2022/2 - #Materiality

Now showing 1 - 20 of 24

Absence in Cinema
Shilina-Conte, Tanya (2022)
Dani Gal’s cinematic and activist engagements with Israel/Palestine in Germany
Zelnick, Sharon (2022)
This essay contributes to current debates about the problematic conflation of support for Palestinians with anti-Semitism in Germany by focusing on the cinematic and activist work of Dani Gal, an Israeli migrant in Berlin. Gal’s film, White City (2018), deals with intersections between memories of the Holocaust and the Nakba by reformatting archival materials – namely, a Nazi propaganda postcard and Zionist leader Arthur Ruppin’s diary – in ways that rethink migrations of architectural aesthetics and racist practices. By upending the expectation to document the past, the photographic stills in White City instead performatively reimagine historical and contemporary predicaments around ethnic discrimination in Germany and Israel/Palestine. By bringing together the proximal victimisation Jews and Palestinians suffered from the Holocaust and the Nakba, as well as the linked perpetrator pasts of some Zionists and Nazis, White City inspires us to understand the power of ‘multidirectional memory’ and ‘cocitizenship’ anew.
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.
Documenta Fifteen and Berlin Biennale 12: A comparative review
Mergler, Agata (2022)
Embracing hybridity beyond the pandemic: The contrasting cases of PÖFF and SGIFF
Papadopoulou Melea; Eleni (2022)
Gli anni
Fgaier, Sara (2022)
How to Win at Photography: Image-Making and Play
Buse, Peter (2022)
Most Fabulous Place
Maamoun, Maha (2022)
NECSUS Editorial Autumn 2022
NECSUS Editorial Board (2022)
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.
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.
Parallax Dash
Torlasco, Domietta (2022)
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
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.
Second Sighted
Stratman, Deborah (2022)
Song for Earth and Folk
Smith, Cauleen (2022)
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.
Symbolic misery and digital media: How NFTs reproduce culture industries
Bocquillon, Rémy; van Loon, Joost (2022)
This contribution will attempt to propose a critical and philosophical engagement with the discussion around NFTs by focusing on the articulation of materialisms and digital media in artistic practices. The philosopher Bernard Stiegler argued that culture industries led to the formation of a symbolic misery, disrupting aesthetic experience through the creation and imposition of practices of consumption;[2] a process reinforced by the technological reproduction of works of art. In recent years, the discussion around Web 3.0, blockchain technologies, and their implementation through non-fungible tokens (NFTs) also reformulates the question of digital reproduction and distribution of works of art.[3] Indeed, in a market dominated by centralised streaming platforms such as Spotify, many artists see in NFTs a way to regain control over their own works and tools, by creating a form of artificial scarcity, mimicking the limited quantity and binding ownership of physical artefacts, as a kind of magical individuation, to paraphrase Simondon.[4] The authors ask to which extent those technologies, although often posited as a liberation from corporate giants, might lead to an exacerbation of the process of proletarianisation which is at the core of Stiegler’s thesis on symbolic misery, even if they are being procured in an ethos of social justice and responsibility, thereby functioning as what Michel Serres called a virtual object.[5] Moreover, it will be argued that by trying to reproduce an artificial idea of scarcity, NFTs also tend to reduce materiality to the object being sold and possessed, consequently reproducing the constitution of ‘art’ as a market, where new practices of consumption and competition are being championed as commodities at the expense of aesthetic experience.
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.
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.

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