d to others. This different sense of subjective and material "presence" both signified and supported by cinematic and electronic media emerges within and co-constitutes objective and material practices of representation and social existence. Thus, while cooperative in creating the moving-image culture or "life-world" we now inhabit, cinematic and electronic technologies are each quite different from each other in their concrete "materiality" and particular existential significance. Each offers our lived-bodies radically different ways of "being-in-the world." Each implicates us in different structures of material investment, and--because each has a particular affinity with different cultural functions, forms, and contents--each stimulates us through differing modes of representation to different aesthetic responses and ethical responsibilities. In sum, just as the photograph did in the last century, so in this one, cinematic and electronic screens differently demand and shape our "presence" to the world and our representation in it. Each differently and objectively alters our subjectivity while each invites our complicity in formulating space, time, and bodily investment as significant personal and social experience.These preliminary remarks are grounded in the belief that, during the last century, historical changes in our contemporary "sense" of temporality, spatiality, and existential and embodied presence cannot be considered less than a consequence of correspondent changes in our technologies of representation. However, they also must be considered something more, for as Martin Heidegger reminds us, "The essence of technology is nothing technological."[1] That is, technology never comes to its particular material specificity and function in a neutral context for neutral effect. Rather, it is always historically informed not only by its materiality but also by its political, economic, and social context, and thus always both co-cons...
