SUPER(IM)POSITIONS: Subverting Melodramatic Representation Through Personal Unpredictability
(2024)
author(s): Emilio Santoyo
published in: Research Catalogue
This Artistic Research in and through cinema explores the possibilities of using outdated melodramatic elements of cinematic representation in a new way, dissolving the intersection between the personal and the fictional as a tool for creating a redemptive act of filmmaking. "Super (im) positions: Subverting melodramatic representation through personal unpredictability" delves into the transformative potential of these elements within cinematic representation. By dissolving the boundaries between the personal and the fictional, this work engages in a redemptive act of filmmaking that reimagines melodrama. The approach employs a contemporary, polyphonic, and playful film language to propose a new form of melodrama—one that acknowledges its inherent perversity to challenge and deconstruct its toxic narratives.
Rooted in the pervasive influence of telenovelas and melodrama, particularly within Mexican culture, this exploration questions and critiques the genre's impact on cultural and individual perceptions of love and relationships. The research was catalysed by a significant personal and professional rupture, leading to a critical examination of the genre's conventions.
By employing a contemporary, polyphonic, and playful film language, Santoyo reimagines melodrama as a genre capable of portraying complex, personal emotions and generating critical, boundary-pushing narratives. This self-reflective genre deviation, temporarily termed the "New Melodrama," seeks to subvert traditional melodramatic tropes by acknowledging and confronting their perverse nature. Through this approach, Santoyo aims to dismantle the toxic knowledge perpetuated by conventional melodrama, offering a sophisticated and nuanced critique from within the genre itself. His work presents a trojan horse strategy, using the familiar systems of melodramatic representation to question and ultimately transform them, proposing a relevant and self-aware cinematic experience.
Through innovative use of superimpositions and a deliberate deconstruction of melodramatic mise-en-scène, this study aims to create a critical and self-reflective genre deviation termed "New Melodrama." This method seeks to subvert traditional cinematic conventions by integrating multiple perspectives and temporalities, fostering a richer, more complex narrative experience. Ultimately, the research stands as a trojan horse within the film industry, using the very mechanics of melodrama to critique and reinvent it, offering a fresh, introspective take on a genre often dismissed as superficial.
environment embodiment - towards poetic narratives
(2024)
author(s): Fernanda Branco
published in: Research Catalogue
PhD Artistic Research project environment embodiment - towards poetic narratives (2020-2024) by Fernanda Branco at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts.
This artistic research explores experiential agency in encounters between body and environment. It draws from uncanny, embodied and poetic perspectives, unfolding as a constellation of sympoietic practices.
Webdesign by Ellen Palmeira
Illustrations by Aza
Abstract Narration
(2024)
author(s): anders bohman
published in: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
In this project, I want to create selected filmscenes and investigate how long an abstract narrative can work before it becomes unclear and loses interest, when it is most effective and how it can be defined.
I det här projektet vill jag undersöka hur länge ett abstrakt narrativ kan fungera i en filmscen innan det blir otydligt och tappar intresset, när är det som mest effektivt och hur det kan definieras.
HONEYMOON IN POMPEII - work in progress
(2021)
author(s): Sven Vinge
published in: International Center for Knowledge in the Arts (Denmark)
“HONEYMOON IN POMPEII – work-in-progress” is an artistic research project conducted at the National Film School of Denmark. In it, I explore transmediality through the production of a prototype artwork spanning film, literary text, sculpture, and virtual reality all loosely inspired by the archeological technique used to cast the Pompeian victims of the Vesuvius eruption in 79 ad.
I describe my initial inspiration and how I changed my intentions of exploring a consistent storyworld to more abstract associations and themes and the different collaborative efforts in producing the four parts of the prototype (a test not meant for public exhibition). The prototype ended up consisting of:
1) A film representing a foot specialist helping a costumer try running shoes in a sports store but showing an obsessive interest in her feet and crossing her personal boundaries.
2) A literary text consisting of selected passages of Wilhelm Jensen’s short novel “Gradiva” (1902) translated to Danish in which we meet the young archeologist Norbert Hanold and notice his obsession with an ancient bas-relief portraying a young woman walking.
