Статті в журналах з теми "Contemporary Hawaiian art"

Lindsay Wilhelm, “Bright Sunshine, Dark Shadows: Decadent Beauty and Victorian Views of Hawai‘i” (pp. 495–526) Inspired by the recent global turn in aestheticism and decadence studies, this essay considers how late-Victorian discourses surrounding beauty, pleasure, and morality inform contemporary literary representations of Hawai‘i as both supremely inviting and dangerously languorous. The essay begins with a short overview of the broader geopolitical and historical circumstances that helped shape nineteenth-century understandings of Hawai‘i—a place renowned abroad for its beauty and hospitality, but nonetheless still notorious as the site of James Cook’s death in 1779. Next, the essay traces the peculiar ambivalence with which travel memoirs such as Isabella Bird’s The Hawaiian Archipelago (1875) and Constance Gordon-Cumming’s Fire Fountains (1883) describe their authors’ experiences in the islands. In these memoirs, Hawai‘i evidences the same convergence between beauty and decay that undergirds the controversial aesthetics of Algernon Charles Swinburne, Oscar Wilde, and other adherents of the creed of “art for art’s sake.” Focusing particularly on Robert Louis Stevenson’s fairy tale “The Bottle Imp” (1891), the essay then examines the ways in which Victorian writers utilize Hawai‘i’s leprosy epidemic as an occasion for exploring the perils of aesthetic hedonism. The essay concludes by briefly turning to the work of nineteenth-century Hawaiian historian Samuel Kamakau, whose own depictions of the decaying Hawaiian village reveal, by contrast, how these British accounts enlist the language of decadence in the service of empire.

The history of pizza is shrouded in mystery. Competing interpretations of the exact origin, development, and even etymology are as diverse as pizzas themselves. What is certain, however, is that from various types of flatbread meals popular among soldiers and poor workers emerged some standards. Certain experts were then able to refine the process and carefully combine ingredients. The key to this tradition, as well as its popularity around the world, is found in the core elements developed by such pizzaiolos. But this has all changed, and contemporary pizza is no longer topped with whatever just happens to be available, as in the flatbreads of old. Nor does it have to adhere to the standards set forth by experts on taste. Today there are Hawaiian, chocolate, and even fruit pizzas. There are pizzas with cauliflower crust, smashed chicken “bread” and pizzas topped with 24 karat gold. And perhaps most importantly, customized pizzas—pizzas that are designed by the consumer with no regard for anything but their own momentary desires. We think this represents a twofold problem, in terms of both approach and of carrying on tradition, and also think comparative philosophy is just like pizza. In this paper we will thus address these problems through proposing a conception of the trans-cultural that is linked to the art of pizza. Moreover, we expand the scope of diversification to include methodology. Based on methodological insights derived from Chinese tradition and contemporary Chinese scholarship, we argue that comparative philosophy as an art (poiesis) could be a welcome alternative which involves: respect for authority (tradition), trust in tested methods and recipes as conditions for creativity and originality, recognition of the philosophical import of style (form is content) and the significance of inspiration and mastery of skills.

Freshwater systems are among the most threatened habitats in the world and the biodiversity inhabiting them is disappearing quickly. The Hawaiian Archipelago has a small but highly endemic and threatened group of freshwater snails, with eight species in three families (Neritidae, Lymnaeidae, and Cochliopidae). Anthropogenically mediated habitat modifications (i.e., changes in land and water use) and invasive species (e.g., Euglandina spp., non-native sciomyzids) are among the biggest threats to freshwater snails in Hawaii. Currently, only three species are protected either federally (U.S. Endangered Species Act; Erinna newcombi) or by Hawaii State legislation (Neritona granosa, and Neripteron vespertinum). Here, we review the taxonomic and conservation status of Hawaii’s freshwater snails and describe historical and contemporary impacts to their habitats. We conclude by recommending some basic actions that are needed immediately to conserve these species. Without a full understanding of these species’ identities, distributions, habitat requirements, and threats, many will not survive the next decade, and we will have irretrievably lost more of the unique books from the evolutionary library of life on Earth.

Within a hegemonic Western discourse, Hawai‘i is largely considered an aesthetic tourist destination. It is perceived to be a vacation haven, bountiful in opportunities for real estate, commodification, and gentrification. While endeavors such as these have indeed proven to be economically prolific for the state, the profits do not directly, if even remotely, benefit the Native Hawaiians whose land continues to be seized and commodified in the name of said profits. Therefore, that dominant discourse which paints Hawai‘i as a tourist destination of great economic potential is in fact a colonialist notion, denoting Hawaiian land as public property to be seized, altered, and owned. In reality, the land that is used for expansive capitalist ventures is often seized from Native people, as has been the trend since settlers first invaded Hawai‘i. This truth is further troubling when one considers Native Hawaiian land relations and the spiritual connection that many Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) have to that land. In light of the spiritual ties that many Kānaka Maoli have to land, or 'āina, its seizure and alteration by non-Native persons is an act of colonialism against not only Kānaka Maoli homes, but also against our bodies and spirits. This spiritual and emotional connection between Kānaka Maoli and our land is deeply rooted, and it is an idea commonly expressed in contemporary Kanaka culture by the term aloha ʻāina. In understanding this sentiment, it is essential that one first understands that aloha carries a much deeper meaning than the Hawaiian “hello” and “goodbye.” Aloha connotes one’s deep love for and connection to Kanaka culture. It also signifies love for one’s neighbors, friends, and ancestors. In essence, aloha ʻāina is an expression of one’s identification with and commitment to Hawaiian land and its connected historical and cultural significance. By close reading Kanaka texts and terminology such as this, one can begin to understand the sanctity of Kanaka land relations, thereby lending to an understanding of one of the ways by which colonialism against Kānaka Maoli continues in perpetuity. In this thesis, I will investigate and discuss relationships between Kanaka bodies and ‘āina. I will do this by close reading Kanaka literature, including the Hawaiian creation mele known as the Kumulipo, the narrative and performative device that is hula, and my Auntie Betty's stories that have been passed down to me through oral storytelling. I will contextualize my findings in both historical and contemporary frames. Ultimately, I am conducting this research with the aim of contributing to existing scholarship which aims to dismantle the dominant narrative which suggests that we live in a post-colonial era. The idea that colonialism is an extinguished historical event is a dangerous and false misconception that allows for the perpetuation of the discriminatory maltreatment of marginalized Indigenous communities and cultures. This discrimination is enacted in countless ways, including but in no way limited to the seizure of Kānaka Maoli lands. It is my hope that this research will encourage any and all readers to continue to learn about Kanaka Maoli and other Native cultures, and that this endeavor for further knowledge will lead to advocacy on behalf of, and greater reverence toward Native people, narratives, and knowledge.

We use Hawaiian methods of knowledge production to weave together contemporary and historical instances of Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) political resistance to U.S. imperialism and settler colonialism. Our departure point is the summer of 2014, when hundreds of Kānaka came forward to assert unbroken Hawaiian sovereignty and reject a U.S. Department of Interior (DOI) proposal to create a pathway for federal recognition of a reorganized Native Hawaiian governing entity. This essay situates testimonies from these hearings within a longer genealogy of Kanaka assertions of “ea” (sovereignty, life, breath) against the prolonged U.S. military occupation of Hawai'i that began in 1898 and extends to the present.

This article explores artistic production in the region of Oceania that resists the ahistorical and future-oriented temporality of climate change discourse, as it perpetuates colonial structures of power by denying Indigenous futures and ignoring the violent histories that have led to the current climate breakdown. In the video poem Anointed (2018), prominent climate justice activist Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner strategically combines spoken word poetry with visual montage in order to situate Cold War nuclear tests by the US military within the same temporal plane as rising sea levels currently threatening the Marshall Islands. Katerina Teaiwa’s exhibition Project Banaba (2017) similarly mobilizes archival imagery in order to visualize the genealogical relationship between Banabans and the settler landscapes of Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia. Sean Connelly’s architectural and design practice in Hawaii Futures, an ongoing digital design project that engages with the threats of sea level rise and coastal erosion in Hawaii, problematizes linear formations of time and favours a future structured around cyclical, ecological time instead. Interacting with vastly different sites, strategies and temporalities, these three multidisciplinary projects provide critical alternatives to the ahistorical framing of colonial climate change in Oceania and thus play a crucial role in constructing a more just future.

The story of Medea’s murder of her own children to gain revenge against their faithless father has been tackled from many angles by playwrights and directors from Euripides’ time to the present. In recent years, due to highly sensationalized, real-life cases of mothers murdering their children, it has become fodder for sociologists, criminologists, psychologists, and feminists. Many recent productions (both original plays and directorial approaches to Euripides’ original) have avoided tackling the difficult questions raised by Euripides’ ending, which demands an answer to the following question: how could the gods send down a dragon-drawn chariot to rescue a woman who murdered her own children? Many contemporary authors and directors prefer to eliminate Euripides’ ending in order to focus on more immediate issues, such as the psychological or social damage resulting from patriarchy, colonialism, and misogyny. After considering several such productions, this article analyzes three plays that directly tackle Euripides’ troubling ending: two original scripts, by Heiner Müller and Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei respectively; and a production of Euripides’ original by Japanese director Miyagi Satoshi. Carol Fisher Sorgenfrei is Professor Emerita of Theatre at UCLA. An expert on postwar Japanese and cross-cultural performance, she is also a translator, director, and playwright. The author of Unspeakable Acts: The Avant-Garde Theatre of Terayama Shūji and Postwar Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2005) and co-author of Theatre Histories: An Introduction (third edition, Routledge, 2016), she has published over a hundred articles, chapters, and reviews. She is an Associate Editor of Asian Theatre Journal and a Fellow of the College of Fellows of the American Theatre.

AbstractIn this chapter I review six contributions to the field of film theory published in 2018: Carl Plantinga’s Screen Stories: Emotion and the Ethics of Engagement (Oxford University Press); Miklós Kiss and Steven Willemsen’s Impossible Puzzle Films: A Cognitive Approach to Contemporary Complex Cinema (Edinburgh University Press); Nicholas Godfrey’s The Limits of Auteurism: Case Studies in the Critically Constructed New Hollywood (Rutgers University Press); Peter Krämer and Yannis Tzioumakis’s The Hollywood Renaissance: Revisiting American Cinema’s Most Celebrated Era (Bloomsbury Academic); Dorothy Wai Sim Lau’s Chinese Stardom in Participatory Cyberculture (Edinburgh University Press); and Gina Marchetti’s Citing China: Politics, Postmodernism, and World Cinema (University of Hawaii Press). The chapter has three sections: 1. Cognition, Emotion, and Ethics; 2. The New Hollywood; 3. Contemporary Chinese Cinema.

Over one hundred years ago, W. E. B. Du Bois (1899) documented large, pervasive, and persistent racial inequities in health. While the current demography of racial groups in the United States is radically different compared to the times when Du Bois first discussed issues of race and health, many of the significant developments in research on racial differences in health in the last century can be traced to his seminal work (Williams and Sternthal, 2010). Du Bois recognized that the limited access to economic resources and the social marginalization of some racial groups could have dire social, physical, and psychological consequences for them. Current research studies continue to document that racial groups with a long history characterized by economic exploitation and geographic marginalization—Blacks or African Americans, American Indians, and Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders—have markedly poor health outcomes compared to the dominant White population. Immigrant Asians and Hispanics tend to have better health than the U.S. average, but their health tends to worsen over time and across subsequent generations. Despite Du Bois's prescience and the advances made by contemporary researchers, there are many substantive theoretical and methodological challenges confronting scholars who study the health of diverse racial and ethnic groups. This special issue of the Du Bois Review provides a state-of-the-art overview of some of these unanswered questions and critical research directions for the study of racial inequality in health.

In 1974, the Honolulu-based director James Grant Benton wrote and staged Twelf Nite O Wateva!, a Hawaiian pidgin translation of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. In Benton’s translation, Malolio (Malvolio) strives to overcome his reliance on pidgin English in his efforts to ascend the Islands’ class hierarchy. In doing so, Malolio alters his native pidgin in order to sound more haole (white). Using historical models of Protestant identity and Shakespeare’s original text, Benton explores the relationship between pidgin language and social privilege in contemporary Hawai‘i. In the first part of this essay, I argue that Benton characterizes Malolio’s social aspirations against two historical moments of religious conflict and struggle: post-Reformation England and post-contact Hawai‘i. In particular, I show that Benton aligns historical caricatures of early modern puritans with cultural views of Protestant missionaries from New England who arrived in Hawai‘i beginning in the 1820s. In the essay’s second part, I demonstrate that Benton crafts Malolio’s pretentious pidgin by modeling it on Shakespeare’s own language. During his most ostentatious outbursts, Malolio’s lines consist of phrases extracted nearly verbatim from Shakespeare’s original play. In Twelf Nite, Shakespeare’s language becomes a model for speech that is inauthentic, affected, and above all, haole.

