Autumn 2016 REFRAME Round-up: New Free eBooks, Website Launches and Video Research/Practice Talks

NEW eBook: REFRAME Books presents The Arclight Guidebook to Media History and the Digital Humanities
NEW eBook: REFRAME Books presents Proceedings of the 2016 INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON LIVE INTERFACES
POST-CINEMA: THEORIZING 21st-CENTURY FILM – eBook now available as an open access PDF at REFRAME Books;
NEW website: CHINESE FILM FESTIVAL STUDIES NETWORK
NEW website: CULTURES OF SOUND AND A WAR WITHOUT END
New SEQUENCE: About Silence – first issue by Liz Greene
New videos in TALKS@MFM – Our continuing series of video recordings of research seminars and masterclasses;
Reframing Activism, Mediático, Reframing Psychoanalysis, The Audiovisual Essay and Global Queer Cinema updates.
Call for Proposals: Poetics and Politics of Documentary Research Symposium 2017

REFRAME‘s latest round up of open access publications and research website and project launches is given below.

NEW eBook: REFRAME Books presents The Arclight Guidebook to Media History and the Digital Humanities

In June 2016, REFRAME Books published The Arclight Guidebook to Media History and the Digital Humanities, edited by Charles R. Acland and Eric Hoyt – a cutting edge collection of work both surveying what media historians are doing with digital tools and charting a course for how the field of media history might move forward in an ongoing dialogue with the digital humanities. FURTHER DETAILS HERE.

2. NEW eBook: REFRAME Books presents Proceedings of the 2016 INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON LIVE INTERFACES

In October 2016, REFRAME Books co-published (with the Experimental Music Technologies (EMuTe) Lab, University of Sussex) the Proceedings of the 2016 INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON LIVE INTERFACES. Edited by Thor Magnusson, Chris Kiefer and Sam Duffy

The proceedings of the Live Interfaces conference (http://www.liveinterfaces.org) are the outcome of a five-day gathering at the University of Sussex’s Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts in June 2016. The biennial ICLI conference is interdisciplinary and practice-based, unique in that it focuses on the role of performance interfaces across all of the performing arts. This year it became clear that ICLI has become an established platform for people operating in diverse sections of the arts to meet and discuss the embodied use of technology in live performance. With a focus on practice, the conference emphasised the role of performances, workshops and installations as well as papers and posters.

With submissions from musicians, dancers, roboticists, brain scientists, visual artists, philosophers, animators, sculpturists, and more, the proceedings illustrate the range of activities encompassed by this lively platform for knowledge exchange and new performance practices. The proceedings were peer reviewed and include long and short papers, doctoral colloquium papers, performance installation and workshop descriptions, as well as some documentation of the event itself. Much of the conference was also filmed and can be found on this YouTube channel. The Ebook PDF is online at: http://www.liveinterfaces.org/proceedings2016.html

3. POST-CINEMA: THEORIZING 21st-CENTURY FILM, a major 2016 open access edited collection from REFRAME Books is now available in a collected PDF!

The major scholarly collection edited by Shane Denson and Julia Leyda, and published by REFRAME’s open access ebook imprint is now available in complete PDF versions.

Endorsement by Tanya Horeck, Reader in Film, Media, and Culture, Anglia Ruskin University:

Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film is an intellectually exciting and important book. Editors Shane Denson and Julia Leyda have assembled an extraordinary range of notable contributors with the aim to open up a critical conversation on the very notion of the post-cinematic – something they achieve in a most novel and engaging way. Through essays and roundtable discussions, Post-Cinema formulates fresh and nuanced questions about the consumption and spectatorship of post-millennial film and other media as they circulate through contemporary digital media ecologies. As is fitting given its subject matter of changing media formats, the design and layout of this book – with its open access digitality and its collaborative dialogues – is as relevant and pioneering as its content. Inviting us to rethink received ideas about how 21st-century media reshape “new forms of sensibility,” Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film is critically imperative reading for anyone interested in ongoing vital transformations in moving image media.

Contributors include: Caetlin Benson-Allott, Paul Bowman, Felix Brinker, Kristopher L. Cannon, Francesco Casetti, Steen Christiansen, Elena del Río, Rosalind Galt, Therese Grisham, Richard Grusin, Leon Gurevitch, Mark B. N. Hansen, Bruce Isaacs, Adrian Ivakhiv, Kylie Jarrett, Selmin Kara, Patricia MacCormack, Lev Manovich, Ruth Mayer, Michael O’Rourke, Patricia Pisters, Alessandra Raengo, David Rambo, Nicholas Rombes, Sergi Sánchez, Karin Sellberg, Steven Shaviro, Michael Loren Siegel, Vivian Sobchack, Billy Stevenson, Andreas Sudmann.

