Abstract

How does it feel to make media? What goes through the filmmaker’s head right at the moment they hit ‘record’? What are the processes – mechanical, digital, physical, psychological – that occur before, during, and after the recording of sound or vision? Building on the recent embodied turn in screen production research and taking inspiration from core ideas of the new materialists, this experimental piece unfolds in two parts.

Part one takes the form of stream of consciousness writing in retort to quotes or ideas from new materialist thinkers like Andrew Pickering and Kathleen Stewart, and a reflection on one’s own media practice. The result of this is two recipes for a kind of embodied making, which were then put into practice with two pieces of media, The Yarra & I and Pieces of Pound Bend. An extended second part connects reflections on this practice to writing on cinema and time, primarily Gilles Deleuze and Jean Epstein.

This work examines where the maker fits in the nebula of media texts, tools, and technologies. What is the point of making media or – perhaps more aptly – when?

When the human realm seems doomed to heaviness, I feel the need to fly like Perseus into some other space. I am not talking about escaping into dreams or into the irrational. I mean that I feel the need to change my approach, to look at the world from a different angle, with different logic, different methods of knowing and proving.
Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (2016 [1988])

Abstract

In this essay, I will discuss the use of remix as a practice of political listening framed by socio-political resistances rather than the popular culture that has influenced much of remix practice and literature. This project seeks to engage with ideas and practices of organisation and resistance expressed by different activists and collectives in my remixes.

These aims lead to my proposal of rearguard remix to engage, learn from and recirculate the knowledge of different forms of political engagement. To develop this concept of remix I work with the ideas of an active rearguard articulated by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui and the rearguard researcher as proposed by Boaventura de Sousa Santos.

In her idea of an active rearguard, Rivera Cusicanqui suggests the researcher needs to listen first instead of assuming that they must search for answers; and in the case of de Sousa Santos the rearguard researcher is committed to ‘know with’ rather than ‘know about’ (2014, p. ix).

In this regard, I consider the processes of remix practice as a non-extractive form of inquiry, that explores and creates relations between political ideas and practices. In the processes of sampling and remixing repetition, and the familiarisation that comes with it, allows for knowing the videos used in more depth, which I consider a process of learning to listen. I will elaborate on the political implications of this process later in this essay.

In the video materials I work with, I privilege the oral expression of ideas, experiences and knowledges – from a digital oral archive formed by critical, indigenous, feminist, and anarchist activists-researchers and their collectives. These audio-visual materials have been shared on platforms such as YouTube, Vimeo, or other social media. The remix Tenemos Redes que Seguir Tejiendo (‘We Have Threads to Keep Weaving’), deals with indigenous resistance – land, knowledge, and way of life against extractive and state megaprojects. It also includes discussions about the role of land struggles in indigenous identities and the political consequences of indigenous organisations. These conversations question essentialist ideas regarding identification, community, collective organisation, and the consequences of these forms of knowledge.

This essay starts with a discussion of sampling and its role in remix. I then discuss the need to learn to listen as a practice for solidarity. Lastly, I discuss the role of recirculation and the logic of sharing in remix practice.

Abstract

In my short film, Picnic Places, roadside infrastructure is cast as an assemblage of objects ‘containing multitudes’, providing an alternative consideration of these locations. I see them as somewhere other than a place to stop and stretch on a long Australian road journey.  Catalogued by an archaeologist from the future, they constitute an archive of absence, which elides other ways of knowing the places we travel through. In a discursive leap, picnic places are juxtaposed against the satellite launch sites being developed to attain Australian ‘sovereign launch capacity’.  Through such incongruous connections, it is proposed a film on these geographical markers of the Anthropocene may create new considerations of the narrative pathway that the settler state is pursuing, as part of the global rush to travel off-world.

