Somatic montage: supra-dimensional composition in cinema and the arts

This dissertation initiates a new cinematic language specific to immersive cinema—somatic montage. A language specific to immersive cinema is an area of cinema theory neglected up until now. Immersive and hyper-cinemas, because of their formal multivalency, occupy a post-cinematic critical space between film and media theory, art history, and art-science-technology. Somatic montage describes a conceptual approach to composing narrative structures in cinematic forms that occupy three and higher dimensions of space-time, examining the roles of proprioceptions, memory, and synaesthesia in experiencing a work of art. We propose a new montage syntax specific to immersive cinema that addresses cinema as a supra-dimensional, embodied construct. The four-dimensional tesseract provides a useful model-metaphor of a somatic montage for addressing concepts of space-time, spatial and temporal ambiguity, the faceting of perspective via multiple viewpoints or screens, and the subjective participation of the viewer in an unfolding narrative. ❧ The concept of somatic montage developed here begins with the impact on the arts of the turn of the 20th-century discoveries of hyperspace, non-Euclidean geometry, relativity theory, and quantum mechanics that established Modernism. We follow with a brief spatial history of montage from linear-temporal cinematic montage, multi-layered spatial montage in two dimensions, assemblage in three dimensions, and finally somatic montage, a montage in (4:n)-dimensions. Advances in neuroscience demonstrating the embodied, somatosensory conceptualization of multiple dimensions of information in the mind are brought to bear on developing a polysensory language for perceiving and composing supra-dimensional cinema. ❧ We demonstrate the relevance of somatic montage in contemporary and historical art forms, including giant screen and “hypercinemas,” video art, multi-projection media installations, panoramas, experimental film, stereoscopy, holography, and the frameless, immersive cinema formats of fulldome, 360° cinema, and virtual and augmented reality. A detailed analysis of the media installation “Ice-Time,” the praxis portion of this dissertation, concludes this research. “Ice-Time” is an immersive, multi-channel audiovisual installation whose formal structure exemplifies embodied, supra-dimensional cinema composition while demonstrating the significance of interdisciplinary art-science research.