Poulaki, Maria. 2015. ‘(In)visibility and (Un)awareness in Complex Cinema’. In Ekman, Ulrik, Jay David Bolter, Lily Diaz, Maria Engberg, Morten Søndergaard (Eds.) Ubiquitous Computing, Complexity, and Culture. New York: Routledge. 1 ‘(In)visibility and (Un)awareness in Complex Cinema’ M. Poulaki A body of “complex narrative” films that became popular in the mid-1990s and have influenced contemporary film storytelling till today, were said to be displaying a “digital aesthetics” characterizing the nascent digital culture. i Digital culture is however anything but a static condition, and since the 1990s the development of computing has brought smaller, portable, ubiquitous digital media. The modes of contemporary digital culture influence the ways of filmic expression, but also our epistemology as media theorists; the way we approach our objects. Therefore the way to theorize the connection between complex films and digital culture can be updated and refined to address their contemporary media environment; it can even start from new epistemological and ontological premises that this environment brings to the fore. I have elsewhere argued that the framework of complex systems theory, which developed through computation, might offer such a new epistemology and ontology for film analysis (Poulaki 2011a&b; 2014). “Invisibility and Unawareness” was the theme of the last in a series of seminars that resulted in the formation of this volume, and highlighted the relation of these notions to ubicomp culture. This was an inspiration for me to connect these two concepts with the notions of observation and self-reference in the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann, and to discover how through their dialectic relationship they can give new insights into the organizing principles of complex films, and they way they address contemporary subjects. This dialectic relationship I will try to map out in the rest of this chapter. (In)visibility and (un)awareness in cinema history Far from offering a comprehensive account of the historical development of cinema as a medium, in what follows I will highlight some scattered instances of its history to suggest that contemporary technological and cultural conditions perhaps bring a qualitative shift in cinema’s relation with visuality, i.e. the way we see. Although cinema is considered to be primarily a visual art, and many important filmmakers and theorists (Eisenstein, Bazin, Comolli et al) always made parallelisms between films and painting, the experience of viewing a film is not the same with looking at a painting, or even a photograph. Without meaning to use here the historical distinction between spatial and temporal arts (in the tradition of Lessing), I would like to set off, for the purposes of this chapter, from the counterintuitive thought that many things in films stay under the threshold of visibility, and many others cannot be grasped in their entirety because of the never-ending movement of the film.