10.13130/2036-461X/16394
This article aims to investigate desktop films as ‘meta-media’ audiovisual forms and to analyse their aesthetics and their meta-reflective potential in the broader framework of contemporary visual and media culture. Screens and interfaces, re-mediated into these films, constitute a second-level media space into the filmic space. They are the only space visually accessible to the spectator, whereby the characters’ gesturality emerges as a form of performing relationship with digital technology, as a posture or a more general engagement with the (media) environment, as an ‘operational trace’ on the screen. Resulting from this visual and narrative structure is the centrality of ‘media performativity’, a concept that will be widely problematized in this article on a theoretical level and analysed as a behavioural pattern that characterizes our daily interaction with the screens surrounding us, as a part of an eco-media system in which action (of the user) and reaction (of the interface) are intervolved and entangled. The concept of media performativity relies on the idea that the individual is no longer separate from the medium throughout the mediation process but is instead deeply and radically involved in the medium itself.
application/pdf
2036-461X
16394
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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Media Ecosystem
Between Visibility and Media Performativity. The Role of Interface and Gesturality in Desktop Cinema
Text.Serial.Journal
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie
21
Beyond Cinema
2021-11-17
2021-09-19
2021-11-17
2022-12-30
177-192
Cinéma & Cie
Elio Ugenti
2021/11/17
10.13130/2036-461X/16394
177
Università degli Studi Roma Tre
2036-461X
36/37
Media Ecosystem
en
192
Between Visibility and Media Performativity. The Role of Interface and Gesturality in Desktop Cinema
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16394/14750
21
                                                                                       Between Visibility and Media
                                                                                       Performativity. The Role of Interface
                                                                                       and Gesturality in Desktop Cinema
                                                                                       Elio Ugenti, Università degli Studi Roma Tre




                                                                                       This article aims to investigate desktop films as ‘meta-media’ audiovisual forms                     Keywords
                                                                                       and to analyse their aesthetics and their meta-reflective potential in the broader
                                                                                                                                                                                          Desktop film
                                                                                       framework of contemporary visual and media culture. Screens and interfaces, re-
                                                                                       mediated into these films, constitute a second-level media space into the filmic           Media performativity
                                                                                       space. They are the only space visually accessible to the spectator, whereby                          Interface
                                                                                       the characters’ gesturality emerges as a form of performing relationship with                    Screen culture
                                                                                       digital technology, as a posture or a more general engagement with the (media)                Media ecosystem
                                                                                       environment, as an ‘operational trace’ on the screen. Resulting from this visual
                                                                                                                                                                                                   DOI
                                                                                       and narrative structure is the centrality of ‘media performativity’, a concept that
                                                                                       will be widely problematized in this article on a theoretical level and analysed as   10.13130/2036-461X/16394
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License




                                                                                       a behavioural pattern that characterizes our daily interaction with the screens
                                                                                       surrounding us, as a part of an eco-media system in which action (of the user)
                                                                                       and reaction (of the interface) are intervolved and entangled. The concept of media
                                                                                       performativity relies on the idea that the individual is no longer separate from
                                                                                       the medium throughout the mediation process but is instead deeply and radically
                                                                                       involved in the medium itself.




                                                                                       Introduction: Visual and Functional
                                                                                       Structure of the Desktop Film
                                                                                         David Kim is a man in his forties living alone with his daughter Margot,
                                                                                       following the premature death of his wife due to a lymphoma. One evening,
                                                                                       Margot tells her father she would sleep over at a girlfriend’s house, but then
                                                                                       she disappears in the middle of the night, after having tried repeatedly to call
                                                                                       Kim as he was asleep. With the help of detective Rosemary Vick, Kim starts
                                                                                       ceaselessly looking for Margot,in the attempt to find out what happened.
                                                                                       After having thought of a voluntary escape, they realize that a kidnapping – if
                                                                                       not even a murder –are much more likely hypothesis. Kim finds thus himself
                                                                                       trapped in a mirror maze: he needs to solve the enigma to find a way out.
                                                                                         This simple and brief account of the plot of Searching (Aneesh Chaganty,
                                                                                       2018) may give the idea of a regular thriller movie, revolving around a


