Postcinema

*Academic Book Review* Killer Tapes… is a fascinating book with rigourous theoretical content and effective challenges to entrenched modes of thinking about movie spectatorship. Benson-Allott outlines a new phenomenology of spectatorship, but this reader is left with important questions regarding certain denials of intent  and limits in surveying the postcinematic landscape and in defining a postcinematic movie culture. In this sense, Killer Tapes… finds its ideal readership in those who are eager to further Benson-Allott’s own ideas and help to scope-out the full field of postcinematic movie culture.

This essay aims to reflect around Mario Tirino's book "Postspettatorialità. L'esperienza del film nell'era digitale". In the contemporary mediascape, where the media hybridize and remedy and the (networked) publics play an increasingly active role, the film experience and spectatorship have changed substantially. Mario Tirino's work enters into the merits of these changes, showing how they derive from a combination of factors that have influenced production, distribution and consumption. The merit of the author is to investigate contemporary cinema and changes in the spectatorship by resorting to consolidated theoretical approaches in the sociology of cultural processes and media sociology and to the presentation of empirical cases and analysis of products, forms and media practices, to provide a comprehensive overview and a broaden reflection on the link between the media and the imaginary and, even more specifically, between cinema and the imaginary.

This essay, taken from my upcoming book A Gossip of Images (Duke University Press), considers the intimate and indiscreet circulation of images beyond the context of individual films and the moment of spectatorship. Referring specifically to the mobilization and transformation of Hollywood star images in queer counterpublics, the essay argues for the necessity of an expanded definition of gossip, not merely as a means of oral communication, but as a mode of image circulation.

In this paper, we investigate the contextual characteristics of media architecture -- parameters that impact its integration in the existing social fabric -- from a socio-demographic (environment), technical (content) and architectural (carrier) perspective. Our analysis draws upon four real-world examples of media architecture, which have been specifically chosen to demonstrate a prototypical range of context-related symptoms, including a deliberate case

The reflection on the pervasiveness of technologies in society and in contemporary artistic practices opens up multiple scenarios on our near future. Overcoming the classic dichotomy art + technology, the new areas of research are complex and full of implications: hyperintelligence; the posthuman between cyborg and anthropocene; the Expanded Internet Art; from reality extended to vide-ogame art; sound art; the artist as inventor. The second volume of the "I Quaderni della Collezione Farnesina" series is dedicated to identifying these new scenarios and identifying the new artistic trend, with particular attention to Italians whose first global mapping is carried out. Studying their work, understanding the disruptive potential of their lateral thinking, allows us to acquire essential reading tools of our hyper-technological society, even in the field of technology and science.

The first exhibition of its kind, ‘Hand in Hand’ featured Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander, Maori, Samoan, Niuean and Fijian Artists based in Aotearoa, USA and Australia.

The 2008 annual Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative’s Sydney Mardi Gras exhibition was an opportunity for Indigenous artists across the Pacific to participate in a celebration of international standing through a program that openly challenged dominant views on sexuality.

The exhibition was also held in collaboration with the Performance Space @ CarriageWorks in Australia.

The artwork featured was a focus on non-conventional media including: the moving image, installation and also inter-disciplinary media including performance art, music and adornment. The artists: Jeffery Samuels, Tracey Moffatt, Arone Raymond Meeks, r e a, Darrell Sibosado, Clinton Nain, Adrian Wills, Dianne Jones, Gary Lee, Moana Nepia, Niwhai Tupaea, Sionelagi Falemaka, Dan Taulapapa McMullin, Claudine Sartain, Salote Tawale & artist / curator: Jenny Fraser (AUS) & invited guest artist / curator Shigeyuki Kihara (NZ).

This paper discusses the prominence of serialization practices in contemporary Hollywood blockbuster cinema from the vantage points of political economy and seriality studies. It suggests that the recent trend towards sequelization, franchising, and transmedia storytelling is best understood as a formal and medial politics of activation aimed at the mobilization of consumers. It furthermore argues that complex transmedial entertainment franchises rely on a combination of different serialization practices to engage viewers regularly and across media, and that this form of intensified serial engagement is central for the solicitation and exploitation of what Tiziana Terranova has called 'free labor'--i.e., the unpaid and voluntarily work of media audiences that functions as a form of free promotion for the series and franchises that encourage it. To make this argument, this chapter sketches the basic aspects of a political economy of serial mass culture and discusses the example of Disney's transmedial 'Marvel Cinematic Universe,' an ongoing franchise built around a series superhero blockbuster films.

