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The debate surrounding the definition and specificity of cinema continues in contemporary film philosophy and theory. This article challenges the traditional approach of medium specificity and proposes Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) as an alternative framework for understanding cinema. Drawing on OOO’s core principles, the article argues that films, like all objects, are autonomous entities with their own reality. Their meaning is not inherent, but rather emerges through the “performative” interaction between the film object and the viewer. This interaction generates “sensual qualities” that constitute the film’s aesthetic experience. The article contends that focusing on the performativity of cinema, rather than seeking a fixed definition, offers a more productive approach to philosophizing on film. It allows for a deeper understanding of how films function as objects and the ways they generate meaning in relation to viewers.

This article explores how uncanny feelings may derive from ways in which a medium operates, from its mediality. Consistent with the main source of uncanny feelings identified by Ernst Anton Jentsch and later elaborated on by Sigmund Freud, tensions between the inanimate and the animate are at the centre of the exploration. Such tensions, the article proposes, are implicitly or explicitly intermedial. The malleability of photographic imagery boosted by the computational revolution remaking photographic technology and practices allow for ever more forms of hybrid mediality in which intermedial tensions operate. The proliferation of such tensions suggests that we are likely to see more uncanny mediality in the time ahead. Our uncanny future may further be strengthened by the increasingly autonomous operations of machine learning algorithms that in part relocate agency from humans to machines.

Copyright of Avant is the property of Centre for Philosophical Research and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Le présent article expose comment les discours sur l'art de la deuxième moitié du XVIIIe siècle édifièrent une conception canonique du pastel. Offrant un cadre conceptuel qui historicise la notion de spécificité des médiums, il détaille les propriétés que les écrits techniques, critiques et encyclopédiques attribuèrent au pastel autour des années 1750–1790. À la fois exploration méthodologique et investigation historique, cette étude propose que la spécificité des médiums conserve une pertinence méthodologique si elle est envisagée sous un angle métaontologique et elle montre comment les qualités particulières conférées au pastel étaient historiquement contingentes. Elle suggère que, par une connexion récurrente aux théories coloristes, le pastel était autrefois pensé comme un médium du portrait moderne et que sa spécificité reposait sur des présupposés teintés par les idéaux artistiques du XVIIIe siècle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyzes Medium Specificities found in the adaptations of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde This study uses Linda Hutcheon’s theory of adaptation focuses on medium specificity in engaging audiences and the process of repetition but not replication. This study found three adaptation works of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde fulfilled the process of repetition but not replication from their textual transformations and innovations occurred in the works.

Starting from the ontology of performance by Peggy Phelan, the article seeks to demonstrate the ontogenesis of performance, showing how performance has been manifested in various forms from its beginnings. Performance is analysed in the context of a new artistic practice in the 1960s and 1970s, where porous boundaries between artistic disciplines led to the fruitful permeation of performance, photography, video, film, and conceptual art. Special attention is paid to the medium specificity of performance as a nonmaterial art form and to its representation, documentation, archiving, and exhibition. The last section of the text is dedicated to reperformance as a recently emerged form of repetition and documentation and to the use of performance in light of the increased interest in preserving the live art of the past.

