Unfolding Media Studies - Turun yliopisto

Unfolding Media Studies 

Working Papers 2010

Unfolding Media Studies 

Working Papers 2010 

Jukka-Pekka Puro & Jukka Sihvonen, eds. 

Media Studies, University of Turku 2011

University of Turku 

School of History, Culture and Arts Studies 

Media Studies 

Working Papers 2010 

ISBN 978-951-29-4530-6 

Printed in Suomen Yliopistopaino Oy – Uniprint Turku 

Turku 2011 

Copyright © 2011 by the authors 

Layout by Päivi Valotie 

Contents 

Preface 7 

Film Studies 

ILONA HONGISTO 

Documentary Fabulation: Folding the True and the False 9 

VARPU RANTALA 

Samples of Christiane F.: 

Experimenting with Digital Postproduction in Film Studies 19 

TOMMI RÖMPÖTTI 

To the Freeze-Frame and Beyond 33 

OUTI HAKOLA 

Modeling Experience: Death Events and the Public Sphere 49 

MARIA KESTI 

Science on Fire! A Flying Torch Articulates 63 

New Media 

JUKKA SIHVONEN 

Careless Saints: 

Notes for Research on the Aesthetics of Digital Games 69 

TERO KARPPI 

Reality Bites: Subjects of Augmented Reality Applications 89 

TAPIO MÄKELÄ 

Locative Games as Social Software: 

Playing in Object Oriented Neighbourhoods 103 

JUKKA-PEKKA PURO 

Turning Inside: Towards a Phenomenology of Biological Media 123

Jukka-Pekka Puro & Jukka Sihvonen 

Preface 

Media Studies at the University of Turku was launched in the year 2000 

when three subjects at the school of Art Studies – film- and television 

studies, communication studies and speech communication – were 

merged together to establish a new and independent department. During 

the preceding decade, the fields of study have mixed together, and today, 

the borderlines between original disciplines have blurred, even vanished. 

Currently Media Studies is a wide umbrella for various research projects 

aimed to explore, interpret and understand media in its different forms, 

functions and discourses. 

This collection of working papers, entitled ‘Unfolding Media 

Studies’, is a 10-year celebration publication. Working papers may not 

be the most conventional way to carry out an “in honor of” -book. It 

offers, however, a many-sided insight into present day Media Studies. 

The working paper -format implies that the papers published are not 

actual research articles. Instead, they are mirroring various research 

projects in their current transformative state. Hence, some papers are 

more tentative and speculative than others, depending on the authors’ 

current situations within their projects. As working papers, the texts are 

also relatively short. The wish is that these papers open up a view to 

the ongoing research projects, their argumentation, methodology, and 

materials; the actual results and conclusions are to be published later in 

academic journals and/or doctoral dissertations. 

The papers are assembled in two groups: film studies and new media. 

‘Film studies’ include four affiliated Ph.D. students: M.A. Varpu Rantala, 

M.A. Ilona Hongisto, M.A. Tommi Römpötti and M.A. Outi Hakola. 

Accordingly, ‘New media’ is consisted of professor Jukka Sihvonen, M.A. 

Tero Karppi, M.A. Tapio Mäkelä and senior lecturer Jukka-Pekka Puro. 

Between these two main fields of study, M.A. Maria Kesti, the newest 

Ph.D. candidate in Media Studies, opens up an essayistic discussion on 

scientific endeavor and it’s metaphors. 

7

This collection of texts offers one possibility to grasp the present 

orientation of research interests in Media Studies. The papers, of course, 

speak for themselves. It is obvious that research interests in the area of 

film, television and other audiovisual media constitute one fundamental 

element in the department’s Ph.D. projects. The continuum from film- 

and television studies carries to the present day and thrives to be a solid 

cornerstone in the research activities of the department. 

The position of new media is quite different facing the future in a more 

prominent way. It seems that new media oriented research has replaced 

research interests towards traditional mass media, and consequently the 

research profile of the department has changed compared to what it 

perhaps was ten years ago. 

Following the idea of the subtitle – Working Papers 2010 – we want 

to focus on the persistence of change. Furthermore, many of the papers 

are strongly connected to the contemporary context. Both the media 

and its research are developing rapidly. This collection of texts is a kind 

of display window of the current ‘Turku style’ media studies. After a 

decade, perhaps even sooner, a similar collection of working papers may 

set up another kind of window. Inevitably, it would be different from 

this one. 

This title has been published simultaneously in two forms: in print 

and as an open access e-book. 

Turku, in January 2011 

Jukka-Pekka Puro & Jukka Sihvonen 

8 

Ilona Hongisto 

Documentary fabulation: 

Folding the True and the False 

This paper addresses the notion of fabulation in relation to documentary 

cinema. The paper draws fabulation from the philosophy of Gilles 

Deleuze, looks briefly at its genealogy and sphere and finally discusses 

what the concept contributes to the study of the documentary. 

In a 1990 interview, Deleuze (1995, 174) insists that Henri Bergson’s 

concept of fabulation should be taken up and given a political meaning. 

Nowhere does he develop on the concept systematically but the brief 

notes on fabulation throughout his work give enough material to situate 

fabulation within his thought on the whole. In the context of art and 

media studies, the concept coincides most readily with such wellestablished 

Deleuzian themes as becoming, minor literature and the 

powers of the false – that for their part can be seen to partake to the 

emphasis Deleuze (2007) puts on the creative act in the arts. 1 

Conveniently for the present purposes, Deleuze (1989, 150) offers 

one definition of fabulation in his discussion of selected documentary 

films from around the 1960’s: “[fabulation] is the becoming of the 

real character when he himself starts to ‘make fiction’, when he enters 

into ‘the flagrant offence of making up legends’ and so contributes to 

the invention of his people.” The abundance of relations within this 

1 In addition to becoming, minor literature and the powers of the false, Ronald Bogue 

(2010, 21–44) connects fabulation to such Deleuzian concepts as the virtual and the 

actual, haecceities and the three passive syntheses of time. Bogue’s reading of the notion 

is tied to a discussion of selected contemporary literary authors whose work Bogue 

reads with the different facets of fabulation. Although Bogue’s elaboration is by far the 

most extensive and systematic take on the notion, it is not without its problems. At 

times, it seems that Bogue wants to synthesize Deleuze’s thought at large under the one 

concept and conversely, he seems to suggest fabulation as a somewhat unified practice 

of contemporary literature. My intention is not to criticize Bogue’s indispensable work, 

but to draw attention to some of the problem areas that might result from elaborations 

of the concept. 

9


brief quotation offers enough material for a full-length article but I will 

contend myself with two facets of fabulation: the relationship between 

real characters and making fiction, and the invention of a people. 

As noted, Deleuze adapts fabulation from Henri Bergson and insists 

that the notion should be politicized. This is perhaps a bit misleading, 

for the notion already has significant political stakes in Bergson. The 

difference is, rather, that for Bergson fabulation has to do with the 

organization of “closed societies” whereas Deleuze positions fabulation 

as the creative “invention of a people”. In The Two Sources of Morality 

and Religion, Bergson (1954, 108) defines fabulation as the production 

of “phantasmic representations” and “hallucinatory fictions” with which 

the internal cohesion of a social group is kept in place. He speaks of 

fabulation as “myth-making”, creating semi-personal Gods, spirits and 

forces that guide the primary instinct of a social group and thus regulate 

behavior in that group. 2 (Bogue 2010, 16; Bogue 2007, 91–94, 106.) 

The difference in Bergson and Deleuze has an intriguing connection 

to Félix Guattari’s (1984, 22–44) distinction between subjected groups 

and subject-groups. Subjected groups struggle against forms imposed on 

them from the outside, and in the act of self-defense they inflict fixed 

positions and hierarchical structures on themselves. Group-subjects, on 

the other hand, form themselves from within, offering their members 

shifting roles and fluid positions. A subjected group remains a closed 

unit, whereas a group-subject keeps itself open to lines of collective 

development with other group and existential modes. In essence, the 

problem of subjected groups in Guattari is similar to Bergson’s problem 

with closed societies: both are guided and controlled by external myths 

that regulate patterns of behavior. Deleuze’s take on fabulation, on the 

other hand, coincides with Guattari’s description of group-subjects. (Cf. 

Bogue 2007, 97–98.) 

2 Bergson’s translators rendered his la function fabulatrice into “myth-making 

function” and the translators of Deleuze’s Cinema 2. The Time-Image followed their 

lead in translating Deleuze’s adaptation of Bergson’s concept into “story-telling 

function”. This brings out both the continuum and the dissonance between the 

respective conceptualizations. In studies that comment upon Deleuze’s take on 

fabulation and in translations of his texts, translations such as “fabulative function” 

(Bogue 2007), “fabulating function” (Deleuze 1998, 3) and simply “fabulation” (Bogue 

2010) have also been used. 

10 

DOCUMENTARY FABULATION 

The concept of fabulation, as it appears in Deleuze’s thought, opens 

to a sphere where fiction folds with the real and where the created folds 

contribute to the social organization of a people. This is significant from 

a documentary perspective for it transposes the question of fiction from 

the structural or formal level of representation to the plane of the real 

itself. 

Making up legends 

To start with, fabulation is an act of resistance to hierarchical social 

structures and dominant myths. According to Daniel Smith (1998, xlv), 

it is a creative practice that extracts “a creative storytelling that is, as it 

were, the obverse side of the dominant myths and fictions, an act of 

resistance whose political impact is immediate and inescapable, and that 

creates a line of flight on which a minority discourse and a people can 

be constituted.” 

In his discussion of documentary cinema, Deleuze (1989, 150) speaks 

of fabulation as a “story-telling function of the poor”. The qualifier “of 

the poor” has significant implications in this context. Not only does 

story-telling belong to the area of social organization, it also belongs to 

the ones that are being organized, “the poor”. Story-telling is not done 

for the poor; it is rather a mode of self-expression. 3 This is what was 

insinuated earlier with real characters entering into “the flagrant offence 

of making up legends”. Fabulation as story-telling steers away from 

narrating “their lives” from an outside position and rather encourages 

the self-expression of the people captured on camera. 

Not surprisingly, then, Deleuze discusses story-telling in documentary 

cinema via the speech-acts of real characters. Making up legends is located 

to speech-acts in such films as Jean Rouch’s Moi, un Noir (France 1958), 

Shirley Clarke’s The Portrait of Jason (USA 1967) and Pierre Perrault’s 

Pour la suite du monde (Canada 1963). What brings these films together 

is their respective emphasis on letting the characters to make up legends 

on their own terms. The documentaries create a space for the characters 

3 On the presentation of self in the documentary, see Hongisto 2010. 

11


to perform acts of resistance to the oppressive modes of existence that 

mark their lives (i.e. “poverty”). 4 

In Rouch’s documentary, a young Nigerian immigrant narrates his 

and his compatriots’ lives in Treichville, Abidjan on the Ivory Coast. 

The camera follows the young men on the streets of Abidjan as they trail 

from one bar to the next or from one work site to another. Work is scarce, 

money a distant dream and the immigrants are constantly frowned upon. 

The young man speaks on the soundtrack to the events that take place 

on the screen. He invents the story as it proceeds and gives to himself 

and his friends names familiar from Western popular culture – Edward 

G. Robinson, Tarzan and Eddie Constantine. Speaking in the present 

tense, the man makes the group of immigrants up as legends, creating a 

line of flight to the unemployment and the desolate circumstances in the 

space of the documentary. 

In Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason the speech-act moves from a voiceover 

to the frame. The documentary was filmed over one night in a New 

York City apartment and it consists of one man, Jason Holliday, making 

himself up a legend. Jason, a colored gay man in his forties, talks to the 

camera about his painful and pleasant childhood memories, his years of 

hustling, and his faraway dreams. Edited into a chronological order, the 

documentary follows the changes that take place over the night as Jason 

gets more intoxicated and flaccid from the booze and joints he consumes 

while speaking. The particular twist in Clarke’s film is in the way Jason 

relates to his dreams while he speaks. Dreaming of a nightclub act he has 

been planning for years, Jason not only speaks about the roles he would 

want to play but takes up performing them for the camera. He sings 

excerpts from the musical Funny Girl in a heartfelt manner and in a way 

invents himself as a nightclub actor while performing. Although the odds 

of him landing a role on Broadway are slim, the documentary provides 

him a frame for performing he has been longing for over the years. In 

4 Although the story-telling function of the poor unifies these works, there are also 

significant differences. Rouch’s documentary cinema is perhaps the most reflexive of 

the three and because of this it is called cinéma-vérité. Clarke is better known as an 

experimental filmmaker but The Portrait of Jason has loose affinities with American 

‘direct cinema’ and its interest in celebrities. Pierre Perrault’s work has been described 

as living cinema, for he prefers to film artisans who can talk at the same time as they do 

their work. 

12 


this way, fabulation as a story-telling function provides resistance to the 

present social orders. 

Both Moi, un Noir and The Portrait of Jason raise questions of the 

ethical stakes in encouraging the characters’ entrance into self-invention. 

Although fabulation opens to the sphere of self-invention, there are no 

innate promises of more affirmative social consistencies in story-telling 

as such. Rather, the ethical responsibility of filmmaking resides in how 

the filmmaker facilitates a sustainable self-invention of real characters. 5 

As a response to the ethical wager in documentary filmmaking, 

Pierre Perrault argues that the filmmaker has to be equally aware of his 

own positionality and background as he is of the people filmed (Bogue 

2007, 99–100). His Pour la suite du monde is set on Île-aux-Coudres, an 

island demarcated from both the Anglophone and the French-Canadian 

cultures of Quebec. The people on the island speak a distinct dialect 

that is hard to understand even for native French speakers. Perrault 

claims that because of his own upbringing and education in the French 

tradition, he could only access their lives as an outsider. 

In the documentary, Perrault encourages the islanders to take up an 

old tradition of the area and to re-institute it to life on the island. The 

tradition of fishing white beluga whales has been lost to the community 

for some time but with the making of the film, the islanders erect a wire 

barrier to the St. Lawrence River and reinvigorate the fishing tradition. 

In this way, Perrault bypasses his own outsider position by pushing the 

community to perform the tradition. The tradition is not documented 

simply as “their story” directed “to us”, but with the story-telling function 

initiated in the making of the film the islanders become actual fishermen. 

As the islanders fish, they talk about the tradition, memories thereof and 

myths involved and thus begin to fashion a new communal lore in which 

what is true and what is false becomes irrelevant. Perrault describes the 

result as a “becoming luminous within one’s own discourse” (qtd in 

Garneau 2004, 26). 

5 For a more elaborate discussion on facilitating and documentary filmmaking, see 

Hongisto 2010. 

13


Creating collectivities 

Both films by Rouch and Perrault challenge the dominant social order 

that regulate the lives of the filmed subjects. The voiceover in Moi, un 

Noir confronts the marginalized position of Nigerian immigrants on the 

Ivory Coast and offers them a space for self-invention. Pour la suite du 

monde confronts the demarcated position of the islanders by facilitating 

the actualization of a lost tradition from within. They differ from 

Clarke’s film in their strong investment in the collective consistency 

of the people filmed. Whereas The Portrait of Jason focuses on the one 

remarkable individual, the two other documentaries deploy the storytelling 

function within a collective. 

One might say that the story-telling function in the two films is an 

effort to disclose “the lines of potential collective development that are 

immanent within the present social field” (Bogue 2007, 98). In other 

words, the documentaries work to enhance the lines of affirmative selfinvention 

that are not imposed from the outside but already an immanent 

part of the community. Here, the fishing tradition on Île-aux-Coudres 

is perhaps the most obvious example. A similar thrust can be seen in the 

appropriation of Western popular culture in Moi, un Noir. 

It is essential to clarify what Deleuze refers to in this context with 

“the invention of a people”. Deleuze repeats the phrase “the people are 

missing” in various occasions but he hardly means that there “are no 

people”. What is missing is an affirmative and open social consistency 

for a people to live in. Hence, the invention of a people appears as a 

political call for creating collective consistencies in response to extant 

social conditions. In this ways, fabulation appears as the envisioning of 

“a collectivity beyond that which exists in actuality” (Bogue 2010, 44). 

Fabulation as the creation of a collective consistency moves the work 

of the documentary from representing collectives to envisioning and 

inventing them. Fabulation as a political tool is particularly vital in cases 

where a collective of people has been deprived of, for example, its culture, 

customs, and language. In his reading of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of 

cinema, D.N. Rodowick (1997, 158–159) speaks of the story-telling 

function within the context of postcolonial African cinema. 6 According 

6 Fabulation has remarkable affinities also to postcolonial literature (see Bogue 2010, 

passim). 

14 


to Rodowick, the biggest problem with West African cinema is that the 

local audiences are not accustomed to images of black skin. Or more 

precisely, they are accustomed only to certain kinds of images of black 

skin, images that the colonial censorship passed. From the colonial 

perspective, images of black skin for example in the Tarzan movies 

function as the “hallucinatory fictions” Bergson identifies in his mythmaking 

function. They enhance the colonial order by homogenizing 

blackness into a single category – “The Negro” – that becomes 

internalized in the guiding primary instinct of the social group. Colonial 

hegemony becomes internalized and individuals become alienated from 

their own myths, languages and customs that are replaced by those of 

“The Negro”. When the unifying myths, languages and customs are 

replaced, the collective is fragmented into alienated atoms harnessed 

by a foreign culture. This brushes out the differences between African 

cultures and offers “the white hero” as the only positive figure which the 

local audiences can identify with. 

Rodowick (1997, 159) argues that the “double colonialization” of 

the individuals and the collectives alike is so severe that remedying the 

situation with representing the repressed varieties of black skin is not 

enough. Nor can the constitution of individual psychological memories 

of repression do much for the cohesion of the collectives. What is needed 

is a vision of blackness in which individuals and collectives could find 

common points of existence. According to Rodowick (1997, 160), 

story-telling in African cinema can amount to a double-becoming 

of individuals and collectives if it engages with the creative power of 

visionary invention. 

New directions 

The concept of fabulation comes with a theoretical perspective in which 

the true folds in the false and vice versa. In this approach, the real itself is 

made up of folds of fiction. For Henri Bergson, “the phantasmic” may have 

dubious social effects in the real because it can enhance the demarcation 

of social groups from one another. Myth-making may take a dominating 

function. Gilles Deleuze, on the other hand, turns “the visionary” into 

an affirmative force of undoing insupportable hierarchies. The storytelling 

function of the poor opposes real dominating structures. 

15


Hence, the concept of fabulation challenges documentary studies 

to consider the relationship between fact and fiction as more readily 

inclusive. As there are more and more documentary films that draw 

from and play upon the proximity of fact and fiction, the theoretical 

challenge posed by fabulation is all the more timely. Making up legends 

in the documentaries from around the 1960s serves as a historical point 

of contact to the numerous contemporary productions that foreground 

speech-acts and deploy elements of fiction in their audiovisuality. 

Fabulation as the creation of collective consistencies is a political 

experiment on the boundaries erected in the real. It is a creative act with 

a view on the future that comes with immense ethical responsibilities. 

Whereas the work of the documentary and its consequent ethical 

liabilities are typically coined to the ways in which people and their 

circumstances are represented, fabulation extends the ethical stakes to 

what is created in the film. In other words, as fabulation challenges the 

dominant social order it equally creates its own order to which ethical 

obligation must extend. Hence, real characters that start to make fiction 

and documentary methods that invent a people must be evaluated in how 

they contribute to the real by experimenting on its forms and relations. 

Bibliography 

Bergson, Henri (1954/1932). The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Trans. 

R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton. Notre Dame: University of Notre 

Dame Press. 

Bogue, Ronald (2010). Deleuzian Fabulation and the Scars of History. 

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 

Bogue, Ronald (2007). Deleuze’s Way. Essays in Transverse Ethics and Aesthetics. 

Aldershot & Burlington: Ashgate. 

Deleuze, Gilles (2007). What is the Creative Act? In Two Regimes of Madness. 

Texts and Interviews 1975–1995. Edited by David Lapoujade. Trans. by Ames 

Hodges and Mike Taormina. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 317–329. 

Deleuze, Gilles (1995). Negotiations. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: 

Columbia University Press. 

16 


Deleuze, Gilles (1989/1985). Cinema 2. The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh 

Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 

Garneau, Michèle (2004). Les deux memoires de Pierre Perrault. Protée vol. 

32:1, 23–30. 

Guattari, Félix (1984). Molecular Revolution. Psychiatry and Politics. Trans. 

Rosemary Sheed. London and New York: Penguin Books. 

Hongisto, Ilona (2010). ‘I’m ready for my close-up now’: Grey Gardens and 

the presentation of self. Transformations 18. http://transformationsjournal.org/ 

journal/issue_18/article_02.shtml [accessed 14 Jan 2011] 

Rodowick, D. N. (1997). Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine. Durham & London: 

Duke University Press. 

Smith, Daniel (1998). “A Life of Pure Immanence”: Deleuze’s “Critique et 

Clinique” Project. In Deleuze, Gilles (1998/1993) Essays Critical and Clinical. 

Trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. London and New York: Verso, 

xi–liv. 

17

Varpu Rantala 

Samples of Christiane F.: 

Experimenting with Digital Postproduction in Film Studies 

Above is a detail of a still-image assemblage of facial close-ups, collected 

from the film Christiane F.– Wir Kindern vom Bahnhof Zoo (Ulrich Edel 

1981). The film is a cinematic stream of dark images, several of which are 

close-ups of the protagonist Christiane (Nadja Brunckhorst), a teenage 

girl who lives in Berlin and falls in love two times at once: with a boy 

and with heroin. 

This practice-based essay discusses the close-ups of faces in Christiane 

F. The essay is related to my Ph.D. project on cinematic images of 

addiction, in which I study the facial close-up, among others, as an 

expressive indicator of addiction as a subjective experience. This kind of 

research framework evokes questions about the role of digitally rendered 

18 19

VARPU RANTALA 

still images as part of the research process. I will examine this role here by 

discussing the potential effects of these images. Christiane F. is explicitly 

concerned with the aesthetics of drug use and addiction, but the following 

methodological procedure might be applied to any kind film. 

I approach the visuality of the film by halting the stream of cinematic 

images into stills and by sampling and remixing these stills into “stillphotomontages” 

or rather, a collage of frames captured from the film. 

This kind of procedure is enabled by the digital image processing 

technologies that induce a certain relation to cinema. As Laura Mulvey 

(2006) has pointed out, the possibility to stop, spool, and slow down 

cinematic images has affected our relationship with film by revealing 

what has been hidden in the original screening experience. For example, 

Douglas Gordon’s work of video art, 24-Hour Psycho (1993) revealed the 

cinematic properties of Alfred Hitchcock’s film Psycho (1960) in new 

ways: slow-motioning of the film stretched its duration into 24 hours 

and enabled new perceptions of its techniques while also creating a new 

kind of affectivity (Mulvey 2006, 101). Overall, the processing of film 

by digital technologies may: 

20 

[a]llow space and time for associative thought, reflection on resonance 

and connotation, the identification of visual cues, the interpretation 

of form and style, and, ultimately, personal reverie. Furthermore, by 

slowing down, freezing or repeating images, key moments and meanings 

become visible that could not have been perceived when hidden under 

the narrative flow and the movement of film. (Mulvey 2006, 146–7.) 

I suggest that digital processing may reveal dimensions of the 

“cinematic unconscious” that do not appear in viewing the film 

with normal speed. Furthermore, I suggest that by utilizing digital 

SAMPLES OF CHRISTIANE F. 

postproduction 1 techniques such as re-assembling and remixing the 

existing film materials, one is affected by their very performative 

materiality: images take agency, and they may do this in unexpected 

ways. This essay tackles with questions that touch this complex terrain 

of visual experience by examining how images may affect the research 

process. I will be focusing on close-ups; an instance that Walter Benjamin 

called the “optical unconscious” (Benjamin 2008 [1931]) that reveals 

a visual reality unseen to the naked eye. I freeze close-ups of faces in 

Christiane F. into still images and assemble them in varied scales, with a 

suggestion that still-images and their assemblages may reveal dimensions 

of a kind of “cinematic unconscious”. 

Experimenting and sampling 

Today the digital computer may turn into an “experimental lab” where 

different media can meet (Manovich 2006). The digital film laboratory 

enables practices of processing cinematic images that relate to both 

scientific and artistic experimentality. These, despite the different 

contexts, may coalesce as they both engage with materiality, artificiality 

and the unknown. Experimenting as scientific testing of hypotheses in 

controlled conditions and with a strict procedure, implies rationality 

and objectivity. Simultaneously it has a flip-side of appearing as alien to 

everyday normality. Bruno Latour’s (1993) image of a bird that suffocates 

in a glass jar in an experiment where air is being removed is an example of, 

despite to the cruel play with life and death, the unnatural and artificial 

evoked by scientific practices. While experimentality in science assumes 

a rigid procedure and objectivity, it also implies something unknown 

1 Initially, postproduction is a technical term from the audiovisual vocabulary used 

in television, film, and video, but here it is extended into the realm of research from 

the visual arts. Postproduction “refers to the set of processes applied to recorded 

material: montage, the inclusion of other visual or audio sources, subtitling, voiceovers, 

and special effects.” (Bourriaud 2002, 6). I suggest that in postproduction 

mode, filmmaking approaches research, and vice versa, research may approach art. For 

example, Soviet montage school filmmakers researched film by re-editing imported 

films to find new montage effects. A related instance of assembling still images 

from film is Jean-Luc Godard’s collage of history of cinema, Histoire(s) du Cinema 

(1988–1998). It was also made into a separate book consisting of still-images of the 

film, which were considered as an individual artwork (Dienst 2006). 

