Future Cinema

Course Site for Future Cinema 1 (and sometimes Future Cinema 2: Applied Theory) at York University, Canada

Edie’s Future Screen

Future Screen

This future screen is
elementally diverse.

It is liquid, gaseous, solid,
and inhabits a state of constant morphosis.
It stores infinite options.

The screen is not quantitative
or geographically fixed.
It is both visible and invisible.

It employs all senses –
but only if desired
and so directed.

If desired,
[by the fusion of the screen with its subject/narrator/interlocutor]
the screen will release [in] its director
a screen that filters (in limitless forms)
all desired and undesired sensation
and awareness
of whatever nature (the screen is nature).

The future subject/theme of the screen is the screen.

While musing on the theatre, Walter Benjamin said:
“The abyss that separates the players from the audience as it does the dead from the living; the abyss whose silence in a play heightens the sublimity, whose resonance in an opera heightens the intoxication – this abyss, of all elements of the theater the one that bears the most indelible traces of its ritual origin, has steadily decreased in significance.” 1

This screen is not raised from an “unfathomable depth.”
[the screen locates a perfect source]
The musing moments are exchanged and interchangeable
between subject and screen-space/time.

The screen as visceral/aural/visual/conceptual/intellectual/psychological/spiritual experience: we don’t really have the sense of it yet, now in 2007 space/time.
But the technology is forming itself.

1. From Benjamin’s chapter, “What is Epic Theatre?” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Edited and with an introduction by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schoken Books, 1969 (p. 154).

Sat, January 13 2007 » Future Cinema, screen assignment

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