Published 11 June 2004
In recent years, the Department of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam has expanded both in the number of faculty members and in the subject areas they represent. This expansion of students and staff in various strands of media and culture has consolidated the team-based organization of the teaching faculty, which among others has led to the successful implementation of one BA-curriculum in Media and Culture, and five Master programs. Building on the team structure in teaching, we intend for the research of Media Studies faculty to continue to reflect this type of cooperation. Joint book projects, such as Hollywood op Straat (1999) and Shooting the Family (2005) have proven the value-addition to be achieved in this manner. Academic research in the humanities has historically been an individual effort. While we expect the publication of monographs and single-authored articles in journals to remain an important part of our research, it is clear that funding bodies increasingly look to - and reward - collaboration in research. The proposals making up the ‘Media and Culture’ programme of the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis in the coming five years thus constitute not only stimulating and inspiring projects, hopefully leading to exciting cross-fertilization of personal fascinations and resulting in innovative work. They also take a step in the direction of increasing ASCA’s chances for attracting outside funding and subsidies.
We have centered the research of the departmental ASCA-staff on subject areas that define common denominators in our faculty’s interests and expertise. In addition, we consider these subject areas to represent cutting edge academic issues in media and culture at the international level, while reflecting contemporary social and critical issues also at the national level. Whether it is the change from analogue to digital media technologies, the history and future of the still image, the place of cinema in the European context, the history of imagined technological futures, the changing production and reception of television, or the multi-mediatization of representations—all these subjects connect issues of transformation in the history and future of media and culture with broader cultural concerns. The interdisciplinary focus on media technologies, media content and context is one of the strengths of our department, resulting in six interdependent areas of research. We hope that the teams are small enough to permit productive interaction and big enough to inspire collaboration.
Since team-based research is a deliberate strategy, the coordinators have also begun to draw up guidelines on what can be expected of the various groups. Each team has been asked to outline a five-year strategy, which includes regular meetings, group seminars and targets for academic output in terms of publications (books or articles). In addition, each team is encouraged to formulate an application for research grants (NWO, European community, or internal grants), seek international partners and organize conferences in the proposed research area. Both Thomas Elsaesser and José van Dijck will coach the various research groups in terms of advice on grant applications, journal publications and book collections. However, each team is self-directive and fully responsible for its own output and level of activities. The coordinators expect to provide the institutional scaffolding and support needed to turn ambitions into tangible results. Below is an outline of the six projects, listing the participants in each team.
Within an astonishingly brief period of time digital technologies have pervaded our everyday life. Computers, visible as well as invisible, have become ubiquitous, in the workplace, at schools, academies and universities, at home, in the streets, in shops, service providers, public transport, in the media, and where not? The use of digital technologies has become standard in ‘old media’ like photography, film, radio and television, the DVD has (almost) completely replaced the videotape, the compact-disk which almost overnight made the vinyl record obsolete is now itself on the verge of being replaced by downloadable MP3-music files; the computer has left the desk and has become mobile, portable and even wearable by transforming and multiplying itself into all sorts of devices like laptops, PDA’s, iPods and other MP3-players, digital cameras (including CCTV’s) and GPS’s; wireless technologies release computers from cables and are turning the mobile telephone into the ‘universal calculator’ the by now already ‘classical’ computer once was thought to be and turn it into a camera, an internet browser, an SMS- and e-mail device, an ‘office-on-the-run’ and game console at the same time.
The digital can no longer be thought of as a separate realm (‘cyberspace’) or reality (‘the virtual’) which exists with its own particular ‘ontology’ parallel to the so-called ‘physical’ or ‘analogue’ reality. Since the digital has surreptitiously but profoundly pervaded and transformed our culture, the digital can also not be thought of as a mere technological phenomenon, nor as a cultural phenomenon that only concerns hackers and cyberati: in a way we have all become geeks.
