Collaborative projection and the twin ecstasies of DIY cineworlding

Abstract

The notion that ethnographic practice needs to be normative in order to be rigorous is problematic, especially when the partners in that research are producing experimental and resistant DIY cultures. Nonnormative ethnographers are “activist” in their critical engagement with dominant regimes of truth and must contend with digital disruption and platform capitalism that has vastly expanded DIY production. It is no longer possible to identify DIY culture with self-production because digital self-production is simply demanded for the “digital citizenship” of platform capitalism. In this article, the psychoanalytic concept of projection is turned upside down and understood as a socially performed digital-bodying that worlds. The screen becomes a location of dissensus, projecting the ecstatic truth of Modern/capitalist worldings or Altermodern/anti-capitalist worldings. Cinematic research-creation, CineWorlding, is an activist cinematic posthumanographic study of the interstices that infold concepts, bodies, social, technological, and environmental ecologies into worldings.

We no longer partake of the drama of alienation, but are in the ecstasy of communication. And this ecstasy is obscene. … It is no longer the obscenity of the hidden, the repressed, the obscure, but that of the visible, the all-too-visible. (Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication)

There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization. (Werner Herzog, The Minnesota Declaration)

Introduction: posthumanography's alternatives to ethnographic norms

The small lights of screen projection are burning away any lingering illusion that audiovision is bound by films, theaters, or TV and has ever really been separable from lived abstraction. Not the materiality of the image itself but the cinema-thinking activated in audiovision (Chion, 2019). Cinema-thinking as lived abstraction is inseparable from bodying in/with the world: “what is lived abstraction if not thought?” (Massumi, 2011: 116). Never far away from one's device, we are induced into the ecstasy of communication while institutions of various sorts struggle with or attempt to maintain a monopoly on the ecstasy of truth. These twin ecstasies are the insatiable hunger for lived abstraction and the feeling forward of the edge of emergent worldings. Lived abstraction is not separable from worldings, it is the abstraction of every event significant form-taking:

an occurrent self-abstraction from the combination of objective ingredients from which it lifts off (the event’s local signs). What the lived abstraction expresses is the event of its own appearance. It is one with its own abstractive manner of appearing. It is the abstraction of its appearance: a being of abstraction, in a becoming of the world. (Massumi, 2011: 148)

Worlding, becoming of a world, no longer the world, marshals past virtualities (material and semiotic) into a future-taking form: futurity. Audiovisual ethnography/cine-ethnomusicology that recognizes the need for technologies of lived abstraction seek out what Isabelle Stengers has called ecologies of practice, operationalizing differences that move thought. Erin Manning writes that “Technologies of Lived Abstraction orients to the creativity at this crossing, in virtue of which life everywhere can be considered germinally aesthetic, and the aesthetic anywhere already political”. ¹ We no longer need to be stuck between a choice of writing culture or writing against culture, instead, we are busy innovating technologies of lived abstraction: mobilizing body-thinking, pen and paper-thinking, cinemathinking at the event-points of material-semiotic-social-technological in-folding. Tracing the worldings that emerge from the in-folding of psychic/conceptual, social, technological, and environmental ecologies. Ethnographic practices are technologies of lived abstraction, practitioners can choose between a freedom to practice experimentally or a commitment to vectoring historical methodology. But as audiovision continues to introduce new and now dominant techno-bio-worldings it seems essential to consider the possibility that ethnography needs to confront its ongoing commitment to maintaining the anthropocentric lived abstractions of Humanism and investigate the emergent complex ecological potentialities of practicing posthumanography (MacDonald, 2023) as technology of lived abstraction. This essay takes up the call to promote an activist cine-ethnography by proposing nonnormative activist cinematic concepts for the humanities and social sciences that see as germinal the twin ecstasies of cineworlding: ethnofiction's ecstasy of communication and poetic/ecstatic truth.

The reader will not find here a step-by-step how-to guide to make a film. This is unnecessary as there are already tens of thousands of hours of cinematic how-to videos on YouTube. Instead, this essay is a proposition for a way of thinking-feeling cinematic research-creation allied to DIY Altermodern ² worldings that are open to collective experimentation and multiplicity of form. This is not a proposition of a methodology but instead a call for cinematic experimentation in DIY research that investigates cinematic projection, its seduction by global systems of capital, and the projective activism of alternative co-produced cineworldings. This cinematic activism occurs in an ecology of proliferating self-production, the ecstasy of communication, where “we no longer live as playwrights or actors but as terminals of multiple networks…where the stage (which is no longer a stage) becomes that of the infinitesible memory and the screen” (Baudrillard, 2012: 23). The screen is the stage upon which we project the ecstatic truth of worldings, the page is the stage where we theorize lived abstraction.