21

VARPU RANTALA 

that may be grasped by focusing on its material procedures. In arts as 

well, experimentality engages with the “unknown”, to the extent it is 

about executing empirical chance procedures with unexpected results 

that are anticipated to be of artistic value, as defined by Walker (1993). 

The experiment of this essay proceeds by sampling, in two senses 

of the term: sampling as retrieving of data and as visual remixing, “a 

rhythm science” (Miller 2004) rooted in DJ culture. Thus the concepts 

of experimenting and sampling are contextualized in two domains; they 

are what Mieke Bal (2002) calls “travelling concepts”, as they travel 

between scientific and artistic discourses. They also bridge these contexts 

and even create lines of flight that flee towards an undefined area between 

them and even beyond; a becoming that exceeds a teleological model 

that puts “first what in fact comes later” (Bal 2002, 32). 

The process of becoming of the unknown is also at stake in Bruno 

Latour’s (1993) view that in scientific experiments, the mute world 

of things is mediated through the researchers; the non-human world 

“speaks” through the research technology and the researcher. In a similar 

vein, Barbara Bolt (2004) proposes that in processes of making art, the 

non-human materiality of the artwork performs: 

22 

[a]t some undefinable moment the painting took on a life that seemed 

to have almost nothing to do with my conscious attempts to control it. 

The “work” (as verb) took on its own momentum, its own rhythm and 

intensity. [--] The painting takes on a life of its own. It breathes, vibrates, 

pulsates, shimmers and generally runs away from me. The painting no 

more merely represents or illustrates reading. Instead, it performs. (Bolt 

2004, 1.) 

Drawing from these views, I consider the process of collecting and 

assembling images into new montage formations as an experiment 

where the productivity of visual matter may be examined, and as 

resonating simultaneously with both artistic and scientific practices. I 

understand dissecting and assembling close-ups from the film as a mode 

of sampling: as collecting data and as remixing the film. It also is an 

experimental process of testing the effects of digital image processing and 

visual research practices. I suggest that these effects may be encountered 

through directly engaging with the image matter and its gestures that 

may generate surprise and novelty. 

Samples in scale: assembling close-ups 


The recurrence of close-ups in Christiane F., most often of Christiane, 

may resonate with the modern concern with addiction as a subjective 

experience: close-ups of faces render the internal, “the most individual 

and subjective” into objectivity, as they are instruments of “breathing 

human soul into an image”, (Balázs 1952 [1924]; see also Hongisto 

2010). Close-ups also manifest powers of scale and proximity: they are 

instruments of hyperbolic magnification (Doane 2005). 

I collected close-ups from the film to both to study the cinematic 

imagining of addiction process through the facial close-ups of Christiane, 

and more generally in order to see how these images perform visually 

when assembled next to each other, according to the idea of montage: 

performing by creating a new effect from the joining of parts that does 

not belong to the individual images. Thus, in addition to revealing 

qualities of images hidden in the process of ordinary viewing, the process 

also produces something new. 

Initially, I halted a frame from the beginning of any scene that 

showed (any) face in a close-up, resulting with 302 images. From this 

mass of images it is possible to extract “samples” that approach the idea 

of sampling as collecting of data by applying predetermined criteria, 

resulting to a limited quantity of something which is intended to 

represent a larger whole. Here, a sample consists of a limited quantity 

of images through which more general patterns of visuality in the film 

may be made visible. 

In film studies, still images are often used as specimens of aspects of 

the film style. But at the same time, because the still images are dissected 

from the dimensions of time and narrative, they are experientially very 

different from viewing the film as a whole. It may be stated that the 

close-up separates the face from the spatiotemporal continuums and 

the narrative (Balázs 1952 [1924]; Doane 2005). An assemblage of 

still-images of close-ups emphasizes this quality, heightening the visual 

impact instead of the narrative. The fact that digital processing changes 

the ways the film materials behave and effect, is also present in the 

possibility of changing of the scale of images while viewing the digital 

stills. A magnification may be further magnified. 

23

VARPU RANTALA 

In this postproduction experiment, the images are remixed to form 

new wholes that also vary in respect of the scale of images. These new 

visual assemblages both reveal something unseen of the film and produce 

new affects. Research processes in general, in effect, involve practices of 

producing new effects through remixing and montage: by picking up 

and showing given images from films, the researcher also creates a new 

aesthetics from the existing work (see Miller 2004). 

Case Christiane F. 

Zoomed to Christiane’s nose, the image presents a strong shadow by the 

line of the nose and the contrasting light tells about the style of dark and 

contrasted images of faces in Christiane F. The enlarged images shows 

the texture of the digital film formed of pixels and the artefacts left by 

encoding algorithms. The extreme close-up, made by zooming into a 

still-image, is a commonplace element of image processing technology. 

The zoom has travelled from the camera to the computer screen and 

enables anyone to approach the structure of the (digitized) film from a 

close distance. 

As a cinematic technique, the close-up embodies poetics of proximity 

and, as Balázs saw it, is a technique of the soul and thus of human 

presence (Balázs 1952 [1924]). Here a close-up of a close-up, however, 

24 


reveals the mechanical structure of the image and effaces the human face 

and the subjectivity implied by it. The “non-human” matter of the image 

becomes visible. Simultaneously, as the focus disappears, the image is 

softened and creates an impression of a painting. The zoom transforms 

the image towards abstract forms, colors and lights. 

The close-up of a nose also speaks its own unconscious language. As 

Balázs notes: “But nostrils, earlobes and neck have their own face. And 

shown in isolation, they betray a hidden crudeness, a barely disguised 

stupidity. [--] The camera close-up aims at the uncontrolled small areas 

of the face; thus it is able to photograph the subconscious” (Balázs 

1984, cit. Koch 1987, 173). An extreme close-up from a film still may 

contribute to discovering telling details of the face that do not surface 

in the ordinary screening – for example, an image in the sample showed 

Christiane with greenish eye-shadow, and might be used with an image 

series focusing on that particular color shade and its meaning to the 

atmosphere of the scene. 

Next, I turn from the extreme enlargement towards the “normal” 

scale, or the wholes of frames scaled for this paper. I formed a montage 

of close-ups of Christiane’s face that consists of 40 still images altogether, 

to study the presentation of her face as an indicator of addiction. Below 

is a sample of four stills from the montage; the two images above are 

from the beginning and the two below from the end of the film. 

These images set up an example of the before-and-after situation in 

terms of becoming addicted. The series begins with an image from the 

25

VARPU RANTALA 

early part of the film, showing Christiane peacefully laying in bed, her 

face beautiful and innocent. Gradually the face changes: dark beneath 

the eyes, abscesses, hair unkempt, pale lips; eventually the face glows 

with tears, vomit and saliva. The sample evokes aesthetics of horror, most 

explicit in the third picture that reminds of the girl possessed by the devil 

in The Exorcist (William Friedkin 1973). The last image is the film’s final 

close-up of Christiane, showing a white face and suggesting a drugged 

state, sleep, narcosis and deathlike unconsciousness rather than ecstasy. 

This kind of succession also reveals something about the narration of 

the film in general and narration of the addiction problem specifically. 

It resonates with the common discourse of visuality of addiction as a 

proceeding disease, a craving beyond words that eats one up alive and 

turns one into a pale ghost (see Hickman 2002). 

While the above technique produced a series of causal development 

that resonates with the dominant visual discourses, another remark on 

the succession of still images concerns the unexpected. In the process 

of editing, layering, stretching, stopping the images, the films “start to 

live” in a way, as Bolt (2004) notes in her discussion of performativity of 

an artwork. This kind of procedure occurred because the German film 

was viewed with English subtitles. Below are two frames from a long 

shot-reverse-shot sequence. In this scene Christiane has made a tattoo 

to herself and discusses it with her mother, whose words are translated 

“you will never get it off”. The text keeps on lingering in the next shot, 

despite of a change into a new image, because they happen to last longer 

than the act of uttering the words: they connect these two shots. 

Textual words appear quite seldom in the “still-photomontage” 

consisting of several images (in the beginning of this essay), and thus 

the words surface from the whole as a noticeable element. In the 

26 


montage, the texts do not appear as logical, but dissected from the flow 

of narrative. They are present only as a rather unexplainable hint and 

appear as ambiguous and associative. In the context of images of drug 

addiction, this text evokes a metaphorical association of something that is 

harmful but that cannot be erased; something fatal but at the same time 

mundane. In the context of heroin addiction, the text with the images 

evokes new associations about the severity of drug use that “haunts” in 

the air as a metaphor as it is assembled into a montage of still images. 

Finally, an intriguing moment in the process of assembling the images 

was finding out what kind of assemblages result from the still images. 

The outcome is a repetitive pattern, a mosaic of close-up images that also 

emphasizes variation. 

27

VARPU RANTALA 

The image mosaic indicates the atmospheres of the film for example 

through the dark and contrasted lighting and makes the blue-grey muted 

color scale explicit, while the basic colors like red are almost non-existent. 

Simultaneously, despite of evoking a sense of the atmosphere of the story 

as a montage effect, the technique also separates the images from the 

organic whole of the film. The repetitive pattern borders to abstraction, 

and creates visual rhythms that bring into mind how the French avantgarde 

filmmakers of the 1920s compared film to music, also implied with 

the idea of sampling. The sample shows how a film is about streams of 

rhythmic patterns, undercurrents or “optical unconscious”. As did also 

the extreme zoom into the image of a nose, these series of images efface 

the individual facial expressions and individuality of the protagonists, 

and reveal the prominence of darkness and patterns of colors and shotreverse-shot 

clusters. 

The sample also shows how digital image processing evokes routines, 

rhythms and repetitions. Adopting a nearly-mechanical procedure of 

picking the sample images from the beginning of the film of each closeup 

defies the processes of conscious choice of the “ideal moments” by the 

researcher and instead focuses on “any-instants-whatever”. This machinic 

dimension gives priority to the film and how it performs in a change 

procedure. The structure of the mosaic, and thus the structure of the 

film, consists of repetitive series of images, discerns the repetitiousness 

inherent to film as an instance of “unconscious” dynamics that is not 

accounted for in normal viewing experiences. 

To conclude 

As I study aesthetics of film in my Ph.D. project on cinematic images 

of addiction, I present still images as examples of the film material. This 

evokes the question of how these images perform as part of the research 

process. I have proposed how research practice may include moments of 

postproduction that creates new aesthetics effects. By dwelling deeper into 

these moments I have examined how the performance of these images 

themselves may be recognized. As Latour (1993) puts it, the non-human 

“speaks” through in scientific research, and in the visual montages, the 

materials “speak” by forming a new aesthetic assemblage. This comprises 

28 


getting directly involved with visual culture, and foregrounds the fact 

that the conditions for film viewing have changed in the digital age; there 

is an increasing possibility to examine the film’s materiality through, for 

example, still images. The approach may also provide insights to larger 

questions about remixing and postproduction as fundamental principles 

of contemporary media culture (e.g. Bourriaud 2002; Manovich 2006; 

Miller 2004). 

Sampling (collecting and remixing) cinematic images enables the 

images to take agency by producing unexpected effects; they are sampled 

but they also have a life of their own, they are not only objects to be 

studied, they also perform. Sensitivity to this kind of productivity of 

research process may guide the researcher towards thinking with images. 

As the researcher processes images, he or she may think, for example, how 

the images function together and what montage effects there are. Thus 

the research process employs visual thinking that situates the researcher 

closer to the object of study. 

This might be a way to continue the analysis of poetics from analysis 

and dissecting towards affirming, adding and continuing the possibilities 

the materials offer. There are, however, risks in this process. Approaching 

the artistic research that usually is based on the artistic perspective and the 

question of how artist can deepen his or her own work (Siukonen 2002), 

arises a question of too much subjective intention, of loss of generality 

and of critical detachment. It may be possible to conduct a research 

that foregrounds becomings of the new by emphasizing the aesthetic 

qualities of film, but there is a fine line between this and a sporadic or 

absurd logic that borders on practices of avant-garde art but do not say 

much about the object studied. One obvious concern is that it is possible 

to pick an infinite amount of different elements from films. Thus one 

has to argue for one’s procedure from a generally relevant ground. More 

generally, marrying artistic and scientific practices will arise questions 

about the role of chance, as such essential to artistic experimentality, and 

of rationality of scientific practices, essential to scientific experiments. 

Making of still-photomontages in this study opened up new 

possibilities to understand visuality of Christiane F., possibilities to 

encounter the “optical unconscious” and potentials to evoke new 

associations. For example, zooming on a close-up of Christiane with green 

eye-shadow shows how it may be possible to pick telling details from the 

29

VARPU RANTALA 

film. Or, an instance of revealing the unconscious is the perception of 

repetitive patterns of dark images, the rhythms of light and darkness that 

stream beyond the films explicit story and give rise to new effects through 

montage. The procedures of sampling and experimenting may result 

into an affective research practice in both positive and negative sense. 

Both ways, it makes possible to make visible metaphorical, fantastic and 

even poetic dimensions that are formed in the very process of handling 

of the images; dimensions that are there in the material but not visible 

with ordinary viewing. 

Film reference 

Christiane F. – Wir Kindern vom Bahnhof Zoo (Ulrich Edel, West Germany 

1981). 

Bibliography 

Balázs, Béla (1952 [1924]). Theory of the film. London: Dennis Dobson. 

Balázs, Béla (1984). Schriften zum Film II (1925–1931). Ed. Wolfgang 

Gersch. Munich: Hanser; Berlin: Henschel; Budapest: Akademiai Kiado. 

Cit. Koch, Gertrud (1987). “Béla Balázs: The Physiognomy of Things.” New 

German Critique 40 (1987): 167–177. 

Bal, Mieke (2002). Travelling concepts in the humanities: Rough guide. London: 

University of Toronto Press. 

Benjamin, Walter (2006 [1931]). “A Short History of Photography.” In 

Merewether, Charles (ed.): The Archive. Cambridge: MIT Press. 

Bolt, Barbara (2004). Art Beyond Representation. The performative power of the 

image. New York: I.B. Tauris. 

Bourriaud, Nicolas (2002). Postproduction. New York: Lucas & Sternberg. 

Dienst, Richard (2006). “Breaking Down: Godard’s Histories.” In Chun, 

Wendy Hui Kuong and Thomas Keenan (eds): New media, old media. 

London: Routledge. 

30 


Doane, Mary Ann (2005). “The Close-Up: Scale and Detail in the Cinema.” 

Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies; Fall2003, Vol. 14 Issue 3, 

p89–111. 

Hickman, Timothy A. (2002). “Heroin chic: visual culture of narcotic 

addiction.” Third Text 16 (2). pp. 119–36. 

Hongisto, Ilona (2010). “I’m Ready For My Close-Up Now”: Grey Gardens 

and the Presentation of Self. Transformations Issue No. 18 2010. Retrieved by 

31.12.2010 from http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/issue_18/ 

article_02.shtml 

Koch, Gertrud (1987). “Béla Balázs: The Physiognomy of Things.” New 

German Critique 40 (1987): 167–177. 

Latour, Bruno (1993). We have never been modern. Cambridge: Harvard 

University Press. 

Manovich, Lev (2006). “Deep Remixability.” Text written as part of a 

Research Fellowship in the Media Design Research programme at the Piet 

Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academie Hogeschool Rotterdam. 

Retrieved by 31.12. 2010 from http://www.webstermedia.nl/mobilemedia/ 

readings/manovich-deepremix.pdf 

Miller, Paul (2004). Rhythm Science. Cambridge: MIT Press. 

Mulvey, Laura (2006). Death 24x second. Stillness and the moving image. 

London: Reaktion Books. 

Siukonen, Jyrki (2002). Tutkiva taiteilija: Kysymyksiä kuvataiteen ja 

tutkimuksen avoliitosta. Lahti: Lahden ammattikorkeakoulun Taideinstituutti. 

Walker, John A. (1992). Glossary of Art, Architecture and Design Since 1945. 

London: Library Association. 

31

Tommi Römpötti 

To the Freeze-Frame and Beyond 

When a movie halts to a freeze-frame it always has a strong impact on 

our interpretation of the story. Freezing the frame is not a recurrent way 

to end a film, but as an attractive piece of narrative discourse it tends to 

guide the spectator to some sort of a definite closure. Yet, is it possible 

to arrive at some particular conclusions through analyzing freeze-frames? 

What actually takes place when the flow of images is arrested and the 

excess of narrative discourse obscures the story resolution? When the 

film story ends in this way, is it still clear how the story ends? 

With these questions I try to find a more interpretative way to 

understand the freeze-frame. As the main example I analyze the end 

of The Summer Trail (Muurahaispolku, dir. Aito Mäkinen and Virke 

Lehtinen 1970), a Finnish film depicting an escape journey of a young 

couple. The ending of the film is particularly interesting because it does 

not end with an actual freeze-frame. By embodying a kind of “freezeframe-ness”, 

the last image constructs a “stand-in” of a freeze-frame, a 

virtual freeze-frame. As a point of comparison and to elucidate the idea 

of freeze-frame-ness, I analyze the end of another Finnish feature film, 

Me and Morrison (Minä ja Morrison, dir. Lenka Hellstedt 2001), which 

ends with an actual (and rather conventional) freeze-frame. 

The aim of my analysis is to question the “ontology” of the freezeframe 

and its relation to the quite common understanding (proposed, 

among others, by Bellour 1987; Neupert 1995; Ma 2008) of the freezeframe 

as an indication to the death of the character. If we think that 

the virtual freeze-frame at the end of The Summer Trail denotes the 

apprehension of the young wanderers (which is comparable to death), 

it would be easy to read the end as a reinforcement of continuity and 

societal ideology. 

Narratives are not necessarily logical in themselves; they only make use 

of logic (Thompson 1986, 140). For sure, cinema is able to manipulate 

our “logical intention” to mediate a message, an ideological stance or a 

32 33


certain world-view, but it can be never a completely predefined universe. 

Potential excess is expressed in every image, and every comprehension is 

preceded by incomprehension. In Francesco Casetti’s (1998, 9) words 

“[t]he film continually directs outward the glances and voices which 

inhabit it [- -] with the hope of a response.” Freeze-frame is one example 

of a conscious act of film’s self-construction, an element of narrative 

discourse asking for response and contemplation. 

I suggest that freezing the frame might be understood as an act of 

redemption: what becomes “saved” is the spectator from collapsing 

into the contradiction between story and narrative discourse. The story 

may be resolved in the end, but narrative discourse does not necessarily 

follow the same clear-cut path. This conflict suggests that freezing the 

frame does not kill the character but rather releases him/her off the hook 

by leaving the end open. 

Drill ground 

How do we understand the movie that suddenly stops moving? Do we 

still take the world in a film as a separate universe to where we can 

momentarily escape? As an element of narration, which evades the 

boundaries of a closed text, freeze-frames refuse to sustain the separation. 

This engenders excess implying further – like narrative excess – “a gap 

or lag in motivation” so that it is maybe difficult and at least inadequate 

only to “follow” the story (Thompson 1986, 131; 140). In a closed text 

the film story is reinforced by causality and conventions of narrative 

continuity, whereas the freeze-frame at the end of the film pushes us 

out of its narrative structure in order to make us “follow” and make 

meaning. “Excess is not only counternarrative,” as Thompson (ibid. 

134) condenses, “it is also counterunity.” 

The freeze-frame is an illusion of immobility in the same way the 

movement is an illusion in the film. When watching a movie we see 

twenty-four immovable frames per second as a moving flow. In this way 

the freeze-frame reminds us of the photograph, the basis of cinema made 

invisible by the film projector (cf. Ma 2008, 98). This arrest of movement 

reveals the cinematic apparatus referring to the realm of metafiction, the 

complicated relation between fiction and reality (cf. Waugh 1984, 36). 

34 

TO THE FREEZE-FRAME AND BEYOND 

Could it be possible that we might meet a more plausible understanding 

of the exceptional ending if we see it in relation to the world outside 

the film? The Summer Trail premiered in the beginning of 1970, and 

its political, cultural and media contexts, its “world outside the film”, is 

of course important because the function of the freeze-frame is always 

relative to the frame of reference. Here, however, my main concern is on 

the freeze-frame as an “inner” element of narration. 

As a device of self-conscious narration the freeze-frame is always a 

surprise, and it can be used to control how spectators make meaning 

(e.g. Campany 2008, 53). The control made possible by the freezeframe 

does not present a solid ending; on the surface the freeze-frame 

seems to be a simple story resolution. Yet, if we consider the range of 

those possibilities that the freeze-frame element can plausibly offer 

for interpretation, the situation is not that black-and-white anymore 

(cf. ibid., 57.) As Francesco Casetti (1998, 124) writes, a film offers 

a precise position to its spectator, but the text in process is “a veritable 

drill ground” and “the spectator must complete a genuine trajectory.” 

By halting the flow of images the film can be ended without closing the 

story; it is inevitable that the discourse will be closed and film ended, but 

the story and spectator’s imagination can still stay activated. 

Richard Neupert (1995, 116) argues that the famous freeze-frame 

endings of Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill, 1969) 

and Thelma & Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991) are both closed text films. 

They “kill” their protagonists in the end. In both cases the death of 

the characters is reinforced and motivated by showing the montage of 

earlier story events during the end credits. Neupert claims that while 

summarizing the life of the protagonists the montage emphasizes the 

meaning of the closure. Why would it not be possible to see the montage 

alternatively as a sign of possible death that would have happened if 

the freeze-frame did not come to rescue? If the answer is ‘Yes’, then the 

significant moment of the freeze-frame can be taken as a savior. It is an 

open end contesting the (ideological) continuity of capital cinema 1 . This 

is the case for example in François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (Les quatre 

1 About capital cinema see Beller 2006, 193–199. 

35


cent coups, 1959), which can be seen as a historical art film reference 

point of freeze-frames creating an open end. 2 

The freeze-frame is a mediating element. It has the ability to bring 

together the spectator’s world and the film’s world. There is always a 

reciprocal relationship between the film and its audience in a way that 

the film immerses the spectator into its world, but at the same time “the 

spectator immerses the film into his (psychic) world” (Elsaesser 1981, 

271). Similarly, Annette Kuhn emphasizes that when two distinguished 

spatiotemporal dimensions, the cinema in the world and the world in the 

cinema merge, cinema becomes a Foucauldian heterotopia, which exists 

outside all places but is at the same time localizable (Kuhn 2004, 109; 

see also Foucault 2000, 178). 

Repetition and memory are essential in connecting “the other world” 

of cinema to the everyday life of the spectator. In Raymond Bellour’s 

(2008, 269) words “the more we consume moving images, the more the 

single still image rises above the rest, substituting itself to our reality.” 

This reminds of Roland Barthes’ (1977, 68) expression on the ability or 

power of still images to “scorn logical time”. The freeze-frame is a means 

to scorn the logic of the narrative, which uses our need and ability to 

find logic everywhere. 

Discourse comes to rescue 

The request of capital cinema is that if a character has done something 

criminal or has just been acting against the dominant order, s/he must 

be punished. Road movies often go against this deterministic act of 

continuity. The Summer Trail (premiered on February 27th 1970) is an 

interesting example of this. 

The first image of The Summer Trail is a POV shot as seen with the 

eyes of the driver in a car. Through the windshield of a moving car we 

see the road and hear the news from the car radio: “Peking radio claimed 

this morning that the Soviet Union was still sending reinforcements to 

2 In the last scene of The 400 Blows Antoine (Jean-Pierre Leaud) escapes from school 

sport class. He starts to run and does not stop before he reaches the sea. After stepping 

into water he turns around and steps towards camera and gazes to camera. Then the 

frame freezes and camera zooms Antoine’s face into a close-up. 

36 


its frontiers and had planned yesterday’s border incident. (pause) Apollo 

11 astronauts will today spend their first day at home for six months 

[- -].” The news broadcast constitutes a historical frame that situates 

the movie explicitly in the political context of its production era, the 

Cold War years. However, the film does not deliver any explicit political 

comment; the context is used as a frame that only stresses the idea of 

contemporariness. 

The main tune of The Summer Trail (“Muurahaispolku” by Ismo 

Sajakorpi & Kivikasvot) says: “Everyone’s free to seek the road he feels is 

best for him.” Jari, who is from Helsinki, is driving a stolen car. On his 

way somewhere inland he meets Marja and persuades her to get along 

with him on the road. We do not know where Jari is coming from, 

neither why nor where he is going to. Being on the move seems to be his 

only aspiration, and Marja is following him. Jari and Marja are driving 

aimlessly on the road, and they move to the direction “he feels is best for 

him” as the theme song puts it. 

