Conference – Abstracts
NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCREEN & SOUND (NASS) RESEARCH CENTRE and
NETWORKS ENHANCING THE SCHOLARSHIP OF TEACHING (NEST)
DIEGETIC LIFE FORMS II:
CREATIVE ARTS PRACTICE AND NEW MEDIA SCHOLARSHIP
CONFERENCE AND FESTIVAL
3-5 September 2010
CONFERENCE ABSTRACTS
Click here to download the Conference Festival Abstracts
DAY 1 – SESSION 1: Setting The Scene
Painting elephant/ painting monkey
Presenter: Ron Elliott
Curtin University
This paper is epistemological and seeks to explore “My Life in Art” as research output. It will examine a number of case studies involving the speaker’s writing work for television and his novel Spinner to tease out issues regarding the measuring of creative output within the Academy. It sees to provoke issues and will claim absolutely no answers. An alternative title might be, “Why I quit my PhD and wrote a novel instead, and why I should not be released from the zoo as a consequence of such wilfulness.”
Be(com)ing Reel Woman
Presenter: Dr Larissa Sexton-Finck
University of Western Australia
Female filmmakers appear to have ample opportunity to exert their agency in 21st century cinema, given that technological advancement, in many ways, serves as a gender equalizer in the medium. Yet women wield only a modicum of power in mainstream cinema, and the number of female filmmakers is decreasing over time. What are the reasons for this absence of reel woman today? More significantly, what are the possibilities and limitations for her subjectivity and agency, in and on screen, in this increasingly male-dominated landscape?
This paper describes how, as a female filmmaker, I conducted an autoethnographical scriptwriting-based investigation into this issue of female agency, by writing an original feature length screenplay, which was both a dramatic experiment and the creative outcome of my research. In this self-reflexive examination, I use the multiple logic of screenplay diegesis, to unravel the overt and latent sites of resistance for reel woman’s actualisation today and to test whether it is possible for female filmmakers, and their female characters, to overcome the seemingly insurmountable odds facing them be(com)ing active agents.
The paper documents my lived moments of struggle in a discipline still deeply rooted in male narratives and details the challenging contexts and contingent moments in my life during the scriptwriting process. I use personal exposition and creative analysis to deconstruct my lived experience and its conditioning of my identity as a reel woman, so as to offer a close-up lens through which to examine the agency of the contemporary female filmmaker, and that of the female characters she writes.
DAY 1 – SESSION 2: The Reality Factor
Assessing Participatory (AV) Ethnography: Audiences, Ethics and Uses
Presenter: Dr Zemirah Moffat
School of Anthropology and Conservation, University of Kent
In the early 1970s, the era of portable sound recorders and prosumer hand-held cameras, social anthropologist and filmmaker Jean Rouch published a manifesto entitled “The Camera and Man.” In it he objected to the axiom that one made a film to please an audience. Instead he argued, he made his films for himself, then for his collaborators, then for ‘the rest of the world.’ As a visual anthropologist, this was the only ethical way to proceed and furthermore, by having the judges be the people observed, it fundamentally altered the nature of anthropological knowledge itself.
A year ago I began teaching a new course in participatory audio visual ethnography at the University of Kent (UK). By harnessing together the accessible technologies of digital recording, 2.0 Web platforms and DIY mentality, its aim is to reanimate and sustain Rouch’s vision of a ‘shared anthropology.’ The course’s purpose is threefold: to imagine and create new forums that will 1) inspire Anthropology, 2) enable the disempowered and marginalised, 3) nurture and encourage social activists. That’s our vision, but what about its implementation and assessment? In my presentation today I shall seek to answer this question using examples of my students’ work, the narrative of how we arrived at our marking criteria and end with an av clip about the course that argues through its form and content that knowledge and meaning are made through and within dialogue.
