Journal articles on the topic 'Architecture et cinéma'

Au début des années 1920, l’architecture cinématographique en est encore à ses balbutiements. Si une poignée d’architectes (Henri Sauvage, Marcel Oudin, E. Vergnes, Charles Siclis, Auguste Bluysen) et d’exploitants aspire à la naissance d’une architecture spécifique, adaptée à la projection et affranchie de toute filiation avec l’héritage théâ­tral, l’éclectisme des solutions mises en oeuvre – parfois même leur archaïsme – témoigne de l’effervescence de ces années de recherche. En France, il faut attendre le lancement commercial des films sonorisés, puis leur généra­lisation au cours des années 1930, pour que le cinéma connaisse une seconde naissance. Les directeurs de salles deviennent les maîtres d’ouvrage d’un important chantier de sonorisation et de modernisation des lieux de projection. Saisissant cette opportunité pour inventer une architecture qui satisfasse pleinement aux exigences du spectacle et de l’exploitation cinématographiques, les architectes captent et mettent à l’épreuve le concept même de modernité.

Renommé tant pour ses essais sur le son au cinéma que pour ses compositions de musique concrète, Michel Chion (né en 1947) produit également un travail cinématographique et vidéo qui s’inscrit dans le prolongement de son écriture musicale. Oeuvre-somme d’une durée de 2 h 30 min,La messe de terreest une véritable « liturgie audio-logo-visuelle » qui associe la musique concrète à une composition très sophistiquée des images. Si l’oeuvre est dominée par la césure, le clivage entre ce que l’on voit et ce que l’on entend, sa trajectoire fait peu à peu converger l’image et le son dans la constitution commune d’une « architecture de temps ». Dans les marges du genre de la messe se laissent alors deviner les traces d’un autoportrait vidéo croisant lehome movieet le journal de travail.

RésuméL’article évalue la contribution de la sémiotique post-greimassienne aux recherches sur les rapports entre les arts. Sa démarche est fondée sur l’hypothèse d’une fécondité conceptuelle de la théorie du langage pour construire un modèle généralisable des relations interartistiques. Ce projet théorique s’appuie sur de nombreux exemples, entre les XVIIIe et XXIe siècles, montrant les liens entre musique, poésie et peinture, entre musique et architecture, et entre peinture, roman et cinéma. Il conduit à dégager d’abord les transpositions qui, limitées au seul plan de l’expression, visent une spécularité sensorielle, formant une « mathesis du sensible ». Approfondissant ensuite les homologies entre les deux plans des langages, on examine la manière dont leurs liens peuvent être remotivés, ouvrant alors sur une conception élargie du semi-symbolisme. Puis, en envisageant la relation interartistique sous la domination du contenu, on s’intéresse aux modalités d’emboîtement et de capture d’une œuvre par une autre, à travers un réexamen d’un motif trans-artistique par excellence : l’ekphrasis. Enfin, eu égard aux spécificités des langages, à leur autonomie et à leur relative étanchéité, on interroge leur résistance au transfert, à partir d’exemples qui, entre tensions et conflictualités, narrativisent les rencontres interartistiques.

From the 1930’s on, a variant in the western architecture of movie theatres built in previous decades came to light. This variant, smaller and more unassuming in its decoration and size, was the result of another economic context and, above all, of a novel programming of newscasts and documentaries in short sessions and continuous slideshows called, depending on the country of your projection, ‘newsreels’, ‘cinegiornali’, ‘actualités filmées’, or ‘wochenschauen’. The establishment of the chain of movie theatres ‘Cinéac -cinéma et actualités’ in French-speaking countries, mainly by the entrepreneur Reginald Ford, gave rise to the proposal of spatial and technical answers to the demands of aspects such as acoustics, optics, a continuous flow of people, safety or ventilation, from the sector of architecture which was most functionalist. In this article the Cinéac built by the architects Adrienne Gorska and Pierre de Montaut, pioneers in projects for this program of leisure, will be analysed. The aim is to demonstrate the technical rigor on which constructiveness, as the leitmotiv of longed for perception, was based. The critical re-reading of layouts and sections will reveal that, behind the prominence of bright facades, there were hidden spatial criteria different from those of the previous cinemas, leading to, as a whole, what was to be a typological adaptation to a function that had already been established

This paper looks at recent examples of how drawing is advancing into the digital age: in London: the annual symposium on Thinking Through Drawing; in Paris: an exhibition at the Grand Palais, Artistes et Robots; a conference at the Institut d’études avancées on Space-Time Geometries and Movement in the Brain and in the Arts; and, at the Drawing Lab, Cinéma d’Été. These events are contrasted to a recent decline in drawing instruction in pre-professional programs of art, architecture, and design as well as in pre-K12 art education due largely to the digital revolution. In response, I argue for the ongoing importance of learning to draw both in visual art and in general education at all levels in the digital age.

Verdier est une maison d’édition indépendante avec un siège social à Lagrasse, dans l’Aude, et une permanence à Paris. La maison est aujourd’hui co-gérée par Colette Olive et Michèle Planel. Ensemble avec Gerard Bobillier et Benoît Rivéro (qui quittera le groupe assez vite), elles ont été à l’origine d’une aventure éditoriale extra­ordinaire. Les titres (environ 700) du catalogue édité en 2019 à l’occasion des quarante années d’existence se regroupent en cinq grandes rubriques : littérature, sciences humaines, philosophie, art, architecture et cinéma, spiritualités. À la fondation de la maison en 1979, les éditeurs ont laissé derrière eux leur militan­tisme politique, sans pour autant renier leur volonté de contribuer à transformer sinon le monde, du moins les consciences. Le cata­logue témoigne d'une exigence sans faille ainsi que d’une extraordinaire ouverture au monde. Né en plein cœur des Corbières, Verdier a voulu se situer au croisement de différentes cultures. En font preuve les collections de traductions de plusieurs langues étrangères, dont l’arabe et l’hébreu. Le fonds comporte des textes fonda­teurs tels le Guide des égarés de Moïse Maïmonide, Les Batailles nocturnes de Carlo Ginzburg, Les récits de la Kolyma (2003) de Varlam Chalamov, mais il montre aussi l’émergence d’auteurs français importants, tels Pierre Michon et Pierre Bergounioux. Comment une maison d’édition qui se caractérise par un fonds exigeant a-t-elle réussi à garder son indé­pendance sans faire de concessions ? Comment a-t-elle su survivre aux naufrages économiques, éviter d’être écrasée dans des reprises commerciales incer­taines ? Comment a-t-elle fait face à la transformation radi­cale de l’industrie du livre, c’est-à-dire sa fabrication, sa diffusion et sa médiatisation ? Ce sont les questions que nous avons posées à Colette Olive, dans le cadre d’un entretien visant à mettre en lumière le travail accompli durant une quarantaine d’années par cette maison d’édition singu­lière.

Cet article interroge, à travers l’étude du cas parisien, l’idée reçue selon laquelle l’exotisme aurait marqué une phase importante de l’architecture cinématographique pendant l’entre-deux-guerres. Il s’agit de mettre en lumière les raisons d’être et l’ampleur de cette tendance en analysant le parcours des architectes et des commanditaires de cinémas ainsi que leur architecture dans le contexte des échanges internationaux avant de terminer par la réception et le devenir de ces exemples d’exotisme. La méthode consiste à croiser nos recherches doctorales avec des travaux sur l’exotisme et l’orientalisme dans l’art occidental. Cette synthèse a montré que le recours aux motifs exotiques dans les salles parisiennes est relativement précoce, mais ce mode décoratif reste marginal par rapport à la tendance Art déco. Cependant, bien que leurs premiers exploitants aient tous fait faillite, la singularité de ces cinémas a été le principal garant de leur survie et préservation comme patrimoine architectural et cinématographique.

RÉSUMÉ L'historiographie parallaxiale renvoie à la manière par laquelle le cinéma des premiers temps apparaît lorsqu'il est considéré selon la perspective de la fin du XXe siècle. Le présent article traite des parallèles qu'on peut établir entre la première décennie du cinéma et la diversification des médias visuels dans les deux dernières décennies du siècle. Ces similitudes ont été théorisées par les chercheuses féministes Miriam Hansen, Anne Friedberg et Giuliana Bruno, qui ont soutenu que les sphères publiques caractéristiques de ces deux périodes ont engendré une forme de spectatorat très différente de celle que proposait la « théorie du dispositif ». La diversité des médias et des positions de lecture, ainsi que les diverses architectures de réception, semblent renvoyer à un certain modèle de modernité et à un regard qui offre un espace au spectatorat féminin. Le présent article tente de résumer et de rassembler ces théories en insistant particulièrement sur leur valeur à titre d'historiographie du cinéma des premiers temps.

Les quatre réécritures filmiques du roman de Fontane, Effi Briest, se trouvent confrontées aux éléments fondateurs des significations fontaniennes que sont : métaphore, temps, reprise. Chaque film les « traite » à sa manière. Ceux de Luderer (1970) et de Jugert (1955) éludent vite la question. Celui de Gründgens (1938) offre l’intérêt de se construire sur une théâtralité que le cinéma s’emploie à exhausser. Seul, le film de Fassbinder (1972) fait porter facture et interrogation filmiques sur la métaphore et le jeu face au réel. Assumant le statut littéraire du récit, le cinéma met dès lors en oeuvre un ensemble de processus spécifiques : fondu au blanc, reprise iconique, jeu de miroirs « glaçant » les personnages, effet de dissociation obtenu par la lecture off du texte ou par son inscription à l’écran. Le film, par suite, toujours déjà réécriture, entre oeuvre et reprise, élabore une polysémie architecturale que fonde tout un art de « rythmer les passages ».

RÉSUMÉ Le passage comme type architectural du XIXe siècle et le cinématographe comme mode spécifique de représentation du tournant du siècle dernier sont des dispositifs de médiation permettant aux individus d'inscrire leur rapport au monde dans des processus apparentés et complémentaires l'un de l'autre. Notre réflexion portera ici sur les rapports entre ces deux dispositifs qui, quoique hétérogènes à plusieurs égards, participent, chacun à leur façon, à la structuration des individus.

Das Wort aus Stein de Kurt Rupli est plus qu’un film d’anticipation. Ce moyen métrage institutionnel produit par la UFA en 1939 est l’expression d’une démesure architecturale qui fait appel au cinéma pour donner réalité aux décors de l’idéologie technocratique nazie. Das Wort aus Stein montre la nouvelle Allemagne telle qu’elle s’imagine avant d’être rasée par les bombardements ennemis qui la menacent déjà au moment du tournage. Une avalanche de pierres, présage prémonitoire du désastre, sert de générique aux projets d’Hitler. À travers l’analyse de certains passages du film, des photos de tournage, des maquettes, d’articles d’époque, ce travail développe l’apocalypse dans laquelle les plans nazis entraînent l’Europe, le peuple juif et finalement l’Allemagne.

The book review is devoted to the materials of the 10th International Scientific Forum “Dialogue of Arts and Art Paradigms” (“SCIENCEFORUM PAN-ART 9”), held on December 30, 2022 by the International Center of Complex Artistic Research of the Saratov State Conservatory (volumes 46-56 of the almanac). The theme of the forum is “A grand experiment of the 20th century: Pro et contra (To the 100th anniversary of the formation of the USSR and the 30th anniversary of its collapse)” (volumes 46-53), the study of artistic culture in all its manifestations (volumes 54-55). Volume 56 is dedicated to the 80th anniversary of the birth of the forum’s author A. I. Demchenko. The materials of the forum are addressed to specialists in various fields – literature, fine arts, architecture, musical art, theater, cinema, folklore.

Tony Day and Maya H.T. Liem (eds), Cultures at war: The Cold War and cultural expression in Southeast Asia (Manneke Budiman) Fox, Richard, Critical reflections on religion and media in contemporary Bali (Martin Ramstedt) Faisal S. Hazis, Domination and contestation: Muslim bumiputera politics in Sarawak (Gerhard Hoffstaedter) Liesbeth Hesselink, Healers on the colonial market: Native doctors and midwivesin the Dutch East Indies (Leo van Bergen) May Ingawanij and Benjamin McKay (eds), Glimpses of freedom: Independent cinema in Southeast Asia (Katinka van Heeren Laura Jarnagin (ed.), The making of the Luso-Asian world: Intricacies of engagement (Hans Hägerdal) J.J.P. de Jong, Avondschot: Hoe Nederland zich terugtrok uit zijn Aziatisch imperium (William H. Frederick) Eben Kirksey, Freedom in entangled worlds: West Papua and the architecture of global power (Pieter Drooglever) Lev, Daniel S., No concessions: The life of Yap Thiam Hien, Indonesian human rights lawyer (Gerry van Klinken) Rémy Madinier, L’Indonésie, entre démocratie musulmane et Islam intégral: Histoire du parti Masjumi (1945-1960) (Chiara Formichi) Rod Nixon, Justice and governance in East Timor: Indigenous approaches and the ‘New Subsistence State’ (Hans Hägerdal) Philippe M.F. Peycam, The birth of Vietnamese political journalism: Saïgon 1916-1930 (Pierre Brocheux) Harry Poeze, Madiun 1948: PKI bergerak (Avsi Warman Adam) Ronit Ricci, Islam translated: Literature, conversion, and the Arabic cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia (William Cummings) Sokhieng Au, Mixed medicines: Health and culture in French colonial Cambodia (Leo van Bergen) Kobkua Suwannathat-Pian, Palace, political party and power: A story of the sociopolitical development of Malay Kingship (A.J. Stockwell) G. Teitler, Op het koloniale oorlogspad; De strijd tegen Moslim-fundamentalisten ter Westkust van Sumatra (1817-1838), vergeleken met de Russische verovering van Tjetsjenië en Dagestan (1817-1859) (Joshua Gedacht) Gerard Termorhuizen, Realisten en reactionairen: Een geschiedenis van de Indisch-Nederlandse pers 1905-1942 (Pieter Drooglever) Tjien Oei (ed.), Memoirs of Indonesian doctors and professionals 2; More stories that shaped the lives of Indonesian doctors (Vivek Neelakantan) Tomomi Ito, Modern Buddhism and Buddhadāsa Bhikkhu: A social history (Justin McDaniel) Geoff Wade and Li Tana (eds), Anthony Reid and the study of the Southeast Asian past (Henk Schulte Nordholt) Roxana Waterson and Kwok Kian-Woon (eds), Contestations of memory in Southeast Asia (Kevin Blackburn)

L’émergence de l’installation au milieu du xxe siècle se fait de manière concomitante avec l’art de la performance et de la vidéo. Les artistes de l’installation se sont donc emparés de l’image en mouvement et ont développé des dispositifs au caractère performatif vis-à-vis du visiteur. Dans les années 1970, Dan Graham révèle la visibilité et la perception d’un « invu », à savoir le temps comme matière et l’espace comme vecteur proprioceptif dans ses installations vidéographiques reposant sur l’effet de time delay. Face à l’enregistrement et à la retransmission en décalé de sa propre image, le visiteur prend conscience de son existence et de son rapport aux autres. Plus récemment, les installations « post-cinématographiques » ont permis de renouveler ces questionnements. L’exposition Servitudes de Jesper Just témoigne de ce dialogue entre installation audiovisuelle, espace architectural et perception du visiteur. Projeté sur des écrans, disséminé dans les sous-sols du Palais de Tokyo, le film de Just n’est visible que par fragments, le visiteur devenant le « monteur » d’une narration ambiguë et hétérodoxe, et devant pour cela se déplacer à travers les enchevêtrements de rampes métalliques, créant une « architecture spectatorielle de l’installation ».

L’émergence de l’installation au milieu du xxe siècle se fait de manière concomitante avec l’art de la performance et de la vidéo. Les artistes de l’installation se sont donc emparés de l’image en mouvement et ont développé des dispositifs au caractère performatif vis-à-vis du visiteur. Dans les années 1970, Dan Graham révèle la visibilité et la perception d’un « invu », à savoir le temps comme matière et l’espace comme vecteur proprioceptif dans ses installations vidéographiques reposant sur l’effet de time delay. Face à l’enregistrement et à la retransmission en décalé de sa propre image, le visiteur prend conscience de son existence et de son rapport aux autres. Plus récemment, les installations « post-cinématographiques » ont permis de renouveler ces questionnements. L’exposition Servitudes de Jesper Just témoigne de ce dialogue entre installation audiovisuelle, espace architectural et perception du visiteur. Projeté sur des écrans, disséminé dans les sous-sols du Palais de Tokyo, le film de Just n’est visible que par fragments, le visiteur devenant le « monteur » d’une narration ambiguë et hétérodoxe, et devant pour cela se déplacer à travers les enchevêtrements de rampes métalliques, créant une « architecture spectatorielle de l’installation ».

