Dear colleagues,
A reminder that this three-day research workshop is starting tomorrow.
Please spread the word to your students, colleagues, and friends.
Best wishes, Michael
[…]
“COLLECTIONS, COLLECTORS AND COLLECTING”: BIMI-PITT RESEARCH WORKSHOP 10-12 MAY 2023
Every two years Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image (BIMI) organises a research workshop with colleagues from University of Pittsburgh. The theme for this year’s BIMI-Pittsburgh Research workshop is collections, collectors and collecting, as this relates to Film and Media Studies and to neighbouring disciplines that explore visual and digital culture broadly conceived.
Registration: This event is free and open to all – students, researchers, anyone who wants to join us. However, it would be helpful if you could register, so that we can manage numbers:
Wednesday 10 May (day 1 of 3): https://www.bbk.ac.uk/events/remote_event_view?id=37136
Thursday 11 May (day 2 of 3): https://www.bbk.ac.uk/events/remote_event_view?id=37150
Friday 12 May (day 3 of 3): https://www.bbk.ac.uk/events/remote_event_view?id=37151
WEDNESDAY 10 MAY
10:30-11:00 INTRODUCTION
Welcome and introduction (Michael Temple, David Pettersen)
11:00-12:30 SESSION ONE
Adam Lowenstein (Pittsburgh): “Ape and Essence: On Film, Collecting, and History”
+
Simone Wesner (Birkbeck): “Collecting Threaded Journeys”
Discussants: Roger Luckhurst (Birkbeck), Stacey Abbott (independent researcher), Sophie Hope (Birkbeck)
12:30-13:30 LUNCH BREAK
13:30-15:00 SESSION TWO
Rahul Kumar (Pittsburgh): “Collectors, Researchers and ‘Rogue Archives’: Indian Cinema and Piracy as Research Methodology”
+
Emma Sandon (Birkbeck): “Introduction to the June Givanni PanAfrican Cinema Archive”
Discussants: Janet McCabe (Birkbeck), Nikolaus Perneckzy (Queen Mary, London)
16:00-18:00 EXHIBITION VISIT
Visit exhibition at RAVEN ROW: “PerAnkh: the June Givanni PanAfrican Cinema Archive” (http://www.ravenrow.org/current/perankh/)
[…]
THURSDAY 11 MAY
10:30-12:00 SESSION THREE
Silpa Mukherjee (Pittsburgh): “Doing Film History in the Global South”
+
Naomi Smith (Birkbeck): “Considering Context: Partisan Roots of the Vanderbilt Television News Archive”
Discussants: Eleni Liarou (Birkbeck), Justin Schlosberg (Birkbeck)
12:00-13:00 LUNCH BREAK
13:00-14:30 SESSION FOUR
Senjuti Mukherjee (Pittsburgh): “Collecting Viral Media: Creative Agents of Documentary in the Age of Democratic Erosion and the Internet”
+
Mary Newbold (Birkbeck): “Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Collector’ and Digital Visual Culture”
Discussants: Sarah Joshi (Pittsburgh), Joe Brooker (Birkbeck)
14:30-15:00 COFFEE BREAK
15:00-16:30 SESSION FIVE
Neepa Majumdar (Pittsburgh): “Collecting as Research: Indian Film Song Booklets between Pleasure and the ‘Drudgery of the Useful’”
+
David Pettersen (Pittsburgh): “Netflix France: Collections, Localization, and National Branding in the Age of SVOD”
Discussants: Emma Sandon (Birkbeck), Dorota Ostrowska (Birkbeck), Mary Harrod (Warwick)
16:45-17:15 EXHIBITION TALK
Oliver Fuke (independent researcher): “Introduction to Trevor Mathison exhibition ‘From Signal to Decay, Vol. 3’”
17:30-18:30 EXHIBITION VISIT
Visit exhibition “From Signal to Decay, Vol. 3” in PELTZ GALLERY (Birkbeck): https://www.bbk.ac.uk/research/centres/peltz-gallery
[…]
FRIDAY 12 MAY
10:30-12:00 SESSION SIX
Mark Best (Pittsburgh): “Collecting as Narrative Drive in Kamen Riders”
+
Daria Ponomareva (Birkbeck): “The Ethics of Preservation and Piracy in relation to the Collection of Video Games”
Discussants: Rebekah Cupitt (Birkbeck), Joel McKim (Birkbeck)
12:00-13:00 LUNCH BREAK
13:00-14:30 SESSION SEVEN
Geneveive Newman (Pittsburgh): “Collective: Memory, Archives, and Sexual Violence”
+
Sasha Bergstrom-Katz (Birkbeck): “On the Subject of Tests: Un-Boxing, Un-Packing”
Discussants: Esther Leslie (Birkbeck), Emma Yapp (Birkbeck)
15:00-16:30 CONCLUSION
General discussion, feedback, and future plans.
