Journal articles on the topic 'Multiplex cinema ; film exhibition ; digital cinema'

Throughout the 1990s, digital technology entered film production and rapidly altered both the production process and the audience's experience, as complex soundscapes and special effects became the hallmark of cinematic blockbusters. By 1999, the prospect of an end-to-end digital cinema, or cinema without celluloid, seemed to be in sight. Digital distribution and exhibition were extolled as particularly attractive prospects, and a number of test sites were established in the United States. However, the last four years have demonstrated that significant issues need to be resolved before there will be broader implementation of digital cinema. Working from a series of interviews with key industry practitioners in Australia and the United States, this article examines the struggles currently affecting the rollout of digital cinema, and assesses the likely impact on Australian exhibition practices.

The sudden and permeating rise of digital technologies has been widely investigated by film critics and scholars. However, most studies tend to focus on the impact of digital technologies on contemporary film production, distribution, exhibition and the finished products it brings forth, reserving too little attention to the massive digitization of born-analog films. The production of digital motion pictures marks an unprecedented breaking point in history, putting the very nature of “film” and “cinema” at stake, while the digitization of film prints risks having an irreversible feedback effect on cinema's technological history. Focusing on two case studies—the 1995 restoration of the 1949 color version of Jacques Tati's Jour de fête and the discovery of some 16mm reels on nitrate stock in a collection deposited with the Museo Nazionale del Cinema in Torino, Italy—we illuminate the importance of technology for film historiography and reassert the need for a joint effort on the part of archives and academic institutions in the preservation of film memory for future generations.

It is widely acknowledged that the geography of film exhibition in the urban West has changed significantly as ‘traditional’ town centre and suburban cinemas have been supplemented, and in some cases supplanted, by multiplex cinemas in out-of-town locations. In this paper I explore the reasons for this shift, using case-study data from Leicester (United Kingdom) to explore the forms of sociality played out in different sites of film exhibition. These data suggest that multiplex cinemas are frequented predominantly by consumer groups seeking an ‘exopolitan’ leisure experience that is predictable and riskless. In contrast, it appears there are many who continue to frequent city-centre and suburban cinemas because they prefer the less predictable ambience of ‘urban’ leisure. The coexistence of these different forms of cinemagoing is discussed in relation to unfolding debates about the postmodern city—a city that accommodates consumers' predilection for ‘riskless risks’ by holding different forms of sociality apart.

Unlike the somewhat natural decay of other single screen theatres of Delhi, the demolition of the famous Chanakya cinema (1969–2008) was an iconoclastic event. When the theatre was demolished in 2008 to pave the way for a multiplex and shopping mall, a wide and intensifying wave of dissent reigned, as the city was rudely awakened to the realities of urban transformation. At a time when film theatres had started to decline in India with the emergence of home entertainment in the 1970s and 1980s, Chanakya theatre offered a distinctive culture of cinema and urban leisure to the middle-class residents of Delhi, foreshadowing the multiplex imagination decades before its arrival. This article attempts to understand the Chanakya story and its theatrical legacy as a prehistory of globalisation. It explores the phenomenon of Chanakya’s auratic presence in the city’s imagination as it maps the theatre’s biographical journey, starting from its precarious inception in one of the more remote areas of Delhi through to its prominent place in the city’s cultural life for almost 30 years, followed by its afterlife as a potent emblem symbolising the end of a bygone era in the city’s collective memory. The micro-analysis of the Chanakya story explores the complex circuits within which architecture, film text, urban materiality and public memory converge.

During the first five years of its development from the opening of The Point in Milton Keynes in 1985, multiplex cinemas radically changed the previous exhibition landscape, modernising the business of cinema exhibition and shifting the site of film consumption to new, out-of-town shopping and leisure centres. This article considers certain key developments in that initial period of the multiplex cinema's introduction into the UK, with particular emphasis on three aspects of its diffusion: the importance of regeneration and enterprise, the multiplex's role in stimulating associated leisure and commercial developments, and its relationship to out-of-town and regional shopping developments. In order to illustrate these themes, the article will consider the opening of four complexes: The Cannon in Salford Quays, and the AMC multiplexes in Telford in Shropshire, in Sheffield and in Dudley Merry Hill in the West Midlands.

Abstract Is there a way to ensure older adults can bridge the digital divide and engage with online cultural heritage? How can cinema-going memories encourage cross-generational engagement? This article proposes to address these issues by using the Italian Cinema Audiences research project as a case study, and specifically cinema-going memories as intangible cultural heritage (Ercole et al., 2016, Cinema heritage in Europe: preserving and sharing culture by engaging with film exhibition and audiences. Editorial. Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, 11(Summer): 1–12. Web. ISSN: 2009-4078). It aims to tackle the difficulty of engaging the older generation with the digital world, by proposing and testing new ways to resolve it. Through a mixed-methods ethnographic approach, this article investigates different strategies: the use of social media platforms; a cross-generational activity involving Historypin, a digital, user-generated archive of crowdsourced historical material; an online dedicated archive built in collaboration with the older adults involved in the project. These different solutions aim not only at increasing digital engagement among older adults, but also at furthering younger generations’ involvement in shared cultural heritage in an online context. By focusing on the memories of cinema-going in 1950s Italy, the article explores the implications of the advantages and disadvantages of these different approaches. It also tests Anja K. Leist’s research findings (2013, Social media use of older adults: a mini-review. Gerontology, 59(4): 378–84) on the key role of moderators (the younger generation) to help novice users (the older generation) in the ‘continuous engagement’ in digital environments. We conclude that in order to bridge the digital divide two components are necessary simultaneously: the creation of digital platforms in which the older generations are both curators and users, and the support of and interaction with younger generations.

The Art House Convergence conference annually brings together hundreds of independent theater owners and supporters of arthouse cinema during the days preceding the Sundance Film Festival. When the organizers invited James Schamus to deliver the keynote address at their 2016 gathering, it was a commission he did not relish. The expected argument of such speeches is pretty much set in stone these days: cinema, understood primarily as feature films meant initially for theatrical exhibition, is under attack, and the keynote speaker's task is to rally the troops in its defense, soliciting applause for recent victories on the battlefield, and railing against the encroachments of the enemies of film, in particular the digital streaming services whose assaults on the sanctity of the theatrical viewing experience, and thus on the aesthetic object known as the theatrical film, grow ever more ferocious with each passing year. Schamus took on the task of delivering that speech, and then transforming it into this article for FQ. He concludes with a rousing plea to all regarding what he terms, “This vicious spiral of longer movies, higher costs and higher ticket prices,” that can only spell disaster for the supporter of truly independent American cinema. Schamus urges readers to stand with him (and all who love the genuine American film experience), to advocate for vibrant, varied, open-ended, hybrid, serial and ongoing open storytelling and entertainment.

Abstract The story of Black women in British mainstream cinema is certainly one of invisibility and misrepresentations, and Black women filmmakers have historically been placed at the margins of British film history. Up until the mid-1980s, there were no Black female directors in Britain. Pioneers like Maureen Blackwood, Martina Attille and Ngozi Onwurah have actively challenged stereotypical representations of Black womanhood, whilst asserting their presence in Black British cinema, often viewed as a male territory. In the 2010s, it seems that the British film industry remains mostly white and masculine. But the new millennium has brought a digital revolution that has enabled a new generation of Black women filmmakers to work within alternative circuits of production and distribution. New strategies of production have emerged through the use of online crowdfunding, social media and video-sharing websites. These shifts have opened new opportunities for Black women filmmakers who were until then often excluded from traditional means of exhibition and distribution. I will examine these strategies through the work of Moyin Saka, Jaha Browne and Cecile Emeke, whose films have primarily contributed to the re-presentation of Black womanhood in popular culture.

Film consumption has changed dramatically in recent decades. The rise of the multiplex has reconfigured the public experience of cinema. At the same time, movie viewing has grown exponentially in domestic and mobile spheres, driven by increasingly flexible access to content and the diversity of screens this material can now be delivered to. While the history of movie watching in theatres has been relatively well traversed, the more recent and highly popular practice of viewing outside cinemas remains significantly under theorised. This article takes up the issue of this critical neglect. It suggests that the practice of watching movies needs to be conceptualised in more integrated manner and that theories successfully applied to understanding digital, Internet and mobile media may be considered equally relevant to film.

In order to document, investigate and analyse the soundscape of the analogue projection box before it passes into history, a series of audio recordings was made within functioning boxes, a selection of which have been released as an ‘album’. The recordings, made in UK boxes that maintain both 35mm film projection and digital projection, also capture the shifting sonic texture of this environment as it changes from primarily analogue to primarily digital operation. This article explores the role of phonographic field recording as a practical methodology within a film historical research project that investigates the role of the film projectionist and cinematic projection throughout the history of cinema exhibition in the UK. It proposes a set of systematic principles for approaching the use of phonographic field recording in this context, and shows how they may be applied. Through an analysis of both the recordings themselves and the experience of making the recordings, it extracts some observations regarding the character, history and culture of the projection box as a lived environment and workplace. Just as cinema-goers seldom get to see inside this hidden room at the back of the auditorium, these sound recordings also reveal it to be a soundproofed box, a noisy environment in which the interface between operator and machine takes audible form, in which noise of one sort indicates smooth operation, while another sort indicates faults that need to be addressed. The article considers the legibility of noise and proposes that the relationship between projectionist and machine is significantly aural as well as visual and tactile.

Video art is a hybrid, combining features of both contemporary art as well as screen arts. It brings together different ways of perception working both in a manner of a movie which transfers the viewer into virtual daydreaming (Matthew Barney, Steeve McQueen), and in a manner of a painting or sculpture which gives a viewer some intense corporal experience (Tony Oursler). Accordingly, there are two ways of presenting video art: in a white cube and a black box. In 1970-s video art used to be presented in white cubes of contemporary art galleries where they nailed the screens right to the wall. In a white cube video comes into the viewers sight together with other items in display, therefore a show-piece comes into contact with other ones in a spectators minds eye. Moreover, a white cube gives visitors an opportunity to be in charge of their time of viewing, which implies, that the white cube perception appears rather chaotic and the final cut of a video in the spectators mind becomes unpredictable, what is characteristic of video. In 2000-s when both video and film technologies got replaced by the digital one, all the moving pictures started to resemble one another. A well-lit room of a white cube was not appropriate for high definition videos, whereas a black box is usually associated with a cinema hall and consequently a video presented in such a cinematic manner makes a viewer unconsciously expect to see a cinematic piece of art. Video today is an indispensable figurant of any significant exhibition of contemporary art and it is defined as an artistic (not cinematic) media. Traditionally video is being exhibited in a white cube of a gallery; however, there is now a distinct tendency to present video art in a black box, that is in a cinematic way. As a result its getting harder and harder to distinguish video art from experimental cinema. Nowadays the very strategy of presentation of video may help this media to retain identity or to lose it.

Sticky, messy and nauseatingly saccharine, the sensory properties of jam may be a long way from the stylized corporate polish of Australia’s multi-billion dollar film exhibition industry, yet the history of Australian cinema space will be forever indebted to the Victoria Preserving Company; one-time producer of the humblest of sweet treats. Through an analysis of Melbourne’s Jam Factory cinema complex, this article explores the unusual intersection of jam, sensory gratification and contemporary Australian cinema-going at the dawn of the 21st century. Encompassing the historic architecture of the former Victoria Preserving Company, South Yarra’s Jam Factory complex provides a gentrified gloss to an inner suburban precinct historically renowned for the manufacturing of jam and preserves. Nestled in the heart of Chapel Street, less than two blocks down from Toorak road and a stone’s throw from the nightclub precinct of Commercial road, the Jam Factory occupies an important part of Melbourne’s cultural heritage; functioning as a quintessential signifier of the city’s traversal from wholesale manufacturing during the early 1900s into the service vectors of digital media technologies and mixed-use retail entertainment destinations at the start of the new millennium. Established in 1876, the Victoria Preserving Company, AKA the ‘Jam Factory’, hosts an array of diverse retail and leisure outlets. Included amongst its tenants are Borders Books, Villa & Hut, TGI Fridays, The Pancake Parlour, a Virgin Music Mega-store, an elaborate Village Cinema megaplex, and a range of ancillary restaurants, fashion stores and cafes. According to the venue’s promotional material, “The Jam Factory of today is, in short, ‘jam packed’ with entertainment” (Chapel St Precinct, n.pag.). With the original building’s façade and cooling store still intact, the architectural remnants of the Victoria Preserving Factory provide a culturally significant backdrop for what is ostensibly Australia’s most noteworthy cinema venture; Village Roadshow’s megaplex cinema flagship. Replete with fifteen large format screens, including two Gold Class cinemas, a Cinema Europa enclave and an interactive games alcove, The Village Jam Factory signifies Australia’s first foray into cinema-based retail entertainment destinations. In commenting on the opening of the Jam Factory megaplex in 1998, Village Roadshow’s general manager Mr. David Herman said, “The objective was to create Australia’s first non-gambling cinema and lifestyle complex” (Catalano 6). More than any other cinema venue, the Village Jam Factory played a key role in pushing Australian film exhibition standards into the new millennium. In an era marked by competing home theatre technologies and diversified sites of media consumption, the Jam Factory’s shift from suburban cinema to lifestyle complex dramatically altered both the business and social practice of movie-going in Australia. Central to this shift was a tripartite marketing strategy which sought to capitalize on: protracted movie-going experiences; sensory stimulation; and, venue promotion. Experiential Jam The promotion of a protracted movie-going experience has been essential to the continued success of the Village Jam Factory. As I have argued elsewhere, the Australian cinema industry of the mid 1990s faced a number of significant incentives for extending the movie going experience beyond the auditorium; not the least being the steady decline of box office takings that occurred during the late 1980s (Downing). In the face of new media technologies such as the internet, DVD and Pay TV, many cinema operators were forced to look beyond the box office as a primary source of profits. To this end Village Roadshow effectively used the Jam Factory as a testing ground for the generation of ancillary leisure and retail income streams. During the mid 1990s Village actively promoted the Jam Factory as a space in which audiences could not only see a film, but also engage in a series of expanded retail activities such as shopping, dining and video-game playing. Discussing the development of multi-use cinema venues during the 1990s, Charles Acland has commented that such spaces “…do not situate conditions of spectatorship alone; they also construct relations between public and cinematic practices” (Acland 119). Sensory Jam Far from being a traditional site of film consumption, the Jam Factory set an industry precedent by becoming the nation’s first cinema venue in which audiences were encouraged to engage in an entertainment experience that was, above all, aimed at stimulating the senses. In keeping with the ‘lifestyle destination’ mantra, the Village Jam Factory provided a new generation of Australians with a multi-sensory entertainment experience that could not be emulated by home theatre technologies. Wide sweeping foyers and elaborate ticket and merchandising counters greet the eye; ‘luxury’ stadium seating with wide aisles and broad armrests offer the ‘ultimate’ in tactile comfort; digital surround sound facilities pleasure the ears and a plethora of food and beverage novelties work to gratify the senses of taste and smell. More than any other Village cinema outlet, the Jam Factory venue smacks of sugar-coated commerce. With a revenue contribution of over 18%, the Village Roadshow candy bar is the undisputed cash-cow of the enterprise (Australian Film Commission 143). Colloquially known as ‘Lollywood’, the Village confectionary counter is an over-priced explosion of colour and candy that sustains industry revenue through a deliberate appeal to the audience’s sense of taste. This sugar dependency synchronistically mirrors the former success of Henry Jones, the entrepreneur behind Australia’s IXL jam brand, who operated his famous preserving company on the site between 1895 and 1926 (Chapel St Precinct, n.pag.). Venue Jam Village Roadshow’s promotion of the Jam Factory venue over the actual films being screened is indicative of Australia’s primary shift towards retail entertainment based cinema complexes. Unlike the homogenous multiplex venues of the 1970s and 1980s, the Village Jam Factory Complex has been aggressively marketed as a Melbourne icon, capable of offering a unique entertainment experience. This agenda is clearly documented in the 1999 Village Roadshow annual report which, pointing towards a perceived threat of home theatre technologies, proclaimed: [In] broadening the cinema going experience … [Village] aims to create an environment of quality entertainment theming and ancillary lifestyle retailing, thus providing a consistently high level of incentive for people to leave their homes for cinema anchored destinations. (Village Roadshow 19) To this end, the Jam Factory became the physical embodiment of Village Cinemas’ corporate tagline “Where Movies Live” (Village Cinemas, n.pag.). Throughout the late 1990s, a number of similar sites proliferated across Europe, the United States and Canada. Two noteworthy examples of this trend are the Manchester Times building in the UK (initially managed by a short lived Village-Warner synergy) and the Sony Centre at Potsdamer Platz, Berlin; previous home to the Third Reich and later, the Berlin Wall. In both of these examples a similar venue-promotion agenda is clearly at work. In reflecting the cultural specificities of their host cities, each of these venues pays a semiotic homage to the previous occupants of their space. The Manchester Times building, for example, retains much of its former architecture and reflects the nocturnal vibrancy of 19th century printing plant. Similarly, the Sony Centre offers an architectural reflection on the complexities of Berlin history and German cinema. In Melbourne, the Jam Factory’s history of jam and jam making are equally preserved. Drawing heavily on postmodern architectural styles, the Jam Factory’s interior uses South Yarra’s local history as a backdrop for a schizophrenic collage of seemingly incommensurate time/place references. From the distinctive red-brick cooling tower (located in the centre of the building) one encounters a hybrid fusion of Mediterranean pasta courts, European coffee lounges, Romanesque artwork and columns (complete with weathered-look paint and ‘crumbling’ tops), statues of Hollywood stars, as well as a dazzling gaming alcove and a series of subdued ‘luxury’ (Gold Class) cinemas. Such eclectic displays of visual hyperbole have been prefigured by Umberto Eco, whose discussion on hyperreality addresses an imagination which “… demands the real thing, and in order to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake” (Eco 8). As a relatively recent contributor to Australian cinema history, the Village Jam Factory has achieved little sustained academic attention, yet its significance must not be undervalued. As Australia’s first cinema-oriented retail entertainment destination, the Village Jam Factory has been crucial in placing Australia into the global film exhibition arena. While the pungent aromas of ripened fruit, vinegar and boiling sugar have long since been replaced by the scent of popcorn and recycled air, the legacy and architecture of jam-making has played a key role in propelling Australian film exhibition into the new millennium. References Acland, Charles. Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes and Global Culture. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. Australian Film Commission. Get the Picture. Sydney: Australian Film Commission, 2001. Catalano, Anthony. “Village to Extend Jam Factory to 14 Cinemas.” The Age 5 Aug. 1998. Chapel St Precinct. General History of Chapel Street & Surrounds. 2006. 30 Dec. 2006 http://www.chapelstreet.com.au/default.asp?mode=history>. Downing, Leanne. “More than Meets the Eye: The Suburban Cinema Megaplex as Sensory Heterotopia.” Refractory: Journal of Media and Culture 8 (2005). http://www.refractory.unimelb.edu.au/journalissues/vol8/downing.html>. Eco, Umberto. Travels in Hyper Reality. Orlando Florida: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986. Village Cinemas. 2006. 30 Dec. 2006. http://www.villagecinemas.com.au/>. Village Roadshow. Annual Report. Melbourne: Village Roadshow, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Downing, Leanne. "Sensory Jam: How the Victoria Preserving Company Pushed Australian Cinema Space into the New Millennium." M/C Journal 9.6 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0612/05-downing.php>. APA Style Downing, L. (Dec. 2006) "Sensory Jam: How the Victoria Preserving Company Pushed Australian Cinema Space into the New Millennium," M/C Journal, 9(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0612/05-downing.php>.

