International Journal of Creative Media Research
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109 research outputs found
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Fear Filter: Visualising the UK Terror Threat Level
No full textThis statement explores the digital photo artwork Fear Filter which uses the UK Terror Threat Level as a source for a set of visualisation tools. It argues that the UK Terror Threat Level should be understood as part of the expansion of a range of security measures during the initial stages of the ‘War on Terror’, many of which seem to be more focused on the production of fear and the performance of security than actually improving security. It positions the artwork, Fear Filter, as offering a critical window onto these processes and putting them to creative use in devising a new configuration between photography, terror and security.
 
The ‘Truth of Sound’: Exploring Immersive Location Sound Recording in Realist Filmmaking
No full textThis article focuses on the somewhat neglected (at least within scholarly circles) area of location-based sound recording, drawing much-needed critical attention to the intricacies and skills involved in location sound recording within realist filmmaking – both scripted and unscripted. Through my own practice-as-research, I aim to reimagine an ontological definition of location sound recording by proposing that a reinvigoration of the ‘realist’ genre can be achieved by connecting the storytelling skills of recording for single camera with the new opportunities afforded by immersive audio technologies – ambisonics here being a vital part of that development process. I demonstrate how use of such immersive audio technologies offer new creative opportunities for realist makers and audiences, based on the unique experience of geographical place and physical event that immersive audio delivers
Over the Wall: A Drone View of the ‘Other’ Side
No full textThis study intervenes in the presumed remoteness of the visual condition and experience of the aerial image created by the drone apparatus, to create new knowledge about the cultural and societal spaces that these envisioning technologies reveal. Using The Walls that Surround Us, a short drone-film of the Peace Walls in Belfast by local film-maker James Brennan, this study captures the participant’s lived experience of the place that is the film’s subject, and analyses how the system of visual signification captured within the film, operates to intervene, sustain, or subvert his association with this place.
This ethnographic framing of the other side of the wall using the drone apparatus, reveals how the human is interconnected with the wider material world, its histories, and events and thus, like the over general labels used to define the different communities in Belfast (Catholic and Protestant), cannot be reduced to dialectical opposition: as a technologically mediated condition there is at once difference and the same
Regrounding in Place, Regrounding in Truth: The Caste Study of Son of a Sweeper
No full textThis creative media research centers on the lingering discrimination faced by India’s scheduled caste Dalits or “sweepers,” who have been left behind during India’s technological growth and global expansion. The author explores the works of Dirlik and Cresswell to situate Dalits within Global Colonialism. Her collaboration with a Dalit education activist results in a documentary film that highlights his efforts to bring community transformation through academic excellence. As the filmmaker interacted with documentary subject Vimal Kumar in his community, this physical “place within a place” became a small, interpretive world in which she and Kumar worked together to make aesthetic filmmaking choices. Her selection of images and sounds in the editing process created a narrative around Kumar’s activism that became a personal expression of the filmmaker’s presence, grounded in both physical place and social concern. The author suggests collaboration between filmmaker and documentary subject is a negotiation of power that may remedy outsider bias. She asserts that the collaborative space existing between her camera and her documentary subject is transformed into a meaningful place resulting in “collaborative truth.” Such a truth can evoke human emotion and activate the viewer because it expresses a more personal understanding of the human experience
‘Breathe Wind into Me, Chapter 1’: A Mixed-media Presentation to Explore How Art Itself Activates and Constitutes New Forms of Knowledge
No full textIn The Minor Gesture (2016), Erin Manning raises the question: how does art in and of itself activate and constitute new forms of knowledge, and can such knowledge be engagingly captured within the strictures of methodological ordering (Manning, 2016: 26)? For this article, I argue that something that was not known that becomes known through art creation and is disseminated as such is as quantifiable as any other form of knowledge under the heading ‘academic research’. New forms of knowledge require different forms of evaluation and a rethinking of what arts-practice as research can do.
