Non-immersive media: collaborating in an ‘immertical’ virtual world
Alexandra Antonopoulou (London College of Communication, UK)
Eleanor Dare (Royal College of Art, UK)
The authors will report on their deployment of Brechtian and other performance-based methodologies which stimulate debate about the materiality of virtuality, remediating the virtual into a non-immersive space, at odds with pervasive rhetoric about immersivity and empathy. The paper will draw on performance-based student projects as well as approaches that the authors have developed to ‘encourage an attitude of critical distance’ towards virtuality, such as their work with the Phi Books project (2011- ) and the Riverine Archive (2019).
The hyperbole which has surrounded Virtual immersive mediation since Mark Zuckerberg bought Oculus in 2014 for 2.3 billion dollars, has been supported by a media which seem largely incapable of critical distance, often making claims for the pro-sociality of VR technology and content which reflect advertising claims, but with little supporting evidence. Brecht famously critiqued empathy & immersion as pandering to a bourgeois individualism. Empathy and immersivity are not obviously conducive to systemic change, least of all when addressing social injustice. At the same, time Antonopoulou has discussed the importance of role-play, fiction and the embodied tacit knowledge of performance as a conductive medium of criticality that leads to change. For Antonopoulou (2016, 2018) the body to body temporal materialities of role-play and the transference to the world of fiction offer critical distance that is useful for theorising on virtual, immersive experiences.
Throughout the pandemic the authors continued their collaboration, deploying immersion in playfulness and writing but also breaking the presence generated by that play. What happens in that moment of breaking, of creating meta narratives and analysis – how can it be framed – as a critical or immertical space a form of meta immersion, and what is the difference between creative ‘flow’ and immersion? How do we then frame the technological interruptions that happen during a technologically mediated collaboration? What is the implication of scenography, world-building, dramaturgy, grammar, recording and post-production when we collaborate on platforms such as Zoom, Teams, Google Hangout?
O campo audiovisual expandido: repertório crítico
Marcus Bastos (PUC-SP, BR)
O artigo propõe um repertório crítico, a partir da análise de obras dos cinemas experimentais, das artes do vídeo e do audiovisual contemporâneo, procurando encontrar uma terminologia capaz de abranger procedimentos de montagem comum, que implicariam em um campo audiovisual expandido resultante do cruzamento seletivo entre estas áreas. O objetivo deste texto não é constituir um campo homogêneo ou amarrar os vetores teóricos colocados em jogo, mas sim estabelecer um material em torno do qual é possível pensar certos aspectos da linguagem audiovisual, do ângulo da montagem sem hierarquia entre som e imagem em movimento. Seguindo o termo audiovisuology adotado no livro See this Sound, organizado por Dieter Daniels e Sandra Naumann, este repertório de obras e termos será descrito pelo termo audiovisualidades. Serão analisadas práticas de montagem existentes em campos diversos. O fato de persistirem em diferentes ciclos tecnológicos e constituírem certos modos de fazer que extrapolam campos estanques é justamente o que torna possível argumentar na direção de um universo de misturas e/ou expansões que culmina no campo audiovisual expandido. Ao mesmo tempo que compartilham elementos do cinema, do vídeo, da televisão e das mídias digitais, as audiovisualidades recortam aspectos muito específicos de cada um deles. Por isso, nem sempre coincidem com aquilo que se considera mais marcante do cinema ou das mídias digitais, e extrapolam os limites mais nítidos em que estes se fecham.
What do videos of dead artists circulating on the Internet tell us? The digital remediation of The Mystery of Picasso
Pierre-Emmanuel Perrier de La Bâthie (Institut Catholique de Paris, FR)
After World War II, while the mass media were experiencing a golden age, some artists used various means, written and visual, to stage themselves. It was a way for them to support their artistic discourse, founding it on a very personal attitude guaranteeing the authenticity of their work. Film, with its ability for capturing sound and movement, became a very appreciated tool to give a more realistic idea of what was an artist. Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Frida Kahlo and Andy Warhol, among many others, make full use of all the possibilities offered by this new medium to sustain their artistic discourses and guide the reception of their works. Decades after their death, these films continue to circulate, helped by their new capacity for remediation given by digital media. Blog, website, social networks, etc. copy and paste these images to infinity. But, most of the time, digital media present the image cut, out of its original context, allowing everyone to rewrite the history of a film, and thus of the artist and his work. Applied to the specific case of the feature-length documentary The Mystery of Picasso (1956) by Henri-Georges Clouzot, this presentation is interested in the problems caused by this new way of circulation of film and of their related information on a digital media. Using concepts from art history and semiology, it will also consider the consequences on the reputation and understanding of Picasso’s work by nowadays general public. Finally, it will examine the stance taken by the right-holders in order to protect this intangible heritage.
