2019/2 — #Gesture

Browsing 2019/2 — #Gesture by Title

Now showing 1 - 20 of 26
  • Article
    At the threshold into new worlds: Virtual reality game worlds beyond narratives
    Matuszkiewicz, Kai; Weidle, Franziska (2019) , S. 5-23
    Virtual and Augmented Reality systems are becoming increasingly popular in our everyday lives. Although these systems are extraordinary examples of the new role played by the human body in digital media ecologies much of the academic scholarship conducted in this area tends to interpret such phenomena from a narrativist standpoint. Such approaches often overlook the essential characteristics of non-narrative media. As a counter-strategy, we propose virtual fictionality – a concept emphasising central aspects of worldliness in VR-based works that lie beyond the narrative paradigm. The aim of the paper is to outline virtual fictionality as a particular world-making strategy of digital games that turns players into configurators.
  • Article
    The autistic gesture: Film as neurological training
    Harbord, Janet (2019) , S. 129-148
    This article explores the co-constitution of autism in the twentieth century with a normative concept of gesture and body language. As an archive of bodies in movement, cinema provides a database of gestures, their changing modality, and cultural distinctiveness across the course of a century. A lesser known cinema of medical and psychiatric film testifies to a longstanding fascination with the a-typical gesture as an optic for observation, documentation, and diagnosis. An identification of idiosyncratic motor co-ordination in the early twentieth century coincided with the rise of neurology, obtaining a different focus in the postwar period in an enquiry into autistic presence. Produced as an outside, autistic gesture provides an external limit-case of what can be known about the development of the human subject.
  • Review
    Blackout / IFFR
    Cumming, Jesse (2019) , S. 315-320
  • Review
  • Article
    Drawing light: Gesture and suspense in the weave
    De Brabandere, Nicole; Thain, Alanna (2019) , S. 189-211
    In this essay, we remix the participatory gestures that emerged in and around Drawing Light, an experimental workshop that we developed in 2018 to explore what happens when illumination moves from a functionalist binary between the invisible and the visible, to become part of an affective charge that reorganises the relation between light and bodily presence, capture and dispersal, clarity and opacity. In other words, we explore the workshop’s propositional conditions that allowed participants to access the material supports of a cinematic experience – light and screens – in order to play with a gesturality in excess of the human, in order to develop a working concept of the ‘light gesture’. We begin by describing the workshop format. We then consider three selected movement ecologies of cinematic light and critical concepts from Suzanne Langer and Edouard Glissant that influenced the workshop design, to refine our sense of how light gestures are compositions with time, and to outline their ‘logic of feeling’. Finally, we revisit the workshop itself through a gestural catalogue, to consider how we re-choreographed these light gestures in collaboration with participants, to reopen the encounters which follow and draw out transversal weavings between ecologies, readings, and practice.
  • Article
    Editorial NECSUS
    NECSUS Editorial Board (2019) , S. 1-3
  • Review
  • Review
    Fields of Loves: Historicising and defining (French) queerness
    Damiens, Antoine (2019) , S. 309-314
  • Review
  • Article
    The filmed body and the cinematic gesture: Zoe Beloff’s revisions
    Blümlinger, Christa (2019) , S. 169-188
    Commenting on New York artist Zoe Beloff’s multimedia installation THE INFERNAL DREAM OF MUTT AND JEFF (2011), this article discusses its epistemological and aesthetic explorations, which focus on the problems of movement as a fundamental act of the cinema machine, and of the moving image as an instrument for the psychosocial control of the human body. In a twofold movement of reuse, Beloff’s studies reveal themselves as both cultural and visual, both theoretical and artistic, demonstrating to what extent the specific ‘techniques’ that bring words, things, and bodies together have been the subject not only of films whose main purpose was entertainment, but also of educational films as a genre. For Beloff, cinema is the place where this archaeology of perception transpires in the clearest fashion; where through mechanical, mimetic movement, and through the moving images of bodies and things, we regain access to what Walter Benjamin calls the forgotten ‘powers of magic’. These powers became tangible at the moment when what Gilles Deleuze called the ‘sensory-motor linkages’ were interrupted, and when synesthesia became manifest. In her installation, Beloff reveals by these kinds of interruptions the conditions of a dispositif of visibility in Foucault’s sense of the term – that is, as a system of value distribution.
