The challenges of using biodata in promotional filmmaking

We present a study of how filmmakers collected and visualised physiological data---'biodata'---to construct a series of short promotional films depicting people undergoing 'thrilling' experiences. Drawing on ethnographic studies of two major advertising campaigns, we highlight key concerns for integrating sensors and sensor data into film production. Our findings address the perceived benefits of using biodata within narratives; the nature of different on-screen representations of biodata; and the challenges presented when integrating biodata into production processes. Drawing on this, we reconsider the nature of information visualisation in the filmmaking context. Further implications from our case studies provide recommendations for HCI collaborations with filmmaking and broadcast industries, focussing both on the practical matters of fitting sensor technologies into and handling data within production workflows, as well as discussing the broader implications for managing the veracity of that data within professional media production

Design fiction for mixed-reality performances

Designing for mixed-reality performances is challenging both in terms of technology design, and in terms of understanding the interplay between technology, narration, and (the outcomes of) audience interactions. This complexity also stems from the variety of roles in the creative team often entailing technology designers, artists, directors, producers, set-designers and performers. In this multidisciplinary, one-day workshop, we seek to bring together HCI scholars, designers, artists, and curators to explore the potential provided by Design Fiction as a method to generate ideas for Mixed-Reality Performance (MRP) through various archetypes including scripts, programs, and posters. By drawing attention to novel interactive technologies, such as bio-sensors and environmental IoT, we seek to generate design fiction scenarios capturing the aesthetic and interactive potential for mixed-reality performances, as well as the challenges to gain access to audience members’ data – i.e. physiological states, daily routines, conversations, etc

What would Wittgenstein say about social media?

Much of the excitement in social media analytics revolves around, a) capturing large-scale collections of naturally-occurring talk, b) repurposing them as data, and, c) finding ways to speak sociologically about them. Researchers have raised concerns over the use of social media data in research (for example, boyd and Crawford, 2012; Housley et al, 2014; Tinati et al, 2014), exploring the ontological and epistemological grounding of the emerging field. We contribute to this debate by drawing on Wittgensteinian philosophy to elucidate hitherto neglected aspects; namely that it is not just social scientists who are in the business of analysing social media, but users themselves. We explore how mainstream social media analytics research (1) overinflates the importance of sociological theories, concepts and methodologies (which do not typically feature in the accounts of social media users), (2) downplays the extent to which social media platforms already exhibit order prior to any sociological accounting of them, and, (3) thereby produces findings which explain social scientific perspectives rather than the phenomena themselves. We reformulate the ontological and epistemological basis of social media analytics research from a Wittgensteinian perspective concerned with what it makes sense to say about social media, as members of society and as researchers studying those members. Such a project aims to explore social media users’ language as a practice embedded within the context of social life and online communication. This reflects the everyday use of language as an evolving toolkit for undertaking social interaction, pointing towards an alternative conception of social media analytics

The Cultural Traffic of Classic Indonesian Exploitation Cinema

Classic Indonesian exploitation films (originally produced, distributed, and exhibited in the New Order’s Indonesia from 1979 to 1995) are commonly negligible in both national and transnational cinema contexts, in the discourses of film criticism, journalism, and studies. Nonetheless, in the 2000s, there has been a global interest in re-circulating and consuming this kind of films. The films are internationally considered as “cult movies” and celebrated by global fans. This thesis will focus on the cultural traffic of the films, from late 1970s to early 2010s, from Indonesia to other countries. By analyzing the global flows of the films I will argue that despite the marginal status of the films, classic Indonesian exploitation films become the center of a taste battle among a variety of interest groups and agencies. The process will include challenging the official history of Indonesian cinema by investigating the framework of cultural traffic as well as politics of taste, and highlighting the significance of exploitation and B-films, paving the way into some findings that recommend accommodating the movies in serious discourses on cinema, nationally and globally. Furthermore, regarding the film traffic, the films became both the significant arenas and the objects of tensions arising from various politics of taste involving several agencies like the State and its cultural elites, local film producers, local film distributors/exhibitors, local audiences, transnational distributors, and global fans. In the bigger picture, the thesis also analyzes how international dynamics of political, economic, social, and cultural transformation of trashy films have formed and impacted the ambience of national and global film cultures, including critically encountering the Western-centric concept of Cult cinema. In establishing the arguments, with archival-led research and a critical historical approach, I will explore various fields of film studies, containing policy studies, distribution/exhibition culture, film reception and spectatorship, and global online fandom

