Complex Shifts
NUI Galway
Non-binary Binaries and Unreal MetaHumans View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Eric Freedman
Video game engines are powering our visual futures as game developers continue to iterate their products to tackle new industry verticals. This analysis draws from software studies and studies of visual culture to examine an engine-based tool that is fairly new to the arsenal of game developer Epic Games—the in-development MetaHuman Creator—and poses the central question: Do the rapid prototyping and building tools of digital content support the free play of identity in playable media? The MetaHuman Creator is a cloud-streamed application that lets content developers create high-fidelity digital characters without being steeped in the technical processes of character generation, rigging, animation, and in-engine real-time functionality. Epic’s tool draws from a library of real scans of people and allows 3D content developers to quickly create unique photorealistic fully-rigged digital humans. The tool allows visual artists to rapidly and seamlessly manipulate a character’s facial features, adjust skin complexion, and select from a range of preset body types and styles. Commercial demonstrations of the MetaHuman tool speed through a series of mutable multiethnic, multiracial, transgender subjects as part of a fluid design process that cleaves bodies from politics. As the engine-driven traces of the natural world continue to move toward greater fidelity and to a greater alignment between physiognomic and mechanical systems, this research asks: Is the MetaHuman Creator an engine for diversity, or simply a spectacle of control?
The Convergence of Television Documentary and "Advocacy" Journalism in the Post-truth, Digital Streaming Era: Mapping New Spaces for Feminist Activism and Policy Discourses View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Amber Hardiman
Feminist policy reform efforts and advocacy initiatives are frequently advanced by and alongside of media productions concerned with the issue of sexual violence. From the earliest days of broadcasting, feminist activism has piggybacked off of the publicity of high-profile trials and social movements to advance specific social, cultural, and political agendas. For example, much of the early literature concerning the relationship between feminist activism, policy movements, and television representation has engaged with “popular” mid-century network TV genres (i.e., prime-time television, network news, talk shows, soap operas, and made-for-TV movies) that were especially prominent from the sexual revolution of the 1960’s and 1970’s onwards (Moorti, 2002; Cuklanz, 2000; Levine, 2007; Projansky, 2001). While several scholars have explored how mass media has been wielded as a tool by activists and media makers, few have considered how various representational modalities in the digital era are converging to create new spaces for feminist advocacy and social reform. I ask: how do documentaries produced for televisual streaming platforms intersect with new forms of “advocacy journalism” in the “post-truth” digital era? More precisely, how are feminist documentarians and activists harnessing these emergent (and increasingly overlapping) digital and televisual spaces to foreground generative policy-oriented discourses? To answer these questions, I explore how contemporary U.S. advocacy-inspired journalism and documentary television constitute distinct public spheres for examining feminist social issues, with each containing unique affordances and limitations regarding their advancement of social change, resulting from their different associations with the notions of “objectivity” and “truth.”
Fascism and the Banality of Social Media: The Relationship Between Media Complexity and Fascist Ideology View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Brady Hammond
Hannah Arendt argued that the evil of the Nazi regime came from a shallowness of thought, from rendering atrocities into the banal. Decades later, theorists increasingly noted that television news was simplifying media into a terrain of headlines and soundbites. The relationship between airtime and complexity of information became clearer: the less of one, the less of the other. Today, social media are entrenched in the lives of people around the world. These media offer users opportunities to engage in worldwide discourses. However, these media have also continued to exert pressure on the ability to communicate complex ideas. For instance, even the expanded size of a tweet, now 240 characters, would still only account for just the first two sentences of this abstract. This paper investigates the “shallowing” of media in the age of the Internet from a critical lens by engaging with the work of Marshall McLuhan. It then reads that shallowing through the works of theorists such as Arendt and Umberto Eco, who explored totalitarianism and fascism in the 20th century. This juxtaposition reveals that social media in the 21st century have facilitated the development of a banal media landscape which is ideally suited for the articulation and growth of fascist ideological thinking.
