A few weeks ago, I tried Amazon Luna for the first time. You scan a QR code with your phone, and your device becomes a game controller. No gamepad, no configuration. I loaded Angry Birds. On the big screen: the full battlefield, slingshot on the left, green pigs in their crumbling castle on the right. On my phone: just the slingshot, enlarged against a neutral background. I placed my finger on the bird, pulled to set force and angle, released the touch. The shot fired on the big screen in near real-time.
I recognized this. Set angle, set force, release. I had done the same thing decades ago on an Intel 286, in a pixelated artillery simulator. Same logic, almost forty years apart.
But now the gesture was happening on a tactile screen I carry in my pocket. And the result was showing up on a display big enough for ten people to watch from a sofa.
So I kept going. If every person in a living room already has a controller in their pocket, what about every person in a theater? Local connectivity for hundreds of devices in a confined space is an engineering problem, not a conceptual one. Modern multiplex projectors are digital. They project whatever a system behind them generates. And we now have systems that can generate anything.
The multiplex is ready to become an arena. We just haven't noticed.
The Theorist Who Saw It First
In 1936, Walter Benjamin wrote that cinema is received in a state of collective distraction, and that this distraction is primarily tactile. Based on constant shifts of place and focus that hit the spectator. He contrasted this with the concentrated contemplation demanded by painting. The distracted mass, he argued, does not enter the work of art. It absorbs it.
Nearly a century later, every spectator walks into the theater with a tactile interface in their pocket. Benjamin described a perceptual mode. Technology has turned it into a physical object. The touchscreen is the literal version of his metaphor. And what I am imagining here is the extreme consequence of his vision: a cinema where distraction is not a side effect but the operating principle itself.
Two Logics of Play
As I followed this idea, two models of collective gameplay came into focus. Each one divides a scarce resource differently.
The first is the parcellation of time. This model recalls the logic of early mainframe terminals, where a centralized processor was quantized into time-slots distributed among users. Everyone sees one screen, one story. But at minute three, five notifications are sent to randomly selected controllers in the theater. The first to respond earns a degree of agency over the narrative. This agency could be cosmetic—a visible but inconsequential intervention. It could be an event that alters the story in the medium term. Or it could be a silent trick: an invisible action whose consequences will surface much later. Someone plants a surprise and sits with the anticipation for an hour before anyone else sees it.
The second is the parcellation of visual space. This is closer to arena gaming, a LAN party on a maxiscreen. The show begins with the screen fragmented into over a hundred miniature displays, each hosting a simple match—say, Pong in black and white. Players compete in basic interactions. As rounds eliminate participants, the surviving screens grow larger and accommodate more complex gameplay: fighting games, racing games, anything. The experience scales toward a climax where the final players perform on a massive screen while the rest of the audience watches, exactly as shooters already let you spectate after elimination.
The most compelling formats will probably be hybrids. Moments where the entire audience watches a single screen as one spectator is called to act. Disarming a bomb. Choosing between the red wire and the blue wire. Everyone is watching. The possibility of failure is real. Someone could ruin the show for everyone.
The Gradient of Agency
But that fear comes from our old paradigm, built on the scarcity of audiovisual content. We cannot yet imagine that a film could generate, in near real-time, an alternative sequence. That a catastrophic plot event could lead to a story that rebuilds on those ruins and recaptures the audience within minutes. We cannot imagine it, but it is technically possible. And this is what excites me.
This is also where agency becomes the central question. Not as a binary, active or passive, but as a gradient. At one extreme, there is the deliberate, physical act: tapping your screen to steer a narrative choice. At the other, something quieter. What if simply being present in the theater, with a smartphone in your pocket carrying its browsing cookies, is already enough? What if the system reads the collective digital fingerprint of the audience and shapes the film accordingly, without anyone lifting a finger?
In this scenario, pricing models change. Some shows might be free, because what is projected on screen becomes a function of the audience's aggregated data. Each person carries their cultural imprint into the room, and the system uses it. The film you see is different from every other screening, for every other audience. The original, the unique and authoritative version, ceases to exist. And the spectrum from unconscious influence by your mere presence to the conscious physical act of tapping a controller to cut a wire: that is the real territory this medium opens up.
Imaginary, for Now
In my previous writing I have traced the coordinates of my practice. The biological hardware. The gaming modes. The theory of imaginary media. This text is the method in action: entering the space where a medium is still imaginary and documenting what it could become before anyone decides what it should be.
Everything I have described here is an assemblage of existing technologies. No invention is required. What is required is seeing the pattern. Recognizing, across four decades, that setting angle and force on an Intel 286 and pulling a slingshot on a phone screen are the same gesture.
This is how my mind works. I follow operational logics across obsolete and emergent devices. I see that a 1980s artillery game and a 2020s cloud gaming service share the same gesture. And when I see that structure, I follow it until it shows me the medium that does not yet exist.
The multiplex as arena is that medium. It is imaginary, for now. And that is why it still holds infinite potential.