Journal articles on the topic 'Motion pictures Social aspects Victoria'

Ecranisation is transformation of written text in a novel into motion pictures in film. In so doing, the transformation undergoes three kinds of characteristics which become the main analysis in ecranization study, namely reduction, addition, and variation of change. This article discusses the results of a study on how the three processes in terms of social setting have contributed to the alteration of storyline. Objective data were collected through purposive sampling in this qualitative study from the novel and its film of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. The results show that the storyline in the film is socially constructed differently from its origin in the novel. It was found that the social behavior and the characterization in the film are not depicted in the same way as in the novel. As the novel is the benchmark for identifying any changes of social setting in the film, it is implied that the transformation has failed in taking into various social aspects as inherent element of storyline in the novel.

IntroductionThe popularity of social networking sites (SNSs) bears witness to thriving movement protests worldwide. The development of new hardware technologies such as mobile devices and digital cameras, in particular, has fast enhanced visual communications among users that help document and broadcast contemporary social movements. Using social media with these technologies thus presents new opportunities for grassroots social movement organisations (SMOs) and activist groups to become narrators of their activist lives, and to promote solidarity and recognition for advancing varied civic and political agendas. With the case of a student activist group that led and organised a 10-day occupation protest in Hong Kong, this article examines the idea of new media-savvy SMOs as political curators that employ SNS platforms to (co-)create digital narratives at large-scale movement protests. Invoking the concepts of curation and choreography, it highlights how these processes can work together to encourage contentious engagement and collaboration in contemporary social movements.The New Media-Savvy SMO as Political CuratorWhereas traditional social movement studies stressed the importance of pre-existing social networks and organisational structures for collective action, developments in new information and communication technologies (ICTs) challenge the common theories of how people are drawn into and participate in social movements. In recent years, a spate of research has particularly emphasised the ability of individuals and small groups to self-organise on the Internet (e.g. Rheingold). Lately, observing the use of SNSs such as Facebook and Twitter in contemporary social movements, work in this area has focused on how SNSs enable movement diffusion through personal networks and individuals’ online activities even without either the aid or the oversight of an organisation (e.g. Shirky).However, horizontal activism self-organised by atomised new media users seems insufficient as an explanation of how many recent protest movements achieved their high tides. While the flourishing literature shows writers have correctly centred their study on the changing dynamics in control over information and the growing importance of individual users’ contributions, it fails to account for the crucial role that SMOs continue to play. In fact, recent studies consistently observe the continuing importance of SMOs in mobilising and coordinating collective actions in online environments (Bimber, Flanagin, and Stohl, Collective). Whereas new ICTs have provided activist groups with the instrument to deal with their contentious activities with less cueing and leadership from conventional institutionalised structures, SMOs have created their own new media resources. Nowadays, a significant percentage of protest participants have received their information from online platforms that are run by or affiliated with these organisations. The critical questions remain about the kinds of communication methods they utilise to activate and integrate independent activists’ networks and participation, especially in emerging social media environments.Unfortunately, existing research tends to overlook the discursive potentials and cultural dimensions in online activism while emphasising the cost-effectiveness and organisational function of new ICTs. In particular, social movement and new media scholars merely attended to the ways in which digital media enable widescale, relatively un-coordinated contributions to repositories of resources for networks of activists and interest groups, as SNS applications stress the importance of user participation, openness, and network effects in the processes of content production and sharing. However, the mere existence or even “surplus” (Shirky 27) of “second-order communal goods” (Bimber, Flanagin, and Stohl, “Reconceptualizing” 372)—a collection of resources created collectively but without a bounded community, through video-posting, tagging, and circulation practices engaged in by individuals—does not accidentally result in critical publics that come to take part in political activism. Rather, social movements are, above all, the space for manifesting ideas, choices, and a collective will, in which people produce their own history through their cultural creations and social struggles (Touraine). As such, the alteration of meaning, the struggle to define the situation, and the discursive practices carried out within a social movement are all major aspects of social movements and change (Melucci).Indeed, SMOs and marginalised communities worldwide have increasingly learnt the ability to become narrators of their activist and community lives, and to express solidarity and recognition afforded through technology adoption. The recent proliferation of social media applications and mobile digital technologies has allowed activist groups to create and distribute their own stories regarding concrete actions, ongoing campaigns, and thematic issues of protest movements on more multimedia platforms. In order to advance political ideas and collective action frames, they may bring together a variety of online content in such a way that the collated materials offer a commentary on a subject area by articulating and negotiating new media artefacts, while also inviting responses. Therefore, not only are the new media channels for activist communication comparatively inexpensive, but they also provide for a richer array of content and the possibility of greater control by SMOs over its (re-)creation, maintenance, and distribution for potential digital narrating. To understand how digital narrating takes place in contemporary protest movements with SNSs, we now turn to two analytic concepts—curation and choreography.Social Media Content Curation and Choreography Curation, as a new media practice, involves finding, categorising, and organising relevant online content on specific issues. For instance, museums and libraries may have curators to select and feature digital items for collection and display, improving the types of information accessible to a public audience. In protest movements, SMOs and political actors may also curate peer-produced content on SNS platforms so as to filter and amplify useful information for mobilising collective action. In fact, this process by SMOs and political actors is particularly important, as it helps sort and draw timely attention to these information sources, especially at times when users are faced with a large amount of noise created by millions of producers (Bennett, Segerberg, and Walker). More importantly, not only does content curating entail the selection and preservation of online materials that may facilitate collective action, but it may also involve the (re-)presentation of selected content by telling stories not being told or by telling existing stories in a different way (Fotopoulou and Couldry). In contrast to professional collecting, it is a much more deliberate process, one which clearly articulates and puts forwards (opportunities for) new meanings or new understanding of a subject (Franks). For example, when new media content is re-posted or shared in its original form but in a new context, digital narrating occurs as it may result in a new or additional layer of meaning (Baym and Shah). Therefore, more than merely expending information resources available to activists, the power of curation can be understood primarily as discursive, as users may pick up particular versions of reality in interpreting social issues and protest movements (Bekkers, Moody, and Edwards).Moreover, nowadays, social media curating is not restricted to text but also includes image and video streaming, as the development of mobile devices and digital cameras has facilitated and enhanced instant communication and information retrieval almost regardless of location. The practice of content curating with SNSs may also involve the process of choreographing with various social media modules, such as posting a series of edited pictures under an overarching schema and organising user-generated photos into an album that suggests a particular theme. Rather than simply using a single visual item designed to tell a story, the idea of choreographing is thus concerned with how curated items are seen and experienced from the users’ perspectives as it “allows curators not just to expose elements of a story but to tell a structured tale with the traditional elements of beginning, middle and end” (Franks 288).In practice, the implementation of choreography can be envisioned to bring together the practice of content curating and that of enhancing and connecting contentious engagement at protest movements. For example, when SMOs make use of images and video to help frame an issue in a more advanced way by sharing a picture with a comment added on Facebook, they may at once, whether consciously or unconsciously, suggest possible endorsement to the selected content and/or the source—may it be that of an individual user or a formal organisation—while drawing attention to the image and circulating it beyond the original network for which it was posted (Bennett, Segerberg, and Walker). As such, by posting pictures with captions and sharing user-generated photos that do not belong to the SMO but are produced by other users, curating and choreographing with social media content can create a temporary space for practicing mutual recognition and extending the relationship between the SMO and the larger public. Combined, they may therefore “entail the creation of norms and boundaries in particular user communities and their platforms” (Bennett, Segerberg, and Walker 239).This article examines the ways in which a new media-savvy SMO employed SNS platforms to (co-)create digital narratives, with the case of the 2012 Anti-National Education Movement in Hong Kong. By highlighting how social media content curating and choreographing may work together to encourage engagement and collaboration at large-scale protests, we can better understand how emerging SNS-enabled affordances can be translated into concrete contentious activities, as well as the discursive aspects and cultural expressions of using new media platforms and digital technologies in contemporary protest movements.Digital Narrating for Grassroots Mobilisation Since 2010, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government has undertaken “national education” curriculum reform. However, the worry about mainland-Chinese style national education in schools brought people out to defend values that were held dear in Hong Kong. Scholarism, a new media-savvy SMO founded by about 20 secondary school students in May 2011, became the first pressure group formed against the “Moral and National Education” curriculum and became the leading activist group. On 30 August 2012, about 50 members and supporters of Scholarism started occupying the public area in front of the government’s headquarters, while three of its members went on a hunger strike. At the same time, Scholarism made active use of Facebook to undertake grassroots mobilisation, prompting both online activism and offline participation. On 7 September, over 120,000 people went to Occupy Headquarters. The next day, the Chief Executive, C. Y. Leung, succumbed to the pressure and declared that the curriculum would not be imposed in Hong Kong schools. In order to initiate a grassroots mobilisation, upon the beginning of Occupy Headquarters, Scholarism carried out the new media practice of telling the story of the student hunger strikers on Facebook to create a “moral shock” (Jasper 106) among the general public. On the first day of the occupation protest, 30 August, a poster on the hunger strike was released by Scholarism on its Facebook page. Instead of providing detailed information about the protest movement, this poster was characterised by the pictures of the three student hunger strikers. The headline message simply stated “We have started the hunger strike.” This poster was very popular among Facebook users; it accumulated more than 16,000 likes.By appealing to the hardships and sufferings of the three student hunger strikers, more photos were uploaded to narrate the course of the hunger strike and the occupation protest. In particular, pictures with captions added were posted on Facebook every couple of hours to report on the student hunger strikers’ latest situation. Although the mobilising power of these edited pictures did not come from their political ideology or rational argumentation, they sought to appeal to the “martyr-hood” of the student activists. Soon thereafter, as the social media updates of the student hunger strikers spread, feelings of shock and anger grew rapidly. Most of the comments that were posted under the updates and photos of the student hunger strikers on Scholarism’s Facebook page protested against the government’s brutality.In addition, as the movement grew, Scholarism extended the self-reporting activities on Facebook from members to non-members. For instance, it frequently (self-)reported on the amount of people joining the movement days and nights. This was especially so on 7 September, when Scholarism uploaded multiple photos and text messages to report on the physical movement of the 120,000 people. As a movement strategy, the display of images of protests and rallies on the Internet can help demonstrate the legitimacy, unity, numbers, and commitment of people supporting the movement goals (Carty and Onyett). Curating and choreographing with protest images on Facebook therefore facilitated the symbolic interactions and emotional exchanges among activists for maintaining movement solidarity and consolidating activist identity.To demonstrate the public support for its organisation and the movement, Scholarism extensively reported on its own, as well as other, protest activities and efforts on Facebook against the introduction of the “Moral and National Education” curriculum, creating unprecedented parallel public records of these events. In fact, throughout the entire movement protest, Scholarism took tight photo records of protest activities, systematically organised them into albums, and uploaded them onto Facebook every day between 30 August and 8 September.Content Co-Creation for Counter-Hegemonic ExpressionsFrom a (neo-)Gramscian perspective, counter-hegemony is often embedded and embodied in music, novels, drama, movies, and so on (Boggs). An example of counter-hegemony in the traditional media is a documentary that questions the government’s involvement in a war (Cohen). Therefore, popular culture in the media may help foster counter-hegemony on the terrain of civil society in preparation for political change (Pratt). For Chinese communities in East Asia, pop music, for example, had played a significant role in organising patriotic feelings in mass protest events, such as the Tiananmen demonstrations of 1989 and the many subsequent protests in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and elsewhere against the violence of the Beijing government (Chow 153). During the occupation protest, Facebook was turned into an open and flexible discursive space, in which cutting-edge counter-hegemonic narratives were produced, distributed, and expressed. Scholarism and many individual activists adopted the social media platform to (co-)create activists’ discourses and knowledge in order to challenge the dominant political and cultural codes (Melucci). An example is a poster created by Scholarism, posted on its Facebook page on 4 September. The title message of this poster is: “This is not the government headquarters. This is our CIVIC SQUARE. Come and occupy!” This message represents a discursive intervention that seeks to “illuminate the limits of normative discourses of knowledge and power” (Lane 138). It did so by replacing the original, official name and meaning of the government headquarters as well as its authority with the counter-hegemonic idea of “civic square,” a term developed and coined by Scholarism during the occupation protest to represent the public space in front of the headquarters.Moreover, the Facebook page of Scholarism was by no means the only source of content out of which counter-hegemonic knowledge and discourses were produced. Conversely, most of the new media artefacts observed on the Facebook page of Scholarism were originally created by and posted on, and therefore re-posted and shared from, the Facebook pages of other individual or group users. They are in forms of text, picture, video, and the like that sought to undermine the legitimacy of the Hong Kong government, ridicule the rationale of the “Moral and National Education” curriculum, and discredit figures in the opposition.An example is a cartoon made by an individual user and re-posted on the Facebook page of Scholarism on 2 September, the day before schools restarted in Hong Kong after the summer break. This cartoon features a schoolboy in his school uniform, who is going to school with a bunch of identical locks tied to his head. The title message is: “School begins, keep your brain safe.” This cartoon was created to ridicule the rationale of the introduction of the “Moral and National Education” by “making visible the underlying and hidden relations of power on which the smooth operation of government repression depends” (Lane 136).Another new media artefact re-posted on the Facebook page of Scholarism was originally created by a well-known Hong Kong cartoon painter of a major local newspaper. This cartoon sought to humanise the student activists and to condemn the brutality of the Hong Kong government. It paints an imagined situation in which a public conversation between the Secretary for Education, Hak-kim Eddie Ng, and the three students on the hunger strike takes place. In this cartoon, Ng is cast as the wholesaler of the “Moral and National Education” curriculum. Holding a bottle of liquid in his hand, he says to the students: “This is the tears of the chief executive from last night. Kids, should you all go home now?”Thus, counter-hegemonic expressions did not flow unidirectionally from Scholarism to the society at large. The special role of Scholarism was indeed to curate and choreograph new media artefacts by employing social media modules such as re-posting and sharing user-generated content. In so doing, it facilitated the mobilisation of the occupation protest and instant collaboration, as it connected scattered activities, turned them into a collective, and branded it with a common identity, conviction, and/or purpose.ConclusionThis article has briefly looked at the case of a new media-savvy SMO in Hong Kong as an example of how activist groups can become political curators at large-scale protest events. In particular, it highlights the concepts of curation and choreography in explaining how emerging SNS-enabled affordances can be translated into concrete contentious activities. This article argues that, rather than simply producing and disseminating content on SNS platforms, SMOs today have learnt to actively construct stories about protest movements with social media modules such as (re-)posting edited pictures and sharing user-generated photos in order to mobilise effective political interventions and sustain a vibrant participatory culture.ReferencesBaym, Geoffrey, and Chirag Shah. “Circulating Struggle: The On-Line Flow of Environmental Advocacy Clips from the Daily Show and the Colbert Report.” Information Communication & Society 14.7 (2011): 1017–38. Bekkers, Victor, Rebecca Moody, and Arthur Edwards. “Micro-Mobilization, Social Media and Coping Strategies: Some Dutch Experiences.” Policy and Internet 3.4 (2011): 1–29. Bennett, W. Lance, Alexandra Segerberg, and Shawn Walker. “Organization in the Crowd: Peer Production in Large-Scale Networked Protests.” Information, Communication & Society 17.2 (2014): 232–60. Bimber, Bruce, Andrew J. Flanagin, and Cynthia Stohl. “Reconceptualizing Collective Action in the Contemporary Media Environment.” Communication Theory 15.4 (2005): 365–88. ———. Collective Action in Organizations. New York: Cambridge UP, 2012.Boggs, Carl. The Two Revolutions: Antonio Gramsci and the Dilemmas of Western Marxism. Boston, MA: South End P, 1984. Carty, Victoria, and Jake Onyett. “Protest, Cyberactivism and New Social Movements: The Reemergence of the Peace Movement Post 9/11.” Social Movement Studies 5.3 (2006): 229–49. Chow, Ray. “Between Colonizers: Hong Kong’s Postcolonial Self-Writing in the 1990s.” Diaspora 2.2 (1992): 151–70. Cohen, Theodore. Global Political Economy. New York: Longman, 2003. Fotopoulou, Aristea, and Nick Couldry. “Telling the Story of the Stories: Online Content Curation and Digital Engagement.” Information, Communication & Society 18.2 (2015): 235–49. 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As Lewis Carroll’s Alice comes to the end of her journey through the looking glass world, she has also come to the end of her patience with its strange power games and arbitrations. At every stage of the adventure, she has encountered someone who wants to dictate rules and protocols, and a lesson on table manners from the Red Queen finally triggers rebellion. “I can’t stand this any more,” Alice cries, as she seizes the tablecloth and hurls the entire setting into chaos (279). Then, catching hold of the Red Queen, she gives her a good shaking, until the rigid contours of the imperious figure become fuzzy and soft. At this point, the hold of the dream dissolves and Alice, awakening on the other side of the mirror, realises she is shaking the kitten. Queens have long been associated with ideas of transformation. As Alice is duly advised when she first looks out across the chequered landscape of the looking glass world, the rules of chess decree that a pawn may become a queen if she makes it to the other side. The transformation of pawn to queen is in accord with the fairy tale convention of the unspoiled country girl who wins the heart of a prince and is crowned as his bride. This works in a dual register: on one level, it is a story of social elevation, from the lowest to the highest rank; on another, it is a magical transition, as some agent of fortune intervenes to alter the determinations of the social world. But fairy tales also present us with the antithesis and adversary of the fortune-blessed princess, in the figure of the tyrant queen who works magic to shape destiny to her own ends. The Queen and the mirror converge in the cultural imaginary, working transformations that disrupt the order of nature, invert socio-political hierarchies, and flout the laws of destiny. In “Snow White,” the powers of the wicked queen are mediated by the looking glass, which reflects and affirms her own image while also serving as a panopticon, keep the entire realm under surveillance, to pick up any signs of threat to her pre-eminence. All this turbulence in the order of things lets loose a chaotic phantasmagoria that is prime material for film and animation. Two major film versions of “Snow White” have been released in the past few years—Mirror Mirror (2012) and Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)—while Tim Burton’s animated 3D rendition of Alice in Wonderland was released in 2010. Alice through the Looking Glass (2016) and The Huntsman: Winter’s War, the 2016 prequel to Snow White and the Huntsman, continue the experiment with state-of-the-art-techniques in 3D animation and computer-generated imaging to push the visual boundaries of fantasy. Perhaps this escalating extravagance in the creation of fantasy worlds is another manifestation of the ancient lore and law of sorcery: that the magic of transformation always runs out of control, because it disrupts the all-encompassing design of an ordered world. This principle is expressed with poetic succinctness in Ursula Le Guin’s classic story A Wizard of Earthsea, when the Master Changer issues a warning to his most gifted student: But you must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard's power of Changing and Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. (48)In Le Guin’s story, transformation is only dangerous if it involves material change; illusions of all kinds are ultimately harmless because they are impermanent.Illusions mediated by the mirror, however, blur the distinction Le Guin is making, for the mirror image supposedly reflects a real world. And it holds the seductive power of a projected narcissism. Seeing what we wish for is an experience that can hold us captive in a way that changes human nature, and so leads to dangerous acts with material consequences. The queen in the mirror becomes the wicked queen because she converts the world into her image, and in traditions of animation going back to Disney’s original Snow White (1937) the mirror is itself an animate being, with a spirit whose own determinations become paramount. Though there are exceptions in the annals of fairy story, powers of transformation are typically dark powers, turbulent and radically elicit. When they are mediated through the agency of the mirror, they are also the powers of narcissism and autocracy. Through a Glass DarklyIn her classic cultural history of the mirror, Sabine Melchior-Bonnet tracks a duality in the traditions of symbolism associated with it. This duality is already evident in Biblical allusions to the mirror, with references to the Bible itself as “the unstained mirror” (Proverbs 7.27) counterpointed by images of the mortal condition as one of seeing “through a glass darkly” (1 Corinthians 13.12).The first of these metaphoric conventions celebrates the crystalline purity of a reflecting surface that reveals the spiritual identity beneath the outward form of the human image. The church fathers drew on Plotinus to evoke “a whole metaphysics of light and reflection in which the visible world is the image of the invisible,” and taught that “humans become mirrors when they cleanse their souls (Melchior-Bonnet 109–10). Against such invocations of the mirror as an intermediary for the radiating presence of the divine in the mortal world, there arises an antithetical narrative, in which it is portrayed as distorting, stained, and clouded, and therefore an instrument of delusion. Narcissus becomes the prototype of the human subject led astray by the image itself, divorced from material reality. What was the mirror if not a trickster? Jean Delumeau poses this question in a preface to Melchior-Bonnet’s book (xi).Through the centuries, as Melchior-Bonnet’s study shows, these two strands are interwoven in the cultural imaginary, sometimes fused, and sometimes torn asunder. With Venetian advances in the techniques and technologies of mirror production in the late Renaissance, the mirror gained special status as a possession of pre-eminent beauty and craftsmanship, a means by which the rich and powerful could reflect back to themselves both the self-image they wanted to see, and the world in the background as a shimmering personal aura. This was an attempt to harness the numinous influence of the divinely radiant mirror in order to enhance the superiority of leading aristocrats. By the mid seventeenth century, the mirror had become an essential accessory to the royal presence. Queen Anne of Austria staged a Queen’s Ball in 1633, in a hall surrounded by mirrors and tapestries. The large, finely polished mirror panels required for this kind of display were made exclusively by craftsmen at Murano, in a process that, with its huge furnaces, its alternating phases of melting and solidifying, its mysterious applications of mercury and silver, seemed to belong to the transformational arts of alchemy. In 1664, Louis XIV began to steal unique craftsmen from Murano and bring them to France, to set up the Royal Glass and Mirror Company whose culminating achievement was the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.The looking glass world of the palace was an arena in which courtiers and visitors engaged in the high-stakes challenge of self-fashioning. Costume, attitude, and manners were the passport to advancement. To cut a figure at court was to create an identity with national and sometimes international currency. It was through the art of self-fashioning that the many princesses of Europe, and many more young women of title and hereditary distinction, competed for the very few positions as consort to the heir of a royal house. A man might be born to be king, but a woman had to become a queen.So the girl who would be queen looks in the mirror to assess her chances. If her face is her fortune, what might she be? A deep relationship with the mirror may serve to enhance her beauty and enable her to realise her wish, but like all magical agents, the mirror also betrays anyone with the hubris to believe they are in control of it. In the Grimm’s story of “Snow White,” the Queen practises the ancient art of scrying, looking into a reflective surface to conjure images of things distant in time and place. But although the mirror affords her the seer’s visionary capacity to tell what will be, it does not give her the power to control the patterns of destiny. Driven to attempt such control, she must find other magic in order to work the changes she desires, and so she experiments with spells of self-transformation. Here the doubleness of the mirror plays out across every plane of human perception: visual, ethical, metaphysical, psychological. A dynamic of inherent contradiction betrays the figure who tries to engage the mirror as a servant. Disney’s original 1937 cartoon shows the vain Queen brewing an alchemical potion that changes her into the very opposite of all she has sought to become: an ugly, ill-dressed, and impoverished old woman. This is the figure who can win and betray trust from the unspoiled princess to whom the arts of self-fashioning are unknown. In Tarsem Singh’s film Mirror Mirror, the Queen actually has two mirrors. One is a large crystal egg that reflects back a phantasmagoria of palace scenes; the other, installed in a primitive hut on an island across the lake, is a simple looking glass that shows her as she really is. Snow White and the Huntsman portrays the mirror as a golden apparition, cloaked and faceless, that materialises from within the frame to stand before her. This is not her reflection, but with every encounter, she takes on more of its dark energies, until, in another kind of reversal, she becomes its image and agent in the wider world. As Ursula Le Guin’s sage teaches the young magician, magic has its secret economies. You pay for what you get, and the changes wrought will come back at you in ways you would never have foreseen. The practice of scrying inevitably leads the would-be clairvoyant into deeper levels of obscurity, until the whole world turns against the seer in a sequence of manifestations entirely contrary to his or her framework of expectation. Ultimately, the lesson of the mirror is that living in obscurity is a defining aspect of the human condition. Jorge Luis Borges, the blind writer whose work exhibits a life-long obsession with mirrors, surveys a range of interpretations and speculations surrounding the phrase “through a glass darkly,” and quotes this statement from Leon Bloy: “There is no human being on earth capable of declaring with certitude who he is. No one knows what he has come into this world to do . . . or what his real name is, his enduring Name in the register of Light” (212).The mirror will never really tell you who you are. Indeed, its effects may be quite the contrary, as Alice discovers when, within a couple of moves on the looking glass chessboard, she finds herself entering the wood of no names. Throughout her adventures she is repeatedly interrogated about who or what she is, and can give no satisfactory answer. The looking glass has turned her into an estranged creature, as bizarre a species as any of those she encounters in its landscapes.Furies“The furies are at home in the mirror,” wrote R. S. Thomas in his poem “Reflections” (265). They are the human image gone haywire, the frightening other of what we hope to see in our reflection. As the mirror is joined by technologies of the moving image in twentieth-century evolutions of the myth, the furies have been given a new lease of life on the cinema screen. In Disney’s 1937 cartoon of Snow White, the mirror itself has the face of a fury, which emerges from a pool of blackness like a death’s head before bringing the Queen’s own face into focus. As its vision comes into conflict with hers, threatening the dissolution of the world over which she presides, the mirror’s face erupts into fire.Computer-generated imaging enables an expansive response to the challenges of visualisation associated with the original furies of classical mythology. The Erinyes are unstable forms, arising from liquid (blood) to become semi-materialised in human guise, always ready to disintegrate again. They are the original undead, hovering between mortal embodiment and cadaverous decay. Tearing across the landscape as a flock of birds, a swarm of insects, or a mass of storm clouds, they gather into themselves tremendous energies of speed and motion. The 2012 film Snow White and the Huntsman, directed by Rupert Sanders, gives us the strongest contemporary realisation of the archaic fury. Queen Ravenna, played by Charlize Theron, is a virtuoso of the macabre, costumed in a range of metallic exoskeletons and a cloak of raven’s feathers, with a raised collar that forms two great black wings either side of her head. Powers of dematerialisation and rematerialisation are central to her repertoire. She undergoes spectacular metamorphosis into a mass of shrieking birds; from the walls around her she conjures phantom soldiers that splinter into shards of black crystal when struck by enemy swords. As she dies at the foot of the steps leading up to the great golden disc of her mirror, her face rapidly takes on the great age she has disguised by vampiric practices.Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen in Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is a figure midway between Disney’s fairy tale spectre and the fully cinematic register of Theron’s Ravenna. Bonham Carter’s Queen, with her accentuated head and pantomime mask of a face, retains the boundaries of form. She also presides over a court whose visual structures express the rigidities of a tyrannical regime. Thus she is no shape-shifter, but energies of the fury are expressed in her voice, which rings out across the presence chamber of the palace and reverberates throughout the kingdom with its calls for blood. Alice through the Looking Glass, James Bobin’s 2016 sequel, puts her at the centre of a vast destructive force field. Alice passes through the mirror to encounter the Lord of Time, whose eternal rule must be broken in order to break the power of the murdering Queen; Alice then opens a door and tumbles in free-fall out into nothingness. The place where she lands is a world not of daydream but of nightmare, where everything will soon be on fire, as the two sides in the chess game advance towards each other for the last battle. This inflation of the Red Queen’s macabre aura and impact is quite contrary to what Lewis Carroll had in mind for his own sequel. In some notes about the stage adaptation of the Alice stories, he makes a painstaking distinction between the characters of the queen in his two stories.I pictured to myself the Queen of Hearts as a sort of embodiment of ungovernable passion—a blind and aimless Fury. The Red Queen I pictured as a Fury, but of another type; her passion must be cold and calm—she must be formal and strict, yet not unkindly; pedantic to the 10th degree, the concentrated essence of governesses. (86)Yet there is clearly a temptation to erase this distinction in dramatisations of Alice’s adventures. Perhaps the Red Queen as a ‘not unkindly’ governess is too restrained a persona for the psychodynamic mythos surrounding the queen in the mirror. The image itself demands more than Carroll wants to accord, and the original Tenniel illustrations give a distinctly sinister look to the stern chess queen. In their very first encounter, the Red Queen contradicts every observation Alice makes, confounds the child’s sensory orientation by inverting the rules of time and motion, and assigns her the role of pawn in the game. Kafka or Orwell would not have been at all relaxed about an authority figure who practises mind control, language management, and identity reassignment. But here Carroll offers a brilliant modernisation of the fairy story tradition. Under the governance of the autocratic queen, wonderland and the looking glass world are places in which the laws of science, logic, and language are overturned, to be replaced by the rules of the queen’s games: cards and croquet in the wonderland, and chess in the looking glass world. Alice, as a well-schooled Victorian child, knows something of these games. She has enough common sense to be aware of how the laws of gravity and time and motion are supposed to work, and if she boasts of being able to believe six impossible things before breakfast, this signifies that she has enough logic to understand the limits of possibility. She would also have been taught about species and varieties and encouraged to make her own collections of natural forms. But the anarchy of the queen’s world extends into the domain of biology: species of all kinds can talk, bodies dissolve or change size, and transmutations occur instantaneously. Thus the world-warping energies of the Erinyes are re-imagined in an absurdist’s challenge to the scientist’s universe and the logician’s mentality.Carroll’s instinct to tame the furies is in accord with the overall tone and milieu of his stories, which are works of quirky charm rather than tales of terror, but his two queens are threatening enough to enable him to build the narrative to a dramatic climax. For film-makers and animators, though, it is the queen who provides the dramatic energy and presence. There is an over-riding temptation to let loose the pandemonium of the original Erinyes, exploiting their visual terror and their classical association with metamorphosis. FashioningThere is some sociological background to the coupling of the queen and the mirror in fairy story. In reality, the mirror might assist an aspiring princess to become queen by enchanting the prince who was heir to the throne, but what was the role of the looking glass once she was crowned? Historically, the self-imaging of the queen has intense and nervous resonances, and these can be traced back to Elizabeth I, whose elaborate persona was fraught with newly interpreted symbolism. Her portraits were her mirrors, and they reflect a figure in whom the qualities of radiance associated with divinity were transferred to the human monarch. Elizabeth developed the art of dressing herself in wearable light. If she lacked for a halo, she made up for it with the extravagant radiata of her ruffs and the wreaths of pearls around her head. Pearls in mediaeval poetry carried the mystique of a luminous microcosm, but they were also mirrors in themselves, each one a miniature reflecting globe. The Ditchely portrait of 1592 shows her standing as a colossus between heaven and earth, with the changing planetary light cycle as background. This is a queen who rules the world through the mediation of her own created image. It is an inevitable step from here to a corresponding intervention in the arrangement of the world at large, which involves the armies and armadas that form the backdrop to her other great portraits. And on the home front, a regime of terror focused on regular public decapitations and other grisly executions completes the strategy to remaking the world according to her will. Renowned costume designer Eiko Ishioka created an aesthetic for Mirror Mirror that combines elements of court fashion from the Elizabethan era and the French ancien régime, with allusions to Versailles. Formality and mannerism are the keynotes for the palace scenes. Julia Roberts as the Queen wears a succession of vast dresses that are in defiance of human scale and proportion. Their width at the hem is twice her height, and 100,000 Svarovski crystals were used for their embellishment. For the masked ball scene, she makes her entry as a scarlet peacock with a high arching ruff of pure white feathers. She amuses herself by arranging her courtiers as pieces on a chess-board. So stiffly attired they can barely move more than a square at a time, and with hats surmounted by precariously balanced ships, they are a mock armada from which the Queen may sink individual vessels on a whim, by ordering a fatal move. Snow White and the Huntsman takes a very different approach to extreme fashioning. Designer Colleen Atwood suggests the shape-shifter in the Queen’s costumes, incorporating materials evoking a range of species: reptile scales, fluorescent beetle wings from Thailand, and miniature bird skulls. There is an obvious homage here to the great fashion designer Alexander McQueen, whose hallmark was a fascination with the organic costuming of creatures in feathers, fur, wool, scales, shells, and fronds. Birds were everywhere in McQueen’s work. His 2006 show Widows of Culloden featured a range of headdresses that made the models look as if they had just walked through a flock of birds in full flight. The creatures were perched on their heads with outstretched wings askance across the models’ faces, obscuring their field of vision. As avatars from the spirit realm, birds are emblems of otherness, and associated with metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls. These resonances give a potent mythological aura to Theron’s Queen of the dark arts.Mirror Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsman accordingly present strikingly contrasted versions of self-fashioning. In Mirror Mirror we have an approach driven by traditions of aristocratic narcissism and courtly persona, in which form is both rigid and extreme. The Queen herself, far from being a shape-shifter, is a prisoner of the massive and rigid architecture that is her costume. Snow White and the Huntsman gives us a more profoundly magical interpretation, where form is radically unstable, infused with strange energies that may at any moment manifest themselves through violent transformation.Atwood was also costume designer for Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, where an invented framing story foregrounds the issue of fashioning as social control. Alice in this version is a young woman, being led by her mother to a garden party where a staged marriage proposal is to take place. Alice, as the social underling in the match, is simply expected to accept the honour. Instead, she escapes the scene and disappears down a rabbit hole to return to the wonderland of her childhood. In a nice comedic touch, her episodes of shrinking and growing involve an embarrassing separation from her clothes, so divesting her also of the demure image of the Victorian maiden. Atwood provides her with a range of fantasy party dresses that express the free spirit of a world that is her refuge from adult conformity.Alice gets to escape the straitjacket of social formation in Carroll’s original stories by overthrowing the queen’s game, and with it her micro-management of image and behaviour. There are other respects, though, in which Alice’s adventures are a form of social and moral fashioning. Her opening reprimand to the kitten includes some telling details about her own propensities. She once frightened a deaf old nurse by shouting suddenly in her ear, “Do let’s pretend that I’m a hungry hyaena and you’re a bone!” (147). Playing kings and queens is one of little Alice’s favourite games, and there is more than a touch of the Red Queen in the way she bosses and manages the kitten. It is easy to laud her impertinence in the face of the tyrannical characters she meets in her fantasies, but does she risk becoming just like them?As a story of moral self-fashioning, Alice through the Looking Glass cuts both ways. It is at once a critique of the Victorian social straitjacket, and a child’s fable about self-improvement. To be accorded the status of queen and with it the freedom of the board is also to be invested with responsibilities. If the human girl is the queen of species, how will she measure up? The published version of the story excludes an episode known to editors as “The Wasp in a Wig,” an encounter that takes place as Alice reaches the last ditch before the square upon which she will be crowned. She is about to jump the stream when she hears a sigh from woods behind her. Someone here is very unhappy, and she reasons with herself about whether there is any point in stopping to help. Once she has made the leap, there will be no going back, but she is reluctant to delay the move, as she is “very anxious to be a Queen” (309). The sigh comes from an aged creature in the shape of a wasp, who is sitting in the cold wind, grumbling to himself. Her kind enquiries are greeted with a succession of waspish retorts, but she persists and does not leave until she has cheered him up. The few minutes devoted “to making the poor old creature comfortable,” she tells herself, have been well spent.Read in isolation, the episode is trite and interferes with the momentum of the story. Carroll abandoned it on the advice of his illustrator John Tenniel, who wrote to say it didn’t interest him in the least (297). There is interest of another kind in Carroll’s instinct to arrest Alice’s momentum at that critical stage, with what amounts to a small morality tale, but Tenniel’s instinct was surely right. The mirror as a social object is surrounded by traditions of self-fashioning that are governed by various modes of conformity: moral, aesthetic, political. Traditions of myth and fantasy allow wider imaginative scope for the role of the mirror, and by association, for inventive speculation about human transformation in a world prone to extraordinary upheavals. ReferencesBorges, Jorge Luis. “Mirrors of Enigma.” Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. Eds. Donald A. Yates and James Irby. New York: New Directions, 2007. 209–12. Carroll, Lewis. Alice through the Looking Glass. In The Annotated Alice. Ed. Martin Gardner. London: Penguin, 2000.The King James Bible.Le Guin, Ursula. The Earthsea Quartet. London: Penguin, 2012.Melchior-Bonnet, Sabine. The Mirror: A History. Trans. Katherine H. 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The Walt Disney Company has been creating magical fairy tales since the early 1900s and is a trusted brand synonymous with wholesome, family entertainment (Wasko). Over time, this reputation has resulted in the Disney brand’s huge financial growth and influence on audiences worldwide. (Wohlwend). As the largest global media powerhouse in the Western world (Beattie), Disney uses its power and influence to shape the perceptions and ideologies of its audience. In the twenty-first century there has been a proliferation of retellings of Disney fairy tales, and Kilmer suggests that although the mainstream perception is that these new iterations promote gender equity, new cultural awareness around gender stereotypes, and cultural insensitivity, this is illusory. Tangled, for example, was a popular film selling over 10 million DVD copies and positioned as a bold new female fairy tale character; however, academics took issue with this position, writing articles entitled “Race, Gender and the Politics of Hair: Disney’s Tangled Feminist Messages”, “Tangled: A Celebration of White Femininity”, and “Disney’s Tangled: Fun, But Not Feminist”, berating the film for its lack of any true feminist examples or progressiveness (Kilmer). One way to assess the impact of Disney is to look at the use of shape shifting and transformation in the narratives – particularly those that include women and young girls. Research shows that girls and women are often stereotyped and sexualised in the mass media (Smith et al.; Collins), and Disney regularly utilises body modification and metamorphosis within its narratives to emphasise what good and evil ‘look’ like. These magical transformations evoke what Marina Warner refers to as part of the necessary surprise element of the fairy tale, while creating suspense and identity with storylines and characters. In early Disney films such as the 1937 version of Snow White, the queen becomes the witch who brings a poison apple to the princess; and in the 1959 film Sleeping Beauty the ‘bad’ fairy Maleficent shapeshifts into a malevolent dragon. Whilst these ‘good to evil’ (and vice versa) tropes are easily recognised, there are additional transformations that are arguably more problematic than those of the increasingly terrifying monsters or villains. Disney has created what we have coined the ‘princess bubble’, where the physique and behaviour of the leading women in the tales has become a predictor of success and good fortune, and the impression is created of a link between their possession of beauty and the ‘happily-ever-after’ outcome received by the female character. The value, or worth, of a princess is shown within these stories to often increase according to her ability to attract men. For example, in Brave, Queen Elinor showcases the extreme measures taken to ‘present’ her daughter Merida to male suitors. Merida is preened, dressed, and shown how to behave to increase her value to her family, and whilst she manages to persuade them to set aside their patriarchal ideologies in the end, it is clear what is expected from Merida in order to gain male attention. Similarly, Cinderella, Aurora, and Snow White are found to be of high ‘worth’ by the princes on account of their beauty and form. We contend, therefore, that the impression often cast on audiences by Disney princesses emphasises that beauty = worth, no matter how transgressive Disney appears to be on the surface. These princesses are flawlessly beautiful, capable of winning the heart of the prince by triumphing over their less attractive rivals – who are often sisters or other family members. This creates the illusion among young audiences that physical attractiveness is enough to achieve success, and emphasises beauty as the priority above all else. Therefore, the Disney ‘princess bubble’ is highly problematic. It presents a narrow range of acceptability for female characters, offers a distorted view of gender, and serves to further engrain into popular culture a flawed stereotype on how to look and behave that negates a fuller representation of female characters. In addition, Armando Maggi argues that since fairy tales have been passed down through generations, they have become an intrinsic part of many people’s upbringing and are part of a kind of universal imaginary and repository of cultural values. This means that these iconic cultural stories are “unlikely to ever be discarded because they possess both a sentimental value and a moral ‘soundness’” (Rutherford 33), albeit that the lessons to be learnt are at times antiquated and exclusionary in contemporary society. The marketing and promotion of the Disney princess line has resulted in these characters becoming an extremely popular form of media and merchandise for young girls (Coyne et al. 2), and Disney has received great financial benefit from the success of its long history of popular films and merchandise. As a global corporation with influence across multiple entertainment platforms, from its streaming channel to merchandise and theme parks, the gender portrayals therefore impact on culture and, in particular, on how young audiences view gender representation. Therefore, it could be argued that Disney has a social responsibility to ensure that its messages and characters do not skew or become damaging to the psyche of its young audiences who are highly impressionable. When the representation of gender is examined, however, Disney tends to create highly gendered performances in both the early and modern iterations of fairy tales, and the princess characters remain within a narrow range of physical portrayals and agency. The Princess Bubble Although there are twelve official characters within the Disney princess umbrella, plus Elsa and Anna from the Disney Frozen franchise, this article examines the eleven characters who are either born or become royalty through marriage, and exhibit characteristics that could be argued to be the epitome of feminine representation in fairy tales. The characters within this ‘princess bubble’ are Snow White, Cinderella, Aurora, Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Tiana, Rapunzel, Merida, Elsa, and Anna. The physical appearance of those in the princess bubble also connects to displays around the physical aspects of ethnicity. Nine out of eleven are white skinned, with Jasmine having lightened in skin tone over time, and Tiana now having a tanned look rather than the original dark African American complexion seen in 2009 (Brucculieri). This reinforces an ideology that being white is superior. Every princess in our sample has thick and healthy long hair, the predominant colour being blonde. Their eyes are mostly blue, with only three possessing a dark colour, a factor which reinforces the characteristics and representation of white ethnic groups. Their eyes are also big and bulbous in shape, with large irises and pupils, and extraordinarily long eyelashes that create an almost child-like look of innocence that matches their young age. These princesses have an average age of sixteen years and are always naïve, most without formal education or worldly experience, and they have additional distinctive traits which include poise, elegance and other desired feminine characteristics – like kindness and purity. Ehrenreich and Orenstein note that the physical attributes of the Disney princesses are so evident that the creators have drawn criticism for over-glamorising them, and for their general passiveness and reliance on men for their happiness. Essentially, these women are created in the image of the ultimate male fantasy, where an increased value is placed on the virginal look, followed by a perfect tiny body and an ability to follow basic instructions. The slim bodies of these princesses are disproportionate, and include long necks, demure shoulders, medium- to large-sized perky breasts, with tiny waists, wrists, ankles and feet. Thus, it can be argued that the main theme for those within the princess bubble is their physical body and beauty, and the importance of being attractive to achieve success. The importance of the physical form is so valued that the first blessing given by the fairies to Aurora from Sleeping Beauty is the gift of physical beauty (Rutherford). Furthermore, Tanner et al. argue that the "images of love at first sight in the films encourage the belief that physical appearance is the most important thing", and these fairy tales often reflect a pattern that the prince cannot help but to instantly fall in love with these women because they are so striking. In some instances, like the stories of Cinderella and Snow White, these princesses have not uttered a single word to their prince before these men fall unconditionally and hopelessly in love. Cinderella need only to turn up at the ball as the best dressed (Parks), while Snow White must merely “wait prettily, because someday her prince will come" (Inge) to reestablish her as royalty. Disney emphasises that these princesses win their man solely on the basis that they are the most beautiful girls in the land. In Sleeping Beauty, the prince overhears Aurora’s singing and that sets his heart aflame to the point of refusing to wed the woman chosen for him at birth by the king. Fortunately, she is one and the same person, so the patriarchy survives, but this idea of beauty, and of 'love at first sight', continues to be a central part of Disney movies today, and shows that “Disney Films are vehicles of powerful gender ideologies” (Hairianto). These princesses within the bubble of perfection have priority placed on their physical and sexual beauty (Dietz), formulating a kind of ‘beauty contest motif’. Examples include Gaston, who does not love Belle in Beauty and the Beast, but simply wants her as his trophy wife because he deems her to be the most beautiful girl in the town. Ariel, from The Little Mermaid, looks as if she "was modeled after a slightly anorexic Barbie doll with thin waist and prominent bust. This representation portrays a dangerous model for young women" (Zarranz). The sexualisation of the characters continues as Jasmine has “a delicate nose and small mouth" (Lacroix), with a dress that can be considered as highly sexualised and unsuitable for a girl of sixteen (Lacroix). In Tangled, Rapunzel is held hostage in the tower by Mother Gothel because she is ‘as fragile as a flower’ and needs to be ‘kept safe’ from the harms in the world. But it is her beauty that scares the witch the most, because losing Rapunzel would leave the old woman without her magical anti-aging hair. She uses scare tactics to ensure that Rapunzel remains unseen to the world. These examples are all variations of the beauty theme, as the princesses all fall within narrow and predictable tropes of love at first sight where the woman is rescued and initiated into womanhood by being chosen by a man. Disney’s Progressive Representation? At times Disney’s portrayal of princesses appears illusively progressive, by introducing new and different variations of princesses into the fold – such as Merida in the 2012 film Brave. Unfortunately, this is merely an illusion as the ‘body-perfect’ image remains an all-important ideal to snare a prince. Merida, the young and spirited teenage princess, begins her tale determined not to conform to the desired standards set for a woman of her standing; however, when the time comes for her to be married, there is no negotiating with her mother, the queen, on dress compliance. Merida is clothed against her will to re-identify her in the manner which her parents deem appropriate. Her ability to express her identity and individuality removed, now replaced by a masked version, and thus with the true Merida lost in this transformation, her parents consider Merida to be of renewed merit and benefit to the family. This shows that Disney remains unchanged in its depiction of who may ‘fit’ within the princess bubble, because the rubric is unchanged on how to win the heart of the man. In fact, this film is possibly more troublesome than the rest because it clearly depicts her parents to deem her to be of more value only after her mother has altered her physical appearance. It is only after the total collapse of the royal family that King Fergus has a change of patriarchal heart, and in fact Disney does not portray this rumpled, ripped-sleeved version of the princess in its merchandising campaign. While the fantasy of fairy tales provides enthralling adventures that always end in happiness for the pretty princesses that encounter them, consideration must be given to all those women who have not met the standard and are left in their wake. If women do not conform to the standards of representation, they are presented as outcasts, and happiness eludes them. Cinderella, for example, has two ugly stepsisters, who, no matter how hard they might try, are unable to match her in attractiveness, kindness, or grace. Disney has embraced and not shunned Perrault’s original retelling of the tale, by ensuring that these stepsisters are ugly. They have not been blessed with any attributes whatsoever, and cannot sing, dance, or play music; nor can they sew, cook, clean, or behave respectably. These girls will never find a suitor, let alone a prince, no matter how eager they are to do so. On the physical comparison, Anastasia and Drizella have bodies that are far more rounded and voluptuous, with feet, for example, that are more than double the size of Cinderella’s magical slipper. These women clearly miss the parameters of our princess bubble, emphasising that Disney is continuing to promote dangerous narratives that could potentially harm young audience conceptions of femininity at an important period in their development. Therefore, despite the ‘progressive’ strides made by Disney in response to the vast criticism of their earlier films, the agency afforded to their new generation of princesses does not alter the fact that success comes to those who are beautiful. These beautiful people continue to win every time. Furthermore, Hairianto has found that it is not uncommon for the media to directly or indirectly promote “mental models of how a woman should look, speak and interact with others”, and that Disney uses its pervasive princess influence “to shape perceptions of female identity and desirability. Females are made to measure themselves against the set of values that are meted out by the films” (Hairianto). In the 2017 film Beauty and the Beast, those outside of the princess bubble are seen in the characters of the three maidens from the village who are always trying to look their very best in the hope of attracting Gaston (Rutherford). Gaston is not only disinterested but shows borderline contempt at their glances by permitting his horse to spray mud and dirt all over their fine clothing. They do not meet the beauty standard set, and instead of questioning his cruelty, the audience is left laughing at the horse’s antics. Interestingly, the earlier version of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast portrays these maidens as blonde, slim, and sexy, closely fitting the model of beauty displayed in our princess bubble; however, none match the beauty of Belle, and are therefore deemed inferior. In this manner, Disney is being irresponsible, placing little interest in the psychological ‘safety’ or affect the messages have upon young girls who will never meet these expectations (Ehrenreich; Best and Lowney; Orenstein). Furthermore, bodies are shaped and created by culture. They are central to self-identity, becoming a projection of how we see ourselves. Grosz (xii) argues that our notions of our bodies begin in physicality but are forever shaped by our interactions with social realities and cultural norms. The media are constantly filled with images that “glorify and highlight some kinds of bodies (for example, the young, able-bodied and beautiful) while ignoring or condemning others” (Jones 193), and these influences on gender, ethnicity, sexuality, race, and religion within popular culture therefore play a huge part in identity creation. In Disney films, the princess bubble constantly sings the same song, and “children view these stereotypical roles as the right and only way to behave” (Ewert). In The Princess and the Frog, Tiana’s friend Charlotte is so desperate to ‘catch’ a prince that "she humorously over-applies her makeup and adjusts her ball gown to emphasize her cleavage" (Breaux), but the point is not lost. Additionally, “making sure that girls become worthy of love seems central to Disney’s fairy tale films” (Rutherford 76), and because their fairy tales are so pervasive and popular, young viewers receive a consistent message that being beautiful and having a tiny doll-like body type is paramount. “This can be destructive for developing girls’ views and images of their own bodies, which are not proportioned the way that they see on screen” (Cordwell 21). “The strongly gendered messages present in the resolutions of the movies help to reinforce the desirability of traditional gender conformity” (England et al. 565). Conclusion The princess bubble is a phenomenon that has been seen in Disney’s representation of female characters for decades. Within this bubble there is a narrow range of representation permitted, and attempts to make the characters more progressive have instead resulted in narrow and restrictive constraints, reinforcing dangerous female stereotypes. Kilmer suggests that ultimately these representations fail to break away from “hegemonic assumptions about gender norms, class boundaries, and Caucasian privileging”. Ultimately this presents audiences with strong and persuasive messages about gender performance. Audiences conform their bodies to societal ‘rules’: “as to how we ‘wear’ and ‘use’ our bodies” (Richardson and Locks x), including for example how we should dress, what we should weigh, and how to become popular. In our global hypermediated society, viewers are constantly exposed to princesses and other appropriate bodies. These become internalised ideals and aid in positive and negative thoughts and self-identity, which in turn creates additional pressure on the female body in particular. The seemingly innocent stories with happy outcomes are therefore unrealistic and ultimately excluding of those who cannot or will not ‘fit into the princess bubble’. The princess bubble, we argue, is therefore predictable and restrictive, promoting female passiveness and a reliance of physical traits over intelligence. The dominance of beauty over all else remains the road to female success in the Disney fairy tale film. References Beauty and the Beast. Dirs. Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise. Walt Disney Productions, 1991. Film. Beauty and the Beast. Dir. Bill Condon. Walt Disney Pictures, 2017. Film. Best, Joel, and Kathleen S. Lowney. “The Disadvantage of a Good Reputation: Disney as a Target for Social Problems Claims.” The Sociological Quarterly 50 (2009): 431–449. doi:10.1111/j.1533-8525.2009.01147.x. Brave. Dirs. Mark Andrews and Brenda Chapman. Walt Disney Pictures, 2012. Film. Breaux, Richard, M. “After 75 Years of Magic: Disney Answers Its Critics, Rewrites African American History, and Cashes in on Its Racist Past.” Journal of African American Studies 14 (2010): 398-416. Cinderella. Dirs. Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, and Hamilton Luske. Walt Disney Productions, 1950. Film. Collins, Rebecca L. “Content Analysis of Gender Roles in Media: Where Are We Now and Where Should We Go?” Sex Roles 64 (2011): 290–298. doi:10.1007/s11199-010-9929-5. Cordwell, Caila Leigh. The Shattered Slipper Project: The Impact of the Disney Princess Franchise on Girls Ages 6-12. Honours thesis, Southeastern University, 2016. Coyne, Sarah M., Jennifer Ruh Linder, Eric E. Rasmussen, David A. Nelson, and Victoria Birkbeck. “Pretty as a Princess: Longitudinal Effects of Engagement with Disney Princesses on Gender Stereotypes, Body Esteem, and Prosocial Behavior in Children.” Child Development 87.6 (2016): 1–17. Dietz, Tracey, L. “An Examination of Violence and Gender Role Portrayals in Video Games: Implications for Gender Socialization and Aggressive Behavior.” Sex Roles 38 (1998): 425–442. doi:10.1023/a:1018709905920. England, Dawn Elizabeth, Lara Descartes, and Melissa A. Collier-Meek. "Gender Role Portrayal and the Disney Princesses." Sex Roles 64 (2011): 555-567. Ewert, Jolene. “A Tale as Old as Time – an Analysis of Negative Stereotypes in Disney Princess Movies.” Undergraduate Research Journal for the Human Sciences 13 (2014). Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies. London, Routledge, 1994. Inge, M. Thomas. “Art, Adaptation, and Ideology: Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 32.3 (2004): 132-142. Jones, Meredith. “The Body in Popular Culture.” Being Cultural. Ed. Bruce M.Z. Cohen. Auckland University, 2012. 193-210. Kilmer, Alyson. Moving Forward? Problematic Ideology in Twenty-First Century Fairy Tale Films. Central Washington University, 2015. Lacroix, Celeste. “Images of Animated Others: The Orientalization of Disney's Cartoon Heroines from The Little Mermaid to The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” Popular Communications 2.4 (2004): 213-229. Little Mermaid, The. Dirs. Ron Clements and John Musker. Walt Disney Pictures, 1989. Film. Maggi, Armando. Preserving the Spell: Basile's "The Tale of Tales" and Its Afterlife in the Fairy-Tale Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Orenstein, Peggy. Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture. New York: HarperCollins, 2011. Parks, Kari. Mirror, Mirror: A Look at Self-Esteem & Disney Princesses. Honours thesis. Ball State University, 2012. Pinocchio. Dirs. Hamilton Luske, Ben Sharpsteen, Wilfred Jackson, Jack Kinney, Norm Ferguson, Bill Roberts, and T. Lee. Walt Disney Productions, 1940. Film. Princess and the Frog, The. Dirs. Ron Clements and John Musker. Walt Disney Pictures, 2009. Film. Richardson, Niall, and Adam Locks. Body Studies: The Basics. Routledge, 2014. Rutherford, Amanda M. Happily Ever After? A Critical Examination of the Gothic in Disney Fairy Tale Films. Auckland University of Technology, 2020. Sleeping Beauty. Dirs. Clyde Geronimi, Eric Larson, Wolfgang Reitherman, and Les Clark. Walt Disney Productions, 1959. Film. Smith, Stacey L., Katherine M. Pieper, Amy Granados, and Mark Choueite. “Assessing Gender-Related Portrayals in Topgrossing G-Rated Films.” Sex Roles 62 (2010): 774–786. Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs. Dirs. David Hand, Wilfred Jackson, Ben Sharpsteen, William Cottrell, Perce Pearce, and Larry Morey. Walt Disney Productions, 1937. Film. Tangled. Dirs. Nathan Greno and Byron Howard. Walt Disney Pictures, 2010. Film. Tanner, Litsa RenÉe, Shelley A. Haddock, Toni Schindler Zimmerman, and Lori K. Lund. “Images of Couples and Families in Disney Feature-Length Animated Films.” The American Journal of Family Therapy 31 (2003): 355-373. Warner, Marina. Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds. London: Oxford UP, 2002. Wasko, Janet. Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy. Polity Press, 2001. Wohlwend, Karen E. “Damsels in Discourse: Girls Consuming and Producing Identity Texts through Disney Princess Play.” Reading Research Quarterly 44.1 (2009): 57-83. Zarranaz, L. Garcia. “Diswomen Strike Back? The Evolution of Disney's Femmes in the 1990s.” Atenea 27.2 (2007) 55-65.

