Digital Traumascape

Abstract

Ever since its much noticed use in the 1973 film Westworld (Michael Crichton, USA, 1973) CGI (computer-generated imagery) has been continuously altering cinematic perception of reality. One of the major changes concerns the production of space. Though CGI is regularly employed to create fantasy worlds or utopian landscapes, it is worth noting that more and more filmmakers are turning to it in order to produce contemporary landscapes of devastation brought about by an atomic, military, or environmental catastrophe. Films such as Wall e (Andrew Stanton, USA, 2008) or 9 (Shane Acker, USA, 2009) are symptomatic in this respect of the aesthetic importance filmmakers now attach to the use of CGI for the representation of devastation. This phenomenon, which can be described here as a “new aesthetic of disaster,” leads us to examine the concept of “Traumascape” in connection with current digital culture, and more particularly in relation to the cinematic “virtualization” of spatial reality. In our view, this “virtualization” allows for a visual “exponentiation” of said reality, thus making it ascend to the power of the “Traumatic Real” in which originates the enigmatic sublimeness of space. Generally speaking, our article intends to analyse the production of digital traumatic space in cinema and to demonstrate its novel relationship with the sublime.