[…]
ABSTRACTS/OUTLINES
Adam Lowenstein: Ape and Essence: On Film, Collecting, and History
My voyage to the world of film scholarship began with an intensive residency on the planet of the apes. I was not aware of it at the time, but my teenage obsession with collecting all things connected to the Planet of the Apes film series (1968-1973) now feels like my first foray into the sort of research project that would characterize my professional career as an academic film scholar. Back then, I tracked down everything from movie posters and film stills to trading cards and comic books, with soundtrack albums, model kits, and action figures in between. If it had something, anything to do with Planet of the Apes, I had to have it.
Today, I recognize the traces of such obsessive tendencies in my passionate attachment to my subjects of research. When I study the horror film or surrealist cinema, for example, I no longer feel the need to collect the things attached to the films. But I do feel powerfully driven to immerse myself as completely as possible in their cinematic worlds. I still want to dwell in those realms of experience that blur the line between film and life. For me, the collecting impulse survives in my “sensory surround” approach to research and teaching: devoting my energy to extending the cinematic encounter beyond the confines of the screening and into the experiential arenas of history, thought, feeling, and self-reckoning. You might say that as a film scholar and as a spectator (as well as a scholar of film spectatorship), I am always returning to the planet of the apes – or perhaps I never really left.
My presentation will constitute the opening of my collection, what Walter Benjamin calls “unpacking my library”: exploring the ways in which my Planet of the Apes collection has shaped who I am, not only as a film scholar but as a person always struggling to understand the impact of the past on the present. The mystery of how personal history and public history intertwine, how horror and trauma move between registers of internal and external, has its roots for me in my Planet of the Apes collection and that collection’s relation to my experience of the cinematic itself.
[…]
Simone Wesner, “Collecting Threaded Journeys”
In contemporary research, the affordances of media format create the conditions and possibilities for collection. Increasingly, representations of cultural materials are captured in digital format foregrounding preservation and instant access and communication. Collecting as practice depends on people. Makers/researchers/collectors direct the collecting process but leave the materials to speak for themselves.
This discussion introduces research experience as gathered in the Dataweave project that investigates the product life cycle of hand-woven materials. In the form of a participatory database Dataweave records information digitally about growing plant fibres and animal fleeces and how the thread emerges in spinning. It demonstrates how weavers turn thread into garments and captures its subsequent journey. The collective efforts of all participants make them visible as makers, users and collectors, providing provenance for the materials. DATAWEAVE tells the stories of the woven materials while harbouring cultural values that otherwise remain hidden along the way.
Exploring the interface of traditional/digital craft culture, I am inviting participates to discuss how the digital as a common space is negotiated between makers/collectors/researchers and specifically what role researchers play when a material’s journey is captured in data and when digital technology is constituted through traditional cultures of making. To what extent is research expertise and identity established and negotiated in collecting data? What are researchers’ selection criteria and goals that drive research focused collection practices? Come and join the discussion and try out spinning your own threaded journey!
[…]
Rahul Kumar: “Collectors, Researchers and ‘Rogue Archives’: Indian Cinema and Piracy as Research Methodology”
In this project, I plan to explore my own position as an academic collector and an academic fan (or ‘acafan’ as Henry Jenkins puts it) and my relationship to the digitized collection of film magazines at the National Film Archive of India (NFAI). I argue that one of the important methodologies of research on Indian cinema is pirating the Archive. This piracy manifests in the outward flow of digitized materials like magazines and other paratexts from the NFAI (characterized by bureaucratic gatekeeping) into the cyberspace (characterized by open access).