  • Article
    Gesture and videographic writing: Manifesting the ‘in between’
    Cox-Stanton, Tracy (2019) , S. 361-364
    The three audiovisual essays presented in this collection employ digital tools to research and explicate the significance of gesture, deliberately engaging with written scholarship. Though written text might anchor the videos’ images and sounds, it never quite contains them, reminding us that the audiovisual essay is itself ‘in between’ scholarship and filmmaking.
  • Article
    Gesture in A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE, a charting of relations
    Cox-Stanton, Tracy (2019) , S. 365-370
  • Article
    Hands, Up
    Zinsel, A (2019) , S. 375-376
  • Article
    Iconomy of the derivative image: Effacing the visual currency in Société Réaliste’s THE FOUNTAINHEAD
    Watt, Calum (2019) , S. 71-90
    This article discusses the experimental film THE FOUNTAINHEAD (2010) by the Parisian artist cooperative Société Réaliste, originally exhibited at Jeu de Paume in Paris. The film reworks the 1949 film of the same name by King Vidor (itself based on a novel by Ayn Rand) by digitally erasing the actors and soundtrack. My reading draws on an interview I conducted with one of the artists to stress the importance of the 2008 financial crisis as the film’s inspiration. The article conceptualises the film’s form and context in relation to the notions of ‘face value’, ‘iconomy’, and the ‘derivative condition’ elaborated in recent film theory by Peter Szendy and Jonathan Beller, to argue that Société Réaliste’s film ‘de-faces’ or erases the original THE FOUNTAINHEAD as visual and ideological currency. Discussing a particular sequence from the film in relation to a recent history of the crisis, I argue that the film can be considered a ‘derivative’ film. Situating Société Réaliste’s film within a broader context of the cinema of the 2008 financial crisis and contemporary financial film theory, I suggest that both the recent theory and the films respond to the crisis through an engagement with financial motifs, notably derivatives.
  • Review
    Media Experiences / Popularizing Japanese TV
    Aitaki, Georgia (2019) , S. 333-340
  • Article
    Mid-twentieth century radio art: The ontological insecurity of the radio text
    Querido, Pedro (2019) , S. 91-111
    In this article, I set out to examine the ontological instability of mid-twentieth century artistic works written for the medium of radio that derives from the tension between transient sound and permanent text. I explore how the evanescence commonly associated with sound in general and radio in particular caused mid-twentieth century radio practitioners like Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and Tom Stoppard to strive for both the simplicity of a superficially intelligible aural text and the complexity stemming from the thematisation of ambiguity and epistemological uncertainty.
  • Article
    The Mighty Maestro on Screen
    Kreutzer, Evelyn (2019) , S. 371-374
  • Article
    (Not) doing it for the Vine: #Boredom Vine videos and the biopolitics of gesture
    Kendall, Tina (2019) , S. 213-233
    This article proposes an analysis of gesture in relation to Vine videos that use boredom-related hashtags to classify bodily movements and gestures and to link them to a particular mood, situation, or state of mind. Drawing from Giorgio Agamben’s ‘Notes on Gesture’, the article situates Vine videos within the emergent attention economy of twenty-first century media, which aims to extract profit from even the most mundane of our daily gestures. As I argue, gesture in these videos is marked by an uncomfortable tension between digital network culture’s demand for both entertaining content and sufficiently entertained subjects, and the obdurate state of lethargy and stalled agency that these videos often express. As such, the gestural in these Vines is caught up in the neoliberal logic of means and ends, while also holding out the possibility of interrupting this logic to disclose what Agamben calls ‘pure means’, or the ‘emergence of the being-in-a-medium of human beings’.
  • Article
    On gesture, or of the blissful promise
    De Rosa, Miriam (2019) , S. 113-128
    In this text I situate gesture within film and media studies, introducing the centrality of this notion from modernity onwards, explaining the structural connection of its analysis and the mechanisms featuring cinema, and giving an account of the main existing resources covering this field. Employing this as a basis, I propose to read gesture as a ‘blissful promise’. To do so, I examine a set of key characteristics that build towards my definition by putting gesture in relation with temporality and continuity, theory and practice, resistance, pleasure, and reconciliation.
  • Review