In the age of digital transformations of images, communications, and storytelling, Marshall McLuhan's insight that "the medium is the message" can be augmented with the corollary that the media is the mix. Digital forms of narrative are not only characterized by their mixed, hybrid forms and content, but their recombinations 1 draw the spectator into the mix in unforeseen ways. By mixing varying degrees of non-linearity and interactivity in what are ultimately animations, digital narratives create new kinds of digital spectatorship. The examples I'll explore here are three films, Conceiving Ada, Gamer, and Time Code. In different yet interconnected ways, each privileges the mix of media over content, or rather, foregrounds the mix as content. These digital narratives divert the reader/spectator/ participant from the traditional ways of making meaning--or at least sense--of narrative. One way to illuminate the examples is to explore how they mix linearity and interactivity. In teaching The Theory and Practice of Digital Narrative, my students and I developed a model for analyzing how different works create new modes of storytelling, and fresh relations of looking at and within the frame.2 Extending some of the terms that Janet Murray develops in Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, the diagram posits an x axis of linearity and a y axis of agency.3 Click here for an animated version of this graph. The linearity axis spans narratives from most linear (one plot line that progresses chronologically through time and space to one outcome through a series of cause and effect occurrences represented from a singular point of view) to non-linear (narratives that could be circular, rhizome-shaped, achronological, synchronic, multiple plotlines, multiple points of view, multidimensional).4 The agency axis spans media that call for very little active participation from the reader/spectator/listener to media that demands a high level of interaction. Of course, all "reading" is in some way active, both in the physical acts of seeing and turning pages/clicking a mouse 5 and in comprehending, imagining, remembering, and making meaning. Nevertheless, there is a distinction between page-turning and making choices in a hypermedia work, and Murray uses the term agency to suggest an "active creation of belief" (as opposed to Coleridge's "willing suspension of belief"). Digital environments require that belief be created and reinforced; as William Gibson posited in Neuromancer, the imagined place of cyberspace is a "consensual hallucination," a social agreement to act as if the places in cyberspace exist. The willing creation of belief is a social agreement that relies on a like-minded community. The more self-reflexive and unconventional the narrative, the more it calls for the will to believe. These examples of digital cinema "interpellate," or hail, their spectators as willing agents in the common project of the creation of belief. The subjectivity that these films seek to create for their viewers is one of being an active, technologically-savvy spectator. Instead of encouraging participation in, to use Guy Debord's phrase, the society of the spectacle, these digital narratives perform a Brechtian function in a distinctly technological manner that derives from the mix of media that is digital cinema. The term "digital cinema" has acquired many meanings, ranging from movies shot on digital video in a manner we associate with film (i.e.: single camera) to digital exhibition of media in digitally-equipped movie theaters and streaming video on the web. Lev Manovich defines digital cinema as "a particular case of animation which uses live action footage as one of its many elements."6 Manovich's historical argument suggests commonalities between the earliest moving images and current developments in digital media; animation was marginalized in the development of cinema, and although some of its techniques were adopted by the avant garde, only now animation returns at the very center of digital cinema.7 Lynn Hershman Leeson's film Conceiving Ada explores digital media in both form and content. In the film Emmy, a contemporary computer software engineer, uses technology to make contact with Ada Lovelace, who invented the first computer language in Victorian England. The narrative moves between Emmy in the present day and Ada in the past as Emmy figures out how to send a software agent into the past to retrieve information. Although the plot doesn't really make sense scientifically, it resonates emotionally; despite the 150 years separating their lives, Emmy and Ada face some of the same issues as women working with technology. Instead of building sets, Leeson developed a technique of blending live action footage shot against a blue screen with digitized photographs of Victorian inns. As she explains in the technical notes of the DVD of the film (and also on the Conceiving Ada website): I felt it important to use the technology Ada pioneered. Virtual sets and digital sound . . . provided environments in which she moves freely through time, becomes liberated and, ultimately, moves into visibility. The actors and filmmaker collaborated in what amounts to a consensual hallucination: On the set, these images were maneuvered through several computers where mattes were added and images were put into perspective or enlarged. They were then laid onto digital videotape while the actors were performing. Actors could reference their location through a monitor that showed them their "virtual" environment. . . . The immediacy of shooting live action while simultaneously manipulating digitized backgrounds in real time was, remarkably, exhilarating. By mixing past and present, fact and fiction, personal and professional, digital and analog, live action and animation, Conceiving Ada tells its powerful story in both form and content. Although it is not immediately obvious that the sets are virtual rather than actual, much of the story takes place in front of and inside Emmy's computer equipment. There are many shots of Emmy gazing into the computer, trying to make her programs work, and when she does make contact with Ada, she can see her memories and talk with her on the computer screen. The film frame often encompasses the computer screen, so we too see the graphic interfaces Emmy designs and animates. By mixing some of the techniques of video art with film style and the malleability of the digital image, Leeson extends her trailblazing career in many directions at once in a work that is a mix about mix. A representation of intense digital interactivity, Conceiving Ada's heroines, creators, and spectators use technology, and specifically digital imaging technology, to create agency. Like Conceiving Ada, Time Code is also an example of digital cinema that calls attention to the digital techniques used in its production, and enlists its spectators as accomplices in creating the narrative. Time Code is itself the product of improvisation, and uses digital technology to capture "real time." Director Mike Figgis divides the screen into four frames; each quadrant contains a continuous 90-minute take of an unscripted, improvised performance, all shot simultaneously with four Sony Dvcam DSR-130s; the film was blocked out on music paper. Figgis describes his movie as a "black comedy about a 90-minute slice of life in Hollywood," and it takes filmmaking as one of its subjects along with jealousy, infidelity, and a fin-de-siecle philosophical and artistic exhaustion. The audio mix of the theatrical release of the film shifts its emphasis between the quadrants, thus directing the spectator's attention to a certain quadrant. Choosing to focus on a quadrant is a kind of spectator-editing. Looking at the entire frame means seeing a new kind of animation, created by multiple screens, encompassing multiple points of view. (See Time Code clip here.) The film folds in on itself self-reflexively. The plot centers around the intersecting lives of four characters involved personally and/or professionally with Red Mullet, Inc., a movie studio (which is the real-life name of Figgis's production company; see www.red-mullet.com), and becomes increasingly Brechtian as the movie builds to the climactic scene in which a hot young independent filmmaker pitches a movie that, like the one we are watching, splits the screen and follows the interactions between four characters. In what could be taken as a manifesto for digital cinema that counters the "chastity" of DOGME 95 with the passionate embrace of technology, the filmmaker announces, "Montage has created a fake reality. . . . Technology has arrived, digital video has arrived, and is demanding new expressions, new sensations. . . . It's time to say again: Art, Technology: a new union." She shows the studio executives storyboards of how four cameras will follow four characters, who are really four aspects of the same character at different points in their lives. But the filmmaker's passionate and theoretical speech is undercut by the context of black comedy that infuses the film: artistic praxis clashes with business practice, and all the plotlines peak as Stellan Skarsgard's Alex bursts into laughter and exclaims, "This is the most pretentious crap I've ever heard. . . . Do you think anybody around this table has a clue about what you're talking about?" Figgis assumes his audience does, that Bauhaus, Soviet montage, and Guy Debord are not as foreign to his spectators as they are to the executives; the filmmakers both within and outside the frames show their theoretical orientation. Time Code is the first major work of digital cinema. It creates a new kind of animation based on subjectivity and point of view, and calls for an active creation of belief from the spectator-editor who takes in and ultimately creates the narrative of the film. The DVD extends the spectator's agency even further. Among its special features is a documentary about how the film was shot 15 times, all four cameras operating simultaneously around the actors' improvisation. Figgis chose the fifteenth version for the theatrical release, but also includes the first version on the DVD. Because the making of the film, and how it uses digital technology, is so central to the spectator's experience, the director's commentary and interviews with the cast reinforce the spectator as an active creator of belief and meaning in the film. Moreover, by including a special audio mixing feature, the DVD gives the medium a new level of interactivity. Using the remote control of a DVD player, the spectator/participant can switch between the audio of the different quadrants. Because the audio is a major aspect of directing the spectator's attention (in addition to visual elements such as movement and stasis), being able to make choices in the audio mix is, to use the music metaphor that the film is based on conceptually, to become the conductor of the film.8 The medium is the mix. Like Time Code and Conceiving Ada, the new French film Gamer is also a particularly digital mix. Gamer moves between live action and digital environments as its main character Tony gets the idea for, designs, and then is swindled out of a computer game. The first time the film environment switches to the game environment is when the hero is in a car chase and his car morphs into a game graphic of a car. The shift between a reality created by conventional film style and the unconventional use of game graphics style reveals the main character's subjectivity, for his reality (and other characters' as well) are constructed through their interaction in the playing and making of games. Gamer is aesthetically and viscerally ambitious in the range of live action and computer graphic interfaces it moves between. The adrenalized state of game-playing mixes with a fictionalized account of game design. Gamer succeeds in creating an immersive text about two differently immersive mediums, film and computer games. When the film depicts how live action can be made digital, and both shows and denies the indexicality of the digital image, it explores the nature of digital cinema in a way that is complementary to the projects of Conceiving Ada and Time Code. In addition to fostering new relations of looking, these digital narratives make forays into nonlinearity. Conceiving Ada and Gamer both have discursive plots that revise the conventions of the linear plot, moving between nested narrative frames in time, space, and subjectivity. Time Code is in one way relentlessly linear, but its synchronic depiction of multiple physical and emotional points of view ruptures the cinematic conventions of time and space constructed by the dominant style of continuity editing. Taken separately, these three films hover around the center point of my diagram, raising the issues of agency and linearity that will continue to be at the center of digital narrative. Taken together the films offer a model of digital transformation that points the way to what is bound to be a medium that increasingly involves its audience in thinking about and then participating in increasingly immersive, nonlinear, and interactive experiences. Notes 1. In the “renew” issue of M/C, David Marshall suggests that one of the areas Cultural Studies can look to is how the culture industries that produce “recombinant culture,” make efforts “to incorporate new technologies into different forms in order to reconstitute audiences in ways that in their distinctiveness produce value that is exchangeable as capital.” This essay is part of a larger work that attempts to open up some of the avenues suggested by Marshall. P. David Marshall. "Renewing Cultural Studies." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.6 (2000). [22 February 2001] . 2. This diagram is a work in progress. My students and I have had much discussion about what to term the bottom of the agency axis. “Passive” seems too simple, yet other terms we’ve come up with such as structured, controlled, limited, voyeuristic, or (my favorite) enslaved don’t seem to work. Special thanks to my students Elliott Davis, Tom Mannino, and John O’Connell, for such discussions. 3. Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, MIT Press, 1999, esp. 128. 4. For an interesting discussion and diagramming of story shapes, see Katherine Phelps, “Story Shapes for Digital Media.” [3/7/01] < http://www.glasswings.com.au/modern/shapes/>. Steven Johnson’s assertion that the hyperlink is the “first significant new form of punctuation to emerge in centuries” is an intriguing one for thinking about the connections possible in hypermedia. (Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate (San Francisco: HarperEdge, 1997), 110-111). 6. Lev Manovich, “What Is Digital Cinema?” http://jupiter.ucsd.edu/~manovich/text/digital-cinema.html 7. In a footnote, Manovich makes an interesting point on avant-garde strategies such as collage, painting on film, combining print with animation and live action footage, and combining many images in a single frame: “what used to be exceptions for traditional cinema became the normal, intended techniques of digital filmmaking, embedded in technology design itself.” Innovative forays into the mix of digital media like my examples illuminate not only the emergence of exceptional techniques but also of innovative narrative and spectatorial strategies. 8. Figgis is using the quadrant method once again in a new film, Hotel, which recently finished production in Florence. During the filming, there was a brilliant site that every day had a new page with the four-quadrant split. In addition to quicktimes of footage of the shoot and the actors in the hotel where the film is set, there were some of the cleverest animations I have ever seen on the web. Unfortunately the site shut down after the shoot finished, but it will be up again in May, most likely at www.filmfour.com/hotel, but check www.red-mullet.com as well.

Newspapers and the 7:15 Showing Cinemagoing involves planning. Even in the most impromptu instances, one has to consider meeting places, line-ups and competing responsibilities. One arranges child care, postpones household chores, or rushes to finish meals. One must organise transportation and think about routes, traffic, parking or public transit. And during the course of making plans for a trip to the cinema, whether alone or in the company of others, typically one turns to locate a recent newspaper. Consulting its printed page lets us ascertain locations, a selection of film titles and their corresponding show times. In preparing to feed a cinema craving, we burrow through a newspaper to an entertainment section, finding a tableau of information and promotional appeals. Such sections compile the mini-posters of movie advertisements, with their truncated credits, as well as various reviews and entertainment news. We see names of shopping malls doubling as names of theatres. We read celebrity gossip that may or may not pertain to the film selected for that occasion. We informally rank viewing priorities ranging from essential theatrical experiences to those that can wait for the videotape release. We attempt to assess our own mood and the taste of our filmgoing companions, matching up what we suppose are appropriate selections. Certainly, other media vie to supplant the newspaper's role in cinemagoing; many now access on-line sources and telephone services that offer the crucial details about start times. Nonetheless, as a campaign by the Newspaper Association of America in Variety aimed to remind film marketers, 80% of cinemagoers refer to newspaper listings for times and locations before heading out. The accuracy of that association's statistics notwithstanding, for the moment, the local daily or weekly newspaper has a secure place in the routines of cinematic life. A basic impetus for the newspaper's role is its presentation of a schedule of show times. Whatever the venue -- published, phone or on-line -- it strikes me as especially telling that schedules are part of the ordinariness of cinemagoing. To be sure, there are those who decide what film to see on site. Anecdotally, I have had several people comment recently that they no longer decide what movie to see, but where to see a (any) movie. Regardless, the schedule, coupled with the theatre's location, figures as a point of coordination for travel through community space to a site of film consumption. The choice of show time is governed by countless demands of everyday life. How often has the timing of a film -- not the film itself, the theatre at which it's playing, nor one's financial situation --determined one's attendance? How familiar is the assessment that show times are such that one cannot make it, that the film begins a bit too earlier, that it will run too late for whatever reason, and that other tasks intervene to take precedence? I want to make several observations related to the scheduling of film exhibition. Most generally, it makes manifest that cinemagoing involves an exercise in the application of cinema knowledge -- that is, minute, everyday facilities and familiarities that help orchestrate the ordinariness of cultural life. Such knowledge informs what Michel de Certeau characterises as "the procedures of everyday creativity" (xiv). Far from random, the unexceptional decisions and actions involved with cinemagoing bear an ordering and a predictability. Novelty in audience activity appears, but it is alongside fairly exact expectations about the event. The schedule of start times is essential to the routinisation of filmgoing. Displaying a Fordist logic of streamlining commodity distribution and the time management of consumption, audiences circulate through a machine that shapes their constituency, providing a set time for seating, departure, snack purchases and socialising. Even with the staggered times offered by multiplex cinemas, schedules still lay down a fixed template around which other activities have to be arrayed by the patron. As audiences move to and through the theatre, the schedule endeavours to regulate practice, making us the subjects of a temporal grid, a city context, a cinema space, as well as of the film itself. To be sure, one can arrive late and leave early, confounding the schedule's disciplining force. Most importantly, with or without such forms of evasion, it channels the actions of audiences in ways that consideration of the gaze cannot address. Taking account of the scheduling of cinema culture, and its implication of adjunct procedures of everyday life, points to dimensions of subjectivity neglected by dominant theories of spectatorship. To be the subject of a cinema schedule is to understand one assemblage of the parameters of everyday creativity. It would be foolish to see cinema audiences as cattle, herded and processed alone, in some crude Gustave LeBon fashion. It would be equally foolish not to recognise the manner in which film distribution and exhibition operates precisely by constructing images of the activity of people as demographic clusters and generalised cultural consumers. The ordinary tactics of filmgoing are supplemental to, and run alongside, a set of industrial structures and practices. While there is a correlation between a culture industry's imagined audience and the life that ensues around its offerings, we cannot neglect that, as attention to film scheduling alerts us, audiences are subjects of an institutional apparatus, brought into being for the reproduction of an industrial edifice. Streamline Audiences In this, film is no different from any culture industry. Film exhibition and distribution relies on an understanding of both the market and the product or service being sold at any given point in time. Operations respond to economic conditions, competing companies, and alternative activities. Economic rationality in this strategic process, however, only explains so much. This is especially true for an industry that must continually predict, and arguably give shape to, the "mood" and predilections of disparate and distant audiences. Producers, distributors and exhibitors assess which films will "work", to whom they will be marketed, as well as establish the very terms of success. Without a doubt, much of the film industry's attentions act to reduce this uncertainty; here, one need only think of the various forms of textual continuity (genre films, star performances, etc.) and the economies of mass advertising as ways to ensure box office receipts. Yet, at the core of the operations of film exhibition remains a number of flexible assumptions about audience activity, taste and desire. These assumptions emerge from a variety of sources to form a brand of temporary industry "commonsense", and as such are harbingers of an industrial logic. Ien Ang has usefully pursued this view in her comparative analysis of three national television structures and their operating assumptions about audiences. Broadcasters streamline and discipline audiences as part of their organisational procedures, with the consequence of shaping ideas about consumers as well as assuring the reproduction of the industrial structure itself. She writes, "institutional knowledge is driven toward making the audience visible in such a way that it helps the institutions to increase their power to get their relationship with the audience under control, and this can only be done by symbolically constructing 'television audience' as an objectified category of others that can be controlled, that is, contained in the interest of a predetermined institutional goal" (7). Ang demonstrates, in particular, how various industrially sanctioned programming strategies (programme strips, "hammocking" new shows between successful ones, and counter-programming to a competitor's strengths) and modes of audience measurement grow out of, and invariably support, those institutional goals. And, most crucially, her approach is not an effort to ascertain the empirical certainty of "actual" audiences; instead, it charts the discursive terrain in which the abstract concept of audience becomes material for the continuation of industry practices. Ang's work tenders special insight to film culture. In fact, television scholarship has taken full advantage of exploring the routine nature of that medium, the best of which deploys its findings to lay bare configurations of power in domestic contexts. One aspect has been television time and schedules. For example, David Morley points to the role of television in structuring everyday life, discussing a range of research that emphasises the temporal dimension. Alerting us to the non- necessary determination of television's temporal structure, he comments that we "need to maintain a sensitivity to these micro-levels of division and differentiation while we attend to the macro-questions of the media's own role in the social structuring of time" (265). As such, the negotiation of temporal structures implies that schedules are not monolithic impositions of order. Indeed, as Morley puts it, they "must be seen as both entering into already constructed, historically specific divisions of space and time, and also as transforming those pre-existing division" (266). Television's temporal grid has been address by others as well. Paddy Scannell characterises scheduling and continuity techniques, which link programmes, as a standardisation of use, making radio and television predictable, 'user friendly' media (9). John Caughie refers to the organization of flow as a way to talk about the national particularities of British and American television (49-50). All, while making their own contributions, appeal to a detailing of viewing context as part of any study of audience, consumption or experience; uncovering the practices of television programmers as they attempt to apprehend and create viewing conditions for their audiences is a first step in this detailing. Why has a similar conceptual framework not been applied with the same rigour to film? Certainly the history of film and television's association with different, at times divergent, disciplinary formations helps us appreciate such theoretical disparities. I would like to mention one less conspicuous explanation. It occurs to me that one frequently sees a collapse in the distinction between the everyday and the domestic; in much scholarship, the latter term appears as a powerful trope of the former. The consequence has been the absenting of a myriad of other -- if you will, non-domestic -- manifestations of everyday-ness, unfortunately encouraging a rather literal understanding of the everyday. The impression is that the abstractions of the everyday are reduced to daily occurrences. Simply put, my minor appeal is for the extension of this vein of television scholarship to out-of-home technologies and cultural forms, that is, other sites and locations of the everyday. In so doing, we pay attention to extra-textual structures of cinematic life; other regimes of knowledge, power, subjectivity and practice appear. Film audiences require a discussion about the ordinary, the calculated and the casual practices of cinematic engagement. Such a discussion would chart institutional knowledge, identifying operating strategies and recognising the creativity and multidimensionality of cinemagoing. What are the discursive parameters in which the film industry imagines cinema audiences? What are the related implications for the structures in which the practice of cinemagoing occurs? Vectors of Exhibition Time One set of those structures of audience and industry practice involves the temporal dimension of film exhibition. In what follows, I want to speculate on three vectors of the temporality of cinema spaces (meaning that I will not address issues of diegetic time). Note further that my observations emerge from a close study of industrial discourse in the U.S. and Canada. I would be interested to hear how they are manifest in other continental contexts. First, the running times of films encourage turnovers of the audience during the course of a single day at each screen. The special event of lengthy anomalies has helped mark the epic, and the historic, from standard fare. As discussed above, show times coordinate cinemagoing and regulate leisure time. Knowing the codes of screenings means participating in an extension of the industrial model of labour and service management. Running times incorporate more texts than the feature presentation alone. Besides the history of double features, there are now advertisements, trailers for coming attractions, trailers for films now playing in neighbouring auditoriums, promotional shorts demonstrating new sound systems, public service announcements, reminders to turn off cell phones and pagers, and the exhibitor's own signature clips. A growing focal point for filmgoing, these introductory texts received a boost in 1990, when the Motion Picture Association of America changed its standards for the length of trailers, boosting it from 90 seconds to a full two minutes (Brookman). This intertextuality needs to be supplemented by a consideration of inter- media appeals. For example, advertisements for television began appearing in theatres in the 1990s. And many lobbies of multiplex cinemas now offer a range of media forms, including video previews, magazines, arcades and virtual reality games. Implied here is that motion pictures are not the only media audiences experience in cinemas and that there is an explicit attempt to integrate a cinema's texts with those at other sites and locations. Thus, an exhibitor's schedule accommodates an intertextual strip, offering a limited parallel to Raymond Williams's concept of "flow", which he characterised by stating -- quite erroneously -- "in all communication systems before broadcasting the essential items were discrete" (86-7). Certainly, the flow between trailers, advertisements and feature presentations is not identical to that of the endless, ongoing text of television. There are not the same possibilities for "interruption" that Williams emphasises with respect to broadcasting flow. Further, in theatrical exhibition, there is an end-time, a time at which there is a public acknowledgement of the completion of the projected performance, one that necessitates vacating the cinema. This end-time is a moment at which the "rental" of the space has come due; and it harkens a return to the street, to the negotiation of city space, to modes of public transit and the mobile privatisation of cars. Nonetheless, a schedule constructs a temporal boundary in which audiences encounter a range of texts and media in what might be seen as limited flow. Second, the ephemerality of audiences -- moving to the cinema, consuming its texts, then passing the seat on to someone else -- is matched by the ephemerality of the features themselves. Distributors' demand for increasing numbers of screens necessary for massive, saturation openings has meant that films now replace one another more rapidly than in the past. Films that may have run for months now expect weeks, with fewer exceptions. Wider openings and shorter runs have created a cinemagoing culture characterised by flux. The acceleration of the turnover of films has been made possible by the expansion of various secondary markets for distribution, most importantly videotape, splintering where we might find audiences and multiplying viewing contexts. Speeding up the popular in this fashion means that the influence of individual texts can only be truly gauged via cross-media scrutiny. Short theatrical runs are not axiomatically designed for cinemagoers anymore; they can also be intended to attract the attention of video renters, purchasers and retailers. Independent video distributors, especially, "view theatrical release as a marketing expense, not a profit center" (Hindes & Roman 16). In this respect, we might think of such theatrical runs as "trailers" or "loss leaders" for the video release, with selected locations for a film's release potentially providing visibility, even prestige, in certain city markets or neighbourhoods. Distributors are able to count on some promotion through popular consumer- guide reviews, usually accompanying theatrical release as opposed to the passing critical attention given to video release. Consequently, this shapes the kinds of uses an assessment of the current cinema is put to; acknowledging that new releases function as a resource for cinema knowledge highlights the way audiences choose between and determine big screen and small screen films. Taken in this manner, popular audiences see the current cinema as largely a rough catalogue to future cultural consumption. Third, motion picture release is part of the structure of memories and activities over the course of a year. New films appear in an informal and ever-fluctuating structure of seasons. The concepts of summer movies and Christmas films, or the opening weekends that are marked by a holiday, sets up a fit between cinemagoing and other activities -- family gatherings, celebrations, etc. Further, this fit is presumably resonant for both the industry and popular audiences alike, though certainly for different reasons. The concentration of new films around visible holiday periods results in a temporally defined dearth of cinemas; an inordinate focus upon three periods in the year in the U.S. and Canada -- the last weekend in May, June/July/August and December -- creates seasonal shortages of screens (Rice-Barker 20). In fact, the boom in theatre construction through the latter half of the 1990s was, in part, to deal with those short-term shortages and not some year-round inadequate seating. Configurations of releasing colour a calendar with the tactical manoeuvres of distributors and exhibitors. Releasing provides a particular shape to the "current cinema", a term I employ to refer to a temporally designated slate of cinematic texts characterised most prominently by their newness. Television arranges programmes to capitalise on flow, to carry forward audiences and to counter-programme competitors' simultaneous offerings. Similarly, distributors jostle with each other, with their films and with certain key dates, for the limited weekends available, hoping to match a competitor's film intended for one audience with one intended for another. Industry reporter Leonard Klady sketched some of the contemporary truisms of releasing based upon the experience of 1997. He remarks upon the success of moving Liar, Liar (Tom Shadyac, 1997) to a March opening and the early May openings of Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (Jay Roach, 1997) and Breakdown (Jonathan Mostow, 1997), generally seen as not desirable times of the year for premieres. He cautions against opening two films the same weekend, and thus competing with yourself, using the example of Fox's Soul Food (George Tillman, Jr., 1997) and The Edge (Lee Tamahori, 1997). While distributors seek out weekends clear of films that would threaten to overshadow their own, Klady points to the exception of two hits opening on the same date of December 19, 1997 -- Tomorrow Never Dies (Roger Spottiswoode, 1997) and Titanic (James Cameron, 1997). Though but a single opinion, Klady's observations are a peek into a conventional strain of strategising among distributors and exhibitors. Such planning for the timing and appearance of films is akin to the programming decisions of network executives. And I would hazard to say that digital cinema, reportedly -- though unlikely -- just on the horizon and in which texts will be beamed to cinemas via satellite rather than circulated in prints, will only augment this comparison; releasing will become that much more like programming, or at least will be conceptualised as such. To summarize, the first vector of exhibition temporality is the scheduling and running time; the second is the theatrical run; the third is the idea of seasons and the "programming" of openings. These are just some of the forces streamlining filmgoers; the temporal structuring of screenings, runs and film seasons provides a material contour to the abstraction of audience. Here, what I have delineated are components of an industrial logic about popular and public entertainment, one that offers a certain controlled knowledge about and for cinemagoing audiences. Shifting Conceptual Frameworks A note of caution is in order. I emphatically resist an interpretation that we are witnessing the becoming-film of television and the becoming-tv of film. Underneath the "inversion" argument is a weak brand of technological determinism, as though each asserts its own essential qualities. Such a pat declaration seems more in line with the mythos of convergence, and its quasi-Darwinian "natural" collapse of technologies. Instead, my point here is quite the opposite, that there is nothing essential or unique about the scheduling or flow of television; indeed, one does not have to look far to find examples of less schedule-dependent television. What I want to highlight is that application of any term of distinction -- event/flow, gaze/glance, public/private, and so on -- has more to do with our thinking, with the core discursive arrangements that have made film and television, and their audiences, available to us as knowable and different. So, using empirical evidence to slide one term over to the other is a strategy intended to supplement and destabilise the manner in which we draw conclusions, and even pose questions, of each. What this proposes is, again following the contributions of Ien Ang, that we need to see cinemagoing in its institutional formation, rather than some stable technological, textual or experiential apparatus. The activity is not only a function of a constraining industrial practice or of wildly creative patrons, but of a complex inter-determination between the two. Cinemagoing is an organisational entity harbouring, reviving and constituting knowledge and commonsense about film commodities, audiences and everyday life. An event of cinema begins well before the dimming of an auditorium's lights. The moment a newspaper is consulted, with its local representation of an internationally circulating current cinema, its listings belie a scheduling, an orderliness, to the possible projections in a given location. As audiences are formed as subjects of the current cinema, we are also agents in the continuation of a set of institutions as well. References Ang, Ien. Desperately Seeking the Audience. New York: Routledge, 1991. Brookman, Faye. "Trailers: The Big Business of Drawing Crowds." Variety 13 June 1990: 48. Caughie, John. "Playing at Being American: Games and Tactics." Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Ed. Patricia Mellencamp. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steve Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. Hindes, Andrew, and Monica Roman. "Video Titles Do Pitstops on Screens." Variety 16-22 Sep. 1996: 11+. Klady, Leonard. "Hitting and Missing the Market: Studios Show Savvy -- or Just Luck -- with Pic Release Strategies." Variety 19-25 Jan. 1998: 18. Morley, David. Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 1992. Newspaper Association of America. "Before They See It Here..." Advertisement. Variety 22-28 Nov. 1999: 38. Rice-Barker, Leo. "Industry Banks on New Technology, Expanded Slates." Playback 6 May 1996: 19-20. Scannell, Paddy. Radio, Television and Modern Life. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. New York: Schocken, 1975. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Charles Acland. "Matinees, Summers and Opening Weekends: Cinemagoing Audiences as Institutional Subjects." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.1 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/cinema.php>. Chicago style: Charles Acland, "Matinees, Summers and Opening Weekends: Cinemagoing Audiences as Institutional Subjects," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 1 (2000), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/cinema.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Charles Acland. (2000) Matinees, Summers and Opening Weekends: Cinemagoing Audiences as Institutional Subjects. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(1). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/cinema.php> ([your date of access]).

