Journal articles: 'Essais (technologie) – France' – Grafiati (2024)

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This issue is the second part of a two-part October project dealing with the photographic practices of women in Weimar culture and in exile from it. Focusing on seven crucial figures (Ellen Auerbach, Ilse Bing, Anne Fischer, Gisèle Freund, Lotte Jacobi, Germaine Krull, and Grete Stern), the essays collected here address a wide range of productive changes and destructive conflicts challenging traditional models of the photographers' social, artistic, and professional identities. Some of these changes resulted from the impact of emerging technologies (both in the infrastructural organization of everyday life and in photography's own newly evolving technologies of cameras and color) and some from the dismantling of the liberal democratic nation state either by the rise of state socialism in the Soviet Union or of fascism in Germany. When these Weimar photographers had to find refuge in France, in the United States, in South Africa, or in Argentina, they found themselves not only confronted with the demands of a rapidly advancing and controlling culture industry but also with the caesura of cultural discontinuity and the disillusioning effects of living in exile.

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En 2010, 30 millions d’européens ont été affectés par la dépression et ce nombre continue à augmenter . La moitié des européens souffrant de dépression n’ont pas accès à des soins de santé mentale et ne reçoivent pas toujours des traitements ayant prouvé leur efficacité comme la thérapie cognitivo-comportemenale . Le temps d’attente pour une consultation parfois long et les frais de prise en charge élevés constituent des freins majeurs pour ce type de thérapie. La prise en charge par Internet peut potentiellement pallier les inconvénients des soins classiques et permettre un traitement de la dépression de très bonne qualité à un prix abordable . European-COMPARative Effectiveness research on online Depression (E-COMPARED) est un projet de recherche européen de trois ans financé par la Commission Européenne. Il vise à évaluer deux modes de prise en charge de la dépression chez l’adulte : la prise en charge classique (face-à-face) et combinée (face-à-face et Internet). Il s’agit d’un projet multidisciplinaire (psychiatrie, nouvelles technologies de l’information et de communication, soins) et ses membres sont les précurseurs de la prise en charge des troubles mentaux communs par Internet. Au sein de E-COMPARED, l’essai clinique î Stratégie thérapeutique à support numérique dans l’épisode dépressif majeur : étude clinique comparative aux soins courants et étude de coût–efficacité constitue le Work Package 2 et sera réalisé, pour la France, au sein du réseau des centres experts sur la dépression résistante (fondation FondaMental). Ce réseau fédère 11 centres qui assureront le recrutement et la réalisation de l’essai, Cet essai clinique débutera mi-2015 et sera mené parallèlement dans 8 pays. L’objectif principal de cette étude étant de montrer la non-infériorité de thérapie combinée par rapport aux soins usuels de l’épisode dépressif majeur, faisant l’hypothèse que la thérapie combinée permettra d’apporter autant d’amélioration que les soins usuels mais à moindre coût.

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Published in tandem in 2013, Franco Moretti’s two most recent books continue his on-going project to develop radical new methods of literary history and to propose new formulations and frameworks for understanding the relationship between form and history and form and ideology. Bringing together the series of essays through which he developed his concept of distant reading, his collection of the same name argues for a ‘falsifiable criticism’ grounded in the data now available through digital technologies and for the concept of a ‘world literature’ that it is the task of comparatists to theorise. His book on the bourgeois – characterised by Moretti as a project of an entirely different nature – finds in the minutiae of language the construction of a bourgeois culture in which the figure of the bourgeois himself ultimately disappears. Contra Moretti, the review contends that these books are deeply interrelated and that the limits of Moretti’s method are to be found specifically in the issues of scale raised by reading these two works in dialectical relationship to each other. In particular, while Moretti importantly forces us to confront in world literature what Fredric Jameson refers to as the ‘scandal of multiplicity’, his method is unable, in the end, to account for a reading of the world in literature in which both the empirical fact of a dead history and the allegorical possibility of another history already in the making can be found.

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Création de 700 épis dans le dernier siècle, extractions massives de sable réalisées pour les besoins de l'industrie … ces actions anthropiques ont eu des conséquences graves sur le fonctionnement de la Loire : enfoncement du lit, et mauvaise alimentation des annexes fluviales notamment. Dans le cadre du plan Loire IV (2014–2020) financé notamment par l'Union européenne, et dont la maîtrise d'ouvrage est en partie portée par Voies Navigables de France (VNF), la réalisation d'un ouvrage de correction sédimentaire a été proposée au voisinage de Nantes, avec l'objectif d'engendrer un remous solide régressif. Pour les études conception morpho-sédimentaires, la Compagnie Nationale du Rhône (CNR) a proposé une modélisation hybride ou composite, qui s'appuie notamment sur un modèle numérique 2D hydro-sédimentaire ainsi qu'un modèle physique de grande dimension : 1/100 pour l'échelle de longueur avec un facteur 2 de distorsion verticale, 1/33 pour l'échelle de densité des matériaux. Ce modèle à fond mobile a été conçu pour satisfaire à deux lois de similitudes dont la combinaison produit des distorsions géométriques et de densité des matériaux. La complexité d'un tel modèle impose un grand nombre de vérifications par l'expérience qu'il faut confronter aux approches théoriques de dimensionnement : du comportement granulaire aux macro-phénomènes (dunes). Un jeu de 341 dunes formées en laboratoire pendant plus de 50 essais a été analysé selon deux axes : le premier concerne la caractérisation géométrique (hauteur, longueur) grâce à la disponibilité de Modèles Numériques de Terrain capturés par un procédé de photogrammétrie submergée, et le second est focalisé sur la vitesse de migration des dunes par Large Scale Particle Image Velocimetry (LSPIV). L'ensemble des analyses réalisées a montré la très bonne adéquation entre les résultats de laboratoire et les phénomènes ligériens de transport de sable.

