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Impact of midwives’ emigration on maternity care services in Nigeria: A cross-sectional survey
No full textBackground: One of the paramount hurdles to Nigeria\u27s development in maternity-care service is the emigration of midwives to developed countries. However, midwives’ perspectives on the effects of the emigration of their colleagues’ to developed countries have yet to be investigated. This study examined the impact of midwives’ emigration on maternity care services and associated challenges in Nigeria. Methods: This study adopted a cross-sectional survey of 121 midwives and nurses at Adeoyo Maternity Teaching Hospital (AMTH), Ibadan Nigeria. Data were collected using a self-structured questionnaire. Results: 98.3% reported negative maternal health outcomes, 98.3% indicated midwives’ burnout, 93.4% reveal midwives’ low morale. Logistic regression analysis identified that the strongest challenge faced by care providers was lack of staff support (OR = 4.05, p = 0.001). Conclusion: The nursing implications of midwife emigration are far-reaching, affecting both maternity care service and remaining midwives. The increased workload reduces the quality of care and poses a high risk to maternal and neonatal outcomes. Addressing these challenges requires a multi-faceted approach, including workforce development, policy reforms, retention strategies. Despite ongoing challenges, maternity-care services can be strengthened through implementation of these strategies
Code-Driven Narratives: Chance, Meaning and Story in Combinatory and Generative Film
No full textThrough combinatory systems, generative creation and structured constraints, code-driven cinema challenges enduring narrative structures, altering both creative processes and viewer expectations. The methods introduce unpredictability and ambiguity, engaging audiences in meaning-making processes while also helping to illuminate complex relationships between humans and machines. Intertwining past, present, and future, code-driven films pose questions of time, memory, place and story.
In combinatory cinema, also known as database film, algorithms select elements from pre-recorded fragments from a database of clips and sounds, and in generative cinema, original media is created by code. Unlike interactive cinema, which privileges user choice, these forms often emphasize chance, generating ambiguous and fluid meanings through montage, compositing and other forms of aleatory juxtapositioning. Drawing from avant-garde traditions such as Dada and Surrealism, as well as constraint-based artistic practices like those of the Oulipo literary group, combinatory and generative cinema leverages randomness and hidden parameters, exposing latent narrative structures. The tension between fragmentation and coherence in these systems challenges linear expectations in novel ways.
The paper offers five examples that demonstrate diverse approaches to code-driven filmmaking, particularly through combinatory and generative methods. Three Rails Live (Coover, Rettberg and Montfort 2013) employs randomized sequences and poetic combinatory structures which create an ever-evolving cinematic experience. Toxicity: A Climate-Change Narrative (Coover and Rettberg, 2016) intertwines fictional and nonfictional elements using a combinatory system that offer possibilities of hope and survival in the face of climate catastrophes. Penelope (Coover and Rettberg 2019) generates algorithmically structured poetry from a database of textual, visual, and auditory fragments, evoking themes of memory, loss and migration. It will happen here (Coover, Vidiksis and Montfort 2021) and its live performance variant, The Floods, integrate documentary footage with generated text and sound, creating immersive, site-specific experiences that immerse viewers in experiences of environmental change and collective memory. Lastly, Water on the Pier (Coover, Vidiksis and Montfort 2021) employs live environmental data and interactive elements to situate and personalize climate urgencies. These works highlight the possibilities of combinatory and generative filmmaking to expand the interpretative capacities of audiences and creators alike. Further, the approaches enrich collaboration between filmmakers, writers, and composers by offering nonhierarchical, iterative, and responsive processes of production and re-imaginings of narrative structures.
The paper argues that combinatory and generative cinema and related code-based methods not only reveal the mechanics of technological storytelling but also interrogate how industrial and post-industrial paradigms shape cultural narratives. By disrupting linearity, these systems offer new approaches to time, memory, and meaning, fostering a deeper understanding of the conditions that govern contemporary media environments. They expand understanding of an evolving relationship between storytelling, computation, and human perception. The approach challenges the fixity of meaning, presenting a dynamic and ever-shifting expressions that reflect the instabilities of memory, time and experience
The Weight of What Was: Lingering, Memory, and Temporality in Immersive Media
No full textLingering holds the weight of what was, embodying presence within absence and exerting influence through traces that waft in the crevices of memory, the weight of the air in a room, or a persistent scent. It is the quiet after-effect, a trace that subtly endures in sensory details. Set against the captivating pull of forward-looking, futuristic narratives as a form of resistance by imagining the potentiality of the otherwise, lingering offers an alternative mode of engagement—embracing presence within absence, the reverberations of what has been, and the slow, deliberate unfolding of meaning in the present. Focusing on the interactive film In the Realm of Ripley (2024), set in a futuristic 2080 Korea, this paper reframes lingering as a powerful, understudied force that reshapes our understanding of temporality as mediated by immersive technology and the increasingly blurred boundaries between truth and fiction. Its central premise—a detective navigating a fragmented memory system—plunges the audience into an environment where the unreliability of perception and the enduring echoes of unresolved past events are palpable. By integrating interactive elements, such as collective decision-making and personalized VR experiences, the film extends the concept of lingering beyond its narrative, embedding it into the audience’s experience. This paper argues that In the Realm of Ripley not only reflects the fragility of memory but also uses the immersive medium to embody lingering as a thematic and sensory state of a fragmented present.