The demand for ever-accelerating fast fashion is unprecedented, while its supply chain burdens environmental systems. Hedonic fashion consumption is generally unfettered by sustainability concerns, but evidence suggests that island geographies‐with dense boundaries between the built and the natural environment‐have a heightening effect on eco-consciousness. A framework based on the contemporary condition of hyperconsumption is proposed: island geography heightens sustainability awareness; consequently, fashion consumers located on islands trade-off perceived hedonic benefits of fashion consumption against perceived moral benefits of connection with nature. The framework is supported by visual evidence collected on the Galápagos island Santa Cruz, indicating that male fashion consumers express connection with nature by means of tattoos, slogans on clothing and choice of eco-friendly materials. Quantitative tests with survey data from the United States and Ecuador show that residents in Hawaii and the Galápagos have higher levels of connection with nature compared to residents on the associated continental areas. This effect is mediated by decreased perceived rewards of hedonic fashion consumption, but the effect is overall weaker in Ecuador compared to the United States due to differences in purchasing power and attitudes towards consumerism. Because of the stereotype that eco-friendly is unmanly, men are generally less likely to embrace environmentally friendly products and the findings of this research point to avenues to overcome this barrier.

Abstract. Most land surface models (LSMs), i.e. the land components of Earth system models (ESMs), include representation of nitrogen (N) limitation on ecosystem productivity. However, only a few of these models have incorporated phosphorus (P) cycling. In tropical ecosystems, this is likely to be important as N tends to be abundant, whereas the availability of rock-derived elements, such as P, can be very low. Thus, without a representation of P cycling, tropical forest response in areas such as Amazonia to rising atmospheric CO2 conditions remain highly uncertain. In this study, we introduced P dynamics and its interactions with the N and carbon (C) cycles into the Joint UK Land Environment Simulator (JULES). The new model (JULES-CNP) includes the representation of P stocks in vegetation and soil pools, as well as key processes controlling fluxes between these pools. We develop and evaluate JULES-CNP using in situ data collected at a low-fertility site in the central Amazon, with a soil P content representative of 60 % of soils across the Amazon basin, to parameterize, calibrate, and evaluate JULES-CNP. Novel soil and plant P pool observations are used for parameterization and calibration, and the model is evaluated against C fluxes and stocks and those soil P pools not used for parameterization or calibration. We then evaluate the model at additional P-limited test sites across the Amazon and in Panama and Hawaii, showing a significant improvement over the C- and CN-only versions of the model. The model is then applied under elevated CO2 (600 ppm) at our study site in the central Amazon to quantify the impact of P limitation on CO2 fertilization. We compare our results against the current state-of-the-art CNP models using the same methodology that was used in the AmazonFACE model intercomparison study. The model is able to reproduce the observed plant and soil P pools and fluxes used for evaluation under ambient CO2. We estimate P to limit net primary productivity (NPP) by 24 % under current CO2 and by 46 % under elevated CO2. Under elevated CO2, biomass in simulations accounting for CNP increase by 10 % relative to contemporary CO2 conditions, although it is 5 % lower compared to CN- and C-only simulations. Our results highlight the potential for high P limitation and therefore lower CO2 fertilization capacity in the Amazon rainforest with low-fertility soils.

AbstractMotivated by the well-established benefits to society of artistic creation and of demographic diversity, we investigate the gender and racial/ethnic composition of influential contributors to four creative domains. Women make up 51% of the U.S. population but are underrepresented at influential levels of contemporary art (28%), high fashion (45%), box office film (27%), and popular music (17%). Marginalized racial/ethnic groups make up 39% of the U.S. population yet comprise approximately half that figure in contemporary art (22%), high fashion (22%), and box office film (19%). Black musical artists have higher representation (48%), though higher representation does not equate with equity and inclusion. As for intersecting identities, white men are overrepresented in all four domains by factors ranging from 1.4 to 2 as compared to the U.S. population, and most other gender-racial/ethnic groups are further minoritized. Our study is the first comprehensive, comparative, empirical look at intersecting identities across creative fields. The exclusion of marginalized individuals, including those who are women, American Indian/Alaska Native, Asian, Black, Latinx, and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander, is severe. The lack of self-expressed demographic data is a challenge, as is the erasure of certain identity groups from the American Community Survey, including agender, gender noncomforming, nonbinary, and transgender individuals. These are challenges that, if addressed, would enhance our collective understanding of diversity in creative fields.

This study is devoted to three artistic projects based on debris found on the shores of the seas and oceans: plastiglomerates discovered in Hawaii by Kelly Jazvac, recycled waste projects off the coast of river Thames by Inge Sluijs, and plastic waste from the coasts of Norway gathered by Þóra Pétursdóttir. The analyzed works are manifestations of the trend called “new materiality” in art. The artists’ goal is to encourage rethinking the status of objects of natural origin that surround us in the context of social relations, especially in the perspective of the nature/culture dichotomy. Cultural objects of natural origin are the result of human action. Stone and mineral formations are a special example in art practice. They can be studied due to their physical properties, but transformed due to contemporary climate change and pollution they turn into an object proving the cultural transformation of the environment. For this reason, stones found in coastal areas can no longer be considered as raw material for geologists, but as part of human life. The innovative and creative presentation of objects at exhibitions in the galleries and museums allows the wide audience to understand the relationship between human activities in the environment and its effects on material changes. By focusing on the physical dimension of the matter used, the artists emphasize the role of marine science and comment on socio-political agencies of things, as well as indicate the need for public engagement in activities for marine issues.

In this essay I evoke ghostly remnants of my choreographic research practices[1] facilitated via a series of global inter-disciplinary collaborations in Hawaii[2] and California[3] bridging Māori cosmologies and epistemological frame works with inter-cultural collectives[4]. Reconstructing diary, email and interview material[5] offers a unique creative insight into contemporary Maori performing art practices, re-experiencing the presentness of time, as intimately informed by an erased other, where the former recipient now becomes the medium, the ghost reader. This essay mirrors the creative processes, tracing moments, already lived, to dance the intangible spirit across leylines of transitional space[6]. [1] Cultural interventions within community spaces of exchange such as public singing lessons, group visits to sites, performative explorations, community sleepovers. [2] Work was undertaken at The Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum during a seven week artist residency in 2013 [3] Work was undertaken as a guest choreographer in residence at University of California Berkeley for the Berkeley Dance Project in 2014 and as an Assistant Professor at the University of California Riverside during Spring Quarter 2014 [4] I am a founding member of Atamira Dance Company and was involved in the collaboration of the Whare Tapere by Charles Royal and Louise Potiki Bryant [5] I have used my emails as a source material to reflect the nature of fragmentary knowledge and cultural revitalisation, a major part of the Whare Tapere as a research archive [6] Local Maori tribes hold various sources of story that relate to Cape Reinga or Rerenga Wairua as a spiritual highway. These leylines are echoed throughout the world, in places I have travelled such as Hawaii and New Mexico.

