The Matter of Media
Throughout the recent wave of books and articles on the current state of film in the digital era one finds more or less the same conclusion: film, or cinema, in its previous incarnation is no longer. The technological shifts that have been taking place si
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The Matter of Media
Throughout the recent wave of books and articles on the current state of film in the digital era one finds more or less the same conclusion: film, or cinema, in its previous incarnation is no longer. The technological shifts that have been taking place since the 1990s have dislodged the ontological foundations of the medium as well as its spaces of reception.1 As several writers have demonstrated, we now live in an era of digital ‘convergence’, where the moving image manifests in numerous forms and contexts, sliding across a multitude of platforms and implicating the spectator/consumer in new ways.2 What was previously associated with the cinematic experience has exploded into a moving image environment that resists any unified definition and infiltrates almost every aspect of our lives, from small handheld devices to gigantic public screens. Accordingly, current scholarship sets out to navigate this heterogeneous terrain and to make sense of its multifaceted and dispersed nature, revisiting and revising established theories whilst developing new ones. For André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion, ‘cinema is going through a major identity crisis’,3 whilst for Janine Marchessault and Susan Lord the scope is wider—‘digital technologies are transforming the semiotic fabric of contemporary visual cultures’, they state, appropriating Gene Youngblood’s concept of ‘expanded cinema’ to account for the new landscape of ‘immersive, interactive, and interconnected forms of culture’.4 Clearly, it is not just cinema that is questioned in the digital era, but the entire realm of human experience: artistic expression, forms of communication and modes of being. © The Author(s) 2020 K. Knowles, Experimental Film and Photochemical Practices, Experimental Film and Artists’ Moving Image, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44309-2_1
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Disentangling one from the other is a challenging task, and their interrelatedness demands theoretical approaches capable of teasing out the complexities. Until quite recently, discussions of technological transition were dominated by the problematic concept of ‘new media’, a term that, like a stone skimming across the surface of water, gained momentum with each successive scholarly text dedicated to it. In Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s introduction to the revised 2016 edition of New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, aptly titled ‘Somebody Said New Media’, several key issues are put into play. ‘To talk of new media in the early twenty-first century’, observes Chun, ‘seems odd: exhausted and exhausting.’5 Not least because, tied to corporate interests, the increasing rate of technological replacement means that nothing is ever new for very long. ‘To call something new’, Chun continues, ‘is to guarantee that it will one day be old; it is to place it within a cycle of obsolescence, in which it will inevitably disappoint and be replaced by something else that promises, once again, the new’.6 This intricate relationship between the old and the new is central to understan
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