Sequels and SAMs: Re-contextualized Media and Affective Memory

Electronic media allows for the repetition of the audiovisual in new contexts. Bernard Stiegler argues that, as people are exposed to these contexts (television, commercials), consumer-based art threatens the singular, a connection to a particular aesthetic in a particular space. When art is repeated, films remember for the audience. This allows for history to be continually re-written according to dominant media institutions. While there are other ways to combat this grand narrative, I argue that there are memories that, like the singular, are not consumer-based. I refer to these as staple associative memories (SAMs). These are not memories of the audiovisual art but are associated with the social component attached to the viewing experience. Through the repetition of a temporal aesthetic, the narratives are expected, but the other elements or associations can create unexpected affectual memories. SAMs are valuable for increasing participation and for the creation of selfhood, but they are being threatened by the use of the sequel. I analyze Blade Runner 2049 as a representation of a sequel that reuses old scenes in new contexts. Because of the affectual elements of these scenes, the memory of the original viewing experience can be warped, changed, or forgotten. I finish by discussing the future of staple associative memories in the context of online streaming and augmented reality

An Expanded Perceptual Laboratory: Public Art and the Cinematic Techniques of Superimposition, Montage and Apparatus/Dispositif

The use of the moving image in public space extends the techniques of cinema— namely superimposition, montage and apparatus/dispositif—threatening either to dehistoricize and distract or to provide new narrative and associative possibilities via public art. These techniques also serve as helpful tools for analysis drawn from cinema studies that can be applied to examples of the moving image in public space. Historical examples include the multi-screen experiments of Charles and Ray Eames; and contemporary public projections such as Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Abraham Lincoln: War Veteran Projection, Robert Lepage’s The Image Mill, my own project entitled Workers That Live in the Mirror, and Daily tous les jours’ McLarena at Montreal’s Quartier des Spectacles. These works illustrate the ways that public projections extend the effect of superimposition through the rehistoricization of space, expand the diegetic boundaries of the moving image through spatial montage, and enact new possibilities for the cinematic apparatus and dispositif through scale and interaction for the purposes of challenging historical narratives and scripts of urban behavior. The large-scale moving image in public art extends the perceptual laboratory of cinema to public space preparing us for more mutable, oneiric and cinematic encounters in and through public art. Note: At the time of writing, Dave Colangelo was affiliated with Ryerson University

Psychopower and Ordinary Madness: Reticulated Dividuals in Cognitive Capitalism

Despite the seemingly neutral vantage of using nature for widely-distributed computational purposes, neither post-biological nor post-humanist teleology simply concludes with the real "end of nature" as entailed in the loss of the specific ontological status embedded in the identifier "natural." As evinced by the ecological crises of the Anthropocene—of which the 2019 Brazil Amazon rainforest fires are only the most recent—our epoch has transfixed the “natural order" and imposed entropic artificial integration, producing living species that become “anoetic,” made to serve as automated exosomatic residues, or digital flecks. I further develop Gilles Deleuze’s description of control societies to upturn Foucauldian biopower, replacing its spacio-temporal bounds with the exographic excesses in psycho-power; culling and further detailing Bernard Stiegler’s framework of transindividuation and hyper-control, I examine how becoming-subject is predictively facilitated within cognitive capitalism and what Alexander Galloway terms “deep digitality.” Despite the loss of material vestiges qua virtualization—which I seek to trace in an historical review of industrialization to postindustrialization—the drive-based and reticulated "internet of things" facilitates a closed loop from within the brain to the outside environment, such that the aperture of thought is mediated and compressed. The human brain, understood through its material constitution, is susceptible to total datafication’s laminated process of “becoming-mnemotechnical,” and, as neuroplasticity is now a valid description for deep-learning and neural nets, we are privy to the rebirth of the once-discounted metaphor of the “cybernetic brain.” Probing algorithmic governmentality while posing noetic dreaming as both technical and pharmacological, I seek to analyze how spirit is blithely confounded with machine-thinking’s gelatinous cognition, as prosthetic organ-adaptation becomes probabilistically molded, networked, and agentially inflected (rather than simply externalized)

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Computer-Assisted Interactive Documentary and Performance Arts in Illimitable Space

This major component of the research described in this thesis is 3D computer graphics, specifically the realistic physics-based softbody simulation and haptic responsive environments. Minor components include advanced human-computer interaction environments, non-linear documentary storytelling, and theatre performance. The journey of this research has been unusual because it requires a researcher with solid knowledge and background in multiple disciplines; who also has to be creative and sensitive in order to combine the possible areas into a new research direction. [...] It focuses on the advanced computer graphics and emerges from experimental cinematic works and theatrical artistic practices. Some development content and installations are completed to prove and evaluate the described concepts and to be convincing. [...] To summarize, the resulting work involves not only artistic creativity, but solving or combining technological hurdles in motion tracking, pattern recognition, force feedback control, etc., with the available documentary footage on film, video, or images, and text via a variety of devices [....] and programming, and installing all the needed interfaces such that it all works in real-time. Thus, the contribution to the knowledge advancement is in solving these interfacing problems and the real-time aspects of the interaction that have uses in film industry, fashion industry, new age interactive theatre, computer games, and web-based technologies and services for entertainment and education. It also includes building up on this experience to integrate Kinect- and haptic-based interaction, artistic scenery rendering, and other forms of control. This research work connects all the research disciplines, seemingly disjoint fields of research, such as computer graphics, documentary film, interactive media, and theatre performance together.Comment: PhD thesis copy; 272 pages, 83 figures, 6 algorithm

Technē/Technology:Researching Cinema and Media Technologies - Their Development, Use, and Impact

Technē/Technology is the up-to-date critical volume on the theories, philosophies, and debates on technology and their productivity for the fields of film and media studies. Comprehensive as well as innovative, it is not organised around a single thesis - except the assertion that technique is a major concern for film and media scholars, whether this is approached in terms of philosophy, techno-aesthetics, semiotics, apparatus theory, (new) film history, media archaeology, the industry or the sensory / cognitive experiences. Technē/Technology deliberately includes contributions by film and media experts working in very different ways on a wide range of technology-related issues. A major questions to be addressed in this book is how the new philosophies (of technology) created in relation to major technological transformations - such as the new philosophies of (media) technology formulated by Benjamin, Heidegger, McLuhan, Kittler, or Stiegler - could or did contribute in turn to the modification of film theory and some of its key concepts

Technē/Technology:Researching Cinema and Media Technologies - Their Development, Use, and Impact

Technē/Technology is the up-to-date critical volume on the theories, philosophies, and debates on technology and their productivity for the fields of film and media studies. Comprehensive as well as innovative, it is not organised around a single thesis - except the assertion that technique is a major concern for film and media scholars, whether this is approached in terms of philosophy, techno-aesthetics, semiotics, apparatus theory, (new) film history, media archaeology, the industry or the sensory / cognitive experiences. Technē/Technology deliberately includes contributions by film and media experts working in very different ways on a wide range of technology-related issues. A major questions to be addressed in this book is how the new philosophies (of technology) created in relation to major technological transformations - such as the new philosophies of (media) technology formulated by Benjamin, Heidegger, McLuhan, Kittler, or Stiegler - could or did contribute in turn to the modification of film theory and some of its key concepts