Items where Subject is "Visual Culture"

A partir de la década de 1970, numerosas mujeres latinoamericanas comenzaron a utilizar el cine como forma de expresión artística y herramienta política realizando documentales que visibilizaron y denunciaron formas de opresión que, hasta ese momento, habían permanecido en el ámbito de lo privado. Como señalan Traverso y
Wilson, la bibliografía sobre el cine documental de la región es escasa (2014) y, a pesar de los esfuerzos por incluir documentales hechos por mujeres, se centra en el cine realizado por hombres.1 Con el objetivo de contribuir a la re-historización del cine latinoamericano desde una perspectiva de género, este artículo propone tres aproximaciones al cine documental hecho por mujeres de América Latina entre 1975 y
1994 a través del análisis de una selección de documentales.

Amidst the UK higher education strikes, Lorena Cervera and Isabel Seguí codirected #PrecarityStory, a short documentary that exposes the increasing precarisation of academic labour at universities. Released in 2020, the film follows a working day in the life of Isabel who, at that time, was a cleaner, researcher, and teacher at the same British elite institution. This is a (self-consciously) performative documentary (Bruzzi, 2006) inspired methodologically by the transmediatic form of Latin American testimonio, where an individual subject stands for a community and the film is an activist artefact in which ‘reality’ is managed creatively to further the political agenda of the filmmakers. This chapter explores the complexities of this approach in which a filmmaker and an empowered film subject join forces to challenge an exploitative workplace and interrogate the mode of production of collaborative cinemas.

Following recent endeavours that have unearthed women’s cinema and reclaimed its contribution to film history, this video essay revisits the filmography of the Colombian feminist film collective Cine Mujer (1978–1999). Narrated by three of its members—Eulalia Carrizosa, Patricia Restrepo, and Clara Riascos—through semi-structured interviews that intersect the personal, professional and political, this short film also reuses Cine Mujer’s archive. Its purpose is, one the one hand, to contribute to restoring its legacy and, on the other hand, to reframe and resignify its images within women’s ongoing battle for equality.

From the 1970s, Latin American women began making documentary films with clear political intents. These films shed light on the precarious conditions that characterized women’s entry to the workforce and other labour struggles, on reproductive rights and women’s role in production and reproduction, and on the inevitable questioning of identity that results from migration and displacement. However, the historiography of Latin American cinema continues to ignore the legacy of these filmmakers. This thesis acknowledges and re-signifies women’s documentaries and reclaims their contributions to film history. Moreover, it provides a new lens through which to revisit the history of Latin American documentary while also adding to the scholarship on Latin American women’s filmmaking through both theoretical analysis and creative practice. In the written component, I propose three approximations to the study of Latin American women’s documentary cinema between 1975 and 1994. To do so, I have curated a selection of nine documentaries produced during these decades that illustrate some of the thematic interests, modes of authorship and production, and formal strategies and aesthetic devices employed by women filmmakers. Ultimately, I contend that this corpus of work was produced during a formative moment for women’s and feminist cinema. The analyses of these films have informed the making of the creative component. The short documentary Processing Images from Caracas traces the archive of activist, filmmaker, and photographer Franca Donda and the film collectives that she was part of, Cine Urgente and Grupo Feminista Miércoles. It also shows how Latin American women’s documentaries and other relevant materials that could make up an archive of women’s and feminist cinema are at the brink of disappearance and foregrounds the urgent need to create such an archive.

This article contextualizes and characterizes the Venezuelan feminist film collective Grupo Feminista Miercoles. Founded by Venezuelan Josefina Acevedo and Italians Franca Donda and Ambretta Marrosu, among others, Grupo Feminista Miercoles (1979–88) produced the documentary Yo, tu, Ismaelina (‘I, you, Ismaelina’) (1981) and the videos Argelia Laya, por ejemplo (‘Argelia Laya, for example’) (1987), Eumelia Hernandez, calle arriba, calle abajo (‘Eumelia Hernandez, up and down the street’) (1988) and Una del monton (‘One of the bunch’) (1988), and participated in several activities organized by the Venezuelan women’s movement. On the one hand, this article pays attention to both the cinematic and political contexts that allowed the emergence of this collective, with a focus on the influence that Italian cinematic and feminist ideas had in these contexts. On the other hand, it also provides formal analysis of the collective’s filmography and explores how feminist ideas and praxis are deployed in its films. The overall aim of this article is to restore the contributions of Grupo Feminista Miercoles to both Latin American political cinema and transnational feminist cinema.

Cine Mujer was the name of two feminist film collectives, one founded in Mexico (1975–1986) and the other in Colombia (1978–1999). Sharing the same name but with no ties between each other, these collectives produced films that provided different representations of women, politicized personal experiences and domestic spaces, and promoted processes of consciousness-raising. Broadly, this article looks at the Cine Mujer collectives as part of a larger phenomenon that, although informed by second-wave feminism and the New Latin American Cinema, can be better understood within the singular complexity of Latin American women’s movements. Specifically, it analyses two documentaries, Cosas de mujeres (1978) and Carmen Carrascal (1982), produced by the Cine Mujer collectives in Mexico and Colombia, respectively. Drawing on Laura Marks’ work on hybridity, excess, and haptic visuality, this article explores the relation between modes of production and representation in these films and positions them as emblematic examples of a formative moment in Latin American feminist documentary. By emphasizing the emotional and sensorial appeal of these films, this article also attempts to expand what is understood by political cinema.

