Inferencia de la respuesta afectiva de los espectadores de un video

In this project we propose the automatic analysis of the relation between the audiovisual characteristics of a multimedia production and the impact caused in its audience. With this aim, potential synergies are explored between different areas of knowledge including, among others: audiovisual communication, computer vision, multimodal systems, biometric sensors, social network analysis, opinion mining, and affective computing. Our efforts are oriented towards combining these technologies to introduce novel computational models that could predict the reactions of spectators to multimedia elements across different media and moments. On the one hand, we study the cognitive and emotional response of the spectators while they are watching the media instances, using neuroscience techniques and biometric sensors. On the other hand, we also study the reaction shown by the audience on social networks by relying on the automatic collection and analysis of different metadata related to the media elements, such as popularity, sharing patterns, ratings and commentaries.Este proyecto propone el análisis de la posible dependencia entre el contenido audiovisual de una producción multimedia y el impacto causado por ésta en sus espectadores. Para ello, nos apoyamos en diferentes áreas de conocimiento tales como comunicación audiovisual, visión por computador, sistemas multimodales, sensores biométricos, análisis de redes sociales, análisis de opinión o computación afectiva, entre otras, con el objetivo de diseñar nuevos modelos computacionales que permitan predecir las reacciones de los espectadores de un video de forma transversal a los medios y momentos en que éstas se producen. Trabajamos principalmente con dos tipos de respuesta: la respuesta cognitiva y emocional inmediata de los espectadores durante el visionado, que medimos utilizando técnicas de neurociencia y sensores biométricos, y la reacción expresada en redes sociales, cuyo impacto es cuantificado mediante el análisis automático de diferentes metadatos recabados para dichos videos, tales como popularidad, patrones de compartición, valoraciones y comentarios realizados en las redes.The work leading to these results has been supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness through the ESITUR (MINECO, RTC-2016-5305-7), CAVIAR (MINECO, TEC2017-84593-C2-1-R), and AMIC (MINECO, TIN2017-85854-C4-4-R) projects (AEI/FEDER, UE)

Sex Sells: The Iconography of Sex Work in Contemporary Art Since 1973

Sex Sells: The Iconography of Sex Work in Contemporary Art Since 1973, explores contemporary renderings of the sex worker as a response to the heavily constructed formalist ideology of the “pure gaze” which privileged the heterosexual male voyeur. The analysis covers a broad range of media, sectioned off into three chapters—painting and photography, body art, and systemic critiques—to explore the affordances of each in critiquing the position of the voyeur as well as the larger capitalistic system. The first chapter investigates the ways in which realistic pictorial renderings depicted the sex worker to impose the voyeuristic viewing position of pornography onto the art-viewer. The second focuses on the relationship between the viewer and the commodified female body, as performers replaced the art commodity with their sexualized bodies. The third chapter discusses larger institutional critiques which illuminate the processes of class structuring in capitalism by recreating the capitalist exploitation or institutional shortcomings of our current sociopolitical system. Taken together, these works respond to the modernist commodification of the art object and female sexuality, which formalist viewing dynamics both reflected and promoted. The artists emphasize the real ramifications of class construction and relational or performative identity to understand how larger social processes play out on certain marginalized bodies, thus highlighting the inherent problems embedded in these social, cultural, and economic systems

'A film should be like a stone in your shoe': a Brechtian reading of Lars von Trier

This central premise of this thesis is that Lars von Trier is a political director. Through a detailed formal analysis of five films I proceed to discuss the political implications of form, something that has not been acknowledged by scholarship so far. In this thesis, I employ Brecht as a methodological tool so as to discuss the shift from a dialectical cinema devoted to the production of knowledge effects, to a post-Brechtian one that brings together points of tension that remain unresolved. Chapter 1 proceeds to a historical evaluation of Brecht’s reception in film theory and considers the ways that Brecht’s theory and practice can address the cinematic and political concerns of the present. The chapter also locates von Trier under the rubric of the post-Brechtian by comparing him to past film practices. Chapter 2 moves to a discussion of von Trier’s Europa trilogy and focuses on issues of historical representation. Emphasis is placed on formal elements that challenge the narrative laws of classical cinema. The chapter argues that von Trier follows Brecht’s mistrust of a historical representation based on pictorial verisimilitude, without however sharing his forward-looking politics and his view of history as Marxist science. Chapter 3 discusses Dogme 95 and The Idiots (1998). Firstly, the chapter discusses Dogme’s combination of a political modernist rhetoric with a realist one and places Dogme’s return to the past in a historical context. Secondly, the chapter considers the role of performance as a formal and thematic element in The Idiots. I draw attention to the ways that the camera becomes performative and brings together material of dramaturgical importance with moments that are the product of cinematic contingency. My discussion is very much informed by contemporary post-Brechtian performance and film studies invested in the discussion of ‘corporeal cinema’. Chapter 4 discusses Dogville, a film with obvious references to Brecht. Unlike previous readings, I shift the emphasis from the film’s assumed ‘Anti-Americanism’ and proceed to a formal analysis that can rethink the film’s politics and innovations. While Brecht has been thought to be as a fleeting presence in von Trier’s films by most critics, this thesis suggests that our knowledge of von Trier’s formal innovations can be deepened and enlivened by discussing them in conjunction with Brecht’s theory. By returning to Brecht, we can also rethink the importance of form as the key to a film’s politics

