writing with a camera

Critical Lexicon for Direct Theory and Moving-Image Practice

Thrown together by David Tamés, last updated on March 2, 2026, this is a work-in-progress, please share your suggestions and corrections using my Contact Form, or email me directly if you are a colleague or student in my course.

Overview

This document defines key terms and concepts based on the theoretical framework established in Edward T. Small’s book Direct Theory,1 in which he argues that experimental moving-image works constitute a form of theorizing enacted through the medium itself, rather than about it.

Terms are clustered into four broad categories: Material (medium, materiality, technology); Structures (form, content, semiotic operations); Genres (major genres and sub-genres); and Theoretical Frameworks (some of the intellectual traditions that informs Direct Theory).

Materiality

Materiality refers to the physical, chemical, electronic, or computational substance of a medium and the ways that substance manifests in perceptual experience. The materiality of film includes the cellulose acetate or polyester base, the light-sensitive emulsion, the sprocket holes, the image grain structure, etc. The materiality of analog video includes the electromagnetic signal, scan lines, the phosphor glow of a CRT display, etc. The materiality of digital video includes pixel grids, compression artifacts, color-space mathematics, code, etc. The Direct Theory framework treats materiality as an expressive resource and acknowledges that experimental practice often foregrounds the medium itself, making visible what conventional cinema renders transparent, and that shifts in technology (for example, the transition from optical printing to digital compositing) reshape the affordances of the medium and therefore what kinds of visual thinking are possible.

Analog Video

With analog video, images are encoded as a continuously variable electrical signal, traditionally recorded on magnetic tape and displayed on CRT displays. It is materiality differs fundamentally from film: where film consists of discrete photochemical frames advanced by a mechanical intermittent movement, analog video has no frames in the physical sense. The image is formed by the continuous sweep of an electron beam modulating voltage across a phosphor screen, line by line, field by field. This signal-based ontology gives analog video a distinct set of material properties and, consequently, a distinct domain for experimental investigation. Analog video devices include synthesizers, colorizers, keyers, processing amplifiers, scan processors, etc. These operate on continuously variable voltage in contrast to discrete photographic frames of film, and are characterized by their real-time responsiveness, their capacity for feedback and emergent behavior, and their fundamentally different relationship to the image than either photochemical or computational processes. Within Direct Theory, the use of analog electronics constitutes theoretical investigation of the electronic signal as an expressive medium. Einstine (Eric Siegel, 1968, 5:22, [view excerpt]https://www.vdb.org/titles/einstine)) is an early analog video synthesis portrait of Albert Einstein. Siegel built his own color video synthesizer and used it to transform a black-and-white photograph into pulsating, chromatically shifting electronic image, the voltage fluctuations of the synthesizer producing a portrait pulsating with the rhythms of the circuit itself. The photographic portrait remains recognizable, but is pure electronic signal, the viewer sees voltage made luminous, the behavior of the circuit disclosed as the image’s animating force.

Analog Video Electronics

The specific circuits, electronic systems, and signal-processing tools associated with the production and manipulation of video. This term emphasizes that video is fundamentally an electronic medium, in other words, video images are composed of electronic signals and that the manipulation of these signals (through video synthesizers, processing amplifiers, time-base correctors, compositing devices, mixers, etc.) that constitutes a mode of creative practice that is distinct in comparison to digital video, computational media, and traditional photo-mechanical film. Experimental video artists working with videographic electronics often highlight the distinct material qualities of video in their artistic investigations, for example, Videograms (Gary Hill, 1980-81, view on Vimeo), created with a Rutt/Etra Scan Processor, 2 responds to spoken language and makes the video signal sculptural.

Digital Video

The moving-image medium in which visual information is encoded as discrete numerical values (binary data) sampled at defined intervals in both space (pixels) and time (frames per second). The materiality of digital video is characterized by quantization, compression algorithms, color-space mathematics, non-linear editing, computational processing, and transcoding. In contrast to film, digital video has no photochemical basis. In contrast to analog video, digital video signal are not continuously variable but discretely sampled and stored as data. In a Direct Theory framework, digital video invites experimental practices that theorize computation itself, including datamoshing, glitch art, algorithmic generation, and code-based manipulation, etc., extending the tradition of medium-specific investigation into the domain of software and data structures.

Computational Media

Computational media fundamentally ruptures the chain of inscription that is characteristic of film, analog video, and digital video. A digital camera samples continuous light into discrete numerical values, then transforms those values using a cascade of mathematical transformations like demosaicing, compression, motion estimation, entropy coding, etc. to produce an encoded mathematical model that must be decoded and reconstructed by an algorithm before it becomes a perceptible image. The image does not exist until computation brings it into being. When an H.264 decoder plays back a P-frame, it is predicting what the frame should look like by applying motion vectors to previous pixel data, then correcting the prediction with residual data. This is very different from reproducing something that was recorded like antecedent media forms that function like a vessel that carries a pre-formed message. Computational media is an active, dynamic, process-oriented construction of the message. This is why datamoshing is theoretically potent: when you delete an I-frame, the decoder continues constructing images from mismatched data, and what you see in the form of the melting, the pixel bloom, among other artifacts, is the constructive process itself made visible, the medium’s active interpretation revealed as the content of the work. Computation is the medium and data is the material.

