of politics’ which may
extend to the ‘hyper-synchronisation of consciousness’ (Ross, 2007). For
Stiegler, the industrialisation of consciousness, which he calls ‘industrial
populism’, reaches its zenith in a digital grammatisation, amounting to a
didacticism regarding the available modes of cognition always directed
towards profit gain. The digital ‘psychotechnologies’ of a late-capitalist
culture are dedicated to the almost perfect conditioning of perception and
desire such that we have reverted to basic programmable drives. We are
moulded as consumers according to the needs of programming industries
who control the ‘mnemotechnical’ systems of media.
Despite this bleak analysis, Stiegler attempts to believe in, and to act
upon, the principle that a seed of ethical renewal exists. In more recent
work, he aspires to a transformation of contemporary capitalism and a
‘psychopolitical’ awakening, which we must at all cost assume is possible
(Stiegler, 2014). He bases his hope for the ‘re-enchantment of the world’ upon
the idea that any given technological system is a pharmakon – essentially
ambivalent, and potentially both poison and remedy. He elaborates:
We propose that (1) every technique is ´pharmacological´ in the sense of

being potentially harmful or beneficial; (2) in the absence of a definition
of a ´therapeutics´ – what the Greeks named a meléte and a épimeleia
(discipline, solicitude, care), which presupposes a technique of the self – a
pharmakon becomes necessarily toxic. (Stiegler, 2014, p. 20)
Through this, we can perhaps start to complexify Heidegger’s notion of

an ‘alternative’ saving power – that technology becomes so entrenched
and ubiquitous that it might result in the coming to pass of truth, and the
revealing of the essence of technology. The essence of technology is described
by Stiegler by its pharmacological characteristic, and only by establishing
a culture of disciplined attentiveness to its potentially poisonous nature
can crisis be averted and its healing power be reclaimed. Crucially, this is
done via the technologies themselves, and not through their contradiction
or Luddite destruction.
Stiegler thus declares a manifesto calling for a new political culture which
is attentive to the potential toxicity of digital technics:
[…] a new cultural, educational, scientific, and industrial politics capable

of taking care of the world […] a politics, which during our time is also
a political economy, is first of all and above all else a system of care that
consists in establishing ways of life (and a culture) that knows how to deal
with the given pharmacological (technical and mnemotechical) state. A

culture is that which cultivates a careful relation to the pharmaka that
compose a human world, and thus which struggles against their ever
possible toxicity. (2014, pp. 18-20 – original emphases)
This politics of care for the world is to be achieved through the restoration of
‘spirit’ and what Stiegler calls an ‘industrial politics of technologies of spirit’.
While the concept of spirit could here seem a little abstract or mystical, he
clarifies its meaning as a kind of ‘motive of life’, and as a restoration of reason
and orientation which is lost in a contemporary culture of programmable
desires and drives. His translator further clarifies the complexity in the
French use of spirit, used to mean not only the conventional sense of an
immaterial substance ‘as such affiliated with the intellectual, religious and
moral faculties of man’, but also:
[…] a synthesis of the psychic and the social, as well as the intellectual
and historical life of man, being tied up in the vicissitudes of processes
of individuation in which one becomes who he is, and in processes of
transindividuation whereby we become who we are. (2014, p. viii, transla-
tor Trevor Arthur’s foreword)
Thus, an ‘Ars Industrialis’ – a new political economy and industry of spirit – is

offered instead as a saving power, that will reveal the pharmacological
essence of technology, specifically that of the digital as a mnemotechnology.
However, for Stiegler this cannot arise spontaneously and automatically from
the technology itself, but is a battle that must be fought through organised
action. As pharmacology tends towards the poisonous, it must be actively
resisted.
Plasticity and Politics
In Deleuze´s analysis of cinema, and in Heidegger’s ‘other’ possibility, a seed

of transgression and renewal is found within the technical medium itself,
even if this potential is not initially apparent at its birth. Stiegler then adds
nuance to this, noting that any ethical spiritual automatism of the digital is
immanent within its technical form, but has the potential to become toxic if
due political attention and discipline are not applied. The time-image thus
emerged from within the cinematic medium to disrupt the didacticism of the
movement-image, creating a tear in the naturalistic suture of conventional
constructions of narrative space, and thus of transcendent and linear time.

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

skills in cognition.
In ways that resonate nicely with Stiegler’s ideas of the processes of
consciousness and of individuation, as well as the idea of some political
agency and reflexivity within these processes, philosopher Catherine Ma-
labou develops a concept of an ontological plasticity. Throughout her work
from her PhD thesis on Hegel’s dialectics through to more recent work on
psychoanalysis, neurology, and ontology, she proposes a new materialism,
from the neuron to the atom, by which both the phenomenal world and
objective reality – ‘the material organisation of thought and being’– are
characterised by a quality of plasticity (Malabou, 2010, p. 61). She states in
conclusion to her book Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing:
I believe that I have shown how, from a philosophical point of view,

plasticity refers both to the process of temporization at work in the heart of
subjectivity (Hegel) and absolute ontological exchangeability (Heidegger)
and also how, from the scientific viewpoint, plasticity characterizes a
regime of systematic self-organization that is based on the ability of an
organism to integrate the modifications that it experiences and to modify
them in return. (Malabou, 2010, p. 61 – my emphasis)
She proposes a kind of secular Spinozan monism, seeing all matter and
thought defined by a quality of plasticity and a process of plastic formation
and re-formation (rather than by Spinoza’s God/Nature as infinite substance).
Though cinema is not Malabou’s primary focus, in her brief dealings with
it, through Deleuze and Resnais’s cinematic brain landscapes in her What
Should We Do with Our Brain, she describes how she sees cinema as a kind
of productive metaphor for the plasticity at the heart of subjectivity. She
notes our initial ignorance to this: ‘We are perhaps always and necessarily
blind, at first, to our own cinema’ (2008, p. 39), but proposes that the very
form of cinema can be a powerful tool in bringing plasticity to our conscious
mind, empowering us to modify our lives.13 Plasticity becomes a particularly
apt concept through which to reflect on the plastic ontology presented to
us through a digital post-cinema and by simulated realities (reducable
themselves to a single substance of binary code), and to relate these directly
13 In a 2015 Vimeo interview clip ‘Catherine Malabou on Cinema’ in association with the film
Love in the Post by Joanna Callaghan (Heraclitus Pictures), she does reflect on cinema’s centrality
in a certain tangent of thought about consciousness, citing Deleuze to note how it ‘deconstructs’
consciousness through affects, in the same way as philosophy might do through writing.
to metaphysical concepts of time, space, energy, and materiality. We see

that digital images construct reality as essentially plastic, and with its own
automatisms and vitalities tend toward the ever-better representation of
a plastic universe.
Patricia Pisters, in The Neuro-Image, identifies her eponymous image
type as blossoming within digital culture, increasingly modelling reality as
a plastic brain-world subject to neuro-pathological ruptures. On the neuro-
screens of digital visual culture, narratives of psychosis and schizophrenia
play out, and events do not attempt to represent the ‘real’ world but show
instead our cognitively fragmented, faulted, and misfired mental topologies.
She then describes in the closing sentences of her introduction that these
breaks, discontinuities, and folds of the neuro-image synthesise a profound
metaphysical plasticity which can become ethical and political:
Perhaps, against the odds, the multiple and heterogeneous screens that
surround us with schizoid franticness, instead of removing us further from
reality, may come to our salvation. […] This book endeavours to see how
art, science and philosophy can come together to turn our contemporary
madness into metaphysics and into micro-political forms of resistance
that are the basis of any change. (Pisters, 2012, pp. 32-33)
In an ethico-political vein, Pisters’s work places the brain and its neurons
as a central condition for a new image ontology which can be resistant and
potentially redemptive within its ‘schizoid franticness’. However, Malabou
expresses the plastic ‘arrangement of being’ not as a state of schizophrenic
disorder or madness (what she calls a ‘schizology’) but rather contrastingly
as new order and organisation: ‘the unity of our time’ (2010, p. 7). Thus, while
Pisters provides a clear and purposeful move away from psychoanalytic and
Marxist film theory of neurosis towards an ethical Deleuzian schizoanalysis,
in doing this, she selects the brain as ‘the most striking example’ of a new
plastic arrangement of the real and uses it as her model. However, this is
perhaps only one (neural) pathway which can take us through the looking
glass of a fully ontological plasticity. As Malabou states:
Plasticity refers to the spontaneous organisation of fragments. The nervous

system presents the clearest, most striking example of this organisation. As
a concept plasticity is also endowed with a dythrambic gift for synthesis
enabling me to perceive the form of fragmentation and find my spot
within it. (Malabou, 2010, p. 7 – my emphasis)
I instead move towards a digital metaphor for ‘the form of fragmentation’,

rather than a neural one. This is not a blurring of the virtual and the actual
within mental, phenomenal experience (leaving objective reality intact),
but a fundamental decomposition of the divide between. Not the develop-
ment, modulation, breakdown, and regeneration of neural processes which
is still anthropocentric in tone, but a metaphysical shift which sees the
physical world itself in a virtual ‘quantum’ soup of subatomic particles, bits
of data, neural synapses, dark matter, 0s and 1s.14 Fully accepting Malabou’s
ontological plasticity is to go so far as to say that the world changes in real
terms through our ability to imagine and represent it. Thought, matter, and
force shape each other through technological processes of mediation. The
digital image is no longer a simple crack or rupture in thought (as Deleuze
thought of the cinematic time-image and through which the Futurists aimed
strategically to destroy traditional representation) but rather it is a new
dynamic and plastic ontology which is new order, genesis, and synthesis – a
plenitude.
Plasticity thus runs conceptually to the very heart of this project, which
is to tie corporeal processes of affection/perception/cognition, technol-
ogy, metaphysics, and ontology together within our contemporary media
landscape. Reality should be perceived as a mediated or grammatised
system which is subject to change, not completely fluid or relativistic, but
instead plastic and capable of ‘taking or receiving form, moulding or giving
form’. Malabou states: ‘there is perhaps no reason to talk of the plasticity
of Being—as if plasticity were some kind of quality—but of saying that
Being is nothing but its plasticity’ (2010, p. 36). Plasticity is therefore the
quality of immanence, the complexity of virtuality, and the condition of
technicity, which is actualised in grammatised but changeable technical
forms. It is Being without the need of a transcendent dialectic Other to
which to refer.
We can now achieve an ideal image of the spiritual automatism of a
new digital image regime. One which influences a new ethico-political
and aesthetic landscape though an affective, passive synthesis of new
metaphysical landscapes that force a critical questioning and yet open
attitude to a world with many fluid and shifting qualities. This is, however,
still an ambiguous ‘pharmacological’ potential, to be taken with a healthy
14 Pisters addresses Malabou’s theory in a 2011 blog response to What Should We Do with Our
Brain? at www.patriciapisters.com/, in which she can ‘see parallels between the concept of
plasticity and the neuro-image in that both attempt to address the challenges of our contemporary
brain-world’.
dose of Stieglerian cynicism. What I must examine then, going forward, is the
promising ethical effect of the new dynamics of consciousness given through
digital images, where this promise demands clear activity, participation,
and learning so that we might become more conscious of the cinema of
our own reality.
3. ‘A Digital Frontier to Reshape the
Human Condition’:1 Virtual Border
Spaces and Affective Embodiment in
Tron and Enter the Void
Dan Strutt
Abstract
By looking at the films Tron, Tron Legacy, and Enter the Void, this
chapter identifies the challenges to metaphysical consciousness that are
posed by the digital. I ask how these films engage aesthetically and imagi-
natively with digital systems and processes and identify two approaches
to the ontological problematic of digital virtuality: one in which an idea
of the feeling body is restored to the impersonal and immaterial digital
dimension, and another in which the body is discarded or abjected. It is
asked what these digital images, reflecting on the conditions of their own
creation, express about the way we can position ourselves within a digitally
connected world, and conclude that we experience an intuitive ontological
breakdown between ideas of ‘data’ and of ‘matter’ within a digital liminality.
Keywords: Emergence, Signs of Art, Post-Human, Liminality, Tron, Enter

the Void
The grid, a digital frontier. I tried to picture clusters of information as they

moved through the computer. What do they look like? Ships? Motorcycles? Were
the circuits like freeways? I kept dreaming of a world I thought I’d never see,
and then, one day, I got in.2
1 The ‘plug line’ written for the book of the same name in Tron: Legacy. Textual excerpts
from the script for Walt Disney Pictures’s motion picture Tron: Legacy used by permission
from Disney Enterprises, Inc. © Disney.
2 Kevin Flynn’s opening voice-over from Tron: Legacy. Textual excerpts from the script for
Walt Disney Pictures’s motion picture Tron: Legacy used by permission from Disney Enterprises,
Inc. © Disney.
doi 10.5117/9789462987135_ch01
These are the opening lines of the Disney-produced film Tron: Legacy
(dir. Joseph Kosinski, 2010). ‘The Digital Frontier’ is the name of the book
written by the character Kevin Flynn after his experiences in the digital
game dimension of the original 1982 Tron movie (dir. ‎ Steven Lisberger).
While this phrase might sound similar to ‘Space: the final frontier’ – the
tagline of the Star Trek TV and movie series – space, it seems, can no longer
be seen as the final limit to our knowledge in the 21st century. In the Tron
movies and within popular scientific discourse in general, we have moved
beyond spatial or geographical frontiers, and even, I would suggest, beyond
the temporal and mental frontiers of the subconscious mind and memory
that defined the psychoanalytically informed discourses of the 20th century,
towards more purely ontological frontiers concerned primarily with the
underlying nature of reality. It seems that, in our contemporary pop-cultural
absorption in contemporary theoretical physics, there are, in fact, frontiers
everywhere around us, not in our perception of objective reality, but rather
actual dimensional boundaries which lie behind or next to our own (in brane
cosmology and theories of quantum probability), in the ‘dark matter’ which
lies between our galaxies and perhaps our atoms (Nexus Theory), or between
two-, three-, four-, and five-dimensionality within a ‘holographic universe’
which posits space, volume, and time as illusory (Talbot, 1991). These new
ontological limits to understanding increasingly preoccupy the mood and
aesthetic of our current sci-fi and fantasy TV and film culture, no longer
simply about aliens, time travel, and apocalyptic events (as toward the end of
the 20th century), but rather about wormholes, alternate timelines, parallel
dimensions, and genetic superpowers to manipulate time and space.3 This
chapter primarily suggests that this thematic preoccupation is not simply
reflected in the content of digital images, but may actually be instigated by
the technological changes in image production, such that the ontological
frontiers of our time are in fact generated and determined by our digital
capacity to express them.
In this chapter, I explore, through two digitally inflected films which
emerged together in 2010 – Enter the Void (dir. Gaspar Noé) and Tron:
Legacy (dir. Joseph Kosinski) – the link between the new conceptual chal-
lenges brought about by the peculiar affectivity of digital imagery and our
contemporary cultural imagination of trans-dimensionality and plastic
3 There are only a few 20th century forerunners to our current fixation on alternate realities.
Notably, on TV, in Quantum Leap, Twin Peaks, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, though the
real aesthetic shift seems to occur around 1998-1999, with Sliding Doors (dir. Peter Howitt),
Run Lola Run (dir. Tom Twyker), and, of course, The Matrix.
‘A Digital Frontier to Reshape the Human Condition’ 81
reality. This link is expressed as a ‘digital frontier’ – understood better

perhaps in Deleuzian language as an ‘ontological problematic’ or ‘limit to
thought’ (without the colonial, gendered baggage that frontier thinking
might carry). The frontier is an ontological liminality explored through
computer-generated aesthetic fabulations of digitally inflected spaces, our
bodies and actions within them, and the transitional zones between actual
and virtual. Rather than thinking simply in dualistic terms of an actual
‘real’ world versus a digital virtuality, we instead elaborate an abstract space
in-between realms where a cross-pollination occurs; a seeding of the real
by the virtual, and a bleeding between dimensions.
This is also an investigation into how, as the Tron quote states above,
we ‘try to picture’ the liminal (non-)space of the frontiers right in front of
our noses. How do we imagine it, how do we visualise it, and how do we
intuit our presence within it? For the tiny minority of us humans that are
theoretical physicists, such metaphysical notions may be tackled through
the abstract language of mathematics. However, being neither a physicist nor
a mathematician, I must picture it imaginatively via the media I have been
exposed to – visualised (at times clumsily) through computer simulation and
digital imagery. Going further, I ask: Do our means of visual expression of
such abstract and speculative realms impact on our experience and intuition
of reality in a more generalised, universal way? In other words, I question
whether or not the forms and aesthetics of the media technology we have
at any given moment directly affect our shared metaphysical imaginary,
and therefore give shape not only to our creative fantasies, but also to our
more tangible societal, global capacity for technological and scientific
progress? In 1920, philosopher Henri Bergson argued that true inspiration
in positivist scientific progress arrives not as a clinical deduction, but as a
kind of emotional intimacy with the object of study, describing: ‘Intuition is
a simple act […] it is a synthesis, not an analysis, not an intellectual act, for
it is an immediate, emotional synthesis’ (in Gunn, 2015). Is our intuition of
reality, and the ways we then try to picture it, not honed and conditioned in
our collective consciousness through the imagery that surrounds, conditions,
and affects us?
Through Heidegger’s questioning of the ‘essence of technology’, we can
conceptualise that the technical means that we have to mediate or ‘reveal’
the world (from primitive crafts, to language, to photography and beyond)
shape our ability to think, to perceive, and to imagine what reality is like
(Heidegger, 1977). Within a regime of digital visualisation, are we then
really still limited to analogising digital processes as ships and freeways as
the protagonist of Tron does? Are we still limited to picture or to imagine
these processes as similar to real world objects, or does the inherent (im)
materiality of data allow us to think beyond these very temporally and
spatially recognisable entities towards more ambiguous forms? By the end
of this chapter, I suggest that we in fact now think and intuit in the opposite
metaphorical direction – that the ships, motorcycles, and freeways of the
real world increasingly come to feel digital in as much as they seem likely
to glitch, be corrupted, or hacked in a liminal space between actuality and
virtuality.
Somewhere within this metaphorical interchange, is a new ontology
born? In as much as, according to psychologists Lakoff and Johnson (1980),
metaphor is actually the only way to phenomenologically experience
external reality, we move via the work of Bernard Stiegler towards a techni-
cal media theory that suggests that our epochal forms of expression (as
mnemo-technologies) fix and share metaphorical relationships, shaping our
knowledge, our ways of learning, and thus of living. We can then, perhaps,
reach an understanding of a functional and dynamic digital ontology that is
affectively embodied, acting upon our consciousness though the technical
work of visual expression within a digital medium.
I posit a working definition of a ‘digital ontology’ as the categories and
relations of Being as they are inflected by digital communication and image
production in both its representative and non-representative elements. These
digitally inflected image relations affect and are affected by concepts from
theoretical physics in a synergistic fashion, such that what is here called
post-cinematic and what is scientific fuse in our collective metaphysical
consciousness (for Stiegler as a tertiary retention). While I do not doubt that
there are special persons for whom the abstract language of mathematics
serves perfectly well as a visualisation tool, increasingly -- at CERN’s Large
Hadron Collider in Switzerland, on the Curiosity Rover which rides through
the Mars landscape, from the Rosetta spacecraft which rode Comet 67P/
Churyumov-Gerasimenko, in other scientific visualisation practices, and, as
I have argued, in Christopher Nolan’s film Interstellar – we are struck by
scientific images which are becoming more purely cinematic, constituting
both qualified positivistic research and aesthetic originality. I suggest that,
under the new image regime of the digital, art and science are ontologically
conflated, and what emerges is a specifically digital understanding of the
fundamental metaphysical state of the universe – a digital ontology.
But this understanding is not only a digital metaphor for the constitution
of the universe (though it is that as well), rather it is a suggestion that, in our
experience, the universe is digital in the same Deleuzian cinematic sense
that we perceive a direct image of time when it is not contained within a
spatial metaphor. It is not a representation of time; it is time itself, generated

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

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

values are highly variable, the powers of the digital image derive from
its mutability and susceptibility to transformation and recombination.

Yet the criteria of perceptual realism reinforce, even exaggerate spatial
coherence. They strive to be more spatially similar and more replete with
spatial information than photography itself. (ibid, p. 103)
There is a paradoxical concept of the real here, an almost perverse hyper-

realism replete with a density and exaggeration of spatial information
which panders to a ‘rather restrictive and circular concept of realism’ based
principally on geometrical relations, but that, through natural inclination
or automatism, it cannot help but transform. Rodowick summarises: ‘The
key point of reference now in the ontology of the digital will be […] the crea-
tion of images ex nihilo that can simulate effects of the real world (gravity,
friction, causation) while also overcoming them’ (ibid, p. 104). This point
is echoed by William Brown, who notes that digital cinema has its own
unique ‘continuous’ logic that cannot help but ‘push beyond the human
understanding of space’ (2013, p. 51).
Thomas Elsaesser similarly suggests that, with digital images, the
dominant impression of reality comes not through the creation of a spa-
tialised perspective or narrative linearity, but in a segmented or ‘liquified’
hyper-reality:
The key digital effects in such a comparison […with reality suture through
formal continuity strategies] would be the impression of hyper-reality,
which would lead to an impression not of movement but of metamor-
phosis; that is, not only in the form of morphing and shape-shifting,
but also as a constitutive instability of scale, mobility of point of view,
and inherent ´liquidity´ of the (visual) representation (Elsaesser, 2014,
p. 33 – my addition).
Elsaesser suggests that our imagined presence and sense of reality in the
digital image is not wholly spatial, or even temporal, but exists in a kind of
floating presence from an unreliable perspective and within a fluid space
-- a distinctive departure from the conventional cinematic rules of suture
through linear and casual movement. The digital ability to overcome the
linear determination of space is noted also by Markos Hadjioannou in From
Light to Byte (2012), stating:
As space expresses the transformative convergence between fields and

figures where the subject changes according to her continual development,
and space (as manifold, smooth and hodological) mutates according to the
variety of the interrelated forces, the digital is equipped with the potential
to overcome its determining codification. This is what is expressed in the
transformative expression of the morph, the incongruous simultaneity of
compositing, and the incalculable variations of interactivity. (Hadjioan-
nou, 2012, p. 214)
Hadjioannou describes how causality (narrative as well as physical) within

well-defined cinematic space is disrupted by a digital instability or incongru-
ity within the image wherein the viewing subjects have to exert their own
agency to negotiate with the expressive ‘code’. We can thus perhaps start
to think of a particular variety of digital image alluding to a contingent
non-space, an image from inside Schrödinger’s box, where both spatial and
temporal linearity seem ambiguous, paradoxical, or in flux – a ‘pure’ image
of quantum probability that requires a human mind to fix and actualise it.
This is, in a way, the central plot device of Marvel’s Dr. Strange (dir.
Scott Derrickson, 2016), in which a highly intelligent and overconf ident
surgeon has to relinquish his egoistic, restrictive ‘scientif ic’ knowledge
of linear reality to exceed the determining codif ication of space and
time, and to travel between dimensions. This is rendered very literally in
wildly hallucinogenic digital sequences in which space folds into crystal
images of maximalist complexity. It is most emphatically expressed in
the f irst ‘Eureka!’ scene of the f ilm when Dr. Stephen Strange is pushed
out of his material body by Tilda Swinton’s ‘the ancient one’, and the
recognisable room space around him stretches and catapults him through
the roof, into space, and into a sequence of increasingly complex fractal
liminal spaces. Framed narratively within a spiritual ‘astral plane’, these
spaces are really digital image-making processes flexing their virtual
muscles, twisting reality-cues as best they can, qualif ied by Swinton’s
voice-over monologue on of the nature of objective reality: ‘You think
that this material universe is all there is? What is real? What mysteries
lie beyond the reach of your senses? At the root of existence mind and
matter meet. Thoughts shape reality. This universe is only one of an
inf inite number.’
Digital Emergence
However, it is not entirely right to say that a digital image such as Dr. Strange
is ontologically virtual in the same way that we could describe a quantum
state, as it is indisputably fully actualised, discrete, and rule-governed by
algorithmic, numerical determination. Though it may allude to virtuality,

it is, at the end of the day, fixed. Hadjiannou ultimately drives this point
home as the crux of his critique, stating:
As the digital confines change to the rapid calculations of bytes and

algorithms, the image loses the ability to make available the astonishing
new bursts of change and the boundless potential that comes with every
different encounter in the world. (ibid)
Despite this numerical basis for the digital image, I would argue that there
is evidence for exactly these bursts of change and emergence, and that
potential for astonishment is not so simply confined. There is a metaphorical
resonance between the ‘quantum state’ as ‘liquid’ (flux) and the material
state of the digital – a state in which data and algorithms are indeed wholly
discrete and controllable, but also in which contingency can play a major
role – both in the code itself and within our mental engagement with code-
as-image. Rather than being truly fixed and unchangeable, factors of noise,
inefficiency, and digital plasticity mean that we can experience image
mutation, evolution, and emergence, generating original affective states
within the encounter, which can indeed be astonishing. 4
Like Hadjiannnou above, Sean Cubitt, referencing Stiegler, in the preface
to his The Practice of Light, begins a bleak analysis of the potential for digital
emergence:
The efficiency gains of standardization […] risk increasing the level of

noise in the system, while discouraging that radical change which is
the hallmark of emergence. The result is a culture that constrains us to
innovation within parameters already historically established, and steers
us away from inventing the disturbing and exciting new. (Cubitt, 2014, p. 4)
However, he implores us always to be open to recognise the ‘both disturb-

ing and liberating virtual potential’ within even the most instrumental
applications of digital visual technology, requesting that we are:
[…] never to abandon to habit or cynicism the ability to wonder at the

intricacies of each mediation; and to embrace, even against all the odds,
4 gacym; tThat there is an organic evolution within the software and an emergent intelligence
of unforeseen and incomprehensible complexity is a main narrative theme of the 2010 Tron:
Legacy film.
the hope that, if we have built ourselves a demeaned perceptual repertoire,

even within its structured regime there are inefficiencies, frictions, noise
and contradictions that can still generate the genuinely new, and that
beyond its borders, other modes of seeing and being seen promise to
emerge. (Cubitt, 2014, p. 16)
This theme of emergence as the ‘genuinely new’ also develops in the work of
media theorist Aylish Wood on software and user interface in her Software,
Animation and the Moving Image (2015). She describes a distribution of agency
between user and software, a ‘complex entanglement’ that is simultane-
ously limiting and enabling. While the animation software offers certain
parameters for free creation, much of the actual work of the animation is
conducted by automatic algorithmic activity which the animator simply
monitors to remove the obvious traces of its automatic nature (ibid, p. 56).
At first, this seems restrictive to creativity, but she goes on to describe
-- through theoretical discourse with Ian Bogost, Lev Manovich, and William
Brown -- how the agency of the software, with both logically designed and
relatively contingent elements, intrudes upon the aesthetic of the image
(ibid, pp. 79-80). She quotes animator Liz Skaggs: ‘You are not creating these
images in your mind, you are using some other tool set, a graph or box or
squares or controllers, different things’ (ibid, p. 56). These tool-sets as the
technical materiality of the software, involving modular structures and
algorithmic automation, start to affect the image in unintended ways – a
‘distinct type of movement’ that Wood refers to as digital contours, unique
to the digital image and ultimately beyond the creative intention of the
animator (ibid, p. 84). This complex entanglement can be seen as a kind
of co-creation that problematises any simple notion of authorial agency,
and thus can create the conditions for the emergence of a new image type.
For Wood’s analysis these digital contours come to constitute a kind of
post-human vision, what might otherwise be seen as a hyper-realism but,
drawing on William Brown, is instead described as ‘an unexpected level of
realism when viewed from the perspective of contemporary physics’(Brown,
quoted in Wood, 2015, p. 92). Through developing the metaphorical equiva-
lence of the digital with quantum physics through a non-human, or ‘more-
than-human’ perspective, Brown articulate a kind of ‘object-orientated’ and
non-anthropocentric digital realism that he dubs Supercinema (Brown,
2013). Wood’s digital contours, then, are the automatic manifestations of a
post-human technicity, exceeding the limits of intentional human creation,
and potentially offering something ‘genuinely new’ as a kind of supra-realism
that, in turn, exceeds human perception.
However, this post-human vision is still, from a phenomenological

perspective, always going to be from the imagined vision of an actual
human eye, even though it might be an experience beyond the observable
world. We must project an idea of our sensory body into this space – an
embodied but totally virtual experience. For Elsaesser, this imaginary
embodied vision is, in fact, the reality effect of all moving images since
their inception:
The ´reality-effect´ is a consequence of the impression of movement,

which, in turn, is complemented by the impression of presence, strength-
ened by sound, but also providing one of the typical subject effects of
cinema; namely, the impression of being included in the image and
endowed with a special kind of ocular-sensory, embodied identity.
(Elsaesser, 2014, p. 32)
The experience of ‘inclusion’ within the moving image is one of an ap-

perceptive, kinaesthetic presence within the image – though, as I explain
in the next chapter, this is not necessarily bound by a schema of an actual
physical body. This point is well exampled by a current culture of quasi-
cinematic digital visualisations within the physical sciences in the form
of, for instance, molecular animations and cosmological simulations.
The addition of perceptual qualities of colour, point of view, and camera
movement to these images (where none actually exists) makes them more
tangible to our embodied sensory array, it makes it feel more ‘real’ to an
imagined sense of corporeal presence next to or within what are often
completely abstract and highly complex datasets. This is, I feel, the post-
human vision which William Brown refers to in action, Elsaesser’s cinematic
‘ocular-sensory, embodied identity’, a hypothetical sensorium, projected
into inhuman environments. This method of research and training in the
physical sciences has in fact been hailed as facilitating many scientific
breakthroughs in meteorological, cosmological, medical, and biological
research fields.5
However, fundamental to my argument that the digital image creates
a transformative experience of reality is that the digitally embodied
experience is generated not only through these scientifically quantified,
standardised, discrete, and modular operational systems, but also through
5 See, for instance, Erik Olsen, ‘Where Cinema and Biology Meet’, The New York Times (15 No-
vember 2010) and Clay Dillow, ‘How the World’s Most Powerful Visualization Lab Turns Hard
Data into Scientific Cinema’, Popular Science (21 January 2011).
a set of ‘inefficiencies, frictions, noise and contradictions’ as technical

