This issue of NECSUS has been compiled, if not written, during the COVID-19 pandemic which has produced a shock across various existential domains: personal, social, political, economic, public health — the list goes on. Some of us may already have settled into new habits and routines that make this situation livable; yet a sense of […]
This paper discusses smartphone spectatorship with a focus on user participation, interactivity, and the fusion of digital media and moving images. In the renaissance of mobile filmmaking and participatory culture, there is no longer a definite difference in the quality of cinema and mobile media tools. Instead, users’ embodied and social presences define the framework of viewing and production. By reflecting on the sovereignty of smartphone film culture, this paper highlights the behavioural and cultural trajectories of mobile movie consumption, where content access merges with content production.
This paper aims to analyse how cultural products reflect the topics and problematics derived from technological and scientific advances and how these relate to the construction of the subject and power. Following the terminology coined by Foucault, this paper will refer to the technologies of the self and the technologies of power reflected in the new approaches to the relationships between humans and machines. In this precise sense, AI narratives and contemporary speculative fictions construct new realities in which factual truths turn into virtual realities and hyperrealities, usually addressing power and political conflicts as well as socioeconomic implications.
Computer games take up and extend traditional discourses on technology and artificial intelligence (AI). Moreover, representations of AI in computer games include not only narrative aspects but game mechanics as well. This contribution focuses on what distinguishes this kind of AI representation from other medial forms, and on how different types of AI representation can be identified within the computer games field. Overall, representations of AI make visible specific aspects and ideologies implied by the gameplay. From this perspective, it is outlined how these representations work either as support for fantasies of self-empowerment or as an emphasis on medial determination; moreover, cultural functions and meanings provided in this context are higlighted.
The article aims to question the concept of ‘expanded cinema’ proposed by Youngblood in 1970, by taking into account three ‘artificial gazes’, corresponding to three exemplar technologies of the contemporary media scenario, commonly conceived as tools for the augmentation of both the visual perception and the cognition of the human being. Likewise, the experimental cinema, the technologies of augmented reality, machine learning, and search engine algorithms bring out the consciousness of the individuals in order to personalise the user experience in a computational way. Simultaneously, they are commonly intended as ludic and irrational experiences offered by the entertainment industry. The article’s purpose is therefore to tackle the ambiguity among the exact knowledge assured and produced by these technologies and the subjectivity of the gaze set by them. By recovering Youngblood’s inheritance, expanded cinema is not just a path to free the spectator’s gaze from the fictional representation of the world produced by the entertainment industry, but also a new media condition in which the users are requested to interpret and communicate the real world in a truthful way.
This article introduces the special section #Intelligence, which includes seven essays addressing the impact of artificial intelligence on cinema and media from a cultural perspective. More particularly, three levels of pertinence are focused on. For the first level, selected papers analyse several representations of non-human intelligence confronted with human intelligence, as provided by film, television series, and video games. On the second level, a set of mutual functioning dynamics between AI and the media are identified and scrutinised. On the third level, the contributing authors consider how AI algorithms lead cinema and media theory to deeply rethink its assumptions about creating and viewing moving images.
In order to understand artificial intelligence an approach called critical re-modelling operating within commonist media practice might be useful. Critical re-modelling builds on media archaeology, cognitive mapping, countervisuality, and critical theory; while commonist media practise is framed as a cyborgian approach à la Donna Haraway, critically inquiring and applying computational models. Selected works of art by Rybn, Algolit, and Tactical Tech provide concrete examples of critical re-modelling. The article concludes by arguing that the wider educational implications in humanities-driven scholarship of media cultures need to be reconsidered, in case commonist media practice seriously want to participate in the coming societal transformations of this decade.
by Richard Misek
This article examines the nascence of artificial intelligence (AI) applications in the film industry at the greenlighting stage, where decisions are made as to the feasibility and earning potential of film projects. Through a qualitative analysis of company case studies, interviews, and media discourse, I interrogate and tease out the ethical, cultural, and industrial implications emerging from the use of AI in influencing decisions about film production, particularly the ways the use of AI might influence notions of creativity, labour, and reception. The article sets out possible research agendas for the future to critically engage with this emerging phenomenon.
What can the Jewish myth of the Golem teach us about artificial intelligence? This article explores the Golem as one of the earliest AI prototypes and a myth that became a foundational story of sci-fi cinema. The Golem sets the parameters of opposition between men and intelligent or sentient machines, and at the same time points to possible third options beyond the dialectic of control.
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 […]
This article uses the Google Clips camera as a case study to illustrate the impact of autonomous machine learning on self-perception, and to investigate how ‘delegation’ of our self to those cameras occurs. The research is based on reviews of the Google Clips camera, analysed using Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis (CAQDAS) and interpreted using Don Ihde’s postphenomonological framework complemented by Bruno Latour’s relation analysis. Positioning the Clips camera as a technological mediator, the analysis concentrates on human-technology-world interaction relations. The research findings include changes in self-perception through complex concepts, such as autonomy, agency, and rationality.
by Oscar Raby
by Charlie Shackleton
by Richard Misek In 1970, experimental filmmaker Peter Kubelka designed a cinema auditorium for Anthology Film Archives in New York, in which ‘shell-like’ seats and reams of black velvet caused all but the screen to disappear into darkness.[1] He referred to his Invisible Cinema as ‘a machine for viewing’.[2] Though the movie theatre is now […]
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
We would like to thank the following institutions for their support:
NECS–European Network for Cinema and Media Studies is a non-profit organization bringing together scholars, archivists, programmers and practitioners.
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