Abstraction, Bare Life, and Counternarratives of Mobility in the Refugee Films of Richard Mosse and Ai Weiwei, Incoming and Human Flow

This chapter explores the unprecedented formal experiments of Richard Mosse and Ai Weiwei in their attempts to capture the signature global event of our time, the mass movements of refugees and immigrants across geopolitical boundaries. In Mosse’s Incoming, a thermal camera registers the heat emanating from human bodies from some 30 miles away, providing images of refugees in lifeboats, transport trucks, and refugee camps that are both other-worldly, almost mutant in their strangeness, and deeply moving—images that rivet the gaze. In Ai Weiwei’s Human Flow, drone cameras render the vast scale of human displacement around the world—a view from above is interspersed with the close witnessing of cell phone video, using the visual language of spontaneous documentation in counterpoint with a technology associated with military surveillance. In both films, Giorgio Agamben’s concept of “bare life” is articulated within an advanced optical and technological framework that brings new critical questions into view.

Narrating New Normal: Graduate Student Symposium Report

This article summarizes the events at Narrating New Normal: Graduate Student Symposium, held virtually on May 17–18, 2021. The symposium was organized by a number of graduate students from the School of Communication and Film (previously named the School of Communication) and was supported by Global Storytelling: Journal of Digital and Moving Images and the School of Communication and Film. It was attended by an international roster of graduate students hailing from academic institutions and think tanks in different countries. The presentations focused on the usage of the phrase new normal, a popular term during crises, in various geopolitical, geocultural, and historical contexts. The essay discusses first the background and theoretical framework that informs the symposium. Conceived during the COVID-19 pandemic, a global crisis that has seen the use of the phrase new normal in describing the shifts in our daily lives or imaginations of a postcrisis future. Taking a critical approach, the symposium aims to interrogate how the phrase is used by different social institutions, corporations, and individuals in various crises, considering how it normalizes precarity. This essay also summarizes the keynote lecture delivered by professor Michal Krzyzanowski (Uppsala University) on the discursive strategies of normalization and mainstreaming. It also covers the papers and discussions across four panels that examined the different aspects of normalization and of new normal in its various incarnations: geopolitics, networked media spaces, normalization and precarity, and popular culture. The article ends by offering a synthesis of the major threads that tie the presentations and addresses together. It proposes that while the phrase new normal normalizes and obfuscates precarity, it also suggests that there are pockets of optimism during crises where we can witness human resilience and individual agency.

Image Processing Test Bench for Robot Vision Using C#

Purpose: Nowadays, image processing is a well-known technological term. In some of the industries, it has practical needs. It is an essential tool for the process and robotic industry. Various popular frameworks and libraries are available to process the image. The OpenCV is one of the best and popular libraries for image processing. It was originally written in C++ by Intel. Now various wrappers are available to implement into the different programming languages. The OpenCvSharp is the wrapper of OpenCV. Those who are familiar with C# can use it. The new researcher who wants to integrate image processing into their project takes some time for setup, function writing, and integration. Here we created a test bench application for Image processing demonstration. It has been made with some usual function to process the image. It was created using visual studio 2022 and OpenCvSharp wrapper in C# language. The researcher can learn about various image processing algorithms without writing any code or giving little bits of effort. The complete project is available on GitHub. Anyone can download, experiment, and integrate into their project without any issue. Design/Methodology/Approach: We created a GUI (Graphical User Interface) based C# application. Using Nuget Package manager, installed two OpenCV wrapper packages. To invoke several functions, we add some buttons, and for changing the method’s parameter, we integrate some text boxes. We created some abstraction layers Between the OpenCvSharp wrapper and GUI. We made our custom module as portable as possible so that our researchers could easily incorporate it into their project. Findings/result: This unique image processing test bench is designed for new researchers trying to integrate image processing capability into their research work. It can take still images or moving images through the connected webcam, automatically sending the various commands and promptly observing the result. Originality/Value: This test bench has been arranged uniquely for the researcher. It might have some value to their research work. The unique feature like automatic trigger can help them send the series of commands without repeatedly typing or pressing the button to see the result. Paper Type: Experiment-based Research

TINDAK TUTUR EKSPRESIF DALAM FILM ANIMASI UPIN DAN IPIN SIARAN TELEVISI SWASTA MNCTV (KAJIAN PRAGMATIK)

The problem to be discussed in this research is how the expressive speech acts in the animated film Upin and Ipin are broadcast on MNCTV private television. Pragmatics is the study of all aspects of meaning that have been covered in semantic theory, or in other words: discussing all aspects of the meaning of speech that cannot be explained completely by direct reference to the conditions of truth of the sentence spoken. Speech acts are actions that are displayed through utterances to convey one's intentions and goals to others in life situations. Expressive is a type of speech act that states something the speaker feels. Animated films are films that are the result of processing hand drawings, so that they become moving images. Animated films are basically based on fantasy stories. While the source of data in the research is the animated film Upin and Ipin. This type of research is a qualitative research with descriptive method. After the researchers conducted research and grouped the results of the research data based on expressive speech acts, the researchers obtained 27 data. The speech act of thanking found 5 data, apologizing found 4 data, congratulating found 3 data, praising found 5 data, complaining found 6 data, and blaming found 4 data. The conclusion in this study is that expressive speech acts in the form of complaining are the most commonly found in the animated film Upin and Ipin.

