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
4 - Dynamic Digital Spaces, Bodies, and Forces
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 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 first ‘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. In doing this, 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 awarfeness 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 psychologist 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).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Digital Image and RealityAffect, Metaphysics and Post-Cinema, pp. 113 - 158Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019