An exercise of anachronism, the article reads Kiarostami’s movies through the lenses of De Chirico’s painting. The exercise is not common in historical disciplines, like art and cinema history. Relations of influence never contradict the “temporal arrow”. Semiotics disregards this temporal frame, and compares texts by situating them in a common network of signifying relations. Semiotics can compare two or more artistic texts whatsoever, but does not encourage an anarchist point of view. Only texts that share similar structures can be fruitfully compared. De Chirico was not only the foremost metaphysical painter but also an important theoretician of metaphysical art. In a text on “art and madness”, he points out that the mad man is like the man who has lost his memory. However, the kind of memory De Chirico has in mind is not the long-term memory of psychologists, but a kind of “semiotic memory”, where interpretative habits are deposited. If this memory is lost, signs cannot be connected to other signs in a customary way, but become the origin of a new perception of reality. That is, according to De Chirico, what happens both in madness and in metaphysical art, where usual spaces and common objects turn into ground for marvel and terror, but also for sweetness and comfort. Metaphysical art, then, does not aim at finding a supernatural reality beyond that of everyday life, but, on the contrary, seeks to finds in everyday life a secret dimension, wherein things reveal themselves as different from how they appear. De Chirico’s reflection on metaphysical aesthetics was a consequence of his experiments with visual language and artistic forms. He had realized that painters could use some architectural forms, like those of arcades, harbors, train stations, etc. in order to frame space in a way that might elicit a metaphysical perception of reality. More generally, two formal features characterize most of De Chirico’s paintings executed in Florence/Paris (1910-1915) and Ferrara (1915-1918): a strong “geometrization” of space and a multiplication of contradictory framings. On the one hand, geometrization simplifies the structure of space and confers an a-temporal outlook to reality; on the other hand, the multiplication of contradictory framings visually translates the enigmatic character of metaphysics. Nothing, or almost nothing, justifies a comparison between De Chirico and Kiarostami from a historical point of view. The latter never mentions the former in his commentaries on his own films; nor spectators, either in Iran or in Italy, think about Italian metaphysical art when they watch Kiarostami’s movies. Moreover, it is undeniable that many characteristics of Kiarostami’s filmic discourse are closely related to a culturally specific background: the (visual) culture of contemporary Iran. Nevertheless, it is evident that Kiarostami’s cinema shares many of the aesthetical principles and creative processes of Italian metaphysical art. First of all, as it turns out from the analysis of most Kiarostami’s movies, an effort to present spectators with a geometrical, simplified, and essential space characterizes the plastic level of his filmic discourse. It is an essential space where relations between elements of narration are visually schematized. Second, Kiarostami too is almost obsessed with the superposition of multiple, often contradictory framings over this geometric space. That allows Kiarostami’s filmic discourse to transform it into a symbolic device, able to signify and communicate complex relations between deep, cosmic, and metaphysical values (mainly life and death). As de Chirico points out in some of his theoretical writings, his aesthetics also relies on the creation of uncanny configurations of objects, where strange and de-familiarizing relations subvert and replace customary ties between subjects and objects, and especially among objects themselves. The same aesthetic principle is at work in most Kiarostami’s movies, where objects are central not only in the development of narrative plots but also as symbolic devices that allow deep values to be expressed at a figurative level. Many differences separate De Chirico and Kiarostami: the historical époques in which they live(d), the socio-cultural contexts in which they work(ed), and the media that they adopt(ed). Yet, a strong similarity can be perceived in certain aspects of their visual languages. There are at least two ways to account for this similarity: on the one hand, the philological one, which nevertheless seems to be doomed not to succeed for the two artists do not share the same historical landscape. The second, more promising way is the one suggested by Lotman’s cultural semiotics: maybe similarities between De Chirico’s and Kiarostami’s visual languages are due to the fact that the Italian and the Iranian semiosphere share some general features in the way in which they shape the articulation and manifestation of meaning through visual texts. A tentative hypothesis explaining such similarity could be formulated as follows: a strong influence of the poetic discourse on the creation of meaning characterizes both semiospheres, a discourse where the syntactic relations of prose are less predominant than the emphasis on the symbolic value of empty space and isolated objects.

This variable describes what kind of concept of culture underlies the cultural coverage at a certain point of time or across time. The variable dissects the concept of culture into cultural forms that are being journalistically covered. It presupposes that each article predominantly focuses on one cultural genre or discipline, such as literature, music, or film, which is the case in most articles in the cultural beat that are written according to cultural journalists’ areas of specialization. By identifying the cultural forms covered, the variable delivers an answer to the question of what kind of culture has been covered, or what kind of culture has been represented. Forms of culture are sometimes also called artistic or cultural disciplines (Jaakkola, 2015) or cultural genres (Purhonen et al., 2019), and cultural classification (Janssen et al., 2011) or cultural hierarchy (Schmutz, 2009). The level of detail varies from study to study, according to the need of knowledge, with some scholars tracing forms of subculture (Schmutz et al., 2010), while others just identify the overall development of major cultural forms (Purhonen et al., 2019; Jaakkola, 2015a). The concepts of culture can roughly be defined as being dominated by high cultural, popular cultural, or everyday cultural forms (Kristensen, 2019). While most culture sections in newspapers are dominated by high culture, and the question is rather about which disciplines, in the operationalization it is not always easy to draw lines between high and popular forms in the postmodern cultural landscape where boundaries are being blurred. Nevertheless, the major forms of culture in the journalistic operationalization of culture are literature, classical music, theatre, and fine arts. As certain forms of culture – such as classical music and opera – are focused on classical high culture, and other forms – such as popular music and comics – represent popular forms, distribution of coverage according to cultural forms may indicate changes in the cultural concept. Field of application/theoretical foundation The question of the concept of culture is a standard question in content analyses on arts and cultural journalism in daily newspapers and cultural magazines, posed by a number of studies conducted in different geographical areas and often with a comparative intent (e.g., Szántó et al., 2004; Janssen, 1999; Reus & Harden, 2005; Janssen et al., 2008; Larsen, 2008; Kõnno et al., 2012; Jaakkola, 2015a, 2015b; Verboord & Janssen, 2015; Purhonen et al., 2019; Widholm et al., 2019). The essence of culture has been theorized in cultural studies, predominantly by Raymond Williams (e.g., 2011), and sociologists of art (Kroeber & Kluckhohn, 1952). In studying journalistic coverage of arts and culture, the concept of culture reveals the anatomy of coverage and whether the content is targeting a broader audience (inclusive concept of culture) or a narrow audience (exclusive or elitist concept of culture). A prevalent motivation to study the ontological dimension of cultural coverage is also to trace cultural change, which means that the concept of culture is longitudinally studied (Purhonen et al., 2019). References/combination with other methods of data collection Concept of culture often occurs as a variable to trace cultural change. The variable is typically coupled with other variables, mainly with representational means, i.e., the journalistic genre (Jaakkola, 2015), event type (Stegert, 1998), or author gender (Schmutz, 2009; Jaakkola, 2015b). Quantitative content analyses may also be complemented with qualitative analyses (Purhonen et al., 2019). Sample operationalization Cultural forms are separated according to the production structure (journalists and reviewers specializing in one cultural form typically indicate an increase of coverage for that cultural form). At a general level, the concept of culture can be divided into the following cultural forms: literature, music – which is, according to the newsroom specialization typically roughly categorized into classical and popular music – visual arts, theatre, dance, film, design, architecture and built environment, media, comics, cultural politics, cultural history, arts education, and other. Subcategories can be separated according to the interest and level of knowledge. The variable needs to be sensitive towards local features in journalism and culture. Example study Jaakkola (2015b) Information about Jaakkola, 2015 Author: Maarit Jaakkola Research question/research interest: Examination of the cultural concept across time in culture sections of daily newspapers Object of analysis: Articles/text items on culture pages of five major daily newspapers in Finland 1978–2008 (Aamulehti, Helsingin Sanomat, Kaleva, Savon Sanomat, Turun Sanomat) Timeframe of analysis: 1978–2008, consecutive sample of weeks 7 and 42 in five year intervals (1978, 1983, 1988, 1993, 1998, 2003, 2008) Info about variable Variable name/definition: Concept of culture Unit of analysis: Article/text item Values: Cultural form Description 1. Fiction literature Fiction books: fictional genres such as poetry, literary novels, thrillers, detective novels, children’s literature, etc. 2. Non-fiction literature Non-fiction books: non-fictional genres such as textbooks, memoirs, encyclopedias, etc. 3. Classical music Music of more high-cultural character, such as symphonic music, chamber music, opera, etc. 4. Popular music Music of more popular character, such as pop, rock, hip-hop, folk music, etc. 5. Visual arts Fine arts: painting, drawing, graphical art, sculpture, media art, photography, etc. 6. Theatre Scene art, including musicals (if not treated as music, i.e. in coverage of concerts and albums) 7. Dance Scene art, including ballet (if not treated as music, .e. in coverage of concerts and albums) 8. Film Cinema: fiction, documentary, experimental film, etc. 9. Design Design of artefacts, jewelry, fashion, interiors, graphics, etc. 10. Architecture Design, aesthetics, and planning of built environment 11. Media Television, journalism, Internet, games, etc. 12. Comics Illustrated periodicals 13. Cultural politics Policies, politics, and administration concerning arts and culture in general 14. Cultural history Historical issues and phenomena 15. Education Educational issues concerning different cultural disciplines 16. Other Miscellaneous minor categories, e.g., lifestyle issues (celebrity, gossip, everyday cultural issues), and larger categories developed from within the material can be separated into values of their own Scale: nominal Intercoder reliability: Cohen's kappa > 0.76 (two coders) References Jaakkola, M. (2015a). The contested autonomy of arts and journalism: Change and continuity in the dual professionalism of cultural journalism. Tampere: Tampere University Press. Jaakkola, M. (2015b). Outsourcing views, developing news: Changes of art criticism in Finnish dailies, 1978–2008. Journalism Studies, 16(3), 383–402. Janssen, S. (1999). Art journalism and cultural change: The coverage of the arts in Dutch newspapers 1965–1990. Poetics 26(5–6), 329–348. Janssen, S., Kuipers, G., & Verboord, M. (2008). Cultural globalization and arts journalism: The international orientation of arts and culture coverage in Dutch, French, German, and U.S. newspapers, 1955 to 2005. American Sociological Review, 73(5), 719–740. Janssen, S., Verboord, M., & Kuipers, G. (2011). Comparing cultural classification: High and popular arts in European and U.S. elite newspapers. Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 63(51), 139–168. Kõnno, A., Aljas, A., Lõhmus, M., & Kõuts, R. (2012). The centrality of culture in the 20th century Estonian press: A longitudinal study in comparison with Finland and Russia. Nordicom Review, 33(2), 103–117. Kristensen, N. N. (2019). Arts, culture and entertainment coverage. In T. P. Vos & F. Hanusch (Eds.), The international encyclopedia of journalism studies. Wiley-Blackwell. Kroeber, A. L., & Kluckhohn, C. (1952). Culture: A critical review of concepts and definitions. Meridian Books. Larsen, L. O. (2008). Forskyvninger. Kulturdekningen i norske dagsaviser 1964–2005 [Displacements: Cultural coverage in Norwegian dailies 1964–2005]. In K. Knapskog & L.O. Larsen (Eds.), Kulturjournalistikk: pressen og den kulturelle offentligheten (pp. 283–329). Scandinavian Academic Press. Purhonen, S., Heikkilä, R., Karademir Hazir, I., Lauronen, T., Rodríguez, C. F., & Gronow, J. (2019). Enter culture, exit arts? The transformation of cultural hierarchies in European newspaper culture sections, 1960–2010. Routledge. Reus, G., & Harden, L. (2005). Politische ”Kultur”: Eine Längsschnittanalyse des Zeitungsfeuilletons von 1983 bis 2003 [Political ‘culture’: A longitudinal analysis of culture pages, 1983–2003]. Publizistik, 50(2), 153–172. Schmutz, V. (2009). Social and symbolic boundaries in newspaper coverage of music, 1955–2005: Gender and genre in the US, France, Germany, and the Netherlands. Poetics, 37(4), 298–314. Schmutz, V., van Venrooij, A., Janssen, S., & Verboord, M. (2010). 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Well, you couldn't control the situation to that extent. The world just comes in on top of you. It creeps under the door. It falls out of the sky. It's all around. (Leunig) Like the world that cartoonist Michael Leunig describes, ambience is all around. Everywhere you go. You cannot get away from it. You cannot hide from it. You cannot be without it. For ambience is that which surrounds us, that which pervades. Always-on. Always by-your-side. Always already. Here, there and everywhere. Super-surround-sound. Immersive. Networked and cloudy. Ubiquitous. Although you cannot avoid ambience, you may ignore it. In fact, ambience is almost as ignored as it is pervasive. For the most part, our attention is given over to what’s in front of us, what we pick up, what we handle, what is in focus. Instead of ambience, our phenomenal existence is governed by what we bring into the foreground of our lives. Our attention is, almost by definition, occupied not by what is ambient, but what is salient (Jaaniste, Approaching Ch. 1). So, when Brian Eno coined the term Ambient Music in the 1970s (see Burns; Radywyl; and Ensminger in this issue), he was doing something strange. He was bringing ambience, as an idea and in its palpable sonic dimension, into salience. The term, and the penchant for attuning and re-thinking our connections to our surroundings, caught on. By the end of the twentieth century, it was deemed by one book author worthy of being called the ambient century (Prendergast). Eno is undoubtedly the great populariser of the term, but there’s a backstory to ambience. If Spitzer’s detailed semantic analysis of ‘ambience’ and its counterpart ‘milieu’ published back in the 1940s is anything to go by, then Newtonian physics had a lot to do with how ambience entered into our Modern vernacular. Isaac Newton’s laws and theories of gravity and the cosmos offered up a quandary for science back then: vast amounts of empty space. Just like we now know that most of an atom is empty space, within which a few miserly electrons, protons, neutrons and other particle fly about (and doesn’t that seem weird given how solid everything feels?) so too it is with planets, stars, galaxies whose orbits traverse through the great vacuum of the universe. And that vacuum Newton called ambience. But maybe outer-space, and ambience, is not actually empty. There could be dark matter everywhere. Or other things not yet known, observed or accounted for. Certainly, the history of our thinking around ambience since its birth in physics has seen a shift from vacuity to great density and polyphony. Over time, several ‘spaces’ became associated with ambience, which we might think of as the great scapes of our contemporary lives: the natural environment, the built environment, the social world, the aesthetic worlds encountered ‘within’ artefacts, and the data-cloud. Now is not the time or place to give a detailed history of these discursive manoeuvres (although some key clues are given in Spizter; and also Jaaniste, Approaching). But a list of how the term has been taken up after Eno–across the arts, design, media and culture–reveals the broad tenets of ambience or, perhaps, the ambience of ambience. Nowadays we find talk of (in alphabetical order): ambient advertising (Quinion), aesthetics (Foster), architecture (CNRS; Sample), art (Desmarias; Heynen et al.), calculus (Cardelli), displays (Ambient Displays Reserch Group; Lund and Mikael; Vogel and Balakrishnan), fears (Papastergiadis), findability (Morville), informatics (Morville), intelligence (Weber et al.), media (Meeks), narratives (Levin), news (Hagreaves and Thomas), poetics (Morton), television (McCarthy), and video (Bizzocchi). There’s probably more. Time, then, to introduce the authors assembled for this special ‘ambient’ issue of M/C Journal. Writing from the globe, in Spain, Ukraine, Canada, United Sates, and New Zealand, and from cities across Australia, in Melbourne, Canberra and Perth, they draw on and update the ambience of ambience. Alison Bartlett, in our feature article, begins with bodies of flesh (and sweat and squinting) and bodies of thought (including Continental theory). She draws us into a personal, present tense and tensely present account of the way writing and thinking intertwine with our physical locality. The heat, light and weathered conditions of her place of writing, now Perth and previously Townsville, are evoked, as is some sort of teased out relation with Europe. If we are always immersed in our ambient conditions, does this effect and affect everything we do, and think? Bruce Arnold and Margalit Levin then shift gear, from the rural and natural to the densely mediated contemporary urban locale. Urban ambience, as they say, is no longer about learning to avoid (or love?) harsh industrial noises, but it’s about interactivity, surveillance and signalling. They ambivalently present the ambient city as a dialectic, where feeling connected and estranged go hand-in-hand. Next we explore one outcome or application of the highly mediated, iPhone and Twitter-populated city. Alfred Hermida has previously advanced the idea of ‘ambient journalism’ (Hermida, Twittering), and in his M/C Journal piece he outlines the shift from ambient news (which relies on multiple distribution points, but which relays news from a few professional sources) to a journalism that is ambiently distributed across citizens and non-professional para-journalists. Alex Burns takes up Hermida’s framework, but seeks to show how professional journalism might engage in complex ways with Twitter and other always-on, socially-networked data sources that make up the ‘awareness system’ of ambient journalism. Burns ends his provocative paper by suggesting that the creative processes of Brian Eno might be a model for flexible approaches to working with the ambient data fields of the Internet and social grid. Enter the data artist, the marginal doodler and the darkened museum. Pau Waelder examines the way artists have worked with data fields, helping us to listen, observe and embody what is normally ignored. David Ensminger gives a folklorist-inspired account of the way doodles occupy the ambient margins of our minds, personalities and book pages. And Natalia Radywyl navigates the experiences of those who encountered the darkened and ambiguously ambient Screen Gallery of the Australian Centre for Moving Image, and ponders on what this mean for the ‘new museum’. If the experience of doodles and darkened galleries is mainly an individual thing, the final two papers delve into the highly social forms of ambience. Pauline Cheong explores how one particular type of community, Christian churches in the United States, has embraced (and sometimes critiqued) the use of Twitter to facilitate the communal ambience, 140 characters at a time. Then Christine Teague with Lelia Green and David Leith report on the working lives of transit officers on duty on trains in Perth. This is a tough ambience, where issues of safety, fear, confusion and control impact on these workers as much as they try to influence the ambience of a public transport network. The final paper gives us something to pause on: ambience might be an interesting topic, but the ambience of some people and some places might be unpalatable or despairing. Ambience is morally ambivalent (it can be good, bad or otherwise), and this is something threading through many of the papers before us. Who gets to control our ambient surrounds? Who gets to influence them? Who gets to enjoy them, take advantage of them, ignore them? For better or worse. The way we live with, connect to and attune to the ambience of our lives might be crucially important. It might change us. And it might do so on many levels. As is now evident, all the great scapes, as I called them, have been taken up in this issue. We begin with the natural environment (Bartlett’s weather) and the urban built environment (Arnold and Levin; and also Radywyl). Then we enter the data-cloud (Herminda; Burns; Waelder, and also Cheong), shifting into the aesthetic artefact (Waelder; Ensminger; Radywyl), and then into the social sphere (Cheong; Teague, Green and Leith). Of course, all these scapes, and the authors’ concerns, overlap. Ambience is a multitude, and presses into us and through us in many ways. References Ambient Displays Research Group. “Ambient Displays Research Group.” 25 July 2006 ‹http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Research/Projects/CS/io/ambient/›. Bizzocchi, Jim. “Ambient Video: The Transformation of the Domestic Cinematic Experience.” Media Environments and the Liberal Arts Conference, 10-13 June 2004, Rochester Institute of Technology, New York. 26 July 2006 ‹http://www.dadaprocessing.com› [third version of this essay]. Cardelli, Luca. “Mobility and Security.” Lecture notes for Marktoberdorf Summer School 1999, summarising several Ambient Calculus papers by Luca Cardelli & Andrew Gordon. Foundations of Secure Computation. Eds. Friedrich L. Bauer and Ralf Steinbrüggen. NATO Science Series. Proceedings of the NATO Advanced Study Institute on Foundations of Secure Computation, Marktoberdorf, Germany, 27 July - 8 Aug. 1999. 3-37. ‹http://lucacardelli.name/Papers/Mobility%20and%20Security.A4.pdf›. CNRS. “UMR CNRS 1563: Ambiances architecturales et urbaines”. 2007. 9 Feb. 2007 ‹http://www.archi.fr/RECHERCHE/annuaireg/pdf/UMR1563.pdf›. Desmarias, Charles. “Nothing Compared to This: Ambient, Incidental and New Minimal Tendencies in Contemporary Art.” Catalogue essay for exhibition curated by Charles Desmarais at Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, 25 Sep. - 28 Nov. 2004. Foster, Cheryl. “The Narrative and the Ambient in Environmental Aesthetics.” Journal of Aesthetics & Art Criticism 56.2 (Spring 1998): 127-137. Hargreaves, Ian, and James Thomas. “New News, Old News.” ITC/BSC (October 2002). 3 May 2010 ‹http://legacy.caerdydd.ac.uk/jomec/resources/news.pdf›. Herminda, Alfred. “Twittering the News: The Emergence of Ambient Journalism.” Journalism Practice (11 March 2010). 3 May 2010 ‹http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a919807525›. Heynen, Julian, Kasper Konig, and Stefani Jansen. Ambiance: Des deux cơtes du Rhin. To accompany an exhibition of the same name at K21 Kuntstsammlung NRW, Düsseldorf, 15 Oct. 2005 – 12 Feb. 2006. Köln: Snoeck. Jaaniste, Luke. Approaching the Ambient: Creative Practice and the Ambient Mode of Being. Doctoral thesis, Queensland University of Technology, 2007. 3 May 2010 ‹http://www.lukejaaniste.com/writings/phd›. Leunig, Michael. “Michael Leunig”. Enough Rope with Andrew Denton. ABC Television, 8 May 2006. 3 May 2010 ‹http://www.abc.net.au/tv/enoughrope/transcripts/s1632918.htm›. Lund, Andreas, and Mikael Wiberg. “Ambient Displays beyond Convention.” HCI 2004, The 18th British HCI Group Annual Conference, Leeds Metropolitan University, UK, 6-10 Sep. 2004. 18 Oct. 2005 ‹http://www.informatik.umu.se/~mwiberg/designingforattention_workshop_lund_wiberg.pdf›. Manovich, Lev. “Soft Cinema: Ambient Narratives.” Catalogue for the Soft Cinema Project presented at Future Cinema: The Cinemtic Imaginary after Film at ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, 16 Nov. 2002 - 30 March 2003. McCarthy, Anna. Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001. Meeks, Cyan. Ambient Media: Meanings and Implications. Masters of Fine Arts thesis, Graduate School of the State University of New York, Department of Media Study, August 2005. Morton, Timothy. “Why Ambient Poetics?: Outline for a Depthless Ecology.” The Wordsworth Circle 33.1 (Winter 2002): 52-56. Morville, Peter. Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become. O’Reilly Media, 2005. Papastergiadis, Nikos. “Ambient Fears.” Artlink 32.1 (2003): 28-34. Prendergast, Mark. The Ambient Century: From Mahler to Trance, the Evolution of Sound in the Electronic Age. London: Bloomsbury, 2000. Quinion, Michael. “Ambient Advertising.” World Wide Words 5 Sep. 1998. 3 Aug. 2006 ‹http://www.worldwidewords.org/turnsofphrase/tp-amb1.htm›. Sample, Hilary. “Ambient Architecture: An Environmental Monitoring Station for Pasadena, California.” 306090 07: Landscape with Architecture. 306090 Architecture Journal 7 (Sep. 2004): 200-210. Spitzer, Leo. “Milieu and Ambiance: An Essay in Historical Semantics (Part 2).” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 3.2 (Dec. 1942): 169–218. Vogel, Daniel, and Ravin Balakrishnan. “Interactive Public Ambient Displays: Transitioning from Implicit to Explicit, Public to Personal, Interaction with Multiple Users.” Proceedings of the 18th ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. Large Public Displays session, Santa Fe. New York: ACM Press. 137-146. Weber, W., J.M. Rabaey, and E. Aarts. Eds. Ambient Intelligence. Berlin: Springer, 2005.