Digital Specificity

Digital specificity is an extension of medium specificity to computational media. It refers to characteristics that distinguish it from their analog predecessors, for example, discrete sampling, algorithmic processing, lossless copying, nonlinear access, transcoding, and parametric manipulation. In a Direct Theory context, digital specificity becomes the ground for new forms of experimental practice. Works that theorize the nature of computation, data, and code through the moving image, just as structural filmmakers once theorized photo-mechanical film and projection.

Film

Film, in the material sense, consists of a transparent strip of cellulose acetate or polyester coated with photosensitive emulsion, perforated along its edges to facilitate advancement through the ensemble of mechanical, optical, and photochemical apparatus designed to capture, process, and display film-based moving images. Traditional film includes in four broad categories: (1) the film material; (2) camera mechanisms (intermittent pull-down movement, rotating variable-angle shutter, frame rate, lens system); (3) laboratory processes (developing, printing, optical effects); and (4) projection devices (light source, intermittent movement, screen). This collection of technologies, standards, processes, and conventions are rooted in the material properties of the medium: grain, emulsion formulation, film base composition, photochemical indexicality, discrete frame structure, and mechanical intermittent movement. In the context of Direct Theory this entire system is significant because experimental filmmakers have consistently made it a subject of investigation. Len Lye scratched directly into the celluloid in Free Radicals (1958), theorizing the strip itself. Paul Sharits exploited the flicker of the projector shutter in T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (1968), theorizing the temporal mechanism of display. in Boundaries of Consumption (2012) Rosa Barba used projection as a sculptural object and cinematic subject theorizing the apparatus that makes the image visible. In these works, the technology is a system whose operations can be theorized through creative practice.

Medium

A medium is the material and technological support through which a moving image work is produced, distributed, and experienced. A medium is never a neutral container for content; it is an active participant in meaning-making. Following the tradition of medium-specific inquiry that runs from Clement Greenberg through Marshall McLuhan, the properties of a given medium (e.g., grain, temporality, modes of inscription) are themselves expressive resources. The experimental artist who foregrounds the medium engages in Direct Theory precisely because the medium’s operations are the theoretical statements.

Medium Specificity

Medium specificity is the principle that each medium possesses unique material and formal properties that distinguish it from all other media, and that the most rigorous or authentic works within a medium are those that explore and exploit these distinctive properties. Medium specificity is essential to understanding why experimental film/video constitutes Direct Theory. The type of questions that experimental moving image artists investigate includes questions like “what can the moving image do that other forms can’t,” or “how does analog video function differently from film.” This produces theoretical knowledge that cannot be reduced to prose. The principle of medium specificity implies that the material conditions of a medium generate a unique set of perceptual, temporal, and cognitive experiences.

Projection

Projection and display technologies are the ensemble of apparatuses and systems through which moving images are made visible to an audience. These fall into two distinct categories. Projection technologies cast light across space onto a separate surface. The projected image is spatial, existing in the beam as well as on the surface, occupying the room. Display technologies, in contrast, generate light from within the viewing surface itself. The display is self-contained and the image originates at the surface the viewer looks at rather than traveling through space to reach it. This distinction matters because each category produces different temporal, spatial, and perceptual conditions. Display technologies produce an image on the surface of the screen, offering an intimate, self-luminous encounter. Projectors differ in that they produce a beam of light that becomes a visible, sculptural presence. This is made explicit in Line Describing a Cone (Anthony McCall, 1973, view on Vimeo) in which the projector’s cone of light is the artwork.

Structures

Structure addresses how experimental works organize themselves formally and how meaning is produced through semiotic operations rather than conventional narrative logic. Small identifies the exploration of non-narrative structures as one of the defining characteristics, positioning experimental work against the diegetic conventions of fiction and documentary. This encompasses alternative organizational principles like associative montage, rhythmic patterning, graphic relationships, durational strategies, etc. that bypass story-driven sequencing. Small’s radical revision of film/video semiotics directly connects signifier and signified, bypassing verbal mediation. The iconic properties of images function as primary meaning-makers, and reflexivity operates structurally to foreground the apparatus and process of image-making itself. Form and content collapse into one another. For McLuhan, the medium is the message, for Small, the structure is the content.

Discourse

Discourse is an organized mode of communication and knowledge production governed by conventions, assumptions, and power relations. In the context of moving image practice, discourse operates in two modes. The first is written theoretical discourse, which is the conventional mode of academic knowledge production conducted through articles, books, and lectures. The second is the discourse of the medium itself in terms of how the moving-image work articulates meaning through its formal and material operations. The central claim of Direct Theory is that experimental works constitute a legitimate form of theoretical discourse that produces knowledge about the medium that is equivalent to, but irreducible to, written theory. What distinguishes this discourse from written theory is the mode: the knowledge is embodied in perceptual experience rather than articulated in propositional language.

