Executable Images: The Enactment and Distribution of Movies in Computer Networks

The progressive digitization of channels and information seems to be leading to a world in which no ontological distinction between media systems exists. According to theorists such as Friedrich Kittler (Gramophone, Film, Typewriter) and Lev Manovich (Software Takes Command), in the new technological configuration all of these systems will be transformed into software layers of computer networks, which in turn will become “universal media machines” (Manovich, Software 30). This process of convergence, understood in terms of a dematerialization of media’s underpinnings, seems particularly disturbing to the organization of cinema, a medium whose distinctive features have been traditionally based on the use of celluloid film as a physical support for the inscription of moving images. As film becomes obsolete and all kinds of images start to circulate primarily as patterns of binary data, is it still possible to differentiate cinema from other visual systems?

According to film scholar D. N. Rodowick, yes it is. Reflecting upon the “disappearance of the photographic ontology,” Rodowick has stated that “while film disappears, cinema persists” (i). For him, it is the “young field” of cinema studies that has to change in order to cope with the ways in which the traditional medium continues to exist within the present media ecology. One can reasonably assume that the perspective offered by cinema studies, as it approaches the medium’s underpinnings in terms of the universal apparatus imagined by Jean-Louis Baudry and Christian Metz, would overlook the technical complexity of computer networks. As a consequence, it would remain myopic to the ways in which these networks might express the cinematographic object.

In order to keep a critical hold over this object, Gertrud Koch suggests that cinema studies could either be transformed or merge with other fields of media scholarship. This article takes a step in the latter direction by attempting to connect cinema studies to even younger disciplines that are more attentive to the materiality of processes of storage and transmission, such as the field of software studies. This emerging field is concerned with the interaction between software and culture that underpins “new representational and communication media” (Manovich, Software 4) and is therefore central to the constitution of cinema after computation. Drawing references from it, I mean to explore the ways in which moving images are enacted and distributed through digital networks. In doing so, I hope to demonstrate that computer-based movies are executable, standing for running algorithms as much as the applications that are commonly used to play, edit, copy, and transmit them.

Such demonstration will be accomplished through an analysis of the workings of computing mechanisms, supplemented with close examination of And Then There Was Salsa (2010), an audiovisual piece whose account provides exemplary expressions of the computer’s mediatic qualities. Without necessarily focusing on the particularities of the piece’s code, I mean to show how its constitution as software blends the image into machine processes, making it dependent on different sociotechnical and economic vectors. I believe that this combined approach will allow for a deeper understanding not only of the nature of digital movies but also of the ways in which the specificities of cinema are maintained after media convergence, all the while being mobilized through new layers of operation and control.

Principles of Computation: Early Computers and Software Abstractions

To understand the nature of the moving images that result from computation, one must first pierce through the main illusion maintained by digital technologies: that of the dematerialization of media. As Matthew Kirschenbaum has stated, “[T]here is no computation without data’s representation in a corresponding physical substratum” (27). This can be clearly perceived in the very earliest forerunners of the digital computer, such as the abacus. Dating from the BC era, this manual device organized calculus by the means of the movement of pebbles in a predefined grid. The correspondence between abstract and material operations was continued through the history of computing mechanisms until the Universal Turing machine, which N. Katherine Hayles characterizes as the “theoretical basis for modern computers” (176). The mathematician Alan Turing first mentioned this device in a...