ETHICS AND POLITICS IN NEW EXTREME FILMS

PhD thesisThis thesis investigates a corpus of controversial, mainly European films from 1998 to 2013, to determine which features have led to their critical description as ‘new extreme’ films and according to what ethical framework ‘new extreme’ films operate. These films feature provocative depictions of sex and violence, and have been decried as misogynistic, homophobic and racist. I contend, firstly, that the extremity in ‘new extreme’ films is best understood as an unresolved tension between opposites such as inside/outside and convention/transgression. This definition draws on work on the ‘extreme’ by sociologist Patrick Baudry and art historian Paul Ardenne. Secondly, I argue that these films employ an ethical framework based on confrontational aesthetic strategies which challenge dominant interpretations of images of sex and violence, a framework similar to the image-based ethics of Kaja Silverman, Petra Kuppers and Wendy Kozol. In this way, ‘new extreme’ films destabilise interpretations of images of women, pornography, nationhood, sex, violence, race and sexuality. This thesis contends that a definition of extremity based on unresolved tensions elucidates the specificity of ‘new extreme’ films whose opposites manifest themselves on formal, aesthetic, narrative, generic and political levels. I argue that these opposites can be linked to an image- based ethical framework, both of which are best understood by examining what is visible or obscured, how close to or distanced from the images we feel and for how long we endure the images. Exploring visibility and obscurity (Krzywinska, White), haptics and sensation (Beugnet, Marks), and ‘processive’ duration (Keeling), I contend that particular strategies of visibility, proximity and duration provoke visceral reactions of disgust, arousal, nausea and shock. Using shocking visibility and undecipherable obscurity, haptic close-ups and distanced long shots, rapid editing and extended takes, new extreme films undermine stable viewing positions thereby challenging our interpretations of images of sex and violence

Embodiment and the Digital Continuum: Post-Cinematic Diffractions in Ex Machina, Her, and Under The Skin

This thesis explores ties between three recent films: Her (2013), Under the Skin (2013), and Ex Machina (2015). I will argue that each of these films incorporates a distinct post-cinematic aesthetic – 1) digitally rendered eco-cinema, 2) hyper-informatic cinema, and 3) transmedia – while narratively working through how bodies are becoming entangled with and porous to their increasingly affective and convergent media. Each of these films show human bodies in-becoming-with technology, both in terms of narrative (or diegesis), and the non-diegetic processes of computer-generated imagery, sonic manipulation and audiovisual or rhythmic intensification that manipulate and digitize bodies as captured by the camera. Each film thus reflexively expresses through post-cinematic affect the spatiotemporal and corporeal discontents associated with the digital shift or the “audiovisual turn” (Vernallis 2013) when humans and technology are in a moment of coevolution: bodies, space, and technology fold into each other and become equalized phenomena, tied by an increasingly reciprocal bio-digital flow

African Luxury

Moving far beyond predominant views of Africa as a place to be 'saved', and even more recent celebratory formulations of it as 'rising', African Luxury: Aesthetics and Politics highlights and critically interrogates the visual and material cultures of lavish and luxurious consumption already present on the continent. Methodologically, conceptually and analytically, the collection dismantles taken-for-granted ideas that the West is the source and focus of high-end and hyper-desirable material cultures. It explores what the culture of consumption means in Africa in both historical and contemporary contexts, studying diverse luxury phenomena including fashion advertising, reality television, retail, gendered consumption and gardening to re-centre the discussion on existing contemporary luxury cultures across the continent

