Transformative realism: reflections of reality in political avant-garde and contemporary fine art film - Spanish Labyrinth, south from Granada

A turn towards documentary modes of practice amongst contemporary fine art video and filmmakers towards the end of the 20th Century, led to moving image works that represent current social realities. This drew some comparisons of these forms of art to journalism and industrial documentary. The practical research is embodied in a single screen film that responds to recent political and ecological realities in Spain. These include the mass demonstrations that led to the occupation of Madrid’s Plaza del Sol and Spain’s in 2011 and largest recorded forest fires that spread through Andalusia in August of the following year. The film, titled Spanish Labyrinth, South from Granada, is a response to these events and also relates to political avant-garde film of the 1930’s by re-tracing a journey undertaken by three revolutionary filmmakers, Yves Allegret, René Naville and Eli Lotar, in 1931. The theoretical research for this project establishes an historical root of artists’ film that responds to current social realities, in contrast to news media, in the Soviet and European avant-garde movements of the 1920s and 1930s. The main aim of this method is to argue the status of the works that I identify, both avant-garde and contemporary, as a form of art that preceded a Griersonian definition of documentary film.

Regulation and Social Media: Speed Bumps or the Code 2.0

“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather (…)” (Barlow 1996). Barlow’s declaration of independence of February 8 1996 was an expression of the libertarian approaches that have run through the Internet since its inception, and is the root of the misapprehension that the internet is somehow unregulated by state sovereignty. But why was it published that day? What happened?

Design as Symbolic Violence. Design for Social Justice.

Design embeds ideas in communication and artefacts in subtle and psychologically powerful ways. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu coined the term ‘symbolic violence’ to describe how powerful ideologies, priorities, values and even sensibilities are constructed and reproduced through cultural institutions, processes and practices. Through symbolic violence, individuals learn to consider unjust conditions as natural and even come to value customs and ideas that are oppressive. Symbolic violence normalises structural violence and enables real violence to take place, often preceding it and later justifying it. Feminist, class, race and indigenous scholars and activists describe how oppressions (how patriarchy, racism, colonialism, etc.) exist within institutions and structures, and also within cultural practices that embed ideologies into everyday life. The theory of symbolic violence sheds light on how design can function to naturalise oppressions and then obfuscate power relations around this process. Through symbolic violence, design can function as an enabler for the exploitation of certain groups of people and the environment they (and ultimately ‘we’) depend on to live. Design functions as symbolic violence when it is involved with the creation and reproduction of ideas, practices, tools and processes that result in structural and other types of violence (including ecocide). Breaking symbolic violence involves discovering how it works and building capacities to challenge and transform dysfunctional ideologies, structures and institutions. This conversation will give participants an opportunity to discuss, critique and/or develop the theory of design as symbolic violence as a basis for the development of design strategies for social justice.

Digital anthropology and educational eGames: learning through behavioural patterns in digital, game-based contexts

The selected publications are focused on the relations between users, eGames and the educational context, and how they interact together, so that both learning and user performance are improved through feedback provision. A key part of this analysis is the identification of behavioural, anthropological patterns, so that users can be clustered based on their actions, and the steps taken in the system (e.g. social network, online community, or virtual campus). In doing so, we can analyse large data sets of information made by a broad user sample,which will provide more accurate statistical reports and readings. Furthermore, this research is focused on how users can be clustered based on individual and group behaviour, so that a personalized support through feedback is provided, and the personal learning process is improved as well as the group interaction. We take inputs from every person and from the group they belong to, cluster the contributions, find behavioural patterns and provide personalized feedback to the individual and the group, based on personal and group findings. And we do all this in the context of educational games integrated in learning communities and learning management systems. To carry out this research we design a set of research questions along the 10-year published work presented in this thesis. We ask if the users can be clustered together based on the inputs provided by them and their groups; if and how these data are useful to improve the learner performance and the group interaction; if and how feedback becomes a useful tool for such pedagogical goal; if and how eGames become a powerful context to deploy the pedagogical methodology and the various research methods and activities that make use of that feedback to encourage learning and interaction; if and how a game design and a learning design must be defined and implemented to achieve these objectives, and to facilitate the productive authoring and integration of eGames in pedagogical contexts and frameworks. We conclude that educational games are a resourceful tool to provide a user experience towards a better personalized learning performance and an enhance group interaction along the way. To do so, eGames, while integrated in an educational context, must follow a specific set of user and technical requirements, so that the playful context supports the pedagogical model underneath. We also conclude that, while playing, users can be clustered based on their personal behaviour and interaction with others, thanks to the pattern identification. Based on this information, a set of recommendations are provided Digital Anthropology and educational eGames 6 /216 to the user and the group in the form of personalized feedback, timely managed for an optimum impact on learning performance and group interaction level. In this research, Digital Anthropology is introduced as a concept at a late stage to provide a backbone across various academic fields including: Social Science, Cognitive Science, Behavioural Science, Educational games and, of course, Technology-enhance learning. Although just recently described as an evolution of traditional anthropology, this approach to digital behaviour and social structure facilitates the understanding amongst fields and a comprehensive view towards a combined approach. This research takes forward the already existing work and published research onusers and eGames for learning, and turns the focus onto the next step — the clustering of users based on their behaviour and offering proper, personalized feedback to the user based on that clustering, rather than just on isolated inputs from every user. Indeed, this pattern recognition in the described context of eGames in educational contexts, and towards the presented aim of personalized counselling to the user and the group through feedback, is something that has not been accomplished before.