Cinema and the Urdu Public Sphere: Literary imaginaries in the making of film cultures in north India (1930-50)

Urdu language and its literary culture had a considerable influence in shaping the narrative and aesthetic vocabularies of cinematic practice in India. While film scholars have recognized the role of Urdu in film dialogues and lyrics, few have attempted to understand the crucial processes by which film culture was fashioned within the Urdu public sphere. This dissertation aims to map the entangled networks of the literary with the cinematic and brings to light the vibrant debates of the Urdu public sphere on cinema from 1930 to 1950. Drawing on an interdisciplinary approach, extensive archival research was conducted to excavate previously undiscovered materials in Urdu on film. In the thesis, these marginalized texts in Urdu are juxtaposed with and studied alongside film sources in Hindi and English to complicate and diversify existing discourses on film in India. The thesis is divided into two sections. The first part focuses on the relationship between cinema and the Urdu public sphere through a study of printed texts such as Urdu film journals, translations of film theory, and biographical dictionaries of actresses and acting manuals. These textual artefacts highlight how cinema as an institution was formalized and disseminated in Urdu with an active engagement in values and codes of etiquette borrowed from an Urdu cultural milieu. I show how these texts were produced with serious pedagogical intent to refine the taste of the cinephiles and at the same time make accessible global film theories through translocation and translation. Part two engages with early sound cinema’s mobilization of the tropes from an Urdu imaginaire, a term I have coined to refer to an affective literary imaginary that provided not only narratives but also cultural frameworks for representation in north Indian cinema in the 1930s and 40s. The coming of sound technology in the 1930s was a momentous technological shift. The thesis demonstrates how cinematic aurality ensured that the Urdu imaginaire blossomed within the film texts through the strategic evocation of the semantics of authority, romance and reform. I employ speculative research trajectories to contextualize the place of the Urdu imaginaire within a heterogenous and variegated film aesthetic by discussing case studies of film personnel, genres, film styles, literary adaptations and codes of respectability in the cinema from 1930 to 1950

Brain-controlled cinematic interactions

Interactive films have been around for almost a century, yet they have suffered repeatedly from critical, commercial and interactional failings. We propose that brain-computer interfaces can offer interactions with narratives and encourage cinematic engagement by minimising active control. We ask what are the problems inherent to interactive cinema? Can real-time interactions via a brain-computer interface (BCI) construct cinematic content? And how do groups of individuals experience brain-controlled cinema designed for individual, shared or distributed control? Our review of related work motivates the interactional choice of using Passive BCI with real-time cinematic construction to synchronise rhythms of the viewers blinking, Attention and Meditation to the rhythms of cinema. We use the Performance Led Research in-the-Wild methodology to probe public deployments of our films, and we describe user interactions in-the-Wild during screenings of multiple designs of two interactive films: three single user, three multi user, and a live score performance. Our descriptions of BCI mappings to cinematic techniques and production strategies to produce interactive content efficiently contributes to the understanding of practical interactive cinema production. In our results we define 1) different stages of control; discovery, conscious and unconscious, 2) awareness of the affective loop, 3) a shifting prominence of engagement between the narrative, the visual qualities and the agency of users’ interactions. We offer a dynamic view of control; people’s experiences are shifting from awareness of their self, the film, and their control. Our hyper-scanning multi-user study introduces the concept of effects moving across groups, working together to produce engaging experiences, and instances of group members disrupting other’s experience by deciding to unilaterally take control of the film. Our discussion contributes to our understanding of passive interactions with narrative systems. Our research contributions include our insights into seven designs of two brain-controlled films. We define two taxonomies, of control and group control, and produce insights into value to audiences of brain-controlled films. We show the development of affective loops of physiological response and cinematic content, and provide new design directions and practical implications for interactive filmmakers