DIY can no longer be defined by self-production in an age dominated by platform capitalism's inducement to DIY social media self-production. Instead, DIY is understood by its orientation to anti-Capitalist subjectification, its alternative anti-capitalist futurities, its Altermodern worldings. Altermodern worldings are often precarious alternatives to Modern worldings of platform capitalism. The DIY art scenes of the 1970–2000s, which give DIY its historic character, was not only oriented to Do-it-yourself production but also and perhaps especially its orientation to anti-capitalist futurity. DIY production and anti-capitalism worked transversally, through each other. The interpenetration of anti-capitalism and craft production has a much longer history that emerged from the Arts and Crafts movement ³ as resistance to industrial capitalism. In cinema, Altermodern worldings were practiced by filmmakers who made DIY art using small gauge cameras originally sold for home movies. In music, inexpensive rock instruments and the inherited styles of rock and roll were transformed into a made-at-home sound that vectored the anti-capitalism of the Arts and Crafts movement and worlded them into youth culture that led to the emergence of new Altermodern worldings. DIY cinematic artists creating with and alongside DIY musicians in DIY scenes are the Altermodern ecology in which cineworlding has developed. CineWorlding proposes a distinction between DIY and DIY+. DIY is no longer defined by its self-production but its orientation to futurity. There seem to be three futures taking shape at this moment: Humanist futurity, Posthuman futurity, and Transhuman futurity. Humanist futurity is an attempt to hold onto or conserve a particular organization of Euro-American liberal domination (Make America Great Again!). Posthuman futurity emerges from the Posthuman Condition (Braidotti, 2013, 2019; with Simone Bignall, 2018a; with Maria Hlavajova, 2018b) aligned with social and environmental justice and a critique of anthropocentrism and the Whiteness and classicism of the volition-intentionality-agency triad (Manning, 2016: 6). Transhuman futurity hooks up Humanism to all manner of techno-pharmacological enhancements of the (too often White and Male) Human body with a double orientation to the private enclosure of digital space (Zuckerberg's Meta) and the colonization of the galaxy (Elon Musk's SpaceX). CineWorlding's activist practice is one proposition for a cinematic posthumanography of these futurities, their struggles, and consequences.

Part one: activist posthumanography for DIY studies

The emergence of the digital cinema ecology in confluence with mobile audiovisual devices has contributed to audiovision to the technosphere ⁴ and makes an investigation into the entanglements and transversal operations of the biosphere-semiosphere-technosphere essential. Audiovision contributes a dizzying array of propositions for the in-folding of psychic/conceptual, social, technological, and environmental ecologies. These events of infolding are not populated by singular biological entities (persons) but are ecotones, transversal complex ecologies where new complex beings emerge at various scales. These emergences are lived abstractions, they are the thinking-feeling of bodying-techno-worldings. In this context, the notion that ethnographic practice needs to be normative in order to be rigorous is problematic, especially when the partners in that research are producing experimental and resistant DIY cultures. Nonnormative ethnographers are activist in their critical engagement with dominant regimes of truth where both DIY cultures and researchers are caught up in conflicting “binds of loyalty, sympathy, and affiliation” (Marcus, 2013: 200). Ethnographic works are practices of intellectual and creative inquiry in solidarity with community but also required to circulate through peer-review journals, be respectable to university hiring and promotion committees, and competitive for grants from research agencies that continue to privilege normative forms of inquiry. This makes experimental ethnographic work activist in a particular sense. But the concept of activist ethnography has tended to orient itself to the overtly Political in no small part due to George E. Marcus influential framing of “the Ethnographer as circumstantial activist” (1998) which he later characterized as unfortunate. Instead of Political, Marcus suggests: “I would say it (activist ethnography) needs instead to make trials or contests of norms and values the basis of forming working collaborations and arguments, with uncertain, often messy outcomes, in the pursuit of ethnographic insights in the field” (2013: 200). Activist solidarity is not only on whatever “front lines of resistance” are occurring in a field, but equally in the struggle to construct alternative modes of knowing, to trouble dominant regimes of truth.

