Improvements on the truth

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-83
Author(s):  
Damian Gascoigne

My drawn animation practice has always focused on the gestural mark and messy materiality. This article is about what happened to that practice in the transition from analogue to digital animation, questioning what was lost forever and what might still be worth fighting for. This practitioner’s account of a ‘before digital, after digital’ career describes the experience of making work, as work itself changed forever. Ushered in with little reflection or resistance in the mid-1990s, the new digital doctrine slowly consumed hand-drawn 2D animation production to the point where few but the most determined independent makers keep this vital practice alive. My contention is that a reckoning on why and how we engage with digital technology is long overdue. The article will set out why – after working with digital tools for more than twenty years – I have now abandoned all but the most cursory engagement with new media tools and taken the long walk back to a material analogue practice. The ideas under discussion here can be traced back to one overriding concern – the unsolvable relationship between movement in drawing and drawing for movement. This dichotomy is unique to 2D animation, because freedom of gesture in drawing does not produce continuity of movement in animation. Mining this seam drives my independent animation practice as I try to reconcile the page and the frame.

2010 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 445-463 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antoine Cordelois

In this article, we use digital technologies (the Subcam and Webdiver) to capture, share and analyze collectively specific user experience. We examine the transition between ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ when people come home, and the steps needed to build the ‘being-at-home’ feeling. Understanding what ‘being at home’ means for the subject is part of our larger project of analyzing the impact of home automation. We provide a model which describes the relation between the home and its inhabitant as instrumental ‘functional coupling’, which, when achieved, provides the ‘at home’ feeling. This article illustrates how digital tools can make the ethnographic approach a collaborative analysis of human experience.


Author(s):  
Katherine Thomson-Jones

Human beings have always made images, and to do so they have developed and refined an enormous range of artistic tools and materials. With the development of digital technology, the ways of making images—whether they are still or moving, 2D or 3D—have evolved at an unprecedented rate. At every stage of image making, artists now face a choice between using analog and using digital tools. Yet a digital image need not look digital; and likewise, a handmade image or traditional photograph need not look analog. If we do not see the artist’s choice between the analog and the digital, what difference can this choice make for our appreciation of images in the digital age? Image in the Making answers this question by accounting for the fundamental distinction between the analog and the digital; by explicating the technological realization of this distinction in image-making practice; and by exploring the creative possibilities that are distinctive of the digital. The case is made for a new kind of appreciation in the digital age. In appreciating the images involved in every digital art form—from digital video installation to net art to digital cinema—there is a basic truth that we cannot ignore: the nature and technology of the digital expands both what an image can be as an image and what an image can be for us.


2007 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 239-259
Author(s):  
Thomas Gibbons

Communications are being transformed by the combination of digital technology and a global media economy. There is increased convergence between traditional broadcasting, cable distribution, satellite broadcasting, telecommunications and the Internet, which has boosted the sheer volume of programming and information that can be conveyed, and extended its reach at both domestic and international levels. Many will see these developments as an opportunity to promote new media products and to rationalise their operations in a global market place. Others may be concerned that the need to compete successfully in that market place will threaten the survival of local and national cultural identity. In terms of policy and regulation, states may be tempted to emphasise trade and industrial policy, intended to improve transnational competitiveness, at the expense of media and cultural policy, aimed at protecting pluralism and diversity.


2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 5-26
Author(s):  
Kajsa Kuoljok

Through a story about a reindeer that wandered off from its grazing area, this article explores the emotional effects mediated by digital technology. It concerns the way in which reindeer movements are made visible through the use of digital tools. As reindeer movements are documented by GPS (Global Positional Systems) technology and transformed into inscriptions, the movements become easier to observe. It makes a difference when herders can follow reindeer movements from above, instead of from the ground. New knowledge emerges with increased amounts of information. As GPS data makes reindeer movement visible, it creates a new, partial relation between seeing and knowing. The strong emotional effects that are induced by this relation on the herder are observed and described through a narrative of the reindeer that wandered into another Sámi community.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Reilly ◽  
◽  
Ian Dawson

