Anticipatory Realism: Constructions of Futures and Regimes of Prediction in Contemporary Post-cinematic Art

This thesis examines strategies of anticipation in contemporary post-cinematic art. In the Introduction and the first chapter, I make the case for anticipation as a cultural technique for the construction of and adjustment to future scenarios. This framing allows analysis of constructions of futures as culturally and media-historically specific operations. Via anticipation, constructions of futures become addressable as embedded in specific performative and material economies: as regimes of prediction. The hypothesis is that cultural techniques of anticipation do not only serve to construct particular future scenarios, but also futurity, the very condition for the construction of futures. Drawing upon the philosophical works of, in particular, Vilem Flusser, Jacques Derrida and Elena Esposito, and the theory of cultural techniques, I conceptualize anticipation through the analysis of post-cinematic strategies. I argue that post-cinematic art is particularly apt for the conceptualization of anticipation. The self-reflexive multi-media interventions of post-cinematic art can expose the realisms that govern regimes of prediction. Three cultural techniques of anticipation and their use as artistic strategies in post-cinematic art are theorized: enactment, soft montage and rendering. Each of these techniques is examined in its construction of futures through performative and material operations in art gallery spaces. The second chapter examines strategies of enactment in post-cinematic installations by Neïl Beloufa. My readings of Kempinski (2007), The Analyst, the Researcher, the Screenwriter, the CGI tech and the Lawyer (2011), World Domination (2012) and Data for Desire (2014) propose that enactment allows for an engagement with futures beyond extrapolation. With Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism, the construction of futures becomes graspable as a political process in opposition to a mere prolonging of the present into the future. The third chapter focuses on the strategy of soft montage in works by Harun Farocki. I interpret Farocki’s application of soft montage in the exhibition Serious Games I-IV (2009-2010) as a critical engagement with anticipatory forms of organizing power and distributing precarity. His work series Parallel I-IV (2012-2014) is then analyzed as a speculation on the future of image production technologies and their role in constructing futures. The final chapter analyses the self-referential use of computer-generated renderings in works by Hito Steyerl. The installations How Not To Be Seen (2013), Liquidity Inc. (2014), The Tower (2015) and ExtraSpaceCraft (2016) are read as interventions in the performative economies of contemporary image production. I argue that these works allow us to grasp the reality-producing and futurity-producing effects of rendering as anticipatory cultural technique. My thesis aims to contribute to the discussions on a ‘turn towards the future’ in contemporary philosophy and cultural criticism. My research thus focuses on the following set of questions. What can we learn about the operations of future construction through encounters with post-cinematic art? How are futures and future construction framed in such art? What realisms do future constructions rely on? And how can anticipation as a cultural technique be politicized and democratized?Gates Cambridge Scholarship AHRC Doctoral Stipend King's College Cambridg

KEER2022

Avanttítol: KEER2022. DiversitiesDescripció del recurs: 25 juliol 202

From Fan Videos to Crowdsourcing: The Political Economy of User-Driven Online Media Platforms and Practices

Following its rise to popularity from 2004 onwards, an increasingly idealistic and dominant conception of platforms, practices, and projects shaped by the Web 2.0 paradigm or the Social Web would emerge and rehabilitate past utopian assertions about the democratizing, participatory, and collaborative potential of the Internet, so as to attractively characterize them as enabling radically empowering forms of online participation by average citizens. In this dissertation, the core features of the affectively charged discourse surrounding this growing media environment are critically examined in order to understand their misleading character and supportive function within the communicative economy of contemporary neoliberal capitalism and the media apparatus of flexible control strategies that sustains it. Moreover, with the help of critical-theoretical, political-economic, and autonomist theories, this dissertation analyzes a set of representative online media practices driven by users and embodying the individualistic and collective incarnations of the Social Web — such as YouTube-based gameplay commentary videos and fanvid parodies of animated media from Japan along with key examples of media crowdsourcing like the Life in a Day documentary and the Star Wars Uncut remake project. Its analysis of these case studies exposes how the above media apparatus of strategies and decisions increasingly shaping this digital media ecosystem, while encouraging the creative agency of online users, often results in its flexible control by corporate interests and the formation of new forms of power relations, inequality, and exploitation

