Catálogo de publicaciones - revistas

<jats:p> In order to assign space value and enter it into an exchange economy, capitalism works to reduce it to an abstract plan. Writing about this process, Henri Lefebvre coins the term ‘abstract space’ and describes the logics of this kind of space in detail. These logics are also at work in the digitally animated spaces of virtual cinematography, such as those used in The Matrix Reloaded (Andy and Larry Wachowski, 2003). Creating totalized, predictable spaces and populating them with highly instrumental and manageable digital replacements of actors (sometimes known as synthespians), virtual cinematography takes space and individuals to be open to geometric abstraction. Using Lefebvre’s work to interpret this virtual spatial production allows a critical evaluation of the motives and consequences of this kind of computer animation to take place, and emphasizes the manner in which virtual cinematography joins up with other visual systems of spatial representation and quantification. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Examining what the author calls ‘small-screen panoramas’, a set of software-based digital panorama services that provide the production and navigation of panoramic photographs available for users’ experience on small-screen devices (laptops, mobile phones, tablet PCs), this article argues that the panoramas’ algorithmic view and movement signal an emerging visual regime that remediates the scale and mobility of their pre-digital predecessors. Digital compositing technique reinstates the sensory and epistemological conditions of the panoramic, ‘tourist’ gaze of modernity as it combines discrete pictures of a location into a 360-degree seamless visual field that proffers an immersive form of spectatorship. At the same time, however, the applications undermine the visual field and spectatorship of the traditional panorama as their technological features activate the embodied, material, and contingent aspects of mobile media spectatorship: the portability of laptops and mobile phones and the applications’ algorithmic streamlining of 2D photographs. These examples, the author claims, demonstrate that, despite the applications’ efforts to create seamless virtual 3D images, they lead to the paradoxical coexistence of the animated and the static, of the immersive and the miniaturized, and the embodied and the disembodied. </jats:p>

<jats:p> Nonfiction has proved to be a long-term strategy of Native/First Nations filmmakers and, as this documentary tradition moves across contemporary mediums, one corner of its experimental aesthetics has focalized around animation. This article explores hybrid documentary approaches in Indigenous model animation across techniques and styles, namely digitally-supplemented stop-motion and game-based machinima. It begins by examining three principal characteristics of Indigenous animated documentaries: (1) they engage with the politics of documentary in the context of Indigenous and settler-colonial history; (2) they use animation to record stories and express ideas not authorized by the settler archive; and (3) they communicate via embedded Indigenous aesthetics and cultural protocols. A material analysis of Indigenous animation then accounts for how three Native artists centre re-mediation and re-embodiment in their work. These artists adapt new techniques in animation to documentary as a process of decolonization, precipitating a distinct hybrid aesthetics that travels across forms to question the veracity of settler documentary. Each reconstructs histories of settler colonialism – which has always chosen to record and authorize as ‘history’ some images and narratives and not others – with model animation practices and new media platforms. Indigenous animation expresses slippages between nonfiction and fiction by creating imagined documents, which strike at the legitimacy of settler institutions. </jats:p>