Abstract
The ‘Marxist view of journalism’ notion as the ruling Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) rebranded media ideology has remained a trendy phrase and hot topic in China’s official, media, and academic research discourse since the early 2000s. Despite its marked and prolonged public presence and significance for the understanding of the Chinese Party-state’s media policy, a specific and systematic critique of the notion has remained absent in the literature.
Aiming to bridge this research gap, this study argues that being designed to attempt to theoretically justify the CCP’s shift to retighten its control over China’s increasingly market-oriented and self-minded media industry in the era of globalisation and digitisation, this high-profile ‘new’ notion is little more than a conveniently refurbished version of the very same old authoritarian press tradition of the Party, illustrating the ruling elite’s lack of theoretical courage and capacity to engage in long-delayed yet much-needed media ideological innovation. The study also offers some general suggestions in relation to how the notion may be revisited and redeveloped.

Abstract

Facebook’s response to the draft News Media Bargaining Code (the Code) proposed by Australia’s Morrison government in February 2021 made digital and corporate history. The Silicon Valley behemoth, with an operating rationale to manipulate and commodify human relations for profit, decided to make an example of a sovereign country. It did so by barring, blanking and scraping information broadly defined as news content from the pages of Australian organisations and entities hosted on the company’s site. Along with Google, Facebook reasoned that the Code imposed an ill-conceived arbitration model to determine revenue for news organisations using their platforms. News organisations, hoping to recoup classified and ad revenue lost to the platforms, argued for greater bargaining powers in negotiating with Facebook and Google.

The Code is underpinned by erroneous assumptions regarding market practices pertaining to digital platforms, entrenching the very problems it claims to address. The developments suggested ‘the curious role of the bargaining code: it’s meant to operate as a legislative threat so arbitration only happens when platforms and news outlets can’t agree. If Google keeps handing out money, this is unlikely to happen’ (Meese, 2021). With agreed government amendments made to the Code on Facebook’s ‘refriending’ of Australia (Frydenberg, 2021), two victorious parties emerged: the digital platforms and old news media.

Abstract
The Black Legend, the ‘truth’ surrounding Spanish atrocities in Latin America, has become a central point of both Spanish and Latin American modern national identities. Much of the present academic focus revolves around re-examining the Conquest itself and the constructing of Conquest narratives after the Reformation and the 1898 war between the United States and Spain. This is particularly relevant in Hollywood and wider cinematic representations of Spanish colonialism. However, the debate remains mired in Modernist considerations of historical ‘truths’ and ‘absolutes’. In a postmodern world, however, these are no longer possible, meaning the debate must move away from a search for ‘truth’ to an examination of the political implication of the rising multiplicity of narratives.
Black Legend historical revisionism is, presently, decidedly popular in the Spanish ‘national’ consciousness. However, Black Legend (cinematic) historiography within Spain only examines the methods and reasons for its own construction, thus, confining itself within modernist historiography. Postmodernity’s challenging of grand narratives and celebration of multiple voices questions the possibility of a defined, singular, Spanish national consciousness and, inevitably, forces the Black Legend’s historical revisionism towards Latin America. The United States is the modern, hegemonic metanarrative, a narrative disseminated through Hollywood and the cinematic lens. Given Latin America’s historical, geographical, and political proximity and shared Western Hemispheric experience over five centuries – Latin Americans are the shared yet contrasting narrative. Postmodern historical revisionism, therefore, resides most powerfully and politically within Latin America.

Abstract

The essay investigates racial reporting in the contemporary Australian media, a subject of great moment. It proceeds by establishing a practical definition of race, then draws a critical distinction between reporting about race and reporting of race, surveys the current, slim guidance available to journalists (principally the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance Journalist Code of Ethics and the Australian Press Council’s Standards of Practice), and notes the difficulty of regulation given journalism’s function as the Fourth Estate. However, because of the subject’s importance and the scantiness of the current guidance, the author concludes that the present state of affairs is untenable, and some elaboration is needed. He proposes, originally, a journalistic analogue to the ‘reasonable person’ test used at law. The test of the reasonable journalist would measure professional, social, personal and statutory duties and values, using input from academic and practising journalists, which, debated and refined over time, would help establish a consistent method for reasonable conduct. The essential point is that, in a field where complicated and contradictory factors are at work, such as decision-making about race reporting, mere guidance is likely to be less useful than a calculus which purposefully and systematically weighs such factors against each other. The calculus suggested, though necessarily a sketch at this stage, offers a path for research and practice which may bring clarity to a difficult area.