Layered encounters: mainstream cinema and the disaggregate digital composite

The digital surface in cinema has, throughout its relatively brief history, been subject to a familiar “iconophobic” tendency, documented by Rosalind Galt (2011), to denigrate surface decoration as “empty spectacle” (p. 2). In early scholarship on computer generated (CG) images in cinema, the digital surface’s alleged seamlessness and “new depthlessness” (Sobchack (1994, p. 123n) and Landon (1992, p.66) respectively, in Pierson, 1999, p.167) frequently became an overdetermined nexus of loss: of material presence, of an indexical relation to the world and lived experience, and of the continuation of older traditions of narrative cinema. Today, digital visual effects sequences in mainstream cinema continue to be framed by film reviewers in negative terms: as variously lacking imagination, realism, narrative depth, and affective power. Digital visual effects and digital media scholarship have done much to reclaim the cultural significance of mainstream digital visual effects sequences and their capacity to speak to a rapidly evolving and increasingly encompassing digital media ecology. Yet the formal heterogeneity of this evolving period of mainstream aesthetic consolidation and experimentation with digital images, surfaces and spaces has yet to be fully acknowledged. This article seeks to contribute to this broader task by focussing on the mainstream cinematic history of the digital composite, and specifically those moments where it displays a particularly self-reflexive character. If the digital composite has traditionally been characterised by its attempt to totally erase signs of its composite nature, across the period of CG images’ proliferation in cinema an occasional figure emerges seeks to do the opposite: a digital composite that formally fragments, foregrounds, and scrutinises the digital surfaces that constitute it. Drawing on scholarship on the computer image, digital media and the post-cinematic, this article will argue that these returns of the self-conscious digital composite speak meaningfully to their historical context

Web-Based Visualization of Very Large Scientific Astronomy Imagery

Visualizing and navigating through large astronomy images from a remote location with current astronomy display tools can be a frustrating experience in terms of speed and ergonomics, especially on mobile devices. In this paper, we present a high performance, versatile and robust client-server system for remote visualization and analysis of extremely large scientific images. Applications of this work include survey image quality control, interactive data query and exploration, citizen science, as well as public outreach. The proposed software is entirely open source and is designed to be generic and applicable to a variety of datasets. It provides access to floating point data at terabyte scales, with the ability to precisely adjust image settings in real-time. The proposed clients are light-weight, platform-independent web applications built on standard HTML5 web technologies and compatible with both touch and mouse-based devices. We put the system to the test and assess the performance of the system and show that a single server can comfortably handle more than a hundred simultaneous users accessing full precision 32 bit astronomy data.Comment: Published in Astronomy & Computing. IIPImage server available from http://iipimage.sourceforge.net . Visiomatic code and demos available from http://www.visiomatic.org