International Journal of Creative Media Research
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109 research outputs found
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Waveform
No full textThe film Waveform is an output from a project of the same name that has been ongoing since 2017, and which centres on the use of drones as tools for generating poetry. Initially, a drone captures aerial images of incoming ocean waves. These images are then analysed by a machine vision system that traces the boundary between wave and shore. This boundary provides a stream of variables for another algorithm that generates short, poem-like texts, which meditate on questions of environmental sensing and sense-making.
Waveform is presented as a speculative apparatus—a fragment of a world in which sensory technologies are employed for creative, notional ends, rather than a source of purely specular representations. The project considers how these devices might be used to re-articulate the world not as a static formation, with an embedded array of attributes awaiting detection and visualisation, but as one that is emerging and transforming continually—with sensory devices contributing also to this emergence. Here, quantitative outputs in the form of numerical graphs and charts give way to poetic texts that hint not only at the scene being imaged, but also convey aspects of the sociotechnical contexts in which these acts of sensing and interpretation occur, and which often go unacknowledged. The point of this gesture is consider how these contexts are both integral to the ways in which sensory acts are framed, and to consider how they might be reframed in-turn so as to enable new modalities of sensory unfolding and becoming. Such openness to alternative potentials for sensing and knowing will be critical in negotiating the forces of severe ecological disruption and degradation which characterise our present moment
Hacking the NAP: Spectography as Counter-fiction Machine
No full textDowntown Miami is home to the Network Access Point (NAP) of the Americas. Operated by the multinational Equinix, informational traffic and computational power hums away through fiber optic cables and within server cages, linking the city to the rest of the world from this windowless facility. The NAP is highly secured with X-ray machines, intrusion detectors, and digital firewalls. Satellites on the roof are obscured by domes to prevent those outside the facility from gauging their directionality. We argue that the NAP facility is, both in its architecture as well as the discourse Equinix produces about it, a fiction machine. It performs a narrative of security, of placelessness, and of isolation. In order to work against neoliberal logics of disavowal and displacement embodied by the NAP, we propose a design methodology we call spectography. Spectography is affirmative speculation on the informational and material environment, and counter to the paranoid aesthetics exemplified by the NAP. Operating with similar logics (speculation, digitality, network technology), spectography does so against the grain of securitization. Working spectographically means employing design methods that reach toward the city as informational space and ongoing material project, speculating not on potential threat, but on situatedness and latent connection
Art Based Research as Virtual Cultural Heritage
No full textVirtually (Y)ours – Expanded Dialogues with an Archive (2017-18) is a conversational piece presented by three artists. It was developed by Annie Wan in collaboration with Amy Cheung Wan-man and Ng Tsz-kwan. The aim is for audiences to actively participate in a ‘dramatic’ digital encounter; artworks from a museum archive are ‘remediated’ and ‘reimagined’ within a web graphics library (WebGL) platform. The objective is to explore the interdisciplinary solutions best suited to inventing a ‘mnemonic cultural tool’ through remediation, in turn facilitating a form of collective identity through the shared memories of individuals as well as those of the institution (in this case, the Hong Kong Museum of Art)
Characterising Generational Reboot Strategies: Contemporary Hollywood, Transmedia Culture, and Spider-Man
No full textAcross this portfolio I will be analysing the generational reboot strategies of Spider-Man, using Toby Maguire’s, Andrew Garfield’s and Tom Holland’s cinematic portrayals. Using an essay film to demonstrate the industrial reboot timeline of the character, I will explore the marketing of each Spider-Man instalment to pinpoint specific reboot strategies over time. Supported with audience research, I will be conducting one-to-one interviews and social media analysis to highlight the values of Spider-Man consumers, curating and designing posters to re-market the films to their opinions. My conclusions will draw attention to the fact that the character of Peter Parker is actually not the unique selling point of any of the three franchises. Labelled as ‘fidelity reboot’, ‘reactive reboot’ and ‘stan culture reboot’, these strategies highlight the generational way in which Spider-Man is constructed and consumed.
