Technical Repetition and Digital Art, or Why the 'Digital' in Digital Cinema is not the 'Digital' in Digital Technics

Mark B. N. Hansen

Film-makers have long worked with technical supports other than film. Certainly since the advent of video, arguably earlier in experiments involving filmless cameras or flicker effects, and, in a different sense, for the long history preceding its actual invention, cinema has operated beyond film. While this extra-filmic operation of cinema can be retrospectively viewed as multiply and differentially anticipating the moment we are now in – the moment of digital convergence of media and of the advent of a properly post-filmic cinematic situation – what is at stake today is, in some important sense, radically discontinuous with such anticipations. The reason, to put it quite simply, is that cinema's contemporary extra-filmic support – the digital computer – comprises a materialization that radically challenges cinema's identity. It is this challenge – which is simultaneously the promise of what has, for the most part uncritically, been called digital art, that I propose to explore here.

The Cinematic Metaphor and the Temporal Object

Let me begin at what for us, in this context, is the beginning: Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media (1999). More specifically, let me begin by quoting Manovich's assessment of the centrality of cinematic grammar in the present and the foreseeable future of new media practices:

The fact that computer games and virtual worlds continue to encode, step by step, the grammar of a kino-eye in software and in hardware is not an accident, but rather is consistent with the overall trajectory of the computerization of culture since the 1940s – the automation of all cultural operations. This automation gradually moves from basic to more complex operations: from image processing and spell checking to software-generated characters, 3-D worlds, and Web sites. A side effect of this automation is that once particular cultural codes are implemented in low-level software and hardware, they are no longer seen as choices but as unquestionable defaults. [...] Now we are witnessing the next stage of this process [after the encoding of linear perspective] – the translation of a cinematic grammar of points of view into software and hardware. As Hollywood cinematography is translated into algorithms and computer chips, its conventions become the default method of interacting with any data subjected to spatialization. [...] Element by element, cinema is being poured into a computer: first, one-point linear perspective; next, the mobile camera and rectangular window; next cinematography and editing conventions; and, of course, digital personas based on acting conventions borrowed from cinema, to be followed by make-up, set design, and the narrative structures themselves. Rather than being merely one cultural language among others, cinema is now becoming the cultural interface, a toolbox for all cultural communication, overtaking the printed world. Cinema, the major cultural form of the twentieth century, has found new life as the toolbox of the computer user. Cinematic means of perception, of connecting space and time, of representing human memory, thinking, and emotion have become a way of work and a way of life for millions in the computer age. Cinema's aesthetic strategies have become basic organizational principles of computer software. The window into a fictional world of a cinematic narrative has become a window into a datascape. In short, what was cinema is now the human-computer interface.

Manovich's characterization of cinema as the cultural dominant of the computer age circa 2000 quite literally set the stage for what, more than a decade hence, we can now recognize – and perhaps partition off – as a first wave of theorization of digital media. Whether the topic in question is the cinematic aesthetics of video game cutscenes or point of view in relation to purely synthetized images, the formula proposed by Manovich – cinematic surface + digital core – seemed, at the time of its appearance, not simply fruitful for characterizing new media objects of various sorts, but in some sense simply 'necessary' to our incipient efforts to make sense of the techno-cultural revolution presented by digital technics. Cinematic conventions, in sum, furnished a familiar cultural interface for us to understand, and to deploy many of the new facilities ushered in by the massive cultural dissemination of digital computing.

With well more than a decade standing between us and Manovich's prescient diagnosis, it is time again to ask after the elective affinity between cinema and new media. Does the cinematic metaphor continue to do service as a means of transitioning to a new, digitally-supported lifeworld? Or does it now rather stand in the way of such a transition, forming a kind of cultural hangover that prevents us from grasping just what is so promising – and perhaps also so disturbing – about the digital? I propose to approach this question by exploring the divergence between 'digital' cinema and 'digital' technics that, as I see it, has progressively widened over the previous decade. What is ultimately at stake in this divergence, as I shall argue below, is time, or more exactly the correlation of time, media and experience: for whereas cinematic media inscribes time as past duration in order to re-present it to present consciousness, digital technics operates on the 'time of the now' and makes time available for experience beyond the reference frame of consciousness. At stake in the divergence, then, is nothing short of an opportunity to open a new collective relationship to time, one in which consciousness relinquishes its longstanding privilege over the experience of time, and comes to be replaced by enworlded body-minds acting in concert with digital artifactualizations of time.

The divergence in question here – between digital cinema and digital technics – has emerged as a result of our increased familiarity with, and deployment of, digital technologies in our everyday lives. What we have learned about digital technics over the last decade cuts against the grain of the cinematic metaphor. We have learned that the digital – or digital technics – is not a time-based medium like film and video, and perhaps is not a medium at all. And, indeed, debate continues to rage about what exactly the digital is if not a medium, with one plausible account arguing that it is a new platform where all prior media converge, a kind of 'super-medium' that (like the alphabet before it) is in fact not one (there being no medium in the singular). Perhaps more radically still, the digital has been designated the infrastructure of our global culture, forming a 'technological unconscious', to invoke the felicitous term proposed by Nigel Thrift, that remains asynchronous with, and heterogeneous to, the rhythms of human experience (both conscious and unconscious) and of the media that exteriorize them.

Notwithstanding its double break with twentieth century's time-based media (double in the sense that it is neither time-based nor yet another medium), digital technics is all about time, which is to say, all about new modes of measurement and artifactualization of time in our world today. And because the human is necessarily involved in any invocation of the world as 'our' world, digital technics is furthermore all about our changed human relation to the artifactualization of time. To summarize the conclusion of my current work on twenty-first century media, digital technics impacts the experience of time in a way that is, in large part, outside the frame of media: the digital inscription of time today occurs at an infrastructural level and at temporal scales that are beneath the threshold of consciousness and perception, and also of the various media – cinema being the most significant – that extend their retentional and memorial agency.