Complex systems are an invention of the universe. It is not at all clear that science has an a priori primacy claim to the study of complex systems. (Galanter 5) Introduction In popular dialogues, describing a system as “complex” is often the point of resignation, inferring that the system cannot be sufficiently described, predicted nor managed. Transport networks, management infrastructure and supply chain logistics are all often described in this way. In socio-cultural terms “complex” is used to describe those humanistic systems that are “intricate, involved, complicated, dynamic, multi-dimensional, interconnected systems [such as] transnational citizenship, communities, identities, multiple belongings, overlapping geographies and competing histories” (Cahir & James). Academic dialogues have begun to explore the collective behaviors of complex systems to define a complex system specifically as an adaptive one; i.e. a system that demonstrates ‘self organising’ principles and ‘emergent’ properties. Based upon the key principles of interaction and emergence in relation to adaptive and self organising systems in cultural artifacts and processes, this paper will argue that complex systems are cultural systems. By introducing generic principles of complex systems, and looking at the exploration of such principles in art, design and media research, this paper argues that a science of cultural systems as part of complex systems theory is the post modern science for the digital age. Furthermore, that such a science was predicated by post structuralism and has been manifest in art, design and media practice since the late 1960s. Complex Systems Theory Complexity theory grew out of systems theory, an holistic approach to analysis that views whole systems based upon the links and interactions between the component parts and their relationship to each other and the environment within they exists. This stands in stark contrast to conventional science which is based upon Descartes’s reductionism, where the aim is to analyse systems by reducing something to its component parts (Wilson 3). As systems thinking is concerned with relationships more than elements, it proposes that in complex systems, small catalysts can cause large changes and that a change in one area of a system can adversely affect another area of the system. As is apparent, systems theory is a way of thinking rather than a specific set of rules, and similarly there is no single unified Theory of Complexity, but several different theories have arisen from the natural sciences, mathematics and computing. As such, the study of complex systems is very interdisciplinary and encompasses more than one theoretical framework. Whilst key ideas of complexity theory developed through artificial intelligence and robotics research, other important contributions came from thermodynamics, biology, sociology, physics, economics and law. In her volume for the Elsevier Advanced Management Series, “Complex Systems and Evolutionary Perspectives on Organisations”, Eve Mitleton-Kelly describes a comprehensive overview of this evolution as five main areas of research: complex adaptive systems dissipative structures autopoiesis (non-equilibrium) social systems chaos theory path dependence Here, Mitleton-Kelly points out that relatively little work has been done on developing a specific theory of complex social systems, despite much interest in complexity and its application to management (Mitleton-Kelly 4). To this end, she goes on to define the term “complex evolving system” as more appropriate to the field than ‘complex adaptive system’ and suggests that the term “complex behaviour” is thus more useful in social contexts (Mitleton-Kelly). For our purpose here, “complex systems” will be the general term used to describe those systems that are diverse and made up of multiple interdependent elements, that are often ‘adaptive’, in that they have the capacity to change and learn from events. This is in itself both ‘evolutionary’ and ‘behavioural’ and can be understood as emerging from the interaction of autonomous agents – especially people. Some generic principles of complex systems defined by Mitleton Kelly that are of concern here are: self-organisation emergence interdependence feedback space of possibilities co-evolving creation of new order Whilst the behaviours of complex systems clearly do not fall into our conventional top down perception of management and production, anticipating such behaviours is becoming more and more essential for products, processes and policies. For example, compare the traditional top down model of news generation, distribution and consumption to the “emerging media eco-system” (Bowman and Willis 14). Figure 1 (Bowman & Willis 10) Figure 2 (Bowman & Willis 12) To the traditional news organisations, such a “democratization of production” (McLuhan 230) has been a huge cause for concern. The agencies once solely responsible for the representation of reality are now lost in a global miasma of competing perspectives. Can we anticipate and account for complex behaviours? Eve Mitleton Kelly states that “if organisations are understood as complex evolving systems co-evolving as part of a social ‘ecosystem’, then that changed perspective changes ways of acting and relating which lead to a different way of working. Thus, management strategy changes, and our organizational design paradigms evolve as new types of relationships and ways of working provide the conditions for the emergence of new organisational forms” (Mitleton-Kelly 6). Complexity in Design It is thus through design practice and processes that discovering methods for anticipating complex systems behaviours seem most possible. The Embracing Complexity in Design (ECiD) research programme, is a contemporary interdisciplinary research cluster consisting of academics and designers from architectural engineering, robotics, geography, digital media, sustainable design, and computing aiming to explore the possibility of trans disciplinary principles of complexity in design. Over arching this work is the conviction that design can be seen as model for complex systems researchers motivated by applying complexity science in particular domains. Key areas in which design and complexity interact have been established by this research cluster. Most immediately, many designed products and systems are inherently complex to design in the ordinary sense. For example, when designing vehicles, architecture, microchips designers need to understand complex dynamic processes used to fabricate and manufacture products and systems. The social and economic context of design is also complex, from market economics and legal regulation to social trends and mass culture. The process of designing can also involve complex social dynamics, with many people processing and exchanging complex heterogeneous information over complex human and communication networks, in the context of many changing constraints. Current key research questions are: how can the methods of complex systems science inform designers? how can design inform research into complex systems? Whilst ECiD acknowledges that to answer such questions effectively the theoretical and methodological relations between complexity science and design need further exploration and enquiry, there are no reliable precedents for such an activity across the sciences and the arts in general. Indeed, even in areas where a convergence of humanities methodology with scientific practice might seem to be most pertinent, most examples are few and far between. In his paper “Post Structuralism, Hypertext & the World Wide Web”, Luke Tredennick states that “despite the concentration of post-structuralism on text and texts, the study of information has largely failed to exploit post-structuralist theory” (Tredennick 5). Yet it is surely in the convergence of art and design with computation and the media that a search for practical trans-metadisciplinary methodologies might be most fruitful. It is in design for interactive media, where algorithms meet graphics, where the user can interact, adapt and amend, that self-organisation, emergence, interdependence, feedback, the space of possibilities, co-evolution and the creation of new order are embraced on a day to day basis by designers. A digitally interactive environment such as the World Wide Web, clearly demonstrates all the key aspects of a complex system. Indeed, it has already been described as a ‘complexity machine’ (Qvortup 9). It is important to remember that this ‘complexity machine’ has been designed. It is an intentional facility. It may display all the characteristics of complexity but, whilst some of its attributes are most demonstrative of self organisation and emergence, the Internet itself has not emerged spontaneously. For example, Tredinnick details the evolution of the World Wide Web through the Memex machine of Vannevar Bush, through Ted Nelsons hypertext system Xanadu to Tim Berners-Lee’s Enquire (Tredennick 3). The Internet was engineered. So, whilst we may not be able to entirely predict complex behavior, we can, and do, quite clearly design for it. When designing digitally interactive artifacts we design parameters or co ordinates to define the space within which a conceptual process will take place. We can never begin to predict precisely what those processes might become through interaction, emergence and self organisation, but we can establish conceptual parameters that guide and delineate the space of possibilities. Indeed this fact is so transparently obvious that many commentators in the humanities have been pushed to remark that interaction is merely interpretation, and so called new media is not new at all; that one interacts with a book in much the same way as a digital artifact. After all, post-structuralist theory had established the “death of the author” in the 1970s – the a priori that all cultural artifacts are open to interpretation, where all meanings must be completed by the reader. The concept of the “open work” (Eco 6) has been an established post modern concept for over 30 years and is commonly recognised as a feature of surrealist montage, poetry, the writings of James Joyce, even advertising design, where a purposive space for engagement and interpretation of a message is designated, without which the communication does not “work”. However, this concept is also most successfully employed in relation to installation art and, more recently, interactive art as a reflection of the artist’s conscious decision to leave part of a work open to interpretation and/or interaction. Art & Complex Systems One of the key projects of Embracing Complexity in Design has been to look at the relationship between art and complex systems. There is a relatively well established history of exploring art objects as complex systems in themselves that finds its origins in the systems art movement of the 1970s. In his paper “Observing ‘Systems Art’ from a Systems-Theroretical Perspective”, Francis Halsall defines systems art as “emerging in the 1960s and 1970s as a new paradigm in artistic practice … displaying an interest in the aesthetics of networks, the exploitation of new technology and New Media, unstable or de-materialised physicality, the prioritising of non-visual aspects, and an engagement (often politicised) with the institutional systems of support (such as the gallery, discourse, or the market) within which it occurs” (Halsall 7). More contemporarily, “Open Systems: Rethinking Art c.1970”, at Tate Modern, London, focuses upon systems artists “rejection of art’s traditional focus on the object, to wide-ranging experiments al focus on the object, to wide-ranging experiments with media that included dance, performance and…film & video” (De Salvo 3). Artists include Andy Warhol, Richard Long, Gilbert & George, Sol Lewitt, Eva Hesse and Bruce Nauman. In 2002, the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, New York, held an international exhibition entitled “Complexity; Art & Complex Systems”, that was concerned with “art as a distinct discipline offer[ing] its own unique approache[s] and epistemic standards in the consideration of complexity” (Galanter and Levy 5), and the organisers go on to describe four ways in which artists engage the realm of complexity: presentations of natural complex phenomena that transcend conventional scientific visualisation descriptive systems which describe complex systems in an innovative and often idiosyncratic way commentary on complexity science itself technical applications of genetic algorithms, neural networks and a-life ECiD artist Julian Burton makes work that visualises how companies operate in specific relation to their approach to change and innovation. He is a strategic artist and facilitator who makes “pictures of problems to help people talk about them” (Burton). Clients include public and private sector organisations such as Barclays, Shell, Prudential, KPMG and the NHS. He is quoted as saying “Pictures are a powerful way to engage and focus a group’s attention on crucial issues and challenges, and enable them to grasp complex situations quickly. I try and create visual catalysts that capture the major themes of a workshop, meeting or strategy and re-present them in an engaging way to provoke lively conversations” (Burton). This is a simple and direct method of using art as a knowledge elicitation tool that falls into the first and second categories above. The third category is demonstrated by the ground breaking TechnoSphere, that was specifically inspired by complexity theory, landscape and artificial life. Launched in 1995 as an Arts Council funded online digital environment it was created by Jane Prophet and Gordon Selley. TechnoSphere is a virtual world, populated by artificial life forms created by users of the World Wide Web. The digital ecology of the 3D world, housed on a server, depends on the participation of an on-line public who accesses the world via the Internet. At the time of writing it has attracted over a 100,000 users who have created over a million creatures. The artistic exploration of technical applications is by default a key field for researching the convergence of trans-metadisciplinary methodologies. Troy Innocent’s lifeSigns evolves multiple digital media languages “expressed as a virtual world – through form, structure, colour, sound, motion, surface and behaviour” (Innocent). The work explores the idea of “emergent language through play – the idea that new meanings may be generated through interaction between human and digital agents”. Thus this artwork combines three areas of converging research – artificial life; computational semiotics and digital games. In his paper “What Is Generative Art? Complexity Theory as a Context for Art Theory”, Philip Galanter describes all art as generative on the basis that it is created from the application of rules. Yet, as demonstrated above, what is significantly different and important about digital interactivity, as opposed to its predecessor, interpretation, is its provision of a graphical user interface (GUI) to component parts of a text such as symbol, metaphor, narrative, etc for the multiple “authors” and the multiple “readers” in a digitally interactive space of possibility. This offers us tangible, instantaneous reproduction and dissemination of interpretations of an artwork. Conclusion: Digital Interactivity – A Complex Medium Digital interaction of any sort is thus a graphic model of the complex process of communication. Here, complexity does not need deconstructing, representing nor modelling, as the aesthetics (as in apprehended by the senses) of the graphical user interface conveniently come first. Design for digital interactive media is thus design for complex adaptive systems. The theoretical and methodological relations between complexity science and design can clearly be expounded especially well through post-structuralism. The work of Barthes, Derrida & Foucault offers us the notion of all cultural artefacts as texts or systems of signs, whose meanings are not fixed but rather sustained by networks of relationships. Implemented in a digital environment post-structuralist theory is tangible complexity. Strangely, whilst Philip Galanter states that science has no necessary over reaching claim to the study of complexity, he then argues conversely that “contemporary art theory rooted in skeptical continental philosophy [reduces] art to social construction [as] postmodernism, deconstruction and critical theory [are] notoriously elusive, slippery, and overlapping terms and ideas…that in fact [are] in the business of destabilising apparently clear and universal propositions” (4). This seems to imply that for Galanter, post modern rejections of grand narratives necessarily will exclude the “new scientific paradigm” of complexity, a paradigm that he himself is looking to be universal. Whilst he cites Lyotard (6) describing both political and linguistic reasons why postmodern art celebrates plurality, denying any progress towards singular totalising views, he fails to appreciate what happens if that singular totalising view incorporates interactivity? Surely complexity is pluralistic by its very nature? In the same vein, if language for Derrida is “an unfixed system of traces and differences … regardless of the intent of the authored texts … with multiple equally legitimate meanings” (Galanter 7) then I have heard no better description of the signifiers, signifieds, connotations and denotations of digital culture. Complexity in its entirety can also be conversely understood as the impact of digital interactivity upon culture per se which has a complex causal relation in itself; Qvortups notion of a “communications event” (9) such as the Danish publication of the Mohammed cartoons falls into this category. Yet a complex causality could be traced further into cultural processes enlightening media theory; from the relationship between advertising campaigns and brand development; to the exposure and trajectory of the celebrity; describing the evolution of visual language in media cultures and informing the relationship between exposure to representation and behaviour. In digital interaction the terms art, design and media converge into a process driven, performative event that demonstrates emergence through autopoietic processes within a designated space of possibility. By insisting that all artwork is generative Galanter, like many other writers, negates the medium entirely which allows him to insist that generative art is “ideologically neutral” (Galanter 10). Generative art, like all digitally interactive artifacts are not neutral but rather ideologically plural. Thus, if one integrates Qvortups (8) delineation of medium theory and complexity theory we may have what we need; a first theory of a complex medium. Through interactive media complexity theory is the first post modern science; the first science of culture. References Bowman, Shane, and Chris Willis. We Media. 21 Sep. 2003. 9 March 2007 http://www.hypergene.net/wemedia/weblog.php>. Burton, Julian. “Hedron People.” 9 March 2007 http://www.hedron.com/network/assoc.php4?associate_id=14>. Cahir, Jayde, and Sarah James. “Complex: Call for Papers.” M/C Journal 9 Sep. 2006. 7 March 2007 http://journal.media-culture.org.au/journal/upcoming.php>. De Salvo, Donna, ed. Open Systems: Rethinking Art c. 1970. London: Tate Gallery Press, 2005. Eco, Umberto. The Open Work. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1989. Galanter, Phillip, and Ellen K. Levy. Complexity: Art & Complex Systems. SDMA Gallery Guide, 2002. Galanter, Phillip. “Against Reductionism: Science, Complexity, Art & Complexity Studies.” 2003. 9 March 2007 http://isce.edu/ISCE_Group_Site/web-content/ISCE_Events/ Norwood_2002/Norwood_2002_Papers/Galanter.pdf>. Halsall, Francis. “Observing ‘Systems-Art’ from a Systems-Theoretical Perspective”. CHArt 2005. 9 March 2007 http://www.chart.ac.uk/chart2005/abstracts/halsall.htm>. Innocent, Troy. “Life Signs.” 9 March 2007 http://www.iconica.org/main.htm>. Johnson, Jeffrey. “Embracing Complexity in Design (ECiD).” 2007. 9 March 2007 http://www.complexityanddesign.net/>. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984. McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1962. Mitleton-Kelly, Eve, ed. Complex Systems and Evolutionary Perspectives on Organisations. Elsevier Advanced Management Series, 2003. Prophet, Jane. “Jane Prophet.” 9 March 2007 http://www.janeprophet.co.uk/>. Qvortup, Lars. “Understanding New Digital Media.” European Journal of Communication 21.3 (2006): 345-356. Tedinnick, Luke. “Post Structuralism, Hypertext & the World Wide Web.” Aslib 59.2 (2007): 169-186. Wilson, Edward Osborne. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. New York: A.A. Knoff, 1998. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Cham, Karen, and Jeffrey Johnson. "Complexity Theory: A Science of Cultural Systems?." M/C Journal 10.3 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/08-cham-johnson.php>. APA Style Cham, K., and J. Johnson. (Jun. 2007) "Complexity Theory: A Science of Cultural Systems?," M/C Journal, 10(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/08-cham-johnson.php>.

This article reflects upon the process of the making and screening of an interactive short film called Textual @traction, which I wrote and directed. The film is 12 minutes long, 35mm film, and shows how a series of messages sent to a lost mobile phone inadvertently allows two gay men to declare their love for each other. In the form of a puzzle, the film denies sight of the crucial messages sent between the characters, messages which motivate their actions. However, through the simple use of SMS (Short Message System) text technology, the audience can receive each of these messages on their own mobile phones as they watch the film in the cinema. Billed as an interactive event with prior information for audience telephone registration, the film has been screened at cinemas, film festivals, and conferences as well as on broadcast television. To receive the text messages during the film, the phone owner is asked to send a message before the screening to a five-digit number that registers their telephone for the event. If audience members do not have a mobile phone, they must share with another audience member or try to solve the puzzle of the film without messages. Messages are sent to audience members’ mobile/cell phones from a laptop computer by a bulk SMS delivery programme, via an SMS gateway, directly to the appropriate national mobile telephone network provider, guaranteeing split-second accuracy. When appropriate and depending on the location of the screening, audience members can also choose the language of the messages when they register. Textual @traction was nominated for UK BAFTA Interactive Award 2005 and won the Best New Media: Interactive Award at the Celtic Film Festival 2005. It has been shown in a number of international film festivals, including the International Festival of New Film, in Split, Croatia 2004; the International Short Film Festival in Los Angeles 2005(Academy-listed); and the Atlantic Film Festival, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 2005. It had its broadcast premier, and world-first for an interactive film, on S4C (Sianel Pedwar Cymru), the Welsh Language Channel with its Welsh title, ‘Caru T x’, on 25 Jan. 2006. This article addresses the audience’s experience of this interactive event, speculating on the relative audience/user positions inherent in the two technologies (cinema and mobile telephone) and on whether or not their combination can be described as a collaboration. Underpinning this speculation is the assumption that modes of representation and communication construct the subject/user in specific ways and that the Textual @traction interactive event requires of the audience member to occupy both the position of cinema viewer and of phone user alternately during the event if they are to ‘complete’ the fiction. Following on from this assumption, I have set out a number of oppositions: Live/Dead, Social/Individual, Intimate/Anonymous, and Passive/Active, against which the differences between the two technologies and the ways they construct the viewer/user are posited. These polarities also allow exploration of the various aspects of the suspension of disbelief assumed by the viewer of the film and whether the interruption to the flow of images and sounds on the cinema screen by the actions required of the viewer to retrieve and read the telephone messages dismantles that suspension by spoiling the viewer’s identification with the characters, undermining their assumptions governing the world of the film, and shattering its temporal and spatial coherence. As writer and director of the film, my initial intention was not to set out to explore these questions at all. Once the story took shape and I saw the possibility that the only dialogue in the film was that delivered by text message, it was a short step (albeit, initially, a frivolous one!) to investigate the possibility of delivering those messages to the audience during the screening of the film. I dislike reading diegetic written text on the cinema screen, believing it to be a betrayal of cinema’s essential qualities: it is a medium of pictures and sounds, not words. Of course, once it became clear that it was going to be possible to send time-specific messages to the audience members, enabling them to simultaneously read the very same message the character on screen is reading, I soon became intrigued by the potential effect this would have on the audience. Would it ‘deepen’ the process of identification with the characters? None of the characters in the film are aware of each other’s identity when they communicate and thus the narrative unfolds with dramatic irony. Would the audience’s resulting privileged knowledge in relation to the characters be enhanced by the film’s interactive dimension, because the characters are ‘unaware’ that the audience members are reading ‘their messages’? The following explores these questions and is, to a large extent, a product of observation and analysis of the interactive event, post-event, and also includes reflection on comments from audience members that have attended the event. Live/Dead Textual @traction has been constructed according to the principles of classic continuity, with every shot contributing to the narrative chain. At the end of the film, there is closure, both the conventional culmination and the objective of the classic (Hollywood) narrative, the classic continuity approach. Textual @traction, like all forms of cinema—whether classic narrative, avant-garde, multi-screen, or home movie—is a record of past events. In this film we engage with re-animated past events at twenty-four still frames a second, willingly suppressing whatever knowledge and awareness of apparatus and artifice we possess. However, while knowledge of a process of construction and presentation are suppressed, there is no necessity for the viewer to believe that the events on screen are happening as we observe them. We know these events are in the past; rather, it is the knowledge of the active arrangement of these discreet, past events (shots, scenes, sequences…) into a natural flow that we necessarily suppress. This is achievable, of course, by our unconscious operation of a complex system that organises this flow into spatial, temporal, and narrative coherence. ‘Film language’ is the term given to this internalised vocabulary we bring to bear on a film to make sense of what we see and hear—modified in each film, some more than others. It allows us to understand spatial and temporal construction, to accept ellipses, parallel action and so on. It is a very complex system, which in classical continuity is mobilised in the service of the story and rendered invisible, so that a film unfolds as if conforming to natural laws (Bazin; Metz; Monaco). I made the decision at an early stage in the development process for Textual @traction that the film would do precisely this. While I wanted the film to be challenging and ‘experimental’, I believed its potential for breaking new ground resided in the realm of the juxtaposition/collaboration of the two technologies and its impact on the viewer’s engagement with the fictional world of the story. The messages would necessarily be disruptive of a mode of presentation that is sacrosanct (at least in mainstream cinema) and I thought the tighter the narrative chain, the more apparent the effects of this juxtaposition/collaboration would be. Disruption does occur when the viewer receives a message (there are eleven in all during the 12 minutes of the film) and it is at these points that the viewer becomes phone user and the recipient of a ‘live’ communication that is time-specific. Technically, each message is sent from the bulk-messaging programme to all the registered phones at the same time so that their arrival coincides with the arrival of the ‘same message’ in the on-screen character’s phone: audience member and on-screen character then read the same message simultaneously. To achieve this, the start time of the computer programme and the start time of the film projection in the cinema have to coincide exactly. One always presumes that text messages sent to our phones originate with a person, even those that are anonymous (news and sports alerts, etc.). The assumption underlying the use of the messages in Textual @traction is that, since according to the classic narrative cinema-effect we ‘become’ each character in order to understand what motivates their actions (identifying most energetically with the protagonist), receiving the same text messages they are receiving and reading them at the same time as they are is consistent with this process of identification, although stretching it to its limits. Crucial to the achievement of identification within the classic continuity approach is the point-of view shot, and it is this element that the messages ‘substitute’ or, perhaps, ‘literalise’ in the film (Bordwell 29-33; Branigan; Gaut 260-270). Conventionally in a film, when a character looks at something that is significant to the story, the look is followed on screen by the point-of-view shot, which shows the audience what is being seen by that character. In Textual @traction, point-of-view shots are deployed in this conventional manner. Moreover, as the main character in the film is a photographer whom we see taking photographs early in the film, the act of looking and the views he sees are, in fact, clearly foregrounded in a number of shot-reverse shot sequences. However, when we see characters looking at their phones and reading the messages they’ve been sent by other characters in the film, these shots are not followed by point-of-view shots that show the messages they are reading. Instead, the spectators in the cinema ‘enact’ their own point-of-view shot as they look at the same message on their phone screens in their hands. In a ‘literal’ sense, the audience members, at these points, ‘become’ the characters. Thus, in Textual @traction there is a two-fold process that reverses the live/dead polarity of cinema. Firstly, the arrival of the message in the audience-member’s phone transforms the past event on the screen to a live one. The suspension of disbelief in the viewer is heightened in order to accept the impossibility of acquiring the same knowledge the people on screen are acquiring, at the same time. Secondly, the viewer in the cinema, when reading the messages, ‘becomes’ the fictional character, performing a live enactment of the point-of view shot that is missing on screen. In both processes, phone technology bestows its live-ness to the dead world of the film—at least momentarily, until rational thought points out its absurdity. Social/Individual While going to the cinema is a social activity, the apparatus of cinema is organised in such a way as to individuate the cinema experience. The combination of the dimming of the auditorium lights to darkness and the seating arrangement encourages the viewer to suppress the awareness of others. The experience can then become intensely private. While there are physical and aural constraints on the viewer’s behaviour, imposed mainly to guarantee other viewers’ enjoyment (including, ordinarily, the prohibition of mobile phone use!), once seated and still, the viewer feels entitled to respond to the action on the screen in whatever way appropriate: they can smile, shudder, or weep with impunity. Additionally, the optics of the lens (the cinema projector reproducing the camera’s), in conjunction with the design of the auditorium itself, continues the tradition of Renaissance perspective in providing a single vanishing point that guarantees centrality to each viewer in relation to the scene depicted however many viewers there are in the cinema, wherever they are sitting. As far as the apparatus of cinema is concerned, there is no privileged view of the visual field displayed on the screen; each viewer in the auditorium see the same view, wherever they sit, centred and interpolated individually. Text-messaging is one-to-one communication par excellence. It takes speech telephone privacy one step further: even in a situation where both sender and receiver are in public spaces, surrounded by people, two-way communication can be completely private. When every member of the audience in a screening of Textual @traction receives text messages, they receive them at the same time as everyone else, and they assume they are receiving the same message. Emphasised by the cacophony of (individually-chosen) text alerts as each message reaches its destination within split seconds of each other, the simultaneity and the common address transforms what is usually an individual and private mode of communication into a collective, social one. At the same time, the individuating effect of the cinematic apparatus is undermined. Awareness of their counterparts’ presence returns, the light from individual phone screens illuminate the viewers’/phones users’ faces as they retrieve and read their messages and they look around the auditorium to compare their reactions with those of others. In those moments, the social/individual polarity as it relates to the two technologies is reversed: the phone’s from individual to social; cinema, from individuating to collectivising. Intimate/Anonymous While the apparatus of cinema individuates, the address of cinema is anonymous, making no adjustment for the individual (Baudry; Comolli; De Lauretis). Of course, there is specificity in the address of most cinema: the various genre of commercial film, as well as the varieties of independent and avant-garde films, presume certain audiences and address these audiences on the basis of a shared set of assumptions and expectations. These include individual films’ themes, the forms of narrative (or non-narrative), its variety of characters, the pleasures the films afford, and so on. However, cinema is not discursive. It cannot by ‘adjusted’ to suit the individual. The Intimate/Anonymous polarity is one that draws out the difference between a mode of representation, in this case cinema, and a mode of communication, text messaging. The former presents a completed artefact of some kind while the latter is a technology that allows for discursive activity between sender and receiver. Of course, various forms of interactive art are necessarily making this notion of the ‘artefact’ problematic, allowing the individual viewer to organise and re-organise narratives, modify environments, and create unique assemblages of images and sounds, often enabled by sophisticated computer programmes. During such interaction, individuals may create never-to-be repeated experiences brought about by complex, randomised interfaces. Nevertheless, these are examples of interaction with the artefact and while they may be unique, they are also anonymous. If discursive activity between users is achieved in these circumstances then the technology by definition becomes a mode of communication, however mediated by technology or programming. Telephone communication is all about individual address, both in spoken and text language. A text messages is either sent to elicit a response or it is the response. Unless it is an unsolicited, anonymous message, a text message is a specific and personal missive to the individual, its specificity arising from the sender’s knowledge of the receiver. Receiving such text messages during Textual @traction (and because of the sexual tenor of some of the messages, they are especially ‘personal’)—‘sent’ to the audience members ‘unwittingly’ by the individual fictional characters on screen—transforms the address of the film from anonymous to intimate, from general to individual. The intimacy associated with text messaging enhances our identification with the on-screen characters because we are given an insight into their motivations by being (voyeuristically) included what is generally a private discourse. For those who have experienced the Textual @traction interactive event and who have expressed an opinion about it, it does seem that it was this dimension of the experience that was a particular source of pleasure. Passive/Active In mainstream cinema we enter the auditorium and we sit down to face the screen, on which the film appears. While we watch and listen we may eat and drink, shout, weep, and laugh. We can also leave if we disapprove of the film or of the behaviour of others around us. While all these activities (and more) are possible, none will impact on what is happening on the screen, nor, crucially, on the flow of information that constructs our understanding of the characters’ actions and the narrative in general. In this respect, as an audience, we are effectively passive. The receiving of messages during Textual @traction invites the audience to collaborate actively in the final form of the narrative that is the interactive event, completing the fictional world constructed by film and text messages together. The information they receive by text message enhances their understanding of both character motivation and of the narrative in general. Without their activity, the film is a puzzle. Added to the conceptual activity that this involves, there is also the physical activity and the psychological adjustment: when the audience members’ message alert sounds, they have to undertake a number of keystrokes on their keypad in order to bring the message up on the phone screen, then they have to read the message and construe the message’s relevance to the characters on screen, before returning to the cinema-screen element of the event once more. Conclusion There is no doubt that the Textual @traction interactive event strains credulity, or, to put it another way, depends on an enhancement of the suspension of disbelief normally accustomed to by a cinema audience. The notion that on-screen characters are ‘unwittingly’ sending text messages to audience members and that they are reading them ‘at the same time’ is nothing short of absurd. Absurdity and its wilful disregard by the audience, however, is no stranger to cinema, as we know. What I have attempted to do in this paper is to account for the success of the Textual @traction interactive event, despite its absurdity, by identifying three forms of collaboration that it depends on: collaboration with the text in order to complete the fiction, a collaboration between cinema as a mode of representation and messaging as a mode of communication that the audience member enables, and a collaboration between cinema/subject and telephone/subject performed by each audience member. As I have indicated, when these collaborations take place, some of the habitual characteristics of both modes are transformed or modified: text messaging becomes a social rather than a private activity, while the apparatus of cinema transforms from one that individuates to one that collectivises. In addition, the address of cinema, normally anonymous, is bestowed with intimacy by the text messaging, and finally, a normally passive audience is active in their involvement to complete the fiction. References Baudry, Jean-Louis. “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus.” Film Quarterly 28.2 (Winter 1974-5): 39-47. Bazin, André. “The Evolution of the Language of the Cinema.” What Is Cinema? Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: U of California P, 1967. 23-40. Branigan, Edward. “Formal Permutations of the Point-of-View Shot”. Screen 16.3 (1975): 54-64. Bordwell, D., J. Staiger, and K. Thompson. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. London: Routledge, 1985. Comolli, Jean-Louis. “Technique and Ideology: Camera, Perspective, Depth of Field.” Movies and Methods Vol. II. Ed, Bill Nichols. Berkeley: U of California P, 1985. 40-57. De Lauretis, T., and S. Heath. The Cinematic Apparatus. London: Macmillan, 1980. Gaut, Berys. “Identification and Emotion in Narrative Film.” Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures: An Anthology. Ed. Noel Carroll and Jinhee Choi. London: Blackwell, 2006. Metz, Christian. Film Language. Trans. Michael Taylor. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1975 [2004]. Monaco, James. How to Read a Film. 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Morris, Ieuan. "Interruption/Interaction/Collaboration: A Critical Appraisal of the Textual @traction Interactive Event." M/C Journal 9.2 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/15-morris.php>. APA Style Morris, I. (May 2006) "Interruption/Interaction/Collaboration: A Critical Appraisal of the Textual @traction Interactive Event," M/C Journal, 9(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0605/15-morris.php>.