This article contextualises and characterises the history and film production of the Colombian feminist film collective Cine Mujer, and analyses how its collective and collaborative practices challenged auteurism. From 1978 to the late 1990s, Cine Mujer produced several short films, documentaries, series, and videos, and acted as a distribution company of Latin American women’s cinema. Its twenty years of activity possibly make it one of the world’s longest-lasting feminist film collectives. Yet, its history is largely unknown in Colombia and abroad. Thus, the question that motivates this article is related to how to inscribe Cine Mujer in film history without uncritically reproducing the methodologies that cast a shadow on women’s cinema. Throughout its trajectory, Cine Mujer transitioned from being an independent cinematic project interested in artistic experimentation to a media organization that produced educational videos commissioned by governmental and global institutions and often targeted at marginalised women. Based on interviews conducted with some of the Cine Mujer members, the Cine Mujer’s catalogues, and its films and videos, I organise Cine Mujer’s corpus of work in three main modes of production that disrupt the role of the auteur and the centrality of the director.

Franca Donda (Italy, 1933-2017) was an activist, filmmaker, and photographer who lived in Caracas for most part of the second half of the twentieth century. During these decades, she made several short films with the Venezuelan collectives Cine Urgente/Urgent Cinema (1968-1973) and Grupo Feminista Miércoles/Wednesday’s Feminist Group (1979-1988). Throughout her life, she also took thousands of photographs of women across Latin America. However, her work has received little scholarly attention, and her archive has not been properly preserved. This article demonstrates the importance of protecting the legacy of Donda, Cine Urgente, and Grupo Feminista Miércoles. To do so, it explores Donda’s multifaceted identity and outlines the production of the two collectives. It maps, locates, and assesses the conditions of some of the materials that could comprise their archive. And it reflects on issues of positionality and briefly describes the transmedia project that is emerging from this research.

Bajo el título donda-doc: Documenter les Femmes et les Féministes par la photo- graphie documentaire. L’exemple de Franca Donda au Venezuela, este proyecto pretende arrojar luz al legado de Franca Donda a través de la producción de varios artefactos culturales desarrollados a partir de su archivo. En este texto ofrecemos, en primer lugar, una breve biografía de Franca Donda, prestando especial atención a su producción cinematográfica y fotográfica. Y, en segundo lugar, ahondamos en el compromiso feminista de su trabajo fotográfico.

This special section within the issues 61 of Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media was co-edited by Lorena Cervera Ferrer, Sonia Kerfa, and Elizabeth Ramírez-Soto. All the articles included in this special section were peer-reviewed. Moreover, this section also includes book reviews and an edited transcription of the roundtable that took place at the conference 'Cozinhando Imagens, Tejiendo Feminismos. Latin American Feminist Film and Visual Art Collectives,' from which this section emerged.

This article describes a pedagogical approach to collage based on the work of art historians John Berger (1926–2017) and Aby Warburg (1866–1929). Its aim is to understand how images can be used to develop critical visual thinking skills within the context of architectural education and architectural theory in particular. Drawing on the notions of ‘visual literacy’ and ‘visual learning’ familiar from educational theory, the article proposes collage as a means to challenge the predominantly verbal modes of assessment prevalent in contextual and critical studies, where ‘contextual’ refers to the wider contexts (cultural, social, historical, theoretical) within which architecture is situated.The Collage Workshop, which the author has developed over the last five years whilst working closely with students at both undergraduate and postgraduate level, is a concrete attempt to implement visually oriented forms of learning and reduce the reliance on written assignments across the curriculum. By analysing some examples of collages produced by students who participated in the workshop, the article hopes to show how images can be used in the construction of an argument and, perhaps more crucially, how seeing assumes meaning in an image-saturated world.

This chapter explores the work of art historian Aby Warburg (1866-1929). Warburg's work, in particular the Bilderatlas Mnemosyene (known in English as the Mnemosyene Atlas), pioneered a means of 'doing' art history by juxtaposing images (mostly photographic works of art) mounted onto large panels to build an argument in pictorial terms.

The thesis uses art practice as a research method to propose novel characterisations of animal life. These characterisations aim to challenge an organicist image of non-human animals. The thesis considers animal bodies and behaviours as subject to aesthetic judgments that are underpinned by deeper ontological and epistemological commitments as to relations between nature and society, in which to be categorised as the former entails a series of privations in relation to the latter – the absence of freedom, subjectivity and creativity. Scholarly research on the history of the perception and conception of animal life within modernity, and subsequent challenges made to these within the contemporary humanities and contemporary art support and inform the practical enquiry. The thesis draws primarily here upon new materialist and post-humanist-oriented animal studies, and on scholarship surrounding the contemporary French artist, Pierre Huyghe.

