Stefan Heidenreich

Oliver Grau et. al: Imagery in the 21st Century. MIT – Press, Cambridge (Mass.)

Collaboration is nothing new to moving images. From the very beginning of cinema it played an important role. One can even describe the history of filmmaking as a progressing series of collaborative practices, or as Janet Staiger suggests, as a sequence of modes of production.1 Different approaches to teamwork depend on the available technologies and their profitability. And they come with a corresponding cultural format and a specific aesthetics of their own. Thus the structure of collaboration can give crucial hints as to how visual production might take shape. In fact, the scope of possible collaborative practices is already present, creating a field of potential practices. So the main task of turning to gaze into the twenty-first century does not consist in guessing the future, but much more in analyzing our present situation and comparing it with the history of the moving image.
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