How to identify and apprehend a configuration of film? How to deploy and put into practice this idea of configurations of film in scholarly work? Benoît Turquety’s “Medium, Format, Configuration: The Displacements of Film” is an important contribution to understanding these questions.

Medium, Format, Configuration

The Displacements of Film

In contrast with media constructed as vast, ontologically homogeneous, non-localized systems, formats show material networks of interoperability and exclusions, inscribed in local specificities, and involving precise conditions for the circulation of images and sounds. Formats, institutionalized as standards, frame the “technical networks” defined by Gilbert Simondon, that unfold technical objects into economically and politically structured webs that cover the world. Media are always formatted and, as such, do not flow: they are displaced.

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Publishing Year
2019
Language
English
Pages
54
Series
Downloads
Cover
License
CC BY-SA 4.0
ISBNs
978-3-95796-004-7 (PDF)
DOI
10.14619/0047
Available as
PDF

The Author

Benoît Turquety is Associate Professor at the University of Lausanne, director of the SNF research project on Bolex and amateur cinema and of the EPIMETE/digital media epistemology research axis. He is a founding member of the Material Archival Studies Network and part of the Dispositives research group, of the Network for Experimental Media Archaeology, as well as the Technology and the Humanities project. He is the author of Inventing Cinema : Machines, Gestures and Media History (Amsterdam University Press, 2019). Focusing on early substandard film production, African video, or experimental poetry, his recent research aims to re-establish digital media as embedded material cultures, articulating machines, techniques, images, and sounds, modes of circulation and transmission, and networks of concepts.

Benoît Turquety's Author Profile

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