Jari is all the time trying to evade the authorities. But after coming 

back from their overnight visit to Sweden they are caught during a 

standard traffic check-up. When a policeman recognizes that the car is 

stolen, the getaway couple jumps in and drives away. Finally they find 

themselves in the wilderness of Lapland where they spend some days off 

the road with a local gold miner-hermit they seem to admire. Eventually 

they find out that the digger is seriously injured. He is in a terrible shape 

and they decide to take him to a nearby town where he could be helped. 

They take him on a stretcher through the northern desert that looks 

quite hostile. At some point they see an airplane and torch a signal fire. 

Soon a hydroplane lands on the river and glides towards the shore with 

two policemen standing on the pontoons of the plane. Only the wind is 

humming on the soundtrack, otherwise it is silent. 

We see a close-up of Jari silently glancing at Marja, and as a reverse 

shot a close-up of Marja staring Jari at the face. When Marja recognizes 

that the hermit has died, we know their journey is not going to end well. 

The following shot shows the two characters kneeling down by the gold 

miner. They are unable to make anything good anymore to compensate 

the deeds they have done earlier on the road. They have to surrender. 

Jari gets up and sees the plane gliding towards them on the water. 

The last shot of the movie begins as a medium shot of Jari and Marja 

37


watching first each other in the eye before starting to walk towards the 

camera and the policemen who supposedly are going to catch them. The 

camera is slowly backing off from their way and the frame is getting 

tighter. There is an obvious resolution in the story line, but the narrative 

discourse gives another possibility. I propose that Jari and Marja will 

not get caught; the discursive expression seems to rescue them in the 

end of the last and long shot (42 seconds), which fades off to blue; we 

never get to see the authorities catching them. Finally the whole screen 

is covered by light blue colour, and only the humming and whispering 

of the wind is heard. The narrative discourse has turned the inescapable 

apprehension into a calming blue. 

The moment Jari and Marja disapper into the blue there is a 

possibility of rescue. The blue colour constitutes a virtual freeze-frame, 

which arrests the flow of movement and prevents them clashing with 

the society they have been escaping. The last, long dissolving shot can 

be divided up into two parts, which both emphasize the meaning of 

the end in the story. The first part (27 seconds: Jari and Marja slowly 

approaching the camera) is a Barthesian significant moment, a mobile 

photograph. The blue (15 seconds) at the end of the shot makes a more 

“spiritual” interpretation possible; it brings forth a sense of salvation, a 

little piece of utopia or heaven reached. The dissolve into blue might 

be understood also as a symbolic, yet narratively concrete, gate that 

directs the spectator from watching a mere representation to look for 

an explanation and interpretation for the film in the context of everyday 

life, where the cinematic mode of production and its influence on the 

perception has a crucial role. 

The functions of the freeze-frame, actual or virtual, can be understood 

in contrast to a photograph seen in a film. Against their technological 

basis both the photograph and the freeze-frame can be seen as signs of 

death since they both ”kill” their objects by freezing them into a fixed 

frame (Bellour 1987, 9). Jean Ma (2008, 98–101) suggests that arresting 

the character’s movement inside the film implicates her/his death because 

in the sudden static state there is a sense of ending and lost time. 

If we agree that arresting the movement has a deadly power in film 

narration, we should still try to specify what do the characters have 

to leave behind when they die and where do they go? The shortest 

answer is: control behind, and freedom ahead. In The Summer Trail the 

38 


narrative discourse leaves the protagonists wandering in the space inbetween. 

The freeze-frame halts the character in the static frame, but 

in the virtual freeze-frame of The Summer Trail the blue colour forms 

a protective shield by replacing or displacing the characters into the 

unknown outside the dominant order. 

The freeze-frame is particularly interesting in cinema because its 

metafictive potential disturbs the continuity of the spectacle. However, at 

the same time it spectacularizes the object on the screen by emphasizing 

the narrative mode of showing over telling. Within the flow of narration 

the freeze-frame might function about the same way as the spectacular 

dancing or singing scenes in musicals (cf. Mellencamp 1991, 3; Polan 

1986, 58–59.) The difference is that the spectacular performance in a 

musical is something we are accustomed to wait for, but the freeze-frame 

is a surprise; with it the object of showing is the mode of telling, the 

expertise is not that of the actor but of the apparatus. 

“Oh my god, they gonna die” 

As a metafictional element in the course of a film the freeze-frame does 

not stop the flow of time, but works as an instrument of time separating 

the spectator and the fiction by creating a “distance” that makes 

contemplation possible (Bellour 1987, 7–8; 10). In contrast to Guy 

Debord, who insisted that the story must be rejected once and for all, 

Raymond Bellour seems to say that there are some narrative elements like 

the freeze-frame that could draw us out of or, at least to some distance 

from the spectacle. Patricia Mellencamp (1991, 9), on the other hand, 

thinks that the spectacular performance in musicals may have the ability 

to draw the spectator out of the dreamlike this was -time of the fiction to 

the present tense of the spectacle. In this way cinematic spectacle has been 

given the power to wake up ideologically. The spectacle element might 

disturb the continuity of the story, but at the same time it strengthens the 

separation between the everyday world of the spectator and the glorious 

construction on the screen. The surprise in the continuity of narration 

is not enough as such; to put it simply, form needs to be supported 

by content. So, the freeze-frame might signify a separation of reality 

from fiction, as Bellour suggests, but as a meta-fictive extension it more 

39


probably could merge these worlds together and make the spectator 

work 3 in conjunction to cinema, and through this work to actively 

participate in the operations of market economy. 

The freeze-frame is paradoxical, even contradictory. Instead of its 

immobility (or because of it) in the end of a movie it gives us a sense of 

“endlessness” (Bellour 2008, 253). The photograph preserves the object 

or embalms, as André Bazin (1967, 14) expressed it, and in this way does 

not arrest but rather emphasizes the presence of time (cf. Bellour 1987, 

8). At the end of a road movie, for example, the endlessness created 

by the freeze-frame can be interpreted as the end of the movement, as 

a stabilizing power of the society. However, because the freeze-frame 

stops the characters’ movement towards their obvious apprehension 

(as in The Summer Trail) or death (as in Thelma & Louise), it rather is 

promising that the characters in the frame do not get caught or die but 

stay alive and somehow get through the difficult situation they are in. In 

Bazin’s (1967, 14) words faded coloured portraits of family albums offer 

“disturbing presence of lines halted at a set moment in their duration, 

freed from their destiny [--]”. In this way also the freeze-frame – cut off 

from the continuous flow of movement – can be seen as a savior freeing 

the characters “from their destiny” to exist but parts of a continuity. 

It is not to say, that freeze-frame offers a solid closure, for the 

disturbing abyss opened up can be comprehended “between simplicity 

what is seen and the complexity what it may mean” (Campany 2008, 

57). By halting the flow of images the narrative discourse comes to 

its end, but the story goes on because the spectator “is thrown out of 

identification with the image and left to gaze its sudden impenetrability” 

(ibid.) The freeze-frame can be understood as a control device, and the 

filmmaker has his/her reasons to end the film in a certain way. Instead 

of controlling the spectator with a clear-cut meaning, the freeze-frame 

howls for interpretation. That is why the meaning is not in what the 

author probably put in it, but what spectators can plausibly get out of 

it. 

3 For Jonathan Beller (2006, 200–201) the dialectical antithesis of the imagecommodity 

is the spectator-worker, which means that “human attention is productive 

of economic value” and “to look is to labor”. 

40 


For example in Thelma & Louise the freeze-frame is a captured 

fragment of the flow of time, and it will be remembered as unchangeable 

as any photograph. If we see the freeze-frame as a narrative savior instead 

of a dead-end street, the end becomes contesting the repressing standards 

of continuity typical of capital cinema. Director Ridley Scott has also 

referred to the possibility that Thelma and Louise do not die. 4 (See also 

Daniel 1999, 179; Laderman 2002, 192–193.) So far I have considered 

the virtual freeze-frame and its ability to promote an argument according 

to which the freeze-frame might “free” rather than “kill”. But if we agree 

that the characters (such as Thelma and Louise) will not survive, how 

should we understand the actual freeze-frame ending, when it does not 

refer to the possibility of dying at all? 

Immobile mobility 

At the end of Me and Morrison we see Milla (Irina Björklund) walking 

away from the funeral ceremony of his druggy boyfriend Aki (Samuli 

Edelmann). During the funeral Milla is standing aside behind a tree. 

After all the other guests dressed in black have gone, Milla starts to read 

a farewell letter Aki has left for her inside the flip-up cover of the Zippo 

lighter. Aki and Milla have both gone off track but in the letter Aki offers 

advice almost like a therapist. The letter is heard as Aki’s voice-over. The 

letter is important for the interpretation of the freeze-frame ending. 

Hi, Milla. We met a bit too late. I was already high up and didn’t have 

a fighter plane to save me. You are brave, honest, loyal, warm, funny, 

full of life, sensitive. And a good swimmer. And so small that you’ll easily 

fit anywhere. Magical Milla… You can do anything. See you. We’ll be 

waiting for you. But don’t rush like we did. Take your time. Promise? 

4 In Thelma & Louise DVD, as a special feature, there is an alternate ending with the 

comments of the director. Where the movie ends with the freeze-frame in alternate 

ending there is a cut to a shot from a helicopter seen from the opposite direction so 

that we can be sure their car is diving down in the canyon. At this point director Scott 

says, probably referring to the test audience: “This they got spooked by. They didn’t 

want to see this. They thought, oh my god, they gonna die. [--] This is too much, 

right, now you know they gonna die, you don’t wanna know they gonna die.“ 

41


42 

Love, me and Morrison. P.S. You’ve also got the sexiest ass in the world. 

And when I say something, I mean it too. 

In the last shot Milla is walking towards the stationary camera. She 

is on the threshold of a new life she has begun to understand she must 

enter. She has already begun to move towards it when she learnt Aki 

had been lying and beginning to lose himself out to drugs. Milla’s final 

understanding is stressed by focusing on the symbolic movement at the 

gate of the graveyard. By stepping to the other side of the gate she leaves 

Aki and the land of the dead, which surrounded Aki wherever he went. 

The narrative discourse reinforces this by tightening the frame of the 

shot from wide angle to an extreme close-up during Milla’s walk. When 

being outside of the cemetery, Aki’s voice-over stops and smiling Milla 

becomes frozen in an extreme close-up. In the last shot Milla is all the 

time (19 seconds) gazing straight at the camera. Before arrested in the 

extreme close-up she says laughingly: “Great”. 

Milla’s last word links the end of the film to its beginning where we 

saw her working as a cleaner in an office. While having a break she almost 

choked on an Aspirin pill. When she is alright again, she is smoking; we 

see an extreme close-up profile shot of her cheek and lips and hear her 

saying “Great”. 

After standing up by Aki’s grave Milla begins to walk towards the 

cemetary gate and we hear the first chords of the main tune, Anssi Kela’s 

song “Milla”. The bass drum of the non-diegetic soundtrack follows the 

rhythm of Milla’s steps making her movements seem determined. The 

smiling freeze-frame raises questions: Did Milla like the end of the letter, 

which turned the tone of Aki’s earlier words upside down? And how 

should we interpret the last smilingly uttered word “Great”? 

Obviously, the freeze-frame at the end does not refer to Milla’s death, 

but quite the opposite. Milla has been on a drift with the wind and the 

freeze-frame stops her turmoil in a quite concrete way. Her smile and 

that one uttered word do not refer to the body part Aki praised (i.e. her 

ass), but Aki’s expression: “And when I say something, I mean it, too.” 


Aki used the same phrase earlier in the film, but it turned out to be a 

lie. 5 That is why the post scriptum of the letter can be understood as a 

false statement. Without forgetting the past the freeze-frame refers to 

the future. It is a moment of understanding suggesting that finally Milla 

might leave all her freak-outs of the past behind. 

Seymour Chatman (1980, 130) has also seen the freeze-frame ending 

of Truffaut’s The 400 Blows as a reach out for the future. However, he 

does not interpret the freeze-frame as a sign of change; on the contrary, 

he sees Antoine (Jean-Pierre Leaud) “trapped in the fugitive way of life” 

and the static image implicating iteration of his future behavior. In Me 

and Morrison the actual freeze-frame paradoxically is a point after which 

everything that happened to Milla seems to push her to the future; the 

freeze-frame is a meaningful moment, which scorns conventionally 

logical cinematic time and creates ambiguity (see Barthes 1977) 6 . 

In Me and Morrison the freeze-frame is supported by the convention of 

showing fragments of the past events during the end credits. In contrast 

to “death freeze-frames” of Thelma & Louise and Butch Cassidy and the 

Sundance Kid (see Neupert 1995, 116), the static spectacle of Milla’s 

smiling face forces her to think it over and continue living. And from 

this threshold between past and future the fast forwarded fragments of 

Milla’s past as seen during the end credits direct also us to the future, and 

make us believe she is getting over her troubled past. Milla’s change can 

be seen in her use of the word “Great”, which both opens and closes the 

story. At the beginning of the film the word is ironically referring to the 

situation (Milla did not choke), but at the end of the film the irony is 

gone and the word refers to the future by leaving the earlier “greatness” 

behind. The difference is reinforced by narrative discourse indicating 

a movement from internal anxiety towards happier times. The earlier 

Milla using the word “great” was apathetic and we saw only her lips from 

aside, but at the end her big smile is facing directly at us. 

5 Aki promised to take Milla and Joonas to Belize after he has got the money. They 

reserve the flights, but Milla finds out Aki has cancelled the flights the next day 

without telling her. 

6 Of interest in this consideration might be the way in which Roland Barthes (1977) 

distinguished three levels of meaning: informational (communication), symbolic 

(obvious) and the third or obtuse (accent) meaning. 

43


For Neupert (1995, 22) the most obvious continuity force in cinema 

is music. Conventionally music works as an indication that the film is 

beginning or ending (see also Casetti 1998, 39). This is exactly the case 

in Me and Morrison. We hear the main tune for the first time at the end 

of the film. 7 Milla’s change is emphasized by her immobile mobility and 

the main tune of the film. When the freeze-frame halts the flow of the 

film, we hear the first lines of the song. We can believe that particularly 

the chorus part ”Milla, hey, you gotta change / there is no direction in 

your life” is not true anymore. We understand that Milla is a different 

young woman now. At the end of Me and Morrison the freeze-frame 

does not confirm Milla’s death, or even her failure in life, but exactly the 

opposite, her breathing, her new life. That is why the freeze-frame in this 

occasion is a savior referring to the future. 

Saved for what? 

In both The Summer Trail and Me and Morrison the freeze-frame – 

whether virtual or actual – at the end of film is a savior for it redeems the 

characters from death, apprehension and humiliation. We can say that 

the ambiguous element of the narrative discourse comes to rescue. 

The freeze-frame-ness of The Summer Trail saves the young couple 

from the restricting power of society represented in this case by the 

police. We do not see Jari and Marja getting caught because the light 

blue screen sets or leaves them wandering. There is no music heard in 

the virtual freeze-frame of The Summer Trail (only the humming wind), 

which emphasizes its exceptionality comparing to the actual freezeframe 

of Me and Morrison. In Me and Morrison Milla is also freed by the 

freeze-frame, but ideologically in a different way than Jari and Marja; 

freeze-frame rescues Jari and Marja by hindering their reintegration with 

the dominant order. Milla is rescued by reintegration as well, however, 

without a clear idea to what. 

7 We know Anssi Kela’s ”Milla” is a main tune, though it is not heard in the film 

until at the end. We have learnt it before the film hit the screens, because it was played 

massively on radio stations and seen as a commercial preview music video on television 

and in movie theatres. 

44 


By the same token the freeze-frame might also save the spectator. 

We are living with the film, for film’s “inside” and “outside” (or text and 

context) are “constantly interactive and capable of dissolving into one 

another” (Casetti 1998, 15). As a doubling meta-fictional act (cf. end 

credits) the freeze-frame stresses more than conventional closure that 

this is not the end; that there is something more beyond the narrative 

discourse, something that may and will merge with it. In the open end 

the spectator works as a continuation of the film by interpreting and 

moving the film to the larger dimension beyond the freeze-frame. This 

ambiguous savior-element can also turn the spectator momentarily free, 

or at least push him/her to think about the dimensions and limitations 

of (his/her) freedom. In this way the excess of the freeze-frame in The 

Summer Trail could free the spectator from the power of the continuity 

and in Me and Morrison take back to the order of continuity. 

The end is the most important ideological arena in the film, because 

it closes the narrative discourse and tends to say what to think of 

everything seen and heard. But when the pressure is high enough, the 

ideological construction might fracture, for it cannot fight against the 

exigencies of the outside world. This kind of weakening ideological order 

makes contemplation and philosophy possible (cf. Gustafsson 2001, 

8.) Following Gustafsson’s thoughts, we can see in the ways films end 

a battle between old and new, convention and exception, ideology and 

philosophy. Here the freeze-frame-ness surely is an exception suggesting 

a movement out of the restricting closed conventions towards the other 

world, the everyday world of the spectator. 

Bibliography 

Barthes, Roland (1977). The Third Meaning. Research notes on some 

Eisenstein stills. In Image Music Text. Stephen Heath (transl.) London: 

Fontana Press. 

Bazin, André (1967 [1945]). The Ontology of the Photographic Image. In 

What is Cinema? Volume 1. Hugh Gray (transl.) Berkeley, Los Angeles & 

London: University of California Press. 

Bellour, Raymond (1987). The Pensive Spectator. Wide Angle Vol. 9:1. 

45


Bellour, Raymond (2008). Concerning ”The Photographic”. Darke, Chris 

(transl.) In Karen Beckman & Jean Ma (eds.) Still Moving: between cinema and 

photography. Durham & London: Duke University Press. 

Campany, David (2008). Photography and Cinema. London: Reaktion Books. 

Casetti, Francesco (1996). Inside the Gaze: The Fiction Film and Its Spectator. 

Nell Andrew & Charles O’Brien (transl.) Bloomington & Indianapolis: 

Indiana University Press. 

Chatman, Seymour (1980). What Novels Can Do That Films Can’t (and Vica 

Versa). Critical Inquiry 7:1. On Narrative (Autumn 1980). 

Daniel, Alistair (1999). Our Idea of Fun: ‘Thelma and Louise’ On Trial. In 

Jack Sargeant & Stephanie Watson (eds.) Lost highways: An Illustrated History 

of Road Movies. Creation Books. 

Debord, Guy (1977 [1967]). The Society of the Spectacle. Malcolm Imrie 

(transl.) Detroit: Red & Black. 

Elsaesser, Thomas (1981). Narrative Cinema and Audience-Oriented 

Aesthetics. In Tony Bennett, Susan Boyd-Bowman, Colin Mercer & Janet 

Woollacott (eds.) Popular Television and Film. London: BFI & The Open 

University Press. 

Foucault, Michel (2000). Different Spaces. In James Faubion (ed.) Aesthetics. 

Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984. Volume 2. Robert Hurley (transl.) 

London: Penquin Books. 

Gustafsson, Lars (2001 [1979]). Filosofian ja ideologian suhteesta eli 

Filosofian paikka on maantiellä. In Erik Rosendahl (transl.) Merkillinen 

vapaus. Helsinki: Loki-Kirjat. 

Kuhn, Annette (2004). Heterotopia, heterochronia: place and time in cinema 

memory. Screen 45:2 (Summer). 

Laderman, David (2002). Driving Visions. Exloring the Road Movie. Austin: 

University of Texas Press. 

Ma, Jean (2008). Photography’s Absent Times. In Karen Beckma & Jean Ma 

(eds.) Still Moving: between cinema and photography. Durham & London: 

Duke University Press. 

Mellencamp, Patricia (1991). Spectacle and Spectator. Looking Through The 

American Musical Comedy. In Ron Burnett (ed.) Explorations in Film Theory. 

Selected Essays from Ciné-Tracts. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 

Neupert, Richard (1995). The End: Narration and Closure in the Cinema. 

Detroit: Wayne State University Press. 

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Polan, Dana (1986). “Above All Else to Make You See”: Cinema and the 

Ideology of the Spectacle. In Jonathan Arac (ed.) Postmodernism and Politics. 

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 

Thompson, Kristin (1986). The Concept of Cinematic Excess. In Philip 

Rosen (ed.) Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology. A Film Theory Reader. New York: 

Columbia University Press. 

Waugh, Patricia (1984). Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-conscious 

Fiction. London & New York: Routledge. 

47

Outi Hakola 

Modeling Experience: 

Death Events and the Public Sphere 

Jürgen Habermas (1992) has provided the most influential theoretization 

of the public sphere. On one hand his defining idea of the public sphere 

as a discursive site for people to freely and rationally discuss societal 

problems opened the field for further research. On the other hand 

Habermas burdened the understanding of the notion by emphasizing 

the role of social rationality. (Dean 2001, 244–245.) 

Habermas has not been thrown aside completely, but his ideas 

concerning the discursive and rational have been reinterpreted. If the 

public is less rational and more influenced by experiences than Habermas 

supposed, then the public sphere could consequently include also fictive 

components, such as films, as worthy discussion participants. Even the 

most absurd or obscene elements of films, such as violent death scenes in 

horror films, could be seen to influence the public sphere. In this article 

I ponder in which ways death events in horror films might participate in 

the public discussion. 

Reclaiming a public place for death 

Whereas Habermas based his theory on debates emerging at the public 

spaces, such as cafes, new approaches have widened the idea of public 

spaces to include media and virtual sites. In these sites discursive elements 

do not refer only to speech or written words. Instead, the emphasis is on 

communicativeness. With a wider interpretation of discourses and spaces, 

also the other mediating elements, such as visuals, can be recognized as 

a part of public discussion. Political theorist Jodi Dean (2001, 251–252) 

argues that publicness consists of different institutions that bring their 

48 49

OUTI HAKOLA 

own norms and communicative actions into the society and thus create 

overlapping domains. 1 

The emergence of social media has increased spatial possibilities, but 

also widened the area of understanding the nature of public discussions. 

Dean (2001, 253) argues that the internet discussion sites are not 

necessarily reasonable or rational, but “at worst, a set of irrational and 

often demeaning rants”. Therefore, the idealistic definitions of public 

sphere have been forced to face the human nature, with its cognitive, 

emotional and embodied elements. From this perspective the public 

sphere appears as a more complicated, conflicted and overlapped 

phenomenon than Habermas’ historical description allowed. This kind 

of reinterpretation of the public sphere recognizes both the political and 

unidealistic potential of public discussion. 

The new approach to the public sphere emphasizes also the role of 

experience and irrational sides of public discussions, and does not limit 

its applicability to the social media. Instead, it opens doors for a new 

approach to older media, such as cinema. Cinema can be considered to 

be in-between the private and public experiences, because it provides 

experiences for individual viewers but the social nature of the medium 

makes these experiences shared. For example, James Donald and 

Stephanie Hemelryk (2000, 114–115) claim that cinema is a public 

form of communication, engaging filmed themes with social, political 

and cultural processes. As a shared experience with other viewers, film 

experiences enter the public by introducing certain themes, particular 

experiences and processes of making meaning. 

Cinema, in fact, is central to creating both privately lived experiences 

and equally essentially public experiences, as is argued, for instance, 

by Miriam Hansen and Norman K. Denzin. They maintain that the 

publicness of cinema not only depends on the movie theaters as public 

places, but the viewing experiences themselves become collectively shared 

and, thereby, public processes. Cinema is essentially a collective and 

communal form of reception, and films create publicness through the 

viewers as experiencing, interacting, and participating subjects. Hansen 

1 Dean, indeed, goes as far as claiming that the concept of public sphere could be 

replaced with the concept of civil society, where the distinction to Habermas’ rhetoric 

would be clearer. (Dean 2001, 251–252). 

50 

MODELING EXPERIENCE 

refers to Jürgen Habermas’ writings in claiming that like other Western 

public spheres, cinema should be interpreted as a form of civil interaction 

in which film production, film texts, and the viewers take part in a ‘web 

of public communication’. (Hansen 1991, 2–12, 19; Denzin 1995, 6.) 

Therefore, cinema may invite certain experiences by mediating 

selected themes, such as death, and the viewer – also an actor in the society 

– experiences and makes meanings from these cinematic suggestions 

in accordance with his/her background, capacities, and intentions, 

also when it comes to death scenes. In modern Western societies the 

encountering of death, however, is problematic. Traditionally the modern 

understanding of death has emphasized its alienated role: death and dying 

people have been marginalized and removed from the social sphere into 

experiences of the private and from the public space into hospitals and 

other specialized institutions to be dealt with by professionals. (See for 

example Ariés 1977, Bauman 1992, 92–97, 104–136; Elias 1993, 12, 

17–18.) 

However, whereas deaths of others are often hidden from the 

everyday experiences, the reproductive media has, according to Vicky 

Goldberg, created an alternative public for death. Especially cinema’s 

audiovisual and dramatizing possibilities with exaggerated visual images 

of death and dying highlight the ‘extensive and intimate view of death’. 

