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digitial going film - film going digital - all media to become one

a quote from Lev Manociches essay "Cinema and Digitial Media" that I would like to share:

Starting in 1936 and continuing into the Second World War, Zuse had been building a computer in the living room of his parents' apartment in Berlin. Zuse's computer pioneered some of the basic ideas of computing: binary arithmetic, floating decimal point and program control by punched tape. For the tape, he used discarded 35 mm movie film. One of these surviving pieces of film shows the abstract program codes punched over the original frames of some interior shot. The iconic code of cinema is discarded in favor of the more efficient binary one. In a technological remake of the Oedipal complex, a son murders his father. But the story has a new twist -- a happy one. Zuse's film with its strange superimposition of the binary over iconic anticipates the process which gets underway half a century later: the convergence of all media, including film, to digital code. Cinema and computer -- the Jacquard loom and the Analytical Engine -- merge into one.

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