Introduction One of the ways in which ‘country’ is made to work discursively is in ‘country music’ – defining a genre and sensibility in music production, marketing and consumption. This article seeks to excavate one small niche in the historical geography of country music to explore exactly how discursive antecedents emerged, and crucially, how images associated with ‘country’ surfaced and travelled internationally via one of the new ‘global’ media of the first half of the twentieth century – sheet music. My central arguments are twofold: first, that alongside aural qualities and lyrical content, the visual elements of sheet music were important and thus far have been under-acknowledged. Sheet music diffused the imagery connecting ‘country’ to music, to particular landscapes, and masculinities. In the literature on country music much emphasis has been placed on film, radio and television (Tichi; Peterson). Yet, sheet music was for several decades the most common way people bought personal copies of songs they liked and intended to play at home on piano, guitar or ukulele. This was particularly the case in Australia – geographically distant, and rarely included in international tours by American country music stars. Sheet music is thus a rich text to reveal the historical contours of ‘country’. My second and related argument is that that the possibilities for the globalising of ‘country’ were first explored in music. The idea of transnational discourses associated with ‘country’ and ‘rurality’ is relatively new (Cloke et al; Gorman-Murray et al; McCarthy), but in music we see early evidence of a globalising discourse of ‘country’ well ahead of the time period usually analysed. Accordingly, my focus is on the sheet music of country songs in Australia in the first half of the twentieth century and on how visual representations hybridised travelling themes to create a new vernacular ‘country’ in Australia. Creating ‘Country’ Music Country music, as its name suggests, is perceived as the music of rural areas, “defined in contrast to metropolitan norms” (Smith 301). However, the ‘naturalness’ of associations between country music and rurality belies a history of urban capitalism and the refinement of deliberate methods of marketing music through associated visual imagery. Early groups wore suits and dressed for urban audiences – but then altered appearances later, on the insistence of urban record companies, to emphasise rurality and cowboy heritage. Post-1950, ‘country’ came to replace ‘folk’ music as a marketing label, as the latter was considered to have too many communistic references (Hemphill 5), and the ethnic mixing of earlier folk styles was conveniently forgotten in the marketing of ‘country’ music as distinct from African American ‘race’ and ‘r and b’ music. Now an industry of its own with multinational headquarters in Nashville, country music is a ‘cash cow’ for entertainment corporations, with lower average production costs, considerable profit margins, and marketing advantages that stem from tropes of working class identity and ‘rural’ honesty (see Lewis; Arango). Another of country music’s associations is with American geography – and an imagined heartland in the colonial frontier of the American West. Slippages between ‘country’ and ‘western’ in music, film and dress enhance this. But historical fictions are masked: ‘purists’ argue that western dress and music have nothing to do with ‘country’ (see truewesternmusic.com), while recognition of the Spanish-Mexican, Native American and Hawaiian origins of ‘cowboy’ mythology is meagre (George-Warren and Freedman). Similarly, the highly international diffusion and adaptation of country music as it rose to prominence in the 1940s is frequently downplayed (Connell and Gibson), as are the destructive elements of colonialism and dispossession of indigenous peoples in frontier America (though Johnny Cash’s 1964 album The Ballads Of The American Indian: Bitter Tears was an exception). Adding to the above is the way ‘country’ operates discursively in music as a means to construct particular masculinities. Again, linked to rural imagery and the American frontier, the dominant masculinity is of rugged men wrestling nature, negotiating hardships and the pressures of family life. Country music valorises ‘heroic masculinities’ (Holt and Thompson), with echoes of earlier cowboy identities reverberating into contemporary performance through dress style, lyrical content and marketing imagery. The men of country music mythology live an isolated existence, working hard to earn an income for dependent families. Their music speaks to the triumph of hard work, honest values (meaning in this context a musical style, and lyrical concerns that are ‘down to earth’, ‘straightforward’ and ‘without pretence’) and physical strength, in spite of neglect from national governments and uncaring urban leaders. Country music has often come to be associated with conservative politics, heteronormativity, and whiteness (Gibson and Davidson), echoing the wider politics of ‘country’ – it is no coincidence, for example, that the slogan for the 2008 Republican National Convention in America was ‘country first’. And yet, throughout its history, country music has also enabled more diverse gender performances to emerge – from those emphasising (or bemoaning) domesticity; assertive femininity; creative negotiation of ‘country’ norms by gay men; and ‘alternative’ culture (captured in the marketing tag, ‘alt.country’); to those acknowledging white male victimhood, criminality (‘the outlaw’), vulnerability and cruelty (see Johnson; McCusker and Pecknold; Saucier). Despite dominant tropes of ‘honesty’, country music is far from transparent, standing for certain values and identities, and yet enabling the construction of diverse and contradictory others. Historical analysis is therefore required to trace the emergence of ‘country’ in music, as it travelled beyond America. A Note on Sheet Music as Media Source Sheet music was one of the main modes of distribution of music from the 1930s through to the 1950s – a formative period in which an eclectic group of otherwise distinct ‘hillbilly’ and ‘folk’ styles moved into a single genre identity, and after which vinyl singles and LP records with picture covers dominated. Sheet music was prevalent in everyday life: beyond radio, a hit song was one that was widely purchased as sheet music, while pianos and sheet music collections (stored in a piece of furniture called a ‘music canterbury’) in family homes were commonplace. Sheet music is in many respects preferable to recorded music as a form of evidence for historical analysis of country music. Picture LP covers did not arrive until the late 1950s (by which time rock and roll had surpassed country music). Until then, 78 rpm shellac discs, the main form of pre-recorded music, featured generic brown paper sleeves from the individual record companies, or city retail stores. Also, while radio was clearly central to the consumption of music in this period, it obviously also lacked the pictorial element that sheet music could provide. Sheet music bridged the music and printing industries – the latter already well-equipped with colour printing, graphic design and marketing tools. Sheet music was often literally crammed with information, providing the researcher with musical notation, lyrics, cover art and embedded advertisements – aural and visual texts combined. These multiple dimensions of sheet music proved useful here, for clues to the context of the music/media industries and geography of distribution (for instance, in addresses for publishers and sheet music retail shops). Moreover, most sheet music of the time used rich, sometimes exaggerated, images to convince passing shoppers to buy songs that they had possibly never heard. As sheet music required caricature rather than detail or historical accuracy, it enabled fantasy without distraction. In terms of representations of ‘country’, then, sheet music is perhaps even more evocative than film or television. Hundreds of sheet music items were collected for this research over several years, through deliberate searching (for instance, in library archives and specialist sheet music stores) and with some serendipity (for instance, when buying second hand sheet music in charity shops or garage sales). The collected material is probably not representative of all music available at the time – it is as much a specialised personal collection as a comprehensive survey. However, at least some material from all the major Australian country music performers of the time were found, and the resulting collection appears to be several times larger than that held currently by the National Library of Australia (from which some entries were sourced). All examples here are of songs written by, or cover art designed for Australian country music performers. For brevity’s sake, the following analysis of the sheet music follows a crudely chronological framework. Country Music in Australia Before ‘Country’ Country music did not ‘arrive’ in Australia from America as a fully-finished genre category; nor was Australia at the time without rural mythology or its own folk music traditions. Associations between Australian national identity, rurality and popular culture were entrenched in a period of intense creativity and renewed national pride in the decades prior to and after Federation in 1901. This period saw an outpouring of art, poetry, music and writing in new nationalist idiom, rooted in ‘the bush’ (though drawing heavily on Celtic expressions), and celebrating themes of mateship, rural adversity and ‘battlers’. By the turn of the twentieth century, such myths, invoked through memory and nostalgia, had already been popularised. Australia had a fully-established system of colonies, capital cities and state governments, and was highly urbanised. Yet the poetry, folk music and art, invariably set in rural locales, looked back to the early 1800s, romanticising bush characters and frontier events. The ‘bush ballad’ was a central and recurring motif, one that commentators have argued was distinctly, and essentially ‘Australian’ (Watson; Smith). Sheet music from this early period reflects the nationalistic, bush-orientated popular culture of the time: iconic Australian fauna and flora are prominent, and Australian folk culture is emphasised as ‘native’ (being the first era of cultural expressions from Australian-born residents). Pioneer life and achievements are celebrated. ‘Along the road to Gundagai’, for instance, was about an iconic Australian country town and depicted sheep droving along rustic trails with overhanging eucalypts. Male figures are either absent, or are depicted in situ as lone drovers in the archetypal ‘shepherd’ image, behind their flocks of sheep (Figure 1). Figure 1: No. 1 Magpie Ballads – The Pioneer (c1900) and Along the road to Gundagai (1923). Further colonial ruralities developed in Australia from the 1910s to 1940s, when agrarian values grew in the promotion of Australian agricultural exports. Australia ‘rode on the sheep’s back’ to industrialisation, and governments promoted rural development and inland migration. It was a period in which rural lifestyles were seen as superior to those in the crowded inner city, and government strategies sought to create a landed proletariat through post-war land settlement and farm allotment schemes. National security was said to rely on populating the inland with those of European descent, developing rural industries, and breeding a healthier and yet compliant population (Dufty), from which armies of war-ready men could be recruited in times of conflict. Popular culture served these national interests, and thus during these decades, when ‘hillbilly’ and other North American music forms were imported, they were transformed, adapted and reworked (as in other places such as Canada – see Lehr). There were definite parallels in the frontier narratives of the United States (Whiteoak), and several local adaptations followed: Tex Morton became Australia’s ‘Yodelling boundary rider’ and Gordon Parsons became ‘Australia’s yodelling bushman’. American songs were re-recorded and performed, and new original songs written with Australian lyrics, titles and themes. Visual imagery in sheet music built upon earlier folk/bush frontier themes to re-cast Australian pastoralism in a more settled, modernist and nationalist aesthetic; farms were places for the production of a robust nation. Where male figures were present on sheet music covers in the early twentieth century, they became more prominent in this period, and wore Akubras (Figure 2). The lyrics to John Ashe’s Growin’ the Golden Fleece (1952) exemplify this mix of Australian frontier imagery, new pastoralist/nationalist rhetoric, and the importation of American cowboy masculinity: Go west and take up sheep, man, North Queensland is the shot But if you don’t get rich, man, you’re sure to get dry rot Oh! Growin’ the golden fleece, battlin’ a-way out west Is bound to break your flamin’ heart, or else expand your chest… We westerners are handy, we can’t afford to crack Not while the whole darn’d country is riding on our back Figure 2: Eric Tutin’s Shearers’ Jamboree (1946). As in America, country music struck a chord because it emerged “at a point in history when the project of the creation and settlement of a new society was underway but had been neither completed nor abandoned” (Dyer 33). Governments pressed on with the colonial project of inland expansion in Australia, despite the theft of indigenous country this entailed, and popular culture such as music became a means to normalise and naturalise the process. Again, mutations of American western imagery, and particular iconic male figures were important, as in Roy Darling’s (1945) Overlander Trail (Figure 3): Wagon wheels are rolling on, and the days seem mighty long Clouds of heat-dust in the air, bawling cattle everywhere They’re on the overlander trail Where only sheer determination will prevail Men of Aussie with a job to do, they’ll stick and drive the cattle through And though they sweat they know they surely must Keep on the trail that winds a-head thro’ heat and dust All sons of Aussie and they will not fail. Sheet music depicted silhouetted men in cowboy hats on horses (either riding solo or in small groups), riding into sunsets or before looming mountain ranges. Music – an important part of popular culture in the 1940s – furthered the colonial project of invading, securing and transforming the Australian interior by normalising its agendas and providing it with heroic male characters, stirring tales and catchy tunes. Figure 3: ‘Roy Darling’s (1945) Overlander Trail and Smoky Dawson’s The Overlander’s Song (1946). ‘Country Music’ Becomes a (Globalised) Genre Further growth in Australian country music followed waves of popularity in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s, and was heavily influenced by new cross-media publicity opportunities. Radio shows expanded, and western TV shows such as Bonanza and On the Range fuelled a ‘golden age’. Australian performers such as Slim Dusty and Smokey Dawson rose to fame (see Fitzgerald and Hayward) in an era when rural-urban migration peaked. Sheet music reflected the further diffusion and adoption of American visual imagery: where male figures were present on sheet music covers, they became more prominent than before and wore Stetsons. Some were depicted as chiselled-faced but simple men, with plain clothing and square jaws. Others began to more enthusiastically embrace cowboy looks, with bandana neckerchiefs, rawhide waistcoats, embellished and harnessed tall shaft boots, pipe-edged western shirts with wide collars, smile pockets, snap fasteners and shotgun cuffs, and fringed leather jackets (Figure 4). Landscapes altered further too: cacti replaced eucalypts, and iconic ‘western’ imagery of dusty towns, deserts, mesas and buttes appeared (Figure 5). Any semblance of folk music’s appeal to rustic authenticity was jettisoned in favour of showmanship, as cowboy personas were constructed to maximise cinematic appeal. Figure 4: Al Dexter’s Pistol Packin’ Mama (1943) and Reg Lindsay’s (1954) Country and Western Song Album. Figure 5: Tim McNamara’s Hitching Post (1948) and Smoky Dawson’s Golden West Album (1951). Far from slavish mimicry of American culture, however, hybridisations were common. According to Australian music historian Graeme Smith (300): “Australian place names appear, seeking the same mythological resonance that American localisation evoked: hobos became bagmen […] cowboys become boundary riders.” Thus alongside reproductions of the musical notations of American songs by Lefty Frizzel, Roy Carter and Jimmie Rodgers were songs with localised themes by new Australian stars such as Reg Lindsay and Smoky Dawson: My curlyheaded buckaroo, My home way out back, and On the Murray Valley. On the cover of The square dance by the billabong (Figure 6) – the title of which itself was a conjunction of archetypal ‘country’ images from both America and Australia – a background of eucalypts and windmills frames dancers in classic 1940s western (American) garb. In the case of Tex Morton’s Beautiful Queensland (Figure 7), itself mutated from W. Lee O’Daniel’s Beautiful Texas (c1945), the sheet music instructed those playing the music that the ‘names of other states may be substituted for Queensland’. ‘Country’ music had become an established genre, with normative values, standardised images and themes and yet constituted a stylistic formula with enough polysemy to enable local adaptations and variations. Figure 6: The Square dance by the billabong, Vernon Lisle, 1951. Figure 7: Beautiful Queensland, Tex Morton, c1945 source: http://nla.gov.au/nla.mus-vn1793930. Conclusions In country music images of place and masculinity combine. In music, frontier landscapes are populated by rugged men living ‘on the range’ in neo-colonial attempts to tame the land and convert it to productive uses. This article has considered only one media – sheet music – in only one country (Australia) and in only one time period (1900-1950s). There is much more to say than was possible here about country music, place and gender – particularly recently, since ‘country’ has fragmented into several niches, and marketing of country music via cable television and the internet has ensued (see McCusker and Pecknold). My purpose here has been instead to explore the early origins of ‘country’ mythology in popular culture, through a media source rarely analysed. Images associated with ‘country’ travelled internationally via sheet music, immensely popular in the 1930s and 1940s before the advent of television. The visual elements of sheet music contributed to the popularisation and standardisation of genre expectations and appearances, and yet these too travelled and were adapted and varied in places like Australia which had their own colonial histories and folk music heritages. Evidenced here is how combinations of geographical and gender imagery embraced imported American cowboy imagery and adapted it to local markets and concerns. Australia saw itself as a modern rural utopia with export aspirations and a desire to secure permanence through taming and populating its inland. Sheet music reflected all this. So too, sheet music reveals the historical contours of ‘country’ as a transnational discourse – and the extent to which ‘country’ brought with it a clearly defined set of normative values, a somewhat exaggerated cowboy masculinity, and a remarkable capacity to be moulded to local circumstances. Well before later and more supposedly ‘global’ media such as the internet and television, the humble printed sheet of notated music was steadily shaping ‘country’ imagery, and an emergent international geography of cultural flows. References Arango, Tim. “Cashville USA.” Fortune, Jan 29, 2007. Sept 3, 2008, http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/01/22/8397980/index.htm. Cloke, Paul, Marsden, Terry and Mooney, Patrick, eds. Handbook of Rural Studies, London: Sage, 2006. Connell, John and Gibson, Chris. Sound Tracks: Popular Music, Identity and Place, London: Routledge, 2003. Dufty, Rae. Rethinking the politics of distribution: the geographies and governmentalities of housing assistance in rural New South Wales, Australia, PhD thesis, UNSW, 2008. Dyer, Richard. White: Essays on Race and Culture, London: Routledge, 1997. George-Warren, Holly and Freedman, Michelle. How the West was Worn: a History of Western Wear, New York: Abrams, 2000. Fitzgerald, Jon and Hayward, Phil. “At the confluence: Slim Dusty and Australian country music.” Outback and Urban: Australian Country Music. Ed. Phil Hayward. Gympie: Australian Institute of Country Music Press, 2003. 29-54. Gibson, Chris and Davidson, Deborah. “Tamworth, Australia’s ‘country music capital’: place marketing, rural narratives and resident reactions.” Journal of Rural Studies 20 (2004): 387-404. Gorman-Murray, Andrew, Darian-Smith, Kate and Gibson, Chris. “Scaling the rural: reflections on rural cultural studies.” Australian Humanities Review 45 (2008): in press. Hemphill, Paul. The Nashville Sound: Bright Lights and Country Music, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970. Holt, Douglas B. and Thompson, Craig J. “Man-of-action heroes: the pursuit of heroic masculinity in everyday consumption.” Journal of Consumer Research 31 (2004). Johnson, Corey W. “‘The first step is the two-step’: hegemonic masculinity and dancing in a country western gay bar.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 18 (2004): 445-464. Lehr, John C. “‘Texas (When I die)’: national identity and images of place in Canadian country music broadcasts.” The Canadian Geographer 27 (1983): 361-370. Lewis, George H. “Lap dancer or hillbilly deluxe? The cultural construction of modern country music.” Journal of Popular Culture, 31 (1997): 163-173. McCarthy, James. “Rural geography: globalizing the countryside.” Progress in Human Geography 32 (2008): 132-137. McCusker, Kristine M. and Pecknold, Diane. Eds. A Boy Named Sue: Gender and Country Music. UP of Mississippi, 2004. Peterson, Richard A. Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1997. Saucier, Karen A. “Healers and heartbreakers: images of women and men in country music.” Journal of Popular Culture 20 (1986): 147-166. Smith, Graeme. “Australian country music and the hillbilly yodel.” Popular Music 13 (1994): 297-311. Tichi, Cecelia. Readin’ Country Music. Durham: Duke UP, 1998. truewesternmusic.com “True western music.”, Sept 3, 2008, http://truewesternmusic.com/. Watson, Eric. Country Music in Australia. Sydney: Rodeo Publications, 1984. Whiteoak, John. “Two frontiers: early cowboy music and Australian popular culture.” Outback and Urban: Australian Country Music. Ed. P. Hayward. Gympie: AICMP: 2003. 1-28.

