Ways 2 interface was a transdisciplinary research project, study log and personal journal I oversaw from 2014 to 2016.
I had planned to carry it over and expand it within the research focus of a traditional master’s degree in Creative Technologies and Enterprise, which I had originally signed up to undertake at the end of 2014.
Hence the name of Ways 2 Interface, a.k.a. Phase 2.
Ways 2 Interface reconsidered the study of the content and the consumer in relation to a wider spectrum of knowledge and holistic considerations.
The fundamental focus of the project was the idea of an interfacing process – the introspective and expressive capacity inherent to us all – that we have always interwoven throughout our day-to-day existences and that we continue to do so at a formidably greater capacity in our contemporary digital realities.
By examining the habits and manifestations of our cognitive, corporeal, cultural and connected ways to interface, Ways 2 Interface aimed to build a unified understanding of this interfacing process.
Ultimately, I decided against undertaking a traditional master’s degree and instead opted to build my own master's degree which I went on to call my MTA Portfolio.
As my MTA Portfolio grew, the drive to pursue a research project to suit the requirements of a traditional master’s degree became less relevant and Ways 2 Interface transitioned away from being a research project in its own right.
It then morphed into a study log for my MTA Portfolio and then became a more general personal journal of mass communications and media studies 2.0.
“We watch films with our eyes and ears, but we experience films with our minds and bodies. Films do things to us, but we also do things with them. A film pulls a surprise; we jump. It sets up scenes; we follow them. It plants hints; we remember them. It prompts us to feel emotions”
– David Bordwell, The Viewer’s Share: The Model of Mind in Explaining Film, 2012
The point of Ways of Being: The Spectator and the Spectacle was to open up the relationship the spectator has with the spectacle and show that it is much more nuanced than merely the spectator passively taking in the spectacle.
“we need to understand how the spectator views, absorbs, receives, engages, experiences, constructs, desires, negotiates, manipulates, participates, fantasises, debates, infers, identifies, critiques, addresses, senses, recreates and integrates with the cinematic fiction [spectacle].”
– Ways of Being: The Spectator and the Spectacle, 2013:36
This is why in Appendix A of the paper, I started to put together redefinitions of the spectator and the spectacle to better express their complex interactions.
What I came up with was…The spectator redefined as the perceiving participator
The spectacle redefined as the spectacle experiencing situation
But, again, something was missing because the perceiving participator and the spectacle experiencing situation were not providing a fully accurate description because, like the spectator and the spectacle terms, they were treating this combined relationship as being made up of two fundamental separated entities:
“cinematic experience [and all content experience] remain phenomenolgically and philosophically undertheorized, in my view, so long as the events on-screen and the spectator are each considered individually, as isolated entities separate from one another. One needs to enlarge the frame of description and know how to draw – behind the back of the spectator, so to speak – a second screen on which the osmotic exchange between the so-called spectator and the events on the primary screen becomes visible.”
– Christiane Voss, Film Experience and the Formation of Illusion, 2011:139
The truth of the spectator and the spectacle is not the spectator and the spectacle, the truth of the spectator and the spectacle is:
They are always a connected unit, the inputs and direct considerations of that unit are always in flux, but the basic unit always remains – it is a fundamental subjective gravity of our cognition.
The fallacy of Ways of Being, in regards to my dissection of the relationship of the spectator and the spectacle, is in the way that I discuss them as being what are fundamentally separate entities and only becoming combined as a result of an external interface – The device that exhibits the spectacle and allows the spectator access to it.
When we talk of the spectator and the spectacle in this separated fashion, we are getting a step ahead of ourselves.
In order to understand the relationship of the spectator and the spectacle, we need to take a step back and examine the nature of the fundamental internal cognitive process that makes the spectator and the spectacle, as separations, a reality.
This process is the internal interface – The cognitive interface inside every human mind.
The interface is what Christiane Voss is talking about when talks about a second screen behind the back of the spectator: “on which the osmotic exchange between the so-called spectator and the events on the primary screen becomes visible.”
The interface is the central focus of Ways 2 Interface because it offers the best means to reconceive of the spectator and the spectacle as fundamentally not being separate entities and to explore the internal workings of that combined entity.
