CHAPTER EIGHT_______________________________________________________

Virtual Sensations: The Hollywood Cinema of Special Effects and the

Affective Topography of the Digital

If the cinema of the Italian neorealism was an attempt to re-open cinema to the
possibilities of mediating the social time of the everyday, and Antonioni’s time-images
sought to refold the existential back into the non-alienated Utopian space of collective
desire, then cinema has in the information age closed off these possibilities and
beckons the spectator-subject to find ontological assurance in the monadic inner space
of its digital universes. The anxieties that the time-image induced in the films of the
neorealists and Antonioni are alleviated by the data-images of the special effects
blockbuster, which transcend the phenomenal world and immerse the spectator in the
sublime time of the ‘artificial infinite’.1
Like the cinema of the time-image, the cinema of special effects privileges a
phenomenological mode of address that eschews the classical narrative dimensions of
film, so as to, in Scott Bukatman’s view, ‘redirect the spectator to the visual (and
auditory and even kinesthetic) conditions of cinema and thus bring the principles of
perception to the foreground of consciousness’.2 It is this commonality that allows us to
thread together two seemingly incommensurable cinematic forms: the post-war cinema
of Italian neorealism/Antonioni and the contemporary Hollywood blockbuster. By
contrasting the divergent nonnarrative temporal and spatial image formations through
which the cinema of the time-image and the special effects blockbuster address the
spectator, we can locate historically and aesthetically a transformation in the way the
spectator-subject ‘thinks through’ the cinematic form as it becomes integrated with the
distributed media of electronic and digital technologies.
Jameson famously theorised the ‘waning of affect’ that accompanied the cultural
turn from modernism to postmodernism. In Jameson’s assessment the modern affects
of anxiety and alienation have become displaced by the ‘euphoria [of] free-floating and

1
Scott Bukatman, ‘The Artificial Infinite: On Special Effects and the Sublime’ in Annette Kuhn (ed.) Alien
Zone 2: The Spaces of Science Fiction Cinema (London, New York: Verso, 1999).
2
Ibid., pp.90-91
impersonal…schizophrenic intensities’ as the dominant psychopathologies for
postmodern culture. Following Jameson, I think the post-war cinema of the time-image
enacts the ‘waning’ of ‘the great modernist thematics of time and temporality, the
elegiac mysteries of durée and memory’, while the data-images of the special effects
blockbuster reconfigures these temporal coordinates as spatialised algorithmic bitmaps
and vector graphic images, rewriting the psychic-perceptual experience of the
spectator-subject in the process.3 The special effects blockbuster is emblematic in its
expression of spatialised temporalities that volatise the phenomenal time of worldly
duration. Reformulating the experience of temporality for the spectator-subject as one
where our senses navigate algorithmic trajectories and trace the vectors of
macrocosmic and microcosmic universes.
I will explore the postmodern affective or sensual modes promoted by the digital
images of the special effects blockbuster and the broader implications this has for
comprehending the status of cinematic subjectivity in detail later, however, before I do, I
need to first outline the presuppositions that give theoretical efficacy to my comparison
of the cinema of the time-image to the special effects blockbuster.

Rupturing Narrative with the Digital Spectacle

The differences between the cinema of the time-image, the Italian neorealists and
Antonioni, and the cinema of special effects, from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space
Odyssey to the computer-generated special effects of contemporary Hollywood
blockbusters seems at first to be cavernous. Indeed they are. However, both the cinema
of the time-image and the special effects blockbuster obey a similar formal logic. In that

3
It is important to acknowledge that the majority of industrially produced feature films since the Second
World War have been movement-images. By contrasting the time-images of post-war Italian cinema with
the special effects sequences of the Hollywood blockbuster I am drawing an aesthetic and philosophical
parallel that in no way intends to suggest that post-war cinema is dominated by time-images. Rather the
time-image provides a common conceptual link or philosophical figure for what are two culturally and
historically divergent post-war cinemas. It is precisely the predominance of movement-images in post-war
cinema that leads me to identify the relatively scarce examples of the time-image in contemporary
cinema. By comparing the form the time-image assumes in the special effects of 1990s Hollywood
blockbusters to the time-images found in Italian neorealism and Antonioni’s films, it becomes apparent
how the time-image operates as a ‘historical image’ - how changes in its formal and aesthetic expression
in different post-war cinemas becomes indicative of wider shifts in the historical reality of cinematic
consciousness as it materialises in the age of digital media. Op cit., Jameson, 1991, pp.14-16.
they both disclose filmic spaces where cinematic time is unmediated by narrative and
present these timespaces in such a way as to subordinate the narrative dimensions in
order to appeal immediately to the spectator’s phenomenological perception. For
Deleuze, it was in the cinema of the Italian neorealists that pure optical situations
emerged, breaking up the sensory-motor linkages of the action-image, and turning the
characters in the films into ‘viewers’ rather than ‘agents’ of narrative action. 4 This
description of pure optical situations perforating the narrative action and arresting
narrative movement as the protagonists and the spectator are similarly confronted with
something ‘intolerable and unbearable’ sounds remarkably like the special effect
sequence of a science fiction film or Hollywood blockbuster. As has been observed by
numerous commentators, special effects sequences in science-fiction films and
blockbusters tend to interrupt the flow of the narrative and address the protagonists and
the spectator with self-sufficient technological spectacles that often assume a formal,
aesthetic and cinematographic autonomy from the timespace of the narrative. 5
This is particularly true of electronic and digital special effects up to the late
nineteen nineties, before computer-generated images (CGIs) became seamlessly
composited into live-action footage. In Michelle Pierson’s historical account of ‘CGI
effects in Hollywood cinema’ she proposes that the development of CGI effects in
Hollywood cinema from the late eighties to the mid-nineties corresponded with a
‘technofuturist’ aesthetic.6 This aesthetic, which is common to science fiction films such
as The Abyss (1989), Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991) and Jurassic Park (1993), to
name a prominent few, emphasises the exhibition of ‘digital artefacts’ (the ‘pseudopod’,
the morphing T-1000 terminator and the computer-generated dinosaurs) by
foregrounding their demarcation in cinematographic space. The technofuturist aesthetic
is characterised by maintaining the technological and aesthetic integrity of the CGIs
from the live-action footage. Its aesthetic effect is generated through this difference,
which, as Pierson suggests, becomes effaced in the ‘assimulationist’ aesthetics of later
4
Op cit, Deleuze, pp. 2-3; p.272.
5
Op cit., Bukatman, 1999. p.254; Andrew Darley, Visual Digital Culture: Surface Play and Spectacle in
New Media Genres (London: Routledge, 2000), p.104; Michele Pierson ‘CGI effects in Hollywood
science-fiction cinema 1989-95: the wonder years’ in Screen, vol. 40, no. 2 (1999), p. 169; Vivian
Sobchack, Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film, Second edition (New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 1987), p.262.
6
Ibid., Pierson, 1999.
Hollywood special-effect blockbusters such as Independence Day (1996) and Jurassic
Park: The Lost World (1997). As Pierson contends: ‘instead of presenting the computer-
generated image as an aesthetic object, [the film] is directed towards integrating the
special effect into the action’.7 Although this is a relatively recent phenomenon, most
special effect science-fiction blockbusters up to the early nineties subscribe to the
technofuturist aesthetic.
Hollywood films have long been considered (at least since George Lucas’ Star
Wars in 1977) the ideal mass medium to showcase cutting-edge special effects, and
through the nineties, it was CGI that became the latest technological attraction to be
marketed for consumption by cinema audiences. CGIs like the special effect techniques
that preceded it, are employed to enhance the hyperreality of filmic aesthetics, which is
why the translucent liquidity of the ‘pseudopod’ in The Abyss and the morphing T-1000
in Terminator 2, are simultaneously composited and juxtaposed with the photo-realist
aesthetics of live-action footage.
In Bukatman’s analysis, Pierson’s technofuturist aesthetic governs the special
effects work of Douglas Trumbull in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Close Encounters
of the Third Kind (1977), Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) and Blade Runner
(1982). Rather than integrate the special effects sequences into the action of the
narrative, Bukatman contends that: ‘[Douglas] Trumbell emphasises the spectatorial
relation to the effect/environment. To some degree, all special effects are so inscribed:
the effect is designed to be seen, and frequently the narrative will pause to permit the
audience to appreciate the technologies on display’.8 It is this tradition that informs the
technofuturist aesthetic projects of The Abyss, Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park in the
early nineteen nineties. In all three films the progression of the narrative is delayed
when the CGI creatures are presented in the diegesis. The first shots of the alien
‘pseudopod’ entering the cabin of the underwater rig in The Abyss, the shots that
compose the sequence where the T-1000 terminator morphs through bars of the door in
the mental institution in Terminator 2, and the first shot of the brachiosaur in Jurassic
Park, are all initially presented through long takes that allow the spectator time to

7
Ibid., p.174.
8
Op cit., Bukatman, 1999, p.259.
observe the visual spectacles and ‘solicit a contemplative viewing of the computer-
generated image’.9 Initially the characters in the diegesis are in momentary stasis; the
intercutting of the reaction-shots of the human characters re-affirms the digital
spectacles priority in the diegesis over the character-centred actions that propel the
narrative drive. Narrative time is temporarily overlayed by the temporality of the
spectacle - the real-time that allows the spectator to contemplate the spectacle, and the
spatialised time of the digital effects themselves.10
The parallels between the ‘presentational’ mode of special effect sequences and
the pure optical situations that directly address the spectator and the diegetic characters
are instructive. Particularly in regard to the characters’ role as surrogate ‘viewers’ of
pure optical situations in the post-war cinema of the time-image, and the positioning of
the characters in the diegesis of science-fiction special effect films as proxy spectators
of the technological spectacle. In both cinematic forms, the role of the characters is
often to serve as infradiegetic viewers for the spectator. This is employed as a
deliberate strategy to destabilise the conventions of narrative cinema. In that, spectorial
identification with the characters as narrative agents becomes subordinate to the
spectator’s identification with their perception of diegetic space as a medium of direct
address.
We have seen how in neorealism and Antonioni’s films the direct address of the
time-image confronts the protagonists and the spectator as pure optical situations that
attempt to promote a phenomenological and ontological experience of the real. The
composition of empty spaces or ‘dead time’ shots in the post-war Italian cinemas carve
out in the diegesis timespaces that are not determined by the actions of the characters
but exist independently as dynamised intervals that allude to an enhanced sensory
engagement with the world. An extension of what Bazin called the ‘myth of total
cinema’; the pure optical situations/any-space-whatevers of neorealism create ‘realer
than real’ inserts that present themselves as autonomous visual artefacts to the
functional action-images of the narrative. Similarly, the contemporary Hollywood
blockbuster constructs its narrative world around special effects sequences that operate

