International Journal of Creative Media Research
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109 research outputs found
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[Making and Faking the News] Critical distance: On illustrating news events from afar
No full textPowerful images depicting the horror and devastation of geopolitical events and heinous abuses of power have an indisputable role to play in our society. This article however challenges the role of the eye witness as the sole conduit to valuable insights within news and media discourse. The authors propose that image-making practices (such as illustration) that operate at a distance from events allow for equally valid insights. Using three case studies of imagery produced at a remove from the news events it thematises, they argue that it is precisely the distance from the news event that enables the work to draw out aspects that are usually outside the frame of visibility. An analysis of Daniel Heyman’s portraits of Abu Ghraib detainees, Tings Chak’s schematic representations of migrant detention centres, and Catherine Anyango Grunewald’s animated film concerning the death of black teenager Michael Brown demonstrates that working at a remove can enable illustrators, artists and activists to reveal overlooked systems of power and control, restore dignity to dehumanised subjects, and reveal the limits of visual evidence. The article concludes with a reflection on the possibilities and limitations of the visual as a form of evidence
Inverting the ‘Black Box’ of Technology: The Digital Ghost Hunt
No full textThis article provides an account of the author’s own creative project, The Digital Ghost Hunt, a 2017-2019 collaboration between the University of Sussex, King’s Digital Lab and KIT Theatre. The project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Centre in the 2018 ‘Immersive Experience’ funding stream and was awarded a full grant for the pilot and an extension to build and widen audiences in the second phase in 2019. Throughout this article we explore the role of an immersive experience in deepening social and historical engagement with the physical world in contrast to the ‘black box’ design paradigm. This work allows for the comparison of the engagement of participants invited to engage with technology-aided experience as builder-makers and as naïve audiences to an already designed experience. We also consider the interactions between design and technology as a means of bringing people of different ages and attitudes towards technology together through shared learning and problem-solving, also with a nod to the popularity of escape room experiences
“I am not really sure how to explain”: Marketing Augmented Reality Experiences to New Audiences
No full textIf the immersive sector is to fully move beyond engaging the early technology adoptors and is to capture mass audiences from different corners of the cultural landscape, then gateway promotional content must be developed – that is, marketing that engages those new to immersive technologies. How, though, can the magic of 3D worlds be communicated via 2D media? Addressing this current industry challenge, the Immersive Promotion Design team was funded by StoryFutures Academy in 2020 to identify new promotional strategies for how virtual and augmented reality experiences can be better marketed to today’s audiences. This article outlines our approach to applying research into new ways of marketing VR/AR to a set of marketing materials we prototyped for Studio McGuire’s The Invited, a CreativeXR-funded experience that reimagines the story of Dracula with a pop-up book and AR technology. I also discuss the results of evaluating The Invited’s research-informed promotion on audience, outlining key learnings about how to communicate the magic of AR content to new audiences
Illustrating Complex Networks
No full textThis audio-visual discourse presents how the practice of network mapping can illuminate the project brief through the lens of all stakeholders. One challenge of research-through-design is that the knowledge produced is often embodied within artefacts, unable to be shared or interrogated by others. There is therefore a need to produce artifacts which are accessible to an interdisciplinary audience. To demonstrate the complex nature of project networks there is a need to visually articulate the networks involved to show where stakeholders sit and who is connected to who. By visually representing this data, the networks are able to be interrogated by others beyond the individual researcher.
This discourse will reflect upon issues in creative practice research and respond to the issue of how we can navigate interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary quagmires in practice-based research. This short methodological reflection will interrogate the value of a predetermined brief and suggest that through network mapping, a more nuanced brief can be created through the lens of all stakeholders. This discourse suggests that this method can be used by those in inter or transdisciplinary fields, beyond that of architecture, to illuminate transdisciplinary quagmires that may arise through the production of a project brief
After Humanity: technology, ecology and a blueprint for speculative media
No full text'After Humanity' approaches issues of technological futures, environmental collapse and human agency. The eponymous future after the fall of humanity imagines a world built through relations between machines and ecology, in order to critique human priorities and the impact of constant expansion on the environment. This is situated in the context of developing a combined speculative media method, fusing design, fiction and ethics. The work is offered as a proof of concept for the method in developing a specific context using machine learning and human creative practices
Bad Evidence: The Fictions of Interrogation
No full textIndications of Guilt, pt.1 examines the structures of American police interrogation and their relationship to fictional screen representations of law enforcement.