Accordingly, digital technics poses a challenge for phenomenological and neo-phenomenological approaches to media experience, which emphasize the surrogacy media lends time-consciousness. Specifically, digital technics no longer supports a framing of the temporal flux (which is also to say of time-consciousness, self-affection and subjectivity) as a Husserlian 'temporal object', a surrogate object that 'objectifies' the flux of time through the brain. As such, digital technics challenges efforts, like that of philosopher Bernard Stiegler, to update Husserl's model of time-consciousness for our technological age. No more than the melody it is introduced to update, the cinematic temporal object can only mirror 'lived experience' and can only objectify the 'contents of consciousness' ('the lived'). As a temporal object premised on its homology with the time frame of consciousness, it remains by definition powerless to capture temporal fluxes that occur at more fine-grained level, which is to say, precisely those fluxes introduced by the digital computer and deployed in the best of today's digital media artworks. In light of this situation (to which I return in some detail below), the burden of sustaining the experience of temporal flux falls onto the spectator, or more precisely, onto the spectator's (passive) receptivity or responsiveness to heterogeneous digital artifactualizations of time. This is, as I shall emphasize below, necessarily to mark a shift in the 'economy' of time: no longer first and foremost an 'intimate' domain of human phenomenological experience, time now attains the cosmological dimension attributed to it by Paul Ricoeur (following Aristotle) and, in an altogether different register, by Alfred N. Whitehead; from this point on, the human experience of time can always only be a co-temporalization involving both embodied mind 'and' physical (technical) artifactualization, one over which the former no longer holds mastery and in which the 'bounds of experience' no longer coincide with the 'total temporal phenomenon'. Otherwise put, the human experience of time in the digital era always involves some element or dimension which escapes that experience, something ulterior or heterogeneous to experience itself.

The 'Digital' Automatism of Post-cinematic Media

To pinpoint exactly what is at stake with respect to time in digital technics, and more generally what is at stake in widening the divergence between digital cinema and digital technics, let us turn to a recent argument that seeks to open up to the digital future without throwing the cinematic baby out with the bathwater. It hardly comes as a surprise that self-proclaimed cinefils D. N. Rodowick frames his exploration of 'digital cinema' in relation to the 'cinematic metaphor' introduced by Manovich:

[...] today most so-called new media are inevitably imagined from a cinematic metaphor. Undoubtedly, the art of cinema is renewing and refashioning itself through the incorporation of digital processes, while a certain idea of cinema informs and insinuates itself into the development of interactive entertainments. Here, the arts of analogy are not displaced by digital technologies; rather an idea of cinema persists or subsists within the new media as their predominant cultural and aesthetic model for engaging the vision and imagination of viewers.

Rodowick goes so far as to acknowledge the blinders this 'cinemato-centrism' places on the development of new media aesthetics:

But this also means that it is difficult to envision what kinds of aesthetic experiences computational processes will innovate once they have unleashed themselves from the cinematic metaphor and begin to explore their autonomous creative powers, if indeed they eventually do so.

Notwithstanding the unequivocal force of this cautionary note, I would submit that today, and indeed already by 2007 or 2006, the singular aesthetic potentials of digital technics are (were) well on the way toward being tapped, not in the sense of being exhausted, but rather of being opened to a highly divergent and innovative set of deployments.

What we learn from Rodowick's ambivalence is precisely that the digital in digital cinema is not the same as the digital in digital technics. While this was perhaps not readily apparent in 1999, at the time of Manovich's writing, it simply cannot be overlooked today. Indeed, to my mind, this reality explains Rodowick's penchant to recognize the need for a break with cinema as the avenue for a responsible approach to digital media at the very moment that he asserts the persistence, indeed the deep cultural entrenchment, of the cinematic metaphor. This ambivalent penchant literally shapes Rodowick's book, in the sense that it informs the marked cleft dividing its first two chapters (focusing on film and duration) from its final chapter on digital media.

Nowhere, however, do the stakes of Rodowick's oscillation become more significant than with regard to the question of time. We find him arguing at different moments that digital processes are and are not images, that the digital is and is not a medium, and perhaps most consequentially, that the digital is and is not capable of provoking the kind of ontological insecurity that emerged in the wake of film's advent. For, as we shall see, Rodowick's fixation on the diminished indexicality of the digital 'image' leads him to pursue a false question – whether the digital can inscribe duration; and this in turn causes him to forget his own call for an alternate approach to digital technics, foreclosing any possibility that digital technics might open a different relationship to time than the inscription of past duration in the process.

Rodowick's argument involves at least two stages. His first, and enabling, move is to isolate the temporal dimension of the technical processing of digital information, a move that becomes possible in the wake of his argument – correct in my opinion – that the primary 'automatism' of digital technics is transcoding or the manipulation of quantized information. Focusing exclusively on the technical processes at work in transcoding, Rodowick finds a cyclical temporality wholly decoupled from any experienced (or potentially experienced) spatial-durational object:

[D]igital capture should be understood in contrast to analogical transcription as a process of calculation in which time is measured as the conversion of light into code ('Quantizing' is the technical term). [...] [T]ranscoding introduces a temporal discontinuity into the recording process, experienced by most of us as shutter lag or other computational indicators of wait time: miniature clocks and spinning rainbow wheels. These signs are indexes of another sort; they designate the operation of computing cycles, applying algorithms while converting space and time into code.

And, in a concise statement that perfectly sums up his claim about computational time and indexicality: 'time itself is transformed as a purely quantitative function defined by calculation. Analog media transcribe time as duration; digital capture or synthesis consumes time as processing cycles.'