2022/2 - #Materiality

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Realism as ontological unrest: Digital aesthetics and reparative dynamics in Mati Diop’s ‘Atlantics’
Pesch, Katrin (2022) , S. 175-200
Grounded in Dakar’s elemental properties as much as manifestations of immaterial and virtual presence, French-Senegalese director Mati Diop’s film Atlantics (2019) embodies what Thomas Elsaesser has described as a post-photographic realism of world cinema. In this article, I show how Atlantics collapses divisions between the evidentiary and the ghostly within the same realist impulse to create a reparative postcolonial aesthetic. Furthermore, as seen in the lucid depiction of Dakar’s clairvoyant nights, the ontological unrest of the film’s post-photographic realism also happens at the level of image aesthetics.
Most Fabulous Place
Maamoun, Maha (2022) , S. 263-264
Documenta Fifteen and Berlin Biennale 12: A comparative review
Mergler, Agata (2022) , S. 340-358
How to Win at Photography: Image-Making and Play
Buse, Peter (2022) , S. 319-326
Absence in Cinema
Shilina-Conte, Tanya (2022) , S. 310-318
Thinkering with the Pathé Baby: Materiality, histories and (re)use of 9.5mm film[
van der Heijden, Tim; Santi, Mirco (2022) , S. 94-125
This contribution explores the materiality and histories of use of 9.5mm film and the Pathé Baby projector and camera. In December 1922, the French film production company Pathé Frères released the 9.5mm film format, which together with Kodak’s 16mm small-gauge, released the following year, would ‘bring cinema into the home’ and effectively popularise the screening, distribution, and production of home cinema and amateur films. This article aims to highlight the significance of 9.5mm film within the history of amateur film and to demonstrate the heuristic value of performing historical re-enactments with obsolete media technologies, such as 9.5mm film and the Pathé Baby, so as to better understand how they worked, how they were used at the time, and how their historical, material, and performative dimensions can be preserved for the future. It draws on a series of media archaeological experiments with the Pathé Baby projector and camera, as well as on the hands-on reconstruction of a 9.5mm film from 1929, made by the Italian artist, composer, and amateur filmmaker Pippo Barzizza (1902-1994). Utilising experimental media archaeology as a practice-based and sensorial approach to media historiography, the article investigates the materiality, functionality, and practices of (re)use of 9.5mm film as a remarkable early twentieth-century home cinema technology.
Symbolic misery and digital media: How NFTs reproduce culture industries
Bocquillon, Rémy; van Loon, Joost (2022) , S. 24-45
This contribution will attempt to propose a critical and philosophical engagement with the discussion around NFTs by focusing on the articulation of materialisms and digital media in artistic practices. The philosopher Bernard Stiegler argued that culture industries led to the formation of a symbolic misery, disrupting aesthetic experience through the creation and imposition of practices of consumption;[2] a process reinforced by the technological reproduction of works of art. In recent years, the discussion around Web 3.0, blockchain technologies, and their implementation through non-fungible tokens (NFTs) also reformulates the question of digital reproduction and distribution of works of art.[3] Indeed, in a market dominated by centralised streaming platforms such as Spotify, many artists see in NFTs a way to regain control over their own works and tools, by creating a form of artificial scarcity, mimicking the limited quantity and binding ownership of physical artefacts, as a kind of magical individuation, to paraphrase Simondon.[4] The authors ask to which extent those technologies, although often posited as a liberation from corporate giants, might lead to an exacerbation of the process of proletarianisation which is at the core of Stiegler’s thesis on symbolic misery, even if they are being procured in an ethos of social justice and responsibility, thereby functioning as what Michel Serres called a virtual object.[5] Moreover, it will be argued that by trying to reproduce an artificial idea of scarcity, NFTs also tend to reduce materiality to the object being sold and possessed, consequently reproducing the constitution of ‘art’ as a market, where new practices of consumption and competition are being championed as commodities at the expense of aesthetic experience.
Sonorous materiality of analogue film
Karataş, Işıl (2022) , S. 69-93
In this article, I represent film materiality’s sensory and ecological aspects through the sounds I recorded during my ethnographic fieldwork on contemporary analogue film practices. By re-listening to the recorded sounds without visual references, I explore the multisensory and aesthetic relationships that human actors have with the film material, and what nonhuman actors have to say about their material causality in these soundscapes. By shifting the focus from the visuality of the film to the sonic qualities of the film material, I explore the potential of sonically observing the media materiality.