Magic and art are products of human connection with the universe, offering answers to questions of meaning and working in interstices between fiction and reality. Magic can and does permeate all forms of media and is depicted as both entertaining and dangerous, as shaping world views, and as practised by a vast array of individuals and groups across cultures. Creative practices in cinema, radio, and installation art suggest that deceptive illusions created through magic techniques can be an effective means of creating compelling and engaging media experiences. It is not surprising, then, that in contemporary art forms involving mixed media and mixed (or augmented) reality the study of magic can offer valuable insights into how technologies mediate audience experiences and how artists can manipulate audience perceptions. Despite art often being described as ‘magical’ (Jones; Charlesworth), there is limited scholarly research applying the philosophical and socio-cultural construct of magic to contemporary art, leaving much to explore with regard to the intersections between magic and art. Scholars and artists have instead preferred to draw from more established bodies of theory in theatre and performance studies (Laurel), cinema (Marsh), and narrative (Murray). This article hones in on that intersection by applying the understudied principles and techniques of magicians to the interpretation and analysis of artworks by Canadian artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. Making ‘magic’ here is not about the supernatural but refers to the refined practice of ‘doing tricks’, developed over thousands of years across many cultures. The aim of this article therefore is to introduce the reader to two interactive artworks through the lens of magic. Through these examples, we demonstrate the direct correlations between the principles of illusion in magic and media-based illusions in art, inviting the recognition of common ground between the equally niche spheres of magicians and contemporary artists. Cardiff and Miller are a well-known contemporary artist duo whose work exemplifies trends in audio-based performance work (Collins) and site specificity (Ross). However, their work is not generally analysed through the lens of magic. Here, we focus on it as ‘mixed reality’ art, specifically ‘augmented reality’ (in contrast to augmented virtuality), a concept that was defined by Milgram and Kishino as any case in which an otherwise real environment is ‘augmented’ by means of virtual (computer graphic) objects. Since the introduction of these terms—‘mixed reality’ and ‘augmented reality’—technologies have made many leaps across innumerable modes of media. Yet their distinction remains useful to categorise artworks and describe any mixed reality approaches that work towards “the existence of a combined pair of a real and virtual space”. In augmented reality, while “the visual as the dominant mode of perception and integration of real and virtual space” (Strauss, Fleischmann et al.), sound can be used for sensory immersion, and to play tricks on the minds of audiences. These distinctions are often critical in discussions of art, especially when “illusion plays a crucial role as it makes permeable the perceptual limit between the represented objects and the material spaces we inhabit” (Avram). Mixed reality artworks often make unique combinations of audio-visual elements, and sometimes activate other senses such as tactile and olfactory. In these works, artists use illusion to connect the embodied experience of the audience members to the electronically mediated experience of their design, which brings us back to magic. Introduction to Conjuring and Deception It is worthwhile to briefly visit the key principles of magic that most clearly tie together conjuring and mixed reality artworks: framing context, consistency, continuity, conviction, justification, surprise, and disguise. These principles are routinely used in combination by magicians to deceive audiences and are commonly referred to under the umbrella term of ‘misdirection’, defined as “that which directs the audience towards the effect and away from the method” (Lamont and Wiseman 3). Conjuring consists of “creating illusions of the impossible” (Nelms), which are comprised of a method (how the trick is achieved) and an effect (what the audience perceives). The principles that form the foundation of conjuring are centred on the creation of illusions in a theatrical context, either on stage or via close-up magic. Think of the famous genius pair of stage magicians Penn & Teller and their blockbuster magic competition television series Fool Us. Now research has revealed how these techniques can also be examined in a broader context than entertainment and across many scholarly disciplines. This research has occurred within the fields of cognitive science (Macknik et al.; Macknik & Martinez-Conde; Macknik, Martinez-Conde, et al.), psychology (Polidoro; Tatler and Kuhn) and interaction design (de Jongh Hepworth; Marchak; Tognazzini). These investigations demonstrate the significance and value of techniques drawn from conjuring across various fields. Indeed, as Macknik states, “there are specific cases in which the magician’s intuitive knowledge is superior to that of the neuroscientist” (Macknik, Mac King, et al.). A successful magic trick requires the audience to experience the effect while unaware of the method (Lamont and Wiseman). Examining the creation of illusions in terms of method and effect is not only applicable to conjuring but also resonates with other forms of media that rely on suspension of disbelief. For example, in the context of cinema, the audience should be engaged with the content on the screen rather than the presentation apparatus. In virtual environments, the aim of the developer is also generally to ensure that the user experiences the effect (immersion in the virtual world) while suppressing awareness of the medium (method). In conjuring, many approaches to deception rely on indirect reinforcement in which a situation is implied rather than stated. When magician and theorist Dariel Fitzkee describes conjuring, he suggests that implication is effective because it “seems to the spectator to be a voluntary decision on his part, uninfluenced by the magician. It is also stronger because such conclusions, reached in this manner, do not seem to be of particular importance to the performer” (97). Both these elements significantly increase conviction, reduce suspicion and are very relevant to the technique of ‘suspending disbelief’ often applied to cinema. Through suggestion, the filmmakers ensured that viewers who themselves had previously constructed a false frame would readily interpret the film document as authentic, so long as the experience did not drastically deviate from expectations. This form of deception is evident in two works by Cardiff and Miller that rely primarily on sound in careful combination with visual and spatial elements to create ambiguous elements that can make the audience question what is real and virtual. The Paradise Institute (Cardiff and Miller) and Walks (Cardiff 1991–2006) utilise the process of binaural recording whereby two microphones are placed inside the ears of a dummy head to convey realistic spatial sound simulations via headphone playback. Next, we look at these artworks as a mode of conjuring taking up methods and desired effects of the art of magic. The Paradise Institute The Paradise Institute was originally produced for the 2001 Canadian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. The work draws on the language and experience of cinema, creating a film-like experience using the illusory principles of magic. To experience the work, viewers approach a simple plywood pavilion, mount a set of stairs, and enter. We first experienced The Paradise Institute at PS1 Gallery, New York in 2001. The first illusion in a series is that this tiny dimly lit interior, complete with red carpet and two rows of velvet-covered seats, is an actual theatre. Once seated, we peer over the balcony onto a miniature replica of a grand old movie theatre created with techniques of hyper-perspective (accentuated depth and extreme angles as in a theatre set). Then we put on the headphones provided, and the projection begins. Beyond the perceptual illusion of the theatre space itself, the primary illusionary device is sound design that combines audio from the fragmented narrative depicted on screen with simulated sounds from the theatre audience. This technique is analogous to offscreen sound in cinema (Davies). Several stories run simultaneously. There is the ‘visual film’ and its accompanying soundtrack; layered over this is the ‘aural action’ of a supposed audience. The film is a mix of genres: part noir, part thriller, part sci-fi, and part experimental. What is more particular about the installation is the personal binaural surround sound that every individual in the audience experiences through the headphones. The sense of isolation each person might feel is disrupted by intrusions seemingly coming from inside the theatre. A mobile phone belonging to a member of the audience rings. A close ‘female friend’ whispers intimately in your ear: “Did you check the stove before we left?” Fiction and reality become intermingled as absorption in the film is suspended, and other realities flow in. Not knowing what to believe, you hear a collage of sounds from the soundtrack of the film you are watching, as well as from people sitting beside you. Was that really a cell phone? At one point the characters you have watched on the screen are talking behind you. (Christov-Bakargiev and Cardiff 151) The multi-layered acoustic space combines chattering and rustling from the virtual audience members seated around you, characters from the film that are sporadically transported to the objective position of the audience, all co-existing with the soundtrack of the film itself. This complex layering of sound, combined with the live ambience, creates a mixed reality environment in which the various virtual elements constantly intrude upon the audience’s perception of reality. The artists conjure an audience and theatre which are not in fact there, but the illusion is so seamless, that your perception combines reality and mediated experience. One of the principles of effective illusions within magic is the capacity to reduce suspicion during the presentation. The work effectively achieves this through a variety of methods. The most compelling aspects of the deception are the intimate conversations and incidental sounds created by the virtual audience members, particularly those seated behind you (as the source cannot be immediately verified). You cannot see, feel, smell, or touch other audience members, but you can hear them. The content is perceived as familiar (therefore suspicion regarding its veracity is reduced), and even within the hyper-real context of the microcinema, irresistibly compelling. The mechanics of the work effectively support the illusion. The installation provides a controlled acoustic space, and volume levels can be precisely adjusted. The layered sound design further assists in masking deficiencies in the technical process in much the same manner as the use of atmospheres and music in a film soundtrack. These characteristics assist in establishing a palpable simulation of acoustic reality. In The Paradise Institute, rather than place the audience in a passive position in relation to their work, Cardiff and Miller use spatial sound as a means of active engagement: “I want people to be inside the filmic experience… I want the pieces to be disconcerting in several ways so that the audience can’t just forget about their bodies for the duration of their involvement, like we do in film” (Beil and Mari 78). Walks Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller designed 24 audio and video walks between 1996 and 2019. Like magicians executing conjuring tricks, the artists use the affordances of electronic media to reveal an alternate reality. The walks, like conjuring tricks, manipulate your perceptions of reality through illusion. The walks are between five minutes and one hour long. As the artists write on their Website, the audio playback is layered with various background sounds all recorded in binaural audio which gives the feeling that those recorded sounds are present in the actual environment. In a video walk, viewers are provided with a video screen which they use to follow a film recorded in the past along the same route they are traversing in the present. Also using binaural microphones and edited to create a sense of continuous motion, the fictional world of the film blends seamlessly with the reality of the architecture and body in motion. The perceptive confusion is deepened by the dream-like narrative elements that occur in the pre-recorded film. Audience members are given a listening device and headphones at the beginning of the walk, similar to the experience of using an audio guide in a museum. At a predefined location, the audience member presses play and is guided by Cardiff’s voice narrating events that occur along a route through the physical environment. Instructions are integrated within a narrative soundscape that shapes the audiences’ perceptions of their immediate environment. The importance of this hybrid reality is highlighted by Cardiff’s own description of the work: “the sound of my footsteps, traffic, birds, and miscellaneous sound effects that have been pre-recorded on the same site as they are being heard … . The virtual recorded soundscape has to mimic the real physical one in order to create a new world as a seamless combination of the two” (Cardiff and Miller). All the walks are recorded as a spatially encoded binaural soundscape, created using microphones fitted to both ears of a mannequin. The intent is that the recording perfectly replicates the sensation of listening with two human ears. Listening back through headphones, the recording feels as ‘live’ as possible. During playback, the audience experiences the illusion of being in the same room as Cardiff’s voice and other sounds in the recording. They perceive a realistic multi-layered sonic environment comprised of the actual acoustic space they inhabit (via aural transparency of the headphones), artefacts from the same environment at a prior time, and narration provided by Cardiff’s voice, all interwoven with creative sound design. Unlike The Paradise Institute, audience members can adjust the playback level, and hence, the mix between the real and virtual elements. In other words, they may be able to hear the sound of their own footsteps or breathing in combination with the designed soundscape. Due to the intimate nature of the binaural recordings (and the timbre of Cardiff’s voice), the audience has the impression that Cardiff is present, an invisible co-traveller on the journey. The walks are successful magic tricks not only because of the perceptual realism of the sonic environments they represent but also because they are narrative-driven, propelling the audience through unknown spaces and stories. The audience, on the one hand, exists in a fictional world, while on the other hand they are placed in a paradoxical position of being at times uncertain if the sound they heard was present in physical reality or was a simulation. Discussion: Reframing Fiction as Fact in an Act of Magic These works indicate how the mechanics of the illusion (in this instance, spatial sound and visual trickery) combined with plausible virtual elements can effectively reframe an experience from a fictional simulation to fact. Even if the experience is clearly framed as fiction, the appropriate use of mechanics can present stimuli that are so compellingly real that they disrupt, even if momentarily, the way the audience interprets a mediated experience, whether it is constructed as a set (in the case of The Paradise Institute) or a streetscape (in the Walks). The conjuring trick at work here, as with The Paradise Institute, is multisensory reinforcement, “the way in which a spectator’s belief about specific matters central to the effect are reinforced” (Lamont and Wiseman 69). The audience’s suspicion may be reduced if each modality works in unison to advance the illusion. For instance, the visual representation of a virtual character is reinforced by corresponding sound, and their actions are further indicated via mechanical devices in physical space. Scholars argue that the more sensory inputs in the mediated experience, the higher the degree of perceptual realism, so long as “the information from various sources is globally consistent” (Christou and Parker 53). This is because “senses do not just provide information but also serve to confirm the ‘perceptions’ of other senses” (England 168). Multisensory integration occurs innately within the individual, and, as Macknik suggests, it “is an ongoing and dynamic property of your brain that occurs outside conscious awareness” (Macknik, Martinez-Conde, et al. 104). The multimodal nature of mixed reality experiences like Cardiff and Miller’s walks provide an example of magic applied in art. Audience members’ eyes and ears are activated, convincing their brains that fiction is reality. To be clear, the artworks discussed here are technically elegant but not overly complex or dependent on technology. This is consistent with magic acts whereby sometimes a deck of cards and a small table are the only props. In conjuring, for the most part, magicians rely on “little technology more complex than a rubber band, a square of black fabric or length of thread” (Steinmeyer 7). Identifying how the adaptability of magic can also be applied to media arts is integral to understanding its power. Effects of illusion can be achieved with relatively simple methods, such as binaural recording or hyper-perspective (not to undermine the skill in such acts of magic). As with a magician’s sleight-of-hand techniques (think of a playing card being perfectly hidden up a sleeve), an accomplished media artist also needs to use techniques of illusion flawlessly. In other words, rather than being device-centric, the principles of misdirection can be applied to suit a specific purpose but must be done skilfully. This is the very reason that Cardiff and Miller’s conjuring strategies are highly adaptive and highly successful. Conclusion: When Art Is Magic, We Are All Deceived What do these examples of magic in mixed reality artworks indicate? The works discussed draw from vast lineages of creative practice, including radio, cinema, installation, and locative media. They demonstrate that applying principles of magic to the design of artworks can create convincing mediated deceptions. They also demonstrate direct correlations between the principles of illusion in magic and media-based illusions in art. Even when an event is framed as fiction, the mechanics of the illusion could make the audience believe in an alternate reality, the very foundation of magic. Just as in conjuring, Cardiff and Miller’s tricks transform an experience into an illusion via elements of showmanship such as drama and atmosphere. In art, however, unlike a conventional magic trick, there is no climactic flurry in which the alternate reality is revealed, such as pulling a rabbit out of a seemingly empty hat. Instead, if the works succeed, the illusion is sustained and virtual characters and spaces are no longer perceived as a simulation, thus bridging reality and virtuality. Janet Cardiff is walking with you, or you are sitting in a cinema. References Avram, Horea. “The Convergence Effect: Real and Virtual Encounters in Augmented Reality Art.” M/C Journal 16.6 (2013). <https://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.735>. Beil, Ralf, and Bartomeu Marí. The Killing Machine and Other Stories 1995-2007: Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller. Hatje Cantz, Darmstadt, 2007. Cardiff, Janet, and George Bures Miller. 2023. <https://cardiffmiller.com/>. ———. “The Affective Experience of Space.” The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Western Art. 2016. 214. Cardiff, Janet, George Bures Miller, and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. Janet Cardiff: A Survey of Works Including Collaborations with George Bures Miller. New York: PS1, 2001. Charlesworth, J.J. “The Return of Magic in Art.” Art Review 30 May 2022. <https://artreview.com/the-return-of-magic-in-art>. Collins, Rebecca Louise. “Sound, Space and Bodies: Building Relations in the Work of Invisible Flock and Atelier Bildraum.” M/C Journal 20.2 (2017). <https://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1222>. Davies, Alexander. Magic, Mixed Realities & Misdirection. PhD Dissertation. Sydney: UNSW, 2013. Davies, Alex, and Jeffrey Koh. “Häusliches Glück: A Case Study on Deception in a Mixed Reality Environment.” Handbook of Digital Games and Entertainment Technologies. Eds. Ryohei Nakatsu, Matthias Rauterberg, and Paolo Ciancarini. Singapore: Springer Singapore, 2017. <https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-4560-52-8_18-1>. De Jongh Hepworth, Sam. “Magical Experiences in Interaction Design.” Proceedings of the 2007 Conference on Designing Pleasurable Products and Interfaces. 2007. Fitzkee, Dariel. Magic by Misdirection. London: Ravenio, 1975. Hyman, Ray. “The Psychology of Deception.” Annual Review of Psychology 40.1 (1989): 133-154. Ishii, Hiroshi, and Brygg Ullmer. “Tangible Bits: Towards Seamless Interfaces between People, Bits and Atoms.” Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1997. Jacobson, Marjory. “Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller.” Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art (2006): 56-61. Jones, Jonathon. “The Top 10 Magical Artworks” The Guardian 5 June 2014. <https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jun/05/top-10-magical-artworks>. Lamont, Peter, and Richard Wiseman. Magic in Theory: An Introduction to the Theoretical and Psychological Elements of Conjuring. U of Hertfordshire P, 2005. Laurel, Brenda. Computers as Theatre. Addison-Wesley, 2013. Macknik, Stephen L., et al. “Attention and Awareness in Stage Magic: Turning Tricks into Research.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 9.11 (2008): 871-879. Macknik, Stephen L., and Susana Martinez-Conde. “A Perspective on 3-D Visual Illusions.” Scientific American Mind 19.5 (2008): 20-23. ———. “Real Magic: Future Studies of Magic Should Be Grounded in Neuroscience.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 10.3 (2009): 241-241. Macknik, Stephen, Susana Martinez-Conde, and Sandra Blakeslee. Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Everyday Deceptions. New York: Henry Holt, 2010. Marchak, Frank M. “The Magic of Visual Interaction Design.” ACM SIGCHI Bulletin 32.2 (2000): 13-14. Marsh, Tim. “Presence as Experience: Film Informing Ways of Staying There.” Presence: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments 12.5 (2003): 11. ———. “Presence as Experience: Framework to Assess Virtual Corpsing.” Presence 2001: 4th International Workshop on Presence. Philadelphia, 2001. ———. “Staying There: An Activity-Based Approach to Narrative Design and Evaluation as an Antidote to Virtual Corpsing.” Being There: Concepts, Effects and Measurements of User Presence in Synthetic Environments. Amsterdam: Ios, 2003. 85-96. Milgram, Paul, and Fumio Kishino. “A Taxonomy of Mixed Reality Visual Displays.” IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information and Systems 77.12 (1994): 1321-1329. Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Updated ed. Boston: MIT P, 2017. Polidoro, Massimo. “The Magic in the Brain: How Conjuring Works to Deceive Our Minds.” Tall Tales about the Mind & Brain: Separating Fact from Fiction. Ed. Sergio Della Sala. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. 36-44. Ross, Christine. “Movement That Matters Historically: Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s 2012 Alter Bahnhof Video Walk.” Discourse 35.2 (2013): 212-227. Strauss, Wolfgang, et al. Linking between Real and Virtual Spaces. GMD Report 75, GMD – Forschungszentrum Informationstechnik GmbH, Sienna. CID, 1999. Tatler, Benjamin W., and Gustav Kuhn. “Don’t Look Now: The Magic of Misdirection.” Eye Movements. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2007. 697-714. Tognazzini, Bruce. “Principles, Techniques, and Ethics of Stage Magic and Their Application to Human Interface Design.” Proceedings of the INTERACT'93 and CHI'93 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 1993. 355-62.