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                                                                                  
      complex, intriguing detective story. We may say it is, indeed. Nevertheless,
      if we widen our perspective and shift from the narrative thread to the
      film’s visual structure, it becomes certainly harder – and misleading – to
      define this movie merely a ‘thriller’. Searching is, in fact, an example of
      desktop film, namely a movie that only takes place on the screens of the
      protagonist’s digital devices. Laptop, smartphone, tablet, are here the only
      environments where the protagonist’s actions and those of the characters
      he interacts with take place.
         From start to finish, the film shows nothing else than the screens
      Kim interacts with. His investigation does not occur in real, ‘physical’
      environments, but mostly follows the traces that his daughter has left
      across the social media accounts or chatrooms she habitually uses. Even
      Kim’s interaction with other characters is always mediated by digital
      devices: it occurs through FaceTime, Facebook Messenger, and Gmail.
         These are our starting questions: what does the formal system of a
      desktop film tell us about visibility? As a product fully embedded within
      contemporary visual culture, what does its meta-reflexive operation suggest
      us about this visual culture, or – more broadly –about contemporary media
      culture in general? In this paper, I will attempt to answer these questions
      by elaborating some reflection and, at the same time, by identifying some
      recurring features in this contemporary film category. I will make reference
      to a few films to analyse some transversal theoretical nodes, though fully
      acknowledging the interesting differences distinguishing each example –
      in terms of both aesthetics and narration.1
         Historically, cinema has brought multiple realities to the screen, adapting
      them to the nature of the screen itself by means of the ‘specificity’ of
      film language. In the case of desktop films, cinema brings to the screen
      a reality that is already ‘screenic’ in itself. Thus, the aim of desktop film
      directors is not to replicate events taking place in a ‘real’ setting, but to
      stage and narrativize the screens themselves (which already intrinsically
      mediate the reality of events within the film, on a diegetic level), starting
      with their tangible operation that is activated by a complex performance
      taking place before the viewer’s eyes. This is done through a specific set of
      media-related actions that – as we shall see – are actorial and authorial at
      the same time.



      From Visibility to Performativity:
      Visual Culture and Gesturality
        Let us therefore move on from the matter of visibility, and return – on
      the basis of a sheer conditioning that lies behind the questions we initially
      asked ourselves – to some of the considerations developed by Béla Balázs
      in the 1920s. His theories encompass a number of aspects which may prove
      functional to our discussion, namely a certain conception of visual culture


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
that is strictly related to the visibility of a body moving in space.
   The visibility of the body and the gesture were two theoretical issues
treated in Balázs’ reflection, revolving around the idea of a newfound
visibility of man (Der sichtbare Mensch, ‘The Visibile Man’, is indeed the
title of his most renowned publication) made possible by the reproductive-
projective action of cinema. The passage from a textual to a visual culture
– that, according to Balázs, the moving image seemed to make possible –
rested upon this.
   Balázs was not interested in the purely artistic-expressive gesture (that
of the performer or the dancer, for instance), which is truly comprehensible
only by a select few and ascribable to a ‘high-culture’ or ‘elite’ ideal of
artistic value. Nor was he focused on strongly coded gestures, such as
those related to sign language, whereby an expressive motion of the body
corresponds to a single conceptual meaning (Balázs seems to implicitly
state that in this case the gesture ends up being, though useful and
unavoidable, a surrogate of the word). The gesture he was interested in –
for the purposes of a true cultural analysis – is the everyday, commonplace
gesture:

          Not culture in the sense of the beautiful poses of statues in art
          galleries, but the gait and the everyday gestures of people in
          the street or at their work. Culture means the penetration of
          the ordinary material of life by the human spirit, and a visual
          culture must surely provide us with new and different expressive
          forms for our daily intercourse with one another. The art of
          dance cannot do this; it is a task that will be accomplished only
          by film.2

  The specific idea of ‘gesture’ that vigorously emerges from Balázs’
reflection transcends that which we may define a formal concept of
gesturality, and rather defines a form of engagement with the world.
Besides, film may distance itself from the high level of formalization and
coding of gestures that is represented by other forms of artistic expression,
and may narrate or document a certain way of existing in the world: a
certain way of experiencing the ordinary space.3
  It is clear that the analysis of forms of interaction with other people and
the surrounding environment today cannot disregard the many forms of
interaction with the media devices inhabiting our everyday spaces and
structuring our everyday practices and gesturality. The settings we regularly
move around are distinguished by a substantial presence of technological
media with which (or should we say, more precisely, within, or through
which) our daily gesturality interacts and by which is partially reshaped.
This is an aspect that has reached its extreme consequences throughout
the COVID-19 pandemic,4 as a growing number of everyday practices has
been relocated to online environments and mediated by screens and
interfaces, whereby an increasingly large number of interpersonal actions


