EnterFrame: Cage, Deleuze and Macromedia Director - multimedia authoring software - Evaluation

Afterimage, July-August, 2002 by David Goldberg

Call the totally-managed digital frame "Lucasian," after George. If driven by an error-correcting decoding system, no pixel is on the screen by accident, and the image appears exactly as it was Intended. With Director, the power to exploit and abuse the reality effect of the digital frame can be exercised at an incredibly intimate and detailed level, An author can combine just about any cinematic trick, trope or cliche with the advantages of the Lucasian frame and interactivity. Here, Director's capabilities and its dominant and latent metaphors demonstrate how Deleuze's model for cinematic analysis survives the leap from film to digital media and remains useful. Director's stage, as conceptually open as unexposed film, becomes the site for creating what Deleuze calls "movement-images:" cinematic representations of cause and effect, predictable sequences of images, and their rational connection; and "time-images:" cinematic images that do not describe or represent time through motion, but present time in the space between two disconnected audio/visual images. (3)

Interactive media is comprised almost exclusively of movement-images, as the fundamental purpose of the GUI is to generate and sustain them. Movement-images can be found everywhere in the computing experience, from the button labeled "click here to buy," to the various instances of progress bars filling up, to the mastery of a video game's every trick and nuance. However, the computing experience does have its time-images. Though a system or scripting error message would qualify as a movement-image, the interactive time-image arises from system failures. Malfunctioning windows, empty dialog boxes, spastic cursors and sudden video memory purges are all time-images that disrupt our previously rational linkages between one interface event and the next. Because authoring tools are subsets of the GUI, they are capable of presenting both movement-and time-Images; for the same reason, the latter type of image is much more evasive than the former. Though the interactive time-image is about time, it is not necessarily about waiting for something to happen, but more about the suspense created while negotiating the unexpected. What new media needs are algorithms for generating suspense, so as to open up room for thought not at the point of the interactive event's triggering or resolution.

In Director, authoring a pause to allow the user to make a decision does not generate suspense, neither does the use of empty gestures such as dissolve, wipe or push transitions. But to demonstrate how deeply-embedded the movement-Image is In Director's logic there is perhaps no better example than the programs "in-betweening" function. When "tweening" an author sets the starting and ending values of a graphic's property such as position, rotation, scaling or transparency, and has Director automatically generate the intermediate stages. Deleuze claimed that when humans perceive cinema they do so through "sensory-motor schemata," which literally fill in our visual, sonic, intellectual and emotional expectations. They are cliches tightly linked to movement-images and rooted in pre-World War II cinema. These tweened narratives and sequences gave way to chaos, juxtaposition and immobility in a frame that generated thought over time instead of representing time through ordered, predictable motion. This is Deleuze' s time-image, born of the post-war physical and psychological disruption of cities literally disappearing in flashes of light and genocide expressed through industrial rationality. In rough terms, the interactive time-image may be associated with confusion, but that is only because whatever is unfolding before the user does not fit their expectations. Perhaps the feeling of learning (not the structuring of knowledge) is more appropriate, assuming that such a feeling can be experienced each time the user encounters the presentation.