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MODELAGEM MATEMÁTICA E ESTATÍSTICA A PLICADA À HIDROGEOGRAFIA E AGROMETEOROLOGIA RODRIGO LILLA MANZIONE1 1 Campus Experimental de Ourinhos – Universidade Estadual Paulista “Julio de Mesquita Filho”, Ourinhos, SP. Avenida Renato Costa Lima, 451 - Ville de France, Ourinhos - SP, 19903-302. E-mail: rlmanzione@gmail.com 1 RESUMO Essa nota científica apresenta a transcrição na íntegra da prova escrita elaborada pelo autor como parte dos exames realizados durante o concurso de livre docência nas disciplinas de Hidrogeografia e Agrometeorologia no Campus de Ourinhos da UNESP em 07 de dezembro de 2016, cujo ponto sorteado foi “Modelagem matemática e estatística aplicada a hidrogeografia e agrometeorologia”. A nota traz conceitos e termos elementares da modelagem aplicada a essas duas áreas do conhecimento, reflexões sobre os elementos da modelagem e suas aplicações, e perspectivas sobre os usos presentes e futuros de técnicas de modelagem. Palavras-chave: hidrologia, meteorologia, agricultura, ensino, pesquisa MANZIONE, R. L.MATHEMATICAL AND STATISTICAL MODELING APPLIED TO HYDROGEOGRAPHY AND AGROMETEOROLOGY 2 ABSTRACT This scientific note brings an integral transcription of the written test performed by the author as part of the exams for habilitation in the disciplines of Hydrogeography and Agrometeorology at the Ourinhos Campus of UNESP (São Paulo State University) on December 7, 2016, whose drawn subject was “Mathematical and statistical modeling applied to hydrogeography and agrometeorology”. The note presents elementary modeling concepts and terms applied to these two fields of knowledge, reflections on modelling elements and its applications, and perspectives on present and future uses of modeling techniques. Keywords: hydrology, meteorology, agriculture, teaching, research

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La production par une jument d’un poulain par an (et pourquoi pas de plusieurs) avec de la sem*nce d’étalon conservée fraîche ou congelée est l’objectif appliqué actuel de toutes les équipes de recherche. Un point très détaillé en français dans les domaines couverts par notre équipe avait été fait en 1992 dans le Recueil de Médecine vétérinaire (volume 168, numéro 11-12). Depuis, de nouvelles connaissances ou de nouvelles technologies ont vu le jour et il était important de les mettre à disposition d’un large public. Le phénomène d’inactivité ovarienne en début de saison de monte limite le nombre de cycles disponibles pour une fécondation. Des études ont permis d’affiner les conditions des traitements lumineux. Des traitements longs à la mélatonine pourraient permettre de décaler le rythme annuel de reproduction de la jument. Le développement des follicules ovariens est sous le contrôle des hormones hypophysaires FSH et LH, et de facteurs intra-ovariens dont l’inhibine. La maîtrise du nombre d’ovulations permettrait (lors de transfert embryonnaire) de pouvoir produire plusieurs embryons par cycle. Des essais de superovulation sont en cours qui utilisent la FSH exogène ou l’effet anti-inhibine. La maîtrise du moment de l’ovulation peut se faire classiquement par injection d’hCG mais aussi par l’administration de GnRH sous forme d’implant. La croissance et la maturation du follicule dominant, ainsi que l’atrésie des follicules dominés, se caractérisent par l’évolution intrafolliculaire de nombreux paramètres biochimiques dont certains ont été étudiés dans l’espèce équine. Sous échographie transvagin*le, le rythme de collecte d’ovocytes le plus rentable est de deux ponctions au cours du même cycle (l’une en fin de croissance folliculaire, l’autre en phase lutéale) : on obtient alors 9 ovocytes en moyenne. La maturation de l’ovocyte provient des maturations respectives du cumulus, du cytoplasme et du noyau. La fécondation in vitro (FIV) n’ayant donné que des résultats moyens, d’autres techniques de reproduction assistée sont utilisées actuellement avec plus de succès au laboratoire : 1) la mise en place de l’ovocyte d’une donneuse soit dans l’oviducte (GIFT), soit dans le follicule (TOIF) d’une receveuse, avec fécondation de la receveuse et 2) l’introduction d’un spermatozoïde directement dans le cytoplasme de l’ovocyte (ICSI). Le transfert d’embryon est utilisé sur le terrain en France principalement pour des juments de haute valeur génétique. Le transport d’embryons frais, mais surtout l’utilisation de la congélation des embryons, simplifieront la gestion entre donneuse et receveuse. La baisse de fertilité observée sur les étalons de plus de 15 ans est fréquemment associée à un profil hormonal caractéristique (niveau basal de FSH et de LH élevé, d’oestrogène diminué, niveau de testostérone non modifié après induction à l’hCG). Ceci pourrait être la conséquence d’une dégénérescence testiculaire primaire. L’évolution des travaux sur la conservation de la sem*nce a abouti à la mise au point de deux grands types de techniques d’insémination : en sem*nce fraîche et en sem*nce congelée. Les résultats obtenus dans les Haras Nationaux montrent que la fertilité par cycle est proche pour les deux types de technique. L’effort doit porter en partie sur des améliorations techniques qui permettront d’avoir accès à toutes les techniques de conservation et d’insémination artificielle pour la grande majorité des étalons. Les critères d’évaluation de la qualité de la sem*nce utilisés en routine (examen de la mobilité essentiellement) ne donnent pas entièrement satisfaction puisqu’ils ne permettent pas de "détecter" certains étalons dont la fertilité se révèle réduite. La plupart des fonctions cellulaires des spermatozoïdes peuvent être explorées : intégrité des membranes, de l’acrosome, stabilité de la chromatine, activité des mitochondries... Cependant les relations de ces fonctions entre elles et, surtout, les relations entre ces fonctions et la fertilité ne sont pas encore très claires.

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RESUMO Discute-se a relação entre a memória do corpo e o ciberespaço, a partir da análise de artigos da revista MEI, volume 32, publicada na França em 2011. Quatorze pesquisadores oriundos de campos diversos do conhecimento integram o dossiê. A proposta é verificar quais objetos e sob quais aportes teórico-práticos as comunidades científicas vem investigando essas relações. Conclui-se que os relatos sugerem três temporalidades na convivência da memória com as tecnologias da informação e comunicação: a era da descoberta do ciberespaço; a era do domínio das técnicas digitais; e, a era da diminuição do consumo de artefatos.Palavras-chave: Memória do Corpo; Ciberespaço; Rastros Digitais; Reciclagem Digital. ABSTRACT The article discusses the relationship between corporal memory and cyberspace, building on the analysis of articles published in the journal MEI, volume 32, in France, 2011. Fourteen researchers from various fields of knowledge collaborated on the dossier. The aim is to verify what objects and with what theoretical and practical contributions the scientific community has been investigating these relationships. The conclusion is that the reports suggest three temporalities in the relation between memory and the information and communication technologies: the age of cyberspace discovery, the age of masterng digital techniques; and the age of decline in consumption of artifacts.Keywords: Corporal Memory; Cyberspace; Digital Traces; Digital Recycling.

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En France en 2011, trois entreprises du secteur de la grande distribution et du secteur du prêt-à-porter (Monoprix, Cora et Kookaï) ont fait l'objet de mobilisations « éclair » menées sur les réseaux sociaux à la suite desquelles deux d'entre elles ont renoncé aux décisions managériales qu'elles avaient prises (licenciements). Au-delà des différences de formes (déjà étudiées et liées aux technologies utilisées), existe-t-il une véritable différence de nature entre les formes de mobilisation sur les réseaux sociaux numériques et les formes traditionnelles de mobilisation collective dans le monde du travail ? L'objectif est de montrer l'apparition d'une nouvelle forme de mobilisation collective dans le monde du travail, spécifique dans sa nature et dans ses modalités. Compte tenu du caractère extrêmement récent des événements décrits, nous avons choisi une démarche descriptive et exploratoire, ainsi qu'une analyse de presse et une revue de la littérature existante. Plusieurs spécificités de nature se dégagent à l'analyse : la nature de la présence, la nature du lien social, et enfin la nature de l'engagement. Notre conclusion principale est l'apparition dans le monde du travail d'une nouvelle forme de mobilisation collective spécifique dans sa nature. Elle constitue une nouvelle opportunité de communication qui, sans se substituer aux typologies de mobilisation traditionnelles dans le monde du travail, vient se rajouter à elles. Elle apparaît comme fortement liée à l'avènement de la génération née entre 1985 et 1995 que le professeur et chercheur américain Mark Prensky a baptisé, dans un essai désormais célèbre,« Digital Native » (Prensky, 2001), les véritables « autochtones » du web.