I am not the first to talk about the interface in this way, but since the very recent all-pervasive overload of technological interfaces onto the consumer market there seems to be a growing consideration towards the larger conceptual frameworks the interface can offer us:
“our perceptions constitute a species-specific user interface that guides behavior in a niche. Just as the icons of a PC’s interface hide the complexity of the computer, so our perceptions usefully hide the complexity of the world, and guide adaptive behavior. This interface theory of perception offers a framework, motivated by evolution, to guide research in object categorization. This framework informs a new class of evolutionary games, called interface games, in which pithy perceptions often drive true perceptions to extinction”
– Donald D. Hoffman, The Interface Theory of Perception, 2009:1
Of all the interface considerations, Hoffman’s Interface Theory of Perception offers us the best place or perspective from which to begin a re-conception of the spectator and the spectacle; not only because It gives my own thoughts on the subject a leg to stand on, but because the computer simulation data he has already demonstrated that his theory holds some ground.
“Why all this horsepower in the brain just to look? The idea from Cognitive Neuroscience is that perception, vision is really just a reality engine; in real time you’re creating all the depths, colours, motions, shapes, textures and objects that you see, so you are creating the reality that you experience right now. You’re not just taking a snapshot of a world that was already there.”
– Donald D. Hoffman, 2013.
In presentation below Hoffman outlines his Interface Theory of Perception and how is impacts our conception of consciousness. You can read more of his research here.
“We pay good money for user interfaces because we don’t want to deal with the over-whelming complexity of software and hardware in a PC. A user interface that slavishly reconstructed all the diodes, resistors, voltages and magnetic fields in the computer would probably not be a best seller. The user interface is there to facilitate our interactions with the computer by hiding its causal and structural complexity, and by displaying useful information in a format that is tailored to our species projects, such as painting or writing.”
– Donald D. Hoffman, The Interface Theory of Perception, 2009:11
However, this is not to say that there is not a world external to us, Hoffman’s theory is just saying that we have evolved to see that world according to our species specific interface framework.
The interfacing relationship relationship between the-perceiving-participator-and-the-spectacle-experiencing-situation and the interface framework that would reveal is what the posts on Ways 2 Interface were going to theorize about.
I also planned to use the blog to document related research of other practitioners that I would pull apart and attempt to apply to my own theorizing.
Then, eventually, my plan was to take all the thinking collected on the Ways 2 Interface blog and apply it to a full-fledge research project as part of a fully accredited master’s degree.
My thinking was to build on the non-empirical research of Ways of Being and Ways 2 Interface by conducting first hand empirical research in an attempt to prove my theories on the interface.
I was very keen to take my media-centric research and explore it more broadly through the fields of cognitive psychology and neuroscience.
But I ultimately elected to pursue the equally difficult task of building my own master’s degree from scratch.
However, my thinking and theorizing regarding the the interface can be discerned in the first set of blog posts I wrote for the Ways 2 Interface blog, some of which were unfinished and have only recently been posted.
Just note, I haven't bothered to polish the unfinished posts, they have just been posted up in their original unfinished and unproofread forms...
It was a big deal for me personally because it was a breakthrough in terms of my skill as a researcher and writer.
But it was a big deal academically too because it was a 30,000 word thesis that received the highest mark of my graduating year and was also bestowed with a research excellence award.
I had put a lot of work into and had planned to achieve a solid first from it, but I had never envisioned attaining the result I ultimately did achieve with it.
The success I achieved with Ways of Being came as a huge surprise and it opened a lot of doors; particularly regarding the undertaking of a master’s degree, which was something I had not previously given serious thought towards.
Ways of Being was a consideration of the epistemological, ontological and metaphysical downfalls of film theory’s understandings of the spectator and the spectacle; with particular emphasis directed towards the neurobiological implications of the spectator’s body.
The research focus of Ways of Being was something that I was passionately interested in and which I had only scratched the surface of within the submitted thesis paper.
There were a great deal of loose ends, both in the main body of the work and also in the appendices, that I really wanted to continue further.
In particular, Appendices A, F and I (which had once been the basis of another chapter in the main body) were two of the key sources of continuation.
I couldn't squeeze Chapter 3 into the limited word count of the main body, so it ended up becoming Appendices F and I
Ultimately, Ways of Being and its success ended up becoming the main driving for behind undertaking a master’s degree; with the potential of undertaking a PhD further down the line.
But deciding what master’s degree I wanted to pursue and how I was going to fund it took a very long time for me to figure out.
In the meantime, I decided to keep my research focus active and created the Ways 2 Interface blog where I could record my latest findings and theorizations.
