scholarly journals Impossible Choreographies

Author(s):  
Gregory Bennett

This exposition discusses the emergence of the database as a creative methodology, and key organising principle in the generation of a series of 3D digital animated artworks. Through detailed explication and demonstration of a complex creative process utilising a range of media formats including video, 3D model views, and interactive 3D, I aim to elucidate an intricate relationship between technology, process and artistic intent, framing this within relevant emergent critical frameworks around digital creative practice. This design strategy will enable the effective communication of some of the inherent qualities of 3D digital production, and the mapping of the operations of the ‘database’ as a pliable creative tool. Working directly into high-end 3D modelling and animation software, and taking the actions of a generic male figure as a point of departure, my animations are created in a modular fashion, building up units of performed movements, loops and cycles (both animated and motion-captured), creating a sometimes complex movement vocabulary. This recalls Lev Manovich’s notions of the database and the loop as engines of (non-linear) narrative in digital media work, in particular his principles of modularity, automation and variability as intrinsic to new media objects. In working with complex software tools I also acknowledge in the fabrication process what Rachael Kearney has termed the ‘synthetic imagination’, and Malcolm Le Grice’s conception of submerged authorship in the interaction with the ‘intelligent machine’ – the creative act as a collaboration with the embodied intellect of the software itself. Drawing on and remediating a range of sources including the photographic studies of Eadweard J. Muybridge, the choreography of Busby Berkeley, nineteenth century optical toys, and the contemporary digital video game, these works present figures which occupy a space between the animate and the inanimate, between automata (devices that move by themselves) and simulacra (devices that simulate other things).

Author(s):  
Dan J. Bodoh

Abstract The growth of the Internet over the past four years provides the failure analyst with a new media for communicating his results. The new digital media offers significant advantages over analog publication of results. Digital production, distribution and storage of failure analysis results reduces copying costs and paper storage, and enhances the ability to search through old analyses. When published digitally, results reach the customer within minutes of finishing the report. Furthermore, images on the computer screen can be of significantly higher quality than images reproduced on paper. The advantages of the digital medium come at a price, however. Research has shown that employees can become less productive when replacing their analog methodologies with digital methodologies. Today's feature-filled software encourages "futzing," one cause of the productivity reduction. In addition, the quality of the images and ability to search the text can be compromised if the software or the analyst does not understand this digital medium. This paper describes a system that offers complete digital production, distribution and storage of failure analysis reports on the Internet. By design, this system reduces the futzing factor, enhances the ability to search the reports, and optimizes images for display on computer monitors. Because photographic images are so important to failure analysis, some digital image optimization theory is reviewed.


2008 ◽  
pp. 259-276
Author(s):  
Andrew Burn

The aim of this chapter is to reflect about the teachers’ training in media education. This training in England is quite insufficient and almost based on the transfer of reading competencies: this means that is does not prepare the teacher to work with digital media, normally characterized by authoring activities. Starting from the experience of a master degree developed in the London Institute of Education, the chapter tries to show how many of the problems involved in this training were discussed and solved with the teachers enrolled in the master. The hypothesis presented is based on the mix between theory and practice, the creative activity of the participants, and the centrality of the role of the learner.


Author(s):  
Ralph Schroeder

The role of new digital media in politics has often been discussed for individual countries and technologies, or at a general level. So far, there are few studies which compare countries and treat new media in the context of the media system as a whole, including traditional and new digital media. The main contribution of this article is to compare two countries at the extremes of the political spectrum and with quite different media systems, the United States and Sweden. It synthesizes what is known to date about digital media in these two cases, including about the uses of Twitter, Facebook and other new media. The article discusses the shortcomings of existing analyses of political communication and of how digital media work in a way that is different from traditional or mass media. The argument is that new media expand input from people into the political systems only at the margins, where they can circumvent established agenda setting and gatekeeping mechanisms. The article develops a framework for understanding digital media which highlights how they extend and diversify the public sphere, even as this sphere is monitored and managed, and still faces the constraint of the limited attention devoted to political issues.


10.16993/bbk ◽  
2021 ◽  

The ongoing digitization of culture and society and the ongoing production of new digital objects in culture and society require new ways of investigation, new theoretical avenues, and new multidisciplinary frameworks. In order to meet these requirements, this collection of eleven studies digs into questions concerning, for example: the epistemology of data produced and shared on social media platforms; the need of new legal concepts that regulate the increasing use of artificial intelligence in society; and the need of combinatory methods to research new media objects such as podcasts, web art, and online journals in relation to their historical, social, institutional, and political effects and contexts. The studies in this book introduce the new research field “digital human sciences,” which include the humanities, the social sciences, and law. From their different disciplinary outlooks, the authors share the aim of discussing and developing methods and approaches for investigating digital society, digital culture, and digital media objects.