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Editoriallist, Liszt, mist, quist (Dialect wood pigeon), wrist, grist, tryst, cyst, cist (box holding ritual objects), schist, whist, twist, xyst (long portico) (Fergusson 270)“Everyone uses lists,” Francis Spufford (2) tells us. Lists are all pervasive; they are part-and-parcel of how we experience and make sense of the world. According to Umberto Eco, the whole history of creative production can be seen as one that is characterised by an “infinity of lists” comprising, to name a few, visual lists (sixteenth century religious paintings, Dutch still life paintings), pragmatic or utilitarian lists (shopping lists, library catalogues, assets in a will), poetic or literary lists (such as in Joyce or Sebald, for instance), lists of places, lists of things (like the great list of ships in the Iliad), and so on, ad infinitum... In accordance with such variation in form comes great variation in purpose, with lists used to “enumerate, account, remind, memorialize, order,” and so on (Belknap 6). List making, Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star point out, “has frequently been seen as one of the foundational activities of advanced human society” (137): to cite three examples, list making is argued to be crucial to our understanding of orality and the development of literacy (Goody 74-111), and to the connection between these and later forms and techniques of information management (Hobart and Schiffman), as well as to our appreciation of the functioning and value of narrativity (White). In this way, Robert Belknap perhaps has a point in proposing that, “The list form is the predominant mode of organizing data relevant to human functioning in the world” (8).Simply defined, a list is “a formally organized block of information that is composed of a set of members” (Belknap 15). What is significant about a list is that it is “simultaneously the sum of its parts and the individual parts themselves” (15). That is to say, like links in a chain, “the list joins and separates at the same time” (15). In addition to these features, Jack Goody also suggests that, across their various manifestations, lists have a number of basic characteristics or conventions concerning how they are constructed and read, which, appropriately, he lists as follows:The list relies on discontinuity rather than continuity; it depends on physical placement, on location; it can be read in different directions, both sideways and downwards, up and down, as well as left and right; it has a clear-cut beginning and a precise end, that is, a boundary, an edge, like a piece of cloth. Most importantly it encourages the ordering of the items, by number, by initial sound, by category, etc. And the existence of boundaries, external and internal, brings greater visibility to categories, at the same time as making them more abstract. (Goody 81)Just as boundaries are “an important attribute” (Goody 80) of the list and how each is compiled, so too are semantic boundary disputes for how we conceive of the list vis-à-vis other forms of enumeration. If one were to compose a list of lists, Belknap suggests, it “would include the catalogue, the inventory, the itinerary, and the lexicon” (2). This is, however, a problematic typology insofar as each item can be seen to hold subtle differences in form and purpose from the list, as Belknap is quick to point out: “The catalogue is more comprehensive, conveys more information, and is more amenable to digression than the list. In the inventory, words representing names or things are collected by a conceptual principle.” (2-3) In his discussion of lists in literature, Spufford extends the first of these distinctions by drawing a qualitative distinction between the list (“In a list, almost everything that makes writing interesting to read seems inevitably to be excluded,” 1) and the catalogue (“Rather richer, and a step closer to the complex intentions and complex effects of literature proper, are the catalogues of some sorts of collections,” 3). Elsewhere, the close associations, and difficulties in differentiating, between the list and the classification system has also been noted (Bowker and Star, 137-61). While we recognise these delicate, at times almost imperceptible but nonetheless significant differences in meaning, in this special issue we take an expansive and inclusive approach to the list form and the implications of lists and listing. One (deceptively simple) distinction that is productive in framing this themed issue and the essays included in it is that which Belknap (3-5) draws between literary lists, on the one hand, and pragmatic or utilitarian lists, on the other hand. According to Belknap, literary lists are “complex in precisely the way a pragmatic list must not be” (5). Belknap, like Spufford before him, takes up and explores these “complexities” of literary lists in great detail. Two contributions to this special issue engage with the intricacies of the literary list. In the first of these, Darren Tofts, in his evocatively titled piece “Why Writers Hate the Second Law of Thermodynamics; Lists, Entropy, and the Sense of Unending,” examines the list form as it is mobilised by a range of writers, from Beckett and Borges, to Joyce and Robbe-Grillet. Tofts explores the exhaustion and tilt towards entropy that “issues from the tireless pursuit of categorisation, classification, and the mania for ordered information” by each of these diverse writers, and the way that words themselves tend to resist entropy by taking on “a weird half-life of their own” and sustaining “an unlikely […] stoical sense of unending.” Quite a different treatment of literary lists is offered by Tom Lee in his essay “The Lists of W. G. Sebald.” Focusing on the novel The Rings of Saturn, Lee explores the way that Sebald mobilises literary lists as a crucial device in his exploration and interrogation of the question, in Lee’s words, of what “might lay ahead for books if the question of what writing can be is asked continually as part of a writer’s enterprise.” But to focus solely on literary lists is to obscure or ignore other vital dimensions of lists and listing, such as the way that pragmatic listing forms (not just their literary counterparts) can be put to powerful rhetorical use (Belknap 3). Bowker and Star capture this well in the following passage:The material culture of bureaucracy and empire is not found in pomp and circ*mstance, nor even in the first instance of the point of a gun, but rather at the point of a list. (Bowker and Star 137)This is something that has been evident to a number of writers and thinkers, not least Foucault, who, in his The Order of Things, for example, sought to delineate the rise of the great natural history taxonomies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in terms of their productive power as authoritative forms of classification. Foucault’s exploration of these connections can be said to have fed his subsequent theorisations of “governmentality”—which Judith Butler summarises as “a mode of power concerned with the maintenance and control of bodies and persons, the production and regulation of persons and populations” (52)—and of “biopolitics”—which Foucault defines as a “set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of power” (Foucault, Security 1). It is within this tradition—that takes as one of its sources the work of Foucault and which runs in diverse tributaries of critical enquiry outwards in its exploration of the interconnections between lists (and other, related processes and techniques of classification) and power (see, for example, Poster)—that we can usefully situate two further essays in this issue, that by Katie Ellis and that by Suneel Jethani. Both of these essays take up lists in relation to quite distinct aspects of disabilities studies. In “Complicating a Rudimentary List of Characteristics: Communicating Disability with Down Syndrome Dolls,” Ellis brings “an interrogation of disability into dialogue with a critical analysis of the discursive function of lists” by interrogating “the use of lists in the way meanings about disability are communicated through the medical diagnostic list,” the production of Down Syndrome dolls for children, and unfavourable public reactions to these dolls. Ellis’s aim in exploring these concerns is to “complicate perceptions of disability beyond a rudimentary list of characteristics through a consideration of the negative public response to these dolls”—responses, she argues, that serve as a potent example of “the cultural subjugation of disability.” Meanwhile, in “Lists, Spatial Practice, and Assistive Technologies for the Blind,” Jethani explores the promise and perils of locative mobile media technologies designed to assist vision-impaired supermarket shoppers. Examining two prototypic applications, Shop Talk and Blind Shopping, Jethani argues that “the emancipatory potential” of these applications, “their efficacy in practical situations,” and their future commercial viability, is dependent upon commercial and institutional infrastructures and control, regulatory factors, and the extent to which they can successfully address “issues of interoperability and expanded access of spatial inventory databases and data.”The bureaucratic—or more specifically, the political economic—dimensions of pragmatic or utilitarian lists and their composition also forms the point of departure for two further essays in this issue. The first of these is Gerard Goggin’s “List Media: The Telephone Directory and the Arranging of Names.” In this feature article (one of two in this issue), Goggin examines the long history and fraught future of telephone