Since its introduction in the 1960s, video as a medium has formed a self-differentiating system, a layering of applications and conventions that cannot be reduced to the material characteristics of their technological foundation. This article gives an overview of different theoretical perspectives on the electronic image, its materiality, and its dispositive discussing the writings of Maurizio Lazzarato, Rosalind Krauss, Raymond Bellour, Yvonne Spielmann, Ina Blom and others. Video is analyzed as an ever-changing technological assemblage from which certain affordances emerge and which encompasses technical as well as human agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2011 U.S. Supreme Court case Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association adjudicated the State of California's right to regulate the sale of "violent" video games and, in the process, effectively considered how video games should be apprehended as a cultural form under the law. The court's decision cited the mis-steps of judicial film censorship in protecting video games as a form of expression under the First Amendment, placing video games into a cultural time line of expressive forms. Some media scholars contest the court's approach for overvaluing the cultural aspects of video games and neglecting their distinct digital materiality. However, a close reading of the case and the circumstances that led the justices' opinions helps articulate a crucial critique of overly materialist approaches to video games associated with media archaeology. The case details reflect the inextricability of materiality and experience in considering video games as a form of expression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to present and examine how art criticism in the Swedish daily press has dealt with video art as a new art form. The article argues that art criticism is challenged by having to deal with video art as a new art form. By paying attention to how the "identity crisis" of video art is represented in art criticism covering the four exhibitions Video/Art/Video, U-media, Japan nu/Sverige nu and Interface, as well as how the inherent properties of the printed press are used in this negotiation, this article shows that the art criticism contains a range of journalistic genres, makes use of art-historical and technological references and investigates the inherent properties of video art. The article further shows that the art criticism is primarily concerned with formal aspects of video art and that the medium specificity of the printed press is particularly salient. By comparing the specific Swedish situation with the international reception of video art as a new art form, I show that, in spite of the difference in date, they are indeed similar. Finally, by relating the reception of video art as a new art form to that of photography during the mid 19th century and digital art at beginning of the 21st century, I further show that the identity crisis of video art is similar to earlier as well as later identity crises of new technological art forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to present and examine how art criticism in the Swedish daily press has dealt with video art as a new art form. The article argues that art criticism is challenged by having to deal with video art as a new art form. By paying attention to how the “identity crisis” of video art is represented in art criticism covering the four exhibitions Video/Art/Video, U-media, Japan nu/Sverige nu and Interface, as well as how the inherent properties of the printed press are used in this negotiation, this article shows that the art criticism contains a range of journalistic genres, makes use of art-historical and technological references and investigates the inherent properties of video art. The article further shows that the art criticism is primarily concerned with formal aspects of video art and that the medium specificity of the printed press is particularly salient. By comparing the specific Swedish situation with the international reception of video art as a new art form, I show that, in spite of the difference in date, they are indeed similar. Finally, by relating the reception of video art as a new art form to that of photography during the mid 19th century and digital art at beginning of the 21st century, I further show that the identity crisis of video art is similar to earlier as well as later identity crises of new technological art forms.