Brain-controlled cinematic interactions

Interactive films have been around for almost a century, yet they have suffered repeatedly from critical, commercial and interactional failings. We propose that brain-computer interfaces can offer interactions with narratives and encourage cinematic engagement by minimising active control. We ask what are the problems inherent to interactive cinema? Can real-time interactions via a brain-computer interface (BCI) construct cinematic content? And how do groups of individuals experience brain-controlled cinema designed for individual, shared or distributed control? Our review of related work motivates the interactional choice of using Passive BCI with real-time cinematic construction to synchronise rhythms of the viewers blinking, Attention and Meditation to the rhythms of cinema. We use the Performance Led Research in-the-Wild methodology to probe public deployments of our films, and we describe user interactions in-the-Wild during screenings of multiple designs of two interactive films: three single user, three multi user, and a live score performance. Our descriptions of BCI mappings to cinematic techniques and production strategies to produce interactive content efficiently contributes to the understanding of practical interactive cinema production. In our results we define 1) different stages of control; discovery, conscious and unconscious, 2) awareness of the affective loop, 3) a shifting prominence of engagement between the narrative, the visual qualities and the agency of users’ interactions. We offer a dynamic view of control; people’s experiences are shifting from awareness of their self, the film, and their control. Our hyper-scanning multi-user study introduces the concept of effects moving across groups, working together to produce engaging experiences, and instances of group members disrupting other’s experience by deciding to unilaterally take control of the film. Our discussion contributes to our understanding of passive interactions with narrative systems. Our research contributions include our insights into seven designs of two brain-controlled films. We define two taxonomies, of control and group control, and produce insights into value to audiences of brain-controlled films. We show the development of affective loops of physiological response and cinematic content, and provide new design directions and practical implications for interactive filmmakers

The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity, Volume 6: War and Peace, Sex and Violence

This ambitious and vivid study in six volumes explores the journey of a single, electrifying story, from its first incarnation in a medieval French poem through its prolific rebirth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Juggler of Notre Dame tells how an entertainer abandons the world to join a monastery, but is suspected of blasphemy after dancing his devotion before a statue of the Madonna in the crypt; he is saved when the statue, delighted by his skill, miraculously comes to life. Jan Ziolkowski tracks the poem from its medieval roots to its rediscovery in late nineteenth-century Paris, before its translation into English in Britain and the United States. The visual influence of the tale on Gothic revivalism and vice versa in America is carefully documented with lavish and inventive illustrations, and Ziolkowski concludes with an examination of the explosion of interest in The Juggler of Notre Dame in the twentieth century and its place in mass culture today. The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity is a rich case study for the reception of the Middle Ages in modernity. Spanning centuries and continents, the medieval period is understood through the lens of its (post)modern reception in Europe and America. Profound connections between the verbal and the visual are illustrated by a rich trove of images, including book illustrations, stained glass, postage stamps, architecture, and Christmas cards. Presented with great clarity and simplicity, Ziolkowski\u27s work is accessible to the general reader, while its many new discoveries will be valuable to academics in such fields and disciplines as medieval studies, medievalism, philology, literary history, art history, folklore, performance studies, and reception studies.https://ecommons.udayton.edu/ml_juggler/1011/thumbnail.jp

The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity

"This ambitious and vivid study in six volumes explores the journey of a single, electrifying story, from its first incarnation in a medieval French poem through its prolific rebirth in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Juggler of Notre Dame tells how an entertainer abandons the world to join a monastery, but is suspected of blasphemy after dancing his devotion before a statue of the Madonna in the crypt; he is saved when the statue, delighted by his skill, miraculously comes to life. Jan Ziolkowski tracks the poem from its medieval roots to its rediscovery in late nineteenth-century Paris, before its translation into English in Britain and the United States. The visual influence of the tale on Gothic revivalism and vice versa in America is carefully documented with lavish and inventive illustrations, and Ziolkowski concludes with an examination of the explosion of interest in The Juggler of Notre Dame in the twentieth century and its place in mass culture today. In this concluding volume, Ziolkowski explores the popularity of The Juggler of Notre Dame from the 1930s through the Second World War, especially in the Allied Resistance. Its popularity in the United States was subsequently maintained by figures as diverse as Tony Curtis and W. H. Auden, and although recently the story and medievalism have lost ground, the future of both holds promise. Presented with great clarity and simplicity, Ziolkowski's work is accessible to the general reader, while its many new discoveries will be valuable to academics in such fields and disciplines as medieval studies, medievalism, philology, literary history, art history, folklore, performance studies, and reception studies.