In Italy, the progressive digital accessibility of sub-standard films, videotapes and related paper materials (work notes, project layouts, letters, etc.), as well as the study of the archives in which they were preserved, make it possible today to reconstruct the emergence (between the Sixties and the early Seventies), of the artistic practice of analog video. At the same time, this permits to highlight how this emergence interests both the contexts of artist’s and independent cinema and the areas of Arte Povera, Conceptual Art and Pop Art. On this basis and reflecting critically, it is possible to see that the medial emergence of "video" - as, albeit otherwise, photography and cinema had already done - has challenged the relationship between art and technology as much as the relationship between the theoretical frameworks and the operational modalities from which historically connoted definitions, taxonomies and lexicographies derive. In this perspective, the objective set here concerns the description and a first focus of the emergence of "video art" in Italy starting from what, perhaps too simplified, can be defined as a "prevideo" phase. A short period in which the chronology of events becomes important, certainly not to define primacies, but to highlight - among the practices - the works, the theoretical-critical discourses, the exhibition projects, their connections, their intercommunication or their flow. We will try, therefore, to reconstruct the debut of "video art" in a historiographical key, tracing its genealogy through the documentary apparatus of the main exhibition projects, artistic practices and videotape works. At the state of the archive research, the documentary traces reveal a peculiar connection between "performativity" and "videotape". This is the common thread that runs through the period under consideration. Already active in certain artist's cinema, the performative dimension intensifies and strengthens through the video device according to the closed-circuit mode, through which the first experimentation of the videotape in Italy is attested between 1969 and 1971. These are researches - whose manifestation is, precisely, performative and whose matrix is conceptual - which question, transforming them, the very ideas of work and exhibition. Not only. In the historical and socio-cultural contingency of 1968, the profound transformations produced by the practices of art (conceptual, pop, poor, kinetic and programmed, performative) impact the device of the exhibition, the places dedicated to exhibitions and, in particular, the galleries that become a mental space, a field open to the planning of artists. The "conceptual" character of their performative actions and of the "real time" in which they occur, show themselves and disappear; their documentation (photographic, cinematographic and videographic), therefore, takes on a peculiar function because it occurs instantaneously and simultaneously with artistic events / acts. The documentation overlaps and, together, becomes an expansive dimension of the artistic act rather than a supplementary dimension. On this basis, a first critical re-examination of how, on a double practical-theoretical track, with different methods and tools, both Luciano Giaccari (with Studio 970/2) and Gerry Schum (VideoGalleria) have operate. In particular, it is a question of highlighting how the work and its presence in Italy are interconnected with the beginning of video practices in the artistic field. Finally, it will be highlighted how, during that period, starting from performing experiences captured and recorded on reduced sub-standard film (8mm, 16mm, Super 8) which already present a strong curatorial planning, developed in exhibition contexts such as museums, galleries or alternative spaces, particular attention has been activated towards videotape (with all the technical specificities and the limits of the technologies of the time) as a mean of expression and documentation. Significantly, those same curatorial projects foresaw that the then-avant-garde technologies could be made available to artists in various ways (mainly Philips technologies). Here, as generative events of Italian video art, will be taken in consideration: the 3a Biennale internazionale della giovane pittura. Gennaio 70: comportamenti, progetti, mediazioni (curated by Renato Barilli, Maurizio Calvesi, Tommaso Trini, Andrea Emiliani at the Bologna Civic Museum in 1970); the 35a Esposizione Biennale Internazionale d'Arte del 1970; Eurodomus 3/ Il Telemuseo (curated by da Tommaso Trini in Milano in 1970); Improvvisazioni su Videonatro VPL 6 IC, videoregistratore LDL 1000, telecamera mini-compact (coordinated by Francesco Carlo Crispolti at the Obelisco Gallery in Rome in 1971); Circuito -----> Chiuso – Aperto (Curated by Francesco Carlo Crispolti in Acireale in 1971); Schifanoia-tv: “mezzo” aperto/opera chiusa (realized in Ferrara in 1972 by the collective Gruppo OB based in Milano).

IntroductionRecut trailers typically mix footage from one or more films to create a preview for a feature that will never exist. Challenging the trailer’s assumed function as existing merely to gain an audience for a main attraction, the recut trailer suggests that the trailer can exist separately from a film. This paper will ask if recut trailers are evidence of fan enthusiasm and question precisely where this enthusiasm is directed. Do recut trailers demonstrate there are fans for the feature film that is recut, or does this enthusiasm extend beyond an appreciation and anticipation for a feature film? It will be ascertained if the recut trailer – as a site for homage, parody and fandom – transcends the advertising imperatives of box office success. This paper will demonstrate how fan-made trailers are symptomatic of the need for a new critical approach to trailers, one that does not situate the trailer as the low advertisement to the high cultural text of the film. It will be proposed that trailers form a network, of which the feature films and other trailers that are invoked form only a part.Recut trailers, while challenging the norms of what is considered an advertisement, function within a strict frame of reference: in their length, use of credits, text, voiceover in direct address to the audience, and editing techniques. Consequently, the recut trailer parodies and challenges the tools of promotion by utilising the very methods that sell to a prospective audience, to create an advertisement that is stripped of its traditional function by promoting a film that cannot exist and cannot be consumed. The promotion seems to end at the site of the advertisement, while still calling upon a complex series of interconnected references and collective knowledge in order for the parody to be effective. This paper will examine the network of Brokeback Mountain parodies, which were created before, during and after the feature film’s release, suggesting that the temporal imperative usually present in trailers is irrelevant for their appreciation. A playlist of the trailers discussed is available here.The Shift from Public to PrivateThe limited scholarship available situates the trailer as a promotional tool and a “brief film text” (Kernan 1), which is a “limited sample of the product” of the feature film (Kerr and Flynn 103), one that directly markets to demographics in order to draw an audience to see the feature. The traditional distribution methods for the trailer – as pre-packaged coming attractions in a cinema, and as television advertisements – work by building a desire to see a film in the future. For the trailer to be commercially successful within this framework, there is an imperative to differentiate itself from other trailers through creating an appeal to stars, genre or narrative (Kernan 14), or to be recognised as a trailer in amongst the stream of other advertisements on television. As new media forms have emerged, the trailer’s spatial and temporal bounds have shifted: the trailer is now included as a special feature on DVD packages, is sent to mobile devices on demand, and is viewed on video-sharing websites such as YouTube. In this move from the communal, collective and directed consumption of the trailer in the public sphere to the individualised, domesticated and on-demand consumption in the private sphere – the trailer has shown itself to be a successful “cross-media text” (Johnston 145). While choosing to watch a trailer – potentially long after the theatrical release of the film it promotes – suggests a growing “interactive relationship between film studio and audience” (Johnston 145), it also marks the beginning of increasing interactivity between the trailer and the audience, a relationship that has altered the function and purpose of the trailer beyond the studio’s control. Yet, the form of the trailer as it was traditionally distributed has been retained for recut trailers in order to parody and strip the trailer of its original meaning and purpose, and removes any commercial capital attached to it. Rather than simply being released at the control of a studio, the trailer is now actively shared, appropriated and altered. Demand for the trailer has not diminished since the introduction of new media, suggesting that there is an enthusiasm not only for coming feature films, but also for the act of watching, producing and altering trailers that may not translate into box office takings. This calls into question the role of the trailer in new media sites, in which the recut trailers form a significant part by embodying the larger changes to the consumption and distribution of trailers.TrailerTubeThis study analyses recut trailers released on YouTube only. This is, arguably, the most common way that these trailers are watched and newly created trailers are shared and interacted with, with some clips reaching several million views. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the network that is created surrounding the recut trailer through addressing its specific qualities. YouTube is the only site consulted in this study for the release for fan-made trailers as YouTube forms a formidable part of the network of recut trailers and studio released trailers, and currently, serves as a common way for Internet users to search for videos.YouTube was launched in December 2005, and in the following 1-2 years, the majority of popular recut trailers emerged. The correlation between these two dates is not arbitrary; the technology and culture promoted and fostered by the unique specificities of YouTube has in turn developed the recut trailer as “one of the most popular forms of fan subversion in the age of digital video” (Hilderband 52). It is also the role of audiences and producers that has ensured that the trailer has moved beyond its original spatial and temporal bounds – to be consumed in the home or on mobile devices, and at any stage past any promotional urgency. The Brokeback Mountain parodies, to be later discussed, surfaced mainly in 2006, demonstrative of an early acceptance of the possibilities that YouTube and mass broadcasting presented, and the possibilities that the trailer could offer to YouTube’s “clip” culture (Hilderbrand 49).The specificities of YouTube as a channel for dissemination have allowed for fan-made trailers to exist alongside trailers released by studios. Rather than the trailer being consumed and then becoming irretrievable, perpetually tied to the feature film it promotes, the online distribution and storing of trailers allows a constant revisiting of the advertisement – this act alone demonstrating an enthusiasm for the form of the trailer. Hilderbrand argues that YouTube “offers[s] new and remediating relationships to texts that indicate changes and acceleration of spectatorial consumption” (49). Specifically, Hilderbrand proposes that YouTube functions as a collection of memories, which in turn present a “portal of cultural memory” (54) – amplified by the ability to create playlists and channels. The tagging of trailers to the films from which they drive, the official trailers released for a film referenced, or other recut trailers ensures that there is a physical trace of the network the trailer creates. Recut trailers demand for knowledge and capital to be shared amongst viewers, the technical attributes of YouTube allow for much of this knowledge to be available on demand, and to be hyperlinked or suggested to the viewer. In order for the parody present in recut trailers to function at the level intended, the films that are drawn upon would presumably need to be identified and some basic elements of the plot understood in order for the capital imbued in the trailer to be completely realised. If the user is unaware of the film, however, clips of the film or the original trailer can be reached either through the “related videos” menu which populates according to the didactic information for the clip watched, or by searching. As the majority of recut trailers seek to displace the original genre of the film parodied – such as, for example, Ten Things I Hate about Commandments which presents the story of The Ten Commandments as a teen film in which Moses will both part the sea and get the girl – the original genre of the film must be known by the viewer in order to acknowledge the site for parody in the fan-made trailer. Further to this, the network deployed suggests that there must be some knowledge of the conventions of the genre that is being applied to the original film’s promotional qualities. The parody functions by effectively sharing the knowledge between two genres, in conjunction with an awareness of the role and capital of the trailer. Tagging, playlists and channels facilitate the sharing of knowledge and dispersing of capital. As the recut trailer tends to derive from more than one source, the network alters the viewer’s relationship to the original feature film and cultivates a series of clips and knowledge. However, this also indicates that intimate fan knowledge can be bypassed – which places this particular relationship to the trailer and the invoked films as existing outside the realms of the archetypal cult fan. This challenges prior conceptions of fan culture by resisting a prolonged engagement normally attributed to cultivating fan status (Hills), as typically only one trailer will be made, rather than exhibiting a concentrated adulation of one text. The recut trailer is placed as the nexus in a series of links, in which the studio system is subverted while also being directly engaged with and utilised. The tools that have traditionally been used to sell to an audience through pre-packaged coming attractions are now used to promote a film that cannot be consumed that holds no commercial significance for film studios. These tools also work to reinforce the aesthetic and cinematic norms in the trailer, which provide a contract of audience expectations – such as the use of the approval by the American Motion Picture Association screen and classification at the beginning of the majority of recut trailers. The recut trailer assimilates to the nature of video sharing on YouTube in which the trailer is part of a network of narratives all of which are accessible on demand, can be fast-forwarded, replayed, and embedded on numerous social networking sites for further dissemination and accompanying editorial comment. The trailer thus becomes a social text that involves a community and is wide-reaching in its aims and consumption, despite being physically consumed in the private sphere. The feature which enables the user to “favourite” a video, add it to their playlist and embed it in another site, demonstrates that the trailer is considered as its own cohesive form, subject to scrutiny and favoured or dismissed. Constant statistics reflecting its popularity reinforce the success of a recut trailer, and popularity will generally lead to the trailer becoming more accessible. Hilderbrand argues that YouTube has nutured a “new temporality of immediate gratification for audiences” which has in turn contributed to the “culture of the clip” (49), which the trailer seems to exemplify – and in the absence of feature films being legally readily accessible on sites such as YouTube, the trailer seeks to fill the void for immediate gratification.Brokeback MountainsWhile fan-made trailers can generate enthusiasm about the release of an upcoming film they may be linked to – as was recently the case with fan-made trailers for teen vampire film, Twilight – there is also a general enthusiasm to play with the form of the trailer and all that it signifies, while in the process, stripping the trailer of its traditional function. Following the release of the trailer for feature film Brokeback Mountain, numerous recut trailers emerged on YouTube which took the romantic and sexual relationship of the two male leads in the film, and applied this narrative to films depicting two male leads in a non-romantic friendship. In effect, new films were created that used the basis of Brokeback Mountain to shift plots in existing films, creating a new narrative in the process. The many Brokeback… parodies vary in popularity, and have been uploaded to YouTube continuously since 2006. The titles include Brokeback to the Future, Saved by the Bell: Brokeback Style, Brokeback of the Ring, The Brokeback Redemption, Broke Trek, Harry Potter and Brokeback Goblet and Star Wars: The Emperor Brokeback. The trailers use footage from a variety of film and television sources that show a friendship between two men and introduce it to the “style” of Brokeback Mountain. There are several techniques which are used uniformly across all of the trailers in order to convey this new plot: the original score used in the Brokeback Mountain trailer begins each recut trailer; the use of typically white text on a black screen based on the original trailer’s text, or a slight variant of it which is specific to the film which is being recut; and the pace of shots altered to focus on lingering looks, or to splice scenes together in order to imply sexual contact. Consequently, there is a consciousness of the effects used in the original trailer to sell a particular narrative to the audience as something that an audience would want to view. The narrative is constructed as being universal, as any story with two men as the leads and their friendship can be altered to show an underlying homoerotic story, and the form of the trailer allows these storylines to be promoted and shared. The insider knowledge of the fan that has noticed these interactions is able to make their knowledge communal. Hills argues that “fans participate in communal activities” (ix), which here takes the form of creating a network of collective stories which form Brokeback – it is a story extended to several sites, and a story which is promoted and sold. Through the use of tagging, playlists and suggested videos, once one recut trailer is viewed, several others are made instantly available. The availability of the original Brokeback Mountain trailer then serves to reinforce the authenticity and professionalism of the clips, by providing a template in which existing footage from other films is moulded to fit within.The instant identifier of a Brokeback… trailer is the music that was used in the original trailer. This signals that the trailer for Brokeback Mountain was itself so iconic that the use of its soundtrack would be instantly recognisable, and the re-use of music and text suggests that the recut trailers reinforce this iconography and its capital by visually reinforcing what signifies Brokeback Mountain. The network these trailers create includes the film Brokeback Mountain itself, but the recut trailer begins to open a new trajectory for the narrative to mould and shift, identifiable by techniques present in the trailer but not the feature film itself. The fan appreciation is evident in several ways: namely, there is an enthusiasm to conflate a feature film into Brokeback Mountain’s general narrative; that there has been enough of an engagement with a feature in order to retrieve clips to be edited into a new montage, and consequently, a condensed narrative with a direct mode of address; and also the eagerness to see a feature film in trailer form, employing trailer-specific cinematic techniques to enhance parody and displacement. Recut trailers are also subject to commenting, which generally reflect on either the insider fan knowledge of the text that is being initiated to the world of Brokeback Mountain, or take the place of comments that reflect on the success of the editing. In this respect, critique is a part of the communal fan interaction with the creator and uploader in the recut trailer’s network. As such, there is a focus on quality for the creator of the fan video, and rating occurs in order to rank the recut trailers. This focus on quality and professionalism elevates the creator of the recut trailer to the status of a director, despite not having filmed the scenes themselves. Demonstrating the enthusiasm for the role of the trailer, the internal promotion on YouTube of the most successful trailers – designated as such by the YouTube community – signals an active engagement with the role of the trailer, and its social properties, even though it is consumed individually.ConclusionWhile the recut trailer extends the fan gaze toward one object or more, it is typically presented as a parody, and consequently, could also be seen as rejecting elements of a genre or feature film. However, the parody typically occurs at the site of displacement: such as the relationship between the two male leads in Brokeback to the Future having a romantic relationship whilst coming to terms with time-travel; the burning bush in Ten Things I Hate about Commandments being played by Samuel L. Jackson as “Principal Firebush”, complete with audio from Pulp Fiction; or recutting romantic comedy Sleepless in Seattle to become a horror film. The parody relies on knowledge that can be found easily, aided by YouTube’s features, while requiring the creator to intimately engage with a feature film. The role of the trailer in this network is to provide the tools and the boundaries for the new narrative to exist within, and create a system of referents for the fan to identify, through parodies of star appeal, genre, or narrative, as Kernan proposes are the three ways in which a trailer often relies upon to sell itself to an audience (14).As this paper has argued toward, the recut trailer can also be released from the feature films it invokes by being considered as its own coherent form, which draws upon numerous sites of knowledge and capital in order to form a network. While traditionally trailers have worked to gain an audience for an impending feature release, the recut trailer only seeks to create an audience for itself. Through the use of cult texts or a particularly successful form of parody, as demonstrated in Scary Mary Poppins, the recut trailer is widely consumed and shared across multiple avenues. The recut trailer then seeks to promote only itself through providing a condensed narrative, speaking directly to audiences, and cleverly engaging with the use of editing to leave traces of authorship. Fan culture may be seen as the adoration of one creator to the film they recut, but the network that the recut trailer creates demonstrates that there is an enthusiasm in both creators and viewers for the form of the trailer itself, to exist beyond the feature film and advertising imperatives.ReferencesBrokeback of the Ring. 27 Feb. 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgt-BiFiBek›.Brokeback to the Future. 1 Feb. 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uwuLxrv8jY›.Brokeback Mountain. Dir. Ang Lee. Film. Paramount Pictures, 2005. The Brokeback Redemption Trailer. 28 Feb. 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtRi42DEdTE›.Broke Trek – A Star Trek Brokeback Mountain Parody. 27 May 2007. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xSOuLky3n0›.Harry Potter and the Brokeback Goblet. 8 March 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9D0veHTxh0›. Hilderbrand, Lucas. "Youtube: Where Cultural Memory and Copyright Converge." Film Quarterly 61 (2007): 48-57. Hills, Matthew. Fan Cultures. New York: Routledge, 2002. Johnston, Keith M. "'The Coolest Way to Watch Movie Trailers in the World': Trailers in the Digital Age." Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 14 (2008): 145-60. Kernan, Lisa. Coming Attractions: Reading American Movie Trailers. Austin: U of Texas P, 2004. Kerr, Aphra, and Roddy Flynn. "Rethinking Globalisation through the Movie and Games Industries." Convergence: The International Journal of Research Into New Media Technologies 9 (2003): 91-113. The Original Scary ‘Mary Poppins’ Recut Trailer. 8 Oct. 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T5_0AGdFic›.Saved by the Bell: Brokeback Style. 4 April 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHLr5AYl5f4›.Sleepless in Seattle. Dir. Nora Ephron. Film. Tristar Pictures, 1993. Sleepless in Seattle: Recut as a Horror Movie. 30 Jan. 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frUPnZMxr08›.Star Wars: The Emperor Brokeback. 14 Feb. 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omB18oRsBYg›.The Ten Commandments. Dir. Cecil B. DeMille. Film. Paramount Pictures, 1956. Ten Things I Hate about Commandments. 14 May 2006. YouTube. Video. 2 March 2009 ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1kqqMXWEFs›.

