Endnote 61: Digital Parallelism defined
An après-garde digital movement, a.k.a. ‘Digital Parallelism’ and ‘Cinema of Chaotic Stasis,’ characterized by a stubborn and possibly intentionally irritating refusal of different narrative lines to merge into any kind of meaningful confluence, the school derived somewhat from both the narrative bradykineticism of Antonioni and the disassociative formalism of Stan Brakhage and Hollis Frampton, comprising periods in the careers of the late Beth B., the Snow brothers, Vigdis Simpson, and the late J. O. Incandenza (middle period).
Context
The whole endnote, off Madame Psychosis's show (053): the one place the anthology gets a formal school-definition of the anticonfluential mode — "refusal of different narrative lines to merge into any kind of meaningful confluence" — that 078 names at source as JOI's genre. The gloss does period-work too: it files JOI ("middle period") in a lineage of real filmmakers (Antonioni, Brakhage, Frampton) and invented ones, so Himself's oeuvre gets art-historical placement inside a footnote to Joelle's radio canon. And the definition is a self-description: "possibly intentionally irritating refusal … to merge into any kind of meaningful confluence" is this novel's own structural dare, glossed from the margin.