Positing the Anthropocene as a condition in which the distinction between human history and natural history has collapsed, the thesis argues for disassociating the concept ‘animal’ and the concept ‘nature’. The thesis attends to entanglements of animal worlds and cultural tropes where this equation fails. It proposes an an-organic and dis-harmonious animal life that attest to the end of nature and witnesses the dissonant and incomplete conditions of modernity. Both the written argument and the artistic outcomes propose novel ways to consider animals in relation to visuality. The thesis takes bio-art (i.e., art practice that incorporates living organisms) as of methodological value in this project where it engages the potentiality of animals themselves to challenge a received historical status. Furthermore, art practice is not just seen as a vehicle for depicting animal futures, but as a condition for liberating animals from nature. The thesis thus equates the postnatural animal with their becoming agents within artworks.

To mark the centenary of the signing of the armistice and the end of the First World War, the Shrine Trustees are pleased to present Flowers of War. Artists and jewellers Kirsten Haydon, Elizabeth Turrell and Neal Haslem have created this beautiful and reflective commemorative wreath using hundreds of floral emblems from battlefields around the world. Inspired by those found on those same battlefields and the native flowers of those countries and all of the Allied nations who fought alongside Britain in that war. Our guest speaker Professor Paul Gough, will speak to us about his presentation, ‘Seeds, soil, saplings, Reflections on the Flowers of War and Peace’. (Introduction by Shrine of Remembrance, Melbourne CEO Dean Lee)

The special authority invested in the war artist and the image had become denuded by the mid-1980s. Although an independent artist working to commission, Peter Howson’s work in the Balkans was considered to have crossed the line that distinguished between impersonal witness and overzealous artist. Unlike William Orpen’s impartial rendition of gross personal violation, Howson was deemed to have become both judge and jury, an advocate not an artist, corrupted by circumstantial evidence rather than remaining vigilant as an uncorruptible viewer. For his part, Howson was clear that the terms of engagement had fundamentally changed since the Great War: it was no longer simply about what could be seen or not seen, but also what was known and could not be denied.

The Flock! exhibition explored the diverse and dynamic uses of flock. It provided an understanding of the applications, benefits and important qualities and uses of flock through the exploration of an array of historical and contemporary flocked objects. The exhibition explored how flock is used across a variety of contexts, including interior design, publishing, and fashion design. It addressed the importance of flock as an important process and surface treatment that is widely used. Importantly it explained that flock is a distinct process and outcome that is not to be mistaken as velvet or referred to just as a ‘fuzzy’ surface.
The exhibition provided visitors with an understanding of flock and how and why it continues to endure and appeal.

This unique exhibition, the first exhibition of its type, explored flock and the extent of its use across a range of contexts. The exhibition brought together for the first time numerous historical and contemporary examples of flock in its exploration of flock's sumptuous, tactile surface finish. The exhibition explored flock's rich history and importantly its contemporary relevance and importance.

The exhibition showcased artwork and design objects produced by artists, designers and many of the leading international flock manufacturers. The exhibition gained a The Textile Society Award and was successfully supported by the Arts Council England-Grants for the Arts, and the European Flock Association. The exhibition was accompanied by Flockage: the symposium that featured presentations by leading flock specialists and design academics. The exhibition was extended by four months owing to popular demand and resulted in Hardie being invited guest speaker at the Flock Association of Europe conference in Berlin, 2009.

Bellantoni and Woolman (2000) note that "Italic and oblique typefaces possess a kinetic quality because of their slant to the right." But what is the nature of this kinetic quality and why is it imparted in this way? This paper explores kinetics, not as a property of italics, but as a manifestation of cognitive work involving metaphoric projection, for which the typeface is but a cue. It will use concepts from cognitive semantics (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999; Fauconnier and Turner, 2002) to posit the idea that the dynamic quality of italics arises from preconceptual structures (such as image schemas) related to embodied experiences of writing and running. These structures forming the basis for higher level metaphors to be constructed in cognition. Consequently, a layout incorporating italics is metaphorical to the extent that the concept of
running is used (consciously or unconsciously) to understand an arrangement of type characters. Furthermore it is argued that the meaning we construct from italic type is not a simple correspondence between slanted letters and the body in motion, but is situated; resulting from a blend of concepts triggered by such things as the meanings of the words italicized and the site/s where they appear.

This book demonstrates the relevance and importance of cognitive linguistics when applied to the analysis and practice of graphic design/communication design.

Phil Jones brings together a diverse range of theory and organizes it in accordance with different stages in the design process. Using examples from contemporary communication design, as well as more familiar selections from the graphic design canon as case studies, this book provides an account of how meanings are made by users, and suggests new strategies for design practice. It seeks convergences between the ways that graphic/communication designers think and talk about their practice and the theories emerging from cognitive science.

This book will be of interest to scholars working in design, graphic design, the philosophy of art and aesthetics, communication studies, and media and film studies.

