If bendy display materials now allow designers to finally now go where Apple and their copyists have been waiting for, then moving images on surfaces begin a different stage of development of the human use of moving images per-se.
The sacred and sanctified space of the cinema/church begins to wither - not for the form of entertainment that has sustained it for years - the story - but more as a site of iconic cognitive distribution, a place where anyone can keep up with ideas developed and distributed within the current paradigm. So the place where ideas of the developing paradigm are developed and distributed must also change.
The age of technical developments such image skins for buildings (a 30 story wood skyscraper - in appearance at least?), invisible tanks and destroyers (camera at the front daylight display at the back – and on every side of the object you wish to make invisible) and wearable imaging approaches at speed. Hot on the tail of recently distributed versions of the accoutrements written about in scf-fi stories of the twentieth century (like the wrist communicator) are much more serious developments: transport beams, warp engines based upon Hawking Drives, hyperspace leaps - it's all coming very shortly - so it's time we upgraded our imaginations and stopped being so startled by it all.
In terms of continuing to theorise the production and display of moving images - we must first remember that 'to theorise' is perhaps within the passing paradigm.
The theoretic age arose with a late form of language development, is language therefore based, bureaucratically organised (catalogued and indexed) and this behaviour was developed after the rise of prosody around 500,000 years ago, language 150,000 years ago, to grasp power by shamans and militarists around 10,000 BC. To be able to barter a connection between the common person and god, or to deliver a chief a military victory - delivered a initially power followed by a higher tribal position and therefore lifestyle to the proponent. No need to hunt or gather if you can tell people it’ll cost them a months rations to speak to god. So modern academia also grasps power to deliver lifestyle and is fundamentally in bed with power. If an academician rocks the boat they are cast out and liberated from a priveleged lifestyle – which to provide a smoke screen for, they moan an awful lot about how much work we have to do. Tell that to a starving person from the third world – or an Al Quaeda representative who wants to behead you, because you're part of oppressing their people.
So we have a duty to go beyond the theoretic to help reveal and articulate the answers that everyone is feeling in their bones. The corporations can't do it, the politicians certainly aren’t going to do it and it's fundamentally against our own interest when looked at from the point of view of the old paradigm. When looked at from the point of view of the new paradigm it is an absolute necessity to try to understand what is going on – but t deliver than in a much more intelligent way than loading sentence with references and citations. We must begin to think for ourselves.
That’s what the Centre for Moving Images is about – that’s why we have an interest in the developing technical parameters of the moving image, it’s history rediscovered and retold, it’s politics, its aesthetics, it’s site of display – all of that constitutes a gestalt view, rather than taking the narrow theoretic confines that conspire to obscure the real issues within the developing moving image paradigm. So our project is that we’re looking at the world through the lens of moving image media to discover new knowledge.