Did you see the videos where the cat jumps in the box, attacks the printer or tries to leap from the snowy car? As the availability and popularity of watching videos on the Internet has risen rapidly in the last decade, so has the prevalence of cat videos. Although the cuteness of YouTube videos of cats might make them appear frivolous, in fact there is a significant irony at their heart: online cat videos enable corporate surveillance of viewers, yet viewers seem just as oblivious to this as the cats featured in the videos. Towards this end, I consider the distinguishing features of contemporary cat videos, focusing particularly on their narrative structure and mode of observation. I compare cat videos with the “Aesthetic of Astonishment” of early cinema and with dog videos, to explore the nexus of a spectatorship of thrills and feline performance. In particular, I highlight a unique characteristic of these videos: the cats’ unselfconsciousness. This, I argue, is rare in a consumer culture dominated by surveillance, where we are constantly aware of the potential for being watched. The unselfconsciousness of cats in online videos offers viewers two key pleasures: to imagine the possibility of freedom from surveillance, and to experience the power of administering surveillance as unproblematic. Ultimately, however, cat videos enable viewers to facilitate our own surveillance, and we do so with the gleeful abandon of a kitten jumping in a tissue box What Distinguishes Cat Videos? Cat videos have become so popular, that they generate millions of views on YouTube, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis now holds an annual Internet Cat Video Festival. If you are not already a fan of the genre, the Walker’s promotional videos for the festival (2013 and 2012) provide an entertaining introduction to the celebrities (Lil Bub, Grumpy Cat, and Henri), canon (dancing cats, surprised cat, and cat falling off counter), culture and commodities of online cat videos, despite repositioning them into a public exhibition context. Cats are often said to dominate the internet (Hepola), despite the surprise of Internet inventor Tim Berners-Lee. Domestic cats are currently the most popular pet in the world (Driscoll), however they are already outnumbered by smartphones. Cats have played various roles in our societies, cultures and imaginations since their domestication some 8-10,000 years ago (Driscoll). A potent social and cultural symbol in mythology, art and popular culture, the historical and cultural significance of cats is complex, shifting and often contradictory. They have made their way across geographic, cultural and class boundaries, and been associated with the sacred and the occult, femininity and fertility, monstrosity and domesticity (Driscoll, Rogers). Cats are figured as both inscrutable and bounteously polysemic. Current representations of cats, including these videos, seem to emphasise their sociability with humans, association with domestic space, independence and aloofness, and intelligence and secretiveness. I am interested in what distinguishes the pleasures of cat videos from other manifestations of cats in folklore and popular culture such as maneki-neko and fictional cats. Even within Internet culture, I’m focusing on live action cat videos, rather than lolcats, animated cats, or dog videos, though these are useful points of contrast. The Walker’s cat video primer also introduces us to the popular discourses accounting for the widespread appeal of these videos: cats have global reach beyond language, audiences can project their own thoughts and feelings onto cats, cats are cute, and they make people feel good. These discourses circulate in popular conversation, and are promoted by YouTube itself. These suggestions do not seem to account for the specific pleasures of cat videos, beyond the predominance of cats in culture more broadly. The cat videos popular on the Internet tend to feature several key characteristics. They are generated by users, shot on a mobile device such as a phone, and set in a domestic environment. They employ an observational mode, which Bill Nichols has described as a noninterventionist type of documentary film associated with traditions of direct cinema and cinema verite, where form and style yields to the profilmic event. In the spirit of their observational mode, cat videos feature minimal sound and language, negligible editing and short duration. As Leah Shafer notes, cat videos record, “’live’ events, they are mostly shot by ‘amateurs’ with access to emerging technologies, and they dramatize the familiar.” For example, the one-minute video Cat vs Printer comprises a single, hand-held shot observing the cat, and the action is underlined by the printer’s beep and the sounds created by the cat’s movements. The patterned wallpaper suggests a domestic location, and the presence of the cat itself symbolises domesticity. These features typically combine to produce impressions of universality, intimacy and spontaneity – impressions commonly labelled ‘cute’. The cat’s cuteness is also embodied in its confusion and surprise at the printer’s movements: it is a simpleton, and we can laugh at its lack of understanding of the basic appurtenances of the modern world. Cat videos present minimalist narratives, focused on an instant of spectacle. A typical cat video establishes a state of calm, then suddenly disrupts it. The cat is usually the active agent of change, though chance also frequently plays a significant role. The pervasiveness of this structure means that viewers familiar with the form may even anticipate a serendipitous event. The disruption prompts a surprising or comic effect for the viewer, and this is a key part of the video’s pleasure. For example, in Cat vs Printer, the establishing scenario is the cat intently watching the printer, a presumably quotidian scene, which escalates when the cat begins to smack the moving paper. The narrative climaxes in the final two seconds of the video, when the cat strikes the paper so hard that the printer tray bounces, and the surprised cat falls off its stool. The video ends abruptly. This disruption also takes the viewer by surprise (at least it does the first time you watch it). The terse ending, and lack of resolution or denouement, encourages the viewer to replay the video. The minimal narrative effectively builds expectation for a moment of surprise. These characteristics of style and form typify a popular body of work, though there is variation, and the millions of cat videos on YouTube might be best accounted for by various subgenres. The most popular cat videos seem to have the most sudden and striking disruptions as well as the most abrupt endings. They seem the most dramatic and spontaneous. There are also thousands of cat videos with minor disruptions, and some with brazenly staged events. Increasingly, there is obvious use of postproduction techniques, including editing and music. A growing preponderance of compilations attests to the videos’ “spreadability” (Jenkins, Ford, and Green). The conventional formal structure of these videos effectively homogenises the cat, as if there is a single cat performing in millions of videos. Indeed, YouTube comments often suggest a likeness between the cat represented in the video and the commenter’s own cat. In this sense, the cuteness so readily identified has an homogenising effect. It also has the effect of distinguishing cats as a species from other animals, as it confounds common conceptions of all (other) animals as fundamentally alike in their essential difference from the human (animal). Cat videos are often appreciated for what they reveal about cats in general, rather than for each cat’s individuality. In this way, cat videos symbolise a generic feline cuteness, rather than identify a particular cat as cute. The cats of YouTube act “as an allegory for all the cats of the earth, the felines that traverse myths and religions, literature and fables” (Derrida 374). Each cat swiping objects off shelves, stealing the bed of a dog, leaping onto a kitchen bench is the paradigmatic cat, the species exemplar. Mode of Spectatorship, Mode of Performance: Cat Videos, Film History and Dog Videos Cat videos share some common features with early cinema. In his analysis of the “Aesthetic of Astonishment,” which dominated films until about 1904, film historian Tom Gunning argues that the short, single shot films of this era are characterised by exciting audience curiosity and fulfilling it with visual shocks and thrills. It is easy to see how this might describe the experience of watching Cat vs Printer or Thomas Edison’s Electrocution of an Elephant from 1903. The thrill of revelation at the end of Cat vs Printer is more significant than the minimal narrative it completes, and the most popular videos seem to heighten this shock. Further, like a rainy afternoon spent clicking the play button on a sequence of YouTube’s suggested videos, these early short films were also viewed in variety format as a series of attractions. Indeed, as Leah Shafer notes, some of these early films even featured cats, such as Professor Welton’s Boxing Cats from 1894. Each film offered a moment of spectacle, which thrilled the modern viewer. Gunning argues that these early films are distinguished by a particular relationship between spectator and film. They display blatant exhibitionism, and address their viewer directly. This highlights the thrill of disruption: “The directness of this act of display allows an emphasis on the thrill itself – the immediate reaction of the viewer” (Gunning “Astonishment” 122). This is produced both within the staging of the film itself as players look directly at the camera, and by the mode of exhibition, where a showman primes the audience verbally for a moment of revelation. Importantly, Gunning argues that this mode of spectatorship differs from how viewers watch narrative films, which later came to dominate our film and television screens: “These early films explicitly acknowledge their spectator, seeming to reach outwards and confront. Contemplative absorption is impossible here” (“Astonishment” 123). Gunning’s emphasis on a particular mode of spectatorship is significant for our understanding of pet videos. His description of early cinema has numerous similarities with cat videos, to be sure, but seems to describe more precisely the mode of spectatorship engendered by typical dog videos. Dog videos are also popular online, and are marked by a mode of performance, where the dogs seem to present self-consciously for the camera. Dogs often appear to look at the camera directly, although they are probably actually reading the eyes of the camera operator. One of the most popular dog videos, Ultimate dog tease, features a dog who appears to look into the camera and engage in conversation with the camera operator. It has the same domestic setting, mobile camera and short duration as the typical cat video, but, unlike the cat attacking the printer, this dog is clearly aware of being watched. Like the exhibitionistic “Cinema of Attractions,” it is marked by “the recurring look at the camera by [canine] actors. This action which is later perceived as spoiling the realistic illusion of the cinema, is here undertaken with brio, establishing contact with the audience” (Gunning “Attractions” 64). Dog videos frequently feature dogs performing on command, such as the countless iterations of dogs fetching beverages from refrigerators, or at least behaving predictably, such as dogs jumping in the bath. Indeed, the scenario often seems to be set up, whereas cat videos more often seem to be captured fortuitously. The humour of dog videos often comes from the very predictability of their behaviour, such as repeatedly fetching or rolling in mud. In an ultimate performance of self-consciousness, dogs even seem to act out guilt and shame for their observers. Similarly, baby videos are also popular online and were popular in early cinema, and babies also tend to look at the camera directly, showing that they are aware of bring watched. This emphasis on exhibitionism and modes of spectatorship helps us hone in on the uniqueness of cat videos. Unlike the dogs of YouTube, cats typically seem unaware of their observers; they refuse to look at the camera and “display their visibility” (Gunning “Attractions,” 64). This fits with popular discourses of cats as independent and aloof, untrainable and untameable. Cat videos employ a unique mode of observation: we observe the cat, who is unencumbered by our scrutiny. Feline Performance in a World of Pervasive Surveillance This is an aesthetic of surveillance without inhibition, which heightens the impressions of immediacy and authenticity. The very existence of so many cat videos online is a consequence of camera ubiquity, where video cameras have become integrated with common communications devices. Thousands of cameras are constantly ready to capture these quotidian scenes, and feed the massive economy of user-generated content. Cat videos are obviously created and distributed by humans, a purposeful labour to produce entertainment for viewers. Cat videos are never simply a feline performance, but a performance of human interaction with the cat. The human act of observation is an active engagement with the other. Further, the act of recording is a performance of wielding the camera, and often also through image or voice. The cat video is a companion performance, which is part of an ongoing relationship between that human and that other animal. It carries strong associations with regimes of epistemological power and physical domination through histories of visual study, mastery and colonisation. The activity of the human creator seems to contrast with the behaviour of the cat in these videos, who appears unaware of being watched. The cats’ apparent uninhibited behaviour gives the viewer the illusion of voyeuristically catching a glimpse of a self-sufficient world. It carries connotations of authenticity, as the appearance of interaction and intervention is minimised, like the ideal of ‘fly on the wall’ documentary (Nichols). This lack of self-consciousness and sense of authenticity are key to their reception as ‘cute’ videos. Interestingly, one of the reasons that audiences may find this mode of observation so accessible and engaging, is because it heeds the conventions of the fourth wall in the dominant style of fiction film and television, which presents an hermetically sealed diegesis. This unselfconscious performance of cats in online videos is key, because it embodies a complex relationship with the surveillance that dominates contemporary culture. David Lyon describes surveillance as “any focused attention to personal details for the purposes of influence, management, or control” (“Everyday” 1) and Mark Andrejevic defines monitoring as “the collection of information, with or without the knowledge of users, that has actual or speculative economic value” (“Enclosure” 297). We live in an environment where social control is based on information, collected and crunched by governments, corporations, our peers, and ourselves. The rampancy of surveillance has increased in recent decades in a number of ways. Firstly, technological advances have made the recording, sorting and analysis of data more readily available. Although we might be particularly aware of the gaze of the camera when we stand in line at the supermarket checkout or have an iPhone pointed at our face, many surveillance technologies are hidden points of data collection, which track our grocery purchases, text messages to family and online viewing. Surveillance is increasingly mediated through digital technologies. Secondly, surveillance data is becoming increasingly privatised and monetised, so there is strengthening market demand for consumer information. Finally, surveillance was once associated chiefly with institutions of the state, or with corporations, but the process is increasingly “lateral,” involving peer-to-peer surveillance and self-surveillance in the realms of leisure and domestic life (Andrejevic “Enclosure,” 301). Cat videos occupy a fascinating position within this context of pervasive surveillance, and offer complex thrills for audiences. The Unselfconscious Pleasures of Cat Videos Unselfconsciousness of feline performance in cat videos invites contradictory pleasures. Firstly, cat videos offer viewers the fantasy of escaping surveillance. The disciplinary effect of surveillance means that we modify our behaviour based on a presumption of constant observation; we are managed and manipulated as much by ourselves as we are by others. This discipline is the defining condition of industrial society, as described by Foucault. In an age of traffic cameras, Big Brother, CCTV, the selfie pout, and Google Glass, modern subjects are oppressed by the weight of observation to constantly manage their personal performance. Unselfconsciousness is associated with privacy, intimacy, naivety and, increasingly, with impossibility. By allowing us to project onto the experience of their protagonists, cat videos invite us to imagine a world where we are not constantly aware of being watched, of being under surveillance by both human beings and technology. This projection is enabled by discourse, which constructs cats as independent and aloof, a libertarian ideal. It provides the potential for liberation from technologized social surveillance, and from the concomitant self-discipline of our docile bodies. The uninhibited performance of cats in online videos offers viewers the prospect that it is possible to live without the gaze of surveillance. Through cat videos, we celebrate the untameable. Cats model a liberated uninhibitedness viewers can only desire. The apparent unselfconsciousness of feline performance is analogous to Derrida’s conception of animal nakedness: the nudity of animals is significant, because it is a key feature which distinguishes them from humans, but at the same time there is no sense of the concept of nakedness outside of human culture. Similarly, a performance uninhibited by observation seems beyond humans in contemporary culture, and implies a freedom from social expectations, but there is also little suggestion that cats would act differently if they knew they were observed. We interpret cats’ independence as natural, and take pleasure in cats’ naturalness. This lack of inhibition is cute in the sense that it is attractive to the viewer, but also in the sense that it is naïve to imagine a world beyond surveillance, a freedom from being watched. Secondly, we take pleasure in the power of observing another. Surveillance is based on asymmetrical regimes of power, and the position of observer, recorder, collator is usually more powerful than the subject of their gaze. We enjoy the pleasure of wielding the unequal gaze, whether we hit the “record” button ourselves or just the “play” button. In this way, we celebrate our capacity to contain the cat, who has historically proven conceptually uncontainable. Yet, the cats’ unselfconsciousness means we can absolve ourselves of their exploitation. Looking back at the observer, or the camera, is often interpreted as a confrontational move. Cats in videos do not confront their viewer, do not resist the gaze thrown on them. They accept the role of subject without protest; they perform cuteness without resistance. We internalise the strategies of surveillance so deeply that we emulate its practices in our intimate relationships with domestic animals. Cats do not glare back at us, accusingly, as dogs do, to remind us we are exerting power over them. The lack of inhibition of cats in online videos means that we can exercise the power of surveillance without confronting the oppression this implies. Cat videos offer the illusion of watching the other without disturbing it, brandishing the weapon without acknowledging the violence of its impact. There is a logical tension between these dual pleasures of cat videos: we want to escape surveillance, while exerting it. The Work of Cat Videos in ‘Liquid Surveillance’ These contradictory pleasures in fact speak to the complicated nature of surveillance in the era of “produsage,” when the value chain of media has transformed along with traditional roles of production and consumption (Bruns). Christian Fuchs argues that the contemporary media environment has complicated the dynamics of surveillance, and blurred the lines between subject and object (304). We both create and consume cat videos; we are commodified as audience and sold on as data. YouTube is the most popular site for sharing cat videos, and a subsidiary of Google, the world’s most visited website and a company which makes billions of dollars from gathering, collating, storing, assessing, and trading our data. While we watch cat videos on YouTube, they are also harvesting information about our every click, collating it with our other online behaviour, targeting ads at us based on our specific profile, and also selling this data on to others. YouTube is, in fact, a key tool of what David Lyon calls “liquid surveillance” after the work of Zygmunt Bauman, because it participates in the reduction of millions of bodies into data circulating at the service of consumer society (Lyon “Liquid”). Your views of cats purring and pouncing are counted and monetised, you are profiled and targeted for further consumption. YouTube did not create the imbalance of power implied by these mechanisms of surveillance, but it is instrumental in automating, amplifying, and extending this power (Andrejevic “Lateral,” 396). Zygmunt Bauman argues that in consumer society we are increasingly seduced to willingly subject ourselves to surveillance (Lyon “Liquid”), and who better than the cute kitty to seduce us? Our increasingly active role in “produsage” media platforms such as YouTube enables us to perform what Andrejevic calls “the work of being watched” (“Work”). When we upload, play, view, like and comment on cat videos, we facilitate our own surveillance. We watch cat videos for the contradictory pleasures they offer us, as we navigate and negotiate the overwhelming surveillance of consumer society. Cat videos remind us of the perpetual possibility of observation, and suggest the prospect of escaping it. ReferencesAndrejevic, Mark. “The Work of Being Watched: Interactive Media and the Exploitation of Self-Disclosure.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 19.2 (2002): 230-248. Andrejevic, Mark. “The Discipline of Watching: Detection, Risk, and Lateral Surveillance.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 23.5 (2006): 391-407. Andrejevic, Mark. “Surveillance in the Digital Enclosure.” The Communication Review 10.4 (2007): 295-317. Berners-Lee, Tim. “Ask Me Anything.” Reddit, 12 March 2014. 29 Apr. 2014 ‹http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2091d4/i_am_tim_bernerslee_i_invented_the_www_25_years/cg0wpma›. Bruns, Axel. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Project MUSE, 4 Mar. 2014. 29 Apr. 2014 ‹http://muse.jhu.edu/›. Driscoll, Carlos A., et al. "The Taming of the Cat." Scientific American 300.6 (2009): 68-75. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Random House, 1995. Fuchs, Christian. “Web 2.0, Prosumption, and Surveillance.” Surveillance & Society 8.3 (2011): 288-309. Gunning, Tom. “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the Incredulous Spectator.” Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film. Ed. Linda Williams. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1995. 114-133. Gunning, Tom. "The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde." Wide Angle 8.3-4 (1986): 63-70. Hepola, Sarah. “The Internet Is Made of Kittens.” Salon, 11 Feb 2009. 29 Apr. 2014 ‹http://www.salon.com/2009/02/10/cat_internet/›. Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Network Culture. New York: NYU Press, 2013. Lyon, David. “Liquid Surveillance: The Contribution of Zygmunt Bauman to Surveillance Studies.” International Political Sociology 4 (2010): 325–338 Lyon, David. “Surveillance, Power and Everyday Life.” In Robin Mansell et al., eds., Oxford Handbook of Information and Communication Technologies. Oxford: Oxford Handbooks, 2007. 449-472. 29 Apr. 2014 ‹http://www.sscqueens.org/sites/default/files/oxford_handbook.pdf›. Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. Rogers, Katharine. The Cat and the Human Imagination: Feline Images from Bast to Garfield. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Shafer, Leah. “I Can Haz an Internet Aesthetic?!? LOLCats and the Digital Marketplace.” Paper presented at the Northeast Popular/American Culture Association Conference, St. John Fisher College, Rochester, New York, 2012. 5 Mar. 2014 ‹http://fisherpub.sjfc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1094&context=nepca›.

In a listicle on becomingminimalist.com, Joshua Becker argues that advances in personal computing have contributed to the growing popularity of the minimalist lifestyle. Becker explains that computational media can efficiently absorb physical artefacts like books, photo albums, newspapers, clocks, calendars, and more. In Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit’s Happy Old Year (2019, ฮาวทูทิ้ง ทิ้งอย่างไร..ไม่ให้เหลือเธอ) the protagonist Jean also argues that material possessions are wasteful and unnecessary in the era of cloud storage. In the film, she redesigns her old-fashioned and messy childhood home to create a minimalist home office. In decluttering their material possessions through a partial reliance on computational storage, Jean and Becker conveniently dispense with the materiality of informational infrastructures and digital archives. Informational technology’s ever-growing capacity for storage and circulation also intensify anxieties about clutter. During our online interactions, we inadvertently leave an amassing trail of metadata behind that allows algorithms to “personalise” our interfaces. Consequently, our interfaces are “cluttered” with recommendations that range from toothpaste to news, movies, clothes, and more, based on a narrow and homophilic comparison of datasets. Notably, this hypertrophic trail of digital clutter threatens to overrepresent and blur personal identities. By mindfully reducing excessive consumption and discarding wasteful possessions, our personal spaces can become tidy and coherent. On the other hand, there is little that individuals can do to control nonhuman forms of digital accumulation and the datafied archives that meticulously record and store our activities on a micro-temporal scale. In this essay, I explore archive fever as the prosthetic externalisation of memory across physical and digital spaces. Paying close attention to Sianne Ngai’s work on vernacular aesthetic categories and Susanna Paasonen’s exploration of equivocal affective sensations, I study how advocates of minimalist design seek to recuperate our fraught capacities for affective experience in the digital era. In particular, I examine how Thamrongrattanarit problematises minimalist design, prosthetic memory, and the precarious materiality of digital media in Happy Old Year and Mary Is Happy, Mary Is Happy (2013, แมรี่ อีส แฮปปี้, แมรี่ อีส แฮปปี้). Transmedial Minimalist Networks and Empty Spaces Marie Kondo famously teaches us how to segregate objects that spark joy from material possessions that can be discarded (Kondo). The KonMari method has a strong transmedial presence with Kondo’s bestselling books, her blog and online store, a Netflix series, and sticky memes that feature her talking about objects that do not spark joy. It is interesting to note the rising popularity of prescriptive minimalist lifestyle blogs that utilise podcasts, video essays, tutorials, apps, and more to guide the mindful selection of essential material possessions from waste. Personal minimalism is presented as an antidote to late capitalist clutter as self-help gurus appear across our computational devices teach us how we can curb our carbon footprints and reduce consumerist excess. Yet, as noted by Katherine Hayles, maximal networked media demands a form of hyper-attention that implicates us in multiple information streams at once. There is a tension between the overwhelming simultaneity in the viewing experience of transmedial minimalist lifestyle networks and the rhetoric of therapeutic selection espoused in their content. In their ethnographic work with minimalists, Eun Jeong Cheon and Norman Makoto Su explore how mindfully constructed empty spaces can serve as a resource for technological design (Cheon and Su). Cheon and Su note how empty spaces possess a symbolic and functional value for their respondents. Decluttered empty spaces offer a sensuous experience for minimalists in coherently representing their identity and serve as a respite from congested and busy cities. Furthermore, empty spaces transform the home into a meaningful site of reflection about people’s objects and values as minimalists actively work to reduce their ownership of physical artefacts and the space that material possessions occupy in their homes and minds: the notion of gazing upon empty spaces is not simply about reading or processing information for minimalists. Rather, gazing gives minimalists, a visual indicator of their identity, progress, and values. (Cheon and Su 10) Instead of seeking to fill and augment empty space, Cheon and Su ask what it might mean to design technology that appreciates the absence of information and the limitation of space. The Interestingness of “Total Design and Internet Plenitude” Sianne Ngai argues that in a world where we are constantly hailed as aesthetic subjects, our aesthetic experiences grow increasingly fragile and ineffectual (Ngai 2015). Ngai further contends that late capitalism makes the elite exaggeration of the autonomy of art (at auction houses, mega-exhibitions, biennales, and more) concurrently possible with the hyper-aestheticisation of everyday life. The increase in inconsequential aesthetic experiences mirrors a larger habituation to aesthetic novelty along with the loss of the traditional friction between art and the commodity form: in tandem with these seismic changes to longstanding ideas of art’s vocation, weaker aesthetic categories crop up everywhere, testifying in their very proliferation to how, in a world of “total design and Internet plenitude”, aesthetic experience while less rarefied also becomes less intense. (Ngai 21) Ngai offers us the cute, interesting, and zany as the key vernacular categories that describe aesthetic experience in “the hyper-commodified, information-saturated, and performance-driven conditions of late-capitalist culture” (1). Aesthetic experience no longer subscribes to an exceptionally single feeling but is located at the ambiguous mixture of mundane affect. Susanna Paasonen notes how Ngai’s analysis of an everyday aesthetic experience that is complex and equivocal helps explain how seemingly contradictory and irreconcilable affective tensions might in fact be mutually co-dependent with each other (Paasonen). By critiquing the broad and binary generalisations about addiction and networked technologies, Paasonen emphasises the ambivalent and fleeting nature of affective formation in the era of networked media. Significantly, Paasonen explores how ubiquitous networked infrastructures bind us in dynamic sensations of attention and distraction, control and helplessness, and boredom and interest. For Ngai, the interesting is a “low, often hard-to-register flicker of affect accompanying our recognition of minor differences from a norm” (18). There is a discord between knowledge and feeling (and cognition and perception) at the heart of the interesting. We are drawn to the interesting object after noticing something peculiar about it and yet, we are simultaneously at a loss of knowledge about the exact contents of that peculiarity. The "interesting" is embodied in the seriality of constant circulation and a temporal experience of in-betweenness and anticipation in a paradoxical era of routinised novelty. Ngai notes how in the 1960s, many minimalist conceptual artists were preoccupied with tracking the movement of objects and information by transport and communication technologies. In offering a representation of networks of circulation, “merely interesting” conceptual art disseminates information about itself and makes technologies of distribution central to its process of production. The interesting is a pervasive aesthetic judgment that also explains our affectively complex rapport with information in the context of networked technologies. Acclimatised to the repetitive tempos of internet browsing and circular refreshing, Paasonen notes we often oscillate between boredom and interest during our usage of networked media. As Ngai explains, the interesting is “a discursive aesthetic about difference in the form of information and the pathways of its movement and exchange” (1). It is then “interesting” to explore how Thamrongrattanarit tracks the circulation of information and the pathways of transmedial exchange across Twitter and cinema in Mary Is Happy, Mary Is Happy. Digital Memory in MIHMIH Mary Is Happy, Mary Is Happy is adapted from a set of 410 consecutive tweets by Twitter user @marymaloney. The film instantiates the phatic, ephemeral flow of a Twitter feed through its deadpan and episodic narrative. The titular protagonist Mary is a fickle-headed high-school senior trying to design a minimalist yearbook for her school to preserve their important memories. Yet, the sudden entry of an autocratic principal forces her to follow the school administration’s arbitrary demands and curtail her artistic instincts. Ultimately, Mary produces a thick yearbook that is filled with hagiographic information about the anonymous principal. Thamrongrattanarit offers cheeky commentary about Thailand’s authoritarian royalist democracy where the combination of sudden coups and unquestioning obedience has fostered a peculiar environment of political amnesia. Hagiographic and bureaucratic informational overload is presented as an important means to sustain this combination of veneration and paranoia. @marymaloney’s haphazard tweets are superimposed in the film as intertitles and every scene also draws inspiration from the tweet displayed in an offhand manner. We see Mary swiftly do several random and unexplained things like purchase jellyfishes, sleep through a sudden trip to Paris, rob a restaurant, and more in rapid succession. The viewer is overwhelmed because of a synchronised engagement with two different informational currents. We simultaneously read the tweet and watch the scene. The durational tension between knowing and feeling draws our attention to the friction between conceptual interpretation and sensory perception. Like the conceptual artists of the 1960s, Thamrongrattanarit also shows “information in the act of being circulated” (Ngai 157). Throughout the film, we see Mary and her best friend Suri walk along emptied railway tracks that figuratively represent the routes of informational circulation across networked technologies. With its quirky vignettes and episodic narrative progression, MIHMIH closely mirrors Paasonen’s description of microevents and microflow-like movement on social media. The film also features several abrupt and spectacular “microshocks” that interrupt the narrative’s linear flow. For example, there is a running gag about Mary’s cheap and malfunctioning phone frequently exploding in the film while she is on a call. The repetitive explosions provide sudden jolts of deadpan humour. Notably, Mary also mentions how she uses bills of past purchases to document her daily thoughts rather than a notebook to save paper. The tweets are visually represented through the overwhelming accumulation of tiny bills that Mary often struggles to arrange in a coherent pattern. Thamrongrattanarit draws our attention to the fraught materiality of digital memory and microblogging that does not align with neat and orderly narrativisation. By encouraging a constant expression of thoughts within its distinctive character limit, Twitter promotes minimal writing and maximal fragmentation. Paasonen argues that our networked technologies take on a prosthetic function by externalising memory in their databases. This prosthetic reserve of datafied memory is utilised by the algorithmic unconscious of networked media for data mining. Our capacities for simultaneous multichannel attention and distraction are increasingly subsumed by capital’s novel forms of value extraction. Mary’s use of bills to document her diary takes on another “interesting” valence here as Thamrongrattanarit connects the circulation of information on social media with monetary transactions and the accumulation of debt. While memory in common parlance is normally associated with acts of remembrance and commemoration, digital memory refers to an address for storage and retrieval. Wendy Chun argues that software conflates storage with memory as the computer stores files in its memory (Chun). Furthermore, digital memory only endures through ephemeral processes of regeneration and degeneration. Even as our computational devices move towards planned obsolescence, digital memory paradoxically promises perpetual storage. The images of dusty and obsolete computers in MIHMIH recall the materiality of the devices whose databases formerly stored many prosthetic memories. For Wolfgang Ernst, digital archives displace cultural memory from a literary-based narrativised framework to a calculative and mathematical one as digital media environments increasingly control how a culture remembers. As Jussi Parikka notes “we are miniarchivists ourselves in this information society, which could be more aptly called an information management society” (2). While traditional archives required the prudent selection and curation of important objects that will be preserved for future use on a macro temporal scale, the Internet is an agglomerative storage and retrieval database that records information on a micro temporal scale. The proliferation of agglomerative mini archives also create anxieties about clutter where the miniarchivists of the “information-management society” must contend with the effects of our ever-expanding digital trail. It is useful to note how processes of selection and curation that remain central to minimalist decluttering can be connected with the design of a personal archive. Ernst further argues that digital memory cannot be visualised as a place where objects lay in static rest but is better understood as a collection of mini archives in motion that become perceptible because of dynamic signal-based processing. In MIHMIH, memory inscription is associated with the “minimalist” yearbook that Mary was trying to create along with the bills where she documents her tweets/thoughts. At one point, Mary tries to carefully arrange her overflowing bills across her wall in a pattern to make sense of her growing emotional crisis. Yet, she is overwhelmed by the impossibility of this task. Networked media’s storage of prosthetic memory also makes self-representation ambiguous and messy. As a result, Mary’s story does align with cathartic and linear narrativisation but a messy agglomerative database. Happy Old Year: Decluttering to Mend Prosthetic Memories Kylie Cardell argues that the KonMari method connects tidiness to the self-conscious design of a curated personal archive. Marie Kondo associates decluttering with self-representation. "As Kondo is acutely aware, making memories is not simply about recuperating and preserving symbolic objects of the past, but is a future-oriented process that positions subjects in a peculiar way" (Cardell 2). This narrative formation of personal identity involves carefully storing a limited number of physical artefacts that will spark joy for the future self. Yet, we must segregate these affectively charged objects from clutter. Kondo encourages us to make intuitive judgments of conviction by overcoming ambivalent feelings and attachments about the past that are distributed over a wide set of material possessions. Notably, this form of decluttering involves archiving the prosthetic memories that dwell in our (analogue) material possessions. In Happy Old Year, Jean struggles to curate her personal archive as she becomes painfully aware of the memories that reside in her belongings. Interestingly, the film’s Thai title loosely translates as “How to Dump”. Jean has an urgent deadline to declutter her home so that it can be designed into a minimalist home office. Nevertheless, she gradually realises that she cannot coldly “dump” all her things and decides to return some of the borrowed objects to her estranged friends. This form of decluttering helps assuage her guilt about letting go of the past and allows her to (awkwardly and) elegantly honour her prosthetic memories. HOY reverses the clichéd before-after progression of events since we begin with the minimalist home and go back in flashbacks to observe its inundated and messy state. HOY’s after-before narrative along with its peculiar title that substitutes ‘new’ with ‘old’ alludes to the clashing temporalities that Jean is caught up within. She is conflicted between deceptive nostalgic remembrance and her desire to start over with a minimalist-blank slate that is purged of her past regrets. In many remarkable moments, HOY instantiates movement on computational screens to mirror digital media’s dizzying speeds of circulation and storage. Significantly, the film begins with the machinic perspective of a phone screen capturing a set of minimalist designs from a book. Jean refuses to purchase (and store) the whole book since she only requires a few images that can be preserved in her phone’s memory. As noted in the introduction, minimalist organisation can effectively draw on computational storage to declutter physical spaces. In another subplot, Jean is forced to retrieve a photo that she took years ago for a friend. She grudgingly searches through a box of CDs (a cumbersome storage device in the era of clouds) but ultimately finds the image in her ex-boyfriend Aim’s hard disk. As she browses through a folder titled 2013, her hesitant clicks display a montage of happy and intimate moments that the couple shared together. Aim notes how the computer often behaves like a time machine. Unlike Aim, Jean did not carefully organise and store her prosthetic memories and was even willing to discard the box of CDs that were emblematic of defunct and wasteful accumulation. Speaking about how memory is externalised in digital storage, Thamrongrattanarit notes: for me, in the digital era, we just changed the medium, but human relationships stay the same. … It’s just more complicated because we can communicate from a distance, we can store a ton of memories, which couldn’t have ever happened in the past. (emphasis added) When Jean “dumped” Aim to move to Sweden, she blocked him across channels of networked communicational media to avoid any sense of ambient intimacy between them. In digitising our prosthetic memories and maintaining a sense of “connected presence” across social media, micro temporal databases have made it nearly impossible to erase and forget our past actions. Minimalist organisation might help us craft a coherent and stable representation of personal identity through meticulous decluttering. Yet, late-capitalist clutter takes on a different character in our digital archives where the algorithmic unconscious of networked media capitalises on prosthetic storage to make personal identity ambiguous and untidy. It is interesting to note that Jean initially gets in touch with Aim to return his old camera and apologise for their sudden breakup. The camera can record events to “freeze” them in time and space. Later in the film, Jean discovers a happy family photo that makes her reconsider whether she has been too harsh on her father because of how he “dumped” her family. Yet, Jean bitterly finds that her re-evaluation of her material possessions and their dated prosthetic memories is deceptive. In overidentifying with the frozen images and her affectively charged material possessions, she is misled by the overwhelming plenitude of nostalgic remembrance. Ultimately, Jean must “dump” all her things instead of trying to tidy up the jumbled temporal frictions. In the final sequence of HOY, Jean lies to her friend Pink about her relationship with Aim. She states that they are on good terms. Jean then unfriends Aim on Facebook, yet again rupturing any possibility of phatic and ambient intimacy between them. As they sit before her newly emptied house, Pink notes how Jean can do a lot with this expanded space. In a tight close-up, Jean gazes at her empty space with an ambiguous yet pained expression. Her plan to cathartically purge her regrets and fraught memories by recuperating her prosthetic memories failed. With the remnants of her past self expunged as clutter, Jean is left with a set of empty spaces that will eventually resemble the blank slate that we see at the beginning of the film. The new year and blank slate signify a fresh beginning for her future self. However, this reverse transition from a minimalist blank slate to her chaotically inundated childhood home frames a set of deeply equivocal affective sensations. Nonetheless, Jean must mislead Pink to sustain the notion of tidy and narrativised coherence that equivocally masks her fragmented sense of an indefinable loss. Conclusion MIHMIH and HOY explore the unresolvable and conflicting affective tensions that arise in an ecosystem of all-pervasive networked media. Paasonen argues that our ability to control networked technologies concurrently fosters our mundane and prosthetic dependency on them. Both Jean and Mary seek refuge in the simplicity of minimalist design to wrestle control over their overstimulating spaces and to tidy up their personal narratives. It is important to examine contemporary minimalist networks in conjunction with affective formation and aesthetic experience in the era of “total design and internet plenitude”. In an information-management society where prosthetic memories haunt our physical and digital spaces, minimalist decluttering becomes a form of personal archiving that simultaneously empowers unambiguous aesthetic feeling and linear and stable autobiographical representation. The neatness of minimalist decluttering conjugates with an ideal self that can resolve ambivalent affective attachments about the past and have a coherent vision for the future. Yet, we cannot sort the clutter that resides in digital memory’s micro temporal archives and drastically complicates our personal narratives. Significantly, the digital self is not compatible with neat and orderly narrativisation but instead resembles an unstable and agglomerative database. References Cardell, Kylie. “Modern Memory-Making: Marie Kondo, Online Journaling, and the Excavation, Curation, and Control of Personal Digital Data.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 32.3 (2017): 499–517. DOI: 10.1080/08989575.2017.1337993. Cheon, Eun Jeong, and Norman Makoto Su. “The Value of Empty Space for Design.” Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2018. DOI: 10.1145/3173574.3173623. Ernst, Wolfgang, and Jussi Parikka. Digital Memory and the Archive. U of Minnesota P, 2013. Happy Old Year. Dir. Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit. Happy Ending Film, 2019. Hayles, N. Katherine. “How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine.” ADE Bulletin (2010): 62-79. DOI: 10.1632/ade.150.62. Kondo, Marie. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Ten Speed Press, 2010. Kyong, Chun Wendy Hui. Programmed Visions: Software and Memory. MIT P, 2013. Mankowski, Lukasz. “Interview with Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit: Happy Old Year Is Me in 100% for the First Time.” Asian Movie Pulse, 9 Feb. 2020. <http://asianmoviepulse.com/2020/02/interview-with-nawapol-thamrongrattanarit-2/>. Mary Is Happy, Mary Is Happy. Dir. Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit. Pop Pictures, 2013. Ngai, Sianne. Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. Harvard UP, 2015. Paasonen, Susanna. Dependent, Distracted, Bored: Affective Formations in Networked Media. MIT P, 2021. Stephens, Paul. The Poetics of Information Overload: From Gertrude Stein to Conceptual Writing. U of Minnesota P, 2015.

