Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
Darkness and light
Sitting before the computer screen, we gaze at the display of digital photographs, souvenirs of summer. A few of the images appear to have a sequential or serial character. I am trying to make you laugh, so I click, click, click, one image after the next. We throw them up on the screen, viewing them at first simultaneously, then one at a time, but quickly. Your shoulders jerk back and forth; the laughing mouth lights up the image then quickly evaporates as we move forward then backward, forward and backward again, symmetrically, through the series, replacing one image with the next as quickly as possible. It is so awkward, still, we exclaim, ‘Look! It's like a movie!’ Yet, it is not quite like a movie because the movement is too slow, too jerky. Its not true animation, not a continuous sequence of moving images. It remains a set of discrete images, images that influence one another, images that have their effect on us, but not quite like a film whose continuity is made possible by the minutely differentiated, sequential attitudes of the frames that make it up – twenty four immobile frames per second. Moreover, as we click through the photographs, one or another in the array stops us. ‘Ah,’ you exclaim, ‘that one is you.’ The slideshow stops abruptly; you survey the image, a pure contingency – one that does not interest me at all.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.