Despite an increasingly digital society, digital art is often not collected and preserved in traditional art institutes due to their technological components and anti-institutional stance. In 2017, LIMA initiated the research project Digital Canon?! to generate attention for, and enabling institutional recognition of, digital art and its history by creating a canon of, digital artworks made in the Netherlands between 1960 and 2000. This paper describes the research project and its methodology as well as critically analyses of the digital dived between 'art world art' and digital art and terminology. It concludes on future (institutional) perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a discussion of and rejoinder to the comments of three respondents on my book, Screen Stories: Emotion and the Ethics of Engagement. Jane Stadler argues that the book would profit from more attention to the "temporal prolongation" made possible by multi-episode television, especially as it relates to the nature of character engagement. While I have reservations about the notion of medium specificity in relation to television and fi lm (and thus prefer the term "screen stories"), I agree that temporal prolongation in relation to an ethics of screen stories is a vital topic. Malcolm Turvey argues that Screen Stories promotes moral intuition and emotion at the expense of moral reasoning and that an ethics of engagement should pay equal attention to reasoning. In my response, I enumerate four reasons why, despite my belief in the importance of reasoning, I focus on emotion and intuition. I do agree that, once we can decide just what moral reasoning is, it should become a focus of an ethics of engagement. Cynthia Freeland focuses her remarks on various aspects of the third part of my book, "The Contours of Engagement," in which I examine how the features of screen stories can lead to viewer experiences with ethical implications. In response, I discuss three issues: medium specificity once more, the supposed tension between conceptions of the active and passive spectator, and the psychological underpinnings of various sorts of character engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In conversation with Carl Plantinga's persuasive account of emotion and the ethics of engagement in Screen Stories, this article considers how audiences engage with fi lm and television in an emotive, evaluative manner that is mediated by technology. Because sensory experience and immersive technologies set screen media apart from forms of storytelling such as literature and because technological developments affect the formal strategies of screen media, I argue that the distinctiveness of and differences between fi lm and television warrant attention. I focus on the ethical implications of sustained engagement with immersive narratives and technologies in contemporary television and algorithmic culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to examine a less discussed aspect of medium specificity arguments. Although their persuasiveness often bears on considering the artistic qualities of artworks (or, in an extended fashion, of artforms), they are more likely to assess the all-encompassing problem of novelty in establishing and developing artforms in general. We can only attest to the novelty of those forms of art that are self-consciously created, viz. the beginnings of which could be adequately documented. Since this process of documentation is a complex task, it is not accurate to use medium specificity as the key feature in considering the novelty of a certain set of artistic products. Expressing his aversion to all forms of media specificity claims, Noël Carroll remarked that if mediacentred arguments aim to reconstruct how a "new" artform becomes prominent, then they fail to consider the appropriate contribution of "aesthetic, moral, and intellectual" values. Most recently, medium specificity talk has been rationally reconstructed as the collection of three formula, each covering an interpretation that can be defended in allocating medium-specificity a role to evaluate and explain artistic achievement: artforms represent particular uses of media that are aiming (or even achieve) to realize artistic values. I intend, however, to reinforce the novelty talk, and, therefore, to reconsider the novelty issue from a different angle, the art historiographical standpoint. Medium specificity claims in art history receive an intriguing feature when confronted with the so-called histories of goals and problems (HGP). HGP states that artistic qualities emerge when an effort is made to solve a well-defined, historically determined specimen (or even, collection) of artistic problems. In a critical view, one can still admit that a medium may be earlier than an artform which thematises it, but this medium is not necessarily used to provide a solution for existing problems or an alternative path towards reaching an inherited goal. A medium could be thematised without following any existing artistic ambition and could still produce artistic value. In consequence, it is particularly important to deliver the conditions of such production. This also involves a move toward a Lessingian definition of artistic media, outlined in the closing sections of this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1974, CBS premiered a television series based on the popular Planet of the Apes films. Despite high expectations from the network, the series was a critical and ratings flop and CBS quickly canceled it in the middle of its first season. This article considers the short-lived Planet of the Apes (1974) series as an early attempt at transmedia storytelling and asks what its failure might reveal about certain pre-conglomeration, pre-franchising industrial logics, particularly as they relate to properties that transition from film to television. The Apes television series offers an opportunity to understand certain logics of transmedia textual management before they become entrenched in discourses of media franchising. Through a combination of industrial and textual analysis, I trace the history of the programme and ultimately argue that the industrial considerations (specifically those of network era broadcast television) heavily informed the intertextual relationships between the film series and the TV show. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interview with Noel Carroll, keynote speaker at the XX Socine Annual Meeting, on the cinematic artwork as a singularity.

This article sets out, first of all, to systematically debunk arguments that attribute to the serial The Wire a medium specificity of “television,” and second of all, to supply means for new conceptualizations of this kind of serial-drama media object. These matters are treated on the levels of technological materiality, media definitions, form, content, and production. The purpose is to lay the foundation for a more attentive and clear conceptual comprehension of what is approaching or has already begun to arrive: a time in which the initial phase of broadcasting of serial moving-image dramas are either skipped or greatly diminished in importance, and in which they exist mainly in the form of On Demand streaming, or, more interestingly, in the form of DVD or downloaded files.

This paper explores the existence and propriety of moving images within computer networks. It means to show that computer-based images are executable, standing for running software systems as much as the applications that are used to play, edit, copy and transmit them. Thus, in computation, movie and apparatus become completely mingled together, developing a complex materiality. Analysing how computers enact and distribute moving images, I end up evoking the concept of code as a parameter that sets conditions for medial property. According to this parameter, different media might retain their specific identities even if they become equivalent surface effects of the same socio-technical system.

