2023/2 - #Cycles

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No more ego-spheres: An interview with Lydia Kallipoliti on ecological design
Pape, Toni; Gold, Riley (2023) , S. 16-33
A conversation about ecological design with architect, engineer, and scholar Lydia Kallipoliti. Taking her books The Architecture of Closed Worlds (2018) and Histories of Ecological Design (2024) as starting points, we asked Kallipoliti to share her understanding of ecological design and trace the histories of ecological design thinking. In this context, the interview focuses on design projects of the 20th century which sought to create so-called ‘closed worlds’: habitats that could function as closed systems where all material resources are regenerated from recycled waste. In addition to explaining the motivations for these projects, Kallipoliti addresses their practical limitations and the theoretical conclusions we can draw from them. Kallipoliti furthermore reflects on the notions of mediation and scale in design thinking and on the politics of the cycle.
Caught in the loops of digital agency panic: On NPCs and internet addicts
Markelj, Jernej; de Zeeuw, Daniël (2023) , S. 61-83
This paper seeks to recontextualise and update Timothy Melley’s concept of ‘agen-cy panic’ to think about current discourses around online media influence and ad-diction. According to Melley, agency panic concerns a set of anxieties linked to the diminished sense of agency, which he sees as escalating after the Second World War. Agency panic is, for him, rooted in the counterfactual expectation of full au-tonomy, a fantasy that is constantly undermined by the growing influence of glob-al networks of communication and capital. In our paper, we examine how an even more networked and distributed sense of agency panic manifests today by engag-ing with two different figures of contemporary digital culture: the non-playable character (NPC) and the internet addict. First, we look at how, in online conspira-cy discourse, the NPC is the product of a process of othering whereby the conspira-torial subject externalises its own sense of compromised agency in digital envi-ronments, allowing it to sustain the fantasy of its own autonomy and independ-ence from these environments. From there, we examine different discourses of ad-diction linked to online cultures as manifestations of digital agency panic. Through the language of addiction, and by promoting the ideal of autonomy as individual self-control, these discourses stigmatise and pathologise users’ various dependen-cies and interrelations with digital devices and services. Building on our analysis of NPC and addiction discourses, we then suggest that the panic-ridden fantasy of the liberal sovereign subject often serves as a pipeline to reactionary, misogynist, or neoliberal immunopolitical cultures set on policing the boundaries between the self and the inferior or unwanted other. We conclude by speculating on how a more distributed understanding of agential self might serve as an antidote to these im-munopolitical tendencies.
From still to moving images and vice versa: Analysing technological cycles and the use of AI to study cinema history
Tadeo Fuica, Beatriz; Lezer, Arthur (2023) , S. 150-175
This article explores some possibilities that an artificial intelligence that retrieves objects offers to cinema historians by focusing on the deep exploration of the photogramme. Thus, it reflects on a technological cycle that begins when cinema put the instantaneous photograph into motion – a motion that hid the details that today are easily retrievable with the help of AI that needs to stop this motion to find them. Being able to identify similar objects in photogrammes of films that are part of a corpus, an object retrieval AI allows us to explore how elements from the mise-en-scène can transform the historical understanding of cinema. Our theoretical reflections are put into practice through the analysis of photogrammes containing wheels in a corpus of films conceived by members of the pioneer generation of cinema archivists in correspondence between Europe and Latin America, at the beginning of the 1950s. The ubiquity of wheels allows us to have a general perception of the kind of image that composes our corpus, while it also allows us to evaluate the possibilities and limitations of using an object retrieval AI for writing cinema history.
#Cycles: On circularity and recursivity in media culture
Pape, Toni (2023) , S. 3-15
This introduction provides three brief conceptual frames for the special section #Cycles: matter, history, and control. A first section on ‘cycles of matter’ problematises recycling discourse and its implications. The second section on ‘cycles of history’ revisits cyclical concepts of history and their contemporary re-evaluation to think about cyclical modes of (over)production. Finally, the section on ‘cycles of control’ briefly discusses cybernetic theories of feedback loops. It addresses how systemic processes of corrective feedback loops can lead to so-called cybernetic subjectivities. Each section highlights the contributions that speak to the respective conceptual frame. All contributions to the special section and audiovisual essay section are briefly introduced in the final two sections.
Inside the archive of feelings: Experiencing Il Cinema Ritrovato
Vidal, Belén (2023) , S. 311-317
Of sand and stone: Thick time, cyclicality, and Anthropocene poetics in ‘Nomadland’
Harkema, Gert Jan (2023) , S. 34-60
This paper presents an ecocinematic reading of Chloé Zhao’s 2020 feature No- madland. Drawing on David Farrier’s notion of Anthropocene poetics, it argues that the film presents an image of ‘thick time’ through which human’s embeddedness in deep time is figured. Through a multilayered temporal entanglement with different cyclical processes of erosion and resurgence, a critique to capitalist exhaustive hy- percyclicity is formulated. Decentering ‘the human’, Nomadland invites a cinematic Anthropocenic thinking and imagining in which a critical nomadic subjectivity is fig- ured as a transcorporeal subject that is materially enmeshed both spatially and tem- porally with the physical world.