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

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

is expressed is in an aesthetic de-familiarising of the recognisable urban
cityscape, as we come to feel that just above and below the façade of our
perceptual real-world is an alternate digital dimension just waiting to break
through. Further metaphorical imagery arrives in the films through the
relations of matter-as-data and electric-charge-as-life-force rendered as af-
fectively embodied, with corporeal energy visualised as ‘resolution’, corporal
punishment taking the form of a leeching of this energy, reward being a gift
of new power influx, and death presented as ‘de-rezzing’. Death manifests

in Tron as a fluctuation of colours, a pixilation, and then a fading (in the
death of the character RAM), and, in Tron: Legacy, as a shattering into
metallic ‘pixel’ cubes. The rendering of these digital concepts as corporeal
metaphors, expressed through relations of resolution and dissolution in
the imagery of the film, generates an affection of the instability of matter,
and of the the formal continuity of the atoms of the body with the pixels
or bits of code of the digital environment.
In another sequence from Tron, Kevin Flynn discovers here that he has
the godlike power to reassemble digital matter into one of the ‘recogniser’
ships. RAM remarks ‘You shouldn’t be able to do that!’ as the module in which
they are standing elevates into the air, and the ship’s components levitate
up to take their place on the craft. This brings RAM to the realisation that
Flynn is indeed a ‘user’, one of the god-like creators of their world, and we
share in his rapture as the ship re-assembles around them. The magical
ability of the protagonist to manipulate space and matter becomes an
affective metaphor for our actual human power to create (or programme)
omnipotently in the digital world. In Tron, as also notably in The Matrix
(dirs. Lana and Lilly Wachowski, 1999), the protagonist learns that matter
itself in the digital simulation can be created, reformed, and destroyed at
will by acquiring this knowledge.
A scene of particular interest in Tron is the uploading of Flynn into the
digital game world. In this ‘digitisation’ scene, the protagonist dematerialises
with a laser and travels through a vivid digital non-space of grid patterns
and ‘worm hole’ vortexes, to rematerialise within the game world. There
is a sense of floating weightlessness in the space between the real world
and the digital game space, and a real corporeal affection of a disembodied
perspective dispersed within a digital liminality. Perhaps perplexingly, they
did not include an equivalent scene in the 2010 update of the film Tron:
Legacy, despite the irony that actor Jeff Bridges was actually digitised
in the making of the film so as to render a virtual, younger version of his
character in the digital dimension – Flynn’s AI avatar Clu.6 The journey
between spaces is instead rendered as within an instant, a change maybe
6 In interview with Den of Geek magazine, the producers of Tron: Legacy, Justin Springer
and Steven Lisberger, discuss this irony:
‘Justin Springer: In Tron there’s a famous scene of Jeff Bridges being digitised and put inside a
computer. And when we began working on Tron: Legacy, and we started to create Clu, we put
Jeff in front of a laser and basically digitising him to go inside the system. [laughs]
Steven Lisberger: […] and I’d made that up! That was a pain in the ass 28 years ago!
JS: Jeff was like, “This is wild, man!”
Figure 4. The malevolent Master Control Programme of Tron (© 1982 Disney).
diegetically qualified by faster contemporary data transfer and processing

speeds, but in fact explained by the director to be a deliberate choice both
not to compete with the scene of the first film, and to portray it from the
perspective of the character, ‘through Sam’s eyes’.7
Despite their differences, and there are many, both Tron films provide
an affective relation of space, matter, and force as a way of stimulating
metaphorical thought about digital immaterial processes – by simulat-
ing an environment where they become materialised. These dynamics
are expressed through an idea of the body, where human corporeality,
rather than, for instance, machines or alien lifeforms, is the image onto
which these dynamics are traced. Immaterial data and programmes are
literally ‘embodied’ and anthropomorphised into humanoid entities for
easy identification despite the unfamiliar environment (for example, the
antagonist Master Control Programme takes the form of a human head/face
rendered in raster wire frame – Figure 4). This is also the case with films
such as The Matrix (dirs. Lana and Lilly Wachowski, 1999), Lawnmower
SL: And then the technicians that were doing the scanning didn’t appreciate the irony. I said,
“Don’t you realise I just made that up all those years ago!” and they said “You made it up, so of
course it came true this way.”‘ (Den of Geek)
7 Tron: Legacy director Joe Kosinski: ‘From the beginning we kind of didn’t wanna do that,
cause it was done so well in the first one. I wanted this experience to be different, so I liked the
idea that you kind of experience it with Sam and it’s a quick thing.’ (collider.com)
Man (dir. Brett Leonard, 1992), and Ghost in the Machine (dir. Rachel
Talalay, 1993) in which data assumes human form in the digital dimension.
Our ‘inclusion in the image’ is achieved through simulating digital spaces
and empathising with these characters through their real presence and
their emphatically tactile interactions with each other and with the spaces
they inhabit.
Enter the Void
I now turn to explore a contrasting though similarly de-realised and vir-

tualised digital cinematic environment that nonetheless takes a radically
different approach to the digital ontological problematic -- Gaspar Noé’s
Enter the Void (Figure 5). This is a 160-minute ‘psychedelic melodrama’
(Hart, 2010) – an intense visual journey which seems, unlike Tron, to explore
more literally the temporal themes of Deleuze’s time-image. Its length
announces it as a durational and experimental piece, not exactly mainstream
fodder (though not quite an art film), which is at times thrilling, erotic, and
also possibly annoying in its seemingly mindless repetition of events and
shocks. Peter Bradshaw, in his Guardian review, remarks how this truly
seems to be an original (post-)cinematic image:
Some may find Enter the Void detestable and objectionable, though if
they affect to find it ‘boring’ I will not believe them. For all its hysterical
excess, this beautiful, delirious, shocking film is the one offering us that
lightning bolt of terror or inspiration that we hope for at the cinema.
(Bradshaw, 2010)
The film is also interesting since, despite not making the digital its explicit
theme, according to the director every single scene was digitally altered,
rendering it distinctively unreal or ‘virtual’, though often not in any clear,
discernible way. Noé says two thirds of the film was post-production: ‘It’s
the most CGI-intensive specialty film I’ve ever seen’ (Harris, 2010).
The spaces of the film are of the real world and, despite some wildly
hallucinogenic scenarios fascinatingly seen from the mind’s eye as if traced
onto the back of the eyelids, the spaces are initially recognisable and seen
from the first-person subjective perspective of the protagonist. However, this
subjective point of view is dramatically altered when he is shot in the chest
by drug enforcers in a toilet stall, and, as the flickering images of his dying
eyes slow and fade out, he leaves his embodied first-person perspective, and
Figure 5: Poster for Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void (Fidélité Films/Wild Bunch, 2010).
we, in his position, assume a ‘witness’ view of a disembodied and voiceless

consciousness. He first sees his own body beneath him and then swiftly
moves through the roof of the building, through the streets and into a
floating omnipresence in the lives of those around him. For some two and
a half hours of the f ilm, his disembodied gaze glides above the streets
of Tokyo, through walls and down drainpipes, and eventually between
dimensions of past, present, and future as the divisions between times

and spaces become gradually less stable. Throughout these sequences, the
urban environment of Tokyo becomes gradually more and more mutated,
de-realised and luridly coloured through digital distortion, towards a
disorienting climactic reincarnation scene leading from a neon-glowing
love hotel to a hospital birthing room.
In an inversion of Tron, instead of projecting the idea of a body into an
imagined or virtual space, we have the removal of the body from any tangibly
real spatial continuity to achieve a radically different kind of corporeal
affectivity. The bodies of the actors are purposefully abjected – literally in
an abortion scene in which we see a foetus crudely discarded in a kidney
dish, and thematically as the gaze of the main protagonist floats above
and looks down onto his own dying body. The performances of the actors
seem disengaged, cold, and distant, and whenever tactility and intimacy
develops – and indeed any identification or empathy with the characters in
a scene – the sequence is punctuated by traumatic and violent jolts of action,
such as in a car-crash ‘flashback’ which is repeated over and over. Instead
of the tactile emotional affectivity of the connected bodies of Tron, which
serve the purpose of making the immaterial dimension of digitality feel
more human, we have instead a detached, drifting, and strangely inhuman
inhabitation of the ‘real’ world, where traumatic events and heightened
melodrama are rendered eerily cold and neutral.
In between and intertwined with the representational images of the
film’s diegesis, we find a multitude of digitally generated flashes of coloured
lights, aimless floating aerial street shots with the movement of vehicles
like toys below, the layering of mundane but de-realised sex scenes, and
hallucinogenic flourishes of alien tendrils intruding into psychic space.
However, seemingly the most crucial and defining shots in this film are
the transitional movements between spaces characterised by a disorienting
swinging motion of the camera and the entering of the camera´s gaze into
various tunnels and enclosed spaces, not entirely unlike the transition
between worlds in Tron.8 The film presents us with multiple any-space-
whatevers, in streets, homes, hotels, and clubs, as seemingly disconnected
spaces without narrative purpose and through which the action floats,
and it is these transitions and transformations that in the end principally
8 In a curious coincidence, Tron is cited as a stylistic influence not because of the digital
imagery, but rather, as Noé states in Wired: ‘Everything seems like it’s made out of neon lights.
When people smoke DMT, they say, “Oh I thought I was in the movie Tron”. Everything is made
out of bright lines’ (Hart, 2010).
define the feel of the film.9 The brushstrokes of digital manipulation and
modulation are in every shot, and the aesthetics of the digital here permit
the powerful rendering of a transition into an altered state of consciousness
between living and death in a heightened affective form.
Troubling the Threshold
What both of these films – Tron: Legacy and Enter the Void – present us
with is an image of an imagined virtual reality as a liminal state of being.
What interests me is not so much the ontological implications of the state
itself within the diegesis, be it dream, death, drugs, or psychosis, but instead
the digitally influenced aesthetic forms used to generate this sense of an
altered dimension at the threshold of intelligibility.
In Tron, we have a representation of an immersive virtual environment
where space and materiality are initially questioned and dissolved, but then
ultimately reconstituted as social relations of desire, power, and resistance,
and always played out against the materiality of the human body. Inversely,
in Enter the Void, time and space, as well as desire and power are folded
towards a dissolution of purposeful action in a disembodied, drifting, and
aimless hypnagogic state in some disorienting non-space. These are both
expressions of a threshold consciousness which are affectively constituted
through digital imagery. They are aesthetic responses to the digital onto-
logical problematic presented by digital technicity itself, and these two
expressions offer different answers to this problem.
This is not to say that the boundaries between actual and virtual were
not explored in analogue cinema, though in the aesthetic conventions of
classical Hollywood cinema, as also in ‘art’ or avant-garde cinema, they
are usually fairly clearly demarcated.10 This was done by use of represen-
tational devices such as the fracture or cracking of the ‘looking glass’ (in,
for example, Jean Cocteau’s Orphée, 1950) or by falling into some kind of
‘rabbit hole’ or vortex as gateway or portal, along with aesthetic devices
such as the graded-film look of the flashback or the shift into technicolour
9 For William Brown, these transition shots are facets of the films ‘anti-humanism’ (2013,
p. 65).
10 There are, of course, a couple of striking exceptions to these conventions from 20th-century
film, for example, Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (1948), in which a large portion of
the film is of unclear virtual or real status. However, even in this film, there is an inconspicuous
moment (when she steps through the paper silhouette of a man) that does seem to mark the
division between fantasy and reality.
as cues (as in Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz, 1939, and Powell and
Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death, 1946). The boundary can
also be rendered through jarring and complex graphic analogue effects,
achieved with animation and superimposition (for instance, the dream
sequence in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, 1958) or simply through eccentric montage
(e.g. David Lynch’s descent into the radiator in Eraserhead, 1977). These
devices and effects clearly point to the different temporal or virtual status
of the images as we become immediately aware that we are entering into an
alternate universe or altered state of consciousness, be that a dream world,
psychosis, drug-induced hallucination, or death. They were sometimes fairly
clumsy, sometimes magical, but were always limited by the technological
constraints of the necessity of having a pro-filmic actual event or filmic
chemical process (such as colour-grading).
While it can be seen that these are essentially proto-digital aesthetic
styles (and this is the position taken in Pisters´s analysis of the work of
Alain Resnais in The Neuro-Image), I suggest that, in reaching something
like its ideal form in digital media (sustained for some 160 minutes in Enter
the Void), this leads to a profoundly different framing of the underlying
problematic – the boundary zone – which is specifically digital. While CGI
effects can simply and quickly mimic all of these analogue effects, in the
digital’s automatic and emergent qualities, we see an exponential growth
of modulations and mutations in the creation of ever more clearly realised,
yet in many ways unrecognisable, alternate worlds. While digital imagery
affectively heightens these transitional moments between dimensions as
we see in Enter the Void and in Tron, even more than this, they have the
capacity to blur the boundary as if the two are merging and blending. Thus,
we have the real world, the recognisable and conventional cinematic milieu
of reality, becoming changed and twisted; or, indeed, we have the alternate
world breaking through into our own. The boundary zone becomes not
merely a transitional space, but swells to become the ontological whole. The
tension at the threshold between worlds becomes one of the main dynamics
in contemporary digital cinema and television as a thematic and aesthetic
preoccupation. Instead of well-contained moments within the sort of surreal
or hallucinogenic dream sequences that serve as a disruptive break in the
linear narrative in the classical Hollywood image, the digital permits the
entire film world to become a twisting and changing maze in which there
is no clearly defined reality external to the images. With the breakdown of
any clearly marked boundaries between the ontological domains of the film,
we must affectively negotiate and inhabit these images before attempting
to draw out any explicit conscious meaning.
Figure 6. Lucy. Director Luc Besson. (Europacorp, 2014). Entertainment Pictures / Alamy Stock Photo.
However, perhaps this is still an ideal only occasionally achieved. In

much mainstream content, we are still habitually reassured of the real
world, of linearity, or continuity, and of the potent activity of the (often
male) body. It is hard to deny, however, that the cinematic mainstream
does increasingly exhibit a veritable obsession with digital distortions
of the real world. In a second ‘snapshot’ of coinciding releases during the
summer of 2014, we could see several different fabulations which make the
stark ontological dualisms of Tron: Legacy and Enter the Void seem even
a little outdated. In Transcendence (dir. Wally Pfister, 2014), the dying
Johnny Depp’s consciousness is uploaded into a computer programme
from which he becomes serenely godlike and can subsequently assemble
and disassemble matter in the real world. In Luc Besson’s Lucy, Scarlett
Johansson’s brainpower is increased exponentially by an experimental
drug, so that she can see and pluck digital data from the air and can also
control matter with the power of her mind (Figure 6).
In The Congress (dir. Ari Folman, 2014), Robin Wright plays a fictionalised
version of herself, a serious actress whose perfect likeness is digitised into a
‘virtual’ actor that is owned and used by the studio in a tacky and commercial
science-fiction film franchise ‘Rebel Robot Robin’ (ironically, this fictional
digitisation process is the same that actually happened to Jeff Bridges for
Tron: Legacy). She later learns that her image has been developed as a digital
avatar within an alternate simulated dimension, ‘Abrahama City’, where the
paying public can experience being inside her body. She enters this digital
‘animated’ dimension to attack and destroy the studio, but gradually loses
touch with reality as the two dimensions of the real and animated become
increasingly confused. In an apocalyptic future, she awakes again in the real
Figure 7. Poster for Ari Folman’s The Congress (Brigit Folman Film Gang, 2013).
world to find that the animated virtual dimension has caused its total atrophy,
as most people have chosen to live in other bodies in the virtual dimension.
In all of these 2014 film examples, real spaces and real forms dissolve
into pixels and bits. This is not some alternate dimension manufactured
to explore aesthetically a digital liminality, but rather our everyday world
portrayed to be in flux, where real spaces and objects themselves become
virtualised via the metaphor of the digital. It is no coincidence that in the
UK distribution posters for all three of these films, we can see matter (a
face, a word) dematerialising and breaking into pixels and code (Figure
7). The metaphorical transference is that reality itself becomes a digitally
rendered boundary space – perhaps a digital simulation, or maybe just
materially unstable. It often seems that, in contemporary digital post-
cinema, there is a practical obsession with enhanced superpowers to
manipulate physics within and between this and other dimensions. 11
11 Marvel Studios, now owned by Walt Disney Studios, is the highest-grossing film studio in
Hollywood, leading to a spate of articles in 2018 asking ‘Is Marvel Killing the Movies?’ (Heer,
Shephard, and Livingstone, 2018).
These powers function, in perhaps a less explicit way than in Tron, as

metaphors for the powers of the player/user/programmer within a digital
dimension, but now with these powers to act transferred into the recognis-
able everyday world. They offer purposeful, embodied action, but in ‘real’
worlds that are drawn into metaphysical doubt, becoming less stable,
and more like the computer simulation – a breakdown of the boundary
between ontological realms.
It is this resonance of digital imagery with the ‘realism’ of theoretical
physics from a post-human perspective that inflects our current mainstream
entertainment culture, filling it with images of the world as physically
and temporally malleable and subject to change. I have to question if this
is just an imperfect metaphor of the digital manipulability of pixels for
quantum states, or if, as an extension of Heidegger’s technics via Bernard
Stiegler’s grammatisation, we can understand that this is our shared mode of
contemporary metaphysical questioning within our technological epoch. The
ontological status of the digital image and its unique qualities, techniques,
and processes both as hardware/software but also as metaphorical and
affective resonances, are the structural system through which we speak of
such things, and as such both enable and limit our capacity to think and
imagine the reality of the metaphysical.
The Digital Border Zone and Cinematic Ethics
Deleuze’s film theory is nothing if not an ethical project, taking cinematic

images as engaging a mode of expanding possibilities for thought and for life:
as a form of becoming. The time-image thus encourages an active reading,
experimentation, and enquiring mode of thought which challenges and
dispels the moral absolutism that comes with linear and directly causal
actions within the movement-image. He names the ‘powers of the false’
within the time-image as those that interrupt and overturn the norma-
tive cinematic image, exposing not only the falsity and pretension of the
movement-image, but also synthesising a new active way of thinking within
a new image relation. For David Rodowick, this aspect of Deleuze’s ethics
in his Cinema books is fundamentally Nietzschean:
The Nietzschean moral universe defines an ontology of descent and ascent,

destruction and creation, a base will to power fueled by ressentiment and
the will to truth, and a creative or artistic will that affirms life and its
powers of transformation, while seeking out possibilities for enhancing
these powers and this life. Between these two wills lies the deepest ethical
problem: the problem of choosing a mode of existence defined by the
possibility of choice. (Rodowick, 2010, p. 103)
Thus, the cinematic image, to be ethical, must challenge us, shatter our sense
of power over the meaning of the image, and then offer up a possibility for
creative choice – for re-creation. We must experience our own powerlessness
and find a way out of it without ever attempting to reclaim total control,
and this is an ongoing process of becoming.
Considering Stiegler and Cubitt’s questioning of the potential of the
digital to offer us a truly new and transformative image, we have to ask
the ways in which the digital image – its thematic preoccupations and
problematics, and the specific forms of experimentation and questioning
that arise within it – might qualify as ethical. Specifically, does the image
of the digital frontier/ontological border zone engage with a form of ethical
philosophy as becoming, and as engaging with immanence and creative
evolution? To explore this, I need to look closer at Deleuze’s image typology
in his Time-Image to ascertain how we can better position and classify the
digital image within his Nietzschean cinematic ethics.
Deleuze noted a distinction between the first time-image, the recollection-
image or dream-image, and the second image of time, the crystal-image
(1989, p. 98). In the recollection-image, we have an image out of time, though
well contained and contextualised by an overarching coherent construction
of linear time. In this image, we are made aware (not necessarily within
the moment but certainly later to the ‘attentive’ viewer) that we are leaving
linear time and that time has ‘forked’. As Deleuze describes:
The relation of the actual image to recollection-images can be seen in the

flashback. This is precisely a closed circuit which goes from the present
to the past, then leads us back to the present. Or rather, as in Came’s
Daybreak, it is a multiplicity of circuits each of which goes through a zone
of recollections and returns to an even deeper, ever more inexorable, state
of the present situation. (1989, p. 48)
In films such as Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless

Mind (2004), Tarkovsky’s The Mirror (1975), or David Lynch’s Mulhol-
land Drive (2001), films well known for their temporal contortions, there
are extended moments of dreamlike disorientation which nonetheless
lead back to a present moment and linear narrative (even if we have to do
some mental athletics and repeat viewing to achieve this understanding).
This also applies to the dream-image: ‘The dream-image is subject to the

condition of attributing the dream to a dreamer, and the awareness of
the dream (the real) to the viewer’ and thus the boundary is still always
marked and maintained by the explicit tethering of the altered states to a
character who is doing the dreaming in a diegetic reality (ibid, p. 58). These
shifts in and out of the present situation are then often marked by stylised
cinematic renderings or transitions to alert us to the changed temporal
status of the image.
In the crystal-image, however, we feel disoriented in time, unable to work
out exactly where present actuality lies in the shifting between memory,
present, and future.
We find ourselves here in a direct time-image of a different kind from

the previous one: no longer the coexistence of sheets of past, but the
simultaneity of peaks of present […] This second type of time-image is
to be found in Robbe-Grillet, in a kind of Augustinianism. In his work
there is never a succession of passing presents, but a simultaneity of a
present of past, a present of present and a present of future, which make
time frightening and inexplicable. (ibid, p. 101)
As noted previously, digital imagery seems ever more suited to this blur-
ring of parallel presents in a kind of dimensional complexity. While these
dimensional zones can be purely temporal as Deleuze imagines them, the
post-cinematic image actually seems to dwell less on its temporal status as
past, present, or future, and instead delves further into a type of multidi-
mensionality of worlds within worlds and parallel timelines. Deleuze does
himself actually speculate on a shift away from the primacy of the temporal
dimension in stating: ‘Perhaps there is a way to go beyond this split in the
large circuit, through states of reverie, of waking dream, of strangeness or
enchantment’ (ibid, p. 59). Are we then now at least closer to this reverie
state in the sustained digitally rendered border zone?
It is not that Deleuze was completely silent on the issue of the digital,
referring instead to an ‘electronic’ or ‘numerical’ image which was, during
the writing of the Time-Image (before 1985) only just ‘coming into being’.
The electronic image, that is, the tele and video image, the numerical
image coming into being, either had to transform cinema or to replace
it, to mark its death […] The new images no longer have any outside (out-
of-field), any more than they are internalized in a whole; rather, they
have a right side and a reverse, reversible and non-superimposable, like
a power to turn back on themselves. They are the object of a perpetual

reorganization, in which a new image can arise from any point whatever
of the preceding image. (ibid, p. 265)
Here, Deleuze poetically evokes a multiplicity of images, unstable in their

spatio-temporal organisation, malleable and complex. In the practically
infinite flexibility of represented reality within the digital image, it feels
as though this is exactly what we are presented with: virtual domains
and imagined dimensions as simultaneous presents, and worlds within
worlds under perpetual reorganisation. When the boundary between worlds
ceases to be policed by a clearly defined Rubicon, we are free to linger and
creatively explore the border zone, and one has to wonder if this is not
exactly the enchantment and ‘state of reverie’ which he anticipated as
being ‘beyond’ the crystal image. But has this indeed transformed/replaced/
destroyed cinema? Certainly, it has transformed it, in that we speak here
of a digital ‘post’-cinema and a specifically digital aesthetic which is here
merely foreshadowed by Deleuze’s images.
The digital aesthetic of the blurred boundary zone seems broadly in
line with Deleuze’s Nietzschean ethics, amounting to an abolition of any
moral will to control, and a profound openness to new becomings. However,
Deleuze expressed ethical concern about this digital organisation of images,
asking to what ends it might be used.
But we are all the time circling the question: cerebral creation or deficiency
of the cerebellum? The new automatism is worthless in itself if it is not
put to the service of a powerful, obscure, condensed will to art […] I am
afraid that the new methods may invalidate all will to art, or make it into
a business, a pornography, a Hitlerism. (ibid, p. 266)
Deleuze’s concern is that the new digital techniques which open such
aesthetic possibilities must be strenuously retained for art’s oppositional
work, not becoming subject to the types of commercial standardisation
and rationalisation by which Stiegler and Cubitt indict digital media. Here,
there persists an ethical insolubility between the goals of commercial
entertainment and art, with standardisation and rationalisation on one
side, and an elevated and obscure sublime on the other. I have suggested
that there is a way to move beyond this divide, to restore an ethical image
even within mainstream and normative digital post-cinematic content.
Signs of Art at the Limits of Humanity
Digital images can qualify as ‘signs of art’ in that they offer up something
new, maybe uncanny, occasionally traumatic, sometimes absurd. However,
in terms of the ethical dissolution of the continuous, causal, spatio-temporal
relations of the movement-image, what we are actually presented with
in Tron and Tron: Legacy is a fairly consistent world of causality and
intentionality, riddled with extended representational metaphors for the
freedoms, faiths, and anxieties of conventional morality. This is, in truth,
more the territory of the sensori-motor-schema of Deleuze’s action-image,
and seems hardly radical in its organisation, with clear markers as to where
the boundary between the actual and virtual worlds of the film lie and
are traversed. Yet, despite this representational coherence, on an affective
level, we become for a moment, especially in the digital transition between
worlds, dissolved in an immateriality which resonates metaphorically
with our abstract knowledges of atomic fields and virtual digital worlds.
The films offer the repetition of conventional constructions of space as
clear markers of realism, and yet, in this repetition, there is the distortion,
mutation, and displacement characteristic of Deleuze’s third synthesis of
time which hampers any dismissive or simple recognition. Within these
simulated realities, we negotiate an imaginary relation with our bodies; we
project our virtual bodies across boundaries and through portals into the
strange and curious new environments to see how it feels, and, consequently,
we feel different. The digital image brings in an original automatism in
its structural and affective relations, which are more about simulation,
modulation, distortion, and ‘elastic reality’ (Rodowick, 2007, p. 170).
Enter the Void then appears comparatively to be a digital time-image
tour de force. It seems to be exactly what Deleuze tantalisingly refers to as
the ‘electronic-image’, with its folding, drifting, and aimless repetition; we
have layer upon layer of points of view, from the hallucinatory, to the godlike,
to the intimately and emotionally implicated. We feel as if all the events of
these characters’ short lives are spread out like a screen database in front
of us, and that we are negotiating hyperlinks between desires and traumas,
dragged this way and that by temptations and the harsh interjections of
memories in the psyche of the protagonist as his life; past, present, and future
(leading up to his reincarnation or rebirth) all co-exist in the moment of
his death. These diegetic events, negotiated by the hyperlinks of impossible
camera movement and digital effects, come to seem exactly like Deleuze’s
description of the electronic screen, as ‘an opaque surface on which are
inscribed “data”, information replacing nature, and the brain-city, the third
eye, replacing the eyes of nature’, as the disembodied consciousness of Oscar

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

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

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

that ironically sees human experience as rather small and insignificant. This
seems to be the principle, for instance, of Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life
(2011), which leaps from the domesticity and family drama of small-town
America to an astounding reverie sequence of cosmic creation – and then
back again, in a reflexivity of human identity, purpose, desire, and will
within the much larger universal context.
For speculative realist Ian Bogost, this non-anthropocentric ontological
view is an ideal to be upheld, holding that, in a ‘flat ontology’, we might be
able to create an alternate order of things that is not simply subject to our
ability to make sense of them (2012, p. 19). He describes an ‘alien phenomenol-
ogy’ as a practice by which we must speculate, through metaphor, about
the processes and operations of objects and things. It is important here to
note that this is not imagined in a mode by which we can truly understand
or communicate with things (e.g. rocks, computers, or aliens), but instead a
philosophical methodology to intentionally fabulate in a creative mode in
order to attempt to disrupt human-imposed hierarchies of Being.
However, as Bogost notes, and as I develop in the next chapter through
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone’s evolutionary embodied consciousness and in
Chapter Four through Lakoff and Johnston and Walter Benjamin’s notions
of metaphorical and mimetic consciousness, there is no true post-anthropo-
centrism here. Bogost states: ‘Metaphorism is necessarily anthropomorphic,
and thus it challenges the metaphysician both to embrace and to yield to the
limits of humanity’ (ibid, p. 74). This is, I think, what digital cinema offers,
whether the neural, the digital, or the plastic is offered as a productive
metaphor for human experience – a futurism which constructs worlds based
on speculative narratives, as ‘instructive and humbling signs’ of alternative
experience or competing realisms at the limits of humanity (ibid, p. 34).
Conclusion
Border-zone images like those of Tron and Enter the Void, in the history of
cinema, have always posed an affective metaphor for the different ontologi-
cal landscapes of memory, psychosis, hallucination, or near-death experience
at the limits of intelligible human experience – and this metaphysically
liminal category is now inclusive of the digital. These affective metaphors
of liminality act as a tangible and visceral starting point for any higher-level
imaginative contemplation – a passive synthesis of metaphysical notions.
This could mean that the boundary dimension of matter, time, space, and
force in flux could then be considered to be nothing specifically digital, but

rather an enduring limit and problematic for thought about exceptional
spaces and states beyond our direct corporeal experience. However, the
digital becomes distinguishable from other images in that, in their inter-
rogation of reality, they do not simply refer to a perceptual, dreamlike, or
‘neuro’ image that is distinct from the stable, actual world. Rather, they
explicitly confound actuality itself, exploding it into a quantum prob-
ability of dimensional paradoxes, without ever descending into meaningless
stochasticity or chaos.
While the digitality of an image as a tangible form of representation can
function, as in Tron and Enter the Void, as a malleable but ultimately
instrumental metaphor for mental or ontologically liminal states, there is
always the possibility for a transformed mode of experience from the image’s
own materiality. Through the glitch, through data being hacked or cor-
rupted, through Cubitt’s ‘inefficiencies, frictions, noise and contradictions’
(2014, p. 16), we have a form of metaphysical plasticity in which the image,
beyond human intent, transforms itself into something new with regard
to our consciousness. The more that the expressive function is trusted to
the automated functions of algorithmic calculation, the more likely that
something unanticipated emerges – a fault or error in the processing, or
simply an unpredictable affective nuanceted. As Aylish Wood observes, the
creative act is not entirely under our control but is a complex dynamism of
agency between user and software/hardware.
The emergent affective and aesthetic elements of digital automatisms
do not always reveal themselves in mainstream entertainment content,
instead originating in other more primitive, artistic, or experimental forms.
Nonetheless, these emergent elements are potent affects that are picked up
and carried into public consciousness by the popular cinematic form – from
the déjà vu ‘glitch’ in The Matrix, to Lucy’s frightening morphing disas-
sembly of the atoms of her own body, to the supernatural horror of the hack
in Unfriended (dir. Levan Gabriadze, 2014). In each of these images, and in
many more in current circulation, an ontological threshold is disturbed and
a liminal space is created through the harnessing of an emergent and digital
visual affects. While for some it may seem tragic that these transformational
affects must arrive into our awareness in commercial forms of advertising
or entertainment spectacle, we have to ask if this packaging detracts from
their potency in destabilising our ontological landscapes.
Furthermore, the digital post-cinematic image with its 3D, HD, HFR,
and IMAX format variants opens up this liminal space affectively and
immersively as never before; such that we might imagine that we can
touch it, interact with it, and inhabit it. It creates an uncanny embodied
metaphorical transference that the real world around us – visible reality,
linear temporality, and materiality – is actually itself in flux, and this is in
turn reflected in our contemporary collective cultural imagination in an
ongoing cycle. In this way, the digital ontological problematic, the digital
frontier, ceases to be simply about the digital itself and becomes a form of
reflexivity on ontological consciousness itself – our own ability to reflect on
our awareness of the ontologically real. As humans, we discourse on these
spiritual problematics in the only way we know how, through the fabulation
of simulated virtual realities, and, through this fabulation process, we
might discover new ways to think differently, affectively and analytically,
corporeally and mentally, creatively and scientifically. The digital elaborates
a new frontier to this thought.
4. Dynamic Digital Spaces, Bodies, and
Forces
Dan Strutt
Abstract
This chapter focuses on affective tonalities within recent digital systems
of image capture, creation, and presentation. It looks to examples of dance
in Digital 3D and the epic battle scene, as images in which structural
relations of space and kinesis are heightened and stretched. This analysis
is grounded within a genealogy of technical advances (from the f irst
‘moving’ images, through to VR digital simulation) and within theory of
how fundamental our proprioceptive sense of the world is to our sense of
grounded physical presence. What is identified is a digital experimental
aesthetic and a new spatiotemporal image regime (seen in the neobaroque
folding of objects and spaces, in glitches and morphs), expressed through
plastic structural and formal relations within the image.
Keywords: Digital Dance, 3D, Kinaesthesis, Neobaroque, Jules Etienne

