2018/1 – #Resolution

Browsing 2018/1 – #Resolution by Title

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  • Review
  • Article
    Beyond human vision: Towards an archaeology of infrared images
    Pierotti, Federico; Ronetti, Alessandra (2018)
    The article sets out to explore in a concise manner the archaeology of today’s infrared images, through some scientific and technological devices, discourses, and practices that have led to the development of analogue infrared imaging from the second half of the 19th century up to the 1960s. We focus on some examples that show the origins of two instances where the contemporary uses of digital infrared intertwine and co-exist: first, the need to map what is invisible to the human eye, and second, the need to track data and manage information flows.
  • Article
    Breaking Bollywood: Moving pictures on mobile screens
    Tanvir, Kuhu (2018)
    This paper examines the exhibition and consumption of popular Hindi films in the mobile phone landscape in India. Discourse on watching media on cellphones has focused on the lack of immersion as a shortcoming of the cellphone as a screen. This criticism is rooted in the most traditional aspects of Apparatus Theory. I argue that immersion as a category is inadequate to understand the massive changes in visual culture that are enabled by the cellphone as a screening device. In India, the film and the mobile phone industries have a thriving pirate underbelly that co-exists with and constantly undermines the ‘official’ industry. In studying the intersections between cinema, mobility, and piracy, I hope to illustrate how the cellphone has shaped a viewing culture that is marked by poor quality images, pirated media, and failure, leading to a fragmentation of the film object that is not mourned but rather celebrated for the possibilities of access that it opens up.
  • Article
    Cinema, meteorology, and the erotics of weather
    Meilvang, Emil Leth (2018)
    This article explores the notion of a meteorology of cinema. Through the close reading of a string of books – with subjects such as clouds, rain, and snow – the article conceptualises an approach to weather on film, and grounds this approach in the anti-hermeneutics of Susan Sontag, André Bazin’s geography of cinema, and the movement philosophy of Gaston Bachelard.
  • Article
    Editorial Necsus
    NECSUS Editorial Board (2018)
  • Review
  • Review
    First Comes Love / Presumed Intimacy
    Handyside, Fiona (2018)
  • Article
    From grain to pixel? Notes on the technical dialectics in the small gauge film archive
    Cavallotti, Diego (2018)
    Since Fossati’s FROM GRAIN TO PIXEL, we commonly think that the current technological landscape of the archive is ‘in transition’ from the ‘analog’ grain to the ‘digital’ pixel. Although this notion is extremely important in shaping the ‘discourse’ on archival practices, the small gauge film archive is still a place where analog and digital cultural techniques coexist rather than fade out (the analogue) or fade in (the digital). Thus, I will focus here on the possible interactions between these two superimposing material layers (chemical/analog and electronic/digital), drawing on a specific case study: the Ugo Pilato Film Collection, preserved at La Camera Ottica – Film and Video Restoration Lab (University of Udine) in Gorizia (Italy).
  • Article
    From mass psychology to media studies: Interview with Jaap van Ginneken on his Kurt Baschwitz biography
    Lovink, Geert (2018)
    In this interview with Jaap van Ginneken we are looking at the (dis)appearance of ‘mass psychology’: a small and short-lived discipline shaped by figures such as Gustave Le Bon, Gabriel Tarde, and Sigmund Freud. For most of his life, Dutch academic van Ginneken has both utilised mass psychology’s methods and written its history. His latest contribution is the biography of the German-Dutch Kurt Baschwitz (1886-1968), who can be considered The Netherlands’ most influential mass psychologist (Kurt Baschwitz, A Pioneer of Communication Studies and Social Psychology, Amsterdam University Press, 2018).
  • Article
    How machines see the world: Understanding image annotation
    Treccani, Carloalberto (2018)
    Michael Baxandall, in PAINTING AND EXPERIENCE IN 15TH CENTURY ITALY (1972), shows the existence of a series of rules that painters of the 15th century were advised to follow. These ‘guidelines’ explained, for example, how each different hand position painted, within that cultural context, represented a different concept. These rules were rather rich and detailed and helped the painter maintain relevance in that historical and cultural context. Today, companies such as Amazon or Facebook are trying to teach machines and algorithms to see and understand what they see (image recognition). However, this process of signification, simple for a human being, is still complex for machines and algorithms. Hundreds of thousands of workers, therefore, are hired in order to label what they see. The workers are paid in pennies per image labelled and labor in precarious working conditions. This often leads to insufficient, poor or confusing labelling. Yet these ‘low quality’ labels are determining the way machines and algorithms see and understand the world. What are the consequences of a learning process that is confused, inaccurate, and qualitatively poor, in this unprecedented historical moment where there are more machines than human beings analysing and trying to make sense of what they see?
