video web log [-\\/] video blog

9.1.01 melbourne

first critique on movement (bird)

movement can be within (of) the image. this is its canonical form but only because of its idiosyncratic televisual history (e.g. manovich). that is, it is canonical only if it assumed that videographic movement on the web is primarily defined by the codes or qualities that have accrued to commerical popular television and popular cinema.

this is the dominant, and hegemonic, conception of 'movement' on the web today, and means that the felicty of the representation of movement is determined by the same criteria as that applied to commercial popular television and popular cinema.

these criteria include assumptions about the audience as an audience of receivers (who may, or may not, interact via their mice), and maintains existing models of broadcast distribution and audience maximisation.

it also means that the representation of movement is defined by notions of perceptual realism and what can be described as technical felicity. These canonised forms of audiovisual representation become the de facto benchmark for web movement. somewhere between 25 and 30 frames per second, full screen, synchronised sound; indexical verisimilitude.

this movement is stable, continuous and aspires to the condition of television. this movement desires only its representational display within the space of the screen. this movement is cartesian in its assumptions of cause and effect, of having a beginning, a middle, and an end. all movement is subsumed to a psychologised narrative or other vehicles of representation.

this movement is narcissistic in its longing for the return of its gaze in the mirror of the televisual. it wants to be daddy, with all the misrecognition of autonomy, motor affect, and the absent authority of the father as its consequence.

like commercial popular television and popular cinema this confuses the representation of movement with movement as (qua) movement. genuine movement requires qualitative change (bergson, deleuze).

few of the representations of movement that the web has invented ever concerns itself with the genuine movement that occurs between pages. between screens. this movement is always a qualitative change.

if you cannot stand in the same stream twice, you can never see the same screen more than once.