Stalking the Zone: Fan Tourism, Tarkovsky and Chernobyl
Melissa Beattie, John A. Riley (Woosong University, KO)
The nuclear meltdown at the site of Chernobyl has become inextricably associated with the Zone in Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, though it occurred almost a decade after the film’s release. This association has led to a first-person shooter video game series conflating the two as well as illegal guides to the Exclusion Zone calling themselves ‘Stalkers.’ Our project (in process) combines a textual analysis of the film, the games and the site of Chernobyl itself (visited in August 2018 by Riley) with audience-based fan tourism research. This paper would discuss our preliminary findings, including the overlap between (and differences among) those respondents who self-identified as being more interested in the site than the film (tourist fans) and those who visited primarily due to the connection with Tarkovsky rather than an interest in the site itself (fan tourists). This paper would further discuss the fan activities engaged in by the fan tourists (and tourist fans) as well as the tourist infrastructure set up around both groups, both legal and otherwise, as well as discussing changes documented in fan activities after HBO’s Chernobyl miniseries aired. Finally, it discusses all of this in the context of contemporary archaeology and museum studies, particularly with a view to the discussion of Chernobyl as a site that happens to be connected to a film as (arguably) a second-order fan-constructed paratext and the idea of ‘appropriateness’ and voyeurism in that Chernobyl was the site of a major ecological and humanitarian disaster that has become a major, polysemic, tourist site.
Da tela à superfície do mundo
Annádia Leite Brito (UFRJ, BR)
O artista, professor e curador cearense Solon Ribeiro herdou um acervo com cerca de 35 mil fotogramas do cinema clássico realizado entre as décadas de 1920 e 1960. Desde 2005, ele os rearticula em suas obras, deslocando-os do dispositivo cinematográfico inicial – narrativo, linear e de sala escura – e do colecionismo afetivo de seu pai para conferir-lhes outras configurações, combinações e possibilidades. Investigando da materialidade da película à sua digitalização e re-materialização em objetos de uso comum, Ribeiro transita entre limiares da imagem, testando até que ponto elas compõem sentidos ou sensações diversos de seu emprego original. Diferentemente das distâncias do assento à tela e da narrativa à vida, o artista propõe que essas figuras estejam próximas do público e sejam reificadas, inclusive através da presença invisível do projecionista liberto da cabine, que retorna as imagens estáticas ao movimento sobre a superfície da cidade. Observaremos o conjunto de sua obra tratando dos fluxos entre o analógico e o digital, entre o fixo e o movimento (Bellour), aproximando-o do conceito de remidiação (Bolter; Grusin).
The Husserl’s “object-image” concept revisited through the interactive installation Sense of Place
Carlos Sena Caires, Gerald Estadieu (University of Saint Joseph, MO)
Through the techniques of lithophane made with 3D printing filaments, using video and white light projections, it is possible to automatically produce a new image-type that we will refer to as the “object-image” — a direct reference to Edmund Husserl, Phantasia: Image Consciousness, Memory, 1898-1925. This “object-image” (for Husserl: a spirituality, a ghost image, an image which does not really exist, and which is the construction of the imagination) is made possible by assembling 3D printed objects and light projection, in a particular way within the space and the course of time, to create an entirely new representation of reality and discover an image that was not possible without this combination. Three possible image events can reveal that “object-image”. The first one that we will call the “primary-image”, that stems from the physical properties of the material itself (Husserl calls it the “Image-thing”). A second one, the “secondary-image” that appears by the direct retro-projection of light onto the medium. And a third one, the “object-image” that unveils itself by the combination of direct light projection with video image projection, offering to the spectator a new illusion of the subject represented (the “subject-image” referred by Husserl). The viewer has a crucial role here and participates in the generation of this new “object-image” and the development of its meaning since perception always depends on viewers’ interpretation. This paper’s main objective is to revisit the image-typology of Husserl, using the artistic installation “Sense of Place” as a starting point. “Sense of Place” is an interactive film installation where interactors participate in the discovery of the film narrative and explore moments of the history as they interact with it.
