lifelong interest a filmmaker like Hollis Frampton displayed in different media
platforms and in the juxtaposition and interpenetration of different media; or
one could cite the various discussions Frampton devoted to the digital image
and the work he did as part of the Media Arts Lab at SUNY, Buffalo. I want
here to take a different, more circuitous, but I think ultimately more profound
and compelling path from Frampton to new media, but also from new media
back to (and beyond) Frampton. The crux of this exploration concerns the nexus
of technology, time, and movement, and Frampton’s role here is to anticipate
the contemporary repositioning of cinemawithina larger media ecology–one
that extends bothbeyondfilm into the post-cinematic as well asbeforefilm into
the prehistory of the cinematic–but whose single and dominant principle is
movement. On this account, cinema becomes reconfigured as a particular fram-
ing of universal movement, or movement-variation, that is determined by its
specific temporal scale; as one of framing among others, it undergoes a relativi-
zation and becomes open to transformation by other media forms that, like di-
gital media, may be capable of broaching its formerly defining homologies with
the temporal syntheses of consciousness.
With his various meditations–both theoretical and artistic–on the contin-
gency of cinema’s technical specifications and the rich temporal virtuality that
these specifications foreclose, Frampton could be said to explode cinema both
from within and from without. In a sense, he operates equally as a filmmaker,
indeed a filmmaker of the most experimental sort, who seeks to question, chal-
lenge and extend the boundaries of the medium of film,andas a new media
practitioneravant la lettre, who embraces (if only, for the most part, in theory)
the technical possibilities of computational mediathat precisely exceed the scope of
cinematic representation. While I want to reserve my in-depth engagement of
Frampton’s work and thought for a later section, let me simply mention a cou-
ple of his more stimulating ideas that cross the divide between these two voca-
tions.
First, there is his intriguing claim, in that most intriguing of texts,“For a Me-
tahistory of Film”, that“cinema is the Last Machine”and that cinema is“prob-
ably the last art that will reach the mind through the senses”.This claim is
made somewhat less opaque, to my mind at least, by his specification of the
precise endpoint of the Age of Machines: while it is“customary”, Frampton
claims, to date this moment to the advent of video, this dating is“imprecise”,
and, indeed, not nearly early enough. In place of video’s advent, Frampton sug-
gests the appearance of“radar”, which, he notes,“replaced the mechanical re-
connaissance aircraft with a static anonymous black box”.What this specifica-
tion helps to clarify is the correlation between cinematic representation and
human sense perception that serves to qualify cinema as a“mechanical art”,
one that could teach and remind us“(after what then seemed a bearable delay)
46 Mark B.N. Hansen