IntroductionWhen I saw Patriots Day (Berg 2016) at my local multiplex, a family entered the theatre and sat a few rows in front of me. They had a child with them, a boy who was perhaps nine or ten years old. Upon seeing the kid, I had a physical reaction. Not quite a knee-jerk, but more of an uneasy gut punch. ‘Don't you know what this movie is about?’ I wanted to ask his parents; ‘I’ve seen Jeff Bauman’s bones, and that is not something a child should see.’ I had lived through the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing and subsequent manhunt, and the memories were vivid in my mind as I waited for the movie to start, to re-present the memory on screen. Admittedly, I had lived through it from the other side of the world, watching through the mediated windows of the computer, smartphone, and television screen. Nevertheless, I remembered it in blood-soaked colour detail, brought to me by online photo galleries, social media updates, the failed amateur sleuths of Reddit, and constant cable news updates, breaking news even when the events had temporarily stalled. Alison Landsberg has coined the term “prosthetic memory” to describe how historical events are re-created and imbued with an affective experience through cinema and other sites of mass cultural mediation, allowing those who did not experience the past to form a personal connection to and subjective memory of history (2). For the boy in the cinema, Patriots Day would most likely be his first encounter with and memory of the Boston Marathon bombing. But how does prosthetic memory apply to audience members like me, who had lived through the Boston bombing from a great distance, with personalised memories mediated by the first-person perspective of social media? Does the ease of dissemination of information, particularly eyewitness photographs and videos, create possibilities for a prosthetic experience of the present? Does the online mediation of historical events of the present translate to screen dramatisations? These questions become particularly pertinent when the first-release audience of a film has recent, living memories of the real events depicted on screen.The time between when an event occurs and when it is brought to cinemas in a true-events adaptation is decreasing. Rebecca A. Sheehan argues that the cultural value of instant information has given rise to a trend in the contemporary biopic and historical film that sees our mediated world turned into a temporal "paradox in which the present is figured as both historical and ongoing" (36). Since 2005, Sheehan writes, biographical films that depict the lives of still-living public figures or in other ways comment on the ongoing history of the present have become increasingly frequent. Sheehan cites films such as The Social Network (Fincher 2010), The Queen (Frears 2006), W. (Stone 2008), and Game Change (Roach 2012) as examples of this growing biopic trend (35-36). In addition to the instantaneous remediation of public figures in the contemporary biopic, similarly there is a stable of contemporary historical films based on the true stories of ordinary people involved in extraordinary recent events. Films such as The Impossible (Bayona 2012), World Trade Center (Stone 2006), United 93 (Greengrass 2006), and Deepwater Horizon (Berg 2016) bring the death and destruction of real-world natural disasters or terrorist attacks to a sanitised but experiential cinematic event. The sensitive nature of some of the events in question often see the films labelled “too soon” and exploitative of recent tragedy. Films such as these typically do not have known public figures as their protagonists, but they arise from a similar climate of the demands of televisual and online mediation that Sheehan describes in the “instant biopics” of her study (36). Given this rise of brief temporal space between real events and their dramatisations, in this essay, I examine Patriots Day in light of the role digital experience plays in both its dramatisation and how the film's initial audience may remember the event. As Patriots Day replicates a kind of prosthetic memory of the present, it uses the first-instance digital mediation of the event to form prosthetic memories for future viewers. Through Patriots Day, I seek to gesture toward the possibilities of first-person digital mediation of major news events in shaping dramatisations of the recent past.Digital Memories of the Boston Marathon BombingTo examine the ways the Boston Marathon bombing circulated in online space, I look at the link- and image-based online discussion platform Reddit as an example of engagement with and recirculation of the event, particularly as a form of engagement defined by photographs and videos. Because the Boston Marathon is a televised and widely-reported event, professional videographers and photographers were present at the marathon’s finish line at the time of the first explosion. Thus, the first bomb and its immediate aftermath were captured in news footage and still images. The graphic nature of some of these images depicting the violence of the scene saw traditional print and television outlets cropping or otherwise editing the photographs to make them appropriate for mass broadcast (Hughney). Some online outlets, however, showed these pictures in their unedited form, often accompanied by warnings that required readers to scroll further down the page or click through the warning to see the photographs. These distinctive capabilities of the online environment allowed individuals to choose whether to view the image, while still allowing the uncensored image to circulate and be reposted elsewhere, such as on Reddit. In addition to photos and videos shot by professionals at the finish line, witnesses armed with smart phone cameras and access to social media posted their views of the aftermath to social media like Twitter, enabling the collation of both amateur and professionally shot photographs of the scene by online news aggregators such as Buzzfeed (Broderick). The Reddit community is seen as an essential part of the Boston Bombing story for the way some of its users participated in a form of ‘crowd-sourced’ investigation that resulted in the false identification of suspects (see: Nhan et al.; Tapia et al.; Potts and Harrison). There is another aspect to Reddit’s role in the circulation and mediation of the story, however, as online venues became a go-to source for news on the unfolding event, where information was delivered faster and with greater accuracy than the often-sensationalised television news coverage (Starbird et al. 347). In addition to its role in providing information that is a part of Reddit’s culture that “value[s] evidence of some kind” to support discussion (Potts and Harrison 144), Reddit played a number of roles in the sense-making process that social media can often facilitate during crisis situations (Heverin and Zach). Through its division into “subreddits,” the individual communities and discussion areas that make up the platform, Reddit accommodates an incredibly diverse range of topics and interests. Different areas of Reddit were able to play different roles in the process of sharing information and acting in a community sense-making capacity in the aftermath of the bombing. Among the subreddits involved in attempting to make sense of the event were those that served as appropriate places for posting image galleries of both professional and amateur photographs and videos, drawn from a variety of online sources. Users of subreddits such as /r/WTF and /r/MorbidReality, for example, posted galleries of “NSFL” (Not Safe For Life) images of the bombing and its aftermath (see: touhou_hijack, titan059, f00d4tehg0dz). Additionally, the /r/Boston subreddit issued calls for anyone with photographs or videos related to the attack to upload them to the thread, as well as providing an e-mail address to submit them to the FBI (RichardHerold). The /r/FindBostonBombers subreddit became a hub for analysis of the photographs. The subreddit's investigatory work was picked up by other online and traditional media outlets (including the New York Post cover photo which misidentified two suspects), bringing wider attention to Reddit’s unfolding coverage of the bombing (Potts and Harrison 148). Landsberg’s theory of prosthetic memory, and her application of it, largely relates to mass culture’s role in “the production and dissemination of memories that have no direct connection to a person’s lived past” (20). The possibilities for news events to be recorded and disseminated by smart phones and social media, however, help to create a deeper sense of affective engagement with a distant present, creating prosthetic memories out of the mediated first-hand experiences of others. The graphic nature of the photos and videos of the Boston bombing collected by and shared on sites like Reddit, the ongoing nature of the event (which, from detonation to the capture of Dzokhar Tsarnaev, spanned five days), and the participatory activity of scouring photographs for clues to the identity of the bombers all lend a sense of ongoing, experiential engagement with first-person, audiovisual mediations of the event. These prosthetic memories of the present are, as Landsberg writes of those created from dramatisations or re-creations of the past, transferable, able to belong to those who have no “natural” claim to them (18) with an experiential element that personalises history for those who do not directly experience it (33). If widely disseminated first-person mediations of events like the Boston bombing can be thought of as a prosthetic experience of present history, how will they play a part in the prosthetic memories of the future? How will those who did not live through the Boston bombing, either as a personal experience or a digitally mediated one, incorporate this digital memory into their own experience of its cinematic re-creation? To address this question, I turn to consider Patriots Day. Of particular note is the bombing sequence’s resemblance to digital mediations of the event as a marker of a plausible docudramatic resemblance to reality.The Docudramatic Re-Presentation of Digital MemoryAs a cinematic representation of recent history, Patriots Day sits at a somewhat uncomfortable intersection of fact and fiction, of docudrama and popcorn action movie, more so than an instant history film typically would. Composite characters or entirely invented characters and narratives that play out against the backdrop of real events are nothing out of the ordinary in the historical film. However, Patriots Day's use of real material and that of pure invention coincides, frequently in stark contrast. The film's protagonist, Boston Police Sergeant Tommy Saunders (played by Mark Wahlberg) is a fictional character, the improbable hero of the story who is present at every step of the attack and the manhunt. He is there on Boylston Street when the bombs go off. He is there with the FBI, helping to identify the suspects with knowledge of Boylston Street security cameras that borders on a supernatural power. He is there at the Watertown shootout among exploding cars and one-liner quips. When Dzokhar Tsarnaev is finally located, he is, of course, first on the scene. Tommy Saunders, as embodied by Wahlberg, trades on all the connotations of both the stereotypical Boston Southie and the action hero that are embedded in Wahlberg’s star persona. As a result, Patriots Day often seems to be a depiction of an alternate universe where Mark Wahlberg in a cop uniform almost single-handedly caught a terrorist. The improbability of Saunders as a character in a true-events drama, though, is thoroughly couched in the docudramatic material of historical depiction. Steven N. Lipkin argues that docudrama is a mode of representation that performs a re-creation of memory to persuade us that it is representing the real (1). By conjuring the memory of an event into being in ways that seem plausible and anchored to the evidence of actuality—such as integrating archival footage or an indexical resemblance to the actual event or an actual person—the representational, cinematic, or fictionalised elements of docudrama are imbued with a sense of the reality they claim to represent (Lipkin 3). Patriots Day uses real visual material throughout the film. The integration of evidence is particularly notable in the bombing sequence, which combines archival footage of the 2013 race, surveillance footage of the Tsarnaev brothers approaching the finish line, and a dramatic re-creation that visually resembles the original to such an extent that its integration with archival footage is almost seamless (Landler). The conclusion of the film draws on this evidential connection to the real as well, in the way that docudrama is momentarily suspended to become documentary, as interviews with some of the real people who are depicted as characters in the film close out the story. In addition to its direct use of the actual, Patriots Day's re-creation of the bombing itself bears an indexical resemblance to the event as seen by those who were not there and relies on memories of the bombing's initial mediation to vouch for the dramatisation's accuracy. In the moments before the bombing's re-creation, actual footage of the Tsarnaevs's route down Boylston Street plays, a low ominous tone of the score building over the silent security footage. The fictional Saunders’s fictional wife (Michelle Monaghan) has come to the finish line to bring him a knee brace, and she passes Tamerlan Tsarnaev as she leaves. This shot directly crosses a visual resemblance to the actual (Themo Melikidze playing Tsarnaev, resembling the bomber through physicality and costuming) with the fictional structuring device of the film in the form of Tommy Saunders. Next, in a long shot, we see Tsarnaev bump into a man wearing a grey raglan shirt. The man turns to look at Tsarnaev. From the costuming, it is evident that this man who is not otherwise named is intended to represent Jeff Bauman, the subject of an iconic photograph from the bombing. In the photo, Bauman is shown being taken from the scene in a wheelchair with both legs amputated from below the knee by the blast (another cinematic dramatisation of the Boston bombing, Stronger, based on Bauman’s memoir of the same name, will be released in 2017). In addition to the visual signifier of Bauman from the memorable photograph, reports circulated that Bauman's ability to describe Tsarnaev to the FBI in the immediate aftermath of the bombing was instrumental in identifying the suspects (Hartmann). Here, this digital memory is re-created in a brief but recognisable moment: this is the before picture of Jeff Bauman, this is the moment of identification that was widely circulated and talked about, a memory of that one piece of good news that helped satisfy public curiosity about the status of the iconic Man in the Wheelchair.When the bombs detonate, we are brought into the smoke and ash, closer access than the original mediation afforded by the videographers at the finish line. After the first bomb detonates, the camera follows Saunders as he walks toward the smoke cloud. As the second bomb explodes, we go inside the scene. The sequence cuts from actual security camera footage that captured the blast, to a first-person perspective of the explosion, the resulting fire and smoke, and a shot that resembles the point of view of footage captured on a smart phone. The frame shakes wildly, giving the viewer disorienting flashes of the victims, a sense of the chaos without seeing anything in lasting, specific detail, before the frame tips sideways onto the pavement, stained with blood and littered with debris. Coupled with this is a soundscape that resembles both the subjective experience of a bombing victim and what their smart phone video has captured. There is the rumble of the explosion and muffled sounds of debris hidden under the noise of shockwaves of air hitting a microphone, fading into an electronic whine and tinnitus ring. A later shot shows the frame obscured by smoke, slowly clearing to give us a high angle view of the aftermath, resembling photographs taken from a window overlooking the scene on Boylston Street (see: touhou_hijack). Archival footage of first responders and points of view resembling a running cell phone camera that captures flashes of blood and open wounds combine with shots of the actors playing characters (both fictional and based on real people) that were established at the beginning of the film. There is once again a merging of the re-created and the actual, bound together by a sense of memory that encourages the viewer to take the former as plausible, based on its resemblance to the latter.When Saunders runs for the second bombing site further down the street, he looks down at two bodies on the ground. Framed in close-up, the bloodless, empty expression and bright blue shirt of Krystle Campbell are recognisable. We can ignore the inaccuracies of this element of the digital memory amidst the chaos of the sequence. Campbell died in the first bombing, not the second. The body of a woman in a black shirt is between the camera's position on the re-created Boylston Street and the actor standing in for Campbell, the opposite of how Campbell and her friend Karen Rand lay beside each other in photographs of the bombing aftermath. The police officer who takes Krystle's pulse on film and shakes her head at Wahlberg's character is a brunette, not the blonde in the widely-circulated picture of a first responder at the actual bombing. The most visceral portion of the image is there, though, re-created almost exactly as it appeared at its first point of mediation: the lifeless eyes and gaping mouth, the bright blue t-shirt. The memory of the event is conjured into being, and the cinematic image resembles the most salient elements of the memory enough for the cinematic image to be a plausible re-creation. The cinematic frame is positioned at a lower level to the original still, as though we are on the ground beside her, bringing the viewer even closer to the event, even as the frame crops out her injuries as scene photographs did not, granting a semblance of respectful distance from the real death. This re-creation of Krystle Campbell’s death is a brief flash in the sequence, but a powerful moment of recognition for those who remember its original mediation. The result is a sequence that shows the graphic violence of the actuality it represents in a series of images that invite its viewer to expand the sequence with their memory of the event the way most of them experienced it: on other screens, at the site of its first instance of digital mediation.ConclusionThrough its use of cinematography that resembles actual photographic evidence of the Boston Marathon bombing or imbues the re-creation with a sense of a first-person, digitally mediated account of the event, Patriots Day draws on its audience's digital memory of recent history to claim accuracy in its fictionalisation. Not everyone who sees Patriots Day may be as familiar with the wealth of eyewitness photographs and images of the Boston Marathon bombing as those who may have experienced and followed the events in online venues such as Reddit. Nonetheless, the fact of this material's existence shapes the event's dramatisation as the filmmakers attempt to imbue the dramatisation with a sense of accuracy and fidelity to the event. The influence of digital memory on the film’s representation of the event gestures toward the possibilities for how online engagement with major news events may play a role in their dramatisation moving forward. Events that have had eyewitness visual accounts distributed online, such as the 2015 Bataclan massacre, the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting, the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing and Westminster Bridge attack, or the 2016 police shooting of Philando Castile that was streamed on Facebook live, may become the subject of future dramatisations of recent history. The dramatic renderings of contemporary history films will undoubtedly be shaped by the recent memory of their online mediations to appeal to a sense of accuracy in the viewer's memory. As recent history films continue, digital memories of the present will help make the prosthetic memories of the future. ReferencesBroderick, Ryan. “Photos from the Scene of the Boston Marathon Explosion (Extremely Graphic).” Buzzfeed News, 16 Apr. 2013. 2 Aug. 2017 <https://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanhatesthis/first-photos-from-the-scene-of-the-boston-marathon-explosion?utm_term=.fw38Byjq1#.peNXWPe8G>.f00d4tehg0dz. “Collection of Photos from the Boston Marathon Bombing (NSFW) (NSFL-Gore).” Reddit, 16 Apr. 2013. 8 Aug. 2017 <https://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/1cfhg4/collection_of_photos_from_the_boston_marathon/>.Hartmann, Margaret. “Bombing Victim in Iconic Photo Was Key to Identifying Boston Suspects.” New York Magazine, 18 Apr. 2013. 8 Aug. 2017 <http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/04/bombing-victim-identified-suspects.html>.Heverin, Thomas, and Lisl Zach. “Use of Microblogging for Collective Sense-Making during Violent Crises: A Study of Three Campus Shootings.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 63.1 (2012): 34-47. Hughney, Christine. “News Media Weigh Use of Photos of Carnage.” New York Times, 17 Apr. 2013. 2 Aug. 2017 <http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/18/business/media/news-media-weigh-use-of-photos-of-carnage.html>.Landler, Edward. “Recreating the Boston Marathon Bombing in Patriots Day.” Cinemontage, 21 Dec. 2016. 8 Aug. 2017 <http://cinemontage.org/2016/12/recreating-boston-marathon-bombing-patriots-day/>.Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia U P, 2004. Lipkin, Steven N. Docudrama Performs the Past: Arenas of Argument in Films Based on True Stories. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2011. Nhan, Johnny, Laura Huey, and Ryan Broll. “Digilantism: An Analysis of Crowdsourcing and the Boston Marathon Bombing.” British Journal of Criminology 57 (2017): 341-361. Patriots Day. Dir. Peter Berg. CBS Films, 2016.Potts, Liza, and Angela Harrison. “Interfaces as Rhetorical Constructions. Reddit and 4chan during the Boston Marathon Bombings.” Proceedings of the 31st ACM International Conference on Design of Communication. Greenville, North Carolina, September-October 2013. 143-150. RichardHerold. “2013 Boston Marathon Attacks: Please Upload Any Photos in Relation to the Attacks That You Have.” Reddit, 15 Apr. 2013. 8 Aug. 2017 <https://www.reddit.com/r/boston/comments/1cf5wp/2013_boston_marathon_attacks_please_upload_any/>.Sheehan, Rebecca A. “Facebooking the Present: The Biopic and Cultural Instantaneity.” The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture. Eds. Tom Brown and Bélen Vidal. New York: Routledge, 2014. 35-51. Starbird, Kate, Jim Maddock, Mania Orand, Peg Achterman, and Robert M. Mason. “Rumors, False Flags, and Digital Vigilantes: Misinformation on Twitter after the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombing.” iConference 2014 Proceedings. Berlin, March 2014. 654-662. Tapia, Andrea H., Nicolas LaLone, and Hyun-Woo Kim. “Run Amok: Group Crowd Participation in Identifying the Bomb and Bomber from the Boston Marathon Bombing.” Proceedings of the 11th International ISCRAM Conference. Eds. S.R. Hiltz, M.S. Pfaff, L. Plotnick, and P.C. Shih. University Park, Pennsylvania, May 2014. 265-274. titan059. “Pics from Boston Bombing NSFL.” Reddit, 15 Apr. 2013. 8 Aug. 2017 <https://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/1cf0po/pics_from_boston_bombing_nsfl/>.touhou_hijack. “Krystle Campbell Died Screaming. This Sequence of Photos Shows Her Final Moments.” Reddit, 18 Apr. 2013. 8 Aug. 2017 <https://www.reddit.com/r/MorbidReality/comments/1cktrx/krystle_campbell_died_screaming_this_sequence_of/>.

