Festivals, Books, Conferences, Exhibitions
As the Melbourne Women in Film Festival (mwff.org.au) reaches its ninth year,[1] we have achieved the position of Australia’s longest running women’s film festival currently in operation.[2] From a two-day festival of retrospective screenings and experimental shorts held in 2017, the festival has grown to an annual five-day event that showcases films by Australian, Aotearoa […]
[W]hat would be able… to contain and counter the pressure neoliberal social and political transformations have put upon communal and artistic life – capture it and turn it into a form of aesthetic activism? If such an activity – such a form of activism in the face of capital-induced ecological catastrophe and social disintegration – […]
‘Nature Manifesto’ by Björk & Aleph « it is an emergency the apocalypse has already happened and how we will act now is essential after the mass extinction we will start anew our old comfort is gone we will parade with mutated crickets in glowing radio-active harvests migrate with wildebeests amongst endangered orangutans a new world […]
by Annet Dekker Abstract Artist and researcher Ofri Cnaani, along with curator Or Tshuva, discusses her exhibition The Contactless Condition (presented at Exhibition Research Lab in Liverpool in 2024) with Annet Dekker (curator/researcher), exploring themes of distance, technology, and control. Cnaani sees ‘contactless’ not just as technology, but as a social and political condition that […]
In the fall of 2008 Malte Hagener aptly summed up decades of Film (and Media) studies tradition, arguing that its agenda had progressively shifted from an ontological question (‘what is cinema?’) to an historical one (‘when is cinema?’), and finally landed on a matter of location (‘where is cinema?’). Seventeen years later, his interpretive proposal […]
Is it French? Popular Postnational Screen Fiction from France, edited by Mary Harrod and Raphaëlle Moine (Springer International Publishing AG, 2024), is the result of a five-year international research project whose original title was ‘Producing the Postnational Popular: The Expanding Imagination of Mainstream French Film and Televisions Series’. Published in open access, the book gathers […]
Is it possible to examine the role of women in technology from the perspective of art, or more precisely through the lens that art has provided to computer science since its origins? This is what the exhibition Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960-1991, curated by Michelle Cotton with the assistance of Sarah Beaumont, sought […]
Introduction Since the 2000s the number of environmental film festivals around the globe has increased significantly; we have witnessed a diversification within eco-themed film festivals, including events focusing on wildlife and environment protection, sustainable food cultivation, animal ethics, and human/animal relations. Among these is Animal Nature Future Film Festival (ANFFF), which was established in 2023 […]
When I first enter the room, I follow a small pathway, and my eyes struggle in the darkness. My senses are strained, but I can feel the vibrations of sound from a distance and begin to feel excited in anticipation of a new experience. A dim light emitted from afar assaults my eyes, but as […]
Argentina is usually known for two leading film festivals: BAFICI (Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival), known for its attraction to cinephiles, and Mar del Plata International Film Festival, the only A-list festival in Latin America. However, the country has a rich circuit of film events that are little known outside its boundaries, mainly due […]
Karin Wagner’s From ASCII Art to Comic Sans: Typography and Popular Culture in the Digital Age presents a fascinating exploration of how typography has been shaped and reshaped by socio-cultural and historical influences. Focusing on four distinct phenomena within the practice of typography, Wagner traces their unexpected ‘usage, design, printing as well as dispersion’ (p. […]
Two recent books find common ground in radically rethinking the projective function of media technologies. The first is Pasi Väliaho’s Projecting Spirits: Speculation, Providence, and Early Modern Optical Media (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022), a detailed media archaeological investigation into the role of optical and projection devices in reorganising the concept of the world at […]
Briony Hannell’s Feminist Fandoms: Media Fandom, Digital Feminism, and Tumblr (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024) is an ethnographic exploration of the culture of feminist fandom found on the titular social media platform Tumblr. Hannell uses interviews with 342 participants to explore how the platform has developed a culture of feminist consciousness-raising which has, the book argues, helped […]
Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power, 1500-2025 took place at Osservatorio Prada, Milan between 23 November 2023 and 29 January 2024. The venue proved curiously appropriate for the exhibition conceived by artists and researchers Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, engaging with a project about imperialism, control, time, politics, and technology in an intriguing, […]
In an attempt to understand different perspectives and voices on digital art in South Africa within a Global South/Majority World context, I interviewed transmedia artist Brooklyn J. Pakathi on 2 March 2023 via Zoom to hear their views on networked online curatorial practices and how these types of practices often diffuse the line between artist […]