Current screens

The architecture of screen design, including LCD, LED and DLP projection, is analysed in terms of the political economy and their aesthetics and phenomenological impacts, in association with the use of codecs as constraining as well as enabling tools in the control and management of visual data transmission

A Short History of Hate

This paper analyses how the theme of hate depicted in Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four has been transformed in representations – from the BBC’s live television production by Nigel Kneale and Rudolf Cartier, in 1954, to Ridley Scott’s commercial for Apple computers in 1984. It goes on to consider the significance of artist Terry Flaxton’s video that was shot separately on the set and the meanings to be drawn from the interviews with east London skinheads who took part in the group-hate scene. The paper argues that Orwell’s dystopian vision offers an inspiration for understanding how the nature of hate has changed from individual performance in community assemblies and mass rallies to what might be defined as an ‘aggregation of behaviours’. The hate of today is not to be found on television, in advertising campaigns or festival documentaries but in Twitter storms and social media bullying

Untimely Ripped (against the mass image)

I take the Aristotelean view that the question for ethics is ‘How should I live?’ and the question for politics is ‘How are we supposed to live?’ Aristotle’s next step was to argue that in both instances, these are questions about the good life. These are fundamentally aesthetic questions. So let me advance as a hypothesis that the reason for doing any of the art, science and critique we undertake is happiness. The world we have is unhappy, so happiness depends on negating what is given to us as the world. That is what images do: they negate the world in order to produce pictures that are more startling, richer, surer, more filled with meaning and more desirable than what we have to inhabit. Even images of unhappy events attempt to heal them. An image aspires to happiness. The proliferation of images is a different matter

Ecomedia: Key Issues

Ecomedia: Key Issues is a comprehensive textbook introducing the burgeoning field of ecomedia studies to provide an overview of the interface between environmental issues and the media globally. Linking the world of media production, distribution, and consumption to environmental understandings, the book addresses ecological meanings encoded in media texts, the environmental impacts of media production, and the relationships between media and cultural perceptions of the environment. [From the publisher]https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/books/1084/thumbnail.jp

Analogon: Of a World Already Animated

Films, and perhaps especially animated films, are ways of thinking. In their own ways, and beyond any intention of human filmmakers, films think (Frampton 2006). Animations think especially hard about movement, time and, unsurprisingly, animation: what motivates something to move. In their remarkably different ways, Muto (2007-8) and Der Lauf der Dinge (1987) undertake a radical thinking-through of change, respectively as mutation and its constituents, and the capacities of film generally and animation specifically to unhinge and re-articulate classifications of human, environmental and technological life. Muto is a seven-minute graphic by Italian street artist Blu filmed in stop-motion on location in Buenos Aires as the artist and his team paint, erase and redraw a series of evolving figures on the walls of the city. Der Lauf der Dinge (The Way Things Go) is a 30-minute film by Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss which documents in a series of long takes (with carefully concealed edits) a series of homemade devices which variously decompose, fall, crash and burn to produce a chain reaction of events

Carbon Bonds: Coal Economics and Aesthetics

Analysis of coal in the carbon economy in relation to its use powering digital device

Digital Cinemas

Digital technologies have altered the terms of all the major areas of film: finance, production and post-production, distribution and consumption.  This chapter looks at these through the lens of debates over historical continuities and discontinuities in each area, looking especially at the variety of production and dissemination formats from blockbusters to zero-budget film-making, the impact of technical standardisation, the affordances of different digital technologies, notably bitmap and vector, and the role of platforms like YouTube and their alternatives. The possibilities and challenges of 'world cinema' as a concept in this terrain will be the central them

Connectivity, Legibility and the Mass Image

Network connectivity should surely by now have already arrived at the global village. Instead, our only universal is the commodity form. To the extent that the actually existing global formation is universal, it does not constitute a culture. But if legibility is a hallmark of culture, the implication is that global connectivity is illegible. The humanities alone are equipped to identify what is truly illegible, a task we perform precisely by reading, using every technique we have, eclectically, to find an entry into the opacity of events. This essay argues that connectivity has produced a universal mass image, and asks whether it is possible to restore legibility to it, and if so in what forms