988 research outputs found
Thematic Fields, Transgressive Religion: Disembodiment and the Will to Nothingness in âSafe Havenâ
In my article, I examine a segment of the 2013 horror anthology, V/H/S/ 2. Entitled âSafe Havenâ and directed by young directors Timo Tjahjanto and Gareth Huw Evans, this segment stands out for its religious and metaphysical subject matter. Examining broader media theory concerns relating to the âfound-footage horrorâ subgenre, I consider how, during the course of âSafe Havenâ, the screen as frame is gradually supplanted by the increasingly unreal events portrayed in the segment. I seek to simultaneously engage with the question of realism in found footage films, while also utilizing Evan Calder-Williamsâ notion of âhorrible formâ to illuminate the various aesthetic features of Tjahjanto and Evansâ intensive work. In addition, I hope to shed new light on the found footage genre through utilizing some aspects of Aron Gurwitschâs neglected work in field psychology. Borrowing Gurwitschâs concept of âthematic fieldâ, I show how the various themes represented in âSafe Havenâ gradually modify the viewer experience, while also deforming the fields portrayed in the film. From a realistic, almost documentary film-style aesthetic, Tjahjanto and Evans transport us to a realm of transgressive religion. Beneath the form of religious piety, we uncover a transgressive spirituality, organized around what Friedrich Nietzsche characterizes in his Geneaology of Morals as the âwill to nothingness.â Beneath representation, the demonic lies in wait, eager to transcend the human element. Degrading everything it infects, the will to nothingness is born, tearing apart corporeality and, indeed, the realism of found footage as orphaned media. Both frame and body alike are torn to shreds. The key imperative of found-footage horror is the following: only the footage may remain intact
Beneath Still Waters: Brian Yuznaâs Ritualistic Return to Indonesian Cinema
This article offered the first academic consideration of American director/producer Brian Yuznaâs recent films in Indonesia. Since the mid 1980s, Yuzna worked across the USA, Europe and the Far East, pioneering a distinctive international brand of horror cinema combining social critique with explicit imagery. Despite these transnational credentials, Yuznaâs work in Indonesia was largely been ignored by those critics interested in reclaiming 1970s/80s genre entries as âlegitimateâ symbols of Indonesian cinema.
By considering Yuznaâs 2010 title Amphibious, I argued that the film contained elements of hybridity and generic impurity that critics such as Karl G. Heider have long attributed to Indonesian film traditions. As well as considering these transnational elements, the article explored connections between abject constructions of the transformative female body in both Indonesian film and Brian Yuznaâs wider cinema. The article also featured exclusive interviews with Brian Yuzna and screenwriter John Penney discussing the reception of the film
Out of body experiences: a practice-led evaluation of the shifting boundaries shared by analogue films and their digital counterparts
Phd ThesisThis thesis provides in-depth analysis of my practice-led PhD and the methods
used to focus on key areas of research - namely exploring the shifting
perceptual parameters revealed when analogue films are transferred to digital
formats. With this process audio-visual content previously locked inside filmâs
decaying form is resurrected as immaterial code within a malleable frame. My
work utilised this spectral quality to examine different layers of film
representation, observing its inner structure, while also stepping back to
contemplate its content from a self-reflexive distance.
These multiple viewpoints introduced unique spaces within which to study the
analogue past from a digital perspective:
The filmstripâs mechanically regulated motion seamlessly combines still images,
sound and light into analogue interpretations of space-time. My work digitally
desynchronised these elements, revealing the structural gaps between them
while also suggesting their merger with a new perceptual model.
Moving beyond internal film worlds to the boundaries they share with the
physical viewing space, another layer of disjointed separation was introduced
by producing screens that struggled to contain film content within their frames.
Stepping back further, these screens occupied a space caught between the
fixed viewpoint of a cinema and the multiple perspectives allowed by gallerybased
installations. The shifting frame of these hybrid spaces created an
oscillation between passive submersion within, and analytical distance from
mediated worlds.