Documentary – Interdisciplinary by Nature
Presenter: Howard Worth
Department of Film & Television
School of Media, Culture & Creative Arts
Curtin University
It seems almost mandatory that documentary makers engage with other disciplines through the research undertaken in the subject area of their production. Whilst on most occasions we dismiss or “archive” the research for a particular topic once the programs are made, it is certainly not uncommon for the research topic to become something of major interest for the documentary maker. In this paper I discuss the way in which a commission to produce a 1 hour documentary on the French exploration of WA led in turn to a commission to produce a documentary on the maritime exploration of Australia, and then to a continuing research interest in the possible discovery of Australia by the Portuguese.
Ultimately, the question becomes, “Am I a filmmaker, an historian, or both?”
Know Thyself: Know Thy Market
An examination of the role of new marketing opportunities in relation to academic assessment of creative arts and the pursuit of knowledge
Presenter: Susan Taylor Suchy
University of Western Australia
While new methods of marketing and rapidly evolving technologies appear to be creating unique opportunities for the creative artist, the idea of pure research and the Arnoldian concept of disinterestedness of the creative mind from political or civil responsibility seems to be in conflict with these current entrepreneurial pressures. This paper examines academia’s role as arbiter of art in relation to the larger picture of the student’s Transcendental ‘self’ that needs to juggle the pursuit of a degree and the realities of the marketplace.
Research is presented from a collection of critical voices from a cultural studies and literary studies perspective, and also cultural economics is examined to debate what has come to be termed the cultural economy of creative industries. Following a critical tradition in literary education, the research examines the effect of this thinking on the education of the modern artist and looks at some new approaches being taken by a variety of universities to accommodate a new paradigm that balances marketing with the Socratic maxim ‘know thyself’.
Thinking With Werewolves: Gender, Creativity & Life/Theory/Art
Presenter: Chantal Bourgault du Coudray University of Western Australia
In my twenties, I wrote a conventional doctoral dissertation about the figure of the werewolf. At that time, I found the werewolf immensely useful to ‘think with’, because it provided a metaphorical framework for exploring entrenched patterns of gendered subjectivity, as well as alternative possibilities for the experience of selfhood. Importantly, I used it – and particularly the female werewolf – to argue that experiencing a ‘loss of self’ can enrich and support our conscious efforts at personhood.
In hindsight, I think that I was trying to theorise the value of ‘abandoned’ experiences such as creative flow and sexual desire (which, for me, were often interlinked). In the wake of this research, I commenced an academic career, but also forged a new relationship with a man who was being described in literary circles as an ’emerging writer’. Despite our established pathways as academic and writer respectively, we soon began making films together, which eventuated in additional careers for both of us.
During that period of my life I used to wear a t-shirt, which sported a slogan from a hair removal advertisement: ‘My werewolf days are over’. But those years – while productive and rewarding in many ways – were troubled; primarily, by deep tensions that attended my attempt to live and work as a ‘creative woman’. So now, to make sense of those experiences, I find myself drawn back to the figure of the (female) werewolf: a monster; an outcast; an idol; a free spirit; a survivor; at once maligned and revered. Once again, I would like to think with her: about how understandings and experiences of creativity are gendered; and about the ways in which feminist perspectives might help us to think about and do creativity differently. But this time around, I will give her a name, and her own voice, in the form of a screenplay.
DAY 2 – SESSION 3: Creative Practice – What Is It?
A Dichotomy Between The Arts And Screen
Presenter: Robert Marshall
In managing a UK based digital arts company for ten years, I built up a media team with very specific skills, knowledge and experience; skills that were essential if we were to work intimately with great performance groups like the Royal Opera, the RSC and the National Theatre. We recorded or ‘filmed’ live productions for digital cinemas, DVD or the web, and it was expected that in interpreting their work we should exercise the same academic and creativity rigour that was evident in their own work.
In working to develop the same capability here, I discovered a remarkable dichotomy in the perceptions of professional media capabilities within both the artistic and academic community. The intellectual and creative rigour that is expected of local arts groups (WASO, WA Opera etc.), is not expected or required of the media practitioners they employ to interpret their work; and, with an unhappy equivalence, nor it would seem in the way academia assesses screen work. This culture of ‘non intellectual expectations’ demeans the serious work of screen artists or practitioners, and sets up a paradox; while we use one set of criteria to evaluate the work of musicians and authors, that is not the case for the screen.