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                                                                                  
      and interactions have taken shape. Our gesturality has systematically
      materialized – in part as the gesturality of a body filmed by the recording
      systems embedded in our computers and mobile devices; in part as a trace
      of our interaction with screen interfaces, which gets visible not only on our
      screens, but also on those of our interlocutors.
        If Balázs’ reflection brings to the table the emergence of a visual
      culture in contrast with a written culture that had marked and nearly
      monopolized communication forms ever since the invention of the printing
      press, we should ask ourselves what the concept of ‘visual culture’ refers
      to today, and how it finds its own peculiar position within contemporary
      media culture, where the link between visuality and gesturality must be
      reinterpreted even starting from the interaction between the contemporary
      media user and the ‘new’ digital media that increasingly appear as mixed
      media, in the definition provided by William J. Thomas Mitchell5. It thus
      seems impossible to exclude from a reflection whose aim is to identify the
      ‘cultural symptoms’6 that emerge in the media-based transformation of
      our everyday areas of activity the behavioural patterns that characterize
      our daily interaction with the screens surrounding us. We shall refer to
      such behavioural patterns as media performativity.
        The centrality of these forms of operation clearly emerges even in the
      ‘media ecology’ concept discussed by Matthew Fuller, in which the attention
      towards objects appears to be replaced by the attention towards media
      ‘practices’ and ‘processes’, to the point objects themselves are perceived
      as processes:

               Objects here should also be understood to mean processes
               embodied as objects, as elements in a composition. […]
               Ecologists focus rather more on dynamic systems in which any
               one part is always multiply connected, acting by virtue of those
               connections, and always variable, such that it can be regarded
               as a pattern rather than simply as an object.7

        The operation we are discussing seems thus to represent a key element,
      even for a reinterpretation of the idea of visual culture.8 At a closer look,
      the visual dimension is no longer exclusive or predominant in our daily
      relationship with the screens around us,9 although the latter still represent
      a fundamental component for the analysis of contemporary visual culture.
      Vision is increasingly analysed as part of a significantly broader sensory
      experience that – referring to U.S. psychologist James J. Gibson’s definition
      of the term in the late 1970s – we may define an ‘ecological relationship’.10
      The body as a whole takes on – in our modern interaction with screens – a
      progressively more central role, and for this reason a cultural analysis of
      contemporary screens becomes more and more an investigation on our
      actions on and inside such screens.11
        Pietro Montani explained this concept extremely clearly: while defining
      the notion of digital sensorium as ‘a way that sensitivity (aisthesis) is


180                                   Ugenti, Between Visibility and Media Performativity

intimately embodied in a technology’, he reiterates the centrality of the
use of screen, its capability to trigger production-communication practices
based upon the interaction or the inseparability of text and images, starting
with the ‘atypical performances assigned to the fingertips’ that allow the
occurrence of ‘a sensitive, specifically technical performance’.12 Even more
radically, we may state – again inspired by Montani’s reflections – that the
centrality taken on by media performativity in modern times redefines and
qualifies the perception of (and relationship with) the surrounding world
very specifically.
  The concept of media performativity thus relies on the idea that the
individual is no longer separate from the medium throughout the mediation
process but is deeply and radically involved in the medium itself.13 We shall
see shortly how the concept of ‘interface’ turns out to be a decisive element
to understand and analyse the peculiar relationship which gets established
between body, gesture, and technological device.
  For now, we shall highlight how – in the scope indicated by Montani –
the screen is no longer a ‘filter’ through which we observe reality, but a
technical element contributing to its very assessment and an orientation of
the individual within it. Gesturality accompanies such forms of performing
relationships with digital technology, in terms of a posture or a more
general engagement with the surrounding environment, which growingly
attracts the interest of contemporary films and series. The ‘narrativization’
of such mechanisms quite openly reveals that which we might define
the ‘dual nature’ of modern digital media: on one hand, they emerge as
essential components of a hypermediated environment; on the other hand,
they are environments in themselves, in which we move and interact with
numerous media objects and other people.14 Desktop films appear to focus,
in particular, on this second aspect.



What Do Desktop Films (Really) Tell Us?
   In the perspective illustrated thus far, the desktop film represents a
particularly interesting case study, due indeed to its ability to place media
performativity at the centre of attention, assigning it the role as true
driveshaft of the narration, whether fictional or documentary. This aspect
does not only materialize in the aforementioned Searching, but even
in other fiction desktop films such as Noah (Patrick Cederberg, Walter
Woodman, 2013), Unfriended (Levan Gabriadze, 2014) or Unfriended: Dark
Web (Stephen Susco, 2018), just to mention a few particularly significant
titles in a growingly vast constellation of works, or desktop documentaries
such as Transformers: The Premake (Kevin B. Lee, 2014) and Watching the
Pain of Others (Chloé Galibert-Laîné, 2019).15
   Evocatively, one might claim that this film category has picked up the
legacy of Balázs’ reflection, by identifying traces (disseminated within


