We have appropriated Deleuze. I want my argument to be simple and clear. From Deleuze we have the concept of the movement image, which provides a basis for how the cinema is able to begin to think itself. In this model cinema consists of perception, action, and affection images. The former emphasises seeing, watching, noticing (the Renoir of A Day in the Country). The second emphasises doing, responses to situations (Ford’s Stagecoach), while the third is primarily concerned with the enlargement of the moments and experiences that lie between noticing and doing (Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc). 

However, while Deleuze establishes that these Bergsonian images have relevance to cinema, what is more important to theorising database cinema is that these images are derived from Bergson’s ‘sensory motor schema’. This tripartite series of perception, affection, and action (notice, decide, do) are underwritten by an economy of movement and action that ranges from the purely autonomous (in the case of mammals things such as homeostasis) through to the relatively free (I read a menu to decide which meal I would like to eat). There is a perception, and then an action, which may be automatic or deliberate. This is an economy of activity, of action and of doing, where things are doing all of the time (this is the nature of the world). Affect then becomes that remainder where an action is not adequate to the perception. The action is, if you like, insufficient to the perception, and this remainder is affect, for example, I see a snake, I jump, and while I am now away from the snake and rationally safe I feel anxiety, stress, tension, fear and relief, all at once. The jump, even where it has happened without thought - and it might have been an impressively large jump too - is not adequate to my perception of risk and danger, has not equalled it, and so this remainder with no where to go as an action produces affect. 

If we work from the premises that Deleuze has provided then in the context of Korsakow films we can see that such works are even more strongly inscribed within the sensory motor schema than cinema because this structure of perceiving, deciding, and doing is fundamental to Korsakow films and interactive work in general. This is quite literal in that within a Korsakow film I view video and at some moment during this I (usually) then make an explicit decision which requires the motor action of a mouse click on an icon or button within the interface which causes something to happen. I perceive, I decide, I act, and the system repeats. 

In our role as viewers of these works we become constituted as users and not merely readers because we are the ‘living image’ (in Bergson’s phrase) that is literally that gap between action and reaction that is the basis of the movement image and the sensory motor schema. In the cinema this gap and indetermination becomes determined through the activity of montage which corrals these varieties of images into relations that are fixed upon the screen. In a Korsakow film there is always, by definition, a site of indetermination - the user who becomes that affective relay between perception and action. 

As a consequence systems such as Korsakow are strongly aligned to what can be characterises as ‘affective narratives’. Stories that enlarge the moments and possibilities between a seemingly simple proposition or scenario and its implications and understanding. This ‘enlarging’ is achieved through including and allowing for multiple points of view, realised literally and figuratively through the affordance of online media to keep as much footage as desired (since you are now liberated from having to choose amongst original footage to make your work fit a strict duration) and then using a combinatory engine (in Korsakow’s case, keywords) to allow for a multiplicity of relations to be created by the user between these parts. For example, Thalhofer’s documentary portrait Planet Bridge, wonders “what is the life of this bridge that folds itself up?” Here the work is not didactic in the sense of making a specific and directed argument but offers up a field of views, interviews, stories and sequences and through the use of keywords constructs an architecture of associations that keeps the connections between these parts loose, fluid, and affective to the extent that there is always an interval of indetermination between the current sequence and those that are then available for choice. The connections between the current clip and the thumbnails available might vary from being highly determined and literal (a ‘home’ icon) to highly affective where the presence of other clips in relation to the current one appears to be associative, yet always insists on some imposition of relevance (this is the import of Kuleshov’s experiments where we always infer connection between adjoining shots and sequences). When these works align themselves towards the affective rather than the perceptual or action image the user must listen to the work rather than merely navigate.