9
Ibid.
10
Ibid., p.170.
as both diegetic spaces and events as wells as extradiegetic visual artifacts; artefacts
that engage the spectator’s senses directly with the hyperreality of the digital spectacle.
This is probably most apparent in the early digital spectacles of Hollywood
blockbusters, when CGI still retained a degree of novelty and films would market their
special effects as the principle attraction. The theatrical trailers of films like The Abyss,
Terminator 2: Judgement Day and Jurassic Park all direct audiences to view the film as
an advertisement for the spectacle of their special effects. While in the films’ self-
reflexive narratives there is often continuous reference to the metanarrative of the
special effect as marketed entertainment-spectacle. Jurassic Park is a good example of
this. The visual spectacle of the computer-generated dinosaurs in the film stand as
perceptual figurations for the kinaesthetic affects solicited by theme park rides. This
figuration is pursued early in the film when the characters watch a short documentary on
the science of dinosaur cloning. Rather than sitting in front of a television, the
characters are harnessed into a ‘simulation ride’; the park’s creator, John Hammond,
standing next to the screen, then proceeds to converse and seemingly interact on a
tactile level with his virtual double who appears on the screen. The ‘real’ John
encourages his slightly sceptical guests to invest in this fantasy and the spectator too is
directed to imaginatively invest in the suturing of CGI dinosaurs with live-action footage.
However, what is of most importance in this sequence is theatrical form of the
‘simulation ride’ in which the characters sit. The ‘simulation ride’ is a theme park
attraction that simulates the motion of a vehicle or aircraft, the sensation of motion is
primarily directed by onscreen visual effects: it thereby produces an embodied feeling of
inertia through a visually generated kinaesthetic sensation. The characters in the film,
and the spectator, never get to indulge in the kinaesthetic experience of the ‘simulation
ride’, instead they/we witness a low-budget documentary animation before the theatre
actually moves to a new window/screen through which the park’s scientists are seen to
be working. And although the ‘simulation ride’ in the film fails to simulate motion, it
nevertheless still foregrounds, through a double mediation, the cinematic frame through
which the spectator watches the film. The narrative organises the cinematic frame to
correspond with the perceptual architecture of a ‘simulation ride’, the film is like a ride
except the affective resonance lies not in kinaesthesia and embodied inertia but in the
sensual engagement with the aesthetics of CGI; there is a figurative condensation of the
aesthetic affect produced by digital effects and the kinaesthetic affect produced by
‘simulation rides’.
The way the narrative in Jurassic Park reflexively frames the experience of
watching the spectacle of digital dinosaurs as a themepark ride, is also a reference to
the actual Jurassic Park ride that Steven Spielberg helped construct at Universal
Studios.11 This demonstrates the degraded function of narrative in the special-effects
blockbuster, instead of containing the spectacle the narrative advertises its ‘meaning’ as
a cross-media promotion independent of the film. Along with Terminator 2: 3D
experience at Universal Studios, the Jurassic Park ride is an example of how in the
1990s, Hollywood became the centre for a cross-media and horizontal integration of the
culture industry. In fact, Michael Wayne points to the Hollywood film industry as a
principle model for the corporate restructuring witnessed in the transition from Fordist to
post-Fordist economies. 12 Arguing that the old studio system of vertical integration
became by the 1980s, a ‘multi-sector and integrated culture industry’ that ensured
market dominance was sustained by the more flexible horizontal integration of
numerous sectors of production, distribution and exchange. Moreover, at the centre of
this multimedia entertainment complex is the cinema multiplex, as Wayne’s economic
research from the early 1990s indicates: ‘Film is the pre-eminent media
content/commodity driving sales at the box office, on television and through a host of
“synergies”, video, books, comics, music soundtracks, computer games, theme parks
and merchandise’.13 Which is why these ‘synergies’ often work in the other direction, as
global media conglomerates try and maximise revenue streams from other sectors by
translating their content into the powerful marketing medium of the blockbuster. For
example, Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) is a film inspired by
the Disney theme park ride, while there are myriad films that have been adapted from

11
Angela Ndalianis, ‘Special Effects, Morphing Magic, and the 1990s Cinema of Attractions’ in Meta-
morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick Change (Minneapolis, London: University of
Minnesota Press, 2000), p.257.
12
Michael Wayne, ‘Post-Fordism, Monopoly Capitalism, and Hollywood’s Media Industrial Complex’ in
International Journal of Cultural Studies .6 (1) (2003), pp.82-103.
13 st
Wayne cites Asu Askoy and Kevin Robins, ‘Hollywood for the 21 Century: Global Competition for
Critical Mass in Image Markets’ in Cambridge Journal of Economics, vol. 16, no. 1 (1992), p.17, as
evidence for his observation, ibid, 2003, p.94.
television shows; Star Trek (1979), Mission Impossible (1996), X-Files (1998), Charlie’s
Angels (2000), Miami Vice (2005); comic books; Superman: The Movie (1978), Batman
(1989), X-Men (2000), Spider-Man (2002); and more recently, computer games; Super
Mario Brothers (1993), Street Fighter (1994), Mortal Kombat (1995), Wing Commander
(1999), Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) and Doom (2005).
Over the last decade the horizontal and cross-media integration of Hollywood’s
media entertainment complex has intensified with the increasing convergence between
media, information technology and telecom industries. The 162.4 billion dollar merger of
Time Warner and America on-line (AOL) in 2000 (approved January, 2001) stands
historically as the biggest union between information and entertainment corporations.
While the $37 billion merger of Viacom and CBS, the $34 billion merger of Vivendi and
Seagrams (NBC), the $19 million deal between Disney/Capital Cities/ABC and the $20
billion dollar conglomeration of NBC and Microsoft, all testify to the concentration of
‘synergies’ across media-entertainment, information and communication networks. 14
Whether the cinema multiplex will continue to drive the content that is translated across
multiple platforms and turned into a diverse range of products and services remains to
be seen. Particularly as video begins to overtake cinema as the historically dominant
moving image medium in the distributed media networks of the digital marketplace. 15
While in America the revenue from video/computer games has overtaken the Hollywood
box-office as software publishing and video game design becomes the fastest growing
industry across all sectors. 16 However, as a formal and aesthetic corrective to this
purely economic view, David Kushner recently wrote in Wired magazine: ‘Even as the
video game industry’s sales have eclipsed movie box office take in the US, the industry
remains hostage to Hollywood’s blockbuster mentality: big budgets, bigger production
teams, sweeping prerendered cinematics, slavish photorealism’.17
For the purposes of my argument here though, the crucial inference to be made
in assessing what Douglas Kellner and Steven Best calls ‘the imbrications of
14
Douglas Kellner and Steven Best, The Postmodern Adventure: Science, Technology and Cultural
Studies at the Third Millenium (New York, London: The Guildford Press, 2001), p.210.
15
This was the assertion made by Malcolm Long, that ‘video is moving centre-stage in the digital
environment’ in his lecture ‘Navigating the Digital Marketplace’ for the Australian Film Television and
Radio School (AFTRS) seminar at the University of Western Australia (6 June 2006).
16
David Kushner, ‘The Infinite Arcade’ in Wired, Issue: 14.08 (2006), p.22.
17
Ibid.
information, entertainment and interactive media in the new digitised and global
economy’, is the way the special effects spectacle of Hollywood cinema is paradigmatic
of the productive nexus between informatics, entertainment and sensory interaction that
is the engine for this economy.18 The ‘synergies’ between the blockbuster film and the
various entertainment media of televisual and digital culture (television spin-offs,
themeparks, computer games, toys, fast-food tie-ins, etc) are premised on the degree
that the cinematic experience can become a complete multimedia and consumer
experience for the spectator. The act of watching CGI dinosaurs of Jurassic Park is
translated into total consumer experience whereby the spectator is immersed in the
virtual space of the brand image, where the cinematic mode of spectatorship transfers
to the kinaesthetic experience of the simulation ride, the buying of merchandise, playing
with toys or eating junk-food, the ‘interactive’ gameplay of the computer game, or
listening to the soundtrack. All these inter-medial consumer experiences create the total
emotional and sensual experience that comes with navigating (with your credit card!)
the commercial radii of the Jurassic Park brand as spectacle. Furthermore, it is the
special effect images in contrast to the narrative in Hollywood blockbusters such as
Jurassic Park (and the countless commercial special-effect blockbusters spawned from
the marketing template of Lucas’s Star Wars trilogy) that are the primary mediators for
extending the filmic experience into the realm of spectacular consumer culture.
This is because the visual special effects produce sensory and corporeal
intensities that can most readily translate spectorial desire into capitalised modes of
sensual consumption. I’ll pursue an interrogation of the term ‘intensities’ below, for now
it can be said to relate a phenomenological mode of spectatorship defined by what
Andrew Darley states as ‘formal excitation, spectacle and physical stimulus’. 19 The
solicitation of senses and feelings and the production of intensities by the special effects
laden Hollywood blockbuster is a strategy aimed at programming consumer desire and
immersing the spectator in the brand image. Rather than promote a more hermeneutic
and ‘readerly’ engagement with the film text as narrative, the special-effect blockbuster
is financially motivated by the need to market the film as the fulcrum for a larger media

