The Digital Image and Reality

The Digital Image and Reality

Affect, Metaphysics and Post-Cinema

The philosophy of technology suggests that rather than technologies being simply useful tools, they also have an often relatively unnoticed or subconscious impact upon the way we live our lives - our interactions with the world, and the way we think. Seen in this way, all media technologies might affect our metaphysical sense of time, space and force through their relative ability to represent these concepts. In The Digital Image and Reality, digital visual technologies are examined through their radically different capacities for representation and simulation and the challenges that they pose to our understanding of the world. I analyse how digital images are well suited to graphical imagination and speculation about the nature of material reality. What is suggested throughout the book is that digital visual technologies offer a new sensual image of the world, subtly impacting not simply our subjective perception or consciousness of reality, but perhaps objective actuality itself.
  • Cover
  • Contents
  • Acknowledgements
  • 1. Cinema’s Foundational Frissons
    • The Arrival of the Digital Image at the Station
    • A Futurist Cinema of Attractions
    • What is Post about Post-Cinema?
    • But is it Art?
    • From Cine-thinking to Digi-thinking
    • Technology and Reality
  • 2. The Affective Synthesis of Reality by Digital Images
    • A Great Evolution
    • A Question of Cause and Responsibility
    • Cinema and Affection
    • Passive Synthesis and the Spiritual Automaton
    • Do We Need a New ‘Digital’ Image Type – A ‘Cinema 3’?
    • The Digital Revealing of Reality
    • Interstellar’s Ontological Revealing
    • The Digital Pharmakon
    • Plasticity and Politics
  • 3. ‘A Digital Frontier to Reshape the Human Condition’: Virtual Border Spaces and Affective Embodiment in Tron and Enter the Void
    • Overcoming Spatial Realism
    • Digital Emergence
    • Tron: Legacy
    • Enter the Void
    • Troubling the Threshold
    • The Digital Border Zone and Cinematic Ethics
    • Signs of Art at the Limits of Humanity
    • Conclusion
  • 4. Dynamic Digital Spaces, Bodies, and Forces
    • ‘Moving’ Pictures: Scientific vs. Aesthetic Truths
    • Formal Dynamics of the Digital Image
    • Movement, Space, and Kinaesthesis
    • The Body in Movement: Digital Dance
    • The Kinetic Dynamism of the Epic Digital Battle Scene
    • The Digital Neo-Baroque
    • Rethinking Cinema through Digital 3D
    • Conclusion
  • 5. Reality Sutures, Simulation, and Digital Realism
    • The Malleable Mediated Mind
    • Rethinking Suture
    • Resemblance and the Mimetic Faculty
    • Metaphor and Embodied Simulation
    • Kinetic Synaesthesia and the Photographic Image
    • Virtuality, Plasticity, and Play
    • Avatar and Digital Naturalism
    • Source Code and the Quantum Mind
  • 6. A Digital Nihilism: Ethical Reflections
    • Autonomous Art and the Disappearance of Utopia
    • ‘A Business, a Pornography, a Hitlerism’
    • The Everyday Art Object of Industrial Design
    • Bernard Stiegler’s Ethical Prognosis
    • ‘A Chaotic Scribble’
    • The Active Subject in Digitality
    • Digital Nihilism and Ontological Plasticity
    • Conclusion
  • Bibliography
  • Index

Subjects

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