Lost, Fan Culture and the Neo-Baroque

A partir de un análisis de Lost, un show de televisión, y The «Lost» Experience, un reality game que se desarrolló a partir de aquel show, el trabajo presente expone que la forma seriada del entretenimiento contemporáneo crea una experiencia que aplica la acción narrativa al ámbito social. El sentido del texto se hace dependiente de un público capaz de percibir múltiples medias para extraer mensajes más complejos por la experiencia de los shows de la televisión. Sirviéndose del marketing viral y de nuevas formas de narración basadas en lugares del social networking —YouTube, Facebook,Twitter etc.—, esos shows han transformado el paisaje urbano en un paisaje teatral. El trabajo presente demuestra cómo Lost y su mundo ficcional extendido han producido un espacio neobarroco performativo para el público, un espacio tan barroco como el Barroco histórico. // Through an analysis of the television show Lost and The «Lost» Experience alternative reality game that developed from it, this article argues that the serial form that drives contemporary entertainment is creating an experience that spills the narrative action beyond the screen and into the social sphere. Meaning and coherence of the text becomes reliant on an audience that is capable of embracing multiple-media in order to extract more complex layers of meaning from the experience of the television series. Embracing the era of viral marketing and a new form of storytelling that relies heavily on social networking sites likeYouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, the series also transformed the cityscape itself into a theatrical space.This article explores how Lost and its extended fictional world produced a neo-baroque performative space for the audience just as baroque in nature as the historical Baroque

Time invaders:conceptualizing performative game time

This chapter characterizes framing devices and other game elements as unstable signifiers, evaluating performances according to how they generate diachronic or synchronic effects by acting on those signifiers. Videogames make use of computers’ capabilities to present a very large set of these signifiers and thus generate highly complex forms of temporal experience. Because neither diachrony (exemplified by player performance) nor synchrony (computer-coded rule structures) can complete their respective operations and always leave a differential margin, videogames can be understood as diachrono-synchronic systems.Performative multiplicities of various sizes can be analyzed in terms of how they draw together or separate performances, creating a comparative methodology for describing temporal experience in videogames. One of the key synchronic effects is the Game Over, which has a high-level effect on all performances of a game. Considered as a synchronic horizon of experience, the Game Over provides a concept capable of addressing the heterogeneous and composite set of videogame elements in terms of how players interpret unstable signifiers. This includes narrative, which can be rigorously defined in terms of its synchronizing effect on a game’s performative multiplicity

A ‘space to imagine’ : Frenchness and the pleasures and labours of art cinema in the English regions

This article explores focus group responses to Mia Hansen-Løve’s Things to Come (2016). The focus groups were conducted across four English regions in Autumn 2018, and drew participants from a range of social, cultural and economic backgrounds. The responses reveal some of the ways in which audiences in the English regions form and make meaning around particular kinds of textual and contextual experiences of cinemagoing and consumption. In particular, the article aims to develop our understanding of contemporary art cinema to take account of the ways in which audiences identify and respond to a film clip which captures the particular textual characteristics associated with the mode. Our research finds that for many, the pleasures of art cinema are contingent on participation within related, elite social and cultural practices, whereas for others, art cinema conventions operate as sites of labour and exclusion. The responses also reveal some of the ways in which narratives of nationhood are constructed in relation to art cinema The methodological approach of the research, drawing on film elicitation,  indicates ways in which traditional models of textual analysis might be enriched by more pluralised accounts of the relationships between form and meaning

Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment

A1 - Authored Research BooksTracing the logic of media history, from the baroque to the neo-baroque, from magic lanterns and automata to film and computer games. The artists of the seventeenth-century baroque period used spectacle to delight and astonish; contemporary entertainment media, according to Angela Ndalianis, are imbued with a neo-baroque aesthetic that is similarly spectacular. In Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment, she situates today's film, computer games, comic books, and theme-park attractions within an aesthetic-historical context and uses the baroque as a framework to enrich our understanding of contemporary entertainment media. The neo-baroque aesthetics that Ndalianis analyzes are not, she argues, a case of art history repeating or imitating itself; these forms have emerged as a result of recent technological and economic transformations. The neo-baroque forms combine sight and sound and text in ways that parallel such seventeenth-century baroque forms as magic lanterns, automata, painting, sculpture, and theater but use new technology to express the concerns of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Moving smoothly from century to century, comparing ceiling paintings to the computer game Doom, a Spiderman theme park adventure to the baroque version of multimedia known as the Bel Composto, and a Medici wedding to Terminator 2:3D, the book demonstrates the logic of media histories. Ndalianis focuses on the complex interrelationships among entertainment media and presents a rigorous cross-genre, cross-historical analysis of media aesthetics

From Neo-Baroque to Neo-Baroques?

El presente artículo argumenta que el "barroco" puede ser entendido como un estado transhistórico que se extiende más allá del siglo XVII enfocándose no solo en escritores e intelectuales que asi lo han entendido, sino tomando ejemplos provenientes del campo de la literatura, la pintura, la arquitectura o el cine, tales como zoótropos y linternas mágicas, el arte de la revolución vanguardista de inicios del siglo XX, el estilo barroco presente en los inicios de la industria de Hollywood o la abierta aplicación política y crítica de estrategias barrocas adoptadas por escritores españoles y latinoamericanos. El artículo culmina en nuestro propio tiempo, sosteniendo que el contexto urbano y de entretenimiento contemporáneo combina lo visual, lo audible y lo textual en formas que se asemejan al dinamismo de las formas barrocas del siglo XVII, pero expresadas de manera tecnológica y culturalmente diferente que, ya sean a través de películas o series de televisión, exposiciones o movimientos musicales, son resultudo de trasformaciones culturales y sistémicas asociadas con la posmodernidad

Hannibal: A Disturbing Feast for the Senses

This article analyses the television series Hannibal (NBC, 2013-) and argues that it is one of the most powerfully affect-driven shows to ever grace the television screen. Hannibal the series not only inflicts a cacophony of sensory assaults on the characters that inhabit its dark narrative universe, but also extends these assaults to the audience that participates in the world it has to offer. Providing a close reading of the episode ‘Hutamono’ (2:6), it is argued that we become victims, both of Hannibal the character and Hannibal the television series’ masterful style and affective power

The Frenzy of the Visible in Comic Book Worlds

This article argues that the comic book form is anything but static. The panels that litter its pages are riddled with a dynamism and motion that presents its own unique articulation of time and space. Some of the narrative action represented within a comic book panel can ‘freeze’ time, but other panels — while remaining visually static as still images on a page — open up complex depictions of time and space that create modes of perception that are particular to comics. The comic represents the animated flux of time and space through stasis.

The Contemporary Comic book superhero

In this cutting edge anthology an international roster of contributors offer original research and writing on the contemporary comic book superhero, with occasional journeys into the film and television variation