Abstraction

Abstraction is the practice of creating moving image works that do not represent recognizable objects, spaces, or narratives from the visible world. Instead, abstract works operate through pure visual forms such as shape, color, light, movement, rhythm, and texture. Abstraction is front and center in Oskar Fischinger’s hand-painted films and the analog video synthesis of the Vasulkas. In Noisefields (Steina and Woody Vasulka, 1974, view at Vasulka Live Archive), a video sequencer is used to switch between two video sources to create flickering effects. The content of this work is an audiovisual modulation of video noise. Abstraction is the primary mode of Direct Theory because it drives attention to the function and operations of the medium. When representation is stripped away from the work, what remains is the medium’s formal and material behavior, revealed as the work’s primary content.

Compositing

Compositing is the process of integrating multiple image components into a single image. Within Direct Theory compositing is significant because it foregrounds the constructed nature of the image. What appears as a unified visual field is composed of multiple distinct components. Zbigniew Rybczyński’s work investigates compositing as both technique and theoretical proposition. In Tango (1981, 8:10, 35mm, view on YouTube) Rybczyński painstakingly rotoscoped and optically composited 36 independently filmed action loops, including a boy chasing a ball, a woman dressing, and a man stealing a parcel, into a single room, where the figures coexist in the same visual space without acknowledging one another. The accumulating impossibility makes the viewer acutely aware that this unified space is a construction, an artifice built from dozens of separately recorded temporal layers. Later in Steps (1987, 26:00, SD video, view on YouTube) he rotoscoped elements of the famous Odessa Steps sequence from Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925) placing a tour guide and contemporary American tourists into the scene using chroma key compositing created a video within the frames of Eisenstein’s famous sequence, composing two historical moments, two different moving image formats, and two different image ontologies. Rybczyński combined spatial and temporal layering, revealing how the moving image constructs the illusion of a unified present from heterogeneous sources, technologies, and historical moments.

Content

Content is used to describe the representational, narrative, thematic, or informational substance that a moving image work appears to convey, or, in other words, what the work is about in the conventional sense. Direct Theory complicates the form/content distinction. With experimental works content and form become inseparable or even inverted. For example, the content of a film may be the operation of the film apparatus itself or the content of a video feedback piece may be the behavior of the electronic signal. Direct Theory dissolves the conventional hierarchy in which form serves content, the formal and material operations of the medium are themselves the most significant content.

Film

As a structural form, film is a category of experience and expression that encompasses narrative features, documentaries, experimental works, and everything shown in theaters, festivals, classrooms, and cinematheques. When I tell someone that “I saw a great film,” I am not making a claim about the physical medium, as I most likely watched a digital projection in a theatre or streaming video at home. Film in this sense of the term refers to a cluster of aesthetic conventions, cultural institutions, modes of reception, and cinematic language codes that developed around the photochemical medium but are now detached from it. People speak of “film schools,” “film criticism,” “film theory,” “film festivals,” and “filmmakers” regardless of whether the physical medium was involved in any part of the production or exhibition chain. The cultural form of film has survived the material basis on which the practice is based. See also Film (physical material and technological apparatus) and Film (ideological and aesthetic category).

Flicker

Filcker is the rapid switching between light and dark visual states, or between different images, at a frequency that produces perceptual effects ranging from apparent motion to stroboscopic vibration, retinal afterimages, and physiological arousal. Flicker is an inherent characteristic of film projection,3 however, it becomes an artistic strategy in works like The Flicker (Tony Conrad, 1966, 30:00, 16mm, b&w, sound, view excerpt on YouTube, viewer discretion is advised due to flicker effect), a paradigmatic instance of Direct Theory in which the artist exploits a fundamental property of the cinematographic apparatus to produce a work that is simultaneously a perceptual experience and a theoretical investigation of the conditions of cinematic perception.

Form

Form is the organization, structure, and patterning of elements within a moving-image work that include the temporal arrangement, spatial composition, rhythmic structure, and the relationships among its constituent parts. In experimental work the formal operations of the work constitute its theoretical statement and form is the primary locus of meaning. Direct Theory is, in large part, the practice of making form itself legible as thought.

Found Footage

Found footage film/video uses existing moving-image material from commercial films, newsreels, industrial films, adverts, home movies, television broadcasts, or other sources, which is appropriated and recontextualized within a new work. Found footage practice is inherently reflexive. By taking images out of their original context and placing them in a new frame of reference, the artist foregrounds questions of authorship, indexical authority, meaning, ideology, and the cultural circulation of images. Found footage works can theorize the moving image as a cultural and ideological artifact, revealing how images carry and produce meaning within specific social and technological systems.