DAY 2 – SESSION 4: Practice-Based Scholarship
Assessing Diegetic Life forms: Assessing Graduate Screen Production Output in Nineteen Australian Film Schools
Presenter: Dr Josko Petkovic
Murdoch University
Assessing an image-based text is a complex task that requires multiple dimensions of judgment. This is because the production process itself consists of a complex circle of interdependent relationships that is almost life-like. Can this complex process be prescribed and measured or is it in the eye of the beholder? This paper presents the results of the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) funded Priority research project Assessing Graduate Screen Production Output in Nineteen Australian Film Schools.
The aim of the project was to show that assessment of image-based creative works is as consistent as assessment conducted in traditional discipline areas. Thirty (30) screen production academics from 22 institutions were tested using the same sample of 45 short Honours productions and a carefully selected set of 34 criteria. Creative works alone were assessed without any written components or exegeses. Rasch psychometric modeling was then used to test the internal consistency of the assessment data.
The results confirmed the hypothesis that screen production assessors are consistent and methodical with very little overall difference between 25 Australian assessors and 5 UK assessors. There was also little difference in the assessments of “objective” and “subjective” criteria which invites all kind of questions regarding the status of subjective and objective verification procedures within creative arts. Is this distinction still valid in the psychometric Google universe?
Harnessing Imagination for Knowledge: A Case for Practice-based Research
Presenter: Associate Professor Maggi Phillips
Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts
Knowledge emanates in and from many modalities, both oppositional and complementary. Mimesis and diegesis are two such modalities that hark back to the interrogative endeavours of the Greek philosophers who sought to account for what might be apprehended in actual encounters (mimesis) and that which lay beyond those encounters in projections and imaginative assembling (diegesis). Centuries later, Michel Foucault’s excavations on the changing visibility of knowledge point to the ongoing interrelationship of these two concepts: his ‘histories’ “share an aim with fiction: the aim not of explanation, or of showing how our ways of seeing and doing are historically necessitated, but, on the contrary, of showing how things might be otherwise” (in Rajchman, 1988, 95). In other words, Foucault’s painstaking ‘histories’ dig into the sediments of vision, language and rhetoric to try and ‘see’ how to access what is yet unknown.
Fictionality, storytelling and the setting up of alternative worlds evoke human experience and, in artistic disciplines like dance, are not antithetical to knowledge. Rather as Susan Melrose suggests, such modes of communication open knowledge to ways of looking forward as well as modes of looking back, to imaginative interrogations as much as to the scrutiny of evidence left by the past. In a variation of Foucault’s pursuit of the visibility/invisibility of knowledge and bringing these ideas into the current academic debate, Melrose frames time as the qualifier in two incommensurable ‘expert’ systems (Melrose, 2006). The ‘spectating’ academic looks back to arrive at knowledge whereas, in her terms, the artist practitioner projects forwards towards potential ‘transformative events’ in the production of knowledge and, as such, enters into the diegetic construction of life worlds.
This proposal aims to argue the validity of imaginative (fictional and/or diegetic) investigations into the splintered truths of knowledge. According to Foucault and Melrose, that is evident, but within university administrative controls and the paradigmatic authority of evidence-based research, imagination still needs advocacy.
References:
Melrose S. (2006) Not yet, and already no longer: loitering with intent between the expert practitioner at work, and the archive. Paper presented at Performance as Knowledge, London, UK.
Rajchman, John. (1988) Foucault’s Art of Seeing October, Vol. 44 (Spring, 1988), pp. 88-117
Shaped Space: locating a performance of Twelfth Night
Presenter: Jenny de Reuck
Murdoch University
New historical approaches have allowed for the reinvention of Shakespearean productions in a variety of adaptive processes that operate in many instances ‘against the grain’. The politics of performance has never been more visible than in many recent productions both in Australia and internationally. This paper argues that the ‘space’ between the actor and the character in Shakespeare’s dramas is most creatively negotiated with young performers if the excitement of Shakespeare’s intersubjective potential is unleashed and their performances are allowed the freedom of expression that more overtly politicised constraints may inhibit.
