Material Media-Making in the Digital Age by Daniel Binns

Author:Daniel Binns
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Intellect Ltd.

The bot @555uhz does not care for privileged instants, preferring to trade solely in the currency of any-instant-whatevers. Indeed, the code itself does not ‘privilege’ the content of one frame over the content of another … What does the code privilege? Whatever the coder tells it to, and in the case of @555uhz, that is to draw whatever the next frame from the film is, and post it to a Twitter feed twice an hour. Occasionally – or more often than not? – the posted frame will be perfectly composed, precisely lit; balanced. But due to the bot’s calculation of every frame as being equal in value to all others, it will also happily post a blurred frame from the middle of a camera movement, or right at the moment a fighter’s jets kick in and it becomes a gunmetal grey streak in the middle of the frame. There are also those wonderful moments in regular speech where the perfectly timed freeze-frame reveals a grotesquely angled lip and the stark whites of one eye.

Treating each frame as equal does not serve the suspension of disbelief, nor does a series of sequential stills make for that thrilling an experience. The bot, though, has revealed once more to us what the moving image is – it remains a series of images that don’t really move at all. Stilled images are made all the more potent by the cinematic device of the freeze-frame; the twisted, contorted body mid-fall at the end of Peter Weir’s Gallipoli (1981), for example, or the majority of Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962). But the frames of @555uhz do not care for any affective quality. They simply exist, one after the other. They are the true fragments of the moving image, dematerialized by the bot, that then invites us to rematerialize it through our scrolling.

M. Beatrice Fazi writes that digital technology, ‘with its binary elaboration of reality through quantifiable mechanical operations and quantitative inputs and outputs, attends to the real by discretizing it’ (Fazi 2018: 4). This is opposed to an aesthetic engagement with the world, which, ‘being predicated upon perceptual relations and sensations, would seem to require a continuous, and thus analogue, association with the world’ (Fazi 2018: 4). This bot, I argue, bridges this opposition, by inviting a tactile and, thus, aesthetic, engagement with the digital fragments of the moving image. These kinds of engagements are all too rare in the ‘seamless’ world of the digital, and this is perhaps why these technologies, formats and materials seem so opaque to us.

*****

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