Johannes Binotto: Practices of Viewing V – Mask

The fifth entry in the Practices of Viewing series on new media and their old histories.

Cinematic images never come to us directly but through mask that crop their visuals to the right format. The question of different image formats and aspect ratios is more than of just film history interest. It raises the question of visibility in general, and how images do not just have one size but could be multiple and evolving.  While in analogue projection one was forced to experiment with cropping the film in different ways, digital film formats give us the size of images as a fixed entity. All the more we should invent new masks of our own in order to see differently.