One of the tasks for philosophers is that of locating patterns (Ihde 2012: 142).

1 Introduction

Philosophical and technoculture studies surrounding the existential understanding of the human–technology–world experience have seen a slow but steady increase toward hermeneutics in the second decade of the twenty-first century (Ihde 1993; Capurro 2010; Romele 2020; among others). This renewed focus makes sense because technological mediations need to be interpreted, and the pervasive use of technological instruments and artifacts pushes technoculture and the study of written, verbal, and nonverbal communication experience closer together. And many of these are more complicated to study, precisely because technology is at the root of the experiences. One interesting subset of technologies is media technologies, also called digital media, which intertwines the device and the content to mediate together in the world (Irwin 2016). Visual media technologies and media content, together, through what is called moving image technologies, create virtual role-playing, virtual and augmented reality, video games, and social media focused worlds that have become central experiences in contemporary culture. How might this comingled “reading” of technology explain the digital film language and experience? The material hermeneutics perspective called postphenomenology is one way to study these visually focused human technology-world perceptual and interpretive experiences.

Just as image-based scientific instruments read the world in different ways, so do visual mediated experiences like virtual and augmented reality, streaming video games, and digital cinema. I contend that understanding the existential “early” film experience helps understand the new age of cinema, with implications for digital media, digital representation of the visual, and technoscience and technoculture studies. This postphenomenological critique of moving images will begin with a look at the embodied experience of cinema, a culmination of embodied making (filmmaker, camera, lighting, sound, editing, etc.) and embodied viewing. Two assumptions guide this exploration. First, technology is not neutral, but has both positive and negative effects, and second, technology changes the way we see ourselves and the world. With these assumptions in mind, the use case will first explore traditional cinema and then the “new age” term “moving image”, to learn more about this complicated and radically transforming technological experience.

2 Establishing Shot

For over one hundred years one of the ways to visually understand and perceive the world was through the film experience. The history of film is complex and rich with technological development and socio-cultural implications. For a more thorough and engaging understanding of the many facets of film history, read Sobchack and Sobchack (1991), Wexman (2009), Cook (2016), Lev (1993, 2006) and Furstenau (2010). In the early days of filmmaking, the moving image was just that, a moving picture using film, a marriage of celluloid plastic and photographic plate emulsion, showing an event or experience like a train going through a town, firefighters on the move, or cars driving down the road. Soon this “stock” of film footage was edited to put disparate visual pieces together, in continuity or discontinuity, for fantasy or documentary, to share with an audience. Sometimes the films would travel through countries to be screened free of charge, for entertainment, enterprise, or propaganda. Eventually, the film viewing experience became popular enough to create brick and mortar movie theatres that advertised a variety of movies for the cost of a ticket. This too became a political and economic enterprise. In short, filmmaking and film viewing created a new visual experience that could be created and perceived and experienced by an audience in a variety of ways. By rethinking film experience phenomenologically, we can argue that film is neither celluloid (as a material product) nor the production process of film-making. Is it not even the autonomous and transcendental (with respect to the filmgoer) text of its narration? “Rather, the film is in its projection and requires the filmgoer to be; it is in the encounter between screen projection and filmgoer. In such a perspective, one could reasonably argue that film is not a film without a filmgoer” (Baracco 2017: 43). How might these ways of “reading” technology explain the digital film language and experience?

This use case takes on the postphenomenological framework because “technologies are not just mediators of the human relation with the world but by mediating they also contribute in the co-constitution of both the human and the world (Romele 2020: 65).” Don Ihde’s postphenomenological framework and methodology uses ideas from technoscience studies and a set of nuanced vocabulary that explores this co-shaping to reveal variations, patterns, and trajectories of the whole-body experience of technology.Footnote 1 Additionally, the increasing disintegration of the “uncanny valley” (Mori 1970) has altered and entangled what it means to be human and what it means to be digital in our highly technologized world.

