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FCJ-176 A Skeuomorphic Cinema: Film Form, Content and Criticism in the ‘Post-Analogue’ Era
David H. Fleming University of Nottingham Ningbo, China William Brown University of Roehampton, London [Abstract] In like manner a beginner who has learnt a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he has assimilated the spirit of the new language and can freely express himself in it only when he finds his way in it without recalling the old and forgets his native tongue in the use of the new. (Karl Marx, 2000: 327) In this essay we utilise a ‘digitally detoured’ notion of the ‘skeuomorph’ to better understand the ‘gaseous’ form and content of contemporary cinema, arguing in particular that this concept entails various nuances that make it a more fecund framework through which to consider the aesthetics of digital cinema. Looking in particular at digital cinematography and performance, we argue that because of its emphasis on concealed and/or misunderstood novelty, the skeuomorphic framework yields…
FCJ-175 Humans at play in the Anthropocene
Troy Innocent Swinburne University of Technology [Abstract] culture arises in the form of play, that it is played from the very beginning. Even in those activities which aim at the immediate satisfaction of vital needs , hunting, for instance, tend, in archaic society, to take on the play-form. Social life is endued with supra-biological forms, the shape of play, which enhance its value. It is through this play that society expresses its interpretation of life and the world (Huizinga, 1949 : 46). Introduction The Anthropocene marks ‘a new phase in the history of both humankind and of the Earth, where natural forces and human forces become intertwined.’ (Zalasiewicz 2010: 2231). It is the current time in which human processes such as culture and language, the use of tools and technology, are acknowledged as part of the earth’s ecology, and as integral to the operations and behaviours of the earth’s ecology…
FCJ-174 Constructing the contemporary via digital cultural heritage
Torsten Andreasen University of Copenhagen [Abstract] The digital cultural heritage archive appeared in the discourse of cultural heritage around the beginning of the new millennium and did so with certain specific goals, the digital preservation of and accessibility to cultural heritage should serve global tolerance, strengthen regional and national identity and, finally, inspire entrepreneurial creativity and innovation. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), the predominant global agent of cultural heritage since the Second World War, has tended to express the potential use-value of cultural heritage by appropriating a quote from Arjun Appadurai: ‘Culture is the resource that society needs to move from today to tomorrow’ (UNESCO, 2010: 7). According to this discursive formation, operated internationally by UNESCO in parallel with its supranational and national counterparts, digital cultural heritage has a specific strategic temporality, the digital construction of the past as a force driving the present into the…
FCJ-173 Being and Media: digital ontology after the event of the end of media
Justin Clemens University of Melbourne Adam Nash RMIT University [Abstract] Everything is Digital Today, everything is digital and the digital is everything. Surely such a totalising, yet reductive, assertion can’t be right, even if we accepted that it had any sense? What about rocks and stones and trees? The great eighteenth-century literary critic Dr Johnson famously responded to Bishop Berkeley’s idealist, ‘immaterialist’ philosophy broached in A Treatise Concerning Human Understanding by kicking a boulder and declaring “I refute it thus!” (Boswell, 238). Such a naturalist rejoinder has found its contemporary avatars in the field of media studies under a variety of names, ranging from Bruno Latour and Actor-Network-Theory [1] to Luciano Floridi’s philosophy of information (Latour, 2007; Floridi, 2014). Despite their manifest, manifold differences, what unites such projects is their commitment to fundamentally naturalistic redescriptions of the complex interactions of trans-human agents. They are directed at displacing ‘the human’ from…
FCJ-173 Being and Media: digital ontology after the event of the end of media
Justin Clemens University of Melbourne Adam Nash RMIT University [Abstract] Everything is Digital Today, everything is digital and the digital is everything. Surely such a totalising, yet reductive, assertion can’t be right, even if we accepted that it had any sense? What about rocks and stones and trees? The great eighteenth-century literary critic Dr Johnson famously responded to Bishop Berkeley’s idealist, ‘immaterialist’ philosophy broached in A Treatise Concerning Human Understanding by kicking a boulder and declaring “I refute it thus!” (Boswell, 238). Such a naturalist rejoinder has found its contemporary avatars in the field of media studies under a variety of names, ranging from Bruno Latour and Actor-Network-Theory [1] to Luciano Floridi’s philosophy of information (Latour, 2007; Floridi, 2014). Despite their manifest, manifold differences, what unites such projects is their commitment to fundamentally naturalistic redescriptions of the complex interactions of trans-human agents. They are directed at displacing ‘the human’ from…
