rizomer

 

Image : cinebits from the controversial film Salò by Pier Paolo Pasolini : what did the filmmaker perceive with his concept of “cinemes”? how can it inspire sensibility, “sympathy for context” in mobile web design?

As my exploration of interaction design around cinematic streams moves towards the mobile web, I am (slowly) coming across the issue of “context” in mobile user experience. Adaptive Path’s presentation by Rachel Hinman provides inspiring lights along this way. As she is pointing the need for a “sympathy for context”, I recall the perceptions of the cinematic medium expressed by filmmaker and poet Pier Paolo Pasolini. In his essay on language and cinema, Empirismo eretico, the late italian filmmaker brings forward the concept of “cinemes” to describe what he perceives as the particles, “the primary visual units”, of cinema. From the coordination of these “cinemes”, he writes, the cinematic image arises. Could his sensibility for the fundamental units of cinema inspire “sympathy for context” in the design of mobile user experience? Since, as cinemakers or designers, we are no strangers to the idea of  “context being about understanding human relationships to the people, places and things in the world”. Should those relationships articulate through camera shots or through mobile web designs, what particles express our “sympathy for context”?