Machinima and the Transcending of Mortality or,

Machinima and the Cinema-World of Latent Realities

Newton Trust/Leverhulme Early Career Fellow

Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities

(CRASSH)

University of Cambridge

jpsn6@cam.ac.uk

Jenna Ng

A talk presented at

The University of British Columbia and The University of Alberta

―Photographs, especially instantaneous

photographs, are very instructive, because we

know that they are in certain respects exactly like

the objects they represent. But this resemblance is

due to the photographs having been produced

under such circumstances that they were

physically forced to correspond point by point to

nature.‖

- Charles Sanders Peirce, Philosophical Writings of Peirce, edited by

Justus Buchler, New York, NY: Dover, 1955, p. 106.

―…the molding of death masks, for example, which

likewise involves a certain automatic process‖;

―One might consider photography in this sense as a

molding, the taking of an impression, by the

manipulation of light‖;

―Let us merely note in passing that the Holy Shroud of

Turin combines the features alike of relic and

photograph.‖

- André Bazin, ―The Ontology of the Photographic Image‖ in What is

Cinema? Vol. 1, Hugh Gray (trans.), Berkeley, CA: University of

California Press, 1967, p. 14.

‗L‘Axiome Cahiers: c‘est que le cinema a rapport au réel et que le réel

n‘est pas le représenté—et basta.‘‘6

(‗‗The Cahiers axiom is this: that the

cinema has a fundamental rapport

with reality and that the real is not what is represented – and that‘s

final.‘‘) Daney hurled this axiom in the

face of the so-called ‗‗Cinéma du

Look‘‘ of the 1980s, those winsome

confections like Diva (1981) and Subway (1985) that came from the

advertising industry, and would lead to

Amélie (Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie

Poulain, 2001). I throw it against an overconfident discourse of the digital.‘

Hugh Hancock, Anthony Bailey

Machine + cinema = machiniema

Machinima

Second Life Halo

World of

Warcraft

“Machinima as found technology”

Diary of a Camper, The Raiders, USA, 1996

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/article/153723-youtube-video-game-channel-machinima-aims-for-the-next-level/