For figures born more than half a century ago in the pages of American comic books, superheroes like Batman, Spider-Man, Superman, or Captain America exhibit a remarkable omnipresence on the big and small screens of our contemporary media environment. Film adaptations of titles by DC Comics and Marvel Comics (the USA’s two biggest publishers of superhero comics) currently constitute one of the most popular genres in American blockbuster cinema, which has churned out close to 40 big-budget movies based on iconic properties during the last decade alone — among them high-grossing productions like Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight-trilogy for Warner Bros, Disney’s string of movies based on Marvel characters (e.g. The Avengers, Iron Man 3, or Guardians of the Galaxy), or Sony’s series of Spider-Man films. In recent years, American television has latched onto the commercial success of these productions and released a string of drama series based on superhero comic books, from The CW’s Arrow (since 2012) and The Flash (since 2014), to ABC’s Marvel’s Agent of S.H.I.E.LD. (since 2013) and Marvel’s Agent Carter (2014), to Fox’s Gotham (since 2014) and Netflix’s Marvel’s Daredevil (2015).
This seminar engages with the surprising longevity of comic book superheroes and their filmic and televisual incarnations in the early 21st century, and discusses recent examples from both American film and television as prominent examples of popular serial storytelling in the digital era. In doing so, the seminar addresses aspects ranging from theories of mass culture and popular seriality, questions about the the historical origins and politics of superhero narratives to the economics of contemporary Hollywood production, the impact of digitization on contemporary film and television, and the practices of fan cultures.

This article deals with the two major actors in North Africa’s 2011 uprisings—namely, youth and the city—through a critical exploration of the cinematic realism that has defined Moroccan filmmakers’ response to the country’s socioeconomic transformation under neoliberal globalization since the 1980s. Taking Noureddine Lakhmari’s Casanegra (2008) as a case study, I argue that this aesthetic frame discloses the critical potential of everyday life and the ordinary affects of anger and the will to revolt among Casablanca’s youth today. This acclaimed film further allows us to approach Moroccan cinema’s affective realism within an urban landscape in a country that has witnessed the rise of a new historical consciousness of postcolonial youth on and off the screen. The first part of this article looks at the neoliberal Casablanca that emerged in the aftermath of Morocco’s market reforms in the 1980s and how that transformation engendered a new wave of urban cinema a decade later. The second part looks at Casanegra’s affective economy of anger and revolt and the articulation of Moroccan youth’s postcolonial subjectivity.

Instead of developing the general theme of the immersive experience, Francesco Casetti and Andrea Pinotti exemplify it by focusing specifically on Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Carne y arena, an interactive virtual reality installation presented at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, insofar as it testifies to the formal and spectatorial transformations that are rightly referred to as post-cinema. More generally, emphasizing the characteristics of “unframedness, presentness, and immediateness,” this kind of work draws our attention to the phenomenology of the film experience. Casetti and Pinotti propose going beyond phenomenology (and ontology) with the project of an iconic ecology based on the concept of phaneron, the appearance as it is perceived for itself.

In this article, I discuss iPhone navigation as a performative practice in mobile and interactive augmented reality tours. I take the iPhone as a theoretical object and examine its specifi city as the prime—yet not exclusive— example of today’s generation of smartphones, their layered interfaces and the navigation practices enabled by the many applications developed for them. My approach to the trend of digital cartography and augmented reality applications for mobile devices is framed in terms of indexicality. This semiotic concept as defi ned by Charles Sanders Peirce refers to the intersection of time, place and subject in their relative relationality. In her introduction to a special issue of Diff erences devoted to indexicality and media Mary Ann Doane comes up with the obvious, yet strangely overlooked distinction between the index that comes to us from the past—a trace of things long gone—and the index in the present. This distinction is mobilized and its two temporalities brought in touch with each other whenever the experience in the present is activated by means of reminiscences—a presence of the past in the present. Hence, one kind of index is the trace—the real relationship between the present sign and the past, of which it is an imprint. Another one is deixis. This linguistic term refers to the here-and-now of the utterance, the situation of discourse (in any medium), which positions a subject, or deictic center. I propose to add to these two a third kind that is brought about by the machine aspect of interface- and software-based indexicality in navigation. Possibility and future-oriented indexicality form what I call the destination index.