2020 ◽  
Vol 237 (10) ◽  
pp. 1172-1176
Author(s):  
Charlotte Schramm ◽  
Yaroslava Wenner

AbstractThe digital media becomes more and more common in our everyday lives. So it is not surprising that technical progress is also leaving its mark on amblyopia therapy. New media and technologies can be used both in the actual amblyopia therapy or therapy monitoring. In particular in this review shutter glasses, therapy monitoring and analysis using microsensors and newer video programs for amblyopia therapy are presented and critically discussed. Currently, these cannot yet replace classic amblyopia therapy. They represent interesting options that will occupy us even more in the future.


Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter

Hieroglyphs have persisted for so long in the Western imagination because of the malleability of their metaphorical meanings. Emblems of readability and unreadability, universality and difference, writing and film, writing and digital media, hieroglyphs serve to encompass many of the central tensions in understandings of race, nation, language and media in the twentieth century. For Pound and Lindsay, they served as inspirations for a more direct and universal form of writing; for Woolf, as a way of treating the new medium of film and our perceptions of the world as a kind of language. For Conrad and Welles, they embodied the hybridity of writing or the images of film; for al-Hakim and Mahfouz, the persistence of links between ancient Pharaonic civilisation and a newly independent Egypt. For Joyce, hieroglyphs symbolised the origin point for the world’s cultures and nations; for Pynchon, the connection between digital code and the novel. In their modernist interpretations and applications, hieroglyphs bring together writing and new media technologies, language and the material world, and all the nations and languages of the globe....


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 30-34
Author(s):  
Yin Lu ◽  
Surng Gahb Jahng
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
Bonnie ‘Bo’ Ruberg ◽  
Daniel Lark

This article looks at the appearance of domestic spaces on the popular livestreaming platform Twitch.tv, with a focus on livestreams that appear to be shot in streamers’ bedrooms. Many Twitch streamers broadcast from their homes, making domestic space central to questions of placemaking for this rapidly growing digital media form. Within the home, bedrooms merit particular attention because they carry particular cultural connotations; they are associated with intimacy, embodiment, and erotics. Drawing from observations of gaming and nongaming streams, we map where bedrooms do and do not appear on Twitch. We locate the majority of bedrooms in categories that foreground connections between streamers and viewers, like Just Chatting, Music & Performing Arts, and autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR). By contrast, across a wide range of video game genres, bedrooms remain largely absent from gaming streams. The presence of bedrooms on Twitch also breaks down along gender lines, with women streaming being far more likely to broadcast from their bedrooms than men. Here, we build from existing research on both livestreaming and digital placemaking to argue for an understanding of place on Twitch as fundamentally performative. This performance is inherently gendered and bound up with the affective labor of streaming. In addition, we demonstrate how the bedroom, even when it does not appear on screen, can be understood as a ‘structuring logic’ of placemaking on Twitch. Given the history of livestreaming, which grows out of women’s experiments with online ‘lifecasting’, the bedroom sets expectations for the type of spatial and emotional access a stream is imagined to offer viewers. In this sense, the absence of bedrooms in gaming streams can be understood as a disavowal of intimate domestic space: an attempt by predominantly male streamers to distance themselves from the implicit parallels between livestreaming and practices like webcam modeling.


Author(s):  
Pete Bennett ◽  
Julian McDougall

This volume re-imagines the study of English and media in a way that decentralises the text (e.g. romantic poetry or film noir) or media formats/platforms (e.g. broadcast media/new media). Instead, the authors work across boundaries in meaningful thematic contexts that reflect the ways in which people engage with reading, watching, making, and listening in their textual lives. In so doing, the volume recasts both subjects as combined in a more reflexive, critical space for the study of our everyday social and cultural interactions. Across the chapters, the authors present applicable learning and teaching strategies that weave together art works, films, social practices, creativity, 'viral' media, theater, TV, social media, videogames, and literature. The culmination of this range of strategies is a reclaimed 'blue skies' approach to progressive textual education, free from constraining shackles of outdated ideas about textual categories and value that have hitherto alienated generations of students and both English and media from themselves.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessie Nixon

Purpose This paper aims to demonstrate how teaching the discourse of critique, an integral part of the video production process, can be used to eliminate barriers for young people in gaining new media literacy skills helping more young people become producers rather than consumers of digital media. Design/methodology/approach This paper describes an instrumental qualitative case study (Stake, 2000) in two elective high school video production classrooms in the Midwestern region of the USA. The author conducted observations, video and audio recorded critique sessions, conducted semi-structured interviews and collected artifacts throughout production including storyboards, brainstorms and rough and final cuts of videos. Findings Throughout critique, young video producers used argumentation strategies to cocreate meaning, multiple methods of inquiry and questioning, critically evaluated feedback and synthesized their ideas and those of their peers to achieve their intended artistic vision. Young video producers used feedback in the following ways: incorporated feedback directly into their work, rejected and ignored feedback, or incorporated some element of the feedback in a way not originally intended. Originality/value This paper demonstrates how teaching the discourse of critique can be used to eliminate barriers for young people in gaining new media literacy skills. Educators can teach argumentation and inquiry strategies through using thinking guides that encourage active processing and through engaging near peer mentors. Classroom educators can integrate the arts-based practice of the pitch critique session to maximize the impact of peer-to-peer learning.


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