Marey, Edward Muybridge
While the last chapter addressed the existential, ontological problematic of

the digital by reflecting on the thematic, metaphorical relations generated
between body and space at the virtual/actual boundary in post-cinema,
this chapter focuses more directly on the technological and formal aspects
of the digital image, and the affects which are specific to them, in a more
schematic mode. In other words, I move from digital effects as affective
emblems of certain metaphysical questions of our time, towards a more
structural analysis of emergent affects of the digital image.1 In doing this,
1 See Kristen Whissel’s Spectacular Digital Effects (2014) for an interesting analysis of how digital
effects can operate semiotically as emblematic of the broader narrative metaphysical concerns.
doi 10.5117/9789462987135_ch04
I take a genealogical view of new architectures and topologies of space and

the affective dynamics of movement, rhythm, and gesture of forms within
these spaces, not as a typology, but as a means to ask how they have impacted
on our awareness of metaphysical qualities. These structural dynamics are
expressed in content which includes the renderings of bodies, objects, and
‘vitality forms’ in computer-generated imagery as well as in hybrid modes
mixing computer-generated animation and live action, and also incorporates
the technological forms of presentation such as digital 3D and digital IMAX
that impact upon these dynamics. ‘Vitality forms’ are defined by psycholo-
gist Daniel Stern as abstract, phenomenal sensations of intensity which
incorporate time, force, movement, space, and intentionality but which
are not only expressed through the movement of a physical object or body,
but also through sound, shape, colour, or any other aesthetic experience, or
indeed any ‘happening’ which expresses ‘energy, power or force in motion’
(Stern, 2010). In discussing new technological modes of image creation and
presentation, this notion of an abstracted sense of kinetic proprioception as
general energy or intensity proves useful for this analysis of digital effects,
as it moves between describing actualised and recognisable bodies and
objects in image forms, and more virtual and non-conscious sensations of
force as metaphysical affects.
In describing new affections of metaphysical notions that are specific to
post-cinematic screen images, I aim to elaborate an emergent intuition of
presence and possibility within the world. These are heightened, distorted,
and ‘hyper’-spatial relations within digitally generated imagery which offer
distinctive impressions of time, movement, and force as bodies and objects
move within the image/frame. These impressions are generated primarily
through a haptic, bodily address, which, instead of positioning the media
‘user’ in a passive and static spectatorial position at optical distance from
the image, involves them in an ever more immersive kinetic play of bodies
and surfaces in which the frame collapses and affects of corporeal intensity
are palpably felt.
In contrasting digital effects with analogue media, do digital effects offer
a real progressive shift in affections of physical/metaphysical forces, or is
their impact merely relative to what we are habituated to at the moment
of emergence of any new media technology? This is to ask if the affective
force of the digital image is, in this time, in any way qualitatively different to
something like the effect of, for instance, early cinema on a viewing public
accustomed only to still images. The comparison seems an obvious one
and yet the question is not so easily reducible to a historically relativistic
position. One needs to appreciate broadly that, with each technological
Dynamic Digital Spaces, Bodies, and Forces 115
shift in visual modes of expression comes about a new synthesis of percep-

tual reality and thus of metaphysical awareness. This is not a progressive
teleology of aesthetic expression leading to greater enlightenment (i.e.
greater knowledge of the Real), but it is rather an evolving and dynamic
symbiosis between (technological) forms of expression and thought about
reality.2 As the birth of cinema reflected changes occurring in modern life
of industrialisation and urbanisation and the experienced compression,
systematisation, and re-articulation of time and space at that historical
moment, digital media seems to reflect more contemporary existential
concerns of post-industrialism, secularism, and theoretical physics.3 To say
that there is a historical specificity to our cognitive reactions to technological
emergence is not to imply that they are simply determined by culture, but
rather that they go hand and hand in a complex interrelation.
My aim is to document what original image/affect dynamics emerge
in digital media as compared and contrasted to any previous time. Some
of these dynamics appear to be the extensions of aesthetic impulses from
the utopian hopes of early cinematic pioneers finally brought to fruition
by digital possibility, while others seem to offer something truly emergent,
unanticipated, and original. While it is always productive to examine
the genealogy of visual media in archaeological modes to ascertain the
historically consistent drives and impulses which affect contemporary
visual media – for instance pointing out the repetitive claims to revelation
that new technologies consistently make – this can be quite a reductive
2 The discourse of a progressive teleology of media posits cinema as the convergence of all
previous aesthetic forms towards an ideal form of realist representation, with digitalisation
as a continuation and honing of this process. It further posits 3D stereographic imagery as the
next technological breakthrough after moving images, colour images, and cinematic sound on
a trajectory to mimic perfectly natural perception (critiqued by Thomas Elsaesser in his 2012
article ‘The Return of 3-D: Logics and Genealogies of the Image in the 21 st Century’, which I
discuss below). The realist narrative is boldly critiqued by Jean Louis Comolli in Machines of
the Visible, wherein he points out that technological advancement towards realism is not purely
technical but is instigated by ideological notions of what constitutes the real, an ‘ideology of
resemblance’. He states: ‘What is at stake in the historicity of the technique are the codes and
modes of production of ¨realism¨, the transmission renewal or transformation of the ideological
systems of recognition, specularity truth-to-lifeness’ (Comolli, 1980, p. 133).
3 Cinema theorists such as Tom Gunning (2006) and Scott Bukatman (2003) have analysed
the social context of cinema at its birth, asking who ‘used’ it and for what social purposes. Pasi
Valiaho (2010) also examines how early moving images expressed new scientific and medical
discourses of the body of the time, re-articulating bodily rhythms and durations, and thus also
shifting corporeally rooted thought about reality.
process, as it dismisses the truly novel to focus only on its precedents. 4

There is an imperative to recognise and focus on the original or emergent
without dismissing it as bare repetition, or worse still disparaging apparent
differences as damaging to the integrity and sanctity of prior media forms.
Therefore, I aim not to cultivate a crude opposition between analogue and
digital media, but to assess the difference that the digital makes, and one
would find it hard to deny that there is a difference in the visual content of
our cinematic images of the last 35 years of our modern digital era.
At first, the emergent technologies of expression, in whatever era, with
whatever technology, have a pronounced novelty to them. They shock or
surprise audiences, and invariably a mythology arises around these first
shocks; as it did with the ‘train effect’ of the Lumières’s The Arrival of a
Train at La Ciotat Station, and as it did with ‘Avatar syndrome’ some
114 years later.5 This ‘frisson’ effect of new technology thus does not change
through the centuries, but its effects and affects quickly become accepted,
habitual, and part of the prevailing ‘default’ expressive regime. Any sense
of revelation quickly dissipates as the images become part of the normative
structure of media content. For this reason, we must be observant as to which
subtle changes these historically specific shifts do make to our awareness
of the world, the differences in kind which affect consciousness, since we
so quickly become habituated to them, and so quickly forget how the world
seemed different before.
I initially engage in a short analysis of each of the two main technologi-
cal shifts in the history of the moving image: first of the proto-cinematic
photographic images of movement by Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne
Jules Marey and the scientific and aesthetic impact they had; and then of the
emergence of the first digital images within mainstream cinematic media
and their distinctive formal features and affectivity. My point is to show
that both these technological shifts instigated their own specific dynamic
modes of expression of reality that have been developed upon and carried
4 For example, in the historical work of theorists such as Ian Christie (2011), Stephen Prince
(2011), and Andrew Darley (2000), true novelty and originality is consistently de-emphasised since
it was essentially foreshadowed by something similar in the past. This playing-down of novelty
is also an approach taken when dismissing new technological progresses in special effects and
in presentation platforms: a ‘we’ve seen it all before’ attitude. Roger Ebert, for instance, stated in
Newsweek (2010): ‘Whenever Hollywood has felt threatened, it has turned to technology: sound,
color, widescreen, Cinerama, 3-D, stereophonic sound, and now 3-D again.’
5 Both mythologies here circulate around the audience´s struggle to discern reality from
screen content. ‘Avatar syndrome’ is discussed in the following chapter.
forth in subsequent moving images.6 These expressions of reality arrive as

revelation, before quickly becoming incorporated into their own seemingly
common-sense visual regimes in an almost phatic mode. Even though their
original affective power still persists, they become too easily recognised and
dismissed. Each of these two image regimes perhaps can be best defined
formally by their spatial or topological features, and these formal aspects
structure (but do not necessarily contain) the organisation of affects of
temporality, force, and kinesis. Furthermore, each image regime positions
the viewer, audience, or user within a spatial dynamic, varying between one
of relative contemplative or analytical distance, or of immersive closeness
and interaction. As users of the image, we are affected by and drawn into
these spatial dynamics which imbue us with a sense of presence within
the screen image, affected by the means of presentation (e.g. cinematic,
televisual, D3D, or IMAX) and by the syntheses of space and movement
within the screen image.
While elaborations of space do seem to be the principal distinctive factor
in the digital screen image, these three dimensions cannot be abstractly
considered without the changing dynamics of movement or bodies and
objects within them, and furthermore, the technologies used to capture or
render these dynamics. Thus, with each screen combination of these factors,
we have a technical relation of figure and ground, synthesising an affection
of motion or energy, and – dependent on compositional and structural
aspects of the frame and represented space – normally reflecting some
conventions of the law of physics (gravity, entropy, thermodynamics, etc.).
However, within the digital image, these rules can be malleable, change-
able, and breakable. We experience an aesthetic pleasure at the stretching,
disruption, and suspension of our models of physical possibility. We enjoy an
interactive experimental play with the image through which we can explore
a new sensibility of bodily presence, form, and power; this kinaesthetic
6 These synthetic dynamics can be thought of as a form of ‘sensori-motor schema’, identified

and described by Deleuze in the concept of the action-image. Deleuze articulates this further:
the main characteristic of the movement-image is to contain and subjugate temporality within
dynamics of continuous space and linear and causal action (1986). While Deleuze valued the
liberation of time from its rational spatial containment by the action-image in cinematic
time-images, in digital screen media, these sensory-motor-schematics can instead be a kinetic
confusion of complex spaces, surfaces, and bodies, which expands our potential affections
of time, movement, and force. These are affects foreshadowed but not fully described by the
time-image, not the clear separation of time and space, or the total annihilation of rational
space, but instead often an almost hyper-coherent or increasingly complex constitution of a
unified space-time.
sensibility, to a certain extent, is honed by the different technological means

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

ing the first ‘motion pictures’, bridging the gap between photography and
cinema with his invention of the zoopraxiscope in the 1870s.7 His original
commission was to document the gallop movement of a horse to solve the
argument of whether the animal’s hooves all left the ground at the same time.
To do this, he set up a row of quick-capture cameras, which were triggered
by threads tripped as the horse rode past. The result was a series of closely
sequential photographs which could be animated by being shown in quick
succession. For this purpose, Muybridge invented his own screening device,
with the images on a spinning glass disc through which light was projected.
7 A contentious issue, with many claiming to have ‘invented’ the moving image, when in
truth the invention was the product of several working in the field. For background, see The
Man who Stopped Time (Clegg, 2007) or Marta Braun’s Picturing Time (1992).
Similar perceptual animation effects had been achieved with the zoetrope
(using illustrated rather than photographic images) for over a thousand years
in the East, while in the West it had only emerged in its modern form in the
1830s. However, in the 1870s, Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope proved to be the
first projected image of movement which could be used for public display
rather than only for the individual user.
Simultaneously, in France, Étienne-Jules Marey had embarked on similar
research to capture the movement of humans and animals by capturing
multiple successive images of a body in motion, using his chronophoto-
graphic gun, which took 12 images per second within a single frame. Though
these images could not be animated in the same way as Muybridge’s, they
nonetheless conveyed a vivid impression of motion, force, and temporality
(Braun, 1992, pp. 43-47). The images that resulted from these two early
pioneers of the ‘moving’ image were the first to capture real movement
in an indexical fashion using photographic technology. It is clear that,
previous to this, human perception was incapable of grasping the minutiae
of movement, unable to know the motion of the insect’s wings, of invisible
air flows, or of a horse’s hooves. As such, this was initially solely a project
of empirical scientific research, but it quickly developed into an object of
public fascination, opening the minds of the public to previously hidden
complexities of biological and physical realities. It had an aesthetic appeal
in its new formal expression of a short moment, expanding time, stretching
an infinitesimal duration into a form which could be studied or explored
at leisure. In this way, a new visual technology managed to impact upon
the common perception of time and force in a way which took the viewer
into the immanent heart of movement through an aesthetically pleasing
affection of real motion (Braun, 1992, p. 254).
While Marey’s impetus was always the scientif ic documentation of
movement and force within disciplines of anatomy and physics, Muybridge
tended towards a more aesthetic goal. For Marey, the technology served only
to increase our positivistic knowledge of the world, and he had no interest
in the inherently illusory nature of perception (Figure 8). Perception was a
faulty and unreliable process which held us back from adequate objective
knowledge of the world, and the chronophotographic technology he devised
was intended to ‘supplant the insufficiency of our senses’ and to surpass the
limitations of the eye (ibid, p. 255). Muybridge, within a pseudo-scientific
auspice, tended to the more theatrical, and crafted images which were often
narrative, titillating, or impressionistic, rather than carefully documented
research (Figure 9). He engaged in the swapping out of individual shots in a
sequence to conceal gaps or inconsistencies and to give a better impression
Figure 8. Jules Ettienne Marey’s pictures ‘for the analysis of motion’ (National Science and Media
Museum/Science and Society Picture Library)
Figure 9. Eadweard Muybridge’s ‘Animal Locomotion’ (National Science and Media Museum/
Science and Society Picture Library)
of smooth motion, and his aim was always to create a more pleasing and
aesthetically acceptable final result (ibid, p. 238). As Marta Braun states
about Muybridge: ‘He saw himself, and always referred to himself as an
artist’ (ibid, p. 54).
Between the divergent goals of Marey and Muybridge, we can clearly
see an aesthetic dualism which actually develops with each and every
new technological means of visual expression since the development of
photographic media. The first tendency being towards a greater exposition
of an underlying reality underwritten by a rationalist fervour to understand
and document. The second tendency was directed towards reflecting on
and experimenting with perception and expression itself, heightening
or exaggerating normal perception for a stimulating and/or entertaining
effect. The same dualism developed in early cinematic work, between the
long-shot everyday naturalism of the Lumière brothers, and the magical
illusionism of Georges Méliès. These impulses can now be seen as clear
separate trends within digital media: between the intense high-definition
and slow-motion detail of, for instance, BBC wildlife documentaries, and
the exaggerated special effects of sci-fi and fantasy. However, though the
first tendency towards a perfect and transparent actuality may hold as its
true goal a positivistic or naturalistic expression of the world, it also has
an distinctive aesthetic stylisation to it, albeit of a different order to the
second tendency, whose explicit goal is to challenge perception for ‘artistic’
purposes. Both, however, present us with a version of reality: one based on
detail – a truth of science; the other based on ensemble – a truth of art (this
distinction is made by Sizaranne, referenced by Braun, 1992, p. 275). Both
truth tendencies must therefore experiment with technological possibility
to give us an expressive re-presentation of the world as we have not seen
it before, and thus they both offer us something new for consciousness as
an aesthetic effect.
However, digital visual technologies present a new and complexified
dynamic between these two aesthetic impulses. What the digital rear-
rangement of pixels permits in a way that simply was not possible before is
a naturalistic precision, an indiscernible or seamless consistency to images
that otherwise might expressionistically juxtapose perceptual realism. This
seems to fold the distance between the two ‘truth’ tendencies, as we can see
the same affective intensity harnessed by both fact and fiction. Increasingly,
there is an ontological indiscernibility of the scientific document from
the image which deliberately exaggerates to toy with perception. Digital
processes twist and blend the complex detail of reality into dissonant hyper-
realities which have an uncanny effect in their proximity to the real. This
is very different from the convenient ‘artistic’ distortions of Muybridge’s
photographs, which served an impressionistic or subjective truth; and it is
also distinct from Méliès´s work, which served to titillate and surprise with
its boldly stated illusionism and physical impossibility. Instead, the digital
generates an uneasy discordant naturalism which synthesises new affects
of the real – a truth fused of both scientific detail and artistic ensemble.
Within conventional understandings of cinematic history, mainstream
entertainment cinema grew to be more preoccupied with telling stories in a
narrative literary tradition rather than with creating innovative expressions
of space, movement, and temporality, and this tendency was more explicitly
pursued as a goal in and of itself in avant-garde and experimental film
practice.8 While this mainstream/avant-garde dualism does not do justice
to the subtle and complex intersections and cross-pollinations between the
two practices, it seems, that in the late 20th century and early 21st century,
8 For a survey of this tendency of traditional film theory between ‘normative and polemical
classifications’, see Elsaesser and Hagener (2010, pp. 2-4).
given the new tools that make it possible, digital screen media shows us a
direct re-orientation towards an experimental approach to exploration of
movement and temporality. This observation becomes particularly clear
when we consider that the revelatory and germinal digital temporal effect
of ‘bullet time’ in The Matrix – which freezes and slows time almost to a
halt as we swing around the action 360º in the time it takes for a bullet to
cross the room – is in fact a direct digital update of Muybridge’s nineteenth-
century multi-camera technique, augmented and smoothed by digital image
interpolation software.
However, while this might seem like a simple return to or recurrence of
a previous image regime, the relation posed towards time and movement
within digital media becomes noticeably different when we consider that
these effects do not pertain to document or index details of an external
reality, but instead aim to play with our sensibility about what is, in fact,
natural or real – not just within our perception (as may have been the focus of
avant-garde image movements influenced by 20th-century theories of mind),
but also interrogating objective physical reality (influenced by contemporary
theoretical physics and existential philosophy). The emphasis under the new
digital image regime becomes the modulation, mutation, and distortion
of space, form, movement, and time to expose different sensations of the
real; to push and challenge any stability of ‘continuous aspect’ perception.9
This then becomes the real departure for digital visual technology from the
analogue, a near perfectly lucid mimesis of reality, but without the claim
to objective truth, an image oxymoron of naturalistic abstraction. We see
the world not revealed in greater detail, but through a looking glass which
challenges recognition without rendering unrecognisable.
Formal Dynamics of the Digital Image
The structural dynamics of these digital aesthetic effects which simulate

and refract the markers of perceptual reality, and which generate a kind
of metaphysical uncanny, are, in a more specific sense new topologies and
constructions of space, and the potential to break with consistency and
stability of body, object, and surface in a photo-realistic, rather than merely
9 In the Wittgenstein sense, the stable ‘aspect’ of the cognition of things is continuous in that
physical reality generally conforms to expectation (Mulhall, 1990).
perceptually suggestive, fashion.10 First, as previously discussed, digital

screen media often works within an often emphatic or hyper-architecture of
space, in both digital CGI and in digital (D)3D, and this heightens and twists
our perception of the dynamics of movement within spaces (Rodowick,
2007, p. 103).11 Secondly, the objects and forms which move in these spaces
become themselves subject to mutation, as they are able to stretch, dissolve,
and morph into other forms, so the idea of the movement of a predict-
able and consistent form through time itself alters. Though it maintains a
temporal dimension, this destabilisation of form seems to become about
more than just the opening up of a temporal moment of passing for closer
analysis/contemplation (as with analogue image capture in the style of both
Muybridge and Marey). Rather, it experiments with our ideas of space and
material form, and with our presumptions about causality and possibility
in physical reality. It challenges the rule-bound expectation of metaphysical
consistency that is in no small part based on our habituated awareness
of conventions of representation of form, movement, space, and time as
established in photographic and cinematic media. It introduces a new and
novel reflexive image relation which in turn introduces a new intuitive sense
of possibility, becoming a form of visceral, kinaesthetic play and learning.
To elaborate on these novel relations of space, motion, and form, I now
wish to provide a short historical survey of the emergence of the use of
computer graphics in mainstream media, with a view to establish which
germinal affects they generate at this early stage in their development, and
further to highlight how they distinguish themselves from photographic
media.12 With each new technical process described, we see how a new
synthesis of hardware and software is engaged by the artist-technician in an
experimental, DIY mode, before being appropriated into an entertainment
mainstream. In this mode, effects are generated that tap into primordial, even
mythical, embodied sensations of flying, floating, and distorted perception,
10 Such perceptually realistic effects of disruption of form could be achieved in analogue media
by superimposition, cross-cutting, or even in animation, though I wish to make a point about
the seamlessly detailed and uncanny photo-realism of these same effects in digital media.
11 As Rodowick discusses in The Virtual Life of Film (2007, p. 103), lacking a direct indexical
relation to reality, the digital image primarily synthesises spatial effects as ‘reality markers’
to strive for a perceptual realism: ‘They [digital images] strive to be more spatially similar and
more replete with spatial information than photography itself.’
12 This is perhaps a similar ‘survey’ mission to that conducted by Andrew Darley in Visual
Digital Culture: Surface play and spectacle in new media genres (2000) and Stephen Prince in
Digital Visual Effects in Cinema: The Seduction of Reality (2011), but to very different ends.
foreshadowed in other artistic practice but here rendered as never before,

opening up new reflections upon these experiences.13
In 1977, we saw the first use of a three-dimensional computer graphic
in cinematic media in Star Wars, in a scene in which the fighter pilots
are briefed about the forthcoming attack on the Death Star using a raster
wire-frame graphic simulation (Netzley, 2001). Having previously collaborated
with John Whitney, Sr. in programming the abstract and experimental
computer-generated film Arabesque, the computer animation artist Larry
Cuba was employed to create this rather more concrete spatial simulation
effect for the film. In the image, the PoV assumes the position of a pilot flying
very smoothly and steadily down a canyon-like trench to a point where a
shot must be fired at a small target in order to destroy the Death Star. This
simulation foreshadows an actual scene in the movie in which a 40-foot
constructed model of the trench was used, and in which there is an increased
spatial and kinetic complexity due to in-air battles, explosions, and multiple
and less stable camera angles (ibid). The effect of the graphic simulation in
the film is in stark contrast to this pro-filmic sequence; it has a calm and
almost hypnotic quality in the fluidity of the motion and the sensation of
weightless propulsion. The three-dimensional spatial depth of the image is
emphasised by the sense of smooth motion towards a perspectival disap-
pearing point in the distance, as the walls of the trench rapidly fall away
from the sides of the frame. The CG animation effect is comparable here to
hand-drawn animation, but with an intense 3D depth and fluidity of move-
ment that is quite distinctive. Similar raster wire-frame model animation
effects were subsequently used in Alien in 1979 (dir. Ridley Scott), and the
affective tone of their smooth, weightless motion foreshadows much more
contemporary spatial effects such as the (ironically analogue) first-person
subjective ‘spider-cam’ in Spiderman (dir. Sam Raimi, 2002) – in which
Spiderman swings down New York City streets – and to most contemporary
CG flight scenes, for instance in Tron: Legacy and Avatar.14 It can be seen
13 Scott C. Richmond in his Cinema’s Bodily Illusions: Flying, Floating and Hallucinating also
focuses on exactly this set of phenomenal sensations and how they are rendered digitally to
modulate proprioception (2016).
14 The seemingly impossible analogue ‘spider-cam’ effect for Spiderman (2002) was produced
by John Dykstra (who was also the special photographic effects supervisor on Star Wars) and
earned him an Oscar nomination. He notes that it was effective within the hybrid media forms
within the movie: ‘We used a cable-mounted camera called a Spider-Cam to photograph the real
world. […] The camera went about 4,000 feet from 22 stories high down to a foot off the ground
and back up again. That was a pretty amazing feat. But that was the way we captured some of
the images that represented New York without having to make them all digitally’ (Wolff, 2004)
that, from the very first mainstream use of CG effects, created by technicians
previously employed in avant-garde film, an innovative affection of space
and movement was generated that was recognisable yet distinctively digital.
These early spatial simulations set the standard and showed the strength of
the technology in generating these intensive sensations and, as such, they
have become a familiar and generic image currency in CG-animated imagery.
While the CG-simulated spaces in these films have a direct referent in a
recognisable space (a landscape or cityscape), another use of early graphic
effects generated a truly novel sensation of movement. This was the creation
of non-spaces or immaterial spaces more similar to the abstract shapes and
flowing forms of the aforementioned experimental CG animation of John and
James Whitney. In the opening sequence of the Disney film The Black Hole
(dir. Gary Nelson, 1980), we saw again a digital raster wire-frame model of an
object, but this time as a virtual representation of flat two-dimensional space,
punctured into a third dimension by the eponymous black hole. To the sound
of a haunting John Barry waltz, the disembodied perspective very slowly drifts
around the rim of the hole before falling into the darkness within. While this
is a very simple and slow effect, it is dramatically affective in its synthesis
of movement, space, and sound. Two years later, in Tron, we were given a
similar affective tone in the transition between the two worlds of the film
as Flynn’s digitised consciousness travels through a digital ‘worm-hole’ and
floats through an abstract non-space before arriving in the game world. It is
this early impetus to create imagined virtual spaces without a clear physical
referent that also emerges as a trend in digital screen media and was developed
through films such as Lawnmower Man (dir. Brett Leonard, 1992), Stargate
(dir. Roland Emmerich, 1994), and Contact (dir. Robert Zemeckis, 1997),
contextualised by a character being placed in immaterial digital space within
a virtual dimension, or through space and time travel. What this provides is a
perceptually realistic affection of presence and motion within a virtual space
without recognisable landscape contours other than a tunnel or tube which
twist and turns, or free-floating ‘objects’ which fly past to signify movement
through space. Foreshadowed in analogue media by the astounding slit-scan
‘stargate’ sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1968), this
rabbit hole, vortex, or wormhole effect continues to be a strong and persistent
affective chord typical of digital visual effect, that of kaleidoscopic journey
through ill-defined space, usually as a transition between other more spatially
recognisable worlds. This affective chord becomes even further enhanced
in 3D, in movies such as Thor (dir. Kenneth Branagh, 2011) and The Green
Lantern (dir. Martin Campbell, 2011), in which travel between galaxies is
rendered in even more immersive and kinetic detail in astounding vortex shots.
The first digital effect of a transformation of material form within the

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

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

perhaps for the first time, the momentary failure of a digitally transcoded
text—a fractured JPEG image, for instance, or a compressed video file
losing traction with itself. The error is perceived as provocative, strange
and beautiful. (2011, note 8)
This sublime moment of the chance encounter triggers a desire to reproduce

or emulate this transcendent moment of chaos. However, this creates a
conundrum centred around how the glitch forms, while referring to an
accidental event, must be tamed, repeated, and reproduced within a design
mode – an intentional error for aesthetic effect. The glitch in pure form is
an unpredictable, chaotic, and ‘aleatory’ mode, that, when appropriated in
the mainstream, becomes controlled and moderated as a set of aesthetic
effects strategically deployed to duplicate the affective resonance of the
original. In the aforementioned examples, glitch effects are narratively
Figure 10. Glitch distortions of ‘technical boy’ in Starz´s American Gods (2017).
supported by, in the case of American Gods, the character ‘Technical

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

ognition process, when run in reverse in several iterations on photographic
imagery, yields utterly surreal and psychedelic imagery, the result of which are
only starting to emerge in the popular mainstream since Google’s 2015 Deep
Dream project (in which the code was released as open source). Photographic
or video images are treated to a form of automatic recognition based around
a specific type of form, for instance, dogs or an eye, and they are altered such
that that faces, spaces, and bodily forms morph and change into these other
recognisable forms. The effects were recently deployed in a music video for
California band Foster the People Doing it for the Money (released August
2017), and for MGMT’s When You Die (released December 2017), directed
by Hallie Cooper-Novack and Mike Burakoff, who, with Jamie Dutcher,
developed their own Glooby software to render some extraordinary and
disturbing imagery. They describe on music website The Line of Best Fit: ‘the
video utilises an amalgamation of AI Style Transfer technology techniques,
making use of artificial neural networks to impose the stylistic qualities of an
image onto video footage’ (Day, 2017). The powerfully hallucinogenic affects
of this technique of digital abstraction may in time come to seem like just
another gimmick, but in these first mainstream, and yet still experimental
forms, it seems both shocking and highly original.
Throughout the development of early CG animation, to recent digital
morphing and glitching techniques, we can chart the early emergent
structural and formal aesthetic trends which moved from experimental,
DIY, and avant-garde practice to very familiar generic defaults within the
new image regime of digital screen media. These effects have evolved over
the last 40 years into seamlessly organised worlds in which human actors
move in new ways. What is digitally added is a new dimension of corporeal
presence within virtual space through new three-dimensional depth effects,
an original sense of movement and force within these spaces, a sensation
of the material mutability of body and substance, and a changed sense
of temporality. All these effects emerged over a period of years and now
converge and coalesce in films such as The Matrix, which self-reflexively
play on the idea of digital virtual simulation, thus incorporating all possible
variations on the altered affections that the digital can afford: time is sped
up and slowed down (in the martial arts training scenes and bullet-time
scenes); space and physical forces such as gravity are breached in powerfully
affective ways (in building jumping and flying scenes); matter is mutable,
with bodies and objects subject to changes in form (with the shape-shifting
agents’ morphs and the bending spoon); and the digital glitch is thematised
in the now idiomatic phrase ‘a glitch in the matrix’.
These digital effects were and are technically impressive, viscerally felt,
and cognitively astounding in a way that is surely comparable to the dawn
of photographic illusions of movement in 1895. However, they have achieved
such a greater level of uncanny photo-realism that their affective impact no
longer plays on our perceptual weaknesses to create illusions (predicated
in the aesthetic tendencies of Muybridge and Méliès), but rather is based
in a near perfect and detailed mimesis of nature, that nonetheless cannot
help but to surpass and distort natural perception. There is a smoothness
and glossiness to these effects, which, while being proximate to the real,
maintain a hyper, uncanny, or exaggerated relationship towards it. They
are undeniably immersive and intensive in a way that qualitatively differs
from what has preceded them in analogue media, and they push at the
boundaries of the recognisable, and of everyday consciousness.
What I suggest is that these new mass-mediated affections of space,
time, energy, and materiality engender a qualitative shift in our embodied
intuition of these metaphysical notions, in the same way as photographic
moving images did in their own time, both reflective and generative of
the experience and discourse of existence as they amalgamate within a
certain historical moment. At a time when there is talk of the immanent
death of the analogue image, and as we become increasingly corporeally
and mentally immersed within a total ubiquity of the digital image, I
propose that we passively become habituated to a sense of digital pos-
sibility.15 While in the next chapter, I directly tackle how we are affected
at a fundamental level of mental awareness by these mediated images,
I first wish to assess how the kinetic dynamics of the body in space are
foundational to a metaphysical sense of position and presence in the
world, and how this might be affected by shifts in the digital expression
of these dynamics.
Movement, Space, and Kinaesthesis
A creature’s corporeal consciousness is first and foremost a consciousness