Neural networks and movement: autonomy in AI-generated video
Bruno Caldas (University of Arts Helsinki, FI)
Neural networks have been concerned with imagery since its first model – the perceptron, created in 1954, had the specific goal of recognizing shapes. The development of visual artificial intelligence has had its ups and downs since then. But the invention of the generative adversarial networks in 2014 represented a major breakthrough in the field. This multi-layer perceptron model, with two networks competing to generate and evaluate samples, has allowed for the first time the generation of photorealistic images made by an artificial intelligence. With that, a whole new front of experimental techniques in visual arts has opened. At this moment, several new models of GANs have been proposed, with different purposes from transferring styles, increasing resolutions, to even video frame prediction. After describing the current state of GANs, I will look at some of the artists facing the challenge of using neural networks to produce moving images and the consequences of their work. Some of the most promising machine learning models will be described. Then I’ll propose a discussion on machine learning technology within the field of automatically generated art. In the last century, Walter Benjamin was concerned about the technical mass reproduction of artworks. What would he say about the mass creation of images by machines? Not long before the first AI photorealistic pictures appeared, Harun Farocki introduced the idea of the operative image – the image conceived away from human participation. So how can we reframe the autonomy of technical imagery in face of non-human creativity?
A adaptação como mundividência intersemiótica: o paradoxo da mulher de Lot, o dilema de Ícaro e a questionação de Leviatã
Luís Miguel Oliveira Barros Cardoso (Politécnico de Portalegre, PT)
A adaptação constitui um profundo e complexo labirinto que sempre marcou as relações entre Literatura e Cinema. Contudo, devemos eleger uma premissa inicial que separa as águas e as leituras: a mundividência intersemiótica e a identidade/independência do objeto artístico. Nesta perspetiva, João Mário Grilo (1995-1996) defende duas ideias centrais. Em primeiro lugar, o cinema não filma livros, ou seja, desde os irmãos Lumière que a câmara institui com aquilo que filma uma relação única e que não pode ser substituída pela literatura. Em segundo lugar, o problema da adaptação é muito relevante para o cinema se for analisado de acordo com a problemática da infidelidade e não de acordo com a fidelidade.
Existe um problema cultural muito profundo que Bluestone (1957) traduz com um exemplo bíblico: “More often than not, the very prestige and literary charm of classics has an inhibiting effect, shriveling up the plastic imagination. Like Lot’s wife, the film-maker is frequently immobilized in the very act of looking over his shoulder”. Para este autor, o paradoxo da mulher de Lot traduz-se na análise da tentação do cinema em olhar para a literatura, ao mesmo tempo que pretende, em definitivo, uma autonomização. Uma adaptação é sempre uma tentativa; não obstante, o realizador pode tentar elevar a sua obra em “desafio aos deuses” da Semiótica. Se, de forma premeditada e sistemática, se pretende literalmente levar para a tela a palavra escrita, não só desafiamos os “deuses”, pois não podemos alcançar uma tradução intersemiótica perfeita, como corremos o risco de, tal como Ícaro, acabar nos precipitando no solo da negação da tangibilidade da transposição, porque quisemos alcançar o impossível.
George Bluestone (1957) afirmou que o filme não corre um perigo de natureza icária, opinando ainda: “Nor is the film, like Leviathan, in danger of bogging down in mud. Since the plastic image is subject to endless variations, it will always defy restriction, will sooner or later break loose to fly on its own”. A filosofia da fidelidade propicia ainda outra vertente que merece a nossa reflexão. Em sentido restrito, revela-se frequentemente como uma oferta de valorização estatutária do filme que é tributário do livro. Mas esta herança traz consigo o estigma da comparação, o que afecta a própria identidade da obra de arte. Em síntese, podemos afirmar que as adaptações literárias continuarão a ser um dos principais vetores de (re)criação no cinema. Qualquer que seja o modelo de análise deste processo que possamos eleger, reiteramos as palavras de João Mário Grilo quando afirma que o cinema não filma livros, ou seja, um livro será sempre um documento semiótico distinto do filme que pode originar, mesmo que tenhamos a tentação deliberada da mulher de Lot, o receio de desagregação de Leviatã ou a quimera impossível de Ícaro.