Drawing on the praxis-led research undertaken with final year, Honours and postgraduate students in the Creative Arts at Murdoch University (2009) this paper will offer a case study of a production of Twelfth Night. ‘Space’ in this context is presented as a field of orientation whose alignments flow from the central sensibilities of the dominant characters in the play.
DAY 2 – SESSION 5: The Body of Evidence
Digital Frankensteins: the post-organic bodies of digital animation
Presenter: Erin Hawley
Murdoch University
In 1818 Mary Shelley wrote of a monstrous body: she imagined the creation of a figure that was posthuman, fragmented, and defined by its uneasy negotiations with the organic world. Nearly two hundred years later, Shelley’s monster has been reimagined, replicated, and rewritten in popular texts of the digital age. At the same time, new possibilities in the digital imaging of human presence in film – from the replacement of actors with computer-generated imagery to the quest for photorealism in digital animation – themselves evoke the Frankenstein tale and consequently make interesting contributions to the evolving Frankenstein myth. This is, after all, an age of digital resurrections and artificial screen life; a period in which we see spectacular progress in our ability to digitally re-present ourselves, and in which concurrent (and very Frankensteinian) questions are raised about what it means to be human, what it means to be alive, what it means to be embodied, what it means to know, what it means to watch a film and what it means to act in one.
This paper will present detailed analyses of two figures that I read as Frankensteinian monsters for the digital age: the motion-capture character/actress Aki Ross from the photorealistic digital feature Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, and the animated cyborg Kusanagi from Mamoru Oshii’s anime Ghost in the Shell. As female characters defined by their beauty rather than their monstrosity, these figures might seem far removed from Shelley’s monster with his “watery eyes, his shriveled complexion and straight black lips”. Like their predecessor, however, Aki and Kusanagi are mechanical bodies defined by problems of (in)visibility, spectral presence, and an uneasy negotiation with “nature”. Imbued with artificial life, their posthuman bodies are also emblematic of a digital culture that reconstructs the organic and de-organicises the screen. This paper presents a dialogue between these two bodies and the mythic figure that the Frankensteinian monster has become.
Screen Presence and the Performing Self
Presenter: Ken Miller
Curtin University
The ubiquitous and accessible media of cameras, screens and cyberspace are becoming the “natural” way for increasingly media-savvy and media-reliant people to express their identities. This is evident by mediated performances of self via vlogs on YouTube and elsewhere in cyberspace, as well as via various forms of actuality television.
How might we understand this phenomenon? And what tensions might be at play? Are we becoming “performing/mediated” selves who manufacture and play out our identities almost as if they were based on a composite of the myriad screen performances that we “absorb” from our mediated exteriority? Have we been conditioned to perform as if we were all stars in a culture of narcissism and hyper mediation? Or is there a deeper yearning in all of this? Despite the fact that we may have become postmodern chameleons who wear different masks and perform ourselves in different ways, it may well be that we also retain a need to explore and express some kind of authentic interiority.
In Exile with Shakespeare’s The Tempest:
Solo Performance as ‘Analytic Theatre’
Presenter: Jane Gilmer
The Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
In this presentation, I analyse my work as a solo performer of Shakespeare. To do this, I critically theorise my work, and visually show it through inserts of my performance-as-research as it is recorded on video.
It is my contention that my exploration of The Tempest in rehearsal and, as a solo performance, proved to be a deeply transformative experience both for myself as solo performer, and, for my audiences because of its restorative power. Throughout the tempest project, I worked with the notion that ‘exile’ can be a necessary state, place or space, through which to explore the project of ‘individuation’ or personal self-consciousness. Performatively exploring Prospero’s exile as an experience was significant to the project, in that exile provided the space of quiescence where the magic of the numinous could take place.
Employing two different critical frames through which to analyse my process, I developed a solo performance of the play that attempts to reveal how the challenge of holding the psychological tension between opposites, that is, the challenge to exist between the internal (personal), and external (public or social) psychological states, is revealed through the action of the play as a process of initiation.