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

The inherent kinetic spontaneity of animate forms lies fundamentally in
this fact. Kinetic spontaneity can be analysed in terms of kinaesthetic
motivations, a species-specific range of movement possibilities, a reper-
toire of what might be termed Í cans´, and – by way of proprioception and
more particularly, of kinesthesia – a sense of agency. (Sheets-Johnstone,
2009, p. 181)
Interdisciplinary theorist Maxine Sheets-Johnstone develops an evolution-

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

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

dynamic that not only is anchored in movement itself but is thoroughly
unique, that flows forth with its own particular surges and fadings,
expansions and contractions, intensities, attenuations and so on. (Sheets-
Johnstone, 2009, p. 317)
The sensations of these corporeal kinetic dynamics are described as

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

any goal-directed activity, and there is a natural propensity to appreciate
them in an aesthetic sense, as a pure mode of expression. These ‘sublime’
affects are intuitively felt to connect one to the ineffable vitalities of
life, and thus dance and rhythmic motion has always had a traditional
connection to spiritual or ritual use throughout human history. She
quotes the musicologist Curt Sachs to elaborate this primal expression
of metaphysical notions:
‘Rhythmical patterns of movement, the plastic sense of space, the vivid

representation of a world seen and imagined – these things man creates
in his own body in the dance before he uses substance and stone and
word to give expression to his inner experiences’ (Sachs, 1963, in Sheets-
Johnstone, 2009, p. 309).
The body and the movement of muscles and limbs are here perceived as the
first medium, our first technology of expression of the way it feels to be in
the world. This is a mode of expression of experience that is universal, even
pan-species, that starts in a very personal way in the body with childhood
play, but which develops into an aesthetic semantics at a relational and at a
culturally mediated level. These kinetic semantics are dynamic movement
patterns which are shared by species or groups, and used to express the ‘the
ineffable qualia of life’ – aesthetic expressions of the affection of forms and
structures, physical and meta-physical (ibid, p. 324). In digital media, the
form of communal sharing of these expressions is changed, vital forms and
gestures are modified, and new affection of ‘spatio-temporal-energic’ force
is generated, in a fashion not dissimilar to the work of Marey and Muybridge
in their own times.
Cultural theorist Erin Manning, in her book Relationscapes (2009),
extends this idea of relational movement and the relation between
movement and thought more explicitly beyond the expressivity of the
human body and into purely aesthetic experience. The expression of
vitality forms here become paint, celluloid, and glass, which capture
bodily sensations of motion metaphorically, and work within a semantics
of kinesis even if they are in the form of static media. Through analysis of
‘kinetic images’ by Australian aboriginal painters, sculptor David Spriggs,
animator Norman Mclaren, and f ilmmaker Leni Reifenstahl, Manning
asks what sense of movement is contained within the works and what
sense of motion the observer gets from them. She emphasises the haptic
address of these analogue artworks, looking at the expressed dynamics
between topological space and movement, and how these touch us in

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

terms are constantly referred to each other: body, world, technics. It is
an aesthetics of the body in its materiality and intensities, and aesthetics
of worlding in its indeterminacy and incompletion, and an aesthetics of
technics in which the cinema’s operation as a technical system is made

palpable. (2016, p. 17)
Here, we see a fusion of Sheets-Johnstone’s evolutionary corporeal conscious-

ness with Heidegger and Stiegler’s technics and Deleuzian affect: ‘The cinema
is a place where we encounter – perceptually and proprioceptively and so
also reflexively and affectively – technics in the mode Stiegler describes,
to which Hansen give the felicitous name: the cinema appears as a technics
of the flesh’ (ibid, p. 165).
I position my analysis of kinetic digital images in much the same way; as
a technics of the flesh, yielding spatio-temporal-energic dynamics generative
of emergent sensations, thoughts, and intuitions about movement, space,
force, time, and material form. The new technical condition of the digital
rendering of bodies and forms in motion within digitally generated spaces,
and the digital capture and presentation of spatio-temporal dynamics in
formats such as D3D and IMAX generate new affections of corporeal and
metaphysical potential. These directly affect the individual, but, as culturally
shared and technologically mediated forms, they start to become like a
shared grammar of dynamic and vital forms and gestures, a technological
grammatisation of metaphysical coordinates. To extend this analysis to
the actual objects of contemporary digital screen culture, I look first at the
example of dance in digital 3D, and then extend this to rhythmic dynamic
kinesis in the more general sense within digital screen media to assess
what novel affection of a sense of corporeal kinetic agency can be seen to
be offered up by the new technologies. These digital dynamics provide new
coordinates within which to orientate our embodied kinaesthetic awareness,
a changing set of ‘I cans’ within the physical world.
The Body in Movement: Digital Dance
Wim Wenders states in the Guardian article ‘The Great Leap Forward’:
‘I can safely say that 3D and dance are made for each other’ (Mackrell.
2010). In making his Pina: dance, dance otherwise we are lost (2011),
he confessed that he had struggled to f ind a visual vocabulary to con-
ceive of a mode to produce the film he had envisioned for some 25 years,
primarily being unable to recreate the element of space with which to
bring Pina Bausch’s dances to life on screen. He elaborates: ‘Space is the
dancers very own medium. With every gesture, with every step, they
conquer space – and cinema has never been able to give us access to that’
(Wenders, in Mackrell, 2010). It was not until 2007, when Wenders saw his
first modern-era digital 3D (D3D) film, that he managed to visualise how
the film could be made:
‘With 3D, I was finally convinced we could enter the dancers’ very own
realm […] As a spectator, you’re involved like never before: you feel the
essence of movement – motion and emotion’. (Wenders, in Mackrell,
2010)
The central thrust of this article by Guardian dance journalist Judith Mack-
rell is that, for the choreographer and the filmmaker, before D3D, dance
has never worked well on screen. She states: ‘However artfully filmed, the
dancers always look diminished in two dimensions, like specimens trapped
behind glass, and it’s all but impossible to capture the emotional and physical
impact of live performance’ (2010). This ‘diminishment’ of dance on film is
seen as a consequence of the screen’s flattening of the stage space and the
necessary wide-angle camera distance from the dancers.
This generalisation does, perhaps, come with a few conspicuous excep-
tions – notably Powell and Pressburger’s 1948 film The Red Shoes. As an
exception, The Red Shoes works so effectively in 2D due to the exaggerated
sense of space conjured by a stark contrast of emphatic depths on the screen.
The dance starts with a paper-flat, two-dimensional, shallow stage space
through which the character Vicky Page dances, but, as she goes emotionally
deeper into the dance, her reality starts to fragment, the stage space becomes
dramatically deeper and more extensive. Three-dimensional spatial effects
of extended perspective clearly breach the stage space, and finally even the
film studio space is ruptured when we see waves crashing into the stage, and
the sea stretching off to the horizon in a cleverly composited image. This
depth effect is achieved with elaborate cinematic set-building, backdrops,
and composited film effects, something generally not achievable when
trying to capture stage-choreographed performance. These are aesthetic,
melodramatic enhancements of cinematic space with a magical and uncanny
quality which strengthen the emotional and physical impact of the dance.
However, with digital 3D (D3D), stage space is rendered with an increased
spatial depth without cinematic artifice, endowing the same sublime and
dramatic impact to captured live dance performance. As choreographer
Wayne Eagling states in the same Guardian article:
‘Ballet has never worked for me on screen; it always looks so flat. I wanted
to see if it could look any better, and this (3D) is promising […] It’s good,
very lifelike, almost as if you are watching from the front of the stage.’
(Mackrell, 2010)
This lifelike sense of proximity, detail, and depth nonetheless creates its
own uncanny affectivity in its spatial immersiveness, as if we ourselves
are within the dance.
Added to this augmented spatial depth, the dancers’ bodies themselves
also seem less flat in 3D, as Mackrell poetically notes about Eagling’s piece
Men y Men:
The dancers’ bodies jump into gilded high definition, the flesh on their
bare chests and arms looking solid and bright. Their movements acquire
sculptural volume, pirouettes no longer appear like flat pinwheels, but
revolve with a deep spiralling expansiveness. Best of all, there is an illusion
of air around each body, restoring the dancers to their proper element;
space. (Mackrell, 2010)
This observation rings especially true with Wenders’s film Pina. There is an
energetic and muscular tonality to the dancers as they move to and from
the camera, and rarely a distant, static camera shot, which would flatten
the image. Instead, the camera moves around, towards and through the
dancers in intimate choreographed moves of its own (Figures 11 and 12).
The viewer´s closeness and corporeal presence within the dance in Pina
is most obviously comparable to the highly visceral dance scenes in Dar-
ren Aronofsky’s recent (2D yet highly digitally inflected) film Black Swan
(2011, the films released only three months apart). Black Swan, which
visually and thematically references The Red Shoes, plays out an intense
psychodrama through its dances, primarily expressed through an intensity
of facial expression and the fragmentation of the dancer’s body. While
there is plenty of movement from handheld camera shots, there is little
spatial or sculptural depth here, with a shallow depth of field blurring out
the background stage space, and only rare wide shots of the full body of
the dancer. The mid-shot and close-up cinematographic choice of Black
Swan serves principally to highlight the inner mental environment of the
character expressionistically rather than the actual movement of her body.17
While this might seem similar in tone to The Red Shoes, the expressionistic
17 This choice of camera shot may also have been used out of necessity, to conceal the relatively
untrained movements of the actress, Natalie Portman. The wide shots are at such a distance as
to conceal the fact that a trained double was used (with a suggestion that Portman’s face was
technique here is quite different, synthesised through ‘magical’ digital

special effects (the sprouting of black feathers), and through intense close-up
facial ‘affection-images’, rather than through affects of space and bodily
movement in a deep figure/ground relation.18 For Black Swan, the dances
are instrumental only as affective climax to its psycho-drama narrative,
and the choreography seems actually somewhat redundant within this
equation. While the effect is nonetheless cinematically breathtaking, it is of
a very different order to the images of both Pina and The Red Shoes, which
use expansive spaces within which we read the full body of the dancer for
a register of dynamic tension, and in which the facial expressions, while
not insignificant, are of marginal importance.
The set stage spaces of Pina are rendered with visceral texture, with
splashes of water, jagged stone, and moist brown earth seeming to have a
choreographic role as the dancer move with and against them. The 3D effect
is even more pronounced in Wenders’s exterior locations, which synthesise
an emphatic depth through a central disappearing point far in the distance,
serving to exaggerate the perspective (Figure 13). Occasionally, these exterior
environments are also in motion, creating a mobile dynamism of dancer,
space, and object.
While the film is absorbing even in 2D presentation due to its deep-focus
cinematography and kinetic dynamism (as home-video audiences will
attest to), the digital 3D projection of Pina brings a quite enhanced sense
of expansive space and force of presence in which the frame of the screen
seems to dissolve completely. Dance seems particularly effective in 3D
because the increased mobility of the ‘actors’ gives licence to play and
experiment with these enhanced spatial effects. The dancers stay within
an inherently contained space defined only by the time it takes to cross it
in choreographed moves (without running off into the distance or out of
shot). There is thus a tensional dynamism between the dancers and the
limits of their bounded space; between figure and ground, as our atten-
tion flickers and shifts in the stark contrast between foreground dancer
and immense background depth.19 This heightened spatial contrast and
digitally grafted onto another dancer’s body), and the dance scenes are predominantly mid-shots
of Portman’s upper half (Markovitz, 2011).
18 There is one intense and famous face close-up in The Red Shoes, signalling the transition
from the real world into mental space. It is not, however, a feature of the whole film as is the
case with Black Swan.
19 This results in, what is called by dance theorist Marc Boucher, a ‘kinetic synaesthesia’, a
complex sensation of being in motion ourselves due to diverse elements and dynamic tension
within the ‘gestalt’ of the experience (2004).
Figures 11 and 12. The dynamic figure-ground relations of Wim Wenders’s Pina: dance, dance,
otherwise we are lost. Dancers Fabien Prioville and Azusa Seyama, photograph by Donata Wenders
(Neue Road Movies, 2011),
Figure 13. The emphatic spatial depth of Wim Wenders’s Pina: dance, dance, otherwise we are lost.
Dancer Cristiana Morganti, photograph by Donata Wenders (Neue Road Movies, 2011).
kinetic dynamic, in D3D and in high definition, creates a unique aesthetic

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

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

second; soon the viewers realise that they are watching the creative act
itself: here is the essence of those two intangibles, art and technique,
merging together to produce performance. (Flanders, 2010)
21 This sentiment is echoed in Vivian Sobchack’s ‘Cutting to the Quick: Techne, Physis and
Poiesis and the Attractions of Slow Motion’ (2006), in which she states ‘The operations and
effects of slow-motion visibly and sensually interrogate those accelerations [of quotidian time]
in what seems a “revelation” – not of immobility or stillness, but of the “essential” movement of
movement itself’ (p. 342).
Figure 14. The large, intensely slow-motion figures of Michalek’s Slow Dancing at Trafalgar square in
London (2010).
Here, Flanders describes a new aesthetic appreciation of the ‘intangibles’ of

dance, which she compares to a witnessing of the pre-actualised moment
of ‘the creative act itself’. Digital technology has, in these circumstances,
permitted a new affection of the energetic force, form, and temporality of
the dancer’s body, understood to be like witnessing the ephemeral moment
of artistic creation, an empowering notion indeed.
The Kinetic Dynamism of the Epic Digital Battle Scene
Having described how the potential kinetic expression of an actual body

in extended space is decisively altered in the digital image, we can now
expand the analysis of a digital transformation of rhythmic movement
to other images of motion-in-space which are not so instantly ‘corporeal’.
Cinema theorist Anne Rutherford, in ‘Cinema and Embodied Affect’, makes
the point that we do not need the image of an actual body to identify
with to experience a corporeal effect (2003). She refers instead to all
the other relational aspects on the screen which have a visceral impact:
architectural space, depth, colour, lighting, camera shot, composition,
confusion of noises and lights, angles and rhythms; a complexity of factors

within the image.
This is an image with no centre, no focal point (a body) […] the surface of
the shot is conceived on a hundred different planes […] the tensions and
dynamisms of the image can effect a bodily agitation. I am thrown into
another dimension, my viewing body fragmented, dispersed, disoriented. I
experience a shot in my stomach, as if my stomach turns over. (Rutherford,
2003)
Rutherford’s dynamic interrelation of image elements resonates well with

Erin Manning’s analysis of both still and moving images, breaking them
down into rhythms and lines of force within topological space which
evoke ‘force taking form’, incipient sensations of movement (if not actual
motion) that express an expansion of possibility for bodily actualisation
beyond actual human form. While these sensations might not always be so
intense as to disorientate, they present our consciousness with an affection
of kinetic energy as a metaphor for actual bodily movement, which we
kinaesthetically process. Even when actually watching dance, we often do
not see bodies moving with one another in recognisable ways, but rather
more abstract lines and forms moving in and around one another in a pure
kinetic confusion; a kinetic synaesthesia of ill-defined forms: twisted and
distorted, juxtaposed against other bodies, partially obscured, moving at
speed, and simply becoming abstract shapes. Many other media forms -- in
cave drawings, Picasso’s oils, or in film -- can be seen inherently to contain
an abstracted sense of vital force beyond that which is literally represented
as movement, a kinetic affectivity which impacts upon our minds and bodies
to give us a specific impression or intuition of space-time.22 The digital then
gives us a further dimension of heightened fluidity and complexity, a visual
density of kinetic imagery created in the post-production suite that is even
harder to grasp with our conventional embodied perceptual models. The
rhythms and forces at work in the digital image take on a new intensive
dimension as bodies fragment and change shape amid a confusion of objects
and within malleable spaces, enhanced within immersive formats where
the boundaries of the frame dissolve.
Within digital post-cinema, we can see emergent kinetic images as in-
novative impressions of space-time, developing from the first digital images
22 The two mediums of cave painting and f ilm are affectively brought together in Werner
Herzog’s recent 3D film Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2011).
in mainstream media that I described above to the present day. These are
novel syntheses of action and scene, figure and ground, sound and light,
from a microscopic to an epic scale that would simply not be achievable
in analogue media due to labour and production cost, or indeed purely
material constraints. They exhibit kinetic dynamics which are entirely
specific to the digital, and though these types of cinematic sequences may
have been foreshadowed in analogue media, they seem now to be defined
by the digital effects used to render them. While some generic standards
of analogue action are merely revised, updated, and transformed by digital
processes into infinitely more complex kinetic sequences, such as the chase
scene (e.g. the Thanator chase in 3D in Avatar) and the flight scene (e.g. the
kaleidoscopic affects of the wormhole sequence in Zemeckis’s Contact), a
particularly novel and original kinetic image in contemporary digital media
is the epic battle scene. The epic battle scene seems to be the digital spatio-
temporal-energic image tour de force and, as such, it proliferates in narrative
digital-effects cinema. While there are many critical discourses about the
ideological effect of the fusion of military imagery and entertainment in
video games and movies, and the subsequent normalisation of extreme
screen violence, it can be seen that the battle scene simply presents filmmak-
ers with the best context to showcase highly kinetic and complexified digital
effects, where, exactly as in dance, there are multiple or multitudinous bodies
and objects moving at speed within dynamic spaces.23 It has thus become one
of the the best diegetic devices to experiment with grandstanding digitally
rendered affections of motion, space, and temporality. If, as Sheets-Johnstone
suggests, dance is the most straightforward and primal mode of expression
of our relational sense of space and potential movement, the digital battle
scene takes this and multiplies it thousand-fold, as multiple bodily forms
flow against one another in an intricate choreography of camera movement,
rhythmic action, and bloodletting.
In landmark digital films such as Avatar, Tron, and the Matrix, but
also in every recent ‘blockbuster’ digital-effects film -- the Transformers
series, supernatural narratives such as Immortals, every superhero movie
(recently, Guardians of the Galaxy, Thor: Ragnarok, Justice League),
and even increasingly in most epic ‘period’ movies such as Hero, Gladiator,
or Nolan’s Dunkirk -- the battle scene is pivotal not only (or not at all) for
23 Kristen Whissel (2014) dedicates a whole chapter to the ‘digital multitude’ within her analysis
of ‘digital effects emblems’, describing these effects as emblematic metaphors for apocalyptic
anxiety. She shows how they thus serve a narrative purpose, affectively symbolising the central
narrative themes evoked by the film.
the narrative, but for the expectation of an audience who, in this analysis,
come to the cinema to be astounded and exhilarated not primarily by the
violence, but rather to engage with the highly affective kinetic ‘action’
afforded by digital technology. In many such films, the digital effects are
all but invisible, though the elaborate choreography of movement is often
completely produced by computer-controlled camera movement and digital
post-production. While the dramatic centrality of the fight scene has always
been the case in the mainstream genre film – with swashbuckling adventure
yarns and martial arts movies – in the digital age of entertainment, we have
a far more heightened dynamic of space, time, and force, on a much larger
and more immersive scale, entirely due to digital effects. The digital battle
sequence also seems to become, at least in part, less about the tense narrative
dynamics of winning and losing, where we might directly identify with a
protagonist’s will to victory, and instead is regarded more aesthetically as the
source of impressive effects of scale, technical skill, and impossible detail.
These effects are temporal, with the speeding up and slowing down of
objects and bodies spinning and flying through the air; spatial, with 3D
effects and epic computer-generated sets; and amplify force and energy, as
gravity-defying stunts are performed and objects are projected impossibly
through the air. For example, in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers,
we see digital hordes of warriors swarming over the elaborate bridges and
embattlements, the gravity defying motions of Legolas as he jumps onto
one of the mammoth creatures, or the movement of the catapults and their
projectiles, all of which present a certain heightened and intense rhythm
and fluidity of motion within an extensive space.24 The corporeal tensing
and arousal in watching these scenes is arguably not simply to do with our
will (through identification processes) for a specific character to emerge
victoriously, but rather because we feel sensually incorporated into the
force and flow of the movements. In another example, in Michael Bay’s
Transformers series, we have some of the most disorienting battle scenes
ever seen, with pivoting camera angles and a visual density, maximalism,
and complexity of detail in the moving machine parts that boggle the mind.
Within this kaleidoscopic disorientation, we seem unable to follow which
character is battling which; instead, it is the immersive 3D kinesis of form,
24 These complex crowd effects were generated by a computer programme MASSIVE (Multiple
Agent Simulation System in Virtual Environment) developed by the filmmakers themselves,
which generated crowds of ‘artificially intelligent’ individuals who make their own decisions
based on behaviour patterns (McCarthy, 2006)
flow, detail, and rhythm, allied with the booming sonic landscapes, that
provides the visceral exhilaration.
The visceral effects of this kind of action are necessarily of a flux between
corporeal tension and anxiety – the viewers’ muscles twitching and their
bodies turning to the direction of the screen action – and then almost
simultaneously, an aesthetic wonder at the fluidity, speed, and scale of
the action. We switch between complete immersion, and then, at one step
back, a sense of wonder at the technical mastery expressed in the shot.25
This affective flux is often managed through digitally stylised and phased
slow-motion effect, wherein the viewer has a momentary respite from the
kinetic hyperactivity of the scene to savour the composition of a shot – usu-
ally a body flying gracefully through the air in some dance-like spin – before
we are flung back into the high-speed action at less of an ‘optical’ distance.
For many, this kind of tension and anxiety is not a pleasurable experience,
though for others the exhilaration, disorientation, and intensity are the
primary sensations to be savoured and are worth the ticket price alone.26
These exaggerated images demonstrate an impulse forever to amp up
the pace and complexity of digital effects, placing total emphasis on af-
fective intensity and immersiveness, occasionally at the cost of emotional
empathy or within politically dubious representation, and often leaving the
audience cold.27 However, used as well-placed and appropriately qualified
set-pieces, they add a new affective dimension to the spatio-temporal-
energic coordinates of narrative and genre screen media which opens up
a new metaphysical horizon within our available modes of expression.
They bypass the distanced analytical gaze for a visceral intensity which
can intoxicate, breaching stable notions of presence, and, as described by
Rutherford above, creating a fully embodied reaction – ‘a bodily agitation’.
What emerges is a clear aesthetic impetus to push the technology to an
ever increasing novelty and spectacle, to generate increasing breaches of
expectation and suspensions of physical/biological possibility. This impulse
25 This effect is analysed by Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin (2000) as being the flux between
immediacy and hypermediacy.
26 Scott Bukatman highlights the escapist pleasures of a kaleidoscopic loss of orientation within
the hyper-rationalisation of space-time which typifies the modernist experience (Bukatman,
2003).
27 For an example of highly stylised action at the cost of political correctness, see Zach Snyder’s
Sucker-Punch (2011), which was generally criticised for its offensive faux-feminism: ‘These
so-called heroines are inherently weak characters who fail themselves and each other as sisters,
friends and confidants. Even in their fantasies of revolt they bow down to the male gaze, stripped
of both agency and voice’ (Bartyzel, 2011).
towards fixating on technological form and detail within media, and on the
increasing immersiveness and interactivity with the screen image within
a peculiar spatial and formal logic has come to be known as the digital
‘neo-baroque’. I now ask how a baroque aesthetic has come to be associated
with recent digital developments, and what this means in terms of a decisive
shift towards a new regime within digital image culture.
The Digital Neo-Baroque
The baroque aesthetic’s first priority since the seventeenth century, ac-
cording to cultural theorist Angela Ndalianis, has been that of exhibition,
virtuosity, spectacle, and active audience engagement (2005). It is the pleasing
element of illusion, complexity, and the consequent sense of wonder which
has always been intimately linked to the possibilities afforded by new
technologies, whether in art, architecture, music, furniture, or film. The
baroque style has also consistently been called upon by philosophers as
much as art historians in narratives of the disruption, reinvention, and
rebirth of more rigid and inflexible hegemonic regimes of representation,
and therefore also of thought: from Walter Benjamin, Heinrich Wölfflin, and
Eugenio d’Ors in the early years of the 20th century, to Deleuze, Christine
Buci-Gluckman, and José Antonio Maravall in the later 20th century (see
Deleuze, 1993). In the 21st century, the baroque aesthetic has again become
prominent specifically in reference to digital images through the work of
Ndalianis, Cubitt (2005), and Timothy Murray (2008).
As Ndalianis describes, the baroque ocular regime was and is ‘an order
that calls upon systems of classical or Renaissance perspective in order to
overturn, investigate, or complicate their rational, self-contained visual and
narrative spaces’ (Ndalianis, 1999). Classical representational systems such
as the Renaissance invention of or rediscovery of perspectival depth were
characterised by a static, centred, and passive viewer position, whereas the
baroque fractures this closed system, delighting in toying with habitual
expectations of centre and order. As Ndalianis explains further:
The spatially invasive nature of baroque and neo-baroque spaces instigates

participatory spectatorial positions through dynamic compositional
arrangements. With borders continually being rewritten, neo-baroque
vision provides optical models of perception that suggest worlds of infinity
that lose the sense of a centre, which are associated with classically ordered
space. Rather, the centre is now to be found in the position of the spectator,
with the representational centre changing depending on the spectator’s

focus. Given that neo-baroque spectacle provides polycentric and multiple
shifting centres, the spectator, in a sense, remains the only element in the
image/viewer scenario that remains centred and stable. (Ndalianis, 1999)
The baroque has at many times been used as a derogatory term by those
who valued the clarity and transparency of the Renaissance style, and was
criticised for its excessive ornamentation, redundancy, over-complexity,
or obscurantism. However, in the neo-baroque, these exact tendencies
are ethically contrasted with the perceived Modernist artistic elitisms
of detached rationalism and simplicity based on purity and function. In
celebrating exuberance, theatrical melodramatics, and heightened sensory
stimulation, it thus has always been seen as more direct and accessible – a
less esoteric and more populist form (Jay, 1988, p. 16).
The term thus seems apt to critique a contemporary visual culture that
emphasises the possibilities of new digital technology to create viscerally
affective architectures of space-time while revelling in its own technical
mastery. The perceived baroque stylings of many digital effects-driven
narrative films and their associated computer games and theme-park rides
are, for Ndalianis, all primarily oriented towards a complete spatial im-
mersion and interaction, extolling visceral affect and excess without elitist
pretension. For Sean Cubitt in The Cinema Effect, technological neo-baroque
films are less like linear narratives than formal puzzle spaces. He describes:
‘Spatialisation takes over from narrative the job of managing the film’s
dynamics. Movement here is sculptural, architectural, or geographical rather
than temporal, and space itself is malleable’ (2005, p. 224), noting further
that: ‘The film world seeks an audience that will realize it by uncovering
its secret algorithm’ (ibid, p. 242). Narrative here is merely ‘decorative’, and
what we are instead given in films like Nolan’s inception, Duncan Jones’s
Source Code (2011), Interstellar, and The Butterfly Effect (dir. Eric
Bress and J. Mackye Gruber, 2004) is multiple folded space-times posed as
a formal problem for the logical mind to square off. The aesthetic pleasure
here is in discovery and exploration of the film’s affective tricks and illusions,
revelling in an Escheresque distortion of conventional Euclidean modes of
representation of space and time. For Cubitt, however, the artificial coher-
ence of these film spaces is ultimately unsatisfying, particularly in the use
of clichéd closure delivered by the weak narrative devices of coincidence
or destiny. However, their continuing popularity testifies to their appeal
as an invitation to play, with an emphasis on formal affects rather than in
the quality of the narrative, characters, or denouement.
Figure 15. Example of digital projection-mapping’s distortion of physical space and shape. 555
Kubik (2009), Galerie der Gegenwart, Hamburg by Urbanscreen.
Beyond narrative cinema, but very much still in the ‘Escheresque’ tradi-
tion, a current neo-baroque trend in digital visual culture worth noting is
projection-mapping. This is a relatively new digital projection technique
(emerging around 2007) that can turn almost any three-dimensional object
into a screen. Software packages such as Madmapper, VVVV, Resolume, and
many others are used to warp and wrap projected images to make them fit
perfectly on multiple irregularly shaped screens – the multiple surfaces of a
three-dimensional object, or on immersive multi-screen set-ups which wrap
and surround an audience. The result is a projection installation that can
make it seem as if a solid inanimate object is moving, flexing, throbbing,
glowing, crumbling, or even exploding. The screen-object can be anything,
from the very small (a training shoe used in an advertisement for the brand
New Balance) to the very large (a whole tower block at London’s Millbank for
brand Nokia, and the disused Battersea power station for Bombay Sapphire).28
The best uses of this technology have been mainly restricted to marketing
purposes and for large-scale live music and club visuals (for example, in the
stage shows of dance-music acts Amon Tobin and Etiénne de Crecy) due to
28 These images and their like can be readily found on YouTube and similar video-sharing
sites, indeed their marketing efficacy often depends on the images being virally distributed
and shared though these platforms.
the expense of production, however, as the technology becomes cheaper

and more affordable to smaller scale artists, it is increasingly being used for
more creative purposes. More sophisticated software mapping systems are
now being developed to track and map moving objects in real time, yielding
intensely uncanny and beautiful projections onto faces, bodies, or objects
in motion. Given the right conditions – complete darkness and powerful
projectors – the results can be impressively affective, as physical form is
apparently folded and collapsed, walls are opened outwards or rendered
transparent, and faces are transformed into other objects (Figure 15).29
With urban projection-mapping, dramatic distortions of space, matter, and
form, as digital neo-baroque illusions are taken out the cinema or living room
and relocated onto the surfaces of the urban environment as public events.
They take the familiar landscape of the city and alter its materiality, turning
monoliths into screens, and solid concrete and brick into fluid substances.
Within a neo-baroque aesthetic sensibility, these images revel in the illusions
afforded by the new post-cinematic digital technology, and draw us into a new
mode of perception, adding an original new virtual dimension to public space.
Rethinking Cinema through Digital 3D
The habitual perspective-based, photo-realistic mode of spatial perception

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

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

been seen as neurologically bypassing this ocular distance and confronting

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

‘body genres’ of horror and pornography (Williams, 2012).31 However, in
current usage, 3D body-shock effects have shifted from being foregrounded
in tokenistic and titillating ‘things flying towards the screen’ de-suturing
moments, and have moved towards a more embedded and narrative usage.
As Martin Scorcese observed about the making of his 3D film Hugo (2011):
Every shot is rethinking cinema, rethinking narrative – how to tell a