For the last few years, I have been engaged in collecting all the pirated digital paratexts in one place. I collect them, catalog them, upload them up on the cloud, and then circulate the link to this cloud storage among the community of Indian film researchers. This web of circulation of the digitized paratexts is underscored by an inaccessible archive that leads to the formation of an underground network of film scholars, like myself, who have also turned into collectors. I’ve also been a part of a social media platform for private film magazine collectors called “Vintage Film and Magazines” which was originally meant for this community of collectors to come together, but gradually it turned into an online archive, although a very chaotic one, where photos, stories, articles and pages from old magazines were shared regularly. Now it also doubles up as a discursive public sphere where the collectors engage in cinephilic discourses on Indian cinema.
Through this project, I would like to argue that the subcultural knowledge that academic-collectors possess critically informs the work they do as film scholars and because of a hostile archive like the NFAI, the community of private collectors becomes indispensable for the research on Indian cinema. I will also engage with the ethics of piracy as a way of encountering the official archive in order to create an unofficial or a ‘rogue archive’ (Abigail De Kosnik, 2016) like “Vintage Film and Magazines.”
Emma Sandon: “Introduction to the June Givanni PanAfrican Cinema Archive”
The June Givanni PanAfrican Cinema Archive (JGPACA) holds a unique collection of artefacts and archival material, which has at its core the interest of Pan-African cinema and its relationship with Black British cinema and culture.
JGPACA has been established as a ‘living archive’, evolving around the work of film curator and archivist June Givanni, who has been collating and sharing this material since the 1980s. A key figure in the Black British independent cinema movement, she was involved in the landmark Third Eye Festival of Third World Cinema with the Greater London Council (GLC) in 1983, later establishing the African-Caribbean Film Unit at the British Film Institute (BFI) in 1992. At the BFI, she also co-initiated the Black Film Bulletin and played a key role in the historic Africa ’95 conference, marking the presence of African filmmaking in the centenary of cinema.
To date, JGPACA holds more than 10,000 items – including over 700 feature films, television programmes, short films, and documentaries, as well as audio recordings, photographs, posters, manuscripts, magazines, books, and documents – connecting African film with the film cultures of diaspora communities in the Americas, the Caribbean and Europe.
[…]
Silpa Mukherjee: “Doing Film History in the Global South”
In 1980s Bombay, a Dubai based mafia exerted control over cinema and its ancillary businesses. This cine-crime nexus was nurtured by the state’s shadowy participation in it. Examining this cine-crime nexus, my project traces a counter archive from materials that are uneven or even missing to construct a study of an entire shadow media economy.
In my presentation I will share archival sources from the 1980s that enable me to foreground a South-South media corridor between Bombay and Dubai that is obscured from standardized world cinema historiographies. These sources are in the form of police interrogation sheets, confession statements, court proceedings, commerce documents, newspaper clippings, and photographs. I assembled this archive ethnographically, from bureaucrats and police who have built their private (and likely pirate) collections in unassuming warehouses in dusty alleyways of Bombay.
My project looks for film history in fortuitous convergences and unexpected repositories. Many historians consult surviving documentation to reconstruct histories of lost films. I use contextual documentation to reconstruct the absent business records of dubiously funded extant films. My research method is tied to my material in unique ways, differentiating my experience from film historians of the Global North. Since my work is about and through underhand business, few scholars encounter the world of hearsay, bribery, and urban intrigue that my work both engages with and in fact demands. Drawing on my experience of navigating red tape in accessing documents through bribes and other payments of the insalubrious kind, this presentation demonstrates what doing film history in the Global South looks like, especially when a researcher looks past the screen. Methodologically, it contributes to non-western media archaeologies and writing media historiographies in the absence of media objects and texts, crucial for postcolonial and indigenous studies where archival taxonomies are pinioned by institutional inertia, decaying materials, and colonialism.
[…]
Naomi Smith: “Considering Context: the Partisan Roots of the Vanderbilt Television News Archive”
Founded in August 1968, the Vanderbilt Television News Archive holds over 40,000 hours of news broadcasts from national television networks across the United States of America and continues to be one of the most extensive and complete archives of television news in the world. Containing over fifty years’ worth of broadcasts, the archive has grown into a vital resource for television news media researchers and anyone else who might be interested in seeing the first draft of the last fifty years of American history.