As much as Ways 2 Interface was a continuation of my theoretical dissertation, it was also a continuation of my practical dissertation, EYES.
EYES was a web series concept proposal package that was a reflexive expression of contemporary networking attitudes and their implications on our ways of being.
The proposal package included a produced pilot episode, a series bible and a producer’s planning portfolio document.
The package also included a blog, EYES of a Storyteller, that I used to chronical the development of the project and Ways 2 Interface very continues in the same vein of its loose and transdisciplinary blogging style.
Ultimately, while I didn’t end up continuing my research in a traditional master’s degree, Ways 2 Interface did serve much the same bridging purpose between my BA (Hons) and the creation of my MTA Portfolio.
The curriculum of the traditional master’s degree I had planned on undertaking, Creative Technologies and Enterprise, but ultimately abandoned was also absorbed into the makeup of my MTA Portfolio.
Ways 2 Interface had a huge part to play in to create of my MTA concentration in Multimedia Studies and Creative Technologies and, for a time, very much serves as an adjunct blog to it.
The focus of the Ways 2 Interface blog naturally shifted as my time and attention gradually moved more towards the building of my MTA Portfolio.
For me, I had a deep and keen interest in researching how we interface with reality (I still do now) but it all boiled down to being able to perform legitimate research to explore those concepts.
In my mind, legitimate research requires the backing of a fully accredited master’s degree which I didn’t have and wasn’t likely to have anytime soon because I elected to construct my own master’s degree.
Therefore, if I was not going to pursue a fully accredited degree, preparing the research for one was largely a waste of my time, which was already being eaten up with the task of building my own master’s degree from scratch.
For a time, Ways 2 Interface served much the same role as ibuiltmyown.education, it held the identity and progress of my MTA Portfolio (or Postgraduate 2.0 Studies, as it was then known).
Parallel to this, and partly because many of the MOOCs I was studying delved into this, I was continuing to dabble with post about my interest in mass communications and media studies.
So, in addition to it being my study log, I also increasing viewed Ways 2 Interface as being the wider media focused blog space to cover anything that Something to do with Film could not cover because of its film-centric focus.
But eventually even its more general media focus fizzled out.
In hindsight, I wish I had kept Ways 2 Interface going a bit longer because I could have used the blog to document the further development of my MTA Portfolio and the building of ibuiltmyown.education and then handed over the duties when ibuiltmyown.education.
I’ve properly tied up the blog now that I have written up this component page as part of my Creative Technologies Sandbox.
But will I ever pick up the research I started first in my Ways of Being dissertation and then in my Ways 2 Interface blog?
Possibly.
It all really depends if I ever do get around to studying a fully accredited master’s degree.
I used Google's Blogger platform to create the Ways 2 Interface blog as I had prior experience with using Blogger to create my Something to do with Film and EYES of a Storyteller blogs.
But I very quickly changed it to Ways 2 Interface which was much more punchier and, with the inclusion of ‘2’ in the name, stylistically conveyed that it was the second phase of the research I was undertaking.
I always envisioned Ways 2 Interface, a more widely media focused blog, being a sister blog to Something to do with Film, my much more specific film focused blog that I started in 2011 when I was studying my BA (Hons).
I also saw it as being an extension of my EYES of a Storyteller blog which I had brought to a conclusion in 2013.
To this end, I adopted the same blog layout from my Something to do with Film and EYES of a Storyteller blogs for use with Ways 2 Interface.
Originally I used a professional looking magazine style blog skin that was created outside of Blogger but I found it to be quite restrictive.
So I instead went back to using the same in-house Blogger blog skins I had used for Something to do with Film and EYES of a Storyteller.
For the Ways 2 Interface layout, I widened the right side panel to better accommodate the content and widgets I placed there.
I also inverted the colour of the background of the blog posts panel to further differentiate it from the two previous blogs.
But comparing it to the design of the Something to do with Film blog and EYES of a Storyteller blogs, there are clear similarities in layout with all blogs plainly being related to one-another.
The background image of the blog is the old power circuit board I removed from my television and replaced with a non-faulty one.
Originally I utilised the full colour image of the circuit board, but later changed it to monochrome so as to make it less distracting and impactful on the content on the pain panels of the blog.
The next clear distinction was the design of the banner image which would serve as the main brand identity for Ways 2 Interface.
With the banner images for Something to do with Film and EYES of a Storyteller, I aimed to keep their designs as visual and immediately discernable as possible.