Analyzing the film’s use of visual, auditory, and haptic cues to sustain a lingering affect, this paper will draws on theories of temporality and affect, particularly those articulated by Henri Bergson and Sarah Ahmed, to position lingering as a mode of engagement that resists linear progress and fixed narratives. Bergson’s notion of duration provides a foundation for understanding the slowness and multiplicity of temporal experience that lingering embodies, while Ahmed’s work on affect frames lingering as a felt resonance that shapes individual and collective memory. Additionally, the paper engages with Lev Manovich’s conceptualization of new media temporality and the immersive potentials of virtual reality as explored by Janet Murray, to interrogate the role of interactive technology in mediating lingering
Papernest: Insects through the Lens of Multimedias
No full textWe use an interactive website and ethnographic film to contextualize the history of the commodification of insects as traditional food, natural dye, and trendy tourist fare in Oaxaca, Mexico. We are a three-person interdisciplinary team of amateur filmmakers, consisting of anthropology faculty, undergraduate student and alumna, who met through our work with our institution’s Digital Humanities Institute. We incorporate photography, film, and archival research to explore insect uses and imaginaries which take many forms in Oaxaca, a state boasting the greatest cultural, linguistic, and biological diversity in Mexico. This presentation describes research-driven visual methods examining current political economies surrounding the commodification of insects.
Pfister’s research uses anthropological and humanistic approaches to explore Oaxaca’s rich cultural and culinary history and contrast it with colonial and EuroAmerican ambivalence toward insects. Our multimedias explore various ways that globalized and climatic changes impact our participants economically, socially, and ecologically, and how their lived experiences might be representative of broader post-colonial tensions and realities (Pfister and Gaytán 2024). Papernest is an interactive website, hosting a gallery of images, film clips and ideas related to human-insect relationships. We use images and participatory methods to engender resonances and contradictions between long-standing traditions and newly-emerging narratives surrounding insects – these reactions range from shock and disgust, to energies toward “rediscovery” of trendy Mexican “super foods” (Katz and Lazos 2016) and natural dyes with longstanding cultural significance in Oaxaca. Project accessible at https://papernest.domains.unf.edu/.
Reworlding the Real through Interactivity: Research-Creation Practices and the Epistemic Recomposition of Reality at the #IFM Conferences (2021–2025)
No full textInteractive platforms have fundamentally reshaped how users engage with moving images, not only transforming narrative possibilities but also reconfiguring the epistemic status of the image itself. More than a narrative device or a set of technological affordances, interactivity operates as a vector for the reconstruction of the real—what can be known, how it is felt, and who participates in its becoming. The growing prominence of interactive works that engage with real-world conditions, rather than fictional or speculative realms, signals a significant shift: interactivity is increasingly used not to escape from the real but to recompose it.
This raises a pressing question: why does interactivity appear better suited to engage with reality than to invent imaginary worlds? This article situates interactivity not merely as a mode of storytelling, but as a philosophical and political gesture—a means of reworlding the real. In doing so, it reclaims interactivity as a critical method of research-creation, one that prioritizes process over product, relation over representation, and sensation over simulation. Through a close engagement with Couchot’s theories and a broader analysis of affect, agency, and embodied cognition, the text explores how interactive practices challenge dominant regimes of knowing, opening new territories for speculative, sensory, and situated modes of engagement.
The arguments developed in this article are grounded in the analysis of thirty-three research-creation projects presented at the Interactive Film and Media (#IFM) conferences between 2021 and 2025. These projects span a wide range of media forms—including web-based platforms (EXPOSED, Receipts), immersive VR environments (Affiorare, Firgrove Reimagined), augmented reality and geolocated works (AR Cité, Monument Public Address System AR), experimental games (Scapegoat), hybrid installations (The Circle Project, Somos Mulheres), and poetic or glitch aesthetics (Lucid Assemblage, The New Virtuality). They address urgent themes such as incarceration and justice, gender and queer identity, mourning and grief, ecological degradation, Indigenous epistemologies, and ritualized embodiment.
