Online Lightning Talks
Lightning talks are 5-minute "flash" video presentations. Authors present summaries or overviews of their work, describing the essential features (related to purpose, procedures, outcomes, or product). Authors are welcome to submit traditional "lecture style" videos or videos that use visual supports like PowerPoint. After the conference, the videos are made available on the network's YouTube channel.
From Attendance to Performance: Spectatorship, "Liveness," and the Emergence of Live Cinema
Online Lightning Talk Jonathan Joy
The intersection of the cinematic dispositif and the elusive spectator has been at the center of a rich debate since the late twentieth century. The cinematic spectator has gone through transformations and modifications, even shifting focus from ocular to haptic. The reference models comprise the work and theories by Jean-Louis Baudry, Laura Mulvey, Christian Metz, Vivian Sobchack, Gene Youngblood, and Laura U. Marks. Their contributions, moving from an ocular-centric epistemology of the late-twentieth century to an embodied, tactile, proprioceptive experience in the twenty-first century, have brought forth an ontology that provides deep consideration to the cinematic spectator. The following theoretical investigation focuses on the expansion of contemporary cinema and what constitutes a spectatorial experience in the twenty-first century. I argue for an act of metamorphosis in the form of contemporary cinema, namely live cinema, which engenders effective movements in the spectatorial experience. The performer and spectator in a live cinema performative setting are met with communicative exchanges entrenched in participation, improvisation, human agency, and communal relationships. Both parties enter an effectively composed journey built on proprioception, accidental performative occurrences, visceral desires, and ephemeral behavior. These developments in a live cinema framework are witness to a shift towards immediacy, spontaneity, immersion, and engagement found in an intuitive encounter with “liveness;” a practice which becomes visible in a real-time fractal performance space.
Digital Arts on the British Waterways
Online Lightning Talk Adnan Hadzi
This paper discusses the network of the British Waterways as a digital social commons, through the researcher’s journey on the narrow boat ‘Quintessence,’ and the development of the ‘boattr’ prototype in collaboration with MAZI, a Horizon2020 research project. For three years, the researcher joined the community of bargees, travellers, who use the canals to live on them, with a temporary permit to stay for two weeks in one place. The paper offers a critical view on the housing situation in the UK and EU in general. The paper also looks into capabilities offered by Do-It-Yourself (DIY) networking infrastructures – low-cost off-the-shelf hardware and wireless technologies – and how small communities or individuals can deploy local communication networks that are fully owned by local actors, including all generated data. These DIY networks could cover from a small square (e.g., using a Raspberry Pi) to a city neighborhood (e.g., RedHook initiative) or even a whole city (e.g., guifi.net), and in the case of boattr, the towpath of the canal network. This paper is being proposed in combination with an installation of a running boattr prototype, micro-computer book. This boattr installation lets the conference visitor experience the ‘boattr’ project through accessing the boattr micro-computer book over any WiFi enabled device. The installation encompasses a photographic triptych showcasing canal life, and a micro-computer through which the viewer can be immersed into a journey on the canals.
Passages II: Lost and Found Images of Contemporary Crisis Migrants
Online Lightning Talk Ann Pegelow Kaplan
This presentation will accompany the artwork Passages II in the conference exhibition. In this time of deep human division and conflict, my video work engages my own individual and family histories to question how human beings come to be positioned in society and the world. My Passage/s project asks viewers to contemplate the plights of contemporary crisis migrants and the role that technology-based storytelling plays in the ways we view other human beings, the significance of their plights, and our (dis)regard for one another's humanity. This video piece makes use of appropriated, online photographic portraits of Rohingya refugee women attempting to make their way to safety. Exploring the connection of my own refugee family to the stories of other crisis migrants, I visually re-contextualize remnants of portraiture, using imagery and absence to engage both the individuals pictured and the viewer.
The Exuberance of Girls Living in Detention
Online Lightning Talk Joan Marie Kelly
A flood of representations and images surround us, forming the concepts that shape our past and futures. An image has the power to contain our historic memory, compose our lived perceptions and provoke action. Representations impact our behavior of acceptance and affirmation or rejection and exclusion. The life of an image is an encounter between three parties, the one producing the image, the person/s the image represents and the unchecked gaze of the audience. All are involved in a negotiation that has ramifications of power, social hierarchy, and personal vulnerability. This study looks at young girls living in detention in Fez Morocco and discusses how creating and exposing images of the girls by the girls and an intervening artist, changes perspectives of the girls, the image maker, and the community while promoting actionable behavior.
Agora(s): Spaces for Approaching an Idea of Visual Territory around the Cauca Corridor
Online Lightning Talk Seber Ugarte Calleja, Eduardo José Castro Zúñíga
Identity spaces are complex in any country. The complexity in Colombia and specifically to the south, regions ranged within the Cauca road corridor, they have a need for being listened and visualized in terms of their diversity, to comprehend identity processes attached to Colonia times. The project we are presenting addresses, from plastic creation, an approach to the idea of visual space and interrelated to the diversity of voices and discourses. The territory is a non-narrowed space able to disrupt and dissolve boundaries from what we conceive as a mapIn this sense. Agora (s), explores the approaches of social-moral discourse construction around different ideas about the definition of cultural territory developed in Colombia in recent years, chiefly, the Panamericano road corridor. From a hybrid methodology practice, we believe the origin of social, visual and oral discourse tends to be nowadays. The visual, here, is constructed as the basis for a direct dynamics of feeling, the everyday life conceived and experienced as a proximity resource, also from the constitution of realities. The image, in a wide sense, enables the possibility of reading that difference, which is to some extent, the emergence of a forgotten population in post-conflict times that needs urgently to build a representation space.
The Role of the Art in a Post-truth Society : The Visual Image in the Midst of the Crisis of the Veridiction Contract
Online Lightning Talk Mei-Hsin Chen
Post-truth describes the intentioned distortion of a reality to influence social attitudes, in which the appeals to emotions and personal beliefs prevail. How do this idea and this phenomenon affect visual art - and to what extent? Can artists take advantage of "emotional lies" to change the course of society led by the void of the post-truth?
Exorcism as a Genre of Magical Literature: An Insight into the Magic Inscriptions Engraved on Amulets and Charms Within the Religious and Shamanic Contexts
Online Lightning Talk Catalina Cheng-Lin
The aim of this research work is to carry out an in-depth analysis of the concept of “exorcism” as a genre of magical literature in the form of prayers, oral imprecatory formulas, or inscribed objects (amulets and charms) used during the ritual performances, since all of them are generated with healing and ritual purposes, as well as the adaptation of their therapeutic and purification functions in religious ceremonies for the liberation of any “demonic possession.” In order to achieve our purposes, we deepen the study of the genesis of exorcism by clarifying its archaic roots still present in the shamanic cultures of prehistory with its survival in the apotropaic rites within the magical-religious Hellenistic (texts of magic in Greek papyri) and Arab-Islamic (the Qu’ran) traditions used for healing and ritual purposes, as well as the ways to adapt each of them in the therapies and religious rites of purification and liberation of the so-called “demonic possession.”
