2019/2 — #Gesture
Recent Submissions
- Article(Not) doing it for the Vine: #Boredom Vine videos and the biopolitics of gestureKendall, Tina (2019)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(Un)Frozen expressions: Melodramatic moment, affective interval, and the transformative powers of experimental cinemaAnger, Jiří (2019)The study examines the double temporality of melodrama and the ways in which it can be further developed or transformed. Typical melodramatic moments draw attention to the tension between static, seemingly frozen tableaus and utopian, supposedly endless expression. Certain experimental films (e.g. Werner Schroeter’s DER TOD DER MARIA MALIBRAN) radicalise this tension, making way for all the affective operations that emerge when the two temporalities are played out against each other. At the same time, while these affective operations make the melodramatic moments appear in a different light, they still leave them recognisable as melodramatic. This paper aims to show how this two-way movement between melodrama and experimental cinema, or melodramatic moment and affective interval respectively, works and the new insights it can bring for affect studies and their application in film theory.
- ArticleAt the threshold into new worlds: Virtual reality game worlds beyond narrativesMatuszkiewicz, Kai; Weidle, Franziska (2019)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.
- ReviewBlackout / IFFRCumming, Jesse (2019)
- ReviewBoth inside the circle and out: Béla Tarr’s MISSING PEOPLE at the Vienna FestivalKlamer, Jonathan (2019)
- ArticleDrawing light: Gesture and suspense in the weaveDe Brabandere, Nicole; Thain, Alanna (2019)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.
- ArticleEditorial NECSUSNECSUS Editorial Board (2019)
- ReviewFemale Authorship and the Documentary Image / Female Agency and Documentary StrategiesPredescu, Alina (2019)
- ReviewFields of Loves: Historicising and defining (French) queernessDamiens, Antoine (2019)
- Review
- ArticleGesture and videographic writing: Manifesting the ‘in between’Cox-Stanton, Tracy (2019)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.
- ArticleGesture in A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE, a charting of relationsCox-Stanton, Tracy (2019)
- ArticleHands, UpZinsel, A (2019)
- ArticleIconomy of the derivative image: Effacing the visual currency in Société Réaliste’s THE FOUNTAINHEADWatt, Calum (2019)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.
- ReviewMedia Experiences / Popularizing Japanese TVAitaki, Georgia (2019)
- ArticleMid-twentieth century radio art: The ontological insecurity of the radio textQuerido, Pedro (2019)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.
- ArticleOn gesture, or of the blissful promiseDe Rosa, Miriam (2019)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.
- ReviewPinpointing the ‘cinematic’ in twenty-first century art: ‘Dreamlands’ / ‘On Desire’Chinita, Fatima (2019)
- Review
- ArticleSelfie-screen-sphere: Examining the selfie as a complex, embodying gestureBerkland, Darren (2019)This article posits that the selfie is a screenic gesture which allows individuals to embody themselves within what Vivian Sobchack calls the ‘screen-sphere’: a reformulation of our definition of the screen which accounts for the ubiquity and mobility of contemporary screens that can no longer be regarded as an ‘“array” of discrete artefacts’ but instead regarded ‘as a structural and functional collectivity’. While Sobchack claims that our ‘lived-bodies cannot physically dwell in this new spatiality without special technologies’ such as VR equipment, I believe that the set of complex gestures which result in the selfie allow, in fact, for a type of embodied existence within the screen-sphere. In particular, it is grasping the device and viewing oneself in its ‘digital mirror’ that results in this complex gestural moment. I am following Flusser in my definition of gesture; that is, a production of meaning that is contained in some practised performance: a symbolic movement that at once both expresses and articulates meaning. I will draw upon Bo Burnham’s film EIGHTH GRADE (2017) to provide an example of how this gestural relationship develops within the screen-sphere, in which a young protagonist engages with a variety of ‘screenic’ surfaces. Closely examining the main character’s selfie process, I will, first, reformulate Sobchack’s screen-sphere as a screenic topology that accounts for how screens arrange space; second, I will examine how gestural movements emerge within this topology; and finally, I will examine the role of the digital mirror, and how looking into the device consolidates this gesture.