Connecting interactive cinema to media ethics and global citizenship

 

Interactive Cinema explores various cinematic practices that work to transform what is often seen as a primarily receptive activity into a participatory, multimedia experience. Surveying a multitude of unorthodox approaches throughout the history of motion pictures, Marina Hassapopoulou offers insight into a range of largely ephemeral and site-specific projects that consciously assimilate viewers into their production.

Analyzing examples of early cinema, Hollywood B movies, museum and gallery installations, virtual-reality experiments, and experimental web-based works, Hassapopoulou travels across numerous platforms, highlighting a diverse array of strategies that attempt to unsettle the allegedly passive spectatorship of traditional cinema. Through an exploration of these radically inventive approaches to the medium, many of which emerged out of sociopolitical crises and periods of historical transition, she works to expand notions of interactivity by considering it in both technological and phenomenological terms. 

Deliberately revising and expanding Eurocentric scholarship to propose a much broader, transnational scope, the book emphasizes the ethical dimensions of interactive media and their links to larger considerations around community building, citizenship, and democracy. By combining cutting-edge theory with updated conventional film studies methodologies, Interactive Cinema presses at the conceptual limits of cinema and offers an essential road map to the rapidly evolving landscape of contemporary media.

Marina Hassapopoulou is assistant professor of cinema studies at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

"Into all the noise and chatter about participatory media comes this wonderful study, Interactive Cinema. Marina Hassapopoulou takes the reader on an expansive tour of the aesthetics and political engagements of what we casually describe as interactive media art practices. In the process, her analysis of a surprisingly diverse array of artistic interventions constructs a new historical path for how we understand multisensory audience experiences. Interactive Cinema investigates the conceptual limits of ‘interactivity’ and shows us the complexity of the related ethical conundrums. In your hands or on the screen before you is a powerful document of the rich, long-running intersection between interactivity and cinema." —Charles R. Acland, author of American Blockbuster: Movies, Technology, and Wonder

"In this detailed and theoretically sophisticated study, Marina Hassapopoulou takes the study of interactive media to a new level, considering its technological, cultural, and ethical implications." —Erkki Huhtamo, UCLA