@#D: face filters, satisfying videos and socio-spatial justice
Gaspar Cohen (independent researcher, PT)
Reflecting on the poiesis of digital states and what can be thought of as 3D phantasmagoria, this article stems from an homonymous installation series, and puts forward some considerations about urban media ecologies, focusing on those that dwell directly on space (as computer vision, photogrammetry, GPS/GIS, AR/VR). Considering visual culture indexes such as Face-Filters, the popularization of material simulation and maximalist neu grunge, computer-aided three-dimensional rendering and decentralized computation will be seen as new spectrae for contemporary geographies. From the 1960s’ computer graphics and the definitive domestication of the cybersphere in the 1990s, 3D is not anymore a screen-based discipline, but has developed to a contemporary urban experience of Augmented/Code/Space (Manovich 2005; Kitchin and Dodge 2014). Neither as a portal for other worlds or a long-lasting overlay, it rays out, glimpses from within the surfaces of reality. The discussion for socio-spatial justice revolves here around Capitalist Realism (Fisher 2009) and its ability to render power. If the industrial machinery, the prison and the screen designed the imaginary and social contracts of modernity, the biopower of algorithms has all space and users’ bodies as quantifiable devices and exploitable resources. Under these conditions, it seems important to draw possibilities for a phenomenology of digital reproduction; where people – not only artists and thinkers – who produce multimedia artifacts can weave critical filters. By analyzing current examples in arts and design we’ll be able to speculate futures for language, spatialization, immersiveness, connection and presence.
Meaning in Flux: Romance and (re)mediation in Gabriel Rui Silva
Sandra Guerreiro Dias (Politécnico de Beja / Universidade de Coimbra, PT)
Gabriel Rui Silva (b. 1956) is a Portuguese poet and performer who is part of the second generation of Portuguese experimental poetry (PO.EX). He is the author of the performance romance, a long exercise of radical experimentation between visual poetry – the text “romance” – and its corresponding visual performances throughout the decade of 1980. The process contains symmetric moments of destruction (called “uninstallation”), which embody a dynamic of opposites, light and dark, that fulfills the ontological premise of the intrigue announced at the first moment, the romance itself, in 1982.
This presentation focuses mainly on the study of four recently found videos which correspond to four of the seven moments of the intervention, namely: “As 24 Pedras” [The 24 stones] (Lisbon, 1987), “Conversa entre Gutenberg e Marconi numa Estação de Caminhos de Ferro” [Conversation between Gutenberg and Marconi at a railroad station] (Lisbon, 1987, one week later), “Lembro-me Perfeitamente de Como Tudo Começou” [I perfectly remember how it all started] (Amadora, 1988), and “Orbis Sensualium Scripturae” [The sensual world of writing] (Setúbal, 1988). As intermedial utterances, the poetic and performance-based artifacts of the above-mentioned poet compose a radical approach to explore multimodal and performative potentialities of text and performance. In particular, I aim to approach and enlighten the iterations and transformations of these works of art conversions and experimentations from written text and performance art to an (im)material displacement epistemology based on the generative potential of meaning, regardless of its material composition and manifestation. I will thus address these poetic and media experimentation performances of Gabriel Rui Silva as a field of discursive and performance experimentation between text, body and media towards a performative and intermedial epistemology of language.
In return: a decolonial approach to fashion and hairstyles in music videos by afrodiasporic re-pats
Cornelia Lund (Fluctuating Images, DE)
When allowed to unfold their experimental laboratory character as defined by Lev Manovich, music videos can develop propositions of aesthetic, cultural, and societal relevance, instead of being simple promotional tools for pop music and musicians. In the African context, music video undoubtedly plays a major role as a medium that allows to playfully criticise established patterns of thought and social models, mainly through the way in which music, musicians, fashion, and hairstyles are presented. As such, it is part of a larger movement bridging the African continent and the diaspora that is trying to figure out how African societies wish to define themselves in the present and for the future. This movement is supported by the growing access to production tools and the Internet on the African continent, which, through a rapid flux of information and exchange of ideas, spans the continent and the diaspora in a shared cultural space in unprecedented ways. This paper proposes to investigate how music videos function in this shared cultural space as a means of dissemination and exchange of ideas, focusing on three examples of videos by members of the African diaspora in different countries: Baloji (Belgium), Sampa the Great (Australia), and Seinabo Sey (Sweden). Using a decolonial approach, the analysis will concentrate especially on the role of fashion and Afro hair(styles) in the videos these three artists made as part of their quest for cultural self-definition on their journeys back to the African countries their families have migrated from.
