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
3 - ‘A Digital Frontier to Reshape the Human Condition’: Virtual Border Spaces and Affective Embodiment in Tron and Enter the Void
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
By looking at the films Tron, TRON LEGACY, and ENTER THE VOID, this chapter identifies the challenges to metaphysical consciousness that are posed by the digital. I ask how these films engage aesthetically and imaginatively with digital systems and processes and identify two approaches to the ontological problematic of digital virtuality: one in which an idea of the feeling body is restored to the impersonal and immaterial digital dimension, and another in which the body is discarded or abjected. It is asked what these digital images, reflecting on the conditions of their own creation, express about the way we can position ourselves within a digitally connected world, and conclude that we experience an intuitive ontological breakdown between ideas of ‘data’ and of ‘matter’ within a digital liminality.
Keywords: Emergence, Signs of Art, Post-Human, Liminality, Tron, Enter the Void
The grid, a digital frontier. I tried to picture clusters of information as they moved through the computer. What do they look like? Ships? Motorcycles? Were the circuits like freeways? I kept dreaming of a world I thought I’d never see, and then, one day, I got in.
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.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Digital Image and RealityAffect, Metaphysics and Post-Cinema, pp. 79 - 112Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019