Taking my own recent video, ‘Breathe Wind into Me, Chapter 1’, as a starting point, this article addresses how practice allows for a re-envisioning of the traditional role of the researcher. Using an amalgamation of text, moving imagery and sound, from current and past research, I will be discussing new knowledge, embodied and otherwise, that could only have ‘surfaced’ through making. I will discuss ‘the haptic’ as an important component of research and inquiry, where the transmission of ‘affect’ creates a particular form of embodied knowledge through being touched by the work. In addition, I will connect Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s idea of haptic technologies as matters of care, and a means of ‘unpacking and co-shaping a notion of care in more than human worlds’ (2017: 95). Through methodological abundance (Hannulah, 2011), including auto-ethnography, I use my past, my memories and my experiences as a making and unmaking of the world. Auto-ethnography, in this instance, is a reformulation of ethnography or anthropology, an in-depth examination of context incorporating cross-disciplinary approaches where the research is one of enquiry and discovery, thinking through making, staying open to the emergent properties of the intra-psychic as well as the intersubjective
‘News Poems’: A New Way of Manufacturing the News
No full textThis submission showcases my experimentations with ‘news poems’, a creative practice based on taking the top stories of the day and re-writing them in a form of heightened speech which aims to be poetic. In the context of ‘fake news’ (Pomerantsev, 2019) and ‘post-truth’ (D’Ancona, 2017), a call to the imagination may sound like playing with fire. But nothing could be further from the truth. Instead, the imaginative remake of journalism becomes an essential part of coming closer to truth. Much of the journalism we have known only tells us the half-truths we already know. But when we use our imagination to approach those involved in news stories, together we make room for our common humanity. This is the task for journalism today, and the news poem is our best chance of fulfilling it.
 
StoryLab Research Network: An Ethnomediaology Approach to Story-Development
No full textThe StoryLab Research Network was a collaborative research project funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. StoryLab is an international film development research network of practice-led researchers from Australia, Malaysia, Ghana, Colombia and the UK. Establishing and utilising an ethnomediaology approach, the project conducted workshops with around 15 emerging independent filmmakers in each of the three developing countries of Malaysia, Ghana and Colombia between June and October 2017, during which each participant developed a screen-based story idea. The underlying question the StoryLab Research Networked sought to explore was: if the digital age has democratised the means of filmmaking and film dissemination, thereby enabling new voices to emerge outside of the dominant Western production centres, then what are the stories filmmakers in emerging economies want to tell and how are these stories reflecting a different perspective on living in an increasingly globalised world?
This article is a report on the research project. It will introduce the StoryLab Research Network and its methodology of ethnomediaology. It will then present an overview of stories developed in the three workshops, demonstrating that these stories have strong personal impulses, discuss local socio-political matters and attempt to challenge the dominance of global and national production centres in the shaping of screen realities. I will end the report with a discussion around the workshops’ impact and future plans of the StoryLab Network. Information on StoryLab can be found at: www.storylabnetwork.com
Introduction: ‘Groundedness’ Editorial
No full textWe live in a world of ecological crisis; a world in which we are witnessing sharpening class differences between a mobile global elite, economic migrants, and an often still largely stationary working population. Shifts in global and local power have seen the nation state, international capital and grounded communities thrown into new combinations and relations
Fifty-one aural selfies (fixed media soundscape compositions)
Get PDFSoundcloud link: Fifty-one aural selfies
The research statement that accompanies the soundscape project ‘Fifty-one aural selfies’ proceeds from a premise that listening may be understood and practiced as an embodied, embedded process of hearing-feeling connection with all that surrounds. While the term 'immersive audio' is often used to refer to spatialised sound media that affords a listener's sense of envelopment within vast spaces, I am interested in developing approaches to capturing and sharing a more mundane, proximate field of sonic experience, in order that spatial listening and immersive audio may be considered and felt from a different perspective. Using held or worn recording devices, utilising binaural and ambisonic recording formats, and employing compositional strategies of layering, filtering and audio transformation to render recordings more vivid, I use ubiquitous sounds of my everyday sonic encounters and close-at-hand interactions as a basis for sonic reimaginings of everyday listening. This combined practice of field recording and soundscape composition is presented here as one way to explore immersive audio practice as a creative domain for capturing and eliciting sensory immediacy, intimacy and self-reflection.
Practicing Scales
Get PDFSoundcloud link: Practising Scales
Practicing Scales is a creative practice research project that explores the theoretical frameworks of subscendence through music performance and spatial audio composition, utilising the disassembly and reassembly of musical ‘objects’ as a methodfor investigation. By examining the interplay between music-related 'wholes' and 'parts,' the project aims to demonstrate the fluidity of boundaries and the entanglement of elements in the process of music creation