18
Op cit., Kellner and Best, 2001, p.213.
19
Op cit., Darley, 2000, p.168.
franchise and incorporate the spectator into the ‘megaspectacle’ of a multi-platform
brand image.20 Thomas Schatz reminds us that the Hollywood film must be ‘not only a
box-office smash but a two-hour promotion for a multimedia product line, designed with
the structure of both the parent company and the diversified media marketplace in
mind’.21

Time, History, Virtuality

Returning to the comparison between the pure optical situations of the Italian postwar
films and the visual presentation of special effects as a technological and aesthetic
object in the Hollywood blockbuster, we can see how both film forms open up cinematic
space to a second virtual temporal dimension that cuts across the narrative time of the
film. I have argued that in the films of neorealism and Antonioni the time-image reveals,
paradoxically, a time outside the image, conceptualised as a virtuality or Event. The
‘dead time’ images, for example, disconnect from their spatial contiguity with the filmic
narrative or montage to open up into a virtual time that engenders the ‘obliteration of a
whole or of a totalisation of images, in favour of an outside which is inserted between
them’.22 The outside for Deleuze is not a space as it were, but as Rodowick explains, it
is ‘the force of time as a becoming and virtuality’. 23 It is time as a creative and universal
flux; this is not necessarily a time ‘outside’ the image, but a virtuality that relates the
world as an infinite series of paraworlds and temporal layers. To put it differently, it is
historical time comprehended as a ‘plane of immanence’, that is, a historical time that
has no teleology but is a virtual plane upon which complex myriad of potential pathways
and a multiplicity of incompossible times and spaces coexist in state of perpetual
immanence. The time of history becomes a crisscrossing in the sublime Now of the
virtual Event.

20
I’m taking the term ‘megaspectacle’ from Best and Kellner, who coined the term in reference to the
escalation in scope, size and intensity of Debord’s concept of the spectacle with the advent of the global
media entertainment complex, op cit., 2001, pp. 226-253.
21
Thomas Schatz, ‘The Return of the Hollywood Studio System’ in Erik Barnouw et al., Conglomerates
and Media (New York: New Press, 1997), p.74.
22
Op cit., Deleuze, 1989, p.187.
23
Op cit., Rodowick, 2001, p.171.
 Formally and aesthetically the Hollywood blockbuster similarly employs its
special effects sequences as a conduit to network the spectator-subject’s
consciousness into an external realm beyond the internal symbolic and spatio-temporal
cohesion of the diegesis. However in the special effects film the experience of time as
virtuality or Event has become the site of the consumer’s sensual navigation through the
synergistic matrix of corporate media brands. The virtual time of the world and history
has become the virtual space of the commodity megaspectacle. Tracing the aesthetic,
formal and philosophical parallels between the visualisation of history in the temporal
figure of the time-image, and the distillation of a corporate controlled multimedia
universe in the special effects of the blockbuster, allows us to work through some
continuities in what is otherwise a tectonic transformation of the modernist cinematic
and historical imaginaries in the social space of postmodern digital culture.
It has generally been acknowledged that in the last twenty years of the twentieth
century, the notion of History conceived as a teleological narrative, something that has
traditionally been the cornerstone of Marxist utopian politics, has become theoretically
suspect. The demise of Marxism as a dominant force in Leftist politics, the fall of the
Soviet Union (and the socialist ideals that it had never really represented) and the global
triumph of neo-liberal ideology and free-market capitalism, has given historical and
political efficacy to what, from the nineteen sixties onwards, was the poststructuralist
critique of Hegelian dialectical philosophy that guides Marxist critiques of capitalist
history. Deleuze was one of the most ardently anti-Hegelian of the Continental
poststructuralist thinkers who emerged predominantly in France during the nineteen
sixties. 24 He riled against the idea of the dialectic as the ontological foundation for
history and the notion that its negative determination of historical time proceeding
through contradiction, conflict and synthesis be postulated as some transcendental and
universal narrative for historical development. Moreover, the Hegelian philosophy of
history is governed epistemologically by an image of time that corresponds with what
Deleuze theorises as the cinematic figure of the movement-image. It follows the

24
Deleuze once said ‘What I detested above all was Hegelianism and the dialectic’ in ‘Lettre à Michel
Cressole’ in La Quinzaine littéraire 161 (April 1, 1973), pp.17-19, cited in Michael Hardt, Gilles Deleuze:
An Apprenticeship in Philosophy (London: UCL Press, 1993), x.
epistemological (Newtonian) logic of the movement-image in the way it sets out a
predetermined, universal image of time as master narrative of historical causality.25
Deleuze’s cinematic figure of the time-image is a diagram for a kind of
poststructuralist thinking that attempts to rearticulate the philosophical concept of history
by rethinking the epistemological and ontological category of time through the
temporality of film. Instead of thinking of history as a linear and chronological,
proceeding with systematic causality, Deleuze prefers to understand history as a milieu
within which ontological agency is located in the real time of the Event or ‘what Deleuze
calls the virtual as the myriad unheard or unacted-on possibilities that reside in every
passing present…a reserve within history of ever-renewable and unanticipated lines of
variation’.26 This is history theorised as a Nietzchean aesthetic, as a ‘critical ontology of
the present’ whereby the Event virtually unfolds the present into ‘a vast territory of
27
potentialities’. The ‘illusion of the present tense’ and the ‘ambiguous reality’
represented in the aesthetics of Italian neorealism, and the ‘dead time’ images that in
Antonioni’s films confront the spectator with unfurling duration, all express the reality of
time as endlessly divisible, a perpetual flux that extends the present into a series of
‘virtual’ temporalities that are all potentially immanent but nevertheless real to the
moment at hand.
It is this ‘sense’ of time as an immanent becoming rather than a determinate
being, as radically contingent rather than linear or progressive, that Rodowick contends
Deleuze argues for a new conception of history as the production of what Nietzche
termed historicher Sinn; which can be translated as ‘historical sense’:

…the logic of the time-image itself can be revaluated in the Nietzchean sense as
an emergence of a historical dispotif that presupposes not only the rearticulation

25
Incidently, Michael Hardt’s book, Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy (London: UCL Press,
1993), examines Deleuze’s philosophy as a poststructural critique of Hegel and dialectical thought. It
explains meticulously the problem of Hegelian dialectics has for Deleuze’s ‘positive’ ontology of
difference.
26
Op cit., Rodowick, 2001, p.190.
27
Ibid., pp.190-195.
 of time in relation to space but also to the expression of a new ‘historical sense’
and the anticipation of a new historical subject.28

The semiotic of the time-image is posited as a new horizon for thinking through the
concept of history and historical subjectivity in that it changes (through the medium of
cinema) the way we ‘sense’ the discursive formations of time and history. In Deleuze’s
The Logic of Sense, the term ‘sense’ refers to the hypostatised virtual gap between the
attributes of a thing and its proposition, or between the signifier and the signified. 29 For
example, the ‘treenness’ of a tree is ‘sensed’ not as an attribute of the tree as a
proposition, but as an attribute of the tree presupposing its conceptualisation
syntactically as a ‘tree’. The ‘historical sense’ that Rodowick refers to in Deleuze’s work
on the time-image, similarly invokes the idea that things or images exist as virtual
entities in time, that their meaning and logic is contingent upon their conditions of
signification.
To say that this ‘sense’ is ‘historical’ is to suggest that understanding and
perceiving time virtually is a form of historical knowing that occurs at a certain point in
history that also transforms the ontological and epistemological concept of ‘history’. To
put it another way, when our historical consciousness apprehends ‘history’ as a
formation that is effectively produced in what Foucault calls the ‘accidents’ (‘the minute
deviations - or conversely, the complete reversals - the errors, the false appraisals, and
the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that continue to have value for us’)
that occur in time and space, and are exterior to our being, our truths and our values,
then this is when we acquire ‘historical sense’. 30 The emergence of this ‘historical
sense’ can therefore be traced through the genealogy of cinematic communication and
the semiotic regimes of the movement-image and the time-image. Specifically, in the
way the time-image makes the spectator-subject ‘sense’ history or perceive time as a
virtuality that de-centres our subjectivity by forcing desire and thought to explore these
endless lines of difference and variation.