IntroductionIt has been nearly half a century since the appearance of Susan Sontag’s landmark essay “The Imagination of Disaster.” The critic wrote of the public fascination with science fiction disaster films, claiming that, on the one hand “from a psychological point of view, the imagination of disaster does not greatly differ from one period in history to another [but, on the other hand] from a political and moral point of view, it does” (224). Even if Sontag is right about aspects of the imagination of disaster not changing, the types, frequency, and magnitude of disasters and their representation in media and popular culture suggest that dynamic conditions prevail on both counts. Disaster has become a significantly urban phenomenon, and highly publicised “worst case” scenarios such as Hurricane Katrina and the Haiti earthquake highlight multiple demographic, cultural, and environmental contexts for visualising cataclysm. The 1950s and 60s science fiction films that Sontag wrote about were filled with marauding aliens and freaks of disabused science. Since then, their visual and dramatic effects have been much enlarged by all kinds of disaster scenarios. Partly imagined, these scenarios have real-life counterparts with threats from terrorism and the war on terror, pan-epidemics, and global climate change. Sontag’s essay—like most, if not all of the films she mentions—overlooked the aftermath; that is, the rebuilding, following extra-terrestrial invasion. It ignored what was likely to happen when the monsters were gone. In contrast, the psychological as well as the practical, social, and economic aspects of reconstruction are integral to disaster discourse today. Writing about how architecture might creatively contribute to post-conflict (including war) and disaster recovery, for instance, Boano elaborates the psychological background for rebuilding, where the material destruction of dwellings and cities “carries a powerful symbolic erosion of security, social wellbeing and place attachment” (38); these are depicted as attributes of selfhood and identity that must be restored. Similarly, Hutchison and Bleiker (385) adopt a view evident in disaster studies, that disaster-struck communities experience “trauma” and require inspired responses that facilitate “healing and reconciliation” as well as material aid such as food, housing, and renewed infrastructure. This paper revisits Sontag’s “The Imagination of Disaster,” fifty years on in view of the changing face of disasters and their representation in film media, including more recent films. The paper then considers disaster recovery and outlines the difficult path that “creative industries” like architecture and urban planning must tread when promising a vision of rebuilding that provides for such intangible outcomes as “healing and reconciliation.” We find that hopes for the seemingly positive psychologically- and socially-recuperative outcomes accompanying the prospect of rebuilding risk a variety of generalisation akin to wish-fulfilment that Sontag finds in disaster films. The Psychology of Science Fiction and Disaster FilmsIn “The Imagination of Disaster,” written at or close to the height of the Cold War, Sontag ruminates on what America’s interest in, if not preoccupation with, science fiction films tell us about ourselves. Their popularity cannot be explained in terms of their entertainment value alone; or if it can, then why audiences found (and still find) such films entertaining is something that itself needs explanation.Depicted in media like photography and film, utopian and dystopian thought have at least one thing in common. Their visions of either perfected or socially alienated worlds are commonly prompted by criticism of the social/political status quo and point to its reform. For Sontag, science fiction films portrayed both people’s worst nightmares concerning disaster and catastrophe (e.g. the end of the world; chaos; enslavement; mutation), as well as their facile victories over the kinds of moral, political, and social dissolution the films imaginatively depicted. Sontag does not explicitly attribute such “happy endings” to wish-fulfilling phantasy and ego-protection. (“Phantasy” is to be distinguished from fantasy. It is a psychoanalytic term for states of mind, often symbolic in form, resulting from infantile wish-fulfilment, desires and instincts.) She does, however, describe the kinds of fears, existential concerns (like annihilation), and crises of meaning they are designed (purpose built) to allay. The fears are a product of the time—the down and dark side of technology (e.g. depersonalisation; ambivalence towards science, scientists, and technology) and changes wrought in our working and personal lives by urbanisation. In short, then as now, science fictions films were both expressions of deep and genuine worries and of the pressing need to inventively set them to rest.When Sontag claims that “the imagination of disaster does not greatly differ” (224) from one period to another, this is because, psychologically speaking, neither the precipitating concerns and fears (death, loss of love, meaninglessness, etc.), nor the ways in which people’s minds endeavour to assuage them, substantively differ. What is different is the way they are depicted. This is unsurprisingly a function of the political, social, and moral situations and milieus that provide the context in which the imagination of disaster unfolds. In contemporary society, the extent to which the media informs and constructs the context in which the imagination operates is unprecedented.Sontag claims that there is little if any criticism of the real social and political conditions that bring about the fears the films depict (223). Instead, fantasy operates so as to displace and project the actual causes away from their all too human origins into outer space and onto aliens. In a sense, this is the core and raison d’etre for such films. By their very nature, science fiction films of the kind Sontag is discussing cannot concern themselves with genuine social or political criticism (even though the films are necessarily expressive of such criticism). Any serious questioning of the moral and political status quo—conditions that are responsible for the disasters befalling people—would hamper the operation of fantasy and its production of temporarily satisfying “solutions” to whatever catastrophe is being depicted.Sontag goes on to discuss various strategies science fiction employs to deal with such fears. For example, through positing a bifurcation between good and evil, and grossly oversimplifying the moral complexity of situations, it allows one to “give outlet to cruel or at least amoral feelings” (215) and to exercise feelings of superiority—moral and otherwise. Ambiguous feelings towards science and technology are repressed. Quick and psychologically satisfying fixes are sought for these by means of phantasy and the imaginative construction of invulnerable heroes. Much of what Sontag says can straightforwardly be applied to catastrophe in general. “Alongside the hopeful fantasy of moral simplification and international unity embodied in the science fiction films lurk the deepest anxieties about contemporary existence” (220). Sontag writes:In the films it is by means of images and sounds […] that one can participate in the fantasy of living through one’s own death and more, the death of cities, the destruction of humanity itself. Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects in art. In science fiction films disaster is rarely viewed intensively; it is always extensive. It is a matter of quality and ingenuity […] the science fiction film […] is concerned with the aesthetics of disaster […] and it is in the imagery of destruction that the core of a good science fiction film lies. (212–13)In science fiction films, disaster, though widespread, is viewed intensively as well as extensively. The disturbances constitutive of the disaster are moral and emotional as well as material. People are left without the mental or physical abilities they need to cope. Government is absent or useless. We find ourselves in what amounts to what Naomi Zack (“Philosophy and Disaster”; Ethics for Disaster) describes as a Hobbesian second state of nature—where government is inoperative and chaos (moral, social, political, personal) reigns. Science fiction’s way out is to imaginatively construct scenarios emotionally satisfying enough to temporarily assuage the distress (anomie or chaos) experienced in the film.There is, however, a tremendous difference in the way in which people who face catastrophic occurrences in their lives, as opposed to science fiction, address the problems. For one thing, they must be far closer to complex and quickly changing realities and uncertain truths than are the phantastic, temporarily gratifying, and morally unproblematic resolutions to the catastrophic scenarios that science fiction envisions. Genuine catastrophe, for example war, undermines and dismantles the structures—material structures to be sure but also those of justice, human kindness, and affectivity—that give us the wherewithal to function and that are shown to be inimical to catastrophe as such. Disaster dispenses with civilization while catastrophe displaces it.Special Effects and Changing StorylinesScience fiction and disaster film genres have been shaped by developments in visual simulation technologies providing opportunities for imaginatively mixing fact and fiction. Developments in filmmaking include computer or digital techniques for reproducing on the screen what can otherwise only be imagined as causal sequences of events and spectacles accompanying the wholesale destruction of buildings and cities—even entire planets. Indeed films are routinely promoted on the basis of how cinematographers and technicians have advanced the state of the art. The revival of 3-D movies with films such as Avatar (2009) and Prometheus (2012) is one of a number of developments augmenting the panoramas of 1950s classics featuring “melting tanks, flying bodies, crashing walls, awesome craters and fissures in the earth, plummeting spacecraft [and] colourful deadly rays” (Sontag 213). An emphasis on the scale of destruction and the wholesale obliteration of recognisable sites emblematic of “the city” (mega-structures like the industrial plant in Aliens (1986) and vast space ships like the “Death Star” in two Star Wars sequels) connect older films with new ones and impress the viewer with ever more extraordinary spectacle.Films that have been remade make for useful comparison. On the whole, these reinforce the continuation and predictability of some storylines (for instance, threats of extra-terrestrial invasion), but also the attenuation or disappearance of other narrative elements such as the monsters and anxieties released by mid-twentieth century atomic tests (Broderick). Remakes also highlight emerging themes requiring novel or updated critical frameworks. For example, environmental anxieties, largely absent in 1950s science fiction films (except for narratives involving colliding worlds or alien contacts) have appeared en masse in recent years, providing an updated view on the ethical issues posed by the fall of cities and communities (Taylor, “Urban”).In The Invasion of the Bodysnatchers and its remakes (1956, 1978, 1993), for example, the organic and vegetal nature of the aliens draws the viewer’s attention to an environment formed by combative species, allowing for threats of infestation, growth and decay of the self and individuality—a longstanding theme. In the most recent version, The Invasion (2007), special effects and directorial spirit render the orifice-seeking tendrils of the pod creatures threateningly vigorous and disturbing (Lim). More sanctimonious than physically invasive, the aliens in the 1951 version of The Day the Earth Stood Still are fed up with humankind’s fixation with atomic self-destruction, and threaten global obliteration on the earth (Cox). In the 2008 remake, the suave alien ambassador, Keanu Reeves, targets the environmental negligence of humanity.Science, including science as fiction, enters into disaster narratives in a variety of ways. Some are less obvious but provocative nonetheless; for example, movies dramatising the arrival of aliens such as War of the Worlds (1953 and 2005) or Alien (1979). These more subtle approaches can be personally confronting even without the mutation of victims into vegetables or zombies. Special effects technologies have made it possible to illustrate the course of catastrophic floods and earthquakes in considerable scientific and visual detail and to represent the interaction of natural disasters, the built environment, and people, from the scale of buildings, homes, and domestic lives to entire cities and urban populations.For instance, the blockbuster film The Day After Tomorrow (2004) runs 118 minutes, but has an uncertain fictional time frame of either a few weeks or 72 hours (if the film’s title is to taken literally). The movie shows the world as we know it being mostly destroyed. Tokyo is shattered by hailstones and Los Angeles is twisted by cyclones the likes of which Dorothy would never have seen. New York disappears beneath a mountainous tsunami. All of these events result from global climate change, though whether this is due to human (in) action or other causes is uncertain. Like their predecessors, the new wave of disaster movies like The Day After Tomorrow makes for questionable “art” (Annan). Nevertheless, their reception opens a window onto broader political and moral contexts for present anxieties. Some critics have condemned The Day After Tomorrow for its scientific inaccuracies—questioning the scale or pace of climate change. Others acknowledge errors while commending efforts to raise environmental awareness (Monbiot). Coincident with the film and criticisms in both the scientific and political arena is a new class of environmental heretic—the climate change denier. This is a shadowy character commonly associated with the presidency of George W. Bush and the oil lobby that uses minor inconsistencies of science to claim that climate change does not exist. One thing underlying both twisting facts for the purposes of making science fiction films and ignoring evidence of climate change is an infantile orientation towards the unknown. In this regard, recent films do what science fiction disaster films have always done. While freely mixing truths and half-truths for the purpose of heightened dramatic effect, they fulfil psychological tasks such as orchestrating nightmare scenarios and all too easy victories on the screen. Uncertainty regarding the precise cause, scale, or duration of cataclysmic natural phenomena is mirrored by suspension of disbelief in the viability of some human responses to portrayals of urban disaster. Science fiction, in other words, invites us to accept as possible the flight of Americans and their values to Mexico (The Day After Tomorrow), the voyage into earth’s molten core (The Core 2003), or the disposal of lava in LA’s drainage system (Volcano 1997). Reinforcing Sontag’s point, here too there is a lack of criticism of the real social and political conditions that bring about the fears depicted in the films (223). Moreover, much like news coverage, images in recent natural disaster films (like their predecessors) typically finish at the point where survivors are obliged to pick up the pieces and start all over again—the latter is not regarded as newsworthy. Allowing for developments in science fiction films and the disaster genre, Sontag’s observation remains accurate. The films are primarily concerned “with the aesthetics of destruction, with the peculiar beauties to be found in wreaking havoc, in making a mess” (213) rather than rebuilding. The Imagination of Disaster RecoverySontag’s essay contributes to an important critical perspective on science fiction film. Variations on her “psychological point of view” have been explored. (The two discourses—psychology and cinema—have parallel and in some cases intertwined histories). Moreover, in the intervening years, psychological or psychoanalytical terms and narratives have themselves become even more a part of popular culture. They feature in recent disaster films and disaster recovery discourse in the “real” world.Today, with greater frequency than in the 1950s and 60s films arguably, representations of alien invasion or catastrophic global warming serve to background conflict resolutions of a more quotidian and personal nature. Hence, viewers are led to suspect that Tom Cruise will be more likely to survive the rapacious monsters in the latest The War of the Worlds if he can become less narcissistic and a better father. Similarly, Dennis Quaid’s character will be much better prepared to serve a newly glaciated America for having rescued his son (and marriage) from the watery deep-freezer that New York City becomes in The Day After Tomorrow. In these films the domestic and familial comprise a domain of inter-personal and communal relations from which victims and heroes appear. Currents of thought from the broad literature of disaster studies and Western media also call upon this domain. The imagination of disaster recovery has come to partly resemble a set of problems organised around the needs of traumatised communities. These serve as an object of urban governance, planning, and design conceived in different ways, but largely envisioned as an organic unity that connects urban populations, their pasts, and settings in a meaningful, psychologically significant manner (Furedi; Hutchison and Bleiker; Boano). Terms like “place” or concepts like Boano’s “place-attachment" (38) feature in this discourse to describe this unity and its subjective dimensions. Consider one example. In August 2006, one year after Katrina, the highly respected Journal of Architectural Education dedicated a special issue to New Orleans and its reconstruction. Opening comments by editorialist Barbara Allen include claims presupposing enduring links between the New Orleans community conceived as an organic whole, its architectural heritage imagined as a mnemonic vehicle, and the city’s unique setting. Though largely unsupported (and arguably unsupportable) the following proposition would find agreement across a number of disaster studies and resonates in commonplace reasoning:The culture of New Orleans is unique. It is a mix of ancient heritage with layers and adaptations added by successive generations, resulting in a singularly beautiful cultural mosaic of elements. Hurricane Katrina destroyed buildings—though not in the city’s historic core—and displaced hundreds of thousands of people, but it cannot wipe out the memories and spirit of the citizens. (4) What is intriguing about the claim is an underlying intellectual project that subsumes psychological and sociological domains of reasoning within a distinctive experience of community, place, and memory. In other words, the common belief that memory is an intrinsic part of the human condition of shock and loss gives form to a theory of how urban communities experience disaster and how they might re-build—and justify rebuilding—themselves. This is problematic and invites anachronistic thinking. While communities are believed to be formed partly by memories of a place, “memory” is neither a collective faculty nor is it geographically bounded. Whose memories are included and which ones are not? Are these truly memories of one place or do they also draw on other real or imagined places? Moreover—and this is where additional circumspection is inspired by our reading of Sontag’s essay—does Allen’s editorial contribute to an aestheticised image of place, rather than criticism of the social and political conditions required for reconstruction to proceed with justice, compassionately and affectively? Allowing for civil liberties to enter the picture, Allen adds “it is necessary to enable every citizen to come back to this exceptional city if they so desire” (4). However, given that memories of places and desires for their recovery are not univocal, and often contain competing visions of what was and should be, it is not surprising they should result in competing expectations for reconstruction efforts. This has clearly proven the case for New Orleans (Vederber; Taylor, “Typologies”)ConclusionThe comparison of films invites an extension of Sontag’s analysis of the imagination of disaster to include the psychology, politics, and morality of rebuilding. Can a “psychological point of view” help us to understand not only the motives behind capturing so many scenes of destruction on screen and television, but also something of the creative impulses driving reconstruction? This invites a second question. How do some impulses, particularly those caricatured as the essence of an “enterprise culture” (Heap and Ross) associated with America’s “can-do” or others valorised as positive outcomes of catastrophe in The Upside of Down (Homer-Dixon), highlight or possibly obscure criticism of the conditions which made cities like New Orleans vulnerable in the first place? The broad outline of an answer to the second question begins to appear only when consideration of the ethics of disaster and rebuilding are taken on board. If “the upside” of “the down” wrought by Hurricane Katrina, for example, is rebuilding of any kind, at any price, and for any person, then the equation works (i.e., there is a silver lining for every cloud). If, however, the range of positives is broadened to include issues of social justice, then the figures require more complex arithmetic.ReferencesAllen, Barbara. “New Orleans and Katrina: One Year Later.” Journal of Architectural Education 60.1 (2006): 4.Annan, David. Catastrophe: The End of the Cinema? London: Lorrimer, 1975.Boano, Camillo. “‘Violent Space’: Production and Reproduction of Security and Vulnerabilities.” The Journal of Architecture 16 (2011): 37–55.Broderick, Mick, ed. Hibakusha Cinema: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Nuclear Image in Japanese Film. London: Kegan Paul, 1996.Cox, David. “Get This, Aliens: We Just Don’t Care!” The Guardian 15 Dec. 2008 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2008/dec/15/the-day-the-earth-stood-still›. Furedi, Frank. “The Changing Meaning of Disaster.” Area 39.4 (2007): 482–89.Heap, Shaun H., and Angus Ross, eds. Understanding the Enterprise Culture: Themes in the Work of Mary Douglas. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992. Homer-Dixon, Thomas. The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2006.Hutchison, Emma, and Roland Bleiker. “Emotional Reconciliation: Reconstituting Identity and Community after Trauma.” European Journal of Social Theory 11 (2008): 385–403.Lim, Dennis. “Same Old Aliens, But New Neuroses.” New York Times 12 Aug. 2007: A17.Monbiot, George. “A Hard Rain's A-gonna Fall.” The Guardian 14 May 2004.Sontag, Susan. “The Imagination of Disaster” (1965). Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Dell, 1979. 209–25.Taylor, William M. “Typologies of Katrina: Mnemotechnics in Post-Disaster New Orleans.” Interstices 13 (2012): 71–84.———. “Urban Disasters: Visualising the Fall of Cities and the Forming of Human Values.” Journal of Architecture 11.5 (2006): 603–12.Verderber, Stephen. “Five Years After – Three New Orleans Neighborhoods.” Journal of Architectural Education 64.1 (2010): 107–20.Zack, Naomi. Ethics for Disaster. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009.———. “Philosophy and Disaster.” Homeland Security Affairs 2, article 5 (April 2006): ‹http://www.hsaj.org/?article=2.1.5›.FilmographyAlien. Dir. Ridley Scott. Brandywine Productions, 1979.Aliens. Dir. James Cameron. Brandywine Productions, 1986.Avatar. Dir. James Cameron. Lightstorm Entertainment et al., 2009.The Core. Dir. Jon Amiel. Paramount Pictures, 2003.The Day after Tomorrow. Dir. Roland Emmerich. 20th Century Fox, 2004.The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Dir. Don Siegel. Allied Artists, 1956; also 1978 and 1993.The Invasion. Dirs. Oliver Hirschbiegel and Jame McTeigue. Village Roadshow et al, 2007.Prometheus. Dir. Ridley Scott. Scott Free and Brandywine Productions, 2012Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. Dir. George Lucas. Lucasfilm, 1977.Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi. Dir. George Lucas. Lucasfilm, 1983.Volcano. Dir. Mick Jackson. 20th Century Fox, 1997.War of the Worlds. Dir. George Pal. Paramount, 1953; also Steven Spielberg. Paramount, 2005.Acknowledgments The authors are grateful to Oenone Rooksby and Joely-Kym Sobott for their assistance and advice when preparing this article. It was also made possible in part by a grant from the Australian Research Council.

