Compact Cinematics

<i>Compact Cinematics</i> challenges the dominant understanding of cinema to focus on the various compact short miniature pocket-sized forms of cinematics that have existed from even before its standardization in theatrical form and in recent years have multiplied and proliferated taking up an increasingly important part of our everyday multimedia environment. <br/><br/>Short films or micro-narratives cinematic pieces or units re-assembled into image archives and looping themes challenge the concepts that have traditionally been used to understand cinematic experience like linear causality sequentiality and closure and call attention to complex and modular forms of cinematic expression and perception. Such forms in turn seem to meet the requirements of digital convergence which has pushed the development of more compact and mobile hardware for the display and use of audiovisual content on laptops smartphones and tablets. Meanwhile contemporary economies of digital content acquisition filing and sharing equally require the shrinking of cinematic content for it to be recorded played projected distributed and installed with ease and speed. In this process cinematic experience is shortened and condensed as well so as to fit the late-capitalist attention economy. <br/><br/>The essays in this volume ask what this changed technical socio-economic and political situation entails for the aesthetics and experience of contemporary cinematics and call attention to different concepts theories and tools at our disposal to analyze these changes.