Our ‘digital condition’ raises a number of questions. First of all, if the digital has become ubiquitous, does it still make sense to talk about ‘new media’ as a specific domain or should new media be theorized within the framework of a more encompassing form of media theory? Second, if it is true that new media ‘remediate’ old media, what new cultural forms and formats do they generate? Computer games are certainly a good example of a ‘specific’ new media format that is not only highly successful in commercial and popular terms, but which is also at the cutting edge of interface and interaction design, and moreover connects and engages scores of players in networked gaming environments like MMORPG’s. Examples like PAC MANHATTAN show that computer gaming has quite literally entered the streets as well. Thirdly, if digital devices and technologies offer the user affordances to respond to, customize, manipulate, and generate and distribute new media-objects, how do new media objects address the user? Which cognitive and semiotic strategies and operations are being deployed in order to ‘customize’ and ‘manipulate’ the user? Fourth, networking has become the cornerstone of digital culture: internet, LAN’s, wireless networks, cell phones and other communication devices have made it possible to create new social, political and cultural networks and communities whose modi operandi, exchange of information, debate, activism can take forms that are completely opposed to – and are very often unknown to – the official public institutions and agencies. How are network cultures constituted, how do they operate, and how do they relate to the ‘offline world’ (if there still is such a thing)?
These, then, are the four areas of research of the ‘Digital ontologies’ program:
1. Media theory – dr. Geert Lovink
2. Digital games – dr. Jan Simons, dr. Joyce Goggin, drs. René Glas (AIO)
3. Interface: visualisation – dr. Yuri Engelhardt
4. Network cultures – dr. Richard Rogers, dr. Martina Roepke
5. Sound technologies – prof. dr. Jose van Dijck and future aio
Dr. Sophie Berrebi and Dr. Julia Noordegraaf Photography, Film and Displacement aims at bringing together research projects concerned with still and moving images and their production, circulation and presentation in contemporary culture. Photography and film’s prominence in visual culture is coupled with the ubiquitous status of its objects and the shifts of meaning that occur with their displacement from one context to another. Aimed at researchers from various disciplines from the humanities and beyond, this project provides a meeting place for researchers who examine photography and film and creates an environment for discussion through research workshops and conferences. Contributing to the development of a theoretical corpus around photography, film and displacement through publications is the principal aim of this research project. To this purpose, a research proposal will be submitted to the N.W.O. Interdisciplinary
The project seeks to attract scholars from the humanities and social sciences whose research involves photography and film either primarily or as a secondary source, and who are interested in theoretical issues relating to their displacement. Areas and topics may be as diverse as
· photographic and audiovisual archives and their use in research
· the recontextualisation of film and photography documents into museum artefacts
· visual anthropology and issues of representation
· film and digitisation
· documentary practices. The project also hopes to engage scholars affiliated to other research institutes for special events and discussion. International and institutional connections
This project will serve as a base for the organisation of international conferences and smaller scale exchanges with comparable research groups in universities both in the Netherlands and abroad. In addition, connections will be established with some of the numerous photography institutions and audiovisual archives in the Netherlands with the aim of participating in institutional debates, but also of initiating collaborative projects such as the co-organisation of conferences, exhibitions and publications. Anticipated activities, projects, events
- The Photography, Film and Displacement conference series. Research workshops and public lectures around interdisciplinary scholars working on the image: see additional program. Begins March 11 with Georges Didi-Huberman. In collaboration with the cultural services of the French Embassy.
- Le Regard, L’Image, Dekolonisatie verbeeld. international conference, film program, exhibition and publication in collaboration with Maison Descartes. October 2005. See additional description
- Collaborative book project on photography, film and displacement by an international group of 6-10 authors, e.g. with specific case studies.
- Other conferences topics may include: Recycling Audiovisual Heritage: From Compilation Films to Multimedia Installations; Photography and Legal Issues; Black Box, White Cube: Moving Images and Sound in the Modern Museum; The Photographic and Filmic Document: From Use-Value to Exhibition Value. Film and Art (in collaboration with the University of Kent, Canterbury), Art in Europe Since the 1960s (In collaboration with Cambridge University).
