A Spectatorship-based Approach to Undoing Blindness Stereotypes in Documentary Practice

The research is presented as an audio-visual thesis, consisting of a 62,000-word thesis and two documentary film artefacts (forty-five and forty-eight minutes, respectively). The equal ratio of theory and practice symbiotically combines the background research, written analysis and practical experimentation. The portrayal of blind people in Western media largely conforms to stereotypical representations that oscillate between two poles: either as unfortunate, disabled and deprived, or exotic, mysterious and in touch with the supernatural. This ‘othering’ of blindness in documentaries is the symptom and partial cause of socio-cultural stigmatisation and ‘ableist’ hegemony. Challenging this hegemony, the thesis proposes the adoption of a spectatorship-based approach to film practice. It first identifies a range of stereotypes in mainstream documentaries, revealing the overwhelming use of formulaic narratives that foreground either tragic or heroic, goal-oriented plot trajectories, and stylistic devices that objectify blind characters. These insights frame the making of my own documentary films about two blind people. The aim is the mediation of everyday experience from the characters’ own perspective, with the result that the spectator experiences them as ordinary people, performing ordinary activities, albeit with extraordinary bodies. The films focus on everyday objects and spaces, and use narrative fragmentation to elicit a temporal sense of ‘everydayness’. The methodology operates on two levels of filmic mediation: the pre-filmic, comprising my first-person encounters with the subjects, and the post-filmic that addresses the mediation of pre-filmic experience to the audience via the film. The pre-filmic level makes use of phenomenological methods; the post-filmic implements a range of methods adapted from cognitive film studies. This spectatorship-focused model offers a new way of representing and communicating the ordinary ‘everyday’ of the two blind characters, undoing the stereotypes that consistently ‘other’ members of this community

Beyond Media Borders, Volume 1

This open access book promotes the idea that all media types are multimodal and that comparing media types, through an intermedial lens, necessarily involves analysing these multimodal traits. The collection includes a series of interconnected articles that illustrate and clarify how the concepts developed in Elleström’s influential article The Modalities of Media: A Model for Understanding Intermedial Relations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) can be used for methodical investigation and interpretation of media traits and media interrelations. The authors work with a wide range of old and new media types that are traditionally investigated through limited, media-specific concepts. The publication is a significant contribution to interdisciplinary research, advancing the frontiers of conceptual as well as practical understanding of media interrelations. This is the first of two volumes. It contains Elleström’s revised article and six other contributions focusing especially on media integration: how media products and media types are combined and merged in various ways

Procedural Films: Algorithmic Affect in Research Media Art Practice

This thesis explores the political aesthetics of ‘procedural films’—media works that use generative algorithmic procedures and manifest as moving images. In contrast to long-held techno-positivist understandings of generative art, the thesis reframes procedural films as a critical media art practice aiming to understand the ‘procedure’ as an affective engine of moving image experience. It employs an interdisciplinary approach that borrows from materialist theories of media, experimental film, artificial life and computational culture, and draws on my practices as artist and curator. These processes of making, curating and experiencing serve as enacted research, as a scalable architecture of thinking through and thinking with the technical media. The thesis proposes a conceptual framework for exploring procedural films as techno-cultural artefacts, addressing the ‘apparatus’, the affective space-time of their viewing and their sociopolitical operation. It proposes that algorithmic autonomy brings an affective renegotiation of the traditional roles of the spectator and the moving image, instead seeing it as a complex entanglement of human and non-human agencies, computational temporalities and generative procedures. Furthermore, it addresses procedural mediation and automation as a part of the political aesthetics of media art, exploring the techno-capitalist commodification of attention, time and images. The thesis investigates two case studies—screensaver and game engine—as procedural apparatuses. It explores these media artefacts as sites of labour, design, affect and experience, addressing their techno-cultural construction, as well as their processes of liveness and emergence

Beyond Media Borders, Volume 1

This open access book promotes the idea that all media types are multimodal and that comparing media types, through an intermedial lens, necessarily involves analysing these multimodal traits. The collection includes a series of interconnected articles that illustrate and clarify how the concepts developed in Elleström’s influential article The Modalities of Media: A Model for Understanding Intermedial Relations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) can be used for methodical investigation and interpretation of media traits and media interrelations. The authors work with a wide range of old and new media types that are traditionally investigated through limited, media-specific concepts. The publication is a significant contribution to interdisciplinary research, advancing the frontiers of conceptual as well as practical understanding of media interrelations. This is the first of two volumes. It contains Elleström’s revised article and six other contributions focusing especially on media integration: how media products and media types are combined and merged in various ways