In 2017, I travelled to Texas to train in America’s widely used form of psychological interrogation. The technique has faced scrutiny in recent years due to high false confession rates. The film combines staged and documentary methods to explore how psychological interrogation can function as a process for creating fiction, whilst ostensibly seeking to establish truth.
This text will outline the research-based methodology I used, which involved embedding myself within a law enforcement community, as well as interviewing detectives, lawyers, false confessions experts and academics. I will discuss the interdisciplinary theoretical contexts I drew upon and the expansion of the True Crime genre in popular culture
Landscape Composite: Remediating Landscape Paintings through Visual Effects
No full textThis multi-piece portfolio examines the development of ‘Landscape Composite’ (2016-) a series of single screen video composites that remediate, through visual effects techniques, existing landscape paintings in the pastoral tradition of the 17th, 18th and 19th century. This portfolio will present the development of the works culminating in the exhibition ‘Post Pastoral’ at Centre Space Bristol (2020).
It will consider the theoretical context surrounding the work, present the methodology in creating the works and consider the intermedial links between painting and visual effects by examining specific works in detail. In terms of process, ‘Landscape/Composite’ applies visual effects techniques to remediate and animate landscape paintings to create ultra high definition tableaux vivant video works presented on large scale video screens. It uses Terry Gifford’s (1999) Post Pastoral idiom as the contextual frame for the remediation. The project provides an original contribution to the emerging trend of artists’ use of visual effects techniques to reexamine painted images of the landscape and reconsider our cultural preconceptions of the landscape and concept of the Pastoral and the picturesque.
https://postpastoral.tumblr.com
Love in a Time of a Marriage Equality Postal Survey: Documentary Filmmaking in the Midst of Moral Panic
No full textIn 2017, Australia was subjected to a costly and divisive same sex plebiscite, precipitating a time of moral panic according to many social commentators. This article examines responses ethically, aesthetically and, moreover, lovingly to homophobia, misogyny and hate in documentary filmmaking creative practice, citing the author’s own emergent collaborative work, a semi-autobiographical documentary film titled Handbag: The Untold Story of the Fag Hag, a love letter of sorts. Specifically, I ask how affective interventions on screen can change hearts and minds, and concludes that empowered and embodied interactions and engagements with audiences are sites of transformative potential
Transmedia Historiography as Educational Practice: Narrativising Colombian Cultural Memory
No full textBoth the biggest challenge and the biggest opportunity for understanding transmediality – itself the use of multiple media technologies to tell stories and communicate information – is the sheer breadth of its interpretation. Though primarily still seen as a commercial practice, this article explores the application of transmedia practices to the communication of history across multiple media platforms, questioning what this approach means to understandings of transmediality. More specifically, the article furthers discussions of the contribution that transmedia storytelling can make to educational practices, identifying new strategies for how transmedia storytelling is now being used to capture and narrativize historical memories, as media-based educational resources. To do so, the article focuses on the Colombian armed conflict and the Desarmados project, which I use to theorise how transmediality can work as historiography, allowing for not only a new way of experiencing and remembering history, but as that which can reshape history for the better, reconciling the past and the present
Y Dosbarth Melyn [The Yellow Classroom] Authorial Ontology and Communicative Intentionality in (an) Observational Documentary Film
No full textThe aim of Y Dosbarth Melyn [The Yellow Classroom] in research terms was to explore in what ways the observational mode of documentary filmmaking might relate to the selfhood of the author. In particular, the work asks: how does the observational documentary mode enable an author to communicate aspects of their own ontological position? Screened at Wales International Film Festival, Camarthen Bay Film Festival, Wairoa Film Festival, and the Cardiff International Film Festival, Y Dosbarth Melyn [The Yellow Classroom] underlines the contingent and shifting nature of the connection between text and audience in the filmmaker’s mind. In particular, the work shows that observational documentary techniques can be used in a more fluid way than has been previously recognised and admitted by many of the field’s Direct Cinema practitioners