2023/2 - #Cycles

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#Cycles: On circularity and recursivity in media culture
Pape, 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.
(Dis)orientation in net art: Disrupting the feedback loop of cybernetic subjectivities
Băcăran, 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.
A genealogy of migrant organising by Germany’s Asiatische Deutsche: Presencing the Asian Film Festival Berlin
Heberer, 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.
A monumental chronicle of ‘The Mother of All Film Festivals’
Iordanova, Dina (2023)
Accessing film culture and community at the 2023 Melbourne International Film Festival
Debinski, Anna (2023)
Caught in the loops of digital agency panic: On NPCs and internet addicts
Markelj, 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.
Close Circuit
Tripot (2023)
Communities of concern, Dora García at M HKA Antwerp
Ruchel-Stockmans, Katarzyna (2023)
Creativity, passion, and community: The rise of India’s transnational producers
Bhatia, 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.
Cybernetic subjectivities on a loop: From video feedback to generative AI
Boutet 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.
Cycles of Labour: In the Metaverse, We Will Be Housewives
Hanáková, Veronika; Tremčinský, Martin; Anger, Jiří (2023)
Editorial NECSUS – Autumn 2023_#Cycles
Beugnet, Martine; de Cuir Jr, Greg; Keilbach, Judith; Loist, Skadi; Pape, Toni; Vidal, Belén; Virginás, Andrea (2023)
Everyday life and mnemonic gestures
Almeida, Ana Sofia (2023)
Experimenting in circles: Agfa, amateur cinema, and the art of R&D
De Rosa, Miriam; Mariani, Andrea (2023)
This article moves from small-gauge film technology manufacturing and experimental film practices to develop a twofold exploration of film and camera conceptually interlinked in a mutual cycle of experimentation. Italian filmmaker Ubaldo Magnaghi’s city symphonies provide an illustrative example: active in the early 1930s as an independent filmmaker, between 1930 and 1933 he produced five films sponsored by Agfa, which was expanding its market in Italy. Magnaghi’s experimental films were thought to stress the material resistance of cameras (an Agfa Movex 30) and the film stock (Agfa Isopan reverse). The article will shed light on the affordances offered to the filmmaker regarding the film stock’s specificities and the camera involved in the manufacturing process. Such a virtuous cycle connecting manufacturing and creativity is metaphorically reinforced on the level of aesthetics in Magnaghi’s film Symphony of Life and Work (1933), characterised by a reiterated circling camera movement. Inspired by this, we aim to craft a study that assembles the various components of the filmmaker’s work in a rounded film experience, underlining the nature of small-gauge cinema as a non-neutral yet empowering practice able to create a complex room for critical analysis eliciting new ways of looking, problematising, and therefore thinking reality.
From still to moving images and vice versa: Analysing technological cycles and the use of AI to study cinema history
Tadeo Fuica, Beatriz; Lezer, Arthur (2023)
This article explores some possibilities that an artificial intelligence that retrieves objects offers to cinema historians by focusing on the deep exploration of the photogramme. Thus, it reflects on a technological cycle that begins when cinema put the instantaneous photograph into motion – a motion that hid the details that today are easily retrievable with the help of AI that needs to stop this motion to find them. Being able to identify similar objects in photogrammes of films that are part of a corpus, an object retrieval AI allows us to explore how elements from the mise-en-scène can transform the historical understanding of cinema. Our theoretical reflections are put into practice through the analysis of photogrammes containing wheels in a corpus of films conceived by members of the pioneer generation of cinema archivists in correspondence between Europe and Latin America, at the beginning of the 1950s. The ubiquity of wheels allows us to have a general perception of the kind of image that composes our corpus, while it also allows us to evaluate the possibilities and limitations of using an object retrieval AI for writing cinema history.
How to Prevent Hair Loss, Kiat Kiat Projects
Marie Sneijder, Lisa (2023)
I foresee that I’m going to have known it
Vorozheikin, Yevhen (2023)
Inside the archive of feelings: Experiencing Il Cinema Ritrovato
Vidal, Belén (2023)
No more ego-spheres: An interview with Lydia Kallipoliti on ecological design
Pape, 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.
Of 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.

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