The story of the archive’s founding is a narrative as equally compelling and – perhaps – surprising, as some of the stories contained within its servers. The archive’s founder, initial financial backer and chief fundraiser, Paul Simpson, was a deeply conservative businessman, and was convinced that network news broadcasts were contributing to social turmoil and unrest across America. He created the archive not necessarily with the needs of future media and journalism researchers in mind, but with the express purpose of demonstrating that the networks were, as he alleged, deeply biased against the conservative right in America.
This presentation considers how we might “read” the archive’s collection in the context of its founding, and whether the intent behind its creation has – or should have – any bearing on the way that researchers interact with the archive and its contents today. Furthermore, it looks at similarities between the rhetoric surrounding the creation of the archive and similar sentiments concerning television journalism expressed by politicians and other social actors today and discusses the potential impacts of this rhetoric on use of the archive now and in the future.
Senjuti Mukherjee: “Collecting Viral Media: Creative Agents of Documentary in the Age of Democratic Erosion and the Internet”
The seemingly inexhaustible supply of online media objects is transforming notions of collecting in creative and historiographic work. Considering the proliferation of citizen-generated visual records of state-sanctioned violence in India, this presentation will unpack the potential for creative agents of the documentary form to emerge as real-time collectors of an exponentially expanding online image landscape. Despite the virality of such images, archives of power continue to exclude, erase or manipulate these narratives. This presentation will examine “collecting” and “selecting,” during times of excess and saturation, as artists attempt to interpret, organise, and anthologise small and large-scale affective narratives of democratic erosion.
Payal Kapadia’s A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021) and Pallavi Paul’s The Blind Rabbit (2021) merge reality and fiction using visual evidence from this environment. Kapadia’s film, on a student’s experience of political events, enmeshes smartphone and CCTV footage of protests and police violence. Meanwhile, Paul addresses the pervasiveness of the image by making it subsidiary to audio clips, examining historical patterns of police brutality and the inner workings of power structures.
Focussing on clips of police brutality from both films, I will trace the ways and forms in which they reappear after being posted online. Destabilising notions of authorship and appropriation, their first appearance is already a collection of sorts, having travelled through anonymous, hyper-local media routes to the bigger platforms. Building on this, I will inquire into how the artists expose the complex infrastructural substrata of the networked digital media landscape by collecting and recollecting the affective object.
Moving beyond nebulous terminologies like found and archival footage, compilation and collage film, the presentation will raise new questions: Can the careful collection and re-presentation of viral media as a form of cultural retrieval invoke empathic solidarity? How does the spectatorial relationship to the viral image generate new ways of thinking about resurfacing the “past” and reactivating memories? These documentary practices expose the stakes of collecting in a world of algorithmic memory-making, where the conditions for encountering and negotiating social realities are automated and increasingly violent.
[…]
Mary Newbold: “Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Collector’ and Digital Visual Culture”
In his unfinished work, The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin collated a convolute of notes and quotations under the thematic of ‘The Collector’. Within these fragments, Benjamin sketched out the constellatory relationship between the social physiognomy of the collector, the objects such a figure might collect, and the places, the storage spaces, where objects to be desired, collected and owned were put on display. For Benjamin, the figure of the collector, along with the rag picker and detective were characterised by a preoccupation with the past. In contrast to the gambler, the prostitute and the flaneur, these figures were concerned with the detritus within which the wish images, the unfulfilled dreams, of the past century could be deciphered as such. Collectors’ objects, often rendered obsolete and, therefore, in a world governed by commodity relations, diminished in both use and exchange value, Benjamin perceived a third category of value in which the ‘wholly irrational character of the object's mere presence’ could be overcome ‘through its integration into a new, expressly devised historical system: the collection.’
For Benjamin, ‘possession and having [were] allied with the tactile, and [stood] in a certain opposition to the optical.’ Benjamin contrasted Collectors ‘as beings with tactile instincts’ with the flâneur, a figure for whom optical sensory experience held primacy. In this paper, I will briefly explore the constellatory— also in ways contradictory—relationship between collecting, possessing and seeing in fragments of The Arcades Project. I will then reflect on the insights that Benjamin’s aphorisms on the Collector can bring to questions of digital visual culture, particularly with respect to the relationship between the optical and the tactile in the case of the (intangible) digital artwork and the possibilities and tensions of possession and having brought about by the non-fungible token.