‘In the game’? Embodied subjectivity in gaming environments

Human-computer interactions are increasingly using more (or all) of the body as a control device. We identify a convergence between everyday bodily actions and activity within digital environments, and a trend towards incorporating natural or mimetic form of movement into gaming devices. We go on to reflect on the nature of player ‘embodiment’ in digital gaming environments by applying insights from the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Three conditions for digital embodiment are proposed, with implications for Calleja’s (2011) Player Involvement Model (PIM) of gaming discussed

Designerly Modus of Wandering and Shared Film Creation in “Corpos Palimpsésticos”: Artistic creations in times of socio-affective contingencies

“Corpos Palimps sticos”1 emerged in 2020, in a moment of worldwide pandemic due to Covid-19 and because of the end of our relationship as lovers. Soon after our separation, and thanks to the call for proposals of the Residency Program “Residências em Residências Circolando / Central Elétrica 2020 – FASE 2”, the idea of mourning the separation through a creative gesture was born. The fruition of artistic objects in their physical places has been interrupted due to the restriction to people gathering in closed spaces. This new reality has forced artists to rethink the format of their works so they could reach a public that, without the usual places, is now reterritorialized in a digital environment. Thus, the project’s goal was the production of video-performances and the constant online sharing of our creation process. The project had an interdisciplinary approach, and although design and filmmaking were the privileged areas, the work also included text creation, photography, music, and scientific research. We will analyse here existing approaches of creation methods such as co-creation in documentary, art-based research, art thinking and a recontextualization of design thinking in order to reframe these modes of creation in “Corpos Palimps sticos”. By using more than a single methodology, we are interested in a process where our areas of research/creation can dialogue randomly in a non-hierarchical way. Once the residency was over, we systematized the creation process that gave rise to this text. Finally, we created the term “Designerly Modus of Wandering” and used the term “Shared Film Creation” of a previous research to base our creative journey in the areas of design and film creation

Reconfiguring the reader : convergence and participation in modern young adult fantasy fiction

PhD ThesisThis thesis explores digital-age literary and reading practices as they were influenced by participatory culture at the turn of the century. Participatory culture is analysed here through the work of Henry Jenkins, Hans Heino Ewers, Margaret Mackey and Katy Varnelis and is recognised as one in which individuals are socially connected to each other in an environment that offers support for creating and sharing interpretations and original works. It has relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic participation, and fosters the sense of community growing around people’s common interests and ideologies, as expressed through performative manifestations such as gaming and fandom. Because juvenile fantasy fiction generally, and J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (1997-2007) specifically, were at the centre of significant developments in response to participatory culture, Rowling’s books are used as a case study on the basis of which changing practices of reading, writing and interpretation of story, principally by children and young people, are mapped and appraised. One aim of this thesis is to evaluate how far participatory culture has affected what it means to be a reader of a text that exists in multiple formats: how each version of the text constructs and addresses its readers/viewers/players/co-creators, and the dynamics and interdependence between the different versions. A second but related aim is to test the claims of new media theorists, including Janet Murray, Pierre Lévy and Marie-Laure Ryan, among others, to establish how far texts, readers and the processes of reading have in fact changed. Specifically, it looks at how far the promises of reader participation and co-creation have been fulfilled, especially within the genre of children’s literature

Can't read my broker face?—Tracing a motif and metaphor of expert knowledge through audiovisual images of the financial crisis

Based on the question of the representability of economy and economics in audiovisual media, developments on the financial markets have often been discussed as a depiction problem. The abstractness and complexity of economic interrelations seem to defy classical modes of storytelling and dramatization. Nevertheless, public opinion about economic changes and dependencies crucially relies on audiovisual media. But how can the public communicate in images, sounds, and words about forces that are out of sight and out of reach, and can supposedly only be adequately grasped by experts? In a case study on audiovisual images of the global financial crisis (2007–), this paper tracks and analyzes a recurring motif: the staging of expert knowledge as close-ups of expressive faces vis-à-vis computer screens in television news, documentaries, as well as feature films. It draws on the use of digital tools for corpus exploration (reverse image search) and the visualization of video annotations. By relating and comparing different staging strategies by which these “broker faces” become embodiments of turbulent market dynamics, the paper proposes to not regard them as repeated instantiations of the same metaphor, but as a developing web of cinematic metaphors. Different perspectives (news of market developments or historical accounts of crisis developments) and affective stances toward the global financial crisis are expressed in these variations of the face-screen constellation. The paper thus presents a selection of different appearances of “broker faces” as a medium for an audiovisual discourse of the global financial crisis. A concluding analysis of a scene from Margin Call focuses on its specific intertwining of expert and screen as an ambivalent movement figuration of staging insight. Between the feeling of discovery (of a potential future threat) and the sense of being haunted (by a menacing force), the film stages the emergence of a “broker face” in an atmospheric tension between suspense and melancholy. We argue that the film thereby reframes the motif and poses questions of agency, temporality, and expert knowledge