ABSTRACT In this article I argue that using past films as found footage has benefited the documentary filmmaker in the production of experimental films. The use of found footage may be easily replicated using digital technology and re-edited into new work and offers opportunities to expand filmic discourse beyond the single text; the continuing expansion of screens, formats and digital technologies affords opportunities for experimentation with diverse screens and screening spaces. Using past films as found footage may also circumvent difficulties in obtaining funding to produce new films or in the purchase of archive material. To amplify my discussion I carry out qualitative analyses of my own film [My Private Life II. 2015. UK. High Ground Films. Directed by Jill Daniels. https://vimeo.com/139077147.] and Chantal Akerman’s found footage films which resonate with my own practice on auto-ethnography and exploration of memory and contested identity.
ABSTRACT Virtual Reality (VR) has been an area of research for over 40 years yet only recently has it begun to achieve public acceptance. One key to this has been the development of ‘Cinematic Virtual Reality’ (CVR) where media fidelity approaches that found in feature film. Unlike traditional VR, CVR limits the level of control users have within the environment to choosing viewpoints rather than interacting with the world itself. This means that CVR production arguably represents a new type of filmmaking. Grammars for filmmakers have developed significantly resulting in a rich vocabulary available to use to create compelling stories. Relatedly, researchers into VR have also begun to understand mechanisms behind compelling engagement within VR. This paper looks to find a bridge between these two previously disparate media. It is argued that the concepts of ‘suspension of disbelief’ and ‘presence’ can be linked via ‘transportation theory’. The applicability of existing filmmaking directing techniques for the creation of CVR projects is then explored. Existing film production methods are considered in a manner adapted to establishing ‘presence’ in a CVR space. Finally, areas for future exploration are considered in light of the immaturity of CVR as a medium.
Arguably one of the most important factors of journalistic quality is careful source selection. Studies on online journalism have revealed working conditions which may lead to poor sourcing practices. This article seeks to answer the following questions: What sources do online journalists use, and how do they rationalize their sourcing practices? A total of 17 Finnish online journalists in 7 newsrooms were observed and interviewed over their practices of source searching, evaluation, and use. The study revealed five distinctive rationales of source use, which I call trust discourses: the ideological, the pragmatic, the cynically pragmatic, the consensual, and the contextual trust. Different trust discourses are associated with different source types, influences, and forms and degrees of source critique. The results reveal – among other things – the online journalists’ largely unquestioned trust of official sources and the cynical re-purposing of content from other media. The study provides accurate first hand observations on the sourcing practices and the results thereof of online journalists, and provides a viable framework for the further study of sourcing practices in online journalism.
Contrary to the fifteen minutes of fame of online memes and viral videos in the volatile and competitive environment of YouTube, successful beauty gurus achieve sustained popularity, enjoy from long-lasting viewer engagement and inhabit legitimized celebrity positions. This article is based on a multi-year ethnographic examination of YouTube's beauty community, focusing on the popular British-Chinese beauty guru Bubz, her channel Bubzbeauty, and the community of viewers formed around her content. Parting from the question of what legitimates Bubz in her influential role, I conceptualize community-specific norms that guide practices, particularly those related to self-presentation and identity-management and their implications for everyday celebrity practice. Merited fame involves certain requirements that need to be consistently demonstrated. The importance of first demonstrating expertise and effort, and then consistently following the community rules of self-presentation and engagement with brands and viewers without 'losing your own self' is at the heart of the values of YouTube's beauty community.
This paper discusses how networked media via the Web is providing the realisation of media hybridisation that began when genres and formats became functions of software. Beginning with an overview of how media formats came together during the twentieth century, the paper argues that the Internet now provides a distribution system that allows for the hyper-hybridisation of media formats alongside more fluid two-way participation than the previous broadcasting and mass distribution models. The paper will look at examples from the author’s own recent work – ongoing video streaming activities with the Royal Shakespeare Company, a ‘virtual gamelan’ for the London Symphony Orchestra, and the Temporal Chaos installation. The paper concludes that our traditional media forms are in a phase of ongoing disruption, which transcend merely updating existing media forms for a digital online era.
This book is a collection of working papers by PhD graduates who have chosen the creative arts as their means of research, expression, and communication. Edited by Desmond Bell, this unique compila...
