From theater to laboratory: two regimes of apparatus in the material assemblages of media culture

Abstract

ABSTRACT This research examines the apparatus concepts in the last decades of film studies, from the apparatus theory in the 1970s to the revisionist historiography of the early cinema and new media theory after the 1980s. Diagrammatizing the operation of a cinematographic apparatus as a process to make a fold between its machinic sensor and motor embedded in the material assemblages of media culture, it suggests two prototypes of apparatus, namely theater and laboratory, defined respectively by their different ways of enfolding an inside, problematizing the outside, and reassembling them to each other. Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s ethnographic experiment in Mysterious Object at Noon provides an example of the laboratorial apparatus that transforms its operational environments into the assemblages of singular problems, never representable, but only concretize-able by the apparatus’s function to network them.