Indentity-in-motion : the narrative duration of the dis/continous film moment

The trajectorv of this thesis is set out like a journey upon which encounters are staged between two films. film theor), and philosophers. such as Slavoj Zizek. Gilles Deletize, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. An encounter with a moment of image suspension. a cut to the blank screen- in Tacita Dean's film, Disappearance atSea (1996). motivates the beginning of this journey's narrative. My reading of this moment counters the way that suspended film moments have been discussed in terms of non-narrative in 1970s film theory and in the contemporary psychoanalýlic filin theory of Slavoj Zizek. Using Gilles Deleuze's notion of narrativization as a process of serialization. I argue that the supposedly non-narrative moment is coextensive with the spectator's dis/continuity in time as opposed to Slavoj Zizek's static suspension or film theory's distanciation. A performative text based on Disappearance at Sea, which I refer to as a 'montage text' and for which precedence is found in Roland Barthes' writing, acts as an interlude that runs in tandem to the main theoretical trajectory. The generativity of absence that emerges from these encounters, both theoretical and poetic. is heightened in the second half of the thesis by the appearance of another 'montage text' based on Chantal Akerrnan's News From Home (1976). In this text. I reconfigure the negativity of historical readings of absence in Neus From Home where it was related to the impossible question of a woman's desire. In my reconfiguration, absence. rather than suspending time. generates a temporalized space and a spatialized time in which the spectator performs the dis/continuity of narrative duration. In the theoretical trajectory of this movement, Gilles Deleuze is hybridized with aspects of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, my argument being that the sublime infinity of Deleuzian serialization requires a relation to embodiment in order for it to be useftil in considering the spectator's relation to the two film encounters with absence. I read this hybridization in terms of a feminine mode of the sublime, which suggests the possibility of the real rather than its negation in representation and contributes to current thinking in feminist philosophy, particularly the work of Elizabeth Grosz

The Politics of Racial Translation : Negotiating Foreignness and Authenticity in Russophone Intersectional Feminism and Timati's Hip-hop (2012-2018)