Rather than focusing on singular case studies, the article maps broader patterns across the corpus to determine emergent tendencies in how interactivity is mobilized in contemporary creative practice. Particular attention is paid to how specific mediums structure user engagement, what forms of knowing and sensing they privilege, and how they contribute to rethinking agency, authorship, and the construction of the real. By surveying this constellation of projects, the article aims to elucidate how research-creation today positions media not merely as vessels of representation, but as engines of speculative, participatory world-making
Navigating Spatial Narratives: Interactive Documentaries and the Representation of Displaced Communities
No full textIn an era marked by geopolitical conflicts and territorial disputes, the concept of space becomes central to shaping perceptions of community and challenging traditional narratives. This study explores interactive documentaries that unfold spatial narratives, offering multi-perspective stories that encourage audiences to question singular interpretations and foster empathetic connections. Focusing on the interactive documentaries Refugee Republic (Visser, Rothuizen, and Van Tol 2014) and The World in Ten Blocks (Francoeur and Uppal 2015), both centered on the representation of communities in specific spatial contexts, this study employs a theoretical framework drawing inspiration from Michel De Certeau\u27s concept of Spatial Stories (1984), along with a multimodal threefold approach analyzing form, content, and interaction. While De Certeau\u27s concept of Spatial Stories, provides a framework to analyze spatial navigation structures through the visual representation of space, the multimodal analysis focuses on the diversity of elements the audience find and engage with throughout the way. This analysis unpacks the intricate relationships between the formal aspects of the documentaries, their portrayals of enclosed communities, and the interactive elements that guide users through these spaces. Overall, by portraying community-based stories, these interactive narratives serve as conduits for diverse lived experiences, embracing complexity and celebrating cultural diversity. Additionally, these interactive documentaries explore a polyphonic approach, as conceptualized by Aston and Odorico (2018), emphasizing how the interactive form facilitates uncertain interactions and reinforces a virtual sense of place and belonging. Ultimately, this research highlights the potential of interactive documentaries to transform traditional storytelling, providing a platform for communities to share their stories, navigate their spaces, and foster a sense of connection among diverse audiences within the virtual realm
Cover Art : "DEEP HORSE ENCOUNTER"
No full textThis piece includes an artist statement by the cover artist of the issue, titled "DEEP HORSE ENCOUNTERS". 
Analysis of Porous Water-Absorbing Materials Used in Solar Water Desalination
No full textPorous water-absorbing materials play a crucial role in enhancing the efficiency of solar water desalination by improving water retention and evaporation rates. This study investigates the thermophysical and chemical properties of various porous materials, including Silica Aerogel, Polyvinyl Alcohol (PVA) Hydrogel, Porous Alumina, Activated Carbon, Zeolite, Cellulose Sponge, Hydroxyapatite, and Graphene Aerogel. The water absorption capacity over 24 hours and evaporation rate were analyzed to determine their effectiveness in desalination systems. Results indicate that Zeolite (20 g/g) and Graphene Aerogel (18 g/g) exhibit the highest water absorption, while Silica Aerogel (0.45 g/g·h) and Zeolite (0.50 g/g·h) demonstrate superior evaporation rates. These findings highlight the potential of graphene-based materials and aerogels for next-generation solar desalination applications
Thermal Effects of Water-Absorbing Porous Materials
No full textWater-absorbing porous materials play a crucial role in thermal management applications, particularly in solar-driven systems where heat retention and evaporative cooling are essential. This study investigates the thermal effects of six different porous materials—Silica Aerogel, Activated Carbon, Zeolite, Expanded Perlite, PVA Hydrogel, and Porous Ceramic—using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations under solar exposure. The surface temperature distributions of these materials were analyzed after 1800 s of heat exposure. The results indicate that PVA Hydrogel and Silica Aerogel exhibited the lowest surface temperatures due to their high-water absorption capacity and strong insulation properties, making them ideal for passive cooling applications. In contrast, Zeolite exhibited the highest temperature due to its high thermal conductivity, making it suitable for solar heat storage applications. Expanded Perlite and Porous Ceramic demonstrated moderate thermal behavior, balancing heat retention and cooling effects
Hybrid Battery-Supercapacitor Systems for Renewable Energy Applications: Comparative Analysis of Off-Grid and Hybrid PV Systems
No full textThis study explores hybrid battery-supercapacitor systems for renewable energy applications, comparing their performance in off-grid and hybrid photovoltaic (PV) systems. Hybrid PV systems achieved higher energy efficiency (94%) compared to off-grid systems (92%), leveraging grid connectivity and advanced energy management strategies. The integration of supercapacitors improved power delivery and response times, ensuring reliable operation under varying load conditions. Economic analysis revealed that hybrid PV systems, despite higher initial costs, offer lower lifecycle expenses, making them a cost-effective long-term solution. Off-grid systems are suitable for remote areas, while hybrid PV systems excel in adaptability and sustainability. The findings highlight the potential of hybrid storage systems to enhance renewable energy integration, supporting energy transition goals