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

that they not only offer up a more haptic address, adding a dimension of
affective depth which is more intensive and immersive, but within this
also create a novel experience of reality which still can seem very much
experimental, breaking new ground even within the commercial confines
of mainstream and narrative media.33
Conclusion
I have argued, using examples from the very first digital spatial, temporal,
and material impingements into the moving image, through different dy-
namics of movement in screen space – in dance, in immaterial spaces, and
in the epic battle scene – through baroque architectures of space and the 3D
technology used to render them, and through the flexion and distortions of
real-world form with projection-mapping, that we now have a well-evolved
and qualitatively different image regime from that which came before. The
new digital screen technologies synthesise original sensations of space and
time, materiality, force and rhythm, generating new dynamic landscapes
which comes to feel like a very real part of our world. Furthermore, I have
tried to establish, through the work of Sheets-Johnstone and Erin Manning,
that this technological shift in spatial and kinetic expression could have a
real impact on evolutionary phenomenology, from corporeal proprioception
and other anthropomorphic kinaesthetic dynamics, to abstract thought
about metaphysical properties – for Scott Richmond, a ‘technics of the
flesh’ (2016).
At first, these technological shifts compensate for the deficiencies of
the human perception, in the work of Marey and Muybridge through to
Michalek’s Slow Dancing and BBC wildlife’s complex digital time-lapse
tracking shots, opening new micro-sensations of existence (at the same
time, creating uncanny perceptual experiences), but then these sensations
surpass human perception altogether, become simple lines of force and
flight in maximalist hyper-baroque architectures of space. As previously
described, for William Brown (2013), this amounts to anti-humanist and
33 In 2016, Film Forum cinema in New York ran a 3D Auteurs film festival, screening 3D films
from cinematic history (Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder alongside more schlock horror)
alongside the new films considered exemplary from the last ten years, such as Gravity (dir.
Alfonso Cuarón, 2013) and Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller, 2015), as well as those by Ang
Lee, Ridley Scott, Scorcese, Wenders, and Herzog et al.
non-anthropocentric cinema, but we can see through the above analysis that
we are always still dealing with a human proprioceptive phenomenology,
only one that moves metaphorically and emblematically into Malabou’s
plastic ontology, Bogost’s alien phenomenology, or Marinetti’s ‘extrahuman’
logics.
As a final point, and to support the argument that we are here involved
in a real technical evolution of corporeal consciousness, I would like to
call on a couple of empirical studies to demonstrate how malleable our
sense of the real actually is within the new immersive technologies,
studies that suggest that what we often think are fixed, consistent, and
unchanging physical qualities of the world are actually relatively fluid
within our metaphysical consciousness. The first of these studies tested
the ability of participants to project objects intuitively into a fourth
dimension through their immersion in a virtual reality simulation. The
researchers state:
Representations of space and time are deeply rooted in human thinking,

reasoning, and perception of the world. However, living in a physical
world of three dimensions, humans have their perceptual and cognitive
systems tailored for sensing, storing, transforming, and reasoning about
three-dimensional (3-D) objects. (Ambinder et al, 2009)
The researchers aimed then to prove that our ability to conceive of, and to
intuit, fairly complex higher dimensional space can be dramatically and
quickly expanded by quite minimal exposure to three-dimensional virtual
(VR) simulation. They describe:
It is a long-lasting question whether human beings, who evolved in a

physical world of three dimensions, are capable of overcoming this
fundamental limitation to develop an intuitive understanding of four-
dimensional space. […] Here we show evidence that people with basic
geometric knowledge can learn to make spatial judgments on the length
of, and angle between, line segments embedded in four-dimensional
space viewed in virtual reality with minimal exposure to the task and
no feedback to their responses. […] These results suggest that human
spatial representations are not completely constrained by our evolution
and development in a 3-D world. (ibid)
The researchers suggest that, by developing and using new technologies of

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

thinking that a man could ‘feel’ like a woman, the signif icance of this
research seems to be about the malleability of our mental image of our
own bodies and its capabilities from only a little exposure to an altered
sensation of corporeal presence within a technological simulation. The
research suggests that corporeally immersive technologies can instigate a
suspension of disbelief and an erasure of cognitive dissonance to the extent
that the participants can have a strong physical reaction in response to an
event occurring to their virtual bodies projected into a virtual world. The
researchers thus conclude that ‘our minds thus have a very fluid picture
of our bodies’.
What these two examples evoke (without, I hasten to add, categorically
proving) is the idea that, through digital simulation – through virtual repre-
sentations of bodies and their positioning within a virtual reality – we can
easily alter what actually proves to be fairly plastic mental models of reality.
This can be a heightened intuition of the world’s metaphysical properties, or a
different kinaesthetic sensation of our own bodies within the world if indeed,
following Sheets-Johnstone’s thought, the two sensations can be separated
at all. In digital screen media – through CGI, D3D, digital mapping, digital
HD, digital slow motion, morphing, glitching, and deep-dream software, and
with new emerging technologies – we have an immersivity and intensity
of physical detail which can afford us emergent and original sensations of
abstract bodies within abstract spaces and the energic force with which they
move. This is best perceived as a playful, interactive learning process, even
though it often proceeds through experimentation which can occasionally
seem bizarre, redundant, superficial, or gimmicky. However, there can be
no doubt that these effects amount collectively to a new image regime, and
the impact of this new image regime on a generation that was born into a
digital era is only beginning to be understood.
5. Reality Sutures, Simulation, and
Digital Realism
Dan Strutt
Abstract
This chapter begins by first complexifying the psychoanalytic concept of
‘suture’ as a theory of how we aesthetically and affectively interface with
images, asking how we police the boundary between actual and virtual
in our experience of the world. By working through notions of mirror
neurons, the simulation theory of the mind, the metaphoric structure of
memory, and mimetic capacity, it establishes that we are influenced and
conditioned by the images we consume to inhabit certain fields of im-
manent possibility intuitively and corporeally. Within digital images, this
field of possibility is rendered plastic, subject to reformation, modulation
and regeneration and it is argued that this foments a more plastic mind
in which actuality and virtuality fuse.
Keywords: Suture, The Mimetic faculty, Metaphor, Embodied Simulation,

Kinetic Synaesthesia, Play
A psychologically tested belief of our time is that the central nervous system,
which feeds its impulses directly to the brain, the conscious and subconscious,
is unable to discern between the real, and the vividly imagined experience – if
there is a difference, and most of us believe there is. Am I being clear? For to
examine these concepts requires tremendous energy and discipline. To allow
the unknown to occur… and to occur… requires clarity [sic]. And where there is
clarity there is no choice. And where there is choice, there is misery.
(The Swami in The Monkees’s 1968 film Head, dir. Bob Rafelson)
Everything is backwards now, like out there is the true world, and in here is the
dream. (Jake Sully [Sam Worthington], in Avatar, 2009, dir. James Cameron)
doi 10.5117/9789462987135_ch05
In Avatar, we are presented with a direct analogy for the suturing of our
mind into a digital screen ‘virtual’ reality. The main character Jake Sully’s
consciousness is projected into the body of his avatar, and his experience
of reality is mediated through his conscious connection to an alternate
body in an alternate world. As we enjoy the pleasures of 3D immersion and
identification within a fantastic alien world from our cinema seat, Sully is
similarly transported from his disabled body restrained within a capsule
into an enhanced and empowered blue body in which he can perform
amazing physical feats.
Sully’s projection of consciousness proves to be an apt metaphor for the
process by which we mentally invest in and virtually inhabit the images we
see on the screen. We see characters in situations performing impossible
tasks, in situations we can never hope to be in, and we experience these
scenarios in some vicarious way, our bodies tensing and releasing, laughing
and crying, even jumping and turning in our seats as the bodies and objects
move on screen. The difference is that, while the character Sully knows the
simulation is real and deadly serious, we as mature spectators maintain a
conscious knowledge that it is just an imaginary projection presented for
our pleasure.1 What this means is that we can engage in metaphorical
‘imaginary’ relations with the images on the screen; a playful creative
engagement through which multiple simulation and mirroring cognitive
processes are mobilised without serious mental risk. This is acknowledged
by modern film theorists such as Jean-Louis Comolli, who ascertains in
his ‘Machines of the Visible’ essay (1980) that we are not imbecilic passive
consumers; we willingly ‘play the game’ and fool ourselves for the pleasure.
We are accomplices in the illusion. While children seem less able to police the
boundary between virtual and real in terms of the suggestive metaphorical
power of the screen image, shrinking in real horror or gurgling with delight,
adults have entered more firmly into a symbolic order detachment from
the imaginary screen reality. We are told that these illusory images cannot
really affect us, and we feel that our engagement with them is an intentional
act within which we maintain our own agency at all times.
However, we have all, I imagine, experienced the odd unsettling cinematic
moment when our firm grip on ‘exterior’ reality is shaken in such a way
1 This actual/virtual safe cognitive distance is acknowledged and toyed with in many films
involving the transposition of consciousness into virtual realms. For instance, in Brainstorm
(dir. Douglas Trumbull, 1983), Tron, and Total Recall (dir. Paul Verhoeven, 1990), through
expository dialogue the audience is informed that ‘virtual’ death within the simulation equals
brain death in reality.
Realit y Sutures, Simul ation, and Digital Realism 161
that, even as we leave the cinema, we feel the screen reality impinging on
our own – a threatening shadow, a seemingly unnatural sparkle of light,
or a ‘glitch in the matrix’ sensation of déjà vu. Can we then really say that
we have complete conscious control over the images we consume, and
exert that control to police the boundary between the virtual and the real
perfectly? Anyone who has had a particularly vivid dream which references
the mood, tone, or embodied experience of watching a movie, or indeed a
dream in which we actually enter into the film diegesis, can attest to the
fact that, however we consciously position the experience of spectatorship,
some of it gets ‘under our skin’ and bleeds into our subconscious mental
processes. Going even further than this, I move towards an understanding
that the virtual screen image is not a thin reproduction of reality which
causes occasional interference in our ‘natural’ perception, but is actually
in a sense more real (in its harmonic and ordered rendering of reality) than
the chaos of actual experience. The screen image is a register of our ways of
seeing, the image of our actualising processes of mind that extract meaning
and model from the multiplicity of sensory input. Thinking this, we can
start to understand that, perhaps it is not the screen reality that impinges
on our own reality, but rather that it is external reality that is checked for
validity against the virtual, simulated image.
This chapter aims to address how images come to enter into our conscious-
ness, at what level(s) of consciousness they enter, and what alterations they
passively make when they take up residence in the neural substrate of our
memory. In our exposure to these images as spectators and consumers, I
ask in what ways we process them as part of our systems of recognition,
cognition, and patterns of abstract thought about reality. Not only in youthful
developmental processes but also throughout our adult life, there is a plastic
structuring and restructuring of associational, procedural, and semantic
memories of ‘virtual’ media experience as much as of ‘real’ experience,
cemented in the synaptic connections of the brain. To a large extent, we
perceive the world through our understanding and awareness of the content
of, and connections between, mediated images. This means that the chang-
ing technological forms of mediation of reality, from the novel, to fine art
painting, to cinema and television, will each generate a habituated mode of
recognising and processing sensory input and relating it to other experiences
within various intuited ontological dimensions. I move towards seeing
digital post-cinematic images as synthesising a distinctive relational mode
of thought about reality; a reality in which there is an uncertainty about
reality itself, and an intuition that our sensory experience of the world and
its objects is not the whole story. Digital media seem to tell a different story
about the subtle vitality of matter and space which lies just beyond normal
‘real’ perception, but which can nonetheless be tangibly and corporeally felt.
While the major discourse of mind of the 20th century was that of the
unconscious network of meanings connected through symbolism and
signification (for Lacan, ‘like a language’), in the 21st century, we move to a
neurological understanding of the modular structure of mental processes in
which cerebral meanings and embodied affections are subtly co-triggered.2
Neural synapses form through our early development, but, as has been
noted in recent research, further re-form and develop in new ways as our
experience broadens and accumulates (Malabou, 2010). By offering up an
unstable image of a reality in flux, digital screen media seem to reflect this
greater self-transformative power of the brain, as much as of the world and
matter itself. New understandings of neurology, as also of physical reality
through quantum physics and cosmology, intertwine with the capacities
of the new technologies of representation to create synergistically a new
complex and heterogeneous ontological model of metaphysical properties
of time, space, force and matter. In this chapter, I suggest that our mind (as
a holistic, embodied, and distributed central nervous system inclusive of
the brain) adapts and changes to account for the symbiosis between these
new contemporary knowledges and digital technologies, re-orientating the
senses to see and feel differently.3
2 Sigmund Freud in fact began his career as a neurologist, but evolved towards theoretical
neurology and psychology before founding psychoanalysis as a therapeutic practice. It was
his turn to psychology which instigated the 20th-century preoccupation with the unconscious
mind. Now the current ‘turn to neurology’ in humanities and social science in the last 20 years
seems to come on the tail of new technologies of brain-imaging and measurement (the digital
scanning techniques of MRI, CT, EEG, etc), but also arrives as a fashionable critique of social
and cultural theory influenced by psychoanalysis. This ‘neuro-hype’ does, however, threaten
to overwhelm more politically informed analysis – leading to recent conferences in Berlin
and London to discuss the opportunities and pitfalls presented by the new prominence of
neuroscience: Neuro-Reality Check: Scrutinizing the ‘neuro-turn’ in the humanities and natural
sciences. Workshop at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. December
2011; also, The Neurological Turn, at The Future of Medical History Conference, Hosted by The
Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL, July 2010.
3 This is a theme that Katherine Hayles develops in her work, in which she identifies a new
transformed cognition in digital culture: ‘There is a mounting body of evidence to suggest that
different media wire the brain in different ways […] The neurological re-wiring takes place
quickest when small repetitive tasks are repeated over and over, reinforcing synaptic pathways
and encouraging the associated neural nets to grow — as, for example, clicking a mouse, scanning
a web page, etc’ (Hayles, 2010).
The Malleable Mediated Mind
Through psychological discourses of conditioning, we are perhaps familiar

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

and Turnbull, 2002, p. 157). They explain how memories are simultaneously
stored in these different ways in different modules of the brain. If one part of
the brain is then damaged, the memory can live on, albeit altered, leading to
situations in which a patient can abstractly remember the act of performing
a skilled motor task, but cannot actually manually do it anymore – their
semantic memory remaining intact while their procedural memory of the
same act is damaged/removed. These multi-modal memories structure our
habitual mental responses in a relatively undivided way. This means, in
principle, that our minds are activated in subtle and complex subconscious
and affective ways by memories of things that happened to us directly, as
well as by memories of ‘virtual’ or simulated experiences we may have had
through media or in dreams, and these can be separated only by drawing
the mental process into a higher level of analytical consciousness. Perhaps
we have all had this kind of momentary memory confusion when sensation
and semantic memories are mixed and the gaps are falsely filled in by
our imaginations – where we imagine for a second that we have actually
experienced something that we only heard about or witnessed. Of course,
in extreme circumstances, this confusion extends to a pathological delu-
sion – of alien abductions or superpowers, but for most of us, this is a rather
more whimsical experience.
What this testifies to is that mind and memory are considerably more
plastic than is often conceived of in some developmental psychology and
neurology, and that, beyond the initial synaptic concretion of associa-
tion networks in our early years of learning, there is still a vast amount
of necessary adaptability in the brain (evidenced by slow degenerative
disorders like Rasmussen’s encephalitis, wherein the brain has time to
transfer most functions over to healthy parts). There are many popular
cultural discourses of neural flexibility and adaptability, most pronounced
of which is brainwashing, usually positing that, through exposure to media
(or propaganda) in an eroded or weakened metal state, we can essentially
be ‘re-programmed’ to believe in false memories, or to delete existing
memory. This concept is normally used to refer to the manipulation or
erasure of cultural values or belief systems, but what about our physical and
metaphysical senses, our sense of position and presence in the world or in
the universe? Our practical and pragmatically naïve everyday experiences
of reality is that space and time exist in empirically real terms, outside of
our comprehension of them, in enduring transcendent form. Since Kant,
however, we have had what Ian Bogost calls the ‘infamous introversion’ that
is the bedrock of Western philosophy – that these metaphysical constructs
exist a priori, not objectively real, but rather ‘ideal’ – as mental schema
to coordinate the information gleaned from our senses (2012, p. 5). Then,
from Einstein’s neo-Kantian position, we understand that time and space
are relative and unfixed qualities subject to the position and speed of an
‘observer’. By these principles, as synthetic mental structures, intuitions of
time and space are constantly tested against sensory experience, and they are
subject to modification within changing environmental factors. You could
perhaps say that this is evidenced by the cultural existential shifts in the
experience and understanding of time and space from industrial modernism
to globalisation that have been scrutinised by writers of modernism and
postmodernism, from Georg Simmel and Virginia Woolf to Fredric Jameson
and David Harvey.5 What is shown through these various theoretical and
cultural relativisms is that space and time are really merely an adaptable
(human) phenomenological model of understanding existence, rather
than of things that exist objectively. ‘Ontological Realist’ Markus Gabriel
summarises this viewpoint:
Space-time is an object under investigation from the standpoint of certain

limited physical models that were never designed to be metaphysical
accounts of a big container comprising everything there is. And if they
were, then the physicists who understood them in this way were wrong.
(in interview with Graham Harman, 2015)
Gabriel asks us to step away even from Kant’s transcendent idealism and
Einstein’s relativism, as blinkered views on what ‘exists’ that stem from the
tradition that it is humans who can exclusively access existence. Bogost
implores us, in no uncertain terms, to flee from the ‘dank halls’ of the mind’s
prison ‘that seeps from the rot of Kant’ (2012, p. 4). From a speculative realist
position, we should not rely on any abstract model that tells us what Being
is through any universal a priori categories.
If we accept this, we can move towards asking how different paradigmatic
technological media forms affect us; our metaphysical sense, our memories,
conditioned and colonised by the images by which we are surrounded. Does
media representation of the fundamental forces of the world – time, space,
energy, and materiality – subtly alter our perception of these qualities in
a lasting and deeply ingrained way? In our phenomenal experience of the
world, do we really manage to police a clear boundary between ‘real’ and
5 Paul Virilio describes exactly a kind of brainwashing or neural ‘brainstorm’ brought on by

the contemporary folding of space and time (Virilio, 1988).
virtual experience? Or, at an affective level, is the boundary between actual

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

Do digital screen media, then, in their generation of simulated realities, and
seen through the prism of recent discourses of neurology, perception, and
physics, generate a new metaphysical sensibility, a new digital ontology?
To investigate further perspectives on how our psychic engagement with
screen images impacts upon our sensibilities and intuitions surrounding
our being-in-the-world, I first turn to examine the traditional notion of
suture in cinematic theory towards expanding and rethinking its meaning
to encompass an affective closeness to the image that twists the distinction
between real and vividly imagined experience. I then move on to concepts
of mimesis, simulation, and synaesthesia as other acknowledged modes of
mental engagement with reality, shifting these into the context of digital
images by drawing on recent neurological research on mirror neurons. By
doing this, I aim to complexify ideas of the way we virtually inhabit the
image, imagining the actions and objects on the screen as actually occurring
to a simulated image of ourselves in ways that become subtly fused with
deeply embedded mental schema.
Rethinking Suture
The ultimate gap that gives rise to suture is ontological, a crack that cuts
through reality itself: the whole of reality cannot be perceived/accepted
as reality, so the price we have to pay for ‘normally’ situating ourselves
within reality is that something should be foreclosed from it: this void
of primordial repression has to be filled in – ´sutured´ – by the spectral
fantasy. (Žižek, 2001, p. 71)
Suture is often understood as the process by which the dissonant ontological

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

including this awareness in the narrative – by deliberately representing the
limit of the narrative order – we feel that we are party to the (hegemonic)
process, so that we then can return to being absorbed in it since we are
not at risk (ibid, p. 32). The tension of an unseen force controlling events,
that might force us to step out of the fiction, disinvest and question the
construction of the fiction, is a gap that must be ‘sutured’ closed, with an
appeasement that it is just ‘part of the process’ and that all is well. Suture
is necessary because there can never be a fully contained totality in the
illusion; the Other, the Real, the breach in the symbolic order that exposes
the truth about the constructed-ness of the fiction always bleeds in through
the cracks. As such, for Žižek, the suture is never complete, we are never fully
immersed in the diegesis but caught in the crack between, and attempts to
‘foreclose’ intrusive reality must always be a matter of trickery.
While this analysis is astute and well grounded in a form of Marxist
transcendental idealism, it struggles too much with the limitations of repre-
sentation; the focus is always on the outside of the image as antagonistic and
an experienced sense of distance or ‘lack’ between self and image -- rather
than a productive fusion or creative immersion of subject and image. For
Žižek, the image is the symbolic order with a monolithic authority, and
the Real is outside of the image, antagonistic and traumatic, needing to be
disguised and sutured through ideological ‘spectral’ fantasy. He posits an
idealised notion of suture as a compensatory structural device, and oversim-
plifies the actual engagement of the viewer into a formula which requires
that viewers are first completely immersed, and then not (because they
abruptly becomes aware that the image is constructed), with a subsequent
crisis in subjectivity which needs to be sutured. It is founded on a notion of
the existence of real threats to a viewer’s subjective position in watching a
film, and further on the real need for the text to dominate.
While it seems certain that particular visual constructions do function to
make the action appear more seamless and believable, it seems likely that
cognitive engagement with the image might be more complex and fluid than
is presented in Žižek’s Marxist-Lacanian formula. In the following sections, I
aim to articulate that there is a nuanced process of subconscious negotiation
through metaphor and embodied simulation occurs when we are immersed
in a screen image. If there is ever a failure of suture, where we disinvest, it
is simply because there is not enough metaphorical activity to connect and
draw us into the virtual world of the image. It seems we can actually deal
with a high level of cognitive dissonance in watching an image, running
several systems of recognition, immersion, and identification within our
conscious mind at any one time without experiencing the kind of jarring or
traumatic break which Žižek suggests.7 This can be (and I would say usually
is) an almost playful process of willing engagement and disengagement with
metaphorical and sensory material from the image.
In light of this, we need to rethink the use of the term suture to explain
the more complex and deeply implicated way that we manage the boundary
between real and virtual experience, in the consumption of media, but also
between reality and dream/fantasy. Instead of thinking in terms of shot
constructions and montage as syntactical ‘tricks’, we can talk about affective
immersion within the image where the frame disappears and we experience
the reality within the image as ‘virtually’ real. This roughly follows Stephen
Heath’s early rethinking of suture in Questions of Cinema (1985) beyond
the more rigid ideological framings and restrictive or dogmatic uses of the
term. Heath insists that there is a complexity to cinematic images which
cannot be confined to just one form of structural analysis, instead positing
a connotative plurality or fluidity of meaning through analogy and symbol,
and through many other structural and stylistic techniques not limited to
the classical ‘suture’ two-shot structure (Magrini, 2006).
It could be said that there is a strong imperative to do this work of the
rethinking of suture as mental interface specifically within the context of
digital screen media. Due to the heightened immersion in digital effects
and digital presentation systems such as IMAX and D3D, and a specific
type of image which reflexively dwells on fantasy and virtuality at the cost
of indexicality, it seems that screen reality is at once more immediate and
yet more self-conscious about its ontological status. Within these highly
constructed images, it seems that the ‘real world’ symbolic order outside is
drawn into question in increasingly complex yet playful ways, and the levels
of metaphor become even more heterogeneous as the virtuality of reality
becomes of central thematic and aesthetic importance. We find ourselves
wholly investing in increasingly unrealistic and unbelievable images, moving
freely between the symbolic and imaginary in complex ways which seem to
do away with the notion that we require any sort of stable and safe subject
position. Suture thus becomes an issue not of concealing or patching an
inherent lack, but rather of managing our mental and corporeal investment
and immersion in hyper-real and hyper-immersive affective images.
7 For Bolter and Grusin (2000), this dissonance is conceived of as a flickering between im-
mediacy and hypermediacy – between transparent immersion and awareness of the constructed
nature of the image – not as conflicting but rather as coinciding perceptions which permit a
sensory investment in the image while maintaining a safe cognitive distance.
In film theorist Francesco Cassetti´s analysis, belief in the projected

reality as indexically or plausibly real is not, and never was, the primary
function of suturing devices. Rather, the suture functions to maintain the
integrity of the screen diegetic reality, even though we know it is illusory.
He states: ‘What matters is the presence of a multifaceted and multi-layered
discursive strategy, one that assembles the chain of discourse, thus providing
a pervasive sense of mastery and a flawless sense of reality, even if it is
illusory’ (Cassetti, 2011, p. 105). Suture is thus seen as a matrix of rhetorical
devices which render the reality coherent without us having to invest in it
as real, rather experiencing it as an integrated metaphorical and mimetic
world in which we can invest. In digital images, Cassetti then states that we
are given coherent worlds without indexical qualities, but which nonetheless
have clear reality cues as ‘suturing points’; his examples suggest that these
can be in naturalistic movement, or in raw ‘surveillance’ style camera shots.8
Our suture into a transparent realism, to Cassetti, was never natural but
based on a certain conventional construction of screen reality, and this
relation does not fundamentally change with digital media.
This coherent discursive world-building sensibility ties in strongly with
the futurist strategies of Douglas Trumbull and Syd Mead in films such as
2001: A Space Odyssey, Tron, and Blade Runner (that I first mentioned in
the introduction), methods that are now being used in real-world research
scenarios to explore potentially disruptive ethical and technological futures.
The imperative here is not that we have a sense of mastery over a perfectly
continuous ‘author-directed’ reality, but rather that in methodologically
designing a world that is, as the World Building Media Lab at USC describes,
‘a holistic […] well-researched, richly-detailed world’, we can then suture
ourselves into its simulated speculative reality in a deep way, inhabiting it
such that it ‘becomes a platform for visionary and predictive imagination –
emerging logically, organically and coherently from the coding of its design’
(worldbuilding.usc.edu). These worlds are complex and textured fictions that
can be imaginatively explored not for the purpose of delivering ideological
narratives, but rather to envision possible future solutions to pressing social
and environmental issues intuitively through emerging technologies. Is this
perhaps the potential ethical future of the digital image itself – one which
does not create fixed monads in which authored narratives can play out, but
rather fictional but rule-governed virtual simulated worlds (in interactive
8 In Chapter Two, I described emphatic spatiality within a set of ‘reality cues’ as markers of
photo-realism, and yet which often supercede perceptual realism in uncanny hyper-real ways.
film, VR, AR, or in game formats) in which new narratives can emerge in
an autopoietic mode?
While Cassetti offers a discursive, ‘grammatised’ style of suture within
narrative film which moves beyond the purely ideological and formal sense,
Seung-Hoon Jeong, in his book Cinematic Interfaces, goes further to radically
rethink and re-conceptualise suture through the digital metaphor of the
interface, creatively appropriating a concept of ‘interfaciality’ to retrofit it
through traditional film concepts that pertain to the modern concept of
suture, such as apparatus, gaze, signification, and embodiment. He states:
‘[…] Suture is no longer a suspicious ideological mechanism, but a produc-
tive agency for renewing film theory’ (Jeong, 2014, p. 15). Interface here
becomes an extremely fluid but productive concept for thinking about
image engagement beyond spectatorship and consumption, and towards
a real fusion of inner and outer worlds, virtual and actual, subjective and
objective, human and inhuman.
As Jeong reiterates, suture is traditionally seen as a tool of a stable diegesis
achieved through the erasure of the ‘enunciative’ mechanism or apparatus
such that cinema becomes ‘the ventriloquist of ideology’ (ibid, p. 33). But,
he notes, de-suturing moments (such as those described by Žižek’s ‘real
tears’ – freeze frames, close-ups, etc.) do not break suture, rather they
‘effectively insinuate the dominant mechanism of human consciousness
without destroying it in avant-garde ways’ – to ‘acknowledge a subjectivity
in the act of reception’ (ibid, p. 37). Suture is seen as essentially unstable (as
it is also for Žižek), and yet this is not traumatic, but rather a productive
interface where we creatively negotiate our own subjectivity within virtual
realities. The interface is a space of continual suture and de-suture within
fluctuating realities:
Interfaciality proliferates in self-reflexive and self-encompassing ways

between the strictly material interface, the fantasy interfacing with the
extradiegetic outside, and the film as a fantastic interface installed in
our social reality. The specific interface per se then sutures one shot to
another, and thereby desutures the shot/reverse-shot structure; fantasy
sutures the character into the intradiegetic outside, thereby desuturing
the diegetic inside; film sutures the spectator into the entire diegesis,
thereby desuturing one’s sense of reality of reality boundary. (ibid, p. 49)
Jeong offers a ‘Chinese boxes of interfaciality’ offering connection between

‘different dimension of the image (deigesis, enunciation) or of the sub-
ject (reality, the Real)’ (ibid, p. 50). As the technical image-interface (the
apparatus or ‘enunciative mechanism’) changes from cinematic to digitally

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

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

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

munication. The observed activity of mirror neurons at an interspecies level
shows that that we are evolved as a species to mirror and model the actions
and mental states of others, even other species, and it seems presumptuous to
think that this occurs only with things that are physically present in front of
us rather than virtually present on the screen. Our natural and subconscious
processes of cognition involve, first, the activation of metaphorical processes
of recognition of resemblances and, secondly, the simulation of ‘being’ other,
the similar, as a virtual experience of this relation.
Seeing resemblances seems so cerebral, a cognitive affair with the worldly.

