Mood as medium: Reconstruction and the material speculations of “new heritage”

If the politics of aspirational construction appeal to the enchantment of infrastructure, reconstruction usually takes as given an environment of post-conflict, natural disaster, or the degradation of systems of preservation or resource management. If construction and conservation are taken as markers of continuity and political stability what does the urge to build again say about those who exert these ideas in advancement of a set of common goals? Shaped through multi-sited ethnography in Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates, this essay explores the mediation of mood and its material speculations. Concepts borrowed from both the preservation of the moving image and digital forms of heritage restoration provide ways of rethinking the place of reconstruction and coming to a new understanding of its sensual and atmospheric terrain.

Multilevel Image Edge Detection Algorithm Based on Visual Perception

Multilevel image edge repair results directly affect the follow-up image quality evaluation and recognition. Current edge detection algorithms have the problem of unclear edge detection. In order to detect more accurate edge contour information, a multilevel image edge detection algorithm based on visual perception is proposed. Firstly, the digital image is processed by double filtering and fuzzy threshold segmentation; Through the analysis of the contour features of the moving image, the threshold of the moving image features is set, and the latest membership function is obtained to complete the multithreshold optimization. Adaptive smoothing is used to process the contour of the object in the moving image, and the geometric center values of the two adjacent contour points within the contour range are calculated. According to the calculation results, the curvature angle is further calculated, and the curvature symbol is obtained. According to the curvature symbol, the contour features of the moving image are detected. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively and accurately detect the edge contour of the image and shorten the reconstruction time, and the detection image resolution is high.

Time and postphotography

This article presents a practice-led research project that asks how experienced time can be perceived through manipulated photographic images. The investigation is carried out by a series of digital images whose content is renegotiated over time, while the subject of the photograph remains within the frame. The artwork evidences an unstable space between a photographic composition and a moving image employed to question the power conventions in visualization and to expand the way we can conceive of time as duration in digital photographic images. It contributes to the discourse about practice-led oriented methodologies in the field of practice as a form of research through a comment on the design practice.

The Shape of Motion

Cinematic motion has long been celebrated as an emblem of change and fluidity or claimed as the source of cinema’s impression of reality. But such general claims undermine the sheer variety of forms that motion can take onscreen—the sweep of a gesture, the rush of a camera movement, the slow transformations of a natural landscape. What might one learn about the moving image when one begins to account for the many ways that movements move? In The Shape of Motion: Cinema and the Aesthetics of Movement, Jordan Schonig provides a new way of theorizing cinematic motion by examining cinema’s “motion forms”: structures, patterns, or shapes of movement unique to the moving image. From the wild and unpredictable motion of flickering leaves and swirling dust that captivated early spectators, to the pulsing abstractions that emerge from rapid lateral tracking shots, to the bleeding pixel-formations caused by the glitches of digital video compression, each motion form opens up the aesthetics of movement to film theoretical inquiry. By pairing close analyses of onscreen movement in narrative and experimental films with concepts from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Henri Bergson, and Immanuel Kant, Schonig rethinks long-standing assumptions within film studies, such as indexical accounts of photographic images and analogies between the camera and the human eye. Arguing against the intuition that cinema reproduces the natural perception of motion, The Shape of Motion shows how cinema’s motion forms do not merely transpose the movements of the world in front of the camera; they transform them.

Fragmented Narratives: Exploring Storytelling approaches for Animation in Spatial Context

Animation is considered a prevalent medium in contemporary moving image culture, which increasingly appears across non-conventional surfaces and spaces. And while storytelling in animation films has been extensively theorized, narrative forms that employ physical space as part of storytelling have been less explored. This paper will examine the narrative aspect of animation works which are screened outside the traditional cinematic venues. It will look at how these animation works tell stories differently - using the full potential of the space, as a narrative device, a tool, and a stage where the narratives unfold. This paper will look at the historical perspective and the state of the art in animation installation today, exploring the relationship between the space and narrative in pre-cinematic, cinematic and post-cinematic conditions. It will examine how narrative structures in animation have changed over time, on their way from the black box of the cinema to the white cube of the gallery and even further, where they became part of any space or architecture. Through case studies of works by Tabaimo, Rose Bond, William Kentridge and other relevant artists, the interdependency of the narrative and the space where it appears will be explored, in order to identify new strategies for storytelling in animation. The aim of this paper is to emphasize the storytelling novelty that animation installations offer, which goes beyond the narrative structures that we are used to see on a single flat surface.

[inaudible]: Point of Audition Representations of Deafness and the Cochlear Implant in A Quiet Place (2018)

Interrogating point of audition (POA) sound through the silences, noises, and closed captions of A Quiet Place’s critically lauded soundscapes, this article examines the ways point of audition aurally and rhetorically constructs deafness, technology, and the audio-viewer. In its sonic rendering of the post-apocalyptic world, A Quiet Place actively involves the audio-viewer in its fantastical conceit and ‘fantasy’ of deafness, folding the audience into the complex cyborgian politics and potential of the malfunctioning cochlear implant. This diegetic technological breakdown merges and tangles with the technology of the film, the point of audition sound highlighting the immersive capabilities and audist expectations of cinematic soundscapes. Yet, in this straining towards ‘immersion’, the uncaptioned silences of Regan’s point of audition further accentuate issues of access, raising questions of the composition and meaning of immersion and silence. Through the shades of silence and sharp whining feedback of A Quiet Place, this article ultimately details the possibilities and complications of analysing point of audition sound, in the process, illustrating the harmonic resonation of the studies of sound, deafness, and disability. This article is the winner of the 2020 Claudia Gorbman Graduate Student Writing Award, selected by the Sound and Music Special Interest Group of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies in conjunction with Music, Sound, and the Moving Image.

Queen Victoria at the Pictures

Queen Victoria was enthusiastically taken up by the shows, exhibitions and lectures that blossomed in the nineteenth century. This collaborative essay demonstrates the way Victoria's life and reign was embraced by the moving-image and projected-image formats that proliferated during the period, particularly touring panoramas, magic lantern shows and early film. Victoria and Albert were themselves intermittent visitors to these new pictorial shows in London, while, across both nation and empire, local communities were able to participate in key royal events thanks to their replaying and broadcasting by media such as the magic lantern and early film.