Thomas Lamarre, McGill University.

répétition

« Rather than a relation between old and new, or then and now, the animated Metropolis suggests that, at the heart of new media is a non-relation between old and new. This is precisely where the question of the digital as new media leads — to non-contradiction and non-mediation, to repetition as (non)relation. New media don’t bode well for history in the sense of validating documents based on indexical traces of the past that are determining (if only in the last instance). New media do make, however, for a past that is potentially less passive, one that is not content to play the role of foundation in order to sustain temporal priorities for present agencies. Rather than a fatal repetition of the death of prior systems, historical repetition in new media implies serial repetition, and opens in festival, ritual and myth. Of course, viewers and filmmakers may be asked to assume a tragic destiny in which the new is not so much new as it is that which was never old. »