Introduction The LEGO Group is a multinational toy manufacturer headquartered in Billund, Denmark, with interests in videogames, television, and film, in addition to toys. Their primary product consists of plastic building blocks with thousands of variations in dozens of colours, purchasable either in sets with instructions to create particular designs, or as assorted boxes for more creative freeform building; sets have a multitude of “themes”, including in-house labels such as ‘Bionicles’ and ‘Ninjago’, ‘city’ sets, and products based on popular intellectual property from film, television, videogames, and even organisations such as NASA. Different sets and themes are targeted at different audience segments, including adults and children by age group. The company announced in 2021 that it would aim to ensure its “products and marketing are accessible to all and free of gender bias” (LEGO Group, “Girls”). The LEGO Group and its various products attract active and engaged fans. LEGO bricks allow users to create designs limited only by their imagination and their ability to acquire sufficient parts. Though initially and perhaps primarily a children’s toy, LEGO has over the past few decades attracted a substantial adult audience, often referred to as Adult Fans of LEGO (AFOLs) who function as brand ambassadors, consumers, and co-creators (Jennings 222). The toy’s creative affordances have allowed AFOLs to establish numerous fan conventions and events at which they display their designs. In addition to unofficial fan activity such as conventions, LEGO has shown an interest in direct economic engagement with fans of their products. This is evidenced by their 2021 purchase of a large after-market LEGO reselling marketplace, Bricklink (LEGO Group, “LEGO Group Acquires”), and the establishment of the LEGO Ideas platform, which is the subject of this article. Such efforts might be viewed in light of Busse’s warning that there is “danger to fan culture [from] the co-optation and colonization of fan creations, interactions, and space” (Busse 112). This article investigates the LEGO Group’s relationship to adult fan labour through the notion of ‘platform rhetoric’, by which we mean the way in which the LEGO Ideas platform, and specifically the LEGO Ideas Guidelines (LEGO Group, “Product Idea”), hereafter “Guidelines”, create an infrastructure for structuring the relationship between fan designers and the company. The platform harnesses the labour of both adult fan designers and other site users to generate new and successful products for the LEGO Group. In doing so, it offers a tantalising case study of how this toy is positioned at the intersection of creativity, transnational data flows, and global economic activity. While the LEGO Ideas platform and Guidelines are not the only space in which LEGO and their fans negotiate such matters, as shown by other examples already mentioned, the platform’s public nature and its intersection with other aspects of participatory online media offer a valuable case study for understanding platform rhetorics and the way they can structure interactions between fans and brands. About LEGO Ideas LEGO Ideas was established in 2008 as a collaboration between the LEGO Group and a Japanese company as a crowdsourcing platform called LEGO CUUSOO. It was relaunched as LEGO Ideas in 2014 (LEGO Group, “LEGO History”). Crowdsourcing is an “online, distributed problem-solving and production model” (Brabham 75) that became popular from about 2006 as a new approach to generating product ideas. It is a process in which “the crowd was co-opted” (Ghezzi et al. 344) and where “products designed by the crowd become the property of companies, who turn large profits off from this crowd labor” (Brabham 76). Ideas appears part of a broader reset for LEGO that occurred as the Internet came to occupy increasing prominence in social and commercial life. Hatch and Shultz (596) observe that in contrast to previous strategies for the company, by the early 2000s “consumer and company alike were now using the Internet as both the platform and a channel for brand engagement”. In line with this trend, the Ideas platform invites fan designers to submit ideas for new LEGO products which then pass through a series of filters before reaching a stage at which the company considers them for production, including multiple stages of public voting. After reaching the final stage of fan voting, potential products are assessed by the LEGO Group on a range of factors. Each of these stages is laid out in the Guidelines, along with authorship arrangements: successful designers receive “1% of the total net sales of the product … 10 complimentary copies of your LEGO Ideas set [and] Credit and bio in set materials as the LEGO Ideas set creator”. Ideas capitalises on the cultures of creation and co-creation that Nancy Jennings has identified as central to AFOL communities, although her work focusses on the Lego Ambassador Program and LEGO Group AFOL Engagement Department (238). The LEGO Ideas Website can be described as a platform, a “digital, socio-technical system that create[s] relationships between different entities” (Lee). When self-applied by the entity, the term platform has a political purpose to simplify or obfuscate “tensions … between user-generated and commercially-produced content, between cultivating community and serving up advertising, between intervening in the delivery of content and remaining neutral” (Gillespie 348). In applying the term ‘platform’ to LEGO Ideas, we are making similar political claims that it occupies a tension-filled role between users (including those who submit designs) and the commercial interests of the LEGO Group. Plantin et al. suggest something of a convergence between platform and infrastructure studies, especially when addressing “new digital objects” (293). The platform also serves a role in collecting large amounts of data for LEGO, which can be understood as equivalent to the advertising initiatives of other platforms. It is certainly not a neutral carrier of content, as our analysis of the Guidelines will show. The affordances of the LEGO Ideas platform engage both fans who actively produce fan products in the form of designs and photographs submitted to the site, but also “nonproductive fans [who] can participate in fandom's gift economy through their engagement with the fruits of fannish labor” (Turk). Such engagement takes the form of participating in the voting systems, commenting upon the designs, and generating engagement through social media. This is a capturing of consumer labour in much the same way envisioned by Toffler (cited in Bruns) in the notion of a ‘prosumer’: “Producer and consumer, divorced by the industrial revolution, are reunited in the cycle of wealth creation, with the customer contributing not just the money but market and design information vital for the production process”. The ecosystem of participation also extends beyond the platform itself as the Guidelines explicitly specify that a user may “promote as you wish online”. Fan designer Brent Waller, creator of two successful LEGO Ideas sets, commented in an interview that you need to actively promote it via outside avenues – forums, websites, Facebook, Twitter etc. This is particularly important if your project is based on existing [sic] license or intellectual property. If that is the case then you need to reach out to those external fan bases who may not be huge LEGO fans but may be a fan of the project you’ve submitted and would love to see it come to life in LEGO form. (Ong, “Interview with Brent Waller”) As such, submitters tend to use social media and other Internet platforms to generate votes, further extending the complexity of interactions between user creativity, the toy company and their economic interests, and the flow of user-generated information across Internet platforms. LEGO Ideas Guidelines as Rhetorical Infrastructure While we have characterised LEGO Ideas as a platform, it is not an open social media platform but instead has tightly controlled submission procedures. Each submission to LEGO Ideas must incorporate several required elements outlined in the Guidelines and be approved by platform staff prior to publication. This is the first in a series of processes by which LEGO Ideas operates to shape the products which are published through it. These are rhetorical infrastructures, “not just containers for composition but systems of support that structure the compositions they generate in an active way” (Pilsch 8). Accepting the distinction between platforms and infrastructure in terms of digital objects discussed by Plantin et al., we are distinguishing between LEGO Ideas as a platform and the LEGO Ideas guidelines as an infrastructural element which shapes how the platform operates. Whereas infrastructure studies has “focused on analyzing essential, widely shared sociotechnical systems” (Plantin et al., 294), the Guidelines serve that purpose only within the Ideas platform for the purposes of this case study. There are similarities in this conception of rhetorical infrastructure and terms such as ‘affordance’, which similarly seek to describe the way in which artifacts embed “mechanisms and conditions [which] create a scaffold through which artifacts request, demand, allow, encourage, discourage, and refuse” (Davis and Chouinard 246, original emphasis). The notion of “rhetorical infrastructure” is distinctive in capturing the functional and relational work done by networks of documents, artifacts, activities, and procedures that underpin action within a given environment (Read 12); within technical communication, there is a particular emphasis on the rhetorical infrastructure of “invisible documents” such as documentation and standards – forms of writing that serve a vital regulatory function but which are often invisible until they fail (Frith 406). Understanding the LEGO Ideas Guidelines as rhetorical infrastructure allows us to excavate how this document works behind the scenes to shape user action and standardise outputs within a platform that ostensibly privileges free play and creativity, but actually transforms these into valuable intellectual property for the LEGO Group. The Guidelines function as a translational infrastructure to incorporate fan labour directly into the LEGO ecosystem. The Guidelines serve their regulatory function in part by outlining in plain terms, both textually and visually, what content will and will not be accepted as a submission to the site. The Guidelines specify that Ideas must be: “single, stand-alone LEGO products”; “a maximum of 3000 pieces”; “must focus on a single concept”; and not based “on a licensed property we currently sell”. Platform users must be older than 13 years of age, and any submitter younger than 18 must have written approval from their caregiver. In this way, LEGO further orients the Ideas platform toward the putative AFOL, and submitted Ideas, in our review, likewise tend to be targeted toward older builders. Additionally, the Guidelines prohibit any commercial activity related to submitted Ideas, although they do permit sharing of “photos and building instructions free of charge”. These are the basic substantive rules by which staff approve submissions to be posted to (or remain on) the platform, though further aesthetic and legal conditions are outlined elsewhere in the Guidelines. Following initial approval, concepts published on LEGO Ideas must achieve a series of voting milestones in which other users of the platform show their ‘support’ – 100 supporters in the first 60 days, 1,000 supporters in the next year, and so on – a process which generates substantial amounts of user data for LEGO. Ultimately, projects have just over two years to attain the figure of 10,000 supporters that triggers the “expert review” phase of the Ideas selection process. Such voting is a form of collective knowledge generation; within the context of a workplace, Majchrzak et al. describe this practice as “metavoicing … adding metaknowledge to the content that is already online” (41). It is also a substantial source of market data. Assuming at least some supporters of each successful project have selected their time zone and filled in other details, the submission of these votes under the LEGO Ideas guidelines demonstrates potential market interest for the projects and other data points of economic interest to the toymaker. Additionally, LEGO Ideas places at least eight ‘cookies’ on Web browsers used to access the site. This process also generates a substantial potential data pool (Bennett; Englehardt et al.). In addition to generating data for LEGO, achieving milestones motivates submitters to continue promoting their idea and thus drives traffic to the platform. Blog posts published on the LEGO Ideas site demonstrate that the 10,000 vote milestone in particular generates substantial excitement for the fan designers. For example, in one such post Peter (user SoGenius106), who submitted an Idea based on television program The Office, notes that this project hit 10k about 8 days before it was set to expire, this is what really made me nervous, knowing that this project was so close to 10K but had little time to get there. (Kamila9) Similarly, Sam (user KaijuBuildz) expressed excitement at reaching the 10,000-supporter milestone: it took a while, around 16 months to be precise. But the feeling when it finally DID hit that magic 5-digit number felt incredible, though it did take some time to truly sink in. (fergushart) Like Waller, quoted earlier, both fan designers noted that using social media platforms outside of Ideas was important to their success. But Sam / KajuiBuildz also credited the platform’s affordances and userbase, suggesting: “word of mouth through the supporters of the project itself was a big help for sure” (fergushart). Such extension across platforms demonstrates “the logic of self-branding – of carefully curated self-promotion – [which] is a fact of social media life, for everyday users and cultural workers alike” (Duffy and Pooley 8). While the LEGO Ideas platform shapes production of submitted projects, the Guidelines also structure the relationship between fan designers and the LEGO Group after any successful voting period. Any Idea that reaches the 10,000-supporter milestone is reviewed by a ‘review board’ of “designers, product managers, and other key team members”; if an Idea is selected for production, “professional LEGO designers take over” (LEGO Group, “Product”). In practice, a number of fan designers document collaborating with professional designers in some capacity. For example, Motorised Lighthouse designer Sandro Quattrini said he was able to express ideas “in our very first meeting” (Ong, “Interview with the LEGO Ideas Design Team”), while the designer of the Typewriter set stated: “I was really made to feel a part of the team” (Huw). In this case, the published document sets a term of engagement that may or may not be reflected in the actual practice of creating a LEGO set following a successful Ideas submission. It therefore establishes the framework through which the decision to interact or not with the designer is left in the hands of LEGO staff assigned to the project. Guidelines for Social Action This points to the dual role of the Guidelines: the document is at once procedural, laying out the steps required of platform users, and social, shaping the ways that users of the platform engage with the Ideas published there and with the LEGO Group. It’s common for technical documents such as guidelines and instructions to be characterised as formulaic, mechanical tools for dictating practice, what Walwema and Butts refer to as “grey genres” (Butts and Walwema 15); in practice, however, such genres both shape users’ actions and position them as members of a community with shared interests and values. This positioning happens in both informal and formal guidelines – for example, Ledbetter’s study of user-generated instructional content in YouTube beauty communities has demonstrated how video tutorials begin from users’ shared interests (here, in makeup techniques) and then build fan-user communities that share specialist vocabularies, social interactions, and value-led behaviours (Ledbetter). Within institutions, codes of conduct are a well-defined and stable genre, yet operate in a complex, unstable nexus of procedural, ethical, and legal contexts; they are simultaneously internal policy documents (setting out standards of behaviour for organisation members), public ethical statements (published as part of an organisation’s commitment to ethical frameworks, emphasising principles and values over actions), and deployed or deployable in legal contexts to shield corporations. As Sam Dragga notes, codes of conduct typically adopt a legislative approach and are composed as “guidelines and regulations”, even where they use language and syntax – like “we” statements – designed to look more like commitments than regulations. These documents position users as subject to the institution’s values, “implying that the individual is without power because all power comes from the regulating corporation” (Dragga 7), rather than as collaborators in them. The LEGO Ideas Guidelines likewise operate to require alignment of user actions with brand values to ensure that fan labour can be successfully monetised at all stages of the Ideas process, from initial visits to the platform right through to commercial production of fan designs. This expectation is codified in the Guidelines’ “Acceptable Content” section: “in order for us to be able to consider your product idea, it must fit with our brand values and guidelines … following these guidelines is the surest recipe to see that your work is approved for LEGO Ideas”. Those values, however, are only implicit in the list of concrete themes and attributes that “do not fit”, including nudity, modern warfare, human-scale weapons, and racism. The Guidelines are explicitly directive, with a hard demarcation between LEGO and its fans: the document refers to “we” the LEGO Group and “you” the user, and bans fan designers from using any version of the brand logo, even an approximation so abstract as “a red square”, lest their submission be misconstrued as LEGO-endorsed. This exclusion occurs even as in-house terminology like “LEGO Fan designer” and “professional LEGO designer” or “LEGO Set designer” establishes an overlap between the labour of fans and employees – one reinforced by the showcasing of those fan designers who do participate in some co-design with LEGO’s professional team when their Idea goes into production. Conclusion The LEGO Ideas platform is presented as a channel for fans and designers to use their existing passion and creativity productively, for their own financial benefit and for the (considerably larger) economic benefit of the company. Adult designers using the platform do so only in alignment within the operation of a set of Guidelines that constrain and guide their decisions in a way perceived to be an appropriate reflection of the LEGO brand. Like other online platforms with social features, the Ideas platform is a commercial infrastructure in which community is shaped, rather than a community infrastructure. The success of the platform has also impacted on the wider toy industry, with other toy companies introducing Ideas-like platforms, such as Mattel’s ‘Creations’. In turn, the platform and its users intersect with other participatory Internet platforms such as social network sites where they promote their Ideas to garner the magical 10,000 supporters needed to progress to the next step. Further engagement with broader notions of digital infrastructure and platforms, especially on the terms described by Plantin et al., would offer fruitful insights into both the wider LEGO operation and LEGO Ideas specifically. Throughout the process, LEGO collects massive amounts of user data from both participating fan designers and other users of the site through both technical means and social signals. Such data is of additional value when combined with other LEGO user accounts such as purchase history, and potentially also with information about users (buyers and sellers) on the Bricklink site. This offers a potentially vast amount of signals about purchase, browsing, and interest among both existing and prospective LEGO customers, and could again be part of a larger study of the company’s corporate strategies. The Guidelines shape the entirety of this interactive space, creating the infrastructure in which different forms of knowledge and cultural capital operate, and rhetorical action occurs. Successful Ideas have captured a social Zeitgeist to gather the required number of supporters, while also ensuring they closely align with the LEGO brand guidelines. LEGO staff participating in the process bring their own institutional perspective to the designs, taking over where required but also consulting the submitting fan designers in a number of cases. On this point, the Guidelines offer ambiguity, allowing the LEGO Group discretion over the final shape of interaction between designers of different status. All of these examples demonstrate the rhetorical infrastructure of the LEGO Ideas platform and its Guidelines. As a key interactive space between the LEGO Group and its adult fan community, the underpinning expertise, documentation, networks of information and individuals, and complex data flows clearly demonstrate the ways that toys can intersect with other social and economic structures. References Bennett, Colin. “Cookies, Web Bugs, Webcams and Cue Cats: Patterns of Surveillance on the World Wide Web”. Ethics and Information Technology 3.3 (Sep. 2001): 195–208. Brabham, Daren. “Crowdsourcing as a Model for Problem Solving: An Introduction and Cases”. Convergence 14.1 (2008): 75–90. Bruns, Axel. “From Prosumption to Produsage.” Handbook on the Digital Creative Economy. Eds. Ruth Towse and Christian Handke. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2013. 67–78. Busse, Kristina. “Fan Labor and Feminism: Capitalizing on the Fannish Labor of Love.” Cinema Journal 54.3 (2015): 110–115. Butts, Jimmy, and Josephine Walwema. “Rhetorical Hedonism and Gray Genres.” Communication Design Quarterly 9.2 (2021): 15–26. Davis, Jenny, and James Chouinard. “Theorizing Affordances: From Request to Refuse.” Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 36.4 (2017): 241–248. Dragga, Sam. “Cooperation or Compliance: Building Dialogic Codes of Conduct.” Technical Communication 58.1 (2011): 4–18. Duffy, Brooke, and Jefferson Pooley. “‘Facebook for Academics’: The Convergence of Self-Branding and Social Media Logic on Academia.edu.” Social Media + Society 3.1 (2017): 1-11. Englehardt, Steven, et al. “Cookies That Give You Away: The Surveillance Implications of Web Tracking”. Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web. International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee, 2015. 289–299. fergushart. “10K Club Interview: Thomas the Tank Engine by KaijuBuildz.” LEGO Ideas, 26 Jan. 2023. 17 June 2023 <https://ideas.lego.com/blogs/a4ae09b6-0d4c-4307-9da8-3ee9f3d368d6/post/10c90709-c7d4-49a9-889e-e02b85f738af>. Frith, Jordan. “Technical Standards and a Theory of Writing as Infrastructure.” Written Communication 37.3 (2020): 401–427. Ghezzi, Antonio, et al. “Crowdsourcing: A Review and Suggestions for Future Research.” International Journal of Management Reviews 20.2 (2018): 343–363. Gillespie, Tarleton. “The Politics of ‘Platforms’.” New Media & Society 12.3 (2010): 347–364. Huw. “Interview with Steve Guinness, Fan Designer of 21327 Typewriter.” Brickset.com, 16 June 2021. 17 June 2023 <https://brickset.com/article/59966/interview-with-steve-guinness-fan-designer-of-21327-typewriter>. Jennings, Nancy A. “‘It’s All about the Brick’: Mobilizing Adult Fans of LEGO.” Cultural Studies of LEGO: More than Just Bricks. Eds. Rebecca Hains and Sharon Mazzarella. Cham: Springer, 2019. 221–43. Kamila9. “10k Club Interview: Peter, Creator of The Office”. LEGO Ideas, 27 July 2021. 17 June 2023 <https://ideas.lego.com/blogs/a4ae09b6-0d4c-4307-9da8-3ee9f3d368d6/post/95be3083-8145-418f-841b-59e2b245a288>. Ledbetter, Lehua. “The Rhetorical Work of YouTube’s Beauty Community: Relationship- and Identity-Building in User-Created Procedural Discourse.” Technical Communication Quarterly 27.4 (2018): 287–299. Lee, Ashlin. “In the Shadow of Platforms: Challenges and Opportunities for the Shadow of Hierarchy in the Age of Platforms and Datafication.” M/C Journal 24.2 (2021). 17 June 2023 <https://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2750>. LEGO Group. “Girls Are Ready to Overcome Gender Norms But Society Continues to Enforce Biases That Hamper Their Creative Potential.” LEGO.com, 11 Oct. 2021. 17 June 2023 <https://www.lego.com/en-id/aboutus/news/2021/september/lego-ready-for-girls-campaign>. ———. “LEGO History: LEGO Ideas.” LEGO.com, 2022. 17 June 2023 <https://www.lego.com/en-us/history/articles/j-lego-ideas>. ———. “Product Idea Guidelines.” LEGO Ideas, 4 Oct. 2022. 17 June 2023 <https://ideas.lego.com/guidelines>. ———. “The LEGO Group Acquires BrickLink, the World’s Largest Online LEGO® Fan Community and Marketplace to Strengthen Ties with Adult Fans.” LEGO.com, 26 Nov. 2019. 17 June 2023 <https://www.lego.com/en-us/aboutus /news/2019/november/lego-bricklink>. Majchrzak, Ann, et al. “The Contradictory Influence of Social Media Affordances on Online Communal Knowledge Sharing.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 19.1 (2013): 38–55. Mattel. Mattel Creations, 2023. 14 June 2023 <https://creations.mattel.com>. Ong, Jay. “An Interview with Brent Waller, Australian Designer of LEGO 21108 Ghostbusters.” Jay’s Brick Blog, 21 May 2014. 17 June 2023 <https://jaysbrickblog.com/interviews/brent-waller-interview-lego-ghostbusters>. ———. “Interview with the LEGO Ideas Design Team and Fan Designer of 21335 Motorised Lighthouse.” Jay’s Brick Blog, 5 Sep. 2022. 17 June 2023 <https://jaysbrickblog.com/news/lego-21335-motorised-lighthouse-design-team-interview>. Pilsch, Andrew. “Events in Flux: Software Architecture, Detractio, and the Rhetorical Infrastructure of Facebook”. Computers and Composition 57 (2020): 1–13. Plantin, Jean-Christophe, et al. “Infrastructure Studies Meet Platform Studies in the Age of Google and Facebook.” New Media & Society 20.1 (2018): 293–310. Read, Sarah. “The Infrastructural Function: A Relational Theory of Infrastructure for Writing Studies.” Journal of Business and Technical Communication 33.3 (2019): 233–267. Schultz, Majken, and Mary Jo Hatch. “Toward a Theory of Brand Co-Creation with Implications for Brand Governance.” Journal of Brand Management 17.8 (2010): 590–604. Turk, Tisha. “Fan Work: Labor, Worth, and Participation in Fandom’s Gift Economy.” Transformative Works and Cultures 15 (2014). 17 June 2023 <https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2014.0518>.

