Audio-visual Artefacts Research Articles

Audiovisual artefacts: the African politics of moving image loss

ABSTRACT Artefacts are human-made objects deemed culturally and historically significant. But they are also those scratches, burns and glitches that appear on audiovisual screens due to poor projection, improper storage or faulty processing. They are those unwanted additions that visualise the presence of loss. This paper explores the politics of audiovisual loss by looking at the history of the Ghana Film Industry Corporation film collection’s demise alongside the 2020 films by Onyeka Igwe – a so-called archive and No Archive Can Restore You – that feature a similar collection in Nigeria. Igwe’s exploratory camera floats around the Nigerian Film Corporation building documenting the filmic carnage within its vaults, reminding audiences that archival horror lies in the “colonial residue” of the archive’s architecture. Artefacts of decay in Igwe’s films, that mark the elimination of information from the image that restoration seeks to renew, are not the result of inaction, but acts of refusal. Film artefacts not only mark loss but are also traces of postcolonial affect. As such, I argue that archival neglect and the losses that it produces may also be acts of archival labour – an articulation of artefacting.

Music Syncing as Intermedial Translation

In this article I discuss the notion of intermedial translation in the context of audiovisual works. I begin by presenting Lars Elleström’s modality model as it provides the larger framework under which I then specify the scope of intermedial translation. After confronting different interpretation of the concept, I present my main contribution, which links this theoretical notion to the practice of music synchronization. I argue that the resulting approach provides a unique tool for the analysis of audiovisual artefacts. In order to further clarify this analytical perspective and prove its usefulness, I then proceed to apply it to artifacts created through a variety of software, ranging from music visualizers to video games. A look into 2006 Flash game Line Rider and the online community that spawned around it completes the article as my main case study.

Video, talk and text: How do parties communicate coherently across modalities in live videostreams?

This study explores how participants co-accomplish coherence in multi-modal conversation. We observed online watch parties, with an interest in the intertwining of text, talk and video. The data comes from two different communities on the live-streaming platform Twitch.tv. Each community consists of one live-streamer and their viewership. The live-streamers broadcast an audio-visual artifact, while simultaneously communicating with their viewers in real-time. The two were highly interactive, despite one (the streamer) speaking and reading, and the other (the chatters) typing and listening. The crisscross of modalities introduces challenges for the management and intelligibility of conversation. One coherence strategy involved a 4-stage process whereby streamers redirected viewers’ attention, and then initiated a collaborative activity. This 4–stage sequence illustrates a predictable structure that is potentially applicable to other digital & multimodal environments. Methodological challenges of digitally-mediated interaction are addressed, such as transcription of voice-and-text cross-modal conversation.

Involving older adults in the design process: a human-centric Design Thinking approach

A product’s acceptance depends on the experience that it provides to its users. To consider user’s contextualised specific needs an user-centred design process is recommended. Human-centric design considers human´s opinions as a design priority, and puts them in the “centre” of the iterative design process. To understand the end-users influence (adults 55+ experience) in product development, we conducted an empirical study with 25 participants, supported by a human-centric co-design thinking process (participatory design) with collection of qualitative data. In this article we report a Design Based Research (DBR) study, that compares the acceptance of a set of two audio-visual artefacts: designed with adults older than 55 and a design process supported only by the designer’s expertise. Overall we believe this study depicts evidence that audio-visual artefacts for the online platform ICTskills4All are more effective when co-designed and validated with end-users.

Hybrid places

Abstract This article is about adaptations to the regimentation of public and private living through the reorganisation of domestic space and time routines a year into changeable Covid-related restrictions. The discussion is based on narratives and audio-visual artefacts generated by participants from 20 UK households through the methodology of photovoice and that articulate domestic-related boundary-making processes and forms of space hybridisation in the ongoing changes caused by the pandemic. In the article, Covid-19 signage is represented by language and other semiotic markings that engender an inside spatial and social semiotics and that stands in a dialogic relationship with the outside spatial and social semiotics as dictated by the pandemic, and where domestic landscapes articulate forms of transmedia code-mixing that invest written words, sounds, and screens.

