Future Sense:
Screen Metaphors in the Digital Age
Peter Dallow
One thinks that one is tracing the outline of the thing’s nature over and over again, and one is merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations.1
The space we commonly call a screen is a space afforded by the virtual force of images. The emerging ubiquity of new kinds of screens and forms of imagery calls for a review of the aesthetics of the screen and the cultural status of “framed sights”, and in turn to reconsidering our mediated relation to our world/s. The reconfiguration of the spatial and temporal framings and horizons of cinematic media, their perceptual and structural qualities, the way they engage us affectively, intellectually, and socially, and their corresponding ‘sense-ratios’ (to use Marshall McLuhan’s term), which arise with each major shift in media, calls for an aesthetic re-appraisal, especially of the changing role the screen is given.
Status consciousness
The status of the screen, as with all culturally constructed visual systems, has always been up for grabs. From it’s inception, concepts of the cinematic screen were pulled between realist and expressive tendencies, at times simultaneously, as the ‘perceptual realism’, narrative fantasies, Expressionist- influenced animated manipulations and inner dreamlike associations competed for attention to their cause. These ranged from the m odernist a vant garde filmic explorations of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s Un Chien Andalou and Dziga Vertov’s The Man With A Movie Camera, to the poetic permutations of Jean Cocteau’s Le Sang d’un Poete, through the post- World War II experimental dance films of Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon and of the underground cinema of Stan Brackage’s Dog Star Man.
The relatively newer screen medium of television spawned the mutant v ideo a rt installations of Nam June Paik’s TV Garden, and Bill Viola’s visual meditations and emotional confrontations, like The Reflecting Pool, laying down time-based dimensions of the contemporary visual arts in darkened art gallery alcoves. There was also the socially engaged alternate imagery emerging from community, regional, and indigenous “voices”. These had emerged with the earliest experiments with cinematic and audio-visual technologies, and were sustained by the resistive trickle of aesthetic and social challenges to dominant media modes and methods, even as mainstream media threw up new and compelling technological challenges with their seductive simulations of global ‘liveness’ that conflated the seeming immediacy with its relative instantaneity of portraying mass rallies and sports events, wars and terrorism.
Now, seemingly every image is available to everyone, just about anywhere, at any time, on almost any electronic device. Or, at least, this is the triumphalist rhetoric of the converged media landscape, where public and private worlds appear to collapse amidst the spontaneous outpourings of friends and media professionals. These endless documentations of everyday life are thrown together in an immense screen phantasmagoria, a melting pot of images and text, video and game graphics in an interactive media multiverse. As Bolter and Gromala observed, new digital technologies do not represent a single medium, but have enabled a globally dispersed network of related media forms.2 While it may be geographically and economically uneven in distribution, for those technologically and socially enabled, the screen is now firmly embedded in everyday life. Every networked i-device, laptop, or workstation has reciprocally become a media transmitter, a “projector” of images, as well as a receiver.
The ubiquity of screens, the extensibility of audiovisual digital media, and the commonplace multi-literacies that follow in their wake mean that, as Paul Virilio observed, not only are the boundaries between things disappearing, but the separation between subject and world are more tenuous than ever.3 The “instantaneous ubiquity” of the media ecology we now inhabit, where phone cameras can stream live to the internet, where Google maps reveal the planet to us on ceaselessly circulating screens with endless repetitions of bizarre and banal life moments trapped in mediaspace, seems to resist rather than enhance understanding. In a sense, space is abolished, time oscillates between instantaneity and an endless loop, and meaning is refused. The gap between seeing and knowing has collapsed into the immediacy of the screen’s spacetime. We remain more confused about the dimensions of our actual world, and the virtuality of our ‘image worlds’, to use Susan Sontag’s term. The gravitational pull of the screen is perfectly paradoxical. Media screens have become, as Siegfried Zielinski argues, virtual spaces for ‘constructed attempts to connect what is separated’ between us and our worlds.4
The media multiverse does not merely extend our vision, but, as Walter Ong observed, transforms our consciousness, re-orients our understanding of who we are, where we are, and what is going on. 5 This has always been part of the paradoxical logic of screen media visualization and virtualization, which Virilio says emerges when the images come to dominate the things they represent, where time seems to prevail over space, and where virtuality dominates actuality.6 This turns the very concept of reality on its head. The sheer impossibility of screen imagery, its real virtuality, rather than the (former) reality it represents, fascinates us.