The book appeared first in an easily navigable web and mobile browser format from which chapter PDFs may be generated and saved (see the foot of each entry). Online at: https://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/post-cinema/.

4. NEW website: CHINESE FILM FESTIVAL STUDIES NETWORK

REFRAME is now hosting the archived website of the AHRC-funded CHINESE FILM FESTIVAL STUDIES NETWORK This research network brings together scholars in the UK, China, other parts of Asia, Europe and the USA who are working on film festivals in Chinese-language territories and cultures (including the People’s Republic, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and elsewhere): https://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/chinesefilmfeststudies/

The website collects materials relevant to Chinese Film Festival Studies, including reports on network events, bibliographies, lists of and reports on film festivals, and much more.

5. NEW website: CULTURES OF SOUND AND A WAR WITHOUT END

A new REFRAME website housing video recordings of a symposium held on June 2, 2015, at the Sussex Humanities Lab, University of Sussex, and sponsored by Public Culture Hub and Sussex Centre for Culture Studies (SCCS): https://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/culturesofsound/

Marking the 13th anniversary of the September 11th attacks, Barack Obama announced the latest phase of the war without end – a bombing campaign of unspecified duration that would take in both Syria and Iraq. Weeks later they were joined by the British Armed Forces.

Under the sign of ‘terror’, this unending war has shaped the places that have been bombed and places that have done the bombing. The estimated 500,000 dead in Iraq and what Claire Alexander has referred to as “the rise and rise” anti-Muslim racism in Britain are but two examples of this. However, other dimensions of cultural life have also changed, including the cultures and circuits of sound.

Cultures of sound have long been intertwined with cultures of war. The vocoder, originally developed to disguise military communications, found its way into popular culture through the work of Moog, Kraftwerk, Grandmaster Flash, Stevie Wonder, 2Pac and Daft Punk among others. In aerially assaulted settlements across the Middle-East and Asia, the sound of bombing, inseparable from everyday life, is sold as entertainment – with games such as Call of Duty: Black Ops earning over $1 Billion in worldwide sales.

In the development of weapons, sound (and music) forms part of the US repertoire of “advanced interrogation” (or torture) techniques, while in the UK’s urban wars Compound Security produces the high-frequency Mosquito device to exclude young people from public space; a device re-invented by young people as the Teen Buzz – a downloadable, Bluetooth-able, sound file that produces a continuous high-pitched sound to target adult authority.

War is known about through sounds. Through soundscape of the Blitz or Operation Protective Edge the ear is trained. Sounds, or their absence, trigger fear, trauma and relief. War, sound and memory interlink. Bugles, anthems and the voices of the dead are audible through the colonial framing of remembrance. At the same time the voices and sounds of colonial soldiers are silenced. Disrupting and re-tuning these cultures of sound then becomes an important post-colonial intervention, as Nirmal Puwar has demonstrated in Noise of the Past.

As Les Back, Paul Gilroy and others have noted, alternative cultures of sound have provided struggles against and demands beyond war at home and abroad. While this is the case, commercial hip hop now provides sound tracks for war and anti-colonial intimacies of former urban music cultures have been fragmented through digital communication.

Through a series of talks and installations, performances and a film screening this symposium explored these and other cultures of sound as connected to unending war.

Participants included, Les Back (Goldsmiths), Michael Bull (Sussex), Joanna Callaghan (Sussex), Louis Goddard (Sussex), Michael Guida (Sussex), Malcolm James (Sussex), Thanos Polymeneas-Liontiris (Sussex), Kuldip Powar, Nirmal Puwar (Goldsmiths), Lyn Thomas (Sussex), Tom Tlalim (Goldsmiths).

6. The latest issue of SEQUENCE: Serial Studies in Media, Film and Music: ABOUT SILENCE

We are delighted to present the latest issue of SEQUENCE: Serial Studies in Media, Film and Music, REFRAME‘s experimental, peer-reviewed, and sequential edited-collection format.

SEQUENCE Five: About Silence offers its readers, and potential interlocutors, space for reflection on, and discussion of, notions of silence, and in particular on forms of creative and critical practice which turn on as well as treat silence – as a space of creativity and criticality. The inaugural contribution to this issue, and to this topic, is by Liz Greene, an academic and sound practitioner whose main research interests are in the theory, history and practice of film sound, currently based at Liverpool John Moore’s University. In her essay “Silence,’ Greene focuses on a piece of her internet radio practice as a space in which to “address silence and silencing in a medium rarely considered for such questions and reflections.”

7. TALKS@MFM – REFRAME continues with its series of video and audio recordings of research presentations and masterclasses held at the School of Media, Film and Music, University of Sussex.