Page 199 - Darko Štrajn, From Walter Benjamin to the End of Cinema: Identities, Illusion and Signification. Ljubljana: Educational Research Institute, 2017. Digital Library, Dissertationes, 29.
P. 199
Ontology of the Virtual
How much is the notion of “film” – whose “material being” as a celluloid
tape fades away – in its increasingly metaphorical presence decisive for un-
derstanding art, now marked by multiple signifiers of “virtual reality”? In
the first move to answer such a question, one cannot help but agree with
the following:
It is difficult to speak about only one cinematographic aesthetic
experience, because digital demands, or allows, different kinds of
perceptual experiences. Nor is it about annihilating our previous
experiences, since hybrid qualities give way to flexibility and assim-
ilation. Therefore, the mere expression ‘let’s go to see a movie’ im-
plies a ritual or habit: to visit a movie theatre and see the current
film. This action remains inside us as an idea (Gómez, 2015: 251).
Transcending cinema, therefore, at first glance runs rather smooth-
ly. It is taking place almost exactly in a manner of the Hegelian Aufhe-
bung. The reason for such an appearance should be sought in the fact that
we still have to deal with the frame – no matter in what kind of apparatus,
which could be a cinema screen or a range of screens of diverse digital de-
vices. “Theorists of new media have made much of the notion of cinema as
the dominant language of culture and of the computer desktop as a cine-
matic space: ‘screen culture’ is posited as the hegemonic cultural interface”
(Nakamura, 2008: 63). To what extent is virtual reality undermined by the
197
How much is the notion of “film” – whose “material being” as a celluloid
tape fades away – in its increasingly metaphorical presence decisive for un-
derstanding art, now marked by multiple signifiers of “virtual reality”? In
the first move to answer such a question, one cannot help but agree with
the following:
It is difficult to speak about only one cinematographic aesthetic
experience, because digital demands, or allows, different kinds of
perceptual experiences. Nor is it about annihilating our previous
experiences, since hybrid qualities give way to flexibility and assim-
ilation. Therefore, the mere expression ‘let’s go to see a movie’ im-
plies a ritual or habit: to visit a movie theatre and see the current
film. This action remains inside us as an idea (Gómez, 2015: 251).
Transcending cinema, therefore, at first glance runs rather smooth-
ly. It is taking place almost exactly in a manner of the Hegelian Aufhe-
bung. The reason for such an appearance should be sought in the fact that
we still have to deal with the frame – no matter in what kind of apparatus,
which could be a cinema screen or a range of screens of diverse digital de-
vices. “Theorists of new media have made much of the notion of cinema as
the dominant language of culture and of the computer desktop as a cine-
matic space: ‘screen culture’ is posited as the hegemonic cultural interface”
(Nakamura, 2008: 63). To what extent is virtual reality undermined by the
197