directories and proprietary interests in them. The argument he develops is that, while telephone directories are a form of book (at least traditionally), they are in fact better thought of as a unique form of media—what he terms “list media.” Proprietary interests in lists are also the specific concern of Jean Burgess and Axel Bruns who, in their article “Twitter Archives and the Challenges of ‘Big Social Data’ for Media and Communication Research,” explore the “technical, political, and epistemological” issues that attend the corporate control of network, profit-driven database—“list”—infrastructure, such as Twitter. Notwithstanding the above considerations of power, inclusion and exclusion, ownership and control, there is one further, vital aspect of non-literary lists that warrants explicit mention here. This is the fact that pragmatic and utilitarian lists and our engagements with them are, for the most part, deeply embedded in everyday life and form part of all the routines, habits, and familiar patterns that characterise our “ordinary lives” (Highmore)—after all, to restate Spufford’s opening remark, this is the context in which “everyone uses lists” (2). The final two of the eight articles making up this themed issue examine everyday lists and the potential of lists as productive mechanisms for documenting and making sense of the ineffability of the everyday. The first of these, which also forms the first of the two feature articles, is Ben Highmore’s “Listlessness in the Archive.” This playful and poetic piece explores the challenges that a researcher faces when they attempt to tackle an archive that is the work of an army of “amateur anthropologist” volunteers who documented British lives in a project of Mass Observation. The centerpiece of the article is a series of lists compiled by the Mass-Observers of the objects on their own mantelpieces. Picking up on the theme of entropy (also explored by Tofts in this issue), Highmore describes the sense of listlessness that threatens to overwhelm his encounter with these lists. Lastly, in our article, “The Everyday Work of Lists,” we take a rather different approach to Highmore’s by exploring the work that lists do in “mediating the materiality and complexity of consumer-based everyday life.” Our guide is the French writer, Georges Perec, who, across a variety of projects and texts, deployed the list as a productive mechanism (an “invent-ory,” as we refer to it) and lever for prying open for inspection the seemingly inscrutable inner workings of everyday spaces, things, and memories. To conclude this editorial introduction, it seems only fitting that we end with a brief list of acknowledgments. We wish to thank:those at M/C Journal, Axel Bruns and Peta Mitchell, for supporting and assisting with this special issue;the authors who entrusted us with their articles, and tolerated with good humour and patience our various requests; and,the many referees for their vital contributions in reading and reviewing the articles gathered here;Simon Hayter and the Ancient Egypt website, for the banner image, a twelfth century BC papyrus list of Egyptian rulers; those authors whose insights, scholarly pursuit and use of lists inspired this issue: Robert Belknap, Jack Goody, Umberto Eco, Georges Perec…ReferencesBelknap, Robert E. The List: The Uses and Pleasures of Cataloguing. New Haven: Yale UP, 2004.Bowker, Geoffrey C., and Susan Leigh Star. Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.Butler, Judith. Precarious Life. London: Verso, 2004.Eco, Umberto. The Infinity of Lists. Trans. Alastair McEwen. London: MacLehose Press, 2009.Fergusson, Rosalind. The Penguin Rhyming Dictionary. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1985.Foucault, Michel. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-1978. Trans. Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.---. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Routledge, 2002.Goody, Jack. “What’s in a List?” The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1977. 74-111.Highmore, Ben. Ordinary Lives: Studies in the Everyday. London: Routledge, 2011.Hobart, Michael E., and Zachary S. Schiffman. Information Ages: Literacy, Numeracy, and the Computer Revolution. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1998. Poster, Mark. “Foucault and Databases.” The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context. Oxford: Polity, 1990. 69-98.Spufford, Francis. “Introduction.” The Chatto Book of Cabbages and Kings: Lists in Literature. Ed. Francis Spufford. London: Chatto & Windus, 1989. 1-23.White, Hayden, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality.” On Narrative. Ed. W. J. T. Mitchell. Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1981. 1-23.

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IntroductionThe American artist Ryan Trecartin makes digital videos that centre on the self-presentations common to video-sharing sites such as YouTube. Named by New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl as “the most consequential artist to have emerged since the 1980s” (84), Trecartin’s works are like high-octane domestic dramas told in the first-person, blending carnivalesque and horror sensibilities through multi-layered imagery, fast-paced editing, sprawling mise-en-scène installations and heavy-handed digital effects. Featuring narcissistic young-adult characters (many of whom are played by the artist and his friends), Trecartin’s scripted videos portray the self as fundamentally performed and kaleidoscopically mediated. His approach is therefore exemplary of some of the key concepts of automediality, which, although originating in literary studies, address concerns relevant to contemporary art, such as the blurring of life-story, self-performance, identity, persona and technological mediation. I argue that Trecartin’s work is a form of automedial art that combines camp personas with what Sianne Ngai calls the “zany” aesthetics of neoliberalism—the 24/7 production of affects, subjectivity and sociability which complicate distinctions between public and private life.Performing the Script: The Artist as Automedial ProsumerBoth “automedia” and “automediality” hold that the self (the “auto”) and its forms of expression (its “media”) are intimately linked, imbricated within processes of cultural and technological mediation. However, whereas “automedia” refers to general modes of self-presentation, “automediality” was developed by Jörg Dünne and Christian Moser to explicitly relate to the autobiographical. Noting a tendency in literary studies to under-examine how life stories are shaped by their mediums, Dünne and Moser argued that the digital era has made it more apparent how literary forms are involved in complex processes of mediation. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, in response, called for an expansion of autobiography into “life writing,” claiming that automediality is useful as a theoretical frame for contemplating the growth of self-presentation platforms online, shifting from the life-narrative genre of autobiography towards more discursive and irresolute forms of first-person expression (4). One’s life story, in this context, can be communicated obliquely and performatively, with the choice of media inextricably contributing to the subjectivity that is being produced, not just as a tool for rendering a pre-existent self. Lauren Berlant conceives of life writing as a laboratory for “theorizing ‘the event’” of life rather than its narration or transcription (Prosser 181). Smith and Watson agree, describing automediality as the study of “life acts” that operate as “prosthetic extension[s] of the self in networks” (78). Following this, both “automedia” and “automediality” can be understood as expanding upon the “underlying intermedial premises” (Winthrop-Young 188) of media theory, addressing how technologies and mediums do not just constitute sensory extensions of the body (Mcluhan) but also sensory extensions of identity—armed with the potential to challenge traditional ideas of how a “life” is conveyed. For Julie Rak, “automedia” describes both the theoretical framing of self-presentation acts and the very processes of mediation the self-presenter puts themselves through (161). She prefers “automedia” over “automediality” due to the latter’s tendency to be directed towards the textual products of self-presentation, rather than their processes (161). Given Trecartin’s emphasis on narrative, poetic text, performativity, technology and commodification, both “automedia” and “automediality” will be relevant to my account here, highlighting not just the crossovers between the two terms but also the dual roles his work performs. Firstly, Trecartin’s videos express his own identity through the use of camp personas and exaggerated digital tropes. Secondly, they reflexively frame the phenomenon of online self-presentation, aestheticizing the “slice of life” and “personal history” posturings found on YouTube in order to better understand them. The line between self-presenter and critic is further muddied by the fact that Trecartin makes many of his videos free to download online. As video artist and YouTuber, he is interested in the same questions that Smith and Watson claim are central to automedial theory. When watching Youtube performers, they remind themselves to ask: “How is the aura of authenticity attached to an online performance constructed by a crew, which could include a camera person, sound person, director, and script-writer? Do you find this self-presentation to be sincere or to be calculated authenticity, a pose or ‘manufactured’ pseudo-individuality?” (124). Rather than setting out to