Video: Post-Cinematic Interfaces with a Postnatural World

There’s something fitting about the fact that the audio recording of my “3 Theses” on postnaturalism and post-cinema — which I presented at the 2014 annual conference of the DGfA, “America After Nature” — is overrun by the nonhuman voices of nameless birds calling to one another, blissfully indifferent to my theoretical speculations. What at first presented itself to me as something of a disappointment, viz. the generally poor quality of the recording and the occasional difficulty of discerning spoken words in particular, seemed on second thought a nice illustration — or better: enactment — of some of the ideas I put forward about the distributed agency of affect’s environmental mediation: here the human voice competes with “natural” and “cultural” forces ranging from songbirds to smartphones, failing to command their attentions but contributing to an improbable concert for a sufficiently non- or posthuman ear immersed in an ecology of material interaction.

Looking at it (or listening to it) from this angle, and getting over my initial disappointment, I decided to add some video of the various postnatural landscapes I encountered while in Germany on my recent trip. The result is another of what I have begun referring to as “metabolic images” — where the computational capture and processing of moving images, along with their temporal (and microtemporal) modulation, point to the subpersonal effects (and affects) of our embodied interfaces with a post-cinematic media environment. (See here, here, or here for more…)

(For the full effect, be sure to view the video in HD on vimeo. And finally, if you happen to have a more humanly inflected interest in the discursive “contents” put forward here, you can find the full text of my presentation here.)