Periodic Reporting for period 1 - AFFIRMATIVE (Affirmative Post-Cinema: Narrative and Aesthetic Responses to Gender and Power)
Reporting period: 2018-11-01 to 2020-10-31
The project’s overall aim was to consider how post-cinematic arts deal with gendered roles and norms and power relations. It examined how different digital formats and genres condition post-cinematic aesthetics and spectatorship, namely augmented and virtual reality, gallery films and social media. The project has tested out the hypothesis that affirmative ethics are pursued for activism, and that it involves a correlation between the active participation of the viewer, narrative content and aesthetic forms.Since post-cinematic arts imply new viewers' involvement than cinema, this research is essential to understand how they may play an affirmative political role in society. Through the detailed analyses of narratives, aesthetics and viewing modes together, this study shed light on how digital films may affirmatively counteract the status quo and discrimination based on gender and race.
The project's research gives an overview of post-cinematic spectatorship and of its potential of to produce social and cultural changes. For this, the researcher has gathered post-cinematic works, especially of virtual and augmented reality, through attending several specialised film and new media festivals and events, and made them available in the Electronic Literature Knowledge Base (ELMCIP). For a detailed and in-depth examination of the spectator's involvement in post-cinematic arts and its potential for political transformation, the researcher chose specific case studies, which were studied through the methods of textual analysis and ethnography, which were presented at 6 international conferences and published in five journal articles, 2 book chapters and a monograph, all open access. In addition, the research for the project has served to prepare pedagogical material. The project followed two strands of work: on representation, production and distribution, and on VR, AR, and spectatorship. These two strands led to the organisation of very well attended online seminars involving contributions from renowned international artists and academics. The contributions to these two topics and seminars are currently prepared for publication as edited collections.
The project has contributed to literature on virtual reality and the viewer's involvement. In particular, it went beyond the state of the art by studying the involvement of the body of the spectator through phonomenology and queer theory. This has brought light on how post-cinematic artworks participate in the reconfiguration of gender, space and power relations, as well as collective cultural memory through the creation of liminal spaces in between digital and physical involvement. The recent focus on discrimination in media production and distribution has also led the researcher to apply the project's innovative affirmative methodology to industry issues, which opens the field for further research and promises great impact in the writing and transformation of current cultural policies.