Redefining Access to Large Audiovisual Archives through Embodied Experiences in Immersive Environments: Creativity & Cognition 2022 -- Graduate Student Symposium

Audiovisual archives are the mnemonic archives of the 21st century, with important cultural institutions increasingly digitizing their video collections. However, these remain mostly inaccessible, due to the sheer amount of content combined with the lack of innovative forms of engagement through compelling frameworks for their exploration. The present research therefore aims at redefining access to large video collections through embodied experiences in immersive environments. The author claims that, once users are empowered to be actors of the experience rather than mere spectators, their creativity is stimulated and narrative can emerge.Comment: Proceedings of the 14th Conference on Creativity and Cognitio

Towards immersive generosity: The need for a novel framework to explore large audiovisual archives through embodied experiences in immersive environments

This article proposes an innovative framework to explore large audiovisual archives using Immersive Environments to place users inside a dataset and create an embodied experience. It starts by outlining the need for such a novel interface to meet the needs of archival scholars and the GLAM sector, and discusses issues in the current modes of access, mostly restrained to traditional information retrieval systems based on metadata. The paper presents the concept of ``generous interfaces" as a preliminary approach to address these issues, and argues some of the key reasons why employing Immersive Visual Storytelling might benefit such frameworks. The theory of embodiment is leveraged to justify this claim, showing how a more embodied understanding of a collection can result in a stronger engagement for the public. By placing users as actors in the experience rather than mere spectators, the emergence of narrative is driven by their interactions, with benefits in terms of engagement with the public and understanding of the cultural component. The framework we propose is applied to two existing installations to analyze them in-depth and critique them, highlighting the key directions to pursue for further development.Comment: This is the pre-published version (after peer-review

«Number One, the lunatic asylum man» Dracula and the Limits of Institutional Psychiatry

Beneath its spectacular Gothic topoi, the experience of subjectivity, the interest in the hidden dimensions of the mind and in the developing fields of neurology and psychiatry, which were challenging post-Enlightenment notions of rationality, traditional constructions of manliness and conventional gender roles, are central in Bram Stoker’s Dracula published in 1897, one year after the term psychoanalysis was introduced. Images of emotional instability, altered states of consciousness, and downright pathologies pervade they novel. Significantly enough, they concern not only the vampire's primary victims, but Dr. Seward himself, the young director of an insane asylum in London who often questions his professional role and even his own sanity. I will argue that Stoker modelled this character on William Joseph Seward, the superintendent of Colney Hatch Asylum from 1882 to 1911, an institution which was at that time the showcase of Victorian psychiatric reform. Like his namesake, Stoker's Seward is an intelligent, sympathetic and dedicated alienist, who yet, from the very beginning, emerges as an unlikely guarantor of psychic order