The digital moving image: Revising indexicality and transparency

Abstract

Cinema as the projected filmic image has been the focus of moving image theory for over a century. Television and video have taken a back seat for several reasons; in particular that they are often considered as inferior moving image mediums in some aspects, both conveying a lesser degree of transparency and, more recently in digital form, being devoid of indexicality as theorised by Charles Sanders Pierce. That is, they supposedly possess a weaker connection to the real or, what Jay David Bolter calls, “the authentic”. This paper, via Tom Gunning’s work on digital media and the claim to photographic truth, will explore and problematise these notions with the aim of challenging the longstanding primacy of the cinematic moving image as well as softening the analog/digital divide