Bolter and Gromala argue that we do not look through the screen experience to a world beyond, but, especially with the digitally driven screen, we instead look at the surface of the screen itself.7 Although the notion of the transparency of the screen remains as elusive as it is popular today, despite a century or more of becoming acquainted with its artificial condition, the translucent and reflective qualities of the screen seem even less understood than ever before.
Jonathan Crary provides some insight into why we lack a sense of detachment from the experience of screen imagery. He argues that we do not separate the experience of moving images from the flow of movement through the whole lived world, from the ongoing ‘ceaseless transformation of perceptual information into purposeful action’.8 This effectively annuls the notion of seeing “images” of the world. Movement directs attention, and hence the flow and direction of energy within the nervous system, in such a way that we do not psychically distinguish between ‘image’ and ‘reality’. And yet images, and the screen in particular, with its illusory rendering of movement, offer a translucent space, where they exist like reflections on a lake, Gaston Bachelard says, that awaken our imaginations.9
Screen images, like other visual categories, are not purely optical but are in fact formed at or by the conjunction of imagination and reason, even as they work in opposition to each other. The visual is pervaded by the conceptual. The taken- for- granted plane of the screen is where these tensions most commonly play out and cancel each other out. The epistemic system of the audiovisual regime of the modern era has been fractured along new consumption and reception vectors, giving rise to a new wave of moral panics about the reach, dispersal and force of screen imagery.
What is Cinema?
In the context of the new media ecologies, and given the now even greater prevalence of the cinematic mode within that media multiverse, it seems timely to return to Andre Bazin’s extended question— What is cinema? Is it the rectangular field framed by four sides? Is it the moving images projected in a dark cinema theater? Does it include the television screen, the computer and large flat screens, or the little mobile ones? Is cinema that which is shown in the frame, or is it what exists outside the frame? Is it a space of reason and rhetoric, or the horizon line of our wildest imaginings? Is the pull that cinematic representation continues to hold most explicable in perceptual, affective, textual, intertextual, or extratextual terms? Is cinema’s strongest “sway” best understood in psychological, social or cultural terms?
Cinema, as a cultural category, or set of specific filmic instances when subjected to the interminable task of critical analysis, reveals a myriad of problematics, according to Dudley Andrew. It cannot readily be abstracted from its social totality, the ‘present of history’, as Frederic Jameson termed it.10 What is proposed here is a more modest project of reviewing the status of the screen itself, and some of the ways it is produced as a cultural space.
“Screening” can mean showing, but it can also mean obscuring— to screen from view. Cinema, paradoxically, can show the unspeakable, and fascinate with unforgettable images, but the screen presents itself as ‘veiled’. It screens overt view social taboos, and cultural prejudices, subconscious truths, and even represses its own symbolic role. As much as the screen appears to present, or represent, the screen also screens from view the workings of desire, and the ideological problematics of its vantage point.
Metaphors of the screen
It can be said that the screen, in all its pluralities, and its Siamese twin, the frame, operate in a metaphoric way to discursively mediate our relations to external and inner worlds. For understanding this mind space that cinema occupies, we need metaphors that relate to our everyday reasoning.11 Further, we need to consider what the metaphoric or conceptual models that the visual framing of the screen represent. The dominant metaphors of the screen, the ways it frames and is framed by social discourses illuminated by its mediality, are useful in considering the status of the screen— past, present, future. The intellectual limitations of this method are, as Leah Ceccarelli argues, that the ‘vehicle’ for metaphors not only commonly serve as frames which focus the ‘tenor’ of a metaphor, evoking the associated meanings, but, in an interesting doubling, metaphors themselves serve as ‘terministic screens’ that filter our perception by selecting only part of reality.12 In doing so, metaphors also deflect other aspects.
