Where is My World?

In my childhood, computer games were a fixed space, without time or location. There were events and game items, but it was a fixed spacetime. During gameplay, I could distinguish between the space inside the computer and real physical space. As much as physical time was frozen, the space within the computer game was also frozen, despite the flowing and moving images. One event or one story continued endlessly, and spacetime repeated until my character defeated the final monster—where the character died again and again. It was a space of death rather than a space of survival. The endless deaths represented the passage of time, and the number of remaining hours in the character’s life represented how much time had passed.

Now, we watch movies through computers, mobile phones, or other devices like the iPad. But movie space is no different. Even though there is no space for me to intervene in a movie—except for a little mouse click or remote control (but can we really call that intervention? Even in a movie theatre, all I can do is rush out of the black box)—through the ending credits, I can feel that one event has ended and that another block of time has passed.

The events never end. Small spaces repeat endlessly.

Perhaps this is where my research question began. How many pieces of events, time, and space can coexist? How can this schizophrenic space be related or structured? If I am no longer just an observer but an active user or producer, where is my position in this network? Perhaps it began with mechanical eyes, as in Dziga Vertov’s work—it was camera vision, providing a third gaze that divided culture and nature. Through mechanical eyes, the human world is no longer simply culture, and the animal world is no longer simply nature. These two are merged as a third spacetime on the screen. It is no longer a question of what is real or virtual, but how many worlds we have—or can have—now. As long as humans exist on earth, a new world is created. Then, where is my world? What is my world?

I look at my room. My room is the maximum size of the world that I can compose and perceive as physical reality—that is, the limit of the range of action I can perceive. “We no longer know what is imaginary or real, physical or mental, in the situation, not because they are confused, but because we do not have to know and there is no longer even a place from which to ask” (Cinema 2, p. 7). The moment I leave my home, the spacetime of the world becomes indiscernible in size and scope. The moment I move beyond my house, I can only reconstruct those surroundings through abstract notions.

If, as Deleuze says, movement-image and time-image have represented time indirectly and directly—through the movement of active actants and the observation of actants—I can no longer do either. I am just looking at a network of relationships in which I am included.

I recognise the ground I stand on, but my relationship with that ground is not connected to how I construct it. The village I live in is not made up of the networks I have created. Postcodes, addresses, and street names indicate how this place is connected with the country of Korea. It has already been set up, and I can only borrow or use the existing code to place myself within it.

Isn’t this too passive? What role do I play? Am I not too passive? Will I be satisfied with this position? Will I be happy with a time defined by the piled-up deaths of characters? How can I construct my own time and space?

For me, practice is active participation. I do not passively insert myself into the network. I engage with it. I connect my own network. Eisenstein repositioned history. Vertov repositioned the human eye. Their approaches were very different, but they moved in the same direction. Both directors pursued a shift from a passive to an active position, and for both, this was achieved through the practice of editing. It is not merely the additive effect of montage that creates emotional ecstasy in Eisenstein’s work, but rather his way of seeing the past. He chose to become both a producer and an observer while making films.

I am a producer and an observer.