Exploring the relationship between women’s empowerment and the internet in China: potentials and constraints

This thesis reports on an exploratory study of the relationship between the Internet and women’s empowerment in China. The theoretical framework of the study combines feminist theorisations of power – the core concept of empowerment – with insights from sociological perspectives on power and gender, as well as collective action theory. This allows for the conceptualisation of women’s empowerment as a dynamic process that is shaped by a set of communicative practices. Focusing on female Chinese bloggers and women’s groups of different organisational types, this study aims to explore the respective ways in which these two types of women actors use the Internet with a view to examining whether, and the extent to which it enables them to generate a sense of empowerment. The empirical data mainly derives from interviews with female bloggers and with staff members from different women’s groups, as well as from a features analysis and social network analysis of the sampled blogs and official websites of studied groups. Overall, the findings suggest that the opportunities offered by the Internet for women’s empowerment through awareness-raising, social interactions, and the organising of collective action, are limited. For female bloggers, their activities do not translate the new communicative practices afforded by the Internet into concrete action to bring about changes in their everyday life. On the contrary, blogs become an alternative platform to discipline their behaviours and to reinforce patriarchal gendered norms. Moreover, the research finds that the promise of empowerment is further undermined by the pervasive commercialisation of the Internet and state control. For women’s groups, contextual factors prevent them from fully realising the potential of the Internet for increasing their organisational visibility, promoting public awareness about gender issues, building a sense of the collective, campaigning, or networking. The major barriers in these processes are state control, a lack of resources, online censorship, and at times, competition from commercial sites. In this respect, the Internet does not play a significant role in forming a collective to challenge existing unjust power relations.

Kahvehane Kongresspark

“Kahvehane (Coffeehouse) Kongresspark”explores the question of transcultural relations and belonging through an artistic exploration of coffee and its cultural history. The project was commissioned as an urban art intervention by the 'Soho in Ottakring' Biennial in Vienna. Organic and fair-trade coffee, sponsored by Kaffee Alt Wien , was served free of charge to the public in specially designed cups and saucers, which were created at the Ceramics Research Centre at the University of Westminster. The designs reflect coffee’s shared multi-ethnic history and the globalization of coffee.The project includes an interactive lecture-performance exploring the many legends about the origins of coffee tracing its journey from Ethiopia, the Arabian peninsula through the Ottoman Empire (Turkey) to Vienna and across the entire globe. While adopting a humorous take on the globalization of coffee, the performance sheds light on the history of colonialism and question the conditions of contemporary trade. The performance was written and performed in collaboration with Bharatanatyam artist and actor Shane Shambhu.

Not Belonging to one’s Self: Affect on Facebook’s Site Governance page

This article makes a contribution to a growing number of works that discuss affect and social media. I use Freudian affect theory to analyse user posts on the public Site Governance Facebook page. Freud’s work may help us to explore the affectivity within the user narratives and I suggest that they are expressions of alienation, dispossession and powerlessness that relate to the users’ relations with Facebook as well as to their internal and wider social relations. The article thus introduces a new angle on studies of negative user experiences that draws on psychoanalysis and critical theory.

