Rosa Barba engages with a futuristic, progressive vision of cinema. By questioning and analyzing cinema's past and present with respect to various forms of staging from the perspective of artistic practice and research, a new space beyond is formulated. Prompted in part by the astronomical, the author takes the reader on a journey to reveal the imaginary of what can be called the cinema of the present. This book revolves around the concept of anarchic organization, introduced here into cinema as a way of building a foundation for thinking and acting through the destabilization of past hierarchies of cinema. It highlights the significance of artistic research in provocatively giving hope for an uncertain future by providing key tools to engage with so-called reality via multifaceted artistic language, media, and images.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Chapter i: Speculating on Astronomy and Cinema
Overexposure
Henrietta Swan Leavitt: The “Cinematic” Discovery of Cepheids—
The Flicker of the Stars—A Digression
The Color Out of Space (2015)
On Darkness—Cinematic and Telescopic Observations
White Museum (2010-): Reordering Cinematic Space
Instruments In and Out
Chapter 2: The Immatrial Medium That Articulates Space—
The Camera as a Drawing Instrument
Camera-as-Instrument Drawings
Drawing to Trace the Physicality of Time
Expanded Spatial Multiplicity I La Duree I Internal Thought /
Accessing Memory
Landscape as Document
Flicker and Algorithm
Landscape as Ruins
History Is Like a Sculpture: Islands as Monuments
of Transformation
Chapter 3: Collective Performance as Embarkation:
Activating the Subconscious
Flicker as Leap
Involuntary Memory
Non-actors as Documents
Fact and Fiction in the Public
Chapter 4: Materiality and Machine: Looping
and Fragmentingto Create a New Auditorium
The New Machine
The Autonomy of the Material
What do I mean by the activity of “play”?
Hyperspace—Referring to another Hyperspace—A New Auditorium
Conclusion
Bibliography
Works
Colophon