On The Distinction Between Interfacing and (Pre-Digital) Animation

As I continue to bend ears about my observations on interfacing in internet and video game films, friends and advisors often suggest I look into work on animation.  While no corridor of thought should go entirely unexplored (and, indeed, I am taking an animation seminar next semester), the insinuation that interfacing is merely a reversion to animation has always struck me as incorrect.

When, in films like The Last Starfighter (1984), Weird Science (1985), Hackers (1995), and Catfish (2005), filmed space is given over to the interface of a digital technology, it is more than just a shift in representational aesthetics.  In these and other internet and video game films, interfacing relinquishes the filmic space of the frame to a digital environment.  In the process, one animating technology (the movie camera) cedes to another (digital rendering).  The transition is significant because it anticipates the broader encroachment of digital technology into the medium of "film," an encroachment that has caused many theorists to revist the ontology of celluloid film in effort to understand the continuing effects of its evolving nature.

Based upon my working definition of interfacing, pre-digital animation might seem to be an "interface" with the illustrator's artwork or the sculptor's molded clay (the latter so much less so because the presence of a frame is requisite for both interfacing and film, but not for sculpture).  In either case, however, it is the camera which is the animating force; rapidly flashed sequences of photographs of the drawn or sculpted "pro-filmic" creates the illusion of movement.  The digital screens with which the films interface are powered by a new animating technology.  By giving up the filmed space to a space which is digitally rendered, interfacing in films from the 1980's introduced viewers to technologies which have since become increasingly a part of our culture and the films that represent it.

In my earliest writings on internet films I tended to view internet and video game narratives exclusively as cultural myths, narratives designed to interrogate and domesticate the digital frontier, to rationalize (indeed narrativize) new ways of life, including a prominent new form of masculinity.  Consideration of the tendency of these early internet films to interface with computer screens reveals that there also exists grounds for a formal investigation into the the role of interfacing in the larger evoloution of the medium.  More than just an aesthetic preference for animation, interfacing presents a technological interstice, a digital breach into filmic space that mirrors the contemporaneous intrusion of technology into so many other aspects of work and leisure.  The Last Starfighter, for example, not only interfaces with the computer graphics of video games but is also (according to the DVD special features) the first film to feature action sequences in completely digitally rendered environments.  Wholly remarkable at the time, the relative banality of "digitally rendered environments" in modern films suggests that cinema's encorporation of digital technology on both the narrative and formal level may have been for the medium's own sake rather than for the sake of its audience.

Testing the limits of the possibility and acceptability of digital rendering may have been enmeshed with attempts to visualize and understand the various, rapidly developing new technologies, but it was also a crucial period of self-reflexivity, the cinema discovering its digital self.  Glancing at the list of films I marshalled above as representatives of interfacing, it is clear to see that, from fantasy to science-fiction to documentary, we, too, have been getting accustomed to our new digital lives.  As digital interfaces were doubly appropriate, both documenting and enacting a switch from mechanical to digital, so these random notes on interfacing are appropriately uploaded to blogger.com, released to the imaged space of our networked environment.