Conurbation [f. CON- + L. urb- and urbs city + -ation] An aggregation of urban areas. (OED) Beyond the urban, further and lower even than the suburban, lies the con-urban. The conurban: with the urban, partaking of the urbane, lying against but also perhaps pushing against or being contra the urban. Conurbations stretch littorally from Australian cities, along coastlines to other cities, joining cities through the passage of previously outlying rural areas. Joining the dots between cities, towns, and villages. Providing corridors between the city and what lies outside. The conurban is an accretion, an aggregation, a piling up, or superfluity of the city: Greater London, for instance. It is the urban plus, filling the gaps between cities, as Los Angeles oozing urbanity does for the dry, desert areas abutting it (Davis 1990; Soja 1996). I wish to propose that the conurban imaginary is a different space from its suburban counterpart. The suburban has provided a binary opposition to what is not the city, what lies beneath its feet, outside its ken. Yet it is also what is greater than the urban, what exceeds it. In modernism, the city and its denizens define themselves outside what is arrayed around the centre, ringing it in concentric circles. In stark relief to the modernist lines of the skyscraper, contrasting with the central business district, central art galleries and museums, is to be found the masses in the suburbs. The suburban as a maligned yet enabling trope of modernism has been long revalued, in the art of Howard Arkeley, and in photography of suburban Gothic. It comes as no surprise to read a favourable newspaper article on the Liverpool Regional Art Gallery, in Sydney's Western Suburbs, with its exhibition on local chicken empires, Liverpool sheds, or gay and lesbians living on the city fringe. Nor to hear in the third way posturing of Australian Labor Party parliamentarian Mark Latham, the suburbs rhetorically wielded, like a Victa lawn mover, to cut down to size his chardonnay-set inner-city policy adversaries. The politics of suburbia subtends urban revisionism, reformism, revanchism, and recidivism. Yet there is another less exhausted, and perhaps exhaustible, way of playing the urban, of studying the metropolis, of punning on the city's proper name: the con-urban. World cities, as Saskia Sassen has taught us, have peculiar features: the juxtaposition of high finance and high technology alongside subaltern, feminized, informal economy (Sassen 1998). The Australian city proudly declared to be a world city is, of course, Sydney while a long way from the world's largest city by population, it is believed to be the largest in area. A recent newspaper article on Brisbane's real estate boom, drew comparisons with Sydney only to dismiss them, according to one quoted commentator, because as a world city, Sydney was sui generis in Australia, fairly requiring comparison with other world cities. One form of conurbanity, I would suggest, is the desire of other settled areas to be with the world city. Consider in this regard, the fate of Byron Bay a fate which lies very much in the balance. Byron Bay is sign that circulates in the field of the conurban. Craig MacGregor has claimed Byron as the first real urban culture outside an Australian city (MacGregor 1995). Local residents hope to keep the alternative cultural feel of Byron, but to provide it with a more buoyant economic outlook. The traditional pastoral, fishing, and whaling industries are well displaced by niche handicrafts, niche arts and craft, niche food and vegetables, a flourishing mind, body and spirit industry, and a booming film industry. Creative arts and cultural industries are blurring into creative industries. The Byron Bay area at the opening of the twenty-first century is attracting many people fugitive from the city who wish not to drop out exactly; rather to be contra wishes rather to be gently contrary marked as distinct from the city, enjoying a wonderful lifestyle, but able to persist with the civilizing values of an urban culture. The contemporary figure of Byron Bay, if such a hybrid chimera may be represented, wishes for a conurbanity. Citizens relocate from Melbourne, Canberra, and Sydney, seeking an alternative country and coastal lifestyle and, if at all possible, a city job (though without stress) (on internal migration in Australia see Kijas 2002): Hippies and hip rub shoulders as a sleepy town awakes (Still Wild About Byron, (Sydney Morning Herald, 1 January 2002). Forerunners of Byron's conurbanity leave, while others take their place: A sprawling $6.5 million Byron Bay mansion could be the ultimate piece of memorabilia for a wealthy fan of larrikin Australian actor Paul Hogan (Hoges to sell up at Byron Bay, Illawarra Mercury, 14 February 2002). The ABC series Seachange is one key text of conurbanity: Laura Gibson has something of a city job she can ply the tools of her trade as a magistrate while living in an idyllic rural location, a nice spot for a theme park of contemporary Australian manners and nostalgia for community (on Sea Change see Murphy 2002). Conurban designates a desire to have it both ways: cityscape and pastoral mode. Worth noting is that the Byron Shire has its own independent, vibrant media public sphere, as symbolized by the Byron Shire Echo founded in 1986, one of the great newspapers outside a capital city (Martin & Ellis 2002): <http://www.echo.net.au>. Yet the textual repository in city-based media of such exilic narratives is the supplement to the Saturday broadsheet papers. A case in point is journalist Ruth Ostrow, who lives in hills in the Byron Shire, and provides a weekly column in the Saturday Australian newspaper, its style gently evocative of just one degree of separation from a self-parody of New Age mores: Having permanently relocated to the hills behind Byron Bay from Sydney, it's interesting for me to watch friends who come up here on holiday over Christmas… (Ostrow 2002). The Sydney Morning Herald regards Byron Bay as another one of its Northern beaches, conceptually somewhere between Palm Beach and Pearl Beach, or should one say Pearl Bay. The Herald's fascination for Byron Bay real estate is coeval with its obsession with Sydney's rising prices: Byron Bay's hefty price tags haven't deterred beach-lovin' boomers (East Enders, Sydney Morning Herald 17 January 2002). The Australian is not immune from this either, evidence 'Boom Times in Byron', special advertising report, Weekend Australia, Saturday 2 March 2002. And plaudits from The Financial Review confirm it: Prices for seafront spots in the enclave on the NSW north coast are red hot (Smart Property, The Financial Review, 19 January 2002). Wacky North Coast customs are regularly covered by capital city press, the region functioning as a metonym for drugs. This is so with Nimbin especially, with regular coverage of the Nimbin Mardi Grass: Mardi Grass 2001, Nimbin's famous cannabis festival, began, as they say, in high spirits in perfect autumn weather on Saturday (Oh, how they danced a high old time was had by all at the Dope Pickers' Ball, Sydney Morning Herald, 7 May 2001). See too coverage of protests over sniffer dogs in Byron Bay in Easter 2001 showed (Peatling 2001). Byron's agony over its identity attracts wider audiences, as with its quest to differentiate itself from the ordinariness of Ballina as a typical Aussie seaside town (Buttrose 2000). There are national metropolitan audiences for Byron stories, readers who are familiar with the Shire's places and habits: Lismore-reared Emma Tom's 2002 piece on the politics of perving at King's beach north of Byron occasioned quite some debate from readers arguing the toss over whether wanking on the beach was perverse or par for the course: Public masturbation is a funny old thing. On one hand, it's ace that some blokes feel sexually liberated enough to slap the salami any old time… (Tom 2002). Brisbane, of course, has its own designs upon Byron, from across the state border. Brisbane has perhaps the best-known conurbation: its northern reaches bleed into the Sunshine Coast, while its southern ones salute the skyscrapers of Australia's fourth largest city, the Gold Coast (on Gold Coast and hinterland see Griffin 2002). And then the conburbating continues unabated, as settlement stretches across the state divide to the Tweed Coast, with its mimicking of Sanctuary Cove, down to the coastal towns of Ocean Shores, Brunswick Heads, Byron, and through to Ballina. Here another type of infrastructure is key: the road. Once the road has massively overcome the topography of rainforest and mountain, there will be freeway conditions from Byron to Brisbane, accelerating conurbanity. The caf is often the short-hand signifier of the urban, but in Byron Bay, it is film that gives the urban flavour. Byron Bay has its own International Film Festival (held in the near-by boutique town of Bangalow, itself conurban with Byron.), and a new triple screen complex in Byron: Up north, film buffs Geraldine Hilton and Pete Castaldi have been busy. Last month, the pair announced a joint venture with Dendy to build a three-screen cinema in the heart of Byron Bay, scheduled to open mid-2002. Meanwhile, Hilton and Castaldi have been busy organising the second Byron All Screen Celebration Film Festival (BASC), after last year's inaugural event drew 4000 visitors to more than 50 sessions, seminars and workshops. Set in Bangalow (10 minutes from Byron by car, less if you astral travel)… (Cape Crusaders, Sydney Morning Herald, 15 February 2002). The film industry is growing steadily, and claims to be the largest concentration of film-makers outside of an Australian capital city (Henkel 2000 & 2002). With its intimate relationship with the modern city, film in its Byron incarnation from high art to short video, from IMAX to multimedia may be seen as the harbinger of the conurban. If the case of Byron has something further to tell us about the transformation of the urban, we might consider the twenty-first century links between digital communications networks and conurbanity. It might be proposed that telecommunications networks make it very difficult to tell where the city starts and ends; as they interactively disperse information and entertainment formerly associated with the cultural institutions of the metropolis (though this digitization of urbanity is more complex than hyping the virtual suggest; see Graham & Marvin 1996). The bureau comes not just to the 'burbs, but to the backblocks as government offices are closed in country towns, to be replaced by online access. The cinema is distributed across computer networks, with video-on-demand soon to become a reality. Film as a cultural form in the process of being reconceived with broadband culture (Jacka 2001). Global movements of music flow as media through the North Coast, with dance music culture and the doof (Gibson 2002). Culture and identity becomes content for the information age (Castells 1996-1998; Cunningham & Hartley 2001; OECD 1998; Trotter 2001). On e-mail, no-one knows, as the conceit of internet theory goes, where you work or live; the proverbial refashioning of subjectivity by the internet affords a conurbanity all of its own, a city of bits wherever one resides (Mitchell 1995). To render the digital conurban possible, Byron dreams of broadband. In one of those bizarre yet recurring twists of Australian media policy, large Australian cities are replete with broadband infrastructure, even if by 2002 city-dwellers are not rushing to take up the services. Telstra's Foxtel and Optus's Optus Vision raced each other down streets of large Australian cities in the mid-1990s to lay fibre-coaxial cable to provide fast data (broadband) capacity. Cable modems and quick downloading of video, graphics, and large files have been a reality for some years. Now the Asymmetrical Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) technology is allowing people in densely populated areas close to their telephone exchanges to also avail themselves of broadband Australia. In rural Australia, broadband has not been delivered to most areas, much to the frustration of the conurbanites. Byron Bay holds an important place in the history of the internet in Australia, because it was there that one of Australia's earliest and most important internet service providers, Pegasus Network, was established in the late 1980s. Yet Pegasus relocated to Brisbane in 1993, because of poor quality telecommunications networks (Peters 1998). As we rethink the urban in the shadow of modernity, we can no longer ignore or recuse ourselves from reflecting upon its para-urban modes. As we deconstruct the urban, showing how the formerly pejorative margins actually define the centre the suburban for instance being more citified than the grand arcades, plazas, piazzas, or malls; we may find that it is the conurban that provides the cultural imaginary for the urban of the present century. Work remains to be done on the specific modalities of the conurban. The conurban has distinct temporal and spatial coordinates: citizens of Sydney fled to Manly earlier in the twentieth century, as they do to Byron at the beginning of the twenty-first. With its resistance to the transnational commercialization and mass culture that Club Med, McDonalds, and tall buildings represent, and with its strict environment planning regulation which produce a litigious reaction (and an editorial rebuke from the Sydney Morning Herald [SMH 2002]), Byron recuperates the counter-cultural as counterpoint to the Gold Coast. Subtle differences may be discerned too between Byron and, say, Nimbin and Maleny (in Queensland), with the two latter communities promoting self-sufficient hippy community infused by new agricultural classes still connected to the city, but pushing the boundaries of conurbanity by more forceful rejection of the urban. Through such mapping we may discover the endless attenuation of the urban in front and beyond our very eyes; the virtual replication and invocation of the urban around the circuits of contemporary communications networks; the refiguring of the urban in popular and elite culture, along littoral lines of flight, further domesticating the country; the road movies of twenty-first century freeways; the perpetuation and worsening of inequality and democracy (Stilwell 1992) through the action of the conurban. Cities without bounds: is the conurban one of the faces of the postmetropolis (Soja 2000), the urban without end, with no possibility for or need of closure? My thinking on Byron Bay, and the Rainbow Region in which it is situated, has been shaped by a number of people with whom I had many conversations during my four years living there in 1998-2001. My friends in the School of Humanities, Media, and Cultural Studies, Southern Cross University, Lismore, provided focus for theorizing our ex-centric place, of whom I owe particular debts of gratitude to Baden Offord (Offord 2002), who commented upon this piece, and Helen Wilson (Wilson 2002). Thanks also to an anonymous referee for helpful comments. References Buttrose, L. (2000). Betray Byron at Your Peril. Sydney Morning Herald 7 September 2000. Castells, M. (1996-98). The Information Age. 3 vols. Blackwell, Oxford. Cunningham, S., & Hartley, J. (2001). Creative Industries from Blue Poles to Fat Pipes. Address to the National Humanities and Social Sciences Summit, National Museum of Canberra. July 2001. Davis, M. (1990). City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. Verso, London. Gibson, C. (2002). Migration, Music and Social Relations on the NSW Far North Coast. Transformations, no. 2. <http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/transformation...>. Graham, S., and Marvin, S. (1996). Telecommunications and the City: Electronic Spaces, Urban Places. Routledge, London & New York. Griffin, Graham. (2002). Where Green Turns to Gold: Strip Cultivation and the Gold Coast Hinterland. Transformations, no. 2. <http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/transformation...> Henkel, C. (2002). Development of Audiovisual Industries in the Northern Rivers Region of NSW. Master thesis. Queensland University of Technology. . (2000). Imagining the Future: Strategies for the Development of 'Creative Industries' in the Northern Rivers Region of NSW. Northern Rivers Regional Development Board in association with the Northern Rivers Area Consultative Committee, Lismore, NSW. Jacka, M. (2001). Broadband Media in Australia Tales from the Frontier, Australian Film Commission, Sydney. Kijas, J. (2002). A place at the coast: Internal migration and the shift to the coastal-countryside. Transformations, no. 2. <http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/transformation...>. MacGregor, Craig. (1995). The Feral Signifier and the North Coast. In The Abundant Culture: Meaning And Significance in Everyday Australia, ed. Donald Horne & Jill Hooten. Allen and Unwin, Sydney. Martin, F., & Ellis, R. (2002). Dropping in, not out: the evolution of the alternative press in Byron Shire 1970-2001. Transformations, no. 2. <http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/transformation...>. Mitchell, W.J. (1995). City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. Molnar, Helen. (1998). 'National Convergence or Localism?: Rural and Remote Communications.' Media International Australia 88: 5-9. Moyal, A. (1984). Clear Across Australia: A History of Telecommunications. Thomas Nelson, Melbourne. Murphy, P. (2002). Sea Change: Re-Inventing Rural and Regional Australia. Transformations, no. 2. <http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/transformation...>. Offord, B. (2002). Mapping the Rainbow Region: Fields of belonging and sites of confluence. Transformations, no. 2. <http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/transformation...>. Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). (1998). Content as a New Growth Industry: Working Party for the Information Economy. OECD, Paris. Ostrow, R. (2002). Joyous Days, Childish Ways. The Australian, 9 February. Peatling, S. (2001). Keep Off Our Grass: Byron stirs the pot over sniffer dogs. Sydney Morning Herald. 16 April. <http://www.smh.com.au/news/0104/14/natio...> Peters, I. (1998). Ian Peter's History of the Internet. Lecture at Southern Cross University, Lismore. CD-ROM. Produced by Christina Spurgeon. Faculty of Creative Industries, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane. Productivity Commission. (2000). Broadcasting Inquiry: Final Report, Melbourne, Productivity Commission. Sassen, S. (1998). Globalisation and its Contents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money. New Press, New York. Soja, E. (2000). Postmetropolis: critical studies of cities and regions. Blackwell, Oxford. . (1996). Thirdspace: journeys to Los Angeles and other real-and-imagined places. Blackwell, Cambridge, Mass. Stilwell, F. (1992). Understanding Cities and Regions: Spatial Political Economy. Pluto Press, Sydney. Sydney Morning Herald (SMH). (2002). Byron Should Fix its own Money Mess. Editorial. 5 April. Tom, E. (2002). Flashing a Problem at Hand. The Weekend Australian, Saturday 12 January. Trotter, R. (2001). Regions, Regionalism and Cultural Development. Culture in Australia: Policies, Publics and Programs. Ed. Tony Bennett and David Carter. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. 334-355. Wilson, H., ed. (2002). Fleeing the City. Special Issue of Transformations journal, no. 2. < http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/transformation...>. Links http://www.echo.net.au http://www.smh.com.au/news/0104/14/national/national3.html http://www.ahs.cqu.edu.au/transformations/journal/issue2/issue.htm Citation reference for this article MLA Style Goggin, Gerard. "Conurban" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.2 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/conurban.php>. Chicago Style Goggin, Gerard, "Conurban" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 2 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/conurban.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Goggin, Gerard. (2002) Conurban. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(2). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0205/conurban.php> ([your date of access]).

In February 2021, during the third COVID-19 lockdown in the state of Victoria, Australia, artist Shaun Wilson used the teleconferencing platforms Teams and Skype to create a slow cinema feature length artwork titled Fading Light to demonstrate how innovative creative practice can overcome barriers of distance experienced by creative practitioners from the limitations sustained during the COVID-19 pandemic. While these production techniques offer free access to develop new methodologies through practice, the wider scope of pandemic lockdowns mediated artists with teleconferencing as a tool to interrogate the nature of life during our various global lockdowns. It thus afforded a pioneering ability for artists to manufacture artwork about lockdowns whilst in lockdown, made from the tools commonly used for virtual communication. The significance of such opportunities, as this article will argue, demonstrates a novel approach to making artwork about COVID-19 in ways that were limited prior to the start of 2020 in terms of commonality, that now are “turning us all into broadcasters, streamers and filmmakers” (Sullivan). However, as we are only just becoming familiar with the cultural innovation pioneered from the limitations brought about by the pandemic, new aesthetics are emerging that challenge normative traditions of manufacturing and thinking about creative artefacts. Teleconferencing platforms were used differently prior to 2020 when compared to the current pandemic era. Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, there were no global gigascale movement restrictions or medical dangers to warrant a global shutdown that would ultimately determine how a person interacts with public places. In a pre-pandemic context, the daily use of teleconferencing was a luxury. Its subsequent use in the COVID-19 era became a necessity in many parts of day-to-day life. As artists have historically been able to comment through their work on global health crises, how has contemporary art responded since 2020 in using teleconferencing within critical studio practice? To explore such an idea, this article will probe examples of practice from artists making artworks with teleconferencing about pandemics during the COVID-19 pandemic. Discussion will purposely not consider a wider historical scope of teleconferencing in art and scholarship as the context in this article explicitly addresses art made in and commenting on the COVID-19 pandemic using the tools of lockdown readily available through teleconferencing platforms. It will instead concentrate on three artists addressing the pandemic during 2020 and 2021. The first example will be There Is No Such Thing as Internet from Polish artists Maria Magdalena Kozlowska and Maria Tobola, “performers who identify as one artist, Maria Małpecki” (“Pogo”). The second example is New York artist Michael Mandiberg’s Uncle Bob 85th Birthday via Zoom 3:00-4:00PM, August 16, 2020 (#24), from the series Zoom Paintings. The third example is Australian artist Shaun Wilson’s Fading Light. These works will be discussed as a means of considering teleconferencing as a contemporary art medium used in response to COVID-19 and art made as pandemic commentary through the technology that has defined its global social integration. Figure 1: Maria Małpecki, There Is No Such Thing as Internet, used with permission. There Is No Such Thing as Internet was presented as a live stream on 7 May 2020 and as an online video between 7-31 May 2020 in the “Online Cocktail Party with Maria Małpecki” at Pogo Bar, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin by Maria Małpecki and curator Tomek Pawlowski Jarmolajew (“Pogo”). The work represents a twenty-minute livestream essay created in part by a teleconferencing video call performance and appropriated video streams. This includes video chat examples from Chomsky and Žižek, compiled together through intertextual video collages which The Calvert Journal described as a work “that explore[s] identity and different modes of communication in times of isolation” (De La Torre). One of the key strengths of this work in terms of teleconferencing is how it embraces the medium as an integral part of the performative methodology. To such an extent, one might argue that if it was removed and replaced by traditional video camera shots, which do feature in the video but are not the main aesthetic driver, the Metamodernist troupe of Małpecki’s videos would not perform the same critique of the pandemic. So, for Małpecki to comment on isolation through the Internet requires video calls to be central in the artwork in order for it to hold the cultural value it embeds through the subject. The conceptual framework relies on short segments to create episodic moments reliant on philosophical laments relating to each part of the work. For example, the first act unfolds with a montage of short video clip collages reminiscent of the quick-clip YouTube browsing habit culture from the pandemic to expedite an argument that indeed, there really is no singular internet. Rather, from this, what we are experiencing is arguably something else entirely. From here we move to the second act titled “We wake up in a different room every morning. We wander in a labyrinth where most doors are already open” (Małpecki); but as Małpecki comments, “sometimes our job is to shut them”. The sequence evolves into a disorientating dual screen sequence of the artists panicking to what they are viewing on screen. What this is exactly remains unclear. It may be us as the audience or something else as Malpecki holds their webcam devices upside down to provide an unnerving menage amidst the screams and exacerbations that invites spatial disorientation as a point of engagement for the viewer. As we recognise that video call protocols during the pandemic are visually static and that normative ‘rules’ of video calls require stabilised video and clean sound, Małpecki subverts these protocols to that of an uncomfortable, anarchic performance. It's at odds with the gentility of video call aesthetics which, in the case of this artwork, is more like watching a continuous point of view shot from a participant on a roller coaster or an extreme fairground ride. As the audience moves through each of the eclectic acts, this randomness laments a continuity that, sometimes satirical and at other times sublime, infuses the silliness and obliqueness of habitual lockdown video viewing. Even the most mundane of videos we watch to pass the time have become anthems of the COVID-19 era as a mixture of boredom, stupidity, and collective grief. Małpecki’s work in this regard becomes a complex observation for a society in crisis. It eloquently uses video calls as a way to comment on what this article argues to be an important cultural artefact in contemporary art’s response to COVID-19. Just as Goya subverted the Venetian pandemic in the grim Plague Hospital, Małpecki reflects our era in the same disruptive way by using frailty as a mirror to reveal an uneasy reflection masked in satirical obscurity, layered with fragments of the Internet and its subjective “other”. Figure 2: Michael Mandiberg, Uncle Bob 85th Birthday via Zoom 3:00-4:00PM, August 16, 2020 (#24), used with permission. Conversely, the work of New York artist Michael Mandiberg uses teleconferencing in a different way by painting the background of video calls onto stretched canvases mostly over the duration of the actual call time. Yet in doing so, the removal of people from inside the frame highlights aspects of isolation and absence in lockdown. At the Denny Dinin Gallery exhibition in New York, The Zoom Paintings “presented in the digital sphere where they were born” (Defoe). Zoom provided both the frame and the exhibition space for these works, with “one painting … on view each day [on Zoom], for a total of ten paintings” (“Zoom”). Describing the works, Mandiberg states that they are “about the interchangeability of people and places. It’s not memorializing a particular event; it’s memorializing how unmemorable it is” (Mandiberg; Defoe). This defines an innovative approach to teleconferencing that engages with place in times when the same kinds of absence experienced in the images of peopleless Zoom video calls mirror the external absence of people in public places during lockdown. Uncle Bob 85th Birthday via Zoom 3:00-4:00PM, August 16, 2020 (#24) is time stamped with the diaristic nature of the Zoom Paintings series. These works are not just a set of painting subjects interlinked through a common theme of paintings ‘about Zoom backgrounds’. They, rather, operate as a complex depiction of absence located in the pandemic, evidently capturing a powerful social commentary about what the artist experienced during these times. In doing so, it immediately prompts the viewer into tensions that conceptually frame COVID-19, whether that be the isolation of waiting out the pandemic in lockdown, the removal of characters through illness from the virus, or even a sudden death from the virus itself. The camera’s point of view illustrates an empty space where we know something is missing. At the very least the artist suggests that someone nearby once inhabited these empty spaces but they are, at present, removed from the scene or have vanished altogether. On 16 August 2020, the day that the painting was made, the New York Times estimated that 514 people in the United States died from COVID-19 (“Coronavirus”). When measured against a further death rate peaking at 5,463 people in the United States who died on 11 February 2021, the catastrophic mortality data in the United States alone statistically supports Mandiberg’s lament as to the severity of the pandemic, which serves as the context of his work. Based on this data alone, the absence in Mandiberg’s paintings intensifies a sense of isolation and loss insofar as the subjectivity embedded within the video call frame speaks to a powerful way that contemporary art is providing commentary during the pandemic (“Coronavirus”). Art in this context becomes a silent observer using teleconferencing to address both what is taken away from us and what visually remains behind. This article acknowledges the absence in Mandiberg’s paintings as a timely reminder of the socio-devastation experienced in the pandemic’s wake. Therein lies a three-folded image within an image within an image, not unlike what we see in Blade Runner when Deckard’s Esper Machine investigates the reflection in a mirror of someone else, and no more vivid than in Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait. From a structural point of view, we witness Mandiberg’s images during its exhibition on Zoom in much the same conceptual way. In this case though, it is a mirrored online image of an image painted from a video call interpreted online from a recorded image transmitted online through teleconferencing. Through similar transactions, Shaun Wilson’s utilisation of video calls is represented in Fading Light as a way to comment on COVID-19 through the lens of Teams and Skype. The similarities of Fading Light to There Is No Such Thing as Internet stem obviously from the study of figuration used as the driver of the works but at the same time, it also draws comparison with Mandiberg’s stillness as represented in the frozen poses of each figure. At a more complex level, there is, though, a polar opposite in the mechanics that, for Mandiberg, uses video to translate into painted subjects. Fading Light does the opposite, with paintings recontextualised into video subjects. Such an analysis of both works brings about a sense of trepidation. For Mandiberg, it is the unsettling stillness through absence. In Fading Light it is the oppressive state of the motionlessness in frame that offers the same sense of awkwardness found in Mandiberg’s distorted painted laptop angles, and that makes the same kind of uncomfortableness bearable. It is only as much as an audience affords the time to allow before the loneliness of the subject renders the Zoom paintings a memorial to what is lost. Of note in Fading Light are the characteristically uncomfortable traits of what we detect should be in the frame of the subject but isn’t, which lends a tension to the viewer who has involuntarily been deprived of what is to be expected. For a modern Internet audience, a video without movement invites a combination of tension, boredom, and annoyance, drawing parallels to Hitchcock’s premise that something has just happened but we’re not entirely sure exactly what it was or is. Likewise, Małpecki’s same juxtaposition of tension with glimpses of Chomsky and Žižek videos talking over each other is joined by the artists’ breaking the fourth wall of cinema theory. Observing the artists lose concentration while watching the other videos in the video call scenario enact the mundane activities we encounter in the same kinds of situations of watching someone else on Zoom. However, in this context, we are watching them watching someone else whom we are also watching, while watching ourselves at the same time. Figure 3: Shaun Wilson, Fading Light, used with permission. The poses in Fading Light are reconfigured from characters in German medieval paintings and low relief religious iconography created during the Black Death era. Such works hang in the Gothic St. Michael’s Church in Schwäbisch Hall in Germany originally used by Martin Luther as his Southern Germany outpost during the Reformation. Wilson documented these paintings in October 2006, which then became the ongoing source images used in the 51 Paintings Suite films. The church itself has a strong connection to pandemics where a large glass floor plate behind the altar reveals an open ossuary of people who died of plague during the Black Death. This association brings an empirical linkage to the agency in Fading Light that mediates the second handed nature of the image, initially painted during a medieval pandemic, and now juxtaposed into the video frame captured in a current pandemic. From a conceptual standpoint, the critical analysis reflected in such a framework allows the artwork to reveal itself at a multi-level perspective, operating within a Metamodernist methodology. Two separate elements oscillate in tandem with one another, yet completely independent, or in this case, impervious to each other’s affect. Fading Light’s key affordance from this oscillation consolidate Wilson’s methodology in the artwork in as much detail as what Małpecki and Mandiberg construct in their respective works, yet obviously for very different motivations. If the basis of making video art in the pandemic using teleconferencing changes the way we might think about using these platforms, which otherwise may not have previously been taken serious by the academy as a valid medium in art, then the quiet meaningfulness throughout the film transcends a structured method to ascertain a pictorial presence of the image in its facsimile state. This pays respect to the source images but also embraces and overlays the narrative of the current pandemic intertwined within the subject. Given that Fading Light allows a ubiquitous dialogue to grow from the framed image, a subjective commonality in these mentioned works provide insight into how artists have engaged innovation strategies with teleconferencing to develop artwork made and commenting about the current pandemic. Whether it be Małpecki’s subversive pandemic variety show, the loneliness of Mandiberg’s Zoom call paintings or Wilson’s refilming of Black Death era paintings, all three artists use video call platforms as a contemporary art medium capable of social commentary during histo-trauma. These works also raise the possibility of interdisciplinary Metamodernist approaches to consider the implications of non-traditional mediums in offering socio-commentary during profoundly impactful times. It remains to be seen if contemporary video call platforms will become a frequented tool in contemporary art long after the COVID-19 pandemic is over. However, by these works and indeed, from the others to follow and not yet revealed, the current ossuary provides an opportunity for artists to respond to their own immediate surroundings to redefine existing boundaries in art and look to innovation in the methods they use. We are in a new era of art making, only now beginning to reveal itself. It may take years or even decades to better understand the magnitude of the significance that artists have contributed towards their own practices since the beginnings of the pandemic. This time of profound change only strengthens the need for contemporary art to preserve and enlighten humanity through the journey from crisis to hope. References Blade Runner. Dir. by Ridley Scott, Warner Brothers, 1982. “Coronavirus US Cases.” New York Times, 27 Mar. 2021. 28 Mar. 2021 <http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html>. Defoe, Taylor. “‘It's Memorializing How Unmemorable It Is’: Artist Michael Mandiberg on Painting Melancholy Portraits on Zoom.” Artnet News 10 Nov. 2020. 19 Mar. 2021 <http://news.artnet.com/exhibitions/mandiberg-zoom-paintings-1922159>. De La Torre, Lucia. “Art in the Age of Zoom: Explore the Video Art Collage Unraveling the Complexities of the Digital Age.” The Culvert Journal, 5 May 2020. 19 Mar. 2021 <https://www.calvertjournal.com/articles/show/11788/online-performance-art-polish-artist-maria-malpecki-digital-age>. Goya, Francisco. Plaga Hospital. Private Collection. 1800. Małpecki, Maria. There Is No Such Thing as Internet. Vimeo, 2020. <http://vimeo.com/415998383>. Mandiberg, Michael. Uncle Bob 85th Birthday via Zoom 3:00-4:00PM, August 16, 2020 (#24). New York: Denny Dinin Gallery, 2020. “Pogo Bar: Maria Małpecki & Tomek Pawłowski Jarmołajew.” KW Institute for Contemporary Art, 7 May 2020. 19 Mar. 2021 <http://www.kw-berlin.de/en/maria-malpecki-tomek-pawlowski-jarmolajew/>. Sullivan, Eve. “Video Art during and after the Pandemic: 2020 Limestone Coast Video Art Festival.” Artlink, 2020. 19 Mar. 2021 <http://www.artlink.com.au/articles/4885/video-art-during-and-after-the-pandemic-2020-limes/>. Van Eyck, Jan. Arnolfini Portrait. Canberra: National Gallery, 1434. Wilson, Shaun. Fading Light. Bakers Road Entertainment, 2021. “The Zoom Paintings.” Denny Dimin Gallery, 12 Nov. 2020. <http://dennydimingallery.com/news/virtual_exhibition/zoom-paintings/>.