Information ethics in the age of digital labour and the surveillance-industrial complex

Thee rise of computing and the internet have brought about an ethical eld of studies that some term information ethics, computer ethics, digital media ethics, or internet ethics e aim of this contribution is to discuss information ethics’ foundations in the context of the internet’s political economy e chapter rst looks to ground the analysis in a comparison of two information ethics approaches, namely those outlined by Rafael Capurro and Luciano Floridi It then develops, based on these foundations, analyses of the information ethical dimensions of two important areas of social media: one concerns the framing of social media by a surveillance-industrial complex in the context of Edward Snowden’s revelations and the other deals with issues of digital labour processes and issues of class that arises in this context e contribution asks ethical questions about these two phenomena that bring up issues of power, exploitation, and control in the information age It asks if, and if so, how, the approaches of Capurro and Floridi can help us to understand ethico-political aspects of the surveillance-industrial complex and digital labour

CODEX: mapping co-created data for speculative geographies

This paper discusses a series of artworks named CODEX produced by the authors as part of a collaborative research project between the Centre for Research in Education, Art and Media (CREAM), University of Westminster, and the Oxford Internet Institute. Taking the form of experimental maps, large-scale installations and prints, we show how big data can be employed to reflect upon social phenomena through the formulation of critical, aesthetic and speculative geographies.

Dark Places Catalogue (First ed.)

Exhibition Catalogue of Dark Places. As one of four co-curators, I worked with John Hansard to produce the publication. The catalogue contains additional information on artists, the positioning of the work with a commissioned essay by Sally O'Reilly. In addition to a descriptive entry on the Dark Places database,as Director of Office of Experiments we also designed Research Tools for independent researchers wishing to undertake work in the field. This included an ID card, with observational notes that correspond to the taxonomy of the database and a researched guide to legal issues for documenting and photographing secret sites.

Fieldworks from the Museum of the Void: Experiments in the Event of an Archive

This exhibition was a research presentation of works made at Center for Land Use Interpretation [CLUI]base in Wendover, Utah, USA between 2008-2010. The project was commissioned by the Centre For Land Interpretation in USA and funded by The Henry Moore Foundation in the UK. Documentation of research conducted in the field as made available as video and installation. An experimental discourse on the preservation of land art was put with GPS drawings and research information displayed as maps and documents. In examining physical sites in Utah, USA, the project connected to contemporary discourse centred on archives in relation to land art and land use. Using experimental processes conceived in relation to key concepts such as event structures and entropy, conceptual frameworks developed by Robert Smithson (USA) and John Latham (UK), the 'death drive' of the archive was examined in the context of a cultural impulse to preserve iconic works. The work took items from Lathams archive and placed them at the canonical 'Spiral Jetty', Smithson land art work at Rozel Point north of Salt Lake City. This became a focus for the project that also highlighted the role of the Getty Foundation in documenting major public artworks and CLUI in creating an American Land Museum. Work was created in the field at extreme remote locations using GPS technologies and visual tools were developed to articulate the concepts of the artists discussed, to engage the exhibition audience in ideas of transformation and entropy in art. Audiences were encouraged to sign a petition to be used in future preservation of spiral jetty currently facing development challenges.

Cracking the USA? Interpreting UK-to-US TV Drama Translations

For well over half a century, British TV drama production has both inherited from and aimed to appeal to nations and cultures beyond the UK, particularly the lucrative (yet notoriously tough) US TV market. However, in the context of mainstream American broadcasting, British-produced imports have never been anything more than a peripheral presence on US small screens. A currently prominent production strategy aiming to counter the mainstream US TV market's aversion to foreign-sourced drama, in an attempt to access prime-time broadcasting positions, is a process which can be labelled as UK-to-US TV drama ‘translation’: the ‘recreation’ of British-based dramas within an American cultural framework. Whilst the cultural reconfiguration of game show and reality/lifestyle TV formats has received heightened critical attention in recent years, investigation into the international translation of TV drama remains less developed. This paper investigates both the internal textual operations and the external production dynamics involved in the process of UK-to-US TV drama translation, drawing on direct interview material from industry professionals. The UK and US versions of the crime drama Cracker constitute the core translation case study, utilising the close analysis of text and production context as a lens through which to examine the mechanics of UK-to-US TV drama translation.

Telephones, Voice Recorders, Microphones, Phonographs: A Media Archaeology of Sonic Technologies in Twin Peaks

This article argues that sonic technologies, such as telephones, voice recorders and phonographs, alongside more (audio)visual ones such as flickering fluorescent lights, videos, and the television sets are crucial to the world of Twin Peaks, and constitute this world as both a communications network with portals to the unknown, and an accumulation of recordings of ghosted voices and entities, perhaps finding its ultimate expression in the backwards reprocessed speech in the Black Lodge. This lodge can be understood as a space in which there are nothing but recordings, albeit now on a cosmic, spiritual and demonic level. Using a media archaeological approach to these devices in the series, this paper will argue that they were already operating by a media archaeological logic, generating the world of Twin Peaks as a haunted archive of sonic and other mediations.