We have also seen a growing awareness and conscious reflexivity regarding
mediation and new technology in pop videos as well as in commercial cinema.
Directors like Michel Gondry operate in both fields. The fame of a blockbuster
movie likeThe Matrix(Andy and Larry Wachowski,) rests to a large ex-
tent on its striking use of special effects such as the so-called bullet-time effect.
This was a new, never-before-seen combination of slow motion and frozen
movement effects that was immediately copied in countless other cinematic
practices around the turn of thest century. These experiments are now often
mimicked in vernacular video and disseminated on platforms like YouTube.
The Spanish artist Sergio Prego devoted a series of low-budget videos to strange
versions of the bullet-time effect involving jumps and splashes of large chunks
of thick paint. It has become clear that the effect actually stems from the artist
Tim McMillan’s frozen-time experiments from, and even further, back to
Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic experiments from thes. Like a mi-
cro-genre in cinema, certain still/moving effects such as the bullet-time effect
seem to have travelled through all of the different registers of cinematic practice
from the big screen to YouTube, and from art galleries to computer games de-
veloped by a new generation of software artists producing a variety of genera-
tive or interactive images, like in Mario Klingemann’s work.
The aftermath of theth anniversary of cinema and the challenges from
new media have led to a reconsideration of what the moving image is and can
be, revealing the contingency of a certain order of the moving image we have
called cinema. This order is now passé. The moving image is no longer simply
something to be observed during a-minute screening in a darkened movie
theatre. Perhaps classical or institutional cinema will end up being the parenth-
esis and not the norm when it comes to studying the life and history of the
moving image.The ubiquity of the moving image in contemporary art and
communications has reopened the key question–what is a moving image?–in
new ways.
Assembling the Field: The Three Phases
The questioning of the moving image is no longer just the activity of film scho-
lars alone. It spans several disciplines from media, film, theatre, dance and art
history to anthropology and into architecture, information science, technology
and biology. This collection of essays tries to assemble the investigation of the
moving image around the emergence of the cross-disciplinary field we tenta-
tively call the still/moving field. This is a vital arena for inquiry regarding the
moving image after the end of cinema as we used to know it. Titles from the
The Still/Moving Field: An Introduction 13