To do this, I used both psychoanalytic critique and, psycho-physical performance techniques: Psychoanalysis proved useful as a way to revealing phenomenological explorations, as my own subjectivities, interfaced with the historically inscribed text. Likewise, the psycho-physical techniques of the actor and director Michael Chekhov, facilitated my entry into an embodied process where I was more fully able to ‘become’ Prospero and participate in his initiation of self-transformation. Experientially, I discovered that this way of working, between analysis and embodied psycho-physical theatre, resulted in a Theatre of Analysis, or ‘Analytic Theatre’, where performing Shakespeare’s text solo, facilitated profound possibilities of self-exploration and self-restoration.
DAY 2 – SESSION 6: Inter-Textual Panorama
Playing Image: the Aesthetics of Screening Scores
Presenter: Cat Hope
Head of Composition and Music Technology
WAAPA, Edith Cowan University
In the last ten years it has not been uncommon to see musicians read scores from projection in the performance space. Artists as diverse as UK electronic artist Leafcutter John, US string quartet Kronos Quartet and Perth new music ensemble Decibel have demystified the code of new music by sharing the score with the listener in the moment of its performance.
Composers are incorporating developments in computer software that enable new forms of ‘mobile’ graphic scores that may be closing the aesthetic and conceptual divide between functional design, communicative procedures and filmic arts. Many contemporary composers are integrating cinematic elements in modern music scoring, using moving image as a way to regulate improvisation and musical form. This paper examines the numerous implications of these practices for both composers, filmmakers, musicians and listeners, as well as the effects on performance, score design and the presentation of live music.
Sciences of the Spirit: Looking at music & film as ‘natural’ knowledge
Presenter: Andrew Ewing
Lecturer Film and Video
Edith Cowan University
In his book ‘Freud and Man’s Soul’, Bruno Bettelheim discusses Freud’s terms Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften. The first refers to ‘natural sciences’, the pursuit that allows for reproduction of experiments and scenarios to confirm theories or repeated occurrences in nature. The latter is much harder to translate but one can offer the term ‘sciences of the spirit’ and use it to describe that which occurs in the natural world but which is difficult if not impossible to recreate in the traditional sense of science.
As a filmmaker and musician tackling academic scholarship I have often found myself in a limbo state between artistic endeavours and the reinterpretation of them into conventional academic discourse. In a performance based presentation I wish to use Freud’s terms as a container for my creative arts practice (as viewed through Bettelheim’s suggested translation and not that of his original English translators who hesitated to accept the original meaning as it failed to inhabit the space of medical science).
In regards to film and music, I find the term Geisteswissenschaften a useful framework to construct an argument for the inherent value and intellectual capacity of works of art and their ability to be research documents on par with written conventional scholarship. Can we agree that art is idiographic knowledge? I wish to present a collage of my own film and musical practice as evidence of this science of the spirit or perhaps knowledge of the soul.
Witness
Presenters: Serge Tampalini, David Moody, Martin Mhando
Murdoch University
Witness is an exploration of concepts of justice, reconciliation and communication through a process of improvisation and group devising. The project explores an encounter from the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission where a white interpreter must record and tell the story of a black activist and victim of torture. It progresses to discussion of the representation of trauma in many of the world’s hotspots.
The “Paper” will be in the form of a video presentation of some excerpts from the recorded play, an excerpt of the play performed live by the actors, and a discussion led by the Director of the play around the creative process and the self-reflexive capacity that the text affords.
DAY 3 – SESSION 7: New Media Scholarship
Going Public with Learning: Online education and the real world
Presenter: Associate Professor Matthew Allen
Department of Internet Studies
Curtin University
It is well established through educational research that students focus most intently in the learning on the assessments they are set. Moreover, there is good evidence that motivation and engagement with learning are further increased when those assessments have an authentic or ‘real world’ dimension. While the degree and nature of authenticity will vary significantly depending on discipline and teaching context, a common way in which assessment can be authentic is if they are, in some way or another, ‘public’ – that is, involving work or presentations which occur outside of the artificial constraints of the educational setting as much as is possible. The Internet, the most extensive and accessible knowledge-work environment known to humanity, therefore provides a major opportunity for educators to create innovative and yet manageable public activities with which challenge students to ‘go public’ with their learning and thus harness the motivational and educative benefits of authentic assessment.
