The “Return” of 3-D: On Some of the Logics and Genealogies of the Image in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

Accustomed as we are to the artistic avant-garde as resistant to all commercial applications (which usually includes the Hollywood film industry), we tend to regard scientific inquiry as pure, technology as instrumental, and the military-industrial complex as immoral. What the return of 3-D shows is how difficult it is to maintain such neat distinctions. One needs to think creatively as well as critically about their entanglement, which has been oppositional, interdependent, and cooperative-complicit all at the same time. Perhaps the reason why Hugo, clutching his father's robot and snatched by the stationmaster from the tracks of the digitally onrushing train, yields such a memorable 3-D image is because its several dimensions hint at just such an improbable but necessary constellation of antagonistic mutuality.