Until a few decades ago, when speaking about cinema, a clear and consolidated collective consciousness was evoked. Now, this is no longer. A symbolic icon of modernity and of its distinctive processes, cinema is now living a complex phase of transition, constantly being questioned by new technological and cultural devices.

In recent years, virtual reality (VR) has emerged as a new frontier of innovation and experimentation within what is known as "immersive entertainment" – gaming, art, museum exhibitions, TV and cinema. The proliferation on the market of new headsets, the spread of platforms, apps and also VR cinemas around the world, and the inclusion of VR productions in international film festivals are trends demonstrating that VR is no longer just a fascinating 1980s-inspired literary or cinematic subject. VR is also a new way of designing and creating an experience in which the spectator is more directly, immediately, and effectively involved and entertained through immersion and a strong sense of presence, i.e. the illusion of being part of an alternative world. Moreover, VR have seen a real explosion of new interest during the COVID-19 pandemic emergency, due to the need to avoid travel and social contact. The special section of the issue aims to explore the relationship between VR and (post)-cinematic storytelling in both fiction and non-fiction modes.

Projection d'ouverture au Centre Pompidou le dimanche 22 mai et Colloque à Reid Hall (Paris) les 23 et 24 mai 2022 (keynote, panels, performances et tables rondes).

À l’ère de ce que Gilles Deleuze a appelé les « sociétés de contrôle » – gouvernées aujourd’hui à la fois par la prédictibilité algorithmique, les nouvelles formes de travail numérique ou l’« économie de l’attention » – quelles stratégies sont explorées par des artistes, des chercheurs et des usagers, pour produire de nouvelles relations aux dispositifs numériques, réflexives et émancipatrices, plutôt qu’addictives, compulsives et conspirationnistes ? Ce colloque souhaite questionner des enjeux esthétiques, psychiques et politiques de la transformation rapide des technologies et des plateformes numériques, en confrontant différents diagnostiques critiques et en examinant des expérimentations artistiques à l’ère du « post-cinéma » (celle des reconfigurations du médium cinématographique à l’époque des médias connectés).

Participants :
Nicolas Bailleul (artiste), Nico Baumbach (Columbia University) Christa Blümlinger (Université Paris 8), Camille Bui (Université Paris 1), Aline Caillet (Université Paris 1), Elisabeth Caravella (artiste), Pierre Cassou-Noguès (Université Paris 8), Yves Citton (Université Paris 8), Aria Dean (artiste), DISNOVATION.ORG, Dominic Gagnon (cinéaste), Jane M. Gaines (Columbia University), Chloé Galibert-Laîné (HEAD de Lucerne), Benjamin Gaulon (artiste), Elisa Giardina Papa (artiste), Gala Hernández López (Université Paris 8), James J. Hodge (Northwestern University), Tung-Hui Hu (University of Michigan), Wendy Hui Kyon Chun (Simon Fraser University’s Canada) Marie Lechner (commissaire indépendante), Alice Lenay (Université Paris 8), Judith Michalet (Université Paris 1), RYBN.ORG, Kim Sacks (Université de Strasbourg), Antonio Somaini (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle), Félix Tréguer (CERI-Sciences Po), Seumboy Vrainom (artiste), Gwenola Wagon (Université Paris 8), Damon R. Young (UC Berkeley).

Projet Alliance porté par Nico Baumbach (Columbia University) et Judith Michalet (Université Paris 1) avec la participation de Aline Caillet (Université Paris 1), Yves Citton (Université Paris 8), Jane M. Gaines (Columbia University), Gwenola Wagon (Université Paris 8) et Damon Young (UC Berkeley), comme membres du comité scientifique.

This point of view featurette examines the usage of the smartphone by rioters documenting their participation in the insurrection of the Capitol on January 6th, 2021, in protestation of the certification of the Electoral count for then President Elect Joe Biden. As is by now well known, much of this footage, which was shared willingly across social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and Parler, quickly became crucial documentary evidence for the FBI’s initial identification and later arrests of suspects. As this essay argues, for media studies scholars, this footage likewise calls for a new interrogation of digital smartphone mediation as a moving image form that passes fluidly between subjective and objective modes. As a “first response” to January 6th, 2021 as both a political and media crisis, this short essay serves to initiate further scholarly discussion of the complex theoretical questions left in the wake of this historical event, particularly concerning practices of digital self-mediation.