O abismo olha de volta: os gestos da câmera assubjetiva da arte contemporânea
Rômulo Moraes (UFRJ, BR)
Se, para Deleuze, como para Bergson antes dele, o movimento é a condição da variação universal e tudo flui sem parar, para Flusser há movimentos que se destacam dessa contiguidade: gestos. Estes expressam a articulação de uma liberdade, de uma potência imaginativa, seja se tencionando na direção do Outro, seja conformando a substância inorgânica ou se dispersando em circularidades transcendentais. Para que os gestos apareçam, no entanto, a visão precisaria de restituir afecções à coextensão da matéria. O cinema só pode se ligar à vida e amplificá-la existencialmente porque a câmera esculpe gestos no movimento fílmico. Ao exigir do espectador uma atenção calcada na contemplação flutuante de um duplo da realidade, a câmera sacraliza mesmo os atos mais anódinos que (re)apresenta. Os corpos por ela capturados ficam implicados em um estado ilusório de luminosidade, como se espelhados por um olho divino – e passam a produzir gestos. Nos anos 1980, entretanto, emerge um outro tipo de imagem. O cinema deixa de ter negativo e se torna um artesanato da virtualidade. O filme já não está mais atrelado a um dispositivo cinematográfico formal – tela-écran monocanal numa sala escura e silenciosa e com cadeiras acolchoadas. Trata-se, pelo contrário, de um cinema- instalação, que utiliza imagens de síntese, realidade aumentada, holografia, renderização, etc, para conceber uma metafísica do Fora. O espectador pode, agora, adentrar a imagem, habitá-la e modificá-la. Mas, nesse caso, de quem é o gesto de modificação? Quem vê e quem é visto? Onde está a câmera?
Any space whatever
Susana Mouzinho (PT)
Part video essay, part reading, I propose for the Besides the Screen conference, a film projection (in the making) and a reading, exploring the ideas of space and materiality and expanded cinema in Robert Smithson’s work, particularly in the film on the construction of the art work Spiral Jetty. Smithson wrote extensively on cinema and throughout his thinking one can identify an engagement with a particular conception of materiality and of the cinematic as detectable in the surface and composition of the elements of the real. The process of the construction of a film is one that follows a disjunctive technique, thus complicating other, somewhat more orthodox conceptions of expanded cinema. Deleuze’s concept of the any-space-whatever informs my discussion of Smithson conception of cinematic space and materiality which I will approach through a performative dispositif.
Space on and off screen: migration of Landscape Cinema from the movie theatre to the museum
Patricia Guerreiro Nogueira (iNOVA Media Lab – ICNOVA, PT)
Film is primarily defined by its principle of structuring and organizing Time and Space, as well as provides a basic framework of the world and of subjective reality. Echoing its spatial display of physical elements and confronting it with a soundscape, filmic landscape addresses subjectivity, since ‘landscape’ is seen as “an area made up of a distinct association of forms, both physical and cultural” (Sauer, 1963). Filmic landscape renders atmosphere and functions as a dramatization element, “a sort of polyptych, disseminated, repeated or altered according to a space-organising narrative necessity” (Natali, 1996). Informed by such theoretical background, as filmmaker I started to explore the specificity of time and space in two short documentaries: “East Side” and “Displacement”. Whereas “East Side” was filmed in Texas (USA), “Displacement” takes part in Northern Portugal. Nevertheless, both pieces portrait how humans occupy and inhabit a geographical space, and consequently how they shape the surrounding landscape and foster a sense of place with space. Supported on a practice-based research, this paper examines how these two short documentaries, by portraying space and the human emplacement in the landscape, may be set up in museum/galleries as video installations, fostering a dialogue back and forth the images in the film and in the art pieces. Not only the documentaries offer a visual understanding of the movement of bodies depicted on screen, as the installations aim triggering the movement of the audience in loco, throughout the venue, exploring the duality of space on and off screen.
