by Tina Kendall This article approaches gesture in relation to the problem of boredom in a postdigital culture. As David M. Berry and Michael Dieter suggest, the term ‘postdigital’ encompasses ‘a wide range of issues attached to the entanglements of media life after the digital’, including, crucially, ‘a shift from an earlier moment driven by […]
by Nicole De Brabandere and Alanna Thain Drawing Light was a research-creation workshop on procedural thinking held in the early evening of a wintery Saturday (10 February 2018) in Montreal, Canada. The workshop was facilitated by Nicole De Brabandere, a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University and an interdisciplinary artist-scholar, and Alanna Thain, director of the […]
by Tracy Cox-Stanton voiceover transcript 1 writing parts and wholes In the essay film, like the video essay, words are not just ideas. They’re also sounds and images. When an essay film examines its object, words often fade away completely, supplanted by the complex signifying landscape of mise en scène. The video essay, like the […]
by Janet Harbord In their eloquent introduction to an anthology devoted to the study of gestures in film, video, and drawing, Grønstad, Gustafsson, and Vågnes capture the poles that the term gesture straddles. ‘At once a codified and natural expression, the gestural is peculiarly and somewhat ambiguously situated between the realm of the discursive and […]
by A Zinsel Author A Zinsel is a recent graduate of the Savannah College of Art and Design, MA program in cinema studies, specialising in audiovisual techniques. Her research focuses on the status of the cinematic image in the digital environment, aided by the use of non-linear editing software and collaborative scholarly practice.
by Tracy Cox-Stanton Reflecting on her audiovisual study of a dance sequence in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Laura Mulvey notes that ‘digitally derived “delayed cinema” [has] a special, privileged relationship to cinematic gesture’.[1] Building upon her arguments in Death Twenty-four Times a Second,[2] Mulvey discusses how digital editing tools enable the film scholar to fragment a […]
Gesturality is the source of signifying practices overall. The body set in motion generates meaning, and all other modes and matters of expression ensue this pristine act of signification. Soviet-Russian film director and theoretician Sergei Eisenstein started from here – from ‘expressive movement’ – in tracing the pathway of meaning throughout all the different artistic […]
by Jennifer O’Meara This article will identify and historicise gestural trends in ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) videos on the social media site Instagram, where media objects foregrounding touch and texture are shared via specialist accounts and hashtags such as #satisfyingvideos and #slimeasmr. Released initially for the iPhone on 6 October 2010, Instagram (owned by […]
by Christa Blümlinger[1] In cinema, techniques of the body are always articulated together with the setting of its recording. Cinema is an invention of the nineteenth century and is part of the machine age. In this regard, we might recall Walter Benjamin’s text on the mechanical reproducibility of the work of art, where he analyses […]
by Darren Gary Berkland Introduction In Bo Burnham’s film Eighth Grade (2018) screens become the lifeworld[1] of the film’s protagonist, Kayla (portrayed by Elsie Fisher). Kayla is a thirteen-year-old on the cusp of adolescence who is navigating the tribulations of the final stages of middle school. Her life is going through several transitions, and the […]
by Marco Dalla Gassa In the aftermath of the Second World War, not least as a response to the terrible conflict which had just come to an end, increasing political actions were taken in pursuit of the ideals of peace and egalitarianism, or of affirming the rights of individuals and minorities.[1] In October 1945, the […]
by Miriam de Rosa Then at one point I did not need to translate the notes; they went directly to my hands. — Francesca Woodman Often I believe I’m working toward a result, But always, once I reach the result, I realize all pleasure was in the planning and executing the path to […]
Call for submissions NECSUS Autumn 2019_#Gesture Guest editor: Miriam de Rosa (Coventry University) A visible action working as utterance, according to Giorgio Agamben gesture is ‘the exhibition of mediality’. It unveils a process and crystallises a meaning into a temporary form, making visible and yet relying upon a sense of deep tactility and materiality, especially […]
by Nanna Verhoeff & Heidi Rae Cooley While touchscreen technology has been around since at least 1974 it did not become widely available on the consumer market until the 2007 release of the Apple iPhone.[1] Since then our handheld devices have gotten smarter and more connected. We enjoy an ever-increasing ability to access and manipulate […]
by Erik Bordeleau A thin veneer of immediate reality is spread over natural and artificial matter, and whoever wishes to remain in the now, with the now, on the now, should please not break its tension film. – Vladimir Nabokov, Transparent Things 1. Transparent things The opening generic of Tsai Ming-Liang’s Face (2009) has just […]
