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Introduction 3
a major question confronting the study of the moving image today: how can one take account of the diverse array of exhibition situations that confront the contemporary spectator? Or, put differently and more succinctly, where is cinema? Raymond Bellour has proposed a rather restrictive answer to this question, positing that only a projection in a movie theater before a collective audience may be called cinema; “film” can circulate outside of this situation, but cinema, no.1 Francesco Casetti, meanwhile, has endeavored to trace out the migrations of cinema beyond the traditional dispositif by describing the persistence of a particular form of experience across new sites of exhibition.2 This focus on location and exhibition practice constitutes an important step in thinking through the transition from analog to digital. But there is also a sense in which it overlooks a key site of inquiry, one that has been as transformed by digitization as the domain of exhibition: how precisely the image arrives at these new locations. If moving images are now consumed on more platforms and in more exhibition situations than ever before, what networks do they traverse in order to reach their audiences? What factors intervene to enable or restrict these passages? Answering these questions means examining the repercussions of the fact that film and video are reproducible media, founded in an economy of the copy. It means exploring the domains of distribution and circulation, where distribution designates the infrastructures (whether formal or informal) that make work available to be seen, and circulation designates the trajectories particular works can take through one or more distribution models. A second artwork from Parreno’s Palais de Tokyo exhibition suggests what it might be like to approach the contemporary transformations of the moving image from this vantage point. When purchasing a ticket for the show, the viewer was invited to take an unlabeled DVD in a blank plastic case (figure 0.2). The exhibition guide noted that the DVD was an artwork entitled Precognition (2012), containing versions of two of the videos on display elsewhere in the exhibition, Marilyn (2012) and C.H.Z. (2011). By allowing the viewer to continue the experience of viewing Anywhere, Anywhere, Out of the World after leaving the Palais de Tokyo, Parreno plays with the spatiotemporal limits of the exhibition and enables its images to travel between the large-scale, public projection of the art institution and the smaller screens of private, domestic situations. The artist makes use