All visual representation, as Barbara Stafford establishes so clearly, works by analogy.13 The cinematic screen, in its ensemble of various formats, utilizes its metaphoric framing qualities to contribute to its potential for cognitive understandings. But again, as with all metaphors, they may operate in several forms simultaneously, and in part mask other aesthetic and conceptual qualities at work. Framing, in the broadest sense, is a key determinant of the workings of any discursive field, none the least the modally and structurally complex world of moving image media. The viewing experience of cinema is physically as well as conceptually guided by its framing practices, perhaps as much as it is by its looking practices.
Our metaphoric understanding of the analogical processes of screen images is functionally bound up with the screen as a representational system, and constructed through the cultural conventions which envelope it. Understanding how the screen mediates provides an entry point to a discussion of what cinema may be, currently and in the future. José Van Dijck suggests that, although movies are the product of much cultural work in production, the screen, provides a set of techno-cultural metaphors in which to imagine the psychological and physiological process of consciousness and memory.14 The conceptual frames thrown over the space of the screen operate not only materially, delimiting the screened image by its spatial framing, but more profoundly their en-framing serves to delimit what is shown and not shown. In doing this, the screen is revealed as a screen, which is to say it reveals how we approach and avoid understanding our selves and our world.
From visuality to virtuality
What have been some of the critical perceptions of the media screen which metaphorize the scalable set of geometric boundaries of the screened image? It is the “concrete abstractions” which derive from classic and later film theory I want to address here. Dudley Andrew, in his Concepts in Film Theory, observes that in classical film theory two metaphors of the screen have vied for supremacy for much of the twentieth century.15 These derive from conflicting realist and expressionist views of cinema’s ideal role.
André Bazin and other social realists promoted the notion of the screen as a window onto the world. The screen as window metaphor carries with it the sense of there being an endless view of the world “in there”, just beyond the framed fragment or “shard” of reality presented to us. The screen --and its double, the camera-- is able to open the spectator’s eyes to the world, and in so doing motivates changing the ills of that world. The countervailing view was that of Sergei Eisenstein, Rudolf Arnheim, and other constructivist and formalist theorists who believed the screen functioned like a (gold) frame around an artwork whose boundaries shaped the images that appeared within it. This view represents the screen as a two dimensional visual plane available for expressive purposes. Whether seen as surface volume or spatial depth, or s urrealistically resisted by the slicing open of an eyeball, the expressionistic screen could reveal another world through an extreme close-up.
In these metaphoric views, the window showed iconic and indexical images of/from the real world, and the frame presented a set of formally constructed iconic and symbolic images. Meaning was assumed to follow likewise, as transparent and truthful, or shown as self-consciously and creatively constructed. Like Jean Mitry, Andrew understood that the cinema was able to function simultaneously as both frame and window.
This dualistic model of the screen was shifted dramatically by the introduction of psychoanalytic theories that contained, according to Andrew, a new critical emphasis upon the role of the unconscious and the ‘fact and force of desire’.16 Film theory became concerned with more than the analysis of individual films. Based upon the work of Sigmund Freud, and under the influence of Christian Metz and others, the critical discourse of film theory shifted, by the impact of psychoanalytic thinking, to another “plane”. Based not only on the cinematic system, but also on the workings of the human psyche, modern film theory helped to discover and identify the ‘charged values scripted into movies’.17 From this critical trajectory, the screen had come to be seen as a mirror. Not only could the viewer be shown aspects of the phenomenal world, in all the filmmakers’ constructed aesthetic glory, but they found reflecting back at them their own (unconscious) image, their own desires and longings. The displacement of critical interpretation from visuality to virtuality had begun.
Film theory continued to be influened by the wider development of ‘critical theory’ based in Marxist thinking, to ultimately reveal a more abstract, ‘structuralist’ plane, where the architectonics of story and plot could be unraveled to reveal not only a film’s formal structural attributes, but also the mythological and ideological operations at work within them. The viewer had become ‘exposed’ to a subliminal ideological perspective, as well as an intentioned political point of view.