Prof. dr Patricia Pisters Taking Gilles Deleuze’s claim that ‘the brain is the screen’ (Flaxman, 2000) as a starting point, this project aims to look at audiovisual images from a ‘rhizomatic’ perspective. While the concept of the rhizome as a metaphor for the grass like network structure of the organization of the brain is by now an established and even inflated term for referring for instance to the organization of the internet or the global flows and complexities of money, goods, people and information, little research has been done so far to all the other references to the brain in Deleuze’s philosophy. Already in work as early as Difference and Repetition the brain is central to Deleuze’s philosophy in his attempt to get away from philosophies of representation. In the last book Deleuze published together with Guattari, again the brain is of utmost importance. The brain is the junction between art, philosophy and science, the three domains of thinking. Art, philosophy and science all think in their own ways (through percepts and affects, through concepts and through functions) and they all need each other in order to get a better understanding. The methodology of this project is profoundly interdisciplinary in that it will always try to relate at least two of these domains of thinking.
This projects wants to be a ‘rhizotorium’, a sort of rhizomatic laboratory in which art, philosophy and science meet at the moment where similar problems are encountered. For instance, at a meta-level of questions of understanding perception and cognition, this project wants to investigate in what ways neurobiology can provide insights into the processing and understanding of film images. One of the questions that is interesting is the idea of the ‘reality of the illusion’ or the realness of the virtual. Another, already more specific question is the question why sometimes quite similar images with only slight differences can trigger completely different reactions in the viewer. Questions of time and spirituality are also related to these meta-questions. At the same time this project will develop new models of concrete analysis of (digital) images and audiovisual phenomena, both artistic and popular. In this way the relevance for thinking of images in a ‘rhizomatic’ way will critically be tested and elaborated in the practice of analysis.
Prof. dr. Thomas Elsaesser Although the cinema has been recognized as an art since the 1920s, only certain categories of film can lay claim to a privileged relationship to the central traditions of 20th-century art. How these categories are defined, what forces have determined them, and why boundaries have shifted are the central questions of this project. The focus is Europe and its cinema(s), where the debate over definitions and terminologies, over artistic agendas and economic interests has been most persistent and passionate. The areas of conflict include the notion of ‘the nation’ (as in ‘national cinema’), and the idea of the artist as creator of a unique vision (as in ‘auteur-cinema’). The artistic agendas extend from politically and formally oppositional practices (such as in ‘avant-garde cinema’), to the high/low culture debate (as in ‘art cinema’ versus ‘Hollywood entertainment’), while the economic interests are emblematically enmeshed in various forms of cultural protectionism, codified as `Film Europe' in the late 1920s, nationalist propaganda in the 1930s and 1940s, Hollywood hegemony in the 1950s, anti-imperialist struggles in the 1960s, the GATT debate and concern over the European audiovisual heritage in the 1980s and 1990s.
The initiatives undertaken to defend Europe's markets against American domination have mostly been problematic, not least since such attempts, however noteworthy, have often concentrated on measures, which conflated economic with aesthetic criteria. Public discussions, whilst reflecting the anxiety of European filmmakers of losing domestic audiences and markets, have often been narrowly partisan and largely failed to address the reasons why cultural capital accumulates so unevenly. The research project studies the forces at work by means of interrelated conceptual and methodological tools, supplemented by individual case studies. It takes into account of such factors as globalization and European expansion, digitization and the move to knowledge societies, trans-national networks of funding and financing, while not neglecting traditional topics such as authors and new waves, though related less to ‘national cinema’ and more to technical innovations such as the DVD, and to institutional contexts such as film festival circuits, repertory and art-house cinemas, museums and gallery installation.
The project is coordinated by Prof dr Thomas Elsaesser and encompasses the work of ten PhD candidates. It concludes its work in June 2005 with an international conference, “Cinema in Europe: Networks in Progress”.
