2023/2 - #Cycles
Browsing 2023/2 - #Cycles by Issue Date
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- ArticleCybernetic subjectivities on a loop: From video feedback to generative AIBoutet de Monvel, Violaine (2023)This paper raises an aesthetic bridge between pioneer video art and current machine learning art through the prism of instant feedback. It reinstates the former’s real-time processual practices as a pertinent origin to reflect on the resolutely looped construction of cybernetic subjectivities. Given the latest developments of artificial intelligence, it infers that these now include technological agency. The article proceeds to compare the room left for human mastery in the recursive operations of both closed-circuit video setups and generative AI models. Taking into account their synthetic power, it ultimately proposes two general definitions of the artist’s creative position within today’s networked landscape.
- ArticleOf sand and stone: Thick time, cyclicality, and Anthropocene poetics in ‘Nomadland’Harkema, Gert Jan (2023)This paper presents an ecocinematic reading of Chloé Zhao’s 2020 feature No- madland. Drawing on David Farrier’s notion of Anthropocene poetics, it argues that the film presents an image of ‘thick time’ through which human’s embeddedness in deep time is figured. Through a multilayered temporal entanglement with different cyclical processes of erosion and resurgence, a critique to capitalist exhaustive hy- percyclicity is formulated. Decentering ‘the human’, Nomadland invites a cinematic Anthropocenic thinking and imagining in which a critical nomadic subjectivity is fig- ured as a transcorporeal subject that is materially enmeshed both spatially and tem- porally with the physical world.
- Article(Dis)orientation in net art: Disrupting the feedback loop of cybernetic subjectivitiesBăcăran, Mihai (2023)This paper examines instances of (dis)orientation instantiated by net art works which challenge, deconstruct, and remodel our embodied relationship with digital maps. I argue that such (dis)orientation can be framed as a tactical media practice that disrupts the feedback loop of cybernetic subjectivities by: 1. bringing into focus aspects of lived experience that do not fit the ‘truth’ of the cartographic representation, and at the same time underlining the ways in which representations participate in the (de)construction of lived experience; 2. challenging the attention economy and opening attention towards otherness and towards the intertwined shifting realities (grounds) of contemporary cultures; 3. questioning the imperative of usefulness inherent in mainstream applications of digital mapping. The paper contends that such (dis)orienting gestures can be understood as a practice of care towards radical otherness.
- ArticleCaught in the loops of digital agency panic: On NPCs and internet addictsMarkelj, Jernej; de Zeeuw, Daniël (2023)This paper seeks to recontextualise and update Timothy Melley’s concept of ‘agen-cy panic’ to think about current discourses around online media influence and ad-diction. According to Melley, agency panic concerns a set of anxieties linked to the diminished sense of agency, which he sees as escalating after the Second World War. Agency panic is, for him, rooted in the counterfactual expectation of full au-tonomy, a fantasy that is constantly undermined by the growing influence of glob-al networks of communication and capital. In our paper, we examine how an even more networked and distributed sense of agency panic manifests today by engag-ing with two different figures of contemporary digital culture: the non-playable character (NPC) and the internet addict. First, we look at how, in online conspira-cy discourse, the NPC is the product of a process of othering whereby the conspira-torial subject externalises its own sense of compromised agency in digital envi-ronments, allowing it to sustain the fantasy of its own autonomy and independ-ence from these environments. From there, we examine different discourses of ad-diction linked to online cultures as manifestations of digital agency panic. Through the language of addiction, and by promoting the ideal of autonomy as individual self-control, these discourses stigmatise and pathologise users’ various dependen-cies and interrelations with digital devices and services. Building on our analysis of NPC and addiction discourses, we then suggest that the panic-ridden fantasy of the liberal sovereign subject often serves as a pipeline to reactionary, misogynist, or neoliberal immunopolitical cultures set on policing the boundaries between the self and the inferior or unwanted other. We conclude by speculating on how a more distributed understanding of agential self might serve as an antidote to these im-munopolitical tendencies.
- ArticleCreativity, passion, and community: The rise of India’s transnational producersBhatia, Neha (2023)Producers are commonly associated with managing finances and budgets, but the work of a producer primarily involves managing emotions and people. They invest emotional labour in the projects, which remains a largely neglected, invisible and hidden aspect of their work. Recent scholarship on film and media industries is increasingly paying attention to the lived experiences of media makers, their cultures, and the emotional qualities of their creative work. In this light, this article focuses on the working world of emerging creative producers involved in supporting Indian independent cinema through international film festival funding and co-production schemes transnationally. This article borrows insights from media industry studies and affective scholarship, as well as incorporates in-depth interviews with transnational producers themselves. It examines the producer’s labour and work, involving extensive human interactions, community-building, and emotional management to make it in the industry. In doing so, the producers become entwined in the transnational capitalist film industry.
- ArticleEveryday life and mnemonic gesturesAlmeida, Ana Sofia (2023)
- Article#Cycles: On circularity and recursivity in media culturePape, Toni (2023)This introduction provides three brief conceptual frames for the special section #Cycles: matter, history, and control. A first section on ‘cycles of matter’ problematises recycling discourse and its implications. The second section on ‘cycles of history’ revisits cyclical concepts of history and their contemporary re-evaluation to think about cyclical modes of (over)production. Finally, the section on ‘cycles of control’ briefly discusses cybernetic theories of feedback loops. It addresses how systemic processes of corrective feedback loops can lead to so-called cybernetic subjectivities. Each section highlights the contributions that speak to the respective conceptual frame. All contributions to the special section and audiovisual essay section are briefly introduced in the final two sections.