Why has software code become an object of intense interest in several different domains of cultural life? In art (.net art or software art), in Open source software (Linux, Perl, Apache, et cetera (Moody; Himanen)), in tactical media actions (hacking of WEF Melbourne and Nike websites), and more generally, in the significance attributed to coding as work at the pinnacle of contemporary production of information (Negri and Hardt 298), code itself has somehow recently become significant, at least for some subcultures. Why has that happened? At one level, we could say that this happened because informatic interaction (websites, email, chat, online gaming, ecommerce, etc) has become mainstream to media production, organisational practice and indeed, quotidian life in developed and developing countries. As information production moves into the mainstream, working against mainstream control of flows of information means going upstream. For artists, tactical media groups and hackers, code seems to provide a way to, so to speak, reach over the shoulder of mainstream media channels and contest their control of information flows.1 A basic question is: does it? What code does We all see content flowing through the networks. Yet the expressive traits of the flows themselves are harder to grapple with, partly because they are largely infrastructural. When media and cultural theory discuss information-network society, cyberculture or new media, questions of flow specificity are usually downplayed in favour of high-level engagement with information as content. Arguably, the heightened attention to code attests to an increasing awareness that power relations are embedded in the generation and control of flow rather than just the meanings or contents that might be transported by flow. In this context, loops provide a really elementary and concrete way to explore how code participates in information flows. Loops structure almost every code object at a basic level. The programmed loop, a very mundane construct, can be found in any new media artist's or software engineer's coding toolkit. All programming languages have them. In popular programming and scripting languages such as FORTRAN, C, Pascal, C++, Java, Visual Basic, Perl, Python, JavaScript, ActionScript, etc, an almost identical set of looping constructs are found.2 Working with loops as material and as instrument constitutes an indispensable part of producing code-based objects. On the one hand, the loop is the most basic technical element of code as written text. On the other hand, as process executed by CPUs, and in ways that are not immediately obvious even to programmers themselves, loops of various kinds underpin the generative potential of code.3 Crucially, code is concerned with operationality rather than meaning (Lash 203). Code does not directly create meaning. It circulates, transforms, and reproduces messages and patterns of widely varying semantic and contextual richness. By definition, flow is something continuous. In the case of information, what flows are not things but patterns which can be rendered perceptible in different ways—as image, text, sound—on screen, display, and speaker. While the patterns become perceptible in a range of different spatio-temporal modes, their circulation is serialised. They are, as we know, composed of sequences of modulations (bits). Loops control the flow of patterns. Lev Manovich writes: programming involves altering the linear flow of data through control structures, such as 'if/then' and 'repeat/while'; the loop is the most elementary of these control structures (Manovich 189). Drawing on these constructs, programming or coding work gain traction in flows. Interactive looping Loops also generate flows by multiplying events. The most obvious example of how code loops generate and control flows comes from the graphic user interfaces (GUIs) provided by typical operating systems such as Windows, MacOs or one of the Linux desktop environments. These operating systems configure the visual space of millions of desktop screen according to heavily branded designs. Basically they all divide the screen into different framing areas—panels, dividing lines, toolbars, frames, windows—and then populate those areas with controls and indicators—buttons, icons, checkboxes, dropdown lists, menus, popup menus. Framing areas hold content—text, tables, images, video. Controls, usually clustered around the edge of the frame, transform the content displayed in the framed areas in many different ways. Visual controls are themselves hooked up via code to physical input devices such as keyboard, mouse, joystick, buttons and trackpad. The highly habituated and embodied experience of interacting with contemporary GUIs consists of moving in and out, within and between different framing areas, using visual controls that respond either to pointing (with the mouse) or keyboard command to change what is displayed, how it is displayed or indeed to move that content elsewhere (onto disk, across a network). Beneath the highly organised visual space of the GUI, lie hundreds if not thousands of loops. The work of coding these interfaces involves making loops, splicing loops together, and nesting loops within loops. At base, the so-called event loop means that the GUI in principle stands ready at any time to accept input from the physical interface devices. Depending on what that input is, it may translate into direct changes within the framed areas (for instance, keystrokes appear in a text field as letters) or changes affecting the controls (for instance, Control-Enter might signal send the text as an email). What we usually understand by interactivity stems from the way that a loop constantly accepts signals from the physical inputs, queues the signals as events, and deals with them one by one as discrete changes in what appears on screen. Within the GUI's basic event loop, many other loops are constantly starting and finishing. They are nested and unnested. They often affect some or other of the dozens of processes running at any one time within the operating system. Sometimes a command coming from the keyboard or a signal arriving from some other peripheral interface (the network interface card, the printer, a scanner, etc) will trigger the execution of a new process, itself composed of manifold loops. Hence loops often transiently interact with each other during execution of code. At base, the GUI shows something important, something that extends well beyond the domain of the GUI per se: the event loop generates and controls informations flows at the same time. People type on keyboards or manipulate game controllers. A single keypress or mouse click itself hardly constitutes a flow. Yet the event loop can amplify it into a cascade of thousands of events because it sets other loops in process. What we call information flow springs from the multiplicatory effect of loops. A typology of looping Information flows don't come from nowhere. They always go somewhere. Perhaps we could generalise a little from the mundane example of the GUI and say that the generation and control of information flows through loops is itself regulated by bounding conditions. A bounding condition determines the number of times and the sequence of operations carried out by a loop. They often come from outside the machine (interfaces of many different kinds) and from within it (other processes running at the same time, dependent on the operating system architecture and the hardware platform). Their regulatory role suggests the possibility of classifying loops according to boundary conditions.4 The following table classifies loops based on bounding conditions: Type of loop Bounding condition Typical location Simple & indefinite No bounding conditions Event loops in GUIs, servers ... Simple & definite Bounding conditions determined by a finite set of elements Counting, sorting, input and output Nested & definite Multiple bounding conditions Transforming grid and table structures Recursive Depth of possible recursion (memory or time) Searching and sorting of tree or network structures Result controlled Loop ends when some goal has been reached Goal-seeking algorithms Interactive and indefinite Bounding conditions change during the course of the loop User interfaces or interaction Although it risks simplifying something that is quite intricate in any actually executing process, this classification does stress that the distinguishing feature of loops may well be their bounding conditions. In practical terms, within program code, a bounding condition takes the form of some test carried out before, during or after each iteration of a loop. The bounding conditions for some loops relate to data that the code expects to come from other places—across networks, from the user interface, or some other devices. For other loops, the bounding conditions continually emerge in the course of the loop itself—the result of a calculation, finding some result in the course of searching a collection or receiving some new input in a flow of data from an interface or network connection. Based on the classification, we could suggest that loops not only generate flows, but they generate those flows within particular spatio-temporal manifolds. Put less abstractly, if we accept that flows don't come from nowhere, we then need to say what kind of places they do come from. The classification shows that they do not come from homogeneous spaces. In fact they relate to different topologies, to the hugely diverse orderings of signs and gestures within mediatic cultures. To take a mundane example, why has the table become such an important element in the HTML coding of webpages? Clearly tables provide an easy way to organise a page. Tables as classifying and visual ordering devices are nothing new. Along with lists, they have been used for centuries. However, the table as onscreen spatial entity also maps very directly onto a nested loop: the inner loop generates the horizontal row contents; the outer loop places the output of the inner loop in vertical order. As web-designers quickly discovered during the 1990s, HTML tables are rendered quickly by browsers and can easily position different contents—images, headings, text, lines, spaces—in proximity. In shorts, nested loops can quickly turn a table into a serial flow or quickly render a table out of a serial flow. Implications We started with the observation that artists, writers, hackers and media activists are working with code in order to reposition themselves in relation to information flows. Through technical elements such as loops, they reappropriate certain facets of the production of information and communication. Working with these and other elements, they look for different points of entry into the flows, attempting to move upstream of the heavily capitalised sites of mainstream production such as the Windows GUI, eCommerce websites or blockbuster game titles. The proliferation of information objects in music, in visual culture, in database and net-centred forms of interactivity ranging from computer games to chat protocols, suggests that the coding work can trigger powerful shifts in the cultures of circulation. Analysis of loops also suggests that the notion of data or information flow, understood as the continuous gliding of bits through systems of communication, needs revision. Rather than code simply controlling flow, code generates flows as well. What might warrant further thought is just how different kinds of bounding conditions generate different spatio-temporal patterns and modes of inclusion within flows. The diversity of loops within information objects imply a variety of topologically complicated places. It would be possible to work through the classification describing how each kind of loop maps into different spatial and temporal orderings. In particular, we might want to focus on how more complicated loops—result controlled, recursive, or interactive and indefinite types—map out more topologically complicated spaces and times. For my purposes, the important point is that bounding conditions not only regulate loops, they bring different kinds of spatio-temporal manifold into the seriality of flow. They imprint spatial and temporal ordering. Here the operationality of code begins to display a generative dimension that goes well beyond merely transporting or communicating content. Notes 1. At a more theoretical level, for a decade or so fairly abstract notions of virtuality have dominated media and cultural studies approaches to new media. While that domination has been increasingly contested by more fine grained studies of how the Internet is enmeshed with different places (Miller and Slater), attention to code is justified on the grounds that it constitutes an increasingly important form of expression within information flows. 2. Detailed discussion of these looping constructs can be found in any programming textbook or introductory computer science course, so I will not be going through them in any detail. 3. For instance, the cycles of the clock chip are absolutely irreducible. Virtually all programs implicitly rely on a clock chip to regulate execution of their instructions. 4. A classification can act as a symptomatology, that is, as something that sets out the various signs of the existence of a particular condition (Deleuze 368), in this case, the operationality of code. References Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996. Deleuze, Gilles. The Brain is the Screen. An Interview with Gilles Deleuze. The Brain is the Screen. Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema. Ed Gregory Flaxman. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000. 365-68. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U P, 2000. Himanen, Pekka. The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age. London: Secker and Warburg, 2001. Lash, Scott. Critique of Information. London: Sage, 2002. Manovich, Lev. What is Digital Cinema? Ed. Peter Lunenfeld. The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1999. 172-92. Miller, Daniel, and Don Slater. The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach. Oxford: Berg, 2000. Moody, Glyn. Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution. Middlesworth: Penguin, 2001. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Mackenzie, Adrian. "Making Data Flow" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.4 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/data.php>. Chicago Style Mackenzie, Adrian, "Making Data Flow" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 4 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/data.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Mackenzie, Adrian. (2002) Making Data Flow. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(4). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/data.php> ([your date of access]).

