Festivals, Books, Conferences, Exhibitions
Ten years after Franco Moretti’s Distant Reading,[1] Taylor Arnold and Lauren Tilton released their book Distant Viewing (MIT Press, 2023), where they explore the ‘methodological and epistemological implications of using computer vision as a tool for the study of visual messages’. (p. 11) When Moretti used his concept of ‘distant reading’, although the study of […]
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.
Dutch artist Nemo Vos discusses his approach to VR and his vision of the role played by film festivals in making VR available. Reflecting on the premiere of his work 8 Billion Selves at International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2024, Vos addresses both the challenges and advantages of exhibiting VR at festivals. Looking to the future, Vos outlines his vision for a series of co-created VR works, each featuring a different artist and aiming for distribution in theatres to achieve economic sustainability for the medium. The artist emphasises the responsibility VR artists themselves have in creating awareness and cultivating audiences, and details how he uses co-creation and collaboration with other art forms to elevate VR from a niche technology to a mainstream artistic form.
It was in October 2015 at Festival du Nouveau Cinéma (FNC) that I first encountered virtual reality (VR) as we know it today. Since then, I have attended every edition of the festival’s Explore section, anxious to discover what immersive and interactive experiences it had in store. Although I could never afford to attend any […]
How might exploring a sleeper subjectivity – the quotidian ways we navigate time, space, ourselves, and others – help us reimagine and reanimate the sociability of sleep itself?[1] This is the question at the heart of the exhibition Insomnolence: The Sociability of Sleep, curated by Marianne Cloutier, Aleksandra Kaminska, and Alanna Thain, held at the […]
At the center of Lazzaretto Vecchio, the immersive island of the Venice Film Festival, there is an open social space where directors, producers, press, volunteers, and festival visitors can gather together to grab quick drinks, meet old and new friends, and sit down for interviews and/or business talks. The community space offers a relief from […]
Within the Venice Film Festival, a dedicated section for immersive works was introduced in 2016, quickly gaining competitive status alongside traditional cinematic works. Venice Immersive serves as both an exhibition and promotion venue for XR and a forum for discussing pivotal market issues. This interview with the Venice Immersive creators and curators, Liz Rosenthal and Michel Reilhac, delves into the early stages of the section, its objectives, the challenges faced, and the major issues within the immersive works market.
In Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, and Performance (2003), seminal literary critic and queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick coins the term ‘paranoid reading’ to describe the tendency of critics to see their objects of study as having some inherent flaw that the critic must unmask. This paranoid reading, contended Sedgwick, deeply prevents critics’ capacity to sense […]
What sense remains today of mounting a defense of formalism in film and media theory? In fact, two recent books provide compelling accounts of how a taxonomy of ‘forms’ can – exactly in constituting such a taxonomy – capture those singular features of our experiences of works that have usually been thought to militate against […]
An established and beloved aspect of the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) is standing in ‘queues winding their way around city blocks in the depths of winter’, meeting like-minded cinephiles.[1] This is not something I can participate in. My disability makes it difficult to stand for long periods of time. For many years, MIFF did […]
It is rare that an exhibition of contemporary visual art is so vigorously conceived as a reading exercise.[1] In Dora García’s She Has Many Names (M HKA Antwerp), curated by Joanna Zielińska, books are everywhere. Not only are writers such as James Joyce, Julio Cortázar, or Albert Camus subjects of García’s work, but writing and […]
Family records and personal analogue artefacts such as home movies and snapshots have continually become noticeable through practices of repurposing and appropriation, particularly in documentary films that have utilised archives either as an illustration, a storytelling device, or historical evidence.[1] Following this perspective, in documentary practices, domestic footage is not just viewed as stale or […]
The Big Three film festivals (Cannes, Venice, and Berlin) may be of venerable age, but we do not have much by way of detailed and authoritative scholarship on their history. In 2000 there was Wolfgang Jacobsen’s 550-page volume 50 Years Berlinale: International Filmfestspiele Berlin, published by Nicolai in collaboration with the festival and Filmmuseum Berlin-Deutsche […]
An established and beloved aspect of the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) is standing in ‘queues winding their way around city blocks in the depths of winter’, meeting like-minded cinephiles.[1] This is not something I can participate in. My disability makes it difficult to stand for long periods of time. For many years, MIFF did […]
Accreditations typically determine how people access a film festival: they determine whether someone acts, for instance, as a journalist, a producer, a creator, a researcher, or as a regular member of the audience. The fact that a festival does not consider any accreditation system also conditions how attendees behave during the event. The spaces one […]
Martine Beugnet
University of Paris 7 Diderot
Greg de Cuir Jr
University of Arts Belgrade
Ilona Hongisto
University of Helsinki
Judith Keilbach
Universiteit Utrecht
Skadi Loist
Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Toni Pape
University of Amsterdam
Maria A. Velez-Serna
University of Stirling
Andrea Virginás
Babeș-Bolyai University
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