The digital revolution has been characterized by the overlapping of different media technologies and platforms which reshaped both traditional forms of audiovisual consumption and older conceptions of place and space. John Agnew claims that, traditionally, the notion of place has been associated with two different meanings: ‘the first is a geometric conception of place as a mere part of space and the second is a phenomenological understanding of a place as a distinctive coming together in space’ (317). Both of the dominant meanings have been challenged by the idea that the world itself is increasingly “placeless” as space-spanning connections and flows of information, things, and people undermine the rootedness of a wide range of processes anywhere in particular (Friedman). On the one hand, by obliterating physical distance, new technologies such as the Internet and the cell phone are making places obsolete, on the other hand, the proliferation of media representations favoured by these technologies are making places more relevant than ever. These increasing mediatisation processes, in fact, generate what Urry and Larsen call ‘imaginative geographies’, namely the conflation of representational spaces and physical spaces that substitute and enhance each other in contingent ways (116). The smartphone as a new hybrid media platform that combines different technological features such as digital screens, complex software applications, cameras, tools for online communication and GPS devices, has played a crucial role in the construction of new notions of place. This article examines a specific type of phone applications: mobile, digital mapping tools that allow users to identify film-locations. In doing so it will assess how new media platforms can potentially reconfigure notions of both media consumption, and (physical and imagined) mobility. Furthermore, the analysis of digital movie maps and their mediation of film locations will shed light on the way in which contemporary leisure activities reshape the cultural, social and geographic meaning of place. Digital, Mobile Movie MapsDigital movie maps can be defined as software applications, conceived for smart phones or other mobile devices, which enable users to identify the geographical position of film locations. These applications rely on geotagging which is the process of adding geospatial metadata (usually latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates) to texts or images. From this point of view these phone apps belong to a broader category of media that Tristan Thielmann calls geomedia: converging applications of interactive, digital, mapping tools and mobile and networked media technologies. According to Hjorth, recent studies on mobile media practices show a trend toward “re-enacting the importance of place and home as both a geo-imaginary and socio-cultural precept” (Hjorth 371). In 2008 Google announced that Google Maps and Google Earth will become the basic platform for any information search. Similarly, in 2010 Flickr started georeferencing their complete image stock (Thielmann 8). Based on these current developments media scholars such as Thielmann claim that geomedia will emerge in the future as one of the most pervasive forms of digital technology (8).In my research I identified 44 phone geomedia apps that offered content variously related to film locations. In every case the main functionality of the apps consisted in matching geographic data concerning the locations with visual and written information about the corresponding film production. ‘Scene Seekers’, the first app able to match the title of a film with the GPS map of its locations, was released in 2009. Gradually, subsequent film-location apps incorporated a number of other functions including:Trivia and background information about films and locationsSubmission forms which allow users to share information about their favourite film locatiosLocation photosLinks to film downloadFilm-themed itinerariesAudio guidesOnline discussion groupsCamera/video function which allow users to take photos of the locations and share them on social mediaFilm stills and film clipsAfter identifying the movie map apps, I focused on the examination of the secondary functions they offered and categorized the applications based on both their main purpose and their main target users (as explicitly described in the app store). Four different categories of smart phone applications emerged. Apps conceived for:Business (for location scouts and producers)Entertainment (for trivia and quiz buffs)Education (for students and film history lovers)Travel (for tourists)‘Screen New South Wales Film Location Scout’, an app designed for location scouts requiring location contact information across the state of New South Wales, is an example of the first category. The app provides lists, maps and images of locations used in films shot in the region as well as contact details for local government offices. Most of these types of apps are available for free download and are commissioned by local authorities in the hope of attracting major film productions, which in turn might bring social and economic benefits to the region.A small number of the apps examined target movie fans and quiz buffs. ‘James Bond and Friends’, for example, focuses on real life locations where spy/thriller movies have been shot in London. Interactive maps and photos of the locations show their geographical position. The app also offers a wealth of trivia on spy/thriller movies and tests users’ knowledge of James Bond films with quizzes about the locations. While some of these apps provide information on how to reach particular film locations, the emphasis is on trivia and quizzes rather than travel itself.Some of the apps are explicitly conceived for educational purposes and target film students, film scholars and users interested in the history of film more broadly. The Italian Ministry for Cultural Affairs, for example, developed a number of smartphone apps designed to promote knowledge about Italian Cinema. Each application focuses on one Italian city, and was designed for users wishing to acquire more information about the movie industry in that urban area. The ‘Cinema Roma’ app, for example, contains a selection of geo-referenced film sets from a number of famous films shot in Rome. The film spots are presented via a rich collection of historical images and texts from the Italian National Photographic Archive.Finally, the majority of the apps analysed (around 60%) explicitly targets tourists. One of the most popular film-tourist applications is the ‘British Film Locations’ app with over 100,000 downloads since its launch in 2011. ‘British Film Locations’ was commissioned by VisitBritain, the British tourism agency. Visit Britain has attempted to capitalize on tourists’ enthusiasm around film blockbusters since the early 2000s as their research indicated that 40% of potential visitors would be very likely to visit the place they had seen in films or on TV (VisitBritain). British Film Locations enables users to discover and photograph the most iconic British film locations in cinematic history. Film tourists can search by film title, each film is accompanied by a detailed synopsis and list of locations so users can plan an entire British film tour. The app also allows users to take photos of the location and automatically share them on social networks such as Facebook or Twitter.Movie Maps and Film-TourismAs already mentioned, the majority of the film-location phone apps are designed for travel purposes and include functionalities that cater for the needs of the so called ‘post-tourists’. Maxine Feifer employed this term to describe the new type of tourist arising out of the shift from mass to post-Fordist consumption. The post-tourist crosses physical and virtual boundaries and shifts between experiences of everyday life, either through the actual or the simulated mobility allowed by the omnipresence of signs and electronic images in the contemporary age (Leotta). According to Campbell the post-tourist constructs his or her own tourist experience and destination, combining these into a package of overlapping and disjunctive elements: the imagined (dreams and screen cultures), the real (actual travels and guides) and the virtual (myths and internet) (203). More recently a number of scholars (Guttentag, Huang et al., Neuhofer et al.) have engaged with the application and implications of virtual reality on the planning, management and marketing of post-tourist experiences. Film-induced tourism is an expression of post-tourism. Since the mid-1990s a growing number of scholars (Riley and Van Doren, Tooke and Baker, Hudson and Ritchie, Leotta) have engaged with the study of this phenomenon, which Sue Beeton defined as “visitation to sites where movies and TV programmes have been filmed as well as to tours to production studios, including film-related theme parks” (11). Tourists’ fascination with film sets and locations is a perfect example of Baudrillard’s theory of hyperreality. Such places are simulacra which embody the blurred boundaries between reality and representation in a world in which unmediated access to reality is impossible (Baudrillard).Some scholars have focused on the role of mediated discourse in preparing both the site and the traveller for the process of tourist consumption (Friedberg, Crouch et al.). In particular, John Urry highlights the interdependence between tourism and the media with the concept of the ‘tourist gaze’. Urry argues that the gaze dominates tourism, which is primarily concerned with the commodification of images and visual consumption. According to Urry, movies and television play a crucial role in shaping the tourist gaze as the tourist compares what is gazed at with the familiar image of the object of the gaze. The tourist tries to reproduce his or her own expectations, which have been “constructed and sustained through a variety of non-tourist practices, such as film, TV, literature, records, and videos” (Urry 3). The inclusion of the camera functionality in digital movie maps such as ‘British Film Locations’ fulfils the need to actually reproduce the film images that the tourist has seen at home.Film and MapsThe convergence between film and (virtual) travel is also apparent in the prominent role that cartography plays in movies. Films often allude to maps in their opening sequences to situate their stories in time and space. In turn, the presence of detailed geographical descriptions of space at the narrative level often contributes to establish a stronger connection between film and viewers (Conley). Tom Conley notes that a number of British novels and their cinematic adaptations including Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) and Stevenson’s Treasure Island belong to the so called ‘cartographic fiction’ genre. In these stories, maps are deployed to undo the narrative thread and inspire alternative itineraries to the extent of legitimising an interactive relation between text and reader or viewer (Conley 225).The popularity of LOTR locations as film-tourist destinations within New Zealand may be, in part, explained by the prominence of maps as both aesthetic and narrative devices (Leotta). The authenticity of the LOTR geography (both the novel and the film trilogy) is reinforced, in fact, by the reoccurring presence of the map. Tolkien designed very detailed maps of Middle Earth that were usually published in the first pages of the books. These maps play a crucial role in the immersion into the imaginary geography of Middle Earth, which represents one of the most important pleasures of reading LOTR (Simmons). The map also features extensively in the cinematic versions of both LOTR and The Hobbit. The Fellowship of the Ring opens with several shots of a map of Middle Earth, anticipating the narrative of displacement that characterizes LOTR. Throughout the trilogy the physical dimensions of the protagonists’ journey are emphasized by the foregrounding of the landscape as a map.The prominence of maps and geographical exploration as a narrative trope in ‘cartographic fiction’ such as LOTR may be responsible for activating the ‘tourist imagination’ of film viewers (Crouch et al.). The ‘tourist imagination’ is a construct that explains the sense of global mobility engendered by the daily consumption of the media, as well as actual travel. As Crouch, Jackson and Thompson put it, “the activity of tourism itself makes sense only as an imaginative process which involves a certain comprehension of the world and enthuses a distinctive emotional engagement with it” (Crouch et al. 1).The use of movie maps, the quest for film locations in real life may reproduce some of the cognitive and emotional pleasures that were activated while watching the movie, particularly if maps, travel and geographic exploration are prominent narrative elements. Several scholars (Couldry, Hills, Beeton) consider film-induced tourism as a contemporary form of pilgrimage and movie maps are becoming an inextricable part of this media ritual. Hudson and Ritchie note that maps produced by local stakeholders to promote the locations of films such as Sideways and LOTR proved to be extremely popular among tourists (391-392). In their study about the impact of paper movie maps on tourist behaviour in the UK, O’Connor and Pratt found that movie maps are an essential component in the marketing mix of a film location. For example, the map of Pride and Prejudice Country developed by the Derbyshire and Lincolnshire tourist boards significantly helped converting potential visitors into tourists as almost two in five visitors stated it ‘definitely’ turned a possible visit into a certainty (O’Connor and Pratt).Media Consumption and PlaceDigital movie maps have the potential to further reconfigure traditional