International Journal of Creative Media Research
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109 research outputs found
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Undressing the Excessive Image: The Essay Film as a Transgressive Mode of Inquiry
No full textThis article examines the making of Transgressions (2015), a short essay film I made on transgressions in art films. There, the theme moves from being a mapped object of knowledge to become a territory that provides the resources for film production and storytelling. As I question to what extent the erotic body is excessive in art films, I observe the essay film becomes a poetic-reflective generator in itself. I end by arguing that we observe the process of making an essay film as a mode of inquiry that includes in its thinking process both unpredictable encounters with the materials and intuitive choices in the editing room, something that a solely analytical or theoretical approach could hardly provide.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.33008/IJCMR.2020.13
Exploring Marginalities: Making Sense of Affective Knowledge in Home Movies through Collaborative Methods
No full textThis work deals with the topic of home movies, usually defined as a form of naïve cinema. Attempting to broaden the scope of analysis possible for the home movie, itself consisting of a form characterised by a lack of rules that render it naïve, my research pays particular attention to characteristics of difference and creativity in the home movie, rather than those aspects rendering it a hard-to-define style. To this aim, I deploy participatory approaches as forms of collaborative ideas-making, and this research statement outlines a workshop held at De Montfort University as part of the Cracking the Established Order conference that explored ways to establish a dialogue with the archive of home movies that at the same time presented new ways to speak about this archive. A core component of this process is the use of creative and imaginative methods such as writing or drawing in combination with philosophical concepts. The knowledge gained through this workshop takes the shape of a multimedia video, representing a sort of artistic statement of the entire working process and its outcome. The multimedia video becomes ultimately an expression of what the home movie means and how it comes about
Dear Carnegie Hall: Utilising Digital Technologies to Unlock Multiple Perspectives of the Past
No full textAccounts of history inherently vary. This single-piece exploration investigates how digital media technologies – specifically, an app – can be used to capture the complexities of understanding a history’s multiple perspectives and perceptions. Dear Carnegie Hall is an interactive storytelling app commissioned by Carnegie Hall in New York to commemorate the music venue’s 125th anniversary. This project was a collaboration between researcher and app producer Ruth Farrar and Barney Heywood and Lucy Telling from Stand + Stare: an interactive design company based in the UK.
In terms of process, Dear Carnegie Hall applies app, image recognition and augmented reality technologies in conjunction with archive material and messages from patrons, backstage staff and audience members. The project provides an original contribution to the emerging trend of museums and galleries mediating digital technologies in apps to create new modes of understanding history. Such apps typically provide a one-way channel of sharing history from the organisation’s app to attendee (see ‘British Museum Visitor Guide’ app (2016) and ‘Uffizi Gallery’, Florence (2017)). In contrast, ‘Dear Carnegie Hall’ explores how the affordances of an app can provide for a more democratic approach to narrating the stories of history. As well as the app curating stories of Carnegie Hall’s past, the user is also able to record an audio postcard (Farrar, 2015) of their personal story and experiences of Carnegie Hall, which in turn aimed to position the app as that which broadened the diversity of the venue. Dear Carnegie Hall thus demonstrates how using new digital technologies can encourage a sense of play with the seemingly fixed stories of history, which led to its users commenting on a deeper understanding of the organisation’s history
Saturation Trails: The Acid Assay
No full textSaturation Trails is the collective title of a body of work conducted with the Archaeologies of Media and Technology research group at Winchester School of Art. The work investigates the materiality and operation of the digital image sensor, the ubiquitous photosensitive chip behind the lens of all phones, tablets, laptops, and cameras. To do this, I designed three experiments which would reveal the technics of the photosensitive semiconductor through which all our images are transduced. Image sensors were exposed using methodologies appropriated from the optoelectronics industry in which this component was developed, tested, and manufactured. The three techniques used were an infra-red laser, hydrofluoric acid and X-ray radiation
The River and the Filmmaker: A Journey towards a Meeting Place
No full textAgnès Varda’s idea of cinécriture opens up an understanding of the myriad of influences on the creation of a documentary, and its combination of malleability and certainty. For her, film is a product of exploratory walks and seemingly unconnected choices as well as the scripting, shooting and editing.