This work is the 2019 winner of our Centre for Media Research Student Award, a special prize awarded each year to one truly exceptional Film or Media undergraduate student at Bath Spa University. The winner exemplifies our core graduate attributes of being an exceptional creative thinker and maker, with outstanding skills in research, digital literacy, global and ethical awareness, and creative collaboration
Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive: Digital Archive as Critical Argument
No full textThe Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive is an online open access resource which contains over three thousand illustrations taken from the four major editions of Shakespeare’s Works in the Victorian period. With these illustrations often neglected by academic scholarship, the resource aims to allow images that have been separated by both time and space to be brought together to generate new meanings and new interpretations. While this aim is significant from a Shakespearean and visual culture perspective, the archive was also created as a space to investigate and make an intervention into wider debates concerning digital ‘authenticity’ and how we can utilise the critical practice of remediation to help us to better understand (and, perhaps, to make arguments with) digital archives. By emphasising the visuality of the illustrations, then, the archive serves to make a comment on the historical importance of these images and how book illustration as an art form has been critically neglected
A Crisis Discipline: Broadening Understanding of Environmental Communication Through Theory and Practice
No full textIn times of unprecedented environmental crisis, which disrupt traditional ways of conducting research and force us to rethink our purpose in the humanities, creative practitioners have the imperative and skillset to make an essential contribution. This article is a multi-perspectival exploration of environmental communication, which draws from concepts in many fields including media communication and the environmental humanities, but is grounded in creative practice as research. It offers insights and examples gained through the author’s direct participation in several types of environmental communication over ten years in different settings: from embedded production in alternative media to environmentally focused research projects that utilise creative and participatory action research methods. Environmental communication can include, but must also go beyond, ‘messaging’; there is a need to recognise the intrinsic value of processes such as creativity, dialogue and participation, and to work for more intangible successes such as enhanced networks and civic participation. This article also counteracts the frustrating tendency in academic culture to generalise art and media forms as part of the same vague entity, either in service of impact and engagement or as too ‘mysterious’ to deconstruct’. This can reveal a limiting disconnect with creative processes, and lead to weak design – and poor understanding – of research projects with creative components. Furthermore, paying attention to the specific processes and characteristics of various art and media forms is an essential part of a general vigilance in foregrounding issues of power, voice, and language in practice. This is not an argument that all research should be practice-based. Ideally, environmental communication could be practiced in a mutually enriching intellectual circuit with more traditional research, but to achieve this we need better acts of translation between theory and practice
The Noise of Becoming
No full textThis visual essay aims to review a virtual art installation: the cyberformance of NAUT-ADA (2018-2020): a fictional character on Instagram that uses role-playing as the method to provoke the affinity between identity and embodied spectatorship: the overflowing reproductive fragmentation of the self within the hypertextual filter bubble (Instagram), and the irresistible affirmation and validation from others that perpetuate self-abjection. I will use a diffractive analysis along with NAUT-ADA’s visual spectacle to attest to the presence of heterotopia: ‘a spatial otherness’ (Foucault, 1986) in virtual environments. The Instagram character NAUT-ADA underlines a retroactive process of becoming ‘as both matrix and catalyst’ (Ascott, 1966): an intelligent virtual art object acting as a metaphor to perform the embodied spectatorship. The title ‘Noise of Becoming’ is to identify the embodied spectatorship as a primary trigger for self-abjection, which actively discharges an excess of self-censorship as a direct result from the “Instagrammable” affirmation-seeking behaviors and the lattices of virtual affiliation inside of the echo chamber. I will further discuss how to embody the diffractive process in my practice to interrupt the reproduction of the same narrative elsewhere.
 
Some Reflections on the Practice of Research
No full textInformed by my own longstanding experience of juggling academic and artistic (theoretical and practice-based) research and teaching, this portfolio will start by looking at some of the challenges of maintaining a creative practice whilst working in an academic context. I will then go on to introduce three different, but thematically linked projects, all of which explore what we mean by reality through the lens of psychosis: A View From Inside (digitally manipulated photographic portraits and artist’s book, 2012); Piecing it Together (participatory collage project, 2015), and There’s So Much More I Want To Tell You, single screen video (2015). These are all practical projects, informed by what, in an academic context, we would call ‘primary research’ with participants. In different ways, each of these projects demonstrates the power of visual media to communicate where words fail, particularly when working in a social context. For example, when looking at, and then creating or contributing to visual images, almost all participants in ‘A View From Inside’ and ‘Piecing It Together’ were readily able to narrate experiences they were finding difficult to access using words alone
Common Ground: A Place to Stand – Together
No full textThe immersive video installation, Common Ground, seeks to establish commonalities across racial boundaries based on cultural attitudes and grounded experience, including attachment to place, eviction from ancestral lands and enduring struggles for self-determination. Three stories (16:9) about connection to place, supported by massive ultra-widescreen 48:9 video landscapes, are told by Highland Scots (Gaels) from the very north of Scotland, ancestral homeland of the author, and three Māori from Te Tai Tokerau (Northland in Aotearoa New Zealand, current home of the author).
Writings by radical human ecologists describe as a triune the three-way relationship between land, people, and the unseen realms. The short stories that comprise Common Ground reveal a history riven when servants of capital intervened in the traditionally collective lives of people who had been cleaved to the land for millennia. The human ecologists call this enclosure as an ontological split. What affect does such a schism have on the psyche of the colonised… and, one wonders, on the colonisers and their offspring? As a settler living in an uncomfortably colonised reality, the author is drawn to Māori because their values are often ordered similarly. The way the stories are presented in Common Ground, is based on the Māori ritual of encounter within a meeting house (whare tupuna) where speakers take the floor un-interrupted and speeches are embellished by a song, be it a psalm, a waulking song, a Gaelic ballad or a prayer.
The immersive installation brings viewers together in a darkened space where they experience connection that may serve to remind them of the potential for the commons and commoning to be a salve for our grief
Song and Soundscape – Immersion and Presence in Spatial Audio
Get PDFSoundcloud link: Returns
Returns is a creative practice research project, involving multichannel recordings of traditional folk songs performed in rural locations. This writing discusses how aspects of immersion and presence were considered over the making process alongside the dissemination method of head tracked headphone-based listening via Apple’s spatial audio. Perceptual immersion, narrative immersion, and certain dimensions of presence are aligned with praxis, resulting in findings from across production processes and the playback system. We propose that these individual parts form a synergy to enhance immersive potential