[…]
Neepa Majumdar: “Collecting as Research: Indian Film Song Booklets between Pleasure and the ‘Drudgery of the Useful’”
The collector and theorist of collecting par excellence, Walter Benjamin, understood the material pleasures of creating new configurations of objects, insisting that collectors “divested things of their commodity character” and freed them from “the drudgery of the useful” (The Arcades Project, 9). Does collecting for research reinscribe drudgery of the useful? My primary objects in this presentation will be digitized copies of song booklets, which have a long and unique history in South Asia. Unlike film booklets that did sometimes accompany film screenings and premieres around the world, the South Asian film booklet was cheaply made to be sold on the streets and, after the coming of sound, included lyrics to the songs in the film, in addition to photos, a summary of the film, and advertisements. The practice continued well into the 1970s. In South Asian film scholarship, song booklets figure prominently as sources especially when the films themselves no longer exist. Every South Asian film historian I know, myself included, collects song booklets, creating many dispersed and unofficial archives of these valuable sources for film history. But we aren’t the only ones collecting song booklets as they are sought after by private collectors as much as by university libraries such as Stanford or official archives such as the National Film Archive of India.
The majority of scholarly writing based on song booklets emphasizes their content over their material properties, using them for information on films that no longer exist, while exhibitions and coffee table books tend to offer primarily a nostalgic, heavily visual, and even fetishized experience of a bygone era. Although these two modes of engaging with song booklets might bring to mind the opposition between the useful and the useless that Benjamin evokes, song booklets as collectors’ items and research objects now point to the impossibility of collecting as a mode of de-commodifying an object or removing it from circuits of usefulness, which collectors take on as a Sisyphean task at best, according to Benjamim. In my own collection and engagement with these materials for my book project on the transition to sound in Indian cinema, there’s been a tension among these various inflections, between the somewhat obsessive pleasure of collecting these materials without any particular goal (“in case I need it someday”) and the impulse to read them for analysis and information. In this presentation, I will offer an overview of song booklets in academia and in the collecting world, where they have gone from costing nothing to significantly escalating in value, moving from there to draw from my collection to present some of the paradoxes of seeking traces of the sound of absent films in their written lyrics, a task that frequently leads to the illuminating distractions of the booklets’ formal features.
[…]
David Pettersen: “Netflix France: Collections, Localization, and National Branding in the Age of SVOD”
Streaming platforms are changing how scholars conceptualize collections and cataloging. In part, this change is an outgrowth of the shift to digital forms of cinema that are now several decades old. However, what is new is the multiple roles that streaming platforms now play, alternately producer, distributor, exhibitor, archive, library, and curator. Streaming platforms develop and monetize catalogs in much the same way that music companies do. The create their collections through acquiring and commissioning films and series that they seek to add to their catalogs for simultaneous release in as many markets as possible. On the commissioning side, catalog development focuses on investments in the local production of media or at least the localization of media. On the acquisitions side, it involves purchase the distribution rights to local media, often misleadingly rebranded as an “original” series for the platform. Frustratingly, these “collections” in these streaming catalogs can be quite ephemeral and unstable. The patchwork of licensing rights is constantly shifting because rights are rarely negotiated in perpetuity, especially as media makers have increasingly realized it is not in their best interests to sign away all rights to their media. In terms of curation, sophisticated algorithms now curate individualized collections for subscribers based on their individual viewing history but also on aggregated data of viewing habits for the platform. National branding of media becomes increasingly porous as a subscriber’s “you may like” suggestions can take them in any number of directions. Consequently, streaming platforms’ vertical integration of roles, now including some of the traditional functions of archive, library, and curation, poses important questions for national identity in an age of seemingly frictionless global media flows.