Ethnofiction, the blending of fiction film and ethnography, offers innovative ways of doing collaborative activist DIY scholarship. Improvisational cinema emphasizes “the role of the imagination in the way ordinary people construct their biographies, selfhood and strategies for the future” (Sjöberg and D’Onofrio, 2020: 733), while also being a mode of collaborative research that moves well beyond the typical outcomes of disciplinary oriented research projects (Guerra and Sousa, 2022). There is, however, still a great deal of resistance to the use of “fiction” in scholarship (MacDonald, 2022). Jean Rouch's ethnofiction and Michael Jackson's existential anthropology (2005, 2017, 2018) are yet to be widely embraced as creative critiques of traditional ethnographic methodology. As Sjoberg has made clear “the most conventional methods of fieldwork have also been challenged as they have become insufficient in exploring the often intangible and ever fleeting realms of imagination, which cannot be captured through verbal exchange and participatory observation alone” (2020: 733). In CineWorlding (MacDonald, 2023), I made a related but slightly different argument. It is not just imagination ⁵ but the extensive space of projection that is normatively structured by marketing and advertising of all kinds is also left out of participatory observation as well as the intensive processes, virtualities, intensities, and affects:

Cinematic research-creation (CineWorlding) embraces fiction film, music video and documentary film forms as research processes and outcomes. This opens technological creative processes, technics and technocultures, to something more than participant observation. Making films and music videos is not a documentation approach (as illustrated in the last previous chapters) that attempts to keep distance but instead transforms research into creative works that flow through both the creative industries and the artistic undercommons. As Erin Manning has pointed out, the undercommons is “a field of relation fabulated at the interstices of the now and the not-yet” (Manning, 2016: 221), the event (2013, 2014) and the minor gesture (2016) that can provide cinematic research-creation a way of thinking-feeling music. The relation between the undercommons, capitalism and the university is an ethical and political question as much as an ecological one. Perhaps cinematic research-creation can provide a useful method for these studies? (MacDonald, 2023: 180)

Cineworlding, grounded in a cinematic investigation of research-creation (Loveless, 2019, 2020; MacDonald, 2022; Manning, 2016), provides an orientation beyond traditional ethnographic methods and documentary realism and builds on the practice Jean Rouch called “projective improvisation” (Loizos, 1993: 50). Understanding cinematic projection on the small (phone) and big screens (cinema) as bodying-digitality tells us something about collective machinic self-production, what Félix Guattari has called subjectification.

DIY and DIY+ and the struggle for futurity

We no longer live surrounded by a media ecology that blurs sales and entertainment instead we live through it, participate in it, and are invited, compelled, and induced/seduced by it to produce ourselves in its form, becoming-bio-techno-media. The current moment is blooming with inventive relational media poetics as forms of digital bodying; bodies becoming digital, audiovisual subjectivations. In a Deleuzian sense, that is to say with the feeling-forward of Nietzschean process, desiring-machines becoming-media blurs distinctions between biosphere and technosphere. These brand new subjectivations, lived abstractions operating between material and immaterial bodies, are always susceptible to capitalist blackholes. The Body Without Organs (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983: 1987) of capitalist transhumanism, ⁶ the very framework and foundations of social media and streaming platforms emit a gravitational pull that does not fundamentally liberate, nor determine, but instead orients and shapes mobile desire-producing. It inspires late-night whispering of the natural right of brand self-making and the material luxury awarded to those who are deemed Good, the influencer. In transhumanist capitalism, artfulness is transmuted into the content. In becoming-content, media-becomings are placed in a struggle against each other propelled by potential riches. The economic formula is now well-known even by the very young. Produce yourself in a dominant model, build social and cultural capital (the sweat of the content producer measured in likes, follows, and fans) in the hope that someday this might be exchanged for financial capital. DIY musicians know this model well. It has always been the economic model of the music industry, an extraction industry based on the mining of creativity. DIY music artists produce poetics outside of, or intentionally away from, the reaching grasp of industrial capital and its machinery of exploitation. Building spaces to nurture poetics has been a “political practice” and will remain so. One aspect of cineworlding is to nurture a cinematic poetics that retains the ethnographic desire of knowing each other differently, while resisting the “scientism” of its disciplinarity, methods, and models.