understandings of media consumption and place. According to Nana Verhoeff digital mapping tools encourage a performative cartographic practice in the sense that the dynamic map emerges and changes during the users’ journey. The various functionalities of digital movie maps favour the hybridization between film reception and space navigation as by clicking on the movie map the user could potentially watch a clip of the film, read about both the film and the location, produce his/her own images and comments of the location and share it with other fans online.Furthermore, digital movie maps facilitate and enhance what Nick Couldry, drawing upon Claude Levi Strauss, calls “parcelling out”: the marking out as significant of differences in ritual space (83). According to Couldry, media pilgrimages, the visitation of TV or film locations are rituals that are based from the outset on an act of comparison between the cinematic depiction of place and its physical counterpart. Digital movie maps have the potential to facilitate this comparison by immediately retrieving images of the location as portrayed in the film. Media locations are rife with the marking of differences between the media world and the real locations as according to Couldry some film tourists seek precisely these differences (83).The development of smart phone movie maps, may also contribute to redefine the notion of audiovisual consumption. According to Nanna Verhoeff, mobile screens of navigation fundamentally revise the spatial coordinates of previously dominant, fixed and distancing cinematic screens. One of the main differences between mobile digital screens and larger, cinematic screens is that rather than being surfaces of projection or transmission, they are interfaces of software applications that combine different technological properties of the hybrid screen device: a camera, an interface for online communication, a GPS device (Verhoeff). Because of these characteristics of hybridity and intimate closeness, mobile screens involve practices of mobile and haptic engagement that turn the classical screen as distanced window on the world, into an interactive, hybrid navigation device that repositions the viewer as central within the media world (Verhoeff).In their discussion of the relocation of cinema into the iPhone, Francesco Casetti and Sara Sampietro reached similar conclusions as they define the iPhone as both a visual device and an interactive interface that mobilizes the eye as well as the hand (Casetti and Sampietro 23). The iPhone constructs an ‘existential bubble’ in which the spectator can find refuge while remaining exposed to the surrounding environment. When the surrounding environment is the real life film location, the consumption or re-consumption of the film text allowed by the digital movie map is informed by multi-sensorial and cognitive stimuli that are drastically different from traditional viewing experiences.The increasing popularity of digital movie maps is a phenomenon that could be read in conjunction with the emergence of innovative locative media such as the Google glasses and other applications of Augmented Reality (A.R.). Current smart phones available in the market are already capable to support A.R. applications and it appears likely that this will become a standard feature of movie apps within the next few years (Sakr). Augmented reality refers to the use of data overlays on real-time camera view of a location which make possible to show virtual objects within their spatial context. The camera eye on the device registers physical objects on location, and transmits these images in real time on the screen. On-screen this image is combined with different layers of data: still image, text and moving image.In a film-tourism application of augmented reality tourists would be able to point their phone camera at the location. As the camera identifies the location images from the film will overlay the image of the ‘real location’. The user, therefore, will be able to simultaneously see and walk in both the real location and the virtual film set. The notion of A.R. is related to the haptic aspect of engagement which in turn brings together the doing, the seeing and the feeling (Verhoeff). In film theory the idea of the haptic has come to stand for an engaged look that involves, and is aware of, the body – primarily that of the viewer (Marx, Sobchack). The future convergence between cinematic and mobile technologies is likely to redefine both perspectives on haptic perception of cinema and theories of film spectatorship.The application of A.R. to digital, mobile maps of film-locations will, in part, fulfill the prophecies of René Barjavel. In 1944, before Bazin’s seminal essay on the myth of total cinema, French critic Barjavel, asserted in his book Le Cinema Total that the technological evolution of the cinematic apparatus will eventually result in the total enveloppement (envelopment or immersion) of the film-viewer. This enveloppement will be characterised by the multi-sensorial experience and the full interactivity of the spectator within the movie itself. More recently, Thielmann has claimed that geomedia such as movie maps constitute a first step toward the vision that one day it might be possible to establish 3-D spaces as a medial interface (Thielmann).Film-Tourism, Augmented Reality and digital movie maps will produce a complex immersive and inter-textual media system which is at odds with Walter Benjamin’s famous thesis on the loss of ‘aura’ in the age of mechanical reproduction (Benjamin), as one of the pleasures of film-tourism is precisely the interaction with the auratic place, the actual film location or movie set. According to Nick Couldry, film tourists are interested in the aura of the place and filming itself. The notion of aura is associated here with both the material history of the location and the authentic experience of it (104).Film locations, as mediated by digital movie maps, are places in which people have a complex sensorial, emotional, cognitive and imaginative involvement. The intricate process of remediation of the film-locations can be understood as a symptom of what Lash and Urry have called the ‘re-subjectification of space’ in which ‘locality’ is re-weighted with a more subjective and affective charge of place (56). According to Lash and Urry the aesthetic-expressive dimensions of the experience of place have become as important as the cognitive ones. By providing new layers of cultural meaning and alternative modes of affective engagement, digital movie maps will contribute to redefine both the notion of tourist destination and the construction of place identity. These processes can potentially be highly problematic as within this context the identity and meanings of place are shaped and controlled by the capital forces that finance and distribute the digital movie maps. Future critical investigations of digital cartography will need to address the way in which issues of power and control are deeply enmeshed within new tourist practices. 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IntroductionWhat can we learn about anomaly from the strangeness of a puppet, a lifeless object, that can both bleed and die? How does the filming process of a puppet’s death engage across media and produce a new media genre that is not easily classified within traditional conventions? Why do these fighting and bleeding puppets’ scenes consistently attract audiences? This study examines how Pili puppetry (1984-present), a popular TV series depicting martial arts-based narratives and fight sequences, interacts with digital technologies and constructs a new media genre. The transmedia constitution of a virtual world not only challenges the stereotype of puppetry’s target audience but also expands the audience’s bodily imagination and desires through the visual component of death scenes. Hence, the show does not merely represent or signify an anomaly, but even creates anomalous desires and imaginary bodies.Cultural commodification and advancing technologies have motivated the convergence and displacement of traditional boundaries, genres, and media, changing the very fabric of textuality itself. By exploring how new media affect the audience’s visual reception of fighting and death, this article sheds light on understanding the metamorphoses of Taiwanese puppetry and articulates a theoretical argument regarding the show’s artistic practice to explain how its form transverses traditional boundaries. This critical exploration focusses on how the form represents bleeding puppets, and in doing so, explicates the politics of transmedia performing and viewing. Pili is an example of an anomalous media form that proliferates anomalous media viewing experiences and desires in turn.Beyond a Media Genre: Taiwanese Pili PuppetryConverging the craft technique of puppeteering and digital technology of filmmaking and animation, Pili puppetry creates a new media genre that exceeds any conventional idea of a puppet show or digital puppet, as it is something in-between. Glove puppetry is a popular traditional theatre in Taiwan, often known as “theatre in the palm” because a traditional puppet was roughly the same size as an adult’s palm. The size enabled the puppeteer to easily manipulate a puppet in one hand and be close to the audience. Traditionally, puppet shows occurred to celebrate the local deities’ birthday. Despite its popularity, the form was limited by available technology. For instance, although stories with vigorous battles were particularly popular, bleeding scenes in such an auspicious occasion were inappropriate and rare. As a live theatrical event featuring immediate interaction between the performer and the spectator, realistic bleeding scenes were rare because it is hard to immediately clean the stage during the performance. Distinct from the traditional puppet show, digital puppetry features semi-animated puppets in a virtual world. Digital puppetry is not a new concept by any means in the Western film industry. Animating a 3D puppet is closely associated with motion capture technologies and animation that are manipulated in a digitalised virtual setting (Ferguson). Commonly, the target audience of the Western digital puppetry is children, so educators sometimes use digital puppetry as a pedagogical tool (Potter; Wohlwend). With these young target audience in mind, the producers often avoid violent and bleeding scenes.Pili puppetry differs from digital puppetry in several ways. For instance, instead of targeting a young audience, Pili puppetry consistently extends the traditional martial-arts performance to include bloody fight sequences that enrich the expressiveness of traditional puppetry as a performing art. Moreover, Pili puppetry does not apply the motion capture technologies to manipulate the puppet’s movement, thus retaining the puppeteers’ puppeteering craft (clips of Pili puppetry can be seen on Pili’s official YouTube page). Hence, Pili is a unique hybrid form, creating its own anomalous space in puppetry. Among over a thousand characters across the series, the realistic “human-like” puppet is one of Pili’s most popular selling points. The new media considerably intervene in the puppet design, as close-up shots and high-resolution images can accurately project details of a puppet’s face and body movements on the screen. Consequently, Pili’s puppet modelling becomes increasingly intricate and attractive and arguably makes its virtual figures more epic yet also more “human” (Chen). Figure 1: Su Huan-Jen in the TV series Pili Killing Blade (1993). His facial expressions were relatively flat and rigid then. Reproduced with permission of Pili International Multimedia Company.Figure 2: Su Huan-Jen in the TV series Pili Nine Thrones (2003). The puppet’s facial design and costume became more delicate and complex. Reproduced with permission of Pili International Multimedia Company.Figure 3: Su Huan-Jen in the TV series Pili Fantasy: War of Dragons (2019). His facial lines softened due to more precise design technologies. The new lightweight chiffon yarn costumes made him look more elegant. The multiple-layer costumes also created more space for puppeteers to hide behind the puppet and enact more complicated manipulations. Reproduced with permission of Pili International Multimedia Company.The design of the most well-known Pili swordsman, Su Huan-Jen, demonstrates how the Pili puppet modelling became more refined and intricate in the past 20 years. In 1993, the standard design was a TV puppet with the size and body proportion slightly enlarged from the traditional puppet. Su Huan-Jen’s costumes were made from heavy fabrics, and his facial expressions were relatively flat and rigid (fig. 1). Pili produced its first puppetry film Legend of the Sacred Stone in 2000; considering the visual quality of a big screen, Pili refined the puppet design including replacing wooden eyeballs and plastic hair with real hair and glass eyeballs (Chen). The filmmaking experience inspired Pili to dramatically improve the facial design for all puppets. In 2003, Su’s modelling in Pili Nine Thrones (TV series) became noticeably much more delicate. The puppet’s size was considerably enlarged by almost three times, so a puppeteer had to use two hands to manipulate a puppet. The complex costumes and props made more space for puppeteers to hide behind the puppet and enrich the performance of the fighting movements (fig. 2). In 2019, Su’s new modelling further included new layers of lightweight fabrics, and his makeup and props became more delicate and complex (fig. 3). Such a refined aesthetic design also lends to Pili’s novelty among puppetry performances.Through the transformation of Pili in the context of puppetry history, we see how the handicraft-like puppet itself gradually commercialised into an