Each technology not only differently mediates our figurations of bodily existence but also constitutes them. That is, each offers our lived bodies radically different ways of ‘being-in-the-world.’ Each implicates us in different structures of material investment, and—because each has a particular affinity with different cultural functions, forms, and contents—each stimulates us through differing modes of presentation and representation to different aesthetic responses and ethical responsibilities (Sobchack 2016: 2–3).

As Sobchack shares, together, the technological and the visual, co-constituted in the human–technology–world experience, illustrates unique patterns and interpretations that increase understanding about these different modes of presentation and representation. But how to study this co-constitution or co-shaping of technology and human? The aim is to move past the subject/object divide to better understand the comingling and intertwining of the human, the technology, and the world.

Postphenomenology gets to the root of this interpretive experience to explore and reveal variations, patterns, and trajectories of the human–technology–world experience. Also important in this account, is the reminder that “embodiment, being a body, is a constant within postphenomenology. But since bodies are actively perceptual and culturally historically constituted, postphenomenology must take account of the variations and possibilities of diverse embodiment. Thus, issues of different cultures, gender, politics, and ethics are included in postphenomenological analyses. Variational analyses provide the methodological style of this approach” (Tripathi 2015: 205). In many of Ihde’s texts, the human–technology–world model or schema is used. The parentheses note the parts of the experience that are related or connected together, and the —> explains the relationality as being toward or moving in a specific way. The use of the model later in this account will provide perspective on the inter-relationality in the technological experience. And “while media and their current evolution may confuse us, postphenomenology might bring order in the chaos and provide a theoretical framework for media and technology” (Van den Eede et al. 2019: xix). Altogether, the aim is to uncover patterns to interpret and provide context to the technological experience.

If all perception is hermeneutic, what can be said about and learned from perceiving and reading the patterns of the visual/digital experience of cinema and moving-images? How might contemporary human–cinema/moving image–world experience be perceived differently through an understanding of earlier cinema and its history? And what can history reveal about contemporary moving-image culture? These questions consider the connection between technology and cinema that become a digital genealogy and imprint of digital media. Next, the style or genre of film called Cinéma Vérité is considered.

3 Cinéma Vérité

The perceptual experience of cinema is a truthful one, founded on the naming of it. Cinema, etymologically, came from the technology itself, cinematograph, a device for projecting moving pictures in order, in rapid succession, to produce movement. The shortened name cinema replaced the longer one and has been used for more than one hundred years. In short, the device has been part of the naming since before it even was. Hans George Gadamer, in Truth and Method (2000), explains that a word itself, like the naming of cinema, is not what opens the way to truth.

Rather, on the contrary, the adequacy of the word can be judged only from the knowledge of the thing it is referring to. We can grant that this is true and still feel there is something missing (2000: 407).

This guiding idea shared by Gadamer can be used to understand a style of cinema, called cinéma vérité. The technological co-constitution or co-shaping in the name suggests two technological underpinnings, the instrumentality of viewing and the instrumentality of making.

At it’s very simplest, cinéma vérité might be defined as a filming method employing hand-held cameras and live, synchronous sound. This description is incomplete, however, in that it emphasizes technology at the expense of filmmaking philosophy (Mamber 1974: 1).

Moving forward with the understanding that cinema has always been wrapped up in technology, in discord and congruence with film theory and philosophy, opens more ways to consider a new age of cinema. In Ihde’s Experimental Phenomenology (2012), he explores cinema as a simulation technology (133), and shares that there is both a “statics and dynamics that need to be taken into account” when critically studying the variations of technologies (134). These are understood as embodied or microperceptual experiences. He adds that there is also the “social or cultural context within which the simulations are taking place” (135). An important idea to remember is “in each of these cases, some new phenomenon was recognized within a gestalt instant.or an initial ‘aha’” (135). This leads to an understanding of cinema that is also true with other image technologies.

Strictly speaking, of course, what is being perceived is precisely what cannot without technological mediation be perceived. The simulations thus give voice or make visible what in mundane situations could not be heard or seen (2012: 141).

