London College of Communication

Wiebke Leister: 'Echoes and Afterlives' Dew whitens into morning. Faintly glowing. An empty canvas, blank sheet of paper unfolded. Seeping through shadows, exposed. Breath fogging a window, face like marble. Shadow-absorbing powder, thick as mud. Opaque surface, no more than milky liquid.

An artistic research project, exhibition and catalogue. As part of the one year MA seminar ‘Photography as Artistic Research’ we asked after the cornerstones of what it means to be human today. These processual gestures of searching for different modes of being were brought together in an exhibition and an accompanying catalogue to provoke and reach out to further ultimate questions about our various medial and inter-medial gestures of researching life, the universe, and everything as a way of being-in-the-world. Artists: Moritz Biele, Franziska Bulgrin, Meller Ehlert, Cathleen Falckenhayn, Simon Grunert, Lukas Heibges, Christian Hemmer, Ines Konitz, Wiebke Leister, Corinna Mehl, Katrin Ribbe. Opening: Wed 26 June 2019 Exhibition: 28 June - 13 July 2019 Artists Unlimited Screening: Fri 28 June Filmhaus Bielefeld Info: Dr Wiebke Leister, DAAD Visiting Professor Photography, Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences.

Wiebke Leister: 'Echoes and Afterlives' Dew whitens into morning. Faintly glowing. An empty canvas, blank sheet of paper unfolded. Seeping through shadows, exposed. Breath fogging a window, face like marble. Shadow-absorbing powder, thick as mud. Opaque surface, no more than milky liquid.

In 1964, Marshall McLuhan warned about the deaf, blind and dumb contemplation of the clash of electric technology against the Gutenberg technology (1964:38). Today, Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han warns against the advent of digital technologies and about a similar drunk obnubilation that clouds our society from noticing the radical change of paradigm (2013:11). The fascinating development of New Media, Social Media and New Technologies have transformed our cultural habits, our means to relate to others and to perceive reality. We've become a digital image of ourselves that we've voluntarily ingested into the Media-the swarm, in Han's terms. New Media is playing a role as a mean to perceive and relate to reality, which is more essentially visual, democratic and horizontal, but that threatens the hierarchy of communication and knowledge. Digital Media is no country for experts, a land of user-produced contents (Bird:2011) that only need to be validated by a segment of the swarm. Everything is possible in the Digital Media; it has become a Prosthetic Imagination that allows to articulate fictional realities that influence the 'real world' and to undermine what not long ago where undeniable truths. At the same time, it enhances free creativity and the democratization of culture, allowing the development of free-contents, interactive media, cross-media, transmedia, fan-arts and so on, transforming and customizing the consumption of culture and information. New Media, as a Prosthetic Imagination, has transformed the concept of 'Truth'. And we're so fascinated with it, we don't know what to do.

How do we write stories for interactivity? From a storyteller's perspective, the notion of interactivity challenges the traditional conception of telling stories, defined by an author-driven narrative and a receptive audience. Interactive technologies have pushed the boundaries of those traditional rules, giving storytellers the opportunity to question, redefine and play with conventions almost two thousand years old. This ongoing research focuses on how are our traditional storytelling techniques and strategies affected by the emergence of interactive media, and on how do we adapt what we already know about narrative into an interactive storytelling. 'The Hunter & the Wolff' is an interactive, plot-driven, loose adaptation of the traditional tale 'Little Red Riding Hood', which aims to test the idea of hands-off interactive storytelling in Cinematic Virtual Reality (CVR), by using the Object Based Media (OBM) approach to contents built with reconfigurable prerendered assets. This paper reflects on the process of writing and design of an interactive story within the mentioned frame. It specifically focuses on the development of two elements: a script and a hands-off interactive model for CVR, developed simultaneously to reinforce the narrative and interactive concepts in both media. From a narratologist's perspective, this project explores the possibility of an interactivity that gives users agency over the storytelling devices and techniques instead of affecting characters and environment, what I'm calling On-Narration Interactivity. This creative writing and design process approached the limitations for interactivity in CVR through spatial storytelling techniques; Designing a reconfigurable soundscape with OBM with both dramatic and interactive purposes; Writing a story that facilitates a leaned-back hands-off interactivity and Proposing a type of interactivity based on instant and instinctive reactions. All these challenges merge together in the proposal of an On-Narration Interactivity, aimed to give users the agency to affect the narration instead of the storyworld.

