The Digital Rebirth: From the Cave of Complacency to the Age of the Upgrade

The Rebirth of Cinema

The 'digital rebirth' is a term I use to refer to current age of digitally and aesthetically focused technologies that increasingly pervade every aspect of our lives. Initially, I used this term to refer to just the technological changes of cinema, but, as with the whole focus of my paper, it very quickly was used to apply to a broader context. I do not know if anyone else has used the term (it would not surprise me), but I started to use it because I wanted to get away from the concept of digital being the death of cinema. 

True, the introduction of digital technology has caused unprecedented disruptions in the industries' paradigms; however, it is by no means the death of cinema, in the long run, digital will ensure the longevity of the art form. Currently, digital is nurturing a new age of innovation.

 The shortcomings of digital

While I am by no means ignorant of some of the current shortcomings of digital, I believe the overall attitude of digital being the death of cinema finds its roots in a more fundamental fear.

"In the first forty years of its existence the film industry was a hive of innovation; it underwent many changes as new techniques and technologies were introduced to better handle the medium. Since the stabilization of sound and, aside from the introduction of colour, widescreen and television, from the 1930s to the 2000s, the industry has found itself in a largely undisturbed aesthetically and financially secure comfort zone. This was a result of the dominant ideology of the film industry - to generate profits! Accordingly, this complacent and cave-like attitude has migrated into the majority of the audience and a large part of the theoretical thinking of Film Studies. Film-goers, filmmakers and film theorists were happy to submit themselves to the shackles of this cave-like scenario precisely because it provided a comfort zone that seemed to be aesthetically perfected and mutually beneficial for all involved parties"

- Ways of Being: The Spectator and the Spectacle, 2013:42

This idea of the cinema comfort zone is something that I Illustrated with Plato's simile of the cave and, in terms of where the digital transition currently finds itself, we are still climbing out of the cave:

"Then think what would naturally happen to them if they were released from their bonds and cured of their delusions. Suppose one of them were let loose, and suddenly compelled to stand up and turn his head and look and walk towards the fire; all these actions would be painful and he would be too dazzled to see properly the objects of which he used to see the shadows. What do you think he would say if he was told that what he used to see was so much empty nonsense and that he was now nearer reality and seeing more correctly... The realm revealed by sight corresponds to the prison, and the light of the fire in the prison to the power of the sun. And you won’t go wrong if you connect the ascent into the upper world and the sight of the objects there with the upward progress of the mind into the intelligible region… the final thing to be perceived in the intelligible region, and perceived only with difficulty" (Plato, The Republic, 2003:242-244).

The digital re-birth has received so much criticism precisely because it is a painful transcendence - it is forcing us to leave a much beloved comfort zone. The art form of cinema was born out of a progressive inclination: first it was envisioned as a new entertainment novelty and very quickly evolved into a new storytelling medium. However, like everything that finds itself in a comfort zone for too long, it runs the risk of becoming complacent. 

Therefore, I believe the digital re-birth is exactly what cinema needs to re-affirm its essential purpose of being a progressive and entertaining storytelling entity. If it does stay the same then it would surely die: “we can’t, as an industry, say that we got it right in 1927, don’t change a thing" (Peter Jackson, 2012). The transition to digital was inevitable anyway, for as much as we do not like to leave our comfort zones, we equally like the advantages and indulgences that digital technology bring to our everyday lives.

Do you have a smartphone? How many times have you used it today?

Above and beyond this, though, one key truth needs to be accepted: we have not just exited one comfort zone to occupy another - the process of transition in cinema is going to be ongoing. Like the iPhone, now that the cinema is a digitally empowered commodity, it will continue to be upgraded. Hypercinema, anyone?

The Power of the Upgrade

Imagine being able to view/sense the Earth in a hypercinema installation with the same impression and level of detail as reality itself, as if you were actually looking at the planet in the void of space. Surely, seeing the whole of your everyday reality suspended in a single sphere would have fundamentally profound and life-changing implications on your ways of being after that experience: "When we look down at the earth from space, we see this amazing, indescribably beautiful planet. It looks like a living, breathing organism. But it also, at the same time, looks extremely fragile” (Astronaut Ron Garan in Bhasin, 2013; see the Overview Effect). 

Ultimately, beyond providing a reformulation, my incentive to orchestrate Ways of Being and Ways 2 Interface is drawn from a fundamental aversion I have towards narrow-mindedness, as produced by complacency; particularly complacency in knowledge, because that only produces more complacency. While Ways 2 Interface is an indulgence into a collection of knowledge that very much interests me, it also forms one part of a vastly bigger project. 

The 21st century is the age when humanity needs to expand its understanding of its ways of being; If the inhabitants are to survive as a race - then we need to leave the cave behind and update our intellects.