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                                                                                                    
                        screen-based interfaces) of a new media gesturality, finding in them a
                        number of implications that significantly affect the twentyfirst century
                        visual and media culture. Namely, they gather the passage from visibility
                        to performativity that we have highlighted in the previous paragraph.
                          The central role and exposure (or the documentation) of media
                        performativity clearly emerges in fictional desktop films as much as it does
                        in desktop documentaries. Whilst in the fictional desktop film, as we have
                        seen, this performativity rests upon – on the diegetic level – the characters,
                        in the desktop documentary the gesture at the centre of attention is the
                        creative one performed by the director him/herself who, time after time,
                        acts upon the windows of the screen interface, and establishes relationships
                        between the materials it presents to the spectator.
                          This is what occurs, for instance, in the desktop documentary Transformers:
                        The Premake by Kevin B. Lee, where the act of directing corresponds with
                        the research action the director performs on the interfaces and folders
                        ‘coming to life’ on his desktop. On the one hand, Kevin B. Lee ‘delegates’
                        the image production to the hundreds of prosumers who shared an endless
                        number of amateur videos created during the filming of Transformers: Age
                        of Extinction (Michael Bay, 2014) online; on the other hand, he builds his
                        narrative by offering to the spectator a footage of contents configured on
                        the basis of the interaction between the director and his PC interfaces.
                          In this scope, we have a found footage film in which the archival images
                        retrieved online by Lee intertwine with his gesturality: the content of such
                        images is animated by the director’s actions, as he explores the web
Fig. 1: Transformers:
The Premake (Kevin      platforms on which the images circulate and are made available to users.
B. Lee, 2014).            What the director thus stages in his film is a topological narration16




182                                                     Ugenti, Between Visibility and Media Performativity

of viral marketing that he places in media environments, in which this
complex phenomenon comes to life, first of all, through sharing of images
and videos by fans of the great contemporary blockbusters.
  In her introduction to a video dedicated to the desktop documentaries by
Kevin B. Lee, the scholar Catherine Grant has made particularly interesting
considerations that may help us define the use of screens and interfaces
made by the director in his movie:

          [Desktop documentary] uses screen capture technology to
          treat the computer screen as both a camera lens and a canvas.
          [It] seeks both to depict and question the ways we explore the
          world through the computer screen.17

  Therefore, both in fictional desktop film and in desktop documentaries,
the media environment is not only the film setting, but even its very
production location. In fictional desktop films, character’s mediation is
an added element. The latter’s media gesturality essentially corresponds
to the gestures used by the director to create the movie, as explained
thoroughly by Patrick Cederberg and Walter Woodman, directors of the
teen-drama desktop film Noah (2014):

          It was an interesting challenge for us to tell this story without
          breaking free from the box of this “image-space”. A lot of
          conversations happened while we were developing the idea
          about leaving the computer screen, but as we crafted the visual
          components we realized that in our execution we managed to
          create and explore a character in a way we hadn’t seen before;
          by observing his interfacing and manipulation of the image
          space. The most bizarre aspect of this idea, that didn’t really
          hit us until after we’d finished the film, is that we performed as
          all the characters. Our actors were only involved for the video
          segments (Skype, Chatroulette). So in watching it, it didn’t
          register clearly that there is a real disconnect between this
          presence and the imagery of the actors themselves.18

  The re-mediation of the interface within the film occurs on an eminently
operative basis, thus not purely a representative one. This operative
dimension hatches thanks to a ‘double level of mediation’ that distinguishes
desktop films. In fact, if it is true that the relationship between the cinema
spectator and a film character is never a direct interaction, in that it is
always mediated by the action of the filming device, in this case we may
affirm that we witness a second-level mediation, given that the action of
the protagonists and the relationships developing between the same within
their real environment becomes accessible to the spectator only through
the filter of the numerous devices relocated19 across the cinematic space.
  Indeed, as is well-known, the term ‘relocation’ aims to identify the
elements that allow a definition of the cinematographic experience beyond
the technical specificity of the medium and the function of a dispositif