For instance, when cinema becomes part of moving-image culture as digitized materiality, the experience changes. “Computers in-form us twice over: first through the specific material conditions by which they latently engage and extend our senses at the transparent and lived bodily level” (Sobchack 2016: 4). Don Ihde explains these different views or “takes” of experience as microperceptions (embodied) and the macropercpetions (socio-cultural). Sobchack more recently used a “new age” term for cinema, and all of the surrounding and integrating technologies and changes, as “moving-image culture”, to explore the shift in visual content. She explains that “we are all part of moving-image culture, and we live cinematic and electronic lives” (2016: 2). This is an interesting jumping-off point for understanding the new age of cinema. Sobchack’s idea of moving-image culture is by no means the only way “in” to understanding, but provides a perspective pivot on “reading” material experience that is embedded in the technological process. Her work is central to this understanding of cinema, or what she calls the phenomenology of the film experience. Her seminal text The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (1992) explores many sides of cinema and is an important and relevant start to understanding contemporary visual culture and cinema’s place in it. Don Ihde’s influence is also seen in Sobchack’s text and understanding of film experience. Sobchack writes: “Ihde offers a useful series of ‘hermeneutic rules’ that indicate the path followed in this present phenomenological study of the emergence of sense and signification in the film experience” (1992: 48). She also notes, later in this same paragraph that her perception that Ihde’s ideas, both a methodology and a philosophy, demand a “critical rigor and for an interrogation of the very common places and common senses from which they emerge” (Ibid). Her more recent work considers more of the “new age” aspects, the electronic and digital sides of moving image culture, to flesh out important existential and social-cultural experiences. In this light of critical rigor and interrogation of the common, a few specific ideas sift to the surface that might add to the understanding of cinema and the contemporary moving image “new age” of cinema.

Intentional Technology is a Maurice Merleau-Ponty term Sobchack uses as a way to explain the technology’s role in the film experience.

This way of considering technology animates human artifacts that extend and alter human existence with human function and significance, while refraining from either a mystical anthropomorphism or a correct but superficial conception of technology as merely ‘a means and a human activity.’ (1992: 165).

This perspective situates the human—cinema technology/viewing—world experience in a unique way through an extension of human ability and subsistence. Sobchack believes that the film apparatus itself, the film camera, the lights, the editing, the sound equipment, and the projection system all extend human experience in concrete and important ways that are not magic or superficial. An important idea to note is that cinema, along with the filmmaking experience, was never separate from the technology. There is not an old age of cinema, when technology was nonexistent, and a new age when it is. There is no cinema of any kind without the technology that makes it BECOME cinema. This is an important distinction to consider when thinking about what might be different now. Digital media technology, instruments, apparatus equipment… are more than the sum of their parts, and create unique entities because of their relationship with each other, the world, and the viewer. Intentional technologies are the instruments that are central to the experience of extending and altering visual experience. She adds that the focus is on the “common and cooperative” (166) functions of technology. A bit further down on the page Sobchack shares that new ways of producing something (tools, production, expertise) along with the relationships of the humans producing it, create new existential experiences and ways of thinking about the world. For the cinema, there is nothing without an intertwining of technology and experience. Sobchack’s work, “The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Photographic, Cinematic and Electronic ‘Presence’” (2016), takes this intertwining further and envisions the turn to the electronic and digital. While there is still the human, the technology, and the world in this experience, the electronic and the digital technology extends the human in different ways resulting in a different experience. Sobchack asks, “What happens when our expressive technologies also become perceptive technologies—expressing and extending us in ways we never thought possible, radically transforming not merely our comprehension of the world but also our apprehension of ourselves?”(1).

Asking this question further considers how the “original cinema experience” differs from those in today’s moving-image culture. Extending to the electronic and digital alters more than perspectives. While the entire chapter is worth the read, several things in this work jump out in importance. First, Sobchack shares that when the technology of the moving image is different, the perception and experience are different. This changes “not only our expression of the world and ourselves, but these perceptive technologies also changed our sense of ourselves in radical ways that have now become naturalized and transparent” (2016: 135). She suggests that “more recently (although no longer that recently), we have been radically “remade” by the perceptive (as well as expressive) technologies of photography, cinema, and the electronic media of television and computer—these all the more transformative of ‘the interior of embodied consciousness’ (and its exterior actions too) because they are technologies that are culturally pervasive” (137). Additionally, she shares that “it also radically changes our epistemological, social, and economic relationships to both representation and each other” (142).