IntroductionMusically-inclined people often speak about the soundtrack of their life, with certain songs indelibly linked to a specific moment. When hearing a particular song, it can “easily evoke a whole time and place, distant feelings and emotions, and memories of where we were, and with whom” (Lewis 135). Music has the ability to provide maps to real and imagined spaces, positioning people within a larger social environment where songs “are never just a song, but a connection, a ticket, a pass, an invitation, a node in a complex network” (Kun 3). When someone is lost in the music, they can find themselves transported somewhere else entirely without physically moving. This can be a blessing in some situations, for example, while living in a disaster zone, when almost any other time or place can seem better than the here and now. The city of Christchurch, New Zealand was hit by a succession of damaging earthquakes beginning with a magnitude 7.1 earthquake in the early hours of 4 September 2010. The magnitude 6.3 earthquake of 22 February 2011, although technically an aftershock of the September earthquake, was closer and shallower, with intense ground acceleration that caused much greater damage to the city and its people (“Scientists”). It was this February earthquake that caused the total or partial collapse of many inner city buildings, and claimed the lives of 185 people. Everybody in Christchurch lost someone or something that day: their house or job; family members, friends, or colleagues; the city as they knew it; or their normal way of life. The broken central city was quickly cordoned off behind fences, with the few entry points guarded by local and international police and armed military personnel.In the aftermath of a disaster, circumstances and personal attributes will influence how people react, think and feel about the experience. Surviving a disaster is more than not dying, “survival is to do with quality of life [and] involves progressing from the event and its aftermath, and transforming the experience” (Hodgkinson and Stewart 2). In these times of heightened stress, music can be a catalyst for sharing and expressing emotions, connecting people and communities, and helping them make sense of what has happened (Carr 38; Webb 437). This article looks at some of the ways that popular songs and musical memories helped residents of a broken city remember the past and come to terms with the present.BackgroundExisting songs can take on new significance after a catastrophic event, even without any alteration. Songs such as Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans? and Prayer for New Orleans have been given new emotional layers by those who were displaced or affected by Hurricane Katrina (Cooper 265; Sullivan 15). A thirty year-old song by Randy Newman, Louisiana, 1927, became something of “a contemporary anthem, its chorus – ‘Louisiana, they’re trying to wash us away’ – bearing new relevance” (Blumenfeld 166). Contemporary popular songs have also been re-mixed or revised after catastrophic events, either by the original artist or by others. Elton John’s Candle in the Wind and Beyonce’s Halo have each been revised twice by the artist after tragedy and disaster (Doyle; McAlister), while radio stations in the United States have produced commemorative versions of popular songs to mark tragedies and their anniversaries (Beaumont-Thomas; Cantrell). The use and appreciation of music after disaster is a reminder that popular music is fluid, in that it “refuses to provide a uniform or static text” (Connell and Gibson 3), and can simultaneously carry many different meanings.Music provides a soundtrack to daily life, creating a map of meaning to the world around us, or presenting a reminder of the world as it once was. Tia DeNora explains that when people hear a song that was once heard in, and remains associated with, a particular time and place, it “provides a device for unfolding, for replaying, the temporal structure of that moment, [which] is why, for so many people, the past ‘comes alive’ to its soundtrack” (67). When a community is frequently and collectively casting their minds back to a time before a catastrophic change, a sense of community identity can be seen in the use of, and reaction to, particular songs. Music allows people to “locate themselves in different imaginary geographics at one and the same time” (Cohen 93), creating spaces for people to retreat into, small ‘audiotopias’ that are “built, imagined, and sustained through sound, noise, and music” (Kun 21). The use of musical escape holes is prevalent after disaster, as many once-familiar spaces that have changed beyond recognition or are no longer able to be physically visited, can be easily imagined or remembered through music. There is a particular type of longing expressed by those who are still at home and yet cannot return to the home they knew. Whereas nostalgia is often experienced by people far from home who wish to return or those enjoying memories of a bygone era, people after disaster often encounter a similar nostalgic feeling but with no change in time or place: a loss without leaving. Glenn Albrecht coined the term ‘solastalgia’ to represent “the form of homesickness one experiences when one is still at home” (35). This sense of being unable to find solace in one’s home environment can be brought on by natural disasters such as fire, flood, earthquakes or hurricanes, or by other means like war, mining, climate change or gentrification. Solastalgia is often felt most keenly when people experience the change first-hand and then have to adjust to life in a totally changed environment. This can create “chronic distress of a solastalgic kind [that] would persist well after the acute phase of post-traumatic distress” (Albrecht 36). Just as the visible, physical effects of disaster last for years, so too do the emotional effects, but there have been many examples of how the nostalgia inherent in a shared popular music soundtrack has eased the pain of solastalgia for a community that is hurting.Pop Songs and Nostalgia in ChristchurchIn September 2011, one year after the initial earthquake, the Bank of New Zealand (BNZ) announced a collaboration with Christchurch hip hop artist, Scribe, to remake his smash hit, Not Many, for charity. Back in 2003, Not Many debuted at number five on the New Zealand music charts, where it spent twelve weeks at number one and was crowned ‘Single of the Year’ (Sweetman, On Song 164). The punchy chorus heralded Scribe as a force to be reckoned with, and created a massive imprint on New Zealand popular culture with the line: “How many dudes you know roll like this? Not many, if any” (Scribe, Not Many). Music critic, Simon Sweetman, explains how “the hook line of the chorus [is now] a conversational aside that is practically unavoidable when discussing amounts… The words ‘not many’ are now truck-and-trailered with ‘if any’. If you do not say them, you are thinking them” (On Song 167). The strong links between artist and hometown – and the fact it is an enduringly catchy song – made it ideal for a charity remake. Reworded and reworked as Not Many Cities, the chorus now asks: “How many cities you know roll like this?” to which the answer is, of course, “not many, if any” (Scribe/BNZ, Not Many Cities). The remade song entered the New Zealand music charts at number 36 and the video was widely shared through social media but not all reception was positive. Parts of the video were shot in the city’s Red Zone, the central business district that was cordoned off from public access due to safety concerns. The granting of special access outraged some residents, with letters to the editor and online commentary expressing frustration that celebrities were allowed into the Red Zone to shoot a music video while those directly affected were not allowed in to retrieve essential items from residences and business premises. However, it is not just the Red Zone that features: the video switches between Scribe travelling around the broken inner city on the back of a small truck and lingering shots of carefully selected people, businesses, and groups – all with ties to the BNZ as either clients or beneficiaries of sponsorship. In some ways, Not Many Cities comes across like just another corporate promotional video for the BNZ, albeit with more emotion and a better soundtrack than usual. But what it has bequeathed is a snapshot of the city as it was in that liminal time: a landscape featuring familiar buildings, spaces and places which, although damaged, was still a recognisable version of the city that existed before the earthquakes.Before Scribe burst onto the music scene in the early 2000s, the best-known song about Christchurch was probably Christchurch (in Cashel St. I wait), an early hit from the Exponents (Mitchell 189). Initially known as the Dance Exponents, the group formed in Christchurch in the early 1980s and remained local and national favourites thanks to a string of hits Sweetman refers to as “the question-mark songs,” such as Who Loves Who the Most?, Why Does Love Do This to Me?, and What Ever Happened to Tracey? (Best Songwriter). Despite disbanding in 1999, the group re-formed to be the headline act of ‘Band Together’—a multi-artist, outdoor music event organised for the benefit of Christchurch residents by local musician, Jason Kerrison, formerly of the band OpShop. Attended by over 140,000 people (Anderson, Band Together), this nine-hour event brought joy and distraction to a shaken and stressed populace who, at that point in time (October 2010), probably thought the worst was over.The Exponents took the stage last, and chose Christchurch (in Cashel St. I Wait) as their final number. Every musician involved in the gig joined them on stage and the crowd rose to their feet, singing along with gusto. A local favourite since its release in 1985, the verses may have been a bit of a mumble for some, but the chorus rang out loud and clear across the park: Christchurch, In Cashel Street I wait,Together we will be,Together, together, together, One day, one day, one day,One day, one day, one daaaaaay! (Exponents, “Christchurch (in Cashel St. I Wait)”; lyrics written as sung)At that moment, forming an impromptu community choir of over 100,000 people, the audience was filled with hope and faith that those words would come true. Life would go on and people would gather together in Cashel Street and wait for normality to return, one day. Later the following year, the opening of the Re:Start container mall added an extra layer of poignancy to the song lyrics. Denied access to most of the city’s CBD, that one small part of Cashel Street now populated with colourful shipping containers was almost the only place in central Christchurch where people could wait. There are many music videos that capture the central city of Christchurch as it was in decades past. There are some local classics, like The Bats’ Block of Wood and Claudine; The Shallows’ Suzanne Said; Moana and the Moahunters’ Rebel in Me; and All Fall Down’s Black Gratten, which were all filmed in the 1980s or early 1990s (Goodsort, Re-Live and More Music). These videos provide many flashback moments to the city as it was twenty or thirty years ago. However, one post-earthquake release became an accidental musical time capsule. The song, Space and Place, was released in February 2013, but both song and video had been recorded not long before the earthquakes occurred. The song was inspired by the feelings experienced when returning home after a long absence, and celebrates the importance of the home town as “a place that knows you as well as you know it” (Anderson, Letter). The chorus features the line, “streets of common ground, I remember, I remember” (Franklin, Mayes, and Roberts, Space and Place), but it is the video, showcasing many of the Christchurch places and spaces only recently lost to the earthquakes, that tugs at people’s heartstrings. The video for Space and Place sweeps through the central city at night, with key heritage buildings like the Christ Church Cathedral, and the Catholic Basilica lit up against the night sky (both are still damaged and inaccessible). Producer and engineer, Rob Mayes, describes the video as “a love letter to something we all lost [with] the song and its lyrics [becoming] even more potent, poignant, and unexpectedly prescient post quake” (“Songs in the Key”). The Arts Centre features prominently in the footage, including the back alleys and archways that hosted all manner of night-time activities – sanctioned or otherwise – as well as many people’s favourite hangout, the Dux de Lux (the Dux). Operating from the corner of the Arts Centre site since the 1970s, the Dux has been described as “the city’s common room” and “Christchurch’s beating heart” by musicians mourning its loss (Anderson, Musicians). While the repair and restoration of some parts of the Arts Centre is currently well advanced, the Student Union building that once housed this inner-city social institution is not slated for reopening until 2019 (“Rebuild and Restore”), and whether the Dux will be welcomed back remains to be seen. Empty Spaces, Missing PlacesA Facebook group, ‘Save Our Dux,’ was created in early March 2011, and quickly filled with messages and memories from around the world. People wandered down memory lane together as they reminisced about their favourite gigs and memorable occasions, like the ‘Big Snow’ of 1992 when the Dux served up mulled wine and looked more like a ski chalet. Memories were shared about the time when the music video for the Dance Exponents’ song, Victoria, was filmed at the Dux and the Art Deco-style apartment building across the street. The reminiscing continued, establishing and strengthening connections, with music providing a stepping stone to shared experience and a sense of community. Physically restricted from visiting a favourite social space, people were converging in virtual hangouts to relive moments and remember places now cut off by the passing of time, the falling of bricks, and the rise of barrier fences.While waiting to find out whether the original Dux site can be re-occupied, the business owners opened new venues that housed different parts of the Dux business (live music, vegetarian food, and the bars/brewery). Although the fit-out of the restaurant and bars capture a sense of the history and charm that people associate with the Dux brand, the empty wasteland and building sites that surround the new Dux Central quickly destroy any illusion of permanence or familiarity. Now that most of the quake-damaged buildings have been demolished, the freshly-scarred earth of the central city is like a child’s gap-toothed smile. Wandering around the city and forgetting what used to occupy an empty space, wanting to visit a shop or bar before remembering it is no longer there, being at the Dux but not at the Dux – these are the kind of things that contributed to a feeling that local music writer, Vicki Anderson, describes as “lost city syndrome” (“Lost City”). Although initially worried she might be alone in mourning places lost, other residents have shared similar experiences. In an online comment on the article, one local resident explained how there are two different cities fighting for dominance in their head: “the new keeps trying to overlay the old [but] when I’m not looking at pictures, or in seeing it as it is, it’s the old city that pushes its way to the front” (Juniper). Others expressed relief that they were not the only ones feeling strangely homesick in their own town, homesick for a place they never left but that had somehow left them.There are a variety of methods available to fill the gaps in both memories and cityscape. The Human Interface Technology Laboratory New Zealand (HITLab), produced a technological solution: interactive augmented reality software called CityViewAR, using GPS data and 3D models to show parts of the city as they were prior to the earthquakes (“CityViewAR”). However, not everybody needed computerised help to remember buildings and other details. Many people found that, just by listening to a certain song or remembering particular gigs, it was not just an image of a building that appeared but a multi-sensory event complete with sound, movement, smell, and emotion. In online spaces like the Save Our Dux group, memories of favourite bands and songs, crowded gigs, old friends, good times, great food, and long nights were shared and discussed, embroidering a rich and colourful tapestry about a favourite part of Christchurch’s social scene. ConclusionMusic is strongly interwoven with memory, and can recreate a particular moment in time and place through the associations carried in lyrics, melody, and imagery. Songs can spark vivid memories of what was happening – when, where, and with whom. A song shared is a connection made: between people; between moments; between good times and bad; between the past and the present. Music provides a soundtrack to people’s lives, and during times of stress it can also provide many benefits. The lyrics and video imagery of songs made in years gone by have been shown to take on new significance and meaning after disaster, offering snapshots of times, people and places that are no longer with us. Even without relying on the accompanying imagery of a video, music has the ability to recreate spaces or relocate the listener somewhere other than the physical location they currently occupy. This small act of musical magic can provide a great deal of comfort when suffering solastalgia, the feeling of homesickness one experiences when the familiar landscapes of home suddenly change or disappear, when one has not left home but that home has nonetheless gone from sight. The earthquakes (and the demolition crews that followed) have created a lot of empty land in Christchurch but the sound of popular music has filled many gaps – not just on the ground, but also in the hearts and lives of the city’s residents. 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Durham: Duke UP, 2012. 145-175.Cantrell, Rebecca. “These Emotional Musical Tributes Are Still Powerful 20 Years after Oklahoma City Bombing.” KFOR 18 Apr. 2015. <http://kfor.com/2015/04/18/these-emotional-musical-tributes-are-still-powerful-20-years-after-oklahoma-city-bombing/>.Carr, Revell. ““We Never Will Forget”: Disaster in American Folksong from the Nineteenth Century to September 11, 2011.” Voices 30.3/4 (2004): 36-41. “CityViewAR.” HITLab NZ, ca. 2011. <http://www.hitlabnz.org/index.php/products/cityviewar>. Cohen, Sara. Decline, Renewal and the City in Popular Music Culture: Beyond the Beatles. Hampshire: Ashgate, 2007. Connell, John, and Chris Gibson. Soundtracks: Popular Music, Identity and Place. London: Routledge, 2003.Cooper, B. Lee. “Right Place, Wrong Time: Discography of a Disaster.” Popular Music and Society 31.2 (2008): 263-4. DeNora, Tia. Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. 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James Lull. London: Sage, 1992. 134-151. Mayes, Rob. “Songs in the Key-Space and Place.” Failsafe Records. Mar. 2013. <http://www.failsaferecords.com/>.McAlister, Elizabeth. “Soundscapes of Disaster and Humanitarianism.” Small Axe 16.3 (2012): 22-38. Mitchell, Tony. “Flat City Sounds Redux: A Musical ‘Countercartography’ of Christchurch.” Home, Land and Sea: Situating Music in Aotearoa New Zealand. Eds. Glenda Keam and Tony Mitchell. Auckland: Pearson, 2011. 176-194.“Rebuild and Restore.” Arts Centre, ca. 2016. <http://www.artscentre.org.nz/rebuild---restore.html>.“Scientists Find Rare Mix of Factors Exacerbated the Christchurch Quake.” GNS [Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences Limited] Science 16 Mar. 2011. <http://www.gns.cri.nz/Home/News-and-Events/Media-Releases/Multiple-factors>. Sullivan, Jack. “In New Orleans, Did the Music Die?” Chronicle of Higher Education 53.3 (2006): 14-15. Sweetman, Simon. “New Zealand’s Best Songwriter.” Stuff 18 Feb. 2011. <http://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/blogs/blog-on-the-tracks/4672532/New-Zealands-best-songwriter>.———. On Song. Auckland: Penguin, 2012.Webb, Gary. “The Popular Culture of Disaster: Exploring a New Dimension of Disaster Research.” Handbook of Disaster Research. Eds. Havidan Rodriguez, Enrico Quarantelli and Russell Dynes. New York: Springer, 2006. 430-440. MusicAll Fall Down. “Black Gratten.” Wallpaper Coat [EP]. New Zealand: Flying Nun, 1987.Bats. “Block of Wood” [single]. New Zealand: Flying Nun, 1987. ———. “Claudine.” And Here’s Music for the Fireside [EP]. New Zealand: Flying Nun, 1985. Beyonce. “Halo.” I Am Sacha Fierce. USA: Columbia, 2008.Charlie Miller. “Prayer for New Orleans.” Our New Orleans. USA: Nonesuch, 2005. (Dance) Exponents. “Christchurch (in Cashel St. I Wait).” Expectations. New Zealand: Mushroom Records, 1985.———. “Victoria.” Prayers Be Answered. 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In one of the earliest films about a whistleblower, On the Waterfront (1954), the dock worker Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando), who also works for the union boss and mobster Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb), decides to testify in court against him and uncover corruption and murder. By doing so he will not only suffer retribution from Friendly but also be seen as a “stool pigeon” by his co-workers, friends, and neighbours who will shun him, and he will be “marked” forever by his deed. Nonetheless, he decides to do the right thing. Already it is clear that in most cases the whistleblowers are not simply the ones who reveal things, but they themselves are also revealed.My aim in this article is to explore the depiction of Edward Snowden and Julian Assange in fiction film and its connection to what I would like to call, with Slavoj Žižek, “Hollywood ideology”; the heroisation of the “ordinary guy” against a big institution or a corrupt individual, as it is the case in Snowden (2016) on the one hand, and at the same time the impossibility of true systemic critique when the one who is criticising is “outside of the system”, as Assange in The Fifth Estate (2013). Both films also rely on the notion of individualism and convey conflicting messages in regard to understanding the perception of whistleblowers today. Snowden and AssangeAlthough there are many so called “whistleblower films” since On the Waterfront, like Serpico (1973), All the President’s Men (1976), or Silkwood (1983), to name but a few (for a comprehensive list see https://ew.com/movies/20-whistleblower-movies-to-watch/?), in this article I will focus on the most recent films that deal with Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. These are the most prominent cases of whistleblowing in the last decade put to film. They are relevant today also regarding their subject matter—privacy. Revealing secrets that concern privacy in this day and age is of importance and is pertinent even to the current Coronavirus crisis, where the question of privacy again arises in form of possible tracking apps, in the age of ever expanding “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff).Even if Assange is not strictly speaking a whistleblower, an engagement with his work in this context is indispensable since his outsider status, up to a point, resembles those of Snowden or Manning. They are not only important because they can be considered as “authentic heroe[s] of our time” (Žižek, Pandemic, 7), but also because of their depiction which differs in a very crucial way: while Snowden is depicted as a “classic” whistleblower (an American patriot who did his duty, someone from the “inside”), Assange’s action are coming from the outside of the established system and are interpreted as a selfish act, as it is stated in the film: “It was always about him.”Whistleblowers In his Whistleblower’s Handbook, Kohn writes: “who are these whistleblowers? Sometimes they are people you read about with admiration in the newspaper. Other times they are your co-workers or neighbours. However, most whistleblowers are regular workers performing their jobs” (Kohn, xi). A whistleblower, as the employee or a “regular worker”, can be regarded as someone who is a “nobody” at first, an invisible “cog in the wheel” of a certain institution, a supposedly devoted and loyal worker, who, through an act of “betrayal”, becomes a “somebody”. They do something truly significant, and by doing so becomes a hero to some and a traitor to others. Their persona suddenly becomes important.The wrongdoings that are uncovered by the whistleblower are for the most part not simply isolated missteps, but of a systemic nature, like the mass surveillance by the National Security Agency (NSA) uncovered by Snowden. The problem with narratives that deal with whistleblowing is that the focus inevitably shifts from the systemic problem (surveillance, war crimes, etc.) to the whistleblower as an individual. Moretti states that the interest of the media regarding whistleblowing, if one compares the reactions to the leaking of the “Pentagon Papers” regarding the Vietnam War in the 1970s by Daniel Ellsberg and to Snowden’s discoveries, shifted from the deed itself to the individual. In the case of Ellsberg, Moretti writes:the legitimate questions were not about him and what motivated him, but rather inquiry on (among other items) the relationship between government and media; whether the U.S. would be damaged militarily or diplomatically because of the release of the papers; the extent to which the media were acting as watchdogs; and why Americans needed to know about these items. (8)This shift of public interest goes along, according to Moretti, with the corporate ownership of media (7), where profit is the primary goal and therefore sensationalism is the order of the day, which is inextricably linked to the focus on the “scandalous” individual. The selfless and almost self-effacing act of whistleblowing becomes a narrative that constructs the opposite: yet another determined individual that through their sheer willpower achieves their goal, a notion that conforms to neoliberal ideology.Hollywood IdeologyThe endings of All the President’s Men and The Harder They Fall (1956), another early whistleblower film, twenty years apart, are very similar: they show the journalist eagerly typing away on his typewriter a story that will, in the case of the former, bring down the president of the United States and in the latter, bring an end to arranged fights in the boxing sport. This depiction of the free press vanquishing the evil doers, as Žižek states it, is exactly the point where “Hollywood ideology” becomes visible, which is:the ideology of such Hollywood blockbusters as All the President’s Men and The Pelican Brief, in which a couple of ordinary guys discover a scandal which reaches up to the president, forcing him to step down. Corruption is shown to reach the very top, yet the ideology of such works resides in their upbeat final message: what a great country ours must be, when a couple of ordinary guys like you and me can bring down the president, the mightiest man on Earth! (“Good Manners”)This message is of course part of Hollywood’s happy-ending convention that can be found even in films that deal with “serious” subject matters. The point of the happy end in this case is that before it is finally reached, the film can show corruption (Serpico), wrongdoings of big companies (The Insider, 1999), or sexual harassment (North Country, 2005). It is important that in the end all is—more or less—good. The happy ending need not necessarily be even truly “happy”—this depends on the general notion the film wants to convey (see for instance the ending of Silkwood, where the whistleblower is presumed to have been killed in the end). What is important in the whistleblower film is that the truth is out, justice has been served in one way or the other, the status quo has been re-established, and most importantly, there is someone out there who cares.These films, even when they appear to be critical of “the system”, are there to actually reassure their audiences in the workings of said system, which is (liberal) democracy supported by neoliberal capitalism (Frazer). Capitalism, on the other hand, is supported by the ideology of individualism which functions as a connecting tissue between the notions of democracy, capitalism, and film industry, since we are admiring exceptional individuals in performing acts of great importance. This, in turn, is encapsulated by the neoliberal mantra—“anyone can make it, only if they try heard enough”. As Bauman puts it more concretely, the risks and contradictions in a society are produced socially but are supposed to be solved individually (46).Individualism, as a part of the neoliberal capitalist ideology, is described already by Milton Friedman, who sees the individual as the “ultimate entity in the society” and the freedom of the individual as the “ultimate goal” within this society (12). What makes this an ideology is the fact that, in reality, the individual, or in the context of the market, the entrepreneur, is always-already tethered to and supported by the state, as Varoufakis has successfully proven (“Varoufakis/Chomsky discussion”). Therefore individualism is touted as an ideal to strive for, while for neoliberalism in order to function, the state is indispensable, which is often summed up in the formula “socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor” (Polychroniou). The heroic Hollywood individual, as shown in the whistleblower film, regardless of real-life events, is the perfect embodiment of individualist ideology of neoliberal capitalism—we are not seeing a stylised version of it, a cowboy or a masked vigilante, but a “real” person. It is paradoxically precisely the realism that we see in such films that makes them ideological: the “based on a true story” preamble and all the historical details that are there in order to create a fulfilling cinematic experience. All of this supports its ideology because, as Žižek writes, “the function of ideology is not to offer us a point of escape from our reality but to offer us the social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, real kernel” (Sublime Object 45). All the while Snowden mostly adheres to Hollywood ideology, The Fifth Estate also focuses on individualism, but goes in a different direction, and is more problematic – in the former we see the “ordinary guy” as the American hero, in the latter a disgruntled individual who reveals secrets of others for strictly personal reasons.SnowdenThere is an aspect of the whistleblower film that rings true and that is connected to Michel Foucault’s notion of power (“Truth and Power”). Snowden, through his employment at the NSA, is within a power relations network of an immensely powerful organisation. He uses “his” power, to expose the mass surveillance by the NSA. It is only through his involvement with this power network that he could get insight into and finally reveal what NSA is doing. Foucault writes that these resistances to power from the inside are “effective because they are formed right at the point where relations of power are exercised; resistance to power does not have to come from elsewhere to be real … It exists all the more by being in the same place as power” (Oushakine 206). In the case of whistleblowing, the resistance to power must come exactly from the inside in order to be effective since whistleblowers occupy the “same place as power” that they are up against and that is what in turn makes them “powerful”.Fig. 1: The Heroic Individual: Edward Snowden in SnowdenBut there is an underside to this. His “relationship” to the power structure he is confronting greatly affects his depiction as a whistleblower within the film—precisely because Snowden, unlike Assange, is someone from inside the system. He can still be seen as a patriot and a “disillusioned idealist” (Scott). In the film this is shown right at the beginning as Snowden, in his hotel room in Hong Kong, tells the documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras (Melissa Leo) and journalist Glenn Greenwald (Zachary Quinto) his name and who he is. The music swells and the film cuts to Snowden in uniform alongside other soldiers during a drill, when he was enlisted in the army before work for the NSA.Snowden resembles many of Stone’s typical characters, the all-American patriot being disillusioned by certain historical events, as in Born on the 4th of July (1989) and JFK (1991), which makes him question the government and its actions. It is generally of importance for a mainstream Hollywood film that the protagonist is relatable in order for the audiences to sympathise with them (Bordwell and Thompson 82). This is important not only regarding personal traits but, I would argue, also political views of the character. There needs to be no doubt in the mind of American audiences when it comes to films that deal with politics, that the protagonists are patriots.Stone’s film profits from this ambivalence in Snowden’s own political stance: at first he is more of a right winger who is a declared fan of Ayn Rand’s conservative-individualist manifesto Atlas Shrugged, then, after meeting his future partner Lindsey Mills, he turns slightly to the left, as he at one point states his support for President Obama. This also underlines the films ambiguity, as Oliver Stone openly stated about his Vietnam War film Platoon (1986) that “it could be embraced by … the right and the left. Essentially, most movies make their money in the middle” (Banff Centre). As Snowden takes the lie detector test as a part of the process of becoming a CIA agent, he confirms, quite sincerely it seems, that he thinks that the United States is the “greatest country in the world” and that the most important day in his life was 9/11. This again confirms his patriotic stance.Snowden is depicted as the exceptional individual, and at the same time the “ordinary guy”, who, through his act of courage, defied the all-powerful USA. During the aforementioned job interview scene, Snowden’s superior, Corbin O’Brian (Rhys Ifans), quotes Ayn Rand to him: “one man can stop the motor of the world”. Snowden states that he also believes that. The quote could serve as the film’s tagline, as a “universal truth” that seems to be at the core of American values and that also coincides with and reaffirms neoliberal ideology. Although it is undeniable that individuals can accomplish extraordinary feats, but when there is no systemic change, those can remain only solitary achievements that are only there to support the neoliberal “cult of the individual”.Snowden stands in total contrast to Assange in regard to his character and private life. There is nothing truly “problematic” about him, he seems to be an almost impeccable person, a “straight arrow”. This should make him a poster boy for American democracy and freedom of speech, and Stone tries to depict him in this way.Still, we are dealing with someone who cannot simply be redeemed as a patriot who did his duty. He cannot be unequivocally hailed as an all-American hero since betraying state secrets (and betrayal in general) is seen as a villainous act. For many Americans, and for the government, he will forever be remembered as a traitor. Greenwald writes that most of the people in the US, according to some surveys, still want to see Snowden in prison, even if they find that the surveillance by the NSA was wrong (365).Snowden remains an outcast and although the ending is not quite happy, since he must live in Russian exile, there is still a sense of an “upbeat final message” that ideologically colours the film’s ending.The Fifth EstateThe Fifth Estate is another example of the ideological view of the individual, but in this case with a twist. The film tries to be “objective” at first, showing the importance and impact of the newly established online platform WikiLeaks. However, towards the end of the film, it proceeds to dismantle Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch) with the “everyone has secrets” platitude, which effectively means that none of us should ever try to reveal any secrets of those in power, since all of us must have our own secrets we do not want revealed. The film is shown from the perspective of Assange’s former disgruntled associate Daniel Domscheit-Berg (Daniel Brühl), who wrote a book about his time at WikiLeaks on which the film is partly based on (Inside WikiLeaks). We see Assange through his eyes and delve into personal moments that are supposed to reveal the “truth” about the individual behind the project. In a cynical twist, it is Daniel who is the actual whistleblower, who reveals the secrets of WikiLeaks and its founder.Assange, as it is said in the film, is denounced as a “messiah” or a “prophet”, almost a cult leader who only wants to satisfy his perverse need for other people’s secrets, except that he is literally alone and has no followers and, unlike real cult leaders, needs no followers. The point of whistleblowing is exactly in the fact that it is a radical move, it is a big step forward in ending a wrongdoing. To denounce the radical stance of WikiLeaks is to misunderstand and undermine the whole notion of whistleblowing as a part of true changes in a society.The cult aspects are often referred to in the film when Assange’s childhood is mentioned. His mother was supposed to be in a cult, called “The Family”, and we should regard this as an important (and bad) influence on his character. This notion of the “childhood trauma” seems to be a crutch that is supposed to serve as a characterisation, something the scriptwriting-guru Robert McKee criticises as a screenwriting cliché: “do not reduce characters to case studies (an episode of child abuse is the cliché in vogue at the moment), for in truth there are no definitive explanations for anyone’s behaviour” (376).Although the film does not exaggerate the childhood aspect, it is still a motive that is supposed to shed some light into the “mystery” that is Assange. And it also ties into the question of the colour of his hair as a way of dismantling his lies. In a flashback that resembles a twist ending of an M. Night Shyamalan thriller, it turns out that Assange actually dyes his hair white, witnessed in secret by Daniel, instead of it turning naturally white, as Assange explains on few occasions but stating different reasons for it. Here he seems like a true movie villain and resembles the character of the Joker from The Dark Knight (2008), who also tells different stories about the origin of his facial scars. This mystery surrounding his origin makes the villain even more dangerous and, what is most important, unpredictable.Žižek also draws a parallel between Assange and Joker of the same film, whom he sees as the “figure of truth”, as Batman and the police are using lies in order to “protect” the citizens: “the film’s take-home message is that lying is necessary to sustain public morale: only a lie can redeem us” (“Good Manners”). Rather than interpreting Assange’s role in a positive way, as Žižek does, the film truly establishes him as a villain.Fig. 2: The Problematic Individual: Julian Assange in The Fifth EstateThe Fifth Estate ends with another cheap psychologisation of Assange on Daniel’s part as he describes the “true purpose” of WikiLeaks: “only someone so obsessed with his own secrets could’ve come up with a way to reveal everyone else’s”. This faux-psychological argument paints the whole WikiLeaks endeavour as Assange’s ego-trip and makes of him an egomaniac whose secret perverted pleasure is to reveal the secrets of others.Why is this so? Why are Woodward and Bernstein in All the President’s Men depicted as heroes and Assange is not? The true underlying conflict here is between classic journalism; where journalists can publish their pieces and get the acclaim for publishing the “new Pentagon Papers”, once again ensuring the freedom of the press and “inter-systemic” critique. This way of working of the press, as the films show, always pays off. All the while, in reality, very little changes since, as Žižek writes, the “formal functioning of power” stays in place. He further states about WikiLeaks:The true targets here weren’t the dirty details and the individuals responsible for them; not those in power, in other words, so much as power itself, its structure. We shouldn’t forget that power comprises not only institutions and their rules, but also legitimate (‘normal’) ways of challenging it (an independent press, NGOs, etc.). (“Good Manners”)In the very end, the “real” journalism is being reinforced as the sole vehicle of criticism, while everything else is “extremism” and, again, can only stem from a frustrated, even “evil”, individual. If neoliberal individualism is the order of the day, then the thinking must also revolve around that notion and cannot transcend that horizon.ConclusionŽižek expresses the problem of revealing the truth in our day and age by referring to the famous fable “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, where a child is the only one who is naive and brave enough to state that the emperor is in fact naked. But for Žižek today,in our cynical era, such strategy no longer works, it has lost its disturbing power, since everyone now proclaims that the emperor is naked (that Western democracies are torturing terrorist suspects, that wars are fought for profit, etc., etc.), and yet nothing happens, nobody seems to mind, the system just goes on functioning as if the emperor were fully dressed. (Less than Nothing 92)The problem with the “Collateral Murder”, a video of the killing of Iraqi civilians by the US Army, leaked by Wikileaks and Chelsea Manning, that was presented to the public, for instance, was according to accounts in Inside Wikileaks and Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy, that it did not have the desired impact. The public seems, in the end, to be indifferent to such reveals since it effectively cannot do anything about it. The return to the status quo after these reveals supports this stance, as Greenwald writes that after Snowden’s leaks there was no substantial change within the system; during the Obama administration, there was even an increase of criminal investigations of whistleblowers with an emergence of a “climate of fear” (Greenwald 368). Many whistleblower films assure us that in the end the system works; the good guys always win, the antagonists are punished, and laws have been passed. This is not to be accepted simply as a Hollywood convention, something that we also “already know”, but as an ideological stance, since these films are taken more seriously than films with similar messages but within other mainstream genres. Snowden shows that only individualism has the power to challenge the system, while The Fifth Estate draws the line that should not be crossed when it comes to privacy as a “universal” good because, again, “everyone has secrets”. Such representations of whistleblowing and disruption only further cement the notion that in our societies no real change is possible because it seems unnecessary. Whistleblowing as an act of revelation needs therefore to be understood as only one small step made by the individual that in the end depends on how society and the government decide to act upon it.References All the President’s Men. Dir. Alan J. Pakula. Wildwood Enterprises. 1976.Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. “Oliver Stone- Satire and Controversy.” 23 Mar. 2013. 30 Juy 2020 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s2gBKApxyk>.Bauman, Zygmunt. Flüchtige Moderne. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003.Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thomson. Film Art: An Introduction. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010.Born on the 4th of July. Dir. Oliver Stone. Ixtian, 1989.The Dark Knight. Dir. Christopher Nolan. Warner Brothers, Legendary Entertainment. 2008.Domscheit-Berg, Daniel. Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website. London: Jonathan Cape, 2011.The Fifth Estate. Dir. Bill Condon. Dreamworks, Anonymous Content (a.o.). 2013.Foucault, Michel. “Truth and Power.” Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984. Vol. 3. Ed. James D. Faubion. Penguin Books, 2000. 111-33.Frazer, Nancy. “From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump – and Beyond.” American Affairs 1.4 (2017). 19 May. 2020 <https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2017/11/progressive-neoliberalism-trump-beyond/>.Friedman, Milton. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982.“Full Transcript of the Yanis Varoufakis/Noam Chomsky NYPL Discussion.” Yanisvaroufakis.eu, 28 June 2016. 15 Mar. 2020 <https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2016/06/28/full-transcript-of-the-yanis-varoufakis-noam-chomsky-nypl-discussion/>.Greenwald, Glenn. Die globale Überwachung: Der Fall Snowden, die amerikanischen Geheimdienste und die Folgen. München: Knaur, 2015.The Harder They Fall. Dir. Mark Robson. Columbia Pictures. 1956.The Insider. Dir. Michael Mann. Touchstone Pictures, Mann/Roth Productions (a.o.). 1999.JFK. Dir. Oliver Stone. Warner Bros., 1991.Kohn, Stephen Martin. The Whistleblower’s Handbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Doing What’s Right and Protecting Yourself. 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Hemdake, Cinema ‘84. 1986.Polychroniou, C.J. “Socialism for the Rich, Capitalism for the Poor: An Interview with Noam Chomsky.” Truthout, 11 Dec. 2016. 25 May 2020 <https://truthout.org/articles/socialism-for-the-rich-capitalism-for-the-poor-an-interview-with-noam-chomsky/>.Scott, A.O. “Review: ‘Snowden,’ Oliver Stone’s Restrained Portrait of a Whistle-Blower.” The New York Times, 15 Sep. 2016. 5 May 2020 <https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/16/movies/snowden-review-oliver-stone-joseph-gordon-levitt.html>. Serpico. Dir. Sidney Lumet. Artists Entertainment Complex, Produzioni De Laurentiis. 1973. Silkwood. Dir. Mike Nichols. ABC Motion Pictures. 1983.Snowden. Dir. Oliver Stone. Krautpack Entertainment, Wild Bunch (a.o.). 2016.Žižek, Slavoj. “Good Manners in the Age of WikiLeaks.” Los Angeles Review of Books 33.2 (2011). 15 May 2020 <https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v33/n02/slavoj-zizek/good-manners-in-the-age-of-wikileaks>.———. Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. Verso, 2013.———. Pandemic! COVID-19 Shakes the World. New York: Polity, 2020.———. The Sublime Object of Ideology. Verso, 2008.Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future and the New Frontier of Power. New York: Public Affairs, 2020.