This themed issue presents a selection of contributions from the Post-Screen Cultures/Prac- tices symposium held at London South Bank University in June 2016. It inaugurates what will become a new tradition of publishing an edition of the journal based on the annual MeCCSA Practice Network/JMP Practice Symposium. The 2016 symposium sought to explore the changing nature of our contemporary engagement with emergent screen- oriented technologies. The overarching theme to emerge was that the current moment is in some ways similar to the earliest days of cinema – a time of vibrant experimentation in which, while rejecting the fetishisation of technology and technological determinism, artists and media practitioners are grappling with emerging media forms and new tech- nological contexts in order to harness their potential.
Since the scientific discoveries to capture what lies beyond on the far side of our visible range and beyond the surfaces, the possibilities for photography in an artistic context have expanded constantly. With the insight into artistic research in the field of scientific imaging technologies, in particular thermography, the author proposes a new visual genre beyond the visible spectrum. To elucidate the claims, the author describes her artistic research in depth, discussing different stages of development and creative decisions.
This paper aims to provide a semiotic analysis of user-generated content on YouTube concerning the song ¿Quién será? 'Who will it be?' (1953, music by Pablo Beltran Ruíz and Luis Demetrio Traconis Molina; lyrics by Pablo Beltran Ruíz), making reference to concepts such as bricolage, hypertextuality and microcelebrity to account for the overall nature of the content. Users connect available materials in creative ways to pay tribute to the music/stars they like, while seeking attention and recognition through their content, which might eventually serve their personal interests such as finding a job or earning revenue from the YouTube Partner Program.
Cinematic virtual reality (VR) elicits new possibilities for the treatment of sound in space. Distinct from screen-based practices of filmmaking, diegetic sound–image relations in immersive environments present unique, potent affordances, in which content is at once imaginary, and real. However, a reductive modelling of environmental realism, in the name of 'presence' predominates. Yet cross-modal perception is a noisy, flickering representation of worlds. Treating our perceptual apparatus as stable, objective transducers, ignores the inter-subjective potential at the heart of immersive work, and situates users as passive spectators. This condescends to audiences and discounts the historic symbiosis of sound–image signification, which comes to constitute notions of verisimilitude. We understand the tropes; we willingly suspend disbelief. This article examines spatial sound rendering in virtual environments, probing at diegetic realism. It calls for an experimental, aesthetic approach, suggesting several speculative strategies, drawing from theories of embodied cognition and acousmatic practice (amongst others) which necessarily deal with space and time as contingencies of the immersive. VR affords a development of the dialectic between sound and image which distinctively involves our spatial attention. The lines between referent and signified blur; the mediation between representations invoked by practitioners, and those experienced by audiences, suggest new opportunities for co-authorship.
The foundation of my film Mnemophrenia was about practising theory instead of theorizing the practice. My project begins with theory, which then leads to the science fiction film Mnemophrenia that constitutes the practical aspect of it. My film demonstrates how theory and practice can be joined and creates a fruitful union, each one feeding the other. My original theoretical hypothesis is founded on the much-discussed subject of the close relationship between film and memory and more specifically the possible creation of ‘artificial’ memories. Mnemophrenia showcases how film can be a memory system itself, consequently affecting memory and creating artificial memories for the viewers. In Mnemophrenia reality and fiction are integrated, mutually negating each other, since the established reality depicted in the film is proven to be ‘artificial’, based fully on different Virtual Reality films. Ultimately the film and this thesis aim to explore the future of cinema that leads to the blurring of real and artificial memories. Together they attempt to demonstrate the dissolution of these boundaries, to display the two-way relationship of reality and fiction and to showcase how theory fuels practice and practice enlivens theory.
This paper brings together auto-ethnographic and participatory research to investigate how the practice of vision constructed through a locative-based augmented reality (AR) browser creates and reveals values and meanings connected to geographies of the place. Leveraging the potential of the collective cultural consciousness formed by the legacy of Titanic, the author has developed an AR browser that layers historic photographs of Titanic with the modern day view of the Belfast shipyard in which the ship was built, to investigate the narrative logic of what is seen and understood through the AR browser. This paper seeks to first show the experience of the AR construction using an authorial voice, enabling the reader to enter the subjective world of the author’s experience, and then tell of the experience using a broad framework of visual cultures discourse, thus enabling the narrative fidelity of the subjective experience to have reached beyond that of a description of what is seen and felt. Using this methodology, the paper identifies the affordances and constraints of the AR image in those situations where what is seen via AR technologies contributes to what is known of the cultural symbolism and value of the place.
