by Toni Pape and Mary-Joy van der Deure On the occasion of our special section #Enough, we invited media scholar Toby Miller for a discussion on the topic. Toby Miller is professor of media studies at the Universidad del Rey Juan Carlos. He has published widely on a variety of topics, including cultural citizenship and […]
The exhibition Liquid Spaces: Politics of the Screen, curated by Doreen A. Ríos for the Bienal Universitaria de Arte Multimedial (BUAM) in Ecuador, delves into the dynamic nature of environments shaped by digital technologies. Underscoring the complexities of screen interfaces and their societal implications, Ríos explores the concept of ‘liquid spaces’, where boundaries blur and definitions remain elusive, reflecting perpetual change. Set within the Latin American context, the artworks address themes such as extractivism, surveillance, and technocapitalism. The exhibition features a diverse range of artworks, including painting and virtual reality, through which the relationship between the body and the screen is discussed, while highlighting audience engagement and interaction as integral components of the viewing experience. Drawing from her previous curatorial endeavors, in an interview with Annet Dekker, Ríos reflects on the transformative influence of screens on perceptions and realities, suggesting that screens serve as modern oracles and their users as potential shamans navigating the digital landscape.
In this interview, the Senior Curator of Photography and New Media at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter speaks with photographers and media artists Lesia Vasylchenko and Istvan Virag about their works commissioned for the New Visions triennial, presented at Henie Onstad in 2023. Vasylchenko and Virag explain how they work with contemporary image production and display technologies, such as synthetic aperture radar images and LED-screens and the perceptual politics associated with these technologies, as well as how they engage with organic materials as resources subject to extraction as well as material witnesses. The interview also addresses how the artists conceptually and practically tackle questions of image resolution and scale, and the artists’ extensive collaboration with scientific knowledge clusters and researchers.
This interview with award-winning documentary filmmaker Mila Turajlić discusses her ongoing artistic research project Non-Aligned Newsreels, which consists of two feature-length films that premiered in 2022, along with performance lectures, installations, exhibitions, research articles, and online content. The interview begins with a discussion of the scopes and aims of the project, which engages with the largely-forgotten collections of Yugoslav Newsreels in Belgrade (Serbia), unearthing the cinematic and political collaborations that were at the heart of the Non-Aligned Movement. The interview further explores the project’s reactivation of the archive and cultural memory, the relationship between politics and cinema, and the continuing importance of a ‘third’ way.
A conversation with B. Ruby Rich, one of the most prolific film critics in the world. For decades she has been involved in film culture as a curator, film critic, professor, and journal editor. In this interview, Skadi Loist and Dagmar Brunow talk with Rich about her inspirations, her international encounters, and her take on film culture and criticism. Above all, this conversation highlights the importance of looking at the social relations that make film culture happen.
by María Vélez-Serna and Markus Stauff Any discussion of ports from a media studies perspective needs to take into account their complex and layered reality: the location, the function, and the visibility of ports result from and produce conflicting layers of geopolitical, infrastructural, legal, and economic dynamics. To integrate at least some aspects that might […]
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 […]
Tom Gunning is one of the most influential and widely cited film historians in the world with over 150 essays and publications on early cinema, the avant-garde, and film genres. He has published extensively on questions of film style and interpretation, film history and film culture, and on early cinema as well as on the culture of modernity from which cinema arose. In his seminal studies of the ‘cinema of attractions’, the concept he famously proposed, he set a new research agenda for early cinema studies by relating the development of cinema to other forces besides storytelling, such as new experiences of space and time in modernity, the relation between cinema and technology, and an emerging modern visual culture. Film culture, the avant-garde movements, the historical factors of exhibition and criticism, and the spectator’s experience throughout film history are recurrent themes in his work. In this interview, Malte Hagener and Annie van den Oever talk with Gunning about his writing process and his inspirations, the people he considers his mentors (Annette Michelson, Jay Leyda, Eileen Bowser, and David Francis), the legendary 1978 FIAF conference in Brighton, and the future of film studies.
by Linda Kopitz Formed in 2017, The Care Collective – Andreas Chatzidakis, Jamie Hakim, Jo Littler, Catherine Rottenberg, and Lynne Segal – is interested in both understanding and addressing multiple crises of care. Written from an interdisciplinary perspective, their first collective book, The Care Manifesto, moves across different spheres of care – from caring politics, […]
In Autumn 2020, the artist and media researcher Paula Albuquerque presented a major exhibition of her work at Nieuw Dakota in Amsterdam, titled Enter the Ghost: Haunted Media Ecologies. Concerned with topics of surveillance, colonial trauma, and media hauntology, the artworks in the show provide a poetic engagement with the violence of contemporary technologies. The […]
In this interview, Henry Jenkins (University of Southern California) discusses with Doron Galili the origins and the reception of his landmark book Convergence Culture, as well as the initial effect of the Covid-19 pandemic on media practices and Jenkins’s most recent work on comic books.
by Julia Leyda and Chris Tedjasukmana This interview arose out of a shared desire to document some of the unwritten, anecdotal history of film studies and the cultures of cinema more broadly. In a conversation with Karola Gramann and Heide Schlüpmann, film and media scholars Julia Leyda and Chris Tedjasukmana encouraged them to narrate some […]
Film festivals cannot always claim to practice what they preach. Even some of the best-intentioned festivals often hit a wall: while attempting to exhibit politically subversive films, organisers also have to respond to diverse – and even conflicting – voices. Responding to the demands of local communities, audiences, filmmakers, and sponsors leads to compromises and […]
by Francesco Pitassio As part of the series of conversations NECSUS has published with prominent scholars (see those with David Bordwell, Ian Christie, Richard Dyer, Anton Kaes, Laura Mulvey, and Vivian Sobchack), we spoke with Pierre Sorlin on his groundbreaking work in film and media studies. Educated as a historian, and working on interdisciplinary subjects […]
by Malte Hagener and Annie van den Oever Martin Scorsese and production design, early British cinema and Sergei Eisenstein, the Archers and contemporary European film culture – Ian Christie is as versatile as he is prolific. We caught up with Ian between a visit to the Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone, teaching at Birkbeck, […]