NECSUS is now inviting abstract submissions for the Features section of our Autumn 2023 issue. Articles in the Features section are full-length research articles on a variety of themes related to media studies but not necessarily connected to a special section topic. For articles published in the Autumn 2023 issue, we accept abstracts until 15 […]
We are now inviting proposals for audiovisual essays exploring questions of cyclicality, circularity, and recursivity for our Autumn 2023_#Cycles issue – from loop films to televisual recursivity and gameplay loops to NPC life. The figure of the loop has become a staple technique of contemporary narrative art. In films and television series, time loops are […]
From 13-17 June 2023, the next NECS Conference will be hosted by the University of Oslo, Norway. This year’s theme ‘Care’ invites cinema and media scholars to come together to think about care and its implications across film and media history and into the digitally mediatised cultures of the 21st century. The local organizing team […]
While spending more and more time online, we increasingly forget the material conditions that enable us to communicate, study, or work over the internet. Our digital life seems to be disembodied and immaterial, although eye fatigue, infrastructural breakdowns, or electricity bills might teach us otherwise. In this issue, contributions in different sections shed light on […]
The discussion of media often meanders between the way media objects are perceived as written texts, projected audiovisual messages, or recorded music on the one hand and material objects on the other. Materiality in the sense of physical matter is considered multi-sensory and in a direct relation to the perceiving body, traditionally – particularly in the arts – associated with processes of valorisation as in the term and concept of ‘aura’. But media studies have long established perspectives beyond simple notions of matter. Even light, sound, and energy have entered the discourse, and materiality can be traced in any and all understandings of media. This special section brings together some of the latest post-digital perspectives on the long-standing discussion of materiality in our ever-changing media landscapes. The contributions represent today’s broadness of the field and discourse, connecting media from their analogue pasts to their materially ambiguous futures.
This roundtable brings together several film festival organisers and scholars to compare notes on the general impact of film festivals on the environment and to anticipate future directions for greening the sector. The event was hosted by The Creative School Catalyst, Toronto Metropolitan University. This is an edited transcript of the roundtable that took place on 13 January 2022 via Zoom.
by Rémy Bocquillon & Joost van Loon[1] Out on the open sea:[2] Navigating the digital art markets We are at a wine bar in Munich – not too far from the Pinakotheken and Technische Universität buildings – where a friend presents her latest exhibition. Reaching for the bottle of an overpriced Bourgogne, we come across […]
This contribution explores the materiality and histories of use of 9.5mm film and the Pathé Baby projector and camera. In December 1922, the French film production company Pathé Frères released the 9.5mm film format, which together with Kodak’s 16mm small-gauge, released the following year, would ‘bring cinema into the home’ and effectively popularise the screening, distribution, and production of home cinema and amateur films. This article aims to highlight the significance of 9.5mm film within the history of amateur film and to demonstrate the heuristic value of performing historical re-enactments with obsolete media technologies, such as 9.5mm film and the Pathé Baby, so as to better understand how they worked, how they were used at the time, and how their historical, material, and performative dimensions can be preserved for the future. It draws on a series of media archaeological experiments with the Pathé Baby projector and camera, as well as on the hands-on reconstruction of a 9.5mm film from 1929, made by the Italian artist, composer, and amateur filmmaker Pippo Barzizza (1902-1994). Utilising experimental media archaeology as a practice-based and sensorial approach to media historiography, the article investigates the materiality, functionality, and practices of (re)use of 9.5mm film as a remarkable early twentieth-century home cinema technology.
Sheffield DocFest, the UK’s largest documentary festival, returned this year for its first predominantly in-person edition following two years of pared back, online, and hybrid editions in 2020 and 2021. Returning in June 2022 as a six-day event comparable in size and scale to the 2019 festival, this year’s edition was framed in part as […]
Embracing hybridity beyond the pandemic: The contrasting cases of PÖFF and SGIFF Film festivals have developed to be hybrid multi-layered, ever-expanding complex events that include diverse activities, engage multiple stakeholders, serve various purposes[1] and take place in multiple and diverse places.[2] The outburst of the pandemic at the beginning of 2020 caused an unpredictable crisis […]
In this article, I represent film materiality’s sensory and ecological aspects through the sounds I recorded during my ethnographic fieldwork on contemporary analogue film practices. By re-listening to the recorded sounds without visual references, I explore the multisensory and aesthetic relationships that human actors have with the film material, and what nonhuman actors have to say about their material causality in these soundscapes. By shifting the focus from the visuality of the film to the sonic qualities of the film material, I explore the potential of sonically observing the media materiality.
by Bohdan Shumylovych, Oleksandr Makhanets, Taras Nazaruk, Natalia Otrishchenko, and Dagmar Brunow Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began on the morning of 24 February 2022. Everyone in the country experienced this and the afterward moments in their own way. All of us have learned what the shock of invasion is, mobilisation and how to resist […]
The thematic contents of the Berlin Biennale 12 and documenta 15, which both took place in Summer 2022, are certainly close, ‘focusing on themes of colonialism and decolonization … art as an opportunity to repair’[1] even though ‘documenta fifteen is practice and not theme based’,[2] its themes also follow decolonisation and demonstrating the continued presence […]
The question of the materiality of the media of the second half of the twentieth century cannot be answered without recourse to the role of quantum mechanics. Nearly all media technologies since 1945 presuppose quantum mechanics in one way or the other. The laser is especially important – this kind of coherent light, produced by stimulated emission is central to a huge plethora of very different, analog or digital, visual, audiovisual or auditory media technologies. In contrast to the role of quantum mechanics and especially the laser, the difference of analog and digital seems secondary.
This essay contributes to current debates about the problematic conflation of support for Palestinians with anti-Semitism in Germany by focusing on the cinematic and activist work of Dani Gal, an Israeli migrant in Berlin. Gal’s film, White City (2018), deals with intersections between memories of the Holocaust and the Nakba by reformatting archival materials – namely, a Nazi propaganda postcard and Zionist leader Arthur Ruppin’s diary – in ways that rethink migrations of architectural aesthetics and racist practices. By upending the expectation to document the past, the photographic stills in White City instead performatively re-imagine historical and contemporary predicaments around ethnic discrimination in Germany and Israel/Palestine. By bringing together the proximal victimisation Jews and Palestinians suffered from the Holocaust and the Nakba, as well as the linked perpetrator pasts of some Zionists and Nazis, White City inspires us to understand the power of ‘multidirectional memory’ and ‘cocitizenship’ anew.