‘The Audiovisual Essay: a digital methodology for film and media studies’
Arts and Humanities Research Council Digital Transformations Grant, 2015-16
Principal Investigator: Richard Misek
Co-Investigator: Allan Cameron
Project partners: Whitechapel Gallery, British Film Institute
‘Cinema Unframed: exploring the screen in virtual reality’
Arts and Humanities Research Council Digital Transformations Follow-On Grant, 2017-18
Principal Investigator: Richard Misek
Project partners: Vrtov, British Film Institute, Live Cinema UK
These two connected projects each focused, in different ways, on extending the creative boundaries of the academic video essay.
‘The Audiovisual Essay’ began by bringing together media academics and moving image artists for four days of events at the Whitechapel Gallery, London in June 2016. A two-day public symmposium entitled Indefinite Visions put artists and academics together on panels to foster a sharing of methodologies and approaches to experimental film practice and criticism; each day was followed by a programme of screenings at Close Up Film Centre. The event was inspired by and coincided with the publication of Indefinite Visions: Cinema and the Attractions of Uncertainty (eds. Martine Beugnet, Allan Cameron, and Arild Fetveit) by Edinburgh University Press, featuring chapters by many of the event’s attendees.
The symposium was accompanied by a two-day workshop which brought together a smaller group of event participants to brainstorm and collaborate on a series of video essays inspired by the theme of indefinite vision. The workshop resulted in the creation of eight video essays, published in a special double issue of InTransition: journal of videographic film and moving image studies (Summer 2017). These included Frames and Containers by Charlie Shackleton and In Praise of Blur, the two most-cited video essays in the annual Sight and Sound magazine ‘Best Video Essays of 2017’ poll.
Related public engagement events included a British Film Institute Schools Day on the video essay, featuring a masterclass with Kogonada.
‘Cinema Unframed’, the second phase of the project, developed Frames and Containers and In Praise of Blur into A Machine for Viewing, an interactive real-time VR video essay made in collaboration with Charlie Shackleton and digital artist Oscar Raby. The work explored the fluid nature of contemporary spectatorship by putting a range of ‘machines for viewing’ including cinema screens, computer monitors, phones, and virtual reality headsets into conversation with each other. It was performed live as a part of the DocLab programme at IDFA 2019 and as a part of the New Frontier programme at Sundance 2020.
An interview conducted at Sundance with the creators is available on the Voices of VR podcast.
Further live performances, a planned roadshow across UK cinemas and arts centres (including BFI Southbank, FACT, Home, the Watershed, and Tramway), as well as a live stream from an empty cinema for Melbourne International Film Festival were cancelled due to COVID-19. More words about the shortened life of A Machine for Viewing, together with performance documentation, are available in NECSUS (Spring 2020).
‘Cinema Unframed’ also resulted in an academic article:‘“Real-time” virtual reality and the ideology of immersion’ (Screen 61.4, Winter 2020).