Michael Renov suggests there are four desires that influence the way a documentarian creates a film, one of them is ‘to express’. When I set out to film Rivers (2019), I was expressing anger and outrage at destruction taking place. For Donna Haraway, this ‘urgency’ arising from destruction does not create despair, rather it inspires action in response to the crisis. Thus the film became an action in response, both to the crisis the Murray-Darling river faced, and crises in my own life.
Through interviews I conducted, this article compares my own filming journey with that of two award winning filmmakers: Nicole Ma and Sabiha Sumar. I find that filmmaking involves locating a meeting place between the filmmaker, the filmed subject, and the audience
Tuinn Cagarach (Whispering Waves): A Sketch for a Sound Archive-led Feature documentary film
No full textTuinn Cagarach (Whispering Waves) is a 20 minute proof of concept for a feature length documentary set in the Outer Hebrides in north west Scotland. It aims to explore the role of the Scottish Gaelic language, and its historically recorded stories, songs and retelling of events, in the understanding of the contemporary significance of the sea and fishing industries to the island’s cultural, and particularly linguistic futures. The film combines Gaelic language sound archive recorded by ethnographers in the middle of the 20th century with contemporary observational documentary images filmed with the fishing community in the islands today. The project aims to both examine the links between Gaelic and fishing, as well as explore of the capacity of sound archive led creative documentary filmmaking to foster connections between the past and present for audiences
Cooking Class: Helping Students to Cook and Eat Better - A Creative Campaign
No full textThis work is one of two 2023 winners of our Centre for Media Research Student Award, a special prize awarded to a final-year Media Communications student. This work stems from the Media Communications Final Project, a module which asks students to embark on a challenge-led research project, the insights from which are disseminated as a cross-platform communications campaign for a real audience. The winner of the award is invited to publish both their background research alongside their creative campaign as a journal article.
What follows is a short walkthrough video of both the research and the campaign, followed by a detailed presentation of the work in full - the Research Portfolio and the Campaign
josef: Spatiality as a Material Property of Audiovisual
Get PDFSoundcloud link: josef
Supplementary links to performances of josef: Iklectik 23/04/2022 / EIS 16/06/2022
josef is an audiovisual performance piece composed specifically for an immersive surround sound environment. Throughout every stage of its creative development, spatiality was one of the principal materials used to shape this work's overall form and structure. As a result, spatiality came to encompass this work's sonic and visual composition, performative enaction, and its eventual studio production and release. Thematically, this work was largely influenced by Josef Albers' Interaction of Color, which contains a collection of ideas demonstrating that spatiality can be conveyed using colour. Sonically, we portrayed this visual notion using additive synthesis coupled with a chromatic spatialisation technique. In keeping with Albers' ideas surrounding colour interaction - his emphasis upon the way in which one's perceptive capabilities alter their experience of an artwork - this work utilises spatiality as a means of curating diverse and nuanced experiences, sympathetic to their environments and unique to their spectators.
Twisting Metal with Earth
No full textThe video Twisting Metal with Earth was produced to explore how weather stations can be useful beyond their function as mechanical sensors. It was suggested that they also act as an aesthetic interface with the hyperobjects of big data and global climate. The video’s animated characters were voiced by interview recordings from couples discussing their experience of weather. One interviewee collected and shared data from his own weather station, others gave more experiential accounts. From the characters’, a conversation emerged that blurred the boundaries between global systems and local experience. Mechanical climate sensors and plants were discussed by the characters as useful objects to think through large and complex topics
The Crimean Bridge and Infrastructural Deepfake
No full textDeepfake technology, widely discussed in the media as a threat, has remained on the periphery of critical scholar engagement. Bringing the deepfake into the center of my practice-based research I expose its technical limitations. These material constraints, interrogated from the perspective of critical infrastructure studies, provide fruitful perspective on deepfake as a practice of machine fictioning that could guide research on propaganda infrastructures. To situate the role deepfake could play in such investigation, I analyse an instance of propaganda (poetic, in Larkin’s terms) infrastructure, the Crimean Bridge, and overview a broader category of computational propaganda in which deepfake could be placed. The context of computational propaganda allows to show the connections between deepfake technology and other means of image doctoring, while providing a historicised criticism of western-centric preoccupation with post-truth political landscapes