By unmooring and offsetting the precise alignment between film structure,
screens and viewing spaces, my practice revealed overlapping edges and
disjointed spaces within which media from different eras interacted. This
opened up new areas of research that fed directly into my theoretical studies
(the thesis layout itself shifts outwards, from media structures to viewing
spaces). This approach enabled me to produce a substantial body of work,
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offering an original contribution to this field
Discovering visual concept structure with sparse and incomplete tags
This work was partially supported by the China Scholarship Council, Vision Semantics Limited, and Royal Society Newton Advanced Fellowship Programme (NA150459)
Large Scale Pattern Detection in Videos and Images from the Wild
PhDPattern detection is a well-studied area of computer vision, but still current methods are
unstable in images of poor quality. This thesis describes improvements over contemporary
methods in the fast detection of unseen patterns in a large corpus of videos that vary
tremendously in colour and texture definition, captured âin the wildâ by mobile devices
and surveillance cameras.
We focus on three key areas of this broad subject;
First, we identify consistency weaknesses in existing techniques of processing an image
and itâs horizontally reflected (mirror) image. This is important in police investigations
where subjects change their appearance to try to avoid recognition, and we propose that
invariance to horizontal reflection should be more widely considered in image description
and recognition tasks too. We observe online Deep Learning system behaviours in
this respect, and provide a comprehensive assessment of 10 popular low level feature
detectors.
Second, we develop simple and fast algorithms that combine to provide memory- and
processing-efficient feature matching. These involve static scene elimination in the presence
of noise and on-screen time indicators, a blur-sensitive feature detection that finds
a greater number of corresponding features in images of varying sharpness, and a combinatorial
texture and colour feature matching algorithm that matches features when
either attribute may be poorly defined. A comprehensive evaluation is given, showing
some improvements over existing feature correspondence methods.
Finally, we study random decision forests for pattern detection. A new method of
indexing patterns in video sequences is devised and evaluated. We automatically label
positive and negative image training data, reducing a task of unsupervised learning to
one of supervised learning, and devise a node split function that is invariant to mirror
reflection and rotation through 90 degree angles. A high dimensional vote accumulator
encodes the hypothesis support, yielding implicit back-projection for pattern detection.European Unionâs Seventh Framework Programme, specific
topic âframework and tools for (semi-) automated exploitation of massive amounts of digital data
for forensic purposesâ, under grant agreement number 607480 (LASIE IP project)
Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990
âPostmodernismâ was the final instalment of a 12-year series of V&A exhibitions exploring 20th-century design. It examined a diverse collection of creative practices in art, architecture, design, fashion, graphics, film, performance and pop music/video, which the curators, Pavitt and Adamson (V&A/RCA), identified under the common theme of âpostmodernismâ. The exhibition assessed the rise and decline of postmodern strategies in art and style cultures of the period, exploring their radical impact as well as their inextricable links with the economics and effects of late-capitalist culture. The exhibition comprised over 250 objects, including large-scale reconstructions and archive film/video footage, drawn from across Europe, Japan and the USA. It was the first exhibition to bring together this range of material and to foreground the significance of pop music and performance in the development of postmodernism.
Pavitt originated and co-curated the exhibition with Adamson. They shared intellectual ownership of the project and equal responsibility for writing and editing the accompanying 320-page book (including a 40,000-word jointly written introduction), but divided research responsibilities according to geography and subject. The research was conducted over four years, with Pavitt leading on European and British material. This involved interviewing artists, designers and architects active in the period and working with collections and archives across Europe. The research led to the acquisition of c.80 objects for the V&Aâs permanent collections, making it one of the most significant public collections of late-20th-century design in the world.
The exhibition was critically reviewed worldwide. For the Independent, âbright ideas abound at the V&Aâs lucid showâ (2011). It attracted 115,000 visitors at the V&A (15% over the Museumâs target) and travelled in 2012 to MART Rovereto, Italy (50,000 visitors) and Landesmuseum ZĂŒrich, Switzerland (70,000 visitors). Pavitt was invited to speak about the exhibition in the UK, USA, Poland, Portugal, Ireland and Italy (2010-12)
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