The later post-structuralist, Postmodern approaches problematiz ed the whole ‘data set’ of the cinema, embedded as it was within the metanarratives of modernization and progress. Like quantum mechanics and pop art, it opened itself up to the ‘black holes’ of cinematic excess and spectacle and the histrionics of the melodramatic imagination. The geometry of the screen revealed the mise-en-abyme of frames within frames, multiple and embedded narratives, garish popular cultural repetitions and quotations, and of parallel universes at work. The virtual space of the screen, as Akira Mizuta Lippit observes, “sutures and severs inside from out, here from there”.18 It can open up like a mouth to show us to be part of something prolonged indefinitely into a universe.
Freeze frame
But even as the theorists debated these newer conceptions of cinematic screen culture, the primacy of the cultural place of the cinema was being overtaken by attempts to better understand the newer mass medium of television. The cinema took on the standing of an older art form. The smaller “tube” of the televisual zone, like the radar screen of war time, took electronic flight to scan the world for material which it could “beam” back almost instantaneously via the new satellite communications systems in “near space”. O lder spatial and aesthetic preoccupations and creative pretensions fell away as the world opened up into a global “village”, as Marshall McLuhan popularly announced in the hipster inflected language of the cultural environment of those changing times. The media paradigm shift that television represented, fitted neatly into this swinging era, and the whole complex of art and media and culture, opened up to a new range of interpretations around communications ‘media’ and popular culture more widely.
The somewhat more culturally detached environment of the cinema, with its meditative aura as the lights dimmed and the feature flickered, exploded with the Atomic Age. The electronic image system of television skipped flirtatiously from program to program. It “flowed”, as Raymond Williams observed, seamlessly, like an electronic river. The “dayparting” of network schedules, moving from news to soaps, music, sports, educational and cooking shows, attempted to match the days of the lives of their viewers. The constant stream of glowing flowing images on the box in the corner was scarcely troubled by commercial interruptions or the viewer’s habit of switching from channel to channel. Cinemas closed as nations were invaded, leaders assassinated, and rock, pop and soul pervaded the new screen. The mesmerizing glow of the phosphorescent glass screen spread virus-like through homes, into bedrooms and bars. The status of the screen was in a state of seige. The logic of the pseudo-event became embedded in political and corporate cultures, and the older, less mobile theoretical paradigms receded deep into the humanities curriculum.19 The movie star died, under mysterious circumstances, and the all-media celebrity was born.
Then the techno-cultural environment began to shift further away from the older analogue world of the silver halide shadowed screen, and even the electron zapped glass tube, into the newer computing- enabled online digital multi-mediated platforms. Media began to converge in this multi-modal realm. The ways in which images, sound effects, and graphics could be produced and reproduced digitally --using computational techniques as well as the older optical, mechanical and electronic methods—questioned the discreteness not only of media, but of their inner channels or semiotic modes as well. Despite the terminological association with windows, the screen quickly became an interface. Not that “old” media, or their logics, were lost altogether. Like opera and orchestral music, theatre and pop concerts, the multiverse weaves nostalgia right into the fetishization of the new.
Avisual Screen Logics
Rather than looking into or at the screen, its reflection, or its monstrous mouths, we began to engage with the ‘deep flatness’ the new screens, or, as Lippit suggests, to scroll or “slide” across its flatness with a “mouse” or finger, thereby shifting our attention in and out of the depth of its hyperlinked digitized information space. The new relation to the dimensions of screen opened up a ‘phantasmatic geography of the subject’ that ‘stretches across the metaphysical surface of the screen’.20 The new screens can be read as metaphysical spaces because the liquid crystal surface establishes an impossible order of deep space. As with the models of the screen before it, the LCD screen attempts to transcend the geography of the “real” world by providing a space where everything “ appears ” in the same place.21 This new kind of depth effect gives a different sense of the screen to film’s apparent interiority, or the televisual flow of images. The new screen modalities have moved beyond visuality to the designed world of ”avisuality” and, as Lev Manovich has ably demonstrated, fallen under the alien sway of database logic, already dormant within the older visual media.22 Avisuality may be the effect of total visibility, Lippit argues.23 After all, depth always was as much of an abstraction as the height and width of the screen.
