Practicing theory: mnemophrenia – a film-essay on the future of cinema and artificial memories

The foundation of my film Mnemophrenia was about practising theory instead of theorizing the practice. My project begins with theory, which then leads to the science fiction film Mnemophrenia that constitutes the practical aspect of it. My film demonstrates how theory and practice can be joined and creates a fruitful union, each one feeding the other. My original theoretical hypothesis is founded on the much-discussed subject of the close relationship between film and memory and more specifically the possible creation of ‘artificial’ memories. Mnemophrenia showcases how film can be a memory system itself, consequently affecting memory and creating artificial memories for the viewers. In Mnemophrenia reality and fiction are integrated, mutually negating each other, since the established reality depicted in the film is proven to be ‘artificial’, based fully on different Virtual Reality films. Ultimately the film and this thesis aim to explore the future of cinema that leads to the blurring of real and artificial memories. Together they attempt to demonstrate the dissolution of these boundaries, to display the two-way relationship of reality and fiction and to showcase how theory fuels practice and practice enlivens theory

The Driver-Car.

The car has become ubiquitous in late modern society and has become the leading object in the ordinary social relations of mobility. Despite its centrality to the culture and material form of modern societies, the relationship between the car and human beings has remained largely unexplored by sociology. This article argues that cars are combined with their drivers into an assemblage, the ‘driver-car’, which has become a form of social being that brings about distinctive social actions in modern society – driving, transporting, parking, consuming, polluting, killing, communicating and so on. To understand the nature of this assemblage a number of theoretical perspectives that describe the interaction and collaboration between human beings and complex objects are explored; the process of driving, ‘affordance’, actor-network theory, and the embodied relationship between driver and car. This theoretical account of the driver-car is intended as a preliminary to the empirical investigation of the place of the driver-car in modern societies

Rango, Ethics and Animation

The first task is to describe if not define ethics: in the film context a quality of the unique instance (where politics might instead be about the consequences for all or for a majority or a group). Documentary for example has a duty to the unique events and subjects it pictures. The question then might be phrased: what is unique in animation? This suggests some distinctions. Simulations based on large data sets do not address the unique and particular and therefore should be considered in this frame as political. Hand-drawn and handmade stop-motion animation might be read as unique expressions of gesture and require a distinct ethical approach. The more mediated forms of CGI animation do not so much sit between these poles as establish a third: how to distinguish ethical from political obligations of animation. No promise of a solution, but tactics for posing the question