Cinematic and Aesthetic Cartographies of Subjective Mutation

This article examines the use of cinema as a mapping of subjective mutation in the work of Deleuze, Gauttari and Berardi. Drawing on Deleuze's distinction between the reduction of the art-work to the symptom and the idea of art as symptomatology, the article focuses on Berardi's use of cinematic examples, posing the question in each case of to what extent they function as symptomatologies or mere symptoms of cultural and subjective mutations in examples ranging from Bergman's Persona to Van Sant's Elephant to finish on speculations about Fincher's The Social Network as a critical engagement with subjective mutation in the 21st Century.

Short films about flying

Online artwork which streams web-cam images live from the Internet and re-mixes them into disjointed narrative sequences, thereby producing cinema as a 'found object' made entirely of live material streamed from the internet. ‘Short Films about Flying’ is an online film which explores how a cinematic work can be generated using live material from the internet. The work is driven by software that takes surveillance video from a live camera feed at Logan Airport, Boston, and combines this with randomly grabbed audio from the web and texts taken from websites, chat rooms, message boards etc. This results in an endless open edition of unique cinematic works in real-time. By combining the language of cinema with global real-time data technologies, this work is one of the first new media artworks to re-imagine the internet in a different sensory form as a cinematic space. ‘Short Films about Flying’ was developed over the course of a year in collaboration with Jon Thomson (Slade) to explore how the concept of the found object can be re-conceptualised as the found data stream. It has informed other research by Craighead and Thomson, such as the web project http://www.templatecinema.com, and began an examination into relationships between montage and live virtual data –an early example of which would be ‘Flat Earth’, an animated work developed for Channel 4 in 2007, with the production company Animate. This piece has been cited in discussions on new media art, as a significant example of artworks using a database as their determining structure. It was acquired for the Arts Council Collection and has continuously toured significant international venues over the last 4 years. Citations include:’ Time and Technology’ by Charlie Gere (2006); 'The Wrong Categories' by Kris Cohen (2006); 'Networked Art - Practices and Positions' edited by Tom Corby (Routledge 2005) and Grayson Perry in The Times (9.8.06).