Transgressing the “Field” Notes on the Dialectics of Enlargement in Live Cinematic Events

This paper returns to the cinematic concept of “expanded cinema” focusing on current forms of expansion in audio-visual semi-ethnographic semi-fictional representations (i.e.,“Expandedethnography”). The paper deconstructs the aesthetical dialectics that produce the collective feeling of enlargement of the ethnographic field from a singular stage to a multiplicity of actors and stages ("fields") via staged live interconnections made between intermedia technologies and social/bodily intersubjective relations, beyond the physical limits of the constructed “reality” of the stage. In doing so, it refers to two recent live cinematic happenings, Supereverything* (2011-207) and Invisible Cities(2019) in terms of convergences, correspondences, and intermedial staging, all of which dialectically synthesize the expanded "field,"or “world pictures”in Heidegger’s terms (1977), of the cityscapes of Kuala Lumpur and Venice, respectively. The paperargues that the ambiguous feeling of enlargement and transgression of the “field” is techno/socially manufactured as part of the wider shift to imagination and subjectivity from modes of production to that of consumption, with consequences for ethnographic representation as a market product.