The contemporary video game market is as recognisable for its brands as it is for the characters that populate their game worlds, from franchise-leading characters like Garrus Vakarian (Mass Effect original trilogy), Princess Zelda (The Legend of Zelda franchise) and Cortana (HALO franchise) to more recent game icons like Miles Morales (Marvel's Spiderman game franchise) and Judy Alvarez (Cyberpunk 2077). Interactions with these casts of characters enhance the richness of games and their playable worlds, giving a sense of weight and meaning to player actions, emphasising thematic interests, and in some cases acting as buffers to (or indeed hindering) different aspects of gameplay itself. As Jordan Erica Webber writes in her essay The Road to Journey, “videogames are often examined through the lens of what you do and what you feel” (14). For many games, the design of interactions between the player and other beings in the world—whether they be intrinsic to the world (non-playable characters or NPCs) or other live players—is a bridging aspect between what you do and how you feel and is thus central to the communication of more cohesive and focussed work. This essay will discuss two examples of game design techniques present in Transistor by Supergiant Games and Journey by thatgamecompany. It will consider how the design of “playful” interactions between the player and other characters in the game world (both non-player characters and other player characters) can be used as a tool to align a player’s experience of “intent” with the thematic objectives of the designer. These games have been selected as both utilise design techniques that allow for this “playful” interaction (observed in this essay as interactions that do not contribute to “progression” in the traditional sense). By looking closely at specific aspects of game design, it aims to develop an accessible examination by “focusing on the dimensions of involvement the specific game or genre of games affords” (Calleja, 222). The discussion defines “intent”, in the context of game design, through a synthesis of definitions from two works by game designers. The first being Greg Costikyan’s definition of game structure from his 2002 presentation I Have No Words and I Must Design, a paper subsequently referenced by numerous prominent game scholars including Ian Bogost and Jesper Juul. The second is Steven Swink’s definition of intent in relation to video games, from his 2009 book Game Feel: A Game Designer’s Guide to Virtual Sensation—an extensive reference text of game design concepts, with a particular focus on the concept of “game feel” (the meta-sensation of involvement with a game). This exploratory essay suggests that examining these small but impactful design techniques, through the lens of their contribution to overall intent, is a useful tool for undertaking more holistic studies of how games are affective. I align with the argument that understanding “playfulness” in game design is useful in understanding user engagement with other digital communication platforms. In particular, platforms where the presentation of user identity is relational or performative to others—a case explored in Playful Identities: The Ludification of Digital Media Cultures (Frissen et al.). Intent in Game Design Intent, in game design, is generated by a complex, interacting economy, ecosystem, or “game structure” (Costikyan 21) of thematic ideas and gameplay functions that do not dictate outcomes, but rather guide behaviour and progression forward through the need to achieve a goal (Costikyan 21). Intent brings player goals in line with the intrinsic goals of the player character, and the thematic or experiential goals the game designer wants to convey through the act of play. Intent makes it easier to invest in the game’s narrative and spatial context—its role is to “motivate action in game worlds” (Swink 67). Steven Swink writes that it is the role of game design to create compelling intent from “a seemingly arbitrary collection of abstracted variables” (Swink 67). He continues that whether it is good or bad is a broader question, but that “most games do have in-born intentionality, and it is the game designer who creates it” (67). This echoes Costikyan’s point: game designers “must consciously set out to decide what kind of experiences [they] want to impart to players and create systems that enable those experiences” (20). Swink uses Mario 64 as one simple example of intent creation through design—if collecting 100 coins did not restore Mario’s health, players would simply not collect them. Not having health restricts the ability for players to fulfil the overarching intent of progression by defeating the game’s main villain (what he calls the “explicit” intent), and collecting coins also provides a degree of interactivity that makes the exploration itself feel more fulfilling (the “implicit” intent). This motivation for action may be functional, or it may be more experiential—how a designer shapes variables into particular forms to encourage the particular kinds of experience that they want a player to have during the act of play (such as in Journey, explored in the latter part of this essay). This essay is interested in the design of this compelling thematic intent—and the role “playful” interactions have as a variable that contributes to aligning player behaviours and experience to the thematic or experiential goals of game design. “Playful” Communication and Storytelling in Transistor Transistor is the second release from independent studio Supergiant Games and has received over 100 industry accolades (Kasavin) since its publication in 2014. Transistor incorporates the suspense of turn-based gameplay into an action role-playing game—neatly mirroring a style of gameplay to the suspense of its cyber noir narrative. The game is also distinctly “artful”. The city of Cloudbank, where the game takes place, is a cyberpunk landscape richly inspired by art nouveau and art deco style. There is some indication that Cloudbank may not be a real city at all—but rather a virtual city, with an abundance of computer-related motifs and player combat abilities named as if they were programming functions. At release, Transistor was broadly recognised in the industry press for its strength in “combining its visuals and music to powerfully convey narrative information and tone” (Petit). If intent in games in part stems from a unification of goals between the player and design, the interactivity between player input and the actions of the player character furthers this sense of “togetherness”. This articulation and unity of hand movement and visual response in games are what Kirkpatrick identified in his 2011 work Aesthetic Theory and the Video Game as the point in which videogames “broke from the visual entertainment culture of the last two centuries” (Kirkpatrick 88). The player character mediates access to the space by which all other game information is given context and allows the player a degree of self-expression that is unique to games. Swink describes it as an amplified impression of virtual proprioception, that is “an impression of space created by illusory means but is experienced as real by the senses … the effects of motion, sound, visuals, and responsive effects combine” (Swink 28). If we extend Swink’s point about creating an “impression of space” to also include an “impression of purpose”, we can utilise this observation to further understand how the design of the playful interactions in Transistor work to develop and align the player’s experience of intent with the overarching narrative goal (or, “explicit” intent) of the game—to tell a compelling “science-fiction love story in a cyberpunk setting, without the gritty backdrop” (Wallace) through the medium of gameplay. At the centre of any “love story” is the dynamic of a relationship, and in Transistor playful interaction is a means for conveying the significance and complexity of those dynamics in relation to the central characters. Transistor’s exposition asks players to figure out what happened to Red and her partner, The Boxer (a name he is identified by in the game files), while progressing through various battles with an entity called The Process to uncover more information. Transistor commences with player-character, Red, standing next to the body of The Boxer, whose consciousness and voice have been uploaded into the same device that impaled him: the story’s eponymous Transistor. The event that resulted in this strange circumstance has also caused Red to lose her ability to speak, though she is still able to hum. The first action that the player must complete to progress the game is to pull the Transistor from The Boxer’s body. From this point The Boxer, speaking through the Transistor, becomes the sole narrator of the game. The Boxer’s first lines of dialogue are responsive to player action, and position Red’s character in the world: ‘Together again. Heh, sort of …’ [Upon walking towards an exit a unit of The Process will appear] ‘Yikes … found us already. They want you back I bet. Well so do I.’ [Upon defeating The Process] ‘Unmarked alley, east of the bay. I think I know where we are.’ (Supergiant Games) This brief exchange and feedback to player movement, in medias res, limits the player’s possible points of attention and establishes The Boxer’s voice and “character” as the reference point for interacting with the game world. Actions, the surrounding world, and gameplay objectives are given meaning and context by being part of a system of intent derived from the significance of his character to the player character (Red) as both a companion and information-giver. The player may not necessarily feel what an individual in Red’s position would feel, but their expository position is aligned with Red’s narrative, and their scope of interaction with the world is intrinsically tied to the “explicit” intent of finding out what happened to The Boxer. Transistor continues to establish a loop between Red’s exploration of the world and the dialogue and narration of The Boxer. In the context of gameplay, player movement functions as the other half of a conversation and brings the player’s control of Red closer to how Red herself (who cannot communicate vocally) might converse with The Boxer gesturally. The Boxer’s conversational narration is scripted to occur as Red moves through specific parts of the world and achieves certain objectives. Significantly, The Boxer will also speak to Red in response to specific behaviours that only occur should the player choose to do them and that don’t necessarily contribute to “progressing” the game in the mechanical sense. There are multiple points where this is possible, but I will draw on two examples to demonstrate. Firstly, The Boxer will have specific reactions to a player who stands idle for too long, or who performs a repetitive action. Jumping repeatedly from platform to platform will trigger several variations of playful and exasperated dialogue from The Boxer (who has, at this point, no choice but to be carried around by Red): [Upon repeatedly jumping between the same platform] ‘Round and round.’ ‘Okay that’s enough.’ ‘I hate you.’ (Supergiant Games) The second is when Red “hums” (an activity initiated by the player by holding down R1 on a PlayStation console). At certain points of play, when making Red hum, The Boxer will chime in and sing the lyrics to the song she is humming. This musical harmonisation helps to articulate a particular kind of intimacy and flow between Red and The Boxer —accentuated by Red’s animation when humming: she is bathed in golden light and holds the Transistor close, swaying side to side, as if embracing or dancing with a lover. This is a playful, exploratory interaction. It technically doesn’t serve any “purpose” in terms of finishing the game—but is an action a player might perform while exploring controls and possibilities of interactivity, in turn exploring what it is to “be” Red in relation to the game world, the story being conveyed, and The Boxer. It delivers a more emotional and affective thematic idea about a relationship that nonetheless relies just as much on mechanical input and output as engaging in movement, exploration, and combat in the game world. It’s a mechanic that provides texture to the experience of inhabiting Red’s identity during play, showcasing a more individual complexity to her story, driven by interactivity. In techniques like this, Transistor directly unifies its method for information-giving, interactivity, progression, and theme into a single design language. To once again nod to Swink and Costikyan, it is a complex, interacting economy or ecosystem of thematic ideas and gameplay structures that guide behaviour and progression forward through the need to achieve a single goal (Costikyan 21), guiding the player towards the game’s “explicit” intent of investment in its “science fiction love story”. Companionship and Collaboration in Journey Journey is regularly praised in many circles of game review and discussion for its powerful, pared-back story conveyed through its exceptional game design. It has won a wide array of awards, including multiple British Academy Games Awards and Game Developer’s Choice Awards, and has been featured in highly regarded international galleries such as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Its director, Jenova Chen, articulated that the goal of the game (and thus, in the context of this essay, the intent) was “to create a game where people who interact with each other in an online community can connect at an emotional level, regardless of their gender, age, ethnicity, and social status” (Webber 14). In Journey, the player controls a small robed figure moving through a vast desert—the only choices for movement are to slide gracefully through the sand or to jump into the air by pressing the X button (on a PlayStation console), and gracefully float down to the ground. You cannot attack anything or defend yourself from the elements or hostile beings. Each player will “periodically find another individual in the landscape” (Isbister 121) of similar design to the player and can only communicate with them by experimenting with simple movements, and via short chirping noises. As the landscape itself is vast and unknown, it is what one player referred to as a sense of “reliance on one another” that makes the game so captivating (Isbister 12). Much like The Boxer in Transistor, the other figure in Journey stands out as a reference point and imbues a sense of collaboration and connection that makes the goal to reach the pinprick of light in the distance more meaningful. It is only after the player has finished the game that the screen reveals the other individual is a real person, another player, by displaying their gamer tag. One player, playing the game in 2017 (several years after its original release in 2012), wrote: I went through most of the game by myself, and when I first met my companion, it was right as I walked into the gate transitioning to the snow area. And I was SO happy that there was someone else in this desolate place. I felt like it added so much warmth to the game, so much added value. The companion and I stuck together 100% of the way. When one of us would fall the slightest bit behind, the other would wait for them. I remember saying out loud how I thought that my companion was the best programmed AI that I had ever seen. In the way that he waited for me to catch up, it almost seemed like he thanked me for waiting for him … We were always side-by-side which I was doing to the "AI" for "cinematic-effect". From when I first met him up to the very very end, we were side-by-side. (Peace_maybenot) Other players indicate a similar bond even when their companion is perhaps less competent: I thought my traveller was a crap AI. He kept getting launched by the flying things and was crap at staying behind cover … But I stuck with him because I was like, this is my buddy in the game. Same thing, we were communicating the whole time and I stuck with him. I finish and I see a gamer tag and my mind was blown. That was awesome. (kerode4791) Although there is a definite object of difference in that Transistor is narrated and single-player while Journey is not, there are some defined correlations between the way Supergiant Games and thatgamecompany encourage players to feel a sense of investment and intent aligned with another individual within the game to further thematic intent. Interactive mechanics are designed to allow players a means of playful and gestural communication as an extension of their kinetic interaction with the game; travellers in Journey can chirp and call out to other players—not always for an intrinsic goal but often to express joy, or just to experience and sense of connectivity or emotional warmth. In Transistor, the ability to hum and hear The Boxer’s harmony, and the animation of Red holding the Transistor close as she does so, implying a sense of protectiveness and affection, says more in the context of “play” than a literal declaration of love between the two characters. Graeme Kirkpatrick uses dance as a suitable metaphor for this kind of experience in games, in that both are characterised by a certainty that communication has occurred despite the “eschewal of overt linguistic elements and discursive meanings” (120). There is also a sense of finite temporality in these moments. Unlike scripted actions, or words on a page, they occur within a moment of being that largely belongs to the player and their actions alone. Kirkpatrick describes it as “an inherent ephemerality about this vanishing and that this very transience is somehow essential” (120). This imbuing of a sense of time is important because it implies that even if one were to play the game again, repeating the interaction is impossible. The communication of narrative within these games is not a static form, but an experience that hangs unique at that moment and space of play. Thatgamecompany discussed in their 2017 interviews with Webber, published as part of her essay for the Victoria & Albert’s Video Games: Design/Play/Disrupt exhibition, how by creating and restricting the kind of playful interaction available to players within the world, they could encourage the kind of emotional, collaborative, and thoughtful intent they desired to portray (Webber 14). They articulate how in the development process they prioritised giving the player a variety of responses for even the smallest of actions and how that positive feedback, in turn, encourages play and prevented players from being “bored” (Webber 22). Meanwhile, the team reduced responsiveness for interactions they didn’t want to encourage. Chen describes the approach as “maximising feedback for things you want and minimising it for things you don’t want” (Webber 27). In her essay, Webber writes that Chen describes “a person who enters a virtual world, leaving behind the value system they’ve learned from real life, as like a baby banging their spoon to get attention” (27): initially players could push each other, and when one baby [player] pushed the other baby [player] off the cliff that person died. So, when we tested the gameplay, even our own developers preferred killing each other because of the amount of feedback they would get, whether it’s visual feedback, audio feedback, or social feedback from the players in the room. For quite a while I was disappointed at our own developers’ ethics, but I was able to talk to a child psychologist and she was able to clarify why these people are doing what they are doing. She said, ‘If you want to train a baby not to knock the spoon, you should minimise the feedback. Either just leave them alone, and after a while they’re bored and stop knocking, or give them a spoon that does not make a sound. (27) The developers then made it impossible for players to kill, steal resources from, or even speak to each other. Players were encouraged to stay close to each other using high-feedback action and responsiveness for doing so (Webber 27). By using feedback design techniques to encourage players to behave a certain way to other beings in the world—both by providing and restricting playful interactivity—thatgamecompany encourage a resonance between players and the overarching design intent of the project. Chen’s observations about the behaviour of his team while playing different iterations of the game also support the argument (acknowledged in different perspectives by various scholarship, including Costikyan and Bogost) that in the act of gameplay, real-life personal ethics are to a degree re-prioritised by the interactivity and context of that interactivity in the game world. Intent and the “Actualities of (Game) Existence” Continuing and evolving explorations of “intent” (and other parallel terms) in games through interaction design is of interest for scholars of game studies; it also is an important endeavour when considering influential relationships between games and other digital mediums where user identity is performative or relational to others. This influence was examined from several perspectives in the aforementioned collection Playful Identities: The Ludification of Digital Media Cultures, which also examined “the process of ludification that seems to penetrate every cultural domain” of modern life, including leisure time, work, education, politics, and even warfare (Frissen et al. 9). Such studies affirm the “complex relationship between play, media, and identity in contemporary culture” and are motivated “not only by the dominant role that digital media plays in our present culture but also by the intuition that ‘“play is central … to media experience” (Frissen et al. 10). Undertaking close examinations of specific “playful” design techniques in video games, and how they may factor into the development of intent, can help to develop nuanced lines of questioning about how we engage with “playfulness” in other digital communication platforms in an accessible, comparative way. We continue to exist in a world where “ludification is penetrating the cultural domain”. In the first few months of the global COVID-19 pandemic, Nintendo released Animal Crossing: New Horizons. With an almost global population in lockdown, Animal Crossing became host to professional meetings (Espiritu), weddings (Garst), and significantly, a media channel for brands to promote content and products (Deighton). TikTok, panoramically, is a platform where “playful” user trends— dances, responding to videos, the “Tell Me … Without Telling Me” challenge—occur in the context of an extremely complex algorithm, that while automated, is created by people—and is thus unavoidably embedded with bias (Dias et al.; Noble). This is not to say that game design techniques and broader “playful” design techniques in other digital communication platforms are interchangeable by any measure, or that intent in a game design sense and intent or bias in a commercial sense should be examined through the same lens. Rather that there is a useful, interdisciplinary resource of knowledge that can further illuminate questions we might ask about this state of “ludification” in both the academic and public spheres. We might ask, for example, what would the implications be of introducing an intent design methodology similar to Journey, but using it for commercial gain? Or social activism? Has it already happened? There is a quotation from Nathan Jurgensen’s 2016 essay Fear of Screens (published in The New Inquiry) that often comes to my mind when thinking about interaction design in video games in this way. In his response to Sherry Turkle’s book, Reclaiming Conversation, Jurgensen writes: each time we say “IRL,” “face-to-face,” or “in person” to mean connection without screens, we frame what is “real” or who is a person in terms of their geographic proximity rather than other aspects of closeness — variables like attention, empathy, affect, erotics, all of which can be experienced at a distance. We should not conceptually preclude or discount all the ways intimacy, passion, love, joy, pleasure, closeness, pain, suffering, evil and all the visceral actualities of existence pass through the screen. “Face to face” should mean more than breathing the same air. (Jurgensen) While Jurgensen is not talking about communication in games specifically, there are comparisons to be drawn between his “variables” and “visceral actualities of existence” as the drivers of social meaning-making, and the methodology of games communicating intent and purpose through Swink’s “seemingly arbitrary collection of abstracted variables” (67). When players interact with other characters in a game world (whether they be NPCs or other players), they are inhabiting a shared virtual space, and how designers articulate and present the variables of “closeness”, as Jurgensen defines it, can shape player alignment with the overarching design intent. These design techniques take the place of Jurgensen’s “visceral actualities of existence”. While they may not intrinsically share an overarching purpose, their experiential qualities have the ability to align ethics, priorities, and values between individuals. Interactivity means game design has the potential to facilitate a particular kind of engagement for the player (as demonstrated in Journey) or give opportunities for players to explore a sense of what an emotion might feel like by aligning it with progression or playful activity (as discussed in relation to Transistor). Players may not “feel” exactly what their player-characters do, or care for other characters in the world in the same way a game might encourage them to, but through thoughtful intent design, something of recognition or unity of belief might pass through the screen. References Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Video Games. MIT P, 2007. Calleja, Gordon. “Ludic Identities and the Magic Circle.” Playful Identities: The Ludification of Digital Media Cultures. Eds. Valerie Frissen et al. Amsterdam UP, 2015. 211–224. Costikyan, Greg. “I Have No Words & I Must Design: Toward a Critical Vocabulary for Games.” Computer Games and Digital Cultures Conference Proceedings 2002. Ed. Frans Mäyrä. Tampere UP. 9-33. Dias, Avani, et al. “The TikTok Spiral.” ABC News, 26 July 2021. <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-26/tiktok-algorithm-dangerous-eating-disorder-content-censorship/100277134>. Deighton, Katie. “Animal Crossing Is Emerging as a Media Channel for Brands in Lockdown.” The Drum, 21 Apr. 2020. <https://www.thedrum.com/news/2020/04/21/animal-crossing-emerging-media-channel-brands-lockdown>. Espiritu, Abby. “Japanese Company Attempts to Work Remotely in Animal Crossing: New Horizons.” The Gamer, 29 Mar. 2020. <https://www.thegamer.com/animal-crossing-new-horizons-work-remotely/>. Frissen, Valerie, et al., eds. Playful Identities: The Ludification of Digital Media Cultures. Amsterdam UP, 2015. Garst, Aron. “The Pandemic Canceled Their Wedding. So They Held It in Animal Crossing.” The Washington Post, 2 Apr. 2020. <https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2020/04/02/animal-crossing-wedding-coronavirus/>. Isbister, Katherine. How Games Move Us: Emotion by Design. MIT P, 2016. Journey. thatgamecompany. 2012. Jurgensen, Nathan. “Fear of Screens.” The New Inquiry, 25 Jan. 2016. <https://thenewinquiry.com/fear-of-screens/>. Kasavin, Greg. “Transistor Earns More than 100+ Industry Accolades, Sells More than 600k Copies.” Supergiant Games, 8 Jan. 2015. <https://www.supergiantgames.com/blog/transistor-earns60-industry-accolades-sells-more-than-600k-copies/>. kerode4791. "Wanted to Share My First Experience with the Game, It Was That Awesome.”Reddit, 22 Mar. 2017. <https://www.reddit.com/r/JourneyPS3/comments/60u0am/wanted_to_share_my_f rst_experience_with_the_game/>. Kirkpatrick, Graeme. Aesthetic Theory and the Video Game. Manchester UP, 2011. Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York UP, 2018. peace_maybenot. "Wanted to Share My First Experience with the Game, It Was that Awesome” Reddit, 22 Mar. 2017. <https://www.reddit.com/r/JourneyPS3/comments/60u0am/wanted_to_share_my_f rst_experience_with_the_game/>. Petit, Carolyn. “Ghosts in the Machine." Gamespot, 20 May 2014. <https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/transistor-review/1900-6415763/>. Swink, Steve. Game Feel: A Game Designer’s Guide to Virtual Sensation. Amsterdam: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers/Elsevier, 2009. Transistor. Supergiant Games. 2014. Wallace, Kimberley. “The Story behind Supergiant Games’ Transistor.” Gameinformer, 20 May 2021. <https://www.gameinformer.com/2021/05/20/the-story-behind-supergiant-games-transistor>. Webber, Jordan Erica. “The Road to Journey.” Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt. Eds. Marie Foulston and Kristian Volsing. V&A Publishing, 2018. 14–31.