Hva skjer med rase-, kjønns- og seksualitetspolitikk i interseksjonell feminisme og hiphop når de forflytter seg østover til postsovjetiske, russiskspråklige kontekster? Denne avhandlingen utforsker oversettelsens betydning i sirkulasjonen av det amerikanske, engelskspråklige idiomet ‘rase som motstand’ i russiskspråklige tilpasninger av hiphop og interseksjonalitet i perioden 2012-2018. Ved hjelp av digital etnografi, diskursanalyse og nærlesing av et utvalg musikkvideoer, analyseres to oversettelsesprosjekter empirisk: en russiskspråklig grasrotside for interseksjonell feminisme, FIO (Feminist Intersectionality Against Oppression), og den – i Russland kontroversielle – tatarisk-jødiske hiphop-entreprenøren Timati. Denne avhandlingen, som befinner seg i skjæringspunktet mellom kjønns- og seksualitetsstudier, rase- og etnisitetsforskning og postsovjetiske kulturstudier, framhever oversettelse både i sitt teoretiske rammeverk og i metodologisk forskningsdesign. Teoretisk er avhandlingens tilnærming til oversettelse inspirert av feministisk teori, feministisk antropologi og oversettelsesstudier, samt av transnasjonale perspektiver på rasialisering og den voksende forskningen på rase i Russland. Metodologisk trekker avhandlingen på verktøy fra oversettelsesstudier og sosiolingvistikk. Ved å begrepsligjøre oversettelse som en forutsetning for geografisk forflytning av ideer, som et sted for forhandling der ting produseres som ‘fremmede’, og som en generativ snarere enn imiterende prosess, spør den hva raseoversettelse frambringer og hvorfor noen oversettelsesprosjekter framstilles som mer fremmede enn andre. Metoden er å spore hvordan fremmedhet tilskrives ulike objekter, samt å undersøke de oversettelsesstrategiene som brukes i de to nevnte empiriske tilfellene når de gjengir engelskspråklige rasekategorier som ‘white’, ‘black’, ‘people of color’ og ‘women of color’. I tillegg til å undersøke hvilke generative effekter oversettelsene har, bruker studien en multimodal tilnærming som overskrider de semantiske grensene til etnorasekategorier og muliggjør utforsking av rasemessig oversettelse på tvers av flere semiotiske moduser. Avhandlingen begrepsligjør rasemessig oversettelse som gjennomsyret av kjønns- og seksualitetsdynamikk, innebygd i geopolitiske konfrontasjoner og informert av russisk imperial arv, og argumenterer for at rasemessig oversettelse er generativ på flere sentrale måter. Den rasemessige oversettelsen skaper nye og moderne formspråk (russofon interseksjonell feminisme og russisk kommersiell hiphop), kronotopisk plasserte former for personlighet knyttet til bestemte oversettelsesstrategier eller motstand mot dem, samt affektive responser og bestridelser av oversettelsesvalg og oversettelsesprosjekter som stigmatiseres eller verdsettes som ‘fremmede’. De som oversetter, tilnærmer seg det engelskspråklige formspråket ‘rase som motstand’ som ‘fremmed og moderne’, og indekserer en avansert tid og et avansert sted, USA, for å styrke, reparere og modernisere russiskspråklig feminisme og russiske musikkscener. Begge oversettelsesprosjektene posisjonerer fremmedgjøring som en kilde til modernisering, noe som forklarer predisposisjonen for fremmedgjørende oversettelsesstrategier. Fremmedgjørende oversettelsesstrategier og motviljen mot bokstavtrohet i postsovjetiske, russiskspråklige kontekster, kan imidlertid gjøre oversetterne selv fremmede, noe som fremmer jakten på originalitet, forsøk på å forhandle oversettelsens stigma og å reparere kronisk inautentisitet. På nettsidene til det russiskspråklige, interseksjonelle feministiske digitale fellesskapet, skaper moderatorenes tilbøyelighet til translitterasjoner en form for uro, beskyldninger om uforståelighet og en slags motvilje for språkblanding. Moderatorenes rolle som en kosmopolitisk, tospråklig, feministisk elite skiller seg fra vanlige russiskspråklige lesere. Interseksjonalitet sirkulerer som en feministisk kronotop, som FIO ser for seg som en feministisk fremtid, et botemiddel mot den russiskspråklige feminismens rasisme, homofobi og transfobi. Feministiske kronotoper blir brukt i diskusjoner rundt oversettelse og blant annet utnyttet i lokale kronotopiske forestillinger om russisk bakstreverskhet og slavofil trangsynthet. Den bokstavelige oversettelsen av kategorien ‘hvit’ genererer figurer som ‘hvit mann’ og ‘hvite kvinner’ og inngår i det russiskspråklige interseksjonelle feministiske formspråket. Produksjonen av modererende antirasistisk hvithet-i-oversettelse mobiliserer kronotopiske figurer av tilbakestående rasistiske andre som komparativ kontrast til mer moderne kunnskap. Den driver også frem spørsmål om grensene for oversettbarheten til kategorien ‘hvit’ for den situerte antirasistiske post-sovjetiske praksisen i kommentartrådene, inkludert den skiftende kategorien Кавказцы/Kaukasiere. Manglende oversettelse av kategoriene ‘people of color’ og ‘women of color’ genererer blant annet søken etter en postsovjetisk ‘woman of color’ som et russiskspråklig interseksjonelt feministisk subjekt. Slik kanoniseres “rå” oversettelse, den transspråklige spredningen av etno-rasistiske kategorier og instrumentaliseringen av figuren ‘trans woman of color’ av russiskspråklige radfem som et tegn på den russiskspråklige interseksjonalitetens totale fremmedhet. Begrepet realia brukes i materialet som en søken etter å lokalisere det amerikanske raseidiomet og for å belyse særtrekkene ved den post-sovjetiske etnorasiske maktdynamikken. I undersøkelsen av raseoversettelse i Timatis hiphop, vises det hvordan Timati, ved å kombinere amerikansk svart hiphop-estetikk med russisk glamour på 2000-tallet, brukte uoversatt amerikansk svarthet som en kosmopolitisk kulturell kapital for å motvirke volden i den post-sovjetiske rasialiseringen. Ved å nærme seg amerikansk svart estetikk gjennom direkte erfaring med ‘kilden’, fikk Timati transnasjonal suksess med sin etnorasiale formbarhet og evne til å formidle mellom postsovjetiske markeder, lokale økonomiske