The Digital Visual


Being understood as a "World Picture"
"This objectifying of whatever is, is accomplished in a setting before, a representing, that aims at bringing each particular being before it in such a way that many who calculate can be sure, and that means be certain, of that being. We first arrive at science as research when and only when truth has been transformed into the certainly of representation."
The funamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture.
The word "picture" (Bild) now means the structured image (Gebild) that is the creature of man's producing which represents and sets before. In such producing, man contends for the position in which he can be that particular being who gives the measure and draws up the guidelines for everything that is."(135)
Martin Heidegger, "The Age of the World Picture,"

 

Lev Manovich, "What is a Digital Cinema?"
Provocative definitions of cinema:
1: Cinema is defined not a form of narrative or spectatorship, but as "live action films. These films consist largely of unmodified photographic recordings of real events that took place in real physical space. …they relied on lens-based recordings of reality."(173)
2: Debunking: "Cinema emerged out of the same impulse that engendered naturalism, court stenography, and wax museums. Cinema is the art of the index; it is an attempt to make art out of a footprint."
3: The art of recorded motion: Central to 19th century invention of cinema (evident from names like "kinetoscope" and "moving picture") was "the art of motion, the art that finally succeeded in creating a convincing illusion of dynamic reality."(175)
[Etymology: cinema from French "cinematographe" from Greek kinema, 'to move' + graphein, 'to write']

19th Century moving pictures:
Hand-coloured print: Experiments at Dover, or Master Charley's Magic Lantern Thomas Rowlandson, London, 1806
Comic print, Schöne Schattenspiel an der Wand / Schöne Laterna magica Artist unknown, German, early 19th century
Magic lantern Augustin Lapierre, Paris, 1860s
Book illustration: Little Paul's Christmas Publisher unknown, London, c. 1860
Toy panorama theatre reel: An Excursion Round the World Maker unknown, British, 1890s
The Edison 'Home' Kinetoscope (Projector) 1912
The First Movie Camera: Edison's Kinetoscope

What's left out when cameras are mechanized and electrified: the manual arts and the body
"A mechanical eye became coupled with a mechanical heart; photography met the motor. As a result, cinema-a very particular regime of the visible-was born. Irregularity, nonuniformity, the accident, and other traces of the human body, which previously had inevitably accompanied moving image exhibitions, were replaced by the uniformity of machine vision."(176)
The traditional subordination of animation to cinema:
The earlier traits of 19th century moving image technologies "was delegated to cinema's bastard relative, its supplement, its shadow: animation."
The dominant realist ideology of cinema:
"Cinema's public image stressed the aura of reality 'captured' on film, thus implying that cinema was about photographing what existed before the camera, rather than about 'creating the 'never-was' of special effects.'"(178)
What motivates the "realist" ideology that guides the development of cinema from the 19th century to the present?
1) to re-present "real" that was present before the camera
2) to do this in the interest of representing what is lost or inaccessible: Example: Griffith's The Birth of the Nation
3) to represent what it would look and feel like…. to be in a battle and see others killed… to fall from a high building...to meet a Martian.
Question: what is the contradiction built into the development of realist cinema?
Once one has gotten over the priority given the real before the camera, there can be new principles for the digital cinema:
1) New sources are available for final footage: from live action to 3-D computer animation
2) Once live action footage is digitalized, it loses its privileged relationship to film making: now images that came through a photographic lens, a paint program, a 3-D graphic program are all pixels.
3) All become raw material for compositing, animating, and morphing.
E.g. of the leaf in the beginning of Forest Gump. This produces a "new kind of realism, that can be described as 'something which is intended to look exactly as if it could have happened, although it really could not."(179)
4) Now editing and special effects, production and post-production merge. Crucial to manipulation of individual images is the "cut and paste"
5) digital film = live-action material + painting + image processing + compositing + 2D computer animation + 3D computer animation
Now digital cinema turns out to be "a particular case of animation that uses live-action footage as one of its many elements."(180) Thus the irony of a certain historical trajectory is isolated: "The history of the moving image thus makes a full circle. Born from animation, cinema pushed animation to its boundary, only to become one particular case of animation in the end."(180)
Question: How do relatively new media forms--like the music video or the video game in CD-ROM (like Myst) or Apple's Quicktime--draw upon the expressive possibilities foreclosed by dominant realist cinema?
Critical question: What effect does the proliferation of special effects have upon contemporary cinema? In what ways has it hurt or improved films? What are your favorite special effects in films?
Manovich, Lev. "What is a Digital Cinema?" The Digital Dialectic. Cambridge, MAss.: MIT Press, 2000. 172-192.

 

The Matrix DVD
"Bullet time": narrated by special effects editor
1) "Everything begins with 3D simulation" Like old story board, this allows the film maker to visualize the scene.
2) There is the building of the set (part real, part illusion) within which the actors are to perform
3) An infra-structure of cameras is built where firing can be controlled, in various ways, by computer.
4) The shot itself, with trick suspension of the actors so as to enable impossible motion (for example, flight; impossibly high jumps, etc.)
5) Finally, with digital editing, there can be extensive manipulation of the shot, including interpellation of images never captured, but filled in by computer.
What is the goal of this arduous technical and human apparatus? What is the effect achieved?

 

Peter Weibel, "the World as Interface: Toward the Construction of Context-Controlled Event-Worlds"
"The primacy of the eye, anticipated in the famous lithograph The Eye, as a Strange Balloon, Drives towards the Infinite by Odilon Redon, as the dominant sense organ of the twentieth century, is the consequence of a technical revolution that put an enormous apparatus to the service of vision."(339)
Eight steps in 150 years of technological developments of machine aided image generation and image transfer:
1) from photography
2) to machine scanning of images
3) to film (from space to time)
4) to cathode ray tube (electronic images possible)
5) to electronic video recording of images
6) to transistors and chips with the digitalization they allow
7) to interactive telecommunications technology based on distinction between sender and message, body and message to a nearly matter-less sign travel through space and time
8) next stage!?: direct communication of images to the brain with neuro chips
Technologies of perception change what the seeing means:
Seeing goes from emphasis upon an object: the painting that "is" the image,
through an escape into other media to become "the visual," a whole new variable range of the visual.
This change intersects with way the body is separated from the message in various technologies of communication (from telegraph to television to the Internet).
Taken together, now the image can be scanned and transported through space: now a two dimensional form (the image) becomes an immaterial temporal nonform, forming the basis of "telematic culture."(340)