Television studies has produced few sustained analyses of performance in serial television. Yet film studies scholarship has shown how attending to the integration of performances with other aspects of film style is crucial to the interpretation and appreciation of expression and meaning in filmed narrative fictions. However, as a particle form of filmed serial narrative, series television raises a number of questions about performance that will not necessarily be satisfyingly addressed by the direct adoption and application of approaches to writing about performance that have been honed in regard to film. How, then, do we write about performance in television serials in ways that recognise and accommodate the form’s relationship to film, while at the same time appropriately acknowledging and responding to long-form television’s serial status? To examine the difficulties and opportunities of approaching performance in serial television this way, the article conducts close readings of various pieces of television studies writing on performance, by scholars such as Jason Mittell, Sue Turnbull, George Toles, and Steven Peacock. Their work brings into view film and television’s points of common relation, and the distinctive challenges, achievements, and rewards of appreciating the best television serials, and the performances in them.

Early American video history is often characterized as difficult and heterogeneous, and this is in part due to the conflicting theoretical approaches to the notion of 'medium'. In early 1970s New York, there were two major strands of discourse on video: one saw and described video through a techno-utopian lens based on Marshall McLuhan's media theories, and the other, still steeped in the legacies of Clement Greenberg, treated video as though it was a static, flat and plastic medium. Neither was able to adequately articulate video's unique aesthetics, but they nonetheless dominated the American language of video during the early 1970s. These opposing views on video eventually came to a head in 1974 at the Open Circuits conference at the Museum of Modern Art, where practitioners of early video, such as Frank Gillette and Douglas Davis, faced hostility from other artists and critics such as John Baldessari and Robert Pincus-Witten. They clashed around the concept of 'medium', with each side accusing the other of being formalist, and these dialogues spill out onto various publications throughout the same year. The article will argue that this conflict lies at the root of American video art's difficulty with articulating its own history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Karol Irzykowski’s The Tenth Muse: Aesthetic Aspects of Cinema (1924) is the first extended study exploring the status of cinema as art in the Polish language. This article looks at these aspects of Irzykowski’s book that relate to his theory of animated film. As the author shows, Irzykowski’s perception of animation can be seen as an effect of his rapport with a Polish animator, Feliks Kuczkowski, as well as Irzykowski’s admiration of Paul Wegener’s films. However, as will be discussed, Irzykowski did not always perceive film as art in the same way as he did painting and sculpture. It is the author’s contention that it was the German critical thinker Rudolf Maria Holzapfel’s theory of appropriate and inappropriate arts that prompted Irzykowski to reconsider his views on film as art. As will be shown, Irzykowski’s theory of animated film developed largely through his familiarity with Kuczkowski’s work and Kuczkowski remains the only known Polish figure who made animated films since 1916. In line with many contemporary developments in the arts, Kuczkowski made his films according to his principle of ‘synthetic-visionary’ film. His innovative ideas are thought of as having influenced such key figures of Polish animation as Jan Lenica and Walerian Borowczyk, while aspects of Irzykowski’s theory can be found in the work of such key Polish avant-garde filmmakers of the 1930s as Jalu Kurek and Stefan Themerson. This article will demonstrate that the rapport between Irzykowski