In the still-rippling wake of Covid, with increasing automation and atomization in the workforce, the rising omnipresence of AI, and the rapidly evolving collective organism of the internet, one could make a case that we finally have arrived at The Future. But without much fanfare, and certainly without maps or instructions. The experience of daily life has shifted so far for so many, and in the midst of this new reality, the relationship between real and representation has never been more fraught—all the way down to the atomic unit of our communication era, the image.

The pieces in this issue oscillate between temporally polarized generations, their movement speaking alternately to the past and future of moving image media.

Excerpted from Vince Warne’s Introduction to Millennium Film Journal No. 78 (Fall 2023)