The condition that marks the post-digital age may be the condition for error. In the condition where machinic systems seek the unforeseen and the emergent, there is also a possibility for the unforeseen error to slip into existence. This condition can be seen in the emerging tradition of artists using error as a creative tool. In his paper “The Aesthetics of Failure: ‘Post-Digital’ Tendencies in Contemporary Music,” Kim Cascone points to the way in which composers, using digital means, exploit the inadequacies of a particular compositional or performative technology (Cascone 13). Cascone cites composers such as Ryoji Ikeda who create minimalist electronic compositions using media as both their form and theme. In these compositions, the errors, imperfections, and limitations of the particular compositional media are the central constituting elements of the piece. In addition to music, this glitch aesthetic is also exploited in the visual arts. Artists such as Tony Scott set up situations in which errors are able to emerge and be exploited in the art making process. In these types of work the artist’s role is to allow a glitch or an error to arise in a specific system, then to reconfigure and exploit the generative qualities of the unforeseen error. Tony Scott, Glitch No. 13, 2001-2005 The generative capabilities of error can be understood through Lev Manovich’s cultural communication model developed in his paper “Post-Media Aesthetics.” Traditionally, a pre-media cultural communication model represents the transmission of a signal as SENDER—MESSAGE—RECEIVER (Manovich, “Post-Media Aesthetics” 18). In this original model the sender encodes and transmits a message over a communication channel; as Manovich indicates, in the course of transmission the message is affected by any noise that exists along the communication channel. The receiver then decodes the message. Here the message is susceptible to error in two ways. First, the noise that originates from the communication channel may alter the message. Second, there may be discrepancies between the sender and receiver’s code (Manovich, “Post-Media Aesthetics” 18). Manovich, in order to propose a post-digital consideration of transmission, has developed this model by including the sender and receiver’s software. Post-digital cultural communication can now be considered as SENDER—SOFTWARE—MESSAGE—SOFTWARE—RECEIVER (Manovich, “Post-Media Aesthetics” 17-18). In this model the cultural significance of software is emphasised. The software, much more than the noise introduced by the communication channel, may change the message. Significantly, the software may introduce an error into the message. Following Gilles Deleuze, we may say that the software may articulate a link to the field of potential in order to generate unforeseen, and perhaps unwanted, information. The cultural role that Manovich ascribes to software becomes elucidated in Dimitre Lima, Iman Morandi, and Ant Scott’s Glitchbrowser. Glitchbrowser is an alternative to the traditional model of a web browser. This browser, rather than attempting to assist user navigation of the internet, creates errors when displaying the pages that it accesses. The images of any page accessed by Glitchbrowser are distorted or glitched through colour saturation and abstraction from their original composition. In this work, following Manovich’s cultural communication model, the software that intervenes between sender and receiver alters the content of the message. Thus in Glitchbrowser, the artists remind us that the information we receive is largely reconstituted by the system it travels through. In a sense the machine reveals itself, rather than creating the illusion of a transparent interface to information. In the application of Glitchbrowser the user witnesses the way that messages are transmitted and altered by the interface. Here, the machine reminds the user of its existence (Manovich, The Language of New Media 206). Any system that seeks the actualisation of unforeseen potential is also a system that has the capacity to become errant. Rather than thinking of the error as something to fear or avoid, we can think of an error as something that brings with it the capacity for the new and the unforeseen (perhaps it is this link to the unforeseen that is precisely the reason that we fear the errant). We can think of any system that is open to the unforeseen as surrounded by a cloud of potential errors, or, as Deleuze would put it, a cloud of the virtual (Deleuze and Parnet 148). At any point in its process, a system is traversing potential errors—and at any point, one may become actualised. We can picture a potential for error at every point that a system is opened to unformed information. As a system attempts to actualise this unformed information, to form the unformed from the cloud of the virtual, the system may also give form to an unformed error. Deleuze’s virtual can be understood as the field of pure potentiality. In this field there exists all those things that could potentially become actualised in the course of a system, but for some reason, do not. We can think of the virtual, from the present moment, as containing all the potential events that could take place in the future. Only one of these events will become actualised, becoming the actual present, and the other events will remain virtual. As Brian Massumi describes, the virtual that Deleuze theorises is a mode of reality that is articulated in the emergence of new potentials—the virtual is implicated in the reality of change. A system, in the event of change, moves through and connects to the virtual, actualising some information and leaving other information as un-actualised virtuality. This system is surrounded by a cloud of the virtual, surrounded by potential errors. At any moment, as the system moves into the virtual it may actualise an error. Rather than thinking of an event as the process by which preformed or preconceived possible information becomes realised, we can only think of an error as coming into being as the unformed and the unforeseen potential is actualised. This potential emerges from unique activities that occur in the process of a system. These unique activities open the system so that unforeseen information may emerge (DeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy 36-37). If a system runs through its process without the potential for error it is essentially closed. It does not allow the potentiality of the emergent or the unforeseen. It is only through allowing the capacity for potential errors that we may provide the opportunity to think the unthought, to become-other, and to hence initiate further unforeseen becomings in the virtual (Rodowick 201). In a sense, when there is potential for an error to emerge in a system, the system cannot be regarded as a pre-formed linear progress; rather, it can only be thought as a divergent process that actualises elements of the virtual. Images from Yann Le Guennec Le Catalogue Yann Le Guennec’s Le Catalogue is an example of artist designed software causing unforeseen errors. This online work allows public access to a catalogue of images and installations created between 1990 and 1996. Every time a page is accessed from the archive, an intended error is activated in the form of an intersecting horizontal and vertical line, generated at random points over the image. The more that the page is viewed, the greater its deterioration by the obscuring intersecting line and the closer the image comes to abstraction. As Eduardo Navas states, “the archive is similar to analogue vinyl records losing their fidelity and being slightly deteriorated every time the needle passes through the groove.” In Le Guennec’s catalogue the act of accessing and consulting an object of the archive, in essence, causes an internal error to the object. This is an error that is inbuilt; it is an error that we cause by the act of looking or accessing any of the images. As we access the image we allow a virtual error to become actual. Eventually the error will take over the original image, and the image will be more about error than it ever was about its referent. Images from Yann Le Guennec Le Catalogue Just as in Cascone’s glitch music, the form and the theme of Le Catalogue is error. In Le Catalogue we see the potential for error whenever information is mediated; the work becomes a reflection on the act of looking, but looking through a particular paradigm, looking through the interface. The work’s archive can only be preserved by allowing the images to exist, un-accessed, behind the interface. But this work is not about preservation. It is ultimately about the ephemeral and its uniqueness. Each error caused by the user, which becomes actual from the virtual, is unique—and each time the archive is accessed it is differentiated from its past. Every time an image is accessed, it becomes its own original; every time an error from the field of the virtual is actualised, the unforeseen emerges. In these types of works the error can be understood through a Deleuzian ontology as a generative and creative force. As mentioned above, in order to position the condition for error as the condition for the unforeseen, we can think of the errant system as involved in a process of making actual potential from the virtual. In contrast, the system that holds no potential for error is involved in the process of realising possibilities. The possible follows a line toward an already established attractor; in this instance the future is closed as it is already given in the present. If we could access information in Le Catalogue without causing the unforeseen error, the information is possible. If this were the case, any selection from the archive’s menu would return a preformed image. In opposition to this, the potential moves through processes of bifurcation and divergence toward chaotic attractors; in this case the future is open (DeLanda, “Deleuze and the Open-Ended Becoming of the World”). Actualisation is separate from realisation in that realisation suggests a passage from the possible to the static. Actualisation implies the production of something new and unforeseen, a becoming virtual that results in new possibilities and transformations (Lévy). The possible exists in a state of limbo as an already constituted thing; the only thing separating the real from the possible is existence. The possible is thus thought of as a latent phantom reality (Lévy 24). If we were only ever interested in realising the possible then errors would not be a concern. The system only becomes errant when we seek the unformed. This occurs whenever we actualise information from the field of the virtual. The virtual error is to be thought of as the potential that may or may not come into being through a process of actualisation. As Lévy states, “the virtual is that which has potential rather than actual existence … The tree is virtually present in the seed” (23). The seed does not know what shape the tree will take, as it would in a possible-real model. Rather the seed must actualise the tree as it enacts a process of negotiation between its internal limitations and the environmental circumstances that it encounters through this process. We can thus see potential errors as virtual in that the system does not know the errors that it may actualise. The system actualises these errors as it explores its degrees of freedom and the circumstances that may allow the emergence of error. As the potential for error marks the potential for the new and the unforeseen, we can see that an error in itself may be creative. An error may be utilised. It may be sought out and used to create the unforeseen within traditional systems, such as our routine computer use. In these instances, as the unique generative qualities of error are actualised, the artist can no longer be thought of as the sole creative force. Rather it is now the artist’s role to provide the circumstances for an error to emerge. The error fills the potentiality of a system with meaning, whether intended or unintended by the designer. It is the participant’s interrelationship with this error that may be thought to proliferate artistic meaning. The aesthetics of the digital encounter occur as an interactive event between participant and machine, with the artist, in a sense, hidden behind the machine. When an error occurs, unforeseen to the artist, the work is affected and possibilities are created for new meanings to emerge. Participant in Blast Theory’s Desert Rain Desert Rain, a complex mixed reality environment, by the group Blast Theory, actualises errors and exposes its software limitations in ways unintended by the artists. The work involves six participants that are asked to navigate a digitally generated landscape of the Gulf War in order to locate a target. This digitally generated space is projected upon a curtain of water spray. Once all the participants have found their targets they are lead through the rain curtain, over a sand dune and to a representation of a hotel room. In this room there is a television screen that displays one of the targets narrating their real life experience of the Gulf War. The digital target is now made actual as a physically real, yet still mediated, person. This work presents a space in which the real and the digital mutually affect one another; the participant’s experience in the digital landscape directs the meaning that they take from the target’s real life narrative, and the experience of this narrative affects the participant’s memories of the digital landscape. The overall experience of Desert Rain is constituted by the coming together of the material and the digital spaces so that they may produce a mixed reality space. However, the actual functioning of Desert Rain does not always provide the means for the theoretical tessellated space that Blast Theory seeks. This is due to certain errors and limitations in the machinic system. But these are not necessarily aesthetic bugs; in fact they may enhance the aesthetics of the form of the work. For instance, the digitally generated graphics are rather clumsy and hard edged, with a slow frame rate and low definition. Also, some participants found it difficult to use the footplate effectively (Benford et al. 54). For these reasons, the space of the digital and the space of the real remain separate, with the participant struggling to manipulate the interface in order to access the digital; the sometimes errant functionality of the interface acts as a barrier between the digital and the material. However, this technical bug may enable the participant to grapple with the machinic in ways which would not occur had the machine been perfect. As Blast Theory and the Communications Research Group point out, ethnographic research into interaction has found that this technical bug was generally only seen as a detriment to the work by those participants with a technical background (Benford et al. 53-55). Those participants, in contrast, with an artistic background tended to see the limitations of the form as a conscious aesthetic gesture. That is, the slowness and clumsiness of the media became directly connected to the larger purpose of the work, which is to criticise the media’s coverage of the Gulf War and the general place of media in our daily lives. Here, for the artistically inclined audience, form and content come inextricably linked. Thus the error in the form is inextricable from the meaning of the work. The imprecise navigation, due to the nature of the footplate, through the obvious and imprecise mediated imaging of the world, directly links to the experience of receiving information through television broadcasts. In a sense the limitations of the media and the interface device are embodied, quite unintentionally, in the content of the work. If the participant of interactive digital media is to be thought of as coupled to the machine, when the machine becomes errant, the participant shares in this condition. The interactive participant experiences limitations, glitches, or bugs first hand; they are, in some respects, party to the glitches and bugs and a part of the system’s limitations. New media theorists and artists such as Valie Export, have already pointed out that the subjective space of the viewer co-exists with the objective space of the machine. As a result the user is tied to the machine and thus connected to its glitches. This is because the work is not just constituted by the machine and its substrate but also by the way the human responds to the immersive environment. The work no longer takes place in a time and space that is separate from the spectator. Rather the time and space of the spectator and the time and space of the machine are both implicit in the realisation of the work. Thus, the spectator’s time and space has become filled with the potential for error. The participant and the machine are mutually engaged in a process of becoming virtual; they deliberate together, as one system that moves into the field of potential. References Benford, Steve, et al. Pushing Mixed Reality Boundaries. eRENA, 1999. Cascone, Kim. “The Aesthetics of Failure: ‘Post-Digital’ Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music.” Computer Music Journal 24.4 (Winter 2000). DeLanda, Manuel. “Deleuze and the Open-Ended Becoming of the World”. New York, 1998. 23 Mar. 2006 http://www.diss.sense.uni-konstanz.de/virtualitaet/delanda.htm>. ———. Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. Transversals: New Directions in Philosophy. Ed. Keith Pearson. London: Continuum, 2002. Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. “The Actual and the Virtual.” Dialogues 2. Ed. Eliot Ross Albert. London and New York: Continuum, 1987. Export, Valie. “Expanded Cinema as Expanded Reality”. 2003. 17 Mar. 2006 http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/28/expanded_cinema.html>. Lévy, Pierre. Becoming Virtual: Reality in the Digital Age. New York: Plenum Trade, 1998. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001. ———. “Post-Media Aesthetics.” Locations. Ed. Astrid Sommer. Karlsruhe: ZKM: Centre for Art and Media, 2001. Massumi, Brian. “Sensing the Virtual, Building the Insensible.” Architectural Design 68.5/6 (1998): 16-24. Navas, Eduardo. “Net Art Review November 30 – December 6, 2003”. 2003. 20 Jul. 2007 http://www.netartreview.net/featarchv/11_30_03.html>. Rodowick, D. N. Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine. Post-Contemporary Interventions. Eds. Stanley Fish and Fredric Jameson. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Barker, Tim. "Error, the Unforeseen, and the Emergent: The Error and Interactive Media Art." M/C Journal 10.5 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/03-barker.php>. APA Style Barker, T. (Oct. 2007) "Error, the Unforeseen, and the Emergent: The Error and Interactive Media Art," M/C Journal, 10(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0710/03-barker.php>.