Flying Objects: Sistership TV and the spectacle of feminist variety
Emily Pelstring (Queen’s University, CA)
Sistership TV is an episodic, internet-based variety show directed by a trio of artists known as The Powers. Each episode is promoted as a livestreamed event, and features live musical performance and short videos created by The Powers and friends in their campy style of reclaimative myth-making. Episodes are thematic, focusing on the interconnectivity of fleshy bodies and immaterial entities, drawing on feminist-materialist theory, media studies and the paranormal. The variety show format of Sistership TV, along with its emphasis on play, and its blurred distinctions between curation and cocreation within a network of artists, point to an artistic-research methodology that favors chaos, hybridity, and the uncategorizeable. This presentation will examine the notion of variety as a point of tension that plays out in relation to the Sistership. The variety show, as a multimodal collage, is an interesting model for considering how the politics of camp, kitsch, and pastiche are mobilized in contemporary art. The multiplicity of perspectives that characterizes the variety show is mirrored in the abundant collage of imagery in the Sistership, reflecting an overall “more is more” approach. Telephones, space helmets, spiderwebs, squids, mermaids, organs without bodies, and bodies without heads dance around the Ship, which is itself a metaphorical vessel that sails through undifferentiated space. Ideas and things are flying objects to be crashed into or merged with, resulting in unlikely combinations. We may laugh at the discontinuity of logic, but we must also be reminded of the generative potential of the accident.
After the Magician
Lea Petrikova (Film and TV School of Academy of Performing Arts, CZ)
The paper introduces “After the Magician”, an artistic research project based on a lost film by Alice Rahon, Le Magicien. Alice Rahon was a surrealist artist working mostly with painting. In the end of the 1940’s, Rahon, together with her partner Edward FitzGerald, created her only film, Le Magicien (The Magician), narrating a story of a magician who was given a task to create a new human after the world had been destroyed by nuclear war. However, the experimental film had been lost before its completion – just a few photos and memories of its creators remained. The experimental film and research project, “After the Magician“, explores the forgotten, unfinished film and circumstances of its production, expanding on several layers that the inspirational film provides with: story of a magician creating new world, motif of an undervalued female film pioneer, who was one of the first Mexican female directors, shamanic context of the magician character, life journey of the underrated artist Rahon, impact of the male gaze on her work and legacy, and primarily the ambiguity of the notion of art in general – what is the value of an artwork? Does it become valuable in time? And is a lost, orphan film, that wasn’t even presented, able to bring important values? The project reflects both theoretically and artistically on the broader theme of invisibility in film drawing on the invisible film Le Magicien that was never finished and presented, and even got lost, however, as the project argues, is still able to open up a dialogue.
Arthur Jafa: the Aby Warburg of the Poor Image
Vinícius Portella (BR)
Despite the obvious disparities, there seems to exist a striking functional analogy between the work of art historian Aby Warburg and that of video-artist Arthur Jafa. Both authors have produced collections of images that are structured by a complex of reiterative gestures. Both offer us repertories of “pathosformeln” (formulas of pathos) that express the particularities of their corpora and the media affordances of their time.
In this direction, I will be focusing on a few of Jafa’s films and interviews and on that unfinished project of Warburg that has been recently an object of considerable scholarly and artistic hype: the Atlas Mnemosyne. Warburg and Jafa worked with different media and in different circuits, this functional analogy that I want to point out is not supposed to erase these distinctions. Nor am I simply trying to make Warburg more current or Jaffa more scholarly, by way of this connection. What I want to bring to light is how such different enterprises are similar in their attempts to extract expressive historic patterns of affective transduction, and how Jafa’s work can be thus understood as a very expressive historical actualization of Warburg’s manic method.
Animist post-cinema: Ursula Biemann’s Acoustic Ocean (2018) and Matthew Barney’s Redoubt (2019)
Radek Przedpełski (Trinity College Dublin, IE)
Thinking with Deleuze, Guattari and Simondon, the presentation examines a recent video installation by Ursula Biemann (Acoustic Ocean, 2018) in conjunction with a wordless feature film by Matthew Barney (Redoubt, 2019) as specimens of what might be called ‘animist post-cinema’. As I shall argue, these experimental films exploring the ecologies of the ocean, the mountain and the forest (the Lofoten Islands and Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains, respectively), provide powerful voices in the context of the current environmental degradation, drawing attention to entanglements of biological, physical and technological life. In particular, I would like to interrogate how the artists’ eco-cinematic interventions reinvent the theme of animal hunt as a process of sensing, transmission and conversion of animal souls or forces, made possible through a technical ensemble of human and metallic components – electroplated copper sheets (Barney) or parabolic microphones fed into recording devices (Biemann). Such cine-aesthetics of forces is not so much depicted or represented but dynamically enacted as a modulation, or a film, across different media: spatial installation and soundscapes in Biemann or the sculptural installations and copperplate engravings that accompany Barney’s feature. I would like to conclude by proposing these cinematic interventions, which affirm a more-than-human, or ahuman, modality of time, as examples of the cinema of the future. This animist post-cinema might be labelled a ‘third cinema’, in the sense of modulating both the movement-image and the time-image.