eliter, amerikansk raseautentisitet og amerikanske hiphop-kjendiser. Han bidro derimot neppe til å avhjelpe hiphopens kroniske inautentisitet i Russland. Forsøk på å håndtere stigmaet fremmedhet og imitasjon, og å oppnå sterkere hiphop-autentisitet på hjemmebane, markerte en reorientering av Timatis prosjekt for rasemessig oversettelse. Fra 2012-2013 figurerer Kaukasus og kaukasiske maskuliniteter som ‘regionale originaler’, noe som gjør det mulig for Timati å oversette den amerikanske svarte maskuliniteten som ligger til grunn for amerikansk hiphop-autentisitet. Han tar i bruk ulike strategier, som ‘vikarierende autentisitet’, memetikk og hiphop-homofobi, og skaper en homofobisk hiphop-meykhana-cipher og visuelle, imperiale troper av et kaukasisk sublim. Skjegget som rasemessig/seksuell metonymi er sentralt for å forstå Timatis prosjekt for rasemessig oversettelse i 2014-2015, som er involvert i seksuell geopolitikk mellom øst og vest. Gjennom hiphop-modernitet og tvillingfantasien om etnisk raseblanding og sentralasiatiske migranters økonomiske oppsving i Russland, oppvurderes den etniske andre fra å være symbol på en sikkerhetstrussel (skjeggete terrorister) til å bli moderne, homofob og kul – og slik i stand til å sikre Russlands organiske og multinasjonale fremtid mot et angivelig korrupt og seksuelt perverst Europa. Høydepunktet i Timatis prosjekt for rasemessig oversettelse i 2014-2016 resulterte i oppfinnelsen av en bevisst memetisk karakter, Teymuraz, som iscenesetter rasistiske klisjeer av kaukasiske og sentralasiatiske menn. Teymuraz, som en del av Russlands hybridkulturelle trend med estetisk populisme, resirkulerer elementer fra New East gopnik-stil, sovjetiske og postsovjetiske komedier om menn fra Kaukasus og Sentral-Asia, blander elementer av samfunnskritikk og tilegner seg de subalternes stemmer. Han utgjør med dette et særegent patriotisk, antirasistisk prosjekt med motstridende implikasjoner. Timatis lekne fremføringer av patriotisme og performativ disidentifikasjon fra USA som kilde til hiphop i 2015 forstår hiphop-patriotisme som en strategi for å lokalisere hiphop i den skiftende geopolitiske konteksten av Russlands vending bort fra Vesten. Russiske diskurser om hiphop-autentisitet, som er opptatt av å oppdage og avsløre plagiat i Timatis arbeid, gir stemme til et særegent arbeid med å skille ‘ekte’ hiphop fra ‘falsk’ hiphop. Dette arbeidet bygger på rasistiske diskurser om handel og umoral, og markerer Timati som ‘fremmed’ - både utenfor sjangerens og den russiske nasjonens grenser – og avslører en russisk etnonasjonal skjevhet som ligger til grunn for russiske diskurser om hiphop-autentisitet. Nøkkelord: oversettelse, interseksjonalitet, rase, etnorasisk, postsovjetisk, russisk hiphop, rap, russisk rap, grasrotfeminisme, digital feminisme, feministiske kronotoper, feministisk oversettelse, feministisk aktivisme, populærmusikk, Russland, russofon, oversettelsesstrategier, litteralisme, translitterasjon, homofobi, transfobi, vikarierende autentisitet, memetikk, realia, rasemessig/seksuell metonymi, indeksikalitet, multimodalitet, den kalde krigen, russisk populærkultur, digital aktivisme, autentisitet, hiphop-maskuliniteter, rasialisering, Kaukasus, Sentral-Asia.What happens to race, gender, and sexuality politics of intersectional feminism and hip-hop when they travel eastwards into post-Soviet Russophone contexts? This thesis explores the role of translation in the circulations of the US Anglophone idiom ‘race as resistance’ in 2012-2018 Russophone adaptations of hip-hop and intersectionality. Drawing on the digital ethnography, discourse analysis, and close reading of a selection of music videos, it empirically analyzes two translation projects: a grassroots Russophone translation-based intersectional feminist page, FIO (Feminist Intersectionality Against Oppression) and – a controversial in Russia – Tatar-Jewish hip-hop entrepreneur, Timati. This thesis, situated at the intersection of gender and sexuality studies, race and ethnicity research, and post-Soviet cultural studies, foregrounds translation in its theoretical framework and methodological research design. Theoretically, the dissertation’s approach to translation is inspired by feminist theory, feminist anthropology, and translation studies, as well as by transnational perspectives on racialization and the growing scholarship on race in Russia. Methodologically it draws on the tools from translation studies and sociolinguistics. Conceptualizing translation as a precondition for travel, as a site of negotiation where things are produced as ‘foreign’ and as a generative rather than imitative process, this thesis asks what racial translation generates and why some translation projects are rendered as more foreign than others. The method is to track the attributions of foreignness and examine the translation strategies used by the two projects mentioned above when rendering English-language racial categories such as ‘white,’ ‘black,’ ‘people of color,’ and ‘women of color.’ The study also uses the multimodal approach that goes beyond the limits of the semantics of ethnoracial categories, allowing for the exploration of racial translation across multiple semiotic modes. Conceptualizing racial translation as saturated in gender and sexuality dynamics, embedded in geopolitical confrontations, and informed by Russian imperial legacies, the thesis argues that racial translation is generative in several central ways. It creates novel and modern idioms (Russophone intersectional feminism and Russian commercial hip-hop), chronotopically positioned types of personhood associated with particular translation strategies or resistance to them, as well as affective responses and contestations of translation choices and translation projects stigmatized or valorized as ‘foreign.’ The translators approach the Anglophone idiom of ‘race as resistance’ as ‘foreign and modern,’ indexing advanced time and place, the USA, brought up to invigorate, repair, and modernize Russophone feminisms and Russian music scenes. Both translation projects position foreignization as a source of modernization, explaining the predisposition for foreignizing translation strategies. However, foreignizing translation strategies and the aversion to literalism within post-Soviet Russophone contexts may render translators themselves foreign, propelling the search for originality, the attempts to negotiate the stigma of translation, and to repair chronic inauthenticity. On the pages of the Russophone intersectional feminist community, the moderators’ predisposition to transliterations generates visceral unease, accusations of unintelligibility, anxieties about the language mixing, and the roles of moderators as cosmopolitan bilingual feminist elites different from ordinary Russophone readers. Intersectionality circulates as a feminist chronotope, envisioned by FIO as a feminist future, a remedy against exclusions within Russophone feminisms such as racism, homophobia, and transphobia. Circulating feminist chronotopes are used in contestations around translation, harnessed on local chronotopic imaginaries such as Russian peasant backwardness and Slavophile parochialism. The literal translation of the category ‘white’ generates figures such as ‘white man’ and ‘white women,’ which enter the Russophone intersectional feminist idiom. The production of anti-racist whiteness-in-translation mobilizes chronotopic figures of backward racist others in comparative contrast with more modern bodies of knowledge and types of personhood. It also propels the questioning of the limits of the translatability of the category ‘white’ for the situated anti-racist post-Soviet praxis in the comment threads, including the shifting category Кавказцы/Caucasians. Non-translation of the categories ‘people of color’ and ‘women of color’ generates, amongst other things, the search for a post-Soviet ‘woman of color’ as a Russophone intersectional feminist subject, the canonization of raw translation, the translingual proliferation of ethnoracial categories and the instrumentalization of the figure of ‘trans woman of color’ by Russophone radfem as a mark of Russophone intersectionality’s total foreignness. Finally, the term realia emerged in the empirical materials as the quest for localizing the US idiom of race, adjusting intersectionality to the specificities of post-Soviet ethnoracial power dynamics. Within the project of racial translation in Timati’s hip-hop, I show how Timati marrying of US black hip-hop aesthetics and Russian glamour in the 2000s deployed untranslated foreign US blackness as a cosmopolitan cultural capital to alleviate the violence of post-Soviet racialization. Approximating US black aesthetics through the direct experience of ‘the source,’ Timati’s ethnoracial malleability and capacity to mediate between post-Soviet markets, local economic elites, US racial authenticity, and US hip-hop celebrities brought him international success, yet hardly helped alleviate chronic hip-hop inauthenticity in Russia. Attempts to manage the stigma of foreignness and imitation and hence achieve a stronger hip-hop authenticity domestically marked a reorientation of Timati’s project of racial translation. From 2012-2013, the Caucasus and Caucasian masculinities figure as ‘regional originals,’ allowing Timati to translate the US black masculinity underpinning US hip-hop authenticity through the strategies of vicarious realness, memetics, and hip-hop homophobia in a gay bashing hip-hop meykhana cipher and visual Imperial tropes of the Caucasian sublime. The beard as racial/sexual metonymy is central for understanding Timati’s project of racial translation involved in East-West sexual geopolitics in the period of 2014-2015: through hip-hop modernity and the twin fantasy of ethnoracial mixing and Central Asian migrant economic uplift in Russia, the ethnoracial other is revalorized away from the image of the security threat (bearded terrorist) as modern, homophobic and cool, able to secure Russia’s organic and multinational future against corrupt and sexually perverse Europe. The pinnacle of Timati’s project of racial translation in 2014-2016 resulted in the invention of a deliberately memetic character, Teymuraz, enacting racialized cliches of Caucasian and Central Asian men. Teymuraz, as part of Russia’s hybrid cultural trend of aesthetic populism, recycles the elements of New East gopnik style, Soviet and post-Soviet comedies about men from the Caucasus and Central Asia, mixes elements of social critique, and appropriates the voices of the subaltern, performing a peculiar patriotic anti-racist project with contradictory implications. Timati’s 2015 ludic performances of hip-hop patriotism, coupled with performative disidentifications from the USA as a source of hip-hop, are read as a strategy of hip-hop localization in the changing geopolitical context of Russia’s turn away from the West. Russian discourses of hip-hop authenticity, preoccupied with detecting and exposing plagiarism in Timati’s work, serve to discern ‘real’ hip-hop from ‘fake’ hip-hop. These acts of discernment draw on the racialized discourses of commerce and immorality, marking Timati as ‘foreign’ - both outside the borders of the genre and the Russian nation – thus exposing the Russian ethnonational bias underpinning Russian discourses of hip-hop authenticity. Keywords: translation, intersectionality, race, ethnoracial, post-Soviet, Russian hip-hop, hip-hop, rap, Russian rap, grassroots feminism, digital feminism, feminist chronotopes, feminist translation, feminist activism, popular music, Russia, Russophone, translation strategies, literalism, transliteration, homophobia, transphobia, vicarious realness, memetics, realia, racial/sexual metonymy, indexicality, multimodality, Cold War, Russian popular culture, digital activism, authenticity, hip-hop masculinities, racialization, Caucasus, Central Asia.Doktorgradsavhandlin