The Patch: An Artful Syn(aes)thetic Mapping of Linguistic Data through Collaborative Digital / Analogue Literacy Processes

The Patch workshop explores creative / critical analyses that can map the collectively relevant topoi of semiosis in linguistic texts according to the three ecologies as articulated by Félix Guattari. As creative pedagogues both in service and critical of creative economics, we valourize a generative practice, one that results in successive creative readings, writings, visualizations, sonifications and audiovisual artifacts. The Patch is a human-computer procedural algorithm, engaging a series of recursive and recombinant processes that utilize several software programs, collaborative writing and performance practices to bridge analogue and digital literacies. A total of 80 teacher education students, graduate students and faculty, working with a single input text, provided the data reported in this paper.

Effects of political versus expert messaging on vaccination intentions of Trump voters.

To increase COVID-19 vaccine uptake in resistant populations, such as Republicans, focus groups suggest that it is best to de-politicize the issue by sharing five facts from a public health expert. Yet polls suggest that Trump voters trust former President Donald Trump for medical advice more than they trust experts. We conducted an online, randomized, national experiment among 387 non-vaccinated Trump voters, using two brief audiovisual artifacts from Spring 2021, either facts delivered by an expert versus political claims delivered by President Trump. Relative to the control group, Trump voters who viewed the video of Trump endorsing the vaccine were 85% more likely to answer “yes” as opposed to “no” in their intention to get fully vaccinated (RRR = 1.85, 95% CI 1.01 to 3.40; P = .048). There were no significant differences between those hearing the public health expert excerpt and the control group (for “yes” relative to “no” RRR = 1.14, 95% CI 0.61 to 2.12; P = .68). These findings suggest that a political speaker’s endorsement of the COVID-19 vaccine may increase uptake among those who identify with that speaker. Contrary to highly-publicized focus group findings, our randomized experiment found that an expert’s factually accurate message may not be effectual to increase vaccination intentions.

Transparency as metajournalistic performance: The New York Times’ Caliphate podcast and new ways to claim journalistic authority

Transparency is increasingly touted as a strategic tool for elevating journalistic authority. Despite this push, literature has overlooked how transparency can be utilized for authority purposes in audiovisual artefacts. In this paper, we conduct a qualitative thematic analysis of The New York Times’ podcast Caliphate to examine how transparency is strategically weaponized to stake a claim to journalistic authority. Based on the premise that transparency is a metajournalistic performance – a type of journalism about journalism that is performative in acting on people’s perception of journalistic authority – we identify three of those metajournalistic performances in the podcast: Revealing the journalistic process, Constructing the reporter’s persona and Reaffirming the journalistic culture. Together, they exhibit a form of self-celebratory transparency that strategically performs boundary-setting, definitional control and legitimization functions, in a bid to impress audiences and have them recognize the journalistic authority of the Caliphate reporters and The Times. We conclude with the implications of these strategic performances of transparency. First, how it can be used by reporters to reinstate verticality over audiences. Second, how the journalistic culture (norms, values, practices, etc.) can be transparently projected outward (to the public) or inward (to the journalist themself) to elevate authority – a new concept for journalism studies. Third, how metajournalistic performances of transparency may reveal power dynamics within the journalistic field.

Sound in the Mise-en-jeu: Conveying Meaning through Videogames’ Mediated Space

Mise-en-jeu is the ontological equivalent of film’s mise-en-scène. As such, mise-en-jeu is a cinematographic language through which game designers communicate. It offers designers the ability to create and shape the aesthetics of videogames’ mediated space, the space of the cinematographic presentation.Our prior work on mise-en-jeu focused on the visual aspects of videogames. With that in mind, starting with an analysis of mise-en-scéne, this paper provides an understanding of how sound is relevant for meaning-making through mise-en-jeu. Since videogames make use of some of motion picture’s filming techniques, we first studied practitioners and academics in the history of film, approaching videogames afterwards.The results of this research show that sound in mise-en-jeu allows designers to provoke emotions in players and to assist those players in formulating meaning as intended by the designers. We also found that mise-en-jeu allows for the deconstruction and interpretation of the characteristics of various variables of videogames’ mediated space. Therefore it allows us to understand better the relationship between videogames as audiovisual artefacts and the potential meanings that emerge from playing them.