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                                                                                   
      founded on the shot-projection binomial. In this sense, the term sets out
      to offer a theoretical-interpretation framework for the analysis of cinema
      dispersion and migration across fruition spaces other than the movie
      theatre and within several digital devices. The desktop film thus appears
      to stage a kind of inverse relocation, inasmuch as the film appears as an
      audio-visual space that welcomes the replacement of new digital media in
      order to reconfigure on the screen certain peculiar traits of the experience
      deriving from their use.
        It may thus be claimed that the film itself becomes an interface capable
      of generating a complex interaction between cinema and digital media,
      accessing a definition of the very concept of interface: one that might
      broaden its sense. In his groundbreaking work dedicated to interface
      operation, Alexander Galloway consistently reiterates the need to not
      consider the interface as a thing, but an effect, and adds: ‘it is always a
      process or a translation’.20 In particular, it is interesting to consider that
      which Galloway defines an ‘intraface’, meaning ‘an interface internal to the
      interface’, described by the author as an imaginary dialogue between the
      workable and the unworkable or – explicitly referencing Gerard Genette’s
      reflection on the concept of ‘threshold’ – as ‘a zone of indecision between
      inside and outside’ or – in the end – as the relationship between the edge
      and the center.
        As stated above, desktop film in the capacity of a threshold works as an
      interface that generates a substantial redefinition of media devices that
      remediate21 within it, making them unworkable for the spectator, who is
      pushed to delegate the condition of media-users to the characters. On the
      basis of this process, it is easily understandable how much the screens of
      computers and mobile devices are more ‘suitable’ for desktop film vision:
      not only because the films find their ‘natural habitat’ in their interfaces, but
      also because the screens have a greater ability to place the viewer before
      the inoperativeness of such interfaces (this effect tends to greatly scale
      down when the films are watched ‘at a distance’ on a TV or cinema screen).
        In such films, the transparency distinguishing the interfaces of
      contemporary screens and granting them maximum efficiency in terms
      of accessibility to digital content become the opacity22 of the intrafaces
      acted upon by the cinematographic medium. And it is this opacity that
      guarantees the fundamental shift from a ‘direct’ topological narrative –
      based on the interactivity of the contemporary media user – to an ‘indirect’
      (non-interactive) topological narrative that turns into a meta-narrative of
      media performativity (the one performed by the characters or the directors
      mediating our relationship with the interfaces of devices in the movies).
        In this sense, the desktop film becomes the medium23 for contemporary
      media gesturality: not as an interactive technological device, but as an
      aesthetic and narrative apparatus allowing a dynamic documentation of
      media gesturality while maintaining its inscription within the borders of its
      (media) ecosystem of origin untarnished.


184                                    Ugenti, Between Visibility and Media Performativity

   The metareflective operation that such films are based upon thus
becomes the main narrative driveshaft of the films themselves, and
exploits the opportunities (even in terms of affordances) granted by screen
interfaces as well as the constitutive (but constructive) instability24 of the
digital mediascapes configured in the same. The magnitude of gesturality
narrated in desktop films certainly requires a placement within the screens
reproducing its effects.
   This aspect may be identified clearly in the documentary Flânerie 2.0
by Chloé Galibert-Laîné. The director combined the desktop film, found
footage, and documentary formats to give the viewer an experience of the
modern city as an intrinsically hybrid and blended experience occurring
in the urban and explorable environments within our mobile device
screens. As long as it is filmed from the outside only, the media gesturality
represented in the film does not offer the sense of operations performed
by people shot by the director: each of them holds a smartphone in their
hands, tapping the screen with their thumbs.
   From the position we are in – an ‘external’ position that places us before
these people, and makes the screens of their smartphones inaccessible –
we may consider their gestures essentially identical. Their actions have a
very limited (or nearly inexistent) impact on the ‘real’ surrounding space.
They might offer us a sense of habit or of the actors’ distracted experience
of the surrounding itself, but not the ultimate sense of hybridization that the
film sets out to narrate. It is only when the director changes perspective
– bringing us spectators inside the screens – that the underlying sense
                                                                                  Fig. 2: Flânerie 2.0
of the film’s aesthetic operation fully acquires an explanation and reveals       (Chloé Galibert-
the processes of anticipation of the real experience that materializes as a       Laîné, 2018).




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                                                                                                   
Fig. 3-4 Flânerie
2.0 (Chloé Galibert-
Laîné, 2018).




                       result of the online research performed or the screenic virtualization of our
                       motion – at times simultaneous – in the urban space.
                        Therefore, our perspective change corresponds to a different
                       understanding of the characters’ gesturality, which leads us to identify how
                       deeply different the repercussions of that pressing or that swiping of the
                       thumbs on the screen can be. Such consequences may be observable not
                       only if we catch a glimpse of the individuals’ gestures, but if we see the
                       effects that the same have on the screens: the traces of the gestures we
                       discussed shortly before.


186                                                    Ugenti, Between Visibility and Media Performativity

   It is indeed such traces that allow a qualification of the gestures and
their comprehension as parts of a broader relationship between the body
and technology. The distinctive features of such gestures thus place them
in a particular space-time dimension that is inferable and practicable
only within the screen-environments – distinguished, as said, by specific
affordances and, consequently, a specific range of actions made possible
by the structure of each interface.
   In theoretical terms, what originates from this example is the concept of
ecomedia. The prefix (eco-) itself refers to the ‘environmental’ dimension of
the issue in play. What environment are we talking about?25 As highlighted
by Francesco Parisi, when we talk about ecomedia the environment that
we identify is ‘not merely the media space we inhabit, but may also mean
the ability that media have to build up as independent environments that
encapsulate us and model our practices’.26
   Besides, it is not arduous to play the game of finding ‘real-life equivalents’
of the situations that take shape in certain desktop films. In the short
film Noah, for example, the protagonist enters his girlfriend’s Facebook
page using her credentials and accesses the different areas of her private
account (messages, diary, notification list) in search for clues to confirm
his suspects that she is cheating on him. He indeed explores a series
of rooms represented by certain areas with specific functions within a
private space. The protagonist’s actions do not appear very distant from
an equivalent situation in a thriller movie in which the character enters –
in such case using a set of keys snatched by way of deceit – the house of
another character, and opens drawers and closet doors, peeps in the most
hidden corners and – why not? – flips through the pages of a secret diary.
These are environment exploration actions taking place in a media space
– in the former case – or in a physical-material space – in the latter case –
notwithstanding that the distinction between the two categories of ‘spaces’
is not excessively simplistic.
   Hence, there exists a media-related action that cinema may keep a
watchful eye on to weave increasingly complex storylines: the plot of
Noah (which is also a short) is essential and linear, as is – essentially –
that of Unfriended, based upon the traditional mechanisms of a revenge
movie, whilst the plots of more recent desktop films such as Searching
and Unfriended: Dark Web turn out to be definitely more intricated. This
is an interesting aspect, because it shows how an initial phase of pure
fascination before this original desktop film setting – and the purely
attractional function of the interfaces included in the same – is being
followed by a phase in which the narrative articulation of the stories is
taking on a greater and greater role.