(Goldberg 1998, 29–30, 38, 42, 48–51.) Cinema encounters death, not 

only through images, but through emotional engagement and narrative 

structures, and in this way it enables us to fantasize and experience death 

in effective ways. Thus, when cinema is accepted as part of the public 

sphere, also death reclaims its position in the public. 

Especially in horror films where death is a central material of generic 

narrations, death is broken into pieces and recreated into spectacles. In 

horror films deaths are a central audiovisual material composing narrative 

turning points. Dealing with themes of death is part of the audience 

expectations. Through cinematic images (albeit with rather negative 

images of death), the death events in these films successfully give some 

form and meaning to death, presenting the viewers with specific models 

of death as an event. 

Narratological theories construct events as building blocks of the 

plot, defined as changes of state, or transitions from one state to another. 

(See for example Bal 1999, 5.) The actual event of death, similarly, is 

51

OUTI HAKOLA 

a veritable change in state, a transformation from one kind of being 

to another kind of being or nonbeing. In other words, death event is 

an individual phenomenon with social reflections. Other similarities 

between narrative event and death event can be found as well. As with 

any narrative element, death happens in a certain place and at a certain 

time, and as any phenomenon, death becomes culturally produced, 

similarly as narrations. (See as well Kastenbaum 2003, 224–225; 

Grønstad 2003, 229.) No wonder then that in fictive stories, a death 

event is often recognized to have special narrative power. 

Death events have a dual role in horror films. The films emphasize 

death’s role in the narration, which makes it possible to study the processes 

of death, but the films also give form to death through violence, which 

makes it possible to study the nature of death as an aesthetic experience. 

And both of these functions can be seen to participate in the public 

when they highlight the role of comprehending and encountering death, 

albeit differently. The combination of narrative and attraction elements 

enables horror films to draw attention to immediate experiences, to slow 

down narration and concentrate on death scenes while still providing 

important narrative turning points. In this way the death events in 

horror films model, deconstruct and reconstruct death for a viewer, and 

by doing so they participate on negotiating death-related issues and 

create public fantasies of death. 

Comprehending death through narration 

The dramatization of death events in horror films helps to comprehend 

(or even to rationalize) death. For example, Catharine Russell emphasizes 

the narrative and discursive role of death, or in other words, the desire 

in Western fiction for meaningful death. Consequently, death can be 

used to advance the plot, but more often it is employed as the closure 

emphasizing the meaning and importance of death. (Russell 1995, 

2–4.) 

The desire to find meaning for death in fiction connotes to the 

postnarratological approaches, especially after the narrativist turn in 

the 1990s, which have emphasized the role of narration as a form of 

knowledge. Storytelling has come to be understood as a fundamentally 

52 


human way of experiencing and comprehending the world. (See 

for example Kreiswirth 2005, 378–381; Prince 2008, 118.) Rachel 

Louise Shaw’s (2004, 131–132, 144–149) empirical study on violence 

supports this argument by showing that cinema’s narrative models 

are often borrowed to make real-life occurrences comprehensible and 

understandable. 2 The narrativization of death likewise deconstructs 

death into smaller, more comprehensible parts. Death as a process thus 

offers itself to be studied. 

Death events are obviously widely exploited in the narrations of horror 

films: they use death and dying processes as central construction material 

in structuring the films not only in the closures, but at all main narrative 

turning points. For example in Dracula (1931), in Psycho (1960), and in 

Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), or even in Godzilla (1998) the monsters 

use murders to intensify their influence: victims are killed, and conflicts 

will escalate until the characters understand the nature of the monster 

and it can be destroyed. The death of the monster is an exclamation 

mark, showing that the destructive monster needs to be barred from the 

society or otherwise its continuing existence will decompose the society 

– as it does in the apocalyptical and postclassical visions of zombie films, 

such as 28 Days Later (2002) or Land of the Dead (2005). 

The narration of death deconstructs the process of dying. Victims are 

not only killed, but the rest of the society needs to react to these deaths 

and kill the monster. In this way these films do not only concentrate on 

death scenes, but also provide models how to react to deaths and how to 

handle with loss, grief and rejection. In horror films the death of some 

character usually changes the focus or perspective away from that person 

and concentrates on the survivors. The films thus end up describing the 

social aspect of death, where the bereaved need to accept death, need to 

negotiate with meanings of death and find the ways to survive and avoid 

becoming victims as well. This makes the films harrowing and traumatic 

descriptions of mourning and loss. 

Julia Kristeva’s concept of abject has been much used in horror studies 

to explain encounters with death and monsters. Abject is something 

2 Shaw tested the importance of narrative models in the understanding and telling of 

violent encounters. She compared film and real-life experiences of violence, concluding 

that both were framed by narrativization. (Shaw 2004, 131–132, 144–149.) 

53

OUTI HAKOLA 

that has been a part of the human being, but after separation from the 

subject (i.e. the mother), it creates a threat to the identity and a source of 

chaos, contamination and fragility, which needs to be cut loose. Abject 

is thus located somewhere between object and subject. The experience 

of abjection is typically linked to bodily functions such as vomiting or a 

corpse: what was once part of humanity has become appalling. (Kristeva 

1982, 1–12.) 

Jonathan Lake Crane further highlights the corpse’s role as a source 

of an abject in horror. The corpse is a reminder of life and subject, both 

of which it ends up denying. As a source of mayhem, the corpse must be 

shut out, often with violence. Before such exclusion can take place, the 

protagonist and other characters need to accept the transformation of the 

diseased. They must negotiate between their memories and abject. (Crane 

1994, 30–34.) Acceptance requires comprehending death as an event 

and handling death emotionally through abjection. Both dimensions 

seek to alienate death, as the concept of modern death requires. 

In horror films abjection does not limit itself only to the exclusion of 

dead victims, but the source of death, the monster, needs to be abjected as 

well. The killing of the monster is about gaining control over a situation 

which has thrown the community off the track. The dramatization of 

death’s exclusion brings an end to the monster’s existence and makes sure 

that it is no longer able to come back. In the narration of horror, as Noël 

Carroll (1990, 102–103) describes, the encounter with and destruction 

of the monster composes a typical ending for the story. The death of 

the monster is an especially violent act, problematically suggesting that 

conflicts can be solved with violence. The monster needs to be killed, as 

Edward J. Ingebretsen (2001, 8) argues: ‘the monster must be staked, 

burned, dismembered, or otherwise dispatched in the final reel.’ Only 

through such extreme violence can the exclusion and death of a monster 

be secured, which then enables the society to let go of the past and to 

restore the disturbed balance. 

The problematic dimensions of the violent death have been further 

accentuated in apocalyptic films since the 1960s. Asbjørn Grønstad 

argues that although conservative closure with death still appears as 

a desired destination or fulfillment of the story, it is often forbidden 

from postclassical films. Instead, they will create a spectacle of dying and 

death that never ends. These films deny the role of death as a natural 

54 


ending for the story: ‘The texts end technically, but not structurally’, as 

Grønstad formulates. (Grønstad 2003, 230–235.) 

As Russell (1995, 2, 174–176) argues, instead of explaining death 

as closures are supposed to do, apocalyptic films explore and make 

visible the spectacular and taboo nature of death. In apocalyptic horror 

films deaths become separate incidents; rather than conflict resolutions, 

they are new narrative turning points. In fact, in denying closure, such 

apocalyptic films also withhold solution by death. The violent alienation 

of death just creates new problems. In such a way, apocalyptic films 

suggest that classical films provide deadly closures only in order to avoid 

handling the consequences of violent death. Apocalyptic films also 

highlight that death events do not exist only for narrative purposes, but 

also for aestheticized purposes. 

Spectacles of death 

The narration of death breaks dying into smaller phases which punctuate 

both the narration and the addressed images of death. Whereas the 

narration of death slows down the process of dying at a metaphysical 

level, the actual death scenes stall the physical processes of dying, 

providing spectacles for the viewer. Such spectacles of death are, in fact, 

an important part of genre conventions. 

The death scenes are the ‘numbers’ in the horror films. According to 

Cynthia Freeland, numbers are scenes that concentrate on the typical 

elements of each genre, which would be violent acts in the case of horror 

films. During these scenes, the spectacle overcomes the plot, although the 

spectacle can and often does connect to the narration and its aesthetic, 

emotional and cognitive goals and effects. (Freeland 2000, 256–262.) 

Consequently, the numbers with death scenes are necessarily complex, 

because they are not only aesthetic spectacles, but part of the narrative 

knowledge about death, integral to the narrative turning points of the 

story and components of the emotional goals of horror films. 

The death scenes have always been part of the horror films, even in 

the classical films where death events are often avoided due to censorial 

aspects. Although death scenes are the central numbers, or spectacles, 

of horror films, not all of them contain direct images of dying people. 

55

OUTI HAKOLA 

Instead, similarly as the rest of the films, these scenes play a game of 

hide and seek. The viewer’s vision is challenged by either showing too 

much or too little. Or as Carol J. Clover (1996, 166–167) argues, horror 

films can be considered as projects where the viewer’s own vision is 

constantly teased, threatened, confused and blocked. Films exploit the 

horror viewer’s constant anticipation of something happening: there are 

warnings of subsequent events, and occasionally the viewer is subjected 

to surprise as well as shock. (Carroll 1990, 128–144; Leffler 2000, 

130–136; Diffrient 2004, 52–81.) 

This game also applies to death scenes. The hiding and revealing 

of death are executed at the discursive level and through different 

narrative solutions, which as a manipulation of narrative events has 

potent emotional power, as argued by Jay Schneider (2003, 136). Death 

scenes are usually mediated through three different means: through 

consequences of dying, through reactions to deaths, or through an act 

of dying. 3 These three ways of mediating the death event to the viewer 

can be used even within the same scene, all inviting different emotional, 

cognitive and physical reactions from the viewer. 

Film narration can authenticate the death events by concentrating 

on the consequences of these acts (corpses, funeral scenes, etc.). For 

example, White Zombie (1932) starts with a funeral scene. A young 

couple arrives to the Caribbean and their carriage drives over a fresh 

grave giving a reason for the driver to warn them about zombies. Indeed, 

the imagination of what happened to the dead might prove to be more 

efficient in creating tension to the story than direct images of dying. At 

the cultural level, these scenes also mediate our desire to turn away from 

death; although we still have to encounter its consequences. 

Especially in the classical films with strict censorial demands, the 

death events become mediated by concentrating on the consequences of 

death, or by concentrating on the character reactions. Furthermore, film 

3 The three relationships to numbers of violent death can be seen as a combination 

of Jay Schneider’s representational differentiation between products and performances 

of murder (Schneider 2003, 117–179) and of Marco Abel’s division between affective 

qualities of effects and causes of violence (Abel 2007, 9). Alone these dichotomies are, 

however, one-dimensional, but when acts (recognized by both men – performances 

by Schneider and causes by Abel) are accompanied by consequences (products by 

Schneider) and embodied responses (effects by Abel), the produced picture is more 

complete. 

56 


narration can confirm death by revealing the characters’ affective reactions 

to the event. In these scenes the viewer is made to watch someone who 

is witnessing death, following their reactions, emotions, and grieve. For 

example, in The Mummy (1999) when the princess sacrifices herself the 

viewer does not witness her death, but sees a shadow of a knife and 

watches the face of her lover Imhotep who needs to escape in order 

to save himself. Often these scenes concentrate on loss and grieve and 

importance of abjection and the need to move on. Therefore, only the 

passing emotional reactions on other characters are allowed to mediate 

the loss death brings along, whereas the emphasis is on the continuance 

of life. 

Finally, film narration can perform a spectacle from an act of violence. 

In the more recent films with more developed technological possibilities 

to create affective violent images the actual spectacles of death have 

become emphasized and the viewer may witness a slowed down process 

of dying. This implies a heightened attention to the constructedness of 

death events in horror films. For example, in Cube (1997) a slice and dice 

death of one character is extremely detailed. Metal strings cut through his 

body and the viewer witnesses how thin lines of blood emerge and slowly 

reveal the diced body. After a moment, the viewer witnesses how the 

body falls into pieces one piece after another, until the bloody remains 

of a person are piled on the floor. 

Russell and Grønstad explain that especially this kind of explicit 

cinematic violence is typically used to give form to death, to capture and 

expose it. Violence extends the dying process and lends it movement, 

color, sound and actors. Violent deaths can hence be described as 

performances and spectacles of the unseeable. (Russell 1995, 175; 

Grønstad 2003, 9–10, 111, 114, 238–240.) Indeed, by approaching 

death through experiences the difficult subject can be given a form open 

to debates and discussions, even if these debates are taken on the limits 

and uses of violence. 

The constant repetition of death events in horror films invites the 

viewer to pay attention to these scenes. It is possible for the viewer to be 

both fascinated and afraid of death, even at the same time. The fantasizing 

possibilities presented in the death scenes of horror films create changing 

possibilities to try to understand and experience death from multiple 

57

OUTI HAKOLA 

points of views. Thus, the repeated stories of death can participate in the 

public debate over death-related attitudes, values, and practices. 

Correspondence with the society 

Both the ways in which death scenes are constructed and the ways in 

which they are used by the narrative materialize the death to the audience 

and create a voice in the public sphere. The viewers can use these images 

for both rationally conceptualizing and emotionally experiencing death. 

Through the shared nature of these viewing processes, death scenes in 

horror films provide a kind of public space where understandings of 

modern death are negotiated. 

Death events in horror films, however, are not the only ones, nor are 

they objective participants in the public debates over death. Other genres 

and institutions provide different approaches and deaths in horror films 

by no means try to provide a truthful image of death. Instead, deaths 

are always constructed and artificial creations, becoming articulated in 

narration where death is given space, time and causality, and stylized 

with an aesthetic and composition of different elements in specific ways. 

The aesthetic nature of the films generates, as Grønstad (2003, 47–48, 

53–39) points out, a distinction between real and imagined, providing a 

place for imagination and play. 

Furthermore, images of death in horror films are influenced by the 

generic conventions. Death events are interpreted through their generic 

authenticity and conventionalized cultural similitude. Steve Neale adds 

that instead of speaking of direct correspondence, we need to discuss 

verisimilitude where filmed scenes are filtered through the genre’s 

institutionalized discursive and aesthetic conventions. (Neale 2000, 

32–34, 213.) 

However, this distinction between real and imagined does not make 

deaths of horror film insignificant. Christine Gledhill reminds us of the 

elaborate link that different fictional worlds and artificial deaths have to 

their socio-cultural contexts: fictive worlds transgress boundaries between 

‘fictive’ and ‘real’ by using ideologically charged ways of defining, for 

example, gender, class, or sexuality. The overlapping of shared images 

and themes can function as sources for (de/re)construction of social 

58 


imagination. (Gledhill 2000, 237–241.) Similarly, the horror genre’s 

images of death do not reflect the deaths of everyday life. Nevertheless, 

they create a critique of their socio-cultural background, especially the 

role and consequences of violent death in the society. 

Death in horror films is first and foremost a violent death. Thus, 

horror films are constantly trying to balance on a fine line. Meanings 

over violent death have always been publicly debated, which gives these 

films their themes, such as death, a socio-cultural dimension, thus 

making these films participants in these debates. The verisimilitude and 

transgressions of boundaries succeeded at the discursive level of films 

have provided an opportunity for horror films to resemble, comment 

and influence public negotiations over death. Therefore, widening the 

understanding of the public sphere to include values, emotions and 

experiences, not only rational reasoning, emphasizes the role of cinema 

as an influential part of the public. 

In summary, cinema models the experiences and these modeled and 

shared experiences create public visions. For example, the narrative and 

aesthetic uses of death events in horror films provide both comprehension 

and experiences of death for audiences. Consequently, horror films make 

evident the constant and pressing human need to encounter death, 

negotiate with death, and give meanings to it. In this way mediated death 

events reclaim death’s continuing role within the public sphere. I also 

argue that re-evaluating the public sphere has refreshed the discussions. 

As the nature of experiences appears important in order to understand 

media in our culture, the functions of experiences and emotions need to 

be further studied in the future. 

Bibliography 

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Representation. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. 

Ariés, Philippe (1977). Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages 

to the Present. Transl. Patricia M. Ranum. Baltimore and London: The Johns 

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OUTI HAKOLA 

Bal, Mieke (1999). Narratology. Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Second 

Edition. Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press. 

Bauman, Zygmunt (1992). Mortality, Immortality and other Life Strategies. 

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Clover, Carol J. (1996). Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern 

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Williams (eds.) Reinventing Film Studies. London: Arnold, 221–243. 

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Goldstein (ed.) Why We Watch: The Attractions of Violent Entertainment. New 

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Herman, Manfred Jahn & Marie-Laure Ryan (eds.) Routledge Encyclopedia for 

Narrative Theory. London and New York: Routledge, 377–382. 

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l’horreur). Transl. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. 

Leffler, Yvonne (2000). Horror as Pleasure. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell 

International. 

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Créateur vol. 48:2, 115–123. 

Russell, Catharine (1995). Narrative Mortality. Death, Closure and New Wave 

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61

Maria Kesti 

Science on Fire! 

A Flying Torch Articulates 

62 63 

1 

From afar the figure resembles 

a lyre. As I move 

closer, it transforms into 

a slender torch with great 

wings. 

The symbol to be 

used in connection to the 

University of Turku was 

designed by Erik Otto 

Waldemar Ehrström. In 

1921 it was affirmed to be 

the current emblem, the 

logo. 

The documents containing 

the visions of 

Ehrström and of the 

committee who made the 

choice are lost. It seems 

unlikely that the flames 

were meant to refer to the 

Turku fire in 1827, the 

biggest city fire in the history of the Nordic countries. A major part of 

the Academy of Turku was destroyed in that fire, and the university was 

transported to Helsinki to become the Imperial Alexander University. 

The flying torch simply cannot imply that along with science, also the 

flames would return to Turku.

MARIA KESTI 

Regardless of its bitter roots in fire, the very flames themselves were 

made into the icon of the academic sciences of Turku. What is it in 

science that burns with such intensity? 

2 

An articulation is a conjunction that binds two separate parts into a 

whole, without being inevitable. In a logo a characteristic of an image 

(a torch, wings) are bound to the referred entity (the University of Turku). 

Almost anything can be combined and reattached, thus creating new 

meanings. There is also a language of signs, a discourse that limits the use 

of images in the articulation of higher education. Neither a bonfire nor a 

flamethrower will do as symbols of science aflame. Correspondingly, an 

airplane or a small bird cannot symbolize the wings of a university. 

The ‘linguistic form’ in the emblem of the University of Turku is 

markedly classical. It differs from contemporary graphic-abstract 

industrial designs. On the other hand, it is not decorative but exudes 

admiration of Antiquity. 

Western notions such as the university, education and the academic, 

rest heavily on the traditions of Antiquity. We would, however, have 

precious little of these traditions without the Renaissance humanists of 

the 15th century. The humanists used the ancient classics in their demand 

of the critical, analytical and rational search for truth. The humanists 

thought that the requirement for the development of humanity was 

civilization and education: knowledge. 

3 

For the moment, Google reaches up to 21 000 hits for the Finnish word 

“soihtu” (meaning a torch that gets nearly 30 million hits). With “soihtu” 

we get vegetarian restaurants, playgrounds, software services, art galleries, 

choirs, ice hockey teams, sculptures, advertising agencies, third sector 

enterprises... The torch is exceptionally popular as an identifier. In this 

the fire plays an important part. There is always something frightening 

about fire. Yet the very use of fire has made possible the global expansion 

of the human race. 

64 

SCIENCE ON FIRE! 

The key connotation in the articulation of humanity and fire is 

control. It is the taming of a destructive force into the controlled 

distillery of humanity and culture, that transforms an animal existence 

into a cultural life. The torch is a cultural artifact that chains fire into 

controlled use. It has something of the raw ferocity of fire, all the while 

governing it proudly and haughtily. 

The torch has a practical use; it brings light into dark places. Still, 

it does not articulate suitably as an instrumental university. Light is 

something more; many religions see light as a metaphor for divinity, 

goodness and heaven. A torch is not a Christian symbol, but in Antiquity 

the torch plays a central role. 

The torch plays a central role in Antiquity. The most notable ancient 

bearer of fire was Prometheus, who created man and stole the fire from 

the gods. As punishment Zeus took away fire from man. Prometheus 

stole it back on the stem of a fennel, in a torch. As a revenge Zeus created 

the woman Pandora. All the ailments, diseases and curses of the world 

spread from her urn. Thus Prometheus is responsible for man, the uproar 

against the gods and the horrors of the world. 

Prometheus’ attitude delighted the minds of the Romanticism, and 

he was used as a symbol for courageous rebellion against any oppression. 

On the other hand, in 1818 Mary Shelley headed her book Frankenstein 

with the subtitle “The New Prometheus”. In the book a scientist creates a 

monster while he, not unlike Prometheus, is trying to create a new Man. 

The novel became a prophecy of nightmarish science. Despite good 

intentions, science creates destruction. All problems of the developed 

countries, from climatic change to the mechanical image of man, can be 

projected to be the doings of science. 

With Prometheus comes connotations that elevate the torch of science 

to a self-sacrificing opponent of oppression, but not all Promethean 

connotations are rhetorically flattering. One such famous light bearer 

comes from Christian folk tales: Lucifer, the angel that fell, crazed by 

the power of being the light bearer, thinking himself equal to God. In 

the antique era Lucifer (Phosforus in Greek) was the planet Venus, the 

Morning Star that brought daylight, depicted as a small boy carrying – 

a torch. 

According to the PR and press office of the University of Turku the 

flames of the torch represent the flight of fiery knowledge, critical ability 

65

MARIA KESTI 

and know-how. Burning is a known metaphor for passion. In the torch 

the meaning stands for a scorching need to create and to do regardless 

of norms or opposition. The passion is a hellish fire, difficult to control. 

This description is worth noticing; a university could also be described 

as a gray, dry, indifferent and ashen machine, lacking any kind of spark 

of life, whose only numbing task is to toil for the benefit of science, 

the institution, the state, social order or commercial success – or in a 

Kafkaesque sense, without any purpose at all. In contrast, the burning 

knowledge gives the university an end in itself. 

The notion of science as an end in itself is commonly associated 

with Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) who preached for the 

development of each individual’s human potential. For him the purpose 

of education was a free and individual development, not vocational 

training. This notion of science does not, however, contain a passion for 

knowledge. 

The burning passion of the torch merely refers to Romanticism: the 

nationalism, the mighty glowing fire of the greatness of the nation and 

its people. Finland declared independency from Russia in December 

1917, and Turku University became the first Finnish university. 

4 

The torch “flies” with two wings, but they lack any illusion of movement. 

The feathers are spread into an arc of a lyre, very much like the feathers in 

a peacock’s fan-shaped tail. According to the University the feathers stand 

for the diversity and geographical spread of the scientific disciplines. 

The spread of the feathers hints at the idea that there is room for 

the scientific disciplines under the protective wings of the university, 

or that the university soars in the sky with its mighty wings. There is 

something homely in the idea of the sheltering wings. The area covered 

by the wings connotates to a bold soaring eagle. 

The bird Phoenix is known to us from ancient mythology. This theme 

could very well symbolize the fate of the predecessor of the University, 

burning to the ground in the 1827 Turku fire, only to be resurrected in 

a different form in 1920. Other stories of winged characters in ancient 

mythology, such as Icarus, are unhappy. The ancients regarded flying as 

offensive to the gods. 

66 

SCIENCE ON FIRE! 

The winged torch bears a striking resemblance to a lyre, which 

is to be found as a cockade on the student’s cap, where it is a sign of 

the University of Helsinki student body. The lyre is Apollo’s, the god 

of prophecy and healing who became the god of all the light and the 

sun. With light and wings science has been made into something godlike. 

The practicing of science becomes a religion where Knowledge is 

worshipped. 

The way in which the winged torch in the myths is connected to 

unfortunate destinies is intresting. The failure of Prometheus was 

regarded as noble by the romantics. The history of humanism has been 

described as a history of the defeated. A socially critical university must 

be the underdog in order to remain critical. 

5 

There is a tension in the emblem of the University of Turku between 

the connection to the burning intrinsic value of knowledge and the 

appearance of the university. A couple of years ago, the following 

text was to be found on the university’s homepage: “Take advantage 

of the university’s large networks of research and education, its forms 

of collaboration and services. Create strategic partnerships that gives 

your enterprise or your organization the competitive edge on the free 

markets.” By 2010 this vocabulary is gone. It has been replaced with 

a new heading “Cooperation and Networking”. It is indicative that in 

the short introductory text the word “network” appears seven times. 

The winged torch reminds us that there is a place for something other 

than instrumental knowledge, the following of superficial trends or the 

servility to the true wielders of power in society. 

The ways in which I have chosen to connect the emblem to particular 

aspects are not inevitable. Nor are any other articulations. My incentives 

to act are not merely conscious and rhetoric. Nor are they subjectivepsychological. 