How on earth then could it be the rudiment of ńothing other´ than a
ćompulsion´, let alone a compulsion to actually be the Other. What does
this say about thought, let alone the ability to discern resemblance?
Doesn’t it imply that thinking is, like theatre, a configuration of very
object prone-exercises in differentiated spaces, in which the thought
exists in imagined scenarios into which the thinking self is plummeted?
(Taussig, 1992, p. 33)
Thus, all thought is seen (through Benjamin) as a struggle to feel what

something might be like by imaginative association, by simulation and
metaphorical processes. Theatre, art, and cinema are thus the forums
through which thought can be extended into physical space, rather than
remaining as purely mental simulation.
Metaphor and Embodied Simulation
Metaphor is central to creativity because it involves the ability to detect

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

generation of evocative images in a poetic mode in literature or cinema,
but it can better be thought of as an ordinary process of consciousness,

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

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

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

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

in this way in grammatising forms of embodied simulation, we can move
towards an analysis of photography, cinema, and post-cinema in which
images are understood to trigger a set of metaphorically related images at
a subconscious level. This starts, as with language comprehension, with
the involuntary reflection of the image in a mental simulation in which we
virtually experience the image content ourselves. This is usually friction-free
in continuity style narrative film, as natural corporeal modes of movement
and perception are directly simulated by the camera shot and editing style.
If the image content or movement is then fragmented or less recognisable,
our cognitive process extracts patterns based on metaphorical association

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

with the intentional action of another, we may also have systems for the
mental mimesis of inanimate objects, and for empathy with the emotional
or physical states of others, for instance, pain or joy (ibid, p. 187). This lends
weight to the idea that we constantly generate an ‘as-if’ simulated model
of reality in our brain which functions metaphorically and mimetically,
policing a boundary between being the same-as and being different-from
both physically and mentally, but which always positions an idea of our
body as virtual sounding board in all simulated situations.12
This observation is carried directly into film analysis by none other than
one of the discoverers of neural mirroring mechanisms, Vittorio Gallese,
who notes that:
Embodied Simulation can better explain the activity of the viewer as a

ćinesthetic subject,´ allowing us to cope with our subcognitive responses
to film in a different and more elegant manner. ES can also shed new
light on the ´mode of presence´ of cinema. Since ES is characterized by
the capacity to share meaning of actions, basic motor intentions, feelings
and emotions, it is clear how relevant could be its role in the experience
of many áction-packed´ movies able to elicit subcognitive or cognitively
impenetrable responses, or in the studies on film immersion based on the
perception of viewer’s presence in the diegetic world or on self-location
in a virtual world. (Gallese and Guerra, 2012, p. 193)
Starting from corporeal motor action and the sharing of simulated models
of bodily presence, Gallese and Guerra also develop an understanding of
the mirroring of the emotions and beliefs of others at a neural level within
a broader set of ‘shared behaviours’ which are needed to engage fully with
the film diegesis. They note that ‘When a movie gives up its goal-orientation
or its action potential, as in the case of 1960s new waves, we have to share
other attitudes, wondering about director’s hidden intentions and feeling a
bit excluded from its environment’ (ibid, p. 199). Later, they state: ‘The refusal
of the POV shot and the absence of any reverse angle shot (in Antonioni)
impair the viewer’s ability to project herself on the movie, to share attitudes
and behaviours with the characters, to empathize with the environment’
(ibid). The implication here is that the mirroring of attitudes or emotions is
12 This connects to Antonio Damasio’s idea that consciousness itself cannot exist and evolve
without a physical body, or at least a simulation of a physical body which is integrated into the
environment; there is no disembodied consciousness (Damasio, 2008).
of a secondary order to the more immediate and direct bodily responsivity

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

the film medium.13
Rutherford’s synaesthetic flux of movements, lights, and sounds is referred
to by dance theorist Marc Boucher as ‘kinetic synaesthesia’, suggesting that
visually perceived movement can be experienced as kinaesthesis (2004).
He describes a multimedia environment wherein a dancer moves through
a projected set, and the ‘tangible movements of the dancer integrates with
the virtual movement of an image, creating a dynamic tension between
figure and ground’(ibid). Because of diverse elements and dynamic tension
within the ‘gestalt’ of the experience, we experience a complex sensation
of being in motion ourselves, which seems essentially to be a heightened
embodied simulation in which different sensory modalities are triggered,
and which is experienced as a corporeal exhilaration. We feel as if our own
bodies are dispersed between the movements of the dancer and the other
images, lights and sounds, and this gives us an experience of aesthetic
pleasure. The aesthetic pleasure here seems to relate to the loss of control
over sensory input rather than the mastery of it, and the inability to exert
the intellect over this input – to rationalise and recognise it. This is not,
however, an experience of disembodied mind cut adrift from a tangible
idea of a body within ‘impaired’ embodied simulation, but rather a fully
corporeal experience of a disorganised, fragmented sensorium untethered
to a clearly defined body image. It is this dissolution of the boundaries of
the body that feels like a creation, an aesthetic intensity (Boucher, 2004).
Cinema pioneer Jean Epstein emphasises the role of synaesthetic sensa-
tion as part of his creative process in his 1921 text La Poésie de Aujourd’hui,
in which he describes the ‘vague illogical sensations’ that emerge from
the ‘non-linguistic, non-rational cognitive mode’ (Liebman, 1980). Clearly
influenced by the discourse of psychoanalysis of his time, Epstein saw
the subconscious as embodied knowledge that the intellect suppresses,
a disorganised, subtle, and dimly felt, but emotional and sensitive side of
human consciousness from which inspiration can arise:
Synaesthesia is the physiological side of the subconscious, basically,

everything is synaesthesia […] The mass of multifarious and confused
sensations is so weak and rapid as to be no more perceptible individually
13 Nicholas Rombes’s Cinema in the Digital Age (2017) interestingly explores how digital film
in particular explores the aesthetics of imperfect images that disturb easy recognition, marked
by blurry or pixelated images, shaky camera work, and other elements. He articulates this as a
‘secret desire’ for disorder within the otherwise perfect digital image.
than the pricks of two points of a compass placed too close together.
(Epstein, 1921, in Liebman, 1980, p. 121)
Epstein highly valued the synaesthetic suspension of logical analysis

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

on screen can perhaps be more clearly thought of as a model of ‘ecological’
perception, which posits normal vision as a complex kinaesthetic and
synaesthetic process of cognition (Modell, 2003, p. 185). All sense perception
must be understood to be affectively embodied and synaesthetic before
it is subdivided, processed, and edited into separate sense categories. We
never then truly watch images from an ‘ocular’ distance, but rather we are
always mentally negotiating with an environment of surfaces, objects, and
qualities which are pertinent to our body. Furthermore, following Epstein,
Modell, and Gallese, we see that this synaesthetic model of perception allows
us to understand how emotion and ‘feeling’ enters into normal cognition.
Anne Rutherford notes how each associational image is also redolent with
memory and imbued with hazily felt meaning; her example is the image of a
cliff, which not only has meaning as a ‘falling off place’ but might also have
associations with other models of ‘dangerous’ or ‘fearsome’ places (2003).
Emotional resonances form part of our embodied synaesthetic perception
as pre-conscious simulation before they converge on a higher perceptual
and conscious level – if, indeed, they ever manage to do so. This model of
perception posits an indivisible, non-dichotomous inhabited bodily state as a
gestalt, and mirroring processes as simulation activity are thus a multi-modal
synaesthetic mimesis, a primitive urge to ‘become’ other in both a corporeal
motor-sensory mode and an intimate emotional empathetic involvement.
It would be tempting, especially when talking about the heightened
emotional evocation of cinematic images, to think that we are talking only
about experience which is potentially sublime in its emotional charge, such
as the aforementioned cliff which will give rise to an emotional experience
of wonder, awe, and fear. However, we can see that even the mundane
aspects of ecological perception have an affective metaphorical resonance
which can be simply aspects of dimensionality, verticality, horizontality,
or rhythms, forces, or dimensions that we become aware of in the spaces
around our body as synaesthetic intensities with an emotional dimension.
We can see then that all images are inflected with emotional meaning,
but initially, at our first cognitive contact with them, without sentiment.
Massumi, in the Autonomy of Affect (1995), defined affects as pre-emotional,
not yet qualified as emotions (through the work of intellectual association),
but here and for Massumi, emotion simply describes intensity as part of a
synaesthetic haze; the cliff instils a sensation of an embodied emotional
force rising within the gut, but this is not yet analysed as the recognisable,
‘qualified’ human sentiment of ‘fear’. For Arnold Modell, more in line with
Epstein than Massumi, the higher-level cognition of ‘sentiment’ is what he
calls ‘feeling’, as contrasted to the baser, more bodily cognition of emotion
which he considers to be essentially unconscious (Modell, 2003, p. 134).
Anne Rutherford adds nuance to the division between emotion as af-
fective synaesthetic resonance and emotion as sentiment by making an
interesting distinction about Brechtian distanciation. She explains that
Brecht’s estrangement effect is normally understood as forcing an emotional
distance between the subject and the text, denying the kind of empathetic
emotional identification that is encouraged by the ideological and soporific
‘suturing’ effect of the conventional Hollywood media (perhaps equivalent
to Gallese and Guerra’s ‘impaired’ embodied simulation in Antonioni) (2003).
Instead, she reinterprets this process as repositioning immersion to be
based on affectivity rather than sentiment. By denying emotional empathy
on the level of sentimental identifications which are ‘passive and habitual’

and of ‘pathos’, we are instead forced into a reflexive relationship with the
sensual state; we are not swept away into escapist, cathartic fantasy, but
rather become more aware of our visceral bond to the environment and
swept into our immersive, affective, interfacial space.
I have spent much of this chapter moving between perspectives on normal
perception and cognition, and cognitive engagement with mediated images,
to emphasise the way that our ‘everyday’ reality is largely structured at a
subconscious level of passive synthesis by the mediated images which surround
us. Reality is thus thought to be ‘mediated’ even in normal perception through
technological grammatised forms. Our processes of consciousness are shaped
and honed by the images we consume and the connections between them, and
the technological form of the creation and sharing of these images impact upon
the ways we can think about, imagine, and communicate about existence. Each
technical media form brings about a new matrix of connections – semantic,
metaphorical, simulated, and synaptic – which together constitute an ontologi-
cal shift which subtly realigns the sensorium to have an altered intuitive sense
of the metaphysical qualities of the world. I now move on to apply these ideas
more specifically within digital media, to analyse how this most recent shift in
media technology seems to move towards an acknowledgement, and a deeper
reflexive understanding of these above issues. The media form itself can be
seen to be a reflection on the synaesthetic confusion of the senses and the
malleability of our sense processing capabilities, playing with ideas of mental
simulation and virtuality in both explicit and implicit modes.
Virtuality, Plasticity, and Play
A child not only plays at being a grocer or a teacher, but also at being a
windmill or a train. The question which matters, however, is the follow-
ing: What does a human being actually gain by the training in mimetic
attitudes?’ (Benjamin, Doctrine of the Similar, 1933)
Metaphor, like pretend play, involves suspension of reference to the

everyday world; hence, the referent (e.g. an imaginary horse) is termed
non-ostensive, making possible a new creative reference, a remaking of
reality. (Seitz, 1997, p. 376)
Metaphorical symbolic play is how we developmentally hone our cognitive

abilities as children, remaking our own perceptual reality into imaginary
worlds in experimental and creative modes. In digital post-cinematic

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

modulating, and reparative plasticity, the brain does not cease to change
at a neural level after its initial formation in childhood, but in fact continues
to adapt and regenerate in ‘an ongoing reworking of neuronal morphology’
(2008, p. 25). New neural networks continue to be laid down, and modulating
neural pathways can lead to fundamental changes not only in identity and
personality but also potentially in metaphysical notions. In Malabou’s book
The New Wounded (2012), she examines neuropathological cases at the more
extreme ends of the spectrum, to demonstrate how complex yet fragile our
subjective ontological groundedness is at a neural level. In an interview
with theologist Noëlle Vahanian, she explains how delicate our subjective
awareness, which seems to run to the core of our being, can actually be:
Neurobiologists make us conscious of the fact that metamorphosis after

brain damage is at every moment possible; there is something like a
break of the subject which is not death, which is another kind of pos-
sibility. To be destroyed as a subject when you suffer from a concussion,
for example, means that you become someone else. The possibility of
becoming someone else at every moment and for everybody equally – for
even if we know that certain people are more likely to be the victims of
such damage, we also know that everybody may undergo this kind of
destruction at any moment – this possibility alters how we conceive of
the subject. The fact of being mortal is one thing, and the fact of being
plastic means being able to be totally transformed and become somebody
else. (Malabou, in Noelle, 2008, p. 9)
Accepting the fragile integrity of what we think of as ‘self’, we can perhaps

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

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

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

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

notes this in his analysis of the close-up, where the camera, in capturing
the exterior appearance of things in intricate detail, reveals them to be
entirely mysterious, with a hidden interior life (1977).17 We can see that,
even without the explicit use of exaggeration or stylisation as modes of
artistic expression, and through instead trying to attain scientific accuracy
and precision detail, we still achieve an evocative aesthetic ambiguity to
the image. There is no such thing, in this understanding, as a ‘naturalistic’
representation; media technology always perverts, distorts, or reconfigures;
it is always an abstraction to some extent.
Though naturalistic in some modes of corporeal kinetic perception,
Avatar at the same time seems highly stylised, expressionistic, and
synaesthetic in others, with baroque architectures of space, enhanced
and emphatically digital floating and flying movements, and fantastic
hyper-perspectival CG-animated landscapes. Like the Rotoscope technique
of Linklater’s Waking Life that is praised by Power, we have affectively
naturalistic movement and expression but with many unrecognisable
elements that simultaneously challenge perception. What we instead see
is a hyper-reality that is proximate to the photographic but always with an
uncanny resemblance. This is a ‘digital naturalism’ which algorithmically
mimics the perceptual habits of photographic naturalism, and yet always
goes beyond. As Manovich explains:
Computerization virtualized practically all media creating and modifica-

tion techniques, éxtracting´ them from their particular physical medium
of origin and turning them into algorithms. This means that, in most cases,
we will no longer find any of these techniques in their pure original state.
The media techniques became ´supercharged´ and amplified; their range
and application were extended; and their controls were made explicit,
formalized, quantif iable, and programmable. (Manovich, 2007 – my
emphasis).
17 Here, Epstein poetically describes the rapture of detail in the close-up: ‘Muscular preambles
ripple beneath the skin. Shadows shift, tremble, hesitate. Something is being decided. A breeze of
emotion underlines the mouth with clouds. The orography of the face vacillates. Seismic shocks
begin. Capillary wrinkles try to split the fault. A wave carries them away. Crescendo. A muscle
bridles. The lip is laced with tics like a theater curtain. Everything is movement, imbalance, crisis.
Crack. The mouth gives way, like a ripe fruit splitting open. As if slit by a scalpel, a keyboard-like
smile cuts laterally into the corner of the lips’ (1977).
Manovich points to the fusion of different media ‘styles’ and aesthetics

within the digital realm, where everything exists simply as a set of adjustable
variables, creating aesthetic chimeras, and within which photo-realism exists
as just another abstracted set of values. When fused with CG animation,
as in the case of Avatar, a new ‘impure’ aesthetic emerges, which, while it
does indeed move towards a perfect aesthetic continuity and coherence,
cannot simply be placed on a teleology towards complete photographic
naturalism. Instead, we have a heightening, amplification, and perversion
of analogue realisms, the aesthetic affects and effects of which are just
starting to be understood.
In discourses of cinematic realism, the technological capacity of the
medium to bring us into closer contact with aspects of reality was praised.
Bazin placed the highest value on the wide-angle, long shot with high
depth of focus so that the eye could roam ‘naturally’ around the shot (2005).
However, realism here becomes a problematic term (as if it was not enough
already). Sean Cubitt notes that ‘every realism is a selection, an abstraction’,
and that even Bazin acknowledged this. He continues: ‘Today, deep focus
and staging in depth are the norm for blockbuster event movies, most of
which have only the most tangential relation to Bazinian realism’ (Cubitt,
2010). In contemporary D3D, we could technically have an infinite depth
of field – our eyes being able to focus at different depths and roam in and
around the screen space. However, despite this potential, in Avatar, the
depth of field is often limited to guide the viewer’s attention within the
diegesis, perhaps also serving as a marker of the film camera technology
even though often no ‘camera’ actually exists in this context. We also have
long takes, but rather than the fixed relation to reality of the un-edited
Bazinian long take, we have instead a type of montrage within ‘the depth of
the image’ whereby individual pixels or component elements are adjusted
in infinite manipulability.18 With Avatar’s motion-capture innovations,
this intra-shot modification process is possible even in real time and with
verité style camera movement – a form of ‘augmented reality’ (similar
techniques are now disturbingly applied in deepfake style videos).19 These
18 For discussion of this definition of montrage, see Deleuze’s Time-Image, where he states:
‘Sometimes montage occurs in the depth of the image, sometimes it becomes flat: it no longer
asks how images are linked, but “What does the image show?” This identity of montage with
the image itself can appear only in conditions of the direct time-image’ (1989, p. 41).
19 Deepfake, a portmanteau of ‘deep learning’ and ‘fake’, is a machine-learning (AI) human-
image synthesis technique that seamlessly and in real-time superimposes images of recognisable
faces onto source video. It has been effective in both pornography and with political figures,
such that it has been banned from the website Pornhub due to its use in revenge porn. In April
analogue-style realist modalities of long take and depth of focus, along with
motion-blur, lens-flare, and handheld camera movement are recognisable
features of photographic image-capture that suture us into a recognisable
cinematic experience even though their material nature has essentially
changed. In a strictly technical sense, we feel at ease at the interface with
the representative reality of Avatar because these photo-realistic markers
are given to us, even though the experience of blue people on an alien planet
in 3D could otherwise be quite cognitively jarring. However, it is perhaps
interesting to conceive of the possibility of a film like Avatar being made
in a way that discharges these habituated photo-realist pretensions with
a focus on digital technical automatisms and experimental possibilities.
Would it be intelligible?
Whereas photographic analogue media exerted a claim to objectivity
in their recording and documentation of the world, the digital has never
previously made such a claim. In the past two decades, CG fantasy films
have largely focused on the alien, extraordinary, and unreal exactly because
truly photo-realistic simulation has simply been too difficult to render
accurately through purely digital means. However, through motion-capture
and 3D technological innovation, Avatar brings a new moment of realistic
technical simulation of human emotional expression and movement by
twisting photo-realistic aesthetics, certainly a technological ‘event’ as
much as the previously discussed Interstellar and even L’a rrivée d’un
train en gare de La Ciotat. In Avatar’s mimesis of reality, we have
images that are manipulated in real time to enhance and complexify any
real or pro-filmic referent in such a way that a psychorealistic boundary
of embodied simulation is perhaps crossed. Despite the heavily critiqued
naïve sentimentality, pseudo-ecological politics, and dubious racial ste-
reotyping of the film’s narrative, we have to look at its affective aspects to
ask why its interfaciality is so rich. Given Patrick Power’s critique above, I
wonder whether it provokes a strong neuro-aesthetic response, stimulating
multi-modal synaesthetic stimulation? Or perhaps, in a more philosophical
analysis, it generates an anti-intellectual affective ‘cinema of immanence’
from which new perceptions, concepts, and connections can arise?
While obviously Avatar is, to an extent, merely an escapist fantasy
film, and elements are clearly supposed to be imaginatively realised, the
hybrid visual effects of a digital naturalism here are intended to be ‘better
2018, director Jordan Peele and Buzzfeed creator Jonah Peretti created a deepfake using Barack
Obama, as a public service announcement about the danger of deepfakes in fake news and in
wider political culture.
than reality’. This is expressed thematically in the narrative through the

existential depression that is experienced by the protagonist Sully, who
feels that his big blue avatar has become more real to him than his disabled
body. Then, interestingly, as multiple media sources and blogs documented
at the time of the f ilm’s release, there was a parallel experience in the
‘real’ world dubbed the ‘Pandora Effect’, whereby viewers experienced
obsession and depression after watching the film (Thomas, 2010). When we
consider that this was due to the fact that their own reality was perceived
as underwhelming after ‘visiting’ the planet Pandora, we can wonder what
it is about the film that has a particular potency – surely not simply a case
of an evocative narrative and characters, but rather a specific technics of
intensity of embodied simulation that is experienced as transformative. In
the following analysis of Source Code, we see another film that actively
reflects on this idea that a digital simulated image-reality could actually be
better than our own, raising ontological questions about embodied agency
and intentionality in digitally simulated spaces (if indeed we do not already
inhabit a digital simulation).
Source Code and the Quantum Mind
In Duncan Jones’s Source Code (2011), we are again, as in Avatar (and also
Tron), presented with a disembodied consciousness projected digitally
into a different body in another world. In this case, the other world is an
alternate dimension or quantum reality existing ostensibly only as data
within a computer programme. This data, the titular ‘source code’, has
been extracted from the mind of a man at the moment of his death, and
contains an eight-minute captured simulation of the spaces and characters
surrounding this man leading up to the terrorist attack in which he dies. This
simulation is run over and over again between the programme and the brain
of our protagonist Captain Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal), with the source
code permitting him to take on the mission of discovering who planted the
bomb such that a further terrorist attack might be averted. However, within
this simulation, and despite being told that the events that occur within
have no bearing on the ‘real’ world, our hero starts to believe that he can
actively alter the course of events. The simulation is so real, and his ability
to act within it so decisive, that he refuses to believe that he has no real
agency or power to influence events. On his last upload to the source-code
programme, he requests that his ‘real’ body – which we discover to be only
an intact brain stem on life-support in a lab – be terminated, in the hope
Figure 16: Source Code’s digital rendering of a reality simulation (Summit Entertainment, 2011) ©
2011 Studiocanal S.A. SCL.
that this alternate simulated reality proves to be real. This hope proves to
be well founded, and he later has the opportunity to tell his ‘operator’ in
the lab that the source-code programme does something that they never
would have expected; it creates an alternate quantum reality.
The most digital effects-driven set-pieces in the film, other than the bomb
explosion which engulfs our characters in flame and tears them apart, are
the transitions between ‘bodies’ that Captain Stevens experiences. In these
shots (and in the movie poster – Figure 16), we see a splintering of Stevens
into geometric shards and lines spreading across the screen like the contours
of a digital-model rendering of a landscape. Later in the film, we see these
effects mixed with distorted and distended shots of a scene at the end of
the movie in the ‘alternate’ future, and images from Stevens’s memory of
the accident which maimed him in Afghanistan. This is accompanied by
similarly digitally distorted sounds and voices. The effect is one of Stevens’s
body being stripped of its flesh, exposing the digital framework underneath,
as if he himself is a digital simulation. In a further transition back to ‘reality’
mid-way through the film, he is looking at his female companion and seems
torn between realities; her face flashes and becomes digitally distorted into
the familiar ‘shard’ geometric vertices of a virtual skeleton, as a voice calls
to him from the real world in the lab. The clear implication is that Stevens
and the alternate dimension exist only as code within a digital flux, but that
‘reality’ is intruding upon the virtual. Later in the film, this relation flips,
such that the virtual starts to interrupt and break down what we originally
thought was real. Though this is not a fully CG-animated film as Avatar
is, the digital effects here allow expression of, and are emblematic of, the
single major underlying conceit of the film, the ontological underpinnings
which imbue the film with a distinctive affective tone.20
The radical sceptical philosophy toyed with in this narrative, and
expressed through the digital effects used, is that the universe/reality
might exist purely as simulation within a brain or computer. It is not made
clear in the denouement which of these substrates reality actually resides
in – whether the programme continues running in the computer, in the
brain of the now not-killed brain-body he inhabits in the source code, or
indeed elsewhere. As in Avatar, our protagonist’s real body ultimately
dies, and his consciousness is transposed into another body, such that
consciousness here is seen as embodied, but extractable and movable as
data, information or electrical activity. Going further down this road though
than Avatar, reality in Source Code is truly understood as how we imagine
it to be – consciousness creates reality. This is reinforced in the plot when
Captain Stevens initially perceives himself to be trapped in some kind of
escape pod in the real world, before he learns that this environment is
merely a projection of his imagination. The body, and embodiment itself,
here is really posited to be as much a part of the simulated hallucination as
the environment in which he understands his body to be. Matter, here, is
in fact illusory, projected outwards from a disembodied mind. We are then
also given a sense that time itself is an illusion; during Steven’s transitions
in between brain and source-code programme, and in the boundary zone
between, we see flashing images of not only his past, but also of his future
within the new reality, in a confusion of memory, present, and future.
The implication is that all Being is illusion/simulation, and that the past,
present, and future of all quantum possibilities exist within a metaphysi-
cal flux. Being digitally transported between alternate realities, Stevens
exists for a moment within this immanent plane. The film seems to move
20 I think this is the case with many such films which are maybe not so ostentatiously ‘digital’;
for instance, Black Swan, Donnie Darko, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. These
films pivot on their digitally inflected ‘emblematic’ key moments, not only on the effects within
the image, but by their reflection on an ontology which could be said to be instigated by a shift
to the digital.
thematically towards some kind of holographic universe theory, as proposed

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

of neurons, but in patterns of nerve impulses that crisscross the entire
brain in the same way that patterns of laser light interference crisscross
21 This implication tethers to a long tradition of thought about ‘Indirect Realism’ supported
by Bertrand Russell, Thomas Metzinger, Gregory Mulhauser, Steve Lehar, and Richard Dawkins,
amongst others (Gamez, 2007, p. 34).
the entire area of a piece of f ilm containing a holographic image. In

other words, Pribram believes the brain is itself a hologram. […] If the
concreteness of the world is but a secondary reality and what is ´there´
is actually a holographic blur of frequencies, and if the brain is also a
hologram and only selects some of the frequencies out of this blur and
mathematically transforms them into sensory perceptions, what becomes
of objective reality? Put quite simply, it ceases to exist. […] We are really
´receivers´ floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency, and what
we extract from this sea and transmogrify into physical reality is but one
channel from many extracted out of the superhologram. (Talbot, 1991)
This mirrors insights from both Deleuze (the brain-screen) and Stiegler
(consciousness as a post-production centre) that I described in Chapter
Two. Reality here is created by observation, and we observe what we are
conditioned to recognise by the grammatised forms of tertiary memory
by which knowledge is stored and shared. What then interests me is how
Source Code introduces these concepts and uses digital processes of
computation and algorithmic programming to stand as a metaphor for
neural activity. It moves between the idea of consciousness as disembod-
ied data within the machine, and as embodied in the flesh, as if they are
equivalent or non-contradictory within a digital ontology. This is a film not
only informed by digital themes, but also constructed by digital processes,
and thus generates a very plastic idea of an ontologically grounded subject.
As both Pisters (2012) and Rodowick (2007) note, the digital image, cut
adrift from any analogical relation to physical reality, turns to mental
landscapes and reflections of cognitive schema. In a further twist, the
digital itself comes to stand for the material of consciousness – not simply
an analogy of computer to brain as in discourses of artificial intelligence, but
rather of all physical reality, including corporeality, being pure information
processed as simulation within a ‘quantum mind’.22 This is a move away from
a conventional materialistic view of reality towards a pure metaphysical
consciousness which is completely immaterial, and this move seems to be
paralleled, reflected, and even generated by the digital images’ ontological
shift away from any material or direct connection to physical reality. In
a complex symbiosis, the digital image spins its own quantum realities
like ‘source codes’, and these increasingly seem to fuse with and become
indiscernible from the ‘real’ world.
22 The ‘quantum mind’ as concept came about as a reflection on the mind/body dualism
caused by observation interference in early quantum experiments (Walker, 2000).
Source Code gives us a complex metaphysical problematic expressed

through an emblematic digital metaphor. Subjectivity, memory, and tem-
porality are digitally expressed as plastic and folded, without recourse to
mystical or magical explanation, and in a way that reflects current scientific
discourse on quantum indetermination. This effect is achieved not through
the film’s pseudoscientific exposition but rather through (digitally) express-
ing affective relations of perception, memory, consciousness, and embodi-
ment. Reality is represented as practically indivisible from simulation, and, in
the same way as Captain Stevens maintains faith in the simulation, the image
is rendered real in as much as we feel we can act from a simulated embodied
perspective. Stevens’s embodied will-to-action then acts as metaphor for
our engagement with cinematic images. It is our embodied investment in
the simulated possibility of intentional action within the screen reality that
sutures us into it. We are Stevens in his darkened chamber, projecting our
consciousness into the alternate dimension as if we were him. We mirror his
actions and emotions, and model his intentions as if we were in the source
code ourselves. In this process, we are also drawn into his questioning of
the ontological levels of reality and quite possibly we see the world through
new eyes as we emerge from the cinema, thinking about what it means to
change our destiny within our given reality.
However, as philosopher David Gamez notes, we cannot ultimately sustain

this mode of seeing the real world indirectly as ‘source code’ in our everyday
experience, despite its potential cognitive empowerments:
The problem with indirect realism is that although we are forced into it
(by logical conclusion), it is also an extremely counter-intuitive claim.
Although it is easy to say that the world is a virtual reality generated by
the brain, it is almost impossible for us to really see everything around
us, everything that we take to be the natural world, as a virtual reality
model. Someone who could sustain this terrifying vision would be on the
brink of madness […] Supporters of the brain hypothesis are doomed to
oscillate between naïve and indirect realism. (Gamez, 2007, p. 35)
And this is why the feeling fades as we must inevitably return to our naïve
realism. However, we have still had this virtual experience, and our em-
bodied reality, our plastic brain, has been subtly changed by it.
6. A Digital Nihilism: Ethical Reflections
Dan Strutt
Abstract
In conclusion, this chapter moves to more pragmatic political concerns,
asking whether there could be positive social outcomes for the digital
shift in image culture. The ethical concerns of Deleuze and Stiegler
about the logic of late capitalism and the potential for insidious affective
conditioning of desire are addressed, alongside their stated imperative
for creative thought, political engagement, and new industrial practices.
It is suggested that the digital actually generates a cognitively active
subject that negotiates affective lures creatively, and who playfully
synthesises new metaphysical awareness. Finally, the chapter brings
together Vattimo’s ‘mellow nihilism’ with Malabou’s ontological plastic-
ity, to dispel rigid metaphysical notions for instead a ‘weak’ ethical
ontology which is both open and plastic, but strategic rather than
complacent.
Keywords: Utopia, Heterotopia, Nihilism, Plasticity, Rancière, Vattimo
By way of conclusion, I wish to examine the digital and post-cinematic shift

in image generation and engagement in terms of the kinds of utopian and
dystopian visions which circulate around new media forms in general, visions
which are regularly charged with a moral exigency. These ethical prognoses
concern themselves with questions about our future, and the tone often
refers to underlying Western enlightenment beliefs in the advancement of
human knowledge – a linear teleology of progress. Accordingly, one can be
positive, negative, or ultimately ambivalent about the changes the digital
makes. Positively, these changes guide us into a new era of aesthetic play
which liberates our sensorium, realigns our notion of the real, rewires the
doi 10.5117/9789462987135_ch06
brain, and stimulates our creative capacities.1 Negatively, it corrodes our

imagination, is tied into nefarious networks of subtle governmentality,
strips us of our narratives for life, and dissolves the political intellect into
a sea of free-floating and short-lived intensities. Ambivalently, it is simply
different – a different way of thinking, a different mode of attention, a
different sense of the world – and prognoses for the future are deferred, or
at least left open.
I have attempted to examine the digital shift in a neutral way, and yet as
a child of a digital age – perhaps just as my parent’s generation, the children
of the 1950s New Wave, might feel about TV, or as my grandparents and
great-grandparents might have felt about moving, technicolour, or talking
images – I am excited and moved by the changes I see, and thus I must
actively moderate my enthusiasm. Acknowledging the excesses of negative
critique which fatalistically write the epitaphs of art, history, mystery,
communication, and creativity, I temper my desire to redress the balance,
and thus rather than wildly celebrating recent developments in digital screen
culture, I must aim for an ambivalent but optimistic tone. This has led me
towards what has been named (in describing the work of Gianni Vattimo)
a ‘mellow nihilism’ within our digital age, or what could be described as a
digital nihilism (Oventile, 2004). What this entails is a refusal to ascribe to
any idealised version of reality (a past golden age or future utopia), instead
choosing to see the immanent possibilities and pharmakological potential
of the situation that we do in fact have. While I do not offer up any ideal
image of media futurity, I also choose to believe that all is not lost, and that,
within a digitally mediated reality, the automatistic features of modulation,
discontinuity, and plasticity can cultivate a profound metaphysical openness.
I do thus perhaps end up subscribing to a teleology of progress, but one
coloured by a fundamental denial of foundationalist thought. By drawing
together the ‘meta’ and ‘micro’ political aspirations of some of my main
theorists, I hope to explain this position adequately.
The more pessimistic sociocultural critiques of digital media forms
tend to filter down to one underlying condition – advanced capitalism.
Indeed, most would-be celebratory theorists of new media temper their
enthusiasm with a cautionary note about concerns for the future of the
politics of communication and representation, the environment of creativity,
1 Here, I refer to my use of Catherine Malabou and Patricia Pisters in the last chapter, through
which I aligned a digital metaphysical plasticity with the quality of neural plasticity to suggest
that, at a neural level, we (humans) are re-formed by the media we consume, and re-conditioned
to acknowledge fundamentally that the world and our brains are indeed plastic.
A Digital Nihilism: Ethical Reflections 201
or the quality of analytic thought. In many ways, it would be lax not to

do so as this is the ethical object of media studies: its social, cultural, and
ontological meaning expressed in concern for the future of human existence.
As Benjamin notes at the beginning of his essay ‘The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, within any observation and theorisation
about ‘developmental tendencies of art under present conditions’, there
should be a prognostic value, and these prognoses can indeed have value
as a ‘weapon’ (against Fascism, and for a revolutionary politics of art, in
Benjamin’s own time) (1999, p. 218). As the new forms of image-capture,
-creation, and -presentation that I have discussed (D3D, Digital Slow Motion,
CGI, digital mapping, etc.) emerge and proliferate within an environment of
hyper-capitalism and all that that entails – spectacle, homogeneity, celebrity,
cliché – it can sometimes seem impossible to see them as anything other
than objects fixed within the economic superstructure, and any affective
pleasure or cognitive enrichment is instantly undermined by the object’s
position within commercial culture.
However, it was in exactly the incipient conditions of this modern capital-
ist age that cinema originally emerged as an apt way to witness and interpret
the dramatically modern developments in ways of living and thinking.
The technology initially presented itself as artistic counterpoint to social
and economic change and has since, at all times, been imbued with some
utopian hopes of social change and future vision. Through the work of
early filmmakers and film theorists such as Eisenstein, Vertov, Epstein,
and (later) Bazin, we see a belief in how the artistic mode of film had the
transgressive potential to alter significantly social and political conditions.
Imbued in early cinematic theory was a technological futurism of cinema’s
revelatory potential, expressing a political commitment to an ethical future
in which cinema as an autonomous art form crafted an aesthetic utopia.
For Eisenstein (1977), cinematic montage graphically and materially gave
us a Marxist dialectic, synthesising the tertium quid or ‘third thing’ as an
ideological concept absorbed by the spectator affectively and intuitively.
For Vertov (1984), the Kino Eye exposed a deeper truth of actuality through
bringing documentary footage to the masses, and through this relation to the
cinematic apparatus, humanity could be elevated through greater affinity
with the machinic. For Epstein and Bazin, the cinematic technology had the
potential to reveal a deeper truth of detail or existence through, respectively,
the close-up and the unedited and naturalistic long take. For each of these
theorists, something about the potential of the mechanics (apparatus) and
mass appeal (distribution) of cinema led them to believe that social and
cultural change could be instigated by the revelations provided. Through an
active mode of aesthetic engagement with film images, we would discover