Introduction 2021 was the year that NFTs got big—not just in value but also in terms of the cultural consciousness. When digital artist Beeple sold the portfolio of his 5,000 daily images at Christie’s for US$69 million, the art world was left intrigued, confused, and outraged in equal measure. Depending on who you asked, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) seemed to be either a quick cash-grab or the future of the art market (Bowden and Jones; Smee). Following the Beeple sale, articles started to appear indicating that the film industry was abuzz for NFTs. Independent filmmaker Kevin Smith was quick to announce that he planned to release his horror film Killroy Was Here as an NFT (Alexander); in September 2021 the James Bond film No Time to Die also unveiled a series of collectibles to coincide with the film’s much-delayed theatrical release (Natalee); the distribution and collectible platforms Vuele, NFT Studios, and Mogul Productions all emerged, and the industry rumour mill suggests more start-ups are en route (CurrencyWorks; NFT Studios; NewsBTC). Blockchain disciples say that the technology will solve all the problems of the Internet (Tewari; Norton; European Business Review); critics say it will only perpetuate existing accessibility and equality issues (Davis and Flatow; Klein). Those more circumspect will doubtless sit back until the dust settles, waiting to see what parts of so-called web3 will be genuinely integrated into the architecture of the Internet. Pamela Hutchinson puts it neatly in terms of the arts sector: “the NFT may revolutionise the art market, film funding and distribution. Or it might be an ecological disaster and a financial bubble, in which few actual movies change hands, and fraudsters get rich from other people’s intellectual property” (Hutchinson). There is an uptick in the literature around NFTs and blockchain (see Quiniou; Gayvoronskaya & Meinel); however, the technology remains unregulated and unstandardised (Yeung 212-14; Dimitropoulos 112-13). Similarly, the sheer amount of funding being put into fundamental technical, data, and security-related issues speaks volumes to the nascency of the space (Ossinger; Livni; Gayvoronskaya & Meinel 52-6). Put very briefly, NFTs are part of a given blockchain system; think of them, like cryptocurrency coins, as “units of value” within that system (Roose). NFTs were initially rolled out on Ethereum, though several other blockchains have now implemented their own NFT frameworks. NFTs are usually not the artwork itself, but rather a unique, un-copyable (hence, non-fungible) piece of code that is attached, linked, or connected to another digital file, be that an image, video, text, or something else entirely. NFTs are often referred to as a digital artwork’s “certificate of authenticity” (Roose). At the time of writing, it remains to be seen how widely blockchain and NFT technology will be implemented across the entertainment industries. However, this article aims to outline the current state of implementation in the film trade specifically, and to attempt to sort true potential from the hype. Beginning with an overview of the core issues around blockchain and NFTs as they apply to film properties and adjacent products, current implementations of the technology are outlined, before finishing with a hesitant glimpse into the potential future applications. The Issues and Conversation At the core of current conversations around blockchain are three topics: intellectual property and ownership, concentrations of power and control, and environmental impact. To this I would like to add a consideration of social capital, which I begin with briefly here. Both the film industry and “crypto” — if we take the latter to encompass the various facets of so-called ‘web3’ — are engines of social capital. In the case of cinema, its products are commodified and passed through a model that begins with exclusivity (theatrical release) before progressing to mass availability (home media, streaming). The cinematic object, i.e., an individual copy of a film, is, by virtue of its origins as a mass product of the twentieth century, fungible. The film is captured, copied, stored, distributed, and shared. The film-industrial model has always relied on social phenomena, word of mouth, critical discourse, and latterly on buzz across digital social media platforms. This is perhaps as distinct from fine art, where — at least for dealers — the content of the piece does not necessarily matter so much as verification of ownership and provenance. Similarly, web3, with its decentralised and often-anonymised processes, relies on a kind of social activity, or at least a recorded interaction wherein the chain is stamped and each iteration is updated across the system. Even without the current hype, web3 still relies a great deal on discourse, sharing, and community, particularly as it flattens the existing hierarchies of the Internet that linger from Web 2.0. In terms of NFTs, blockchain systems attach scarcity and uniqueness to digital objects. For now, that scarcity and uniqueness is resulting in financial value, though as Jonathan Beller argues the notion of value could — or perhaps should — be reconsidered as blockchain technology, and especially cryptocurrencies, evolve (Beller 217). Regardless, NFT advocates maintain that this is the future of all online activity. To questions of copyright, the structures of blockchain do permit some level of certainty around where a given piece of intellectual property emerged. This is particularly useful where there are transnational differences in recognition of copyright law, such as in France, for instance (Quiniou 112-13). The Berne Convention stipulates that “the subsistence of copyright does not rest on the compliance with formal requirements: rights will exist if the work meets the requirements for protection set out by national law and treaties” (Guadamuz 1373). However, there are still no legal structures underpinning even the most transparent of transactions, when an originator goes out of their way to transfer rights to the buyer of the accompanying NFT. The minimum requirement — even courtesy — for the assignment of rights is the identification of the work itself; as Guadamuz notes, this is tricky for NFTs as they are written in code (1374). The blockchain’s openness and transparency are its key benefits, but until the code can explicitly include (or concretely and permanently reference) the ‘content’ of an NFT, its utility as a system of ownership is questionable. Decentralisation, too, is raised consistently as a key positive characteristic of blockchain technology. Despite the energy required for this decentralisation (addressed shortly), it is true that, at least in its base code, blockchain is a technology with no centralised source of truth or verification. Instead, such verification is performed by every node on the chain. On the surface, for the film industry, this might mean modes of financing, rights management, and distribution chains that are not beholden to multinational media conglomerates, streamers like Netflix, niche intermediaries, or legacy studios. The result here would be a flattening of the terrain: breaking down studio and corporate gatekeeping in favour of a more democratised creative landscape. Creators and creative teams would work peer-to-peer, paying, contracting, servicing, and distribution via the blockchain, with iron-clad, publicly accessible tracking of transactions and ownership. The alternative, though, is that the same imbalances persist, just in a different form: this is outlined in the next section. As Hunter Vaughan writes, the film industry’s environmental impact has long been under-examined. Its practices are diverse, distributed, and hard to quantify. Cinematic images, Vaughan writes, “do not come from nothing, and they do not vanish into the air: they have always been generated by the earth and sun, by fossil fuels and chemical reactions, and our enjoyment of them has material consequences” (3). We believe that by watching a “green” film like Avatar we are doing good, but it implicates us in the dirty secret, an issue of “ignorance and of voluntary psychosis” where “we do not see who we are harming or how these practices are affecting the environment, and we routinely agree to accept the virtual as real” (5). Beyond questions of implication and eco-material conceptualisation, however, there are stark facts. In the 1920s, the Kodak Park Plant in New York drew 12 million gallons of water from Lake Ontario each day to produce film stock. As the twentieth century came to a close, this amount — for a single film plant — had grown to 35-53 million gallons per day. The waste water was perfunctorily “cleaned” and then dumped into surrounding rivers (72-3). This was just one plant, and one part of the filmmaking process. With the shift to digital, this cost might now be calculated in the extraction of precious metals used to make contemporary cameras, computers, or storage devices. Regardless, extrapolate outwards to a global film industry and one quickly realises the impact is almost beyond comprehension. Considering — let alone calculating — the carbon footprint of blockchain requires outlining some fundamentals of the technology. The two primary architectures of blockchain are Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS), both of which denote methods of adding and verifying new blocks to a chain. PoW was the first model, employed by Bitcoin and the first iteration of Ethereum. In a PoW model, each new block has a specific cryptographic hash. To confirm the new block, crypto miners use their systems to generate a target hash that is less than or equal to that of the block. The systems process these calculations quickly, as the goal is to be “the first miner with the target hash because that miner is the one who can update the blockchain and receive crypto rewards” (Daly). The race for block confirmation necessitates huge amounts of processing power to make these quick calculations. The PoS model differs in that miners are replaced by validators (or staking services where participants pool validation power). Rather than investing in computer power, validators invest in the blockchain’s coins, staking those coins (tokens) in a smart contract (think of this contract like a bank account or vault). When a new block is proposed, an algorithm chooses a validator based on the size of their stake; if the block is verified, the validator receives further cryptocurrency as a reward (Castor). Given the ubiquity and exponential growth of blockchain technology and its users, an accurate quantification of its carbon footprint is difficult. For some precedent, though, one might consider the impact of the Bitcoin blockchain, which runs on a PoW model. As the New York Times so succinctly puts it: “the process of creating Bitcoin to spend or trade consumes around 91 terawatt-hours of electricity annually, more than is used by Finland, a nation of about 5.5 million” (Huang, O’Neill and Tabuchi). The current Ethereum system (at time of writing), where the majority of NFT transactions take place, also runs on PoW, and it is estimated that a single Ethereum transaction is equivalent to nearly nine days of power consumption by an average US household (Digiconomist). Ethereum always intended to operate on a PoS system, and the transition to this new model is currently underway (Castor). Proof of Stake transactions use significantly less energy — the new Ethereum will supposedly be approximately 2,000 times more energy efficient (Beekhuizen). However, newer systems such as Solana have been explicit about their efficiency goals, stating that a single Solana transaction uses less energy (1,837 Joules, to be precise) than keeping an LED light on for one hour (36,000 J); one Ethereum transaction, for comparison, uses over 692 million J (Solana). In addition to energy usage, however, there is also the question of e-waste as a result of mining and general blockchain operations which, at the time of writing, for Bitcoin sits at around 32 kilotons per year, around the same as the consumer IT wastage of the Netherlands (de Vries and Stoll). How the growth in NFT awareness and adoption amplifies this impact remains to be seen, but depending on which blockchain they use, they may be wasting energy and resources by design. If using a PoW model, the more valuable the cryptocurrency used to make the purchase, the more energy (“gas”) required to authenticate the purchase across the chain. Images abound online of jerry-rigged crypto data centres of varying quality (see also efficiency and safety). With each NFT minted, sold, or traded, these centres draw — and thus waste, for gas — more and more energy. With increased public attention and scrutiny, cryptocurrencies are slowly realising that things could be better. As sustainable alternatives become more desirable and mainstream, it is safe to predict that many NFT marketplaces may migrate to Cardano, Solana, or other more efficient blockchain bases. For now, though, this article considers the existing implementations of NFTs and blockchain technology within the film industry. Current Implementations The current applications of NFTs in film centre around financing and distribution. In terms of the former, NFTs are saleable items that can raise capital for production, distribution, or marketing. As previously mentioned, director Kevin Smith launched Jay & Silent Bob’s Crypto Studio in order to finish and release Killroy Was Here. Smith released over 600 limited edition tokens, including one of the film itself (Moore). In October 2021, renowned Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai sold an NFT with unreleased footage from his film In the Mood for Love at Sotheby’s for US$550,000 (Raybaud). Quentin Tarantino entered the arena in January 2022, auctioning uncut scenes from his 1994 film Pulp Fiction, despite the threat of legal action from the film’s original distributor Miramax (Dailey). In Australia, an early adopter of the technology is director Michael Beets, who works in virtual production and immersive experiences. His immersive 14-minute VR film Nezunoban (2020) was split into seven different chapters, and each chapter was sold as an NFT. Beets also works with artists to develop entry tickets that are their own piece of generative art; with these tickets and the chapters selling for hundreds of dollars at a time, Beets seems to have achieved the impossible: turning a profit on a short film (Fletcher). Another Australian writer-producer, Samuel Wilson, now based in Canada, suggests that the technology does encourage filmmakers to think differently about what they create: At the moment, I’m making NFTs from extra footage of my feature film Miles Away, which will be released early next year. In one way, it’s like a new age of behind-the-scenes/bonus features. I have 14 hours of DV tapes that I’m cutting into a short film which I will then sell in chapters over the coming months. One chapter will feature the dashing KJ Apa (Songbird, Riverdale) without his shirt on. So, hopefully that can turn some heads. (Wilson, in Fletcher) In addition to individual directors, a number of startup companies are also seeking to get in on the action. One of these is Vuele, which is best understood as a blockchain-based streaming service: an NFT Netflix, if you like. In addition to films themselves, the service will offer extra content as NFTs, including “behind the scenes content, bonus features, exclusive Q&As, and memorabilia” (CurrencyWorks). Vuele’s launch title is Zero Contact, directed by Rick Dugdale and starring Anthony Hopkins. The film is marketed as “the World’s First NFT Feature Film” (as at the time of writing, though, both Vuele and its flagship film have yet to launch). Also launching is NFT Studios, a blockchain-based production company that distributes the executive producer role to those buying into the project. NFT Studios is a decentralised administrative organisation (DAO), guided by tech experts, producers, and film industry intermediaries. NFT Studios is launching with A Wing and a Prayer, a biopic of aeronaut Brian Milton (NFT Studios), and will announce their full slate across festivals in 2022. In Australia, Culture Vault states that its aim is to demystify crypto and champion Australian artists’ rights and access to the space. Co-founder and CEO Michelle Grey is well aware of the aforementioned current social capital of NFTs, but is also acutely aware of the space’s opacity and the ubiquity of often machine-generated tat. “The early NFT space was in its infancy, there was a lot of crap around, but don’t forget there’s a lot of garbage in the traditional art world too,” she says (cited in Miller). Grey and her company effectively act like art dealers; intermediaries between the tech and art worlds. These new companies claim to be adhering to the principles of web3, often selling themselves as collectives, DAOs, or distributed administrative systems. But the entrenched tendencies of the film industry — particularly the persistent Hollywood system — are not so easily broken down. Vuele is a joint venture between CurrencyWorks and Enderby Entertainment. The former is a financial technology company setting up blockchain systems for businesses, including the establishment of branded digital currencies such as the controversial FreedomCoin (Memoria); the latter, Enderby, is a production company founded by Canadian film producer (and former investor relations expert in the oil and uranium sectors) Rick Dugdale (Wiesner). Similarly, NFT Studios is partnered with consulting and marketing agencies and blockchain venture capitalists (NFT Investments PLC). Depending on how charitable or cynical one is feeling, these start-ups are either helpful intermediaries to facilitate legacy media moving into NFT technology, or the first bricks in the capitalist wall to bar access for entry to other players. The Future Is… Buffering Marketplaces like Mintable, OpenSea, and Rarible do indeed make the minting and selling of NFTs fairly straightforward — if you’ve ever listed an item for sale on eBay or Facebook, you can probably mint an NFT. Despite this, the current major barrier for average punters to the NFT space remains technical knowledge. The principles of blockchain remain fairly opaque — even this author, who has been on a deep dive for this article, remains sceptical that widespread adoption across multiple applications and industries is feasible. Even so, as Rennie notes, “the unknown is not what blockchain technology is, or even what it is for (there are countless ‘use cases’), but how it structures the actions of those who use it” (235). At the time of writing, a great many commentators and a small handful of scholars are speculating about the role of the metaverse in the creative space. If the endgame of the metaverse is realised, i.e., a virtual, interactive space where users can interact, trade, and consume entertainment, the role of creators, dealers, distributors, and other brokers and players will be up-ended, and have to re-settle once again. Film industry practitioners might look to the games space to see what the road might look like, but then again, in an industry that is — at its best — somewhat resistant to change, this may simply be a fad that blows over. Blockchain’s current employment as a get-rich-quick mechanism for the algorithmic literati and as a computational extension of existing power structures suggests nothing more than another techno-bubble primed to burst (Patrickson 591-2; Klein). Despite the aspirational commentary surrounding distributed administrative systems and organisations, the current implementations are restricted, for now, to startups like NFT Studios. In terms of cinema, it does remain to be seen whether the deployment of NFTs will move beyond a kind of “Netflix with tchotchkes” model, or a variant of crowdfunding with perks. Once Vuele and NFT Studios launch properly, we may have a sense of how this all will play out, particularly alongside less corporate-driven, more artistically-minded initiatives like that of Michael Beets and Culture Vault. It is possible, too, that blockchain technology may streamline the mechanics of the industry in terms of automating or simplifying parts of the production process, particularly around contracts, financing, licensing. This would obviously remove some of the associated labour and fees, but would also de-couple long-established parts and personnel of the industry — would Hollywood and similar industrial-entertainment complexes let this happen? 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