Logos and academic writing began for certain reasons, 

but lives on for others. Their genres use us, creating and recreating 

something of which we are not always aware of. 

67

Jukka Sihvonen 

Careless Saints: 

Notes for Research on the Aesthetics of Digital Games 

This text is an attempt to start thinking about audio-visual media from 

the viewpoint of aesthetic concepts and conceptualised aesthetics. “The 

philosopher is the concept’s friend” as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari 

(1994, 5) put it; “philosophy is the discipline that involves creating 

concepts.” As always with intellectual activity the conceptual process 

requires mediators, those who bring elements into the discussion and 

help to carry the process maybe a bit further. 1 In this text my mediators 

are the German philosopher Immanuel Kant and the Scottish rally car 

driver Colin McRae (together with other similar “avatars”). At the end 

of the text various threads will be tied together with the help of another 

German, Walter Benjamin and his ideas about playing. There are two 

conceptual starting points: the first one concerns the interests of art, and 

the second one the relationship between a work of art and the spectator. 

These two, then, are the vantage points that supposedly merge in the 

third area of discussion, the environment of the game console. 

I am following here the practice of Jason Rutter and Jo Bryce (2006), 

among others, in referring to video-, console-, computer-, television- 

(etc.) games with a single term digital game. Much of what has been 

written on digital games refers to but a limited group of game genres. 

On the one hand there are the fantasy genres: adventure, horror, and 

violence seem to be the themes that clearly dominate the field of various 

research inclined perspectives. On the other hand there are the “closer to 

reality” genres such as the entire Sims family of games, or various sports 

1 “Whether they’re real or imaginary, animate or inanimate, you have to form your 

mediators. It’s a series. If you’re not in some series, even a completely imaginary one, 

you’re lost.” See Gilles Deleuze, “Mediators” in Negotiations 1972–1990. Translated by 

Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press 1995 (orig. Pourparlers 1990), 

p. 125. 

68 69


simulations. 2 However – at least from the viewpoint of digital car-games 

that interest me here – not much has been written about the digital games 

in relation to traditional aesthetic questions. 3 Rather than attempting to 

fill this gap the aim of this text is to outline a few threads and to follow 

the ones with which it might be possible to begin to comprehend this 

field of research in its conceptual and historical context. 

1. Kant and “art for art’s sake” 

From a philosophical point of view one of the essential issues in aesthetics 

is the relationship between art and everyday life. Immanuel Kant posed 

this question in his early text on the aesthetic sublime and especially in 

the Critiques of Pure Reason (1781) and Judgement (1790). At the end 

of his early book, Observations on the feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime 

(orig. 1764), in which he distinguishes and describes the categories of 

these fundamental feelings, he writes: 

70 

Nothing now is more to be desired than that the false glitter, which so 

easily deceives, should not remove us unawares from noble simplicity; 

but especially that the as yet undiscovered secret of education be rescued 

from the old illusions, in order early to elevate the moral feeling in 

the breast of every young world-citizen to a lively sensitivity, so that 

all delicacy of feeling may not amount to merely the fleeting and idle 

enjoyment of judging, with more or less taste, what goes on around us. 

(Kant 1991, 115–116.) 

There are several interesting phrases in this quote: “the as yet 

undiscovered secret of education”, “to elevate the moral feeling”, “every 

2 A recent study on The Sims is Tanja Sihvonen, Players Unleashed! – Modding The 

Sims and the Culture of Gaming. Amsterdam University Press: Amsterdam 2010. 

3 “No wonder!” might be an immediate response since the major effect could be 

defined in terms of the spinal tap rather than the thinking mind. For a general 

overview see for example Hanna Sommerseth, “Exploring Game Aesthetics” in 

Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory (Proceedings 

of DiGRA 2009), (www.digra.org). An event worth of mentioning (yet illustrative in 

terms of game genres discussed) is the conference titled “Aesthetics of Play” organized 

at the University of Bergen (Norway) in 2005. The proceedings can be reached at: 

www.aestheticsofplay.org/. 

CARELESS SAINTS 

young world-citizen”, “lively sensitivity”, “idle enjoyment of judging”… 

Each would require a discussion of its own but for the moment it might 

be enough to point out the general idea of the argument: the sensitivity 

of world-citizens can develop further from simply enjoyable judgments 

to a genuine corpus of taste only through education alert enough in terms 

of feelings. This notion could be related to a well-known fact concerning 

Andy and Larry Wachowski, the brothers behind the famous Matrixtrilogy 

(1999, 2001, 2003): their “visionary aesthetics” is explained to 

have been brewing in their committed enthusiasm on comic strips and 

PlayStation -games. Because of this interest they supposedly flew to 

Japan to study how the violent martial arts -games (such as the famous 

Tekken-series) were actually designed. Following Kant, one might want 

to ask if these aesthetic realms belong to the world of “false glitter” or to 

the world of “noble simplicity”? Does this education aim at “enjoyable 

judgments” or a “genuine taste”? The question would fit well to the 

context of Matrix since this kind of duplicity is the elementary matrix of 

even the entire narrative construction of the film cycle. 4 The rest of what 

follows tries to argue that this question is much more complicated than 

what might seem. 

Comparing Matrix to PlayStation, however, is indicative. 5 The 

various digital games have had for already awhile a strong hold on the 

market not just economically but perhaps also aesthetically. At least in 

the sense that these games have been widely produced and consumed, 

and therefore their audio-visual strategies have had an impact on the 

audio-visual and kinetic sensibility of those (such as the Wachowskibrothers) 

whose “taste” has, or depending on the argument, has not 

been developing under their influence. The central role of cinema in this 

situation is derived from the conviction that the history of its images, 

4 See Tanja Sihvonen, “The Matrix as a Cyberspace” in Tanja Sihvonen & Pasi 

Väliaho (eds.), Experiencing the Media: Assemblages and Cross-overs. Media Studies, 

University of Turku: Turku 2003: 255–280. 

5 In the field of digital games in this text I will be discussing solely about console 

games with which I am referring to typical games designed and produced for game 

consoles such as Xbox (Microsoft), GameCube (Nintendo) and PlayStation (Sony). My 

primary experience is in the realm of the PlayStation family of consoles PS, PS2 and 

PSP games. A significant exception in the world of consoles is Nintendo’s Wii because 

the relationship between the screen and the player(s) is different – and would require a 

study of its own. Of various statistics in relation to video games see < www.theesa.com >. 

71


signs, and methods of perception pretty much still fertilize the waters 

in which newer media forms spawn. In this sense cinema functions as 

an archive the elements of which the contemporary audio-visual culture 

with its various modes both recycles and recreates – or, as has been 

suggested by Bolter and Grusin (2000) – re-mediates. 

This kind of an archive does not include images and sounds only but 

also and maybe even more so, modes of perception and affection. 6 This 

is why even the future media cannot be discerned from its cinematic 

foundations. This is also one of the reasons why cinema studies is, can 

and should be an elementary component of media studies. 7 The paradox, 

according to my argument here is that rather than films themselves, 

digital games both indicate and embody this elementary importance. In 

this sense these games are not just toys or only entertainment but most of 

all an evidence of the importance of cinema within the various networks 

of contemporary media. And as will be suggested in the conclusion, one 

of the first texts in which this argument has been put forward is Walter 

Benjamin’s classic Artwork -essay from the 1930s. 

An attempt to view the field of cinema connected to digital games 

more generally refers to an option to think about films through and as part 

of the history of audio-visions. 8 In this attempt art can hardly be thought 

of as referring to some transcendental metaphysics only. Moreover, it 

begins to be difficult to think that it refers with its symbols to some 

abstract world of meanings or that it concerns primarily representations 

of reality. The immediate contact within reach for the arts is, of course, 

6 This line of thought could be stretched even further by arguing – along with 

Jonathan Beller’s book The Cinematic Mode of Production (2006) – that it includes even 

a particular “mode of production”. 

7 This view is shared by, among others, D. N. Rodowick (2007, 186): “The history 

of film theory therefore remains a keystone for understanding the problems raised 

by electronic and digital media for aesthetic and social theory.” Another question 

altogether is whether aesthetics of digital media should similarly take its model from 

something like aesthetics of film. Nevertheless, also in this field – as a recent textbook 

(Thomson-Jones 2008) shows – the relationship between authorship and viewership 

comprises a fundamental discussion. 

8 Of such considerations on the “pre-game” era see Siegfried Zielinski, Audiovisions: 

Cinema and Television as Entr’Actes in History. Translated by Thomas Elsaesser et.al. 

Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2000 (orig. Audiovisionen 1990); Friedrich 

Kittler, Optical Media – Berlin lectures 1999. Translated by Anthony Enns. Cambridge: 

Polity Press 2010 (orig. Optische Medien 2002). 

72 


to the reality here-and-now, the dimension to which Gilles Deleuze 

often refers with concepts such as immanence and intensity. 9 Some critics 

(Paul Virilio among others) have argued that the contemporary, mediasaturated 

age does not know “here” anymore, it only recognizes the 

“now”. 10 Simply put, this could be tested by experiments in art trying 

to bring this “here” back to “now” as an underscored experience. For 

media the connection between its own forms and the everyday life 

has been an integral starting point already from early on. The realm 

of everyday life had to be connected to several parallel networks such 

as the plumbing and sewage systems, electricity, cable and broadcast 

transmission, and so forth, until it could be saturated by numerous 

forms of media technology such as gramophones, typewriters, radios, 

telephones, etc. Therefore, when media and art become connected to 

each other more closely (and about the potential forms one could discuss 

endlessly), 11 correspondingly art might become connected to everyday 

life more substantially. Requirements for this connection are set by the 

limits of the machinery and the capabilities of the networks. How have 

these relations been linked to strategies of saying and seeing, that is, 

to those different options with which the field of statements and the 

field of the visible have (or have not) become understood? 12 To put it 

briefly, what kind of an “artistic” discourse network do we find in the 

contemporary life of everyday media – especially when by media we 

mean digital games? 13 And according to what kind of criteria elements 

9 This conceptual framework is discussed at the beginning of What is Philosophy? (see 

Deleuze & Guattari 1994, 35–60. 

10 See for example Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb. Translated by Chris Turner. 

London & New York: Verso 2000 (orig. La Bombe informatique 1998). 

11 Examples of such discussions and forms can be found for example already in Gene 

Youngblood’s early treatment of the relationships between cinema and digital media in 

his book Expanded Cinema (1970). A more recent example of this same line of thought 

is the magnum opus edited by Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel, Future Cinema; The 

Cinematic Imagery After Film (2003). 

12 Deleuze deals with this problem particularly in his book on Michel Foucault (see 

Deleuze 1988; further discussed in Lambert 2006, chapter 5). 

13 Of course this is a question quite too large to tackle in detail here. Friedrich Kittler 

(1991) offers the historical perspective to former centennial turning points in his book 

Discourse Networks 1800/1900. (See also John Johnston 1997, 1–26.) 

73


in this network – in referring to Kant – can be seen as belonging to the 

world of “noble simplicity” rather than “false glitter”? 

Art, in this context, should not be seen as an opposite to something 

mechanical, stereotypical, and habit based. Instead, art embraces this 

kind of repetition, includes and embodies (I consciously try to avoid 

“produces”) a particular aspect in the everyday reality. The particularity 

is in the aim to bring into focus, to “focalize”, the limited nature of 

saying and seeing. Art attempts to filter the potential for difference 

from the restricted nature of saying and seeing by bringing in a new and 

potentially even a disturbing element or force. This means focalizing 

also on that which by art and in the everyday life breaks the traumatic 

and paralyzing model of experiencing. This development works even if 

one changes here the word “art” into “media” (though, then it might be 

even harder not to be talking about production). And again, art just like 

media is not a simple everyday phenomenon existing and functioning 

there only for a particular kind of consumption, as art would be in the 

philosophy of l’art pour l’art. The main attempt would be to argue for 

re-claiming the interest back to art. This interest would not be a simple 

denial or a pragmatic concern in economics and global markets. Yet, if 

one forecloses these and asks what is the interest of a digital game, is 

there anything left to be answered besides economy? In concentrating on 

various tactics to modify the coded construction, the study on The Sims 

referred to earlier, argues convincingly that there is a lot of material for 

such research, but does the same apply to console games which seem to 

offer very little space for something like “modding”? I find this a relevant 

question especially after moulding the notion “art for art’s sake” in this 

connection into “play for play’s sake”: does playing require any other 

interest besides itself? 

2. Art, interest, and nature 

The phrase – art for art’s sake – is an expression that also concerns 

the interests of art. The argument was powerfully implemented into 

Immanuel Kant’s aesthetics and developed further by numerous scholars 

ever since. Of course this Kantian definition of the beautiful as some 

kind of disinterested pleasure has been also widely criticized. As Giorgio 

74 


Agamben (1999, 1–2) shows, one of the earliest and strongest critics 

of this view was Friedrich Nietzsche. In his On the Genealogy of Morals 

(from 1887) Nietzsche writes: 

[--] the only thing I wish to emphasize is that Kant, instead of viewing 

the aesthetic problem from the experience of the artist (the creator), 

like all philosophers considered art and the beautiful exclusively from 

the point of view of the “spectator,” and in the process unwittingly 

included the “spectator” himself in the concept “beautiful.” But if only 

the philosophers of the beautiful had been sufficiently familiar with this 

“spectator” at least! – that is, as a great personal fact and experience, as an 

abundance of the most authentic, intense experiences, desires, surprises, 

delights in the domain of the beautiful! [--] “That which pleases without 

interest,” Kant has said, “is beautiful.” Without interest! Compare this 

definition with that offered by a genuine “spectator” and artist – Stendahl, 

who once described the beautiful as une promesse de bonheur. Here in any 

case the very aspect of the aesthetic condition which Kant emphasized 

at the expense of all others – le désintéressement – is rejected and crossed 

out. Who is right, Kant or Stendahl? (Nietzsche 1996, 83.) 14 

It seems that the issue concerning the lack of interest (or disinterest) 

arrives into aesthetics when shifting the emphasis onto the side of the 

spectator. As Agamben (1999, 3) argues, there are thinkers both before 

(such as Plato) and after (such as Artaud) Nietzsche, who also have 

emphasized the role of the interest rather than that of the disinterest 

in the experience of the beautiful. For Plato this interest was actually so 

powerful that, as is well known, he wanted “no poetry into our city, save 

only hymns to the gods and the praises of good men.” 15 

14 Agamben’s The Man Without Content argues that among other things modern 

aesthetics begins with a schism between artist and spectator, which indicates a deeper 

level of irony that can be read in the various comments about art and interest. 

More or less this tradition goes on from Kant till Heidegger, but the central theme 

comes from Hegel and the idea of art in a “self-annulling” mode. My question here 

would be whether digital games and gamers (rather than the more obvious forms of 

contemporary media art for example) actually continue this tradition of “men without 

content”? 

15 Plato, Republic. Translated by Paul Shorey. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, 

Mass.: Harvard University Press 1953, I, 398a (I: 243–245), and II, 607a (2: 

464–465). 

75


The emphasis on the interest seems to implement a requirement to 

highlight also the role of the artist rather than that of the spectator. 

To conclude at this point: on the one hand there are the questions of 

disinterest, spectatorship, and Kantian aesthetics. On the other hand 

there are the questions of interest, authorship, and Nietzschean aesthetics. 

The problem possible to establish now is the mid-point introduced by 

the potentialities of interactivity. What kind of aesthetics would be 

the one that, so to speak, is in-between author and spectator, interest 

and disinterest? As already said the tough part here is the interest: if art 

prompts from something like the desire for beauty, from what does the 

digital game live – besides mere sales figures? 

One option to think about this is to see the artist/spectator and 

interest/disinterest settings a bit differently by focusing on the notion of 

the spectator. Here I am referring to a well-known aesthetic distinction 

between haptic and optic. 16 Simply put, optic aesthetics would emphasize 

seeing, distance, thinking, and the effects on the mind whereas haptic 

aesthetics would foreground touching, proximity, bringing things at 

close hand, and the effects on the body. Now, from this perspective, one 

might argue – as Paterson (2007, 131) among others has done (even 

though referring only in passing to digital games as being “low-end” in 

terms of their haptics) – that there is a lot of sense to talk about digital 

games and aesthetics especially if the viewpoint (or rather “touching 

point”) is configured in terms of haptic aesthetics. 

In the background of Immanuel Kant’s simple distinction between 

the sublime and the beautiful there probably was a more general idea 

concerning the “location” of these feelings. Namely, in the context of 

describing national differences, he argues: “Nothing can be more set 

against all art and science than an adventurous taste, because this distorts 

nature, which is the archetype of all the beautiful and noble” (Kant 

1991, 99). The national aspect in relation to this is that “the Spanish 

nation has displayed little feeling for the beautiful arts and sciences” 

because of having had such a heightened adventurous taste. The conflict 

between interests is evidently at hand: it was not possible to develop 

16 An excellent overview of the various interpretations of this division (originally made 

by Aloïs Riegl in relation to the difference between Greek and Roman art) can be 

found in Paterson 2007 (in particular chapter 5 on haptic aesthetics). 

76 


qualities of taste because adventure (and only adventure) was the interest 

of Spanish people. From this viewpoint the digital gamers driven by the 

adventurous desire – notwithstanding their actual nationality – would 

all be “Spaniards”. In this rhetoric “adventure for adventure’s sake” 

would be in direct analogy with “play for play’s sake”. In order to play 

a little žižekian language game at this point one could develop a line of 

thought according to which the ontologically most correct name for a 

rally driver is Carlos Sainz: he is Spanish and he has the “car” in his first 

and the “saint” in his last name. In the same way as Slavoj Žižek (2002, 

8) arguing that “fidelity to castration” (a modification of Fidel Castro) 

represents Cuban “politico-ideological identity”, here carless and careless 

saints would represent rally car gamers in general. 

For Kant nature is the measure of the beautiful and noble. But 

what (and how) is this nature after it has been radically transformed by 

technology (to an extent in which Benjamin could call it “the second 

nature”), and when it is not just perceived through but experienced in the 

mediated images and sounds? A case in point might be PlayStation games 

such as Gran Turismo, Colin McRae Rally, or World Rally Championship 

and the way in which they take the player into different surroundings all 

over the world. 17 Why would “nature” in these games not be an aesthetic 

phenomenon as it was for Kant in the form of a mountain view or a 

horserace arranged in the forests of Königsberg? 

Instead of speculating more on the possible similarities one needs to 

specify the ways in which the aesthetic world of digital games is neither 

“false” nor “noble”, but rather in numerous ways, a hybrid compound 

with traces from several aesthetic registers. The unifying tendency 

between these registers is an attempt at creating effects. This allows also 

17 At least five consecutive versions of Colin McRae Rally -game (for the PlayStation 

consoles 1 and 2) exist: versions Colin McRae Rally (1998) and Colin McRae Rally 2.0 

(2000) for the PS1-console, Colin McRae Rally 3 (2002), 4 (2003), and 2005 (2004) 

for the PS2 (plus for the PS3 three Colin McRae: Dirt -games: 2006, 2007, and 2010) 

– all designed and published by Codemasters (UK). In the following I will be referring 

to these (PS1&2) games with the abbreviation CMR. Another group of similar games 

is the World Rally Championship –family (from now on WRC) with about the same 

amount of versions, designed and published by Evolution Studios and Sony. The first, 

fully FIA licensed WRC game was released in 2001 for PS2. Quite recently an ideal 

merger took place with Gran Turismo 5 (launched in 2010 for PS3) that also includes 

the totally licensed WRC. 

77


an option to think of the haptic and optic from the perspective of effects 

and functions rather than mere essences. Surely the gaming structures 

can be divided according to two consecutive modes: the player-mode 

and the viewer-mode. The player can play a session (such as one stage in 

a rally) and then sit back to watch the performance either by allowing the 

machine to edit the sequence or to “cut” it him- or her-self. These modes 

are related to one another in different ways according to differences in 

the overall game-design. In order to argue that this kind of hybrid use 

of “transparent layers” is elementary, a few of these registers might be 

pointed out for example in the following way: 

78 

(1) Visual arts -effect: we can look at the moving image as though 

repositioning the tradition of wall-garments and tapestry in the 

mode of which nature as pastoral scenes became familiar to our 

grandparents. 18 

(2) Cinema -effect (or “tele-visualism”): the movements of the image 

are both recreations and simulations of the ways in which film- and 

television cameras and microphones customarily “see” and “hear” 

the environment. 

(3) Photo-realistic -effect (or “illusionism”): the reproductions 

and recordings of natural sounds try to create an illusion of (and 

therefore, simulate) an ongoing, real-time event. 

(4) Interactivity -effect: the moves of the player’s thumbs on the 

gamepad (or the wheel and pedals -system) get more or less directly 

immediate (but so far only almost) reactions visible and audible on 

the screen. An essential aspect here is also the “force feedback” such 

as the vibrating gamepad. 19 

Even though these effects can be emphasized differently (depending 

for example on the genre of the game), they do not function as contestants 

18 In principle this “effect” concerns the visibility of pixels. Therefore there is a kind 

of degradation in scale when comparing PS3 to PS2 to PS, for example, since in PS3games 

the visibility of pixels is significantly lower than in the PS-games. 

19 See Paterson 2007, 132 passim. Also according to James Newman (2002) the 

vibrating gamepad such as the “Dual Shock 2”-system designed for the PS consoles, is 

an essential component in the game event experience. 


in relation to the player’s attention. Rather, their interplay aims at a 

“sensuous atmosphere” in such a way that the player could focus as fully 

as possible on the action that takes place – not so much on either or both 

sides of the screen (neither “here” nor “there”) but rather in-between. 

This would imply also that the optic and the haptic would necessarily 

require each other. Here the experience of being connected (physically, 

mentally, and sensibly) to a technologically created digital game-world is 

the elementary dimension for the aesthetic questions. Though, the less 

the player focuses on the material, cognitive, and sensory aspects of the 

connection, the better gaming results become. The bottom line is that 

the player must move out from the position of the passive “receiver” of 

the spectacle in order to play at all. At the same time, however, there 

should be at least some kind of an awareness of the presence of the 

spectacle because that aspect still also dictates the attractiveness of not 

just particular games but playing in general. A concrete example in some 

of the rally games is the event of a potential accident. When driving 

around a corner for example the player may be facing big rocks falling 

from a cliff: the suddenly emerged and difficult task is to try to avoid 

crashing them. However, when repeating the stage, the rocks may or 

may not be falling. 

To what extent do the “texts” of art still aim at faithful simulations 

of external reality, the nature? Or rather, do they aim at modifying 

“events” with which the grip of the interface on the user (viewer, player, 

receiver, what not) would become ever closer? When suddenly facing a 

falling rock in the game are we “reading a text” or “reacting to an event”? 

Transforming the simple rhetoric familiar from film studies (for example 

notions such as “suture”) into computerized and digital environments 

easily dismisses that it is primarily connected to issues of desire. 20 A 

more fundamental problematic of desire might even re-direct the 

interest of the research. This move would be from audio-visual reception 

to possibilities of the user as a player with media-dependent skills to 

reinvent and re-experience various aspects of popular sensibility. In this 

sense there would be three important and interconnected “spheres” (for 

20 On the notion of “suture” and the way in which its scope is restricted to film as 

a narrative medium see Thomas Elsaesser & Malte Hagener (eds.), Film Theory. An 

introduction through the senses. New York & London: Routledge 2010, 90. 

79


creating events) involved: game usage, media skills, popular sensibility. 

The intensity of reinventions and -experiences would be dependent on 

the way in which these spheres are interconnected by the choices of 

aesthetic design. The first one would be a more general field of game 

theories. The second one would be a kind of “logic of media sense”, and 

in this way closely connected to theories of media education and media 

literacy for example. The third one would be also historical: the “cinema 

of attractions” might be an elementary component in the cultural history 

of popular sensibility as understood in this way. 21 Clearly one option 

would be to trace the line of “liveness” for example, from the period of 

early cinema through television to the console era. 22 

The key questions, therefore, would be how does the mechanism of 

popular sensibility feed the system of desire it, in the end, is dependent 

on? Do the attempts to manipulate (maybe even to minimize) the 

distance between the user and the machine really liberate the “spectator” 

from the constraints of aesthetic experience as it traditionally has been 

understood from the viewpoint of the “spectator” rather than the “artist” 

and from the viewpoint of l’art pour l’art -aesthetics? To what extent does 

the promise inscribed into the audiovisual techno-space of computer 

networks concern the potentially utopian existence of techno-bodies as 

liberated from the perceptual and sensual disadvantages of the human 

body? And finally, how does this promise feed the construction of desire 

that generates the expanding energy for the entire super-system of digital 

games? 

21 The core -text is Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions” (orig. 1986). Another 

related text by Tom Gunning (2010) in focusing on the notion of the early ‘phantom 

rides’ provides an illuminating historical treatment for drawing a connection between 

‘the cinema of attractions’ and the digital rally games. 

22 As has been suggested for example by Mimi White, “The Attractions of Television: 

Reconsidering Liveness” in Couldry, Nick & Anna McCarthy (eds.), MediaSpace. 