and Kuczkowski was crucial to establishing a dialogue between theory and practice as will be later seen in relation to the emerging film avant-gardes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of smart phone use, and its convergence with mapping infrastructures and large search and social media corporations, has led to a commensurate rise in the importance of location. While locations are still defined by fixed longitude/latitude coordinates, they now increasingly ‘acquire dynamic meaning as a consequence of the constantly changing location-based information that is attached to them’ becoming ‘a near universal search string for the world’s data’. As the richness of this geocoded information increases, so the commercial value of this location information also increases. This article examines the growing commercial significance of location data. Informed by recent calls for ‘medium-specific analysis’, we build on earlier work to argue that social media companies actively extract location data for commercial advantage in quite specific ways. By not paying due and careful attention to the specifics of data extraction strategies, political and cultural economic analyses of new media services risk eliding key differences between new media platforms, and their respective software systems, patterns of consumer use, and individual revenue models. In response, we develop a comparative analysis of two platforms – Foursquare and Google – and examine how each extracts and uses geocoded user data. From this comparative exploration of platform specificity, we aim to draw conclusions concerning marketing (economic) surveillance, and how Foursquare’s and Google’s operations work in the service of fostering the securitization of mobility - the process by which the capacity to track and predict mobility and associated patterns of consumption is directly productive of value. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The essay considers a number of video works made by Jamie Jenkinson using an iPhone. The discussion centres around the visible interactions between the technology – lens, file formats, codecs, resolution, etc. – subject matter and the way the camera is moved. The imagery generated by these interactions often exhibit aberrant effects, such as uneven blur, which point to the limitations and determinations – the specificity – of the technology. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of MATRIZes is the property of Universidade de Sao Paulo, Programa de Pos Graduacao em Ciencias da Comunicacao and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Certain television dramas of the past thirty years have often been described as 'cinematic' for displaying stylistic tendencies historically associated with feature films. This article argues that describing such shows as 'cinematic' misrepresents movies and television serials as artistic mediums, and tends to obscure their distinctive achievements. Against this critical tendency, the article accounts for the ending of Mad Men's fifth season not in terms of the series' 'cinematic' style, but in terms of how it handles images of faces and places to carry and express the special burden of history and future available to long-form serial television. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the early history of Cine Falcatrua, a Brazilian film society that deployed personal computers in order to exhibit movies downloaded from the internet in free weekly screenings, this article aims to show how cinematographic apparatus can be rearranged using domestic devices. In doing so, the text examines the logic behind the process of specification of media technology, paying attention both to the direct engagement with movie distribution as well as to the establishment of ancillary structures for the promotion and understanding of the primary medial operations. It concludes by making the case for how emerging practices, in order to become proper to the medium, must either be crystallized within the cinematographic circuit or cast out to other fields of creation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