The idea of the perceptual experience is no longer about the human–technology–world experience, but the human-new technology-world experience. The kinds and the types and the uses and the ways of the being of the technology matters. And while they are different in gears and guts, they are all technologies that re-present AND represent in multiple ways. The second important idea central to this work is the notion that while traditional cinema and today’s moving-image experience is subjectively and bodily different, both in perception and presence, the experience

emerges within and co-constitutes objective and material practices of representation and social existence. Thus, while certainly cooperative in creating the moving-image culture or lifeworld we now inhabit, cinematic and electronic technologies are quite different… in their concrete materiality and particular existential significance (Sobchack 2016: 2).

The important and overlooked nuance in Sobchack’s idea is that within that moving image culture, the technologies are very different and the way they are existentially experienced is also different. As a quick aside, most individuals do not become ill when sitting forward watching images on a screen. While viewing and experiencing the virtual world, however, users and players can experience VR motion sickness. The technology AND the existential experience are different in the new age of cinema, called moving-image culture.

Each technology not only differently mediates our figurations of bodily existence but also constitutes them. That is, each offers our lived bodies radically different ways of ‘being-in-the-world.’ Each implicates us in different structures of material investment, and—because each has a particular affinity with different cultural functions, forms, and contents—each stimulates us through differing modes of presentation and representation to different aesthetic responses and ethical responsibilities (2016: 2).

Sobchack’s 2016 chapter, built on an earlier 2004 chapter in her book Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, juxtaposes the photographic, the cinematic and the electronic to increase understanding of the co-constitution of moving-image culture and the new age of cinema. The next turn is to the digital and the technological through an expanded or material hermeneutics.

Much moving-image experience does not occur in a fixed location. Notes Patrick Heelan, in his text Space-Perception and the Philosophy of Science, “Unlike the perceiver localized just at one spot in space, at the center of his/her World, the scientific observer is not localized; it is everywhere simultaneously in its frame of reference, it is a universal observer” (1988: 168). This is an important distinction because viewers experienced “old age” cinema in fixed, two-dimensional space, and now, through new technologies humans experience a three dimensional or Euclidian space in real-time. This process uses mathematical isomorphism to create space where points of interest are coordinated in mediated and mobile ways. In mimetic isomorphism, one organization imitates or adopts another to benefit and align both entities. Technological isomorphism follows similar lines. In the human–technology–world experience, as seen in moving image culture, change occurs that produces an isomorphic environment, acting as a co-constitutional link between symbols and real-world objects. Specifically, the relationship between humans and technology begins to change. This suggests that the co-constitution may have a variety of sociocultural and embodied variants to consider.

André Bazin’s seminal book What is Cinema (2005), originally written in 1967, fleshes out the ideas of cinema as language in the chapter “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema”. He shares, “Under the heading ‘plastics’ must be included the style of the sets, of the make-up, and, up to a point, even of the performance, to which we naturally add the lighting and, finally, the framing of the shot which gives us its composition. As regards to montage, derived initially as we all know from the masterpieces of Griffith, we have the statement of Malraux in his Psychologie du cinema that it was a montage that gave birth to film as an art, setting it apart from mere animated photography, in short, creating a language or in his explanation of dialectic progress in the first fifty years of cinema” (38). Later, he shared that “it does not appear that the language of cinema was at a loss for ways of saying what it wanted to say” (26) and adds “a language the semantic and syntactical unit of which is in no sense the Shot; in which the image is evaluated not according to what it adds to reality but what it reveals of it” (28). At the end of the chapter, he shares his most revealing statement and the importance of understanding cinema as a language. He explains, “The film-maker is no longer the competitor of the painter and the playwright, he is, at last, the equal of the novelist” (40). This notion seems to fit perfectly with the idea of using hermeneutics as a way of understanding cinema and its broader term, moving image culture.