Matéria, estrutura e repetição – notas sobre alguns filmes estruturais/materialistas de Peter Gidal
Fernando Stutz
A proposta deste artigo é discutir o conceito materialidade a partir dos filmes estrutural/materialistas, em especial na obra de Peter Gidal. Tal como se sabe, a corrente britânica dos filmes estruturais (organizada na London Film Coop entre os anos 1960 e 1970) explorou radical e sistematicamente o dispositivo cinematográfico em todas as suas dimensões (captação, revelação, edição, projeção) privilegiando sobretudo os seus aspectos materiais. A apreciação destes aspectos estava, via de regra, programaticamente ligada à constituição de uma postura anti-ilusionista e auto-reflexiva. A possibilidade de medir, perfurar, arranhar (a película); de repetir, acelerar e desacelerar (movimentos de câmera e cortes); de deslocar, decompor, desarticular (projetor e tela) foram todas tentativas utilizadas por realizadores britânicos, como Gidal, a fim de produzir filmes radicalmente questionadores. Tais tentativas, como também já se sabe, encaminharam o cinema a um beco sem saída. É a este beco que o artigo pretende voltar. Através da leitura crítica de textos de Gidal e da análise de três de seus filmes (Hall, Clouds e Key), o artigo busca identificar possíveis contribuições para refletir sobre o retorno à materialidade nas práticas audiovisuais contemporâneas (Tacita Dean, Bill Morrison, Peter Tcherkassky) e problematizar o debate que suscitam sobre o desaparecimento das técnicas fotoquímicas. Ao final, o artigo sugere a hipótese de que, nos filmes estruturais, o recurso da repetição revela-se paradigmático para se pensar o cinema como matéria e como promotor de uma sensibilidade singular, tal como condicionada por estratégias semelhantes nas artes visuais e na música do mesmo período .
Rusty Odyssey: the colonial trajectory of copper across the Atlantic
Yeon Sung (The Royal Academy of Arts, NL)
Copper, the first metal processed by Neolithic humans has accompanied the history of humankind for approximately 10,000 years, disguised in various forms of tools, ornaments, sculptures, currency, weapons, and conductors of electricity. In the idea of New Materialism, the atomic number 29 assigned material has been an animate object for a transversal human agency that has conveyed the propagation of colonial ideologies between two formal imperialists, the Netherlands and Japan. Former imperialists on the opposite coast of the Pacific enriched their territories which led the rise of colonialism, exchanging commodities and progressive ideas through the trade of copper. The mined raw copper was melted in different forms that embodied the physical and spiritual desire of the imperialists, exploiting their colonies. The colonial era declined, but the post-colonial specters made of copper have been bequeathed as historical heritages and imperial hegemonies, leaving wounds in the contemporary age. Along with the transformation of copper on the colonial trajectory, Rusty Odyssey takes multidisciplinary roles of a researcher and artist, provoking historian-disciplined statements interpreted in the artistic voice to the ignorance of colonialism inherited over centuries and regions. This article also examines conflicts in the contemporary era over copper to lay the foundation of the experimental documentary “Rusty Odyssey” through the perspective of a Korean artist residing in the Netherlands.
Filmes em rede: novas tecnologias e autoria coletiva no cinema cearense contemporâneo
Fábio Camarneiro (UFES, BR)
Durante as primeiras décadas do século XXI, o cinema brasileiro tem questionado a tradicional figura do “autor”, tão cara a certa tradição crítica, com vários filmes foram assinados por duplas de realizadores ou por coletivos. Poucas regiões porém tem tantos exemplos nesse sentido como o estado do Ceará, pelo menos desde o surgimento do coletivo Alumbramento — cuja trajetória é narrada no livro “Fissuras e fronteiras”, de Marcelo Ikeda —, mas também no longa coletivo “O animal sonhado” (2015), realizado por seis estudantes de cinema, ou em “Tremor iê” (2018), de Lívia de Paiva & Elena Meirelles. “Canto dos ossos” (Jorge Polo & Petrus de Bairros, 2020) tem um realizador cearense e outro do estado do Rio de Janeiro, e a própria ação se divide entre esses dois lugares. Realizado com alguns membros em comum e duas equipes distintas (diretores de fotografia, diretores de arte, atores etc.), “Canto dos ossos” é um filme que tematiza o hibridismo e que, não por acaso, narra uma história de vampiros jovens, letárgicos e hedonistas.
