#post-cinema

Ultimately, what Upstream Color points to is the way that biological, technological, phenomenological, and economic realities are all imbricated with one another today in a total media environment—that of post-cinema, which is unified and propagated not by cognitive but by decidedly post-perceptual means. Cameras are irrational, neither subjective nor objective but radically ambiguous and volatile. Images are discorrelated, incommensurate with human subjectivities and perspectives. Media generally are post-perceptual, transductively mediating new forms of life by modulating the metabolic processes through which organisms such as ourselves are structurally coupled with our (biotic, technical, material, and symbolic) ecospheres. By insinuating themselves into the molecular flows of affect, prior to the possibility of perception and action, post-cinema’s metabolic images have a direct impact on “the way we tick”—i.e. on the materially embodied production and modulation of time and temporal experience. In other words, these images radically articulate the conditions of life itself in the contemporary technosphere: not only do they “express” these conditions and our experiences of them, but they are in part responsible for enabling our experience in the first place; by articulating together the organic (the material substrate out of which human subjectivities are formed) and the technical (computational processes in particular) at a categorically pre-personal and non-cognitive level of microtemporal becoming, metabolic images are involved in generating the conditions for molar experience in the post-cinematic world. Finally, these techno-organic processes point us beyond our individual experiences, towards the larger ecologies and imbalances of the Anthropocene. Ultimately, we might speculate, what post-cinema demands of us by means of its discorrelated images is that we learn to take responsibility for our own affective discorrelations—that we develop an ethical and radically post-individual sensibility for the networked dividualities through which computational, endocrinological, socio-political, meteorological, subatomic, and economic agencies are all enmeshed with one another in the metabolic processing and mediation of life today.

...digital and post-cinematic media technologies do not just produce a new type of image; they establish entirely new configurations and parameters of perception and agency, placing spectators in an unprecedented relation to images and the infrastructure of their mediation.