The Digital Image and Reality: Affect, Metaphysics and Post-Cinema probes the philosophical questions, cultural anxieties, ethical implications, and aesthetic possibilities around digital cinema’s unique relation to notions of “the real.” That cinema’s illusion is now made of bits that can be analyzed, copied, transcoded, and altered in a granular way means that the digital capture of physical phenomena (how our senses take in the world) can be sculpted into novel forms that do more than copy perceptual reality. Bringing together studies in perception and brain neuroplasticity, the philosophical critiques of technology by Stiegler and Heidegger, the media theories and speculations of Benjamin and McLuhan, and the affect and embodiment theories of Deleuze and Massumi, Strutt explores how popular digital cinema is not only altering our collective and individual ideas of the real but also stretching the boundaries of what reality can be.
As evidence, Strutt draws on examples from the...