All the world’s a stage - literally so, given the ubiquitous presence of webcams recording daily life in cities. This footage, allegedly documentary, recreates cities as cinematic environments as people interact with the multitudes of cameras and screens around them. Paula Albuquerque’s original research and experimental films, presented in this groundbreaking book, expose fictionalising elements in archival webcams and explore video surveillance as an urban condition that influences both perceptions of the past and visions of the future.

Dr Paula Albuquerque is a scholar and an artist who teaches at the University of Amsterdam and the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. She published articles in Necsus Journal, and in the forthcoming book Experimental Glitch, Bloomsbury. She showed films and other art work at, among others, Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam and International Film Festival Rotterdam.

"Something about Albuquerque’s enthusiasm for the cinematic possibilities of the webcam is absolutely infectious. I confess that before reading the book, I had never really considered webcams as anything particularly valuable. ... Albuquerque’s argument, however, is extremely well made, and her writing style made for one of the most readable scholarly pieces I’ve yet read. All in all, Albuquerque has written an excellent piece, and made a believer out of me." - Jonathan T. Pearce, Film Matters 10.2 (2019)

''Both innovative, intuitive, rigorous, and rich in theoretical advancements, The Webcam as an Emerging Cinematic Medium analyzes these different aesthetic forms with its characteristics, rules, and codes."
– Yves Laberge, Séquences, issue 339, 2024

Acknowledgements Introduction Artistic Research The Cinematic as Mode of Existence The Global Media Network The Cinematic Technology Chapter Overview Chapter 1 Video Surveillance versus the Affected Personal Cam 1.1 Internalizing the Camera 1.2 Affects and the Cinematic Potential: Affected Personal Cam 26 1.2.1 The Owner as Embryonic Filmmaker 1.2.2 A Camera of Affects 1.3 Observing the Observer Observing the Observed 1.4 The Affected Body of the Camera 1.5 Privacy and Subjectification Chapter 2 Post-Panopticism and the Attention Economy 2.1 The Apparatus 2.2 The Panopticon 2.3 Post-Panopticism 2.4 Attention Economy 2.4.1 Beyond Cinema and into the Realm of Surveillance 2.4.2 The Relation between the Attention Economy and Post-Panopticism 2.5 The City as Film Set Chapter 3 From Cinematographic to Cinematic Apparatus 3.1 The Classical Cinematographic Apparatus 3.1.1 The Camera 3.1.1.1 Cinematography 3.1.2 Projection: The Projector and the Screen 3.1.3 Spectatorship 3.1.4 Editing 3.1.5 The Mise-en-Scène, Acting and Authorship 3.2 The Cinematic Experience Chapter Cinematic Chronotopes: The Temporality of the Cinematic Mode of Existence of the Webcams 88 4.1 The Cinematic 4.2 From Real Time to Realtime 4.3 Webcam Temporality and Realtime: A Synthesis of Cinematic Time and Network Time 4.3.1 Cinematic Time 4.3.2 Network Time and Realtime 4.4 Realtime-generated Cinematic Chronotopes Chapter Webcams and the Archive 5.1 Referentiality 5.1.1 Archiving Time — Index, as Trace and Deixis 5.1.2 The Indexicality of the Digital 5.2 Materiality 5.2.1 The Computer as Archive: A Matter of Code 5.2.2 Fragile Memory 5.3 Narrative 5.3.1 Code as Logos — Anticipating and Programming Future Flows 5.4 The Fragmented Historicity of the Digital Flux 5.5 The Database Logic of New Media Objects Chapter 6 Appropriating the Cinematic Apparatus 6.1 On Appropriation 6.2 The Significance of the Precarious Aesthetic 6.2.1 Hito Steyerl: the Poor Image 6.2.2 Harun Farocki: The Contamination of Surveillance 6.2.3 Walid Raad: The Atlas Group Archive 6.3 Afterword Conclusion Bibliography List of Images Index of Authours Index of Makers Index of Subjects/Artworks