Video Vortex Reader II: moving images beyond YouTube

32 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubetheory & aesthetics33as a window towards us and, even if this is not the case as yet, around us. Through theinteraction with the device the frame of each single image is technologically overwritten, asour interaction simulates or replaces the movement of our head, as we seek to look aroundthe corner. Now, a single fingertip enables us to look through the doorway, to gain access, ina sense, to that which Rosemary was prevented from seeing.As new applications and devices are developed, frames are multiplying. Cinema evolves froma flat space with only one direction. Familiar formats, such as the cinematic moving image,are just one element within new databases and digital object – that which is shaped, formed,gestaltet. Rather than being destroyed, older formats will need to coexist, in a kind of modular,or set-like arrangement, with newer formats. In some ways, the merging of media hasbeen observable for a long time. For example, linear narratives increasingly open themselvesto spatiality. The limits of the frame are not respected anymore. Rather, open structures arefavoured. Television series such as Lost expand the narrative universe in multiple directions.Lost does not seek to answer only one question, it consists of an ever-expanding universeof questions. Rather than distracting the audience, the confusion within this universe keepsthe viewer in front of the screen. Through continuous and intensive mediatization, variousforms increasingly influence each other. The lines between distinct media forms are blurring:movies are based on video games and games on movies; the question of sequence becomesirrelevant when cultural forms become modular.According to Peter Greenaway, ‘There is no such thing as a frame in the natural world – it isa man-made, man-created device’, and, he continues, ‘If the frame is a man-made device,then just as it has been created, so it can be un-created. The parallelogram can go. 21 Ascrude as it is, the system of one-point perspective became the ruling ideology, as I have describedin relation to painting and cinematic space. In this essay, I have been concerned withthe way that new digital forms multiply frames or windows, and blur the distinction betweenpresentation and reality. Technical images draw attention to the act of framing itself. Theseframes or windows and doors might be best characterized as openings. These openings canact like windows or doors, but can also be frames with closed borders. These borders blockthe ability of the image to extend into an imaginary space. Their direction is always towardsthe inside. In this way, the frame’s borders become decorative; an operation on a surface, atextured map, which is also an image.the possibilities inherent within these devices remain mere glimpses, already these devicesare able to detect how they are held, and can arrange the screened information space accordingly.The screen in real space merges with the controller interacting with the gameworld.How to fill the space opened by such devices is still the question faced by their designers,makers or producers. It seems obvious that the device and its location and usage will affectthe forms it screens, plays, presents. Online video presents itself in small chunks. It will dependon the technical capabilities of the network what kind of chunks of information – and amovie is a big chunk of organized information – the device opens to the fingertip. In conclusion,I would like to cite a passage of Vilém Flusser’s work that I believe reflects powerfullyupon this issue:Among other things, an image is a message. It has a sender and it searches for an addressee.This search is a question of its portability. Images are surfaces. How does one transportsurfaces? It all depends on the physical bodies on whose surfaces the images are affixed....Recently, something new has been discovered. Disembodied images, “pure” surfaces, andall the images that have so far been in existence can be translated (transcoded) into imagesof a new kind. In this situation, the addressees no longer need to be transported. These picturesare conveniently reproduced and transmitted to individual addressees wherever theymight be. However, the question of portability is a little more complicated than it has beendescribed here. Photographs and films are transitional phenomena somewhere betweenframed canvases and disembodied images. There is, however, one unambiguous tendency:images will become progressively more portable and addressees will become even moreimmobile. 22A final phenomenon that deserves mention is the increasing transportability of the movingimage. New devices such as the iPhone, iPod, and in particular the iPad constitute mobilephysical containers or bodies for the moving image, whereas the cinematic screen has alwaysbeen a geographically fixed location. And, whereas the analogue 35mm film of a single movieis about 30 kilometres long and weighs several kilograms, the mobile digital device can notonly store several movies, it can access an enormous cinematic library. The iPad directs theviewer towards a multiplicity of meaning beyond the simple play function. Although many of21. Peter Greenaway, Cinema Militans Lecture 2003, 28/09/2003, http://petergreenaway.co.uk/essay3.htm.22. Vilém Flusser, Images in the New Media, in Andreas Ströhl (ed.) Writings, Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 2004, p. 70.