identify “right” from “wrong” subjectivities, the role of both the automedia and automediality critic is to illuminate how and why subjectivity is constructed across distinct visual and verbal forms, working against the notion that subjectivity can be “an entity or essence” (Smith and Watson 125).Figure 1: Ryan Trecartin, Item Falls (2013), digital video stillGiven its literary origins, automediality is particularly relevant to Trecartin’s work because writing is so central to his methods, grounding his hyperactive self-presentations in the literary as well as the performative. According to Brian Droitcour, all of Trecartin’s formal devices, from the camerawork to the constructed sets his videos are staged in, are prefigured by the way he uses words. What appears unstructured and improvised is actually closely scripted, with Trecartin building on the legacies of conceptual poetry and flarf poetry (an early 2000s literary genre in which poetry is composed of collages of serendipitously found words and phrases online) to bring a loose sense of narrativization to his portrayals of characters and context. Consider the following excerpt from the screenplay for K-Corea INC. K (Section A) (2009)— a work which centres on a CEO named Global Korea (a pun on “career”) who presides over symbolic national characters whose surnames are also “Korea”:North America Korea: I specialize in Identity Tourism, ?Agency...I just stick HERE, and I Hop Around–HEY GLOBAL KOREA!?Identifiers: That’s Global, That’s Global, That’s GlobalFrench adaptation Korea: WHAT!?Global Korea: Guys I just Wanted to show You Your New Office!Health Care, I don’t Care, It’s All WE Care, That’s WhyWE don’t Care.THIS IS GLOBAL!Identified: AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHGlobal Korea: Global, Global !!Identified: AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHFigure 2: Ryan Trecartin, K-Corea INC. K (Section A) (2009), digital video stillTrecartin’s performers are guided by their lines, even down to the apparently random use of commas, question marks and repeated capital letters. As a consequence, what can be alienating on the page is made lively when performed, his words instilled with the over-the-top personalities of each performer. For Droitcour, Trecartin’s genius lies in his ability to use words to subliminally structure his performances. Each character makes the artist’s poetic texts—deranged and derivative-sounding Internet-speak—their own “at the moment of the utterance” (Droitcour). Wayne Koestenbaum similarly argues that voice, which Trecartin often digitally manipulates, is the “anxiety point” in his works, fixing his “retardataire” energies on the very place “where orality and literacy stage their war of the worlds” (276).This conflict that Koestenbaum describes, between orality and literacy, is constitutive of Trecartin’s automedial positioning of the self, which presents as a confluence of life narrative, screenplay, social-media posing, flarf poetry and artwork. His videos constantly criss-cross between pre-production, production and postproduction, creating content at every point along the way. This circuitousness is reflected by the many performers who are portrayed filming each other as they act, suggesting that their projected identities are entangled with the technologies that facilitate them.Trecartin’s A Family Finds Entertainment (2004)—a frenetic straight-to-camera chronicle of the coming-out of a gay teenager named Skippy (played by the artist)—was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, after which time his work became known around the world as an example of “postproduction” art. This refers to French curator and theorist Nicholas Bourriaud’s 2001 account of the blurring of production and consumption, following on from his 1997 theory of relational aesthetics, which became paradigmatic of critical art practice at the dawn of Web 2.0. Drawing from Marcel Duchamp and the Situationists, in Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, Bourriaud addressed new forms of citation, recycling and détournement, which he saw as influenced by digital computing, the service economies and other forms of immaterial social relations that, throughout the 1990s, transformed art from a subcultural activity to a key signifier and instrument of global capitalism.Because “word processing” was “indexed to the formal protocol of the service industry, and the image-system of the home computer […] informed and colonized from the start by the world of work” (78), Bourriaud claimed that artists at the start of the twenty-first century were responding to the semiotic networks that blur daily and professional life. Postproduction art looked like it was “issued from a script that the artist projects onto culture, considered the framework of a narrative that in turn projects new possible scripts, endlessly” (19). However, whereas the artists in Bourriaud’s publication, such as Plamen Dejanov and Philippe Parreno, made art in order to create “more suitable [social] arrangements” (76), Trecartin is distinctive not only because of his bombastic style but also his apparent resistance to socio-political amelioration.Bourriaud’s call for the elegant intertextual “scriptor” as prosumer (88)—who creatively produces and consumes, arranges and responds—was essentially answered by Trecartin with a parade of hyper-affective and needy Internet characters whose aims are not to negotiate new social terrain so much as to perform themselves crazy, competing with masses of online information, opinions and jostling identities. Against Bourriaud’s strategic prosumerism, Trecartin, in his own words, chases “a kind of natural prosumerism synonymous with existence” (471). Although his work can be read as a response to neoliberal values, unlike Bourriaud, he refuses to treat postproduction methods as tools to conciliate this situation. Instead, his scripted videos present postproduction as the lingua franca of daily life. In aiming for a “natural prosumerism,” his work rhetorically asks, in paraphrase of Berlant: “What does it mean to have a life, is it always to add up to something?” (Prosser 181). Figure 3: Ryan Trecartin, A Family Finds Entertainment (2004), digital video stillPluralist CampTrecartin’s scripts direct his performers but they are also transformed by them, his words acquiring their individualistic tics, traits and nuances. As such, his self-presentations are a long way from Frederic Jameson’s account of pastiche as a neutral practice of imitation—“a blank parody” (125) that manifests as an addiction rather than a critical judgement. Instead of being uncritically blank, we could say that Trecartin’s characters have too much content and too many affects, particularly those of the Internet variety. In Ready (Re’Search Wait’S) (2009-2010), Trecartin (playing a character named J.J. Check, who wants to re-write the U.S constitution) states at one point: “Someone just flashed an image of me; I am so sure of it. I am such as free download.” Here, pastiche turns into a performed glitch, hinting at how authentic speech can be composed of an amalgam of inauthentic sources—a scrambling of literary forms, movie one-liners, intrusive online advertising and social media jargon. His characters constantly waver between vernacular clichés and accretions of data: “My mother accused me of being accumulation posing as independent free will,” says a character from Item Falls (2013)What makes Trecartin’s video work so fascinating is that he frames what once would have been called “pastiche” and fills it with meaning, as if sincerely attuned to the paradoxes of “anti-normative” posturing contained in the term “mass individualism.” Even when addressing issues of representational politics, his dialogue registers as both authentic and insipid, as when, in CENTER JENNY (2013), a conversation about sexism being “the coolest style” ends with a woman in a bikini asking: “tolerance is inevitable, right?” Although there are laugh-out-loud elements in all of his work—often from an exaggeration of superficiality—there is a more persistent sense of the artist searching for something deeper, perhaps sympathetically so. His characters are eager to self-project yet what they actually project comes off as too much—their performances are too knowing, too individualistic and too caught up in the Internet, or other surrounding technologies.When Susan Sontag wrote in 1964 of the aesthetic of “camp” she was largely motivated by the success of Pop art, particularly that of her friend Andy Warhol. Warhol’s work looked kitsch yet Sontag saw in it a genuine love that kitsch lacks—a sentiment akin to doting on something ugly or malformed. Summoning the dandy, she claimed that whereas “the dandy would be continually offended or bored, the connoisseur of Camp is continually amused, delighted. The dandy held a perfumed handkerchief to his nostrils and was liable to swoon; the connoisseur of Camp sniffs the stink and prides himself on his strong nerves” (292).As an artistic device, camp essentially wallows in all the bad fetishisms that Frankfurt School theorists lamented of capitalism. The camp appropriator, does, however, convey himself as existing both inside and outside this low culture, communicating the “stink” of low culture in affecting ways. Sontag viewed camp, in other words, as at once deconstructive and reconstructive. In playing appearances off against essences, camp denies the self as essence only to celebrate it as performance.In line with accounts of identity in automediality and automedia theory, camp can be understood as performing within a dialectical tension between self and its representation. The camp aesthetic