- ArticleCycles of Labour: In the Metaverse, We Will Be HousewivesHanáková, Veronika; Tremčinský, Martin; Anger, Jiří (2023)
- ArticleA genealogy of migrant organising by Germany’s Asiatische Deutsche: Presencing the Asian Film Festival BerlinHeberer, Feng-Mei (2023)The first film festival of its kind in Germany, the Asian Film Festival Berlin (AFFB), was run by multiple generations of Asian German organisers from 2007-2017. In 2020, the festival came to a halt due to lack of resources. The recent disruption of the AFFB leads us back to the festival’s roots in migrant labor organising by South Korean guest workers in 1970s West Germany. This harbinger labor movement sparked by migrant women inspired the creation of two important diasporic Asian grassroots collectives based in Germany, each of which would respectively host the AFFB: the Koreanische Frauengruppe and korientation. To excavate these genealogical connections is to document an interconnected history of community organising that remains overlooked in official postwar history, and that highlights the unique cyclicality of the AFFB as part of ever-evolving minoritarian movements that positively advance documentation, inclusion, and social justice.
- ArticleScreening the financial crisis: A case study for ontology-based film analytical video annotationsBakels, Jan-Hendrik; Grotkopp, Matthias; Scherer, Thomas J.J.; Stratil, Jasper (2023)This paper presents a dataset of fine-grained film analytical annotations (Melgar & Estrada & Koolen 2018) for a corpus study of feature films, documentaries, and television news on the Global Financial Crisis (2007-), generated by the research group Affektrhetoriken des Audiovisuellen (Freie Universität Berlin and Hasso-Plattner-Institute Potsdam, 2016-2021, see Bakels et. al. 2020a). The semantic video annotations are based on the AdA Filmontology (v1.8), which consists of eight annotation levels, 78 annotation types, and 501 annotation values (Bakels et. al. 2020b). Each level, type, and value has a unique resource identifier (URI) as well as an English and German name and description. In our paper, we reflect on the specific challenges of capturing film-analytical claims of embodied viewing experiences in an ontology-based taxonomy. We further critically discuss aspects such as intercoder-reliability, consistency, as well as the requirements of training and synchronising expert annotators. The dataset contains more than 92,000 manual and semi-automatic annotations authored in the open-source-software Advene (Aubert/Prié 2005) by expert annotators, as well as more than 400,000 automatically-generated annotations for wider corpus exploration. The annotations are published as Linked Open Data under the CC BY-SA 3.0 licence and available as rdf triples in ttl files and in Advene’s non-proprietary azp-file format, which allows instant access through the graphical interface of the software. Via a web application all annotations can be downloaded, queried, and visualised in conjunction with password-protected access to the source video files (Agt-Rickauer 2022). This dataset is of interest for research on the financial crisis discourse or the specific films and broadcasts; also, the dataset serves as a proof of concept for ontology-based video annotation and as a provider of training data on film analytical concepts such as shot length, camera movements, or affective tonalities.
- ArticleCommunities of concern, Dora García at M HKA AntwerpRuchel-Stockmans, Katarzyna (2023)
- ArticleVoices from the debris: An interview with Mila Turajlić on unearthing anti-colonial solidaritiesBirdsall, Carolyn; Denić, Nadica (2023)This interview with award-winning documentary filmmaker Mila Turajlić discusses her ongoing artistic research project Non-Aligned Newsreels, which consists of two feature-length films that premiered in 2022, along with performance lectures, installations, exhibitions, research articles, and online content. The interview begins with a discussion of the scopes and aims of the project, which engages with the largely-forgotten collections of Yugoslav Newsreels in Belgrade (Serbia), unearthing the cinematic and political collaborations that were at the heart of the Non-Aligned Movement. The interview further explores the project’s reactivation of the archive and cultural memory, the relationship between politics and cinema, and the continuing importance of a ‘third’ way.
- ArticleThe Time-Loop as Game Mechanic, Narrative Device and Cycle of Systemic RacismO’Brien, Daniel (2023)
- ArticleSplit Screen as Hermeneutic Tool: Recursivity and Crosstalk in ‘Better Call Saul’Marañón, Nicolás Medina; Kiss, Miklós (2023)
- ArticleHow to Prevent Hair Loss, Kiat Kiat ProjectsMarie Sneijder, Lisa (2023)
- ArticleClose CircuitTripot (2023)
- ArticleOn Operational ImagesGimenez, Alba (2023)
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- ArticleA monumental chronicle of ‘The Mother of All Film Festivals’Iordanova, Dina (2023)
- ArticleNo more ego-spheres: An interview with Lydia Kallipoliti on ecological designPape, Toni; Gold, Riley (2023)A conversation about ecological design with architect, engineer, and scholar Lydia Kallipoliti. Taking her books The Architecture of Closed Worlds (2018) and Histories of Ecological Design (2024) as starting points, we asked Kallipoliti to share her understanding of ecological design and trace the histories of ecological design thinking. In this context, the interview focuses on design projects of the 20th century which sought to create so-called ‘closed worlds’: habitats that could function as closed systems where all material resources are regenerated from recycled waste. In addition to explaining the motivations for these projects, Kallipoliti addresses their practical limitations and the theoretical conclusions we can draw from them. Kallipoliti furthermore reflects on the notions of mediation and scale in design thinking and on the politics of the cycle.