The Digital Image and Reality: Affect, Metaphysics and Post-Cinema
The Digital Image and Reality: Affect, Metaphysics and Post-Cinema
by Daniel Strutt
Amsterdam University Press, 2019 eISBN: 978-90-485-3865-2
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | TOC
ABOUT THIS BOOK
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.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
[Dan Strutt](https://www.gold.ac.uk/media-communications/staff/strutt-dan/) is a lecturer in the department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he teaches film theory and analysis alongside social, cultural and economic theory. Having worked on research projects with Creativeworks London, CREATe and the AHRC Creative Economy Programme, he also engages in innovative performance production work with contemporary digital audio-visual artists.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 1. CINEMA'S FOUNDATIONAL FRISSONSa. The Arrival of the Digital Image at the Station. b. A Futurist Cinema of Attractionsc. What is Post about Post-Cinema? d. But is it Art?e. From Cine-thinking to Digi-thinkingf. Technology and Reality2. THE AFFECTIVE SYNTHESIS OF REALITY BY DIGITAL SCREEN IMAGESa. A Great Evolutionb. A Question of Cause, and Responsibilityc. Cinema and Affectiond. Passive Synthesis and the Spiritual Automatone. Do We Need a New Digital Image Type - A Cinema 3? f. The Digital Revealing of Realityg. Interstellar's Ontological Revealingh. The Digital Pharmakoni. Plasticity and Politics.3. 'A DIGITAL FRONTIER TO RESHAPE THE HUMAN CONDITION': VIRTUAL BORDER SPACES AND AFFECTIVE EMBODIMENT IN TRON AND ENTER THE VOID.a. Overcoming Spatial Realismb. Digital Emergence. c. Tron: Legacyd. Enter the Voide. Troubling the Thresholdf. Signs of Art at the Limits of Humanityg. Conclusion4. DYNAMIC DIGITAL SPACES, BODIES AND FORCESa. 'Moving' Pictures: Scientific vs. Aesthetic Truthsb. Formal Dynamics of the Digital Imagec. Movement, Space and Kinaesthesisd. The Body in Movement: Digital Dancee. The Kinetic Dynamism of the Epic Digital Battle Scenef. The Digital Neo-Baroque g. Rethinking Cinema through Digital 3Dh. Conclusion5. REALITY SUTURES, SIMULATION AND DIGITAL NATURALISMa. The Malleable Mediated Mindb. Rethinking Suturec. Resemblance and the Mimetic Facultyd. Metaphor and Embodied Simulation e. Kinetic Synaesthesia and the Photographic Imagef. Virtuality, Plasticity and Playg. Avatar and Digital Naturalismh. Source Code and the Quantum Mind6. A DIGITAL NIHILISM: ETHICAL REFLECTIONSa. Autonomous Art and the Disappearance of Utopiab. 'A Business, a Pornography, a Hitlerism'c. The Everyday Art Object of Industrial Design d. Bernard Stiegler's Ethical Prognosise. 'A Chaotic Scribble'f. The Active Subject in Digitalityg. Digital Nihilism and Ontological Plasticity h. Conclusion7. Bibliography8. Index