While conventionally, the Internet is thought to offer educators and students the chance to learn together at distance (online discussion by external students to replace tutorials), or to provide flexibility advantages for on-campus study ( time-shifting attendance at lectures; ease of handling submission of assignments and so on. Yet, online learning should not just involve the transfer the on-campus experience online, for the benefit of remote students; or the systematic digitisation of the on-campus experience for efficiency dividends. Rather, online learning only works to improve education when due account is paid to the the more substantial benefits of the Internet as a knowledge-networking system, in the wider world, and with an emphasis on publication, public engagement, and moving beyond the limited confines of the ‘classroom’, whether real or virtual.
This paper will show how university education, for both on-campus and external students, can online learning that is designed primarily to allow students to engage in public, authentic tasks for assessment. It will describe the Online Networks Conference held as part of a unit of study in the BA (Internet Communications) at Curtin University in semester 1, 2010, including presentation of results from surveys of participating students that demonstrate the value of this approach. Key findings that emerge are, firstly, that authentic assessment works best when it is the central structuring device in curriculum design, rather than an added afterthought; that students engage in high levels of constructive informal learning around the task; and that our understanding of ‘public’ may not be quite as straightforward as we first imagine.
Remix, Mash-Up, Share: copyright and assessment policy in interactive
media, games and digital design
Presenter: Ingrid Richardson
Murdoch University
The proliferation of Web 2.0 applications and services – characterised by dynamic interactivity, social software and the exponential growth of user-generated content – is having a significant impact on university learning environments. However, to date, much of the teaching and learning literature and research projects in this area have focused primarily on the social networking potential of Web 2.0 (i.e. the integration of blogs, wikis and social networking systems into pedagogical practice).
This paper presents initial outcomes of an ALTC project (entitled “Remix, Mash-Up, Share”) that focuses on an equally important yet under-researched aspect of Web 2.0, and particularly its implications for developing authentic assessment practices and criteria in the disciplines of interactive media, games and digital design. That is, the emergence of a type of content production that is collaborative, shared, and more significantly, often comprises the re-use and remixing of existing media content, or the ‘mashing-up’ and aggregation of existing services and applications.
Such work, often described as ‘derivative’ or akin to ‘bricolage’, is becoming increasingly predominant in professional new media practice, yet has not been successfully integrated into undergraduate assessment components and criteria. This is because it presents a fundamental paradigm shift away from the traditional notion of student-authored, original, ‘discrete’ and summative assessments, and goes against the grain of both conventional copyright regulations, and current assessment and plagiarism policies in universities both Australia-wide and overseas. This paper will specifically focus on students’ attitudes and approaches to the conundrum of copyright in relation to remixed and/or shared digital content, and the need for more flexible approaches to both copyright and assessment policy in university learning and digital content production more generally.
DAY 3 – SESSION 8: The Old, the New and the Interactive
New Media/Digital Romanticism – nature, nurture, enchantment
and the everyday
Presenter: Jacqueline Baker
Associate lecturer
Murdoch University
This paper presents an analysis of my research into New Media/Digital Romanticism which involves three major elements – New Media/Digital art, Romanticism and Environmentalism. It begins by providing a critique of the correlations between Neoclassicism and contemporary narratives embedded in artistic and scientific practice, such as the primacy given to technoscientific achievement and intellect, and the anthropocentric view of people’s place in the universe. The media and New Media/Digital art worlds are infiltrated by scientific and technological advancements such as virtual reality, post-humanism, cyberculture, artificial intelligence and biotechnology. My research investigates ways in which technologically mediated virtual worlds and biotechnological advancements have influenced our perceptions of the self, our world, our experience of the ‘real’ and sense of embodiment.