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                                                                                    
      A Few Final Remarks: From the
      Performativity of Media-Users to
      the Interface Performance
        In conclusion of this article, it is perhaps appropriate to attempt to grasp
      what value the actions of these films’ characters truly take on, and what
      is the role played by interfaces in structuring and defining rules for the
      environments wherein they materialize. This is clearly a complex issue
      which will have to be further developed at a later time.
        The interfaces re-mediated within the movie cause the existence of a
      media environment that welcomes the characters’ actions, it orients their
      intentions in a new (or at least different) way compared to what occurs in
      the ‘real world’, and finally affects the viewer’s narrative experience deeply,
      despite the stories told in such films – including the formal structure by
      means of which they are conveyed – may turn out to be easily positioned
      within the limits of certain greatly canonical cinema and television genres:
      horror, in the case of Unfriended; teen drama for Noah; family sit-com
      for the Connection Lost (S06xE16, 2015) episode of the TV series Modern
      Family (ABC, 2009-2020); thriller in the case of Searching and Unfriended:
      Dark Web; documentary in the case of Transformers: The Premake; just
      to mention a few. The subjectivity of the spectator watching these films
      meets the subjectivity of the various characters in a land we may define
      – according to Galloway – ‘threshold’, given that the action takes place in
      part on the basis of a pure succession of events (namely the film storyline
      as we have described for Searching at the beginning of this paper), and
      in part due to the characters’ constant status of media-users. In doing
      so, it establishes a relationship with the surrounding world and the other
      characters that is driven by the exhibited structure of the interfaces with
      which the subjects interact, and which plays out an intradiegetic media
      subjectivation process.
        If it is true that in the desktop film the visibility of the gesture is strongly
      depowered and marginalized (as in the case of Searching and – especially
      – Noah) in favour of performativity of the trace, or the effect of the gesture
      on the media environment, then we may state that the performance in play
      becomes – at intervals – a full performance of the interface itself.
        In this sense, the desktop film hatches a feature of the mechanisms
      distinguishing contemporary interfaces that may be clearly inferred from
      Branden Hookway’s reflections. The theorist – with the aim of elaborating
      a complex cultural theory of the interface – rediscovers the meaning that
      this concept had in nineteenth-century fluid dynamics, thus highlighting
      its ability to separate and – at the same time – establish a relationship and
      potential ‘work’ between two fluids comprising a system. This is how the


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interface acts to create a form of interaction.
  To recover this ‘scientific’ sense of the interface does not have – according
to Hookway – a purely etymological meaning, but rather a conceptual
significance. His underlying idea rests upon, in fact, the belief that the
interface shall not be investigated as a technological element per se, but
as the element capable of generating a relationship between the user and
the technological device or – in his own words – ‘as a site of contestation
between human and machine’.27 On the basis of this, Hookway expresses
the need to read the interface structuring in unavoidably dynamic and
process-based terms, ‘more as a forming and less as a form’,28 and to
give maximum value to the action, the procedure, and the performance by
means of which the relationship fully materializes:

          While the interface operates in space and time, and on occasion
          may be described as a site or an event, it also governs the
          production of sites and events; it describes the site or moment
          in which the full operation and apparatus of systems, networks,
          hierarchies, and material flows are distilled into concrete
          action.29

  An action on the interface – or through the interface – is thus a (re)action
by the interface on the media-user. Therefore, the re-mediation occurring
in desktop films cannot and shall not be considered a simple re-mediation
of a peculiar ‘visual structure’ that characterizes media environments
configured within contemporary digital screens, but the re-mediation of
a proceduralism born out of the interaction with such structures. A re-
mediation with the power to highlight and document the practicability of
those very structures, and to narrativize the complex system of actions (by
the subject) and reactions (by the interface) that only when considered as
a system may account for the overall meaning of the media performativity
in contemporary culture.
  The metareflective dimension of the desktop films we have analysed
in this paper – by building on the intraface theory by Alexander Galloway
– becomes a tool in the hands of directors to narrate the fundamental
indissolubility of visuality and gesturality as parts of the complex form
of media performativity characterising the contemporary visual culture.
Moreover, it may promote a view from inside that fully reveals the
environmental influence potential of the contemporary media in which we
act and move every day.