Prof. dr. Thomas Elsaesser and Dr. Wanda Strauven Imagined Futures is a research project concerned with the conditions, dynamics and consequences of rapid media transfer and transformation. ‘Media' here encompasses all imaging techniques and sound technologies, with the cinema providing the conceptual starting point and primary historical focus. While changes in basic technology, public perception and artistic practice may often evolve over long historical cycles, our main assumption is that there are also elements not of steady and gradual process, but moments when transfer occurs in discontinuous, unevenly distributed fashion, during relatively short periods of time, and with mutually interdependent determinations. Imagined Futures initially identified two such periods of transformation taking place across a broad spectrum of media technologies: the period of the 1870-1900 and the period 1970-2000. The first witnessed the popularization of photography, the emergence of cinema, the global use of the telegraph and the domestic use of the telephone, the invention of wireless radio and of the basic technology of television, while the second saw the consolidation of video as popular storage medium and avant-garde artistic practice, the universal adoption of the personal computer, the change from analogue to digital sound and image, the invention of the mobile phone, and the emergence of the internet and world wide web. A key characteristic of such periods of rapid media change is the volatility, unpredictability and contradictory nature of the dynamics between the practical implications (industrial applications and economic potential) of these technologies, their perception by the popular imagination (in the form of narratives of anxiety, utopia and fantasy), and the mixed response (eager adoption or stiff resistance) from artists, writers and intellectuals. These shifting configurations among different agents offer a rich field of investigation for cultural analysis, posing methodological challenges and requiring specific case studies. The basis of research conducted in the context of the Imagined Futures project is thus the triangulation of the avant-garde, the academy and popular application of media technologies. The cultural practices to be investigated are marked by a-synchronicity, anachronism, delay and anticipation, while location, place, displacement and mobility form another crucial set of coordinates. Currently, Imagined Futures is a cluster of three core projects which fall into a historical, a theoretical and an ‘applied' strand: 1) The historical strand relates to the ‘media and modernity' thesis: the contradictory concept of a compulsively ‘innovative' avant-garde and the (institutional) position as well as (self-) perception of the artist in relation to the memory function of culture. Throughout the 20th century, the artist, the work (and, by extension, the art world and its public) have been engaged in a dynamic-adaptive (and not merely antagonistic) relation with popular and commercial applications of the same media technologies. In this respect, the cinema serves as an implicit reference point in a much wider cultural field, including literature, museum practice, architecture and the fine arts. 2) The theoretical strand examines the texts and discourses produced by critics and academics in response to media technologies as cultural practice. The ambition is not only to have a clearer sense of the (technological, aesthetic, economic, indeed anthropological) implications of rapid media change, but to intervene in the debate around the different versions of ‘crisis historiography' (Foucault's concept of Archaeology, Luhmann's Systems Theory and Latour's Network Theory, as well as New Historicism and the growing interest in Counterfactual History). Special attention is given to the culture of performative theory and performative self-reference, promoted in avant-garde manifestos, by artist's statements and even instruction manuals. 3) The ‘applied' strand is product- and practice-oriented and is understood to include all manner of applications of (media) technologies, ranging from social issue uses, locative media projects, to commercial schemes, military applications, and public space projects. One additional common denominator of Imagined Futures research is the question how media articulate (public and private) space and modulate the (subjective and global) experience of time. Several of the ongoing research projects of our PhD candidates are concerned with non-linear temporalities in mainstream feature films, the temporal dimension of installation work and of video art; others trace the genealogy of locative media, and the bodies/identities ‘in formation' in the information society. All members of this project regularly intervene in the old media vs. new media debates with publications, forum discussions and conference papers. The long-term goal of Imagined Futures is to overcome the limits of traditional humanities scholarship with respect to disciplinary boundaries and isolated objects of study, aiming to re-energize by ‘synchronizing' the university, the art world and the general public, and thereby stimulate new forms of interaction between the avant-garde, the academy and the activist general users of image and sound technologies.
Dr. Jaap Kooijman and Dr. Joke Hermes Starting from the realization that the benefits of cultural studies’ involvement during the 1980s in debates about media and culture have been woven into both common knowledge and production practices, there is a need to develop a new critical vocabulary to understand how television and popular culture function culturally. This move from both common-sense understandings of television and a focus on production to television’s cultural dimensions is not new. However, a re-orientation of the relationship between them is a pressing concern. This is particularly so given that terms like “culture” come to signify quite dramatically different concepts and rethinking the links between them is important if one is to understand contemporary television in its present textual, affective, technological, and institutional dimensions.
There have been visions of what television might be and what it might do socially and culturally long before the medium came into being. Metaphors and names – like tele-vision, seeing far; or ‘broadcasting’ spreading wide thoughts and images that would unite nations – suggest the potential invested in television. Teleporting is television’s strength. In this research domain, television will be understood as a multiform object of analysis. Television has, first of all, distinctive cultural forms (liveness and seriality have been appropriated and rewritten from older cultural modes); it offers distinct cultural experience (closing of distance; immediacy); it has distinctive generic modes (genre hybridity); it creates new types of public roles and star texts, and has unique forms of programming. Changing fast under multimedial conditions, television is now more mobile, which raises questions about the authority of the medium to define the world and how it uses its historically defined characteristics to write new scripts for understanding reality.