Mental Imagery

Mental imagery is the internal, subjective visual experience in the viewer’s mind. These are images produced by imaginative, cognitive processes. For Direct Theory, mental imagery is significant because certain experimental strategies (e.g., flicker, extreme duration, sensory deprivation, repetition, damage, datamosing, and the list goes on) are designed to interact with the viewer’s capacity for internal visualization. Experimental works operate at the phenomenological level, theorizing perception and cognition through the image’s capacity to evoke experiences that far exceed its material. material

Montage

Montage is the theory and practice of assembling cinematic language elements (shots, sounds, sequences) into a rhythmic and structured whole. Compared to editing, montage in a broader theoretical sense refers to any juxtaposition of elements that generates meaning through their relationship. For Direct Theory, montage is significant as a mode of thinking: Eisenstein’s intellectual montage, for example, proposes that the collision of images can produce concepts in which the medium “thinks” through juxtaposition rather than through verbal argument.

Moving Image

The moving image is a broad category encompassing all time-based visual media including film, analog video, digital video, animation, computational media, and their hybrid forms unified by the shared characteristic of images that unfold in and through time. This encompassing term is used to establish experimental practice as a tradition that cuts across specific media technologies. The moving image names a perceptual and aesthetic field defined by temporal unfolding, visual transformation, and the phenomenology of movement and change.

Reflexivity

Reflexivity is the quality of a work that turns attention back upon its own conditions of production, mediation, and reception. A reflexive work foregrounds itself as a constructed artifact within a specific medium and technological system. Reflexivity is central to Direct Theory. Experimental works are reflexive investigations that disclose the properties of the medium with which they are made, constituting theoretical inquiry through practice.

Theory

Theory is the systematic and reflective inquiry into the principles, operations, and significance of a given domain. Theory about the moving image conventionally takes the form of written discourse in books, articles, lectures, and conference presentations produced by scholars and critics. The central claim of Edward T. Small’s Direct Theory is that experimental moving image works in and of themselves constitute a form of theory. They investigate, analyze, and articulate the operations of the medium through practice rather than prose. Direct Theory is a theory enacted, embodied, and materialized in the work itself, rendering the distinction between “theory” and “practice” untenable for experimental moving-image art.

Time

Time is the fundamental dimension by which all moving-image experience unfolds. Time is an active, manipulable, and experientially complex dimension of the moving-image medium. Artists can investigate time using durational strategies, as in Empire (Andy Warhol, 1964) in which a single fixed-camera shot of the Empire State Building lasts over eight hours. When I watched a sinle reel of this I experienced boredom, restlessness, and eventually hypnotic attention to the dance of the film grain. Artists can also orchestrate temporal manipulations, as in Passage à l’acte (Martin Arnold, 1993) in which a brief scene from To Kill a Mockingbird is subjected to obsessive frame-by-frame repetition, reversal, and stuttering. Ordinary gestures are stretched, looped, and replayed until they become uncanny, and violent. Arnold’s manipulation of time reframes the temporal flow of conventional cinema. Another way to deal with time is through rhythmic structure as in T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (Paul Sharits, 1968) in which single frames of solid color alternate with images producing a pulsing visual rhythm and retinal afterimages, stroboscopic color mixing. Time can also be examined through layering multiple temporalities as in The Clock (Christian Marclay, 2010), a 24-hour video montage assembled from thousands of film and television clips, each containing a clock or reference to the current time, synchronized so that the work functions as a timepiece. I sat in this installation for two hours, acutely aware that time in the moving image is a composite of layered, competing temporal registers.

Semiotic System

The structured totality of signs, codes, conventions, and rules through which a medium generates and communicates meaning. Each medium, including film, analog video, digital video, computational media, constitutes a distinct semiotic system with its own codes (e.g. visual, auditory, temporal, spatial) and conventions (e.g. continuity editing, shot/reverse-shot, emphasis on story). Each medium possesses a distinct semiotic system, and experimental practice in the tradition of Direct Theory theorizes these systems by foregrounding, disrupting, or reinventing their operations.

Sign

In semiotic theory, the sign is the fundamental unit of meaning. It is an entity that stands for or represents something other than itself to an interpreting consciousness. Following the work of Ferdinand de Saussure (semiology) and Charles Sanders Peirce (semiotics), a sign is the composite of a signifier (the material form) and a signified (the concept or meaning). With moving image works, signs operate through visual, sonic, temporal, and kinesthetic codes. Experimental works in the Direct Theory framework theorize the sign-function itself exposing how moving images produce meaning, rather than simply deploying signs in the service of narrative or documentary reference.