"All the Feels!”: Music, Critique and Affect in Fanmade Music Videos

This study explores the fan practice of vidding and the resulting works, vids. Vids, created within transformative media fandom, are narrative grassroots music videos, which argue something about their visual source/s and use the combination of music and moving images to do so. I argue that the use of music in vids is a key element in creating meaning, and that affect is a central part of how this happens. Thereby, vids play an important part in fandom's 'feels' culture as critical reflections on media that also inspire such reflection in their (fan) audiences. Previous studies of vids have established their narrative nature and their ability to communicate through images and lyrics, but have not explored the role of music or affect in this. This study investigates these two factors. Drawing on a theoretical framework that engages with fan studies, audiovisual music and affect, I introduce an innovative ethnographic methodology, that incorporates interviews with vidders, analysis of vids where music analysis is included and online observation of their reception. I show how such an approach allows for scholars to understand a vid's ability to communicate through an audiovisual language comprised of music and images together. The findings from this method are interrogated using a theoretical framework that incorporates fan studies, audiovisual music studies and affect theory. I argue that vids speak through an audiovisual language that is received and understood within media fandom, and that 'feels' are a central part of the communication in this language. 'Feels', inspired through music and editing, are important to how a vid becomes critically reflexive and to its ability to inspire critical engagement in other fans. Vids merit further study within not only fan studies, but musicology and wider media studies because of their ability to communicate in this manner

