2022/2 - #Materiality

Browsing 2022/2 - #Materiality by Issue Date

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  • Article
    Preserving the now! Mediating memories and archiving experiences in Ukraine
    Shumylovych, Bohdan; Makhanets, Oleksandr; Nazaruk, Taras; Otrishchenko, Natalia; Brunow, Dagmar (2022)
    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
  • Article
    Realism as ontological unrest: Digital aesthetics and reparative dynamics in Mati Diop’s ‘Atlantics’
    Pesch, Katrin (2022)
    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.
  • Article
    Sonorous materiality of analogue film
    Karataş, Işıl (2022)
    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.
  • Article
    Gli anni
    Fgaier, Sara (2022)
  • Review
    On greening film festivals: The environmental impact of film festivals and their future design and operation
    de Valck, Marijke; Zielinski, Ger (2022)
    This roundtable brings together several film festival organisers and scholars to compare notes on the general impact of film festivals on the environment and to anticipate future directions for greening the sector. The event was hosted by The Creative School Catalyst, Toronto Metropolitan University. This is an edited transcript of the roundtable that took place on 13 January 2022 via Zoom.
  • Article
    Second Sighted
    Stratman, Deborah (2022)
  • Article
    On #Materiality
    Diecke, Josephine; Lameris, Bregt; Niebling, Laura (2022)
    The discussion of media often meanders between the way media objects are perceived as written texts, projected audiovisual messages, or recorded music on the one hand and material objects on the other. Materiality in the sense of physical matter is considered multi-sensory and in a direct relation to the perceiving body, traditionally – particularly in the arts – associated with processes of valorisation as in the term and concept of ‘aura’. But media studies have long established perspectives beyond simple notions of matter. Even light, sound, and energy have entered the discourse, and materiality can be traced in any and all understandings of media. This special section brings together some of the latest post-digital perspectives on the long-standing discussion of materiality in our ever-changing media landscapes. The contributions represent today’s broadness of the field and discourse, connecting media from their analogue pasts to their materially ambiguous futures.
  • Article
    The laser: On the quantum materiality of media in the twentieth century
    Schröter, Jens (2022)
    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.
  • Review
  • Review
  • Review
  • Article
    Song for Earth and Folk
    Smith, Cauleen (2022)
  • Article
    NECSUS Editorial Autumn 2022
    NECSUS Editorial Board (2022)
  • Review
  • Article
    The impersonal essay, or Montage as memory of the world
    Torlasco, Domietta (2022)
    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.
  • Article
    Distant reading televised public information: The communication of Swedish government agencies, 1978- 2020
    Stjernholm, Emil (2022)
    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.
  • Review
    Absence in Cinema
    Shilina-Conte, Tanya (2022)
  • Review
  • Article
    The past is always changing: An interview with Tom Gunning
    Hagener, Malte; van den Oever, Annie (2022)
    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.
  • Article
    Thinkering with the Pathé Baby: Materiality, histories and (re)use of 9.5mm film[
    van der Heijden, Tim; Santi, Mirco (2022)
    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.