This paper will expand on insights unearthed during a practice-led PhD recently undertaken by the author at University of the Arts, London. The research project is investigating illustrated skateboard deck artwork in order to identify the distinct visual aura the skateboarder conjures within popular culture. Skateboard deck artwork is a kind of illustrated vernacular, principally developed in California during the 1970s and 1980s, to market skateboard products. The imagery is distinguished by thematic concerns aimed at young adult skateboarders. A practice-led investigation will reveal the origins and function of this persistent illustrated language. This approach will rely upon the author’s prior experience as a professional illustrator and arts educator to illuminate the significance of visual aesthetics, thereby offering a new lens to survey skateboard’s resilient visual culture.

This paper was motivated by an enthusiasm and curiosity to investigate the origins of the illustrated visual language associated with skateboarding. The conspicuous displays articulated the adrenalin thrills of the act itself and disseminated a potent visual code to juvenile consumers eager to establish their rebellious, anti-social credentials. This paper sought out the rich visual iconography associated with Californian youth movements (brought to light by Woolfe in his essay The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, 1965) and attempted to establish a clear lineage between the legacy of Hot-rod customisation practices and the graphic heritage of skateboard culture best characterised by popular skateboard brands such as Powell-Peralta and Santa Cruz, which established the resilient visual inheritance that would eventually transform the perception of these counter cultural attitudes and motifs.

In recent years there has emerged an increasing theoretical and contextual impetus from within the discipline of illustration that would seek to define the practice by authorial approaches to the production and distribution of illustrated content. The priority of this investigation is the attempt to imagine a theoretical landscape or environment in which an ‘authorial turn’ within the discipline might emerge and anchor itself to strategies outside of persisting colloquial or industrial notions of illustration practice. Specifically, this paper aims to tie such thinking to existing practices and concepts relevant to the contemporary construction, distribution and exchange of networked images.

The notion of the meme began with Richard Dawkins’ media-gene metaphor before a further propagation and refinement by psychologist Susan Blackmore. Removed from this original contextualisation, within today’s colloquial understanding of ‘Internet memes,’ one important aspect relating to Dawkins’ original metaphor is still relevant. The Internet meme as a unit of cultural exchange, in order to survive, has to reproduce. With this in mind I will explore examples of memes that function and spread primarily through a process of image-media led reproduction and
subsequent mutation. This is a contemporary, intuitively anxious process that has drawn association with Soviet Film-maker Dziga Vertov’s ‘visual bond’ concept of media led social bonding

The Hidden Stories app delves deep into the untold history of Leicester’s Cultural Quarter, bringing the area to life through poetry, plays and narrative non-fiction.

The app operates via locative technology that triggers fragments of writing at specific locations; the texts are effectively connected with the location and history they are exploring, with content being unlocked as the user moves around the area.

Each text is displayed differently within the app, taking advantage of the framework to emphasise the ideas being presented by the writers and reflecting the concept of hidden stories.

Hidden Stories was commissioned by Phoenix and developed by Cuttlefish Multimedia as part of Affective Digital Histories, a research project investigating how communities change with urban decline and regeneration. The five pieces of creative writing used in the app were commissioned and edited by Corinne Fowler, director of the University of Leicester’s Centre for New Writing. To find out more visit affectivedigitalhistories.org.uk.

The video Twisting Metal with Earth was produced to explore how weather stations can be useful beyond their function as mechanical sensors. It was suggested that they also act as an aesthetic interface with the hyperobjects of big data and global climate. The video’s animated characters were voiced by interview recordings from couples discussing their experience of weather. One interviewee collected and shared data from his own weather station, others gave more experiential accounts. From the characters’, a conversation emerged that blurred the boundaries between global systems and local experience. Mechanical climate sensors and plants were discussed by the characters as useful objects to think through large and complex topics.

This paper examines notions of truth in relation to fictive modalities and discourses presented in animation and constructed imagery. It explores how notions of minimal departure and recentering of the audience are utilised within fictive depictions as narrative devices that allow the viewer to integrate truth statements into an understanding of their own world.

Drawing upon discussion of documentary animation, it considers how constructed images utilise a range of modalities in order to posi- tion discourses and make statements about reality that can affect the audience through emotional connections. Following this, the paper con- siders Lewis’ and Marie-Laure Ryan’s examination of possible worlds within literary texts. It examines how constructed images negotiate the telling of truths via truth clusters, and how the recentering of audiences in relation to the fictive worlds through those clusters allows for truth to emerge in the bridging between their world and the fictive world.

The paper proceeds to question whether texts combining low modalities or high fictionality are able to present truths through a collusion between the audience and authors’ worlds. It explores this notion through an analysis of the animated film Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared and Scavengers. The paper suggests that such texts utilize playful relocation and recentering towards fictive worlds in order to articulate truth claims about our real-world experiences, and can do so through the utilization of lower modalities and significant departures from such experiences.