Digital disruption and platform capitalism have both vastly expanded DIY production and are seducing self-expression onto the marketplaces of the attention economy. Text proliferated in blogs, photography proliferates on Instagram, talk radio proliferates in podcasts, cinema proliferates on Vimeo, YouTube, TikTok, and now Instagram “reels.” There is no need to teach anyone to make cinema, billions are already doing it. The autobiographical film is no longer a long-form art piece. Instead, it is made of individual short clips, often less than a minute and spread out over a long series of single posts. The film is watched vertically, no longer horizontally, by scrolling down a feed. New episodes are generated daily and are difficult to disentangle from the body-phone assemblage making them. Perhaps it is watched in segments mixed up with other clips in proliferating montages. Constant montages of DIY cinema, DIY music, and DIY photography. But of course this is not the same DIY that populates the cultural studies imaginary. In this world of seductive self-production and the ecstasy of communication, what has been called DIY culture becomes difficult to differentiate from the person as brand, capitalist subjectification in digital capitalist culture:

subjectification in (Félix) Guattari's estimation is a political concept that has a machinic character defined by the involuted relationships between users and information technologies (the latter emerging in a great variety and with profound influence from the machinic phylum that more and more entangles human and non-human ecologies). (Genosko, 2012: 149)

Platform Capitalism is a culture with its rituals of digital subjectification where “the socius as a full body forms a surface where all production is recorded, whereupon the entire process appears to emanate from this recording surface. Society constructs its own delirium by recording the process of production” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983: 10). It is no longer possible to identify DIY culture with self-production because digital self-production is simply required for “digital citizenship,” membership in the socius of platform capitalism. The psychoanalytic concept of projection is turned upside down in social media, and in line with Deleuze and Guattari's understanding of the social Unconscious. Cinematic projection (now in two senses social Unconscious and technological) is an involution or infolding of the body-technology but also the bio-techno-body-marketplace where its circulation is oriented to the attempted collection of cultural and social capital in the form of “likes” and “follows.” Subjectification and projection ⁷ provide concepts for a process ontology of cinematic research-creation or cineworlding.

In the third decade of the twenty-first-century subjectification is a swirling data storm fully infused with advertising, public relations, and personal brands. “What if” Baudrillard wrote:

reality dissolved before our very eyes? Not into nothingness, but into the more real than real (the triumph of simulacra)? What if the modern universe of communication, or hyper-communication, had plunged us, not into the senseless, but into a tremendous saturation of meaning entirely consumed by its success…If it were no longer a question of setting truth against illusion, but of perceiving the prevalent illusion as truer than truth? (2012: 83–84)

The prevalent illusion is the seduction of and by capitalist worldings; seduction is a name for the force that produces users. Seduction is a drawing forward operating at the interstices between body and screen technology, where bio-technical infolding occurs, the bodying of social media. Ecstasy of communication is a seduction into subjectification, “the feed” is a trance-like state of the doubling techno-mirror of digital devices and the flow of capital, the flow of data for data companies. The ecstasy of communication is the giddy hypnotism of “capitalist realism” (Fisher, 2009) and the delight in the quest for social and cultural capital. It is also an ecstatic truth based on “stylization as opposed to mere observation” (Ames, 2012: 11). This all suggests a need for a model of ethnographic research capable of grappling with these bio-technological-affective assemblages in order to understand contemporary DIY production.

It is possible to distinguish DIY from DIY + by recognizing their orienting futurities. Worldings are not a static point in spacetime but instead they vector, they are always in motion. Worldings do not share one virtual future but instead are enmeshed in psychic/conceptual, social, technological, environmental ecological struggles over the actualization of their virtual futurities. Each worlding, therefore, has an orientation. Its virtual histories actualized in the reaching toward virtual futurity. It follows then that DIY worldings may be oriented to Posthuman futurity cultivated and sustained by Altermodern worldings. But this is not necessarily the case. There is an iterative relationship between a worlding and its constituents. It is not a contradiction to recognize that both the worlding, its contents, and its environment are co-produced. Altermodern worldings and Posthuman futurity are sympoietic, becoming-with. One of the first challenges of cineworlding is to reconceive the dynamic between cine-ethnographer and object. In a dynamic system, there is no outside, everything becomes collectively. The cinematic-enabled ethnographer becomes cyborgrapher, a bio-technical machine that projects worldings, and engages with technologies of lived abstraction.