28
Ibid., p.187.
29
Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia
Press, 1994).
30
Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-memory and Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, Donald F.
Bouchard (ed.) (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p.141, cited in Rodowick, op cit., 2001, p.190.
 A problem arises, however, when the idea of History becomes expressed as a
postructuralist aesthetic like the time-image. If we completely abandon the notion of
History on the evidence of it being epistemologically fragile - in the way it appeals to
philosophical models of totality and teleology - then, as Jameson has asserted, we raise
the ‘terrifying spectre of postmodern relativism’; and ‘from a limited series of
conventional and reassuring narrative options (the so-called master narratives), history
becomes a bewildering torrent of sheer Becoming, a stream into which, as Cratylus put
it long ago, one cannot even step once’.31 Furthermore, once we have stepped into this
‘bewildering torrent of sheer Becoming’, as Jameson puts it, then ‘history itself
evaporates in the process, and along with it any possibility of political agency or
collective anti-systemic praxis’.32 Rather than dispense with any conception of History
as meta-narrative, or even the dialectical process that in many ways aptly describes the
systemic development of modern capitalism up until the postmodern era, it would be
more useful to retain the idea of History as a diachronic category but argue that its
synchronic meaning has been transformed. The way we ‘think’ and experience history
through metaphors of time has changed, but this is a synchronic transmutation in
capitalist history; it doesn’t mean History ceases to become relevant as an index for the
diachronic. Despite proclamations about the ‘end of history’ which became fashionable
in the 1980s with both postmodern theorists like Baudrillard and conservative critics like
Francis Fukuyama, what ended wasn’t History but a particular current of modern
historical consciousness that was intimately linked with Hegelian philosophy and the
‘thinking’ of history through linear, causative or teleological conceptions of time.33
The time-image then becomes a synchronic diagram for history in the post-war
period. It is an epistemic marker for historical consciousness as capital begins to
restructure its global apparatus with the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. The
‘historical sense’ that the time-image evokes anticipates a shift in historical

31
Op cit., Jameson, 2005, p.88.
32
Ibid., p.89.
33
The ‘end of history’ debate, which carried through the 1980s the poststructuralist critique of Hegel’s
historical philosophy, became, with Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (New York:
Avon Books Inc., 1992) a general slogan for neo-liberals proclaiming that free-market capitalism was the
only viable political economic system and represented the final stage of human social organisation and
government. For a critique of Fukuyama’s theory see Jameson’s chapter ‘ “End of Art” or “End of History”’
in op cit., 1998, pp.73-92.
consciousness and subjectivity, as cinema, televisual media and information
technologies began to forge new visual figurations of history by introducing new
metaphors for comprehending time and space. In Deleuze’s cinematic philosophy the
time-image directly images a virtual temporality where the real and the imaginary are
indiscernible, where the past and present commingle in an eternally immanent present
and where narrative worlds are both subjective dreamscapes and objective landscapes.
Deleuze constantly emphasises that the time-image is a paradox, in that it images time
as a spatial construct - as a filmic shot or montage sequence - but that the ontological
meaning of the time-image refers to the virtuality that is outside (or deeply interior - as
an immanent force of becoming) any spatial representation of time and thought. As
Rodowick reminds us, the direct image of time is ‘time [that] is always outside the
image; it recedes from the image to toward an absolute horizon, since it is
incommensurable with space’.34
The description of time as an ‘absolute horizon’, and the time-image as a
cinematic Event that opens up the image to the virtual terrain of time as a force of
becoming, in my view, relates time as a virtual space. Albeit one where there is no
determinate mapping of a singular time, but just a multiplicity of temporal vectors that
are like ‘so many alternative paths and deviations in the line of time either, barred,
35
forgotten or barely dreamed’. This is why Deleuze argues that time is
‘incommensurable’ with space, because time is virtual, it is the aporia between the
signifier and the signified where meaning is indeterminate, whereas space, in Deleuze’s
language, is ‘actual’, it is the attribute of a proposition signified in space as an ‘actual’
entity or as a definitive semiotic order. To say then that the time-image defers to a
virtual temporality, is to suggest that it is creating a circuit between its identity as a
cinematographic signifier actualised in filmic space and its non-identity in the virtual and
limitless (non)spatial configurations of time.
What is interesting about Deleuze’s description of the virtuality that the time-image
cuts into the spatiotemporal fabric of the filmic diegesis is that this philosophical
category or Idea seems to find a formal and material expression in the ‘virtual’ space of

34
Op cit., Rodowick, 2001, p.200.
35
Ibid., p.171.
the digital image. 36 This isn’t a straightforward correlation however; the relationship
between Deleuze’s conception of virtuality and the ‘virtuality’ of digital space is complex
and requires patient analysis. Initially, it might be useful to explain how Deleuze
theorises the virtual as a philosophical concept before drawing formal and aesthetic
comparisons between the virtuality expressed in the time-image and the ‘virtual’
architecture of the digital image.
On a philosophical level, Deleuze’s understanding of the virtual is informed by
Bergson’s theory of perception, and the idea that ‘[A]n image may be without being
perceived - it may be present without being represented - and the distance between
these two terms, presence and representation, seems to measure the interval between
matter itself and our conscious perception of matter’. 37 For Bergson the conscious
perception of matter or images (images being the form matter takes when ‘perceived’ by
the body) denotes the moment when the virtual presence of the image is converted into
an ‘actual’ representation. Deleuze, dispensing with the embodied subject of
Bergsonian phenomenology and replacing it with the transsubjective machine
assemblage of cinema, theorises the cinematic cut and the frame as the act of
conscious perception whereby the virtual image is translated into an actual
representation. It is this process that instructs the cinema of the movement-image: the
‘neutralisation’ of the universal flux of images (matter) into a determinate framing of
perception and consciousness. The time-image works the other way, the actual
representation of the image defers to its virtual presence, which means the image is no
longer ‘perceived’ as an actual representation but ‘sensed’ as a virtual entity.
This ‘sensing’ of a virtual presence in the time-images of post-war European
cinema signals the emergence of more self-aware mode of cinematic consciousness. If
we interpret the semiotic regime of the movement-image as a subjective model for
perceptual consciousness it is a consciousness forged through the ‘representational’
index of Euclidean space and perspective. Furthermore, the thought machines of
movement-image or industrial cinema ‘think’ through the time-consciousness of

36
See Hanson’s book New Philosophy for New Media (op cit., 2004) for a rigorous analysis of the
theoretical relationship between Deleuze’s cinematic philosophy of virtuality and the ‘virtual’ realm of
digital media.
37
Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1988),
p.35.
Newtonian mechanics, they ‘perceive’ thought as the cause-and-effect logic that
organises the cognitive schema of the syuzhet and fabula in Bordwell’s normative
model of narrative montage or in the organic relations of Eisenstein’s dialectical
montage. With the genesis of the time-image in post-war European films, cinematic
consciousness became conscious of a mutation in the representational and
epistemological coordinates of its Euclidean spatial and perspectival dimensions. By
inserting images that didn’t connect up in a rational or coherent manner with the other
film images or were disconnected from the narrative logic of the film, the post-war
European cinemas challenged the philosophical mechanics of cinematic ‘thinking’. So
instead of ‘perceiving’ thought as the coherent arrangement of filmic space into a
narrative teleology or an organic totality, thought is ‘perceived’ in the pure optical
situtations/any-space-whatevers of post-war European cinema, in the empty and
disconnected urban spaces that confront thought with a space ‘grasped as the pure
locus of the possible’.38
Both Italian neorealism and the films of Antonioni can be seen to undergo a
transformation in the way cinema ‘thinks’ through its images. Rather than assuming a
perceptual consciousness that organises its film-world through a modern regime of
perspectival vision and thinks this world through a solipsistic time-consciousness
governed by the ‘external’ framing of Newtonian epistemology, the time-image relates a
more fluid cinematic consciousness that ‘senses’ the presence of time as a potential in
the ‘aleatory singularity of events’ expressed through neorealism’s ‘chance encounters’
or in the alienating void of Antonioni’s ‘dead time’ images. By extracting this potential
from the ‘disembodied’ and ‘empty’ spaces of post-war Europe Deleuze argues that the
time-image realises the content of the world as an immanent virtuality and allows
perceptual consciousness to ‘see’ and ‘think’ time and space beyond the confines of
industrial cinema’s Newtonian mechanics of vision.
In Deleuze’s philosophical cinematic historiography it is in the pure optical situation
and any-space-whatevers of Italian neorealism and Antonioni’s films that this post-
industrial anti-Newtonian time-consciousness emerges as mode of cinematic
consciousness. The any-space-whatevers constructed in the depth-of-field

38
Op cit., Deleuze, 1986, p.109.
compositions of Italian neorealism and in the empty, ‘dead time’ images that punctuate
Antonioni’s work describe for Deleuze filmic spaces that ‘are expressed for themselves,
outside spatio-temporal coordinates, with their own ideal singularities and their virtual
conjunction’. 39 What Deleuze means by suggesting that these spaces exist outside
spatio-temporal coordinates is that their relational meaning is not determined by the
cognitive linkages constructed through the empirical (Euclidean) coordinates of the
filmic montage. Rather, any-space-whatevers promote a filmthinking that thinks the
images through a virtual topology whereby the space becomes a singularity that
conjoins an infinite number of immanent temporalities, spatialities, ‘nonplaces’,
subjectivities and perspectives that are beyond or outside the image. The way
Antonioni’s desolate urban landscapes are inextricably linked with mental images, with
the subjectivites of absent characters and with the ‘sense’ of time as an open and
immanent plane of duration, illustrates how any-space-whatevers create ‘virtual
conjunctions’ between the ‘representational’ space of the image and the ‘virtual’
presence of parallel worlds and mindscapes enfolded through the vicissitudes of a time
and space ‘outside’ the empirical or formal measure of cinema’s Euclidean perspectival
regime.
In Deleuze’s analysis, the any-space-whatevers of post-war European cinema
enact what is an ontological transformation of the cinematic image from a medium of
‘representation’ to one of virtualisation. Any-space-whatevers theorised as specific post-
war manifestations of the time-image come to redefine the conceptual boundaries of
cinematic consciousness by challenging industrial or movement-image cinema’s
perceptual and empirical regime of perspectival ‘representation’. They install in
cinematic consciousness a way of thinking and feeling through images that isn’t
motivated by the extrinsic causal (Newtonian) designs of montage or its perspectival
geometry. Instead, time-images reveal virtual images that cannot be perceived through
the classical modality of cinematic vision. Time-images are images that can only be
thought or felt as an affect, they instantiate in the cinematic imagination a new model of
perceptual knowledge that, paradoxically, doesn’t locate this knowledge in the optical-
geometric faculties of filmic perception.