Signified

The signified is the conceptual or mental component of the sign. It is the meaning that the viewer associates with the signifier. In conventional media, the signified is a represented object, event, or situation that exists in either a fictional storyworld or the social-historical world. A shot of a stairway signifies “stairway,” and a sequence of actions signifies a story. In experimental moving image works, this relationship is destabilized, attenuated, or reconfigured. For example, in Mothlight (Stan Brakhage, 1963, 16mm, view on Vimeo), moth wings, flower petals, and blades of grass are pressed directly between strips of splicing tape and printed onto film. The signifiers are the material objects themselves. When projected, what is signified is not “moth parts” or “flower petals” in any representational sense. Instead, Brakhage evokes fragility, translucence, velocity, and textures produced by the material characteristics of the signifier as it is projected onto the screen. The meaning of the work lies in the perceptual and affective experience the physical signifier generates as it is projected onto the screen. The signified shifts from representation to phenomenological sensation; the material signifier produces a subjective experience in the viewer’s consciousness, a form of perception different from what we have come to expect from the indexical medium of film, crafted in the documentary or narrative modes.

Signifier

The signifier is the material, perceptible component of the sign, which in the context of moving images is the visual form, the sonic event, the temporal pattern, or the texture of the image. The signifier is what is apprehended by the senses. In experimental media, the signifier is often foregrounded at the expense of conventional signification. The material properties of the support becoming the focus of attention rather than a transparent vehicles for representational content. For example, in Dawn Surf Jellybowl Film (Jennifer West, 2011, 8:15, 16mm film negative transferred to HD digital video, view excerpt on Vimeo the film negative was sanded with surfboard shaping tools, rubbed with surf wax, splashed with tequila, smeared with sunscreen and tar, scraped with a shark’s tooth, and floated in ocean waves, and then digitized and projected. What the viewer sees is not a representation of surfing but the visible trace of textures produced by substances acting directly on the emulsion. The signifier (the material surface of the film) is no longer a transparent support for recorded content but the primary thing to be seen, the visible traces of “damage” constituting the meaning of the work.

Symbol

A symbol is a sign in which the relationship between signifier and signified is established through convention rather than through resemblance (as in an icon) or physical connection (as in an index). In Peircean semiotics, the symbol is arbitrary — its meaning must be learned. The distinction among icon, index, and symbol matters because experimental film and video often destabilizes or foregrounds these semiotic relationships. In A Movie (1958) Bruce Conner weaves together found footage drawn from images that carry indexical authority including newsreels, disaster films, and pornography and through montage reframes these indexical images symbolically, constructing new relationships that generate meaning entirely through juxtaposition. Conner’s work is a semiotic investigation conducted through practice, disclosing how indexical images acquire new symbolic meanings when reframed through editorial context.

Video Feedback

When a video camera is aimed at its own monitor, a recursive loop is created as the output of the system becomes its input resulting in spiraling, tunneling, and self-similar patterns emergeing from the electronic system interacting with itself. Video feedback theorizes the video medium by revealing the behavior of the electronic signal when freed from representational responsibility. Artists like the Vasulkas used video feedback as a primary mode of investigating the nature of the electronic image. More recently, Canadian artist Sabrina Ratté has extended this tradition, building her practice from video feedback and analog video synthesis as foundational techniques. As Ratté describes it, “I have always thought of video as a way of painting with electronic light.”4 In works like her Radiances series (2017), Ratté generates luminous, architectural environments from the raw material of analog video feedback and synthesis, then layers these textures into 3D digital environments. Ratté’s work demonstrates that video feedback remains a generative investigative tool with self-referential logic that continues to produce new forms of Direct Theory as it migrates across analog and digital domains.

Genres

Genre is an approach to classifying works according to shared formal, thematic, or functional characteristics. Major genres are a fundamental mode of moving image practice with its own traditions, conventions, critical discourses, and theoretical significance. In the context of Direct Theory, experimental film/video constitutes a major genre separate from fictive narrative and documentary, rather than being a minor subcategory or avant-garde backwater. This paradigm shift repositions experimental work as having equivalent ontological status to the dominant forms, with its own coherent aesthetic principles and historical trajectory. Small acknowledges various sub-genres and modes like abstract film, found footage compilation, structural film, diary film, expanded cinema, etc. each with distinct formal strategies. Many films do not fit neatly into one of the three major genres (narrative, documentary, experimental), however, works can straddle multiple sub-genres and major-genres while maintaining conceptual distinctiveness. For example, Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, 1983) combines documentary footage, digital image processing, and associative montage to present as essayistic meditation on memory, time, and the process of image-making itself.

Documentary

John Grierson defined documentary as “the creative treatment of actuality.”5 The genre encompasses works oriented toward the recording, representation, and interpretation of events, people, places, and phenomena in the social-historical world. Documentary, as Bill Nichols observes, claims a privileged relationship to historical reality. Its conventions (voice-over narration, interviews, observational footage, evidential editing) serve to construct an argument about or account of the real.6 Documentary represents the orientation of the moving image toward evidence and argument about the world.

Expanded Cinema

Gene Youngblood popularized the term expanded cinema in his book Expanded Cinema7, referring to moving-image practices that extend beyond conventional single-screen, single-projector paradigms. Expanded cinema includes multi-screen installations, live performance with film and video, projection onto sculptural or architectural surfaces, the creation of nontheatrical venues for viewing moving images, and the integration of moving images with other media and environments. In a Direct Theory context, expanded cinema theorizes the spatial, architectural, and social conditions of the moving-image experience, investigating what happens when the image is released from the rectangle and enters the viewer’s embodied space.