shows the self as discursively mediated and embedded in subjective formations that are “heterogeneous, conflictual, and intersectional” (Smith and Watson 71). Affiliated with the covert expression of hom*osexual and queer identity, the camp artist typically foregrounds art as taste, and taste as mere fashion, while at the same time he/she suggests how this approach is shaped by socio-political marginalization. For Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the criticality of camp is “additive and accretive” rather than oppositional; it is a surplus form that manifests as “the ‘over’-attachment to fragmentary, marginal, waste or leftover products” (149).Trecartin, who identifies as gay, parodies the excesses of digital identity while at the same time, from camp and queer perspectives, he asks us to take these identifications seriously—straight, gay, transsexual, bisexual, inter-sexual, racial, post-racial, mainstream, alternative, capitalist or anarchist. This pluralist agenda manifests in characters who speak as though everything is in quotation marks, suggesting that everything is possible. Dialogue such as “I’m finally just an ‘as if’”, “I want an idea landfill”, and “It reminds me of the future” project feelings of too much and not enough, transforming Warhol’s cool, image-oriented version of camp (transfixed by TV and supermarket capitalism) into a hyper-affective Internet camp—a camp that feeds on new life narratives, identity postures and personalities, as stimuli.In emphasising technology as intrinsic to camp self-presentation, Trecartin treats intersectionality and intermediality as if corresponding concepts. His characters, caught between youthhood and adulthood, are inbetweeners. Yet, despite being nebulous, they float free of normative ideals only in the sense that they believe everybody not only has the right to live how they want to, but to also be condemned for it—the right to intolerance going hand-in-hand with their belief in plurality. This suggests the paradoxical condition of pluralist, intersectional selfhood in the digital age, where one can position one’s identity as if between social categories while at the same time weaponizing it, in the form of identity politics. In K-Corea INC. K (Section A) (2009), Global Korea asks: “Who the f*ck is that baby sh*t-talker? That’s not one of my condiments,” which is delivered with characteristic confidence, defensiveness and with gleeful disregard for normative speech. Figure 4: Ryan Trecartin, CENTER JENNY (2013), digital video stillThe Zaniness of the Neoliberal SelfIf, as Koestenbaum claims, Trecartin’s host of characters are actually “evolving mutations of a single worldview” (275), then the worldview they represent is what Sianne Ngai calls the “hypercommodified, information saturated, performance driven conditions of late capitalism” (1). Self-presentation in this context is not to be understood so much as experienced through prisms of technological inflection, marketing spiel and pluralist interpretative schemas. Ngai has described the rise of “zaniness” as an aesthetic category that perfectly encapsulates this capitalist condition. Zany hyperactivity is at once “lighthearted” and “vehement,” and as such it is highly suited to the contemporary volatility of affective labour; its tireless overlapping of work and play, and the networking rhetoric of global interconnectedness (Ngai, 7). This is what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello have termed the “connexionist” spirit of capitalism, where a successful career is measured by one’s capacity to be “always pursuing some sort of activity, never to be without a project, without ideas, to be always looking forward to, and preparing for, something along with other persons, whose encounter is the result of being always driven by the drive for activity” (Chiapello and Fairclough 192).For Ngai, the zany—epitomized by Jim Carrey’s character in Cable Guy (1996) or Wile E. Coyote from the Looney Tunes cartoons—performs first and asks questions later. As such, their playfulness is always performed in a way that could spin out of control, as when Trecartin’s humour can, in the next moment, appear psychotic. Ngai continues:What is essential to zaniness is its way of evoking a situation with the potential to cause harm or injury […]. For all their playfulness and commitment to fun, the zany’s characters give the impression of needing to labor excessively hard to produce our laughter, straining themselves to the point of endangering not just themselves but also those around them. (10)Using sinister music scores, anxiety-inducing editing and lighting that references iconic DIY horror films such as the Blair Witch Project (1999), Trecartin comically frames the anxieties and over-produced individualism of the global neoliberalist project, but in ways that one is unsure what to do with it. “Don’t look at me—look at your mother, and globalize at her,” commands Global Korea. Set in temporary (read precarious) locations that often resemble both domestic and business environments, his world is one in which young adults are incessantly producing themselves as content, as if unstable market testers run riot, on whose tastes our future global economic growth depends.Michel Foucault defined this neoliberal condition as “the application of the economic grid to social phenomena” (239). As early as 1979 he claimed that workers in a neoliberal context begin to regard the self as an “abilities-machine” (229) where they are less partners in the processes of economic exchange than independent producers of human capital. As Jodi Dean puts it, with the totalization of economic production, neoliberal processes “simultaneously promote the individual as the primary unit of capitalism and unravel the institutions of solidaristic support on which this unit depends” (32). As entrepreneurs of the self, people under neoliberalism become producers for whom socialization is no longer a byproduct of capitalist production but can be the very means through which capital is produced. With this in mind, Trecartin’s portrayal of the straight-to-camera format is less a video diary than a means for staging social auditions. His performers (or contestants), although foregrounding their individualism, always have their eyes on group power, suggesting a competitive individualism rather than the countering of normativity. Forever at work and at play, these comic-tragics are ur-figures of neoliberalism—over-connected and over-emotional self-presenters who are unable to stop, in fear they will be nothing if not performing.ConclusionPortraying a seemingly endless parade of neoliberal selves, Trecartin’s work yields a zany vision that always threatens to spin out of control. As a form of Internet-era camp, he reproduces automedial conceptions of the self as constituted and expanded by media technologies—as performative conduits between the formal and the socio-political which go both ways. This process has been described by Berlant in terms of life writing, but it applies equally to Trecartin, who, through a “performance of fantasmatic intersubjectivity,” facilitates “a performance of being” for the viewer “made possible by the proximity of the object” (Berlant 25). Inflating for both comic and tragic effect a profoundly nebulous yet weaponized conception of identity, Trecartin’s characters show the relation between offline and online life to be impossible to essentialize, laden with a mix of conflicting feelings and personas. As identity avatars, his characters do their best to be present and responsive to whatever precarious situations they find themselves in, which, due to the nature of his scripts, seem at times to have been automatically generated by the Internet itself.ReferencesBourriaud, Nicolas. Postproduction: Culture as a Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World. New York: Lucas & Stenberg, 2001.Chiapello, E., and N. Fairclough. “Understanding the New Management Ideology: A Transdisciplinary Contribution from Critical Discourse Analysis and New Sociology of Capitalism.” Discourse and Society 13.2 (2002): 185–208.Dean, Jodi. Crowds and Party. London & New York: Verso, 2016.Droitcour, Brian. “Making Word: Ryan Trecartin as Poet.” Rhizome 27 July 2001. 18 Apr. 2015 <http://rhizome.org/editorial/2011/jul/27/making-word-ryan-trecartin-poet/>.Dünne, Jörg, and Christian Moser. 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Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015.Prosser, Jay. “Life Writing and Intimate Publics: A Conversation with Lauren Berlant.” Biography 34.1 (Winter 2012): 180- 87.Rak, Julie. “Life Writing versus Automedia: The Sims 3 Game as a Life Lab.” Biography 38.2 (Spring 2015): 155-180.Schjeldahl, Peter. “Party On.” New Yorker, 27 June 2011: 84-85.Smith, Sidonie. “Virtually Me: A Toolbox about Online Self-Presentation.” Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online. Eds. Anna Poletti and Julie Rak. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014.———, and Julia Watson. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota P, 2010———, and Julia Watson. Life Writing in the Long Run: Smith & Watson Autobiography Studies Reader. Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, 2016.Sontag, Susan. “Notes on Camp.” Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Picador, 2001.Trecartin, Ryan. “Ryan Trecartin.” Artforum (Sep. 2012): 471.Wayne Koestenbaum. “Situation Hacker.” Artforum 47.10 (Summer 2009): 274-279.Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey. “Hardware/Software/Wetware.” Critical Terms for Media Studies. Eds. W.J.T. Mitchell and M. Hansen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.