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

imagined by the historical avant-garde, leading as it did to the dual excesses
of totalitarianism and commodification. Positioned as provocation, the
avant-garde arts promised emancipation and new social order, but what
actually occurred was at first the rigid aesthetic ideology of fascism (the
rather embarrassing fact that Italian Futurism converged directly into
fascism, Bertetto, 2018), and latterly, the dissolution or absorption of avant-
gardism into the cultural logic of neoliberal capitalism, leading, in the view
of many theorists, to standardisation and homogeneity. In an advanced age
of digital mass communication, what many critics see is the abandonment
of any ethico-aesthetic regime, and instead the hyper-synchronisation of
aesthetic modes controlled by certain powerful corporate forces through
new communication technologies. In other words, art as an autonomous
realm ceases to exist, and thus, as a consequence, any ethics of aesthetics
is also perceived to die.2 For Bernard Stiegler (2010), as for many other
roughly ‘postmodern’ theorists who, on the surface, ascribe to this way of
thinking (for example, Jameson, Baudrillard, or Virilio), the outlook is bleak
as we become increasingly separated from the real, and thus also from any
aesthetic and political reflection upon the real.
2 The excellent new book by Josephine Berry, Art and (Bare) Life (2018), explores this question
through concepts of biopolitical power and individualised creativity. She notes, in conclusion:
‘Standing as we are at the brink of art’s total integration and hence total meaninglessness, it’s
hard to see any way ahead that doesn’t look to renew the avant-garde demand to realize art as
a praxis of life and thereby abolish its separateness. Yet if we are to renew this cry, it can only
be on condition that the life referred to be understood in its broadest, most sociogenic and
biogenic senses; where folding and errancy, intention and mutation, are able to range widely,
without systematically precluding and always renewing one another’ (Berry. 2018. p. 321).
However, this diagnosis of the death of art focuses too much on a singu-
lar idea of utopia, crafted through the imagination of a dialectic relation
between commercial culture and the autonomous, political avant-garde (in
the Marx-inflected aesthetic theory of Adorno, and later, that of Lyotard).
Walter Benjamin, in his own time, seemed a solitary voice standing against
this resistance to a rigid superstructural thinking in refusing to indict the
new mass images as part of advanced capitalist ideology, instead seeing
a new democratised popular image form, and a new secular and political
function of art in society.3 More contemporarily, the prerequisite opposition
of art to commercial culture for any possible ethical future has been again
challenged by Jacques Rancière and Gianni Vattimo. For these philosophers,
as I describe below, the dialectic is not so clearly delineated, and a com-
mercialised cultural logic does not simply spell the end of creativity or of
the political artwork.
In the objects of a contemporary design culture, both Rancière and
Vattimo see a profitable yet artistic field of cultural production, which,
like architecture, carries both a use value and an aesthetic value. These
art objects are not held at optical distance and appreciated as beautiful
but essentially useless, but are instead blended into everyday life, forming
part of a new politico-aesthetic regime which does not require shock effects
or provocative confrontationalsim, and yet which does not simply equal a
bland homogeneity. As Vattimo states:
Mass culture has by no means standardized aesthetic experience, as-

similating the whole of the ´beautiful´ to the values of that community
which has felt itself to be the privileged bearer of the human – European
bourgeois society. Instead, it has explosively brought to light the prolifera-
tion of what is ´beautiful´, assigning the word not only to different cultures
through its anthropological research, but also to ´subsystems´ within
Western culture itself. In fact, the utopia of an aesthetic rehabilitation of
existence through a unification of the beautiful and the everyday has come
to an end in parallel with the end of the revolutionary utopia of the sixties,
3 This is the general theme of ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ essay,
that a popular form of art within a context of commercial production can still have the value
of a revolutionary weapon. In the preface to the essay, Benjamin insists that we must address
our actual art culture optimistically, rather than only thinking about an idealised form of art
in an imagined better situation. He suggests that, by focusing on positive theses, rather than
on criticism, about the developmental tendencies of the specific objects of contemporary art
culture, there is a revolutionary potential (Benjamin, 1999, pp. 217-218).
and for the same reasons, namely the explosion of systematicity and the
unintelligibility of unilinear history. (Vattimo, 1992, p. 67 – my emphasis)
Contra Bernard Stiegler et al., and rather than standardisation and hyper-
synchronisation, for Vattimo, we have a relative ‘heterotopic’ explosion of
heterogeneity and diversity, wherein heterotopia defines both a plural,
diverse utopia, and also a liminal space outside of (but not in opposition
to) hegemonic control. Aesthetics here becomes redefined as an immanent
field of multiplicity, of many different ways of perceiving beauty and sublim-
ity, rather than as a transcendent, autonomous, or auratic sphere beyond
understanding, and, as such, it becomes radically open:
Utopia has disappeared, even from aesthetics, with the advent of a certain
úniversality´ in the channels different models of value and recognition
have found to express themselves. […] A mass aesthetic experience has
taken shape in the combined voices raised by communitarian systems of
recognition and communities that show, express and recognize themselves
in different myths and formal models. (ibid, p. 68)
This could seem like an abandonment of a strong guiding ideology, towards

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

public and inner life. His translator Daniel Ross states:
What Rancière fails to think is that aesthetics, that is, sensibility and feel-
ing, has become the very means by which every aspect of life is calculated
and controlled, through the invention of aesthetic and affective technolo-
gies configured toward synchronising experience, and therefore desire,
and therefore behaviour, to the point of becoming ćounter-productive,´
that is, to the point of threatening the destruction of desire itself, and
therefore politics, if not indeed economics. (Ross, 2009)
Indeed, Rancière has been accused (by Alain Badiou) of having a merely
symbolic commitment to politics, offering not reflections on real political
situations, but merely ‘motifs’ for an escapist ‘meta’-politics, or for ‘lazy
posturing of the “my art is my activism” kind’ (Davis, 2006). Thus, the issue
of the political reality of contemporary digital technologies, a crucial ques-
tion for both Stiegler (and Benjamin in his own time), seems inadequately
theorised by both Rancière and Vattimo. Though Vattimo celebrates new
global communities and communication – which could have a technological
reading – neither he nor Rancière seem to move beyond pure and broad
concepts toward a pragmatic political and ethical reading of modern digital
objects of commercial culture.
‘A Business, a Pornography, a Hitlerism’
To then frame the technological question of this project within this context of
utopian/heterotopic vision, we must ask whether the specific machinations
of a digital visual culture are or are not political, inasmuch as they may
have social or political consequences. And, if they are political, are these
consequences in any way independent or resistant to the hegemonic logic
of advanced ‘informational’ capitalism? This is to work towards asking if
there can truly be said to be any ethical outcome for recent developments in
digital media. To examine this, I look at the ethical discourse of technology
through the theorists who specifically target it, before moving to look at
examples of specific technologies, and finally returning a reading of Rancière
and Vattimo through a more specifically technological lens.
It is Deleuze that set this enquiry in motion, by giving an impression of
a technological medium of expression which, in its structural elements, at
first expresses existing modes of perception and of metaphysical intuition,
and then later comes to expand and alter them in an ethically and socially
productive way: ‘[…] a determination at first formal and material, and then
later genetic and differential’ (1986, p. 85). First, it reflects the trajectory
of Western thought in form and materiality, then, as spiritual automaton,
it comes to determine or refract this mode of thought – thought and
technological means of expression co-defining each other in a synergistic
process of becoming (this draws close to Heidegger’s concept of Gestell
or ‘enframing’ in The Question Concerning Technology). The movement-
image, for Deleuze, is based on a closed moral system founded on a singular
teleology of progress – the outcome of a Western metaphysical legacy
culminating in Cartesian rationalism. Through mythical narrative function
and action/reaction sensory-motor-schema, it generates symbolic threats
as alien, enemy, or other to an established moral order, and deals with
them through clear causal actions to provide closure as a return to moral
order. The time-image, then, is an open and ethical entity. It synthesises
a fracture within the Western tradition of transcendent continuous time,
opening us up to an experience of pure duration – a direct image of time.
What this presents us with is instead a ‘radical ethics of multiplicity […]
affirming and exploring the ruination of the sensory-motor-schema of
the heroic-communal relational action-image’ (Canning, 2000, p. 350). By
this strategy, any closed model of truth, any moral dualism is abandoned
for experimentation with image relations and thus with affection and
perception. For Deleuze, only the cinematic technology, the moving image
as a temporal medium, can represent and then further instigate this shift
by achieving its own spiritual automatism.
Deleuze then, in his conclusion to the Time-Image, states that the aesthetic
principle of the ‘electronic image’ pre-exists the digital technology which
brings it to its ideal form (1989, p. 266). He identifies this as an impetus
expressed in the time-image, an aesthetic of ‘superimposed layers, with
variable outcrops, retroactive relations, heavings, sinkings, collapsings’,
with a ‘right side and a reverse, reversible and superimposable, with the
power to turn back on themselves, perpetual reorganisation […] in omni-
directional space’ (ibid). Nonetheless, he expresses a strong concern that
this impulse should, within the digital, form part of a new will-to-art, a
‘cerebral creation’ and a new aspect of the time-image – not being made into
‘a business, a pornography, a Hitlerism’ and thereby becoming ‘a deficiency
of the cerebellum’ (ibid). The pure time-image, he states, calls into existence
an original regime of images which liberates time from its subservience to
movement, and while the ‘new methods’ of electronic media offers potential
for a will-to-art, he foresees that it will either be invalidated through being
appropriated by commercial forces, or relaunched as a reinvigorated ethical

aesthetic:
Electronic images will have to be based on still another will to art, or on

as yet unknown aspects of the time-image. […] It is the time-image which
calls on an original regime of images and signs, before electronics spoils
it or, in contrast, relaunches it. (Deleuze, 1989, p. 267)
The prerequisite for this relaunch of a will-to-art is, for Deleuze, the emer-
gence of a ‘pure speech act’, a ‘creative storytelling which is as it were the
obverse side of the dominant myths, of current words and their supporters,
an act capable of creating the myth instead of drawing profit or business from
it’ (ibid, p. 270 -- my emphasis). Only by a dissolution and destruction of any
existing moral rational order can we bring about this relaunch ‘emerging
from the debris of the end of the world’ (ibid). Here, Deleuze reveals his
Marxist dialectical and utopian politics of aesthetics. Only through ‘art
beyond knowledge, creation beyond information’ can a ‘redemption’ be
achieved (ibid). He explicitly equates the interests of profit and business
with a rationalism and ‘Hitlerism’ which is so deadly to creativity that it
must be completely obliterated. For Deleuze, pure time, pure immanence,
and pure difference is the force of negation to spatialisation, transcendence,
and identity. Only through the annihilation of the latter can one achieve
the former.
However, the revolution never came, and instead we have had, since
the time of Deleuze’s writing, a cultural evolution which comes to fruition
under a digital and informational capitalist regime. This evolution is the
near complete fusion of art and commerce in postmodern digital culture in
which the consumer is increasingly an active, skilled, and informed reader
and decipherer of complex images and objects, which are tangible, useful,
and entertaining and yet which play along the boundaries of rational com-
prehension due to their own automatism. In this work, I have endeavoured
to discover images which are either an extension of the aesthetic principle
of the time-image (in Enter the Void’s any-space-whatevers, Inception’s
dream-images, or Pina’s durational dances) or indeed which innovate in
original ways that could be constitutive of its relaunch (in Avatar or Source
Code’s digital rendering of images of metaphysical flux and neural plasticity,
Interstellar’s perfect scientific/cinematic simulation aesthetics, and in
the baroque mutability of form and matter in glitching, morphing, and
projection-mapping practices). These images achieve ethical effects in ways
that may slip through the gap in Deleuze’s closing of the door on creativity,
by expressing ‘another will to art, or an as yet unknown aspect of the time-

image’ (1989, p. 266 – my emphasis). The contemporary truth is that a real,
un-idealised art object can hardly exist outside of, or oppositional to, the
economies of production and creation in late capitalism, even though it
may still fulfil the condition of an ethical will-to-art.
The Everyday Art Object of Industrial Design
As Benjamin noted in 1936: ‘The tasks which face the human apparatus of
perception at the turning points of history cannot be solved by optical means,
that is, by contemplation alone’ (1999, p. 240). Instead, these tasks must be
lived through, inhabited as part of everyday experience, and the necessary
skills in perception are thus received and learned in a distracted state,
requiring little direct attention. For Benjamin, cinema was the principal
medium by which the modern subject tackled these tasks, but we can take
his analysis beyond cinema to cover other artefacts of mainstream culture,
such that art is reinstated as a democratic public exercise with which we
engage without aura, ceremony, or ritual. So where does this form of aesthet-
ics exist in contemporary commercial culture, if not cut adrift from it as a
transcendent and unresolvable sublime realm of avant-garde expression?
Can we say that our contemporary entertainment culture equips us with
the skills in perception that we need at this given point in our history?
Rancière sees that, in industrial production, through design, we are given
objects – as much as in the exclusive art sphere – which ‘are committed
to doing something else than what they do—to create not only objects
but a sensorium, a new partition of the perceptible’ (2002, p. 140). In these
everyday objects, we have a form of ‘applied art’ through which we see a
mode of ‘collective education’ in a symbolic economy of common life. He
states:
He (the designer) thinks of himself as an artist, inasmuch as he attempts

to create a culture of everyday life that is in keeping with the progress of
industrial production and artistic design, rather than with the routines
of commerce and petty-bourgeois consumption. (Rancière, 2002, p. 140)
This belief in an ethos of design integrity which overrides cynical profit

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

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

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

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

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

or ‘enframing’. Grammatisation ‘names the process whereby fluxes are
reduced to discrete, formal, symbolic, and reproducible elements’ (Ross,
2010), and language is perceived as only one technological form amongst
many. In Stiegler’s Technics and Time 3, the focus comes to bear specifically
on the more subtle and affective digital visual media technologies which,
within advanced capitalism, become prostheses for memory (2010).
In Stiegler’s view, digital media offers up a new technical condition of
expression and thus a new grammatisation. Though technologies cannot
be seen as culpable, they define the modes of knowledge-sharing avail-
able to us. They have been integrated with humanity in cyborg ways since
the first primitive hominid communication. The hope for the new digital
grammatisation is that it might involve the social and political retelling
of stories and the sharing of knowledge and experience in new communi-
ties and through new aesthetic forms. For Deleuze (1989), this should be
a radically new creative storytelling, in novel forms, which contributes to
the destruction of the myths of the past. Stiegler, however, moves towards
a bleaker prognosis when it comes to digital media. He sees that, in the
objects of mass communication – through cinema, television, and digital
technologies – there has been a slow process of homogenisation by which
there is a degree of similarity in all aesthetic forms of communication (Ross,
2009). What this amounts to for him is a deliberate and cynical programming
of aesthetic modes of engagement, that is to say affective media, to condition
and influence desire with the aim of controlling behaviour. The digital mass
media thus provides the most efficient and effective form through which
commercial interests can distribute images which ‘synchronise’ desires,
simplifying and emboldening them, and reconditioning them towards forms
of consumption which regress to instant ‘drive’ satisfaction. In Stiegler’s
dystopian vision of a digital mastery of affective governmentality, desire
and aesthetics will both ultimately be destroyed as we are habituated into
automatic, programmed modes of attention/engagement and consumption/
satisfaction, regressing us to the id state of the ideal consumer (ibid).
In this way, the new digital grammatisation can be easily perceived as a
sophisticated method of biopolitical governance. For Stiegler, the ‘program-
ming industries’ which produce the technical means of recording memory
(i.e. the media/marketing industries) have a vested interest in controlling
consciousness on the level of unconscious drives. This is done by controlling
our attention through psychotechnologies of ‘spectacular innovation’, tricks,
and gimmicks which ‘short-circuit’ the longer systems of attention by which
knowledge and memory are shared inter-generationally (Stiegler, 1998,
p. 21). Longer circuits of generational transmission of knowledge are also

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

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

complex, rich, and stimulating in their immersive affectivity and metaphori-
cal resonance, and also present an ethical possibility for new industrial
practices of making and sharing experience. I have argued here that these
practices potentially function even within the conf ines of industrial
control to empower and motivate creative and political awakenings. To
demonstrate this, I now return to look at some of the discourses and forms
previously discussed in this project, specifically to address the critiques of
contemporary D3D technology and the neo-baroque digital film, and then
to assess the ethical potential of these new forms of presentation.
‘A Chaotic Scribble’
As discussed throughout this book, the contemporary images of the current

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

and Repetition, in which he disagrees with Baudrillard on the status of the copy without original
referent. He re-appropriates it as an ethical concept which confronts the identity of the ‘original’
and transforms it (2004, pp. 154-156).
As Thomas Elsaesser points out in his article ‘The Return of 3-D: Logics
and Genealogies of the Image in the 21st Century’, in an ironic turn, the
stereoscopic media technology that has historically existed as a critique of
monocular and bourgeois visual regimes (including the complex viewing
positions of the original sixteenth-century Baroque art style as well as 20th-
century Dada and Cubist art movements) becomes the new normative image
regime in the digital era, and this carries certain ethical risks. In becoming
ubiquitous, the current 3D technology potentially becomes simply the new
default mode of mass-media commercialism, and, as such, becomes party
to the ideological cultural flows associated with that. On a further, more
worrying note, as immersive affectivity is ever heightened in new digital
technologies, it seems that what is lost is exactly the sense of cognitive
distance from the image content that would allow an analytical/political
mode of reception. The haptic closeness to the image which originally
stood as critique of a rationalist and Realist optical regime is here seen as
having been appropriated by commercial interests as an insidious form of
influence. Affective media here is portrayed as a neurological bypassing
of our rational-critical faculties and this potentially allows us to become
overly influenced (Elsaesser, 2013).
While this sounds like the familiar paranoid fears of mass hypnosis
and subliminal messages which have circulated since mass media first
came about, this takes a more sinister turn when we consider, as Erin
Manning does in Relationscapes, the powerfully immersive and affective
tone of explicitly political propaganda. In Manning’s analysis, she uses the
example of Leni Reifenstahl’s work for the Nazis, specifically Olympia,
identifying the powerful suture of the ‘biogrammatic’ images of the human
form stemming from the emotional and relational connections cultivated
by the rhythmic and intensive imagery. She notes that the pre-conscious
impact of these politically charged, highly affective images of perfect bodies
moving in perfect motion can be considered even more powerful than the
content-driven semiotically charged propaganda with which we might be
more familiar (Manning, 2009). The explicit goal of the Nazi propaganda
machine to conquer hearts and minds through affective media extended
somewhat logically into experiments in 3D with films So Real you can
Touch It and Six Girls Roll into Weekend. The technology and aesthetic
of stereography, which only a few years earlier had formed part of an avant-
garde critical art movement, was thus appropriated as a potential propaganda
tool of the Nazi aesthetic cultural movement (Child, 2011).
While the new affective and immersive digital imagery can be quite easily
critically positioned either as a revolutionary critique of closed inflexible
thought, or inversely as an order of sinister and insidious commercial control

of our desires, it can also, in cineastes Roger Ebert and Mark Kermode’s
school of thought, be simply written off as somewhat irritating, redundant,
and superfluous.9 Film theorist Sean Cubitt seems to subscribe more to
this latter point of view than either of the former when he says, in The
Cinema Effect, that contemporary technologically driven neo-baroque
visual media is just so many modular stylistic devices which thrive on an
insular formal excellence at the cost of intelligence or social understanding
through meaningful connection (2005, p. 242, 269). On the subject of cinema,
he states:
Contemporary cinema is more ambitious than contemporary philosophy,

but neither undertakes to understand the universe any longer […] The
film world is a windowless monad, a simple structure unafflicted by
connections to the rest of the world, entirely inward. (Cubitt, 2005, p. 242)
He laments that, as the form of contemporary visual media becomes desper-

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

through his language, Cubitt values this novel experience, referring to it as
‘that wonder which is the proper, conceptless affect of firstness’ (ibid, p. 242),
but then undermines it as a ‘seduction’ and a ‘hypnotized subordination to
the magic of illusion’ (ibid, p. 256). He describes how The Abyss, through its
innovative digital special effects, presents an ‘artificial though not synthetic’
experience, but this mesmerised state is not creative or inspirational; rather,
it is an abuse, a fake, which leads us away from consideration of life or reality,
deeper into a self-satisfying, meaningless monad which is nothing more
than the magical power of the commodity form; a ‘virtual satisfaction of
virtual needs’ (ibid, p. 269).
The sublime affective state of conceptless firstness alone is not enough for
Cubitt. It is ultimately an empty experience as it does not engage culturally,
socially, or philosophically. We must have higher-level analysis, the activity
of the intellect as processes of secondness and thirdness for an experience
of firstness to become in any way significant. He states that ‘Mere firstness
would produce nothing but a chaotic scribble’ (ibid, p. 81). Further, Cubitt
notes:
Presenting itself as if it were Peircean firstness, in fact Hollywood today

offers its audiences a mirror in which their aspiration toward being is
rewarded with the vision of the absolute object, secondness without the
possibility of thirdness that can arise only from a socialized system of
texts and spectators. (ibid, p. 269)
Here, like Stiegler, Cubitt asserts that our technological circuits of atten-
tion have been hot-wired by commercial influences to take any desire for
ontological analysis and understanding and give it a false satisfaction, a
quickly fading sensation of wholeness. It ‘addresses only the present instant,
doomed by its dependence on the cutting-edge to radical obsolescence’ (ibid,
p. 271). He accuses mainstream cinema of duping its audience: ‘Despite the
narrative’s attempt to make the corporate state the villain of the piece, The
Abyss mesmerizes its subject into descending into the depths from which
the magic arises’ (ibid, p. 256). While the ‘pre- or alinguistic nature of the
digital sublime’ promises an escape from ideology, it results only in a denial
of ideology, a willful blindness (ibid, p. 269).
For Cubitt, the enlivening affects supplied by cinematic digital screen
media, while thrilling, fade quickly into nothing since they are essentially
meaningless. He dismisses any enduring individual or cultural effects
of engagement with the digital image, saying instead that we are merely
engaging in ‘a transformed mode of play, prizing intensity over intelligence’

(ibid). However, if we cease to see the purpose of contemporary media –
indeed of any media form – as the crafting of timeless or iconic objects of
social import, we can see them rather as an active and dynamic process
of play and learning, which, rather than simply making intensity its prize,
actually experiments ethically in forms of metaphysical embodiment, and
addresses the ontological issues which with our world currently confronts
us. It does not matter so much if they come to seem dated or obsolescent
like so many toys and games of our childhood (as, for example, with the
morphing effects previously discussed), because, in the rapid proliferation
of images and technologies, these objects of contemporary screen culture
become part of a shared cultural currency, part of our communal ‘tertiary’
memory. These digital visual ‘intensities’ have served their purpose, forming
a matrix of metaphorical associations that passively synthesise a sense of
what it is to live in a digital age.
I have tried to prove through this work that these digital objects of
firstness as affects supplied by digital screen cultures and practices, be
they sensations of space, time, force, or materiality do indeed synthesise
aspects of secondness and thirdness as new concepts and perceptions,
though not directly through content-driven and representational meth-
ods. I have also posited that this is not simply a denial of or escape from
ideological processes, but a fundamental destabilising of the metaphysical
foundations which support any rigid ideological belief. While the method
might be playful, experimental, and therefore sometimes apparently
banal or superficial, the new grammatisation of affective fluxes through
digital mediation do in fact generate new desires, new practices, and a
new existential condition. It seems that there is a distinct need to develop
this mode of analysis further while the popular realm of image critique
(that of Ebert and Kermode) seems stuck in a ‘cinephiliac’ attitude which
celebrates a specific type of autonomous auteur cinema perceived to be
under direct attack .10 There is a different attitude and mode of analysis
for the images of a digital and commercial image culture, which instead
develops the idea of a mentally agile viewer able to negotiate with multiple
virtual simulations of reality in processes that refract and reconstruct
thought about reality.
10 For the epitome of this type of analysis, see Sontag’s essay The Decay of Cinema, 2002,
pp. 117-122.
The Active Subject in Digitality
The central ethical issue as developed in this chapter becomes one of activ-
ity or passivity, whether the spectator within a commercial digital visual
culture is an active, interactive, and educated consumer who acts on a
playful impulse to step out of the rational ordinary, or a disengaged dupe, a
gullible individual whose desires have been conditioned towards base drives
requiring instant gratification, and whose consumption is automatic and
without fulfilment. Entering into this argument, Mark Hansen establishes
that the subject in digital culture is more active than ever. He summarises:
As I see it, digitisation requires us to reconceive the correlation between

the user’s body and the image in a more profound manner […] The image
has itself become a process and, as such, has become irreducibly bound
up with the activity of the body. (Hansen, 2006, p. 10)
Without space and time as given transcendent qualities in new media in the
form of linear timelines and continuous spaces, Hansen describes how the
human body (by which he also means the brain) must actualise durational
space-time through a negotiation with the profusion of data into which we
are immersed (ibid, p. 253). Hansen therefore articulates how, in a digital age,
rather than our minds becoming ‘soft’, our embodied processes of cognition
are achieved through increased and complexified activity.
Cultural theorists Luciana Parisi and Steve Goodman, however, go further
than this in criticising the anthropocentrism of this concept of ‘activity’,
wherein the human mind/body is positioned as nexus for all potential
actualisation. They prefer to construct an ecological model in which the
activity of the human is only a part of an autopoetic system. Their article,
‘Rhythmic Nexus: The Felt Togetherness of Movement and Thought’ (2008),
posits the idea of technology synthesising its own fluid and immanent
dynamic as an ‘extensive continuum’, or quantum flux, into which we as
humans fit. This idea integrates well with both Stiegler’s grammatisation,
Deleuze’s spiritual automaton, and Bogost’s alien phenomenology, moving
the emphasis away from the human, and onto an immanent flux of pos-
sibilities for expression framed by digital hardware and software.
As we, as a digital culture, move towards a synthetic but autopoietic
continuum of creation, we see the emergence of a new aesthetic entailing
ethical experimentation with virtuality, alongside the generation and
multiplication of metaphysical anomalies (Parisi and Goodman, 2008).
We can see this aesthetic tendency in many of the objects of post-cinematic
digital culture that I have examined in this work, where space and time are
distorted into liminal zones and other worlds. It can seem like artists and
filmmakers, in honing technical skills of hardware and software operation
and manipulation, have a well-developed sense of the spiritual automatism
of the digital, engaging in a work of revealing rather than of intentionally
sculpting new forms. In this work, it can often feel as if there is indeed a
different dimension or quantum flux which is proximate, surrounding
us, or on the other side of some portal waiting to be explored rather than
created. There seems an ethico-aesthetic imperative to experience this
immanent flux and to speculate on our potential human interaction with it.
As a culture, we ask: What are the possibilities for post-humanity emerging
from this digital ether?
Parisi and Goodman point out that, in the logic of late capitalism, com-
mercial interests have inevitably taken note of this aesthetic shift towards
indetermination, and try to pre-empt or guide the future potential desires
to secure and future-proof capital – efforts towards containing, controlling,
and predicting desires in what they call an affective ‘ecology of allure’:
A new stratum of topological control directly inciting mental, physical, and

affective activities is deployed by ubiquitous clusters of adaptive software
enabling the installation of smoothening platforms of pre-emption, a
distributed ecology of allure – where allure describes the attractional
power generated by contrasting eternal objects or virtual worlds se-
lected by actual occasions. This pre-emptive power operates through the
contagious activity of futurity in the present, of potential space-times
serving as attractors to actual occasions. For example, artificial agency
of markets that install lures to feeling, thereby pre-empting a desire yet
to come. (Parisi and Goodman, 2008)
This concept of the insidious affective allures of digital psychotechnolo-

gies – as creating an illusion of subjective choice while actually steering
desire – is very much the mode of analysis followed by Stiegler. However,
for Parisi and Goodman, this attempt to attract and allure for the purposes
of market control must ultimately fail, since:
Such pre-emptive strikes, instead of blocking or slowing a novel future

from happening, speed up the production of novelty. (ibid)
They state that attempts at control and pre-emption actually feed the multi-
plicity, causing it to grow rather than controlling outcomes as intended. The
pre-emptions contribute to, feed, and accelerate an aesthetic of virtuality

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

postmodernism with a specifically digital aesthetic, and with a new digital
ontology which entails the weakening of ‘strong’ metaphysical notions.
Vattimo pursues what he calls ´weak thought.´ Resigned to imprisonment

in metaphysics, this thinking hopes gradually to bend metaphysics toward
dissolution. Weak thought questions “strong” claims, truth assertions
brandishing as their ultimate warrants anachronistic, termite-ridden
metaphysical cudgels. The trick to weak thought is to work strategically
with the erosion of foundations rather than to react futilely against this
nihilistic trend. (Oventile, 2006)
The postmodern digital age thus finally puts the last nail in God’s coffin,
and what we are left with is a nihilistic fluidity and immanent plurality.
The digital ontology that we move towards becomes analogous with a
liberal, tolerant, and democratic society, and a digital nihilism entails
wholeheartedly embracing the moral ‘crises’ of postmodernism.
Vattimo suggests that this kind of nihilism is not some acceptance of
relativism leading inexorably to political apathy, but instead that it can
be strategic, eroding the foundations of metaphysical presumption. Here,
digital images can be seen to have a clear strategic role in devising, reproduc-
ing, and disseminating a new ethics; in the glitch’s uncanny affects of the
fracturing of reality, in superpowers, in multiple dimensions and the border
spaces between them. In the representation of the ‘relaxation’ or dissolution
of metaphysics, all fundamentals of the physical world are drawn into
doubt, twisted and folded. Everything becomes unfixed, unfounded: from
physical structures, spaces, and objects; personality, memory, and mental
processes; to reality, physical laws, and possibility (and various combinations
thereof). The liminal impossible, the uncanny and the fabulous are no
longer the material of biblical miracles and the holy sublime, but are now
the secularised content of digital distortions and modulations. The death
of god and metaphysics in crisis thereby becomes inextricably linked to a
new digital aesthetic regime and a new regime of the sensible – entailing the
death of ‘art’. This typifies the digital aesthetic that I have here identified,
an aesthetic that dynamically reveals a world rather than just representing
it. Vattimo also makes this connection:
The aesthetic experience of mass society, the giddy proliferation of

