Editorial NECSUS: Autumn 2024_#Enough
by Martine Beugnet, Greg de Cuir Jr, Ilona Hongisto, Judith Keilbach, Skadi Loist, Toni Pape, Maria Velez Serna, and Andrea Virginás
It is with great pleasure that we present the Autumn 2024 issue of NECSUS with a special section on the topic #Enough. The word ‘enough’ usually indicates a limit. This may be a lower threshold that needs to be met, for instance of subsistence needs, or an upper boundary that has been breached, for example when public protests indicate that a group of people can no longer live under conditions of, say, labour exploitation, political division and discrimination, or environmental destruction. The contributions to our special section present various perspectives on what #Enough might mean in the field of media studies.
In lieu of an introduction to the special section, we offer an annotated bibliography on the topic of #Enough, initiated by the NECS Sustainable Media workgroup. The reading notes survey political and economic debates about sufficiency and planetary limits, exploring their resonance with historical and contemporary media practices represented by an eclectic array of manifestos, policy discussions, and proposals for digital sustainability.
This is followed by an interview with Toby Miller on the topics of degrowth and sustainability in the media. Toni Pape and Mary-Joy van der Deure talked to Miller about overproduction and growth, advertising and consumerism, ‘corporate social responsibility’ and environmentally-sustainable policies, the environmental footprint of media preservation, academic publishing, and degrowth in academia.
‘Enough is enough’ proclaims one of the Tekel workers, whose resistance is the topic of Özge Çelikaslan and Şirin Fulya Erensoy’s article ‘It is never enough: Exploring the dynamics and aesthetics of enough through video archival testimonies’. The article delves into the radical image production of the Tekel workers’ resistance in Turkey (2009-2010), arguing that the resulting audiovisual archive and its circulation fosters solidarity, critiques the government’s privatisation policies, and exposes the socio-political conditions faced by the workers.
In their article ‘Doudou Joop: The pirogue of cinema’, Jade de Cock de Rameyen and Mamadou Khouma Gueye examine the life and work of Senegalese filmmaker Doudou Diop, who died during an attempted migration to Europe. The authors address the focus on environmental justice in Diop’s work, his use of low-resolution images, and the political force of unfinished works to reflect on the role of media circulation in the resistance against systemic violence against migrants.
In ‘Living imperfectly between knowledge and despair: Social impact entertainment, activism, and Dark Waters’, Karim Townsend provides an ecocritical analysis of Todd Haynes’ film Dark Waters. Townsend questions the film’s efforts to create social impact by highlighting the tensions between the film’s engaged rhetorical strategies and the limitations of Social Impact Entertainment in challenging corporate power and creating lasting social change.
Finally, in their research article ‘The infinite as paradigm: Reframing the limits of AI art’, Magdalena Krysztoforska and Oliver Kenny propose that the rise of generative AI models capable of producing endless visual and audio outputs challenges traditional AI art discourses centered on creativity and agency. The authors introduce ‘the infinite’ as a paradigm that broadens the scope of cultural practices in the AI age.
Our Features section includes five original research articles. In ‘The rise of computational images: The role of star-targeting spectroscopy’, Francesco Giarrusso explores Angelo Secchi’s pioneering work in stellar spectroscopy. Highlighting Secchi’s contributions to spectral taxonomy, pattern recognition, and data archiving methods, Giarrusso shows that 19th-century spectroscopic practices prefigured contemporary datafication and image analysis techniques, thus laying the ground for a culture of the invisual.
In ‘Additive processes as format: The Synchrome Corporation and the politics of early experimental film’, Pierre J. Pernuit provides an historical analysis of the interwar experiments in colour film by Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell. Their Synchrome Corporation, Pernuit argues, strategically positioned itself between the avant-garde and the commercial film industry, partly drawing on the latter’s technoaesthetic discourses of improved realism and partly rejecting the industry as too market-oriented.