Experimental

Experimental moving mage practice encompasses works that foreground the formal, material, perceptual, and cognitive properties of the medium itself. Experimental works investigate what the moving image is and does rather than using it as a transparent support for narrative or documentary expression. Edward S. Small argues that experimental is not a minor, marginal, or merely oppositional category but a major genre with its own rich history, diverse traditions (from visual music to structural film to video art), and unique epistemological function: the production of theoretical knowledge through practice. To call experimental work a major genre means that it is as fundamental to the moving image as fictive narrative and documentary, and that its contribution, what Edward S. Small calls Direct Theory, is a form of human knowledge.8

Fictive Narrative

Fictive narratives are made with imagined events, characters, storylines, and storyworlds. Narrative is the dominant genre of mainstream media, including Hollywood feature films, television dramas, and streaming series. The conventions of this genre include continuity editing, character identification, causal plot structure, and diegetic coherence. These conventions have become so thoroughly naturalized that they are often mistaken for the inherent properties of the cinematic arts. The orientation towards story is what distinguishes fictive narrative from documentary and experimental works.

Kinesthetic Cinema

Kinesthetic cinema theorizes the body’s perceptual engagement with light, motion, and time, engaging the viewer’s bodily, proprioceptive, and physiological responses; this is cinema experienced through the body as a whole. Kinesthetic effects are produced through camera movement, flicker, visual rhythm, spatial depth cues, and immersive display environments. Serene Velocity (Ernie Gerhr, 1970, view on YouTube) demonstrates that the moving image is a visual, cognitive, and somatic phenomenon.9

Structural Film

Structural film is experimental cinema characterized by works that typically employ fixed camera positions, flicker effects, loop printing, rephotography, and other techniques. They foreground duration, process, and the material conditions of the cinematic apparatus. Key artists include Tony Conrad, Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton, Paul Sharits, and Ernie Gehr. In the Direct Theory framework, these works theorize the cinematographic apparatus, including the camera, the filmstrip, the projector, the screen, etc., by making its operations the explicit subject of the viewer’s experience.

Visionary Film

Visionary film is associated with P. Adams Sitney’s influential book Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943–2000.10 It include moving image works ranging from Maya Deren’s trance cinema through Stan Brakhage’s poetic subjectivity to the structural investigations of Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton, and Paul Sharits. In the Direct Theory framework, visionary film theorizes consciousness, perception, and the phenomenology of seeing, in contrast to structural film, which focuses on the apparatus of the medium.

Theoretical Frameworks

Theoretical Frameworks encompass the intellectual traditions that inform and support the core arguments of Direct Theory, which draws upon the film theory of perception, cognition, and spectatorship. Small’s synthesis attempts to create a theoretical apparatus specifically calibrated to experimental moving images rather than retrofitting theories developed for narrative cinema. One shortcoming of Direct Theory is that the cognitive and neuroscience dimensions of the cinematic experience remain under explored, providing opportunities to update and expand our understanding of Direct Theory.

Biosphere

The biosphere is the total living sphere, an interconnected system of all biological organisms and the physical environments they inhabit, from the ocean floors to the upper atmosphere of Earth. The term was coined by geologist Eduard 11Suess and developed as a concept by Vladimir Vernadsky,12 who defined the biosphere as the planetary-scale condition in which life operates as an integrated, self-sustaining system and as the foundational layer upon which the noosphere and videosphere emerge. The three spheres are nested and sequential: life gives rise to thought, thought gives rise to a total media environment. In a Direct Theory context, the moving image artist working within the videosphere operates at the outermost layer of a system that extends from biological life through collective cognition to the electronic and computational mediation of all experience.

Film

Film as a term carries ideological and aesthetic weight. Calling something a film signals seriousness and artistic ambition, while video suggests television or home movies. Historically, this distinction has been reinforced by funders, museum acquisition policies, critical discourse, and exhibition practices. The hierarchy has eroded in the past decade, however, it has not disappeared. When director Christopher Nolan decided to shoot and exhibit Oppenheimer (2023) on large-format film, he was making a cultural claim and providing his work prestige and material authenticity, demonstrating that film continues to function as a marker of cultural legitimacy whose power persists well into the digital era. See also Film (the photochemical medium) and Cinematographic Technology.

Noosphere

The noosphere is a concept developed by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Vladimir Vernadsky, referring to the sphere of human thought and collective consciousness that surrounds the planet,13 analogous to the biosphere. Gene Youngblood imagines this as an extension of expanded cinema thinking,14 the noosphere represents the idea that communication technologies, including cinema, video, and networked digital media, participate in the formation of our collective cognitive realm. In a Direct Theory context, the noosphere suggests that experimental media practice contributes to individual perception and the evolution of shared human consciousness and knowledge.

