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If graffiti's gestural forms connote animation of the human body as well as the fragmented bodies of our cities, cinema's ability to animate is more descriptive than connotative. Computers, again through their replicative functionality, already suggest a certain degree of animation of information as it moves and streams through pathways connecting memory and processors. But this in itself does not suggest the movement effected by cinematic representation. However, where the sense of movement we associate with computers intersects the history of cinema and moving images in general, becoming relevant to Kinograffiti, is the moment within the short history of computers when viewing screens become an integral part of how we work with these devices. It is not that the screen, this object that references not only film, but also the psyche, is absolutely necessary to the functioning of a computer. In fact, it has been pointed out that the work performed by computers is not particularly attuned to visual perception. However, it is precisely this device's supplementary status which renders it so important to an investigation of our relationship to digital media. The Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) gave humanity to the monstrosity of room-sized computing machinery by acting as a sort of face in scale with our own. Certainly the keyboard allowed us to communicate to these devices. Printers even allowed computers to write to us on long ribbons of paper. Like paper, CRT's represented text on a flat, legible surface. Unlike paper, the glowing, ephemeral surfaces of CRT's could be used to display different information over time, depending on the state of the computer. A CRT was like a window into the state of a computer at a particular moment in time. In this way, CRT's were unlike film, which projected the same fixed play of forms every showing. CRT's were perhaps, as they continue to be, more akin to television. Like television, the computer display appears to bring closer a vision of something our own bodies cannot reach. Nonetheless, the possibility for temporal fiction shared between those early computers equipped with CRT's and films was soon exploited in the form of video games. Early video games animated simple graphics to show dynamic game boards where triangle spaceships traveled black space shooting point-sized projectiles at each other. Expressing more than the computer's origin in a culture of war, these early video games reveal something of the relationship of programmer to machine. At work between them is a repetitive structure of design and play (of a play between design and play) whereby neither the player nor the game is understood as finished or completed. A player may master a game, become bored with, or break a game, but it will always be possible to redesign the game. In this way, a certain temporality is put in play. This temporality corresponds to a sense of infinity, of possibility without bounds. It also resonates with a cultural sense of self understood as collection of drives and desires in play, interacting dynamically with each other.

If today we find this sense of digital media in any way familiar, not to mention appealing, it is perhaps because we have come to regard its artifacts as ephemeral and consistent with a sense of passing time, a momentariness to which we find difficulty holding on. To put this into perspective, it is important to place this sense of digital media in relation to other media -- those we now tend to call "analog".

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