Toward media collection-based storytelling

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2007.Includes bibliographical references (p. 113-118).Life is filled with stories. Modern technologies enable us to document and share life events with various kinds of media, such as photos, videos, etc. But people still find it time-consuming to select and arrange media fragments to create coherent and engaging narratives. This thesis proposes a novel storytelling system called Storied Navigation, which lets users assemble a sequence of video clips based on their roles in telling a story, rather than solely by explicit start and end times. Storied Navigation uses textual annotations expressed in unconstrained natural language, using parsing and Commonsense reasoning to deduce possible connections between the narrative intent of the storyteller, and descriptions of events and characters in the video. It helps users increase their familiarity with a documentary video corpus. It helps them develop story threads by prompting them with recommendations of alternatives as well as possible continuations for each selected video clip. We view it as a promising first step towards transforming today's fragmented media production experience into an enjoyable, integrated storytelling activity.Edward Yu-Te Chen.S.M

Digital Jianghu: Independent Documentary in a Beijing Art Village

My ethnography explores the independent documentary film community in Songzhuang, an artist village in Beijing's Tongzhou District. Through participant-observation, interviews, participation in festivals, and my own filmmaking practice, I describe filmmakers and festival organizers as cultural producers endeavoring to work outside the confines of both the government and the mainstream cinema industry. To offer an analysis of the social, political, economic, and ethical conditions of this independent film community, my study also focuses on concrete practices of filmmakers and film supporters; privately-owned centers and social networks that enable the production, exhibition, and distribution of films; and the relationship between this community and government regulation. I argue that the independent documentary community constitutes a jianghu (literally, “rivers and lakes”), which, drawing from Chinese literature, I delimit as a social world of marginality and resistance against the status quo. Further, jianghu refers not only to independent filmmakers, but also to millions of “migrants” within the Chinese population who, even as they provide labor that fuels development, nonetheless subsist on the margins. This study also considers the efforts of filmmakers and scholars to elucidate a Chinese visual aesthetic, which has been called xianchang (“on the spot”) and, most recently, jingguan dianying (“quiet observational cinema”). These indigenous framings counter eurocentric notions of documentary and prevail among the majority of independent directors as an aesthetic wellsuited to represent the “cruelty of the social,” a term I introduce to describe social suffering born not only of China’s modern history of pain but also its contemporary turbulent era. I draw together the issues of distribution, social impact, and economic stability for independent documentary, as well as document the role of the state in quelling, censoring, and co-opting independent film. I conclude by exploring xianchang and my own filmmaking practice as advancing a form of knowledge that, owing to its experiential quality and its refusal to simplify and reduce phenomena into cultural data, is well-suited to represent the inherent complexity of Chinese society. Finally, a coda documents recent government oppression and festival cancellations to argue that the current moment is one of grave uncertainty for Chinese independent film.Anthropolog

A Holmes and Doyle Bibliography, Volume 5: Periodical Articles--Secondary References, Alphabetical Listing

This bibliography is a work in progress. It attempts to update Ronald B. De Waal’s comprehensive bibliography, The Universal Sherlock Holmes, but does not claim to be exhaustive in content. New works are continually discovered and added to this bibliography. Readers and researchers are invited to suggest additional content. Volume 5 includes "passing" or "secondary" references, i.e. those entries that are passing in nature or contain very brief information or content

Examining university student satisfaction and barriers to taking online remote exams

Recent years have seen a surge in the popularity of online exams at universities, due to the greater convenience and flexibility they offer both students and institutions. Driven by the dearth of empirical data on distance learning students' satisfaction levels and the difficulties they face when taking online exams, a survey with 562 students at The Open University (UK) was conducted to gain insights into their experiences with this type of exam. Satisfaction was reported with the environment and exams, while work commitments and technical difficulties presented the greatest barriers. Gender, race and disability were also associated with different levels of satisfaction and barriers. This study adds to the increasing number of studies into online exams, demonstrating how this type of exam can still have a substantial effect on students experienced in online learning systems and technologies