This article develops a comparative analysis of Charles and Ray Eames’ Powers of Ten, and Eva Szasz and Robert Verrall’s Cosmic Zoom, seen through the lenses of Bergsonian and Deleuzo- Guttarian philosophy. The author claims that, despite similarities with respect to their subject matter and modes of production, there are significant stylistic differences between these films that are suggestive of divergent ontological, epistemological and political commitments. Of particular importance is the foregrounding of objectivity in the case of Powers of Ten and subjectivity in the case of Cosmic Zoom – a distinction that is reflected in their respectively quasi-indexical and expressive modes of representation. This fundamental tension similarly conditions their differently inflected approaches to time, space and measure, drawing attention to the strange intertwining of representation, abstraction and affect that is characteristic of much animated film. Ultimately, it is proposed that, in the context of Powers of Ten and Cosmic Zoom, animation’s capacities for abstraction and expression are differently distributed, resulting in a cosmopolitical opposition which can be aligned with the Deleuzo–Guattarian distinctions between major and minor language, and royal and nomadic science.

Many of the questions that are central to the consideration of graphic design and communication have a strong resonance with issues appertaining to the philosophy of affect. It seems strange then that whilst there has been much interest in the affective turn in the context of the arts, it has been relatively absent
from discussion of graphic design. This seems particularly odd when we consider the ways in which matters of feeling, emotion and behavioural disposition are often combined in the context of advertising and visual communication – that is, in the at once semiotic and political regulation of the social, or, conversely, in the modes of resistance that emerge out of practices of design activism. This article attempts a (re)reading of contemporary and historical graphic design, through the concept of affect.

It is well known that, despite his close engagement with cinema, Gilles Deleuze was less concerned with animated film, being somewhat dismissive of its capabilities. In recent years, however, a number of attempts have been made – most notably by William Schaffer, Thomas Lamarre and Dan Torre – to construct Deleuzian positions in animation theory. This article outlines some of these approaches, whilst engaging critically with Torre’s writings. In particular, it foregrounds Torre’s neglect of the post-structural, political dimension of Deleuzian thought through an examination of the concepts of faciality, the close-up, and relation as they occur in Deleuzian and Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy. This is in part facilitated through a comparison of Stuart Blackton’s Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906) – a work directly addressed by Torre, and Emile Cohl’s Fantasmagorie (1908) – a work which he largely passes by. It is claimed here that, despite a number of apparent similarities, the animations of Cohl and Blackton express a radically divergent series of ontological commitments. Cohl offers the audience an experience of chaotic, mutable, relational complexity that revels in its incoherence, whilst Blackton presents a series of more straightforward set pieces, dwelling for the most part upon object-centric representational form. The tension between representation and becoming that occurs between these works is employed to facilitate a critical engagement with Torre’s process-cognitivism. It is suggested that Torre’s work, though exceptional in its pedagogic value, is likewise expressive of this tension, and that in its effort firstly to combine a series of process-philosophical and cognitivist ideas, and secondly to unpack the radical ideas of Deleuze through the more conservative philosophy of Nicholas Rescher, it runs the risk of falling back into a quasi-Kantian philosophy of generality and representation.

Alongside South India’s rapid urbanisation, the early decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed the arrival of new digital technologies and social media platforms in India, opening new possibilities for performance on a mediatised urban and global stage. In a wave of popular performance practices emerging around 2011–2, Bengaluru (as with other cities across India) became the site to a host of flash mobs staged in urban spaces and filmed for online publics. This chapter examines the flash mob performance trend of that era in relation to national discourses of ‘New India’as an example of forms of cultural practice characterised by an ‘aesthetics of arrival’ in globalising India.

This book challenges the status quo of the materiality of exhibited photographs, by considering examples from the early to mid-twentieth century, when photography’s place in the museum was not only continually questioned but also continually redefined.

By taking this historical approach, Laurie Taylor demonstrates the ways in which materiality (as opposed to image) was used to privilege the exhibited photograph as either an artwork or as non-art information. Consequently, the exhibited photograph is revealed, like its vernacular cousins, to be a social object whose material form, far from being supplemental, is instead integral and essential to the generation of meaning.

Over the last decade developments in virtual reality (VR) technologies have given rise to a new wave of immersive storytelling experiences that have captivated audiences at film festivals, in galleries, through online platforms and various other venues. In response, scholarly research into narrative-based VR has sought to understand the affordances, artistic qualities and immersive nature of this medium. Within this array of analysis and reflection, traditional screenwriting concerns such as narrative structure, plot devices and character development have been discussed alongside notions of immersion, embodiment and user experience design. Accordingly, notions of ‘script development’ have expanded to encompass processes gathered under terms like ‘conceptualization’, ‘prototyping’ and ‘narrative design’, which assume specific connotations in relation to various disciplinary approaches. This Special Issue explores the technologies, practices and paradigms that VR storytelling implements, with particular attention given to the differing terminology across disciplines that resonates, repurposes or redefines conceptual understandings belonging to earlier media, and specifically, to screenwriting for film.

Contact: A Festival of New Experimental Film and Video, Apiary Studios, London, 6-8 May 2016. Curator.

Participating artists including George Barber, Louisa Fairclough, Nicky Hamlyn, Sally Golding, Malcolm Le Grice, Karen Mirza & Brad Butler, Matthew Noel-Tod, Heather Phillipson, Greg Pope, Lis Rhodes, Ben Rivers, Guy Sherwin & Lynn Loo, Jennet Thomas, Jennet Thomas, Andrea Zimmerman.