Effects of Political versus Expert Messaging on Vaccination Intentions of Trump Voters

To increase COVID-19 vaccine uptake in resistant populations, such as Republicans, focus groups suggest that it is best to de-politicize the issue by sharing five facts from a public health expert. Yet polls suggest that Trump voters trust former President Donald Trump for medical advice more than they trust experts. We conducted an online, randomized, national experiment among 387 non-vaccinated Trump voters, using two brief audiovisual artifacts from Spring 2021, either facts delivered by an expert versus political claims delivered by President Trump. Relative to the control group, Trump voters who viewed the video of Trump endorsing the vaccine were 85% more likely to answer “yes” as opposed to “no” in their intention to get fully vaccinated (RRR = 1.85, 95% CI 1.01 to 3.40; P = .048). There were no significant differences between those hearing the public health expert excerpt and the control group (for “yes” relative to “no” RRR = 1.14, 95% CI 0.61 to 2.12; P = .68). These findings suggest that a political speaker’s endorsement of the COVID-19 vaccine may increase uptake among those who identify with that speaker. Contrary to highly-publicized focus group findings, our randomized experiment found that an expert’s factually accurate message may not be effectual to increase vaccination intentions.

Aspectos del montaje en la poética de Val del Omar

La múltiple producción del cineasta, fotógrafo, poeta e inventor José Val del Omar permite pensar una noción del montaje desplegada bajo el signo de la intermedialidad. Al recorrer medio siglo de su práctica artística en diversos formatos, su actividad como inventor de artefactos audiovisuales, más su producción como escritor, se revela una común preocupación por el montaje ejercido por diversos medios, entendido como elemento clave de una verdadera misión para el cine: la transformación del espectador. Este artículo recorre, mediante el hilo conductor del montaje en sus dimensiones poéticas, estéticas y técnicas, algunas operaciones fundamentales de su obra realizativa y su pensamiento.

Short-film adaptations of Munro’s stories in the 1980s. A multimodal stylistic analysis

This paper presents and deconstructs the four cliches regarding the inferiority of adaptations to adapted texts identified by Linda Hutcheon (2013), by examining screen adaptations of Alice Munro’s short stories. It focuses on three short Canadian films released in the 1980s: Boys and Girls (1983), Thanks for the Ride (1983) and Connection (1986). The theory derives from Hutcheon’s reconceptualization of adaptation(s), while the methodology relies on multimodal stylistic analysis. The inspection of the adaptation process reveals lines of narrative continuity and discontinuity that show the distinct narrative potential of audio-visual artefacts. Contrary to what is commonly thought and expressed by the cliches, the three Canadian films manage to negotiate intimacy and distance through point of view; to express interiority; to shape nonlinear, fractured and layered temporality; to give form to metaphors and other figures. In Thanks for the Ride , the representation and negotiation of intimacy and distance in point of view are central and fluid, functional to the intersectional discussion about gender and social class. Interiority is expressed in Boys and Girls through close-ups and eye-angles, with particular attention to the filmic representation of the female protagonist Margaret. Connection deploys and intertwines two diegetic and temporal plans, and the resurfacing past profoundly affects the present time. Ultimately, all three films convincingly depict a mirror scene, a semiotically layered and complex trope, which represents Munro’s concern with introspection.