Phenomenology

Phenomenology investigates the structures of conscious experience as they present themselves to a perceiving subject. It is a philosophical tradition originating with Edmund Husserl and developed by Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. This approach directs attention to the viewer’s lived experience, focusing on how the moving image is encountered in perception, how time is felt in duration, and how the body responds to light, movement, and time. Direct Theory is fundamentally concerned with how experimental works produce perceptual, temporal, cognitive, and affective experience that constitutes a form of knowledge irreducible to propositional language.

Semiology and Semiotics

Semiology, based on the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, studies signs as elements within structured systems of difference and convention, taking language as its master model. Semiotics, an approach introduced by Charles Sanders Peirce, is more concerned with the process of signification, i.e., how signs relate to their objects iconically (through resemblance), indexically (through physical or causal connection), and symbolically (through convention). Small engages both traditions, but the Peircean typology is particularly relevant for Direct Theory because it provides the vocabulary for articulating what is materially and semiotically distinctive about each moving-image medium. The photochemical image of film is indexical because light from the profilmic world physically changes the emulsion. An analog video signal is indexical in a manner quite different compared to film. The voltage of an electronic signal is continuously proportional to luminance based on the translation of photon density to voltage levels. Digital video complicates indexicality (the visible image is algorithmically reconstructed from encoded data rather than causally inscribed). When experimental practitioners foreground the material signifier, for example, the grain of film, the scan line of video, or the compression artifact of digital media, they are performing semiotic investigation through practice, disclosing how each medium’s particular mode of signification shapes the meaning it can produce.15

Technostructure

Technology is embedded in networks of capital, regulations, professional standards, and cultural assumptions. The technostructure is the ecosystem of technological, institutional, economic, and ideological structures within which media is produced, distributed, and consumed. Vilém Flusser sharpens this with his distinction between functionaries and artists. For Flusser, every apparatus contains a program, the set of possibilities built into it by its designers. The functionary operates within this program without questioning its logic, exhausting its prescribed possibilities while keeping the technostructure invisible behind the apparent neutrality of professional practice. The artist works against the program, attempting to produce images the apparatus was not designed to make, thereby revealing the program’s existence and its constraints. 16 Experimental media artist are operating as Flusser’s artist when they subverts the intended function of a tool, revealing the technostructure that normally operates invisibly, affirming that embedded in every tool are the decisions about what images are possible, what images are permissible, and whose interests those images serve.

Videosphere

By analogy with the noosphere and the biosphere, the videosphere names the universe of technical images17 that saturates contemporary culture, the omnipresent field of screens, signals, streams, and images within which human experience is now embedded. The term foregrounds the environmental or ecological character of electronic media. Video and its digital successors are an encompassing condition. In a Direct Theory framework, the videosphere is the cultural and technological milieu within which experimental video and digital practice operates and this practice seeks to theorize and make visible the videosphere.

Footnotes

  1. Edward S. Small and Timothy W. Johnson. Direct Theory: Experimental Motion Pictures as Major Genre. Southern Illinois University Press, 2013, Amazon, WorldCat, Snell Library. ↩

  2. The Rutt/Etra Scan Processor is an analog video instrument developed in 1973 by Steve Rutt, Bill Etra, and Louise Rutt that manipulates the deflection of a television monitor’s electron beam, displacing the horizontal scan lines vertically based on the brightness values of an input video signal so that luminance becomes topographic relief. The result transforms flat video imagery into undulating, three-dimensional-looking forms made entirely of visible scan lines. Bright areas rise, dark areas recede, turning the raster itself into a sculptural surface that can be modulated in real time through voltage control. Used extensively by artists including Woody Vasulka, Gary Hill, and Nam June Paik, the Rutt/Etra made the normally invisible line-by-line architecture of the video image perceptually available as an expressive material, see: https://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=456 ↩

  3. Contemporary film is recorded at 24 frames per second, a rate that is too low to avoid visible flicker upon projection if each frame is shown once. Sound cinema was standardized at 24 fps, however, during the silent era frame rates varied. Many silent films have been shot at 18fps. In any case, the human eye will detect pulsing at 24 fps. The solution to this problem, dating back to early cinema, is to show each frame multiple times by interrupting the light beam more frequently than once per frame. In mechanical film projectors, a double-bladed or triple-bladed shutter rotates in front of the light source. Each of the 24 frames is shown twice, producing 48 pulses per second with a double-bladed shutter; or three times, producing 72 light pulses per second with a triple-bladed shutter. The film is projected at 24 frames per second, however, the flicker rate is raised to a level that exceeds the threshold of human perception of flicker, which is roughly 45-50 Hz for most people in a darkened theater. The extra blade interrupts the light while the frame sits still in the gate, creating additional dark intervals that the eye blends into continuous illumination. This is precisely what makes flicker such a powerful tool for experimental filmmakers like Paul Sharits and Tony Conrad, working against the design of the apparatus to suppress flicker, deliberately engineering frame-to-frame alternations that reintroduce the stroboscopic pulsing that the multiple-bladed shutter was invented to eliminate, foregrounding a property of the apparatus that the entire engineering history of cinema projection has been designed to render invisible. ↩