No man [...] can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which one may be true. (Nathaniel Hawthorne Scarlet Letter – as seen and pondered by Tony Soprano at Bowdoin College, The Sopranos, Season 1, Episode 5: “College”)The fictitious is a particular and varied source of insight into the everyday world. The idea of seriality—with its variations of the serial, series, seriated—is very much connected to our patterns of entertainment. In this essay, I want to begin the process of testing what values and meanings can be drawn from the idea of seriality into comprehending the play of persona in contemporary culture. From a brief overview of the intersection of persona and seriality as well as a review of the deployment of seriality in popular culture, the article focuses on the character/ person-actor relationship to demonstrate how seriality produces persona. The French term for character—personnage—will be used to underline the clear relations between characterisation, person, and persona which have been developed by the recent work by Lenain and Wiame. Personnage, through its variation on the word person helps push the analysis into fully understanding the particular and integrated configuration between a public persona and the fictional role that an actor inhabits (Heinich).There are several qualities related to persona that allow this movement from the fictional world to the everyday world to be profitable. Persona, in terms of origins, in and of itself implies performance and display. Jung, for instance, calls persona a mask where one is “acting a role” (167); while Goffman considers that performance and roles are at the centre of everyday life and everyday forms and patterns of communication. In recent work, I have use persona to describe how online culture pushes most people to construct a public identity that resembles what celebrities have had to construct for their livelihood for at least the last century (“Persona”; “Self”). My work has expanded to an investigation of how online persona relates to individual agency (“Agency”) and professional postures and positioning (Barbour and Marshall).The fictive constructions then are intensified versions of what persona is addressing: the fabrication of a role for particular directions and ends. Characters or personnages are constructed personas for very directed ends. Their limitation to the study of persona as a dimension of public culture is that they are not real; however, when one thinks of the actor who takes on this fictive identity, there is clearly a relationship between the real personality and that of the character. Moreover, as Nayar’s analysis of highly famous characters that are fictitious reveals, these celebrated characters, such as Harry Potter or Wolverine, sometime take on a public presence in and of themselves. To capture this public movement of a fictional character, Nayar blends the terms celebrity with fiction and calls these semi-public/semi-real entities “celefiction”: the characters are famous, highly visible, and move across media, information, and cultural platforms with ease and speed (18-20). Their celebrity status underlines their power to move outside of their primary text into public discourse and through public spaces—an extra-textual movement which fundamentally defines what a celebrity embodies.Seriality has to be seen as fundamental to a personnage’s power of and extension into the public world. For instance with Harry Potter again, at least some of his recognition is dependent on the linking or seriating the related books and movies. Seriality helps organise our sense of affective connection to our popular culture. The familiarity of some element of repetition is both comforting for audiences and provides at least a sense of guarantee or warranty that they will enjoy the future text as much as they enjoyed the past related text. Seriality, though, also produces a myriad of other effects and affects which provides a useful background to understand its utility in both the understanding of character and its value in investigating contemporary public persona. Etymologically, the words “series” and seriality are from the Latin and refer to “succession” in classical usage and are identified with ancestry and the patterns of identification and linking descendants (Oxford English Dictionary). The original use of the seriality highlights its value in understanding the formation of the constitution of person and persona and how the past and ancestry connect in series to the current or contemporary self. Its current usage, however, has broadened metaphorically outwards to identify anything that is in sequence or linked or joined: it can be a series of lectures and arguments or a related mark of cars manufactured in a manner that are stylistically linked. It has since been deployed to capture the production process of various cultural forms and one of the key origins of this usage came from the 19th century novel. There are many examples where the 19th century novel was sold and presented in serial form that are too numerous to even summarise here. It is useful to use Dickens’ serial production as a defining example of how seriality moved into popular culture and the entertainment industry more broadly. Part of the reason for the sheer length of many of Charles Dickens’ works related to their original distribution as serials. In fact, all his novels were first distributed in chapters in monthly form in magazines or newspapers. A number of related consequences from Dickens’ serialisation are relevant to understanding seriality in entertainment culture more widely (Hayward). First, his novel serialisation established a continuous connection to his readers over years. Thus Dickens’ name itself became synonymous and connected to an international reading public. Second, his use of seriality established a production form that was seen to be more affordable to its audience: seriality has to be understood as a form that is closely connected to economies and markets as cultural commodities kneaded their way into the structure of everyday life. And third, seriality established through repetition not only the author’s name but also the name of the key characters that populated the cultural form. Although not wholly attributable to the serial nature of the delivery, the characters such as Oliver Twist, Ebenezer Scrooge or David Copperfield along with a host of other major and minor players in his many books become integrated into everyday discourse because of their ever-presence and delayed delivery over stories over time (see Allen 78-79). In the same way that newspapers became part of the vernacular of contemporary culture, fictional characters from novels lived for years at a time in the consciousness of this large reading public. The characters or personnages themselves became personalities that through usage became a way of describing other behaviours. One can think of Uriah Heep and his sheer obsequiousness in David Copperfield as a character-type that became part of popular culture thinking and expressing a clear negative sentiment about a personality trait. In the twentieth century, serials became associated much more with book series. One of the more successful serial genres was the murder mystery. It developed what could be described as recognisable personnages that were both fictional and real. Thus, the real Agatha Christie with her consistent and prodigious production of short who-dunnit novels was linked to her Belgian fictional detective Hercule Poirot. Variations of these serial constructions occurred in children’s fiction, the emerging science fiction genre, and westerns with authors and characters rising to related prominence.In a similar vein, early to mid-twentieth century film produced the film serial. In its production and exhibition, the film serial was a déclassé genre in its overt emphasis on the economic quality of seriality. Thus, the film serial was generally a filler genre that was interspersed before and after a feature film in screenings (Dixon). As well as producing a familiarity with characters such as Flash Gordon, it was also instrumental in producing actors with a public profile that grew from this repetition. Flash Gordon was not just a character; he was also the actor Buster Crabbe and, over time, the association became indissoluble for audiences and actor alike. Feature film serials also developed in the first half-century of American cinema in particular with child actors like Shirley Temple, Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland often reprising variations of their previous roles. Seriality more or less became the standard form of delivery of broadcast media for most of the last 70 years and this was driven by the economies of production it developed. Whether the production was news, comedy, or drama, most radio and television forms were and are variation of serials. As well as being the zenith of seriality, television serials have been the most studied form of seriality of all cultural forms and are thus the greatest source of research into what serials actually produced. The classic serial that began on radio and migrated to television was the soap opera. Although most of the long-running soap operas have now disappeared, many have endured for more than 30 years with the American series The Guiding Light lasting 72 years and the British soap Coronation Street now in its 64th year. Australian nighttime soap operas have managed a similar longevity: Neighbours is in its 30th year, while Home and Away is in its 27th year. Much of the analyses of soap operas and serials deals with the narrative and the potential long narrative arcs related to characters and storylines. In contrast to most evening television serials historically, soap operas maintain the continuity from one episode to the next in an unbroken continuity narrative. Evening television serials, such as situation comedies, while maintaining long arcs over their run are episodic in nature: the structure of the story is generally concluded in the given episode with at least partial closure in a manner that is never engaged with in the never-ending soap opera serials.Although there are other cultural forms that deploy seriality in their structures—one can think of comic books and manga as two obvious other connected and highly visible serial sources—online and video games represent the other key media platform of serials in contemporary culture. Once again, a “horizon of expectation” (Jauss and De Man 23) motivates the iteration of new versions of games by the industry. New versions of games are designed to build on gamer loyalties while augmenting the quality and possibilities of the particular game. Game culture and gamers have a different structural relationship to serials which at least Denson and Jahn-Sudmann describe as digital seriality: a new version of a game is also imagined to be technologically more sophisticated in its production values and this transformation of the similitude of game structure with innovation drives the economy of what are often described as “franchises.” New versions of Minecraft as online upgrades or Call of Duty launches draw the literal reinvestment of the gamer. New consoles provide a further push to serialisation of games as they accentuate some transformed quality in gameplay, interaction, or quality of animated graphics. Sports franchises are perhaps the most serialised form of game: to replicate new professional seasons in each major sport, the sports game transforms with a new coterie of players each year.From these various venues, one can see the centrality of seriality in cultural forms. There is no question that one of the dimensions of seriality that transcends these cultural forms is its coordination and intersection with the development of the industrialisation of culture and this understanding of the economic motivation behind series has been explored from some of the earliest analyses of seriality (see Hagedorn; Browne). Also, seriality has been mined extensively in terms of its production of the pleasure of repetition and transformation. The exploration of the popular, whether in studies of readers of romance fiction (Radway), or fans of science fiction television (Tulloch and Jenkins; Jenkins), serials have provided the resource for the exploration of the power of the audience to connect, engage and reconstruct texts.The analysis of the serialisation of character—the production of a public personnage—and its relation to persona surprisingly has been understudied. While certain writers have remarked on the longevity of a certain character, such as Vicky Lord’s 40 year character on the soap opera One Life to Live, and the interesting capacity to maintain both complicated and hidden storylines (de Kosnik), and fan audience studies have looked at the parasocial-familiar relationship that fan and character construct, less has been developed about the relationship of the serial character, the actor and a form of twinned public identity. Seriality does produce a patterning of personnage, a structure of familiarity for the audience, but also a structure of performance for the actor. For instance, in a longitudinal analysis of the character of Fu Manchu, Mayer is able to discern how a patterning of iconic form shapes, replicates, and reiterates the look of Fu Manchu across decades of films (Mayer). Similarly, there has been a certain work on the “taxonomy of character” where the serial character of a television program is analysed in terms of 6 parts: physical traits/appearance; speech patterns, psychological traits/habitual behaviours; interaction with other characters; environment; biography (Pearson quoted in Lotz).From seriality what emerges is a particular kind of “type-casting” where the actor becomes wedded to the specific iteration of the taxonomy of performance. As with other elements related to seriality, serial character performance is also closely aligned to the economic. Previously I have described this economic patterning of performance the “John Wayne Syndrome.” Wayne’s career developed into a form of serial performance where the individual born as Marion Morrison becomes structured into a cultural and economic category that determines the next film role. The economic weight of type also constructs the limits and range of the actor. Type or typage as a form of casting has always been an element of film and theatrical performance; but it is the seriality of performance—the actual construction of a personnage that flows between the fictional and real person—that allows an actor to claim a persona that can be exchanged within the industry. Even 15 years after his death, Wayne remained one of the most popular performers in the United States, his status unrivalled in its close definition of American value that became wedded with a conservative masculinity and politics (Wills).Type and typecasting have an interesting relationship to seriality. From Eisenstein’s original use of the term typage, where the character is chosen to fit into the meaning of the film and the image was placed into its sequence to make that meaning, it generally describes the circumscribing of the actor into their look. As Wojcik’s analysis reveals, typecasting in various periods of theatre and film acting has been seen as something to be fought for by actors (in the 1850s) and actively resisted in Hollywood in 1950 by the Screen Actors Guild in support of more range of roles for each actor. It is also seen as something that leads to cultural stereotypes that can reinforce the racial profiling that has haunted diverse cultures and the dangers of law enforcement for centuries (Wojcik 169-71). Early writers in the study of film acting, emphasised that its difference from theatre was that in film the actor and character converged in terms of connected reality and a physicality: the film actor was less a mask and more a sense of “being”(Kracauer). Cavell’s work suggested film over stage performance allowed an individuality over type to emerge (34). Thompson’s semiotic “commutation” test was another way of assessing the power of the individual “star” actor to be seen as elemental to the construction and meaning of the film role Television produced with regularity character-actors where performance and identity became indissoluble partly because of the sheer repetition and the massive visibility of these seriated performances.One of the most typecast individuals in television history was Leonard Nimoy as Spock in Star Trek: although the original Star Trek series ran for only three seasons, the physical caricature of Spock in the series as a half-Vulcan and half-human made it difficult for the actor Nimoy to exit the role (Laws). Indeed, his famous autobiography riffed on this mis-identity with the forceful but still economically powerful title I am Not Spock in 1975. When Nimoy perceived that his fans thought that he was unhappy in his role as Spock, he published a further tome—I Am Spock—that righted his relationship to his fictional identity and its continued source of roles for the previous 30 years. Although it is usually perceived as quite different in its constitution of a public identity, a very similar structure of persona developed around the American CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite. With his status as anchor confirmed in its power and centrality to American culture in his desk reportage of the assassination and death of President Kennedy in November 1963, Cronkite went on to inhabit a persona as the most trusted man in the United States by the sheer gravitas of hosting the Evening News stripped across every weeknight at 6:30pm for the next 19 years. In contrast to Nimoy, Cronkite became Cronkite the television news anchor, where persona, actor, and professional identity merged—at least in terms of almost all forms of the man’s visibility.From this vantage point of understanding the seriality of character/personnage and how it informs the idea of the actor, I want to provide a longer conclusion about how seriality informs the concept of persona in the contemporary moment. First of all, what this study reveals is the way in which the production of identity is overlaid onto any conception of identity itself. If we can understand persona not in any negative formulation, but rather as a form of productive performance of a public self, then it becomes very useful to see that these very visible public blendings of performance and the actor-self can make sense more generally as to how the public self is produced and constituted. My final and concluding examples will try and elucidate this insight further.In 2013, Netflix launched into the production of original drama with its release of House of Cards. The series itself was remarkable for a number of reasons. First among them, it was positioned as a quality series and clearly connected to the lineage of recent American subscription television programs such as The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Dexter, Madmen, The Wire, Deadwood, and True Blood among a few others. House of Cards was an Americanised version of a celebrated British mini-series. In the American version, an ambitious party whip, Frank Underwood, manoeuvres with ruthlessness and the calculating support of his wife closer to the presidency and the heart and soul of American power. How the series expressed quality was at least partially in its choice of actors. The role of Frank Underwood was played by the respected film actor Kevin Spacey. His wife, Clare, was played by the equally high profile Robin Warren. Quality was also expressed through the connection of the audience of viewers to an anti-hero: a personnage that was not filled with virtue but moved with Machiavellian acuity towards his objective of ultimate power. This idea of quality emerged in many ways from the successful construction of the character of Tony Soprano by James Gandolfini in the acclaimed HBO television series The Sopranos that reconstructed the very conception of the family in organised crime. Tony Soprano was enacted as complex and conflicted with a sense of right and justice, but embedded in the personnage were psychological tropes and scars, and an understanding of the need for violence to maintain influence power and a perverse but natural sense of order (Martin).The new television serial character now embodied a larger code and coterie of acting: from The Sopranos, there is the underlying sense and sensibility of method acting (see Vineberg; Stanislavski). Gandolfini inhabited the role of Tony Soprano and used the inner and hidden drives and motivations to become the source for the display of the character. Likewise, Spacey inhabits Frank Underwood. In that new habitus of television character, the actor becomes subsumed by the role. Gandolfini becomes both over-determined by the role and his own identity as an actor becomes melded to the role. Kevin Spacey, despite his longer and highly visible history as a film actor is overwhelmed by the televisual role of Frank Underwood. Its serial power, where audiences connect for hours and hours, where the actor commits to weeks and weeks of shoots, and years and years of being the character—a serious character with emotional depth, with psychological motivation that rivals the most visceral of film roles—transforms the actor into a blended public person and the related personnage.This blend of fictional and public life is complex as much for the producing actor as it is for the audience that makes the habitus real. What Kevin Spacey/Frank Underwood inhabit is a blended persona, whose power is dependent on the constructed identity that is at source the actor’s production as much as any institutional form or any writer or director connected to making House of Cards “real.” There is no question that this serial public identity will be difficult for Kevin Spacey to disentangle when the series ends; in many ways it will be an elemental part of his continuing public identity. This is the economic power and risk of seriality.One can see similar blendings in the persona in popular music and its own form of contemporary seriality in performance. For example, Eminem is a stage name for a person sometimes called Marshall Mathers; but Eminem takes this a step further and produces beyond a character in its integration of the personal—a real personnage, Slim Shady, to inhabit his music and its stories. To further complexify this construction, Eminem relies on the production of his stories with elements that appear to be from his everyday life (Dawkins). His characterisations because of the emotional depth he inhabits through his rapped stories betray a connection to his own psychological state. Following in the history of popular music performance where the singer-songwriter’s work is seen by all to present a version of the public self that is closer emotionally to the private self, we once again see how the seriality of performance begins to produce a blended public persona. Rap music has inherited this seriality of produced identity from twentieth century icons of the singer/songwriter and its display of the public/private self—in reverse order from grunge to punk, from folk to blues.Finally, it is worthwhile to think of online culture in similar ways in the production of public personas. Seriality is elemental to online culture. Social media encourage the production of public identities through forms of repetition of that identity. In order to establish a public profile, social media users establish an identity with some consistency over time. The everydayness in the production of the public self online thus resembles the production and performance of seriality in fiction. Professional social media sites such as LinkedIn encourage the consistency of public identity and this is very important in understanding the new versions of the public self that are deployed in contemporary culture. However, much like the new psychological depth that is part of the meaning of serial characters such as Frank Underwood in House of Cards, Slim Shady in Eminem, or Tony Soprano in The Sopranos, social media seriality also encourages greater revelations of the private self via Instagram and Facebook walls and images. We are collectively reconstituted as personas online, seriated by the continuing presence of our online sites and regularly drawn to reveal more and greater depths of our character. In other words, the online persona resembles the new depth of the quality television serial personnage with elaborate arcs and great complexity. Seriality in our public identity is also uncovered in the production of our game avatars where, in order to develop trust and connection to friends in online settings, we maintain our identity and our patterns of gameplay. At the core of this online identity is a desire for visibility, and we are drawn to be “picked up” and shared in some repeatable form across what we each perceive as a meaningful dimension of culture. Through the circulation of viral images, texts, and videos we engage in a circulation and repetition of meaning that feeds back into the constancy and value of an online identity. Through memes we replicate and seriate content that at some level seriates personas in terms of humour, connection and value.Seriality is central to understanding the formation of our masks of public identity and is at least one valuable analytical way to understand the development of the contemporary persona. This essay represents the first foray in thinking through the relationship between seriality and persona.ReferencesBarbour, Kim, and P. David Marshall. “The Academic Online Constructing Persona.” First Monday 17.9 (2012).Browne, Nick. “The Political Economy of the (Super)Text.” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 9.3 (1984): 174-82. Cavell, Stanley. “Reflections on the Ontology of Film.” Movie Acting: The Film Reader. Ed. Wojcik and Pamela Robertson. London: Routledge, 2004 (1979). 29-35.Dawkins, Marcia Alesan. “Close to the Edge: Representational Tactics of Eminem.” The Journal of Popular Culture 43.3 (2010): 463-85.De Kosnik, Abigail. “One Life to Live: Soap Opera Storytelling.” How to Watch Television. Ed. Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell. New York: New York University Press, 2013. 355-63.Denson, Shane, and Andreas Jahn-Sudmann. “Digital Seriality: On the Serial Aesthetics and Practice of Digital Games.” Journal of Computer Game Culture 7.1 (2013): 1-32.Dixon, Wheeler Winston. “Flash Gordon and the 1930s and 40s Science Fiction Serial.” Screening the Past 11 (2011). 20 May 2014.Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Woodstock, New York: The Overlook Press, 1973.Hagedorn, Roger “Technology and Economic Exploitation: The Serial as a Form of Narrative Presentation.” Wide Angle 10. 4 (1988): 4-12.Hayward, Jennifer Poole. Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997.Heinrich, Nathalie. “Personne, Personnage, Personalité: L'acteur a L'ère De Sa Reproductibilité Technique.” Personne/Personnage. Eds. Thierry Lenain and Aline Wiame. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 2011. 77-101.Jauss, Hans Robert, and Paul De Man. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Brighton: Harvester, 1982.Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992.Jung, C. G., et al. Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. 2nd ed. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966.Kracauer, Siegfried. “Remarks on the Actor.” Movie Acting, the Film Reader. Ed. Pamela Robertson Wojcik. London: Routledge, 2004 (1960). 19-27.Leonard Nimoy & Pharrell Williams: Star Trek & Creating Spock. Ep. 12. Reserve Channel. December 2013. Lenain, Thierry, and Aline Wiame (eds.). Personne/Personnage. Librairie Philosophiques J. VRIN, 2011.Lotz, Amanda D. “House: Narrative Complexity.” How to Watch TV. Ed. Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell. New York: New York University Press, 2013. 22-29.Marshall, P. David. “The Cate Blanchett Persona and the Allure of the Oscar.” The Conversation (2014). 4 April 2014.Marshall, P. David “Persona Studies: Mapping the Proliferation of the Public Self.” Journalism 15.2 (2014): 153-70.Marshall, P. David. “Personifying Agency: The Public–Persona–Place–Issue Continuum.” Celebrity Studies 4.3 (2013): 369-71.Marshall, P. David. “The Promotion and Presentation of the Self: Celebrity as Marker of Presentational Media.” Celebrity Studies 1.1 (2010): 35-48.Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. 2nd Ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.Martin, Brett. Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad. London: Faber and Faber, 2013.Mayer, R. “Image Power: Seriality, Iconicity and the Mask of Fu Manchu.” Screen 53.4 (2012): 398-417.Nayar, Pramod K. Seeing Stars: Spectacle, Society, and Celebrity Culture. New Delhi; Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications, 2009.Nimoy, Leonard. I Am Not Spock. Milbrae, California: Celestial Arts, 1975.Nimoy, Leonard. I Am Spock. 1st ed. New York: Hyperion, 1995.Radway, Janice A. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984.Stanislavski, Constantin. Creating a Role. New York: Routledge, 1989 (1961).Thompson, John O. “Screen Acting and the Commutation Test.” Movie Acting: The Film Reader. Ed. Pamela Robertson Wojcik. London: Routledge, 2004 (1978). 37-48.Tulloch, John, and Henry Jenkins. Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Doctor Who and Star Trek. London; New York: Routledge, 1995.Vineberg, Steve. Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style. New York; Toronto: Schirmer Books, 1991.Wills, Garry. John Wayne’s America: The Politics of Celebrity. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.Wojcik, Pamela Robertson. “Typecasting.” Movie Acting: The Film Reader. Ed. Pamela Robertson Wojcik. London: Routledge, 2004. 169-89.