Abstract:

What creative techniques of resistance are available to a female filmmaker when she is the victim of a violent event and filmed at her most vulnerable? This article uses an autoethnographic lens to discuss my experience of a serious car crash my family and I were inadvertently involved in due to police negligence and a criminal act. Employing Creative Analytical Practice (CAP) ethnography, a reflexive form of research which recognises that the creative process, producer and product are “deeply intertwined” (Richardson, “Writing: A Method” 930), I investigate how the crash’s violent affects crippled my agency, manifested in my creative praxis and catalysed my identification of latent forms of institutionalised violence in film culture, its discourse and pedagogy that also contributed to my inertia. The article maps my process of writing a feature length screenplay during the aftermath of the crash as I set out to articulate my story of survival and resistance. Using this narrative inquiry, in which we can “investigate how we construct the world, ourselves, and others, and how standard objectifying practices...unnecessarily limit us” (Richardson, “Writing: A Method” 924), I outline how I attempted to disrupt the entrenched power structures that exist in dominant narratives of violence in film and challenge my subjugated positioning as a woman within this canon. I describe my engagement with the deconstructionist practices of writing the body and militant feminist cinema, which suggest subversive opportunities for women’s self-determination by encouraging us to embrace our exiled positioning in dominant discourse through creative experimentation, and identify some of the possibilities and limitations of this for female agency. Drawing on CAP ethnography, existentialism, film feminism, and narrative reframing, I assert that these reconstructive practices are more effective for the creative enfranchisem*nt of women by not relegating us to the periphery of social systems and cultural forms. Instead, they enable us to speak back to violent structures in a language that has greater social access, context and impact.My strong desire to tell screen stories lies in my belief that storytelling is a crucial evolutionary mechanism of resilience. Narratives do not simply represent the social world but also have the ability to change it by enabling us to “try to figure out how to live our lives meaningfully” (Ellis 760). This conviction has been directly influenced by my personal story of trauma and survival when myself, my siblings, and our respective life partners became involved in a major car crash. Two police officers attending to a drunken brawl in an inner city park had, in their haste, left the keys in the ignition of their vehicle. We were travelling across a major intersection when the police car, which had subsequently been stolen by a man involved in the brawl – a man who was wanted on parole, had a blood alcohol level three times over the legal limit, and was driving at speeds exceeding 110kms per hour - ran a red light and crossed our path, causing us to crash into his vehicle. From the impact, the small four-wheel drive we were travelling in was catapulted metres into the air, rolling numerous times before smashing head on into oncoming traffic. My heavily pregnant sister was driving our vehicle.The incident attracted national media attention and our story became a sensationalist spectacle. Each news station reported erroneous and conflicting information, one stating that my sister had lost her unborn daughter, another even going so far as to claim my sister had died in the crash. This tabloidised, ‘if it bleeds, it leads’, culture of journalism, along with new digital technologies, encourages and facilitates the normalisation of violent acts, often inflicted on women. Moreover, in their pursuit of high-rating stories, news bodies motivate dehumanising acts of citizen journalism that see witnesses often inspired to film, rather than assist, victims involved in a violent event. Through a connection with someone working for a major news station, we discovered that leading news broadcasters had bought a tape shot by a group of men who call themselves the ‘Paparazzi of Perth’. These men were some of the first on the scene and began filming us from only a few metres away while we were still trapped upside down and unconscious in our vehicle. In the recording, the men are heard laughing and celebrating our tragedy as they realise the lucrative possibilities of the shocking imagery they are capturing as witnesses pull us out of the back of the car, and my pregnant sister incredibly frees herself from the wreckage by kicking out the window.As a female filmmaker, I saw the bitter irony of this event as the camera was now turned on me and my loved ones at our most vulnerable. In her discussion of the male gaze, a culturally sanctioned form of narrational violence against women that is ubiquitous in most mainstream media, Mulvey proposes that women are generally the passive image, trapped by the physical limits of the frame in a permanent state of powerlessness as our identity is reduced to her “to-be-looked-at-ness” (40). For a long period of time, the experience of performing the role of this commodified woman of a weaponised male gaze, along with the threat of annihilation associated with our near-death experience, immobilised my spirit. I felt I belonged “more to the dead than to the living” (Herman 34). When I eventually returned to my creative praxis, I decided to use scriptwriting as both my “mode of reasoning and a mode of representation” (Richardson, Writing Strategies 21), test whether I could work through my feelings of alienation and violation and reclaim my agency. This was a complex and harrowing task because my memories “lack[ed] verbal narrative and context” (Herman 38) and were deeply rooted in my body. Cixous confirms that for women, “writing and voice...are woven together” and “spring from the deepest layers of her psyche” (Moi 112). For many months, I struggled to write. I attempted to block out this violent ordeal and censor my self. I soon learnt, however, that my body could not be silenced and was slow to forget. As I tried to write around this experience, the trauma worked itself deeper inside of me, and my physical symptoms worsened, as did the quality of my writing.In the early version of the screenplay I found myself writing a female-centred film about violence, identity and death, using the fictional narrative to express the numbness I experienced. I wrote the female protagonist with detachment as though she were an object devoid of agency. Sartre claims that we make objects of others and of ourselves in an attempt to control the uncertainty of life and the ever-changing nature of humanity (242). Making something into an object is to deprive it of life (and death); it is our attempt to keep ourselves ‘safe’. While I recognise that the car crash’s reminder of my mortality was no doubt part of the reason why I rendered myself, and the script’s female protagonist, lifeless as agentic beings, I sensed that there were subtler operations of power and control behind my self-objectification and self-censorship, which deeply concerned me. What had influenced this dea(r)th of female agency in my creative imaginings? Why did I write my female character with such a red pen? Why did I seem so compelled to ‘kill’ her? I wanted to investigate my gender construction, the complex relationship between my scriptwriting praxis, and the context within which it is produced to discover whether I could write a different future for myself, and my female characters. Kiesinger supports “contextualizing our stories within the framework of a larger picture” (108), so as to remain open to the possibility that there might not be anything ‘wrong’ with us, per se, “but rather something very wrong with the dynamics that dominate the communicative system” (109) within which we operate: in the case of my creative praxis, the oppressive structures present in the culture of film and its pedagogy.Pulling FocusWomen are supposed to be the view and when the view talks back, it is uncomfortable.— Jane Campion (Filming Desire)It is a terrible thing to see that no one has ever taught us how to develop our vision as women neither in the history of arts nor in film schools.