Place, Scale, and Culture in a Media Age. London & New York: Routledge 2004. 

80 

3. Spielraum as a playful innervation of technology 


Gilles Deleuze’s notion of sensation, as one of the most radical forms of 

contemporary aesthetics, is fully in line with the Nietzschean tradition. 23 

John Rajchman situates this line of thought at the end of his book The 

Deleuze Connections (2000, 119) in the following way: “Indeed Deleuze 

is perhaps the first since Nietzsche to find a way to practice aesthetics 

as a ‘gay science’, extracting it from Nietzsche’s Alpine aphorisms and 

reinserting it into the heart of urban ‘modernity’ [--].” What is interesting 

in this context is that Nietzsche as well as Deleuze groups the artist 

together with the player and the child, furthermore, with distinctively 

positive intentions. 

One option to resituate this kind of reference between “Alpine 

aphorisms” and “urban modernity” would be to compare Gran Turismo 

to Colin McRae Rally. They are both highly developed digital games in 

the form of car racing. However, most of the events in the earlier GTgames 

are situated in urban environments and racetracks whereas most 

of the stages in the CMR-games take place on various roads that can 

be traced back to geographical landscapes. In this case the difference 

is perhaps too obvious: Seattle in GT has a closer relationship with 

Seattle in Washington State compared to how the CMR stages relate 

to, say, the Alpine landscapes outside Monte Carlo – even though from 

a technological point of view they are all similar polygons. Seemingly 

it is still easier to digitize urban scenery compared to a combination 

of forests, fields, and lakes. However, even this division generalizes too 

much since there are significant differences among the various “vintages” 

of the games. The landscape becomes more and more detailed the better 

(i.e. faster and more polygon and pixel-rich) technology is available. 

In the games, however, the function of the landscape is to be but a 

backdrop. It is like the painted canvases in school-plays, obscuring the 

audience from seeing what there literally is “behind the scenes”. In the 

rally game this is easily detected in trying to drive the car off road and 

into the forest: the program immediately stops and repositions the car 

23 Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon – The Logic of Sensation. Translated by Daniel W. 

Smith. New York & London: Continuum 2003 (Francis Bacon – Logique de la sensation 

1981). Detailed commentaries and extensions to this notion can be found for example 

in Bogue 2009 and Grosz 2009. 

81


on the road again. The programming does this, of course, for a reason; 

playing the game is moving on these digitally simulated roads as fast as 

possible from point A to point B. Put in this way one might argue that 

in these games options for playing are rather limited. The argument, 

however, depends on how playing is defined. 

When writing about the nature of plays and playing (Spiel, spielen), 

Walter Benjamin observed already in the 1930s not just the complicated 

network of possible definitions but most of all the central role of 

technology in the “essence” of games. 24 Benjamin’s position might be 

summarized in three aspects. First of all (unlike Roger Caillois and Johan 

Huizinga, who have written perhaps the two major classic books on 

playing), Benjamin does not set playing distinct from work but rather, 

sees it as an elementary aspect of the everyday life in general. 25 Secondly, 

playing – especially in its German formation spielen – includes several 

options to emphasize different sides of the term itself, and these include 

“gaming” (as in playing with toys), “acting” (as in performing a play), 

and “gambling”. Benjamin’s (typical) conceptual point is an attempt to 

maintain all these differences while writing about the nature of playing. 

Thirdly, for him playing is the fundamental element also in watching 

films. There playing is a fundamental mode of “innervation” generating 

the connection with which the masses can deal with what Benjamin 

calls “the second nature”, i.e. the technological modernity. The notion of 

Innervation works here, perhaps not against but in relation to the notion 

of Schau-Lust, the enjoyment of seeing (and hearing) spectacular things. 

When compared to concepts used here earlier, Benjamin’s term further 

indicates that rather than being two distinct behavioural modes in game 

events the “user-me” together with the “viewer-me” are but two sides 

24 The key-text here is Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical 

Reproduction” (published in different versions and languages during the second half of 

the 1930s), and when referring to Benjamin on playing I am relying heavily on Miriam 

Bratu Hansen’s (2004) article “Room-for-Play; Benjamin’s Gamble with Cinema”. 

Hansen also discusses the important differences between the various versions of the 

Benjamin-text mentioned above. 

25 The reference here is to books: Roger Caillois, Man, Play and Games (orig. French 

Les Jeux et les Hommes, 1958) and Johan Huizinga, Homo-Ludens: A Study of the Play 

Element in Culture (orig. Dutch Proeve eener bepaling van het spelelement der cultur, 

1938). A brief discussion of these two in relation to game studies is in Dovey & 

Kennedy 2006, 23–25. 

82 


of the same face. In the same way optic and haptic are corresponding 

attributes of the same aesthetics, and digital games are literally a tangible 

example of this correlation: hands, eyes and ears play together. 

In Benjamin’s view, as a site for playing (Spielraum), film offers a kind 

of play-bin for learning to cope with technology. And, as Hansen (2004, 

45) observes (referring to Andy Darley, among others): “As far as the 

ascendancy of an aesthetics of play over one of semblance is concerned, 

one could well argue that the development Benjamin discerned and 

valorized has culminated in visual digital genres such as video and 

computer games [--].” The point made by Darley (2000, 172–3; 176–8) 

and repeated by Hansen concerns the freedom of the player: rather than 

playing with the game, the issue at hand is the game playing with the 

spectator. According to Hansen: “But, to stay with Benjamin’s point, the 

genres discussed by Darley also promote a playful innervation of new 

technologies, albeit with diminished expectations regarding its utopian, 

liberating, and even apotropaic significance.” This leads Hansen to 

wonder whether the fundamental problem of game cultures, from a 

supposedly Benjaminian perspective, would be – again – the question of 

“a new type of public sphere, at once infinitely expanded and extremely 

fragmented” and how, in conclusion, this would entail a requirement “to 

wage an aesthetics of play, understood as a political ecology of the senses”. 

(Hansen 2004, 44–45, emphasis added.) 

This notion of the “political ecology of the senses” might be a 

direct reference to one of the three ecologies written by Félix Guattari 

(2000) – and in this respect, especially the second and third ecologies 

that deal with the social relations (Benjamin’s “masses”) and the human 

subjectivity (Benjamin’s “optical unconscious”). 26 The end result is an 

event of exchanging sensuous experiences: by positioning the player 

under constant bombardment of movements, images and sounds filled 

with other images and sounds, the game simultaneously harnesses 

the player to learn to cope with an ever-expanding and fragmenting 

technological environment filled with images, sounds and their 

combinations embedded within one another. Because the consumption 

26 Guattari’s treatment can be read as an interesting expansion of the ideas presented 

by Gregory Bateson concerning “human adaptation” in Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of 

Mind. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press 2000: 446–453 (orig. 

1968). 

83


of the audio-visual sensations is the “price” the player prepays for these 

lessons, the reward is always in the future. Rather than giving an image 

or a representation (to be viewed) of the contemporary world, these 

digital games train the viewers to take the correct poses the future world 

requires. However, as Gregory Bateson argued already in the mid-1950s, 

it is up to the player whether he or she is willing to take the optioned 

pose, or, to put it a bit more mildly, in which way to take it. 27 

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Tero Karppi 

Reality Bites: 

Subjects of Augmented Reality Applications 

88 89 

Intro 

Augmented Reality (AR) applications are emerging in consumer 

electronics. AR is a concept coined at the end of the 1990s to describe 

a live direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment the 

elements of which are augmented by computer-generated sensory 

input such as sound or graphics. (Azuma 1997) (Milgram and Kishino 

1994). 

I fiddle with my iPhone a bit and open up an Augmented Reality 

application called Layar. A digitally enhanced view of my current 

surroundings is projected on the screen via the gadget’s digital camera. 

Icons and texts appear on the screen pointing out locations I might 

be interested in. I turn 360 degrees with the gadget and it shows me 

pizzerias, stores, a library and a bus station. Suddenly I feel hungry and 

head up to have a slice. 

What just happened? Fuller and Goffey (2009, 142) suggest, that 

to answer this question, we need to get a grip on “contemporary media 

practices of trickery, deception and manipulation”. They argue that we 

should be interested in different techniques of “producing reality”, such 

as hypnosis or sorcery, regardless of whether they lead or are derived from 

scientific knowledge. Keeping this in mind, we may start our approach 

towards Augmented Reality applications and their way of initiating us 

into a specific form of reality. Here I want to turn to Roger Caillois 

(1935) and his take on psychasthenia. 

Following Pierre Janet, Caillois defines psychasthenia as psychosis in 

which the subject feels being physically dislocated. The subject does not 

know where to place itself. “I know where I am, but I do not feel as though 

I’m at the spot where I find myself. To these dispossessed souls, space seems 

to be a devouring force. Space pursues them, encircles them, digests

TERO KARPPI 

them… It ends by replacing them.” (Caillois 1935). What happens 

according to Elizabeth Grosz (Grosz 2001, 39), is that the “primacy of 

the subject’s own perspective is replaced by the gaze of another for whom 

the subject is merely a point in space, not the focal point organizing 

space”. At least two interesting things take place in psychasthenia; for 

the first, the subject is physically dislocated and secondly, the space 

replaces and creates a new subject. In fact, the subject in psychasthenia 

is parallel to how Gilles Deleuze elaborates in his book The Fold on 

subject’s relation to point of view. For Deleuze, the point of view is not 

a follow-up of the pregiven subject. On the contrary “a subject will be 

what comes to the point of view, or rather what remains in the point of 

view”(Deleuze 1993, 19). 

Undoubtedly something like this happens when the world becomes 

augmented with digital information. Dependency of an object in relation 

to the subject is reversed. An auto-constitution of a new subject on the 

basis of its objects appears (Alliez 2004, 56). The subject becomes in the 

very moment of entering to a point of view. In this paper I will analyze 

how this taking place of the subject is mediated via Augmented Reality 

applications. 

While the paper is conceptual, it is grounded on an empirical 

analysis of the Layar browser for iPhone and smartphones using the 

Android operating system. Layar was launched on June 16 th 2009. It 

is an Augmented Reality Browser which uses smartphone’s camera, 

GPS device and internet connection to provide a view of our real-world 

environment with augmented layer of digital information in the form 

of visual hotspots. Layar started out with five layers but currently there 

are over 1000 layers to choose from. Some of these layers are for free 

and some are only for purchase. These layers vary from Google powered 

local search to Wikipedia and dating sites used to locate people searching 

company near you. 

Instead of meaning or representations I am interested in how AR 

applications affect the users. I am following Spinoza’s understanding 

of bodies both active and receptive, and affect being body’s capacity to 

activity and responsiveness (Bennett 2010, xii). This means elaborating 

how AR applications capture the attention of the user and guide the 

senses of the user. To analyze how the Layar and AR applications in 

general work, a theoretical three-layered method is provided. The first 

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layer analyzes the relation between the real-world environment and the 

application. The second layer analyzes the interface or the screen of the 

browser and the third layer analyzes the relation of the user and the 

software. 

Layer 1: Movement-Image or how the environment becomes affective 

In Deleuze’s interpretation of Foucault, power and knowledge function 

through the archives of visible and articulable (Parikka 2009, 108; 

Deleuze, Foucault 1988). Each historical formation implies a relation 

between visible and sayable, things and words, content and expression. 1 

What I am interested here is how the visible and the articulable function 

from the perspective of power and knowledge in Augmented Reality 

applications such as Layar. It is a technology of visible and articulable per 

1 In Discipline and Punish, Foucault shows the difference between the law and its 

actual exercise in the prison system. The law and the prison are two different systems 

with different histories and developments and yet they meet in the boundary of power 

and knowledge. The law sets rules and breaking them leads to prison. This is the 

transition from discipline to punish. 

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se providing us a technologically mediated vision to the world: showing 

us the world in a way that exceeds our natural senses. 

Quite basically The Layar browser displays digital information of the 

environment, which is seen through the mobile phone’s camera: 

92 

Layar works by using a combination of the mobile phone’s camera, 

GPS, compass, accelerometer and a mobile Internet connection. The 

camera captures the world as seen through its lens and shows it on the 

screen. The GPS determines the exact location and the compass and 

accelerometer the field of view. Based on these sensors and the selected 

layer, digital information is retrieved over a mobile Internet connection 

and augmented on top of the camera view. (Layar website) 

Layar is based on the notion that we are constantly surrounded by 

location-aware digital information. For the naked eye this information 

remains invisible but via digital technology such as the Layar browser, 

this information can be articulated and made visible. With a right plugin 

(or layer), the browser can show where the closest Chinese restaurant 

is, or what are the opening hours of the nearby museum. At first glance 

we notice that the categories of the visible and the articulable are not 

sufficient if we really want to understand how power and knowledge 

work through Layar. Digital information made visible on the screen 

points out that there is data being processed and provided out of reach 

of our senses. In fact, drawing from German media archaeology, Jussi 

Parikka (2009, 110–111) has suggested that when it comes to digital 

technology and digital culture in general, articulable and visible should 

be updated with the category of calculable. Indeed, calculation is used in 

Layar with multiple ways from coding of the digital image of the camera 

to locating the user for the digital archives of information from which 

the data for the user is mined. To put it bluntly in AR applications the 

data that is visible and/or articulable is also calculated. 

In practice what the user of Layar faces is the interface. What 

appears to be somewhat chaotic for the naked eye, in the sense that 

our environment is full of data that is not processed or organized, is 

put in order via the processes of seeing, articulating and calculating of 

the Layar application. Layar functions as a screen that intervenes to the 

chaotic multiplicity of the events and brings order to it (Deleuze 1993, 

REALITY BITES 

76). It is the screen that makes something out of the chaos via processes 

of calculation. 

The screen serves as a link to Deleuze’s discussions of cinema, 

which can be used to contextualize the AR applications from another 

perspective. In the books of cinema Deleuze has defined images from 

the basis of movement and time. Drawing from the philosophy of 

Henri Bergson, he tries to conceptualize how we are in the midst of 

moving images that constantly flow around us. Deleuze’s (2002, 60) 

intention is to break the “philosophical tradition which placed light on 

the side of the spirit and made consciousness a beam of light which drew 

things out of their native darkness”. His critique is targeted especially 

against intentionality of phenomenology but also Kant and Descartes 

who posit the perceiving subject in the center of their philosophical 

thinking. Deleuze’s fundamental theorem is that images are movement 

in themselves. The eye of the perceiver does not illuminate the images 

and impose movement to them. On the contrary, images are luminous 

by themselves and if they appear to us it is not because we are looking at 

them but because they light upon us. (Deleuze 2002, 56–61.) 

The biology of Jacob Von Uexküll (1989) describes this relation 

from the viewpoint of a tick. Uexküll describes how the female tick after 

mating climbs to the tip of a twig and there waits for a warm-blooded 

animal to arrive. The eyeless tick uses photosensitivity of her skin to spot 

the mammal closing by. The smell of butyric acid coming from the skin 

glands of the passing mammal is the hotspot for the tick. After sensing 

the stimuli from the smell the tick drops from her twig in order to hit 

the animal skin. The temperature of the platform on which the tick has 

landed reveals to her whether or not the hit has been a success. If she has 

landed on a suitable animal she penetrates the skin and starts sucking 

the warm blood. After eating the tick drops herself from the animal, lays 

her eggs and dies. 

Uexküll uses the tick as an example to differentiate two world-views, 

which he calls Umgebung and Umwelt. Umgebung is the objective 

space habited by living beings and the Umwelt is the environmentworld 

that is constituted of hotspots, which interest the animal and 

which the animal uses in order to navigate in the world. Uexküll (1989, 

324) defines “the first principle of Umwelt theory: all animals, from the 

simplest to the most complex, are fitted into their unique worlds with 

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equal completeness. A simple world corresponds to a simple animal, a 

well-articulated world to a complex one.” 

It is evident that Uexküll is not interested in describing the 

Umgebung. It exists but we do not perceive it. What we understand as 

an environment is the Umwelt. The Umwelt becomes mediated through 

different senses. For the tick it is the photosensitive skin. We humans 

have five primary senses through which the reality is perceived. Now 

augmented reality software adds another layer to this environmentworld. 

With augmented reality devices such as iPhone added with Layar 

software, the world opens to us from a different perspective. 

A new Umwelt is created by using the hardware of mobile phone 

such as GPS receiver, compass and camera and Augmented Reality 

software. Through the camera of the phone the environment is perceived 

through the techniques of vision. However, this vision is filled with a 

software layer of hot spots. Augmented Reality software such as Layar 

uses the GPS and compass to locate the user and access to the internet 

from where it searches for digital information that is targeted to certain 

coordinates. This information is then presented on the screen of the 

phone. It becomes inseparable from the Umgebung of the perceiving 

subject now mediated as Umwelt through the hardware of the phone 

and software of the Augmented Reality program. 

Layer 2: the Event or how the hotspots become affective 

The interface, the screen of the Layar mediates us an environment. It 

does not give us a snapshot of the world, an immobile image but on the 

contrary, it shows a mobile temporal section of the world, a perspective 

to a bloc of space-time (Deleuze 2002, 59). In The Fold, Deleuze 

(1993) returns to defining the subject in relation to its environment. 

This time the relation is described with the concept of event, inspired 

by the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. What is important for 

Deleuze is Whitehead’s understanding of the event as a process in which 

things and entities posit themselves. Objects as events exist in their selfactualizations, 

which are consisted of asymmetrical relations, interactions 

and becomings (Väliaho 2007, 130). 

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What is an event, Deleuze asks, and starts explaining it with the 

conditions that make an event possible. Events emerge from a chaos, 

“but only in under the condition that a sort of a screen intervenes” 

(Deleuze 1993, 76). We need a screen to make sense of the chaos. 

Paraphrasing Deleuze, without a screen chaos is an abstraction. Indeed, 

chaos and the screen are comparable to Uexküll’s concepts of Umgebung 

and Umwelt. Umwelt is based on Umgebung but the one cannot be 

reduced to another or understood separately without the other. If we 

have and access to Umgebung through Umwelt we correspondingly have 

the access to the chaos only through the screen. 

While the screen and the chaos are ontological concepts for Deleuze, 

we can use them to explain how Augmented Reality applications are 

connected to ‘reality’. In the applications, the screen is extended over the 

chaos in a quite literary manner: the camera of the mobile device blocks 

the flow of the light from the Umgebung mediating it to an Umwelt. 

This Umwelt, seen through the screen, has intrinsic properties such as 

for example saturation of color, tint or intensity. The characteristic of the 

matter shot by the camera become the texture of the event but also the 

digital information harvested from the databases and archives give it an 

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extended value. They appear on the screen as texts and images pointing 

at the hotspots and capturing the eye of the perceiver. The Umwelt of 

the AR application is a “concrescence” of these heterogeneous elements 

of extension and intension. 

Now, Deleuze argues that events should be understood as 

concrescence rather than conjunction or connection. Concrescence (in 

biology) implies to growing together of initially separate parts or organs. 

The elements grasp each other or “prehend” each other. For Whitehead, 

prehension means the act by which one element assumes and responds 

to another (Whitehead 1978, 20; Shaviro 2009, 28). It is in this process 

where also individuality or identity emerges. Every individual is a series 

of prehensions. In Deleuze’s (1993, 78) own examples the eye prehends 

light and living beings prehend water, soil, carbon and salts. Furthermore 

prehension entails an exchange between the subject and an object. As 

the target of prehension the individual is an object and as active part 

of prehending it becomes the subject. In this exchange self-identity is 

created by prehending the immediate past, what the object just was 

(Shaviro 2009, 29). 

Each event is singular; it has its own identity that is formed in the 

process of prehending and being prehended. The screen of the application 

forms an Umwelt. This Umwelt is an event in itself. It has its own 

extensions and intensions. It is a bloc of space-time and as such it does 

not remain a fixed identity but becomes another with other elements it 

runs into. It is indeed important to understand that these applications 

are events themselves. They do not have to go through human subjects 

for meaning or sense. 2 

Layer 3: the User or how affects are subordinated to capital 

Jonathan Crary has magnificently described how capitalism captures 

our perception and attention. Revolutionizing the means of perception, 

2 What should be noted is that if we want to think of the human user, we need 

to define him/her as yet another part of the concrescent formed by the Umgebung 

and the Umwelt of the AR application. While recognizing the primacy of the 

affective matter I, however, want to explore more the relation of the human user and 

Augmented Reality in the following chapters. 

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REALITY BITES 

capitalism has for the last 100 years generated and re-created the 

conditions of our sensory experience with media such as film, television 

and photography. To accelerate circulation and exchange capitalism 

demands that our perception and attention is distracted and attentive. 

We move from one thing to another in a rapid pace finding new points 

of interest and discarding others. For Crary this is not our natural ability 

to perceive and observe but a system of using senses that has emerged 

within the needs of culture of capitalism. (Crary 2001, 13–14, 29–31.) 

AR applications are the next step in the long line of audiovisual 

technologies entangled in the networks of capitalism. What could 

be noted is that here capitalism does not refer explicitly to a mode of 

production but more broadly to heterogeneous apparatuses that affirm 

social subjection and tie users to machinic enslavement (Lazzarato 2006). 

Following Deleuze and Guattari (2005, 458), “capital acts as the point of 

subjectification that constitutes all human beings as subjects”. Different 

technological devices can be described as these points of subjectification. 

Here we return to the concepts of visible, articulable and calculable to 

understand how power and knowledge function in Augmented Reality 

applications. Arguably many layers of Layar browser are permeated with 

semio-capitalism: that is the capitalism of signs and semiotic goods. 

In his famous text Man, Play and Games, Roger Caillois has described 

how games fit into different categories according to their distinguished 

characters. Here a specific attention could be given to the dimension 

he calls vertigo. What he means by this is games, which “momentarily 

destroy the stability of perception and inflict a kind of voluptuous panic 

upon an otherwise lucid mind” (Caillois 1961, 23). Vertigo describes 

games which through bodily experience and sensory affection immerse 

the players inside the world of the game and often do this by altering 

the player’s perception. Classic examples of vertigo are spinning, danza 

de los voladores and waltzing, where through a physical movement the 

player is distracted from his / her world inside the vertigo of a game, 

but also mind-bending techniques like hypnosis can be considered. As 

a result vertigo for Caillois means a spasm, rupture or shock, in other 

words, a temporary state of destructing order and stability. 

Now, while Caillois talks about games and playing I suggest that we 

should consider vertigo more generally as a fundamental condition of 

digital audiovisual technologies. To approach this wider angle we can 

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think of vertigo in terms of the so called affective turn. For example 

Luciana Parisi and Tiziana Terranova have proposed that we should try 

to understand digital images outside the questions of representation and 

reality. According to Parisi and Terranova digital images are affective 

media. They have a capacity to embody the experience of seeing without 

deceiving the spectator or falling into the category of unreal simulations. 

Digital images are “endowed with the power to impinge on the body 

by capturing its potential”. (Parisi and Terranova 2001, 125.) In other 

words this means the potential of digital images to suck the user inside 

the vertigo, alter his/her perception with digital means. 

To elaborate on this more thoroughly one option would be to rely 

on the Deleuzean re-reading of Whitehead’s categories of subjective aim, 

subjective form and self-enjoyment. In the case of Layar the digital 

hotspots are indeed affective images. For one it is the hotspot of Public 

Library that affects his/her body, for other it is the Starbucks, and for the 

third it might be a Thai Massage Salon. Using the Layar we constantly 

encounter information which affects us. According to this information, 

the subject constantly restructures himself/herself by processes of 

adapting, developing, remembering and anticipating (Mackenzie 2002, 

17). Whitehead calls this selection as “subjective aim”, which forms 

the “principle of selection and an act of self-selection”. Prehensions 

are coordinated and combined by the subjective aim in the process of 

adaptation and simultaneously each entity creates itself by including this 

and excluding that. (Shaviro 2009, 74.) 

“Whitehead privileges feeling over understanding, and offers an 

account of experience that is affective rather than cognitive” (Shaviro 

2009, 57). Shaviro emphasizes that the criteria via which the subjective 

aim functions are rather aesthetic than logical. This is perfectly in line 

with Parisi and Terranova’s (Parisi and Terranova 2001) interpretation of 

affective images. Seeing images is never completely visual but also tactile, 

sensory and material (Kennedy 2000, 3). Images affect us in a particular 

way even though we might not know, recognize or understand them. 

For Whitehead privileging the affective is based on characteristics 

of prehension, which he calls “subjective form”. Let us revise: every 

prehension has a ‘subject’ which is prehending and an ‘object’ that 

is prehended. Now ‘subjective form’ characterizes how the object is 

prehended. It is a feeling or a manner that the prehending subject receives 

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or perceives from its object. The object in itself is objective and entirely 

determinate, but when it becomes the object of prehension (datum) 

it also becomes indeterminate in relation to how the subject feels the 

object. (Whitehead 1978, 23–24; Shaviro 2009, 55.) 

For instance, I feel hungry and I use Layar to find a place to get food. 

