Between Visibility and Media Performativity. The Role of Interface and Gesturality in Desktop Cinema

This article aims to investigate desktop films as “meta-media” audiovisual forms, trying to analyze their aesthetics and their meta-reflective potential in the broader framework of contemporary visual and media culture. Screens and interfaces, re-mediated into this kind of films, constitute a second-level media space into the filmic space. They are the only visually accessible space for the spectator, in which gesturality of the characters emerges as a form of performing relationship with digital technology, in terms of a posture or a more general engagement with the (media) environment: as an “operational trace” on the screen. What results from this particular visual and narrative structure is the centrality of media performativity: a concept that will be widely problematized in this article on a theoretical level. In brief, media performativity will be understood as a behavioral pattern that characterizes our daily interaction with the screens surrounding us, and as part of an eco-media system in which action (of the user) and reaction (of the interface) are involved and entangled. The concept of media performativity thus forms by means of the idea that the individual is no longer separate from the medium throughout the mediation process, but is deeply and radically involved in the same.