A teacher performing action research: capturing pupils’ perspectives of didactic relations

In this practitioner research, I work as a teacher-researcher and examine my own teaching. In the paper I have answered the question: How can pedagogical action research be used as a methodology in capturing pupils’ perceptions of didactic relations? In this article I describe how I was able to implement the goals set in the curriculum and at the same time collect and analyse data with my pupils. The data for this paper is narrative and it comprises 136 pictures and 25 audio-visual artefacts (20 picture books, three iMovie videos and two PowerPoint presentations) created by 4th grade students. This study supported the pupils’ agency, the core goal of pedagogical action research, on many levels. The pupils were able to choose the number of pictures and the application they wanted to use. The methods used in the study also worked in launching pupils’ perspectives of subject didactics and issues connected to the traditional classification of didactics: what to study, how to study and what purpose to study for and gave me an opportunity to develop my teaching according to the pupils’ wishes. However, in the study I failed to reveal the pupils’ perspectives of the pedagogical relationship between them and myself.

Prison Views: Rethinking the Moving Image in the era of transmedia communication.

The paper presents an on-going research project aimed at exploring the fast modifications in the area of audiovisual communication and of the moving image. The combination between the ubiquity, ease of access, improved capacity of ‘self-producing’ audiovisual artifacts, and the medium’s communicative force and interactivity, have opened a completely new season for this domain of communication. A key aspect is a relevant shift in the way information is delivered. One can today witness a migration process in which contents that were traditionally delivered in the most diverse formats tend to be re-packaged into audiovisual form. In this framework, the formulation of the audiovisual artifact as an individual, independent piece is increasingly being questioned in favour of the communication landscape described by Henry Jenkins as transmedial: an online distributed space, populated by intertwined multi-media contents. This not only produces a massive proliferation in the available information in audiovisual (or ‘multimedia’) format, but greatly impacts the foundations of the moving image as a language.Thanks to a grant from our Regional government we are currently developing an experimental research project for an exhibit on the historic Museum of Alghero 19th century city’s prison. A unique opportunity of exploring the interactions between the physical and intangible dimensions of information design, the project revolves on a series of exhibit displays, populated by short audiovisual artifacts that either revisit audiovisual narrative formulas such as the documentary and the historical reconstruction, and venture to emerging hybrid formulas such as interactive augmented reality. The paper describes the first outcomes of this ongoing research within an exhibit project that integrates space, interactivity, real artifacts and digital storytelling, taking into scrutiny the evolving role of moving image artefacts in the emerging scenario of hybrid communicative environments.

Monitoring of audio visual quality by key indicators

Over 10 billion hours of video are watched online every month. Together with high definition television broadcasting and the rise in high quality video on demand, this makes quality assessment a key task in the global multimedia market. Automating quality checking is currently based on finding major audiovisual artefacts. The Monitoring Of Audio Visual quality by key Indicators (MOAVI) subgroup of the Video Quality Experts Group (VQEG) is an open collaborative project for developing No-Reference models for monitoring audiovisual service quality. The purpose of this paper is to report on the development of the audiovisual part of this project, which includes the detection of muting, clipping and lip synchronization (also known as lip sync) artefacts.

The Sounds and Sights of Natural Childbirth: Films and Records in Antenatal Preparation Classes, 1950s-1980s.

Film and sound recordings are a ubiquitous part of the antenatal preparation courses that serve as a rite of passage to parenthood in Western Europe and North America. This article analyses a sample of these didactic tools used in classes from the 1950s to the 1980s, the heyday of the natural childbirth movement. These audio-visual artefacts both reflected and conditioned expectations for women's behaviour during labour and birth through their representation of pain. They demonstrate changing norms in the role of the father, but show how physician authority-and male authority more broadly-remained largely unchallenged. Two phases are discernable in these sources. From the 1950s through the mid-1960s, natural childbirth was presented as essentially painless. From the late 1960s through the 1980s, pain and effort in labour and birth found graphic representation on the screen, reflecting a shift in what was considered a desirable birth experience and what natural childbirth preparation could accomplish.