Concrete Abstract: Exploring Tactility in Abstract Animations from Early Avant-garde Films to Contemporary Artworks

After witnessing social chaos and the collapse of values at the beginning of the twentieth century, avant-garde artists insert new thought patterns and progressive aesthetic into the traditional perception of art. Being enthralled by the new film medium, former painters like Viking Eggeling, Walther Ruttman and Hans Richter start to experiment with light in two-dimensional film formats, they animate lines, stripes, basic shapes, play with the foreground and the background, and, most important of all, they construct a temporality within the visual order of the screen. Viking Eggeling’s Symphonie Diagonale (1921-24), Walther Ruttman’s Opus I (1921) and Hans Richter’s Rhythmus 21 (1921) show such temporality built in, which is caught by the idea of music as their titles suggest. These short abstract animation films attempt to discover the artistic possibilities of the new developing medium, film. Like the pioneer avant-garde abstract filmmakers, today’s artists still seek to stimulate a new perception for a possible embodiment that will activate the sense of touch in the audience. Tactility, enhanced by the material, opens up a new network of spatio-temporal relationships in the viewer's consciousness and subjecthood. This essay aims to bring a historical perspective to the abstract moving images of which the tactile or haptic experience is a defining characteristic. Through a selection of abstract animations, the materiality of the film image and the screening site will be elaborated upon according to the haptic features that are corporally embodied by the viewers. In the light of historical abstract animation, the aim is to dwell upon the dynamics of a continuous tendency to capture tactile instances to help bring forth the spatial resonances as well as visualize and reedify the rhythmic passing of time.

Editorial - Animated Space

Since early days, the moving images of animated film have suggested a spatial freedom that challenges the limits of the photographic and traditional filmic space. When, in 1914, Winsor McCay drew himself onto the landscape to interact with Gertie, he was initiating a practice of expanding the space(s) we live in through the use of the animated image that lasts until today. Animation’s wide aesthetic and technical malleability, and its innate ability to suggest metamorphosis and unrest, has led its practice to cross boundaries and engage with the space beyond the limits of the traditional screen.

Bank Kosa Kata Untuk Tuna Rungu dan Tuna Wicara Berbasis Web

Communication is the most important key to mastering this era of globalization. There is no denying that language is the most important part of communication. When one person uses the same language or understands another person's language, they can communicate well. Sign language is a language based on artificial communication, i.e. body language and lip movements during communication. This sign language is standardized as SIBI (Indonesian Sign Language System). SIBI is one of the media in the form of books that are able to communicate with deaf people in the community. Its shape is a systematic arrangement of groups of fingers, hands and various movements, symbolizing the word Indonesian. Book media does not seem to be easily understood by users, so it takes an application that can provide moving images to facilitate sign language learning, one of which is web-based.

Early Cinema, Modernity and Visual Culture

The end of the nineteenth century saw the Balkans animated with cultural movements and socio-political turmoil. Alongside these developments, the proliferation of print media and the arrival of moving images was transforming urban life and played a significant role in the creation of national culture. Based on archival research and previously overlooked footage and early press materials, Imaginary of the Balkans: Visual Culture, Modernity and Early Cinema is the first study on early cinema in the region from a transnational and cross-cultural perspective. This work investigates how the unique geopolitical positioning of the Balkan space and the multi-cultural identity of its communities influenced and shaped visual culture and early cinema development. Moreover, it examines the relationship between the new medium and visual culture through the notion of the haptic, and explores the role early cinema and foreign productions played in the construction of Balkanist and semi-colonial discourses. Reframing hierarchical relations between ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’, this book departs from approaches such as “new cinema history” and “vernacular modernity” to counter modernity discourses of “lacks and absences”, and instead, establishes new connections between moving image and print artefacts, early film practitioners and intellectuals, the socio-cultural context and cultural responses to the new visual medium.

Missionaries, modernity and the moving image: Re-presenting the Melanesian Other to Christian communities in the West between the World Wars

<p>This thesis considers conflicting representational strategies used by Christian missionaries in displaying Melanesian people to white audiences in the West with particular reference to films made during the period of colonial modernity between 1917 and 1935. Most scholarly work on Christian mission in the Pacific has focussed on the nineteenth century and on the effect of Christianisation on indigenous populations, rather than on the effect of mission propaganda on Western communities. This thesis repositions mission propaganda as an important alternative source of visual imagery of the Melanesian ‘Other’ available to white popular audiences. Within a broader commercial market that commodified Western notions of Melanesian ‘savagery’ via illustrated travelogue magazines and commercial multi-media shows, missionaries trod an uneasy knife-edge in how they transmitted indigenous imagery and mediated cultural difference for white consumers. Five case-studies consider missionary propaganda from four Christian denominations in disparate parts of Melanesia. They reveal a temporal trajectory in the conflicted but symbiotic relationship between, on one hand, missionary organisations interested in propagandising their work and, on the other, travelogue-adventurers operating with commercial motives. This trajectory follows missionaries as they move from facilitation of travelogue-adventurers, through passive commissioning of their services, then active collaboration, and finally to autonomous film-making in their own right. I consider how white missionaries played a pivotal role in both enabling and subverting the dominance of the prevailing commercial paradigm of the period: that Melanesians are by nature and definition ‘savages’ and ‘head-hunters’ residing in a thrilling, timeless, virtual place called ‘Cannibal-Land.’ These contradictory impulses, I contend, destabilised both Christian and ‘Cannibal-land’ stereotypes. This destabilising effect was not restricted to film, but I suggest that it was amplified by the use of the quintessentially modern medium of moving images. I argue that film – particularly film made by missionaries – posed an implicit challenge to the essentially literary trope of ‘Cannibal-land’. Moving images offered a more unruly medium within and around which indigenous Melanesians of the colonial era could sometimes display what I term a radical visibility that escaped and transcended both types of Western stereotype.</p>