Sexcams in a Dollhouse: Social Reproduction and the Platform Economy

Once a peripheral phenomenon on the Web, sexcam platforms have been gaining social and economic importance, attracting millions of visitors every day. Crucial to this popularity is the technical and economic model that some of those sites use. Sexcam platforms combine the practices of labor and user-generated platforms. As platforms, they mediate between users and providers, becoming the field where those operations occur. Sexcam platforms, however, are more than intermediaries, and their structures incorporate and reproduce discriminatory conventions. Sexcams in a Dollhouse: Social Reproduction and the Platform Economy is a research-creation project exploring digital labor through the American sexcam platform Chaturbate.com. Rather than treating this platform as an exception, this project invites the consideration of Chaturbate as a paradigmatic instance of work in the context of platform capitalism. Sexcam platforms, this research argues, illustrate recent changes in the notions of what is work and what is leisure, what generates value, or the shifting nature of social relations through social media. Using a made-up dollhouse as an interface and stage, this project set up a series of performative interventions on the sexcam platform. Through humorous yet critical play, these pieces asked about the situation of social reproduction on the platform economy, the role of maintenance practices in the generation of value, and the incorporation of new technological infrastructures into daily life

Radical Communication: Politics after 1968 in/and Polish Cinema

The anniversary of 1968 provides an opportunity to revisit its unique intersection of revolutionary politics and collective creativity, in which cinema was caught up as never before—in the production of a certain political affect, global in its scope. This dissertation pursues what followed in its wake, using the case of People’s Poland, which saw an unprecedented labour struggle in the region just as things had begun to dissipate elsewhere—from the mid-1970s on—culminating in one of the largest social movements in human history, in 1980, the independent and free trade union Solidarność (Solidarity). In recuperating these years, we locate a corresponding, alternative history for Polish political aesthetics and radical cinema practice after 1968, using a combination of historical documentation, close reading, and theoretical intervention. Like the politics of 1968, and the horizontal organizing of Solidarity, these films put pressure on existing categories of “the political,” locating it an aesthetics of participation and the spirit of research, in which viewers play a large part in constructing meaning, rather than it being a function of a self-contained “political text.” Much of this grows out of the strong documentary tradition in Polish cinema, which the film artists under discussion then subvert, pushing beyond its limits. We see how, in different ways, contemporaries Grzegorz Królikiewicz (Ch. 1) and Krzysztof Kieślowski (Ch. 2 and 3) call into question this tradition—the former using an avant-garde/film-theoretical approach, and the latter developing an immanent critique of the capacity of cinema to represent (i.e., speak for) political reality. Piotr Szulkin (Ch. 4) adds to these a haptic, affective element that explicitly theorizes labour as the subject of cinema. Finally, Andrzej Żuławski (Ch. 5) pushes these haptic, affective, elements into the red, using a visceral approach that marries genre cinema and historical embodiment, drawing on the traditions of Polish Romanticism and utopianism. In sum, these films use viewer participation to forge an embodied, affective, negativizing cinema aesthetic able to encompass a wider array of human experience than that circumscribed by Party politics or the (male) discourse of the intellectual opposition. This we call radical communication

Erotic Transgressions: Pornographic Uses of the Victorian

This dissertation argues that while pornographic film asserts itself as the rebellious cousin to the literary and cinematic canon, it nonetheless relies on a particular Victorianness, transgressing and drawing on its perceived repressions and perversions for pornography’s own ostensible subversiveness. Through an analysis of pornographic adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, this project shows that the rupture and rearticulation of social and corporeal propriety constitutes pornography’s persistent appeal. These predominantly American pornographic texts, spanning 1974—2012, appropriate canonical British icons as a way of refuting the old world (framed as sexually repressed yet hypocritical) and establishing a postmodern American sexual identity (framed as sexually liberated and culturally savvy). Hardcore pornography is distinct in its unsimulated representation of sex, and its peculiar position at the intersection of legal, cultural, and spatial categorization and control. “Erotic Transgressions” shows the way pornography highlights postmodern culture’s interest in Victorian sexuality as a way of navigating our own fractured sexual identities. An analysis of these neo-Victorian texts reveals the intersections between public/private and desire/disgust in pornographic eroticism, and exposes the complicated ways in which consumers use pornography as a paradoxically disruptive and regulating medium