Temporal Explorations in Cosmic Consciousness: Intra-Agential Entanglements and the Neuro-Image

Patricia Pisters

doi:10.5130/csr.v21i2.4323

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Published: Nov 25, 2015

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5130/csr.v21i2.4323

Keywords:

embodied brain, Deleuze, neuro-image, The Fountain, entanglements, agential-realism, Barad, Gravity

Patricia Pisters

University of Amsterdam

Abstract

When Deleuze in the 1980s argued that ‘the brain is the screen’ he introduced the concepts of movement-image and time-image, two different modes of cinema with particular ontological and aesthetic characteristics. Contemporary cinema, however, has moved into yet another aesthetic mode, which I have proposed to call the neuro-image. One of the characteristics of the neuro-image is that we no longer follow the movements and actions of characters in a certain space (as in the movement-image), nor see the world coloured through their eyes (as in the time-image), but we (often quite literally) experience brain worlds more directly, from within mental landscapes. In this essay I will investigate in which ways these brain worlds aesthetically express an embodied and embedded brain, addressing the new materialist dimensions of the neuro-image in a journey of cosmic cinema and, to speak with Barad, ‘meeting the universe halfway.’

Issue

Vol 21 No 2 (2015): New Materialisms

Section

New Materialisms: Movement, Aesthetics, Ontology (Peer Reviewed)

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Author Biography

Patricia Pisters, University of Amsterdam

Patricia Pisters is professor of film studies at the Department of Media Studies of the University of Amsterdam and director of the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA). She is one of the founding editors of Necsus: European Journal of Media Studies. She is programme director of the research group Neuraesthetics and Neurocultures and co-director (with Josef Fruchtl) of the research group Film and Philosophy. Publications include The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory (Stanford University Press, 2003) and Mind the Screen (ed. with Jaap Kooijman and Wanda Strauven, Amsterdam University Press, 2008). Her latest book is The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture (Stanford University Press, 2012). See for articles, her blog and other information also www.patriciapisters.com .

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Patricia Pisters, University of Amsterdam