artistic object that the audience would yearn to collect and project their bodily imagination. Anthropologist Teri Silvio notices that, for some fans, Pili puppets are similar to worship icons through which they project their affection and imaginary identity (Silvio, “Pop Culture Icons”). Intermediating with the new media, the change in the refined puppet design also comes from the audience’s expectations. Pili’s senior puppet designer Fan Shih-Ching mentioned that Pili fans are very involved, so their preferences affect the design of puppets. The complexity, particularly the layer of costumes, most clearly differentiates the aesthetics of traditional and Pili puppets. Due to the “idolisation” of some famous Pili characters, Shih-Ching has had to design more and more gaudy costumes. Each resurgence of a well-known Pili swordsman, such as Su Huan-Jen, Yi Ye Shu, and Ye Hsiao-Chai, means he has to remodel the puppet.Pili fans represent their infatuation for puppet characters through cosplay (literally “costume play”), which is when fans dress up and pretend to be a Pili character. Their cosplay, in particular, reflects the bodily practice of imaginary identity. Silvio observes that most cosplayers choose to dress as characters that are the most visually appealing rather than characters that best suit their body type. They even avoid moving too “naturally” and mainly move from pose-to-pose, similar to the frame-to-frame techne of animation. Thus, we can understand this “cosplay more as reanimating the character using the body as a kind of puppet rather than as an embodied performance of some aspect of self-identity” (Silvio 2019, 167). Hence, Pili fans’ cosplay is indicative of an anomalous desire to become the puppet-like human, which helps them transcend their social roles in their everyday life. It turns out that not only fans’ preference drives the (re)modelling of puppets but also fans attempt to model themselves in the image of their beloved puppets. The reversible dialectic between fan-star and flesh-object further provokes an “anomaly” in terms of the relationship between the viewers and the puppets. Precisely because fans have such an intimate relationship with Pili, it is important to consider how the series’ content and form configure fans’ viewing experience.Filming Bleeding PuppetsDespite its intricate aesthetics, Pili is still a series with frequent fighting-to-the-death scenes, which creates, and is the result of, extraordinary transmedia production and viewing experiences. Due to the market demand of producing episodes around 500 minutes long every month, Pili constantly creates new characters to maintain the audience’s attention and retain its novelty. So far, Pili has released thousands of characters. To ensure that new characters supersede the old ones, numerous old characters have to die within the plot.The adoption of new media allows the fighting scenes in Pili to render as more delicate, rather than consisting of loud, intense action movements. Instead, the leading swordsmen’s death inevitably takes place in a pathetic and romantic setting and consummates with a bloody sacrifice. Fighting scenes in early Pili puppetry created in the late 1980s were still based on puppets’ body movements, as the knowledge and technology of animation were still nascent and underdeveloped. At that time, the prestigious swordsman mainly relied on the fast speed of brandishing his sword. Since the early 1990s, as animation technology matured, it has become very common to see Pili use CGI animation to create a damaging sword beam for puppets to kill target enemies far away. The sword beam can fly much faster than the puppets can move, so almost every fighting scene employs CGI to visualise both sword beams and flame. The change in fighting manners provokes different representations of the bleeding and death scenes. Open wounds replace puncture wounds caused by a traditional weapon; bleeding scenes become typical, and a special feature in Pili’s transmedia puppetry.In addition to CGI animation, the use of fake blood in the Pili studio makes the performance even more realistic. Pili puppet master Ting Chen-Ching recalled that exploded puppets in traditional puppetry were commonly made by styrofoam blocks. The white styrofoam chips that sprayed everywhere after the explosion inevitably made the performance seem less realistic. By contrast, in the Pili studio, the scene of a puppet spurting blood after the explosion usually applies the technology of editing several shots. The typical procedure would be a short take that captures a puppet being injured. In its injury location, puppeteers sprinkle red confetti to represent scattered blood clots in the following shot. Sometimes the fake blood was splashed with the red confetti to make it further three-dimensional (Ting). Bloody scenes can also be filmed through multiple layers of arranged performance conducted at the same time by a group of puppeteers. Ting describes the practice of filming a bleeding puppet. Usually, some puppeteers sprinkle fake blood in front of the camera, while other puppeteers blasted the puppets toward various directions behind the blood to make the visual effects match. If the puppeteers need to show how a puppet becomes injured and vomits blood during the fight, they can install tiny pipes in the puppet in advance. During the filming, the puppeteer slowly squeezes the pipe to make the fake blood flow out from the puppet’s mouth. Such a bloody scene sometimes accompanies tears dropping from the puppet’s eyes. In some cases, the puppeteer drops the blood on the puppet’s mouth prior to the filming and then uses a powerful electric fan to blow the blood drops (Ting). Such techniques direct the blood to flow laterally against the wind, which makes the puppet’s death more aesthetically tragic. Because it is not a live performance, the puppeteer can try repeatedly until the camera captures the most ideal blood drop pattern and bleeding speed. Puppeteers have to adjust the camera distance for different bleeding scenes, which creates new modes of viewing, sensing, and representing virtual life and death. One of the most representative examples of Pili’s bleeding scenes is when Su’s best friend, Ching Yang-Zi, fights with alien devils in Legend of the Sacred Stone. (The clip of how Ching Yang-Zi fights and bleeds to death can be seen on YouTube.) Ting described how Pili prepared three different puppets of Ching for the non-fighting, fighting, and bleeding scenes (Ting). The main fighting scene starts from a low-angle medium shot that shows how Ching Yang-Zi got injured and began bleeding from the corner of his mouth. Then, a sharp weapon flies across the screen; the following close-up shows that the weapon hits Ching and he begins bleeding immediately. The successive shots move back and forth between his face and the wound in medium shot and close-up. Next, a close-up shows him stepping back with blood dripping on the ground. He then pushes the weapon out of his body to defend enemies; a final close-up follows a medium take and a long take shows the massive hemorrhage. The eruption of fluid plasma creates a natural effect that is difficult to achieve, even with 3D animation. Beyond this impressive technicality, the exceptional production and design emphasise how Pili fully embraces the ethos of transmedia: to play with multiple media forms and thereby create a new form. In the case of Pili, its form is interactive, transcending the boundaries of what we might consider the “living” and the “dead”.Epilogue: Viewing Bleeding Puppets on the ScreenThe simulated, high-quality, realistic-looking puppet designs accompanying the Pili’s featured bloody fighting sequence draw another question: What is the effect of watching human-like puppets die? What does this do to viewer-fans? Violence is prevalent throughout the historical record of human behaviour, especially in art and entertainment because these serve as outlets to fulfill a basic human need to indulge in “taboo fantasies” and escape into “realms of forbidden experience” (Schechter). When discussing the visual representations of violence and the spectacle of the sufferings of others, Susan Sontag notes, “if we consider what emotions would be desirable” (102), viewing the pain of others may not simply evoke sympathy. She argues that “[no] moral charge attaches to the representation of these cruelties. Just the provocation: can you look at this? There is the satisfaction of being able to look at the image without flinching. There is the pleasure of flinching” (41). For viewers, the boldness of watching the bloody scenes can be very inviting. Watching human-like puppets die in the action scenes similarly validates the viewer’s need for pleasure and entertainment. Although different from a human body, the puppets still bears the materiality of being-object. Therefore, watching the puppets bleeding and die as distinctly “human-like’ puppets further prevent viewers’ from feeling guilty or morally involved. The conceptual distance of being aware of the puppet’s materiality acts as a moral buffer; audiences are intimately involved through the particular aesthetic arrangement, yet morally detached. The transmedia filming of puppetry adds another layer of mediation over the human-like “living” puppets that allows such a particular experience. Sontag notices that the media generates an inevitable distance between object and subject, between witness and victim. For Sontag, although images constitute “the imaginary proximity” because it makes the “faraway sufferers” be “seen close-up on the television screen”, it is a mystification to assume that images serve as a direct link between sufferers and viewers. Rather, Sontag insists: the distance makes the viewers feel “we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence” (102). Echoing Sontag’s argument, Jeffrey Goldstein points out that “distancing” oneself from the mayhem represented in media makes it tolerable. Media creates an “almost real” visuality of violence, so the audience feels relatively safe in their surroundings when exposed to threatening images. Thus, “violent imagery must carry cues to its unreality or it loses appeal” (280). Pili puppets that are human-like, thus not human, more easily enable the audience to seek sensational excitement through viewing puppets’ bloody violence and eventual death on the screen and still feel emotionally secure. Due to the distance granted by the medium, viewers gain a sense of power by excitedly viewing the violence with an accompanying sense of moral exemption. Thus, viewers can easily excuse the limits of their personal responsibility while still being captivated by Pili’s boundary-transgressing aesthetic.The anomalous power of Pili fans’ cosplay differentiates the viewing experience of puppets’ deaths from that of other violent entertainment productions. Cosplayers physically bridge viewing/acting and life/death by dressing up as the puppet characters, bringing them to life, as flesh. Cosplay allows fans to compensate for the helplessness they experience when watching the puppets’ deaths on the screen. They can both “enjoy” the innocent pleasure of watching bleeding puppets and bring their adored dead idols “back to life” through cosplay. The onscreen violence and death thus provide an additional layer of pleasure for such cosplayers. They not only take pleasure in watching the puppets—which are an idealized version of their bodily imagination—die, but also feel empowered to revitalise their loved idols. Therefore, Pili cosplayers’ desires incite a cycle of life, pleasure, and death, in which the company responds to their consumers’ demands in kind. The intertwining of social, economic, and political factors thus collectively thrives upon media violence as entertainment. Pili creates the potential for new cross-media genre configurations that transcend the traditional/digital puppetry binary. On the one hand, the design of swordsman puppets become a simulation of a “living object” responding to the camera distance. On the other hand, the fighting and death scenes heavily rely on the puppeteers’ cooperation with animation and editing. Therefore, Pili puppetry enriches existing discourse on both puppetry and animation as life-giving processes. What is animated by Pili puppetry is not simply the swordsmen characters themselves, but new potentials for media genres and violent entertainment. AcknowledgmentMy hearty gratitude to Amy Gaeta for sharing her insights with me on the early stage of this study.ReferencesChen, Jasmine Yu-Hsing. “Transmuting Tradition: The Transformation of Taiwanese Glove Puppetry in Pili Productions.” Journal of the Oriental Society of Australia 51 (2019): 26-46.Ferguson, Jeffrey. “Lessons from Digital Puppetry: Updating a Design Framework for a Perceptual User Interface.” IEEE International Conference on Computer and Information Technology, 2015.Goldstein, Jeffrey. “The Attractions of Violent Entertainment.” Media Psychology 1.3 (1999): 271-282.Potter, Anna. “Funding Contemporary Children’s Television: How Digital Convergence Encourages Retro Reboot.” International Journal on Communications Management 19.2 (2017): 108-112.Schechter, Harold. Savage Pastimes: A Cultural History of Violent Entertainment. New York: St. Martin’s, 2005.Silvio, Teri. “Pop Culture Icons: Religious Inflections of the Character Toy in Taiwan.” Mechademia 3.1 (2010): 200-220.———. Puppets, Gods, and Brands: Theorizing the Age of Animation from Taiwan. Honolulu: U Hawaii P, 2019. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004.Ting, Chen-Ching. Interview by the author. Yunlin, Taiwan. 24 June 2019.Wohlwend, Karen E. “One Screen, Many Fingers: Young Children's Collaborative Literacy Play with Digital Puppetry Apps and Touchscreen Technologies.” Theory into Practice 54.2 (2015): 154-162.