I cast the screen over my environment and see that there is a Restaurant 

Peppermill, and two fast-food joints, Hesburger and Mantu’s Grill within 

a walking distance. I want food fast so I feel affected by the burger place 

and the grill. I check out the digital information for both of the places 

and discover that Mantu’s Grill is a local grill and Hesburger is a chain of 

fast-food restaurants. I decide to support the local and head to Mantu’s 

Grill. My subjective aim is to get food and the restaurants have a certain 

subjective form which either appeals to my subjective aim or not. To be 

clear, here subjective aim is described as both a cognitive and an affective 

condition but it need not be both. What is implied is that the subjective 

aim emerges from a need for the subject to be satisfied. 

Outro 

Indeed, the last step of prehension is characterized with ‘self-enjoyment’. 

It is the final phase of the processes, a satisfaction. Self-enjoyment “marks 

the way by which the subject is filled with itself and attains a richer 

and richer life” (Deleuze 1993, 78). In Deleuze’s reading self-enjoyment 

is almost biblical and neo-platonic appraisal of the prehension but we 

can analyze it also with the terms of psychastenia. Self-enjoyment is the 

stage where “depersonalization by assimilation to space” has happened 

(Caillois 1935). The subject has been dislocated from the Umgebung 

and thrown inside the Umwelt to the extent that s/he becomes one with 

the environment. 

By providing the data in the form of hotspots, AR applications interfere 

with our subjective aim preselecting for us objects for prehension. The 

local information layer of the Layar application is powered by Google 

and it locates information according to the coordinates of the user. It 

finds restaurants, shops, kiosks, barber shops, department stores, movie 

theaters to name but a few. Symptomatically many of the hotspots it 

finds, have something to do with consumption. AR applications cover 

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the environment with potentially endless stream of information which 

can be reshaped into audible and visible commodities. The screen is 

dynamized and activated with hotspots that capture user’s attention. Or 

to be more exact, hotspots create the user’s attention since it would not 

exist without them. It is in the midst of these hotspots and through their 

selection where the subject takes place. 

What follows is that the self-enjoyment of the person using 

Augmented Reality is the self-enjoyment of a capitalist subject. The user 

is filled with commodities, services and other goods in the subjectivation 

of the hotspots of Augmented Reality application. However, this should 

not be confused with the traditional models of ideology and propaganda 

and their presumed capabilities of transforming thinking subjects into 

unconscious puppets. On the contrary, digital capitalism acknowledges 

that we have the capacity to think. But what is important is that it also 

acknowledges that thinking happens only with a certain technology that 

forces us to think (Fuller and Goffey 2009, 142–143). Thinking is an 

active and affirmative event that always happens in a historical situation 

with different materials, actors and sensations affecting to it. Following 

Deleuze (2002, 108), “thought never thinks alone and by itself, moreover 

it is never simply disturbed by the forces which remain external to it”. 

Together with attention and perception Augmented Reality 

applications also capture thought. Following Whitehead, thinking is 

not only a cognitive process but also an emotional process. Augmented 

Reality applications come in the middle of attention, perception and 

thinking and offer us a screen with readymade hotspots through which 

we experience our environment. It does not remain as an instrument 

for us to use. It is not an object. On the contrary it becomes a screen 

through which the world is sensed. It gives us points to which we can 

grasp and through which our subjectivity is constructed. 

What occurs in Augmented Reality applications is the production 

of both reality and subjectivity. It affects us beyond the concepts of 

meaning and sense, on affective level, grasping our senses and arousing 

our emotions. Indeed, Augmented Reality applications do not reduce us 

to viewers but inhabits us in a new world, vertigo, where our attention 

is captured by hotspots of digital information. As speculated here, these 

hot spots point often to commercial spaces and market places praising 

the glory of digital economy. 

100 

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Tapio Mäkelä 

Locative Games as Social Software: 

Playing in Object Oriented Neighbourhoods 

Nigel Thrift suggests that in full palette capitalism “value increasingly 

arises not from what is but from what is not yet but can potentially 

become, that is from the pull of the future, and from the new distributions 

of the sensible that can arise from that change” (Thrift 2008, 31). In the 

past few decades of Information Technology moved from laboratories 

to workplaces, and most recently from desktops to our pockets. Now 

location sensitive mobile computers may redistribute how space is made 

sensory and sensible. 1 In this essay 2 I will examine locative games, which 

are a combination of location based technologies such as GPS, WiFi or 

GSM cell positioning with authored game software for mobile phones 

or portable computers. These games are an emergent form of social 

software that may recede to future media archaeology, or they may with 

the pull of the future (and present play) to become and increasingly 

popular media form. 

1 Jacques Ranciére sees politics of art lie in its capacity to redistribute the sensible, 

how it suspends “the normal coordinates of sensory experience” and how that plays a 

role in further distributing or redistributing places and identities and the visible and 

invisible (Ranciére 2009, 24–25). For locative games and art, redistribution of the 

sensible happens differently for the experiencing subject, the closer temporary network 

of people within the game, and the wider public on the street, who may be completely 

unaware that a game is taking place. 

2 This is an edited and shortened English version of Tapio Mäkelä (2010) 

“Positionssensitive Spiele als Soziale Software. Urbane Erfahrungen in 

objektorientierten Nachbarschaften”. In Mathias Fuchs and Strouhal, Ernst Eds. 

Passagen des Spiels II. Das Spiel und seine Grenzen. Vienna, New York: Springer Verlag. 

102 103


Locative games 3 position the player in a public space, where s/he will 

experience both the game’s configuration 4 and the physical surrounding 

while in movement. How is the locative player configured? It would 

appear at first sight quite uncomplicated; player experience is constructed 

through the game and its interface, the physical environment, and 

interaction with other players if present. Rather than being able to 

configure the player position through genre specific conventions, 

locative games are an emergent form where ambiguity and various layers 

of configuration and interpretation are at play. In this essay I will discuss 

locative games by a UK based artist group Blast Theory. 5 Their projects 

can be addressed as social play, where contact with other participants as 

well as with designed game objects and sequences configure the player. 

Locative games are perhaps as far on the spectrum of games from shoot 

‘em ups as possible. Their gameness is mostly limited to a goal-oriented 

meta narrative, and the action is about spatial exploration and social 

3 By locative games I refer to games that use mobile phones or handheld PCs in 

combination with location data (GPS, WiFi node or mobile network cell location 

triangulation). The term locative was coined by a Latvian artist Karlis Kalnins from 

The Centre for New Media Culture RIXC, Riga to differentiate artistic exploration 

from commercially driven ones under the title location based services (Tuters 2004). 

4 Stuart Moulthrop discusses the term configuration: “In games the primary cognitive 

activity is not interpretation but configuration, the capacity to transform certain aspects 

of the virtual environment with potentially significant consequences for the system as a 

whole” (Moulthrop 2004, 60). I use the term configuration to address also the way that 

a game is constructed for the player, and in turn how the configuration of the game 

configures the user. In this respect, I fully agree with the questioning of reading a game, 

or in this case a locative game as a text only, but at the same time I am equally critical 

of juxtaposing configuration with interpretation as both Moulthrop and Markku 

Eskelinen suggest. (Moulthrop 2004; Eskelinen 2004, 38.) 

5 Blast Theory is an artist group consisting of three artists and a varying number 

of collaborators and production company staff. Matt Adams worked in professional 

theatre as an actor and director before studying English Literature at University College 

London. Ju Row Farr was a dancer, who studied Fashion, and Visual Arts and Textiles 

at Goldsmiths College in London. Nick Tandavanitj studied Art in Social Context at 

Dartington College of Arts. Emerging from the club culture of the late 1980s and early 

1990s they all had a desire to work with events and engage in audiences in different 

ways known to either theatre or visual arts. Also as their name suggests, they wanted 

to avoid a too theoretical approach literally blasting it away, and focussing on the 

experience of the participant (Adams 2008). Their work expands much beyond locative 

games as mixtures of game, participatory play and drama, and street theatre. Blast 

Theory website: http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/ 

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LOCATIVE GAMES AS SOCIAL SOFTWARE 

play. Locative games I argue, can be studied as social software that are 

played and performed in “object oriented neighbourhoods”. 

Street player in Can You See Me Now, London 2010. Image copyright Blast Theory. 

On-line player in Can You See Me Now, London 2010. Image copyright Blast Theory. 

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Locative games should at this stage be understood rather as a tag 

pointing to a field of practice than a media genre. In HCI and game 

design, authors prefer to use the term pervasive games, which usually 

puts the emphasis more on the game interface and technology rather 

than the game play or conceptual aspects of each given work. 6 

For example, in Blast Theory’s Can You See Me Now? there are physical 

game avatars in city space, while on-line players move their virtual avatars 

in a 3D-model of the city area the game is set at. Communication is 

established using chat and walkie-talkie voice between players on-line 

and runners in a given city space, who chase the on-line players’ avatars 

(Blast Theory 2005; Benford and et.al. 2007, 258). The player can move 

the avatar for quite a long time. Whether you get caught or not is really 

not so important. The participant is left in a state of disbelief rather 

than fulfilment about what happened in the “real” city space. The way 

Can You See Me Now becomes an interesting experience is on the one 

hand socially through the text based communication with the runners 

and other players, and conceptually as it raises questions about the 

relationship of on-line and street presence, but does not offer the player a 

grounded, active user position. The sound link with the street level play 

gives the most tangible sense of the physical experience of the runners 

for the on-line players; while mouse clicks on the screen create distance. 

This example illustrates how a locative game not only experiments with 

mobility in city space, but they may create hybrid experiences between 

Internet and physical sites. 

Social locative software 

If location based media applications like navigators in cars are supposed 

to seamlessly tell you exactly where you are and where to go, and fail 

miserably if that seamlessness fails (as it does), then locative media games 

are in this respect speculative software; they often leave the player in an 

6 Staffan Björk points out that the origins of pervasive games are found in computer 

science research on pervasive and ubiquitous computing (Björk 2007, 276). André 

Lemos contends that Locative media “are examples of applications and services using 

the ubiquitous and pervasive computing proposed by (Mark) Weiser (Lemos 2008, 

92). See for example Integrated Project on Pervasive Gaming, http://iperg.sics.se/ 

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ambiguous state, unsure whether they are in a game scenario or not, 

where they are, and where to go next. Software that does not render itself 

as consumable blips but urges the user to see through the interface into 

the very construction of software is called by Matthew Fuller “speculative 

software”. 7 In this respect, I would like to read the “locative” as being 

questioning, ambiguous, and curious about location and direction while 

navigation oriented applications are successful only if they give you the 

answer. Yet with Blast Theory’s work it has to be said that software itself 

(as on the PDA or smart phone) is only one component that configures 

the player, as there is always a metascript of an urban street play, how 

all elements are orchestrated as a live event, which also fights against 

notions of analyzing their work as software in a purely technical sense 

of the term. 

Clay Shirky started using “social software” in 2003 as a term 

encompassing uses of software that would support groups even if the 

interaction would take place offline, while avoiding the use of the 

corporate term groupware (Allen 2004) Allen quotes Shirky: 

“There was also no word or phrase that called attention to the 

explosion of interesting software for group activities that fell outside online 

communities and CSCW [Computer Supported Collaborative Work], 

things like Bass-Station (which is for offline community) or “Uncle Roy 

is All Around You” (which is computer-supported collaborative play)” 

(Shirky quoted in Allen 2004) 

Blast Theory’s Uncle Roy is All Around You (Uncle Roy) was thus one 

motivating example that ignited wider use of the term social software. 

Interestingly Shirky calls it a computer-supported collaborative play, 

which also links the term with Human Computer Interaction design 

research. 8 Shirky’s “collaborative play” suits Uncle Roy and other locative 

works by Blast Theory well. Collaboration in their works exists on several 

7 Obviously software has no subjectivity, ie. it does not speculate, but it’s design is 

speculative and invites the user to investigate it. 

8 CSCW, Computer-supported collaborative work, is the context from which most 

contemporary and critical Human Computer Interaction theories have emerged (Lucy 

Suchman, Paul Dourish). Traditional HCI still suffers from its inability to comprehend 

users as social, creative subjects with fluid identities. It could be perhaps argued that 

there is a longer “emergence” of the social in HCI within CSCW, that in its “human or 

user centeredness” has pointed at social analysis of new media environments for some 

time. 

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levels: between players, the facilitating artist and software team, between 

the game and the user as a compliance to accept the configured player 

position, at least enough to play. 

Social software is today understood mostly through different types 

of sociality on peer-to-peer file sharing platforms, 2D and 3D net 

virtual communities, MMORPGs, and in particular social networking 

platforms such as Orkut, Facebook, Twitter and Cyworld. I suggest 

making a distinction between terms social software and social media. 

Social media suggests a software user culture as a wider genre, where 

several types of applications can be seen to serve similar purposes, and the 

phenomenon itself is already widely popular. Social software demarcates 

an area of experimentation, oscillating between different technical and 

social designs that may be marginal in terms of popularity, but constitute 

a creative area for practice based research. Based on these suggested 

distinctions, one can say that Twitter and Jaiku are examples of the few 

existing social media on mobiles, while most mobile social applications 

at this stage represent the experimental social software phase. Social 

software and social media should not be seen as categories or opposites 

but rather as phases or layers, where any Internet based social media 

cannot exist without social software, but the reverse is possible. 

According to Mark Pesce “social networks emerge from interactions; 

they are not created in a one-off process, but rather, grow and change 

over time” (Pesce 2006). Mobile device based locative games, when 

performed live, have the potential of social networks, yet if they are 

dismounted after an event is over, they remain as social software and 

temporary social networks. In other words, locative games are speculative 

social software, an emergent form of media practice that interrogates 

social configurations in public spaces, and when performed, they may 

create temporary social networks. 

Interestingly, using the latest technology as a design strategy does 

not necessarily extend duration of temporary social networks. Day of 

the Figurines 9 by Blast Theory already suggests that it is possible to have 

participants commit their time over a longer duration using a design 

based on lowest common technical denominator (Theory 2006). 

While the game script design was very elaborate, in Day of the Figurines 

9 http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/bt/work_day_of_figurines.html 

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interaction between participants and the work took place over SMS and 

a web site, and was represented on a live game board in a gallery where 

small tin soldier sized figurines corresponded with each user. Here social 

relationships were not separated or kept together by location data, but 

rather affiliations through mediated conversations, and the proximity of 

player participants was represented through tiny avatar objects. 

Game players in Day of the Figurines are represented by a small toy figure on a game 

board, while interaction with the game happens via SMS messaging. 

For each project by Blast Theory the design is rather complex as it 

includes the meta scripts for the game, scripted moments in how the 

handheld or mobile software kicks in and advances the game, scenarios 

of players’ behaviour and misbehaviour, and a route for how the players 

should approximately progress through the game board. Player experience 

emerges often from tensions between different design elements. For 

example, what emerges as the experience of the game in Uncle Roy is All 

Around You is not so much whether the player reaches the goal and finds 

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Uncle Roy 10 , but the combined ambiguity of urban game space with 

conversations and exchanges one ends up having during the game play 

that generate a question of trust and mistrust between street and on-line 

players. In her account of the Uncle Roy play experience Kate Adams 

describes this ambiguity: 

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“Where it seemed that Uncle Roy could be trusted, it quickly became 

evident that some of them could not. Instructions such as ‘follow the 

man in the t-shirt at the traffic lights’ for example, were clearly given for 

their amusement, at the expense of the live player” (Adams 2006). 

When the street and online players entered Uncle Roy’s office, their 

lines of communication were cut from each other and asked the same 

question: “When can you begin to trust a stranger?” In Uncle Roy’s 

office, the street players wrote the answer onto a postcard, while online 

players replied to a pop-up form on their browser. The street players 

would then be directed to a phone box (in the UK version of the game 

this prop can still exist!) and then to step into a white limousine. If the 

IRL player would say yes to the question of really trusting a stranger, 

and being willing to offer support for the next 12 months to a stranger 

in need of help, s/he would be connected with an IRL player and a bond 

would be made between them. 

What is described here is more a “temporary network of trust” being 

formed between the players than an action filled sequence in a game. 

This level of social interaction is not generic to location based media 

in a wider sense. On the contrary, Uncle Roy All Around You pushes 

its participants to evaluate their commitment to other players and 

conceptually people relationships in general. At intersections like this 

one, locative games made by artists potentially transgress game scripts to 

a conceptual level, and the players are not only asking questions of how 

the game is designed, but also how their own identities are constructed 

in relation to others. What kinds of sociality do locative games by Blast 

Theory construct? 

10 In this game street players are looking for a mystical character called Uncle Roy 

receiving advice from both the game hosts and on-line players. On-line players use a 

3D model of the city, while street players have a PDA computer. 


Kate Adams suggests that what is established in Uncle Roy between the 

on-line players is a sense of a community, while they are being blocked 

from accessing the “real” that street players experience (Adams). These 

temporary shared experiences are unlikely to create senses of community. 

In fact, possibility to interact socially without a sense of community 

may be what Clay Shirky was after in his definition of social software; 

avoiding the tight-knittedness of “community”, and referring by the 

social to a much more temporary, loose, and possibly playful associations. 

Social software on the web and mobile is characterized by a casual and 

ludic mode of communication. This type of conversation is enabled by 

locative games that have open communication channels or encounters. 

However, rather than gestures of throwing a sheep or a philosopher at 

each other as one would on Facebook, in works of Blast theory the ludic 

sociality leans more towards a designed dramatic interaction. 

When gameplay stops being non-transparent and offers moments of 

disruption, it shifts emphasis from performing the game to performing 

the self. Curiously, locative games position a player into city space rather 

alone and vulnerable amongst non-players even in busy crowds. 11 This 

factor further enhances the affective experience of social contact with 

others during gameplay. 

The social, the real, and game embodiment 

Axel Bruns remarks with regard to Second Life and massively multiplayer 

online games that “the social aspects of the games rather than the 

in-game narratives have become a key factor of attraction” (Bruns 2008, 

310). Sal Humphreys discusses participation to MMORPGs as labour: 

[…] it is social and emotional investments, or affective and immaterial 

labour, which produce socio-cultural outcomes – intangible but 

11 Mixed Reality Lab has researched the user experience in Uncle Roy. One of the 

players commented on loneliness and anxiety: “My initial feelings were of slight 

paranoia because you knew you were probably being watched and certainly monitored. 

I felt very much on my own with no one to confer with or discuss how to do it, or if it 

was the right way. This was accentuated by the thought that people may be watching 

you ‘doing it wrong’. I couldn’t help but look around me to see whom else might be in 

on it”(Benford and et.al. 2006). 

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112 

nonetheless vital and economic. Thus it is not just that people invest 

affective labour into the system, it is that there are social and cultural 

outcomes from that investment that are of value too. […] increasingly 

value resides in the intangible and immaterial processes of networked 

production. Relationships have taken a central role in determining 

value” (Humphreys 2009). 

Such value in a game like Uncle Roy derives on the one hand from 

the exploratory, embodied and mobile way of experiencing a city 

and the game content, and on the other hand from the relationships, 

and intangible social (and other) connections that are collaboratively 

produced. Humphreys describes EverQuest as social interactive software 

since it fulfils the criteria of having productive players, who have “invested 

in the game and tied to it through social networks, accumulated status 

and emotional relationships with other players” (Humphreys 2009). 

Players in locative games are productive, but does the impermanence of 

their social relations imply that their affective labour has gone in vain? 

On the contrary, one could in a caricature fashion say that goal oriented 

games are Fordian, while contemporary social software are postindustrial, 

as the value shifts to the immaterial and the temporary. 

In his book Reassembling the Social Bruno Latour emphasizes the role 

of objects in the formation of the social, instead of the more common 

approach of examining human social ties in social sciences (Latour 

2007, 72–73). In the work of Blast Theory, it does seem that the mobile 

device (be it a PDA or mobile phone) acts as a catalyst, or a kind of deux 

et machina that casts participants from an everyday experience mode 

to one where they become alert to listen, to observe, and to play. In 

this sense, “the social” is embedded not only in software or the social 

configuration of game play, but also to the very material culture around 

mobile telephony. For this purpose, Actor Network Theory (ANT) offers 

some tools for at least not forgetting the role of objects, which according 

to Latour is so common: 

Much like sex during the Victorian period, objects are nowhere to be 

said and everywhere to be felt. They exist, naturally, but they are never 

given a thought, a social thought. Like humble servants, they live on 

the margins of the social doing most of the work but never allowed to 

be represented as such. There seems to be no way, no conduit, no entry 


point for them to be knitted together with the same wool as the rest of 

the social ties” (Ibid., 73). 

Latour calls this “an object-oriented sociology for object-oriented 

humans”. 12 While appreciating the humour in his style as well, it is also 

striking to note that much of cultural theory has on the contrary focused 

on the conceptual and discursive object, and paid less attention to the 

material object and social ties. Somewhat perversely, I would suggest 

that the lack of attention to material objects has enabled also much 

speculation of games and embodiment. 

Alexander Galloway suggests that games enable congruence between 

the game world felt by a player through action with his or her social 

reality. According to Galloway, what follows is a third realism after 

textual and visual paradigms; realism in action, which allows games to 

be evaluated as forms of social critique (Galloway and Thacker 2006, 

73, 83–84). I would like to contest the implied connection proposed by 

Galloway between manual action using a game controller with “the real” 

or with social accountability. 13 

If you think about a game console, say a Playstation 3; the object 

limits the movement to fingers and hands, and now with Wii to arms 

and a bit beyond. Further, the social space of play is most often in front 

of a screen, at somebody’s house, if not using a portable version. Even 

if expanding its physical sphere, console game play does not have a 

configured relationship with the wider environment. Hence questions 

12 Karin Knorr Cetina writes: “Thus, the practice turn, as I see it, moves the level of 

cultural analysis ‘down’ to the realm of material regularities without losing sight of 

symbolic regularities and the ways these are associated with the material. What the 

understanding of culture as a nexus of lifeworlds adds to this is a shift away from 

the strong association of practices with doings, routines and human activities. … 

The notion of a nexus of lifeworlds and lifeworld processes is also intended to raise 

sociological awareness of the phenomenon that epistemic environments are merged 

realms of existence and forms of life; they bring together the world of non-human 

objects with human contexts and processes.” (Knorr Cetina 1997, 364–365). 

13 Gamer’s physical actions of shoot ’em up games or procedural management of 

MMORPGs or strategy games like Civilization III as such do not stand for embodied 

action or corporeality, at least not in the Foucauldian sense where one would look 

at the subject in relation to power/knowledge. If action results in events on a screen 

(linked with databases, sometimes networked ones) game studies may still need 

tactics of interpreting representations, not only considering performativity with game 

mechanics as a link with the real. 

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of embodied activity and their relationship with the social (as based on 

the type of physical play Galloway suggested) are far exaggerated. 

Consequently, one might expect an argument that finally locative 

gaming offers a true connection with the real and the social, as players 

enter city spaces rather than interact with computer graphics on a 

screen. On the contrary, I would argue that also for a locative game 

player, social relations are a far more complex set of inter-relations than 

what the embodied urban game play itself renders available, it being 

only one of the layers of “the real”. 14 The relationship or exchange 

between participating players in locative games is an important part 

of the experience, but this sociality does not by definition offer more 

accountability towards everyday life, or “the real” than an MMORPG 

clan chat. What is different is the sense of embodiment in the juncture 

of city space and game play that each player experiences differently. 

Based on Humphreys and Bruns, and my reading of locative games, 

I would conclude that socially configured games offer social affect and 

meaning regardless of the haptic interface. What really is different 

between these sites of game play is how sociality is constructed and 

performed in front of the screen or in open street space. 

Playing in object oriented neighbourhoods 

The concept of an object oriented neighbourhood takes Actor Network 

Theory’s emphasis on material culture and objects and positions it in 

urban theory of lived place by Michel de Certeau and Pierre Mayol. It 

suggests and enables a mobilization of place, and paradoxically devalues 

14 De Souza e Silva & Sutko suggests that “hybrid reality games”, such as Can You See 

Me Now lack a primary play space because they “are played simultaneously in physical, 

digital, or represented spaces (such as a game board). […] Players are, therefore, 

distributed in physical and digital spaces, but these spaces do not completely overlap 

with other others [?]; rather, they are superimposed and connected through social 

actions (de Souza e Silva and Sutko 2009, 4). Indeed, depending on which participant’s 

point of view is at focus, CYSMN offers different experiences and one communicates 

as if across these different game modalities. Holding onto “digital spaces”, however 

means continuing the mostly Anglo-American cyberspatialization typical of the 1990s. 

It also puts in question the usefulness of “hybrid reality” as a concept if it derives from 

“virtual reality” or “cyberspace” as one end of the hybrid spectrum of the lived space as 

“the real”. 

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the relationship of location data to place, but also gives it a new, 

dynamic meaning. Pierre Mayol writes with de Certeau in The Practice 

of Everyday Life. Volume 2: Living and Cooking, bridging the concept of 

the neighbourhood with the social: 

What neighbourhood becomes is “a mastery of the social environment 

because, for the dweller, it is a known area of social space in which, 

to a greater or lesser degree, he or she knows himself or herself to be 

recognized. The neighbourhood can thus be grasped as this area of 

public space in general (anonymous, for everyone) in which little by 

little a private, particularized space insinuates itself as a result of the 

practical, everyday use of this space” (Mayol 1998, 9). 