La diffusione di tecnologie digitali immersive, come gli headset per la Realtà Virtuale (VR) e le app come Aurasma per la Realtà Aumentata (AR), promettono l'esplorazione di realtà " altre " dove la fruizione passiva viene riconfigurata in pratiche immersive e performative. Infatti, indossando i visori VR ci si troverà immersi in una realtà esperibile a 180° o 360°, costruita con tecniche di computer graphic in 3D, in cui gli ambienti grafici e le figure (avatar e bot) che popolano questi mondi sintetici compaiono " miracolosamente " davanti ai nostri occhi; alla stessa maniera, puntando il nostro smartphone su un marker Aurasma, immagini e brevi video di 30-40 secondi compariranno sullo schermo sovrapponendosi agli spazi fisici in cui ci troviamo. Non sembra allora esagerato parlare di immagini che appaiono come piccole epifanie provenienti da livelli ontologici differenti e integrati, che si mescolano con quelle esperibili negli spazi fisici, richiedendo all'utente una serie di azioni e ricomposizioni, o che ci traggono fuori dallo spazio reale e materiale, offrendo all'utente immerso livelli profondi di intrattenimento. Se da un lato, come è ormai noto, questo mercato ha trovato nella pornografia[1] e nel videoludico le officine per sperimentare diversi livelli di coinvolgimento emozionale e fisico, garantendo l'immersione dell'utente in porno-mondi virtuali, o in ambienti videoludici totali-grazie all'implementazione della soggettiva tipica del porno " gonzo " e degli " sparatutto "-dall'altro lato, queste nuove tecnologie stimolano anche la sperimentazione di modelli narrativi complessi, con cui elaborare simbolicamente la complessità dell'odierna società digitale, chiamando spesso in causa immaginari del complotto e dell'apocalisse. In quest'ultimo caso si tratta di storie in cui le immagini che ci appaiono sono capaci di innescare una sensibilità mistica a partire da veri e propri miracoli ipermediali generati da una trasfigurazione digitale di ambienti reali. pagina 1 / 7

This paper explores the relationship between the digital desiring subject of our time and his/her digital (sexual) gadgets as a fundamentally infantile and ritualized way of managing the death drive. The paper recognizes the 21st century as a post-cinematic era in which the subject's relationship to media coincides with his/her relationship to desire: perennially excessive, marred by anxiety, and difficult to articulate. It also suggests, through a close reading of the movement of images in online sexual economies that despite the widely available technology of moving images, the digital subject chooses the still image as a mode of representation over the too-revealing movement of the moving image in his/her transactions of desire-which may or may not amount to a physical encounter, though it certainly produces endless, and endlessly deferred, impressions of its possibility. Like a masturbatory prosthesis capable of turning the supposed continuity of time (in which each instant dies to give way to the next) into the circular repetition of the neurotic (in which each time feels like the first time), the digital serves as world-making device for the subject to stage old modes of being that feel very new, and newer at each repetition. The still image traps or seizes that which the moving image lets out or leaks much in the same way the notion of the category contains, or maims, the chaotic/oceanic/excessive queerness of Desire.

A.C. Dalmasso, “Technicity and the Utopian Limits of the Body”. In Battin JM, Duarte Penaranda GA (eds.) (2020) Reading Black Mirror. Insights into Technology and the Post-Media Condition, Bielefeld, Transcript-Verlag, 2020 (ISBN: 9783837652321): 237-256.

https://cup.columbia.edu/book/reading-black-mirror/9783837652321

Una volta i termini «città» e «cinema» evocavano – almeno nel senso comune – un immaginario piuttosto chiaro e consolidato. Ora non più. Figure emblematiche della modernità e dei suoi processi più caratteristici, la città e il cinema si ritrovano in una complessa fase transitoria, che mette in discussione non solo la natura essenziale, ontologica della loro struttura, ma soprattutto il senso della loro trasformazione. In questo panorama la sperimentazione artistica ha precorso i tempi, configurando un territorio interdisciplinare di ricerche fra architettura, arti visive e media, che sembra avvalorare l’ipotesi di un «post» e di un «oltre» della visione nella metropoli contemporanea.