Editorial NECSUS: Spring 2024_#Open
by Martine Beugnet, Greg de Cuir Jr, Judith Keilbach, Skadi Loist, Toni Pape, Belén Vidal and Andrea Virginás
We are happy to present the Spring 2024 issue of NECSUS with a special section titled #Open. Edited by the members of NECS Open Scholarship committee, the articles in this section address openness as a value in media culture as well as media studies. What is an aesthetic of openness? How can media scholars ‘open up’ media technologies that are usually black-boxed? What are the challenges of open-access publishing? And what does it mean for academia to open up to society? The articles in our special section explore these and other questions. We are deeply grateful to our guest editors, the members of the NECS Open Scholarship Committee: Bregt Lameris, Miriam de Rosa, Jeroen Sondervan and Victoria Pastor-González.
The editorial board also associates the theme #Open with academic freedom. In recent months, we have seen the suppression of peaceful campus protests questioning university indifference to the Israel-Hamas war. Police have been called onto campuses and exercised excessive force to clear encampments. Solidarity events have been cancelled by university boards and speakers have been prevented from entering the Schengen area, as in the case of Ghassan Abu-Sittah, the British-Palestinian rector of University of Glasgow and witness to the International Court of Justice, who was invited to report on his experiences as a medic in Gaza during the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. Academics at all levels and in various countries have been intimidated, punished, and arrested for exercising their right to freedom of speech and for showing solidarity and support to their students as they exercise their own rights to assemble and speak out. As an academic journal, we defend the right to express one’s scholarly views. We reject the idea that research should have to be politically neutral or objective in a positivist sense. Instead, we believe that pluralism takes precedence and leads the way to a shared understanding of the world. Quoting Hannah Arendt: ‘Only in the freedom of our speaking with one another does the world, as that about which we speak, emerge in its objectivity and visibility from all sides.’ (The Promise of Politics, edited by Jerome Kohn, Schocken Books, 2005, pp. 128-129)
Under the special theme #Open, we call on our community to emphatically affirm this pluralism and defend it as a fundamental necessity, both for academic work and democratic processes. However, openness does not equal indifference. We would also like to clearly affirm that NECSUS is an anticolonial and antifascist journal. We reject discrimination of all types, and at this charged moment in particular we categorically reject Islamophobia and anti-Semitism. We believe that the massive tragedy unfolding in the Middle East, which has been building up for generations, demands real social change. We cannot go back to the status quo.
Our recurring sections show the commitment of the academic community that NECSUS represents to enlarging the space for pluralism and debate, in a variety of interventions around contemporary media. The Features section opens with an interview with Lisa Parks, conducted by Judith Keilbach and Linda Kopitz, about media backends. In the interview, Parks explains her approach to studying backends – that is, those parts of media that are usually not open to their users. Addressing hierarchies of knowledge and power she considers opening up technical objects as a feminist intervention and accentuates the labour required to manufacture media devices. The interview maps the various economic, political, and scholarly tensions around the notion of openness.
Anamarija Horvat’s article ‘“I say! Neither a Whore nor a Saint”: Transgender memory, Spanish popular television, and media histories in Veneno’ considers the streaming series Veneno as part of a broader turn in the Spanish television and cinema towards histories of transgender experience. Horvat shows that this historical re-evaluation also allowed the series to make an important intervention in political discourses around trans rights in Spain. Mingyuan Wan’s ‘Queer Bare Lives’ analyses the Michael Mayer film Out in the Dark to show how it mobilises the conventions of melodrama to present the abjection of its queer protagonist to the state of bare life. This analysis grounds Wan’s argument that the film challenges homonationalist discourses by showing that they oppress all queer life, Israeli and Palestinian, and thwart queer social bonds across the lines drawn by geopolitical conflict.
In ‘Game engines: Optimising VFX, reshaping visual media’, Tom Livingstone develops a phenomenological theory of In-Camera VFX, or what is colloquially called virtual production. The article explains what difference the underlying new production technology – the game engine – makes for the status of the resulting images and our experience of them (for an insightful analysis, we also recommend the Chemical Brothers’ ‘Live Again’). Cristina Formenti also looks at animation, but from an ecomaterialist perspective. In ‘The environmental footprint of animated realism’, Formenti focuses her investigation on feature-length animated documentaries. The analysis finds that the quest for representational realism and aesthetic spectacle requires a multi-layered production line that entails the unnecessary overconsumption of resources, the overproduction of unused footage, and excessive waste. The article ultimately proposes that the environmental costs of an animated film should be considered in the prestige economy of awards. In ‘Becoming a Netflix nation: Extroversion, exportability, and visibility through a case study of Maestro in Blue’, Georgia Aitaki studies the first Greek Netflix series, a romantic drama that involves a musician who organises a festival on a scenic Greek island. Acknowledging that the series’s tourist gaze is clearly made for a global audience, Aitaki asks what compromises countries with small television industries need to make in order to become an exportable Netflix Nation.
The audiovisual essay section in this issue was edited by Chloé Galibert-Laîné. Under the theme ‘Sitting, standing, dancing with our screens’, Galibert-Laîné has compiled five Francophone video essays that explore the relation between our screens and our bodies. Chloé’s introduction to the section further clarifies the theoretical stakes of this project. Here are a few teasers: you can learn a lot about gaming chairs, sofa usage, the 1996 Olympic Games, Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy, Xena the Warrior Princess, and menstruation.
The festival review section is dedicated to virtual reality. Da Ye Kim’s ‘The two sides of VR utopias’ provides a historical overview of the emergence of VR at international film festival networks. In ‘Why (film) festivals? Virtual reality experiences at a crossroads’, Philippe Bédard considers the limitations of festivals as an exhibition site for the burgeoning medium of VR films. Marijke de Valck interviewed Dutch VR artist Nemo Vos to discuss his vision for VR cinema and its exhibition at festivals. Finally, Anja Boato interviewed Liz Rosenthal and Michel Reilhac, the curators of the XR section at the Venice International Film Festival.
In the book review section, Byron Davies considers The Shape of Motion: Cinema and the Aesthetics of Movement by Jordan Schonig and Disformations: Affects, Media, Literature by Tomáš Jirsa. Nicole Braida covers the book Distant Viewing, co-authored by Taylor Arnold and Lauren Tilton. Amy Gaeta explores Kathrin Maurer’s The Sensorium of the Drone and Communities.
In the exhibition review section Toni Pape reviews InSomnolence: The Sociability of Sleep, which was presented at the Agora Hydro-Québec in Montreal. Annet Dekker interviews Doreen A. Ríos, curator of the exhibition Liquid Spaces: Politics of the Screen at the Bienal Universitaria de Arte Multimedial (BUAM), at Universidad San Francisco at Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Quito and Q Galería in Ecuador.
To close this issue, we present a data paper by Shiming Shen. In ‘Archiving Europe: Unveiling the visual world through stock shots in French television (2001-2021)’, Shen analyses a database of stock shots housed at the French Institut national de l’audiovisuel to assess how they depict Europe and how their circulation shapes cultural imaginaries of Europe. We hope you enjoy this issue.