In recent years a number of dramas focussing on Indigenous Australians and Australian history have appeared on the ABC, one of Australia's two public television channels. These dramas have different foci but all represent some aspects of Australian Indigenous history and how it interacts with 'mainstream' representations of Australian history. The four programs I will look at are Cleverman (Goalpost Pictures, 2016-ongoing), Glitch (Matchbox Films, 2015-ongoing), The Secret River (Ruby Entertainment, 2015) and Redfern Now (Blackfella Films, 2012), each of which engages with the past in a unique way.Clearly, different creators, working with different plots and in different genres will have different ways of representing the past. Redfern Now and Cleverman are both produced by Indigenous creators whereas the creators of The Secret River and Glitch are white Australians. Redfern Now and The Secret River are in a realist mode, whereas Glitch and Cleverman are speculative fiction. My argument proceeds on two axes: first, speculative genres allow for more creative ways of representing the past. They give more freedom for the creators to present affective representations of the historical past. Speculative genres also allow for more interesting intellectual examinations of what we consider to be history and its uncertainties. My second axis argues, because it is hard to avoid when looking at this group of texts, that Indigenous creators represent the past in different ways than non-Indigenous creators. Indigenous creators present a more elliptical vision. Non-Indigenous creators tend to address historical stories in more overt ways. It is apparent that even when dealing with the same histories and the same facts, the understanding of the past held by different groups is presented differently because it has different affective meanings.These television programs were all made in the 2010s but the roots of their interpretations go much further back, not only to the history they represent but also to the arguments about history that have raged in Australian intellectual and popular culture. Throughout most of the twentieth century, indigenous history was not discussed in Australia, until this was disturbed by WEH Stanner's reference in the Boyer lectures of 1968 to "our great Australian silence" (Clark 73). There was, through the 1970s and 80s, increased discussion of Indigenous history, and then in the 1990s there was a period of social and cultural argument known locally as the 'History Wars'. This long-running public disagreement took place in both academic and public arenas, and involved historians, other academics, politicians, journalists and social commentators on each side. One side argued that the arrival of white people in Australia led to frontier wars, massacre, attempted genocide and the ongoing oppression of Indigenous people (Reynolds). The other posited that when white people arrived they killed a few Aborigines but mostly Aboriginal people were killed by disease or failure to 'defend' their culture (Windschuttle). The first viewpoint was revisionist from the 1960s onwards and the second represented an attempt at counter-revision – to move the understanding of history back to what it was prior to the revision. The argument took place not only among historians, but was taken up by politicians with Paul Keating, prime minister 1993-1996, holding the first view and John Howard, prime minister 1996-2007, aggressively pursuing the second. The revisionist viewpoint was championed by historians such as Henry Reynolds and Lyndall Ryan and academics and Aboriginal activists such as Tony Birch and Aileen Moreton Robinson; whereas the counter-revisionists had Keith Windschuttle and Geoffrey Blainey. By and large the revisionist viewpoint has become dominant and the historical work of the counter-revisionists is highly disputed and not accepted.This argument was prominent in Australian cultural discourse throughout the 1990s and has never entirely disappeared. The TV shows I am examining were not made in the 1990s, nor were they made in the 2000s - it took nearly twenty years for responses to the argument to make the jump from politicians' speeches and opinion pieces to television drama. John Ellis argues that the role of television in popular discourse is "working through," meaning contentious issues are first raised in news reports, then they move to current affairs, then talk shows and documentaries, then sketch comedy, then drama (Ellis). Australian Indigenous history was extensively discussed in the news, current affairs and talk shows in the 1990s, documentaries appeared somewhat later, notably First Australians in 2008, but sketch comedy and drama did not happen until in 2014, when Black Comedy's programme first aired, offering sketches engaging often and fiercely with indigenous history.The existence of this public discourse in the political and academic realms was reflected in film before television. Felicity Collins argues that the "Blak Wave" of Indigenous film came to exist in the context of, and as a response to, the history wars (Collins 232). This wave of film making by Indigenous film makers included the works of Rachel Perkins, Warwick Thornton and Ivan Sen – whose films chronicled the lives of Indigenous Australians. There was also what Collins calls "back-tracking films" such as Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002) and The Tracker (2010) made by white creators that presented arguments from the history wars for general audiences. Collins argues that both the "blak wave" and the "back track" created an alternative cultural sphere where past injustices are acknowledged. She says: "the films of the Blak Wave… cut across the history wars by turning an Indigenous gaze on the colonial past and its afterlife in the present" (Collins 232). This group of films sees Indigenous gazes relate the past and present whereas the white gaze represents specific history. In this article I examine a similar group of representations in television programs.History is not an innocent discourse. In western culture 'history' describes a certain way of looking at the past that was codified in the 19th century (Lloyd 375). It is however not the only way to look at the past, theorist Mark Day has described it as a type of relation with the past and argues that other understandings of the past such as popular memory and mythology are also available (Day). The codification of history in the 19th century involved an increased reliance on documentary evidence, a claim to objectivity, a focus on causation and, often though not always, a focus on national, political history. This sort of history became the academic understanding of history – which claims to be, if not objective, at least capable of disinterest; which bases its arguments on facts and which can establish its facts through reference to documentary records (Froeyman 219). Aileen Moreton-Robinson would call this "white patriarchal knowledge" that seeks to place the indigenous within its own type of knowledge production ("The White Man's Burden" 414). The western version of history tends to focus on causation and to present the past as a coherent narrative leading to the current point in time. This is not an undisputed conception of history in the western academy but it is common and often dominant.Post-colonialist analyses of history argue that western writing about non-western subjects is biased and forces non-westerners into categories used to oppress them (Anderson 44). These categories exist ahistorically and deny non-westerners the ability to act because if history cannot be perceived then it is difficult to see the future. That is to say, because non-western subjects in the past are not seen as historical actors, as people whose actions effected the future, then, in the present, they are unable to access to powerful arguments from history. Historians' usual methodology casts Indigenous people as the 'subjects' of history which is about them, not by them or for them (Tuhiwai Smith 7, 30-32, 144-5). Aboriginal people are characterised as prehistoric, ancient, timeless and dying (Birch 150). This way of thinking about Indigenous Australia removes all agency from Aboriginal actors and restoring agency has been a goal of Aboriginal activists and historians. Aileen Moreton Robinson discusses how Aboriginal resistance is embodied through "oral history (and) social memory," engaging with how Aboriginal actors represent themselves and are represented in relation to the past and historical settings is an important act ("Introduction" 127).Redfern Now and Cleverman were produced through the ABC's Indigenous Department and made by Indigenous filmmakers, whereas Glitch and The Secret River are from the ABC drama department and were made by white Australians. The different programs also have different generic backgrounds. Redfern Now and The Secret River are different forms of realist texts; social realism and historical realism. Cleverman and Glitch, however, are speculative fiction texts that can be argued to be in the mode of magical realism, they "denaturalise the real and naturalise the marvellous" they are also closely tied ideas of retelling colonial stories and "resignify(ing) colonial territories and pasts" (Siskind 834-5).Redfern Now was produced by Blackfella Films for the ABC. It was, with much fanfare, released as the first drama made for television, by Aboriginal people and about Aboriginal people (Blundell). The central concerns of the program are issues in the present, its plots and settings are entirely contemporary. In this way it circumvents the idea and standard representation of Indigenous Australians as ancient and timeless. It places the characters in the program very much in the present.However, one episode "Stand Up" does obliquely engage with historical concerns. In this episode a young boy, Joel Shields, gets a scholarship to an expensive private school. When he attends his first school assembly he does not sing the national anthem with the other students. This leads to a dispute with the school that forms the episode's plot. As punishment for not singing Joel is set an assignment to research the anthem, which he does and he finds the song off-putting – with the words 'boundless plains to share' particularly disconcerting. His father supports him saying "it's not our song" and compares Joel singing it to a "whitefella doing a corrobboree". The national anthem stands metaphorically for the white hegemony in Australia.The school itself is also a metaphor for hegemony. The camerawork lingers on the architecture which is intended to imply historical strength and imperviousness to challenge or change. The school stands for all the force of history white Australia can bring to bear, but in Australia, all architecture of this type is a lie, or at least an exaggeration – the school cannot be more than 200 years old and is probably much more recent.Many of the things the program says about history are conveyed in half sentences or single glances. Arguably this is because of its aesthetic mode – social realism – that prides itself on its mimicry of everyday life and in everyday life people are unlikely to set out arguments in organised dot-point form. At one point the English teacher quotes Orwell, "those who control the past control the future", which seems overt but it is stated off-screen as Joel walks into the room. This seeming aside is a statement about history and directly recalls central arguments of the history wars, which make strong political arguments about the effects of the past, and perceptions of the past, on the present and future. Despite its subtlety, this story takes place within the context of the history wars: it is about who controls the past. The subtlety of the discussion of history allows the film makers the freedom to comment on the content and effects of history and the history wars without appearing didactic. They discuss the how history has effected the present history without having to make explicit historical causes.The other recent television drama in the realist tradition is The Secret River. This was an adaptation of a novel by Kate Grenville. It deals with Aboriginal history from the perspective of white people, in this way it differs from Redfern Now which discusses the issues from the perspective of Aboriginal people. The plot concerns a man transported to Australia as a convict in the early 19th century. The man is later freed and, with his family, attempts to move to the Hawksbury river region. The land they try to settle is, of course, already in use by Aboriginal people. The show sets up the definitional conflict between the idea of settler and invader and suggests the difference between the two is a matter of perspective. Of the shows I am examining, it is the most direct in its representation of historical massacre and brutality. It represents what Felicity Collins described as a back-tracking text recapitulating the colonial past in the light of recovered knowledge. However, from an Indigenous perspective it is another settler tale implying Aboriginal people were wiped out at the time of colonisation (Godwin).The Secret River is told entirely from the perspective of the invaders. Even as it portrays their actions as wrong, it also suggests they were unavoidable or inevitable. Therefore it does what many western histories of Indigenous people do – it classifies and categorises. It sets limits on interpretation. It is also limited by its genre, as a straightforward historical drama and an adaptation, it can only tell its story in a certain way. The television series, like the book before it, prides itself on its 'accurate' rendition of an historical story. However, because it comes from such a very narrow perspective it falls into the trap of categorising histories that might have usefully been allowed to develop further.The program is based on a novel that attracted controversy of its own. It became part of ongoing historiographical debate about the relationship between fiction and history. The book's author Kate Grenville claimed to have written a kind of affectively accurate history that actual history can never convey because the emotions of the past are hidden from the present. The book was critiqued by historians including Inge Clendinnen, who argued that many of the claims made about its historical accuracy were largely overblown (Clendinnen). The book is not the same as the TV program, but the same limitations identified by Clendinnen are present in the television text. However, I would not agree with Clendinnen that formal history is any better. I argue that the limitation of both these mimetic genres can be escaped in speculative fiction.In Glitch, Yurana, a small town in rural Victoria becomes, for no apparent reason, the site of seven people rising from the dead. Each person is from a different historical period. None are Indigenous. They are not zombies but simply people who used to be dead. One of the first characters to appear in the series is an Aboriginal teenager, Beau, we see from his point of view the characters crawling from their graves. He becomes friendly with one of the risen characters, Patrick Fitzgerald, who had been the town's first mayor. At first Fitzgerald's story seems to be one of working class man made good in colonial Australia - a standard story of Australian myth and historiography. However, it emerges that Fitzgerald was in love with an Aboriginal woman called Kalinda and Beau is his descendant. Fitzgerald, once he becomes aware of how he has been remembered by history, decides to revise the history of the town – he wants to reclaim his property from his white descendants and give it to his Indigenous descendants. Over the course of the six episodes Fitzgerald moves from being represented as a violent, racist boor who had inexplicably become the town's mayor, to being a romantic whose racism was mostly a matter of vocabulary. Beau is important to the plot and he is a sympathetic character but he is not central and he is a child. Indigenous people in the past have no voice in this story – when flashbacks are shown they are silent, and in the present their voices are present but not privileged or central to the plot.The program demonstrates a profoundly metaphorical relationship with the past – the past has literally come to life bringing with it surprising buried histories. The program represents some dominant themes in Australian historiography – other formerly dead characters include a convict-turned-bush-ranger, a soldier who was at Gallipoli, two Italian migrants and a girl who died as a result of sexual violence – but it does not engage directly with Indigenous history. Indigenous people's stories are told only in relation to the stories of white people. The text's magical realism allows a less prescriptive relationship with the past than in The Secret River but it is still restricted in its point of view and allows only limited agency to Aboriginal actors.The text's magical realism allows for a thought-provoking representation of relationships with the past. The town of Yurana is represented as a place deeply committed to the representation and glorification of its past. Its main street contains statues of its white founders and war memorials, one of its main social institutions is the RSL, its library preserves relics of the past and its publican is a war history buff. All these indicate that the past is central to the town's identity. The risen dead however dispute and revise almost every aspect of this past. Even the history that is unmentioned in the town's apparent official discourse, such as the WWII internment camp and the history of crimes, is disputed by the different stories of the past that the risen dead have to tell. This indicates the uncertainty of the past, even when it seems literally set in stone it can still be revised. Nonetheless the history of Indigenous people is only revised in ways that re-engage with white history.Cleverman is a magical realist text profoundly based in allegory. The story concerns the emergence into a near future society of a group of people known as the "Hairies." It is never made clear where they came from or why but it seems they appeared recently and are unable to return. They are an allegory for refugees. Hairypeople are part of many Indigenous Australian stories, the show's creator, Ryan Griffen, stated that "there are different hairy stories throughout Australia and they differ in each country. You have some who are a tall, some are short, some are aggressive, some are friendly. We got to sort of pick which ones will fit for us and create the Hairies for our show" (Bizzaca).The Hairies are forced to live in an area called the Zone, which, prior to the arrival of the Hairy people, was a place where Aboriginal people lived. This place might be seen as a metaphor for Redfern but it is also an allegory for Australia's history of displacing Aboriginal people and moving and restricting them to missions and reserves. The Zone is becoming increasingly securitised and is also operating as a metaphor for Australia's immigration detention centres. The prison the Hairy characters, Djukura and Bunduu, are confined to is yet another metaphor, this time for both the over-representation of Aboriginal people in prison and the securitisation of immigration detention. These multiple allegorical movements place Australia's present refugee policies and historical treatment of Aboriginal people within the same lens. They also place the present, the past and the future within the same narrative space.Most of the cast is Aboriginal and much of the character interaction is between Aboriginal people and Hairies, with both groups played by Indigenous actors. The disadvantages suffered by Indigenous people are part of the story and clearly presented as affecting the behaviour of characters but within the story Aboriginal people are more advantaged than Hairies, as they have systems, relationships and structures that Hairy people lack. The fact that so much of the interaction in the story is between Indigenous people and Hairies is important: it can be seen to be an interaction between Aboriginal people and Aboriginal mythology or between Indigenous past and present. It demonstrates Aboriginal identities being created in relation to other Aboriginal identities and not in relation to white people, where in this narrative, Aboriginal people have an identity other than that allowed for in colonialist terms.Cleverman does not really engage with the history of white invasion. The character who speaks most about this part of Aboriginal history and whose stated understanding of himself is based on that identity is Waruu. But Waruu is also a villain whose self-identity is also presented as jealous and dishonest. However, despite only passing mentions of westernised history the show is deeply concerned with a relationship with the past. The program engages with Aboriginal traditions about the past that have nothing to do with white history. It presents a much longer view of history than that of white Australia. It engages with the Aboriginal tradition of the Cleverman - demonstrated in the character of Uncle Jimmy who passes a nulla nulla (knob-headed hardwood club), as a symbol of the past, to his nephew Koen and tells him he is the new Cleverman. Cleverman demonstrates a discussion of Australian history with the potential to ignore white people. It doesn't ignore them, it doesn't ignore the invasion but it presents the possibility that it could be ignored.There is a danger in this sort of representation of the past that Aboriginal people could be relegated to the type of ahistorical, metahistorical myths that comprise colonialist history's representation of Indigenous people (Birch). But Cleverman's magical realist, near future setting tends to undermine this. It grounds representation in history through text and metaphor and then expands the definition.The four programs have different relationships with the past but all of them engage with it. The programs are both restrained and freed by the genres they operate in. It is much easier to escape the bounds of formal history in the genre of magical realism and both Glitch and Cleverman do this but have significantly different ways of dealing with history. "Stand up" and The Secret River both operate within more formally realist structures. The Secret River gives us an emotional reading of the past and a very affective one. However, it cuts off avenues of interpretation by presenting a seemingly inevitable tragedy. Through use of metaphor and silence "Stand up" presents a much more productive relationship with the past – seeing it as an ongoing argument rather than a settled one. Glitch engages with the past as a topic that is not settled and that can therefore be changed whereas Cleverman expands our definition of past and understanding of the past through allegory.It is possible to draw further connections. Those stories created by Indigenous people do not engage with the specifics of traditional dominant Australian historiography. However, they work with the assumption that everyone already knows this historiography. They do not re-present the pain of the past, instead they deal with it in oblique terms with allegory. Whereas the programs made by non-Indigenous Australians are much more overt in their representation of the sins of the past, they overtly engage with the History Wars in specific historical arenas in which those wars were fought. The non-Indigenous shows align themselves with the revisionist view of history but they do so in a very different way than the Indigenous shows.ReferencesAnderson, Ian. "Introduction: The Aboriginal Critique of Colonial Knowing." Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians. Ed. Michele Grossman. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2003.Birch, Tony. "'Nothing Has Changed': The Making and Unmaking of Koori Culture." Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians. Ed. Michele Grossman. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2003.Bizzaca, Chris. "The World of Cleverman." Screen Australia 2016.Blundell, Graeme. "Redfern Now Delves into the Lives of Ordinary People." The Australian 26 Oct. 2013: News Review.Clark, Anna. History's Children: History Wars in the Classroom. Sydney: New South, 2008.Clendinnen, Inga. “The History Question: Who Owns the Past?” The Quarterly Essay. Melbourne: Black Inc., 2006.Collins, Felicity. "After Dispossession: Blackfella Films and the Politics of Radical Hope." The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Politics. Eds. Yannis Tzioumakis and Claire Molloy. New York: Routledge, 2016.Day, Mark. "Our Relations with the Past." Philosophia 36.4 (2008): 417-27.Ellis, John. Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty. London: I.B. Tauris, 2000.Froeyman, Anton. "The Ideal of Objectivity and the Public Role of the Historian: Some Lessons from the Historikerstreit and the History Wars." Rethinking History 20.2 (2016): 217-34.Godwin, Carisssa Lee. "Shedding the 'Victim Narrative' for Tales of Magic, Myth and Superhero Pride." The Conversation 2016.Lloyd, Christopher. "Historiographic Schools." A Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography Ed. Tucker, Aviezer. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. "Introduction: Resistance, Recovery and Revitalisation." Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians. Ed. Michele Grossman. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2003.———. "The White Man's Burden." Australian Feminist Studies 26.70 (2011): 413-31.Reynolds, Henry. The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia. 2nd ed. Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin Books, 1995.Siskind, Mariano. "Magical Realism." The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature. Vol. 2. Ed. Ato Quayson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 833-68.Tuhiwai Smith, Linda. Decolonizing Methodologies Research and Indigenous Peoples. 2nd ed. London: Zed Books, 2012.Windschuttle, Keith. The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. Paddington, NSW: Macleay Press, 2002.

We (I, Robert Lawrence and, in a rare display of unity, all my online avatars and agents)hereby render and proclaim thisMANIFESTO OF PIECES AND BITS IN SERVICE OF CONTRADICTIONAL AESTHETICSWe start with the simple premise that art has the job of telling us who we are, and that through the modern age doing this job while KEEPING UP with accelerating cultural change has necessitated the invention of something we might call the avant-garde. Along the way there has been an on-again-off-again affair between said avant-garde and technology. We are now in a new phase of the new and the technology under consideration is the Internet.The recent hyperventilating about the term postInternet reflects the artworld’s overdue recognition of the effect of the Internet on the culture at large, and on art as a cultural practice, a market, and a historical process.I propose that we cannot fully understand what the Internet is doing to us through a consideration of what happens on the screen, nor by considering what happens in the physical space we occupy either before or behind the screen. Rather we must critically and creatively fathom the flow of cultural practice between and across these realms. This requires Hybrid art combining both physical and Internet forms.I do not mean to imply that single discipline-based art cannot communicate complexity, but I believe that Internet culture introduces complexities that can only be approached through hybrid practices. And this is especially critical for an art that, in doing the job of “telling us who we are”, wants to address the contradictory ways we now form and promote, or conceal and revise, our multiple identities through online social media profiles inconsistent with our fleshly selves.We need a different way of talking about identity. A history of identity:In the ancient world, individual identity as we understand it did not exist.The renaissance invented the individual.Modernism prioritized and alienated him (sic).Post-Modernism fragmented him/her.The Internet hyper-circulates and amplifies all these modalities, exploding the possibilities of identity.While reducing us to demographic market targets, the Web facilitates mass indulgence in perversely individual interests. The now common act of creating an “online profile” is a regular reiteration of the simple fact that identity is an open-ended hypothesis. We can now live double, or extravagantly multiple, virtual lives. The “me meme” is a ceaseless morph. This is a profound change in how identity was understood just a decade ago. Other historical transformations of identity happened over centuries. This latest and most radical change has occurred in the click of a mouse. Selfhood is now imbued with new complexity, fluidity and amplified contradictions.To fully understand what is actually happening to us, we need an art that engages the variant contracts of the physical and the virtual. We need a Hybrid art that addresses variant temporal and spatial modes of the physical and virtual. We need an art that offers articulations through the ubiquitous web in concert with the distinct perspectives that a physical gallery experience uniquely offers: engagement and removal, reflection and transference. Art that tells us who we are today calls for an aesthetics of contradiction. — Ro Lawrence (and all avatars) 2011, revised 2013, 2015, 2018. The manifesto above grew from an artistic practice beginning in 1998 as I started producing a website for every project that I made in traditional media. The Internet work does not just document or promote the project, nor is it “Netart” in the common sense of creative work restricted to a browser window. All of my efforts with the Internet are directly linked to my projects in traditional media and the web components offer parallel aesthetic voices that augment or overtly contradict the reading suggested by the traditional visual components of each project.This hybrid work grew out of a previous decade of transmedia work in video installation and sculpture, where I would create physical contexts for silent video as a way to remove the video image from the seamless flow of broadcast culture. A video image can signify very differently in a physical context that separates it from the flow of mass media and rather reconnects it to lived physical culture. A significant part of the aesthetic pleasure of this kind of work comes from nuances of dissonance arising from contradictory ways viewers had learned to read the object world and the ways we were then still learning to read the electronic image world. This video installation work was about “relocating” the electronic image, but I was also “locating” the electronic image in another sense, within the boundaries of geographic and cultural location. Linking all my projects to specific geographic locations set up contrasts with the spatial ubiquity of electronic media. In 1998 I amplified this contrast with my addition of extensive Internet components with each installation I made.The Way Things Grow (1998) began as an installation of sculptures combining video with segments of birch trees. Each piece in the gallery was linked to a specific geographic location within driving distance of the gallery exhibiting the work. In the years just before this piece I had moved from a practice of text-augmented video installations to the point where I had reduced the text to small printed handouts that featured absurd Scripts for Performance. These text handouts that viewers could take with them suggested that the work was to be completed by the viewer later outside the gallery. This to-be-continued dynamic was the genesis of a serial form in work going forward from then on. Thematic and narrative elements in the work were serialized via possible actions viewers would perform after leaving the gallery. In the installation for The Way Things Grow, there was no text in the gallery at all to suggest interpretations of this series of video sculptures. Even the titles offered no direct textual help. Rather than telling the viewers something about the work before them in the gallery, the title of each piece led the viewer away from the gallery toward serial actions in the specific geographic locations the works referred to. Each piece was titled with an Internet address.Figure 1: Lawrence, Robert, The Way Things Grow, video Installation with web components at http://www.h-e-r-e.com/grow.html, 1998.When people went to the web site for each piece they found only a black page referencing a physical horizon with a long line of text that they could scroll to right for meters. Unlike the determinedly embodied work in the gallery, the web components were disembodied texts floating in a black void, but texts about very specific physical locations.Figure 2: Lawrence, Robert, The Way Things Grow, partial view of webpage at http://www.h-e-r-e.com/growth_variant4.html, 1998.The texts began with the exact longitude and latitude of a geographical site in some way related to birch trees. ... A particularly old or large tree... a factory that turned birch trees into popsicle sticks and medical tongue depressors... etc. The website texts included directions to the site, and absurd scripts for performance. In this way the Internet component transformed the suite of sculptures in the gallery to a series of virtual, and possibly actual, events beyond the gallery. These potential narratives that viewers were invited into comprised an open-ended serial structure. The gallery work was formal, minimal, essentialist. On the web it was social, locative, deconstructive. In both locations, it was located. Here follows an excerpt from the website. GROWTH VARIANT #25: North 44:57:58 by West 93:15:56. On the south side of the Hennepin County Government Center is a park with 9 birch trees. These are urban birches, and they display random scratchings, as well as proclamations of affection expressed with pairs of initials and a “+” –both with and without encircling heart symbols. RECOMMENDED PERFORMANCE: Visit these urban birches once each month. Photograph all changes in their bark made by humans. After 20 years compile a document entitled, "Human Mark Making on Urban Birches, a Visual Study of Specific Universalities". Bring it into the Hennepin County Government Center and ask that it be placed in the archives.An Acre of Art (2000) was a collaborative project with sculptor Mark Knierim. Like The Way Things Grow, this new work, commissioned by the Minneapolis Art Institute, played out in the gallery, in a specific geographic location, and online. In the Art Institute was a gallery installation combining sculptures with absurd combinations of physical rural culture fitting contradictorily into an urban "high art" context. One of the pieces, entitled Landscape (2000), was an 18’ chicken coop faced with a gold picture frame. Inside were two bard rock hens and an iMac. The computer was programmed to stream to the Internet live video from the coop, the world’s first video chicken cam. As a work unfolding across a long stretch of time, the web cam video was a serial narrative without determined division into episodes. The gallery works also referenced a specific acre of agricultural land an hour from the Institute. Here we planted a row of dwarf corn at a diagonal to the mid-western American rural geometric grid of farmland. Visitors to the rural site could sit on “rural art furniture,” contemplate the corn growing, and occasionally witness absurd performances. The third stream of the piece was an extensive website, which playfully theorized the rural/urban/art trialectic. Each of the three locations of the work was exploited to provide a richer transmedia interpretation of the project’s themes than any one venue or medium could. Location Sequence is a serial installation begun in 1999. Each installation has completely different physical elements. The only consistent physical element is 72 segments of a 72” collapsible carpenter's ruler evenly spaced to wrap around the gallery walls. Each of the 72 segments of the ruler displays an Internet web address. Reversing the notion of the Internet as a place of rapid change compared to a more enduring physical world, in this case the Internet components do not change with each new episode of the work, while the physical components transform with each new installation. Thematically, all aspects of the work deal with various shades of meaning of the term "location." Beginning/Middle/End is a 30-year conceptual serial begun in 2002, presenting a series of site-specific actions, objects, or interventions combined with corresponding web pages that collectively negotiate concepts related to time, location, and narrative. Realizing a 30-year project via the web in this manner is a self-conscious contradiction of the culture of the instantaneous that the Internet manifests and propagates.The installation documented here was completed for a one-night event in 2002 with Szilage Gallery in St Petersburg, Florida. Bricks moulded with the URLs for three web sites were placed in a historic brick road with the intention that they would remain there through a historical time frame. The URLs were also projected in light on a creek parallel to the brick road and seen only for several hours. The corresponding web site components speculate on temporal/narrative structures crossing with geographic features, natural and manufactured.Figure 3: Lawrence, Robert, Beginning/Middle/End, site-specific installation with website in conjunction with 30-year series, http://www.h-e-r-e.com/beginning.html, 2002-32.The most recent instalment was done as part of Conflux Festival in 2014 in collaboration with painter Ld Lawrence. White shapes appeared in various public spaces in downtown Manhattan. Upon closer inspection people realized that they were not painted tags or stickers, but magnetic sheets that could be moved or removed. An optical scan tag hidden on the back of each shape directed to a website which encouraged people to move the objects to other locations and send a geo-located photo to the web site to trace the shape's motion through the world. The work online could trace the serial narrative of the physical installation components following the installation during Conflux Festival. Figure 4: Lawrence, Robert w/Lawrence, Ld, Gravity Ace on the Move, site-specific installation with geo-tracking website at http://www.h-e-r-e.com/gravityace/. Completed for Conflux Festival NYC, 2014, as part of Beginning/Middle/End.Dad's Boots (2003) was a multi-sited sculpture/performance. Three different physical manifestations of the work were installed at the same time in three locations: Shirakawa-go Art Festival in Japan; the Phipps Art Center in Hudson, Wisconsin; and at the Tampa Museum of Art in Florida. Physical components of the work included silent video projection, digital photography, computer key caps, and my father's boots. Each of these three different installations referred back to one web site. Because all these shows were up at the same time, the work was a distributed synchronous serial. In each installation space the title of the work was displayed as an Internet address. At the website was a series of popup texts suggesting performances focused, however absurdly, on reassessing paternal relationships.Figure 5: Lawrence, Robert, Dad’s Boots, simultaneous gallery installation in Florida, Wisconsin and Japan, with website, 2003. Coincidently, beginning the same time as my transmedia physical/Internet art practice, since 1998 I have had a secret other-life as a tango dancer. I came to this practice drawn by the music and the attraction of an after-dark subculture that ran by different rules than the rest of life. While my life as a tanguero was most certainly an escape strategy, I quickly began to see that although tango was different from the rest of the world, it was indeed a part of this world. It had a place and a time and a history. Further, it was a fascinating history about the interplays of power, class, wealth, race, and desire. Figure 6: Lawrence, Robert, Tango Intervention, site-specific dance interventions with extensive web components, 2007-12.As Marta Savigliano points out in Tango and the Political Economy of Passion, “Tango is a practice already ready for struggle. It knows about taking sides, positions, risks. It has the experience of domination/resistance from within. …Tango is a language of decolonization. So pick and choose. Improvise... let your feet do the thinking. Be comfortable in your restlessness. Tango” (17). The realization that tango, my sensual escape from critical thought, was actually political came just about the time I was beginning to understand the essential dynamic of contradiction between the physical and Internet streams of my work. Tango Intervention began in 2007. I have now, as of 2018, done tango interventions in over 40 cities. Overall, the project can be seen as a serial performance of contradictions. In each case the physical dance interventions are manifestations of sensual fantasy in public space, and the Internet components recontextualize the public actions as site-specific performances with a political edge, revealing a hidden history or current social situation related to the political economy of tango. These themes are further developed in a series of related digital prints and videos shown here in various formats and contexts.In Tango Panopticon (2009), a “spin off” from the Tango Intervention series, the hidden social issue was the growing video surveillance of public space. The first Tango Panopticon production was Mayday 2009 with people dancing tango under public video surveillance in 15 cities. Mayday 2010 was Tango Panopticon 2.0, with tangointervention.org streaming live cell phone video from 16 simultaneous dance interventions on 4 continents. The public encountered the interventions as a sensual reclaiming of public space. Contradictorily, on the web Tango Panopticon 2.0 became a distributed worldwide action against the growing spectre of video surveillance and the increasing control of public commons. Each intervention team was automatically located on an online map when they started streaming video. Visitors to the website could choose an action from the list of cities or click on the map pins to choose which live video to load into the grid of 6 streaming signals. Visitors to the physical intervention sites could download our free open source software and stream their own videos to tangointervention.org.Figure 7: Lawrence, Robert, Tango Panopticon 2.0, worldwide synchronous dance intervention with live streaming video and extensive web components, 2010.Tango Panopticon also has a life as a serial installation, initially installed as part of the annual conference of “Digital Resources for Humanities and the Arts” at Brunel University, London. All shots in the grid of videos are swish pans from close-ups of surveillance cameras to tango interveners dancing under their gaze. Each ongoing installation in the series physically adapts to the site, and with each installation more lines of video frames are added until the images become too small to read.Figure 8: Lawrence, Robert, Tango Panopticon 2.0 (For Osvaldo), video installation based on worldwide dance intervention series with live streaming video, 2011.My new work Equivalence (in development) is quite didactic in its contradictions between the online and gallery components. A series of square prints of clouds in a gallery are titled with web addresses that open with other cloud images and then fade into randomly loading excerpts from the CIA torture manual used at Guantanamo Bay Detention Center.Figure 9: Lawrence, Robert, Eauivalence, digital prints, excerpts from CIA Guantanamo Detention Center torture manual, work-in-progress.The gallery images recall Stieglitz’s Equivalents photographs from the early 20th century. Made in the 1920s to 30s, the Equivalents comprise a pivotal change in photographic history, from the early pictorial movement in which photography tried to imitate painting, and a new artistic approach that embraced features distinct to the photographic medium. Stieglitz’s Equivalents merged photographic realism with abstraction and symbolist undertones of transcendent spirituality. Many of the 20th century masters of photography, from Ansel Adams to Minor White, acknowledged the profound influence these photographs had on them. Several images from the Equivalents series were the first photographic art to be acquired by a major art museum in the US, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.My series Equivalence serves as the latest episode in a serial art history narrative. Since the “Pictures Generation” movement in the 1970s, photography has cannibalized its history, but perhaps no photographic body of work has been as quoted as Stieglitz’s Equivalents. A partial list includes: John Baldessari’s series Blowing Cigar Smoke to Match Clouds That Are the Same(1973), William Eggleston’s series Wedgwood Blue (1979), John Pfahl’s smoke stack series (1982-89), George Legrady’s Equivalents II(1993), Vik Muniz’sEquivalents(1997), Lisa Oppenheim (2012), and most recently, Berndnaut Smilde’s Nimbus Series, begun in 2012. Over the course of more than four decades each of these series has presented a unique vision, but all rest on Stieglitz’s shoulders. From that position they make choices about how to operate relative the original Equivalents, ranging from Baldessari and Muniz’s phenomenological playfulness to Eggleston and Smilde’s neo-essentialist approach.My series Equivalence follows along in this serial modernist image franchise. What distinguishes it is that it does not take a single position relative to other Equivalents tribute works. Rather, it exploits its gallery/Internet transmediality to simultaneously assume two contradictory positions. The dissonance of this positioning is one of my main points with the work, and it is in some ways resonant with the contradictions concerning photographic abstraction and representation that Stieglitz engaged in the original Equivalents series almost a century ago.While hanging on the walls of a gallery, Equivalence suggests the same metaphysical intentions as Stieglitz’s Equivalents. Simultaneously, in its manifestation on the Internet, my Equivalence series transcends its implied transcendence and claims a very specific time and place –a small brutal encampment on the island of Cuba where the United States abandoned any remaining claim to moral authority. In this illegal prison, forgotten lives drag on invisibly, outside of time, like untold serial narratives without resolution and without justice.Partially to balance the political insistence of Equivalence, I am also working on another series that operates with very different modalities. Following up on the live streaming technology that I developed for my Tango Panopticon public intervention series, I have started Horizon (In Development).Figure 10: Lawrence, Robert, Horizon, worldwide synchronous horizon interventions with live streaming video to Internet, work-in-progress.In Horizon I again use live cell phone video, this time streamed to an infinitely wide web page from live actions around the world done in direct engagement with the horizon line. The performances will begin and automatically come online live at noon in their respective time zone, each added to the growing horizontal line of moving images. As the actions complete, the streamed footage will begin endlessly looping. The project will also stream live during the event to galleries, and then HD footage from the events will be edited and incorporated into video installations. Leading up to this major event day, I will have a series of smaller instalments of the piece, with either live or recorded video. The first of these preliminary versions was completed during the Live Performers Workshop in Rome. Horizon continues to develop, leading to the worldwide synchronous event in 2020.Certainly, artists have always worked in series. However, exploiting the unique temporal dimensions of the Internet, a series of works can develop episodically as a serial work. If that work unfolds with contradictory thematics in its embodied and online forms, it reaches further toward an understanding of the complexities of postInternet culture and identity. ReferencesSaviligliano, Marta. Tango and the Political Economy of Passion. Boulder: Westview Press, 1995.

