How Does the Digital Matter? Envisioning Corporeality through Christian Volckman’s Renaissance

Existential phenomenology addresses the idea of vision as an embodied and meaningful activity. Within this schema, perception is already informed by the sensory intentionality of the living being that is setting itself within a dialectical and dialogical relation to the world. In such an understanding of experience, cinematic vision is positioned within the individual and historical person who interacts with a screen that itself reflects an existential relation between body and world. But what happens when digital images present entities and spaces that are physically not part of this world? How, in other words, do computational structures affect cinema's relation with reality? This article examines arguments concerned with the relation between digital media and corporeality, filtering them through the work of André Bazin, Roland Barthes, and Gilles Deleuze. From the point of view exhibited by Christian Volckman's Renaissance (2006), it questions the idea that digital cinema is a one-way ticket to incorporeality, suggesting that the new technology does in fact retain the ability to matter through nuances specific to its own constructions.

Duke Scholars

Author Markos Hadjioannou Literature