1,721,174 research outputs found
Database economy and transnational cinema
No full textDigital or electronic cinemas are dependent on a global regime of standards covering such features as aspect ratios, colour gamuts, screen resolution, and compression-decompression algorithms. These standards are worked out by a variety of intersecting organisations representing a variety of interests. This paper argues that such standardisation is isomorphic with the convergence of biopolitical and commodity forms in an emergent political economy that can be described as a database economy. This infrastructure of standards and ordering principles constitutes an actually existing transnational public sphere. The paper discusses the possibilities for developing an alter-globalising pubic sphere in digital cinemas, testing three possible avenues: cinemas of the silent majority, new modes of distribution, and content-driven approaches. It concludes by asking whether vanguard practices of building new forms of cinema apparatus may be essential to the construction of alter-globalising transnational cinemas.<br/
Making space
No full textLike the category ‘e’ films of Jean-Louis Comolli and Pierre Narboni (21), the contemporary blockbuster sets out in support of the dominant ideology but contains, in this instance in its technological foundations, an intrinsic contradiction. They contradict Wittgenstein (22): they are not reduplications of what is the case, but statements of the non-identicality of the present, from which springs all possibility of future change. More than contradictions, the vector’s trajectory points into an unmapped future, suggesting that the work of remaking media need not be limited to remaking technologies, but to exploding the forewarned and forearmed managerialist commodification that the grid expresses as the iron fist of the market, and the perpetual status quo of risk management in a polity where elections seem to be won exclusively on the basis of fear of change. The vector, and the contradiction between vector and arithmetic forms, including the very screens that contain them, point, with all due trepidation, towards a distant shore where things are no longer as they ar
For a history of black
Full text linkin the presence of light, black is only ever virtual. I mean the word in its technical sense: black is an unrealised capacity, the goal of a tendency that is never fully realised. The alternative, in film and electronic imaging, has been to achieve maximum contrast: that is, to use the wisdom of colour combinations to persuade us that the greys of the screen are blacks. If black is always unreachable as ideal absence, these formal allocations of blackness to greys are equally virtual, an expression of the capacity of such greys to become black. Because being black is never an actualised event, we must speak of becoming black: the unrealisable destiny of certain tonal combinations in systems reliant on projected or backlit images
Indigenous, settler and migrant media
No full textFor indigenous, setller and migrant cultures, places operate very differently. Creating places in digital media is always a matter of transience for all three. This is not only a matter of the ephemerality of the medium. It concerns the relationship between the user and the artefact. The transient places created in digital media are not traditional, even when they draw on and place themselves in relation to traditio
The supernatural in neo-Baroque Hollywood
No full textStylistic traits of the neo-baroque: fluid navigational rather than decoupage; multi-layered soundtracks; composition in depth, frequently achieved through multi-plate compositing; visual spaces veering towards the indecipherable; characters gifted with a kind of spatial omnivoyance; semantic structures raised on themes of narcissism; all suggesting that the neo-baroque uses allegories of immersion as a response to a real or felt crisis of power and its symbolic systems, notably of cause and effect. These result in a pattern-making aesthetic characterised by the modularisation and spatialisation of narrative, voiced in themes of eternity and predestination. The chapter will open with a comparison between the Freund Mummy of 1931 and Sommers' versions The Mummy and The Mummy Returns of 1999 and 2001 respectively. The chapter will go on to test its theses against other films including Sommers' Van Helsing, Hellboy, Batman Begins, the Blade and Pirates of the Caribbean cycles and other popular action films voicing supernatural themes
On the Reinvention of Video in the 1980s
Full text linkChapter from book resulting from AHRC funded project: Sean Cubitt and Stephen Partridge (eds), REWIND:Artists’ video in the 1970s & 80s, John Libbey, 201
Flusser and the CCD
No full textFor Flusser, codes embedded in any apparatus feed on human use to produce new combinations to assimilate into the apparatus itself. This more general application of the word apparatus includes not only the mechanical device but the ensemble formed by manufacture, clubs, publications, galleries, newspapers and magazines, people and their institutions. Flusser's 'apparatus' is an institution: an ordering of social interactions which produces its own type of language (discourse), its own mode of knowledge, its own idea of truth. Unhampered by moral judgements external to its own operation, its goal is maximal efficiency. The apparatus operates in and as a regime of power, in much the same way as the clinics, asylums and prisons investigated in Michel Foucault's early writings<br/
Observations on the history and uses of animation occasioned by the exhibition Eyes Lies and Illusions selected from works in the Werner Nekes collection
No full textThe 500 items selected from Werner Nekes' collection of 20,000 (accompanied by a judicious selection of recent works) in the exhibition Eyes Lies and Illusions (at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Thursday 2 November 2006 - Sunday 11 February 2007; previously shown at the Hayward Gallery, London in the winter of 2004-5) sketch a 400-year history of optical tools, toys and tricks. To consider them as 'pre-cinema' is to do them an injustice, pre-empting their intrinsic fascination by delivering them over to a technology their makers could scarcely have imagined.Their abiding fascination is as much about the possibility of playing with them in the present as with a Benjaminian dislocation of the recent past. It belongs, so, to a shared history of technique, and a common concern with what constitutes us as human, rather than to a catalogue of failed attempts to produce La Sortie des usines Lumières
A critique of play
No full textThe concept of play has been a touchstone for cultural studies since the translation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on carnival (1968), a natural and liberating resistance to domination. As the neo-baroque constructs its spectacles, it requires a spectacular, unquestionable depiction of both Evil and the Good (Bather 2004). Articulated as it is with the markets for consumer goods, through product placement, tie-ins and merchandising, all pitched at the youth market, play offers itself as the royal instantiation of good. The ludic may well be instinctual, but only in the same way that hunger and sex are instinctual. Humans, mammals, are born with an interest in play, but that interest is as thoroughly socialised, as thoroughly historical, and as thoroughly open to exploitation as the other primal forces acting on the human psyche. Play can no longer be thought of as an instinctual revolt against domination, a kind of instrumental irrationality. Instead, like hunger or sex, it has become an integral element in the imbrication of the somatic into the social. Integral to the management of creativity in the sunrise industries, play is also a privileged vehicle for socialisation into the contemporary. To be specific, contemporary capital opposes evil not with good but with innocence; and play constitutes the single most manipulable tool for the construction of innocence, on screen and in life. The predilection of postmodernism for play in all its guises is inadequately critical. Which kind of game? Are all games equally and essentially good or are there distinctions to make between them and histories to tell? Is the celebration of play merely a reaction to the imagined high seriousness of modernism? Is there a cultural task remaining, to build new modes of play
Coherent light from projectors to fibre optics
No full textArguments for the 'Death of Cinema" hold that film's realist destiny has been betrayed by digital technologies. Arguments for the 'Post medium Condition' hold, against the medium-specificity of Greenberg and after de Duve's art made of 'n'importe quoi', that medium no longer matters. In papers on colour separation and management, the temporalities of film and electronic frames, optical construction of volume and chip design, I argue that the material matters more than ever, but that crude binaries do not help understand the dialectic of standardization and divergence characteristic of contemporary mediation. This is especially true of the glass technologies that are key to the history of projection and of digital networks
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