Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Cinema’s Foundational Frissons
- 2 The Affective Synthesis of Reality by Digital Images
- 3 ‘A Digital Frontier to Reshape the Human Condition’: Virtual Border Spaces and Affective Embodiment in Tron and Enter the Void
- 4 Dynamic Digital Spaces, Bodies, and Forces
- 5 Reality Sutures, Simulation, and Digital Realism
- 6 A Digital Nihilism: Ethical Reflections
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - The Affective Synthesis of Reality by Digital Images
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Cinema’s Foundational Frissons
- 2 The Affective Synthesis of Reality by Digital Images
- 3 ‘A Digital Frontier to Reshape the Human Condition’: Virtual Border Spaces and Affective Embodiment in Tron and Enter the Void
- 4 Dynamic Digital Spaces, Bodies, and Forces
- 5 Reality Sutures, Simulation, and Digital Realism
- 6 A Digital Nihilism: Ethical Reflections
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Abstract
This chapter expands on the issues and theories previously introduced, categorising them into four broad areas: philosophy of technology; processes of affection and cognition; existing digital image theory; and ethics/aesthetics. It clearly articulates Heidegger and Stiegler's theory of technology and make direct links to contemporary visual culture. The affective turn in image theory is then discussed (largely indebted to the influence of Gilles Deleuze) and explicitly connected to parallel transformations in digital image production and distribution. The chapter finishes by integrating contemporary aesthetic theory with social and ethical issues, to suggest that an advanced digital visual culture has real and tangible benefits for our shared metaphysical awareness of the world.
Keywords: Digital Pharmakon, Plasticity, Cinema 3, Spiritual Automaton, Stiegler, Deleuze
It was no longer a question of knowing where the centre was, the sun or the earth, because the primary question became ´Is there a centre or not at all?´ All the centres, of gravity, equilibrium, force, revolution, in short, of configuration, were collapsing. It was at that point that a restoration of centres undoubtedly occurred, but at the price of a profound change, of a great evolution of the sciences and the arts. (Deleuze, 1989, p. 143)
A Great Evolution
In my approach to the digital, post-cinematic image, I roughly follow the path taken by Gilles Deleuze in his Cinema books, which is to discern how ontological and metaphysical matters of reality, time, and space – ‘all the centres of configuration’ – are expressed and contemplated through the content and structure of cinematic media. While other earlier film theorists such as André Bazin and Jean Epstein also described the intrinsic capacity of film to capture and harness something of the essential nature of reality beyond normal perception, this was often coloured with a kind of quasispiritual belief in the sanctity of film, and, indeed, of reality. Deleuze instead created a kind of quasi-scientific taxonomy of film images, classified in their capacity to represent different forms of thought, without recourse to some ambiguous transcendence but rather to reality as fluid and changeable. 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’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Digital Image and RealityAffect, Metaphysics and Post-Cinema, pp. 41 - 78Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019