Introduction It is very common for children’s films to adapt, rework, or otherwise re-imagine existing cultural material. Such re-imaginings are potential candidates for fidelity criticism: a mode of analysis whereby an adaptation is judged according to its degree of faithfulness to the source text. Indeed, it is interesting that while fidelity criticism is now considered outdated and problematic by adaptation theorists (see Stam; Leitch; and Whelehan) the issue of fidelity has tended to linger in the discussions that form around material adapted for children. In particular, it is often assumed that the re-imagining of cultural material for children will involve a process of “dumbing down” that strips the original text of its complexity so that it is more easily consumed by young audiences (see Semenza; Kellogg; Hastings; and Napolitano). This is especially the case when children’s films draw from texts—or genres—that are specifically associated with an adult readership. This paper explores such an interplay between children’s and adult’s culture with reference to the re-imagining of the horror genre in children’s animated film. Recent years have seen an inrush of animated films that play with horror tropes, conventions, and characters. These include Frankenweenie (2012), ParaNorman (2012), Hotel Transylvania (2012), Igor (2008), Monsters Inc. (2001), Monster House (2006), and Monsters vs Aliens (2009). Often diminishingly referred to as “kiddie horror” or “goth lite”, this re-imagining of the horror genre is connected to broader shifts in children’s culture, literature, and media. Anna Jackson, Karen Coats, and Roderick McGillis, for instance, have written about the mainstreaming of the Gothic in children’s literature after centuries of “suppression” (2); a glance at the titles in a children’s book store, they tell us, may suggest that “fear or the pretence of fear has become a dominant mode of enjoyment in literature for young people” (1). At the same time, as Lisa Hopkins has pointed out, media products with dark, supernatural, or Gothic elements are increasingly being marketed to children, either directly or through product tie-ins such as toys or branded food items (116-17). The re-imagining of horror for children demands our attention for a number of reasons. First, it raises questions about the commercialisation and repackaging of material that has traditionally been considered “high culture”, particularly when the films in question are seen to pilfer from sites of the literary Gothic such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) or Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). The classic horror films of the 1930s such as James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) also have their own canonical status within the genre, and are objects of reverence for horror fans and film scholars alike. Moreover, aficionados of the genre have been known to object vehemently to any perceived simplification or dumbing down of horror conventions in order to address a non-horror audience. As Lisa Bode has demonstrated, such objections were articulated in many reviews of the film Twilight, in which the repackaging and simplifying of vampire mythology was seen to pander to a female, teenage or “tween” audience (710-11). Second, the re-imagining of horror for children raises questions about whether the genre is an appropriate source of pleasure and entertainment for young audiences. Horror has traditionally been understood as problematic and damaging even for adult viewers: Mark Jancovich, for instance, writes of the long-standing assumption that horror “is moronic, sick and worrying; that any person who derives pleasure from the genre is moronic, sick and potentially dangerous” and that both the genre and its fans are “deviant” (18). Consequently, discussions about the relationship between children and horror have tended to emphasise regulation, restriction, censorship, effect, and “the dangers of imitative violence” (Buckingham 95). As Paul Wells observes, there is a “consistent concern […] that horror films are harmful to children, but clearly these films are not made for children, and the responsibility for who views them lies with adult authority figures who determine how and when horror films are seen” (24). Previous academic work on the child as horror viewer has tended to focus on children as consumers of horror material designed for adults. Joanne Cantor’s extensive work in this area has indicated that fright reactions to horror media are commonly reported and can be long-lived (Cantor; and Cantor and Oliver). Elsewhere, the work of Sarah Smith (45-76) and David Buckingham (95-138) has indicated that children, like adults, can gain certain pleasures from the genre; it has also indicated that children can be quite media savvy when viewing horror, and can operate effectively as self-censors. However, little work has yet been conducted on whether (and how) the horror genre might be transformed for child viewers. With this in mind, I explore here the re-imagining of horror in two children’s animated films: Frankenweenie and ParaNorman. I will consider the way horror tropes, narratives, conventions, and characters have been reshaped in each film with a child’s perspective in mind. This, I argue, does not make them simplified texts or unsuitable objects of pleasure for adults; instead, the films demonstrate that the act of re-imagining horror for children calls into question long-held assumptions about pleasure, taste, and the boundaries between “adult” and “child”. Frankenweenie and ParaNorman: Rewriting the Myth of Childhood Innocence Frankenweenie is a stop-motion animation written by John August and directed by Tim Burton, based on a live-action short film made by Burton in 1984. As its name suggests, Frankenweenie re-imagines Shelley’s Frankenstein by transforming the relationship between creator and monster into that between child and pet. Burton’s Victor Frankenstein is a young boy living in a small American town, a creative loner who enjoys making monster movies. When his beloved dog Sparky is killed in a car accident, young Victor—like his predecessor in Shelley’s novel—is driven by the awfulness of this encounter with death to discover the “mysteries of creation” (Shelley 38): he digs up Sparky’s body, drags the corpse back to the family home, and reanimates him in the attic. This coming-to-life sequence is both a re-imagining of the famous animation scene in Whale’s film Frankenstein and a tender expression of the love between a boy and his dog. The re-imagined creation scene therefore becomes a site of negotiation between adult and child audiences: adult viewers familiar with Whale’s adaptation and its sense of electric spectacle are invited to rethink this scene from a child’s perspective, while child viewers are given access to a key moment from the horror canon. While this blurring of the lines between child and adult is a common theme in Burton’s work—many of his films exist in a liminal space where a certain childlike sensibility mingles with a more adult-centric dark humour—Frankenweenie is unique in that it actively re-imagines as “childlike” a film and/or work of literature that was previously populated by adult characters and associated with adult audiences. ParaNorman is the second major film from the animation studio Laika Entertainment. Following in the footsteps of the earlier Laika film Coraline (2009)—and paving the way for the studio’s 2014 release, Boxtrolls—ParaNorman features stop-motion animation, twisted storylines, and the exploration of dark themes and spaces by child characters. The film tells the story of Norman, an eleven year old boy who can see and communicate with the dead. This gift marks him as an outcast in the small town of Blithe Hollow, which has built its identity on the historic trial and hanging of an “evil” child witch. Norman must grapple with the town’s troubled past and calm the spirit of the vengeful witch; along the way, he and an odd assortment of children battle zombies and townsfolk alike, the latter appearing more monstrous than the former as the film progresses. Although ParaNorman does not position itself as an adaptation of a specific horror text, as does Frankenweenie, it shares with Burton’s film a playful intertextuality whereby references are constantly made to iconic films in the horror genre (including Halloween [1978], Friday the 13th [1980], and Day of the Dead [1985]). Both films were released in 2012 to critical acclaim. Interestingly, though, film critics seemed to disagree over who these texts were actually “for.” Some reviewers described the films as children’s texts, and warned that adults would likely find them “tame and compromised” (Scott), “toothless” (McCarthy) or “sentimental” (Bradshaw). These comments carry connotations of simplification: the suggestion is that the conventions and tropes of the horror genre have been weakened (or even contaminated) by the association with child audiences, and that consequently adults cannot (or should not) take pleasure in the films. Other reviewers of ParaNorman and Frankenweenie suggested that adults were more likely to enjoy the films than children (O’Connell; Berardinelli; and Wolgamott). Often, this suggestion came together with a warning about scary or dark content: the films were deemed to be too frightening for young children, and this exclusion of the child audience allowed the reviewer to acknowledge his or her own enjoyment of and investment in the film (and the potential enjoyment of other adult viewers). Lou Lumenick, for instance, peppers his review of ParaNorman with language that indicates his own pleasure (“probably the year’s most visually dazzling movie so far”; the climax is “too good to spoil”; the humour is “deliciously twisted”), while warning that children as old as eight should not be taken to see the film. Similarly, Christy Lemire warns that certain elements of Frankenweenie are scary and that “this is not really a movie for little kids”; she goes on to add that this scariness “is precisely what makes ‘Frankenweenie’ such a consistent wonder to watch for the rest of us” (emphasis added). In both these cases a line is drawn between child and adult viewers, and arguably it is the film’s straying into the illicit area of horror from the confines of a children’s text that renders it an object of pleasure for the adult viewer. The thrill of being scared is also interpreted here as a specifically adult pleasure. This need on the part of critics to establish boundaries between child and adult viewerships is interesting given that the films themselves strive to incorporate children (as characters and as viewers) into the horror space. In particular, both films work hard to dismantle the myths of childhood innocence—and associated ideas about pleasure and taste—that have previously seen children excluded from the culture of the horror film. Both the young protagonists, for instance, are depicted as media-literate consumers or makers of horror material. Victor is initially seen exhibiting one of his home-made monster movies to his bemused parents, and we first encounter Norman watching a zombie film with his (dead) grandmother; clearly a consummate horror viewer, Norman decodes the film for Grandma, explaining that the zombie is eating the woman’s head because, “that’s what they do.” In this way, the myth of childhood innocence is rewritten: the child’s mature engagement with the horror genre gives him agency, which is linked to his active position in the narrative (both Norman and Victor literally save their towns from destruction); the parents, meanwhile, are reduced to babbling stereotypes who worry that their sons will “turn out weird” (Frankenweenie) or wonder why they “can’t be like other kids” (ParaNorman). The films also rewrite the myth of childhood innocence by depicting Victor and Norman as children with dark, difficult lives. Importantly, each boy has encountered death and, for each, his parents have failed to effectively guide him through the experience. In Frankenweenie Victor is grief-stricken when Sparky dies, yet his parents can offer little more than platitudes to quell the pain of loss. “When you lose someone you love they never really leave you,” Victor’s mother intones, “they just move into a special place in your heart,” to which Victor replies “I don’t want him in my heart—I want him here with me!” The death of Norman’s grandmother is similarly dismissed by his mother in ParaNorman. “I know you and Grandma were very close,” she says, “but we all have to move on. Grandma’s in a better place now.” Norman objects: “No she’s not, she’s in the living room!” In both scenes, the literal-minded but intelligent child seems to understand death, loss, and grief while the parents are unable to speak about these “mature” concepts in a meaningful way. The films are also reminders that a child’s first experience of death can come very young, and often occurs via the loss of an elderly relative or a beloved pet. Death, Play, and the Monster In both films, therefore, the audience is invited to think about death. Consequently, there is a sense in each film that while the violent and sexual content of most horror texts has been stripped away, the dark centre of the horror genre remains. As Paul Wells reminds us, horror “is predominantly concerned with the fear of death, the multiple ways in which it can occur, and the untimely nature of its occurrence” (10). Certainly, the horror texts which Frankenweenie and ParaNorman re-imagine are specifically concerned with death and mortality. The various adaptations of Frankenstein that are referenced in Frankenweenie and the zombie films to which ParaNorman pays homage all deploy “the monster” as a figure who defies easy categorisation as living or dead. The othering of this figure in the traditional horror narrative allows him/her/it to both subvert and confirm cultural ideas about life, death, and human status: for monsters, as Elaine Graham notes, have long been deployed in popular culture as figures who “mark the fault-lines” and also “signal the fragility” of boundary structures, including the boundary between human and not human, and that between life and death (12). Frankenweenie’s Sparky, as an iteration of the Frankenstein monster, clearly fits this description: he is neither living nor dead, and his monstrosity emerges not from any act of violence or from physical deformity (he remains, throughout the film, a cute and lovable dog, albeit with bolts fixed to his neck) but from his boundary-crossing status. However, while most versions of the Frankenstein monster are deliberately positioned to confront ideas about the human/machine boundary and to perform notions of the posthuman, such concerns are sidelined in Frankenweenie. Instead, the emphasis is on concerns that are likely to resonate with children: Sparky is a reminder of the human preoccupation with death, loss, and the question of why (or whether, or when) we should abide by the laws of nature. Arguably, this indicates a re-imagining of the Frankenstein tale not only for child audiences but from a child’s perspective. In ParaNorman, similarly, the zombie–often read as an articulation of adult anxieties about war, apocalypse, terrorism, and the deterioration of social order (Platts 551-55)—is re-used and re-imagined in a childlike way. From a child’s perspective, the zombie may represent the horrific truth of mortality and/or the troublesome desire to live forever that emerges once this truth has been confronted. More specifically, the notion of dealing meaningfully with the past and of honouring rather than silencing the dead is a strong thematic undercurrent in ParaNorman, and in this sense the zombies are important figures who dramatise the connections between past and present. While this past/present connection is explored on many levels in ParaNorman—including the level of a town grappling with its dark history—it is Norman and his grandmother who take centre stage: the boundary-crossing figure of the zombie is re-realised here in terms of a negotiation with a presence that is now absent (the elderly relative who has died but is still remembered). Indeed, the zombies in this film are an implicit rebuke to Norman’s mother and her command that Norman “move on” after his grandmother’s death. The dead are still present, this film playfully reminds us, and therefore “moving on” is an overly simplistic and somewhat disrespectful response (especially when imposed on children by adult authority figures.) If the horror narrative is built around the notion that “normality is threatened by the Monster”, as Robin Wood has famously suggested, ParaNorman and Frankenweenie re-imagine this narrative of subversion from a child’s perspective (31). Both films open up a space within which the child is permitted to negotiate with the destabilising figure of the monster; the normality that is “threatened” here is the adult notion of the finality of death and, relatedly, the assumption that death is not a suitable subject for children to think or talk about. Breaking down such understandings, Frankenweenie and ParaNorman strive not so much to play with death (a phrase that implies a certain callousness, a problematic disregard for human life) but to explore death through the darkness of play. This is beautifully imaged in a scene from ParaNorman in which Norman and his friend Neil play with the ghost of Neil’s recently deceased dog. “We’re going to play with a dead dog in the garden,” Neil enthusiastically announces to his brother, “and we’re not even going to have to dig him up first!” Somewhat similarly, film critic Richard Corliss notes in his review of Frankenweenie that the film’s “message to the young” is that “children should play with dead things.” Through this intersection between “death” and “play”, both films propose a particularly child-like (although not necessarily child-ish) way of negotiating horror’s dark territory. Conclusion Animated film has always been an ambiguous space in terms of age, pleasure, and viewership. As film critic Margaret Pomeranz has observed, “there is this perception that if it’s an animated film then you can take the little littlies” (Pomeranz and Stratton). Animation itself is often a signifier of safety, fun, nostalgia, and childishness; it is a means of addressing families and young audiences. Yet at the same time, the fantastic and transformative aspects of animation can be powerful tools for telling stories that are dark, surprising, or somehow subversive. It is therefore interesting that the trend towards re-imagining horror for children that this paper has identified is unfolding within the animated space. It is beyond the scope of this paper to fully consider what animation as a medium brings to this re-imagining process. However, it is worth noting that the distinctive stop-motion style used in both films works to position them as alternatives to Disney products (for although Frankenweenie was released under the Disney banner, it is visually distinct from most of Disney’s animated ventures). The majority of Disney films are adaptations or re-imaginings of some sort, yet these re-imaginings look to fairytales or children’s literature for their source material. In contrast, as this paper has demonstrated, Frankenweenie and ParaNorman open up a space for boundary play: they give children access to tropes, narratives, and characters that are specifically associated with adult viewers, and they invite adults to see these tropes, narratives, and characters from a child’s perspective. Ultimately, it is difficult to determine the success of this re-imagining process: what, indeed, does a successful re-imagining of horror for children look like, and who might be permitted to take pleasure from it? Arguably, ParaNorman and Frankenweenie have succeeded in reshaping the genre without simplifying it, deploying tropes and characters from classic horror texts in a meaningful way within the complex space of children’s animated film. References Berardinelli, James. “Frankenweenie (Review).” Reelviews, 4 Oct. 2012. 6 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.reelviews.net/php_review_template.php?identifier=2530›. Bode, Lisa. “Transitional Tastes: Teen Girls and Genre in the Critical Reception of Twilight.” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 24.5 (2010): 707-19. Bradshaw, Peter. “Frankenweenie: First Look Review.” The Guardian, 11 Oct. 2012. 6 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/oct/10/frankenweenie-review-london-film-festival-tim-burton›. Buckingham, David. Moving Images: Understanding Children’s Emotional Responses to Television. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996. Cantor, Joanne. “‘I’ll Never Have a Clown in My House’ – Why Movie Horror Lives On.” Poetics Today 25.2 (2004): 283-304. Cantor, Joanne, and Mary Beth Oliver. “Developmental Differences in Responses to Horror”. The Horror Film. Ed. Stephen Prince. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2004. 224-41. Corliss, Richard. “‘Frankenweenie’ Movie Review: A Re-Animated Delight”. Time, 4 Oct. 2012. 6 Aug. 2014 ‹http://entertainment.time.com/2012/10/04/tim-burtons-frankenweenie-a-re-animated-delight/›. Frankenweenie. Directed by Tim Burton. Walt Disney Pictures, 2012. Graham, Elaine L. Representations of the Post/Human: Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2002. Hastings, A. Waller. “Moral Simplification in Disney’s The Little Mermaid.” The Lion and the Unicorn 17.1 (1993): 83-92. Hopkins, Lisa. Screening the Gothic. Austin: U of Texas P, 2005. Jackson, Anna, Karen Coats, and Roderick McGillis. “Introduction.” The Gothic in Children’s Literature: Haunting the Borders. Eds. Anna Jackson, Karen Coats, and Roderick McGillis. New York: Routledge, 2008. 1-14. Jancovich, Mark. “General Introduction.” Horror: The Film Reader. Ed. Mark Jancovich. London: Routledge, 2002. 1-19. Kellogg, Judith L. “The Dynamics of Dumbing: The Case of Merlin.” The Lion and the Unicorn 17.1 (1993): 57-72. Leitch, Thomas. “Twelve Fallacies in Contemporary Adaptation Theory.” Criticism 45.2 (2003): 149-71. Lemire, Christy. “‘Frankenweenie’ Review: Tim Burton Reminds Us Why We Love Him.” The Huffington Post, 2 Oct. 2012. 6 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/03/frankenweenie-review-tim-burton_n_1935142.html›. Lumenick, Lou. “So Good, It’s Scary (ParaNorman Review)”. New York Post, 17 Aug. 2012. 3 Jun. 2015 ‹http://nypost.com/2012/08/17/so-good-its-scary/›. McCarthy, Todd. “Frankenweenie: Film Review.” The Hollywood Reporter, 20 Sep. 2012. 6 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movie/frankenweenie/review/372720›. Napolitano, Marc. “Disneyfying Dickens: Oliver & Company and The Muppet Christmas Carol as Dickensian Musicals.” Studies in Popular Culture 32.1 (2009): 79-102. O’Connell, Sean. “Middle School and Zombies? Awwwkward!” Washington Post, 17 Aug. 2012. 3 Jun. 2015 ‹http://www.washingtonpost.com/gog/movies/paranorman,1208210.html›. ParaNorman. Directed by Chris Butler and Sam Fell. Focus Features/Laika Entertainment, 2012. Platts, Todd K. “Locating Zombies in the Sociology of Popular Culture”. Sociology Compass 7 (2013): 547-60. Pomeranz, Margaret, and David Stratton. “Igor (Review).” At the Movies, 14 Dec. 2008. 6 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.abc.net.au/atthemovies/txt/s2426109.htm›. Scott, A.O. “It’s Aliiiive! And Wagging Its Tail: ‘Frankenweenie’, Tim Burton’s Homage to Horror Classics.” New York Times, 4 Oct. 2012. 6 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/05/movies/frankenweenie-tim-burtons-homage-to-horror-classics.html›. Semenza, Gregory M. Colón. “Teens, Shakespeare, and the Dumbing Down Cliché: The Case of The Animated Tales.” Shakespeare Bulletin 26.2 (2008): 37-68. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1993 [1818]. Smith, Sarah J. Children, Cinema and Censorship: From Dracula to the Dead End Kids. London: I.B. Tauris, 2005. Stam, Robert. “Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation.” Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation. Eds. Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. 1-52. Wells, Paul. The Horror Genre: From Beelzebub to Blair Witch. London: Wallflower, 2000. Whelehan, Imelda. “Adaptations: the Contemporary Dilemmas.” Adaptations: From Text to Screen, Screen to Text. Eds. Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan. London: Routledge, 1999. 3-19. Wolgamott, L. Kent. “‘Frankenweenie’ A Box-Office Bomb, But Superior Film.” Lincoln Journal Star, 10 Oct. 2012. 18 Aug. 2014 ‹http://journalstar.com/entertainment/movies/l-kent-wolgamott-frankenweenie-a-box-office-bomb-but-superior/article_42409e82-89b9-5794-8082-7b5de3d469e2.html›. Wood, Robin. “The American Nightmare: Horror in the 70s.” Horror: The Film Reader. Ed. Mark Jancovich. London: Routledge, 2002. 25-32.