No abstract available. This article was originally published by Parallel Press, an imprint of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries, as part of The International Journal of Screendance, Volume 1 (2010), Parallel Press. It is made available here with the kind permission of Parallel Press.

This paper presents a digital artefact (trailer and DVD) made out of the film archive of poet Jerome Rothenberg’s performance-conferences given at the Sorbonne and at the ENS-LSH in November 2005. The editing work undertaken with film artist Meryem De Lagarde led to a clearer understanding of issues of remediation, immediacy and hypermediacy, from the oppositional, Modernist legacy of artifice to the contemporary awareness of our collective, compliant fascination with images. Finally, editing raised issues of poetry film as genre, of medium-specific arts and of critical art.

This article discusses the theoretical and historical implications of three dimensions (3D) by revisiting Marshall McLuhan’s famous distinction between ‘hot’ and ‘cool’ media. McLuhan’s characterization of cinema as a ‘hot’ medium relies on its capacity to produce ‘high-definition’ imagery, and the pursuit of 3D in cinema in the 20th century had to do with approximating the total vision that only cinema was expected to offer in comparison with television as a ‘cool’ medium marked by a ‘low-definition’ image. By contrast, today’s resurgence of 3D in its digital form signals that high definition, hitherto regarded as specific to cinema, now involves other screens and interfaces that operate under the logic of media convergence and invite their users’ multisensory behaviors. In this context, we argue that this pervasiveness of 3D across different platforms, including mainstream digital 3D cinema, is symptomatic of the broader tendency of contemporary culture to become ‘hotter’ (i.e. to intensify human senses) and that certain experimental films provide an antidote to the tendency by incorporating low-definition images and offering the viewer a perceptual distance from which to reflect on their status. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Is cinematicity a virtue in film? Is lack of cinematicity a defect? Berys Gaut thinks so. He claims that cinematicity is a pro tanto virtue in film. I disagree. I argue that the term "cinematic" principally refers to some cluster of characteristics found in films featuring the following: expansive scenery, extreme depth of field, high camera positioning, and elaborate tracking shots. We often use the word as a term of praise. And we are likely right to do so. We are right if we mean that the film does well what movies often do well. We are wrong if we mean that the film is good for doing what is merely distinctive of film. This issue has important implications for understanding the role of the medium in artistic evaluation. I argue that we should reject Gaut's claim because it entails an implausibly strong medium specificity thesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article sets out, first of all, to systematically debunk arguments that attribute to the serial The Wire a medium specificity of "television," and second of all, to supply means for new conceptualizations of this kind of serial-drama media object. These matters are treated on the levels of technological materiality, media definitions, form, content, and production. The purpose is to lay the foundation for a more attentive and clear conceptual comprehension of what is approaching or has already begun to arrive: a time in which the initial phase of broadcasting of serial moving image dramas are either skipped or greatly diminished in importance, and in which they exist mainly in the form of On Demand streaming, or, more interestingly, in the form of DVD or downloaded files. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A Bazinian commitment to cinematic realism, grounded as it is in the ontology of the photograph, sets up the aesthetic ambition of cinema as irreparably opposed to the structures and ambitions of high modernism – whether high modernism be taken to have its essence in formal experiment, medium specificity, or negation. Bazin himself licenses such an opposition, but the sense of a divide here is not his alone: there are structural and grammatical reasons why realism (photographic or otherwise) and modernism appear as incompatible. Yet however strong this opposition is – and however much he himself sometimes endorses it – Bazin equally offers us resources for closing the gap. In his distinction between aesthetic and psychological realism, his sense of the importance of automatism in cinema's significance, and finally in his insistence that true representation is achieved through poetry, Bazin uncovers a concept of realism as transformative, not transparent, fidelity. This idea of poetic, formalist realism allows for a tentative reconciliation between modernism and realism generally. However, it does so by giving up on a robust idea of photographic transparency as the basis of cinema's power, and thus threatens to efface its specificity as a medium. Stanley Cavell's redescription of medium as automatism helps uncover a Bazinian version of cinematic specificity, one which allows for cinema's appetite for realism without reducing that capacity to a mere inflexible fact of the medium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is based on a paper I gave for the first seminar of a series organized by the AHRC Artists' Moving Image Research Network, held at Chelsea College of Art and Design in January 2011 - 'Rewriting History: Interrogating the Past and the Question of Medium Specificity'. The printed version tries to preserve the informal style of the talk, including its jumps of focus and attention. At the risk of being churlish about the 'Moving Image', which after all is embedded in the name of the Network and that of this journal, I argue against the notion of a Moving Image culture and its tendency towards homogeneity. I strongly support MIRAJ and its mission, and am glad to be part of it, but I want to question some of the consequences, as I see them, of an inclusive approach to media art in all its many shapes and forms, to which the Network is dedicated in principle and deed. In particular, I think we need more critical distinction and debate in this ever-growing area of practice. I refer to some of the seminar discussion and objections the paper led to, in the hope of stimulating still more responses. The debate goes on, in events, conferences and the art press. Originally, I was going to name this paper after King Lear's angry growl 'I'll teach you differences', but that hostage to fortune pitched it a bit high. I settled for a milder title, and I hope a milder tone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on discussions at a symposium held in Melbourne in 2011, this article describes the reactions of artists, curators and software engineers to the varied transitions between analogue and digital media. The authors argue that both the 'post-medium condition' mooted by Krauss and the 'Death of Cinema' theses of film scholars like Rodowick and Mulvey miss critical issues in these transitions and over-emphasize others. We make the case that there are more continuities than often recognized between analogue and digital; that transitional forms like video have not been analysed sufficiently; that software studies needs to be backed up with hardware studies; and that there is a new role for mediumspecific criticism. We argue that, in the current state of digital resources for production, distribution and display, each work needs to be analysed in its specificity, rather than ascribing universal qualities to imaginary abstractions such as 'digital media'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]