future cinema: the cinematic imaginary after film

Timothy Druckney
Fugitive Realities, Situated realities, "situational realities," or future cinema(s) past

p65
Amid the whirling cinematic experiments of the 1960s, investigations in great depth in Gene Youngblood's pivotal Expanded Cinema(1970), came the introduction of video and soon synthesizers and early computing. Rapidly absorbed by a generation riveted by both cinema and television, the early phases of this exploded cinema turned away from sheer optical effects (though these were to return in the "synthetic" experiments of the 1970s) and integrated the possibilities for the creation of "event-spaces" into Happenings, performances, and installation (....)
In breaking the barrier between screen and space, in conceptualizing the electronic "image" as a relative phenomenon, this generation abandoned the passive viewer and posed fundamental questions about a future in which the significance of the experience of art was to become an aspect of communication, information, and calculation.

p65
"The Philips Poeme electronique would utilize electronic media to further the power of architecture in its quest for the unknowable," in Le Corbusier's words, "a boundless depth opens up, effaces the walls, drives away contingent presences, accomplishes the miracle of the ineffable space."

Marc Treib Space calculated in Seconds: The Philip Pavilion, Le Corbusier, Edgard Varese

P65 Indeed the synthesizer-- no less the computer-- was on the horizon while Varese was working on Poeme electronique and the transformation of sound/noise into equivalent forms of information heralded the shift from analogue to digital in which randomness, probability, computability, were to merge and extend the limits and reception of sound by dissolving sonic hierarchies, by detemporalizing sonic linearity, by obliterating the distinction between representation(or reproducibility) and calculability, by assenting to the possibilities of virtualization, by realizing that signal/noise ratios of information theory could be implemented as analytical/critical/creative tools, by radicalizing the cybernetic,