Digital Media and Art: Always Already Complicit?

Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Lisa Gitelman) Avatars of Story (Marie-Laure Ryan) Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity (Johanna Drucker

Inmediatez, hipermediación, remediación

The authors review some concepts of media analysis such as hypermediacy, inmediacy, adding the original concept of re-mediation to define the form-retrieving processes of representation in new media that appear when a new technology of communication is born. The three processes: immediacy, hypermediacy and re-mediation, constitute formal evolutions with dynamics of a defined nature in each case, that could help us to understand the technological processes and their cultural action.Los autores revisan categorías del análisis mediológico como las de hipermediación, inmediatez y añaden el concepto original de la remediación para delimitar el proceso de recuperación de formas representacionales de medios anteriores perdidas en el surgimiento de una nueva tecnología de comunicación. Los tres procesos: inmediatez, hipermediación y remediación constituyen evoluciones formales con dinámica propia que pueden servirnos para entender el proceso tecnológico y su acción en la cultura.Les autheurs révisent quelques cathégories de l’analyse des médias comme l’inmediat, l’hiper-médiation et présentent le concepte original de la re-médiation comme le procès de recuperation des formes antérieures perdues dans l’evolution des nouvelles médias de communication. Les trois procès, l’ inmediat, l’ hiper-médiation et la re-médiation constituent des evolutions formelles chacune avec leur dynamisme à elle, que peuvent nous aider à comprendre le procès technologique et son action culturelle

Bringing it all together online: Performance, outreach, and education. The model of the German Theater Project at Indiana University

Every year, the Department of Germanic Studies at Indiana University hosts a theater project for high school students from across the state. 2021 was the 8th consecutive successful year of the festival, and the second time it was held online. The main incentive of the project is to give German students of all levels a creative way to engage with the language through performance. In our article, we explore how to move the festival to a digital space during the pandemic, as well as how the project is organized in general. We write about difficulties and successes with the format, and show examples of student projects and educational workshops. The festival has thrived as an outreach program for the department, attracting more and more learners to German. Even though the project was switched to an online format, every year, an increasing number of high school students enthusiastically participate and use it as an outlet to show their love for language, culture, and performance

Digital afx: digital dressing and affective shifts in Sin City and 300

In Sin City (Robert Rodriguez, 2005) and 300 (Zack Snyder, 2006) extensive post-production work has created stylised colour palettes, manipulated areas of the image, and added or subtracted elements. Framing a discussion around the terms ‘affect’ and ‘emotion’, this paper argues that the digital technologies used in Sin City and 300 modify conventional interactions between representational and aesthetic dimensions. Brian Massumi suggests affective imagery can operate through two modes of engagement. One mode is embedded in a meaning system, linked to a speci?c emotion. The second is understood as an intensi?cation whereby a viewer reacts but that reaction is not yet gathered into an alignment with meaning. The term ‘digital afx’ is used to describe manipulations that produce imagery allowing these two modes of engagement to coexist. Digital afx are present when two competing aesthetic strategies remain equally visible within sequences of images. As a consequence the afx mingle with and shift the content of representation

Blast Theory’s Karen: exploring the ontology of technotexts

The continual and rapid emergence of media technologies predominantly since the digital revolution in the late twentieth century has generated a new social, cultural and cognitive ecology. This new environment has shaped the landscape of contemporary theatre and performance, and has brought about new modes such as virtual theatre, multimedia performance and online theatre. These emerging performative responses to the mediatised ecology have heralded transformations in directing, performing and design, and, relatedly, a paradigm shift in the ontology of theatre and performance. The textual dimension of theatre – a strong aspect of British theatre tradition that is mostly associated with playtexts - has also adapted to the changing performance landscape. As a result of this adaptation process, new modes of texts have emerged. The texts that have emerged from practices, whose design and performance are partially or completely based on new technologies and their aesthetics, can be considered in this group. This article is an experiment in forging a vocabulary to identify such texts, which it presents as technotexts, and explore some of their ontological characteristics. It offers an attempt to start a conversation about the changing ontology of text in mediatised theatre practice. To this end, I investigate Blast Theory’s Karen (2015), a smart phone app-based, interactive performance, which illustrates an inventive textual landscape through multiple layers of writing, and invites questions regarding the changing form and role of text as a process and product in relation to performance, authorship and spectatorship, and textual object/archive