´beautifuls´ that make worlds, is likely to be significantly altered by the
fact that even the unitary world of which the sciences believed they could
speak has revealed itself to be a multiplicity of different worlds. It is no
longer possible to speak of aesthetic experience as pure expressivity, as
a purely emotive colouring of the world, as one did when the basic world
was regarded as a given, open to scientific method of science. (Vattimo,
1992, p. 69)
I would argue that this aesthetic experience of which he speaks – a shift

beyond expressionism to the synthesis of new naturalisms – only comes
into full fruition in a digital regime of the perceptible, because only now
can one adequately give an image of the multiplicity. While this might
have been foreshadowed or suggested in analogue media with the crystal
images and ‘irrational’ cuts of Deleuze’s analysis, it now bursts into full
photo-realistic expression. As I have examined, the digital post-cinematic

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

Deleuze’s cinematic ‘camera-consciousness’, but specific to the materiality of
digital image technology. This entails an examination of the essence of digital
technology, which gives shape to us and our interactions with the world in
as much as we use it in an instrumental mode (as memory prosthesis, of
expression, of design). The first footnote to Heidegger’s essay The Question
Concerning Technology outlines the difficulty in translating ‘essence’ from
the German word ‘Wesen’. The translator states that: ‘it does not simply
mean what something is’, but also ‘the way something pursues its course’,
‘comes to presence’, or ‘endures as presence’ (1977, p. 3). This essence is seen
as digital screen media’s spiritual automatism, which draws us into a mode
of conscious thought and awareness distinct from that given to us through
analogue media. Digi-thinking is thus to be conceptualised as a mode of
metaphysical consciousness that is affectively synthesised through the
automatisms of digital visual technologies, and which permeates thought,
perception, and activity.
From Stiegler, via Derrida, we understand that technologies act as a
pharmakon, with an enabling potential to simulate new realities, but also
a harmful potential to limit and stultify thought. For the technology of
film, in Deleuze’s analysis, the spiritual automatism of the screen image
took these two clear directions: the movement-image drew us by affective
allure into the power of representation – ‘from the beginning linked to
the organization of war, state propaganda, ordinary fascism, historically
and essentially’ (1989, p. 165); the time-image then confronted us with the
un-representable – ‘the sensory-motor break makes a man a seer who finds
himself struck by something intolerable in the world, and confronted by
something unthinkable in thought’ (ibid, p. 169).
Similarly, with digital media, we also see the two faces of the pharmakon.
On the one hand, we have the tendency to ever greater systematisation
and rationalisation in digital visualisation and database aesthetics – the
figurative, linear relation of things in the philosophical tradition of the
movement-image (which, for Stiegler and Cubitt, equates to increasing
standardisation and homogenisation). On the other hand, we have the
extension or relaunch of the regime of the time-image through the technol-
ogy of the digital, in which its spiritual automatism gives us a new virtual
‘unthinkable’. Within the field of digital humanities, we now see developing
new strands of enquiry which see this ethical power of the digital image –
new affective strategies of resistance, new links and relations synthesised
by the new organisations of information.
In my analysis, and in the manner of Deleuze’s Nietzscheanism, the
ethical power of the digital image is in its nihilism. As he states:
For it is not in the name of a better or truer world that thought captures
the intolerable in this world, but, on the contrary, it is because this
world is intolerable that it can no longer think a world or think itself.
The intolerable is no longer a serious injustice, but the permanent state
of a daily banality […] Which, then, is the subtle way out? To believe not
in a different world, but in a link between man and the world, in love or
life, to believe in this as in the impossible, the unthinkable, which none
the less cannot but be thought. (Deleuze, 1989, p. 170)
Deleuze proposes the irony that it is only through acknowledging the

powerlessness of thought, or of belief, that we can think and believe anew.
This powerlessness of thought must then entail a return to the body, to
sensation and to the possibility of action.
What is certain is that believing is no longer believing in another world,

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

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

Titles of films are shown in Small Caps
3D (D3D) projection 214, 215 Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers 146
dance in 137–8 Transformers 146
3D films 29fn18, 126, 215 Bay, Michael, Transformers 19
Avatar 188 battle scenes 146
Cave Of Forgotten Dreams 144fn22, Bazin, André 42, 191
152 Being
Ebert on 23, 116fn4, 152 as illusion 195
Hugo 153 plasticity as 76
Life of Pi 152 Benjamin, Walter
Pina: Dance, Dance Otherwise We Are on art 203
Lost 139, 140–1, 141, 152 On the Mimetic Faculty 173
The Doctrine of the Similar 173, 184
Adorno, Theodor, on antinomy 19fn9, 62 The Work of Art in the Age of Technological
Frankfurt School 26 Reproduction 32, 201
aesthetic dualism, and technologies 121–2 Bergson, Henri, on intuition 81
aesthetic theory, Vattimo on 210 Besson, Luc, Lucy 99, 99
affect Billings, Lee 24
and the body 50 the body
and creativity 50 and affect 50
as synaesthetic reaction 49 and affect theory 50
systems, and cognitive functions 49 Bogost, Ian 19, 109, 164, 165
affect theory Bordwell, David 19, 28
and the body 50 Boucher, Marc 173
and film theory 50 on kinetic synaesthesia 139fn19, 181
of media 49 Boundaries, breakdown 98
afro-futurism, Dery on 16–17 see also liminality
alternate realities, films 80fn3 Braidotti, Rosi, on low-culture fiction
analogue effects, Nolan 65 genres 15
analogue image, demise of 131fn15 brain, as hologram 196–7
animation styles brain damage, and metamorphosis 186
Waking Life 188 Branagh, Kenneth, Thor 126
Waltz With Bashir 188 Braun, Marta 121
Aronofsky, Darren, Black Swan 138 Bridges, Jeff 92
art Brown, William 18, 84, 154
Adorno on 19fn9 post-human realism 148
applied, Rancière on 208 Supercinema 83, 87
Benjamin on 203 Bukatman, Scott 14, 28
and commerce 207
death of 202–3 Cameron, James
Lyotard on 19fn9 Avatar 12
will-to-art, Vattimo on 209 digital 3D 188
digital naturalism 188–93
Barker, Stephen 68 montrage 191
Barker, Timothy Scott, Time and the Digital 11 motion-capture 191, 192
baroque Pandora Effect 193
Ndalianis on 148–9 suture concept 38, 160
see also digital neo-baroque Terminator 2: Judgment Day,
battle scenes morphing 127
films 145–6 The Abyss 216–17
kinetic images 145 Titanic 29
Campbell, Martin, The Green Lantern 126 time-image 33, 42, 46, 48, 55, 55–6, 58, 64,
Cassetti, Francesco 170, 171 73, 101, 211
CGI 29 works
emergence 125–7 Cinema 1: The Movement-Image 28fn16,
films 125 32, 52
simulated spaces 125–6 Cinema 2: The Time Image 42, 52, 56,
‘Cinema 3’, need for 58 58, 59, 63, 102, 103, 206, 225
see also digital post-cinematic images Difference and Repetition 54
cinema Proust and Signs 54
affective approaches 28–9 Deleuze, Gilles & Felix Guattari, A Thousand
multiplex vs arthouse 13–14 Plateaus 52
and plasticity 74 Derrickson, Scott, Dr. Strange 85
as practice of philosophy 33–4 Derrida, Jacques
as ‘spiritual automaton’ 56 grammatology 67
‘train effect’, founding myth 9–10 Grammatology 211
see also digital cinema; digital post-cinema; Difference, and repetition 29–30
futurist cinema Enter The Void 107
‘cinema of attractions’ 15, 18 ‘digi-thinking’ 31, 223
‘cine-thinking’ 31, 225 and mindfulness 225
Cocteau, Jean, Orphée 97fn10 see also ‘train-thinking’
cognition digital aesthetic 73
embodied, and metaphor 175–6 emergence 28
and ‘passive synthesis’ concept 55 digital cinema, Manovich on 22, 44
cognitive functions, and affect systems 49 digital contours
Comolli, Jean Louis, Machines of the Vis- and post-human vision 87–8
ible 115fn2, 160 Wood on 87
consciousness digital dance 136–43
and creation of reality 195 digital effects, theorists 14
embodiment/disembodiment 197 digital emergence, potential for 86–7
and kinaesthesia 132–3 digital frisson 13, 15
projection of 160 acceptance of 116
Coogler, Ryan, Black Panther 16, 17 digital frontier 81
creativity digital images
and affect 50 affective force of 114
and metaphor 174, 175 ambivalence about 215–16
crystal images analogue pre-cursors 46, 97–8
characteristics 103 Elsaesser on 84
Deleuze on 103 formal dynamics 123–31
Cubitt, Sean 9, 10, 67, 191 of metaphysical flux 83, 108
on The Abyss 216–17 neural plasticity 187, 225
The Cinema Effect 83, 149, 216 and reality 45, 60–4
The Practice of Light 86 as ‘signs of art’ 105
cyberpunk films 15 The Matrix 123
see also digital post-cinematic images
Dalí, Salvador & Luis Buñuel, Un Chien digital naturalism, Manovich on 190–1
Andalou 12 digital neo-baroque 148–51
dance, in 3D 137–8 characteristics 151
Deep Dream, image-generator 129–30 films 149
Deleuze, Gilles 19–20 projection-mapping, example 150–1, 150
‘camera consciousness’ notion 32, 33, 34 digital nihilism 30, 38–9, 200
on crystal images 103 of Enter The Void 106
film theory 31, 51–2 and ontological plasticity 221–3
Hansen’s criticisms of 51 digital ontology, definition 82
on images 103–4 digital post-cinema 18
movement-image 20, 32, 33, 51, 58, 64, 72, kinetic images 144–5
73, 101, 117fn6, 177, 224 writers on 83
‘passive synthesis’ concept 52, 54–5, 60 digital post-cinematic images 12, 59–60,
on recollection images 102 63–4
‘spiritual automaton’ concept 52, 56 definition 20
taxonomy of film images 42 liminality 110–11
‘the brain is the screen’ 32 manifestations 21
Index 243
and reality 31 Contact (Zemeckis) 126

remaking of reality 185 Dr. Strange (Derrickson) 85
digital screen culture, ubiquity 30 Elysium (Blornkamp) 16
digital simulation, reality as 100–1 Enter The Void (Noé) 30, 57, 80, 89, 95,
digital virtual reality 105–6, 106–7
and indexicality 43 Eraserhead (Lynch) 98
meaning 42 Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless
dreams, and reality 176 Mind (Gondry) 102, 187
Duchamp, Marcel 152 Falling Deep Inside (Elliot) 141–2
Ghost In The Machine (Talalay) 94
Eagling, Wayne 137–8 Hugo (Scorcese) 153
Ebert, Roger, on 3D films 23 Inception (Nolan) 57, 187
Eisenstein, Sergei 201 Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade
Elderkin, Nabil, Welcome To Heartbreak, (Spielberg) 127
glitch art 129 Interstellar (Nolan) 12, 23–5, 64–7
Elliot, Simon, Falling Deep Inside 141–2 Lawnmower Man (Leonard) 94, 126
Elsaesser, Thomas Life Of Pi (Lee) 152
on digital images 84 Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers
‘The Return of 3D’ 15, 115fn2 152, 215 (Jackson) 146
embodied simulation, Gallese and Guerra Lucy (Besson) 99, 99
on 179–80 Minority Report (Spielberg) 16
emergence 12, 48, 85-7, 108, 115 Mulholland Drive (Lynch) 102
Emmerich, Roland, Stargate 126 Olympia (Reifenstahl) 215
emotion Orphée (Cocteau) 97
as affective synaesthetic resonance 183 Pina: Dance, Dance Otherwise We Are
as sentiment 183 Lost (Wenders) 136, 152
enframing (Gestell) concept, Heidegger 62, Ringu (Nakata) 12, 193–8
206 Source Code (Jones) 12, 38, 57, 193–8
entertainment culture, and role of military Spiderman (Raimi) 125
technology 13 Star Trek: The Wrath Of Khan
Epstein, Jean 42, 190 (Meyer) 127
La Poésie de Aujourd’hui 181 Star Wars (Lucas) 125
on synaesthesia 181–2, 182 Stargate (Emmerich) 126
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
fabulation, and scientific discovery 27fn27 (Cameron) 127
fascism, and Futurism 202 The Abyss (Cameron) 216–17
Faulkner, Keith, three syntheses of time 54 The Big Swallow (Williamson) 10
film theorists 28, 42, 49 The Black Hole (Nelson) 126
film theory The Congress (Folman) 99, 100
and affect theory 50 The Green Lantern (Campbell) 126
Deleuze 31, 51–2 The Matrix (Wachowski) 29, 92, 93, 123
films The Mirror (Tarkovsky) 102
analogue to digital shift 44, 45 The Red Shoes (Powell & Press-
and ‘passive synthesis’ concept 55 burger) 97fn10, 137, 138, 139
with temporal distortions 102 The Wizard Of Oz (Fleming) 98
films (list) Thor (Branagh) 126
2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick) 126 Titanic (Cameron) 29
A Matter Of Life And Death (Powell & Transcendence (Pfister) 99
Pressburger) 98 Transformers (Bay) 19, 146
Alien (Scott) 125 Tree Of Life (Malick) 109
Aliens (Cameron) 16 Tron: Legacy (Kosinski) 37, 80, 89, 91,
Avatar (Cameron) 12, 38, 160, 188–93 92, 93, 105
Batman: The Dark Knight (Nolan) 65, Tron (Lisberger) 16, 37, 80, 90, 92, 105
129 Un Chien Andalou (Dalí & Buñuel) 12
Black And White (Landis) 127 Vertigo (Hitchcock) 98
Black Panther (Coogler) 16, 17 Waking Life (Linklater) 188
Black Swan (Aronofsky) 138 Waltz With Bashir (Folman) 188
Blade Runner (Scott) 16 Welcome To Heartbreak (Elderkin) 129
Cave Of Forgotten Dreams (Her- Willow (Howard) 127
zog) 144fn22 152 Wolfman (Siodmak) 127
Cloverfield (Reeves) 129 see also under the director for more detail
Flanders, Judith 142–3 Analyses Concerning Passive and Logical

Flaxman, Gregory 33 Synthesis 53
The Brain is the Screen 32 ‘passive synthesis’ 37, 52, 53
Fleming, Victor, The Wizard Of Oz 98 Steinbock on 53
Folman, Ari
The Congress 99 illusion, Being as 195
poster 100 images
Waltz With Bashir 188 Deleuze on 103–4
Frankfurt School 202 moving 119, 120–1
Futurism see also crystal images; digital stereoscopic
cinema 17 images; images; plastic image; post-
and fascism 202 cinematic image; recollection images
Marinetti on 17, 18, 153 indexicality, and digital virtual reality 43
post-human 17 intuition, Bergson on 81
futurist cinema 15–16
Jackson, Peter, Lord Of The Rings: The Two
Gabriel, Markus 165 Towers, battle scenes 146
Gallese, Vittorio & Michele Guerra, on Jeong, Sueng Hoon, Cinematic Interfaces 11,
embodied simulation 179–80 171, 172
Gamez, David 176, 198 Jones, Duncan, Source Code 12, 57, 193–8
‘Gargantua’ black hole, Interstellar 23–4, alternate quantum reality 194
24, 65, 66 consciousness, treatment of 197
gestalt psychology 178 poster 194
glitch art reality as simulation 195
artists 128
Batman: The Dark Knight 129 Kant, Immanuel, 164-5
Cloverfield 129 Critique of Pure Reason 33
examples 128–9, 129 kinaesthesia, and consciousness 132–3
Welcome To Heartbreak 129 kinetic effects 145
Gondry, Michel, Eternal Sunshine Of The kinetic images
Spotless Mind 102, 187 battle scenes 145
grammatisation concept digital post-cinema 144–5
definition 68–9 kinetic synaesthesia 144
digital 71 Boucher on 181
and reality 69 Kosinski, Joseph, Tron: Legacy 80
Stiegler 15fn7 68, 177, 204–5, 211–12, 213 Kubrick, Stanley, 2001 A Space Odyssey,
ubiquity of 70 stargate sequence 126
grammatology, Derrida 67, 211
Gunning, Tom 28 Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson, Metaphors We
‘cinema of attractions’ 15 Live By 176
Landis, John, Black And White,
Hadjioannou, Markos 86 morphing 127
From Light to Byte 84 language
Hansen, Miriam 28, 219 and grammatisation 69
criticism of Deleuze 51 and mimesis 176–7
Heath, Stephen, Questions of Cinema 169 as technology 67, 211
Heidegger, Martin Lee, Ang, Life Of Pi, 3D 152
enframing (Gestell) concept 62, 206 Leonard, Brett, Lawnmower Man 94, 126
techné concept 35, 61 liminality
The Question Concerning Technology 61, digital post-cinematic images 110–11
62–3, 206, 223–4 films 109–10
Herzog, Werner, Cave Of Forgotten metaphors of 109–10
Dreams 3D 144fn22 Linklater, Richard, Waking Life 188
heterotopia, and utopia 204 Lisberger, Steven
Higgs Boson ‘god’ particle 36 TRON 80
Hitchcock, Alfred, Vertigo 98 Master Control Programme 93
hologram, brain as 196–7 Lumière brothers
Howard, Ron, WILLOW, morphing 127 cinema’s founding myth 9–10, 116
Husserl, Edmund as virtual reality 11, 121
Index 245
Lynch, David Terminator 2: Judgment Day 127

Eraserhead 98 Willow 127
Mulholland Drive 102 motion, affects of 135
Lyotard, Jean Francois, on the sublime 19fn9, 62 movement-image 47, 55, 57, 60, 105
Deleuze 20, 32, 51, 64, 73, 101, 117fn6 224
McDowell, Alex, on narrative futurism 16 MTV generation 28
Malabou, Catherine Mullarkey, John 19, 20
ontological plasticity concept 74, 186, 223 Muybridge, Eadweard
Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing 74 ‘Animal Locomotion’ 121
The New Wounded 186 zoopraxiscope 118
What Should We Do with Our Brain 74
Malick, Terence, Tree Of Life 109 Nakata, Hideo, Ringu 12
malleability narrative futurism 16
of memory 163–4 Ndalianis, Angela 14
of reality 155–7 on neo-baroque 148–9
see also plasticity Nelson, Gary, The Black Hole 126
Manning, Erin 118, 144 neo-baroque 12, 38, 118, 148-51
Relationscapes 134, 142, 215 Noé, Gaspar
Manon, Hugh S. & Daniel Temkin, Notes on Enter The Void 3 0, 57, 80
Glitch 128 bright lights 96
Manovich, Lev CGI effects 94
on digital cinema 22, 44 difference and repetition 107
on digital naturalism 190–1 digital nihilism 106
Marey, Étienne-Jules, animated pictures 119, disembodied consciousness 95–6
120, 189–90 poster 95
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, on Futurism 17, review 94
18, 153 third synthesis of time 106–7
Marks, Laura 28 time-image exploration 94, 105–6
Massumi, Brian 28 Nolan, Christopher
Autonomy of Affect 183 analogue effects 65
Mead, Syd, on science fiction 16 Batman: The Dark Knight 65
media, affective theory of 49 glitch art 129
Méliès, Georges 121, 122 Inception 57
memory, malleability of 163–4 Interstellar 12, 64–7
metamorphosis, and brain damage 186 ‘Gargantua’ black hole 23–4, 24, 65, 66
metaphor
characteristics 175 ontology
and creativity 174, 175 flat 109
and embodied cognition 175–6 digital 26, 43, 82, 84, 89, 167
and reality 82 of film 44
Seitz on 184 Nietzsche 101
Meyer, Nicholas, Star Trek: The Wrath Of and plasticity 76, 108, 187, 223
Khan, time lapses 127 and digital nihilism 221–3
Michalek, David, Slow Dancing 142 Malabou 74, 186, 223
slow-motion figures 142, 143
military technology, role in entertainment Parisi, Luciana & Steve Goodman
culture 13 ‘affective ecology of allure’ 220–1
mimesis ‘Rhythmic Nexus’ 219–20
Aristotelian 188 ‘passive synthesis’ concept
and language 176–7 and cognition 55
and perception 173 Deleuze 52, 54–5, 60
and resemblance 172–4 and film 55
mindfulness, and ‘digi-thinking’ 225 Husserl 37, 52, 53
mirror neurons 174, 177, 178–9 origins 52
Modell, Arthur 176, 178, 183 passive absorption of 52–3, 53–4, 55
morphing see also third synthesis
Black And White 127 perception
Indiana Jones And The Last and mimesis 173
Crusade 127 and synaesthesia 182, 183
Pfister, Wally, Transcendence 99 naïve view of 34–5, 164

pharmakon, ambivalence 71–2, 224 and plasticity 76, 226
phenomenology remaking of, in digital post-cinematic
alien 19, 155, 219 images 185
evolutionary 154-5 as simulation 195, 198
transcendental 32 and technologies 35
Pisters, Patricia 187 see also realism; alternate realities; virtual
The Neuro-Image 45, 46, 75, 98, 107 reality
plastic image 59 recollection images
plasticity characteristics 102
as Being 76 Deleuze on 102
characteristics 74, 75 Reeves, Matt, Cloverfield, glitch 129
and cinema 74 Reifenstahl, Leni, Olympia 215
empowerment of 74 resemblance, and mimesis 172–4
essence of 223 Resnais, Alain 46
metaphysical 110 Richmond, Scott C. 14, 154
neural 186, 187, 225 Cinema’s Bodily Illusions 135
and reality 76, 226 Rodowick, David 45, 84, 101–2
see also malleability; ontological plasticity The Virtual Life of Film 44, 83
post-cinema Ross, Daniel 70–1, 205, 213
meaning of ‘post’ 21–6 Rutherford, Anne 182–3, 183
Shaviro on 21 Cinema and Embodied Affect 143–4, 180
see also digital post-cinema
post-human vision, and digital Sachs, Curt 134
contours 87–8 science fiction
Powell, Michael & Pressburger, Emeric films 15
A Matter Of Life And Death 98 Mead on 16
The Red Shoes 97fn10, 137 scientific discovery, and fabulation 27fn27
Power, Pat, Animated Expressions 188 Scorcese, Martin, Hugo, 3D 153
Pribram, Karl, on brain as hologram 196–7 Scott, Ridley, Alien, CGI effects 25
proprioception 132, 154 Seitz, James E., on metaphor 184
aesthetics 135–6 sentiment, emotion as 183
corporeal 19, 132 Shaviro, Steven 28
kinetic 114 on post-cinema 21
and subjectivity 135 Post-Cinematic Affect 13fn3
‘structure of feeling’ 13
Raimi, Sam, Spiderman 125 Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine 109, 118, 145
Rancière, Jacques 203, 204, 205 ‘Consciousness:A Natural History’ 132
on applied art 208 Siodmak, Curt, Wolfman, stop-motion
realism animation 127
Bazin 48 Skaggs, Liz 87
cinematic 45 Slate magazine 16
direct 34fn24, 170 Sobchack, Vivian 28
hyper- 84, 87 Meta-Morphing 127
indirect 198 Solms, Mark & Oliver Turnbull, The Brain and
perceptual 122 the Inner World 163
photographic 43-4, 131 spatial realism 83–5
post-human 108 Spielberg, Steven
psycho- 188 Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade,
spatial 83 morphing 127
social 214 Minority Report 16
reality Spinoza, Baruch, monism 223
creation of, and consciousness 195 spirit concept, Stiegler on 72
and digital images 45, 60–4 ‘spiritual automaton’ concept
and digital post-cinematic images 31 cinema as 56
as digital simulation 100–1 definition 56
and dreams 176 Deleuze 52
and grammatisation 69 Steinbock, Anthony, on Husserl 53
malleability of 155–7 stereoscopic images 133, 151–2
and metaphor 82 in art movements 152
Index 247
Stern, Daniel train, as technological event 11

on synaesthesia 49–50 ‘train effect’
on vitality forms 114 founding myth of cinema 9–10, 116
Stiegler, Bernard 35, 202 and ‘train-thinking’ 31
grammatisation concept 15fn7, 68, 177, ‘train-thinking’
204–5, 211–12, 213 and ‘train-effect’ 31
on spirit concept 72 see also ‘digi-thinking’
Technics and Time series 67, 212 Tsivian, Yuri 28
on tertiary retention 69 Turvey, Malcolm 182
stop-motion animation, Wolfman 127
subjectivity universe
projection 172 as digital entity 82
and proprioception 135 holographic theory of 196
suture concept 38, 167–72 utopia, and heterotopia 204
Avatar 160
instability of 171 Vattimo, Gianni 200, 203–4, 205, 222
as interface 169, 171–2 on aesthetic theory 210
meaning 167 weak thought 221
purpose 167–8 on will-to-art 209
Žižek on 167–8 virtual embodiment, study 156
Swinton, Tilda 85 virtual reality
synaesthesia projection to fourth dimension 155–6
Epstein on 181–2, 182 and the ‘train effect’ 11
and perception 182, 183 virtuality, analogue media 42–3, 97–8
Stern on 49–50 see also digital virtual reality
see also kinetic synaesthesia vitality forms
definition 114
Talalay, Rachel, Ghost In The Machine 94 Stern on 114
Talbot, Michael 196
Tarkovsky, Andrei, The Mirror 102 Wachowski, Lana & Lilly, The Matrix 29,
Taussig, Michael 173 92, 93
techné concept, Heidegger 35, 61 digital images 123
technologies Warhol, Andy
and aesthetic dualism 121–2 Debby Harry image 26
enablement frame and limiting front cover of Amiga World 27
structure 36 Wenders, Wim
post-evolution appreciation of 47 on 3D and dance 137
and reality 35 Pina: Dance, Dance Otherwise We Are
technology, language as 211 Lost 136
tertiary retention, Stiegler on 69 3D projection 139
third synthesis of time 54, 55, 58–9, 105 dancers 140–1
Enter The Void 106–7 ‘The Great Leap Forward’ 136
and time-image 59 Whissel, Kristin 14, 113fn1, 145fn23
Thorne, Kip, The Science of Interstellar 23-5 Whitehead, Alfred N. 135
time Williamson, James, The Big Swallow 10
as divine space, in ancient Greece 32 Wood, Aylish 14, 110
Kant on 33 on digital contours 87
time-image 20, 32, 34, 46 Software, Animation and the Moving
Deleuze 33, 42, 48, 55, 55–6, 58, 64, 73, 101 Image 87
Enter The Void 94 World Building Media Lab 170
ethical 211
ethics of 101–2 Zemeckis, Robert, Contact 126, 145
films 207 Žižek, Slavoj, on suture 167–8, 171, 182
and original regime of images 206–7 zoopraxiscope 118
and the third synthesis 59

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The Digital Image and Reality

The Digital Image and Reality

Amsterdam University Press

Cover design: Kok Korpershoek, Amsterdam

isbn 978 94 6298 713 5

© D. Strutt / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2019

1. Cinema’s Foundational Frissons 9

2. The Affective Synthesis of Reality by Digital Images 41

3. ‘A Digital Frontier to Reshape the Human Condition’: Virtual

5. Reality Sutures, Simulation, and Digital Realism 159

6. A Digital Nihilism: Ethical Reflections 199

Keywords: Post-Cinema, Futurism, Cinema of Attractions, Deleuze,

The Arrival of the Digital Image at the Station

A Futurist Cinema of Attractions

Of course, any digital frisson can easily be dismissed as part of a commodity

effects which together, at a cultural level, form a new grammatisation of

with a small f, simply meaning a cinema which, as Braidotti notes, revels

We have control over the narrative here. We want a different outcome.

streamliners, and set designers – white to a man – who have engineered

While pure Futurism requires perhaps a level of abstraction and avant-

There is a profound anti-phenomenalism, anti-rationalism, and post-

the Modernist avant-garde, but which ‘crystallizes’ with digital technology.

9 The conception of a dialectical aesthetics as described in the aesthetic theory of Theodor

making distinctions between a classic Hollywood cinema as essentially

What is Post about Post-Cinema?

Steven Shaviro develops a strong sense of a post-cinema in his 2010 book

[…] production, editing, distribution, sampling, and remixing of au-

While many of these aspects of the cultural and political economy of a

both quantitative and qualitative differences between analogue and digital

material universe behind and launch into a virtual, theoretical dimen-

In 1985, Andy Warhol somewhat surprisingly launched the Commodore

post-structural discourses of crises of faith in objective truth.13 If cinema was

existential crises and a breakdown of meaningful connection. Intoxicating

a popular mainstream cinema as in opposition to an esoteric avant-garde

From Cine-thinking to Digi-thinking

I ascertain a fundamental ontological difference that the digital shift in

by the new digital arrangement of images, image processes, and image

20 Cine-thinking is actually elaborated from Deleuze’s concept of a ‘camera-consciousness’

The ´regime´ of the movement image bespeaks a process of regulation

itself from a passive-reflective to an active-determinative status and becomes

Technology and Reality

In the next chapter, I expand my understanding of some basic concepts of

culturally and psychologically specific parameters. This insight has been

Do we move into a post-human, object-orientated form of vision through

Keywords: Digital Pharmakon, Plasticity, Cinema 3, Spiritual Automaton,

In my approach to the digital, post-cinematic image, I roughly follow the

‘crystal-image’ as a hall of mirrors). However, within a digital media paradigm,

A Question of Cause and Responsibility

Here we confront a new kind of ontological perplexity – how to place or

However, despite, or perhaps because of, this insecure ontological status

Digital images, despite continuing to use codes of realism which serve to

‘situated’, stating that, while the development of digital technology may

Film as f ilm is indeed profoundly marked by digital culture, but the

Pisters thereby sees evidence of database logics, networks, and re-mixability

Here, the cinematic apparatus is a very humanist endeavour, merely reflect-

It is here that Tarkovsky’s wish comes true: that ´the cinematographer

At the turn of the nineteenth century, we anticipated cinematic technology’s

Cinema and Affection

images beyond semiotic and psychoanalytic notions of representation and

Gestalt which are processed through affect systems as a form of corporeal

Deleuze finds himself compelled to bracket Bergson’s embodied con-

Hansen critiques Deleuze´s attempt to fix affection and make it concrete,

Passive Synthesis and the Spiritual Automaton

1. Cinema’s Foundational Frissons 9

2. The Affective Synthesis of Reality by Digital Images 41

5. Reality Sutures, Simulation, and Digital Realism 159

6. A Digital Nihilism: Ethical Reflections 199