Contact: A Festival of New Experimental Film and Video featured 70 film, video and performance artists across three days in its venues’ three studios. Its curatorial focus combined a multiplicity of forms, in an accessible and aware manner, which brought together niche and new audiences and formed an important contribution to the contemporary condition of experimental film practices in the UK.

This independent survey, which was supported by ACE, presented single and multi-projector and performance-related works, and specially commissioned installations. To schedule the works in a relatable manner an innovative structure was initiated – the works were presented in small clusters, rather than the normative, often lengthy and formally inappropriate, short film programme format - which challenged viewing hierarchies, introduced new artists, providing the opportunity for the ‘sampling’ and discovery of unknown works. This conception was appreciated by the audience and artists alike (William Raban wrote: ‘Your programming was enlightened').

The Festival programmed established and emerging artists, from original members of the London Filmmakers Co-op to recent graduates, who showed new and untested works. These were selected in consultation with organisations such as no.w.here, collective-iz, Unconscious Archives, Nightworks and Screen Shadows. This ethos reflected the field’s and Festival’s co-operative and collaborative intent, and was emphasised by the supportive presence of many of the artists throughout its duration.

To document the event’s intentions and methodology a publication was produced, which included contextual essays, discussion pieces and all the Festival’s details (Guy Sherwin wrote: 'the brochure is simple, informative, elegant’). This also addressed its legacy through further disseminating its composition and ideas, as such collectable reference points are vital indicators of experimental film and video’s development. The Festival’s discursive structure, which celebrated the fields’ diversity and vibrancy, was enthusiastically and critically received, with each day selling-out.

The Contact Festival included the work of over 70 artists and filmmakers, featuring single-screen films, multi-screen/performance-related works and site-specific installations. Accompanied by a publication including discussion pieces by Luke Aspell and collective-iz (on collective practices), Sally Golding, James Holcombe and Cathy Rogers (on different manifestations of contemporary expanded cinema), and short essays by Maria Palacios Cruz (LUX, Deputy Director), William Fowler (BFI, curator of artists' moving image) and Nicky Hamlyn (filmmaker and writer), plus complete listings.

The Contact Festival included the work of over 70 artists and filmmakers, featuring single-screen films, multi-screen/performance-related works and site-specific installations. Accompanied by a publication including discussion pieces by Luke Aspell and collective-iz (on collective practices), Sally Golding, James Holcombe and Cathy Rogers (on different manifestations of contemporary expanded cinema), and short essays by Maria Palacios Cruz (LUX, Deputy Director), William Fowler (BFI, curator of artists' moving image) and Nicky Hamlyn (filmmaker and writer), plus complete listings.

Contact is a unique configuration of eight artists, which is structured equally across two exhibitions, at New Art Projects, London. These artists work in distinct and interrelated mediums and forms that explore material, temporal and spatial relations working with stil and moving images, analogue and digital practices, human and machine processes. Their distinct approaches and applications produce different, but related, medium engagement, viewing regimes and cross-disciplinary discourse. They are in contact with materials, forms, context, one another, and are part of an ongoing conversation that generates new connections and ideas.

Curated by: Andrew Vallance

Part 1: 20 July-17 August 2024
Jenny Baines, Sophie Clements, Carali McCali, Cathy Rogers

Part 2: 18 January-8 February 2025
Savinder Bual, Jim Hobbs, Simon Payne, Andrew Vallance

A series of eight film screening and expanded events, which featured 22 artists. It drew on Film Talks: 15 Conversations About Experimental Cinema's discursive pairings, enabling them to show and perform work.

The applied interaction, between maker and work, in a specific context, further developed the conversation for all - peer-to-peer, artist-to-audience, work-to-context - enriching subject related understanding.

The public returning to the printed text re-animated the original words, indicated further questions and offered new insight, all that can only occur in an informed live interaction.

The events sought to explore (in different ways) how practitioners and viewers can be brought together in sites of co-presence, be part of a collaborative and discursive enterprise that shares and explores conceptual and contextual encounters.

Film Talks is an edited collection of unique conversations on experimental cinema from a range of eminent and emerging film and video makers. The book represents a contemporary snapshot of the ways in which experimental cinema is perceived by its practitioners, often in relation to other art forms, moving image culture at large and wider social issues. It is an invaluable guide for those keen to immerse themselves in the insights and perspectives that only artists can offer.

Film Talks: 15 Conversations on Experimental Cinema is a collection of unique conversations on experimental cinema, involving a range of international film and video makers from the United Kingdom, Europe and North America. The book represents a snapshot of the diverse ways that these practitioners have come to think about the field of experimental cinema, in relation to other art forms, moving image culture at large, and wider social issues. Film Talks: A Touring Programme of Experimental Cinema, a series of eight international screenings, is in two parts and features twenty-one 16mm films and video works by artists who feature in the book, drawing out new ideas and connections that span different visions of cinema.