Everybody’s Talking About Pop Music: The Evolution of the Cinematic Video Game

This paper explores the historical links between the technical limitations of video game audio and the creative solutions that were derived to bypass them. Early musical experimentation within video games owes much to innovative pioneers who developed ways to incorporate compelling sound effects and music within mainstream game titles. However, as the technical limitations receded, so too did the incentive for game developers and musicians to develop a distinctively video-game aesthetic for providing musical accompaniment. Promising experiments into the effectiveness of adaptive audio became side-lined as the games industry looked to cinema as an inspiration and model to apply. The result is that music in video games has now largely lost, or marginalised, its most powerfully distinctive feature—the ability to be responsive to the interactivity of the medium. Within this paper we also discuss the use of mainstream music within video games, and how the cultural connotations of song selection serve as a kind of developer annotation. Similar to their use in cinema and television, popular songs offer an opportunity to add a kind of complex aural ideography to a story without requiring large amounts of exposition or meta-textual representation. However, these narrative tools have come at a cost—while a useful compatible convention of audio-visual artefacts, they serve mainly to homogenize the use of music between what could be significantly different mediums.

An Afropolitan Muse

This article discusses the moral positions and ethical projects of an urban music culture in contemporary Mali. The story unfolds through close and sustained analysis of a single audiovisual artifact: the music video for Sidiki Diabate’s “Djeliya.” To begin with, the essay addresses the specifically “cultural” register of morality the video represents, through the local moorings and collective interests of a musical mode of being defined by kinship, traditional aesthetics, and a rich oral historical consciousness: jeliya . In the mix are the author’s own memories of life among the Diabate griots, going back nearly two decades. Rooted in the music culture of jeliya , the essay then considers the ethical routes of modern griots like Sidiki Diabate, whose performance practices and cultural productions emerge from but cannot be reduced to moral topoi; who cultivate a sense of self in the world mindful of heritage and tradition. Yet, there are other moral and ethical stories to tell about this video, the music culture it represents, and the African society of which it is a part. Watching and listening at a time of internecine conflict and regional turmoil, the article considers the “absent presences” that inform (and sometimes haunt) the video’s contemporary reception. Beyond culture, the social imperatives of the nation, city, religion, aesthetics, social media, and professional identity come into focus to evoke a complex, urban African structure of feeling: Afropolitanism.

Short Film Experience: Introduction

Since the advent and standardization of the theatrical feature length film, the audio-visual short has been more or less marginalized in the discussions on cinematic experience. Historically stretching from the ‘early cinema’ of the vaudeville, to the now obsolete ‘little films’ of YouTube and beyond, the audio-visual short traverses a wide variety of media platforms, practices and technologies, including animation, video installation art, video clips and TV commercials, as well as animated GIFs, machinima and DIY movies, made to measure for handheld devices. The widespread usage of the format suggests that short audio-visual artefacts are not an anomaly or rarity on the periphery of cinema, but rather should be put at the centre of our discussions when rethinking cinematic experience and the moving image today. Such is the request we have made to the contributors to this volume: to write a short essay on short film experience.

Audiovisual cultural artifacts of protest in the Basque Country

In this article we propose the emergence of a new kind of visual protest and alternative communication called the Audiovisual Cultural Artifact of Protest (ACAP). These will be studied in the context of the Basque Country, which currently combines structural and conjunctural characteristics that make it an outstanding laboratory for the study of these artifacts. A theoretical analysis of the complex relationships between power, communication and resistance will be carried out, and a reading is proposed that deals with the different planes on which these resistances and disputes are expressed. Based on this analysis, four kinds of audiovisual artifacts produced in the Basque Country are studied. For the empirical analysis, the methodological reflections of visual sociology are taken into consideration. The results provide an overview of these Audiovisual Cultural Artifacts of Protest and the theoretical discussion confirms the emergence of these new forms of visual protest, indicating the existence of a broad-based dynamic in which their proliferation and diversification is occurring. The analysis of the case of the Basque Country allows these tactical and communicative innovations to be contextualised and a discussion to take place about the importance of that context, the discourse’s construction and the possible trend towards spectacularisation of the resistances.Caption: #U12Bilbora: MobiLIPDUBzioa Durangon (2012).