Gidal's materialist film

This paper belatedly re-evaluates Peter Gidal’s texts Materialist Film (1989) and Structural Film Anthology (1976) for contemporary use within digital media moving image production. Materialist film’s direct methods reproduce Abstract Expressionism’s essentialism in painting and sculpture and can be related to Samuel Beckett’s minimalism, of which Gidal has also written. Gidal’s texts are recounted in relation to the splitting of the avant-garde in two by Peter Wollen in 1975, a move that subjugated materialist film in favour of an emergent feminist counter cinema.

Teaching an old game new tricks : long-term feedback on a re-designed online role play

Despite an extensive history of use in teaching Political Science subjects, long-term scholarly studies of online role plays are uncommon. This paper redresses that balance by presenting five years of data on the Middle East Politics Simulation. This online role play has been run since the 1990s and underwent significant technical upgrade in 2013-14. The data presented here covers student feedback to this upgrade process and the factors that can influence their response. Key indications are that students tend to recognise when something is fit (or not) for its purpose and will forgo attractive and well-appointed online environments if the underlying learning exercise is valued. However, there are limits to this minimalism and whilst designers do not need to replicate every Internet trend, attention needs to be paid to broader changes in technology, such as access platform and changing avenues of political communication. The study demonstrates that long-term monitoring of online role play exercises is important to allow informed changes to be implemented and their impacts properly assessed.