FCJ-171 Expectations denied: Fan and industry conflict around the localisation of the Japanese video game Yakuza 3
Craig Norris University of Tasmania [Abstract] Introduction As various scholars (Jenkins, 2006a; Ito, 2007; Gray, 2010) have shown, fans can derive creative and emotional pleasure out of the ‘world building’ occurring in complex media franchises like Pirates of the Caribbean (Jenkins, 2007), and Star Wars (Brooker, 2002). Media industries are also increasingly valuing the contributions fans are making to these large media franchises. As Joshua Green and Henry Jenkins (2009: 213) have pointed out, ‘fans have been redefined as the drivers of wealth production within the new digital economy: their engagement and participation is actively being pursued.’ As this research has shown, although audiences engage deeply and passionately with these large fictional worlds there is a growing expectation among fans that they will have some freedom to use and access this content in a way which best suits them. Within this context, online fan cultures have provided researchers with a…
FCJ-170 Challenging Hate Speech With Facebook Flarf: The Role of User Practices in Regulating Hate Speech on Facebook
Benjamin Abraham University of Western Sydney [Abstract] Introduction A recent spate of high profile cases of online abuse has raised awareness of the amount, volume and regularity of abuse and hate speech that women and minorities routinely attract online. These range from the responses garnered by Anita Sarkeesian’s (2012; 2014) video series ‘Tropes vs. Women in Video Games,’ which included photoshopped images of Sarkeesian made to appear bruised and brutalised, (Lewis, 2012) to the abuse directed at the activist Caroline Criado-Perez following her campaign to have a woman represented on a UK banknote (Guardian Staff, 2014), to the countless instances of more pernicious ‘Everyday Sexism’ documented by the activist group of the same name. As a result of these and a host of similar recent events, it has become increasingly apparent that online abuse and instances of hate speech directed at women, people of colour, transgender individuals and other minorities…
FCJ-169 Mapping Moving-Image Culture: Topographical Interface and YouTube
Stephen Monteiro The American University of Paris [Abstract] Navigation and mobility are defining characteristics of the contemporary media experience. Unlike the rigid, easily learned parameters of earlier media forms, global digital networks offer increasingly complex and constantly changing exchanges, formations, and compilations of information. Through a combination of hardware design and integrated software a range of devices including smartphones, tablets, and netbooks are as much navigational instruments as they are communicative tools (Verhoeff, 2012; Farman, 2011). These devices and their effects are meant to get us places, whether objectively through geo-positioning and locative technologies or subjectively through operations and platforms that retrieve, analyse, and display data in response to our commands and presumed goals. In theorizing interfaces, Alexander Galloway points to effects as their critical component. ‘Interfaces are not simply objects or boundary points. They are autonomous zones of activity. Interfaces are not things, but rather processes that effect a…
FCJ-168 Do objects dream of an internet of things?
Teodor Mitew University of Wollongong [Abstract] Heteroclite I: Hermes, a walking statue In a fragment of a comedy by Plato Comicus, a statue of Hermes stumbles onstage and must answer the skeptic’s question: ‘Who are you? Tell me at once. Why are you silent? Won’t you speak?’ To which the statue replies, ‘I am Hermes, with a voice of Daedalus, made of wood, but I came here by walking on my own’. (Daston, 2004: 39) I may speak with the voice of my maker, but I came here on my own. I may be enunciating the agency of another, but have agency of my own too. In the Greek view of being, possessing a spirit was synonymous with having a voice, and therefore entities that appeared to be superficially inanimate yet had a voice signaled a transgression of the rules of occupancy, a deviation from the parameters of being, a…
FCJ-163 Olympic Trolls: Mainstream Memes and Digital Discord?
Tama Leaver Curtin University [Abstract] Introduction During 2012, the Australian and international press frequently deployed the accusation of ‘trolling’ as part of a wider moral panic about supposedly anonymous online abuse facilitated by social media. The term trolling has been applied to a range of activities, many of which are simultaneously labelled abuse, (cyber)bullying and general mischief. Despite clear early work on trolls in Usenet discussion groups (Donath, 1999), there is surprisingly little detailed research on trolling, and what exists is largely focused on the provocative and ephemeral internet image board 4chan, and the related Anonymous movement (Phillips, 2011b; 2012a). As 4chan has been a hotbed for the creation of online memes—jokes and images, often combining text and visuals, following a particular style or grammar, which are rapidly spread across the internet—memes and trolling have often been tied together. However, this paper focuses on a more banal example of memes…
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