Bernd Herzogenrath, in Film As Philosophy (2017), asks “Is there something like cinematic thought, thinking with images? How does it relate to philosophical thoughts and inquiries or to scientific analyses of this process? Can these disciplines benefit from each other” (viii)? I think the answer to these questions is postphenomenology and hermeneutics. Maurice Merleau Ponty, Paul Ricoeur, Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze all studied film and cinematic language through hermeneutics, phenomenology, and philosophy, in general. Don Ihde’s ideas in Expanding Hermeneutics, Visualism in Science (1998) also adds to the visual depth of these ideas. Ihde’s notion of visual praxis (4) rings true for cinema as much as it does for science. He notes “the same patterns of multiple instrumentations, multivariant instrumental perspectives, and the like have emerged as the standards of science’s depiction of the natural world” (4). Cinema, like science, involves deep interpretation. For both, the question is “What can be seen” (198)? The next section moves to the cinematic style called Mise en scène, the ways mediation patterns can be laid out and revealed.

4 Mise en scène

The idea of Mise en scène in cinema can mean several things. On a very basic level, it means how the set is laid out. It can also mean a style of filmmaking involving special attention to longer takes with camera movements that focus most often in a kind of environment. For cinema or moving picture culture, as explored by Sobchack, the design involves reading the visual. Today’s cinematic making has shifted in embodied ways, through the wearable GoPro camera for example (see Irwin 2017), viewing instruments or apparatus (VR headsets), or alternate reality with the Pokémon Go app.

Using the postphenomenological schema of human–technology–world, the use case of moving-image technology can be illustrated. There is no directionality in this first schema.

Then, humans experience embodied unity with the technology, as directed toward the world, in existential and materially felt ways. This experience is “complex, multidimensional, loaded in the intentional, directional arc of motility, perceptually rich, and that the motile body is the necessary condition for intelligent behavior and our ‘opening’ to the world” (Ihde 2012: 142). The technology is experienced in a literal and physical sense. “It takes less and less deliberate action on our part to engage with media or ICTs [Information Communication Technologies]. No longer do we need to place ourselves behind a computer to go online; we carry ‘the online’ constantly in our pocket or on our wrist. It is always there, at our fingertips” (Van den Eede et al. 2019: xvii). The model would be established as (human-technology) —> world.

First, the filmmaker experiences the film through the technology as the film is created, in implied and apparent ways (Ihde 2012: 139) and then the human user experiences the language of the film and interprets it, with all of the highs and lows and embodied leanings (think horror film or sappy rom-com storyline) of the experience. The model would look like this: (human-moving-image) —> world. The embodied or perhaps double-bodied experience is one of embodied practice and expertise, as the filmmaker’s shoot/collect/edit the visuals through contemporary digital means, and then distribute for the viewer or experiencer or user to embody and interpret experience through the screening of the film, with some kind of projector. It may even be experienced more this way: (human × 2-moving-image) —> world. “Technologies do become embodied, but never totally nor in fully transparent ways. That is how they give us the powers and possibilities we would not otherwise have” (Sobchack 2016: 143).

In the schema of hermeneutic relations, the experience is one of reading how the moving-image technologies represent the world like this: human —> (technology-world). The filmmaker edits the moving images in certain ways that represent the world, though time in a film is often considerably reduced. When the cinematographer looks through the camera lens, the composition is designed with a visual rhetoric that allows the viewer or experiencer to read the encounter. The special experience of reading the camera technology, with the lens, focus, f stops, framing, and other visual cues, and the visual grammar of the editing, creates a technological experience for the human maker, and then the human viewer. This means at least two humans are bound together in the relational process. The experience is a representative of the human × 2 —> (moving image–world) relation.

The third human-technology-word relation is alterity relations, with a schema of human —> technology (world) relations. For moving-images, the crux of this experience lies within the emergence of technology in the world or as the world. The experience of watching a film is very different from the 3D immersive experience of virtual or augmented reality (AR). For the AR designer, the scene can be set anywhere, and all of the different scenes are “stitched” together for a seamless environment in an alterity way. Then, the human experiencing the moving-image encounters the unity of the world through the image. Specifically, for virtual and augmented reality, the human is experiencing the world, and walking and moving spatially through it, while experiencing an alternate visual reality. The physical world is backgrounded. This illustrates the human × 2 —> moving-image (world) relation.

