Paper short abstract:

As cinematic apparatuses become obligatory passages for labor-related knowledge mediation, screenscripting assumes a role in the development of physical and cognitive interactions in workplaces. This paper shows how cinematic epistemic templates regulate the self-realization of efficiency.

Paper long abstract:

There are two main contributions of cinematic apparatuses to professional training today:

1) they offer the possibility of a sensorial activity within a figurative space where aesthetic affordances are minutely programmable;

2) they offer the possibility of redistributing in the deliberately arranged space-time of representation a set of scattered/contingent events that characterize actual labor situations, thus enabling the construction of interactional situations by steps of complexity, linking trainees progressively to the signifying entities that characterize their future positions.

Trainees are required to engage in featured environments in order to experience the range of effects of their choices and actions. Algorithms and feedback scenarios are used to emulate environmental reactions, as learning progress is assumed to depend directly on the trainees’ assessment of feedback information generated by their actions. Therefore, cinematic training dispositifs embody a cybernetic principle for building systems of efficient behavior self-production: “effective behavior must be informed by some sort of feedback process, telling it whether it has equalled its goal or fallen short.” (Wiener, 1950) Accordingly, an autopoietic system of efficiency emerges from circuits linking operators to environments of which positive/negative reactions are made readable by the former, which is precisely what digital cinematic figures afford: an accurate readability of their (scripted) metamorphoses.

Such epistemological issues will be illustrated with a study of a dispositif for learning vine pruning, designed to enhance “pruning reasoning” through the simulation of the apprentices’ interaction with a multitude of algorithmically controlled factors (climatic, biological...) considered to influence the plants development.