User:Aitantv/Metahaven (2018) Digital Tarkovsky

Synopsis

Text & Author Cinema of the Interface is a chapter from Digital Tarkovsky (2018), an essay written by artist duo Metahaven who combine graphic design, filmmaking, and textiles to make multi-media installations.

Thesis of the Text Metahaven attempt to interpret and appreciate the time we spend on our devices and screens as a form of cinema. Indeed, interfaces and platforms contain elements of image, sound, motion, interaction, and duration, and are so considered a cinematic experience. They drawer a comparison between Tarkovsky's "flow of time" and the way in which platforms direct narrative arches and cliffhangers, shaping themselves around a user’s needs and attention.

Part 1: Cinema of the Interface

The central question "the question of how to interpret and appreciate the time we spend on our devices and screens as a form of cinema. And perhaps ask another question — why are we doing this? Why must this everyday smartphone ritual be compared to cinema?"
“For all the complaints that we could make against the average digital device for the time that it is stealing from us, we should perhaps instead investigate the kind of experience that we have whilst staring at — and interacting with — these tiny screens and the digital platforms inside and behind them. Since the experience we intend to describe contains the elements of image, sound, motion, interaction, and duration, we are considering it a cinematic experience.”
“Media theorist Charles Soukup contends that “the temporal and spatial dimensions of everyday life are complexly interconnected with digital screens. Time and space are fragmented and displaced as individuals are decreasingly ‘grounded’ or tethered to a kind of physical shared reality.”
“We are engaging with digital devices and screens in a way that approaches, but has not yet reached, the stage of full immersion. In other words, the proto-cinematic narrative form that unites all of these screen experiences is not yet seamless and complete; a digital patchwork that blends in and out of reality and, at the time of writing, ends up totaling every day at the length of a slow Russian movie.”
“One of the most central qualities of Tarkovsky’s films is how they make us feel the flow of time — even if such a flow is more of a human experience than an accurate scientific observation. Put differently, Tarkovsky forces us to experience the fact that things take time.”
“We are daydreaming, speculating, and waiting differently. Messages, push notifications, and social media prompts become a new measure of our time. Our addiction to the mobile device’s platform services then enmeshes us in time intervals that run between our cravings for updates, shorter or longer latency periods when no updates happen, the moments of actual updates, and the velocities of all other events in our lives and environments.”
Media theorist Charles Soukup contends that “the temporal and spatial dimensions of everyday life are complexly interconnected with digital screens."
"Platforms direct narrative arches and cliffhangers, shaping themselves around a user’s needs and attention. All of this is crucially dependent on the user reciprocating. The platform experience becomes increasingly lengthier, while more user data feeds back into the platform.”
“Cinema does not normally resolve the problem of the broken cup by running the footage backwards. Instead, its drama is the unfolding of entropy itself. As in life, irreversibility is the driving force of the narrative. Cinema finds one of its sources of drama in entropy, and a certain amount of realism or life-likeness plays a role here too.”
The thickness of reality increases when measured against the relentless pacing regimes of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Our impression of the viscosity of a Now, when measured against the undeclared cinematic regime of platformbased

pacing, increases, and brings us back to Tarkovsky, a progenitor of slow cinema."

Tarkovsky asserts that “although the assembly of the shots is responsible for the structure of a film, it does not,

as is generally assumed, create its rhythm.” Rhythm is determined by the “pressure of time” that runs through the edited pieces, and not by the length of the cuts. To join up different parts, their time pressure has to match."

If the pace of everyday experience is dictated by digital updates, there is always a remainder of experiences that don’t obey this rhythm.
“For Stiegler, cinema creates a sort of temporary pocket inside a larger timescale, in which cinematic consciousness becomes active. While watching a film, “the time of our consciousness will be totally passive within the thrall of those ‘moving’ images that are linked together by noises, sounds, words, voices. [M]inutes of our life will have passed by outside our ‘real’ life, but within a life or the lives of people and events, [29] real or fictive, to which we will have conjoined our time, adopting their events as though they were happening to us as they happened to them.”
“Prior events accumulate into an experiential “current note,” a Now that functions not just as a momentary state of being but as a hyper-dense neutron star comprised of many previous Nows. The consecutive passing of each image thus becomes compressed into each future Now.”
If we could totally recall yesterday every moment before today would exist in the now. Therefore "no passage of time is possible. Time has ceased to exist"
“In spite of film having already ostentatiously won the competition for biggest screen, it still deems it necessary to set rules to avoid distraction from other durational devices; film’s claims on space have to be aggressively defended because it has lost its monopoly on time. More precisely, cinema has lost its monopoly over the dominating inner-time that the screen acts as a conduit for.”
“In post-war France, the historian Fernand Braudel introduced an equivalent of the cinematic long take: the longue durée. It was nothing short of a paradigm shift in what it meant to write history, and how this was supposed to happen. Braudel viewed history as a dialectic between slow, almost imperceptible change, and the present as it would be experienced at any given moment.”
“For nothing is more important, nothing comes closer to the crux of social reality than this living, intimate, infinitely repeated opposition between the instant of time and that time which flows only slowly.”
“Braudel’s long-term historical pattern recognition disjoints the moving playhead from the in- and out-points of the take. Unsurprisingly, a field for which Braudel’s work holds a special significance is that of climatology. The massive, irreversible, planetary-scale climate change that is associated with the feedback loops which human industrial and economic activity has triggered onto the planet can politically uniquely be assessed as a longue durée.”
“On November 7, 2012, Donald Trump tweeted: “It’s freezing and snowing in New York — we need global warming!” [41] The future president of the United States demonstrated, in grotesquely inflated form, what beguiles “humans with their own innate sense of hereness and nowness, elevating it to the norm for the universe and everything and everyone else. Why should cinema keep catering to this erratic human trait, the fallacy of the Now?”
"Cinema is art, but art film is not cinema."
"It’s a confrontation between materialities. Your version of digital is all about being in transit and precarious. In your laptop, your deepest feelings, stored in flash memory, literally sit right next to the graphics card that is struggling to encode your new short film. When you imagine yourself endowed with the means of production to, for once, do everything “properly,” every machine gets its single task and every day its single purpose. You do one thing at a time and you do it well."
Cinema is a material practice. It’s made up of bodies, technology, money, effort, sacrifice — and it is also a place of exclusion, where sharp boundaries are being drawn between those who are let in, and those who aren’t. These boundaries are produced by, translated into, and reinforced as access to the material means that are necessary to create and sustain cinema.
"The digital badlands are, in many ways, what the cheap guitars and amplifiers of punk rock once were to big studio music production. Our reason, in this essay, for combining interface with cinema is that the means of display — our devices — have come to overlap with the means of production. The camera is also the screen. Hence, we surmise, they must