At last year’s Tour de France—the three-week cycling race—the winner of one stage was disqualified for allegedly obstructing a competitor. In newspapers and on social media, cycling fans immediately started a heated debate about the decision and about the actual course of events. They uploaded photographs and videos, which they had often edited and augmented with graphics to support their interpretation of the situation or to direct attention to some neglected detail (Simpson; "Tour de France").Due to their competitive character and their audience’s partisanship, modern media sports continuously create controversial moments like this, thereby providing ample opportunities for what Jason Mittell—with respect to complex narratives in recent TV drama—called “forensic fandom” ("Forensic;" Complex), in which audience members collectively investigate ambivalent or enigmatic elements of a media product, adding their own interpretations and explanations.Not unlike that of TV drama, sport’s forensic fandom is stimulated through complex forms of seriality—e.g. the successive stages of the Tour de France or the successive games of a tournament or a league, but also the repetition of the same league competition or tournament every (or, in the case of the Olympics, every four) year(s). To articulate their take on the disqualification of the Tour de France rider, fans refer to comparable past events, activate knowledge about rivalries between cyclists, or note character traits that they condensed from the alleged perpetrator’s prior appearances. Sport thus creates a continuously evolving and recursive storyworld that, like all popular seriality, proliferates across different media forms (texts, photos, films, etc.) and different media platforms (television, social media, etc.) (Kelleter).In the following I will use two examples (from 1908 and 1966) to analyse in greater detail why and how sport’s seriality and forensic attitude contribute to the highly dynamic “transmedia intertextuality” (Kinder 35) of media sport. Two arguments are of special importance to me: (1) While social media (as the introductory example has shown) add to forensic fandom’s proliferation, it was sport’s strongly serialized evaluation of performances that actually triggered the “spreadability” (Jenkins, Ford, and Green) of sport-related topics across different media, first doing so at the end of the 19th century. What is more, modern sport owes its very existence to the cross-media circulation of its events. (2) So far, transmedia has mainly been researched with respect to fictional content (Jenkins; Evans), yet existing research on documentary transmedia forms (Kerrigan and Velikovsky) and social media seriality (Page) has shown that the inclusion of non-fiction can broaden our knowledge of how storytelling sprawls across media and takes advantage of their specific affordances. This, I want to argue, ensures that sport is an insightful and important example for the understanding of transmedia world-building.The Origins of Sport, the Olympics 1908, and World-BuildingSome authors claim that it was commercial television that replaced descriptive accounts of sporting events with narratives of heroes and villains in the 1990s (Fabos). Yet even a cursory study of past sport reporting shows that, even back when newspapers had to explain the controversial outcome of the 1908 Olympic Marathon to their readers, they could already rely on a well-established typology of characters and events.In the second half of the 19th century, the rules of many sports became standardized. Individual events were integrated in organized, repetitive competitions—leagues, tournaments, and so on. This development was encouraged by the popular press, which thus enabled the public to compare performances from different places and across time (Werron, "On Public;" Werron, "World"). Rankings and tables condensed contests in easily comparable visual forms, and these were augmented by more narrative accounts that supplemented the numbers with details, context, drama, and the subjective experiences of athletes and spectators. Week by week, newspapers and special-interest magazines alike offered varying explanations for the various wins and losses.When London hosted the Olympics in 1908, the scheduled seriality and pre-determined settings and protagonists allowed for the announcement of upcoming events in advance and for setting up possible storylines. Two days before the marathon race, The Times of London published the rules of the race, the names of the participants, a distance table listing relevant landmarks with the estimated arrival times, and a turn-by-turn description of the route, sketching the actual experience of running the race for the readers (22 July 1908, p. 11). On the day of the race, The Times appealed to sport’s seriality with a comprehensive narrative of prior Olympic Marathon races, a map of the precise course, a discussion of the alleged favourites, and speculation on factors that might impact the performances:Because of their inelasticity, wood blocks are particularly trying to the feet, and the glitter on the polished surface of the road, if the sun happens to be shining, will be apt to make a man who has travelled over 20 miles at top speed turn more than a little dizzy … . It is quite possible that some of the leaders may break down here, when they are almost within sight of home. (The Times 24 July 1908, p. 9)What we see here can be described as a world-building process: The rules of a competition, the participating athletes, their former performances, the weather, and so on, all form “a more or less organized sum of scattered parts” (Boni 13). These parts could easily be taken up by what we now call different media platforms (which in 1908 included magazines, newspapers, and films) that combine them in different ways to already make claims about cause-and-effect chains, intentions, outcomes, and a multitude of subjective experiences, before the competition has even started.The actual course of events, then, like the single instalment in a fictional storyworld, has a dual function: on the one hand, it specifies one particular storyline with a few protagonists, decisive turning points, and a clear determination of winners and losers. On the other hand, it triggers the multiplication of follow-up stories, each suggesting specific explanations for the highly contingent outcome, thereby often extending the storyworld, invoking props, characters, character traits, causalities, and references to earlier instalments in the series, which might or might not have been mentioned in the preliminary reports.In the 1908 Olympic Marathon, the Italian Dorando Pietri, who was not on The Times’ list of favourites, reached the finish first. Since he was stumbling on the last 300 meters of the track inside the stadium and only managed to cross the finish line with the support of race officials, he was disqualified. The jury then declared the American John Hayes, who came in second, the winner of the race.The day after the marathon, newspapers gave different accounts of the race. One, obviously printed too hastily, declared Pietri dead; others unsurprisingly gave the race a national perspective, focusing on the fate of “their” athletes (Davis 161, 166). Most of them evaluated the event with respect to athletic, aesthetic, or ethical terms—e.g. declaring Pietri the moral winner of the race (as did Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in The Daily Mail of July 25). This continues today, as praising sport performers often figures as a last resort “to reconstruct unproblematic heroism” (Whannel 44).The general endeavour of modern sport to scrutinize and understand the details of the performance provoked competing explanations for what had happened: was it the food, the heat, or the will power? In a forensic spirit, many publications added drawings or printed one of the famous photographs displaying Pietri being guided across the finish line (these still regularly appear in coffee-table books on sports photography; for a more extensive analysis, see Stauff). Sport—just like other non-fictional transmedia content—enriches its storyworld through “historical accounts of places and past times that already have their own logic, practice and institutions” (Kerrigan and Velikovsky 259).The seriality of sport not only fostered this dynamic by starting the narrative before the event, but also by triggering references to past instalments through the contingencies of the current one. The New York Times took the biggest possible leap, stating that the 1908 marathon must have been the most dramatic competition “since that Marathon race in ancient Greece, where the victor fell at the goal and, with a wave of triumph, died” (The New York Times 25 July 1908, p. 1). Dutch sport magazine De Revue der Sporten (6 August 1908, p. 167) used sport’s seriality more soberly to assess Hayes’ finishing time as not very special (conceding that the hot weather might have had an effect).What, hopefully, has become clear by now, is that—starting in the late 19th century—sporting events are prepared by, and in turn trigger, varying practices of transmedia world-building that make use of the different media’s affordances (drawings, maps, tables, photographs, written narratives, etc.). Already in 1908, most people interested in sport thus quite probably came across multiple accounts of the event—and thereby could feel invited to come up with their own explanation for what had happened. Back then, this forensic attitude was mostly limited to speculation about possible cause-effect chains, but with the more extensive visual coverage of competitions, especially through moving images, storytelling harnessed an increasingly growing set of forensic tools.The World Cup 1966 and Transmedia ForensicsThe serialized TV live transmissions of sport add complexity to storytelling, as they multiply the material available for forensic proliferations of the narratives. Liveness provokes a layered and constantly adapting process transforming the succession of actions into a narrative (the “emplotment”). The commentators find themselves “in the strange situation of a narrator ignorant of the plot” (Ryan 87), constantly balancing between mere reporting of events and more narrative explanation of incidents (Barnfield 8).To create a coherent storyworld under such circumstances, commentators fall back on prefabricated patterns (“overcoming bad luck,” “persistence paying off,” etc.) to frame the events while they unfold (Ryan 87). This includes the already mentioned tropes of heroism or national and racial stereotypes, which are upheld as long as possible, even when the course of events contradicts them (Tudor). Often, the creation of “non-retrospective narratives” (Ryan 79) harnesses seriality, “connecting this season with last and present with past and, indeed, present with past and future” (Barnfield 10).Instant-replay technology, additionally, made it possible (and necessary) for commentators to scrutinize individual actions while competitions are still ongoing, provoking revisions of the emplotment. With video, DVD, and online video, the second-guessing and re-telling of elements—at least in hindsight—became accessible to the general audience as well, thereby dramatically extending the playing field for sport’s forensic attitude.I want to elaborate this development with another example from London, this time the 1966 Men’s Football World Cup, which was the first to systematically use instant replay. In the extra time of the final, the English team scored a goal against the German side: Geoff Hurst’s shot bounced from the crossbar down to the goal line and from there back into the field. After deliberating with the linesman, the referee called it a goal. Until today it remains contested whether the ball actually was behind the goal line or not.By 1966, 1908’s sparsity of visual representation had been replaced by an abundance of moving images. The game was covered by the BBC and by ITV (for TV) and by several film companies (in colour and in black-and-white). Different recordings of the famous goal, taken from different camera angles, still circulate and are re-appropriated in different media even today. The seriality of sport, particularly World Cup Football’s return every four years, triggers the re-telling of this 1966 game just as much as media innovations do.In 1966, the BBC live commentary—after a moment of doubt—pretty soberly stated that “it’s a goal” and observed that “the Germans are mad at the referee;” the ITV reporter, more ambivalently declared: “the linesman says no goal … that’s what we saw … It is a goal!” The contemporary newsreel in German cinemas—the Fox Tönende Wochenschau—announced the scene as “the most controversial goal of the tournament.” It was presented from two different perspectives, the second one in slow motion with the commentary stating: “these images prove that it was not a goal” (my translation).So far, this might sound like mere opposing interpretations of a contested event, yet the option to scrutinize the scene in slow motion and in different versions also spawned an extended forensic narrative. A DVD celebrating 100 years of FIFA (FIFA Fever, 2002) includes the scene twice, the first time in the chapter on famous controversies. Here, the voice-over avoids taking a stand by adopting a meta-perspective: The goal guaranteed that “one of the most entertaining finals ever would be the subject of conversation for generations to come—and therein lies the beauty of controversies.” The scene appears a second time in the special chapter on Germany’s successes. Now the goal itself is presented with music and then commented upon by one of the German players, who claims that it was a bad call by the referee but that the sportsmanlike manner in which his team accepted the decision advanced Germany’s global reputation.This is only included in the German version of the DVD, of course; on the international “special deluxe edition” of FIFA Fever (2002), the 1966 goal has its second appearance in the chapter on England’s World Cup history. Here, the referee’s decision is not questioned—there is not even a slow-motion replay. Instead, the summary of the game is wrapped up with praise for Geoff Hurst’s hat trick in the game and with images of the English players celebrating, the voice-over stating: “Now the nation could rejoice.”In itself, the combination of a nationally organized media landscape with the nationalist approach to sport reporting already provokes competing emplotments of one and the same event (Puijk). The modularity of sport reporting, which allows for easy re-editing, replacing sound and commentary, and retelling events through countless witnesses, triggers a continuing recombination of the elements of the storyworld. In the 50 years since the game, there have been stories about the motivations of the USSR linesman and the Swiss referee who made the decision, and there have been several reconstructions triggered by new digital technology augmenting the existing footage (e.g. King; ‘das Archiv’).The forensic drive behind these transmedia extensions is most explicit in the German Football Museum in Dortmund. For the fiftieth anniversary of the World Cup in 2016, it hosted a special exhibition on the event, which – similarly to the FIFA DVD – embeds it in a story of gaining global recognition for the fairness of the German team ("Deutsches Fußballmuseum").In the permanent exhibition of the German Football Museum, the 1966 game is memorialized with an exhibit titled “Wembley Goal Investigation” (“Ermittlung Wembley-Tor”). It offers three screens, each showing the goal from a different camera angle, a button allowing the visitors to stop the scene at any moment. A huge display cabinet showcases documents, newspaper clippings, quotes from participants, and photographs in the style of a crime-scene investigation—groups of items are called “corpus delicti,” “witnesses,” and “analysis.” Red hand-drawn arrows insinuate relations between different items; yellow “crime scene, do not cross” tape lies next to a ruler and a pair of tweezers.Like the various uses of the slow-motion replays on television, in film, on DVD, and on YouTube, the museum thus offers both hegemonic narratives suggesting a particular emplotment of the event that endow it with broader (nationalist) meaning and a forensic storyworld that offers props, characters, and action building-blocks in a way that invites fans to activate their own storytelling capacities.Conclusion: Sport’s Trans-Seriality Sport’s dependency on a public evaluation of its performances has made it a dynamic transmedia topic from the latter part of the 19th century onwards. Contested moments especially prompt a forensic attitude that harnesses the affordances of different media (and quickly takes advantage of technological innovations) to discuss what “really” happened. The public evaluation of performances also shapes the role of authorship and copyright, which is pivotal to transmedia more generally (Kustritz). Though the circulation of moving images from professional sporting events is highly restricted and intensely monetized, historically this circulation only became a valuable asset because of the sprawling storytelling practices about sport, individual competitions, and famous athletes in press, photography, film, and radio. Even though television dominates the first instance of emplotment during the live transmission, there is no primordial authorship; sport’s intense competition and partisanship (and their national organisation) guarantee that there are contrasting narratives from the start.The forensic storytelling, as we have seen, is structured by sport’s layered seriality, which establishes a rich storyworld and triggers ever new connections between present and past events. Long before the so-called seasons of radio or television series, sport established a seasonal cycle that repeats the same kind of competition with different pre-conditions, personnel, and weather conditions. Likewise, long before the complex storytelling of current television drama (Mittell, Complex TV), sport has mixed episodic with serial storytelling. On the one hand, the 1908 Marathon, for example, is part of the long series of marathon competitions, which can be considered independent events with their own fixed ending. On the other hand, athletes’ histories, continuing rivalries, and (in the case of the World Cup) progress within a tournament all establish narrative connections across individual episodes and even across different seasons (on the similarities between TV sport and soap operas, cf. O’Connor and Boyle).From its start in the 19th century, the serial publication of newspapers supported (and often promoted) sport’s seriality, while sport also shaped the publication schedule of the daily or weekly press (Mason) and today still shapes the seasonal structure of television and sport related computer games (Hutchins and Rowe 164). This seasonal structure also triggers wide-ranging references to the past: With each new World Cup, the famous goal from 1966 gets integrated into new highlight reels telling the German and the English teams’ different stories.Additionally, together with the contingency of sport events, this dual seriality offers ample opportunity for the articulation of “latent seriality” (Kustritz), as a previously neglected recurring trope, situation, or type of event across different instalments can eventually be noted. As already mentioned, the goal of 1966 is part of different sections on the FIFA DVDs: as the climactic final example in a chapter collecting World Cup controversies, as an important—but rather ambivalent—moment of German’s World Cup history, and as the biggest triumph in the re-telling of England’s World Cup appearances. In contrast to most fictional forms of seriality, the emplotment of sport constantly integrates such explicit references to the past, even causally disconnected historical events like the ancient Greek marathon.As a result, each competition activates multiple temporal layers—only some of which are structured as narratives. It is important to note that the public evaluation of performances is not at all restricted to narrative forms; as we have seen, there are quantitative and qualitative comparisons, chronicles, rankings, and athletic spectacle, all of which can create transmedia intertextuality. Sport thus might offer an invitation to more generally analyse how transmedia seriality combines narrative and other forms. Even for fictional transmedia, the immersion in a storyworld and the imagination of extended and alternative storylines might only be two of many dynamics that structure seriality across different media.AcknowledgementsThe two anonymous reviewers and Florian Duijsens offered important feedback to clarify the argument of this text.ReferencesBarnfield, Andrew. "Soccer, Broadcasting, and Narrative: On Televising a Live Soccer Match." Communication & Sport (2013): 326–341.Boni, Marta. "Worlds Today." World Building: Transmedia, Fans, Industries. Ed. Marta Boni. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2017. 9–27."Das Archiv: das Wembley-Tor." Karambolage, 19 June 2016. 6 Feb. 2018 <https://sites.arte.tv/karambolage/de/das-archiv-das-wembley-tor-karambolage>.The Daily Mail, 25 July 1908.Davis, David. Showdown at Shepherd’s Bush: The 1908 Olympic Marathon and the Three Runners Who Launched a Sporting Craze. Thomas Dunne Books, 2012."Deutsches Fußballmuseum zeigt '50 Jahre Wembley.'" 31 July 2016. 6 Feb. 2018 <https://www.fussballmuseum.de/aktuelles/item/deutsches-fussballmuseum-zeigt-50-jahre-wembley-fussballmuseum-zeigt-50-jahre-wembley.htm>.Evans, Elizabeth. Transmedia Television Audiences, New Media, and Daily Life. New York: Routledge, 2011.Fabos, Bettina. "Forcing the Fairytale: Narrative Strategies in Figure Skating." Sport in Society 4 (2001): 185–212.FIFA Fever (DVD 2002).FIFA Fever: Special Deluxe Edition (DVD 2002).Hutchins, Brett, and David Rowe. Sport beyond Television: The Internet, Digital Media and the Rise of Networked Media Sport. New York: Routledge, 2012.Jenkins, Henry. "Transmedia Storytelling and Entertainment: An Annotated Syllabus." Continuum 24.6 (2010): 943–958.Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. Spreadable Media. Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: New York UP, 2013.Kelleter, Frank. "Five Ways of Looking at Popular Seriality." Media of Serial Narrative. Ed. Frank Kelleter. Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 2017. 7–34.Kerrigan, Susan, and J.T. Velikovsky. "Examining Documentary Transmedia Narratives through the Living History of Fort Scratchley Project." Convergence 22.3 (2016): 250–268.Kinder, Marsha. "Playing with Power on Saturday Morning Television and on Home Video Games." Quarterly Review of Film and Television 14 (1992): 29–59.King, Dominic. "Geoff Hurst’s Goal against West Germany DID Cross the Line!" Daily Mail Online. 4 Jan. 2016. 6 Feb. 2018 <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-3384366/Geoff-Hurst-s-goal-against-West-Germany-DID-cross-line-Sky-Sports-finally-prove-linesman-right-award-controversial-strike-1966-World-Cup-final.html>.Kustritz, Anne. "Seriality and Transmediality in the Fan Multiverse: Flexible and Multiple Narrative Structures in Fan Fiction, Art, and Vids." TV/Series 6 (2014): 225–261.Mason, Tony. "Sporting News, 1860-1914." The Press in English Society from the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries. Eds. Michael Harris and Alan Lee. Associated UP, 1986. 168–186.Mittell, Jason. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York: NYU Press, 2015.———. "Forensic Fandom and the Drillable Text." Spreadable Media. 17 Dec. 2012. 4 Jan. 2018 <http://spreadablemedia.org/essays/mittell/>.The New York Times 25 July 1908.O’Connor, Barbara, and Raymond Boyle. "Dallas with Balls: Televised Sport, Soap Opera and Male and Female Pleasures." Leisure Studies 12.2 (1993): 107–119.Page, Ruth. "Seriality and Storytelling in Social Media." StoryWorlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies 5.1 (2013): 31–54.Puijk, Roel. "A Global Media Event? Coverage of the 1994 Lillehammer Olympic Games." International Review for the Sociology of Sport 35.3 (2000): 309–330.De Revue der Sporten, 6 August 1908.Ryan, Marie-Laure. Avatars of Story. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.Simpson, Christopher. "Peter Sagan’s 2017 Tour de France Disqualification Appeal Rejected by CAS." Bleacher Report. 6 July 2017. 6 Feb. 2018 <https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2720166-peter-sagans-2017-tour-de-france-disqualification-appeal-rejected-by-cas>.Stauff, Markus. "The Pregnant-Moment-Photograph: The London 1908 Marathon and the Cross-Media Evaluation of Sport Performances." Historical Social Research (forthcoming). The Times, 22 July 1908.The Times, 24 July 1908."Tour de France: Peter Sagan Disqualified for Elbowing Mark Cavendish." 4 July 2017. 6 Feb. 2018 <https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/cycling/2017/07/04/demare-wins-tour-stage-as-cavendish-involved-in-nasty-crash/103410284/>.Tudor, Andrew. "Them and Us: Story and Stereotype in TV World Cup Coverage." European Journal of Communication 7 (1992): 391–413.Werron, Tobias. "On Public Forms of Competition." Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 14.1 (2014): 62–76.———. "World Sport and Its Public. On Historical Relations of Modern Sport and the Media." Observing Sport: System-Theoretical Approaches to Sport as a Social Phenomenon. Eds. Ulrik Wagner and Rasmus Storm. Schorndorf: Hofmann, 2010. 33–59.Whannel, Garry. Media Sport Stars. Masculinities and Moralities. London/New York: Routledge, 2001.