Defining what makes cinema a unique artistic medium has been a central theoretical tendency dating back to its earliest years. Already an unsettled question throughout film’s century-plus existence as an analog format, the introduction of digital carriers has only complicated the debate. Cinema—a medium so connected to its traditional physical carrier that it is often referred to as “film”—exemplifies the difficulties of essentializing any medium in the age of digital convergence.

Refusing to accept that all digital media are homogeneous or that cinema is “dead,” I approach the question of medium specificity by tracing an ecology of cinema. One that considers cinema’s joint cultural and technical constitution. From preservation to protocols, marketing to moire, fears of cinema’s death to hopes for greater immediacy through raw data, cinema, as I argue, can only be defined through its larger shifting web of relations. As such, I examine the current state of computational film broadly, paying equal attention to marketing tactics, technological shifts, legal battles, distribution strategies, and preservation best practices alike.

Central to this ecological understanding is the reality that changes in one node of this meshwork resonate through each other often with dramatic results. While working towards unveiling a broader picture of cinema in its current state, each chapter of this dissertation also meditates on conflicting determinations of quality at varying nodes in this ecology and examines how such determinations come to influence film’s circulation and preservation. Quality, in relation to cinema, functions simultaneously as (among other things) a marketing tool, a means of controlling access, a production goal, a fuzzy technological standard, and a staple of archival practice. Quality is a term deployed in wholly different ways to drastically different ends, each influencing the overall “essence” of cinema and each carrying its own increasingly concerning ramifications for the future of the seventh art.

The combination of high-energy pulsed-laser experiments and molecular dynamics simulations yields an improved understanding of the deformation and failure mechanisms under extreme loading conditions. Coordination of these techniques improves as the characteristic spatial and temporal scales of state-of-the-art laser experiments overlap increasingly with massive atomistic simulations. SPaSM and LAMMPS molecular dynamics codes were employed to simulate atomic systems containing up to one billion atoms. The extreme stress states generated by laser-driven shocks persist for incredibly short durations (picoseconds to nanoseconds). Over severely reduced time scales, extreme stresses activate novel phase transformations and defect mechanisms. An overarching theme of the present thesis is the role of limited time and superimposed stresses and strains via laser-generated shocks on the resulting deformation mechanisms occurring during the passage of the pulse. At the reduced time scales (picoseconds to nanoseconds), novel phase transformations and defect mechanisms are activated.

This dissertation focuses on two representative materials: tantalum, a body-centered cubic metal; and silicon, a diamond-cubic (covalently bonded) semiconductor. Significant structural changes were obtained experimentally and by molecular dynamics. In tantalum, the competition between dislocations and twinning is shown to be determined, inter alia, by the strain rate. Additionally, an unexpected phase transition to hexagonal at large compressive strains and to face-centered cubic at large tensile strains is revealed. The strain-rate dependence of spalling is modeled and successfully compared with experimental results; the effect of grain boundaries is established. An estimate of the ultimate tensile strength of tantalum, obtained by extrapolation of the strain-rate dependent spall strength to the Debye frequency of atoms as well as by an evaluation of the equation of state, is shown to be 33 GPa. In silicon, we identified supersonic dislocations bursts, which have durations of fractions of picoseconds; bulk and shear-induced amorphization; and intermediate phase changes to higher-coordinated structures.