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the cinematographic ideology. The spectator remains aware of the screen—if not,
then they might run from the theater when a dinosaur enters frame or a gun is shot.
Less so are they conscious of the projector and the beam emanating from it—if dust
or smoke obfuscates the beam, or if the film shakes in the projector gate or even
burns up, then this drawing attention to the projector would be a failure that 'takes
us out' of the experience of the movie. Though vaguely conscious of the editing, the
spectator is almost completely unconscious of the filmstock and sound recording
choices—if these things are noticed at all it is a failure of production (such as in
cheap B-movies where there are jarring changes between film stocks with different
grains or scratchy soundtracks). And the same can be said of the scripting and
acting—once we notice the acting of the drama or the scripting of the drama we are
no longer
in the drama
where we are supposed to be. Artists of the same decade sub-
verted this standard perception through different techniques seeking in the elements
repressed within the cinematographic apparatus a fresh material for expression—a
material essential to cinema capable of an avant-garde
Acinema
. Anthony McCall
created films that emphasized the projector beam. Stan Brakhage made films that
emphasized the interaction of the projector light and the material of the film
strip itself. Flickerfilm makers like Tony Conrad and Paul Sharits created metrical
montage films that emphasized the cutting and rejoining of film strips and their
mechanical movement through the projector light. Filmmakers like Jonas Mekus,
Kenneth Anger, and Jack Smith made avant-garde films that turned upside-down the
emphasized and repressed areas of production, scripting, and performance. Avant-
garde film sought to rupture the ideology inherent in the cinematographic apparatus,
to create a fresh image capable of inspiring new thoughts, emotions, and politics.
This movement seeking a phenomenology of cinematic apparatus arose in the
television era. With the newly wired world, a media philosophy that could encap-
sulate the connections and circuits of contemporary technology into a conceptual
whole was attractive and maybe necessary for survival. McLuhan's analogy, a
decade earlier, in
Understanding Media
of sound waves becoming visible just as
a plane approaches the sound barrier seems prescient—like much of his topic—of
the networked age: “The sudden visibility of sound just as sound ends is an apt
instance of that great pattern of being that reveals new and opposite forms just as
the earlier forms reach their peak performance. Mechanization was never so vividly
fragmented or sequential as in the birth of the movies, the moment that translated us
beyond mechanism into the world of growth and organic interrelation. The movie,
by sheer speeding up the mechanical, carried us from the world of sequence and
connections into the world of creative configuration and structure” (McLuhan and
Gordon
2003
).
We can transpose this analogy to another age and transition—to the networked
electric image which began with live video and has been accelerated in AR.
Augmented Reality, in all its permutations of live manipulated media, is the first
truly network-age screen media—not just movies broadcast over electric wires, or
recorded on to digital media, or enhanced through computer-calculated effects, but a
medium which takes live media manipulation as its essence and material. With this
acceleration, we can look back to excavate the material shift from the filmic image,
to the electric one.