A monumental chronicle of ‘The Mother of All Film Festivals’
Iordanova, Dina (2023) , S. 318-325
How to Prevent Hair Loss, Kiat Kiat Projects
Marie Sneijder, Lisa (2023) , S. 338-343
Cycles of Labour: In the Metaverse, We Will Be Housewives
Hanáková, Veronika; Tremčinský, Martin; Anger, Jiří (2023) , S. 220-222
I foresee that I’m going to have known it
Vorozheikin, Yevhen (2023) , S. 230-233
Rewind, recycle, revive! An investigation into nostalgia-driven sequel and requel practices in small European film industries: The case of Flanders
de Cock, Atalya; Cuelenaere, Eduard; Willems, Gertjan; Joye, Stijn (2023) , S. 127-149
In the last decade, nostalgia-driven imitative filmmaking – characterised by requels and ‘belated’ sequels – has become ubiquitous in commercial cinema globally. While the transgenerational appeal of nostalgia in Hollywood has been researched extensively, smaller European film industries like Flanders remain underexplored in this regard. This article focuses on three case studies to investigate how Flemish nostalgia-driven sequels and requels employ transgenerational nostalgia both within the films and in their marketing endeavours. Compared to Hollywood’s consistent 1980s nostalgia strategy, Flemish cinema employs nostalgia as a short-term commemorative tactic, celebrating Flemish pop culture artefacts of the recent past instead of the past itself.
Communities of concern, Dora García at M HKA Antwerp
Ruchel-Stockmans, Katarzyna (2023) , S. 358-367
The Time-Loop as Game Mechanic, Narrative Device and Cycle of Systemic Racism
O’Brien, Daniel (2023) , S. 234-236
Cybernetic subjectivities on a loop: From video feedback to generative AI
Boutet de Monvel, Violaine (2023) , S. 103-126
This paper raises an aesthetic bridge between pioneer video art and current machine learning art through the prism of instant feedback. It reinstates the former’s real-time processual practices as a pertinent origin to reflect on the resolutely looped construction of cybernetic subjectivities. Given the latest developments of artificial intelligence, it infers that these now include technological agency. The article proceeds to compare the room left for human mastery in the recursive operations of both closed-circuit video setups and generative AI models. Taking into account their synthetic power, it ultimately proposes two general definitions of the artist’s creative position within today’s networked landscape.
Everyday life and mnemonic gestures
Almeida, Ana Sofia (2023) , S. 326-331
(Dis)orientation in net art: Disrupting the feedback loop of cybernetic subjectivities
Băcăran, Mihai (2023) , S. 84-102
This paper examines instances of (dis)orientation instantiated by net art works which challenge, deconstruct, and remodel our embodied relationship with digital maps. I argue that such (dis)orientation can be framed as a tactical media practice that disrupts the feedback loop of cybernetic subjectivities by: 1. bringing into focus aspects of lived experience that do not fit the ‘truth’ of the cartographic representation, and at the same time underlining the ways in which representations participate in the (de)construction of lived experience; 2. challenging the attention economy and opening attention towards otherness and towards the intertwined shifting realities (grounds) of contemporary cultures; 3. questioning the imperative of usefulness inherent in mainstream applications of digital mapping. The paper contends that such (dis)orienting gestures can be understood as a practice of care towards radical otherness.
Close Circuit
Tripot (2023) , S. 226-229
Surveillance, resistance, and the politics of love: On Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster
Escobar, Cristóbal (2023) , S. 254-271
Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster, a surrealist black comedy that satirises the ideological formation of the couple, portrays three different spaces to represent the conformism of political alliances in contemporary culture. This tripartite structure ⎯ a Pythagorean theorem ⎯ is composed by a city-space, a hotel-space, and a forest-space; the latter two being micro-segments of the city that, by way of antagonistic ideologies, are placed in war against each other. By mapping this system of relations, I seek to connect the normalising powers of society in the film with the issue of surveillance as developed by both Michel Foucault’s disciplinary modernity and Gilles Deleuze’s subsequent paradigm of information. In a second section, and thinking about the tactics that the film’s characters employ to mock the conventions set up by dogmatic administrations, I draw on the notion of resistance as an act that defies the city-Law as well as on the politics of love as a reciprocal law that goes beyond any other law; one that remains hidden, or blinded, for characters to see, for as Shakespeare suggests: ‘love is blind, and lovers cannot see’.
Split Screen as Hermeneutic Tool: Recursivity and Crosstalk in ‘Better Call Saul’
Marañón, Nicolás Medina; Kiss, Miklós (2023) , S. 223-225
Scale, infrastructure, and extractivism: An interview with Lesia Vasylchenko and Istvan Virag on their works in New Visions. The Henie Onstad Triennial for Photography and New Media
Sæther, Susanne Østby (2023) , S. 344-357
In this interview, the Senior Curator of Photography and New Media at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter speaks with photographers and media artists Lesia Vasylchenko and Istvan Virag about their works commissioned for the New Visions triennial, presented at Henie Onstad in 2023. Vasylchenko and Virag explain how they work with contemporary image production and display technologies, such as synthetic aperture radar images and LED-screens and the perceptual politics associated with these technologies, as well as how they engage with organic materials as resources subject to extraction as well as material witnesses. The interview also addresses how the artists conceptually and practically tackle questions of image resolution and scale, and the artists’ extensive collaboration with scientific knowledge clusters and researchers.

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