Haunted Machines and the Fear of Mechanic Life

The 2019 Udine/Gorizia International Film Studies Conference will investigate the interrelationships between automation, representation and “viewing/listening dispositives” from early to late modernity/postmodernity. In doing this, we would draw on the “1900 episteme” (which is the main feature of the “technical society that come into being in the 17th century and became the flourishing industrial society of 19th century”) and the tripartition spectator (or user)-machine-representation” (Albera and Tortajada, 2010). More precisely, we aim to stress the function of automatism in long-term dynamics of dispossession, integration, training, disorientation, deprivation, proletarization, and rejection of the human being/“subject” as a creator/producer and as a consumer/viewer/listener: how do these dispositives imitate human faculties? And how do they imitate the world that surrounds us? How do they imitate life? Not by chance, with the rise of an emerging “machine agency” and a new “subject of history” (Anders, 1980) between the 17th and 21th Century, “technologies took over”: automated cultural activities and daily routines “were increasingly imagined as living entities” (Parikka, 2010). For being capable of recording movement over time, the cinema and the media double the world that surrounds human beings.

1999

In popular imagination, ghosts, or the spirits of the departed have always existed as traces of the past. But today, like anything else in this world, if they want to survive they need to adjust to the present, if not future. Nowhere is this more visible than in contemporary Asian horror cinema, perhaps to a certain extent also because unlike in the rationally repressive west, many Asian cultures do not rush to deny spiritualism, but rather negotiate the ways in which spiritual experiences can apply to media and technology-infused global societies. This article focuses on examining the ways new media and visual technologies affect the representation of ghosts in contemporary Asian horror film, in effect producing a new variety of spirits, named here “ghosts in the machines.” These new spirits materialise within photographic and video images, transmit themselves through television frequency waves, become embedded in an electronic code, scramble the signal of video surveillance cameras, clone themselves using cellular technologies, replicate through text messages and emails, hack computer systems and infect the cyberspace better than any computer viruses known to man. Since the described phenomenon can be seen as a feature characteristic of contemporary Japanese horror cinema, this article will focus mostly on Japanese horror films and those Korean, Hong Kong and Thai films that seem to follow the Japanese model or exist in intertextual relations to it.

Moving Pictures, Living Machines. Automation, Animation and the Imitation of Life in Cinema and Media, 2020

After almost a decade of post-war reconstruction, from the 1950s to the early 1970s Italy went through a period of deep economic growth, usually referred to as the Italian economic miracle or boom, during which the country evolved from a relatively poor, rural nation to global industrial power. However, as it happened in many other western countries, what started out as a utopian phase of progress, turned out to be in fact a moment of drastic changes in human behavior and social life, brought by the mass migration from the countryside to metropolitan areas, the informatization of labor, the mass diffusion of television, and the birth of electronic culture. The countercultural movement of the 1960s, as well as several avant-garde artists associated with the movements of Arte Povera and Radical Architecture, exposed the dystopian consequences of the economic boom. Seen in retrospect, what was at stake for them was that electronic technology was eliciting the automation of life. This paper aims to explore the ambiguous technophilic dimension that surrounded electronic technology in Italy during the 1960s, as it emerged from two cinematic works that epitomized two antithetical positions: Elea Classe 9000 (1960) directed by Nelo Risi and Supersurface: An Alternative Model for Life on the Earth (1972) by Superstudio. The former is a 32-minute 35 mm documentary produced by Italian typewriters and computers manufacturer Olivetti to promote the company’s early computer series Elea 9000 designed by visionary architect and designer Ettore Sottsass. Directed by Risi, the film featured illustrations by graphic designer Giovanni Pintori and a soundtrack by experimental composer Luciano Berio, renowned pioneer of electronic music. The latter is a 10-minute 35 mm film by Florence-based Radical Architecture collective Superstudio on the occasion of their participation in the landmark exhibition Italy: the New Domestic Landscape, curated by Emilio Ambasz at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1972.

Ekphrasis. Images, Cinema, Theory, Media

The main purpose of this paper is to overview the differences between various embodied experiences we, as users, can have when interacting with contemporary visual media. By using the concept of modes of imagination, the author is approaching the problem of media specificity from another perspective. Using the four different "Ghost in the Shell" narratives as a coherent case study, the paper discusses the different modalities in which the most important categories of contemporary visual forms of representation (cinema, animated cartoons, graphic novels and video games) create immersive practice. The assumption is that "cinematic mode" or the "gaming mode" have their own ghost-like "modality", as they bringing the user/ reader/ viewer inside their imaginative world differently. The discussion about modes and modalities is not rejecting the semiotic modes theories, it rather proposes a change of view. Starting with the philosophical intuition of Jacques Derrida, who claimed that what we imagine is never the image that we see, by the fusion of the two fundamental dimensions of any illusion, this author takes into consideration the deep separation between image and imagination. Using the insightful method of "hauntology", the author overviews the most important theories about media specificity and proposes the use of cinematic modalities as experienced by the users of film as fictional world.

This article proposes an ecophilosophy of the cinema. It builds on Martin Heidegger’s articulation of art as ‘world-disclosing,’ and on a Whiteheadian and Deleuzian understanding of the universe as a lively and eventful place in which subjects and objects are persistently coming into being, jointly constituted in the process of their becoming. Accordingly, it proposes that cinema be considered a machine that produces or discloses worlds. These worlds are, at once, anthropomorphic, geomorphic, and biomorphic, with each of these registers mapping onto the ‘three ecologies,’ in Felix Guattari’s terms, that make up the relational ontology of the world: the social, the material, and the mental or perceptual. Through an analysis of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), I suggest that cinema ‘stalks’ the world, and that our appreciation of its potentials should similarly involve a kind of ‘stalking’ of its effects in the material, social, and perceptual dimensions of the world from which cinema emerges and to which it returns.

Significação, 2021

Significação, v. 48, n. 56, jul-dez 2021, p. 76-94 Based on Arlindo Machado's readings of Gilbert Simondon, still in the 1990s, we revisit this author to explore his thoughts on imagination, invention and the complex network of relationships between machines and humans, in a reflection on the practice of cinematographic photography and its images.

aniki: Revista Portuguesa da Imagem em Movimento / Portuguese Journal of the Moving Image, 2024

Introduction to the Special Section "The Natural World in Cinema", vol. 11, n.º 2 da aniki: Revista Portuguesa da Imagem em Movimento / Portuguese Journal of the Moving Image. With Maile Colbert and Susana Mouzinho

Cogent Arts & Humanities, 2017

This article compares two examples of industrial patronage in the late 1950s. The first is the 1958 filming of Le Chant du styrène by filmmaker Alain Resnais, with a voiceover of a poem by Raymond Queneau, with funding from the Péchiney firm. The second is the 1959 exhibition Forces et rythmes de l'industrie ("Forces and Rhythmes of Industry") by painter Reynold Arnould, organized with funding from 12 major French companies. We show how similar these two operations were, from two perspectives: first, the logic behind arts patronage for major firms of the time, and second, the esthetic and social issues at stake for the representation of industry in the context of the debate on automation. An historic and esthetic analysis of Resnais' film and Arnould's canvases provides an opportunity to discuss the societal concerns of this period of accelerated industrial development in Europe in the 1950s. We then look at the perspective of these artists in light of the work of sociologists from this period, who were conducting fieldwork in the same factories that Resnais filmed and Arnould painted.