C inema in turn has been infected by the vectoral pandemic of digital elasticity and designed avisuality that computing technologies permit. The image of a scene can be frozen even as a character continues to move in free motion, becoming temporally detached from the frame of the background scene, no longer bounded by the older lens-based filmic integrities of space, as in The Matrix. The temporal-spatial shifts of these complex composite shots, with their synthetic camera movements defy a singular notion of the cinematic frame . The elasticity of sophisticated digital visual effects prompt ‘a general sense of dislocation of the temporal-spatial dimensions of cinema itself’, Yvonne Spielman argues, with its illusions of three dimensional space and its narrative continuities attempting the closure of problems of/in time and space.24 The matrix alluded to by The Matrix, and employed by digital visual effects in general for morphing realities in a gridded, pixellated digital space, represents a new kind of cognitive literacy. It creates a designed cinematic setting that appears to be a “endless dataspace” , and in turn becomes a metaphor for the elusiveness of the curved space and black holes of Quantum Mechanics and Multiverse Theory.25
Screen Spacetime
As the computational basis of digital media and networking systems have progressed, media has diverged into new extensible, networkable and socially programmable forms. This has facilitated the present media multiverse, with its scalability creating a diversity of static and moving screens, from tiny hand-helds to stadium sized matrices.
The chunks of visual information dispersed on the proliferating ensemble of screens, especially the smaller i-device ones, focus the viewer’s attention on visual elements that would be lost on the larger cinema screens and within the busy formats of television. The depth and detail of cinematic spectacle are subsumed in the pixellated color, contrast, and visual rhythms of the smaller screens. It is a point borne out by David Lynch’s observations on the ‘Future of Cinema’ about how films are changing as they go online and become mobile, while sound has, more than ever, become the “glue” of the digital media artifact, focusing the eye.26
The surface of these newer high definition hybrid pixel- based flat screen technologies function as a doorway to the deeper databased information network architectures and participatory spaces in cyberspace. They operate much as Vannevar Bush’s mnemonic Memex promised. This ‘mediatized synaethesia’ offers the illusion of an externalized entry to memory, a portal to the everpresent past, as present.27 The extensive properties of the screen’s virtual spacetime, as Manuel DeLanda terms it, literally allows space to function through time.28 The virtual, as Rodowick suggests, ‘is always overrunning the actual’ in this virtual screen spacetime, where events lost to the (virtual) past are projected into the ‘present perceptual image’, and the ‘irreversible succession of passing presents’ disappear into the virtual time of memory.29
These new media, paradoxically, are still mostly based in projecting an image in the present, from the past, that no longer exists, is no longer actual or visible. But there is also the potential for screen interactivity with options yet to be configured, with images still being formed or foreshadowed, through the informational portal. In this view we see the screen projecting itself as a ‘futurespace’, a portal to possible future events and interactions, real or simulated, more truly “initializing” the virtuality of the screen.
The networked screen also offers an optimally engineered searchable social framework for digital videos to be spread virally, exponentially contributing to the knowledge “trees” forged in the emerging immense multiverse ecology. A new notion of movement has become one of the critical axes of new media. The mobility of new screens, and the changeability and portability of all forms of interactive digital media “content” are as potentially fluid in form as they are shifting in time and place—the move their site/location, recurring in different sites at different times as they are asynchronously updated, revised, added to, copied, sampled, forwarded, incorporated and responded to. Digital media cannot be viewed or assessed as static, completed media objects in the way that the older, more singular media could be viewed, collected, or captured in a relatively consistent form .
The critical ground has shifted metaphorically again. The concept of the screen has come to be based more on a prismatic metaphor, where visual materials are not merely remediated but refracted as “mental projections” in multiple and varying ways.