39
Ibid., p.102.
 It is perhaps Mark Hansen who has described this phenomenon most lucidly in his
discussion of Deleuze’s cinema of the time-image:

For Deleuze…what marks the crucial break instigating the shift of one cinema to
the cinema of the time-image is the breakdown in the logic of connection
between images: in the space of the irrational cut or interstice between two
images, access is opened to a series of virtual images that instantiate the force
of time itself. Accordingly, ‘perception’ of the time-image - if we can still even call
it that - necessarily takes place from a position that simply cannot be identified
with the zero-point occupied by the perceiving human body: precisely because it
opens ‘perception’ up to the imperceptible, the time-image is an image that can
only be thought.40

Hansen argues that Deleuze’s conceptualisation of any-space-whatevers is one that

attempts to grapple philosophically with the ‘nonplace’ that ‘demarcates a space that
has always already been de-actualised - a space without any “original” analogical
correlation with human activity’. This space can only ever be ‘felt’, or at least requires
new modalities of proprioception to render its affects ‘visible’ to brain-body
consciousness. He further contends that the cinematic any-space-whatever has
mutated into the digital any-space-whatever; informational spaces that have no
analogical relation to human movement and perception but refer to abstract
spatiotemporal dimensions that lie beyond the human referents of lived time and
perceptual space. One of the main theoretical aims of Hansen’s book is to redevelop
the concept of the Deleuzian time-image as a problematic for new media art and
aesthetics by analysing how digital technologies expand our comprehension of the
virtual as an affective topology that transforms human perceptual experience and
consciousness. For the purposes of my argument, Hansen’s analysis provides an
intricate exploration of what I contend is the philosophical anticipation of the nascent
virtuality of digital media by the Deleuzian time-image. I’m unable to fully expand on
Hansen’s project within the scope of this book, however, it should be noted that

40
Op cit., Hanson, 2004, p.257.
Hansen’s thesis that the time-image affects cinematic consciousness in a way that lays
the groundwork for the affective and sensual topologies of the digital, is one that forms
one of the central premises of my own study.
Following Hansen’s lead, I want to now turn to the ‘virtual’ space of digital media
and discuss how in digital space we can find a material analogue for the time-image.
Initially, I believe the best way to theorise the structural and aesthetic logic of digital
media is through Lev Manovich’s conception of the database as the ‘symbolic form’ of
the computer age. 41 Following Panofsky’s assertion that linear perspective is the
‘symbolic form’ of modernity, Manovich contends that the database is the dominant
‘symbolic form’ for computational or digital media. Database, in the specific terms of
computer science, is a collection of data that is arranged according to a variety of
models (hierarchical, networked, relational, object-orientated) and typically allows the
user to access discrete pieces of information within its schema. What characterises
database logic is its modular structure; each factual element within its index can be
accessed independently without having to negotiate the entire schematic order. This
logic is antithetical to that of most traditional media narratives, which require the reader
or spectator to observe and connect all the elements together sequentially, whether it is
the words, sentences and chapters in a book, or the shots and sequences in a filmic
montage.
The opposition between narrative and database is the cornerstone for
Manovich’s conceptualisation of database as a ‘symbolic form’. Narrative denotes a
cultural form that is based in what Deleuze has philosophised as the chronological
temporality of cause-and-effect that governs the cinema of the movement-image.
Databases, however, store information in ‘virtual’ spaces. When a user accesses data
they search and navigate the database through multiple trajectories, this nonlinear
movement is a central principle of digital or computational media, which is why
Manovich understands the database as the structural foundation for the hypertextual
design of new media. Again, Deleuze offers a conceptual lens in his philosophy of
virtuality in the time-image; databases as ‘virtual’ spaces organise time in no
chronological order, but only as ‘data structures and algorithms’ that relate

41
Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA., London: MIT Press, 2001), p.194.
incommensurable spatial points as potential trajectories in time. 42 In this way the
database posits, what in Deleuze’s vocabulary would be the ‘actual’ space of a
navigational trajectory - the pathway of an embodied user negotiating the schema of the
database - as one of multiple ‘virtual’ trajectories that have already been ‘actualised’
before the user even traverses these pathways. In this way the database formalises
through its hypertextual architecture the ‘crystalline’ form of the time-image - the ‘sheets
of the past’, represented in the database by the predetermined choices of its interface
are materialised in a narrative produced by the user. Moreover, the ‘virtual’ space of the
database is more material than the ‘actual’ syntagmatic linkages constructed through
the database, as where the database has a constant virtual presence, the user’s
trajectory has markedly less presence in time.
The aesthetic experience of digital media is very much determined by the
affective temporal continuum created between the real lived experience of the user and
the virtual realm of the digital datascape. This continuum is, as Hansen suggests, built
on ‘the confrontation of potentially incompatible embodiments of time: the lived affective
temporality of human experience and the “intensive” time of machine processing’. 43 The
digital image functions as an interface between these divergent temporal orders by
translating the ‘intensive’ time of programming codes, the deep algorithmic logic of the
machine, into recognisable images and objects that form the symbolic language of
computational media. A rather banal example is the graphical-user interface (GUI) of
the Windows desktop. The Windows interface and GUIs generally translate all the
unintelligable streams of numbers and code into a format that refers to the cultural and
aesthetic norms of media culture. Whether its web-pages referring to the format of a
print magazine, QuickTime player borrowing its interface controls from other machines
such as the fast-forward, rewind and pause buttons on the VCR, or even the scissors
icon that is used to represent the ‘cut’ function, the GUI translates the numerical and
algorithmic functions of the computer into symbolic emblems we can identify with. The
digital image is not really an ‘image’ in as much as it is a referent for the interactive
relationships that define the human-machine interfaces of digital media.

42
Ibid., p.197.
43
Op cit., Hansen, 2004, p.235.
 The word interaction needs to be qualified in this instance as a tactile interaction
with objects in real-time in virtual space. Unlike the cinema screen which is interactive in
an imaginary or psychological level, the interfaces of digital media technologies such as
virtual reality (VR) or the GUIs of most computer-based media are governed by an
instrumental interactivity, a physical tactility whereby the user’s bodily movements
directly manipulate images and objects in a virtual space. It is this interaction between
humans and machines, whereby the image or object on a computer screen or in a
computer game is a referent for the real-time bodily movement of the user transmitted
through the mouse, finger on a touch pad, joystick or head-mounted display (HMD) of a
VR system, that distinguishes the digital interface from other visual media (except
radar). Moreover, the interactive functions of digital media interfaces often define the
aesthetic experience of the digital image. Using the example of computer games,
specifically the first-person shoot’em ups like Doom or Quake, we can observe how the
aesthetic appeal of the 3-D virtual environments has as much to do with the quality of
the ‘gameplay’ - the interface functions that allows players to move around the
gameworld, open doors, shoot weapons, etc - as they do with the visual graphics. This
example points more broadly to primacy of the digital image as an interface rather than
an image. The user or player’s affective responses to digital images are often primarily
felt in terms of their interactive functionality, in their capacity as a virtual avatar or
mediator that tracks a person’s movements and connections through cyberspace or
some other virtual environment.
The interactivity of digital media images represents a shift in the way the
representational images of visual media operate to produce aesthetic effects. Rather
than merely displaying images as objects for aesthetic contemplation the images of
digital media provoke affective responses by establishing a temporal continuum
between embodied human experience and the nonhuman zones of machine time. Much
of the aesthetic appeal of digital special effects lies in their capacity to represent
temporal universes that transcend the lived-physical indexes of our existential reality.
For example the aesthetic effects of digital morphing used first in films such as the
Abyss, Terminator 2: Judgement Day and Jurassic Park are created by inserting a
digital composite within a space that refers to the spatio-temporal index of cinematic
photorealism. As Manovich has commented, by the second half of the twentieth century
cinematic photorealism had assumed the same ontological and phenomenological
weight as our embodied material reality.44 With digital images the temporal features of
cinema’s photorealistic images and by extension the existential temporal index of our
perceived material reality are radically reconfigured by numerical code. The spectacular
aesthetic affects produced when the analogical index of material reality is transcoded
into the spatio-temporal dimensions of digital code comes from the ontological distortion
of existential time and space. The uncanny aesthetic attraction of the digital morph used
in Hollywood special effect blockbusters, corporate advertisements and music videos of
the early nineteen nineties (as the uncanny transmogrification of human figures into
liquid, of tigers into cars and of people’s faces into each other people’s face) can be
found in its capacity as a representational figure for spatio-temporal dimensions that
transcend the physical laws of the human universe and the parameters of human
perception. 45 The digital morph hereby allowed the everyday human observer or
cinematic spectator to access new temporal dimensions and spatial zones as embodied
sensations and affects - as the kinaesthetic experience of the special effect.
In Yvonne Spielman’s analysis ‘The morph is a crucial technique of simulation
since parts of the image may be transformed in both ways, back and forth, so that two
different moments in time hit each other in a single image unit, creating a paradoxical
image position’. 46 As an embodied sensation the aesthetic effect/affect of the digital
morph comes from perceiving time as a ‘virtual conjunction’ - as an image that
paradoxically represents temporal duration as potentially moving both forwards and
backwards and in any direction. The uncanny aesthetic effects/affects of the digital
morph are affirmed in the moment when the ontological and existential parameters of
time and space are deterritorialised by the digital image. It is in this interval where time
ceases to be thought as a linear movement that Deleuze argues the power and quality
of affect is genuinely felt in thought. Affect for Deleuze is hereby not purely the
vertiginous or kinaesthetic sensations provoked by the special effects of the digital