Granted, there is text present on both of the previous two banners, but I only ever put as much as I felt was necessary for introducing the basic concept of each blog.
But for the Ways 2 Interface blog, I wanted the banner image to be heavy on text and information
I wanted a banner image that would quite literally be a heads up display to play into blog’s reflexive nature and essential concept of ‘the interface’.
The image I started with was a photograph I took at the BFI IMAX in 2013 while myself and the rest of the audience were waiting for The Dark Knight Trilogy all-nighter to begin.
BFI IMAX - Looking up to the projection room
I didn’t originally take this photo because I planned to eventually use it for the branding of a blog.
Rather, I took it because I wanted to visually document the vast size of the BFI IMAX – the biggest cinema screen in the UK – which is almost impossible to do without a very wide-angle lens.
BFI IMAX - Looking towards the screen, I couldn't even get all the screen in the photo
1st version
However I went with the photo of the audience in the BFI IMAX mainly because…
The IMAX medium and the BFI IMAX were two inspirations for Ways of Being, my dissertation precursor to Ways 2 Interface
The image contained a number of different interfaces and points of view, i.e. people using their smartphones, one person taking an picture with their smartphone, various people staring directly into my lens, other people looking elsewhere, some people are wearing glasses which act as an interface between them and the external world, there is the interface of the projection room window.
The dominant red glow of the image reminded me of the heads up display from the Terminator movies, which itself is another form of interface and was an aesthetic I wanted to replicate in the blog banner.
Terminator HUD from Terminator 2: Judgement Day
The blog banner changed a couple of times mainly from where I would add more text information to it or would adjust the information therein.
2nd version
The final form it took occurred when I decided to transition Ways 2 Interface away from being a research project in its own right and more of a study log and personal journal.
3rd version
As I was also experimenting with social media at the time and planned to explore the interfacing natures of social media as part of the research project, I also created a hashtag specifically for the blog.
I did create a Twitter account specifically for Ways 2 Interface on which I routinely used the #2interface hashtag.
But the @ways2interface Twitter account didn’t really go anywhere so I eventually deleted the account and instead focused all my marketing efforts on my personal social media accounts.
I had also planned on creating various additional info images to visually present aspects of the research I was undertaking, but never got beyond the one below.
The Ways 2 Interface blog also originally had its own URL – www.ways2interface.com – which I purchased.
I also purchased the similar www.waystointerface.com URL and set it up as a redirect to ways2interface.com because I worried that if someone was typing in the name (which is very rare these days) they would type ‘to’ opposed to ‘2’.
I discontinued using the paid for URLs when my focus shifted from Ways 2 Interface over to what ended up becoming ibuiltmyown.education a.k.a. my MTA Portfolio.
Then I reverted back to using the free blogger URL www.ways2interface.blogpsot.com which is why a lot of the hyperlinks in the pages and posts of the blog no longer work because they’re still set to the ways2interface.com URL.
As part of this wrap up process, I have posted all the unfinished/unutilized posts I originally wrote in 2014 and 2015 that I never got around to exhibiting.
Just note, I haven't bothered to polish the unfinished posts, I have just be posted then up in their original unfinished and unproofread forms.
I have also posted up some of the information pages of Ways 2 Interface which are no longer available via the page tab bar under the blog banner.
This is an unpublished and unused blog post from late 2013 that was originally intended as one of the introduction posts for the Ways 2 Interface project.
Ways of Understanding
Ways 2 Interface is the continuation of a research project that I initiated in October 2012 and which culminated in Ways of Being: The Spectator and the Spectacle, my graduate theoretical dissertation.
The 30,000 word paper was praised for its boldness, progressive thinking and received the highest mark that has ever been awarded to a Film and Screen Studies dissertation at Bath Spa University; as well as being awarded the Media Futures Research Award for Excellence in Film and Screen Studies research.
The primary content (Introduction, Chapter One, Chapter Two and Conclusion) was only half the paper!
"This is a well researched, conceptually sound and cogently argued
dissertation which is striking in its originality of argumentation and
in its nuanced reading of a wide range of film and critical material.It
draws on a plethora of examples from traditions of visual culture from
prehistoric cave art to contemporary film, the IMAX experience and
future practices of audio‐visual consumption in order to examine
traditional and contemporary theories of spectatorship and the
spectator’s relation with the spectacle. The introduction clearly sets
out the structure and methodology of the dissertation and provides a
useful overview of the technological shifts which have resulted in a
reconfiguration of the relationship between the viewer and the viewed.