This paper presents a case study realized in a Greek model high school as an extracurricular animation-making project during an after-school club. The student-participants were 20 volunteers between 16 and 18 years old. The researcher studied the affective function of moving image literacy, i.e. the feelings and emotions experienced by the student-participants during animation-viewing, animation-making as well as the affective engagement they wished to cause to their audience. Their creation was a short animation film entitled ‘The Society’, symbolically dealing with the issue of the Greek economic crisis from a social viewpoint. The affective function studied is considered as one of the benefits of moving image literacy, whether this literacy is applied within a subject of the curriculum, is taught as a subject per se or is applied in an extracurricular project addressing all age groups. So, this case study shows the range of feelings students can experience during an animation-making project and how their emotional involvement contributes to the success of the pedagogic process. Its aim is to encourage teachers to use moving image literacy as a means of affective involvement of their students with the subject taught, an aspect that has not been widely explored so far.
ABSTRACT This study utilizes an ethnography to examine the influences on news production processes at a digitally native news nonprofit. Prior literature suggests that communication routines remain the most powerful influence on news production, but this study’s findings suggest that because of the influx of different market models currently impacting the journalism industry, organizational level influences may be becoming more powerful than communication routines. These findings are investigated through the lens of gatekeeping theory with consideration for the implications for future gatekeeping research.
This paper conceptualises immersive journalism, and discusses the implications of the technology for users who then get a first-hand experience of being at a news event through wearing a virtual reality headset. The paper surveys current approaches to 360-degree immersive journalism films that were produced by early adopters in 2015, identifying the contrasting narrative forms and style of the stories. Focus group studies add new, significant understanding to the types of narratives that work and the impact that immersive storytelling has. The focus group is a study of 18–24 year olds in the UK who are being targeted by this new technology as a way for news broadcasters to reach a new audience. This first study into immersive journalism content produces a new understanding of the impact of the narratives. It identifies the value for news producers adopting this technology, whilst raising concerns over the production of filming 360 degrees. A framework is offered for further research studies into immersive technologies and storytelling in the field of news.
The use of social media is now widely accepted within journalism as an outlet for news information. Live tweeting of unfolding events is standard practice. In March 2014, Oscar Pistorius went on trial in the Gauteng High Court for murder. Hundreds of journalists present began live-tweeting coverage, an unprecedented combination of international interest, permission to use technology and access which resulted in massive streams of consciousness reports of events as they unfolded. Based on a corpus of Twitter feeds of 24 journalists covering the trial, this study analyses the content and strategies of these feeds in order to present an understanding of how microblogging is used as a live reporting tool. This study shows the development of standardised language and strategies in reporting on Twitter, concluding that journalists adopt a narrow range of approaches, with no significant variation in terms of gender, location or medium. This is in contrast to earlier studies in the field.
The rapidity with which images circulate across the Internet has multiplied their contexts of reception and patterns of interpretation. This poses some challenges for the work of the online curator who neither relies on the physical space of the art gallery nor on the photographic frame to designate context and fix meaning. However, it also presents the opportunity to test new conceptual tools for dealing with networked images’ inherent fluidity. This article proposes ‘online critical tracing’ as a reflexive method to begin charting, connecting and critically examining the unstable flow of networked images. The method develops from my tracing of a specific visual object – a T-shirt commercialised by the Swedish international retailer H&M patterned with the statement ‘this image is not available in your country’. Reflecting back on this experiment, I examine a number of implications that conditions of image circulation have for online curation, namely problems of commodification, interpretation and aesthetics. While attempting to situate this method theoretically, I highlight the challenges and possibilities it might open up for the curation of networked images.
The modern viewer is familiar with the cinematic paradigm, in which he or she is fixed in a darkened auditorium. However, current audio-visual technologies introduce new viewing modes. This article explores the spatial properties of the projection system (projector, screen surface, projection beam and the viewer), during the transition from analogue to digital technology, with paradigms from the 1960s’ expanded cinema to current multimedia installations, in particular works defined as digitally expanded cinema. Our aim is to explore how the projection space can be combined with architectural space, using expanded cinema design principles.
Engaged ethnography requires a deep rationale for involvement and a passion for a particular cause. Visual ethnography implements an aesthetic component, compliment, or fold into that complex, multi-layered engagement. This theoretical research attempts to move beyond traditional, epistemic debates and blend anthropological, communicative, and sociological concepts to form a cohesive approach to knowledge construction that exposes power, educates on publicly important issues, and reaches a critical consciousness to visually engage the public sphere. It is through that effort to recognize when a break from the shackle of our own limits of consciousness can create previously unattainable knowledge.
