Jon Baldwin reviews Hybrid Images and the Vanishing Point of Digital Visual Effects by Tom Livingstone, Edinburgh University Press, 2024
This is a fascinating book which examines configurations of images in digital culture as they pass from novelty to norm. For example, compare the notorious jerky AI rendition of Will Smith eating pasta in 2024 to the relatively smooth dining experience he has in 2025.
As Livingstone explains these ‘cinema of attractions’, hybrid images and digital visual effects become dominant and ideological, naturalised, a given, and thus we forget how they were before, i.e. they morph into the norm. Livingstone also wants to remind us of the ontological and epistemological issues that impact our visual culture, our ways of seeing and everyday life. He is concerned about the ways neoliberalist capitalism is able to influence and even control what we see and how we see it in an effort to maintain cultural hegemony alongside its economic and political status.
We are invited to deep-dive into digital colourisation, holograms, digital compositing, time-ramping, and computer-animation, for example. Like Looney Tunes cartoons, Eisenstein’s Plasmatic Theory of Disney Animations, and other visual renderings that bend, if not break, the laws of physics, we thus explore how we relate to time, space, the past and the future, in the context of the intensified hybrid images.
Digital colourisation, for instance, mediates our access and relationship to history. Considering the colourisation process in Peter Jackson’s World War I documentary They Shall Not Grow Old (2018), Livingstone focuses on the hybridisation of analogue footage with digital practice, and its micro-manipulation of colour information at the level of the pixel. While purporting to offer the audience clear accessibility to a perception of the past, the limited parameters of the digital palette skew the results. Thus, colourisation of archive footage actually augments, shifts and alienates our perception of moving-images that have been reshaped along the lines of amenability rather than the pursuit of verisimilitude. For instance, the audience forgets aspects of the archive footage that cannot be colourised.
In turn, consider the colourised faces of the soldiers in Jackson’s film. The skin tone is lacking in variation, appears strange with a monotonous wash, overly luminous, or chalky and sallow, no nuance of shade, hue or reflection. The reason for this chromatic sameness – also apparent in digital images of black faces – is that colourisation deploys too few hues in its rendering of flesh tones. Hence, we encounter the production-line politics of remembrance and representation: in attempting to humanise the individuals caught on film, Jackson’s process actually homogenises them.
Moreover, on-screen spaces created by digital compositing may offer the audience multiple perspectives, but they also micro-manage our attention. The cyborgs in Blade Runner 2049 (2018), for instance, recondition our gaze and we share their spatial experience: a neoliberal environment which is saturated by data fields, micro-sensors, information and capital flow. Indeed, this appears to be similar the direction which AI smart spectacles are headed with regards to street level facial recognition and instantly available data background information.
Furthermore, time-ramping in action films – the speeding up and slowing down of movement – no longer accords with the flow of time as it is experienced by humans in their day-to-day lives. Instead, pro-filmic manipulation produces a labour-intensive, industrial sense of temporality which favours the neoliberal corporate demands of digital VFX that operate on a micro-temporal scale. That is to say, the audience is being taught how to see like software sees, and to accept this as natural, normal and inevitable.
Finally, computer-animated images orientate their representational and referential capacity temporally forwards, and present the viewer with material items and objects like cars or handbags which convincingly seem to be from the future. Thus, these computer-generated aesthetics help to generate consumer desire and demand, affecting shopping habits and behaviour which, in turn, will reshape the shelves in department stores, virtual baskets on shopping baskets and, ultimately, the physical world.
Such imagery purports to embolden our view, allowing us see further, deeper, and clearer, but, in truth, the digital-industrial-complex narrows the contours of what we can see, blinkers, and shapes and controls our subjectivity according to the aims and objectives of neoliberal capitalist culture.
Tom Livingstone’s ‘Hybrid Images and the Vanishing Point of Digital Visual Effects’ (2024) is a brilliant look at the blind spot of digital imagery, and it is available via the Edinburgh University Press website.