Romanticism in the 18th and 19th centuries observes philosophies such as pantheism, beauty, joy, enchantment, sublimity, ‘wilderness’, spontaneity and imagination. My investigation examines the subjective expression of the spiritual and emotional landscape and explores how Romantic artists and writers moved beyond a mimetic portrait of our environment and the human condition. In this context, I examine contemporary expressions of Romanticism as evident in video and installation art, VJing, electronic dance music culture, video games, the Internet and the influences behind my digital video art practice. An examination of the concept of New Media/Digital Romanticism aspires to encourage imaginative and creative utilisation of modern technologies as a way to express environmental appreciation and sustainability by providing alternative expressions of landscape depiction, in order to address the lack of sublime aesthetic in contemporary art and media, while celebrating our natural, quotidian existence.
The Third State of Cinema: Remediation at work
Presenter: John McMullan
Murdoch University
Cinema as the projected filmic image has been the focus of moving image theory for over a century. Television and more recently online digital video have taken a back seat for several reasons; in particular they are often considered as inferior mediums, both conveying a lesser degree of transparency and being devoid of indexicality as theorised by Charles Sanders Pierce. That is, they supposedly possess a weaker connection to the real or, what Jay David Bolter would call, the authentic.
This paper, via Tom Gunning’s work on digital media and the claim to photographic truth, will explore and problematise these notions with the aim of overturning the longstanding primacy of the cinematic moving image. I will suggest, with reference to Gaudreault and Marion’s theory on the second birth of a medium, that cinema itself is well into what could be perceived as its third state of being; that of linear long-form narrative anchored deep within the fantastic and iconic. Finally, I will consider the genealogy of online digital video’s position as a medium in relation to television, as the latter also finds itself undergoing transformation.
How not to understand interactivity by ignoring it
Presenter: Mark Cypher Murdoch University
Interactivity in New Media artworks is almost always described in terms of social construction. If ,as Katja Kwastek suggests, “[t]he objective of interactive media art is precisely to uncover and reflect the specific forms of interaction enabled by new media”, then the question needs to be asked: How does privileging the social and thereby ignoring the media (and by implication the interaction), adequately describe interactivity?
This paper aims to provide a more symmetrical account of interaction by employing Actor Network theory, and as such proposes that there is much more at work in interactive new media artworks than “the social”.
Media engagement from the physiological perspective
Presenter: Jennifer Robinson
Interactive Television Research Institute
Murdoch University
From eye-tracking to neuroimaging (fMRI), physiological measures are used to explore many aspects of the media experience, such as interactivity, immersion, enjoyment, engagement and attention. Sundar et al (2010) are exploring how different modalities, such as clicking & zooming, change perceptual bandwidth and engagement using both physiological and psychological measures of the experience. Weber et al (2009) proposed a cognitive synchronization theory of flow that can be measured using fMRI to see when gamers are maximally enjoying their experience.
ITRI uses biometric measures to explore attention and emotional responses to media. Using arousal, heart rate and eye-tracking measures, we’re learning how people engage with their media experiences (e.g. The Bloomberg Effect, 2009). This presentation will provide an overview of the latest techniques being used by the researchers at ITRI and sample insights into the TV viewing and multi-platform media experience we have gained from this research.
References:
Robinson, J., Schweda, A., Treleaven-Hassard, S., & Varan, D. (2009). The ‘Bloomberg’ Effect: Parallel Processing of TV Content. Perth, Australia: Interactive Television Research Institute, Murdoch University.
Sundar, S., Xu, Q, Bellur, S., Oh, J., & Jia, H. (2010). Modality is the Message: Interactivity Effects on Perception and Engagement. Proceedings of the 28th International conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Altanta, Georgia, USA, April 14-15.
Weber, R., Tamborini, R., Westcott-Baker, A., & Kantor, B. (2009). Theorizing Flow and Media Enjoyment as Cognitive Synchronization of Attentional and Reward Networks. Communication Theory, 19, 397-422.
