From my first visit to the states in 1989 to the present, I have been struck by how the different patterns of consumption for TV and for film are played out: American TV is arranged for short bites of entertainment - usually simply presented, easily understandable, self-contained globules of material that can fit between commercial breaks. The impossibility of presenting a feature length film on American TV was brought home to me last Christmas Day, when I made the mistake of trying to watch (for the umpteenth time) Frank Capra's classic, "It's a Wonderful Life", on prime time terrestrial TV.

The carefully structured emotional intensity of Capra's schmaltzy brand of Americana was so comprehensively annihilated by the increasing frequency of commercial breaks, that one was reminded of the bombing of Dresden! Why, I asked myself, had this piece of seemingly valued American culture been celebrated (through a week of 'station breaks' - where TV channels trail upcoming programmes) by trashing it?

I pose the question in this way because the answer clearly has to do with the different modes of consumption that America assigns to TV and 'The Movies'. I would argue that this is true also of more up-to-date movies which, it is claimed, are made with on eye on TV presentation. I would also suggest that the pattern here, of new media offering shorter texts, is proving true of our proposed plug-in cinema also. McLuhan's observation, that the younger medium (in this case TV) relegates the older medium (movies) to the status of content and pushes the older medium in the direction of Art, holds true. But there is more: Movie theatres are the closest that America comes to a purity of the moving image. As well as maintaining a separate, art status for movies, this is perhaps also connected with the sense of ownership American consumers have towards the movie industry. One of my enduring memories of attending a cinema on my first visit to Manhattan, is of a whole audience shouting abuse and throwing popcorn cartons at the screen during a commercial. The vocal audience made it clear that they did not pay their ticket money to watch commercials at the movies – odd to one who had grown up on a diet of Pearl & Dean. Suddenly I realised, thanks to this American audience, that commercials were for TV, which had to finance itself somehow. Movies are financed by us stumping up at the box office. There was a clear and pure line of command there.

In a country where prime time TV shows (all TV programmes are called 'shows' in America), such as Entertainment Tonight [ET], Access Hollywood (and even local News 'shows' in NYC), routinely report the weekend box office ratings every Monday, the separate aesthetics of these media are ingrained. How then is the use of the HCI [Human Computer Interface] being assigned a niche in the landscape of late capitalism?

The Internet is, as we all know, a place where paedophiles and pornographers lurk. This is the first profile tranche to be negotiated by the new medium. News reports and TV cop shows capitalise on this for content ("Yes, Officer, I made sexual advances and offered to fulfil her masochistic fantasies in the chatroom. But I did not murder her. How could I: we never met face to face."). And this too is part of the process of media negotiation – when one medium becomes the subject content of the other a degree of acceptance has been reached. Chat shows and TV magazine/ lifestyle shows also begin to sanction the web by having their own web sites, where news of up-coming shows can be trailed, transcripts downloaded, pseudo-consumer reports (which are really advertisements – "These are the latest appliances to whiten your teeth; as seen on our show!") can be posted. E-mails can also be sent direct to chat shows in TV or radio for an immediate response - a case of old media explicitly integrating new.

These examples illustrate the process of negotiation that takes place between media - a process that has been called remediation. A similar, if allegedly more vituperative remediation can be seen to have taken place in the 1950's and 60's, when TV was often framed in movies as being small minded and trivial. TV in turn plundered movies by creating spin-offs and bite-size versions (The Twilight Zone or Hitchcock's TV show, for example) of what the movies offered, but which required consumers to make a special journey to town and spend more time and money than the demands of a growing family usually allowed.

But it is too simple to predict that the relationship between TV and the Internet will replay the negotiation that took place between movies and TV. For one thing the Internet is not a single medium and for another it absorbs the modes and conventions of just about all previous media. Then there is the question of what implications are thrown up by our plug-in cinema attempting to bye-pass the intermediate medium of TV? One commentator has opined that the Internet can be compared with the 19th century telegraph system. If we take this analogy at face value for the moment, then movies can be equated with the World Wide Web – a system of communication built on the infrastructure of the Internet (which in turn uses the telephone system, which had used the telegraph's infrastructure). The major difference between the Internet and the web is that the latter uses visual imaging. Things are not as clear-cut and mechanical as McLuhan suggested.

It is therefore the visual aspect of the HCI that has to be addressed first in our investigations of how digital media will affect the aesthetic modalities that have traditionally been linked with movies. The second element to be addressed is the relations of power operating on the new medium. For me the third and last element to be addressed is the question of interactivity. In practice, of course, these three are related and affect each other in subtle ways. I make no claims to have space to address any of these in detail here, but simply wish to offer an inadequate outline the problematic.

Visual culture has a long tradition and needs to be understood in terms of various theories about the processes of representation. According Pierce, for example, signs fall into three main categories: the icon, the index and the symbol. The trouble is that these categories tend to slide into each other and often operate simultaneously. An image of Bogart, for example, stands for a particular Hollywood star, is an index of a genre (story type) or character type, and might symbolise economic relations that stars had in the industry at particular historical moments. If you or I wanted to reference the above categories in our digital film, however, we could not use Bogart without being slapped with a bill from Warner Brothers or some other big Brother.

So the indexical use of such aesthetic 'short cuts' – especially if we want to enrich our text with reference to mainstream story and/ or style – has serious implications for the wresting of power. Clearly the new texts will be short, so how important will narrative remain? How much visual short hand must we borrow in order to lend depth to those texts yet remain fresh?

There is little question that we are indeed witnessing the dawn of a new art form. But what will be the content of the new art? What forms will we appropriate from old media? And what new purpose(s) will these forms serve in order to maintain the 'newness' of the Art? Perhaps even more problematic; who will be the audience? Will they also be new and if so, how? And what do we, as producers of new forms of moving picture texts, want to say with the new tools at our disposal?