Indexicality and spectatorship in digital media: waking life as hybrid digital artifact

Abstract

This essay explores changes in concepts of realism and spectatorship in the digital age. With digital technology, images no longer bear witness to reality in the same way envisioned by theorists such as Andre Bazin, and a new model of spectatorship must follow this loss of indexicality. The digital rotoscoping technique employed in Richard Linklater's /Waking Life/demonstrates this split between reality and image, in part by preserving the real beneath an entirely created artistic surface.