Webcams have been discussed throughout this book as producing a complex emerging form of filmmaking that has mostly evolved in continuity with that of the classical cinematographic apparatus. Due to their ownership modes and the fact that webcam filmmaking is created by devices primarily intended for surveillance, it also reflects contemporary manifestations of the Panopticon. Moreover, the networked character of the cinematic apparatus of webcams puts these cameras at the centre of debate about mass information collection and the archival of personal data on a global scale. It is these latter aspects that I intend to analyse in the present chapter. How do webcams archive time according to their digital referentiality in comparison to analogue cinema? And how do these records get stored in archival facilities as data consisting of computer memory, i.e. code?

Referentiality

The analogue medium of film contains not only the temporality discussed in the previous chapter but actually incorporates the referent that is materially present in the celluloid. By comparing the processes of storing time in both analogue and digital filmmaking, I will now demonstrate how webcams may potentially harbour a similarly materialized temporality regardless of their specific platform.

Archiving Time – Index, as Trace and Deixis

In this section, I compare the referentiality of analogue and digital film. Using classical semiotics I will analyse the indexicality of digital materials. In the writings of film theorists such as David Rodowick and Paolo Cherchi Usai, cinema is said to be dead, killed by digital convergence.