Image Encounters
Polyphonic Performance: Agency among Images, Sounds, Objects, Bodies and New Technologies
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Rodrigo Desider Fischer
The paper investigates how the concept of polyphonic performance is developed through the correlation among images, sounds, objects, bodies and new technologies. The paper aims to analyze the multimedia and multidisciplinary performance. This piece was focused on the correlation or the agency among the images, sounds, objects, bodies and new technologies to create a polyphonic dramaturgy. Reflecting on the agency of these elements, from a perspective without hierarchization among them, the paper aims to think how the actions of them can generate a narrative and a discourse that does not emphasize their possible representations, symbolisms or historicities, but above all, to highlighting their materiality and performativity.
Imaging the Future: Blade Runner’s Visions of Cutting-edge Technology Turning into Fears of Desolated Climate
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Elise Eimre
This paper is an analysis of climate fiction genre in cinema. The case study of "Blade Runner" (dir. by Ridley Scott, 1982) and "Blade Runner 2049" (dir. by Denis Villeneuve, 2017) endows to examine two key questions around this subject. Firstly, how is the cinematic vision of high-tech future changed from first Blade Runner to its sequel? And secondly, what kind of effect is this change predisposing? "Blade Runner", a loose adaption of Philip K. Dick’s novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep", brought in 1982 to silver screens all over the world a vision of dystopian future of 2019, of a time that is now around the corner. Following "Blade Runner 2049" jumps forward another thirty years and sequels a perception of the forthcoming with highly different thematic weight ratio. While the climate crisis has a visually dominant part in both films, the tones and proportional emphasis have substantially changed. What once was a combination of anticipation of the high-tech progress mixed with fear of its aftereffects has now turned into a warning of the consequences, which are inevitable if we fail to change our present behaviour and energy technologies. The hypothesis of this analysis is that cinematic visions of future are one of the most telling reflections of a present state of mind. Their analytical mapping can both open up dialogues surrounding the startling issues and reason the affective ramifications, if we only take an effort to have a closer look.
Visual Encounters: More-than-representation in Art, Design and Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kim Snepvangers, Arianne Rourke
Text and Image are frequently brought into conversation in tertiary art & design contexts. Specifically, this paper sets forth some visual exemplars that challenge traditional formats for dissemination of scholarly artwork and images. For example, Higher Degree Research submission often means adapting creative works into text-based documents for assessment purposes. Complexity in such spaces of representation frequently results in unsatisfying outcomes. The concept of "more than representation" Lorimer (2005); Thrift & Dewsbury (2000) and Connell’s (2017) sense of the significance of alternative spaces is used to contextualise a range of visual encounters. Encounters are conceived as a way to interrupt stability of past recording platforms and to enable interventions in everyday routines. The focus is on visually emergent and unremarkable actions, shared experiences and serendipitous dispositions. Rather than traditional representational traits such as uncovering meanings and linear progress narratives, case studies of image/text seek to pay attention to the fleeting and the unexceptional. Each case presents a diverse visual format (artworks, animations and multichannel video) using performative conversions of text and image. In the age of big data, visual intelligence and "readings" that interrogate representational formats are crucial in uncovering the situated mechanics of production. Speech and text conceived as artistic devices open novel opportunities for change. Each case recognises constrained acts of speaking/voice within cultural displacement for example in working with International students in Higher Education. How artists devise altered encounters to countermand prior invisibility or disparagement is highlighted, challenging contested ideas across geographies of place and time.
Machine Vision: A Metaphor for Sight
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Helen Goritsas
It is enticing to think of human vision as a kind of biological video camera, projecting light signals via the retina into images to be interpreted by the brain. It is quite clear however that what we see is not just a function of the world we live in, but to a significant degree influenced by how we interact, what we choose to focus upon and what we choose to ignore. In light of the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the capture and processing of large amounts of images as data, this paper will critically explore film theorist Andre Bazin's ontological conception of the objective nature of the automated image and the mediums capacity to derive an advantage from man’s absence. This paper will examine the potential impact on the screen arts, of teaching computers "to see" and concludes that AI could only ever reshape and replicate art and what is quintessentially human.
