ABSTRACT
This introductory chapter theorises composite spaces, where the user is simultaneously inhabiting digital and material space, in the context of the rise of ubiquitous digital media. It illustrates how contemporary cinema imagines, projects, and represents both the affordances and threats associated with the increasingly composite spaces that users inhabit in their daily lives with a focus on issues of subjectivity, agency, and embodiment. This approach is grounded in an understanding of cinematic remediation not only of digital media technology itself but also of the spatial relationships that digital media engender. The chapter argues that the films analysed in the book collectively demonstrate the characteristics required to negotiate composite layered spaces successfully, such as the ability to distribute one's subjectivity between several perceptual channels and to multiply oneself across networked spaces while maintaining a sense of bodily and subjective integrity, as well as the deleterious consequences when composite spaces are not navigated successfully. The introductory chapter surveys how cinema represented cyberspace in the past with a focus on films of the late 1990s, such as The Matrix (The Wachowskis, 1999) and eXistenZ (Cronenberg, 1999), before explaining why these models require updating in the context of contemporary digital media.
