Digital Cinema and Morphogenesis

Between the Discrete and the Continuous

Abstract

This article develops the particularities of the generation of visual forms in digital cinema as opposed to those of analog cinema. For this, it is considered that what is proper to cinema is less the reliable record of reality than morphogenesis, the production of animated forms from a tricotomic unfolding as established by Adrian Ivakhiv. Consequently, following the idea of indexicality, we conceptualize differences and overlaps, reading in parallel the proposed morphogenetic model and the cosmology, also tricotomic, of C. S. Peirce. This leads us to consider the relations between the fields of the discrete and the continuous according to the hypothesis that morphogenesis in analog cinema corresponds to a molding process, while in the digital it corresponds to one of modulation.