44
Op cit., Manovich, 2001, pp. 249-259.
45
See the collection of essays in Meta-morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick
Change, op cit., Sobchack (ed.), 2000, for a detailed cultural and technical history of the cinematic and
digital ‘morph’.
46
Yvonne Spielmann, ‘Expanding Film into Digital Media’ in Screen 40.2 (1999), p.142.
morph but the affect of it figuring time as a virtual space. The uncanny aesthetic affects
are secondary sensory reactions to this fundamental existential distortion of temporal
perception by digital images.
If we situate the digital morph within the historical context of cinematic
consciousness it designates the transformation of cinematographic space into an omni-
directional virtual space that doesn’t privileged horizontal axis of traditional montage and
narrative cinema nor the vertical axis developed by the neorealist aesthetic. Rather, as
Deleuze suggests, it ‘constantly varies its angles and co-ordinates, to exchange the
vertical with the horizontal’. 47 The omni-directional time of the digital image in many
ways materialises the virtual temporal reality of the any-space-whatever as a formal
object that refigures the absent philosophical object of the time-image as a material
presence. The virtual realm that the time-image points to by inviting the spectator to
think about time as a radically contingent potentiality through the vertical and quasi-
virtual spaces of neorealist cinema or Antonioni’s empty spaces that conjoin
incompatible subjective and objective worlds, is most often considered as a lack or
absence. This is because the affective meaning of Deleuze’s any-space-whatevers
does not refer to the horizontal and vertical planes of the cinematic imagination but to
the epistemological and ontological confusion of these dimensions, something that can
only be represented symbolically in film as an absence. With digital technologies the
symbolic representation of any-space-whatevers can be achieved. In that the virtual
time zones that cannot be ‘seen’ but only intuited in the time-images of post-war
European cinema are made perceptible by rendering cinematographic space omni-
directional. Whereas the any-space-whatevers of European post-war cinema attempted
to represent time as a perpetual Now that was free from any linear determination,
whether this was narrative or the horizontal organisation of the filmic montage, the
digital image turns this nonlinear conception of time into the specific form of its media-
object. The material ontology of the digital image liberates the cinematographic image

47
Deleuze when examining the numerical coordinates of the electronic image asserts that ‘the
organization of space here loses its privileged directions, and first of all the privilege of the vertical which
the position of the screen still displays in favour of the omni-directional space which constantly varies its
angles and co-ordinates, to exchange the vertical with the horizontal’, op cit., 1989, p.265.
from analogue registration and organises the time of the image as a multidimensional
virtual space.
In the digital era the philosophical interval between the existential time of modern
cinematic perception and the imperceptible time of the virtual is no longer a question
that needs to be reduced to abstract philosophical speculation. Rather, the question of
how embodied human experience, temporal perception and body-brain consciousness
is reconstituted or transcoded in the virtual space of the digital has become a chief
practical concern for the developers and programmers of new media interfaces.
Anticipating many of the philosophical issues that emerge as human-machine relations
are reconfigured through the informatics of digital media, Deleuze’s time-image
presents us with a nascent cinematic figure for the digital interface. The time-image
attempts to explore how thought and the cerebral processes of the brain can traverse
the virtual temporalities and images that lay beyond the immediate representational and
‘relational’ spaces of movement-image cinema by deepening the dimensions of time
and the layers of association in the cinematic image. In Deleuze’s philosophy, the
ontological and ‘creative’ realm of the virtual is intuited in the openings that the time-
image creates between cinematic images to an ‘outside’ that mobilises a whole range of
immanent affects, subjectivities, temporalities and incompossible worlds. These virtual
dimensions cannot be directly ‘seen’ in the representational space of cinema but can be
intuited or ‘sensed’ as a presence in the pregnant potentiality of time-pressure that flows
through the frame and ‘out-of-field’ or in the subjectivity of a lost character that haunts
the gaze of the camera. Whatever specific form of filmthinking the time-image inspires,
it is perhaps best summarised in Frampton’s well chosen quote from Hugo
Munsterberg: ‘with the whole mobility of our association of ideas, pictures of the past flit
through the scenes of the present. Time is left behind…The freedom of the mind has
triumphed over the unalterable law of the outer world’.48
In Deleuze’s thesis, the cinema of the time-image explodes the confines of
industrial (movement-image) cinema’s rigid Newtonian thought-machine. Deleuze in
some of his supplementary writings and interviews on cinema describes it as being

48
Hugo Munsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (New York: D. Appleton, 1916), p.181, cited
in Frampton, op cit., 2006, p.138.
isomorphic with the brain.49 And it follows that the time-image generates new cerebral
circuits just as it creates new cinematic circuits between actual images and their virtual
conjunctions ‘outside’ the system of cinematic representation. 50 By breaking the
sensory-motor connections of classical filmthinking the cinema of the time-image
multiplies the neuroaesthetic dimensions of the ‘cinematic brain’ so that a new
multidirectional cinematic consciousness is born, as Hansen’s describes: ‘Deleuze’s
neuro-cinema operates a fundamental disembodiment of the brain - a transcendence of
its sensory-motor basis’.51 This idea that the cinema of the time-image provides a model
for a virtual cinematic consciousness that transcends the embodied materiality of the
brain appears wildly utopian. Yet, we only have to look at the materialisation of the
virtual reality generated by global computational and informational technologies in the
digital age to observe a ‘collective brain’ that transcends the material capacities of
embodied human perception and thought. Furthermore, the philosophical problems
posed by the time-image remain as urgent as ever in the digital age. As similar to time-
images and any-space-whatevers, the human spectator or user doesn’t directly
‘perceive’ the virtual form of the digital, rather its dimensional presence can only be felt
when the machine time of computational programming is transcoded into the aesthetic
effects/affects of a digital morph or in the interactive haptic and kinaesthetic functions of
GUIs, computer games or VR.
The notion that many interactive digital media interfaces or images translate
visual information into our perceptual consciousness through non-visual sensory,
kinaesthetic, haptic and bodily stimuli suggests that the topography of the virtual is
currently being mapped in digital media more through the bodily dimensions of affect
than through the mechanics of perception. The emphasis in digital media on non-visual
sensory and haptic modalities of proprioception suggests that it may in fact be our
bodies that are best equipped to incorporate the virtuality of the digital as an affective
experience that can then be given form in perceptual consciousness. This conception of
affect as an alternative modality of perception for the virtual follows Deleuze’s argument
that virtual space is affected in the cinematic figures of the time-image and any-space-

49
Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, trans. M. Joughin (New York: Columbia Press, 1995), p.60.
50
See Hansen’s discussion of Deleuze and the cinematic brain in op cit., 2004, p.248
51
Ibid., p.193.
whatevers as an expression of ‘pure potentiality’. The virtual is not something that can
be represented in cinematic space or perceived through cinema’s classical visual
regime, but only felt in the affect of time as a spiritual power. Although, while Deleuze is
explicit in stating that time and the virtual cannot be perceived as spatial movement but
can only be accessed as thoughts and affects, his theoretical position is undermined by
his philosophical conceptualisation of the virtual as a transcendental force.
As Hansen discusses in reference to the media philosophy of Pierre Levy and
Timothy Murrey, Deleuze understands affect as a vehicle (power) for the virtual as a
transcendental mode of abstract thought and not as a material or embodied sensation.
As a corrective to Deleuze, both Levy and Murrey seek to rearticulate affect as the
embodied experience of the virtual and hereby enact ‘a fundamental transformation in
the philosophical tenor of the virtual: rather than a transcendental condition for thought,
the virtual becomes instead the quasi or infraempirical catalyst for the “real genesis” of a
bodily spacing, which is, not surprising, nothing other than the virtualisation of the body
itself’. 52 This understanding of the virtual as an embodied sensation that can be
registered in the affective experiences of human subjectivity enables us to better
comprehend how the cinematic figure of the time-image relates historically and
aesthetically to the interactive interfaces of digital images.
What becomes immediately apparent when we compare the virtual nonplaces
that are expressed in the time-images of the post-war Italian filmmakers with the digital
images and special effects of the Hollywood blockbuster is the divergent aesthetic
affects that are produced in the spectator/user by digital virtuality compared to the
virtuality theorised by Deleuze in the time-image. In Deleuze’s theorisation of the time-
images of Antonioni’s cinema, the virtual is marked by a sublime absence, which
directly contrasts with the contemporary experience of digital virtuality, which in the
contemporary Hollywood blockbuster assaults the spectator as a spectacular
hypervisible presence. With this shift in cinema’s aesthetic and material form - from
analogue to digital - the affective topography of cinematic virtuality has also altered.
In the cinema of Antonioni the virtual Event is felt in the empty and entropic durée
of the void (expressed through ‘dead’ time-images and empty any-space-whatevers) as

52
Ibid., p.145.
it threatens to enfold the spatial coherence of the film diegeses into the perpetual Now
of real-time duration. This is most evident in the final sequence in Eclipse where the
‘dead time’ images become invested with the pure potentiality of temporal duration. The
empirical space of the street crossroads is hereby transformed into a nonplace haunted
by disembodied traces of social interactions and by an apocalyptic future that is
actualised in the time of the present. What is most significant, however, is the way these
time-images ‘trigger the process of bodily spacing’.53 In Hansen’s analysis the process
of bodily spacing refers to the affective production of cinematographic space as an
analogical spatial figure in the body. It should also be stipulated that bodily spacing is
also an affective rather than perceptual process, in that ‘the affective body does not so
much see as feel the space of the film; it feels it… as an energised, haptic spatiality
within itself’.54 How then does the body feel the empty spaces and ‘dead time’ images of
Antonioni’s films? Well first of all, the potentialisation of time in Antonioni’s vacant
spaces generates the bodily production of affectivity as nonvisual haptic and tactile
sensations. These sensations refer to the spectator’s perception of time as durée but
are not intrinsically connected to the external act of perception. Instead they relate the
physical impact of the scale and length of temporal duration as ‘tactility’ within the body.
The haptic and tactile modalities of sensation affect in bodily space the weight of time-
pressure felt in Antonioni’s ‘dead time’ shots. When the time of the shots become
internally figured in the haptic and tactile modes of proprioception, and this becomes an
autonomous register alongside vision, then it could be said that the virtual dimension of
Antonioni’s time-images have been affected in the spatiality of the body.
In feeling the weight of durée as a modality of bodily sense the spectator has
created a virtual conjunction between the cinematographic space and the affective field
of sensation within their body. In Antonioni’s films the affective topography of this bodily
spacing is consubstantial with lived time of existential duration. By forming an embodied
affective correlative to the extensive time of duration expressed in the longuers and
elliptical spaces of Antonioni’s films, the spectator further incorporates the architecture
of the cinematic time-space into a bodily analogue that further represents an attempt to

