Videodrome

First it takes over your mind and then your body.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IxeroqZSuo

Videodrome prefigures the effect that video compression algorithms, of the motion vector variety, have on the motion pictures they encode. The motion picture experts group (MPEG) inaugurates a screen which will be a flexible surface onto which the motion picture will be projected. The movement of the motion picture, which was originally set up to occur in thought, will be extracted prior to thought, and used to animate the screen instead. Once the screen is animated it is no longer necessary to project the complete motion picture onto it. The motion picture will be re-inscribed on a path leading back to the photographic.

Now the end result still requires thought to supply movement, but it will now be according to movements prefigured by the encoding process, the purpose of which is not to necessarily alter the motion picture, but to make it cheaper to deliver.

But the process does also alter it. The alterations may not be as magnified as they are in Videodrome, or even conscious, but insofar as they are there they can operate unconsciously. There is that possibility of a conscious effect, if later, invoking that sense of something trapped within a flexible sac.

Entrapment.

But we can also imagine more hopeful elaborations of the Videodrome process, which aims to redeem movement rather than entrap it. The determining factor will be the reason. Is the reason purely economic rationalism (ie. cheaper delivery systems) or philosophical elaboration.

Carl