While in the 1980s cultural studies offered revolutionary terms such as pleasure to revalue everyday practices of media use in a combined theoretical and political project, such terms seem inappropriate or insufficient in today’s landscape of everyday media use, increasing globalization and the merging of media production in global conglomerates. Contemporary media users are widely recognized as literate and cynical, fully aware of the conditions under which they consume media and popular culture. The media (more than academic or journalistic media critique) are invested in exploring boundaries and rewriting rules of ethics and quality, of reality and authenticity, of decency and morality. By looking at the mobility of meaning production, and the ways in which authority is established by recourse to speed, dialogue and publicity rather than by standards or brands, it will become clear how neither the classic terms of cultural studies, nor such distinctions as between the private and the public, or high and low culture for that matter, are of much use. Academic research in the realm of television and popular culture needs to recognize the impressive power of the industry to draw agendas for discussion of media content and use. Academia has, however, its own responsibility to engender debate and find space for alternative agendas and the development of critical response. The obvious means for humanities scholars are to historicize and re-theorize developments in the field and in everyday practice. We propose to look at three types of practices:
1. Practices of production
2. Practices of reception
3. Practices of critique
These practices involve all aspects of television and popular culture: specific texts, the groups who make and use them, and the contexts in which they do so. They provide a perspective to look at television and popular culture, without marking social or cultural domains. Under practices of critique for instance, high theory might be the point of departure to look at particular developments in media production and concrete products. Likewise, practices of reception include the textual and production context, while questions for research projects related to this question start from a reception point of view, e.g. materially available as a particular type of fandom.
Dr. Charles Forceville Increasingly, verbal means of presenting information and arguments give way to multimodal means. Graphics and pictures in newspapers, commercials, manuals, course books, and airport environments carry a substantial information load. Documentaries and news reports convey their "facts" via a mix of images, language, and music. TV channels and broadcasting organizations create their identities largely via audiovisual designs. Websites and blogs combine verbal information with visuals and sometimes sounds, often providing considerable freedom in the order in which information is accessed. On the assumption that no representation is innocent or neutral in the sense that each has some purpose or objective, it is important to inventory and analyse how multimodal discourses are structured and (attempt to) achieve their rhetorical or aesthetic aims. Areas of particular interest are: (1) Multimodal metaphor. Lakoff and Johnson (1999) claim that we think metaphorically - indeed, that we cannot conceive of abstract things without metaphor. But their cognitivist metaphor paradigm hitherto largely ignores non-verbal manifestations. Forceville is particularly interested in the Source-Path-Goal schema (in film and games) and in the metaphorical representation of emotions (see Forceville 2005). (2) Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson 1995). Hitherto, the very fruitful RT has mainly been applied to verbal communication in face-to-face situations. It needs to be applied to multimodal discourse genres, because both the theorization of these genres and the theory itself can benefit from the application. (3) Graphic design. Engelhardt (2002) has charted and theorized the meaningful visual elements in maps, charts, and diagrams. His findings require further (dis)confirmation, and the link between visuals and language needs to be explored in more depth. (4) The role of language in films. This area is vastly under-researched in film studies. One of the few exceptions is Kozloff (2000). Elements such as subtitling, dubbing, intonation, language options on DVDs, as well as the pragmatics of film language require sustained scholarly attention. (5) Genres of special interest are (i) the documentary film - because of its supposedly privileged relation to "reality," as well as because of the rhetorical and ethical perspectives it invites; (ii) comics & animation film - because they are considerably more under the control of their makers than photographs and live-action films, and thus are ideally suited for studying how non-mimetic signs convey significant information; and (iii) advertising - because this is the multimodal genre of persuasive discourse par excellence. Activities/output: Launching PhD projects via ASCA and other funding sources; publication of Multimodal Metaphor (eds. Charles Forceville & Eduardo Urios-Aparisi); organization of Researching and Applying Metaphor, international workshop (2009, to be confirmed); article publications; Participation in the Centre for Creative Content and Technology.
Source: ASCA
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