ABSTRACT
Throughout its history cinema has taken viewers to all kinds of places, from romantic sunsets or the farthest-flung reaches of a galaxy, to abstract patches of colour spiralling to music. We are used to thinking about how technologies are implicated in generating the many imaginative and intellectual possibilities of cinema as they organize time and space, as flickering patterns of light and dark, while changing colours and shapes establish the place inhabited by characters. While these ideas are important, they take us directly into the story-world of the film, displacing the location of our first encounter – the interface of the screen. The work of Digital Encounters is to step back from story-worlds and the alternative spaces of cinema, and instead pay attention to the screen as an interface where viewers come into contact with technologies of image construction. It seems important to look more fully at this interface, as by thinking about how technologies are used to manipulate the different elements making up an image’s placement and transformation we can begin to see how the organization of these elements is central to processes of viewing, playing a part in enabling and orchestrating engagements and identifications. While much writing has pointed to different aesthetic practices in cinema, paying attention to how its technologies are used in the expressivities of the medium, I place an alternative emphasis here, one that reveals the ways in which technologies shape what and how we see, not only in creative practices, but also in the world more generally.
