De/Mystifying smartphone-video through Vilém Flusser’s quanta

Videos made on smartphones are recognised in popular culture in a manner that is not reciprocated in media theory and fine art practice. The difference between smartphone-video and other film and video technology has been obscured within post-medium contexts such as “moving image,” where an ideological indifference creates new physical and psychological barriers between video ‘user’ and moving image ‘artist.’ This thesis considers smartphone-video as a significantly different gesture to other moving image technologies, which I raise through media theorist Vilém Flusser’s interpretation of “quanta,” and his interest in ‘the gesture of video’ as a “quantised phenomenon.” I approach these ideas through my own smartphone-videos, which are initially influenced by principles of Peter Gidal’s structural/materialist filmmaking. By readdressing Gidal’s methods of non-illusionist demystification, smartphone-video can be considered a very different gesture to filmmaking. Film becomes stable, causal, and Newtonian; while video becomes unstable, probable, and quantum. Developments in digital imaging and computer processors highlight such quantum mechanics, which although complex, function in ways classical physics cannot explain. This thesis proposes how Flusser’s concept of quanta can account for the unstable qualities found in smartphone-video’s manner of operation when de/mystified through principles of Gidal’s structural/materialist filmmaking. Such observations consider video's quantum instability through AI driven automation and user-friendly features that enable “quantum dialogues” between user and machine as decision-makers. Observing smartphone-videos as non-polarised quantum dialogues through improvisation in the act of recording, expresses Flusser’s theory of gestures, and elucidates his proto-decolonial efforts against “universal phenomena.” The gesture of smartphone-video encompasses much more than I had imagined, and subsequently — with the aid of Karen Barad — considerations are made to a de/mystification of video’s gesture, operating through proximity in an intra-subjective network of user(s)

Pandemic Media: Preliminary Notes Toward an Inventory

With its unprecedented scale and consequences the COVID-19 pandemic has generated a variety of new configurations of media. Responding to demands for information, synchronization, regulation, and containment, these "pandemic media" reorder social interactions, spaces, and temporalities, thus contributing to a reconfiguration of media technologies and the cultures and polities with which they are entangled. Highlighting media’s adaptability, malleability, and scalability under the conditions of a pandemic, the contributions to this volume track and analyze how media emerge, operate, and change in response to the global crisis and provide elements toward an understanding of the post-pandemic world to come

Soulful bodies and superflat temporalities: a nomadology of the otaku database of world history at the ends of history

This thesis is a philosophical engagement with the popular, low, and vernacular theories of History performed and expressed within contemporary Japanese manga (‘comics’) and anime (‘limited animation’), and most importantly, in the global production and consumption of otaku (‘manga and anime fan’) cultural and media ecologies. My project is rooted in a reading of the post-structural theoretical inquiries of Gilles Deleuze in parallel with what media theorist McKenzie Wark calls ‘otaku philosophy’ to examine how both high and low theories articulate anxieties and fascinations with the global theoretical discourses on ‘the ends of History’ and the imminent demise of industrial modernity. The first portion of the thesis is dedicated to a reading of the Japanese counter-cultural manga movement called gekiga (‘dramatic pictures’). In traversing gekiga’s post-war lineages to its revival in the medievalism of otaku artists Miura Kentarō and Yukimura Makoto, the first part postulates on what an anti-modern, anti-historical approach – or what Deleuze and Guattari call a nomadology – might look and feel like as it is mediated in the manga form. The second portion of the thesis examines the way in which Japanese anime mobilises the philosophies of nomadology in its filmic form and transmedial properties. In a critical assessment of the anime works of the otaku-founded media corporation Type-Moon, this section explores the Fate series alongside Deleuzian film and media philosophies to explore the infinite potentialities and recursive limitations of otaku nomadologies as they materialise beyond the screen. By reassessing the rise of otaku culture as a vernacular, global, and cosmopolitan rise in the critique of modernity and History, this thesis hopes to explore how transcultural and transmedial fan philosophies of historicity, memory, and temporality can be recontextualised within current academic debates about the efficacy of post-national historiographic pedagogies explored in the fields of postcolonial studies, comparative studies, global studies, and media studies