  • Review
  • Article
    The instability of the digital archive: How to deal with pixels by hand
    Larcher, Jonathan; Leyokki (2018)
    This essay presents the work of the Brèches artist collective and research questioning the ‘becoming-archive’ and the instability of vernacular digital images. With this investigation, the collective seeks a way to reverse the quality and hierarchy usually attributed to high and low resolution, and to reverse the established order between archives and family footage. Their practice deals with three types of images: photographic archives of the 19th century, digitised at a very high resolution; very low resolution images produced through entry-level DV cameras and first generation mobile phones; inflation of the latter through an algorithmic process inspired by GAME OF LIFE (Conway, 1970). The collective experiments with hand-crafted digital images, understood as a way of working with visual texture and materiality – rather than figures and mimicry – and as a way of editing a film frame by frame.
  • Article
    Interactive media and imperial subjects: Excavating the cinematic shooting gallery
    Cowan, Michael (2018)
    This article examines a little-known example of early interactive cinema: cinematic shooting galleries, which appeared in multiple variations in Europe and the US around 1910. All but forgotten today, such devices – which allowed spectators to fire live bullets at projected images on the screen – offer an excellent test case for any media archaeology in search of ‘precursors’ to digital media such as interactive cinema and video games. They might also appear tailor-made for Kittlerian arguments about the deep links between media and warfare. But understanding cinematic shooting galleries also demands careful attention to the cultural context of hunting and tourist safaris in which they emerged and took on meaning in the early 20th century. The article argues that such devices intersected with a much broader visual culture of colonialism and hunting, promising a ‘training’ in self-mastery through their interactive simulation of the hunt. That training depended on the device’s ability to show images in movement, simulating danger and demanding a rapid response. But it also depended on a less conspicuous aspect frequently highlighted in descriptions from the time: the pause, which kicked in to stop the image for a few seconds whenever a spectator fired the gun. This pausing feature links the cinematic shooting gallery with broader research into pausing mechanisms, particularly in the domain of educational film. But whereas educators conceived the pause as a tool for intellectual mastery, the cinematic shooting gallery used the pause to heighten the sense of bodily mastery, where the stilling of the image would run parallel to the stilling of the body’s automatic nervous responses.
  • Review
  • Article
    The resolution of sound: Understanding retro game audio beyond the ‘8-bit’ horizon
    Braguinski, Nikita (2018)
    The labelling of retro-themed musical products as ‘8-bit’ has become a fixture of today’s popular culture. Yet, contrary to its use in the visual realm, this ‘resolution’ of retro game audio normally does not specify the amount of information used to encode and display the artefact. Instead, the number ‘8’ in ‘8-bit audio’ refers to a nebulous amalgam of aesthetic imaginaries that connect to a vision of grossly inadequate audio and video technologies of the previous decades. In this article, I propose a different vocabulary for the assessment of the specific qualities of 1980s game audio, and its more recent imitations.
  • Article
    Resolution: Digital materialities, thresholds of visibility
    Casetti, Francesco; Somaini, Antonio (2018)
    Often used as a synonym of ‘definition’, the term ‘resolution’ indicates the quantity of detail a raster digital image holds, and may refer to image resolution (the size of a digital image file), display resolution (the total number of pixels or the pixel density of a digital visual display), or optical resolution (the number of image sensor elements in a digital camera). Resolution may be increased or decreased, and its various degrees determine not only the visual appearance of an image, but also the conditions of its production, storage, and circulation. As a way of measuring and controlling visibility, resolution raises a whole series of aesthetic, epistemological, and political implications, and may be tackled from the different perspective of media theory, media archaeology, and visual culture theory. Reaching back to McLuhan’s reflections on the low definition of the television screen and on its analogies with mosaics and pointillisme, this introduction examines the question of resolution in a number of film, media, and artistic practices from the 1960s to today.
  • Review
  • Article
    To double or diffuse: Art and the mobility of images, ca. 2005
    Østby Sæther, Susanne (2018)
    In this essay I examine how artists responded aesthetically to the new order of image mobility and transience that unfolded around 2005, when social media instigated the imperative to share and exchange files. With video-based works by Slater Bradley and Seth Price as cases, I explore how low resolution imagery around this time was purposefully deployed to signal the travels of an image through a network. Contributing to the growing scholarship on circulation and distribution of art and media, I develop the models of ‘doubling’ and ‘diffusion’ as analytical tools to differentiate between two distinct material-technical and networked practices of image reproduction and distribution evoked in these works, as well as between the affective charge they induce.
  • Review
    TV Socialism / Broadcasting Modernity
    Russell, William (2018)
  • Article
    The uncanny mediality of the photographic GIF
    Fetveit, Arild (2018)
    This article examines uncanny mediality in photographic GIFs by interrogating sources of this uncanniness and the logic informing its operation in particular examples. From a phenomenological analysis of an instructive GIF that loops a six-second recording of the artist Prince, the article goes on to examine the confluence between features prone to generate the uncanny and features characterising the photographic GIF as a medium. This examination involves a probing of how the uncanny is theorised in seminal contributions by Ernst Jentsch and Sigmund Freud. It also involves probing uncanny potentials in photographic mediality by means of examining the history of photographic theory. Drawing on these theoretical and historical resources the article probes further examples, among them a cinemagraph, in a comparative analysis of how uncanny mediality may operate in GIFs.