The fourth experience is background relations. This might not seem to fit as a human–technology–world experience for this use case at first, but the idea of visual images in the background can lead to some interesting variations. The sounds of moving-images often occur as background or unconsciousness noise. Humans experience moving image billboards and advertisements. People sometimes like having the television on as “background” noise. I argue that moving image technologies like augmented reality, virtual reality, and gaming, along with their sound tracks and sound effects also become backgrounded in habit-forming ways. New technologies allow humans a visual moving image world experience in such a way that the technology is in the background and not at all noticed until it is “cued up” for use. And perhaps, not even then. Humans tangentially know the technology is there, but design and technological structure have backgrounded the perceptual knowing that technology plays a part in the experience. An experience can be so immersive that the human does not think to put thought into what is outside or beyond or around. The moving image experience is in the moment. The human experiences technology and the world as a bundled perceptual reality. That model may look like human × 2 (moving-image/world) relation.

Once the moving image experience is analyzed into potentially distinct variations, as a postphenomenological account or use case, the relation becomes more obvious. As Don Ihde has shared, once you see a variation, it is hard to un-see it. And we are called, as philosophers, notes Ihde, to locate patterns.

To review, the basic schema is illustrated like this: human–moving image–world

Embodied relations: (human × 2-moving-image) —> world or (human-moving image) —> world

Hermeneutic relations: human × 2 —> (moving image–world)

Alterity relations: human × 2 —> moving-image (world)

Background relations: human × 2 (moving-image/world).

What becomes trickier, or considering of more analysis, is when the experiences are layers and co-mingled. The most contemporary and immersive moving image technologies commingle and mediate experience is far more complicated ways than the four relations just described. And while human–technology–world is experienced in a co–co-constitutive way; the kind of experiences are also layered. For instance, a visual experience can be both embodied and hermeneutic all at the same time. While the viewer/experiencer/user is wrapped up in the story and the technology and the entire moving-image culture experience, hermeneutic experiences are happening in tandem. Perhaps, a moving image experience involves embodied motility, hermeneutic reading, alterity disappearance of becoming one with the technology, and at the same time, the technological experience is backgrounded. The experience ripples out and radiates in micro and macroperceptual ways into the material world. Because of the co-constitutionality of moving images, a blended schema of the four simultaneous relations might look something like this. I use the “curly” brackets for clarification, to delimit or bind the essential quality of the co-constituted relations.

{(human × 2-moving-image/world) —> (moving image–world) —> moving-image (world) world —>)

The most important idea to be gained from this schema exercise is not to debate the placement of the arrows, parenthesis and brackets, or how exactly the schema should be designed, but about the complicated, layered and varied whole-body co-constitutional nature of human–technology–world entanglement founded on cinema experience, and caught up in contemporary immersive moving image technologies. The final section, Fin, shares ideas about moving forward in contemporary moving-image culture.

4.1 Fin

When a film is finished, the credits roll. At the end of old French films, the words fin appears as an indicator that the film is completed. In early American films, the phrase “The End” is often used. This is a semiotic, hermeneutic, linguistic, and visual cue for the end of the story. But there is more to this story than technological intentionality integrated at the end of a moving image. Galit Wellner, in her article Material hermeneutic of digital technologies in the age of AI (2020), shares that there is more to digital material hermeneutics than transferring something that was once analog, into digital form, to create a digital representation. Wellner highlights the technological effects that point back to the human. It would be nice, perhaps, if “new age of cinema” moving image endings were as clear. In the understanding of moving image culture, however, the intentionality is often ambiguous and uncertain. What kinds of intentionality does the technology have toward the human, when the moving image streaming technology starts up the next episode after a five-second countdown? The human is cognitively aware of a choice, to either push the digital semiotic representation of a pause or stop “button” to end service, or to do nothing and allow the next episode to continue. Has the technology intentionally directed the human to remain unmoving because another episode of moving images will occur in five more seconds based on its algorithm? Would the algorithm have intentionality that leads the viewer participant toward a more sedentary lifestyle through the convenience of algorithmic continuation?