53
Ibid., p.214.
54
Ibid., p.232.
imbricate the internal affectivities of the modern subject with the virtual duration of the
world.
The virtual time of the world is also historical. And from a historical perspective,
the affective topography of the virtual promoted in much of Antonioni’s cinema was one
that referred to the void as an empty symbolic figure for the domain of collective time
and history - what Jameson contends is the Real of history. The affects of emptiness
and alienation that are evoked in Antonioni’s films are symptomatic of a blockage in
high modernist subjectivity, as ‘historical sense’ becomes felt as a ‘bewildering torrent of
sheer Becoming’. The pure optical situations and the time-images that expressed the
lived historical time of the social in neorealism, are, in Antonioni’s films, taken to signify
the temporal object of the social as ‘the place of the fantastic as a determinate, marked
absence at the heart of the secular world…an object world forever suspended on the
brink of meaning, forever disposed to receive the revelation of evil or grace that never
comes’. 55 Initially, the affective experiences of the virtual in neorealism were most
closely aligned to the notion of ‘historical sense’. The any-space-whatevers and pure
optical situations of neorealism emphasised the eternal recurrence of time, historically,
as the virtual timespaces of the ‘people’ out-of-field who make up the social milieu, in
the missed encounters and possible trajectories that are hinted at as the protagonists
wander through their environments. It is in the ‘sense’ of history and the social as a host
of unseen possibilities and interactions converging in the Now (in neorealism’s ‘illusion
of the present tense’) of the time-image that the notion of historical consciousness is
turned into an affective response. It is in Antonioni’s films though, that the any-space-
whatevers and ‘dead time’ sequences began to preclude conceptualisations of the
historical and the social from the affective content of their virtual conjunctions.
What Antonioni’s films highlight in their evocation of the virtual as the empty
timeless time of the void was the growing schizophrenic disjuncture between the
continuity of lived historical time and the ‘intuition of existence as a pure inert spatial
present’.56 The feelings of boredom, anxiety and existential ennui that resonate through

55
Op cit., Jameson, 1981, pp.134-135.
56
Crary paraphrases Eugene Minkowski’s clinical account of schizophrenia, inspired in part by Bergson’s
work on the subject, as ‘a “discordance” and lack of integration between an intuition of existence as a
pure inert spatial present and as a continuity of lived time’, cited in Crary, op cit, 1999, p.326n105. For the
Antonioni’s images and characters are symptomatic of the subject’s alienation from the
collective time of historical experience during the high modernist period of Fordist
capitalism. The social and political value of neorealism’s aesthetic in developing a
‘historical sense’ that anchored historical experience in the Now of social reality had
become lost when the post-war social milieu changed fundamentally with the advent of
consumer capitalism. Antonioni’s films effectively document the fading of this social
reality from historical consciousness by showing in his empty spaces and ‘dead time’
shots the entropic diffusion of virtual time and the impoverished affective experience of
the Now.
Time as a virtuality is expressed in Antonioni’s films as an empty void - the bodily
experience of boredom and existential anxiety designates the alienating disjuncture
between the subject and the collective time of history. Turning now to consider the
virtual time of digital images, we must understand this machine time as a time beyond
the lived time of history and its register in the inert spatial presence of human existence.
Digital images are interfaces for the quantum temporalities that structure the virtual
architecture of digital information; they communicate a virtual space expurgated from
the biological time of human mortality and from the historical time of the social.
Moreover, it is a time that exists apart from the sublime time of the void figured in
Antonioni’s films. In Antonioni’s films the time of the virtual is experienced as the infinite
and enduring time of the cosmos, as cinematic tropes that evoke the sublime quietude
of nature or foreshadow the final annihilation of life in a nuclear apocalypse. Although
Antonioni’s time-images relate historical time as a void impossibly represented through
the duration, loss and ephemerality of the world or cosmos, this time still refers to the
space of worldly experience. The time of the digital image relates a technological
sublime that is beyond such experience. Recalling Cubitt’s comments on the Kantian
distinction between the beautiful and the sublime, he argues that ‘Beauty alludes to loss
- ecological fragility, the Being-towards-death’ whereas the sublime abandons ‘duration

direct source see, Eugene Minkowski, ‘Bergson’s Conceptions as Applied to Psychopathology’ in Journal
of Nervous and Mental Disease, vol. 63, no. 4 (June, 1926), pp.553-568.
along with any sense of loss, ephemerality or beauty [and] in their place establishes the
punctual and fulfilled moment outside time’.57
Cubitt distinguishes between the time of beauty and the sublime in explicit
reference to CGI effects of early 1990s blockbusters such as Independence Day,
Armageddon (1998) and Volcano (1997), suggesting that the technological sublime of
special effects cinema adds to the ‘modes of timelessness familiar to the baroque -
eternity, death, nature’ the spectacular timeless time of digital mediations. 58 In the
specific context of my analysis, we can observe how the sublime time of digital special
effects in postmodern media culture replaces, as an ahistorical temporal figure, the
timeless time of the void expressed in Antonioni’s time-images. This transfiguration of
the sublime as a temporal object between the high modernist time-images of Antonioni’s
cinema and the blockbuster cinema of special effects is of profound historical
significance. Whereas Antonioni’s time-images symbolically figure the Real of history
(the impossibility of representing the real social space of collective history) in the
absence, duration and loss represented through the cosmological time of eternal natural
or the being-towards-death of the nuclear apocalypse, in digital special effects the real
loses all reference to the social time of the world, to a historical and material time
bounded by death. Already in Antonioni’s cinema the ‘historical sense’ of virtual time
had become imagined as a cosmic void or lack, an alienation that could be felt in the
production of a cinematic ‘bodily spacing’ that realised the embodied time of the virtual
as a deeply disturbing affective sensation. The haptic and tactile sensations affected in
the virtual conjunctions of Antonioni’s time-images further signalled a broader existential
and historical crisis for the post-war subject of capital. With the transfiguration of the
virtual in the temporal object of the digital image, the crisis in high modernist subjectivity
can be seen to be addressed through the reconfiguration of the ontological, temporal,
spatial and affective topography of cinematic consciousness.
The ‘historical sense’ that in Deleuze’s writings comes with the emergence of the
time-image as cinematographic figure for historical time experienced as the perpetual
immanence of the Now, has in the global information networks of the digital age

57
Sean Cubitt, ‘Introduction. Le reel, C’est L’impossible: The Sublime Time of Special Effects’ in Screen
vol. 40, no. 2 (1999), p.126.
58
Ibid., p.130.
become refashioned as the ‘intensities’ produced in the Now of real-time interactive
human-machine interfaces. Following Jameson, I use the term ‘intensities’ to broadly
relate postmodern modes of sensual and perceptual experience that arise as ‘accidents
in the continuum of postcontemporary life, breaks and gaps in the perceptual system of
late capitalism’. 59 These intensities articulate the euphoric and dizzying sensation
elicited from the postmodern subject as she negotiates the disorientating hyperspaces
of consumer capitalism and is barraged with an incessant flow of commodities, media
images and megaspectacles. In Jameson’s thesis, postmodern intensities replace the
alienation, ennui and existential anxiety of modernist subjectivity. Jameson argues that
modernist alienation describes the feeling that comes with the ‘waning of historicity, of
our lived possibility of experiencing history in some way’, whereas postmodern
intensities more properly signal the ‘end of history’. 60 This is because these postmodern
intensities no longer refer to the ‘modernist thematics of time and temporality’ or ‘the
elegiac mysteries of duree and memory’ but to the bodily and perceptual effects
produced in the new technological space of a virtual communicational and informational
media abstracted from social, historical time and from the phenomenological
consciousness of temporal continuity and duration.61
Intensities have become the currency of the real as historical consciousness
gives way to the cybernetic circuitries of media and communication technologies. For
the modernist subject, historical subjectivity is defined by the evaporation of History as a
master narrative for representing the collective time of social change. However, as
Jameson’s tells us, the late twentieth century anxiety concerning the ‘end of history’

…is not really about Time at all, but rather about Space; and that the anxieties it
so powerfully invests and expresses, to which it gives such usable figuration, are
not unconscious worries about the future or about Time: they express the
constriction of Space in the new world system; they bespeak the closing of
another, more fundamental frontier in the new world market of globalisation and
transnational corporations.