Cinematic altermodern subjectification and the cyborgrapher

“Who is more powerful” Dre asks in the film Megamorphesis (2016) “your Hip Hop self or your civilian self?” The film cuts between an observational style documentary about Cipher 5 (MacDonald, 2016) and direct to camera address about the role of each Hiphoppas “double.” Each double had a story of emergence and lives in relation to its civilian self. Sometimes the “double” was referred to as a “higher self,” or at other times the civilian self was dissolved into the Hiphop self. What was central to the experience of all of the youth involved in the film was that the existence of multiple namable selves occupying their body was not philosophically problematic for them in any way. Within hiphop, a technology of lived abstraction encouraged auto-complexification. Each Hiphoppas double emerged from an event withing the psychic/conceptual, social, technological, environmental ecology of their worlding. The event is a sympoiesis, a becoming-with, and is a kind of “possession” (Rouch, 2003: 88–100; MacDonald forthcoming) where the Hiphop double rides the body of the Hiphoppa and is inseparable from their verses, poetry that is existential and contributing to an alternative and critical being in the world, as-if from the vantage point of another world. In the two follow-up films Letters to Attawapiskat (2016) and Unspittable (2019) aspects of this precarious Altermodern worlding become more evident. The production process for Unspittable was an attempt to understand Rouch's ethnofiction, as there has been little written about how it was done (MacDonald, 2020). The films are far ahead of the theory that they are producing in their wake. As I live with these films, screen them at festivals, discuss them in Q&A, classrooms, lectures, and in print, they continue to speak lessons that at the time of their making were unintelligible. What was missing was a series of concepts that could name the techniques of lived abstraction. It was not a language familiar to ethnography nor to critical theory. Something that was neither critique nor anthropology, but instead something that was a critical anthropology of worldmaking that emerged from a resistance to capitalist realism but not in simple opposition to it. Instead, it worked at the level of opacity (Glissant, 1997) an alternative mode of thinking-feeling (Manning and Massumi, 2014) different from the transparency of the volition-intentionality-agency triad (Manning, 2016: 6) of capitalist modernity/coloniality (Mignolo and Walsh, 2018).

Over the production of these three films, an unfamiliar worlding began to take consistency that accelerated when the methods moved from documentary to ethnofiction. Unspittable began to engage in the production of an altermodern projection that stood in stark contrast to the prevalent projection of the city as broadcast by its authorities. Here we reach the second ecstasy of cineworlding. Perhaps the altermodern projection that emerged in the ethnofiction is what Werner Herzog means by ecstatic truth, “to see that which is Human through eyes other than our own: eyes of the alien or the animal…possibly even post-human point of view” (Prager, 2007: 199). Unspittable's cineworlding like the name suggests, incapable of being said or put into words, moved by way of affect (Massumi, 2015). The affect that moves through a large circuit between the actors’ performance, the city, HipHop Kulture, the editing suite, the audience at the screening, the film's circulation through global networks of film festivals, university screenings, articles, reviews, podcast discussions. Unspittable has proliferated across media and through networks. Seduced by the ecstasy of communication, Unspittable's ecstatic truth worked by way of affect that produced a cinematic projection of a hiphop city that did not resemble the politicians’ city, nor a PR company's city. This Altermodern projection of the city was made possible through a collaborative orientation to a fiction film where the members of Unspittable played themselves and we co-wrote a fiction film about their reality. This is not a film of ethnographic facts but instead a projection that audiovisualizes the ecstatic truth of Hiphop and the becoming-Altermodern of a city.

CineWorlding as cinematic research-creation is itself an iterative process of research on creative practice and creative practice on research. CineWorlding proposes posthumanography as an alternative to ethnography because it no longer operates within the framework of Humanism. As the Hiphoppas illustrated for them there is no holding onto the myth of the Rational Unified Universalizable Human Subject, their bodies are multiplicities. This is also true of the cyborgrapher, the techno-bio assemblage of cinema camera and networked digital memory processed through camera, editing suite, screening, digital circulation, and capture. Becoming-cybographer, as illustrated by many case studies in CineWorlding (2023), excites a “crowd behind the lens” (211–236). For those committed to critical theory's struggle against unfettered capitalism, after liberated flows of desire have become the nutrients of platform capitalism, and after recognizing that critique has “run out of steam” (Latour, 2004), experiments in CineWorlding's posthumanography is a proposition for an ethico-aesthetic digital media practice as activist strategy. A cine-anthropology of bio-techno symbiogenesis, it is shaped by a transversal reading across Viveiros de Castro's Cannibal Metaphysics (2014) and Jean Rouch's cine-trance (2003). Jean Rouch's cinematic worldings (ethnofiction) utilized a cinematic poetics of possession as doubling, that can be read with Manning and Massumi's concept of bodying:

There is an important difference between conscious thought and thought that moves with experience in the making. Conscious thought is but the pinnacle of a much more complex thinking, one that aligns to field perception but does not yet single itself out for conscious discrimination. Nonconscious thought is everywhere active in experience. It moves at differential speeds. It cuts across. It opens up. It shifts. It is not in the body or in the mind, but across the bodying where world and body co-compose in a welling ecology. (2014: 115–116)

Digital cinema production is techne-poiesis, the making or doing that brings something new into the world, possession, doubles, bodying. Recognizing the sympoiesis, the becoming-with of matrixes reorients the question of politics, struggle, and liberation away from the reductive notion of identity toward the informing of technologies of lived abstraction, the thinking-becoming-bodying-media. Cinematic poetics is central to this. Poetics recognizes matrix productivity over the identitarian capture (naming and describing) of culture/matrix. Culture is sharing the techniques (matrix) of bodying-worlding. Posthumanography recognizes that the anthropology, cultural psychology, and technics blur when we turn out attention to repetition and difference. Music is one technology that infolds a more-than human techno-semio-biosphere. When the cyborgrapher is seduced by Altermodern worldings, cineworlding projects Altermodern becomings. The seduction can be characterized by the twin ecstasies of cineworlding, the ecstasy of communication (Baudrillard, 2012) and of ecstatic truth (Ames, 2012; Herzog and Cronin, 2014; Prager, 2007). These twin ecstasies are a way of navigating or wayfinding the cyborgrapher's collaborative projections.

Part two: collaborative projection of altermodern cineworldings

In his 2018 book American Music Documentary: Five Case Studies in Cine-Ethnomusicology Ben Harbert calls for a “critical cinema of music” (2018: 246). In October 2022, the Journal for Audiovisual Ethnomusicology (JAVEM) is published by the Society for Ethnomusicology and marks a turning point for ethnomusicology. While cinema had been used in ethnomusicology from its inception, and in anthropology since the beginning of the twentieth century, this was the first time that films were published by an academic music journal. Previously, films were published by academic film companies and while recognized, often reviewed in print, they did not have the same status as a journal article. With JAVEM, the film is now a journal publication. We can now move on to another, perhaps more a more interesting question than whether or not a film is scholarly: what can a scholarly film do? Barley Norton has noted that cine-ethnomusicology has been characterized by what he has called the “documentation paradigm” (2021: 123), that is, cinema has been used as a technology for recording performances that can be later analyzed. Making a stand-alone film, in this paradigm, is often not the point. Harbert's documentary focus in American Music Documentary incorporates what Anthony Seeger called “lost peers” into cine-ethnomusicology. It is possible to construct an alternative history of a poetic cinema of music (MacDonald, 2022) which might begin with Dudley Murphy's involvement in Ballet Mecanique (1924) before working with Bessie Smith and Duke Ellington on St Louis Blues and Black and Tan in 1929. In some ways, Dudley Murphy can be seen as a precursor to cineworlding. He worked outside of major Hollywood studios and made films with artists who at the time were establishing new musical territory. Black and Tan for instance was Ellington's second hit record during a time when artists recorded for any label. In important ways he could be considered a DIY artist running his own band, booking his own gigs, establishing his own record deals. There is a central plot structure in Murphy's films that moves from the context of a musicians’ creative life to a cinematic musical performance that from today's perspective might be seen as proto-music videos. Musicians become actors that play themselves in a drama of their own collective production where the musical performance transforms the screen reality into screen poetics. This can be seen as a prototype cinematic research-creation film for DIY music studies. The cinematic poetics of the presented performance illustrates that cinematic capacity of Bessie Smith and Duke Ellington to present their music in ways that will seduce audiences into their worldings. Most importantly the projections (cinematic, sociological, musicological, and psychoanalytic) are of jazz poetics. Its poetics are the ecstatic truth of jazz, in these films, the affects of jazz stir viewers intensively. Murphy's experiments in collaborative projection can be seen in Ballet Mecanique which still, a century later, has the ability to produce affects that student viewers describe as anxiety. Using the cinema screen to vector affects of modern art or jazz opens the possibility of vectoring affects of DIY altermodern worldings.