  4. CBC Arts. “Sabrina Ratté: ‘I have always thought of video as a way of painting with electronic light’” CBC Arts, April 20, 2018, view article. ↩

  5. Susan Kerrigan and Phillip Mcintyre. “The creative treatment of actuality: Rationalizing and reconceptualizing the notion of creativity for documentary practice,” Journal of Media Practice 11(2), August, 2010, pp. 111-130, Taylor & Francis Online (PDF). ↩

  6. Bill Nichols. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Indiana University Press, 1991. ↩

  7. Gene Youngblood. Expanded Cinema. E.P. Dutton, 1970, WorldCat, Monoskop (PDF). ↩

  8. Edward S. Small and Timothy W. Johnson. Direct Theory: Experimental Motion Pictures as Major Genre. Southern Illinois University Press, 2013, Amazon, WorldCat, Snell Library. ↩

  9. Ernie Gehr wrote, “In representational films sometimes the image affirms its own presence as image, graphic entity, but most often it serves as vehicle to a photo-recorded event. Traditional and established avant garde film teaches film to be an image, a representing. But film is a real thing and as a real thing it is not imitation. It does not reflect on life, it embodies the life of the mind. It is not a vehicle for ideas or portrayals of emotion outside of its own existence as emoted idea. Film is a variable intensity of light, an internal balance of time, a movement within a given space.” — “Program Notes for a Film Showing at the Museum of Modern Art.” Film Culture, no. 53-54-55 (Spring 1972). ↩

  10. P. Adams Sitney. Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943–2000. 3rd ed. Oxford University Press, 2002, Internet Archive (PDF). ↩

  11. Suess, Eduard. Das Antlitz der Erde (The Face of the Earth). 4 vols. F. Tempsky, 1883–1909. Suess introduced the term “biosphere” in this work. ↩

  12. Vernadsky, Vladimir I. The Biosphere. Translated by David B. Langmuir. Copernicus/Springer-Verlag, 1998. Originally published in Russian as Biosfera (Leningrad: Nauchno-tekhnicheskoe izdatel’stvo, 1926). Vernadsky developed the biosphere from Eduard Suess’s coinage into a full-scale scientific concept, a biogeochemical system in which living matter functions as a geological force shaping the planet. ↩

  13. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The Phenomenon of Man. Translated by Bernard Wall. Harper, 1959. ↩

  14. Gene Youngblood. Expanded Cinema. E.P. Dutton, 1970, WorldCat, Monoskop (PDF). ↩

  15. Warren Buckland. The Cognitive Semiotics of Film, Cambridge University Press, 2000, pushes semiotic analysis into cognitive territory that connects well with the phenomenological dimension of Direct Theory. Because the work of Ferdinand de Saussure is a tough slog (his work was published posthumously from student lecture notes) and the writings of Charles Saunders Peirce are notoriously scattered and dense, the best starting point is Daniel Chandler. Semiotics: The Basics, 5th Edition (Routledge, 2025). Chandler synthesizes Saussure and Peirce side by side, making explicit where the two frameworks overlap and diverge, and extends semiotic analysis into visual and digital media. This is the most engaging starting point for approaching semiotics through moving-image practice. For a deeper dive into the work of Charles Saunder’s Peirce see Gérard Deledalle. Charles S. Peirce’s Philosophy of Signs: Essays in Comparative Semiotics. Indiana University Press, 2000. ↩

  16. Vilém Flusser. Towards a Philosophy of Photography. Translated by Anthony Mathews. Reaktion Books, 2000. Originally published in German as Für eine Philosophie der Fotografie (European Photography, 1983). ↩

  17. Vilém Flusser. Into the Universe of Technical Images. Translated by Nancy Ann Roth. University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Vilém Flusser’s concept of the universe of technical images describes our contemporary cultural condition in which images produced by cameras and computers have become the dominant mode through which human beings experience, understand, and organize reality. For Flusser, technical images are fundamentally different from traditional images (paintings, drawings) because they are not made by human hands interpreting the world but are generated by apparatuses executing programs, encoding the world into images through automated processes that most users neither understand nor question. Flusser warns us that technical images appear transparent and are therefore dangerous. Technical images seem to show us the world directly, when in truth they are densely coded programmatic mediations that structure perception according to the logic of the apparatus that produced them. In a Direct Theory context, Flusser’s framework reinforces the necessity of experimental practice. The experimental artist who foregrounds, disrupts, or decodes the operations of technical images performs an essential act of critical disclosure to those for which the operations are invisible. The video artist exposing the signal’s behavior, and the media artist glitching the codec are, in Flusser’s terms, working against the program of the apparatus, thus making visible the conditions of image production that the apparatus is designed to conceal. ↩

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