Parallax Dash
Torlasco, Domietta (2022) , S. 261-262
Dani Gal’s cinematic and activist engagements with Israel/Palestine in Germany
Zelnick, Sharon (2022) , S. 226-248
This essay contributes to current debates about the problematic conflation of support for Palestinians with anti-Semitism in Germany by focusing on the cinematic and activist work of Dani Gal, an Israeli migrant in Berlin. Gal’s film, White City (2018), deals with intersections between memories of the Holocaust and the Nakba by reformatting archival materials – namely, a Nazi propaganda postcard and Zionist leader Arthur Ruppin’s diary – in ways that rethink migrations of architectural aesthetics and racist practices. By upending the expectation to document the past, the photographic stills in White City instead performatively reimagine historical and contemporary predicaments around ethnic discrimination in Germany and Israel/Palestine. By bringing together the proximal victimisation Jews and Palestinians suffered from the Holocaust and the Nakba, as well as the linked perpetrator pasts of some Zionists and Nazis, White City inspires us to understand the power of ‘multidirectional memory’ and ‘cocitizenship’ anew.
Preserving the now! Mediating memories and archiving experiences in Ukraine
Shumylovych, Bohdan; Makhanets, Oleksandr; Nazaruk, Taras; Otrishchenko, Natalia; Brunow, Dagmar (2022) , S. 126-149
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began on the morning of 24 February 2022. Everyone in the country experienced this and the afterward moments in their own way. All of us have learned what the shock of invasion is, mobilisation and how to resist it, and the steps to be followed during a bombing. We all had to take care of close ones, help strangers, evacuate, and volunteer with transfers, food, and medicine. All these experiences appear in various forms: taking pictures, noting reflections, discussing our feelings and emotions with others, following the news, warfare updates, and air raid alerts. The situation was so dynamic and those experiences were so ephemeral that as academics we found it important to capture the moment. We have developed our capacity and expertise to document such experience as historical and/or legal evidence, but also as a way to withstand the invasion
Second Sighted
Stratman, Deborah (2022) , S. 259-260
NECSUS Editorial Autumn 2022
NECSUS Editorial Board (2022) , S. 1-4
Song for Earth and Folk
Smith, Cauleen (2022) , S. 257-258
The Milk Of Dreams, or The Lukewarm Cup That Puts Commons to Sleep
Baravalle, Marco (2022) , S. 327-339
The laser: On the quantum materiality of media in the twentieth century
Schröter, Jens (2022) , S. 46-68
The question of the materiality of the media of the second half of the twentieth century cannot be answered without recourse to the role of quantum mechanics. Nearly all media technologies since 1945 presuppose quantum mechanics in one way or the other. The laser is especially important – this kind of coherent light, produced by stimulated emission is central to a huge plethora of very different, analog or digital, visual, audiovisual or auditory media technologies. In contrast to the role of quantum mechanics and especially the laser, the difference of analog and digital seems secondary.
The past is always changing: An interview with Tom Gunning
Hagener, Malte; van den Oever, Annie (2022) , S. 150-174
Tom Gunning is one of the most influential and widely cited film historians in the world with over 150 essays and publications on early cinema, the avant-garde, and film genres. He has published extensively on questions of film style and interpretation, film history and film culture, and on early cinema as well as on the culture of modernity from which cinema arose. In his seminal studies of the ‘cinema of attractions’, the concept he famously proposed, he set a new research agenda for early cinema studies by relating the development of cinema to other forces besides storytelling, such as new experiences of space and time in modernity, the relation between cinema and technology, and an emerging modern visual culture. Film culture, the avant-garde movements, the historical factors of exhibition and criticism, and the spectator’s experience throughout film history are recurrent themes in his work. In this interview, Malte Hagener and Annie van den Oever talk with Gunning about his writing process and his inspirations, the people he considers his mentors (Annette Michelson, Jay Leyda, Eileen Bowser, and David Francis), the legendary 1978 FIAF conference in Brighton, and the future of film studies.
The post-pandemic festival: Identity, crisis, and curation at Sheffield DocFest 2022
Vallejo, Aida; Moore, Andy (2022) , S. 288-300
The impersonal essay, or Montage as memory of the world
Torlasco, Domietta (2022) , S. 249-256
The audiovisual essay has been conventionally associated with the subjective and the personal. On the other hand, this introduction makes a case for the adoption of an ‘impersonal’ voice or viewpoint as a tactical response to the overvaluation of the self that pervades our current media economy.
Distant reading televised public information: The communication of Swedish government agencies, 1978- 2020
Stjernholm, Emil (2022) , S. 201-225
This study focuses on the Swedish public information programme Anslagstavlan, a unique audiovisual communication tool for Swedish government agencies since 1972 and an important part of Sweden’s audiovisual cultural heritage. Whereas digital research methodologies for data-driven text analysis have been developed and established over the last decades, the use of digital tools in the analysis of audiovisual sources has only recently gained increased attention. In this article, automatic speech recognition algorithms are used to extract the speech from a large sample of spoken messages in Anslagstavlan (1978-2020) which are then explored using digital methods for text analysis. The article argues that automatic speech recognition and corpus analysis should be viewed as a useful tool to gain an overview of a larger corpus of audiovisual media and to notice patterns and trends that would not be visible by close reading alone.

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