PCMS: Roderick Coover on the Digital Panorama

This Friday begins the year's Philadelphia Cinema and Media Seminar.

Roderick Coover, Temple University
"The Digital Panorama and the Cinematic Image: Contiguity, Continuity, and Aesthetics of the Electronic Image"

Respondent: Bob Rehak, Swarthmore College

Temple University Center City Campus (TUCC)
Room 420

Friday, September 26, 2008
5:30-7:00pm

Among the changes brought about by computing technology are the ways in which digital tools enable the integration of temporal and spatial imagery on a common surface and, the ways they both minimize and maximize a fundamental dialectic of cinema, that of continuity and montage. For example, one thing that is new about new media is the potential to maintain an illusion of temporal continuity and spatial contiguity, while, at the same time, allowing also for montage, collage, layering, compositing, and other forms of media-mixing. Once dialectically opposed methods of panoramic art and cinema, such as those of continuity and montage, of close-up and long-shot, and of exposition and narrative, now co-exist. This paper takes up these issues through a discussion of contiguity, continuity, rhetoric, and aesthetics, wth examples drawn from works by the Labyrinth Project, Jeffrey Shaw, John Cayley and Roderick Coover.

For more on the seminar, visit the PCMS website.