The term Virtual Archaeology was coined 30 years ago when personal computing and the first wave of digital devices and associated technologies became generally available to field archaeologists (Reilly 1991; 1992). The circumstances that led to the origin of Virtual Archaeology have been recounted elsewhere. Put briefly, Virtual Archaeology was intended for reflexive archaeological practitioners “to be a generative concept and a provocation allowing for creative and playful improvisation around the potential adoption or adaptation of any new digital technology in fieldwork; in other words to explore how new digital tools could enable, and shape, new methodological insights and interpretation, that is new practices” (Beale, Reilly 2017). Digital creativity in archaeology and cultural heritage continues to flourish, and we can still stand by these aspirations. However, in 2021, the definition and extent of this implied “archaeological” community of practice and its assumed authority seems too parochial. Moreover, the archaeological landscape is not under the sole purview of archaeologists or cultural heritage managers. Consequently, experimentation with novel modes and methods of engagement, the creation of new forms of analysis, and different ways of knowing this landscape, are also not their sole prerogative. This applies equally to Virtual Archaeology and digital creativity in the realm of cultural heritage more generally. We assert that other affirmative digitally creative conceptions of, and engagements with, artefacts, virtual archaeological landscapes and cultural heritage assemblages – in their broadest sense – are possible if we are willing to adopt other perspectives and diffract them through contrasting disciplinary points of view and approaches. In this paper we are specifically concerned with interlacing artistic and virtual archaeology practices within the realm of imaging, part of something we call Virtual Art/Archaeology.


Author(s):  
Katharine Dommett ◽  
Luke Temple ◽  
Patrick Seyd

Abstract Over recent decades, scholars have explored political parties’ adoption of digital technology. Tracing successive eras of change, scholarship has examined the degree to which digital disrupts or embeds traditional power structures—with many studies finding evidence of ‘controlled-interactivity’. In this article, we revisit debates around the adoption of digital tools from a bottom-up perspective. Moving beyond attempts to categorise elite strategies for digital adoption, we consider practices on the ground to document how, in practice, digital technology is being taken up and used. Using a case study of the UK Labour Party, we categorise a range of different practices, highlighting and theorising the presence of digital adherents, laggards, entrepreneurs, renegades and refuseniks. Discussing the drivers of these practices, we offer new insight into variations in digital adoption and consider the significance of these trends for our understanding of party organisation.


Author(s):  
David Paulson

For many years, we have attempted to teach teachers technology for their own personal use and to help them use technology effectively with their students. We have introduced them to computers, to operating systems, peripherals, software, the Internet, and to all of the attending elements of digital technology. These, the knowledge and effective use of digital tools, are the “hard skills.” They are “hard skills” not because they are difficult to learn, but because they are time intensive and require the ability to put all of the disparate parts of technology together. They are the skills anyone would need were they to assume the responsibility of teaching them to someone else.


2006 ◽  
Vol 120 (1) ◽  
pp. 142-155
Author(s):  
Steve Archer

This paper has as its focus two key strands that are significant to contemporary media education. The first is the increasing move towards creative production work as the central and dominant feature of media studies courses. In UK schools, this has largely been facilitated by the rapid expansion of digital technologies. Whilst this offers unprecedented opportunities for students to construct advanced and highly polished artefacts, it has also created new challenges for the media teacher in relation to pedagogy and classroom management. The second strand is the emergence of globalised, commercial media cultures and their relation to new media forms facilitated by digital technology. Here, this paper is interested in the relatively new media form of the music video which, in its dominant mode of distribution and exhibition, exists globally as part of satellite and digital packages. Music video as a form is ideal for use in Media Studies as an object of study and as a framework for facilitating creative work. Based on practitioner research methods, this paper teases out the tensions that exist between popular culture, media education and digital technology, incorporating the way a sense of community located beyond the school can create opportunities for student creative work.


Author(s):  
Jerome McGann

Abstract The essay is a study of how critical editions work, whether in paper-based forms or in electronic forms. The first section – more than half the essay – gives a close examination to J. C. C. Mays’s superb recent (Bollingen) edition of Coleridge’s poetry. This analysis establishes the terms for investigating the opportunities that digital technology supplies for scholars pursuing a close study of the socio-historical character of literary works. This investigation pivots around the seminal work of D. F. McKenzie, whose theory of the social-text edition argues for a more comprehensive kind of editorial method. This essay argues that the method can be best realized through digital resources. It concludes with a discussion of The Rossetti Archive as a “proof of concept” experiment to test the social-text approach to editorial method.


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