Formulación extendida del modelo MK

Throughout the project I was inclined to view the filmic contributions as ‘noticings’ in that a relative camera-environment awareness supports the idea that our individual narratives are co-intensive findings with the underlying (and overarching) forces and flows in nature – a balancing of the rarefication, or ‘filtering of forces’ that we absorb and inspire us to act. Evoking Bergson, Deleuze reminds us that ‘we do not perceive the thing or the image in its entirety, we always perceive less of it, we perceive only what we are interested in perceiving ... by virtue of our economic interests, ideological beliefs, and psychological demands’ (Deleuze, 1997b: 20). Like the Indian parable of blind men identifying an elephant, it may take many hands to find a new story through a co- narrative space, especially one that is unfamiliar to our conditioned expectations and given constructions of cinema experience. Lyotard highlighted the eliminating function of editing and direction as pre-conditioned agreements between author and audience as to what makes an image recognisable: ‘In eliminating, before and/or after the shooting, any extreme glare, for example, the director and cameraman condemn the image of film to the sacred task of making itself recognisable to the eye’ (Lyotard, 1991: 173-174). Recalling Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and its call to the reader to look through and beyond the veil of media representation, we can intuit a potential strength of Lifemirror to disrupt controlled symbolic hierarchies that have thus far shaped an ever- overcoding reality. In reducing cinema to an altered state of image flow we are faced with the perceptions and timings of each other’s experience as collective rhythms written in light. As Deleuze comments in an interview with Cahiers du Cinéma, ‘A work of art always entails the creation of new spaces and times (it's not a question of recounting a story in a well-determined space and time; rather, it is the rhythms, the lighting, and the

space-times themselves that must become the true characters)’ (Deleuze in Flaxman, 2000: 370). In this way, the Lifemirror machine can be seen as the processing of molecular contingencies of narrative.

In his book Deleuze Beyond Badiou (2013), Clayton Crockett argues that Cinema 2is the philosopher’s most political work and a culmination of thought that leads not to a simple re-evaluation of film theory, but to a re-organisation of the reader’s thought-actions and their politico-creative potential. Of the brain-screen connection to the political he writes,

Deleuze (in Cinema 2) is not interested in developing a metaphysical understanding of time as unchanging eternity; he is interested in building a brain. Building a brain involves producing the event as time-image, a pure image of time that cuts entities away from their automatic sensory-motor linkages and reconstitutes them in another series or another order. (Crockett, 2013: 97)

In contemplating a mobilised cinema, it is the idea of a time-brain relationship that enables a reconsideration of the inter-subjective temporal narratives at play in networks. While we live through our own sensory-motor narratives, an awareness of others in the time and place in the network moves the ‘thought’ of recording away from the self-path and into a ‘crystal-path’ that becomes sensitive to co-existence with others and the structure-other of the environment. Crockett’s thesis uses Alain Badiou’s critique of Deleuze’s ontological dynamism10 against itself to reanimate the underlying creative imperative in the act of thinking. Through a reading of Difference and Repetition (1994), Deleuze’s magnum opus that lays a foundation for his subsequent works, Crockett

suggests that the creative imperative moves towards an evolution of thinking that peaks in Cinema 2 and culminates as an ‘urgent political project’ of building a new brain for the individual and society. We can read this through a consistent strengthening of the conceptual time-image as the irrational cut – a force between non-commensurable images that trigger synaptic relinkages to create ‘a new brain which would be at once the screen, the film stock and the camera, each time membrane of the outside and the inside’ (Deleuze 1997b: 215). The actualisation of the networked agent as collective camera- projector implies a certain freedom from control of the solo-artistic project and replaces it with an organic creative force that activates an awareness of co-intention and mirror- understanding of self through other. Jean-Luc Nancy tells us that’ we ‘do not “have” meaning anymore, because we ourselves are meaning —entirely, without reserve, infinitely, with no meaning other than “us”’ (Nancy, 2000: 1). How then might network cinema reflect this understanding?

Regarding the Lifemirror machine as an alternative or counterpoint to the existing model of cinema, we are presented with a form of living story that moves and creates meaning only in reaction to our own movements. While the Cinema books provide an ontology of cinematic images beneath (and above) the text, the Lifemirror machine uses the underlying ontology of real and virtual intensities as direction for a plane of immanence reproduced on the cinema screen. Nature, working through sensor though cloud, is therefore given the directorial reigns as change itself becomes the connecting force of narrative. Nancy continues,‘Being itself is given to us as meaning. Being does not have meaning. Being itself, the phenomenon of Being, is meaning that is, in turn, its own circulation — and we are this circulation’ (Nancy, 2000: 2). A rhizomatic cinema platform may accompany hierarchy where the space between becomes connection itself

relying on the digital translation of the ongoing and universal movement image. It would then be a question of watching image-flow and facilitating a creator-audience with the production of their own cinematic connections. Using life as a shared experience of finitude in the base framework of a networked cinema suggests a very different model for thinking with the moving image that requires new forms of control that are guided by network sensitivities rather than authorial cuts. Nancy concludes:

Circulation—or eternity—goes in all directions, but it moves only insofar as it goes from one point to another; spacing is its absolute condition. From place to place, and from moment to moment, without any progression or linear path, bit by bit and case by case, essentially accidental, it is singular and plural in its very principal. (Nancy, 2000: 4)

The machine then proposes a conceptual break from the ‘reason’ of cinema through the absolute embrace of the time-image as a natural phenomenon of mass recording.

The time-image made from network participation affirms a belief that transforms to knowledge. For Deleuze, to believe in the world freed from sensory-motor function is still a belief based in the narrative-driven cinema dominated by industry (this is why he confines his argument to works by great auteurs). In Deleuze’s words:

The link between man and the world is broken. Henceforth, this link must become an object of belief: it is the impossible which can only be restored within a faith. Belief is no longer addressed to a different or transformed world. Man is in the world as if in a pure optical and sound situation. The reaction of which man has been dispossessed can be replaced only by belief. Only belief in the world can

reconnect man to what he sees and hears. The cinema must film, not the world, but belief in this world, our only link. The nature of the cinematographic has often been considered. Restoring our belief in the world—this is the power of modern cinema (when it stops being bad). Whether we are Christians or atheists, in our universal schizophrenia, we need reasons to believe in this world. It is a whole transformation of belief. (Deleuze, 1997b: 171-2)

Mobile cameras are a networked sense that can reconnect the broken link to the world by attempting a new idea of cinema. As such, the machine proposes a challenge to the imperial structures of commercial production supplying the programmes for community theatres, and more generally, raises questions on the future of community narrative practices. The environment becomes cinema and cinema becomes environment voiced by its own audience, and perhaps, the ‘people who are missing’.