Aspas o palas:

Much like cinema, people express ‘possible worlds’ (Deleuze, 1990: 308). The cinema of the network is not an enclosed world but rather the film-world turned inside-out through the proliferation of mobile recording technologies. The wandering camera-machine confronts a cinema leaking theatre. Films such as Russian Ark (1996), Live Tape (2009), and Victoria (2015) all use a single ‘take’ to replace montage with a continuous camera-theatre performance. Lars Von Trier’s The Boss of it All (2008) attempts an opposing strategy by using the interruption of a machine to self-referentially disrupt the flow of the film. To do this, the director developed a bespoke system called ‘Automavision’, a machine that limits human authorship by randomly adjusting the settings and positions of the camera in each take. By disturbing the viewpoints that construct the narrative,

traditional cinema feels a tremor from the digital machine and the ‘boss of it all’, as an ironic reflection on the director himself, is called into question. The seventh art is indeed transforming into something entirely different when networked, something ‘other’.

Deleuze asserts that, ‘the Other assures the margins and transitions in the world’

(Deleuze, 1990: 305). He elaborates:

(The Other) is the sweetness of contiguities and resemblances. He regulates the transformations of form and background and the variations of depth. He prevents assaults from behind. He tills the world with a benevolent murmuring. He makes things incline toward one another and find their natural compliments to one another. When one complains about the meanness of others, one forgets this other and even more frightening meanness–namely, the meanness of things were there no Other. The latter revitalises the not-known and the non-perceived, because Others, from my point of view, introduce the sign of the unseen in what I do see, making me grasp what I do not perceive as what is perceptible to an Other.

(Deleuze, 1990: 305)

This meditation on the Other is drawn from a reading of Michel Tournier’s version of Robinson Crusoe. Without the Other, Robinson is confronted with the structure-other where his given conceptions of reality break down to leave him in an elemental state.

Rather than the ego, it is this structure ‘which renders perception possible’ (Deleuze 1990: 309) and leads the way for a reorganisation and comprehension through the Other, without whom there is nothing but elements (Deleuze, 1990: 302). The Internet as a temporally mediated Other is an interesting idea in terms of perception and the construction of meaning. The world becomes uncommonly sensed together from that which we do not see or experience. Deleuze elaborates,

The part of the object that I do not see I posit as visible to Others, so that when I will have walked around to reach this hidden part, I will have joined the Others behind the object, and I will have totalized it in the way that I had already anticipated. As for objects behind my back, I sense them coming together and forming a world, precisely because they are visible to, and are seen by, Others.

(Deleuze, 1990: 305)

What emerges in the network cinema is an inverted author-vision so that only the exterior, through self and other, reveals itself in time. Thus, together we see time. The experience of time through self and other in an elemental cinema then questions the essence of a temporal community. Deleuze continues:

The Other thus assures the distinction of consciousness and its object as a temporal distinction. The first effect of its presence concerned space and the distribution of categories; but the second effect, which is perhaps the more profound, concerns time and the distribution of its dimensions - what comes before and after time. (Deleuze, 1990: 311)

In this light, the ‘double-interval’ of Lifemirror theoretically reflects a more general cinematic of ‘being together’ in a linear paratactic feedback. In this way, the digital network allows the ‘before and after’ time of film to be re-presented through an extended sense of the creator-audience.

To further explain this evolving cinematic, it is useful to consider Nancy’s observation that ‘communication consists before all else in this sharing and in this co-appearance (com-parution) of finitude’ (Nancy, 1991:29). In re-formulating Heidegger’s notion of

‘being-towards-death’ through mitsein (being-with), rather than dasein (being-there), the philosopher proposes an idea of community based on shared finitude and the interruption of myth. As an experimental network, this project may similarly be seen as an interruption of cinema (and cinematic thinking) as the emblematic tool for the subjective continuation of myth in collective memory. Nancy calls upon myth as a communication of the ‘in-common’ that spans our shared finitude in order to set in motion a political thought of community. Images made in the digital network also span our individual finitudes such that it is arguable that myth itself, like the notion of space, will be mediated under new terms. The involution of myth as ‘nature communicating itself to man’ (Nancy, 1997: 49) may be invoked by way of a movement of cinematics that continually defer to a middle voice in the transmission of images between digital and organic planes. In discussing Nancy’s conception of community in relation to myth, Ian James observes that the mythic narratives that form our sense of identity are themselves without foundation. Myth itself cannot account for the plurality of finite sense that forms experience, however this very plurality

might then be organised into new mythic narratives which would displace the old;

hence the difference between one epoch and another would turn around the shifts which occur in relation to the mythic narratives that found an affirmation of community. In this context historical change cannot be conceived in terms of a dialectical or teleological process, but rather in terms of a constant birth or becoming of singular-plural sense that interrupts established foundational narratives and opens the way for future narratives to emerge. (James, 2006: 199)

Nancy’s framework thus provides a powerful tool to critiquing the communitarian aspects of cinema and considering the very idea of a cinematic network where myth

continually interrupts and invents itself through the transformations of a people. In this new formulation, the seventh art in the cloud is a cinema-to-come where its elements are people who are, to some degree, artists ‘with the task of answering to this world, or of answering for it’ (Nancy, 1997: 93). This calls for a transformation from the artist-philosopher in a world without others, into a participatory channel where networked tools become ‘open to this fragmentation of sense that existence is’ (Nancy, 1997: 139).

Attending a community-created cinema would signify a community distinct from society in that pure creation-attendance forms community into ‘an organic communion with its own essence.’ (Nancy, 1996: 9), a community without unity but in the interstitial spaces of cinematic thinking. Here, the intimate relationship of ‘being together’ and ‘co-creating the world’ may be contemplated through the ‘gesture of video’ as ‘a new way of being-in-the-world’ (Flusser, 2014: 146). We would be elemental in this imaginary space of cinema, as possible worlds communicating a possible world, at once obliterated and alone, but reforming in time.

Pre-empting Von Trier’s comedy, The Boss of it All, Bergson suggested that laughter results when mechanism is injected into the human situation. From this perspective, the digital could be placing us at the margins of a divine comedy. We need new ways of thinking-doing art as a way with rather than as an aspiration or commodification – a making art sacred in all directions in time and so to open new doors in the future – digital or not. Those who are called artists have the ability to touch others through a medium but the great circuit is in reality at every instant and every centre of indetermination. A Zen monk contemplates a tilting universe as she pours tea, so network technology deserves similar awareness for it is a web that both surpasses and supports our own agency as a medium for nature. Humans are now responsible for a connection between digital and

organic networks where both may influence each other. We may hear the Native American Leader Chief Seattle remind us that ‘man did not weave the web of life: he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself' (Seattle, 1986).

And as both audience and authors to the film that is life, our performative action now moves in two directions, between two webs. So as theatre turns to meet our cameras, we might hear Deleuze urging both director and now meta-director to think again the problem of the stage, ‘the problem of a movement which would directly touch the soul, which would be that of the soul’ (Deleuze, 1994: 9).

Conclusions

The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak.

James Joyce (1992: 166)