Sometimes it is difficult to end moving image experience, like when the human continues viewing indefinitely (binging or through addiction), or the technology ends the experience (dead battery), or the story pauses only for a few seconds, before continuing to a next episode. Or perhaps, the human has momentarily forgotten that there is a different world from the one they are co-constitutionally part of. Many times, in moving image culture, there is no finite ending to the story because the human is a participant who chooses to end experience. I am reminded of a cinema experience that was so captivated that like a good book, I felt a sense of mourning when the story was over. Had I been given the opportunity to continue living in that world for longer, I would absolutely have opted to do so. This may be why many movies also become moving image games. One of the considerations to think about is when to start or end a digitally mediated experience. The virtual, augmented, and the algorithmically calibrated world is always waiting. The adventure is ready to continue. The game is paused. The ending is not clear. As technology continues to create digital material hermeneutically, embodied, alterity, and backgrounded (and more) ways of experiencing human–technology–world relations, the mediated experience needs more accounts and analysis that reveal the traces and patterns.

[A]s they have mediated and represented our engagement with the world, with others, and with ourselves, photographic, cinematic, and electronic technologies have transformed us so that we presently see, sense, and make sense of ourselves as quite other than we were before each of them existed (Sobchack 2016: 5).

Precisely because moving images mediate and represent and engage us in transformative and radical ways, it is incredibly important that we fervently analyze and study these transformations and the patterns they reveal. As the Don Ihde orienting quote at the beginning of this essay shares, “One of the tasks for philosophers is that of locating patterns” (Ihde 2012: 142). This process starts with that exact idea. Noticing, sharing, and studying patterns of use, both the subtle daily ones and the seismic shifting varieties that reorganize socio-culture and political life, are important exercises that create accounts that contribute to the future of an understanding of the human–technology–world. The uncanny valley, that place of “other”, “othering” and “otherness” is changing and shifting and ultimately, disappearing. Self and other have merged in co-shaping, co-constituted, and compounding ways. And what may be an unremarkable, taken-for-granted, and “normal” experience for one person may be consequential and fraught for another. Interpreting the world has become more complicated. Peter-Paul Verbeek shares,

Moreover, technology—thanks to its role in scientific perception—plays a constitutive role in the production of scientific knowledge, which is becoming progressively more important in the framework through which human beings interpret the world. The role of scientific instruments in the production of scientific knowledge runs far deeper than that of ‘depicting reality:’ instruments mutually constitute the reality investigated. They make visible aspects of reality that otherwise would be invisible, aspects that have to be actively represented and thus ‘interpreted’ by the instrument (2005: 144)

As a thought exercise, what if we altered a few words and considered Verbeek’s ideas with a specific emphasis on moving image technology.

Moreover, moving image technology—thanks to its role in popular culture perception—plays a constitutive role in the production of socio-cultural knowledge, which is becoming progressively more persuasive in the framework through which human beings interpret the world. The role of moving-image technology in the production of culture knowledge runs far deeper than that of “depicting reality:” instruments mutually constitute the reality investigated. They make visible aspects of reality that otherwise would be invisible, aspects that have to be actively represented and thus “interpreted” by the instrument.

Moving image technology and culture are embedded in philosophical and technoscience studies. Postphenomenology is one way to study this phenomenon, through the art form of cinema, an experience embedded in technology. “Because without ways of exploring technology through this lens, the ubiquity and the everydayness and the transparency will cover it over. And the fact that the politics of certain objects are sometimes invisible to some people, occluded in their very everydayness, is often exactly by design” (Rosenberger 2017: 235). Right now, “the price of its power entails a subtle and graded sense of that while we use and even partially embody our technologies, we also ultimately remain the contingent humans we are” (Sobchack 2016: 143). But this is changing. “Yes, humans still have the ability to step into a multiplicity of our technologies—and thus to also step out of them” (143), but for how long?