Avatars of the digital: the visual motifs of a present cinema for the future

Abstract

The evolution of cinema, from its origins to its current digital form, reflects a profound shift in how images are created and perceived. Historically tied to rituals and the divine, images once served as a bridge to transcendence. The invention of photography and cinema marked the beginning of their transition into tools for capturing and preserving gestures and memories. With the advent of video and digital screens, images have become ubiquitous, stripped of their original contexts, and transformed into fragments of a global cultural narrative. Modern digital cinema, interwoven with technologies like infinite scroll, represents a reconfiguration of visual storytelling – an ever-accessible archive of interconnected moments, no longer constrained by traditional linearity or singular meaning. This transformation reveals cinema’s enduring role as both a historical repository and a fluid medium of representation and creation of visual motifs in the digital age.