Introduction In not dismissing the personal narratives of individuals, Frederic Jameson describes the ‘telling of the individual story and individual experience as ultimately involving the whole laborious process of telling of the collectivity itself’ (cf. Bhabha 292). The construction of a nation involves a process of selection and textual mediation which binds an imagined community to a constructed past. Homi Bhabha refers to the ‘cultural construction of nationness as a form of social and textual affiliation’ (292). He observes how narratives employ a host of complex strategies and cultural identification and discursive address which displace historicism. The focus on temporality, according to Bhabha, then resists the linearity of events and idea that historicism proposes. Personal narratives in this sense, provide a canvas for disjunctive forms of representations to re-represent cultures and nations. It is in this context, this paper considers the role of weblogs in society and seeks to analyse their potential agency to re-cast historicity and to re-negotiate the identity of a nation. Personal commentaries and narratives contained in weblogs firstly jam spaces in the Internet, and secondly, they jam both temporality and the linearity of historicity that is contained in official voices that claim to speak on behalf of the nation. Nations are conceived as ‘imagined’ (Anderson), as a ‘myth’ (Gellner) or ‘invented’ (Hobsbawm & Ranger) rather than real and consequentially require great effort to construct and maintain. As such people and their narratives can be conceived as ‘neither the end nor the beginning of the national narrative’ (Bhabha 297). They represent a binary dialogism between the ethnographic perspective of people’s individual psyche and the ideological forces of the nation. While weblogs are often viewed as having the potential to build social networks and virtual settlements (Nardi et al.; Blanchard), this paper analyses the agency of personal narratives in providing embedded ethnographic perspectives in the electronic terrain and its consequences for the trajectory of history. It seeks to understand how mediated texts in weblogs can be situated in society and how it can be assessed as a media genre through cultural and literary theories. New media spaces have created opportunities and novel ways of recording and archiving narratives of communities, cultures and societies. They represent sites of cultural production where cultural or collective memory can be articulated or re-ignited. The act of remembering can be ritualised and visualised in web spaces. The ability to personalise and publicise on the web presents new avenues for understanding and reviewing history. Undoubtedly, the internet as a repository of information and narratives accommodates a multitude of environments and genres which co-exist on the same platform. This co-presence can in many ways represent the dialectical struggles between competing forces in the offline society. The web spaces present a possibility for both the ephemeral and transient to manifest and equally narratives which can resist the linearity of historicity. This jamming or flooding of electronic spaces with competing narratives makes the electronic terrain a contested space between the authentic and inauthentic as well as the empowered and the marginalised. This incessant plurality on the Internet can reorder both the temporal and spatial dimensions of mediated consciousness hence disrupting the linear historicity of nation-states and modernity. Modernity as a form of cognitive consciousness in society is constructed by carefully selecting the narratives of its birth to celebrate rationality, to resist the primeval tendencies and to renounce any association with its ignominious past or traditions. New media to a degree resists the dominant power structures of mainstream media thus encouraging civic participation and plurality in the new spaces where audiences can appropriate the role of producers; where the pronoun ‘I’ can assume a counter-point to the dominant discourses in society. Invariably, the age of globalization is one characterised by competing mediations which give rise to a postmodern ‘new memory’ (Hoskins) which is diffused yet not entirely free from the processes of state power or the emergence of ‘Holocaust Industry’ (Finklestein). The Internet as a diverse platform for activities ranging from publishing to commerce forms part of the wider contemporary media landscape. Its lack of centrality and sheer expanse makes it a diffused medium catering to a plethora of niche interests and audiences. The personal blogs compete with a multitude of data and information that occur on the Internet and elsewhere in other media. The mass media inevitably has the power to construct national events and to sustain a mediated national memory through its image archives and narratives. Its ability to reach a wider audience and its pervasiveness in narrating the nation stands in contrast to niche and personalised media like blogs with their disparate audiences. Nevertheless, the occurrence of personal narratives in the alternative and niche spaces provides a counter-point to the dominant narratives of the mass media. Its occurrence, presence and sustained counter-commentary create a civilian electronic archive to represent people’s narratives and memory. While its ability to monopolise or dominate national narratives may be limited, its presence and utterance needs to be acknowledged and celebrated. With the proliferation of new media platforms in postmodern societies, the centre-periphery distinctions with regard to information, news and memory construction will become more problematic without completely diminishing the divisions between mass and niche media spaces. The Physical and Virtual as Entwined Just as physical spaces are a place of gathering for those who belong and those who are displaced, the Internet provides a convening space for disembodied presence. This is often viewed as a Manichean dualism between the occurrence of thought and material presence. Equally, this is seen as unleashing a virulent ‘avatarism’ (Donath) which seeks to re-invent this virtual disembodiment by assuming different identities or by embracing a non-identity of anonymity. This cognitive engagement with the virtual sphere and the attendant consequences with regard to identity construction and reinvention have been observed and studied by media theorists. Nevertheless the offline and online are not separate and compartmentalised entities. They are entwined in complex ways (Miller and Slater). Virtual articulations as sites of cultural production reinforce the links between the real society and the virtual world, for the virtual is mediated through the societal norms and values of offline communities. Vygotsky’s (cf. Wertsch, Vygotsky; “Narrative”) concept of ‘mediation’ particularly in the form of language provides a link between the individual and the socio-cultural setting in which an individual is located. Hence the media artefact and the forms of use provide a form of mediation which reinforces the link between the individual and the social context. The performative in the pronoun ‘I’ in a personal narrative can implicate the collective consciousness of a society linking the ‘I’ with an abstract ‘we’ and hence connecting individual narratives to the social frames and groups in society. In applying the Bakhtinian approach of self and authorship, for the ‘perceiver their own time is forever open and unfinished, their own space is always the centre of perception. In contrast the time within which we perceive others is always closed and finished’ (cf. Holquist 29). The cognitive time and space of an individual in a weblog interacts with the virtual spaces imposing a material world time on an illusive and imagined cyberspace. For Bakhtin, existence, like language is a shared event. Invariably, ‘self and authorship’ both conjoin and separate the immediate reality of ‘my own living particularity (a uniqueness that is present itself as only for me ) with the reality of the system that precedes me in existence (that is always-already-there) and which is intertwined with everyone and everything else.’ (Holquist 28). Unequivocally, ‘otherness’ is perceived from the vantage point of the self and in tandem, the utterance of ‘I’ provides the central point needed to calibrate all further time and space discriminations. Hence, ‘I’ is the invisible ground of all further time and space discriminations (Bakhtin). Individual Psyche and Collective Memory Maurice Halbwachs conceived the concept of collective memory in the 1920’s inspired by Durkeim’s notion of a ‘collective consciousness’ realized through the will of a crowd in a gathering. According to Halbwachs, it is the individuals (as group members) who remember with the aid of cultural tools (cf. Wertsch, “Narrative”). Hence the act of remembering is a diffused activity which is realised through the interface between individual agency and the utilization of cultural tools. Central to the notion of collective memory is textual mediation where active agents use symbolic means such as written texts, particularly narratives (Wertsch, “Narrative”). Web spaces with an abundance of individual and communal narratives embody a construct which is incomplete and prone to de-selection and decentring and where the identity of a nation can be re-imagined and re-conceived textually. Employing the recurrent metaphor of the palimpsest (sheets of vellum on which the original writing has been rubbed out and written over) to the narratives of the Internet, these personal narratives or weblogs both challenge and retain the national past hence disrupting the sense of temporality and history. They can be both a symbolic form of resistance and conformity. For the post-structuralists, the palimpsest is representative of an intertextuality between different fields (Cryderman). These contemporaneous narratives on the Internet viewed through the allegory of the palimpsest signify a dialogism between the nationally-endorsed narratives and individual perspectives. In citing Homi Bhaba in the context of the Internet, it is evident that ‘the nation reveals in its ambivalent and vacillating representations, the ethnography of its own historicity and opens up the possibility of other narratives of the people and their difference’ (Bhabha 300) Weblogs as Ethnographic Tools Weblogs have started to a play a bigger role in the breaking and shaping of news since the late 1990s. With millions being published, blogs offer a new way of mediating national and global events with personal narratives which can contradict and or complement news and events as they are told in traditional media spaces. Blogs are often more localized and may be useful in building communities (Herring et al.). The Internet was initially conceived as a borderless entity with fluid boundaries which threaten the physical demarcations of nation-states. Nevertheless, the moulding of the Internet through the context and culture of use has witnessed a rise in the role of nation-states in enacting artificial boundaries on the virtual environment through regulations and social norms which have mediated the patterns of usage and forms of local appropriation of this global platform. The localisation and the personalisation of this electronic terrain represent the embeddedness of the Internet in the offline society and culture. One of the most significant events in the trajectory of this electronic genre was the emergence of the post 9/11 weblogs which re-told the stories of ground-zero from the perspectives of the personal (Krishnamurthy). It showcased how individual narratives mediated global events tempering the landscape of news reporting. Likewise, the warblogs recorded the Iraq war from ethnographic perspectives providing intricate insights and in the process re-mediating the tone and coverage of mainstream media and public opinion. Weblogs or web-based diaries occupy a tenuous space between the private and public. While diaries are kept by individuals to relate private experiences; their sacredness is in many ways characterised by their inaccessibility by others; often representing a solitary space for private ruminations and reflection. A diary loses its aura if its engagement with the self and the tenets of privacy are broken or violated. Weblogs which are written by individuals and made available to a potentially global community celebrate the performative aspect of the ‘self.’ A weblog’s relevance as an e-genre is signified by both its ability to retain its individual voice and its access to a wider community of strangers. Weblogs are intrinsically hybrid formats which fuse private thoughts and commentary on a global plaftform facilitating communion with ‘imagined others’ while anchoring the self at the centre stage of articulation. In applying Bakhtin’s ‘law of placement’ in dialogism, everything is perceived from a unique position in existence, as such the meaning of whatever is observed is shaped by the place from which it is perceived (cf. Holquist 21). In this sense, we regard each other from different centres in cognitive space and thus the personal articulation has significance for the representation of the society and social frames. These spaces of private commemoration in part puncture the temporality of history and indeed the processes of history-making. Invariably, ‘the present of the people’s history then is a practice that destroys the constant principles of the national culture that attempt to hark back to true national past which is often represented in the reified forms of realism and stereotype’ (Bhabha 300). The present is not a static moment, but a mass of different combinations of past and present relations (Holquist 37). This is comparable to the format of a weblog where permalinks to other sites mediate the memory of blogs widening the potential ability to remember beyond the text that falls in the spaces of personal narrative. Conclusion The jamming of web spaces with personal narratives for the consumption of local and global audiences signifies new public spaces of private commentary, public commemoration and global communion. These private spaces then link the national events of the world with personal perceptions, hence incorporating historic time within the spaces of self expression. Here the chronotope of world events becomes embedded in the ‘personal.’ Web diaries written in war zones by citizens of their day-to-day encounters with the aggressor record both time and events from the vantage point of the oppressed; a private narrative which occupies its space in a global stage. Here the private narrative in a public space challenges the temporality of war as well as the linearity of historicity. National cultures, according to Bhabha are ‘signs of control or abandonment and as such counter-narratives continuously evoke and erase its totalising boundaries both actual and conceptual thus disturbing those ideological manoeuvres through which ‘imagined communities’ are given essentialist identities’ (Bhabha 300). Inevitably the emergence of ‘new memory’ (Hoskins) in the postmodern world is a contradictory one which needs to reconcile the durable visual images of our electronically mediated world as well as the competing mediations of diverse niche and personalised media artefacts which negate or recast the hegemony of this visual culture. References Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991. Bakhtin, M. Translated by C. Emerson and M. Holquist. In The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. M. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Bhabha, H.K. “Dissemination: Time, Narrative and the Margins of Modern Nation.” In Nation and Narration. Ed. H.K. Bhabha. London: Routledge, 1990. 291-322. Blanchard, A. “Blogs as Virtual Communities: Identifying a Sense of Community in the Julie/Julia Project.” In Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community and Culture. 2004. http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogsphere>. 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Oxford: Blackwell, 1983. Holquist, M. Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World. London: Routledge, 1990 Hoskins, A. “New Memory: Mediating History.” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 21.4 (2001): 333-346. Krishnamurthy, S. “The Multidimensionality of Blog Conversations: The Virtual Enactment of September 11.” Internet Research 3.0. Maastricht, The Netherlands, 2002. Miller, D., and D. Slater. Internet: An Ethnographic Approach. Oxford: Berg, 2000. Nardi, B.A., D.J. Schiano, M. Gumbrecht, and L. Swartz. “Why We Blog.” Communications of the ACM 47.12 (2004): 41–46. Wertsch, J.V. “Narrative as a Cultural Tool in Collective Memory.” Conference for Sociocultural Research III, 2000. 9 Sep. 2006 http://www.fae.unicamp.br/br2000/trabs/2045.doc>. ———. Vygotsky and the Social Formation of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1985. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Ibrahim, Yasmin. "Weblogs as Personal Narratives: Displacing History and Temporality." M/C Journal 9.6 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0612/08-ibrahim.php>. APA Style Ibrahim, Y. (Dec. 2006) "Weblogs as Personal Narratives: Displacing History and Temporality," M/C Journal, 9(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0612/08-ibrahim.php>.