Katherine Morrow’s ‘Movies born online: The formalisation and industrialisation of Chinese internet movies’ traces how the now established genre of ‘big internet movies’ evolved from earlier micro-movies to feature-length productions. Through a study of filmmaker Zhang Hao’s work, the article also addresses the changing commercial infrastructure and government regulation of big internet movies since 2010.
In ‘Archival encounters: Institutional critique in contemporary found footage films’, Finn D’Amico-Jubak proposes the concept of archival encounters to think about appropriation films where filmmakers not only use the archive as source material but as a site for institutional critique. Through an analysis of Expedition Content (2020) and Riotsville, USA (2022), the author shows that these films foreground the archives themselves, questioning the origins and meanings of their materials and critically assessing the power relations between film archives, filmmakers, and communities.
Zina Giannopoulou contributes an article titled ‘Poetics of refraction, Black subjectivity, and Alice Diop’s Saint Omer’. Giannopoulou pays close attention to the film’s textual and subtextual techniques to show that the film articulates a relational Black subjectivity that contests European understandings of a separable, self-contained subjecthood, also to question the ethics of fictionalising the real crimes depicted in the film.
This issue contains a selection of audiovisual essays on television series and Covid-19, curated by Ariane Hudelet. The AV essays by Catherine Fowler on Normal People, Barbara Zecchi on Estoy Vivo, Pierre-Olivier Toulza on The Haunting of Ill House, and Mathias de Bondt on Utopia explore how serial narratives helped audiences cope with the pandemic.
In the festival reviews section, Pablo Salas Tonello spotlights the International Film Festival of Heights in San Salvador de Jujuy, Argentina. Wendy Wenxin Zhang showcases the Animal Nature Future Film Festival, which is held between the UK and China. Both festivals are conceived around considerations of space: one set in a mountainous region, the other taking place between two countries. This leads to structural and institutional challenges, which the reviews assess in a transparent, critical, and insightful manner.
The book reviews section contains three contributions. Siheng Zhu reviews Karin Wagner’s From ASCII Art to Comic Sans: Typography and Popular Culture in the Digital Age (MIT Press 2023). Giancarlo Grossi offers a double book review of Pasi Väliaho’s Projecting Spirits: Speculation, Providence, and Early Modern Optical Media (Stanford University Press, 2022) and Francesco Casetti’s Screening Fears: On Protective Media (Zone Books, 2023). River Seager reviews Briony Hannell’s Feminist Fandoms: Media Fandom, Digital Feminism, and Tumblr (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024).
In the exhibition reviews section, Il Sun Moon gives an account of Refik Anadol’s Echoes of the Earth at Serpentine North in London and the art collective UVA with the exhibition Synchronicity at 180 Strand in London. Domenico Quaranta visited Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power, 1500-2025, which took place at Osservatorio Prada, Milan. Finally, Carly Whitaker interviews Brooklyn J. Pakathi on networked curatorial practices for online exhibitions. We thank all of our authors and section editors for their contributions to this issue.
On a more somber note, we must announce that the Spring 2025 issue of NECSUS will be scaled back, with only review sections and a special audiovisual essay section. The Autumn 2025 issue will contain a special section with review sections, audiovisual essays, but no Features section. This decision reflects the reality of our current financial constraints, which require us to adapt our output to a significantly smaller budget. We are actively collaborating with the NECS Steering Committee and the Open Scholarship Committee on fundraising initiatives and workflow adjustments to ensure that we can sustain the journal for 2026 and beyond. However, as long as there are no proper funding streams for Diamond Open Access journals at national and European levels, these structural problems will persist.
The NECSUS editorial board would like to discuss this urgent issue with the community at the NECS 2025 General Meeting in Lisbon. As a journal created by and for the NECS community, the editorial board believes that NECSUS deserves reliable, long-term support from its members. Your membership fees are crucial to this effort, so please remember to renew your membership in the new year and help secure the future of NECSUS. Thank you for your support, and happy holidays!