Philosopher Byung-chul Han has warned how our society is witnessing in a state of drunk obnubilation the shift of paradigm from the McLuhanian electronic thinking into a digital state of mind (2013:11). Storytelling is not immune to digitality’s enchants.
We, film and video practitioners seem to still be fascinated with this new technology without fully understanding its consequences or its place in the bigger paradigm shift that is the advent of digital thinking. We’re not always aware, for instance, that digital video consumption has reinforced individuality, against the traditional communality of meeting around the box in our living rooms (Ang:1995, Lotz:2007).
Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and personalized consumption platforms such as Netflix are based mainly on enabling audiences to customize consumption and make it individual. If we go further, interactive storytelling can place the passive spectator in a new role inside the story. Digital technologies are facilitating developers and artists to generate experiences where spectators control the media – the mediator – and, sooner than later, will be able to participate of the content – the story. For us, practitioners, this generates a series of philosophical questions regarding the once receptive ontology of the spectator and the epistemological experience of facing the world from a digital, data-driven and interfaced optic. Interactive media eliminates the need of channels and mediators. Interactive storytelling personalizes the narrative experience, making it more intimate but also lonelier. Digitality erases mediation while, at the same time, constitutes itself as a barrier between the immersed spectator and the communality of cinema and television. This paper presents the findings of a first creative experiment in the frame of an ongoing research, which aims, from a practitioner’s position, to observe the ontological and epistemological shifts of the video spectator in the advent of digitality.

During the last decade, Chilean television has faced a crisis involving consistent ratings decrease, advertisement bailing out, lowering budgets, less original productions and the inability to find solutions within a business model that was successful in the 90s and that the managements refuse to abandon. A common feature of the crisis is the channels' passivity to embrace new broadcasting technologies driven by the internet, what we commonly call 'New Media', consumption through devices other than the television and a more significant audience engagement. Technologically, the industry is preparing itself for the implementation of DTTV (Digital Terrestrial Television) in 2018-as a reference, DTTV exists in the UK since 1999-while a significant part of the audience-people younger than 50 with access to internet-are migrating to New Media and abandoning traditional Chilean contents that are not possible to find there. In this context, several streaming experiments and enterprises have been released in the last couple of years, offering a window for Chilean contents that don't reach the channels and a chance to study the behaviour of Chilean audiences towards post-broadcasting technologies.

Este estudio sobre audiencias en festivales de cine en Chile establece cuatro categorías analíticas de audiencia, según hábitos de consumo: reales, transitorias, potenciales y específicas. En base a una metodología mixta - entrevistas en profundidad, encuesta y observación participante en 6 festivales de cine - se arrojaron conclusiones sobre todos los actores del sector audiovisual: sector público, industria, realizadores, distribuidores, festivales y audiencias. Los resultados dan cuenta de la falta de un proyecto transversal al sector, y se destacan las diferentes estrategias de convocatoria de los festivales y la disparidad en sus resultados, donde se observan casos de poco conocimiento de sus audiencias y otros con mayor cercanía al público.

Resumen Este estudio sobre audiencias en festivales de cine en Chile establece cuatro categorías analíticas de audiencia, según hábitos de consumo: reales, transitorias, potenciales y específicas. En base a una metodología mixta �entrevistas en profundidad, encuesta y observación participante en 6 festivales de cine� se arrojaron conclusiones sobre todos los actores del sector audiovisual: sector público, industria, realizadores, distribuidores, festivales y audiencias. Los resultados dan cuenta de la falta de un proyecto transversal al sector, y se destacan las diferentes estrategias de convocatoria de los festivales y la disparidad en sus resultados, donde se observan casos de poco conocimiento de sus audiencias y otros con mayor cercanía al público.