Machinima and the Transcending of Mortality or,
Machinima and the Cinema-World of Latent Realities
Newton Trust/Leverhulme Early Career Fellow
Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities
(CRASSH)
University of Cambridge
Jenna Ng
A talk presented at
The University of British Columbia and The University of Alberta
―Photographs, especially instantaneous
photographs, are very instructive, because we
know that they are in certain respects exactly like
the objects they represent. But this resemblance is
due to the photographs having been produced
under such circumstances that they were
physically forced to correspond point by point to
nature.‖
- Charles Sanders Peirce, Philosophical Writings of Peirce, edited by
Justus Buchler, New York, NY: Dover, 1955, p. 106.
―…the molding of death masks, for example, which
likewise involves a certain automatic process‖;
―One might consider photography in this sense as a
molding, the taking of an impression, by the
manipulation of light‖;
―Let us merely note in passing that the Holy Shroud of
Turin combines the features alike of relic and
photograph.‖
- André Bazin, ―The Ontology of the Photographic Image‖ in What is
Cinema? Vol. 1, Hugh Gray (trans.), Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1967, p. 14.
‗L‘Axiome Cahiers: c‘est que le cinema a rapport au réel et que le réel
n‘est pas le représenté—et basta.‘‘6
(‗‗The Cahiers axiom is this: that the
cinema has a fundamental rapport
with reality and that the real is not what is represented – and that‘s
final.‘‘) Daney hurled this axiom in the
face of the so-called ‗‗Cinéma du
Look‘‘ of the 1980s, those winsome
confections like Diva (1981) and Subway (1985) that came from the
advertising industry, and would lead to
Amélie (Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie
Poulain, 2001). I throw it against an overconfident discourse of the digital.‘
Hugh Hancock, Anthony Bailey
Machine + cinema = machiniema
Machinima
Second Life Halo
World of
Warcraft
“Machinima as found technology”
Diary of a Camper, The Raiders, USA, 1996