Pairs: - / -, The Depot, London, 19, 27 June & 3, 10 July 2017. Curator.

Featuring: Jennifer Nightingale/Simon Payne, Nick Collins/Cathy Rodgers, Nicky Hamlyn/Neil Henderson, Amy Dickson/Jamie Jenkinson

Pairs: - / -, was a curated series of four events, each of which featured two artist-filmmakers, who presented new work, alongside a work that inspired them, and was introduced by a printed version of a conversation between the featured pair. Its combination of works and words, and consideration of site, facilitated research into creative, critical and curatorial practice and its public manifestation.

My curatorial practice examines film and video exhibition configuration, the resulting spectatorship and addresses the need to develop more accessible knowledge exchange, through challenging the passivity of most film presentations. Pairs’ furthered my investigation into the importance of discursive programming, how through this developmental methodology artists and audiences can experience a more rewarding encounter.

The series presented diverse experimental film and video practices through peer-to-peer and artist-to-audience dialogues. The pairs had shared and/or contrasting areas of interest, and their transcribed conversations, which is a neglected area of research, reflected on their own and one another’s practices and informed the series. Further to this, the artists’ inspirational film choices provided tracible linkages. The works were presented in their original formats – film and digital projections (single and double screen) and multi-media performance – reinforcing the importance of medium specificity within this field. Some of the artists are key figures in the history of experimental film and in combining their work with that of younger artists, the ‘pairings’ built on the field’s legacy and dissemination.

This configuration allowed related debates - contextual histories, thematic focus, exhibition strategies - to occur in an insightful and relatable manner. It reflected the featured works’ experimental intent, a questioning of form and content, created an active encounter between the works and their reception, always an experimental aspiration, and offered a more interactive experience through its discursive assemblage.

Pairs: - / -, The Depot, London, 19, 27 June & 3, 10 July 2017. Curator.

Featuring: Jennifer Nightingale/Simon Payne, Nick Collins/Cathy Rodgers, Nicky Hamlyn/Neil Henderson, Amy Dickson/Jamie Jenkinson

Pairs: - / -, was a curated series of four events, each of which featured two artist-filmmakers, who presented new work, alongside a work that inspired them, and was introduced by a printed version of a conversation between the featured pair. Its combination of works and words, and consideration of site, facilitated research into creative, critical and curatorial practice and its public manifestation.

My curatorial practice examines film and video exhibition configuration, the resulting spectatorship and addresses the need to develop more accessible knowledge exchange, through challenging the passivity of most film presentations. Pairs’ furthered my investigation into the importance of discursive programming, how through this developmental methodology artists and audiences can experience a more rewarding encounter.

The series presented diverse experimental film and video practices through peer-to-peer and artist-to-audience dialogues. The pairs had shared and/or contrasting areas of interest, and their transcribed conversations, which is a neglected area of research, reflected on their own and one another’s practices and informed the series. Further to this, the artists’ inspirational film choices provided tracible linkages. The works were presented in their original formats – film and digital projections (single and double screen) and multi-media performance – reinforcing the importance of medium specificity within this field. Some of the artists are key figures in the history of experimental film and in combining their work with that of younger artists, the ‘pairings’ built on the field’s legacy and dissemination.

This configuration allowed related debates - contextual histories, thematic focus, exhibition strategies - to occur in an insightful and relatable manner. It reflected the featured works’ experimental intent, a questioning of form and content, created an active encounter between the works and their reception, always an experimental aspiration, and offered a more interactive experience through its discursive assemblage.

Pairs: - / -, The Depot, London, 19, 27 June & 3, 10 July 2017. Curator.

Featuring: Jennifer Nightingale/Simon Payne, Nick Collins/Cathy Rodgers, Nicky Hamlyn/Neil Henderson, Amy Dickson/Jamie Jenkinson

Pairs: - / -, was a curated series of four events, each of which featured two artist-filmmakers, who presented new work, alongside a work that inspired them, and was introduced by a printed version of a conversation between the featured pair. Its combination of works and words, and consideration of site, facilitated research into creative, critical and curatorial practice and its public manifestation.

My curatorial practice examines film and video exhibition configuration, the resulting spectatorship and addresses the need to develop more accessible knowledge exchange, through challenging the passivity of most film presentations. Pairs’ furthered my investigation into the importance of discursive programming, how through this developmental methodology artists and audiences can experience a more rewarding encounter.

The series presented diverse experimental film and video practices through peer-to-peer and artist-to-audience dialogues. The pairs had shared and/or contrasting areas of interest, and their transcribed conversations, which is a neglected area of research, reflected on their own and one another’s practices and informed the series. Further to this, the artists’ inspirational film choices provided tracible linkages. The works were presented in their original formats – film and digital projections (single and double screen) and multi-media performance – reinforcing the importance of medium specificity within this field. Some of the artists are key figures in the history of experimental film and in combining their work with that of younger artists, the ‘pairings’ built on the field’s legacy and dissemination.

