Screen and Script: cross-media practices
Recent Submissions
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Photo filter apps: understanding analogue nostalgia in the new media ecologyAs digital media have become more pervasive and entrenched in our daily routines, a nostalgic countertrend has increasingly valued the physical and tactile nature of the analogue image. In the past few years, technologically obsolete devices, such as lo-fi cameras and vinyl records, have not faded out of sight completely but are instead experiencing a comeback. At the same time, digital media capitalise on the nostalgia for the analogue and fetishise the retro aesthetics of old technologies. This article explores the emergence of photo filter and effect applications which allow users to modify digital photos, adding signifiers of age such as washed-out colours, scratches and torn borders. It is argued that these new technologies, with programs such as Instagram, Hipstamatic and Camera 360, bring back the illusory physicality of picture-taking through digital skeuomorphism. Drawing on media archaeology practice, this article interrogates the limits of the retro sensibility and the fetishisation of the past in the context of digital media, in particular by focusing on the case study of the start-up Instagram. This photo filter application neither merely stresses the twilight nature of photography nor represents the straightforward digital evolution of previous analogue features. Rather, it responds to the necessity to feel connected to the past by clear and valued signs of age, mimicking a perceived sense of loss. Faced with the persistent hipster culture and the newness of digital media, photo filter apps create comfortable memories, ageing pictures and adding personal value. As such, it will be argued that this phenomenon of nostalgia for analogue photography can be linked to the concepts of ritual and totem. By providing a critical history of Instagram as a photo-sharing social network, this article aims to explain new directions in the rapidly changing system of connective media.
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Studying ethnic minorities' media uses: comparative conceptual and methodological reflectionsThis paper discusses conceptual and methodological issues in the study of ethnic minorities' media uses. It does so by drawing on research experiences in different national contexts (Israel, Switzerland, and Belgium), looking for similarities but also differences related to the specific national contexts as well as the research designs and the ethnic groups involved. Starting from a broad reflection on ethnicity, the paper subsequently tackles issues such as the operational definition of ethnicity in ethnic labels, qualitative sampling procedures, language use, and problems of translation, as well as personal research experiences. By comparing national contexts and research experiences, we find recurring issues with specific national inflections, making us more aware of the specificity of ethnic matters in different context
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Screening the dark side of love: from Euro-horror to American cinemaHow can love be understood globally as a problematic transgression rather than the narrative of "happy endings" that Hollywood has offered? The contributors utilize varying methodologies of textual analysis, psychoanalytic models, and cultural critique and engage with a broad range of films to explore issues of gender identity and spectatorship.
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Digital broadcasting – challenges and opportunities for European community radio broadcastersAccess to broadcast infrastructure is vital for community radio services, however the switch-over from analogue to digital, as envisaged by European policy-makers, creates challenges for such stations. In this article, we will set out the general environment within which the transition to digital is occurring, illustrate the current state of the digital migration debate, identify potential difficulties for community radios, but also highlight opportunities that digital technologies may provide. Challenges include the historical tendency of European policy-makers to prioritise the requirements of larger Public Service and commercial broadcasters which has resulted in the promotion of platforms such as DAB that are not designed to cater for smaller-scale local and non-profit’ media. Furthermore the existence of a variety of jurisdiction-specific approaches to digital switch-over in Europe creates uncertainty as to the emerging technical and policy environment.
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The Alhondiga project: glocalising culture for the communityPositioned as a local, community alternative to the Guggenheim Museum, the Alhondiga cultural centre is one of the many projects of urban regeneration through culture in the city of Bilbao, Northern Spain. It is a multipurpose leisure and arts centre extending over 43,000 square meters, built in the early XXth century as a wine warehouse and redesigned recently by Philip Starck. While the Guggenheim Museum has maintained its international outlook and connotations, oriented towards cultural tourism and being filled primarily by tourists visiting the city, the Alhondiga project is a usable, open space used primarily by the local community, offering an experience that straddles the local and the global, the traditional and the contemporary, the everyday and the cutting edge achieved through a mix of material space design and cultural programming. The presentation will analyse how elements of material and immaterial culture blend in order to foster education, leisure and citizenship agendas in a community which in the past was culturally inward looking. It will evaluate the contrasting understandings of culture and its consumers that emerge from the venue and its programme and the attempt to combine the local and the global both in content and in terms of audience appeal and engagement. It will do so through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the different activities and events, both regular and occasional, over a period of two years, and what they reveal about how community inclusivity and engagement are targeted through cultural programming.
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Mourning and melancholia at the Harare International Festival of the ArtsThis article has a twofold purpose: first, I look at the Harare International Festival of the Arts (HIFA) as a site of mourning and melancholia – to use the phrase that was first used by Sigmund Freud in his seminal paper and which was reformulated more recently by a postcolonial scholar Ranjana Khanna. I suggest that unconscious mechanisms, which are expressions of loss on the part of both black and white Zimbabweans, are acted out in the festival. In particular, on the part of white Zimbabweans it might be an expression of the so-called ‘white alienation’ experienced after the loss of domination. Second, I also look at assertions of a feminist academic, Sara Ahmed, who claims in her book Embodied Strangers that it is difficult, if at all possible, to circumvent the embodied and cultural context of an encounter between a representative of a western culture and the Other. I present a case study of the opening show at HIFA 2011, which seems to confirm this theory. However, I also suggest that it might be possible to subvert this expected narrative through a Winnicottian notion of a space for creativity and play. I look at two different examples of such encounters and cite the poem by Charmaine Mujeri in which she describes her hybrid identity.