A practice, for Mayol, “is what is decisive for the identity of a dweller 

or a group insofar as this identity allows him or her to take up a position 

in the network of social relations inscribed in the environment” (Ibid.). 

Is neighbourhood then a more flexible term than community? By object 

oriented neighbourhood I refer to a social and material process, where 

the material city space with its objects becomes signified, even if for 

a fleeting moment, through the media and communication objects 

that are used within it. This approach considers place not to be rooted 

in a particular street corner necessarily, but rather dynamically with a 

social group that dwells or roams in and through locations, which shift 

according to use of mobile and locative devices, software, and networks. 

In a locative game, different props are added to a game board, and by 

the end of the game, each player can tell a story of the game and city 

experience by relating with different sequences, objects, and people they 

encountered. In this act of signification, following Mayol, a little private 

and particularized space is inscribed within the anonymous space; and 

shared signification (play) renders it a sense of a neighbourhood. 15 

According to Adriana de Souza e Silva public spaces have become 

hybrid through mobile telephony, merging “the physical and the digital 

in a social environment created by the mobility of users connected via 

15 This can be a seed for a more radical thought; a dynamic sense of place does not 

require an ownership of place, just a sense of signification, which leaves a physical 

site open for multiple neighbourhoods that do not contradict each other by rights of 

dwelling. This is a kind of a semantic, networked relationship with place that is unable 

to form bordered territories. 

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mobile technology devices” (de Souza e Silva 2006, 19, 30). 16 Like 

with earlier paradigms of computing, mobile computing discourse also 

has emphasized another mode of interface transparency, ubiquitous 

computing, which is besides transparent, also location independent 

(Ibid., 25). Locative (games) practices mobilize the neighbourhood 

by enabling a more transient, fluid movement within public space, yet 

inscribing meaning onto sites and thus creating temporary senses of 

neighbourhood and place. 17 In this sense, when used and played with, 

ubiquitous media uses can be context and place related. 

In Blast Theory’s Uncle Roy, Rider Spoke 18 and Ulrike and Eamon 

Compliant 19 the material design of the work is fundamentally important 

16 Adriana de Souza e Silva and Daniel M. Sutko use the term locative social networks 

(LMSN) that allow “for the creation of a dynamic relationship between people/players 

and the spaces that they inhabit (both physical and digital)” (de Souza e Silva and 

Sutko 2009, 6). 

17 Miwon Kwon remarks, “while site-specific art once defied commodification by 

insisting on immobility, it now seems to espouse fluid mobility and nomadism for the 

same purpose” (Kwon 2002, 31). Kwon questions this move by asking, whether this 

nomadic principle is bowing to capitalist expansion, or does it constitute a form of 

“resistance to the ideological establishment of art” (Ibid.). Here one can ask the same 

question, yet re-formulated as: do locative games merely expand the consumption 

of mobile phones and devices, or do they offer also new modes of experience? If 

successful, do these works push site specificity away and introduce a more fluid 

situation specificity? 

18 In Rider Spoke by Blast Theory, participants are invited for a bike ride in a city. 

Equipped with a WiFi network ID sniffing Nokia tablet, participants are invited to 

cycle onwards and look for places to hide (Blast Theory 2007). Originally launched 

at the Barbican Centre in 2007, I tried it in a demo mode during the AND Festival 

hosted by FACT, Liverpool in 2009. In a new version, local artists had worked with 

the project to design questions; such as if one can remember a particular smell and 

look up the place and record a commentary. Or whether there is a public building 

that one would be sad to see disappear. At each instance, you stop, gather your breath 

and record a message. In the evening, Blast Theory team goes through the messages 

and uploads interesting entries to the platform. Following participants are not able 

to record into the same locations, but can listen to messages co-authored by others. 

The sociality in this work is about asynchronous peer-to-peer sharing. It hardly has 

a game structure, except that you are given tasks, you fulfil them and reach an end. 

Rider Spoke made me highly aware of how the Nokia tablet itself, its presence altering 

a bicycle ride was taking a lot of my attention. It felt like an evocative object that itself 

was the reason, of course with the software and project scenario inbuilt, to be doing 

what I was doing. 

19 http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/bt/work_ulrikeandeamoncompliant.html 

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Rider Spoke at the AND Festival, FACT, Liverpool 2009. Image copyright Tapio 

Mäkelä. 

for the player experience. Starting from the mobile phone or PDA to 

the different props chosen to be part of the game play, objects become 

leitmotifs (to use a classic term from narratology), and give meaning to 

the experience of the game and the location it is staged in. For example, 

in Rider Spoke the exploration of the city is done on a bicycle with a 

WiFi tablet on the cross bar. What you hear on the headset is merged 

with your physical experience of daring to drive in traffic, looking 

for sites in the city you feel special about. Or in Ulrike and Eamon 

Compliant, first set on streets of Venice, the physical sites that were 

used in a mobile phone narrative taking you along the streets added an 

definite affective tone to the story, a kind of alienation. As I said before, 

locations in these works feel more like material sites with a particular 

affect rather than as places relating with the site’s history or everyday life. 

Blast Theory’s work brings people to different parts of the city and offers 

an alternative experience of that location, yet that experience is not place 

117


specific before the game is performed. 20 Locative games by Blast Theory 

offer a transitory urban spatial and material experience that is played in 

an object oriented neighbourhood. 

Bruno Latour suggests that in ANT social is “the name of a movement, 

a displacement, a transformation, a translation, an enrolment” (Latour 

2007, 64). This well describes the sense of mobility and sociality of copresence 

using mobile devices, which lack capabilities to create more 

permanent representations of the self within the medium. Latour further 

defines the social as: 

118 

“an association between entities which are in no way recognizable as 

being social in the ordinary manner, except during the brief moment 

when they are reshuffled together. … Thus, social, for ANT, is the name 

of a type of momentary association which is characterized by the way it 

gathers together into new shapes.” (Latour 2007, 65) 

When a player participates into and MMORPG game, or a chat 

room, s/he performs as well as follows others perform via their on-line 

characters or nick names, making considerable investments as affective 

labour to configure the characters. Similarly, I argue, in location based 

participatory works the participants become characters, and their 

experience is played out through the sensation of being a character in 

relation to other players as much as being a participant, an observer, 

a lurker, or what have you. The locative player in most cases would 

not look like a 9-foot monster or a 4-foot dwarf, yet s/he is equipped 

noticeably with a mobile device, through which s/he performs and thus 

stands out in the crowd. 

It is in this real-time performativity in which the social as a momentary 

association (Latour) takes place, and the newly formed impressions 

of others (and self performed to others) are the new social shapes that 

continuously emerge – with technologies used, and in relation to the 

20 Simon Pope discusses Locative arts through Michel de Certeau: “It is the possibility 

that meaning can be produced at a tactical level, even when a strategic position is 

denied, that is key. In the case of an imposed structure of spaces – a mathematical 

description of all possible spaces – it appears that locative media operates at this level of 

resistance” (Pope 2005). Pope is reminded of Marc Augé’s ‘proliferation of spaces’ and 

addresses “the compulsion for locative media projects to acknowledge or even invent 

these spaces” (Pope 2005). 


physical environment. Web based social media such as Facebook offer a 

variety of tools to construct anonymity as well as representations of self, 

and self networked and playing with associated others. Social mobile 

software, locative games included at this stage are mostly personal 

yet almost purely about momentary association and temporary social 

configuration. 21 What does this performative labour of momentary 

associations become once it is always soon over? Could it be addressed 

as a kind of “residue of the mobile self”, traces that in a way mark your 

mobility if not location, and your ability to build more “mobile and 

affective social capital”? 

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21 Blast Theory’s combination of a web interface with street play make a rare exception 

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most mobile social applications any sense of permanence is created through uploading 

from mobiles to the web, be it mob logs, Twitter or Jaiku. 

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to Produsage. New York: Peter Lang. 

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Arceneaux. New York: Peter Lang. 

de Souza e Silva, Adriana, and Daniel M. Sutko (2009). Merging Digital and 

Urban Playspaces. An Introduction to the Field. In Digital Cityscapes: Merging 

digital and urban playspaces, edited by A. De Souza e Silva and D. M. Sutko. 

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New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, edited by N. Wardrip-Fruin and 

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121

Jukka-Pekka Puro 

Turning Inside: 

Towards a Phenomenology of Biological Media 

122 123 

Preface 

This paper is based on the assumption that the perpetual expansion of 

communication and media technologies having emerged during the 

previous century cannot be cumulative ad infinitum. The most recent 

technological innovations imply that some tentative concepts invented in 

the beginning of the 2000s, such as Eugene Thacker’s biomedia or Mauri 

Ylä-Kotola’s sensomotoric media, may have succeeded to be predictive. 

The scenario that media technology is directing towards a new kind of 

endeavour is becoming accurate. This potential endeavour, labeled here 

as “turning inside”, is not only a new technological path. It implies that 

there is also a need for salient mediatheoretical reconceptualizations. 

In this paper, I will shortly examine how phenomenology, as it has 

been approached in communication studies, could be conceived as 

biomediaphenomenology. 

The expansion of communication 

Communication, as it has been portrayed in communications models 

since Claude Shannon’s mathematical theory, is stoutly understood as a 

fundamentally progressive, expansive and emergent phenomenon. Thus, 

communication is not just sending and receiving messages or getting 

feedback, as Shannon and Weaver’s model would imply, but expanding 

something that was temporally and spatially located to one specific time 

and place. In this sense, the idea of communication is not only, as it has 

been conceived in Latin communicare, to share or make common, but 

to extend and expand. This argument, emphasized especially by North-


American progressivist media researchers, 1 points out that extension and 

expansion should not be understood only as the widening variety of new 

technologies, but as a deepening and widening public awareness and 

strengthened shared values. 2 

There are several models in which the idea of expansion has been 

illustrated. In fact, expansion is the core of communication in such 

multidimensional models as Barnlund’s (1970) Transactional model 

or, even in a more illustrative manner, in Ruesch and Bateson’s (1951) 

Functional model. According to Ruesch and Bateson (1951/2006), 

communication functions at four levels from intrapersonal and 

interpersonal levels to groups and, eventually, to cultural level. As can 

124 

Figure 1: 

Ruesch and 

Bateson’s (1951) 

Functional 

model of 

communication. 

1 Progressivist media criticism has been enhanced during last years particularly by 

Media Matters for America, launched in 2004. See http://mediamatters.org/ 

2 North-American progressivism, it’s history, present state and goals are vividly 

displayed in Edwin Rutsch’s documentary, see http://www.progressivespirit.com/ 

See also http://www.progressiveliving.org/ 

TURNING INSIDE 

be seen in Figure 1, each level consists evaluating, sending, receiving and 

channeling. 

Intellectually speaking, as Mortensen (1972) has put it, the most 

interesting communication model describing expansion is Dance’s 

(1967) Helix or Helical Model. As Dance himself have explicated, it 

implies that communication is accumulative, progressive, continuous, 

and, fundamentally, expansive. As some critics have – ironically – 

pointed out, it does not, in fact, illustrate anything else than just that. 

The argument of the helical model – that communication is an evolving, 

progressive and expansive process – becomes, however, very clear. 

Model as a map of development 

Figure 2: 

Dance’s (1967) 

Helical model of 

communication. 

Unlike in the 1970s and 1980s, recent textbooks on communication 

or media studies are not based on modeling. Most classic models – in 

addition to previous models, such as, for instance, Westley and MacLean 

(1957) or Becker (1968) – are either excessively trivial or unrefined 

when considering the state of media landscape of the 2010s. Dance’s 

model, however, seems to have certain strengths. Despite of the irony, 

it offers possibilities, following Chapanis’ (1961) argument, to tentative 

“sophisticated play”. 

The main question to be raised here, however, is the question of 

the unending growth. It is relatively easy to conclude that Dance’s 

model reflects the ideas of progressivism typical to the 1960s following, 

125


in particular, Dewey’s and Park’s notions of communication theory 

(Rodgers 1982; Pietilä 2005). The model represents naive optimism, 

projecting Dewey’s remarks on the great community. In terms of Chapanis’ 

sophisticated play, however, it can be also claimed that seminal books 

such as McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) or Mead’s notions on 

symbolic interactionism, are affecting the model. The model gathers all 

kinds of communicative growth, no matter whether the growth is social, 

technological or symbolic in nature. 

The Weltanschaung of the helical model has been criticized widely. 

Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse argued already in the 1950s that 

progress is nothing but a pure illusion – the “progress” is industrial and 

mass cultural, and, unfortunately, rarely nothing more than that. This 

Frankfurtian view affected on various later commentaries. Raymond 

Williams, among others British neomarxists, emphasized that the top of 

the helix is, in fact, an ideological arena in which “various class views are 

fought out” (Gurevitch et al 1982, 1). French post-structuralists, such 

as Roland Barthes and, in particular, Jean Baudrillard (1988), concluded 

that the growth of the media was leading to “the death of the real”. In 

that sense, the top of the helix implies merely to hyper reality or media 

bias. 

The tension between progressivism – including neo-progressivism – 

and its critics is as essential in the 2010s as it was during the previous 

decades (see Silcock 1999). The idea of progression as it has been 

approached in various new media research programs (see for example 

Lievrouw 2001), and those arguments that criticize the development in 

terms of the emptiness of the progress, can be easily located to the polarity 

between the great community and Baudrillard’s Exstasy of communication. 

The spectrum of media technologies has emerged, but the question of 

the nature of progression and emergence remains. 

Paradigms of technology 

Since McLuhan, the most revolutionary turn in media technology is 

– obviously – the internet and, interconnectively, the development of 

computing. If the development of media technology from the 1920s 

to 1990s is located into the classic S-curve as formulated by Everett 

126 


Rogers (1986; 2003) and his successors, between the 2000s and 2010s 

the development of the media technology has only accelerated and, 

at least in terms of digital inventions, the progressivist assumption on 

perpetual growth seems somewhat plausible. As it has been seen in 

the development of all technologies – i.e. including others than media 

technology – described by S-curves, the technological progress follows 

certain stages from early phases to obsolescence. Undoubtedly, media 

technology is still, after decades of accelerating rate of development, in 

its emergent phase: new technologies arise before the existing ones pass 

away. 

If Rogers and his colleagues are right in their assumptions on the 

development of technology, the emergence and progress will, sooner or 

later, slow down. Or, as it has been pointed out by some of the researches 

focusing on the technological lifecycle (Lehman-Wilzig & Cohen- 

Avigdor 2004), the progress will turn towards new paradigms. Following 

the very basic distinctions of the Toronto school media ecology (Strate 

2006), there are at least three paradigm shifts to be distinguished: the 

first from spoken to written communication, the second describing 

the turn from local to global broadcasting, and, finally, the turn from 

analogical to digital media. Sooner or later, following the footsteps of 

Rogers, there will be a turn from the present digital technologies towards 

something revolutionary. 

At the moment, there are at least three paths of development that are, 

undoubtedly, consequential in foreshadowing the future of digital media. 

The development of user interfaces, operating systems and network 

technology are connected together at various levels, but, on the other 

hand, they seem to evolve independently – and they seem to point to the 

same direction. The main argument in this paper is to articulate what 

this direction – the “turning inside”, as it is called later – could mean as 

a paradigmatic change in the development of media technology. 

The development of user interfaces 

As far as mainstream everyday computer and media technologies 

are concerned, most of the PC and Mac user interfaces are currently 

graphical user interfaces (GUI), getting input via keyboard and mouse. 

127


In mobile technology, the situation is more diverse. Symbian interface, 

known as S60, has been challenged by Android and Iphone interfaces 

and, in particular, by touch screen technology. 3 Touch screen is clearly a 

monumentous step in the continuum of development of user interfaces 

from Xerox PARC via Macintosh to Microsoft Windows 95 and further 

to the latest OS- and PC user interfaces. 

There are, however, at least six other directions of user interfaces that 

are clearly and intensively progressive. The applications of (1) gesture 

recognition have developed rapidly since the 1990s, when first pilot 

applications were born (Wu & Huang 1999). The augmented reality 

-based applications (2) have been under constant development since 

Azuma’s (1997) widely recognized groundings. Finally (3), telepresence, 

as it has been conceptualized in the recent book by Bracken and Skalski 

(2010), is opening new insights to the entire ideology of the traditional 

GUI. Different, but equally important applications have been carried 

out under (4) neural impulse actuator, (5) brain-computer interface and 

(6) head and eye tracking -studies. 

In common to all these new wave user interfaces is the notion that 

human-computer interaction is intimately connected to the user’s 

sensomotoric system. This “sensomotoric media”, as Ylä-Kotola 4 calls it, 

is not “used” as we tend to use operating systems via GUI today. Instead, 

as the user is more tightly connected to the system, the system enfolds 

the user. That is, the system is experienced as a more open and reactive 

entity instead of simply technical components. 

From Unix philosophy to Linux enlightenment 

As Mike Gancarz (1995, 2003) has pointed out, the structural 

development of operating systems is two-fold. First, the very fundamental 

cornerstone for developing new operating systems is the idea of Unix 

philosophy. The rules of Unix philosophy, as summarized by Raymond 

(2003), articulate the cultural and social norms of computing as they 

3 More about mobile user interfaces, see http://llt.msu.edu/vol12num3/emerging.pdf 

4 http://www.eisis.org/docs/myk_four_stages_of_new_media.pdf 

128 


have been emerging during the last decades. The fundamental rules are 

the following: 

·Rule of Modularity: Write simple parts connected by clean 

interfaces. 

·Rule of Clarity: Clarity is better than cleverness. 

·Rule of Composition: Design programs to be connected to other 

programs. 

·Rule of Separation: Separate policy from mechanism; separate 

interfaces from engines. 

·Rule of Simplicity: Design for simplicity; add complexity only 

where you must. 

·Rule of Transparency: Design for visibility to make inspection and 

debugging easier. 

·Rule of Robustness: Robustness is the child of transparency and 

simplicity. 

·Rule of Representation: Fold knowledge into data so program logic 

can be stupid and robust. 

·Rule of Least Surprise: In interface design, always do the least 

surprising thing. 

·Rule of Silence: When a program has nothing surprising to say, it 

should say nothing. 

·Rule of Repair: When you must fail, fail noisily and as soon as 

possible. 

·Rule of Diversity: Distrust all claims for “one true way”. 

·Rule of Extensibility: Design for the future, because it will be here 

sooner than you think. 

The Unix philosophy and its rules are, however, in a turning point. 

As Gancarz (2003) notes, the idea of open source systems, and Linux, 

in particular, has launched a new programming philosophy. The shift 

from Unix to such systems as Linux, is far from technical. Welsh and his 

colleagues (2004, ix), for example, describe Linux as “a rebellion against 

129


commercial operating systems” and continue by stating that instead of 

an actual system, Linux is a manner of “reaching enlightenment”. 

Enlightenment or not, the overall philosophy of computing and 

operating systems, as conceptualized by Luciano Floridi (1999), has 

changed radically. Instead of “layman users” and “professional coders”, 

there are more and more “committed participants”. In addition to 

Linux the open-source movement and its achievements such as Apache 5 

or PHP 6 , have already demonstrated how “rebel code” system design 

and system architecture are composed as communal tasks (see Moody 

2001). 

WANs and BANs 

Following the current terminology, the network technology can be 

divided into main categories as follows: 

130 

WAN = Wide Area Network 

CAN/MAN = Campus or Metropolitan Area Network 

LAN = Local Area Network 

PAN = Personal Area Network 

These main categories contain various subcategories, such as wireless 

LAN, known as WLAN, which is a modification of LAN -technology. 

Likewise, PAN can be divided into various subcategories, but, in 

practice, the development during the recent years has been dominated 

by one specific solution: Bluetooth. In network technology, the overall 

direction of new innovations is to be seen clearly. During the previous 

decades, the development has been immense in all categories mentioned 

above. At the moment, however, there is a controversy familiar from lifecycle 

research. The natural limits of WANs and MANs, in particular, 

are at hand. Web 2.0, for example, may change various policies, rules 

and standards of information sharing 7 , but the development of actual 

5 http://www.apache.org/ 

6 http://www.php.net/ 

7 see http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1008839&download= 

yes%22 


network technology, at least in terms of constant progression, will slow 

down – inevitably. 

That is not to say that the progress would, self-evidently, be in 

a regression or deadlock. Instead, as is to be seen in other media 

technologies, the progress will turn towards new possibilities. The latest 

concept and the most recent field of study have been labeled as BAN, i.e. 

Body Area Network. Instead of being directed outwards towards larger 

groups, communities, audiences or participants, the network technology 

seems to be turning inwards from PAN technology to the next logical 

step, from personal level to body level. 

Body area network, as it has been described for example by Chen 

and colleagues (2010), contains of at least three different tiers. Body 

sensors that monitor, for example, EEG, ECG and EMG, body motions 

and temperature, or blood pressure, are tied together at intra-ban 

communication. The second level contains of inter-ban communication, 

and the third is actually just a routing access to the internet. The system 

is illustrated in Figure 3. 

Figure 3: Body area network described by Chen et al (2010). 

131


The turning inside 

All three paths of media technology are directing to the same point: 

instead of broadcasting, the development is aimed at sharp-edged 

narrowcasting (see Jenkins 2006, 5), personalcasting (Hermann 2002) 

or, in fact, “intracasting”. Open code system designers are, analogically, 

users and designers at the same time. User interfaces are blurring the 

technical borderlines between the user and the system. Network 

technology from WANs to BANs implies that the network is not only 

coming closer, it is penetrating into our bodies. Users are, literally, not 

only part of the network, they are a network. 

This kind of development raises both practical and epistemological 

questions that are at the very heart of media studies. The first notion, 

obviously, is the realization that technical possibility does not imply 

social approval. Open code operating systems are not open to everyone 

– just those, who are committed to programming. Furthermore, all 

new technologies from user interfaces to networks are dependent on 

communal and personal investments. That is, the development of BANs, 

for example, will be dependent on intellectual, social and economical 

equity. 

The emergence of intracasting is, however, definitely occurring. It 

may face new kind of technological resistance, as the technology is so 

tightly intertwined to personal territory. On the other hand, the idea 

of intimate media technology opens up a new page in the current 

media usage. Systems and programs do not represent machinery, but 

a new possibility to “be” in the internet, or to be connected into the 

system. In that sense, the shift from the present media landscape towards 

narrow-, personal- or intracasting is, primarily, a matter of variety of new 

experiences and interpretations on media technology. 

Eugene Thacker has approached the interconnection between 

biological body and media technology, in particular. Biomedia, as 

Thacker has labeled the domain, opens up a question of biological 

media. As Thacker (2004) points out, for example, the structures and 

architectures of current system design are disclosing biological micro- 

and macrostructures (such as DNA or central nervous system) and, from 

132 


biotechnological perspective, vice versa. 8 Thacker’s seminal book was 

published in 2004, and since that several new innovations stemming from 

nano-, bio- and media technologies have appeared. Such innovations 

as iPill 9 , for example, seem to confirm that Thacker’s assumptions are 

noteworthy. 

The notion that the development on media technology is turning 

inside, is, on the other hand, far more than just technological speculation. 

The question should not be, whether Thacker’s ideas on biomedia should 

be taken seriously or not, but to consider, how these new paradigms, 

driven by technological interests, should be explored within human and 

social sciences. One of the most enlightening openings focusing on that 

question has been put forward by Paul Dourish. Dourish’s Where the 

Action Is (2004) offers an inspiring exemplar on the phenomenology 

of the digital social life. 10 Dourish leads to ask, for example, what does 

it mean to be – phenomenologically speaking – in the system? What is 

the Lebenszusammenhang of biomedia? During the times of Brentano, 

Husserl and other founders of phenomenology, the biological dimension 

of human being was something inescapable. Heidegger’s “Being-in-the- 

World” – Dasein – was based on the fact that our Being is always ushered 

by our biological appearance. 

On that basis, mediaphenomenology, as it has been constituted by 

Tomasulo (1990) and developed, for example, by Konitzer (1998), is facing 

a profound reconceptualization. The idea of “biomediaphenomenology”, 

as it can be called – regardless of such as mouthful expression – is to 

approach media theory from three angles mentioned above. Following 

Heidegger’s original terms, the first task is to consider “the natural 

conception of the world” as it is understood in the current media 

environment. As far I can see, the real task, however, is to analyze how 

the most fundamental dimensions of Being-in-the-World – Being-With, 

Being-One’s-Self and Being-in as such – can be interpreted in the new 

kind of biomediated everydayness. 

8 One of the best known examples is DNA computing. See http://www.alexpetty. 

com/2010/09/11/vortex-math-based-computing/ 

9 “iPill” was Phillips’ trademark until November 2010. The new trademark is 

“IntelliCap”. See http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/21817/ 

10 See also http://www.dourish.com/embodied/ 

133


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