So while we can speak of the ‘reality effect’ as a way of explaining our inclinations towards visual representations on the screen in its external and internal dimensions, we can also speak of the hyperreal “screen effect” as an analogue of the physical space we call screen. I call this “the existential life of the screen,” as it exists in all the multiple ‘extensities’ and qualities’ and complex ways media screens are perceived and worked with. The characteristic manner of occupying that spacetime, with its ‘cascade of broken symmetries’, as Manuel DeLanda terms them, define its relation to the realm of the actual.30
Metaphors as Meta-communication
We inhabit an unstable media environment, a ‘world of screens and a screen world based upon the geology of cinema’.31 More clearly than ever, ‘a co-production of mind, technology and culture’ coalesce around media.32 The emergence of the screen spacetime is indicative of the genesis of spatial structure more generally. It is a powerful metaphor for our existential strivings to define ourselves as human beings, and to understand ourselves as not merely being part of nature.
Screen metaphors operate meta-communicatively in that they help explain the over arching conceptual codification of what is framed within and without the screen, as well as our attitudes towards this activity. The screen is where the real unreality of culture becomes manifest. It is where the virtual makes visible not just what Walter Benjamin called the ‘optical unconscious’, but the social unconscious. It is where the world is distanced from sense. It is on the screen where images, fragmented from reality, interrupt the world, and existence becomes exposed to itself.33 It is the symbolic space where, as Jean-Luc Nancy puts it more simply, sense is revealed to itself, and where we are able to sense ourselves.34
In the same way that form is integral to consciousness, the screen is able to signify the sensing of the self. It is where our existential sense of distance from the world is marked out. The world we approach through the screen is, as Michael Taussig observes, the world of copies, the world of mimesis, where the world is distanced from its copy --and where intelligibility, however sublimated by narrative causality and spectacle, tries to transcend itself, to become lost in and seduced by this otherness.35 Consciousness is implicitly reflective and reflexive. However much we are captivated and attempt to lead towards some object by our goal- oriented attention, we are never the less confronted by our own attention, with its attendant fears and suspicions.
The mimesis on the screen is arguably more reflexive of the mind than it is reflective of the world. It reveals more about the aesthetic choices and the mental predisposition and sensibility captured in the moment of production than it does actually reproduce nature, “the real”. And yet, as Derrida proposed, human perception and conception is an artifact of nature in that the source of the mimesis is not to be found in art as imitation, but as a “flexion” of natures relation to itself. In this sense, aesthetic activity produces like nature, according to Rodowick.36
The crucial point here is that the enduring charm of the cinema lies in its facility to fascinate us with our mimetic technologies, sustained by the narrative webs constructed through the diegetic depth effect. The continuities and discontinuities within the imaginative and prosaic presentations on screen provide the basis for us to confront the disruptions and challenges of life. Consciousness constitutes itself as a resolution of these. We see how things are, or should be, and in so doing sense our “self”. The screen, as with other enduring cultural forms, provides the conditions for sense to be present to itself. The metaphoric status of the screen helps mask the fundamental conceptual break from life that the screen itself represents. Our largely unconscious adoption of screen metaphors aids in smoothing the way for understanding, and yet there seems to be a more basic problematic revealed about the relations between perception, mind, thought, and sense at issue in this.
In some ways, the distinctions between brain and mind parallel those between screen and medium. Of course, studies of visual perception have long been troubled by an apparent logic of mind that implies the existence of an internalized virtual frame or screen inside the mind, as though the mind was inhabited by a miniaturized spectator, reporting to us the outcomes of the transmissions of our nervous system. At least, that was the logical extrapolation of earlier perceptual theories of images.37
The paradox here is that seeing has been our most enduring metaphor for thinking, certainly since the Enlightenment. But what if, as James Elkins ponders, it is seeing and reflecting which are fundamental to our mental operations, and thinking itself is only a metaphor, a figure of speech, to help explain the other embodied ways we experience being in the world.38 This is the reversal of the primacy of oral and literary modes, over the visual and aural modes— including the cinematic.
Watch this space— Not a conclusion
While images captivate, amuse, or horrify us, while there remains the impulse to say something that can only be said through the “language” of cinema to express a feeling and a thought, to explore big, abstract things that can’t be conveyed any other way, and while there remains an audience seeking the screen ‘effect’, cinema has a future. Cinema continues to appear as a figural cultural space afforded by the virtual force of images, energized by its gravitational pull for images, ideas, memories, dreams, and reflections. It is enlivened by the new creative configurations of old human dreams. Is the luminous screen now our pre-eminent cultural space?
1. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Prentice Hall, 1973. p. 114.
2. Bolter, Jay and Gromola, Diane. Windows and Mirrors: Interaction Design, Digital Art, and the Myth of Transparency. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.
3. Virilio, Paul. The Vision Machine. Bloomington: Indiana Uni. Press, 1994.
4. Zielinski, Siegfried. Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.
5. Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London & New York: Routledge, 1982.
6. Virilio, Paul. The Vision Machine. Bloomington: Indiana Uni. Press, 1994.
7. Bolter, Jay and Gromola, Diane. Windows and Mirrors: Interaction Design, Digital Art, and the Myth of Transparency. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.
8. Crary, Jonathan. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. p. 349.
9. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos. Boston: Beacon Press, 1971.
10. Jameson, Fredric. Signatures of the Visible. New York: Routledge, 1992.
11. Tikka, Pia. “(Interactive)Cinema As A Model Of Mind – Could Cinema Supply A Toolbox For The Externalization Of Mind?”, in Dialogeja Taiteissa Ja Mediassa/ Dialogues In Arts And Media, Working Papers Publication Series, F 25, University Of Art And Design Helsinki, Helsinki, 2003. p. 36.
12. Ceccarelli, Leah. “Neither Confusing Cacophony Nor Culinary Complements: A Case Study of Mixed Metaphors for Genomic Science”, Written Communication, Vol. 21 No. 1, January 2004 92-105.
13. Stafford, Barbara. Visual Analogy: Consciousness as the Art of Connecting. Cambridge. MA: MIT Press, 2001.
14. Van Dijck, José 2008 ‘Future Memories: The Construction of Cinematic Hindsight’, Theory, Culture & Society. Vol. 25(3): 71–87.
15. Andrew, Dudley. Concepts in Film Theory. Oxford: Oxford Uni. Press, 1984.
16. Ibid. p. 134.
17. Ibid. p. 139.
18. Lippit, Akira Mizuta. Atomic Light (Shadow Optics). Minneapolis: Uni. Minnesota Press, 2005. p. 73.
19. Boorstin, Daniel. The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. NY: Vintage, 1961.
20. Lippit, Akira Mizuta. Atomic Light (Shadow Optics). Minneapolis: Uni. Minnesota Press, 2005. p. 73.
21. Ibid. p. 74.
22. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002.
23. Lippit, Akira Mizuta. Atomic Light (Shadow Optics). Minneapolis: Uni. Minnesota Press, 2005. p. 74.
24. Spielmann, Yvonne. “Elastic Cinema: Technological Imagery in Contemporary Science Fiction Films”, Convergence 2003; Vol. 9 (3), p. 57.
25. Ibid. p. 71.
26. Lynch, David. Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, And Creativity. New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2007. p. 155.
27. Van Dijck, José. “From shoebox to performative agent: the computer as personal memory machine”, New Media & Society. Vol. 7(3): 311–332.
28. DeLanda, Manuel. Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. London: Continuum, 2002.
29. Rodowick, D. N . The Virtual Life of Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni. Press, 2007. p. 78-79
30. DeLanda, Manuel. Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. London: Continuum, 2002.
31. Lippit, Akira Mizuta. Atomic Light (Shadow Optics). Minneapolis: Uni. Minnesota Press, 2005. p. 79.
32. Van Dijck, José. “Future Memories: The Construction of Cinematic Hindsight”, Theory, Culture & Society. Vol. 25(3): 72.
33. Walter Benjamin “optical unconsciousness”
34. Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Sense of the World. Trans. J.S. Librett. Minneapolis: Uni. Minnesota Press, 1997.
35. Taussig, Michael. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses . New York & London: Routledge, 1993.
36. Rodowick, D. N . Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy After the New Media. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2001.
37. Damasio, R. Antonio. “How the brain creates the mind”, in Scientific American, Vol. 12/ 1, 2002.
38. Elkins, James. The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing. San Diego: Harvest Books, 1996.