Unspittable (2019) and Ark: A Return to Robson Valley (2022) builds on this model. Cinema production technology is put in service to the projection of affects circulating within the altermodern worlding. Films have helped to vector popular music ever since (Blackboard Jungle, A Hard Day's Night, A Star is Born, etc.). The role these cinematic projects have played in shaping the direction of these worldings, while unknown, can be illustrative nonetheless. If popular music has always been entwined with cinema, perhaps there is a cultural practice of collaborative poetic projection that has played an important role in constituting scenes (sociological) and genres (musicological), that approached transversally can be said to constitute the poetic core of Altermodern cineworldings.

Poetics can be activist. Poetics scream to be heard as a whisper in a riotous din of capturing capitalism. Words of resistance are swallowed by enlarging transhumanist capitalist blackholes, they are technologies of lived abstraction based on escape or fugitivity. DIY's poetics, their technologies of lived abstraction, perform emerging collectivity, cultures of care, heterogenous solidarity, asphalt thinking-feeling in movement is DIY's opacity. Opacity for Glissant (1997), is as an alternative modality of thinking-feeling that moves not in opposition to the transparency of Rationality or Capitalism but in its own ways. Its ways snake through thick undergrowth covertly avoiding open spaces where transparency's threat, the market place, the negative dialectic, the marketer, the critic, and capitalism and critique await. There is also the constant threat of the snare of methodology that is the capturing, singularizing, negativizing, and taming of its worldings. Poetics as a technology of lived abstraction is resistance that turns its back on standoff, intentionally walking (or running) away from the political that seeks to reduce it to its majoritarian terms. Poetics is an underground resistance to being pinned down and named. In Glissant's opacity, the poetics of relation does not desire after institutional inclusion, instead, it seeks worlding practices and ethico-aesthetics oriented to complexifying heterogeneity, embracing movements-moving. Cinematic DIY poetics can be a way to practice Altermodern CineWorlding that moves with the techno-bio-becomings of the undercommons, an attempt to develop new practices of study (Harney and Moten, 2013). Altermodern cineworlding does not start on its own, it is already prefigured in independent cinema across the twentieth century allied with the conceptual apparatus supplied by cultural studies. Scholarly cinema can be reimagined by attending to the cinematic knowledges that have been proliferating.

Conclusion

There is no longer any need to train people to produce cinema. It is a practice that an increasing number of people in the world are already involved in. What is needed instead is an increased theoretical awareness of audiovisions’ techniques of lived abstraction. As this essay has argued, DIY altermodern worlding requires an alternative approach because it is not the facts of its materiality but the ecstatic truth of its posthuman futurity. DIY altermodern worldings remodel the materials of Modern and Transhumanist worldings into an alternative formation that blurs. An altermodern city is not the same as a modern or transhuman city. The streets of a city are not facts but are playgrounds of semio-material codings where DIY politics operates in the becoming-mediasphere-semiosphere-technosphere-biosphere. DIY cinematic research-creation uses screens to project the becomings of Altermodern worldings. Cinema produced in this way provides an approach for an activist transdisciplinary research practice that has an ethico-aesthetic orientation beyond “politics.” The future of cinematic research-creation as a model of DIY music and culture research is at the time of this writing unclear, but perhaps this lack of clarity should be taken as a proposition for scholarly inventiveness. Cinematic research-creation does not need to have a definitive or singular model, it can be activist, becoming as varied and as vast as the DIY poetics that it seeks to understand. It also does not require a descriptive form. While I use long-form improvisational cinema as my practice, any manner of cinema production is available. The outcomes of these studies need not be limited to scholarly judgment but instead as a way of becoming-with altermodern worldings that have long provided alternatives to the well-known damages inflicted by Modernity/Coloniality. Cineworldings project altermodern worldings, and these projections are infolded as propositions for new scholarly concepts and practices. The goal of cineworlding is not to stop thinking by focusing on the object of cinema but instead to practice the ongoingness of thinking, the techniques of lived abstraction that in-fold the bio-semio-technosphere into a future that is taking shape right now.