have a time, some time, in common."

"We are looking for a yet-undeclared cinema of the interface, and will set out on this journey referencing a filmmaker who detested computers even before they became omnipresent. His sense of time has a lot to tell us about our platform-paced lives, in which the true pace of change is still, as we have trouble admitting, well below the speed of fibre-optics."

Part 2: Horizontal Gravity

“Geoff Dyer complains that “we move further and further away from Tarkovsky time towards moron-time in which nothing can last — and no one can concentrate on anything — for longer than about two seconds.” [6] Will Self, in a talk spearheaded by a still from Solaris, decries the dramatic shortening of the average shot length in films over the course of the last century. For this reason, Self claims he no longer watches films, but only film stills. [7] Time, says Dyer, is no longer experienced as an art form but simply as a hindrance to enjoyment.”
"We are looking for the fantastical in an everyday guise — and searching for our own capacities, in a digital sphere, to believe in an image (again)."
"Tarkovsky said that a script had to “die in the film.” [10] Most directors and producers would agree that a film’s idea gets modified during its making, but not many would commit to a process like Tarkovsky’s, risking so much of what seemed to be certain on paper in the becoming of moving image."
"the dearth of sci-fi props in Stalker is no accident. Tarkovsky believed that “a detailed ‘examination’ of the technological processes of the future transforms the emotional

foundation of a film, as a work of art, into a lifeless schema with only pretensions to truth.”

"“Hypernormalisation” is a term which Curtis borrows from the author Alexei Yurchak, who coined it in 2005. Curtis describes hypernormalisation as a process of people becoming conditioned to believe in a reality that is composed of obvious falsehoods, which are yet accepted as real, because there is nothing else."

Part 3: Digital Tarkovsky

"Physical distribution means poor images, moving from a physically contained commodity to an online, immaterial, for-free video file, encountering compression, and

therefore loss of information, in the transition. And the result is a kind of sacrilege; the power graph of Cinema is disrupted, as the original images were also receptacles for the inherited authority of its system."

"Indeed, the word “cinematic” appears to be less about capturing an extraordinary event, object, or subject matter, and more about the longing for an extraordinary type of gaze."
"It is possible to read the word “cinematic” here as applying to an image that has partially fictionalized itself; an image that has become unquestionable, as its pronunciation has been imbued with built-in epicness."
"Despite a new flurry of low-cost anamorphic, epic, and cinematic tools, digital cinema is increasingly less about optics. In the words of Lev Manovich, it is moving “from Kino-Eye to Kino-Brush.”"
"Live-action footage is reduced to just another graphic, no different from images that were created manually.”"
"Will Self comments that in a digital age “our ability to produce suspension of disbelief is greater than our suspension of disbelief. Our capacity to produce images of high fidelity is greater than our capacity to see them.”"
"The specific importance of Tarkovsky here is best summarized by Dyer, the point being Tarkovsky’s insistence that an artwork’s treatment, style, approach, and vision should be preponderant over its subject matter."
"Electronic and computational objects are increasingly endowed with vision. Unlike humans, machines do not get tired of filming the same thing for a very long time, so they are the champions of longue durée."
"The room is in some way a movie theatre. The iPhone is in some other way the big screen. So indeed, it is in some way an uncharted cinema of the interface. Yet because of the way in which Instagram’s platform

design interacts with its viewer’s attention, and the way in which the presence of others on the platform interacts with that, this is also a tainted cinema that plays strange tricks on its filmmakers and viewers. The Mauna Kea telescope commanded uninterrupted attention and got it. But platform time is punctured with interruptions and disjunctions. In its attempt to draw users in, and determine what is “relevant” for them, platforms prefer certain signals over others. These preferences structure, in the longer term, the habitual preferences of the user in ways that have been called “filter bubbles.”"

"More precisely, viewing the event through the app, from a distance, may highlight, to the user, their own physical distance from the scene, and thus that their life may be felt as lacking in some of

the things that the depicted lives of others so ostentatiously possess — fun, happiness, beauty, intensity"

"The long film of Instagram Stories is a mixed bag of augmented realities that the user is in some sort of social relationship with, even if many of the ties present between sender and receiver may be quite weak

in actual life."

"This is a cinema whose content and texture are the self-representation and self-production of a social fabric under the pressure of platform design. We can, and perhaps should, imagine different, cooperative

platforms, which reflect conditions that users want for themselves."