Seu processo de produção marca uma radicalização do uso de redes, com contatos virtuais entre Ceará e Rio de Janeiro, armazenamento em nuvem, colaboração em espaços virtuais etc., mostrando novas maneiras para se formar equipes e executar rotinas de trabalho. Além disso, um terceiro espaço geográfico — a Mostra de Tiradentes, onde o filme foi premiado em janeiro de 2020 — sediou o primeiro encontro de membros das diferentes equipes, trazendo também uma nova marca aos festivais de cinema.
Devir Ambiente como agenciamento
Carlos Eduardo Tsuda (UNESP, BR)
No presente artigo, discuto o tema do espaço e do tempo em intervenções urbanas e obras performáticas para espaço público a partir de estudos de caso de obras minhas e de outros artistas. À luz de autores de diferentes modalidades disciplinares, pratico uma pesquisa interdisciplinar e decentralizada, hibridizando formas diferentes de produção de conhecimento através do diálogo entre investigação teórica e prática artística. Ensaio o conceito de devir ambiente enquanto uma forma de agenciamento poético e estético da vida pública e seus inúmeros desdobramentos sócio-político-ambientais na relação entre corpos, corpo e espaço e corpo e urbes. Procuro problematizar etapas do processo criativo das obras, e sua relação com a cidade e seus habitantes, no tocante às formas de interação e participação pública, às alterações perceptivas do espectador e à transformação de estruturas de relação estabelecidas no espaço. Num sentido macro, abordarei as inúmeras modalidades do experimentalismo sócio-político-artístico e o silêncio como forma de resistência e resiliência política. Neste contexto, me interessa discutir a construção de redes de interatividade, a criação de redes temporárias de ativação, a elaboração e fomento de processos de negociação de curta, média e longa duração, o desenvolvimento de processos de subversão, hackeamento, infiltração e contaminação, a criação de sensações e distorções temporais e espaciais e as transformações afetivas das relações interpessoais e sociais.
Teoria e prática da adaptação: o caso de António de Macedo
Célia Vieira, Carlos Coelho Costa (ISMAI, PT)
O desenvolvimento de novas formas de adaptação, sobretudo no contexto digital, ao colocar a relação de transformação entre os média como um processo mais dinâmico e integrado num universo de transmediação, conduziu a um incremento da teoria da adaptação, trazendo enfoques que permitem repensar abordagens tradicionalmente situadas no âmbito estrito da literatura comparada. Nesta comunicação propomo-nos refletir sobre a questão da adaptação, tomando como corpus de análise a filmografia do cineasta português António de Macedo, enquanto caso que ilustra o processo de adaptação como forma de criação conducente a obras intrinsecamente palimpsestuosas.
Changes of Address: voice over and landscape in Long Distance
Richard O’Sullivan, Queen’s University, Belfast
Long Distance is a 17-minute autobiographical essay piece, describing the end of a relationship. It consists chiefly of still photographs taken through the windows of a train traveling from San Francisco to Chicago, during which this relationship came to an end. At least two strands unwind as the film progresses: the line of images itself, and the first-person voice-over unfurling over it (which is sometimes shown onscreen as text). The image and the voice do not always align precisely in meaning or tone, and they often keep only a general – and not precise – pace with each other. In this presentation, I shall explore relations of voice-over, image, and text in the work. I shall contextualise the film in relation to theories of the ‘excess’ in the image that resists or complicates its central, intended significance. These will include Roland Barthes’ concept of the third or obtuse meaning, his notion of the punctum, and Kristin Thompson’s theory of cinematic excess. I shall also consider how the film’s temporality is complicated by these relations of image and voice. Along with its forward progression in time, the film moves into the space of the image, expanding chosen details, even as the voice-over continues on. Linear temporality is complicated by detours and hesitations.