The French film industry is well known for its protectionist policies, including its hard-won exceptions to free trade agreements for media objects and strict film release windows, called media chronology, that are designed to direct box office revenue back into making films about France in the French language. These debates and historical struggles can be understood as defending the right to localized media, one that is now being disrupted by the global reach and simultaneous release strategy of predominantly American SVOD platforms like Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and Apple. According to UniFrance, French films and series are the fourth most represented national industry on streaming platforms. As streaming platforms commission and acquire French films and series to release throughout the world, the protectionist laws and regulations that favored intense localization of French media are undergoing renegotiation.
This presentation focuses on the disruptions Netflix introduced into the French media industry beginning in 2017 and the ways in which it is increasingly collaborating with local production partners and government regulators in France. Because Netflix is the most popular streaming service in France and has acquired and commissioned many local French series, it is the ideal platform around which to understand in which SVOD is changing the French industry. Netflix’s commitment to inclusive casting has led it to acquire and commission many suburban films and series set in the French suburbs, such as Divines (Benyamina, 2016), Street Flow (Banlieusards, 2019) Athena (2022), and Represent (En place, 2023), to name just a few. Netflix has also begun to cultivate new pools of filmmaking talent by investing in non-traditional films schools that seek to train students from the suburbs. It is important to understand Netflix’s corporate strategy as a “collections” policy, one that presents a distinct set of images of France back to its domestic audience and the rest of the world. Netflix’s French brand is quite different from the historical sets of images that the French film industry has cultivated for its national identity on the international festival circuit.
[…]
Oliver Fuke: “Introduction to Trevor Mathison exhibition ‘From Signal to Decay, Vol.3’”
From Signal to Decay is an ongoing and iterative research project into artist, musician, composer, sound designer and recordist Trevor Mathison’s rich and varied body of work. This exhibition, Volume 3, presents a set of 15 drawings made using graphite alongside a sound piece. In each of the drawings, Mathison began by scraping a graphite cube across the paper and spreading out its particles, in order to pick up the variations in the paper. As the artist and composer has himself commented, this process suggests a parallel with his approach to sound and his work with granular synthesizers, which allow him ‘to take one small element of sound and by breaking it down, find numerous textures within it.’ Each drawing could be said to be the ‘equivalent to a single tone, shimmering like a visual wall of sound. A still, frozen note held in suspension.’ This focussed exhibition builds on Mathison’s first solo exhibition in the UK, From Signal to Decay: Volume 1, staged at Goldsmiths CCA, and Volume 2, his first solo album.
[…]
Mark Best: “Collecting as Narrative Drive in Kamen Riders”
For over five decades, the Japanese company Toei Productions has maintained a stable of popular, live-action superhero television series, mostly created by manga artist Shotaro Ishinomori. Kamen Rider [“Masked Rider”] (beginning in 1971) and Super Sentai (Americanized as the Power Rangers) have been the most successful. Seasonal renewals of each series — in either tight or loose continuity with previous seasons — allow for new waves of merchandise each year, as children grow into or out of the target audience. This presentation focuses on recent iterations of the insect-themed, motorcycle-riding Kamen Riders and their relationships to collecting, not so much as the accumulation of merchandise by fans, but more notably as an increasingly prominent narrative structure within the series itself.
In her 2006 study Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination, anthropologist Anne Allison considers Kamen Rider in terms of cyborg transformation and identity in relation to commodification. While the transformation of the superhero remains the central convention of the series, cyborg identity has given way to increasing numbers of forms necessary for the hero to meet increasingly powerful threats. The basis for one of the most popular Kamen Rider toys, the transformation belts (or “drivers”) used by the heroes have changed from fixed objects to modular devices using a wide range of attachments (appropriately called “gimmicks” by English-speaking adult fans) that give the hero various powers (and related forms). The obvious analogy would be levelling-up in videogames (which is, in fact, the theme of one series). However, like the “Gotta Catch ‘Em All” slogan of the Americanized version of Pokemon (also examined by Allison), the knowledge of and need to acquire gimmicks now shapes the stories themselves, often from the beginning of a series. In other words, Kamen Rider has become a show as much about collecting as about superhero action against supervillains.
[…]
Daria Ponomareva: “The Ethics of Preservation and Piracy in relation to the Collection of Video Games”
The proposed presentation will touch upon two main issues of digital collecting of video games – ethics of collecting illegally downloaded files and the issue of ownership of paid digital copies of games. The aim of the presentation is to draw attention to these issues for the further research.