Since the first days of the World Wide Web, artists like myself have been exploring the new possibilities of network interactivity. Some good tools and languages have been developed and made available free for the public to use. This has empowered individuals to participate in the media in ways that are quite remarkable. Nonetheless, the future of independent media is clouded by legal, regulatory, and organisational challenges that need to be addressed. It is not clear to what extent independent content producers will be able to build upon the successes of the 90s – it is yet to be seen whether their efforts will be largely nullified by the anticyclones of a hostile media market. Not so long ago, American news magazines were covering the Browser War. Several real wars later, the terms of surrender are becoming clearer. Now both of the major Internet browsers are owned by huge media corporations, and most of the states (and Reagan-appointed judges) that were demanding the break-up of Microsoft have given up. A curious about-face occurred in U.S. Justice Department policy when John Ashcroft decided to drop the federal case. Maybe Microsoft's value as a partner in covert activity appealed to Ashcroft more than free competition. Regardless, Microsoft is now turning its wrath on new competitors, people who are doing something very, very bad: sharing the products of their own labour. This practice of sharing source code and building free software infrastructure is epitomised by the continuing development of Linux. Everything in the Linux kernel is free, publicly accessible information. As a rule, the people building this "open source" operating system software believe that maintaining transparency is important. But U.S. courts are not doing much to help. In a case brought by the Motion Picture Association of America against Eric Corley, a federal district court blocked the distribution of source code that enables these systems to play DVDs. In addition to censoring Corley's journal, the court ruled that any programmer who writes a program that plays a DVD must comply with a host of license restrictions. In short, an established and popular media format (the DVD) cannot be used under open source operating systems without sacrificing the principle that software source code should remain in the public domain. Should the contents of operating systems be tightly guarded secrets, or subject to public review? If there are capable programmers willing to create good, free operating systems, should the law stand in their way? The question concerning what type of software infrastructure will dominate personal computers in the future is being answered as much by disappointing legal decisions as it is by consumer choice. Rather than ensuring the necessary conditions for innovation and cooperation, the courts permit a monopoly to continue. Rather than endorsing transparency, secrecy prevails. Rather than aiming to preserve a balance between the commercial economy and the gift-economy, sharing is being undermined by the law. Part of the mystery of the Internet for a lot of newcomers must be that it seems to disprove the old adage that you can't get something for nothing. Free games, free music, free pornography, free art. Media corporations are doing their best to change this situation. The FBI and trade groups have blitzed the American news media with alarmist reports about how children don't understand that sharing digital information is a crime. Teacher Gail Chmura, the star of one such media campaign, says of her students, "It's always been interesting that they don't see a connection between the two. They just don't get it" (Hopper). Perhaps the confusion arises because the kids do understand that digital duplication lets two people have the same thing. Theft is at best a metaphor for the copying of data, because the original is not stolen in the same sense as a material object. In the effort to liken all copying to theft, legal provisions for the fair use of intellectual property are neglected. Teachers could just as easily emphasise the importance of sharing and the development of an electronic commons that is free for all to use. The values advanced by the trade groups are not beyond question and are not historical constants. According to Donald Krueckeberg, Rutgers University Professor of Urban Planning, native Americans tied the concept of property not to ownership but to use. "One used it, one moved on, and use was shared with others" (qtd. in Batt). Perhaps it is necessary for individuals to have dominion over some private data. But who owns the land, wind, sun, and sky of the Internet – the infrastructure? Given that publicly-funded research and free software have been as important to the development of the Internet as have business and commercial software, it is not surprising that some ambiguity remains about the property status of the dataverse. For many the Internet is as much a medium for expression and the interplay of languages as it is a framework for monetary transaction. In the case involving DVD software mentioned previously, there emerged a grass-roots campaign in opposition to censorship. Dozens of philosophical programmers and computer scientists asserted the expressive and linguistic bases of software by creating variations on the algorithm needed to play DVDs. The forbidden lines of symbols were printed on T-shirts, translated into different computer languages, translated into legal rhetoric, and even embedded into DNA and pictures of MPAA president Jack Valenti (see e.g. Touretzky). These efforts were inspired by a shared conviction that important liberties were at stake. Supporting the MPAA's position would do more than protect movies from piracy. The use of the algorithm was not clearly linked to an intent to pirate movies. Many felt that outlawing the DVD algorithm, which had been experimentally developed by a Norwegian teenager, represented a suppression of gumption and ingenuity. The court's decision rejected established principles of fair use, denied the established legality of reverse engineering software to achieve compatibility, and asserted that journalists and scientists had no right to publish a bit of code if it might be misused. In a similar case in April 2000, a U.S. court of appeals found that First Amendment protections did apply to software (Junger). Noting that source code has both an expressive feature and a functional feature, this court held that First Amendment protection is not reserved only for purely expressive communication. Yet in the DVD case, the court opposed this view and enforced the inflexible demands of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Notwithstanding Ted Nelson's characterisation of computers as literary machines, the decision meant that the linguistic and expressive aspects of software would be subordinated to other concerns. A simple series of symbols were thereby cast under a veil of legal secrecy. Although they were easy to discover, and capable of being committed to memory or translated to other languages, fair use and other intuitive freedoms were deemed expendable. These sorts of legal obstacles are serious challenges to the continued viability of free software like Linux. The central value proposition of Linux-based operating systems – free, open source code – is threatening to commercial competitors. Some corporations are intent on stifling further development of free alternatives. Patents offer another vulnerability. The writing of free software has become a minefield of potential patent lawsuits. Corporations have repeatedly chosen to pursue patent litigation years after the alleged infringements have been incorporated into widely used free software. For example, although it was designed to avoid patent problems by an array of international experts, the image file format known as JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) has recently been dogged by patent infringement charges. Despite good intentions, low-budget initiatives and ad hoc organisations are ill equipped to fight profiteering patent lawsuits. One wonders whether software innovation is directed more by lawyers or computer scientists. The present copyright and patent regimes may serve the needs of the larger corporations, but it is doubtful that they are the best means of fostering software innovation and quality. Orwell wrote in his Homage to Catalonia, There was a new rule that censored portions of the newspaper must not be left blank but filled up with other matter; as a result it was often impossible to tell when something had been cut out. The development of the Internet has a similar character: new diversions spring up to replace what might have been so that the lost potential is hardly felt. The process of retrofitting Internet software to suit ideological and commercial agendas is already well underway. For example, Microsoft has announced recently that it will discontinue support for the Java language in 2004. The problem with Java, from Microsoft's perspective, is that it provides portable programming tools that work under all operating systems, not just Windows. With Java, programmers can develop software for the large number of Windows users, while simultaneously offering software to users of other operating systems. Java is an important piece of the software infrastructure for Internet content developers. Yet, in the interest of coercing people to use only their operating systems, Microsoft is willing to undermine thousands of existing Java-language projects. Their marketing hype calls this progress. The software industry relies on sales to survive, so if it means laying waste to good products and millions of hours of work in order to sell something new, well, that's business. The consequent infrastructure instability keeps software developers, and other creative people, on a treadmill. From Progressive Load by Andy Deck, artcontext.org/progload As an Internet content producer, one does not appeal directly to the hearts and minds of the public; one appeals through the medium of software and hardware. Since most people are understandably reluctant to modify the software running on their computers, the software installed initially is a critical determinant of what is possible. Unconventional, independent, and artistic uses of the Internet are diminished when the media infrastructure is effectively established by decree. Unaccountable corporate control over infrastructure software tilts the playing field against smaller content producers who have neither the advance warning of industrial machinations, nor the employees and resources necessary to keep up with a regime of strategic, cyclical obsolescence. It seems that independent content producers must conform to the distribution technologies and content formats favoured by the entertainment and marketing sectors, or else resign themselves to occupying the margins of media activity. It is no secret that highly diversified media corporations can leverage their assets to favour their own media offerings and confound their competitors. Yet when media giants AOL and Time-Warner announced their plans to merge in 2000, the claim of CEOs Steve Case and Gerald Levin that the merged companies would "operate in the public interest" was hardly challenged by American journalists. Time-Warner has since fought to end all ownership limits in the cable industry; and Case, who formerly championed third-party access to cable broadband markets, changed his tune abruptly after the merger. Now that Case has been ousted, it is unclear whether he still favours oligopoly. According to Levin, global media will be and is fast becoming the predominant business of the 21st century ... more important than government. It's more important than educational institutions and non-profits. We're going to need to have these corporations redefined as instruments of public service, and that may be a more efficient way to deal with society's problems than bureaucratic governments. Corporate dominance is going to be forced anyhow because when you have a system that is instantly available everywhere in the world immediately, then the old-fashioned regulatory system has to give way (Levin). It doesn't require a lot of insight to understand that this "redefinition," this slight of hand, does not protect the public from abuses of power: the dissolution of the "old-fashioned regulatory system" does not serve the public interest. From Lexicon by Andy Deck, artcontext.org/lexicon) As an artist who has adopted telecommunications networks and software as his medium, it disappoints me that a mercenary vision of electronic media's future seems to be the prevailing blueprint. The giantism of media corporations, and the ongoing deregulation of media consolidation (Ahrens), underscore the critical need for independent media sources. If it were just a matter of which cola to drink, it would not be of much concern, but media corporations control content. In this hyper-mediated age, content – whether produced by artists or journalists – crucially affects what people think about and how they understand the world. Content is not impervious to the software, protocols, and chicanery that surround its delivery. It is about time that people interested in independent voices stop believing that laissez faire capitalism is building a better media infrastructure. The German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger reminds us that the media tyrannies that affect us are social products. The media industry relies on thousands of people to make the compromises necessary to maintain its course. The rapid development of the mind industry, its rise to a key position in modern society, has profoundly changed the role of the intellectual. He finds himself confronted with new threats and new opportunities. Whether he knows it or not, whether he likes it or not, he has become the accomplice of a huge industrial complex which depends for its survival on him, as he depends on it for his own. He must try, at any cost, to use it for his own purposes, which are incompatible with the purposes of the mind machine. What it upholds he must subvert. He may play it crooked or straight, he may win or lose the game; but he would do well to remember that there is more at stake than his own fortune (Enzensberger 18). Some cultural leaders have recognised the important role that free software already plays in the infrastructure of the Internet. Among intellectuals there is undoubtedly a genuine concern about the emerging contours of corporate, global media. But more effective solidarity is needed. Interest in open source has tended to remain superficial, leading to trendy, cosmetic, and symbolic uses of terms like "open source" rather than to a deeper commitment to an open, public information infrastructure. Too much attention is focussed on what's "cool" and not enough on the road ahead. Various media specialists – designers, programmers, artists, and technical directors – make important decisions that affect the continuing development of electronic media. Many developers have failed to recognise (or care) that their decisions regarding media formats can have long reaching consequences. Web sites that use media formats which are unworkable for open source operating systems should be actively discouraged. Comparable technologies are usually available to solve compatibility problems. Going with the market flow is not really giving people what they want: it often opposes the work of thousands of activists who are trying to develop open source alternatives (see e.g. Greene). Average Internet users can contribute to a more innovative, free, open, and independent media – and being conscientious is not always difficult or unpleasant. One project worthy of support is the Internet browser Mozilla. Currently, many content developers create their Websites so that they will look good only in Microsoft's Internet Explorer. While somewhat understandable given the market dominance of Internet Explorer, this disregard for interoperability undercuts attempts to popularise standards-compliant alternatives. Mozilla, written by a loose-knit group of activists and programmers (some of whom are paid by AOL/Time-Warner), can be used as an alternative to Microsoft's browser. If more people use Mozilla, it will be harder for content providers to ignore the way their Web pages appear in standards-compliant browsers. The Mozilla browser, which is an open source initiative, can be downloaded from http://www.mozilla.org/. While there are many people working to create real and lasting alternatives to the monopolistic and technocratic dynamics that are emerging, it takes a great deal of cooperation to resist the media titans, the FCC, and the courts. Oddly enough, corporate interests sometimes overlap with those of the public. Some industrial players, such as IBM, now support open source software. For them it is mostly a business decision. Frustrated by the coercive control of Microsoft, they support efforts to develop another operating system platform. For others, including this writer, the open source movement is interesting for the potential it holds to foster a more heterogeneous and less authoritarian communications infrastructure. Many people can find common cause in this resistance to globalised uniformity and consolidated media ownership. The biggest challenge may be to get people to believe that their choices really matter, that by endorsing certain products and operating systems and not others, they can actually make a difference. But it's unlikely that this idea will flourish if artists and intellectuals don't view their own actions as consequential. There is a troubling tendency for people to see themselves as powerless in the face of the market. This paralysing habit of mind must be abandoned before the media will be free. Works Cited Ahrens, Frank. "Policy Watch." Washington Post (23 June 2002): H03. 30 March 2003 <http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A27015-2002Jun22?la... ...nguage=printer>. Batt, William. "How Our Towns Got That Way." 7 Oct. 1996. 31 March 2003 <http://www.esb.utexas.edu/drnrm/WhatIs/LandValue.htm>. Chester, Jeff. "Gerald Levin's Negative Legacy." Alternet.org 6 Dec. 2001. 5 March 2003 <http://www.democraticmedia.org/resources/editorials/levin.php>. Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. "The Industrialisation of the Mind." Raids and Reconstructions. London: Pluto Press, 1975. 18. Greene, Thomas C. "MS to Eradicate GPL, Hence Linux." 25 June 2002. 5 March 2003 <http://www.theregus.com/content/4/25378.php>. Hopper, D. Ian. "FBI Pushes for Cyber Ethics Education." Associated Press 10 Oct. 2000. 29 March 2003 <http://www.billingsgazette.com/computing/20001010_cethics.php>. Junger v. Daley. U.S. Court of Appeals for 6th Circuit. 00a0117p.06. 2000. 31 March 2003 <http://pacer.ca6.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/getopn.pl?OPINION=00a0... ...117p.06>. Levin, Gerald. "Millennium 2000 Special." CNN 2 Jan. 2000. Touretzky, D. S. "Gallery of CSS Descramblers." 2000. 29 March 2003 <http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery>. Links http://artcontext.org/lexicon/ http://artcontext.org/progload http://pacer.ca6.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/getopn.pl?OPINION=00a0117p.06 http://www.billingsgazette.com/computing/20001010_cethics.html http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery http://www.democraticmedia.org/resources/editorials/levin.html http://www.esb.utexas.edu/drnrm/WhatIs/LandValue.htm http://www.mozilla.org/ http://www.theregus.com/content/4/25378.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A27015-2002Jun22?language=printer Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Deck, Andy. "Treadmill Culture " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0304/04-treadmillculture.php>. APA Style Deck, A. (2003, Apr 23). Treadmill Culture . M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0304/04-treadmillculture.php>

IntroductionCulinary education in Ireland has long been influenced by culinary education being delivered in catering colleges in the United Kingdom (UK). Institutionalised culinary education started in Britain through the sponsorship of guild conglomerates (Lawson and Silver). The City & Guilds of London Institute for the Advancement of Technical Education opened its central institution in 1884. Culinary education in Ireland began in Kevin Street Technical School in the late 1880s. This consisted of evening courses in plain cookery. Dublin’s leading chefs and waiters of the time participated in developing courses in French culinary classics and these courses ran in Parnell Square Vocational School from 1926 (Mac Con Iomaire “The Changing”). St Mary’s College of Domestic Science was purpose built and opened in 1941 in Cathal Brugha Street. This was renamed the Dublin College of Catering in the 1950s. The Council for Education, Recruitment and Training for the Hotel Industry (CERT) was set up in 1963 and ran cookery courses using the City & Guilds of London examinations as its benchmark. In 1982, when the National Craft Curriculum Certification Board (NCCCB) was established, CERT began carrying out their own examinations. This allowed Irish catering education to set its own standards, establish its own criteria and award its own certificates, roles which were previously carried out by City & Guilds of London (Corr). CERT awarded its first certificates in professional cookery in 1989. The training role of CERT was taken over by Fáilte Ireland, the State tourism board, in 2003. Changing Trends in Cookery and Culinary Textbooks at DIT The Dublin College of Catering which became part of the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT) is the flagship of catering education in Ireland (Mac Con Iomaire “The Changing”). The first DIT culinary award, was introduced in 1984 Certificate in Diet Cookery, later renamed Higher Certificate in Health and Nutrition for the Culinary Arts. On the 19th of July 1992 the Dublin Institute of Technology Act was enacted into law. This Act enabled DIT to provide vocational and technical education and training for the economic, technological, scientific, commercial, industrial, social and cultural development of the State (Ireland 1992). In 1998, DIT was granted degree awarding powers by the Irish state, enabling it to make major awards at Higher Certificate, Ordinary Bachelor Degree, Honors Bachelor Degree, Masters and PhD levels (Levels six to ten in the National Framework of Qualifications), as well as a range of minor, special purpose and supplemental awards (National NQAI). It was not until 1999, when a primary degree in Culinary Arts was sanctioned by the Department of Education in Ireland (Duff, The Story), that a more diverse range of textbooks was recommended based on a new liberal/vocational educational philosophy. DITs School of Culinary Arts currently offers: Higher Certificates Health and Nutrition for the Culinary Arts; Higher Certificate in Culinary Arts (Professional Culinary Practice); BSc (Ord) in Baking and Pastry Arts Management; BA (Hons) in Culinary Arts; BSc (Hons) Bar Management and Entrepreneurship; BSc (Hons) in Culinary Entrepreneurship; and, MSc in Culinary Innovation and Food Product Development. From 1942 to 1970, haute cuisine, or classical French cuisine was the most influential cooking trend in Irish cuisine and this is reflected in the culinary textbooks of that era. Haute cuisine has been influenced by many influential writers/chefs such as Francois La Varenne, Antoine Carême, Auguste Escoffier, Ferand Point, Paul Bocuse, Anton Mosiman, Albert and Michel Roux to name but a few. The period from 1947 to 1974 can be viewed as a “golden age” of haute cuisine in Ireland, as more award-winning world-class restaurants traded in Dublin during this period than at any other time in history (Mac Con Iomaire “The Changing”). Hotels and restaurants were run in the Escoffier partie system style which is a system of hierarchy among kitchen staff and areas of the kitchens specialising in cooking particular parts of the menu i.e sauces (saucier), fish (poissonnier), larder (garde manger), vegetable (legumier) and pastry (patissier). In the late 1960s, Escoffier-styled restaurants were considered overstaffed and were no longer financially viable. Restaurants began to be run by chef-proprietors, using plate rather than silver service. Nouvelle cuisine began in the 1970s and this became a modern form of haute cuisine (Gillespie). The rise in chef-proprietor run restaurants in Ireland reflected the same characteristics of the nouvelle cuisine movement. Culinary textbooks such as Practical Professional Cookery, La Technique, The Complete Guide to Modern Cooking, The Art of the Garde Mange and Patisserie interpreted nouvelle cuisine techniques and plated dishes. In 1977, the DIT began delivering courses in City & Guilds Advanced Kitchen & Larder 706/3 and Pastry 706/3, the only college in Ireland to do so at the time. Many graduates from these courses became the future Irish culinary lecturers, chef-proprietors, and culinary leaders. The next two decades saw a rise in fusion cooking, nouvelle cuisine, and a return to French classical cooking. Numerous Irish chefs were returning to Ireland having worked with Michelin starred chefs and opening new restaurants in the vein of classical French cooking, such as Kevin Thornton (Wine Epergne & Thorntons). These chefs were, in turn, influencing culinary training in DIT with a return to classical French cooking. New Classical French culinary textbooks such as New Classical Cuisine, The Modern Patisserie, The French Professional Pastry Series and Advanced Practical Cookery were being used in DIT In the last 15 years, science in cooking has become the current trend in culinary education in DIT. This is acknowledged by the increased number of culinary science textbooks and modules in molecular gastronomy offered in DIT. This also coincided with the launch of the BA (Hons) in Culinary Arts in DIT moving culinary education from a technical to a liberal education. Books such as The Science of Cooking, On Food and Cooking, The Fat Duck Cookbook and Modern Gastronomy now appear on recommended textbooks for culinary students.For the purpose of this article, practical classes held at DIT will be broken down as follows: hot kitchen class, larder classes, and pastry classes. These classes had recommended textbooks for each area. These can be broken down into three sections: hot kitche, larder, and pastry. This table identifies that the textbooks used in culinary education at DIT reflected the trends in cookery at the time they were being used. Hot Kitchen Larder Pastry Le Guide Culinaire. 1921. Le Guide Culinaire. 1921. The International Confectioner. 1968. Le Repertoire De La Cuisine. 1914. The Larder Chef, Classical Food Preparation and Presentation. 1969. Patisserie. 1971. All in the Cooking, Books 1&2. 1943 The Art of the Garde Manger. 1973. The Modern Patissier. 1986 Larousse Gastronomique. 1961. New Classic Cuisine. 1989. Professional French Pastry Series. 1987. Practical Cookery. 1962. The Curious Cook. 1990. Complete Pastrywork Techniques. 1991. Practical Professional Cookery. 1972. On Food and Cooking. The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. 1991. On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. 1991 La Technique. 1976. Advanced Practical Cookery. 1995. Desserts: A Lifelong Passion. 1994. Escoffier: The Complete Guide to the Art of Modern Cookery. 1979. The Science of Cooking. 2000. Culinary Artistry. Dornenburg, 1996. Professional Cookery: The Process Approach. 1985. Garde Manger, The Art and Craft of the Cold Kitchen. 2004. Grande Finales: The Art of the Plated Dessert. 1997. On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. 1991. The Science of Cooking. 2000. Fat Duck Cookbook. 2009. Modern Gastronomy. 2010. Tab.1. DIT Culinary Textbooks.1942–1960 During the first half of the 20th century, senior staff working in Dublin hotels, restaurants and clubs were predominately foreign born and trained. The two decades following World War II could be viewed as the “golden age” of haute cuisine in Dublin as many award-wining restaurants traded in the city at this time (Mac Con Iomaire “The Emergence”). Culinary education in DIT in 1942 saw the use of Escoffier’s Le Guide Culinaire as the defining textbook (Bowe). This was first published in 1903 and translated into English in 1907. In 1979 Cracknell and Kaufmann published a more comprehensive and update edited version under the title The Complete Guide to the Art of Modern Cookery by Escoffier for use in culinary colleges. This demonstrated that Escoffier’s work had withstood the test of the decades and was still relevant. Le Repertoire de La Cuisine by Louis Saulnier, a student of Escoffier, presented the fundamentals of French classical cookery. Le Repertoire was inspired by the work of Escoffier and contains thousands of classical recipes presented in a brief format that can be clearly understood by chefs and cooks. Le Repertoire remains an important part of any DIT culinary student’s textbook list. All in the Cooking by Josephine Marnell, Nora Breathnach, Ann Mairtin and Mor Murnaghan (1946) was one of the first cookbooks to be published in Ireland (Cashmann). This book was a domestic science cooking book written by lecturers in the Cathal Brugha Street College. There is a combination of classical French recipes and Irish recipes throughout the book. 1960s It was not until the 1960s that reference book Larousse Gastronomique and new textbooks such as Practical Cookery, The Larder Chef and International Confectionary made their way into DIT culinary education. These books still focused on classical French cooking but used lighter sauces and reflected more modern cooking equipment and techniques. Also, this period was the first time that specific books for larder and pastry work were introduced into the DIT culinary education system (Bowe). Larousse Gastronomique, which used Le Guide Culinaire as a basis (James), was first published in 1938 and translated into English in 1961. Practical Cookery, which is still used in DIT culinary education, is now in its 12th edition. Each edition has built on the previous, however, there is now criticism that some of the content is dated (Richards). Practical Cookery has established itself as a key textbook in culinary education both in Ireland and England. Practical Cookery recipes were laid out in easy to follow steps and food commodities were discussed briefly. The Larder Chef was first published in 1969 and is currently in its 4th edition. This book focuses on classical French larder techniques, butchery and fishmongery but recognises current trends and fashions in food presentation. The International Confectioner is no longer in print but is still used as a reference for basic recipes in pastry classes (Campbell). The Modern Patissier demonstrated more updated techniques and methods than were used in The International Confectioner. The Modern Patissier is still used as a reference book in DIT. 1970s The 1970s saw the decline in haute cuisine in Ireland, as it was in the process of being replaced by nouvelle cuisine. Irish chefs were being influenced by the works of chefs such as Paul Boucuse, Roger Verge, Michel Guerard, Raymond Olivier, Jean & Pierre Troisgros, Alain Senderens, Jacques Maniere, Jean Delaveine and Michel Guerard who advanced the uncomplicated natural presentation in food. Henri Gault claims that it was his manifesto published in October 1973 in Gault-Millau magazine which unleashed the movement called La Nouvelle Cuisine Française (Gault). In nouvelle cuisine, dishes in Carème and Escoffier’s style were rejected as over-rich and complicated. The principles underpinning this new movement focused on the freshness of ingredients, and lightness and harmony in all components and accompaniments, as well as basic and simple cooking methods and types of presentation. This was not, however, a complete overthrowing of the past, but a moving forward in the long-term process of cuisine development, utilising the very best from each evolution (Cousins). Books such as Practical Professional Cookery, The Art of the Garde Manger and Patisserie reflected this new lighter approach to cookery. Patisserie was first published in 1971, is now in its second edition, and continues to be used in DIT culinary education. This book became an essential textbook in pastrywork, and covers the entire syllabus of City & Guilds and CERT (now Fáilte Ireland). Patisserie covered all basic pastry recipes and techniques, while the second edition (in 1993) included new modern recipes, modern pastry equipment, commodities, and food hygiene regulations reflecting the changing catering environment. The Art of the Garde Manger is an American book highlighting the artistry, creativity, and cooking sensitivity need to be a successful Garde Manger (the larder chef who prepares cold preparation in a partie system kitchen). It reflected the dynamic changes occurring in the culinary world but recognised the importance of understanding basic French culinary principles. It is no longer used in DIT culinary education. La Technique is a guide to classical French preparation (Escoffier’s methods and techniques) using detailed pictures and notes. This book remains a very useful guide and reference for culinary students. Practical Professional Cookery also became an important textbook as it was written with the student and chef/lecturer in mind, as it provides a wider range of recipes and detailed information to assist in understanding the tasks at hand. It is based on classical French cooking and compliments Practical Cookery as a textbook, however, its recipes are for ten portions as opposed to four portions in Practical Cookery. Again this book was written with the City & Guilds examinations in mind. 1980s During the mid-1980s, many young Irish chefs and waiters emigrated. They returned in the late-1980s and early-1990s having gained vast experience of nouvelle and fusion cuisine in London, Paris, New York, California and elsewhere (Mac Con Iomaire, “The Changing”). These energetic, well-trained professionals began opening chef-proprietor restaurants around Dublin, providing invaluable training and positions for up-and-coming young chefs, waiters and culinary college graduates. The 1980s saw a return to French classical cookery textbook such as Professional Cookery: The Process Approach, New Classic Cuisine and the Professional French Pastry series, because educators saw the need for students to learn the basics of French cookery. Professional Cookery: The Process Approach was written by Daniel Stevenson who was, at the time, a senior lecturer in Food and Beverage Operations at Oxford Polytechnic in England. Again, this book was written for students with an emphasis on the cookery techniques and the practices of professional cookery. The Complete Guide to Modern Cooking by Escoffier continued to be used. This book is used by cooks and chefs as a reference for ingredients in dishes rather than a recipe book, as it does not go into detail in the methods as it is assumed the cook/chef would have the required experience to know the method of production. Le Guide Culinaire was only used on advanced City & Guilds courses in DIT during this decade (Bowe). New Classic Cuisine by the classically French trained chefs, Albert and Michel Roux (Gayot), is a classical French cuisine cookbook used as a reference by DIT culinary educators at the time because of the influence the Roux brothers were having over the English fine dining scene. The Professional French Pastry Series is a range of four volumes of pastry books: Vol. 1 Doughs, Batters and Meringues; Vol. 2 Creams, Confections and Finished Desserts; Vol. 3 Petit Four, Chocolate, Frozen Desserts and Sugar Work; and Vol. 4 Decorations, Borders and Letters, Marzipan, Modern Desserts. These books about classical French pastry making were used on the advanced pastry courses at DIT as learners needed a basic knowledge of pastry making to use them. 1990s Ireland in the late 1990s became a very prosperous and thriving European nation; the phenomena that became known as the “celtic tiger” was in full swing (Mac Con Iomaire “The Changing”). The Irish dining public were being treated to a resurgence of traditional Irish cuisine using fresh wholesome food (Hughes). The Irish population was considered more well-educated and well travelled than previous generations and culinary students were now becoming interested in the science of cooking. In 1996, the BA (Hons) in Culinary Arts program at DIT was first mooted (Hegarty). Finally, in 1999, a primary degree in Culinary Arts was sanctioned by the Department of Education underpinned by a new liberal/vocational philosophy in education (Duff). Teaching culinary arts in the past had been through a vocational education focus whereby students were taught skills for industry which were narrow, restrictive, and constraining, without the necessary knowledge to articulate the acquired skill. The reading list for culinary students reflected this new liberal education in culinary arts as Harold McGee’s books The Curious Cook and On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen explored and explained the science of cooking. On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen proposed that “science can make cooking more interesting by connecting it with the basic workings of the natural world” (Vega 373). Advanced Practical Cookery was written for City & Guilds students. In DIT this book was used by advanced culinary students sitting Fáilte Ireland examinations, and the second year of the new BA (Hons) in Culinary Arts. Culinary Artistry encouraged chefs to explore the creative process of culinary composition as it explored the intersection of food, imagination, and taste (Dornenburg). This book encouraged chefs to develop their own style of cuisine using fresh seasonal ingredients, and was used for advanced students but is no longer a set text. Chefs were being encouraged to show their artistic traits, and none more so than pastry chefs. Grande Finale: The Art of Plated Desserts encouraged advanced students to identify different “schools” of pastry in relation to the world of art and design. The concept of the recipes used in this book were built on the original spectacular pieces montées created by Antoine Carême. 2000–2013 After nouvelle cuisine, recent developments have included interest in various fusion cuisines, such as Asia-Pacific, and in molecular gastronomy. Molecular gastronomists strive to find perfect recipes using scientific methods of investigation (Blanck). Hervè This experimentation with recipes and his introduction to Nicholos Kurti led them to create a food discipline they called “molecular gastronomy”. In 1998, a number of creative chefs began experimenting with the incorporation of ingredients and techniques normally used in mass food production in order to arrive at previously unattainable culinary creations. This “new cooking” (Vega 373) required a knowledge of chemical reactions and physico-chemical phenomena in relation to food, as well as specialist tools, which were created by these early explorers. It has been suggested that molecular gastronomy is “science-based cooking” (Vega 375) and that this concept refers to conscious application of the principles and tools from food science and other disciplines for the development of new dishes particularly in the context of classical cuisine (Vega). The Science of Cooking assists students in understanding the chemistry and physics of cooking. This book takes traditional French techniques and recipes and refutes some of the claims and methods used in traditional recipes. Garde Manger: The Art and Craft of the Cold Kitchen is used for the advanced larder modules at DIT. This book builds on basic skills in the Larder Chef book. Molecular gastronomy as a subject area was developed in 2009 in DIT, the first of its kind in Ireland. The Fat Duck Cookbook and Modern Gastronomy underpin the theoretical aspects of the module. This module is taught to 4th year BA (Hons) in Culinary Arts students who already have three years experience in culinary education and the culinary industry, and also to MSc Culinary Innovation and Food Product Development students. Conclusion Escoffier, the master of French classical cuisine, still influences culinary textbooks to this day. His basic approach to cooking is considered essential to teaching culinary students, allowing them to embrace the core skills and competencies required to work in the professional environment. Teaching of culinary arts at DIT has moved vocational education to a more liberal basis, and it is imperative that the chosen textbooks reflect this development. This liberal education gives the students a broader understanding of cooking, hospitality management, food science, gastronomy, health and safety, oenology, and food product development. To date there is no practical culinary textbook written specifically for Irish culinary education, particularly within this new liberal/vocational paradigm. There is clearly a need for a new textbook which combines the best of Escoffier’s classical French techniques with the more modern molecular gastronomy techniques popularised by Ferran Adria. References Adria, Ferran. Modern Gastronomy A to Z: A Scientific and Gastronomic Lexicon. London: CRC P, 2010. Barker, William. The Modern Patissier. London: Hutchinson, 1974. Barham, Peter. The Science of Cooking. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2000. 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