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Notes
 1
     For an analysis of the desktop film Unfriended (Levan Gabriadze, 2014) and the Bottle Songs
series of desktop documentaries (Chloé Galibert-Laîné, Kevin B. Lee, 2018), see: Shane Denson,
Discorrelated Images (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020). For an analysis of the short desktop
film Noah, see Lydia Tuan, ‘Screening Screens: Cinematic Spectatorship in the Desktop Film Noah’,
Cinéma & Cie. International Film Studies Journal, 20.34 (Spring 2020), pp. 117 – 32. For a comparative
analysis of the desktop films Unfriended, Noah, and Searching, I recommend my article ‘Spazio
filmico e spazio mediale nel computer screen film’, in Re-directing. La regia nello spettacolo del XXI
secolo, ed. by Luca Bandirali, Daniela Castaldo, Francesco Ceraolo (Lecce: Università del Salento,
2020), pp. 143–52.
   2
     Béla Balázs, Der sichtbare Mensch oder die Kultur des Films [1924], English translation in Béla
Balázs: Early Film Theory: Visible Man and The Spirit of Film, edited by Erica Carter (New York:
Berghahn Book, 2010), p. 13.
   3
     For a vast and multi-faceted reflection on the relationship between gesture and moving image
(cinema, contemporary visual arts, and new digital media) that transcends the specific definition we
are considering here, see the special issue #Gesture, ed. by Miriam De Rosa, NECSUS. European
Journal of Media Studies, 2 (Autumn 2019).
   4
     See, for example: Pandemic Media. Preliminary Notes Toward an Inventory, ed. by Philipp Dominik
Keidl, Vinzenz Hediger, Laliv Melamed, Antonio Somaini (Lüneburg: Meson Press, 2020). See also
Virale. Il presente al tempo della pandemia, ed. by Roberto De Gaetano, Angela Maiello (Cosenza:
Pellegrini, 2020).
   5
     William J. Thomas Mitchell, ‘There Are No Visual Media’, Journal of Visual Culture, 4.2 (August
2005), 257–66.
   6
     We hereby borrow an evocative definition by Patricia Pisters, who uses it in her analysis of Michael
Clayton (Tony Gilroy, 2007), to introduce a more general account of contemporary screen culture.
Patricia Pisters, The Neuro-Image. A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2012).
   7
      Matthew Fuller, Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture (London,
Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2005), p. 4. Peppino Ortoleva also seems to take the direction of a (con)
fusion of objects and practices in an ecological perspective in his definition of ‘online iconosphere’.
See: Peppino Ortoleva, ‘YouTube e l’iconosfera online’, in Estetica dei media e della comunicazione,
ed. by Antonio Somaini, Roberto Diodato (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2011), pp. 295–312.
   8
     This aspect may also be inferred from Asbjørn Grønstad, Henrik Gustafsson and Øyvind Vågnes’
reflection. The three authors – as the name of their text suggests – set out to combine the topic of
gesturality and the act of seeing, and conclude by honouring contemporary media culture with a
space where their interdependence, if not even their deep mutual penetration, firmly emerges. See:
Gestures of Seeing in Film, Video and Drawing, ed. by Asbjørn Grønstad, Henrik Gustafsson, Øyvind
Vågnes (New York, London: Routledge, 2016). See, in particular, ‘Gestures of Seeing’, the introductory
essay by the editors, pp. 17–27.
   9
     For a literature review on the concept of ‘screen’ that takes into account even the contemporary
function of screens for the purpose of composing a broader epistemological framework in terms
of aesthetics, history, and archaeology, see, most importantly: Screen Genealogies: From Optical
Devices to Environmental Medium, ed. by Craig Buckley, Rüdiger Campe, Francesco Casetti