IntroductionI stumble to my feet breathing heavily and, over the roar of a tank, a nearby soldier yells right into my face: “We’re surrounded! We have to hold this line!” I follow him, moving past burning debris and wounded men being helped walk back in the opposite direction. Shells explode around me, a whistle sounds, and then the Hun attack; shadowy figures that I fire upon as they approach through the battlefield fog and smoke. I shoot some. I take cover behind walls as others fire back. I reload the weapon. I am hit by incoming fire, and a red damage indicator appears onscreen, so I move to a better cover position. As I am hit again and again, the image becomes blurry and appears as if in slow-motion, the sound also becoming muffled. As an enemy wielding a flame-thrower appears and blasts me with thick fire, my avatar gasps and collapses. The screen fades to black.So far, so very normal in the World War One themed first-person shooter Battlefield 1 (Electronic Arts 2016). But then the game does something unanticipated. I expect to reappear—or respawn—in the same scenario to play better, to stay in the fight longer. Instead, the camera view switches to an external position, craning upwards cinematically from my character’s dying body. Text superimposed over the view indicates the minimalist epitaph: “Harvey Nottoway 1889-1918.” The camera view then races backwards, high over the battlefield and finally settles into position behind a mounted machine-gun further back from the frontline as the enemy advances closer. Immediately I commence shooting, mowing down German troops as they enter our trenches. Soon I am hit and knocked away from the machine-gun. Picking up a shotgun I start shooting the enemy at close-quarters, until I am once again overrun and my character collapses. Now the onscreen text states I was playing as “Dean Stevenson 1899-1918.”I have attempted this prologue to the Battlefield 1 campaign a number of times. No matter how skilfully I play, or how effectively I simply run away and hide from the combat, this pattern continues: the structure of the game forces the player’s avatar to be repeatedly killed in order for the narrative to progress. Over a series of player deaths, respawning as an entirely new character each time, the combat grows in ferocity and the music also becomes increasingly frenetic. The fighting turns to hand-to-hand combat, or shovel-to-head combat to be more precise, and eventually an artillery barrage wipes everybody out (Figure 1). At this point, the prologue is complete and the gamer may continue in a variety of single-player episodes in different theatres of WW1, each of which is structured according to the normal rules of combat games: when your avatar is killed, you respawn at the most recent checkpoint for a follow-up attempt.What are we to make of this alternative narrative structure deployed by the opening episode of Battlefield 1? In contrast to the normal video-game affordances of re-playability until completion, this narrative necessitation of death is in some ways motivated by the onscreen text that introduces the prologue: “What follows is frontline combat. You are not expected to survive.” Certainly it is true that the rest of the game (either single-player or in its online multiplayer deathmatch mode) follows the predictable pattern of dying, replaying, completing. And also we would not expect Battlefield 1 to be motivated primarily by a kind of historical fidelity given that an earlier instalment in the series, Battlefield 1942 (2002) was described by one reviewer as:a comic book version of WWII. The fact that any player can casually hop into a tank, drive around, hop out and pick off an enemy soldier with a sniper rifle, hop into a plane, parachute out, and then call in artillery fire (within the span of a few minutes) should tell you a lot about the game. (Osborne)However what is happening in this will-to-die structure of the game’s prologue represents an alternative and affectively unsettling game experience both in its ludological structure as well as its affective impact. Defamiliarization and Humanization Drawing upon a phenomenology of game-play, whereby the scholar examines the game “as played” (see Atkins and Kryzwinska; Keogh; Wilson) to consider how the text reveals itself to the player, I argue that the introductory single-player episode of Battlefield 1 functions to create a defamiliarizing effect on the player. Defamiliarization, the Russian Formalist term for the effect created by art when some unusual aspect of a text challenges accepted perceptions and/or representations (Schklovski; Thompson), is a remarkably common effect created by the techniques used in combat cinema and video-games. This is unsurprising. After all, warfare is one of the very examples Schklovski uses as something that audiences have developed habituated responses to and which artworks must defamiliarize. The effect may be created by many techniques in a text, and in certain cases a work may defamiliarize even its own form. For instance, recent work on the violence in Saving Private Ryan shows that during the lengthy Omaha Beach sequence, the most vivid instances of violence—including the famous shot of a soldier picking up his dismembered arm—occur well after the audience has potentially become inured to the onslaught of the earlier frequent, but less graphic, carnage (Bender Film Style and WW2). To make these moments stand out with equivalent horrific impact against the background of the Normandy beach bloodbath Spielberg also treats them with a stuttered frame effect and accompanying audio distortion, motivated (to use a related Formalist term) by the character’s apparent concussion and temporary disorientation. Effectively a sequence of point of view shots then, this moment in Private Ryan has become a model for many other war texts, and indeed the player’s death in the opening sequence of Battlefield 1 is portrayed using a very similar (though not identical) audio-visual treatment (Figure 2).Although the Formalists never played videogames, recent scholarship has approached the medium from a similar perspective. For example, Brendan Keogh has focused on the challenges to traditional videogame pleasure generated by the 2012 dystopian shooter Spec Ops: The Line. Keogh notes that the game developers intended to create displeasure and “[forcing] the player to consider what is obscured in the pixilation of war” by, for instance, having them kill fellow American troops in order for the game narrative to continue (Keogh 9). In addition, the game openly taunts the player’s expectations of entertainment based, uncritical run-and-gun gameplay with onscreen text during level loading periods such as “Do you feel like a hero yet?” (8).These kinds of challenges to the expectations of entertainment in combat shooters are found also in one sequence from the 2009 game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 in which the player—as an undercover operative—is forced to participate in a terrorist attack in which civilians are killed (Figure 3). While playing that level, titled “No Russian,” Timothy Welsh argues: “The player may shoot the unarmed civilians or not; the level still creeps slowly forward regardless” (Welsh 409). In Welsh’s analysis, this level emerges as an unusual attempt by a popular video game to “humanize” the non-playing characters that are ordinarily gunned down without any critical and self-reflective thought by the player in most shooter games. The player is forced into a scenario in which they must make a highly difficult ethical choice, but the game will show civilians being killed either way.In contrast to the usual criticisms of violent video games—eg., that they may be held responsible for school shootings, increased adolescent aggression and so on —the “No Russian” sequence drew dramatic complaints of being a “terrorist simulator” (Welsh 389). But for Welsh this ethical choice facing the player, to shoot or not to shoot civilians, raises the game to a textual experience offering self-inspection. As in the fictional theme park of Westworld (HBO 2016), it does not really matter to the digital victim if a player kills them, but it should—and does—matter to the player. There are no external consequences to killing a computer game character composed only of pixels, or killing/raping a robot in the Westworld theme park, however there are internal consequences: it makes you a killer, or a rapist (see Harris and Bloom).Thus, from the perspective of defamiliarization, the game can be regarded as creating the effect that Matthew Payne has labelled “critical displeasure.” Writing about the way this is created by Spec Ops, Payne argues that:the result is a game that wields its affective distance as a critique of the necessary illusion that all military shooters trade in, but one that so few acknowledge. In particular, the game’s brutal mise-en-scène, its intertextual references to other war media, and its real and imagined opportunities for player choice, create a discordant feeling that lays bare the ease with which most video war games indulge in their power fantasies. (Payne 270)There is then, a minor tradition of alternative military-themed video game works that attempt to invite or enable the player to conduct a kind of ethical self-examination around their engagement with interactive representations of war via particular incursions of realism. The critical displeasure invoked by texts such as Spec Ops and the “No Russian” level of Call of Duty is particularly interesting in light of another military game that was ultimately cancelled by the publisher after it received public criticism. Titled Six Days in Fallujah, the game was developed with the participation of Marines who had fought in that real life battle and aimed to depict the events as they unfolded in 2004 during the campaign in Iraq. As Justin Rashid argues:the controversy that arose around Six Days in Fallujah was, of course, a result of the view that commercial video games can only ever be pure entertainment; games do not have the authority or credibility to be part of a serious debate. (Rashid 17)On this basis, perhaps a criterial attribute of an acceptable alternative military game is that there is enough familiarity to evoke some critical distance, but not too much familiarity that the player must think about legitimately real-life consequences and impact. After all, Call of Duty was a successful release, even amid the controversy of “No Russian.” This makes sense as the level does not really challenge the overall enjoyment of the game. The novelty of the level, on the one hand, is that it is merely one part of the general narrative and cannot be regarded as representative of the whole game experience. On the other hand, because none of the events and scenarios have a clear indexical relationship to real-world terrorist attacks (at least prior to the Brussels attack in 2016) it is easy to play the ethical choice of shooting or not shooting civilians as a mental exercise rather than a reflection on something that really happened. This is the same lesson learned by the developers of the 2010 game Medal of Honor who ultimately changed the name of the enemy soldiers from “The Taliban” to “OPFOR” (standing in for a generic “Opposing Forces”) after facing pressure from the US and UK Military who claimed that the multiplayer capacities of the game enabled players to play as the Taliban (see Rashid). Conclusion: Affective Friction in Battlefield 1In important ways then, these game experiences are precursors to Battlefield 1’s single player prologue. However, the latter does not attempt a wholesale deconstruction of the genre—as does Spec Ops—or represent an attempt to humanise (or perhaps re-humanise) the non-playable victim characters as Welsh suggests “No Russian” attempts to do. Battlefield 1’s opening structure of death-and-respawn-as-different-character can be read as humanizing the player’s avatar. But most importantly, I take Battlefield’s initially unusual gameplay as an aesthetic attempt to set a particular tone to the game. Motivated by the general cultural attitude of deferential respect for the Great War, Battlefield 1 takes an almost austere stance toward the violence depicted, paradoxically even as this impact is muted in the later gameplay structured according to normal multiplayer deathmatch rules of run-and-gun killing. The futility implied by the player’s constant dying is clearly motivated by an attempt at realism as one of the cultural memories of World War One is the sheer likelihood of being killed, whether as a frontline soldier or a citizen of a country engaged in combat (see Kramer). For Battlefield 1, the repeated dying is really part of the text’s aesthetic engagement. For this reason I prefer the term affective friction rather than critical displeasure. The austere tone of the game is indicated early, just prior to the prologue gameplay with onscreen text that reads:Battlefield 1 is based on events that unfolded over 100 years agoMore than 60 million soldiers fought in “The War to End All Wars”It ended nothing.Yet it changed the world forever. At a simple level, the player’s experience of being killed in order for the next part of the narrative to progress evokes this sense of futility. There have been real responses indicating this, for instance one reviewer argues that the structure is “a powerful treatment” (Howley). But there is potential for increased engagement with the game itself as the structure breaks the replay-cycle of usual games. For instance, another reviewer responds to the overall single-player campaign by suggesting “It is not something you can sit down and play through and not experience on a higher level than just clicking a mouse and tapping a keyboard” (Simpson). This affective friction amplifies, and draws attention to, the other advances in violent stylistics presented in the game. For instance, although the standard onscreen visual distortions are used to show character damage and the direction from which the attack came, the game does use slow-motion to draw out the character’s death. In addition, the game features incidental battlefield details of shell-shock, such as soldiers simply holding the head in their hands, frozen as the battle rages around them (Figure 4). The presence of flame-thrower troops, and subsequently the depictions of characters running as they burn to death are also significant developments in violent aesthetics from earlier games. These elements of violence are constitutive of the affective friction. We may marvel at the technical achievement of such real-time rendering of dynamic fire and the artistic care given to animate deaths and shell-shock depictions. But simultaneously, these “violent delights”—to borrow from Westworld’s citation of Shakespeare—are innovations upon the depictions of earlier games, even contemporary, combat games. Indeed, one critic has almost ashamedly noted: “For a game about one of the most horrific wars in human history, it sure is pretty” (Kain).These violent depictions show a continuation in the tradition of increased detail which has been linked to a model of “reported realism” as a means of understanding audience’s claims of realism in combat films and modern videogames as a result primarily of their hypersaturated audio-visual texture (Bender "Blood Splats"). Here, saturation refers not to the specific technical quality of colour saturation but to the densely layered audio-visual structure often found in contemporary films and videogames. For example, thick mixing of soundtracks, details of gore, and nuanced movements (particularly of dying characters) all contribute to a hypersaturated aesthetic which tends to prompt audiences to make claims of realism for a combat text regardless of whether or not these viewers/players have any real world referent for comparison. Of course, there are likely to be players who will simply blast through any shooter game, giving no regard to the critical displeasure offered by Spec Ops narrative choices or the ethical dilemma of “No Russian.” There are also likely to be players who bypass the single-player campaign altogether and only bother with the multiplayer deathmatch experience, which functions in the same way as it does in other shooter games, including the previous Battlefield games. But perhaps the value of this game’s attempt at alternative storytelling, with its emphasis on tone and affect, is that even the “kill-em-all” player may experience a momentary impact from the violence depicted. This is particularly important given that, to borrow from Stephanie Fisher’s argument in regard to WW2 games, many young people encounter the history of warfare through such popular videogames (Fisher). In the centenary period of World War One, especially in Australia amid the present Anzac commemorative moment, the opportunity for young audiences to engage with the significance of the events. As a side-note, the later part of the single-player campaign even has a Gallipoli sequence, though the narrative of this component is designed as an action-hero adventure. Indeed, this is one example of how the alternative dying-to-continue structure of the prologue creates an affective friction against the normal gameplay and narratives that feature in the rest of the text. The ambivalent ways in which this unsettling opening scenario impacts on the remainder of the game-play, including for instance its depiction of PTSD, is illustrated by some industry reviewers. As one reviewer argues, the game does generate the feeling that “war isn’t fun — except when it is” (Plante). From this view, the cognitive challenge created by the will to die in the prologue creates an affective friction with the normalised entertainment inherent in the game’s multiplayer run-and-gun components that dominate the rest of Battlefield 1’s experience. Therefore, although Battlefield 1 ultimately proves to be an entertainment-oriented combat shooter, it is significant that the developers of this major commercial production decided to include an experimental structure to the prologue as a way of generating tone and affect in a fresh way. ReferencesAtkins, Barry, and Tanya Kryzwinska. "Introduction: Videogame, Player, Text." Videogame, Player, Text. Eds. Atkins, Barry and Tanya Kryzwinska. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007.Bender, Stuart Marshall. "Blood Splats and Bodily Collapse: Reported Realism and the Perception of Violence in Combat Films and Videogames." Projections 8.2 (2014): 1-25.Bender, Stuart Marshall. Film Style and the World War II Combat Film. 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