The Digital Image and Reality: Affect, Metaphysics and Post-Cinema (Film Culture in Transition) - Hardcover

Inhaltsangabe

I offer an original theory of digital image technology which boldly states that both software and hardware systems, in their complex automatisms, expose or reveal the world to us anew, and in turn change us as human subjects. This is not a suggestion of technological determinism, but rather an idea of digital technologies as an ambivalent and intentionless matrix that have emergent qualities - qualities that reveal themselves to us beyond human control. Beside and beyond the established metaphysics of film stemming from Bazin and Cavell to Deleuze, I move to analyse the specifically digital free play with the essence of things - an inconstancy and instability of matter and time, which, like data, can be warped and folded. Rather than it being processes of perception or memory that alter the way reality appears to us, in the digital image things are actually more than what they seem. Spaces, bodies and objects are revealed as complex multiplicities or inter-dimensional entities which act as portals or are themselves subject to change and transformation. This is revealed to us through a digital neo-baroque aesthetic and the technology that drives it. The book offers an aesthetic redemption of popular and mainstream digital screen media, to suggest that the effects and affects contained even within low genre forms of entertainment, as much as in art and experimental media practices, can be seen to have a cultural value and a ethical effect in their synthesis of affects. The media technologies that surround and suffuse our everyday life profoundly affect our relation to reality. Philosophers since Plato and Aristotle have sought to understand the complex influence of apparently simple tools of expression on our understanding and experience of the world, time, space, materiality and energy. The Digital Image and Reality takes up this crucial philosophical task for our digital era. This rich yet accessible work argues that when new visual technologies arrive to represent and simulate reality, they give rise to nothing less than a radically different sensual image of the world. Through engaging with post-cinematic content and the new digital formats in which it appears, Strutt uncovers and explores how digital image-making is integral to emergent modes of metaphysical reflection - to speculative futurism, optimistic nihilism, and ethical plasticity. Ultimately, he prompts the reader to ask whether the impact of digital image processes might go even beyond our subjective consciousness of reality, towards the synthesis of objective actuality itself.

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