Virtual Hubs : Understanding Relational Aspects and Remediating Incubation

We have recently seen the emergence of new platforms that aim to provide remotely located entrepreneurs and startup companies with support analogous to that found within traditional incubation or acceleration spaces. This paper offers an understanding of these `virtual hubs', and the inherently socio-technical interactions that occur between their members. Our study analyzes a sample of existing virtual hubs in two stages. First, we contribute broader insight into the current landscape of virtual hubs by documenting and categorizing 25 hubs regarding their form, support offered and a selection of further qualities. Second, we contribute detailed insight into the operation and experience of such hubs, from an analysis of 10 semi-structured interviews with organizers and participants of virtual hubs. We conclude by analyzing our findings in terms of relational aspects of non-virtual hubs from the literature and remediation theory, and propose opportunities for advancing the design of such platforms

The role of live visuals in audience understanding of electronic music Performances

There is an identified lack of visual feedback in electronic music performances. Live visuals have been used to fill in this gap. However, there is a scarcity of studies that analyze the effectiveness of live visuals in conveying feedback. In this paper, we aim to study the contribution of live visuals to the understanding of electronic music performances, from the perspective of the audience. We present related work in the fields of audience studies in performing arts, electronic music and audiovisuals. For this purpose, we organized two live events, where 10 audiovisual performances took place. We used questionnaires to conduct an audience study in these events. Results point to a better audience understanding in two of the four design patterns we used as analytical framework. In our discussion, we suggest best practices for the design of audiovisual performance systems that can lead to improved audience understanding

'It's a film' : medium specificity as textual gesture in Red road and The unloved

British cinema has long been intertwined with television. The buzzwords of the transition to digital media, 'convergence' and 'multi-platform delivery', have particular histories in the British context which can be grasped only through an understanding of the cultural, historical and institutional peculiarities of the British film and television industries. Central to this understanding must be two comparisons: first, the relative stability of television in the duopoly period (at its core, the licence-funded BBC) in contrast to the repeated boom and bust of the many different financial/industrial combinations which have comprised the film industry; and second, the cultural and historical connotations of 'film' and 'television'. All readers of this journal will be familiar – possibly over-familiar – with the notion that 'British cinema is alive and well and living on television'. At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, when 'the end of medium specificity' is much trumpeted, it might be useful to return to the historical imbrication of British film and television, to explore both the possibility that medium specificity may be more nationally specific than much contemporary theorisation suggests, and to consider some of the relationships between film and television manifest at a textual level in two recent films, Red Road (2006) and The Unloved (2009)

What's all this hype about hypertext?: Teaching literature with George P. Landow's The Dickens Web

The essay describes the use of George P. Landow's hypertext, The Dickens Web, in an advanced undergraduate literature class and analyzes its practical and theoretical implications. Hypertext is shown to encourage active student engagement, especially with contextual material; to lead to more focused research topics; and to facilitate student collaboration. Some of Landow's claims about the ease with which this occurs, however, are questioned. The difficulty of teaching students how to follow and construct conceptual hypertextual links is examined, and the instructor's role in relation to student contributions to the Web is presented as much more problematic than Landow allows.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/42572/1/10579_2004_Article_BF00419788.pd

Designing interactive newsprint

The possibility of linking paper to digital information is enhanced by recent developments in printed electronics. In this article we report the design and evaluation of a local newspaper augmented with capacitive touch regions and an embedded Bluetooth chip working with an adjunct device. These allowed the interactive playback of associated audio and the registration of manual voting actions on the web. Design conventions inherited from paper and the web were explored by showing four different versions of an interactive newspaper to 16 community residents. The diverse responses of residents are described, outlining the potential of the approach for local journalism and recommendations for the design of interactive newsprint