59
Op cit, Jameson, 1998, p.112.
60
Op cit., Jameson, 1991, p.15
61
Ibid., p.16.
The impoverishment of the postmodern historical imagination is related to the
spatialisation of lived historical time in the microcircuits of digital space. Even the
‘historical sense’ that Deleuze posits as a poststructural philosophical corrective to the
epistemologically problematic diachronic notion of History represents a forlorn attempt
to re-establish time as a creative historical force. In the global space of cybernetic
capitalism, the open flux of worldly duration that the time-image directly images is
transformed into the spatialised extension of digital datascapes. As Cubitt has noted in
the slow-motion, multiple angles, steadicam, crane work and zooms of contemporary
Hollywood cinema, ‘duration becomes extension’ as the aleatory singularity of duration
expressed in the temporal vector of the time-image is transcoded into a spatialised
architecture of an algorithm: ‘the spatialisation of the vector transforms it from the free
evolution of open trajectory to the predictable spatialised extension of the present, an
algorithm whose iterations determine its future performance’. 62 The spatialisation of
lived time as it emerges as a product of cinematic time, is something that can be
conceptualised in the movement from Deleuze’s concept of the time-image to the
cinematic architecture of the digital image.
The digital image, similar to the time-image, can be viewed as a conceptual
figure for a certain historical un-imagining. If we conceptualise the digital image as a
historical image, as a visual diagram for a certain temporal and spatial experience that
emerges at the end of the twentieth century, then it becomes a lot clearer how the
notion of history and historical consciousness have become reconfigured, rather than
becoming extinguished, in the virtual space of global capital’s informational and
communicational networks. From a diachronic perspective, the ‘historical sense’ that
replaces the teleological narrative of Marxist historiography in Foucault and Deleuze’s
Nietzchean theorisation of historical time (and the ‘end of history’ thesis put forward by
various political and cultural commentators) is really just an attempt to grapple with the
problematic idea of history as a temporal category once the concept of time, and the
lived experience of time, becomes ontologically unstable as it is radically foreshortened
in the immediacy of electronic and digital space. This is also true of Deleuze’s analysis

62
Op cit., Cubitt, 2004, p.361.
of the time-image. Rather than interpreting the time-image philosophically as a
cinematographic sign that directly images time as a transcendental ontological Power, it
is better to understand the time-image as historiographic sign that documents the first
cinematic imaginings of the virtual as an ontological figure for historical experience. By
evaluating the time-image as a conceptual diagram for the historical experience of the
virtual (as ‘historical sense’) before the virtual becomes associated with the human-
machine interfaces and immaterial datascapes of contemporary cyberculture, we can
better comprehend the dissolution of historical consciousness in the postmodern period
as a process that involves the re-imagining of the virtual timeless time of duration in the
virtual space of digital information.
In Cubitt’s study he suggests that the re-imagining of the virtual in the digital age
is a refiguration of the sublime time of the divine as the spatial infinity of cyberspace:
‘The infinity of the virtual has taken the place of the infinity of the divine, turning external
expansion of the future into the internal and dematerialised spatial expansion of the
present’. 63 Deleuze’s abstract philosophical discussion of virtual time as a ‘spiritual
power’ lends itself to the idea that the time-image expresses time as the ‘infinity of the
divine’. Consequently, Cubitt’s analysis provides a useful narrative through which to
interpret the transformation of the virtual as the re-investment of time’s transcendental
power of becoming in the artificial infinite of digital space. Perhaps of most significance
though is the proposition that in the infinite virtual space of the digital the sublime
experience of time as an expansive futurity is rearticulated as the intensive expansion of
the present. The anxiety that becomes manifest when the high modernist subject
confronts the sublime in Antonioni’s images reveals a disjunction between synchronic
phenomenal experience and diachronic historical experience. In the artificial infinite of
digital space this historical anxiety is recast as a media interface that separates the
individual as an embodied presence in front of the screen from the virtual reality
represented in the electronic and digital space of computer-mediated communication.
The utopian abolition of the boundary that separates lived existential time from the
collective time of history is, in digital culture, the utopian desire for instantaneous access
to all information. The temporal value of the real is hereby measured by the ‘real time’

63
Op cit., Cubitt, 1998, p.84.
transmission of information, by the speed at which the user can access the social
networks of information, either through immediate communication with other users, or
through the consumption of news, economic and financial data, cultural events,
consumer products and entertainment.
In regard to cinematic consciousness, intensities can be viewed as the affective
topographies engineered by digital images and special effects. As I mentioned above,
the visual and aesthetic appeal of special effects in the Hollywood blockbuster comes
from the perceived digital manipulation of our phenomenal lifeworld; its rendering onto a
spatiotemporal dimensional plane that defies the physical and material laws of our
sentient world. In Hansen’s language of ‘bodily spacing’, the visual stimulation of digital
special effects is only the trigger for a deeper refiguration of digital space in the body. It
is in the haptic and tactile sensations, in the nonvisual kinaesthetic and synaesthetic
experience of special effects, that the machinic time-space of the digital is affected
(virtualised) in the body as a ‘bodily spacing’. Following this argument, the formal,
sensual and bodily intensities that Darley and others note as dominating the aesthetic
experiences of interactive digital media, in fact designate the affective or virtual
production of digital informational codings in the body of the user-spectator. Intensities
hereby describe the spatialised production of digital temporal economies as internalised
sensations and bodily affects.
Like the Deleuzian time-image, digital images and special effects model for
cinematic consciousness a new way of thinking through the image as a ‘virtual
conjunction’ that ‘senses’ the relations between images as a feeling rather than
understanding it through the perceptual logic of the filmic interval. In digital space the
temporal function of the filmic image is, as Spielman tells us, ‘transferred into a spatial
category where the differences between single images are represented simultaneously
through the use of (multiple) layers’. 64 The temporal interval that mediates the gap
separating adjacent film images is eliminated in the space of the digital image, as is the
imperative to construct meaning through the serial continuity of film shots and the
temporal difference of images. Instead, the formal syntheses of filmthinking and the
ability to construct meaning is determined by the viewer-spectator’s capacity to ‘make

64
Op cit., Spielman, 1999, p.138.
sense’ of the visual information as a multilayered, multidimensional structure and
negotiate the spatial composition of the digital image as a non-linear complexity. What
makes this difficult is that the digital image collapses the temporal form of the film
interval into its omni-directional space and in doing so disrupts the mapping of the film
image as a sensorimotor connection in the mind and vision of the spectator. The time of
the interval is hereby rendered imperceptible to human-cinematic vision and can only be
‘felt’ as a ‘bodily spacing’ rather than cognitively and perceptually understood as an
indexical marker for cinematic temporality.
To use the example of the digital morph, its aesthetic value is premised on
disrupting the temporal index of the cinematographic moving image. The affectivity of
the special effect is realised when the filmic interval loses its temporal and
representational value as a modality of cinematic perception. With the digital morph the
time of the filmic interval is re-ordered as an infinitesimal calculation of a spatial
algorithm, as such, the affective experience of the morph is no longer grounded in the
temporal, perceptual and sensorimotor connections of the movement-image. Rather,
what Sobchack describes as the ‘uncanny’ sensation derived from perceiving the
‘temporal reversibility and palindromic quality of the morph, the non-hierarchical
similitude of its elements’ can be interpreted, pace Hansen, as the affective production
of digital morphology as a ‘bodily spacing’.65 Unable to process the temporal value of
the morph through the perceptual index of filmic vision, the sensorimotor connection of
the filmic interval is displaced into the body as a tactile-haptic sensation. 66 The
‘uncanniness’ felt when viewing the digital morph is a proprioceptive sensation that
comes with registering something that has no correlation with our perception, or exists
beyond the temporal field of human-cinematic perception, as a bodily feeling that
produces the informational ontology of the morph as a material intensity in the
sensorium of the spectator.
The kinaesthetic and sensual intensities elicited by interactive digital images or
special effects, like the morph, thereby constitute the temporal and functional
reconfiguration of the filmic interval in the bodily dimensions of the user-spectator. The

65
Op cit., Sobchack, 2000, pp.137, 141.
66
Op cit., Hansen, 2004, p.225.
temporal remapping of the filmic interval in the bodily space of the user-spectator of
digital media involves an awakening of a new perceptual consciousness, one that
Hansen, paraphrasing Stephanie Strickland and her analysis of Web-based
hypermedia, believes is integral to the interactive experience of new media:

Web-based works offer our perceptual system a “new callisthenics” that enlarges
the “window of the now”; and they do so, specifically, by drawing our perceptual
attention to more fine-grained levels of stimuli – “by bringing into consciousness
many more of the microfluctuations and/or fractal patterns that had been
smoothed over, averaged over, hidden by older perception and knowledge
processes”.67

With the rapid acceleration of computational connective speeds and processing power,
machine time may increasingly affect the experience of the lived present, as the
thickening bandwidth of real-time media interactions demand that our neural processes
evolve to accommodate the heightened flows of information that bombard our senses.
The digital image capitalises on the virtual Now of the time-image and transcodes it into
the virtual space of the ‘artificial infinite’; the temporal economy of duration - its anxiety
inducing being, its existential gravitas - is thereby translated into the affective economy
of bodily intensities. In Hansen’s thesis, the digital image ‘capitalises on the external
sensorimotor collapse’ of movement-image cinema so as to resituate the ‘internal
sensorimotor interval’ in the affective activities of the body. 68 The cinematographic
regime of the time-image is therefore only a transitional period in the further colonisation
of the human mind-body as the commodity-signifier of the cinematic frame implodes in
the pixelated universe of digital space.
In Deleuze’s cinematic philosophy the time-image liberates cinematic
consciousness from the sensorimotor linkages of the movement-image by collapsing
the filmic interval into the virtual time or global duration of the world. Through the
cinematographic figure of the time-image Deleuze believed modern cinema could

67
Ibid., p.235.
68
Ibid., p.225.
‘restore our belief in the world’ by short-circuiting the sensory-motor connections of
industrial/movement-image cinema and expressing in the image the dynamic
experience of time, history and nature as a creative and immanent becoming. 69 What
the pure optical situtations and any-space-whatevers of post-war Italian cinema actually
did was reveal the crisis of the historical imagination after World War II and humankind’s
alienation from their natural and urban environments. Against Deleuze’s admonishment
for modern cinema to help reconnect us to a belief in the world, cinema in the
information age has offered us an escape from the world and our historical anxiety by
subjecting us to the virtual spectacles of digitally rendered realities. The critical ontology
and living duration of ‘historical sense’ has given way to the vertiginous pleasures of
libidinal, sensual and bodily intensities produced in the interstices of digital human-
machine interfaces. The power of time as a historical and material expression of
‘becoming-other’ is in the marketable commodity of special effects an affective
experience that inscribes the bioinformatic circuits of the consumer-spectacle into the
commodified spectator of the Hollywood special-effects blockbuster.

69
Op cit., Deleuze, 1989, p.172.