3) A sculpture consisting of four transparent plastic reliefs depicting a walking woman (copies of the bas-relief described in the novel) suspended in a 1x2x2 meter aluminum frame.
4) An erotic virtual reality experience in which the perceiver’s bodily movements affects the virtual world. When moving, the represented scene freezes and vice versa.
We conducted a test of the joint transmedia artwork with a small group of respondents who answered a questionnaire reflecting on their experience. I reflect on the respondent’s answers and propose further questions and themes that may be interesting to explore through artistic research: How does one explore transmediality not necessarily in relation to a consistent storyworld but also relying on abstract characteristics? What are the limits (if any) between mixed media art, transmedia art, and installation art? How can transmediality be explored as either a goal in itself or as a development tool for artists working with particular media in mind? Could it be beneficial to explore transmediality through the metaphor of archeology and how?
Naturfilm
(2021)
author(s): Elisa Rossholm, Anna Sofia Rossholm
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
’Naturfilm’ (nature film) consist of three image based essays that reflect on the relation between mankind and nature in Swedish classical nature documentaries, and also on modernity’s negotiation of the separation of nature and human culture by large. The essays include reflections on landscape, natural resources, species and gender relations, indigenous cultures and media materiality. The essays combine images and voice-over, more specifically a series of drawings of still images from existing film footage combined with fragmentary reflections on the images as media inscription and representation.
The essays are media transformations of existing Swedish documentary films from the peak of the classical era, namely from the late 1930s until the early 1950s. In an ecological context, this period represents what is labeled ‘the great acceleration’, an increased exploitation of natural resources, and to some extent an intensified separation of nature and human activities.
Passions of Utopia
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Johannes Rydinger, Nicia Ivonne Fernandez Grijalva, Yasmin Henra van Dorp
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The Passions of Utopia is a collaborative artistic research project exploring futuremaking and storytelling through the lens of a 360-camera and telenovela tropes.
By using the cynical, plastical and exaggerated form of the telenovela we are trying to explore themes such as future, desire and truth.
Part of the process led to a 20 minutes VR-experience where the audience can take part in a immersive telenovela. It was also showed at ETC Solpark as a part of the interdisciplinary exposition and publication Awesome Arrarat
Throguh a web of different methods, where classic film production work flows and 360-action camera filmmaking is weaved together with site specific installations, we also want to explore narratives that contribute to fiction storytelling through VR in a playful way
The team consists of Yasmin Van Dorp, Nicia Fernández and Johannes Rydinger, students at the masterprogram The Art of Impact at Stockholm University of the Arts
100 MOVEMENTS
(last edited: 2021)
author(s): Gerko Egert
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
100 VIDEOS
100 x 100 MOVEMENTS
EACH VIDEO = ONE MOVEMENT = 100 SECONDS
NO EDITS
Embodied experiences as a call for action
(last edited: 2020)
author(s): Franco Ismael Veloz
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
This project attempts to explore different ways of connecting with someone else’s reality . How can we cause an impact with storytelling? Generate reflection, a look from another perspective? It attempts to close the gap between information and the actual person behind it.
KnowingUnknowing
(last edited: 2018)
author(s): Helen Kindred
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
KnowingUnknowing is an improvised duet in triptych form by dancer Helen Kindred and guitarist Benjamin Dwyer. Improvising filmmaker Pete Gomes joined them in a performance in which the director-as-camera operator became an integral element of the improvisation transforming the work from a duet into a trio. The film KnowingUnknowing is a demonstration of the combined improvisations of dancer, guitarist and filmmaker.
Our writings on this process appear here in two parts. The first is an essay by Gomes that explores his developing practice of ‘improvising mise en scene’—the ways in which the live, improvised interaction of the director-as-camera operator advances upon traditional understandings of mise en scene in film. The second essay, written jointly by Dwyer and Kindred, explores themes surrounding originality in improvisation, the processes at work in the moment of the expression of embodied knowledges and experience, the role of poetics and philosophy in understanding these processes, and how they have specifically impacted the KnowingUnknowing project.