190                                                        Ugenti, Between Visibility and Media Performativity

(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019); Erkki Huhtamo, ‘Elements of Screenology: Toward
an Archaeology of the Screen’, ICONICS: International Studies of the Modern Image, 7 (2006), 31–82;
Mauro Carbone, Philosophie-écrans: Du cinéma à la révolution numérique (Paris: Vrin, 2016).
  10
     James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979).
  11
      We may find a setup of this kind even in the aforementioned neuro-philosophical proposal by
Patricia Pisters who, in her analysis of the film Michael Clayton, and lingering on the screens and
monitors that literally envelop the protagonist, states: ‘[these screens] are the markers of both
a typical twenty-first-century media city and the practices of everyday media use’. Pisters, p. 2
[emphasis added].
  12
      Pietro Montani, Emozioni dell’intelligenza. Un percorso nel sensorio digitale (Milan: Meltemi,
2020), p. 71.
  13
     Cf. Richard Grusin, ‘Radical mediation’, Critical Inquiry, 42.1 (Autumn 2015), pp. 124–48.
  14
      See, most importantly, Francesco Casetti, ‘Mediascapes: A Decalogue’, Perspecta. The Yale
Architectural Journal, 51, (2017), pp. 21–43; Andrea Pinotti, Antonio Somaini, Cultura visuale (Turin:
Einaudi, 2016); Ambienti mediali, ed. by Pietro Montani, Dario Cecchi, Martino Feyles (Milan: Meltemi,
2018).
  15
     ‘Desktop documentary’ is a definition coined by Kevin B. Lee and other filmmakers at the School of
the Art Institute of Chicago. See, on this topic, Luka Bešlagić, ‘Computer Interface as Film: Postmedia
Aesthetics of Desktop Documentary’, AM Journal, 20 (2019), 51–60. See also Wanda Strauven,
‘The Screenic Image: Between Verticality and Horizontality, Viewing and Touching, Displaying and
Playing’, in Screens: From Materiality to Spectatorship: A Historical and Theoretical Reassessment,
ed. by Dominique Chateau and José Moure (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016), pp.
143–56; Miriam De Rosa, Wanda Strauven, ‘Screenic (Re)Orientations: Desktop, Tabletop, Tablet,
Booklet’, Touchscreen, Etc., in Screen Space Reconfigured, ed. by Susanne Ø. Sæther, Synne T. Bull
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020), pp. 231–62. De Rosa and Strauven chose to speak
– more broadly – of ‘desktop cinema’, preferring this definition to that of ‘desktop documentary’.
  16
      On the concept of ‘topological narration’, I shall take the liberty of recommending my paper
‘Exploring Media Space in a Narrative Way. The Ongoing Desktop Narration Between New Digital
Media and Contemporary Cinema’, Imago. Studi di cinema e media, 22 (forthcoming 2021).
  17
       Catherine Grant, ‘Reframe Conversation. Kevin B. Lee’, https://filmstudiesforfree.blogspot.
com/2015/04/on-desktop-documentary-or-kevin-b-lee.html [accessed 10 September 2021].
  18
     Unpublished interview to Walter Woodman and Patrick Cederberg performed by the author on 13
March 2015.
  19
     Francesco Casetti, The Lumière Galaxy: Seven Key Words for the Cinema to Come, (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2015).
  20
     Alexander Galloway, The Interface Effect (Cambridge, UK, Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2012).
  21
      In Galloway’s reflection, the concept of remediation directly derives from another reflection by
Marshall McLuhan. In this paper, I prefer to make reference to the reinterpretation made in the
late-90s by David Bolter and Richard Grusin in their book Remediation: Understanding New Media
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).
  22
       The correlation between opacity and metareflection dimension seems to be implicit even
in Galloway’s observations. It is no coincidence that in mentioning a series of cases in which the
unworkable state of the intraface emerges he also references art cinema or Brecht’s alienation-
effect. All such practices leverage an awareness by the viewer of the processes lying behind the
representation. See: A. Galloway, op. cit., pp. 40–42.


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 23
      On the relationship between the image and the documentation of the gesture, also see the
reflections by Giorgio Agamben in ‘Notes on Gesture’, in Id., Infancy and history: essays on the
destruction of experience (London: Verso, 1993), pp- 133–39.
  24
     Upon discussing ‘constructive instability’, we explicitly refer to the definition presented by Thomas
Elsaesser. On this topic, see Thomas Elsaesser, ‘“Constructive Instability”, or: The Life of Things as
the Cinema’s Afterlife’, in Video Vortex Reader. Responses to YouTube, ed. by Geert Lovink, Sabine
Niederer (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2008), pp. 13–31. Also see Thomas Elsaesser,
‘Tales of Epiphany and Entropy: Around the Worlds in Eighty Clicks’, in The YouTube Reader, ed. by
Pelle Snickars, Patrick Vonderau (Stockholm: National Library of Sweden, 2009), pp. 166–86.
  25
      See Ursula Heise, ‘Unnatural Ecologies: The Metaphor of the Environment in Media Theory’,
Configurations, 10.1 (November 2002), 149–68.
  26
     Francesco Parisi, La tecnologia che siamo (Turin: Codice, 2019), pp. 23–24.
  27
     Branden Hookway, Interface (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2014), p. 130.
  28
     Ivi, p. 62 [emphasis added].
  29
     Ivi, p. 5.




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