This configuration allowed related debates - contextual histories, thematic focus, exhibition strategies - to occur in an insightful and relatable manner. It reflected the featured works’ experimental intent, a questioning of form and content, created an active encounter between the works and their reception, always an experimental aspiration, and offered a more interactive experience through its discursive assemblage.

Resemblance to Other Animals (16 mins, HD, 2019) is a memory work that considers locational effect and its recollection. Its key elements, images of encased taxidermy and a traveller’s voice, offer different temporal plains and positions. The images were shot in the Horniman Museum’s, London, natural history gallery and the recordings were inspired by work related travel, time away from home. These combined sensory streams, conjoined by narrative’s reason, suggest temporal and spatial complexity and the partialness of remembrance.

The Horniman Museum is a testament to the Victorian mania for collecting, which was also the time of the ‘memory crisis’ when Bergson, Freud, Proust and later Benjamin were proposing a new intuitive, individuated, understanding of memory. A museum collection creates history, a vision of the past, that is in itself a product of history. Resemblance to Other Animals juxtaposes this site with personal recollection, which relates a sense of place to identity and can challenge institutionalised positions, examining how this correlation can be conceptualised and represented.

This examination considers whether the artistic engagement with form and content can formulate a place of creative reckoning, were an imaginative exploration can occur and a different past can be discovered, and if these sensory and conceptual elements can create a memorious investigation that generates new readings.

Film is the ‘art of time’, and film and memory’s
generative affiliation is founded in this relationship.
This paper will examine how this mnemonic facility is
invoked through practice and how this in turn creates
memories.

The tension between narrative interests
and memory’s imperatives can form an axis of
experimentation and exploration. All films reference
memory, one way or another, however not all are
works of memory. Some films would evoke the idea
of memory but do not risk structural and psychological
instability whereas others consciously suggest
memory’s presence through offering more than one
temporal plain and other related signifiers.

The latter categorisation includes the films suchas
Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (Resnais, 1963), Tren
de sombras (Guerín, 1997) and Appearances (Meter,
2000). In this work the correspondence of history and
form, narrative and memory relates and develops
subjective and cultural recollection.

These films relate a form of filmic hybridity that
emphasizes conceptual potentiality and will be the
focus of this study. This examination will consider how
these films’ account of memory’s evolving resonances
is an act of writing and re-writing, and how these works
produce new ways of seeing and thinking.

The global pandemic forced the film industry to adapt its practices. The primary driver of these changes was the economic imperative for production to continue. Similarly, film production courses had to deploy new methods to enable student films to be produced. Through this process new and often creative working methods were devised. This necessity for change also allowed for a critical reassessment of standardised industrial filmmaking - this emphasised that until this point there had been a general unwillingness to reflect upon the industrial production and educational norm, with its ecological unsustainability, exclusive practices and embedded hierarchies. So, the imposing of ‘restrictions’ in fact became an opportunity for creative discovery and to rethink practice related possibilities.

In this paper the authors will draw on their experience of teaching MA Film Practice, at Arts University Bournemouth, and the need to reimagine disciplinary engagement and devise new curriculum components. This process transformed restrictions into ‘creative parameters’. It also focused the course’s practice based research ethos and enhanced the student reflexive and reflective development. These innovations are now embedded in the course’s structure and have facilitated a departmental debate concerning ‘standardised’ working methods (copying historical normative models), and how we can foster a more inclusive and inventive learning environment.

Further to this, the graduating students, now emerging reflective practitioners – more socially, ethically and conceptually aware – can potentially affect new standards and approaches to film production, and in doing so promote original and diverse work, as well as embracing inclusive and ecologically sustainable methodologies. This paper will consider the instructiveness of this academic innovation and its potential to inform future film practice.

It is now accepted that current film production practices are unsustainable and new formulations need to be found that address the climate crisis. The issue’s primary reporting is concerned with industrial film productions, which is undoubtedly important, but this top down approach needs to be balanced with more inclusive and imbedded solutions. Therefore, a pedagogic perspective, which considers whether learning initiatives can influence production methods, is timely. This article proposes that through this engagement alternative practices can be developed.

The deep geological repository project for the long-term storage of radioactive material opens an encounter between design processes in the present and the ‘deep time’ of 4.46 billion year futures. Beyond debates around ethics of responsibility to future generations, this paper argues,
this invokes a more radical futurity, where human thought confronts its contingency alongside nuclear timescales. Art practices play a key ‘stakeholder’ role in imagining repository sites, in a context where they are both rooted in materialities of stochastic decay process and necessarily subject to interdisciplinary transformation. This paper asks what specific knowledge art practices
could give us in this context. What are their potentials and problems? And what could this mean for the historical conditions of ‘contemporary art’? It does this through departing from the 2010 film Into Eternity and its production of awe-struck ineffability through cinematic allusion to massive duration. Deep radiological times are proposed instead not as ‘eternity’ but as ‘very large
finitude’ (Morton), not immeasurable but as call to develop art practice through collective experimentation and technological augmentation. This extends Nick Srnicek’s proposal for an ‘aesthetics of the interface’ as a making operational of complex data through making it amenable
to the senses, and concludes with some propositions from the author’s current art practice.