This is clearly an ambitious project. It makes a passionate case for the
revival of grand theory in studies of Spectatorship in particular and
Film Studies in general and sustains this case through argumentation of
an exceedingly high order.It acknowledges the need to expand the scope
of such studies beyond film, in its reference to a wide range of media
texts as much as to critical literature, all of which are directed
towards an understanding of spectatorship from points of view as diverse
as the sensory, experiential, philosophical, spiritual, metaphysical
and neuorological."
(Dr Suman Ghosh, Lecturer in Film and Screen Studies).
However, as I commented in the paper, Ways of Being only served as an introductory speculation and there was a great deal of research material and other speculative thinking that I was not able to deal with in the paper. Futhermore, I continued to conduct research for the project even after I had submitted the paper in June 2013. Hence, my incentive to orchestrate Ways 2 Interface.
Looking Beyond Seeing
While my intentions for my theoretical dissertation were originally very different, a deep-seated inclination (intensified by my first exposure to IMAX) steered me towards a reconsidertation of our understandings of the relationship of the spectator and the spectacle.
This reconsideration was first centered on film, but very quickly broadened to include all forms of audio visual content. This inclination was further intensified (as the choice of titles for my paper and this platform will testify) when I was introduced to John Berger's Ways of Seeing.
“I want to question some of the assumptions usually made about the tradition of European painting. That tradition that was born about 1400, died about 1900. Tonight, it isn’t so much the paintings themselves which I want to consider, as the way we now see them. Now, in the second half of the 20th century, because we see these paintings as nobody saw them before. If we discover why this is so, we shall also discover something about ourselves and the situation in which we are living.” (Berger, 1972).
Berger's
considerations are very much steeped in the theoretical traditions of
Lacanian psychoanalysis. Like other radical thinkers, Berger was infleunced by the explanations a psycoanalytical account could provide for the spectator's relationship with any type of spectacle and, in turn, Berger
served as a pioneer in the establishment of a wider academic grounding
of spectatorship study in the 1970s.
Seeing the Gaze
Key among these areas of study was that of the Gaze, as pioneered in Film Studies. Gaze theory argued that there is an ideology:
"a ‘way of seeing,’ structured into visual representations and
the way those presentations address spectators” (Williams, 1994:1).
Therefore, the gaze refers less to the process the spectator employs to view a film and more to the way in which a film is a constructed gaze - a particular way of seeing something - that the spectator adopts while watching a film.
The gaze was wholly reliant on a psychoanalytical explanation and it posited that a spectator is a sumissive componant of a larger cinematic/spectacle apparatus and adopts whatever mindset or ideology a particular cinematic/spectacle apparatus embodies:
"film theorists argued that the kind of deception that cinematic illusion wrought upon the film spectator was a precise instantiation of the kind of deception wrought by ideology upon the individual” (Allen, 1998:7).
Two-and-a-half
thousand years old, Plato's simile of the cave acts a surprisingly good
illustraion of the apparatus, gaze theory and classical film theory's
somewhat complacent treatment of the spectator and spectacle as a whole.
“Imagine an underground chamber like a cave, with a long entrance open to the daylight and as wide as the cave. In this chamber are men who have been prisoners there since they were children, their legs and necks being fastened that they can only look straight ahead of them and cannot turn their heads. Some way off, behind and higher up, a fire is burning, and between the fire and the prisoners and above them runs a road, in front of which a curtain-wall has been built, like the screen art puppet shows between the operators and their audience, above which they show their puppets… Imagine further that there are men carrying all sorts of gear along behind the curtain-wall, projecting above it and including figures of men and animals made of wood and stone and all sorts of other materials, and that some of these men, as you would expect, are talking and some not.” (Plato, 2003:241)
However, the theory of the gaze and the apparatus was heavily critisised with the emergence of cognitive film theory. The main criticism was that the gaze and the apparatus provided a one-sided explanation and delegated the spectator to a function where the actual audience member was non-existent.
The gaze and the apparatus did not account for the cognitive input a spectator brings to a film or spectacle experience - it did not provide an account of both sides of the relationship.
Ways of Thinking and Feeling
Cognitive Film Theory presents a two-sided account of the spectator and spectacle, where the actual audience member, based on their individual life experience, is just as much as involved in the creation of a way of seeing a film or spectacle: “Viewers
cannot absorb cinematic images any more than they can absorb reality.
