By way of conclusion, I wish to examine the digital and post-cinematic shift in image generation and engagement in terms of the kinds of utopian and dystopian visions which circulate around new media forms in general, visions which are regularly charged with a moral exigency. These ethical prognoses concern themselves with questions about our future, and the tone often refers to underlying Western enlightenment beliefs in the advancement of human knowledge – a linear teleology of progress. Accordingly, one can be positive, negative, or ultimately ambivalent about the changes the digital makes. Positively, these changes guide us into a new era of aesthetic play which liberates our sensorium, realigns our notion of the real, rewires the brain, and stimulates our creative capacities. Negatively, it corrodes our imagination, is tied into nefarious networks of subtle governmentality, strips us of our narratives for life, and dissolves the political intellect into a sea of free-floating and short-lived intensities. Ambivalently, it is simply different – a different way of thinking, a different mode of attention, a different sense of the world – and prognoses for the future are deferred, or at least left open.

I have attempted to examine the digital shift in a neutral way, and yet as a child of a digital age – perhaps just as my parent's generation, the children of the 1950s New Wave, might feel about TV, or as my grandparents and great-grandparents might have felt about moving, technicolour, or talking images – I am excited and moved by the changes I see, and thus I must actively moderate my enthusiasm.