The issue with digital collecting of video games is lack of ownership and ability to curate the collection. Certain games, after some time has passed, stop being sold online anymore, which makes it impossible for collectors to purchase games later, leaving them with three options – to pirate games, search for them on other platforms, or purchase physical copies in store or second-hand. For example, old games require certain platforms that are not sold anymore with some being sold secondhand, if a collector wants to own a copy of an old game it is more likely that they have to download it illegally. How ethical is it to collect pirated games that are over twenty years old and cannot be purchased second-hand?The presentation will show a case of Silent Hill series and how pirating of games contributes to preservation of the original files.
I will explore if people online identify their collections as such and the difference between physical collecting in terms of ownership with a few examples from YouTube and forums. Some examples will be from my research journey; I bought a game online for my research topic and paid 3 pounds for it, later I find the game in my library of purchased games, but it showed I needed to buy it again at the full price now. How truly does one own a copy of a game after the purchase? After all, can files that are able to be copied multiple times be truly considered objects of collecting?
[…]
Geneveive Newman: “Collective: Memory, Archives, and Sexual Violence”
The presentation consists of two components: a short, seven to ten minute experimental/documentary film, and a brief artist’s statement to accompany the screening. The film utilizes audio design to reconstruct the rhetorical development of intimate partner violence. It turns away from the spectacular, visualized, and often caricatured ways in which audiences are accustomed to identifying representations of gendered violence, relying instead on the oral/aural components of the experience. Taking a cue from Jen Proctor’s Am I Pretty, the film minimizes visual information in favour of dialogue, edited using experimental aesthetics.
This short film is a demonstration of how social technologies in the 2020s, with all of the politics of algorithmic computing, make the creation of social collections possible if not inevitable. The film is an experimental documentary perspective on the ways that abuse develops over the course of a relationship. Using a victim-survivor’s conversations (with consent) recently discovered in a social media archive, the film illustrates the rhetoric of intimate partner abuse. The film further explores questions of the utility of these unknown archives, the politics of digital deletion, questions, concerns and complications will be teased out in the brief artist’s statement.
The statement accompanying the film (no longer then ten minutes) will extrapolate on the intersections of my dissertation research into the rape victim-survivor as spectator of/for sexual violence in media, and the applications of that theory to creative making. Put differently, the film is experimental on a number of technical and aesthetic levels, but also presents an opportunity to work through how audio-visual mediums can address sexual violence differently. The film and statement operate in conjunction to work towards imagining alternatives that can exist beside but do not rely on narrative and aesthetic tropes common to representations of sexual violence.
[…]
Sasha Bergstrom-Katz: “On the Subject of Tests: Un-Boxing, Un-Packing”
On the Subject of Tests is a multi-faceted collection of artistic-research and writing in which I seek a better understanding of the ways in which kits used for intelligence testing archive their own histories and how these histories are therefore unpacked and re-performed in a testing environment. By collecting out-of-use intelligence test kits, I am able to examine the objects that constitute them, including puzzles, toys, games, picture books, forms and questions to be read aloud. The objects that comprise the tests have their own individual histories, having been commercial toys, educational tools, and therapeutic objects, they are now gathered together in a “kit” to become a test. Further, these objects were trialled individually as tests before being collected into the kits and passed through multiple institutions and locations. One puzzle, for example, was first used as a test at Ellis Island (1912), seeking to collect immigrant data based on ethnicity and race. This puzzle was then re-designed and included in an intelligence test kit, the Wechsler Bellevue Scales of Intelligence (1939), and is still in contemporary tests today.
My project, therefore, understands the test kits as archives of their own pasts through their material compositions. In the video project, On the Subject of Tests: Un-Boxing, Un-Packing, I expand the research on the test-as-archive by collaborating with artists to, together, unbox a collection of historical test kits and discuss them in relation to both the history of testing. The project also, importantly, highlights my own personal relationships with the objects and their designs, evidencing the ways in which the test-kits are affective objects. For the workshop at BIMI, I will screen an excerpt of this project (about 30 minutes) alongside a brief introduction to the project as a whole.
[…]
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