Instead they undertake a perceptual dialogue, seeing in part what their
schemas encourage them to seek out, and in part what the artist’s
shaping of cinematic form encourages them to see" (Nadaner, 1984:126).
Repositioning Botticelli's Venus and Mars.
While Berger does favour a psychoanalytical approach, there is something of a cognitive pronouncement in his theorising:
“The invention of the camera has changed not only what we see, but how we see it. In a crucial but quite simple way, it has even changed paintings painted long before it was invented. The painting on the wall, like a human eye, can only be in one place at one time. The camera reproduces it, making it available in any size anywhere, for any purpose. Botticelli’s Venus And Mars used to be a unique image which it was only possible to see in the room where it was actually hanging. Now its image or detail of it, or the image of any other painting which is reproduced, can be seen in a million different places at the same time. As you look at them now, on your screen, your wallpaper is around them. Your window is opposite them. Your carpet is below them. At this same moment, they are on many other screens, surrounded by different objects, different colours, different sounds. You are seeing them in the context of your own life” (Berger, 1972).
While cognitive film theory flourished throughout the 1980s and 1990s, developments in Film Studies, over the past ten years, have been pushing the boundaries of understanding even further.
Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses by Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener serves something as the culmination of this expanded thinking and of all previous film theoretical thinking besides.
However, Elsaesser and Hagener posit that all lines of thought in film theory have been at fault by not considering the human body as a required variable and construct in the study of the spectator and the spectacle:
"Each type of cinema (as well as every film theory) imagines an ideal spectator, which means it postulates a certain relation between the (body of the) spectator and the (properties of the) image on the screen, however much at first sight the highlighted terms are "understanding" and "making sense", "interpretation" and "comprehension". What is called classical narrative cinema, for instance, can be defined by the way a given film engages, addresses and envelops the spectatorial body. Films furthermore presuppose a cinematic space that is both physical and discursive, one where film and spectator, cinema and body encounter one another. This includes the architectural arrangement of the spectatorial space (the auditorium with its racked seating), a temporal ordering of performances (separate sessions or continuous admission) and a specific social framing of the visit to the movie-theater (a night out with friends, or a solitary self-indulgence), the sensory envelope of sound and other perceptual stimuli, as well as the imaginary construction of filmic space through mise-en-scene, montage and narration. Likewise, bodies, settings and objects within the film communicate with each other (and with the spectator) through size, texture, shape, density and surface appeal, as much as they play on scale, distance, proximity, color or other primarily optical markers. But there are additional ways the body engages with the film event, besides the senses of vision, tactility and sound: philosophical issues of perception and temporality, of agency and consciousness are also central to the cinema, as they are to the spectator. One of the challenges of our task was to tease out from formalist and realist theories their respective conceptions of cinema's relation to the body, whether formulated normatively (as, for example, in the approaches of both Sergej Eisenstein and Andre Bazin, however opposed they might be in other respects) or descriptively (more typical, at least in rhetorical strategy, of phenomenological and other contemporary theories)" (Thomas Elsaesser & Malte Hagener, Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses, pages 4-5)
Study in bed, not in the library. Especially when it's cold!
Furthermore, Elsaesser and Hagener argue that by reconsidering classic and contemporary film theory in relation to the inclusion of the bodily perspective will enable a greater and unifying understanding of the spectator and the spectacle:
"The idea of the body as sensory envelope, as perceptual membrane and material-mental interface, in relation to the cinematic image and to audio-visual perception, is thus more than a heuristic device and an aesthetic metaphor: it is the ontological, epistemological and phenomenological "ground" for the respective theories of film and cinema today" (Thomas Elsaesser & Malte Hagener, Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses, pages 11)
Upgrading Our Understanding
Ultimately, these four components - Ways of Seeing, the gaze, cognitive film theory and Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses - served as the 'way in' for the Ways of Being project; they provided an essential account of the explanations of the spectator and spectacle relationship which already existed in the academic sphere.
My aim, as was Berger's and Elsaesser's and Hagener's, was to reconsider these established presumptions and, through doing so, construct a greater understanding of a our larger ways of being: "the situation in which we are living.” (Berger, 1972).
In Ways of Being I proposed a case to transition the academic study of film and the spectator from its cave-like complacency and re-position it firmly in the current age of the upgrade.
