Relación entre la distribución de las especies y la variación ambiental

Films that express emotions contrast with those specifically aimed at revealing actions, states or objects. In Deleuze’s cinema, the ‘affective’ image would show a character or object that induces a feeling or state of affection in the character or viewer. Happy (Fig.

23, DVD 17) is a seven clip film made by four people and begins a potential interactive narrative of happiness. The sun moves on the screen and a dot of refracted light plays across the frame which merges almost seamlessly into a drop of rain trickling on a window. The following clips show a prepared meal, a book case with music playing and some insects ‘dancing’ by a river in which the sun is again reflected. Some viewers commented on the presence of nature, a kind of visual refrain, as a ‘happiness’, while

Figure 22. Stills from Happy

others noticed the interruptions as being more significant. In an online commentary, one creator-audience expressed a positive emotional response,

This seems only to be a short film but even so it makes me feel happy. Maybe it is because the words you hear in the song are cut short, missing the word 'love' which is replaced by the following clip of a beautiful river scene which visually illustrates the missing word?

The dot of light merges into a raindrop and the sung words ‘When I fall in…’ is continued with an image. With no script and no underlying history or template, participants could return to being moved by a sense of co-mediation where they weave slices of each other’s own life expression to create something unique. The clip of insects was somehow repeated in the processing. This repetition of the same caused an interesting rhythmic disruption that questioned the perceptual flow of the machine to distinguish it as a form of cinema.

The film Fear (Fig. 24, DVD 18) has an opposite emotional effect. A doorway into darkness, a man in a sinister mask banging a drum, a spider on a wall. Immediately darker we see that feelings across time are contracted into a present movement. The sound of the drum surrounded by the silence of surrounding shots induces a sense of caution and suggests a possible narrative continuity by sound. The participants noted that the form has a different effect to a horror genre experience because the of the sense of sharing within the image; they reported a ‘contemplation of fear’, rather being made to feel fear. If one observes these sequences as a present continuous motion between documentary and fiction, we can begin to think about how to augment them with narrative devices removed from traditional cinematics and moving towards co-evolving

expressions that organise through lines of flight rather than imposed structures. For example, a narrative of ‘the idea’ of fear may be formed through undifferentiated cinematic thought ‘about fear’. As Barthes has proclaimed that the birth of the reader must come at the cost of the death of the author (Barthes, 1977, 148), and here we find no film author. A collective cinematic process functions not as storyteller but tapestry weaver onto which we place our own narrative encounters. As one participant noted,

The narratives did become a reflective thing…so you have to interpret that narrative…your own interpretation of it will actually inform you what you actually think the narrative is. Seems to be how you view it…you can draw out your own narrative from it. (See text appendix 6)

Another participant who perceived their own nightmare in the film suggested that Lifemirror mimics a collective unconscious at work, a thought that correlates neatly with the idea that a generative and ephemeral cinema might reflect an intuitive aspect of a collective consciousness.

Figure 23. Stills from Fear

The imposed temporality of the clips opens doors to thinking how such time constraints may be adapted in the future when bandwidths are faster and further narrative devices are found for the form. Watching the film Blink (DVD 20), which is currently comprised of five clips at one second each, a viewer imagined people literally blinking their views of the world into the cinema; immediately shared as if the blink ‘took a burst of video and hit send’. It could be argued that 0osocial media is already facilitating instantaneous consciousness sharing however the viewer (who uses social media in her everyday life) said there was something very different about seeing such an immediate glimpse in continuous form (She contrasted the experience with using Facebook where the image flow is static). She also reported that it seemed like her own dream and that if it were edited, rather than ordered by time, it would not have had the same effect because the continuity ties the image back to a relatable reality. In considering the effect on an individual narrative becoming collective, we can understand a certain cinematic vertigo that threatens to swamp the self as an individual actor. In response to this, it was suggested that one could use an individual as a baseline for a film by focusing on a singular life narrative by filtering back from other at different times. Organisation of clips in this way would immediately expand a thematic narrative by following a particular character duration among others, it would be ‘character-driven’ which then questions how and why any ‘one’ would be selected. The question of individual identity and its relation to cinematic narrative then becomes a key question for further investigation. How do we see the self through collective cinematics?