— Marie Mandy (Filming Desire)The democratisation of today’s media landscape through new technologies, the recent rise in female-run production companies (Zemler) in Hollywood, along with the ground-breaking #MeToo and Time’s Up movements has elevated the global consciousness of gender-based violence, and has seen the screen industry seek to redress its history of gender imbalance. While it is too early to assess the impact these developments may have on women’s standing in film, today the ‘celluloid ceiling’ still operates on multiple levels of indoctrination and control through a systemic pattern of exclusion for women that upholds the “nearly seamless dialogue among men in cinema” (Lauzen, Thumbs Down 2). Female filmmakers occupy a tenuous position of influence in the mainstream industry and things are not any better on the other side of the camera (Lauzen, The Celluloid Ceiling). For the most part, Hollywood’s male gaze and penchant for sexualising and (physically or figuratively) killing female characters, which normalises violence against women and is “almost inversely proportional to the liberation of women in society” (Mandy), continues to limit women to performing as the image rather than the agent on screen.Film funding bodies and censorship boards, mostly comprised of men, remain exceptionally averse to independent female filmmakers who go against the odds to tell their stories, which often violate taboos about femininity and radically redefine female agency through the construction of the female gaze: a narrational technique of resistance that enables reel woman to govern the point of view, imagery and action of the film (Smelik 51-52). This generally sees their films unjustly ghettoised through incongruent classification or censorship, and forced into independent or underground distribution (Sexton-Finck 165-182). Not only does censorship propose the idea that female agency is abject and dangerous and needs to be restrained, it prevents access to this important cinema by women that aims to counter the male gaze and “shield us from this type of violence” (Gillain 210). This form of ideological and institutional gatekeeping is not only enforced in the film industry, it is also insidiously (re)constituted in the epistemological construction of film discourse and pedagogy, which in their design, are still largely intrinsically gendered institutions, encoded with phallocentric signification that rejects a woman’s specificity and approach to knowledge. Drawing on my mutually informative roles as a former film student and experienced screen educator, I assert that most screen curricula in Australia still uphold entrenched androcentric norms that assume the male gaze and advocate popular cinema’s didactic three-act structure, which conditions our value systems to favour masculinity and men’s worldview. This restorative storytelling approach is argued to be fatally limiting to reel women (Smith 136; Dancyger and Rush 25) as it propagates the Enlightenment notion of a universal subjectivity, based on free will and reason, which neutralises the power structures of society (and film) and repudiates the influence of social positioning on our opportunity for agency. Moreover, through its omniscient consciousness, which seeks to efface the presence of a specific narrator, the three-act method disavows this policing of female agency and absolves any specific individual of responsibility for its structural violence (Dyer 98).By pulling focus on some of these problematic mechanisms in the hostile climate of the film industry and its spaces of learning for women, I became acutely aware of the more latent forms of violence that had conditioned my scriptwriting praxis, the ambivalence I felt towards my female identity, and my consequent gagging of the female character in the screenplay.Changing Lenses How do the specific circ*mstances in which we write affect what we write? How does what we write affect who we become?— Laurel Richardson (Fields of Play 1)In the beginning, there is an end. Don’t be afraid: it’s your death that is dying. Then: all the beginnings.— Helene Cixous (Cixous and Jensen 41)The discoveries I made during my process of CAP ethnography saw a strong feeling of dissidence arrive inside me. I vehemently wanted to write my way out of my subjugated state and release some of the anguish that my traumatised body was carrying around. I was drawn to militant feminist cinema and the French poststructuralist approach of ‘writing the body’ (l’ecriture feminine) given these deconstructive practices “create images and ideas that have the power to inspire to revolt against oppression and exploitation” (Moi 120). Feminist cinema’s visual treatise of writing the body through its departure from androcentric codes - its unformulaic approach to structure, plot, character and narration (De Lauretis 106) - revealed to me ways in which I could use the scriptwriting process to validate my debilitating experience of physical and psychic violence, decensor my self and move towards rejoining the living. Cixous affirms that, “by writing her self, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into…the ailing or dead figure” (Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa 880). It became clear to me that the persistent themes of death that manifested in the first draft of the script were not, as I first suspected, me ‘rehearsing to die’, or wanting to kill off the woman inside me. I was in fact “not driven towards death but by death” (Homer 89), the close proximity to my mortality, acting as a limit, was calling for a strengthening of my life force, a rebirth of my agency (Bettelheim 36). Mansfield acknowledges that death “offers us a freedom outside of the repression and logic that dominate our daily practices of keeping ourselves in order, within the lines” (87).I challenged myself to write the uncomfortable, the unfamiliar, the unexplored and to allow myself to go to places in me that I had never before let speak by investigating my agency from a much more layered and critical perspective. This was both incredibly terrifying and liberating and enabled me to discard the agentic ‘corset’ I had previously worn in my creative praxis. Dancyger and Rush confirm that “one of the things that happens when we break out of the restorative three-act form is that the effaced narrator becomes increasingly visible and overt” (38). I experienced an invigorating feeling of empowerment through my appropriation of the female gaze in the screenplay which initially appeased some of the post-crash turmoil and general sense of injustice I was experiencing. However, I soon, found something toxic rising inside of me. Like the acrimonious feminist cinema I was immersed in – Raw (Ducournau), A Girl Walks Home at Night (Amirpour), Romance (Breillat), Trouble Every Day (Denis), Baise-Moi (Despentes and Thi), In My Skin (Van), Anatomy of Hell (Breillat) – the screenplay I had produced involved a female character turning the tables on men and using acts of revenge to satisfy her needs. Not only was I creating a highly dystopian world filled with explicit themes of suffering in the screenplay, I too existed in a displaced state of rage and ‘psychic nausea’ in my daily life (Baldick and Sartre). I became haunted by vivid flashbacks of the car crash as abject images, sounds and sensations played over and over in my mind and body like a horror movie on loop. I struggled to find the necessary clarity and counterbalance of stability required to successfully handle this type of experimentation.I do not wish to undermine the creative potential of deconstructive practices, such as writing the body and militant cinema, for female filmmakers. However, I believe my post-trauma sensitivity to visceral entrapment and spiritual violence magnifies some of the psychological and physiological risks involved. Deconstructive experimentation “happens much more easily in the realm of “texts” than in the world of human interaction” (hooks 22) and presents agentic limitations for women since it offers a “utopian vision of female creativity” (Moi 119) that is “devoid of reality...except in a poetic sense” (Moi 122). In jettisoning the restorative qualities of narrative film, new boundaries for women are inadvertently created through restricting us to “intellectual pleasure but rarely emotional pleasure” (Citron 51). Moreover, by reducing women’s agency to retaliation we are denied the opportunity for catharsis and transformation; something I desperately longed to experience in my injured state. Kaplan acknowledges this problem, arguing that female filmmakers need to move theoretically beyond deconstruction to reconstruction, “to manipulate the recognized, dominating discourses so as to begin to free ourselves through rather than beyond them (for what is there ‘beyond’?)” (Women and Film 141).A potent desire to regain a sense of connectedness and control pushed itself out from deep inside me. I yearned for a tonic to move myself and my female character to an active position, rather than a reactive one that merely repeats the victimising dynamic of mainstream film by appropriating a reversed (female) gaze and now makes women the violent victors (Kaplan, Feminism and Film 130). We have arrived at a point where we must destabilise the dominance-submission structure and “think about ways of transcending a polarity that has only brought us all pain” (Kaplan, Feminism and Film 135). I became determined to write a screen narrative that, while dealing with some of the harsh realities of humanity I had become exposed to, involved an existentialist movement towards catharsis and activity.ReframingWhen our stories break down or no longer serve us well, it is imperative that we examine the quality of the stories we are telling and actively reinvent our accounts in ways that permit us to live more fulfilling lives.— Christine Kiesinger (107)I’m frightened by life’s randomness, so I want to deal with it, make some sense of it by telling a film story. But it’s not without hope. I don’t believe in telling stories without some hope.— Susanne Bier (Thomas)Narrative reframing is underlined by the existentialist belief that our spiritual freedom is an artistic process of self-creation, dependent on our free will to organise the elements of our lives, many determined out of our control, into the subjective frame that is to be our experience of our selves and the world around us (107). As a filmmaker, I recognise the power of selective editing and composition. Narrative reframing’s demand for a rational assessment of “the degree to which we live our stories versus the degree to which our stories live us” (Kiesinger 109), helped me to understand how I could use these filmmaking skills to take a step back from my trauma so as to look at it objectively “as a text for study” (Ellis 108) and to exercise power over the creative-destructive forces it, and the deconstructive writing methods I had employed, produced. Richardson confirms the benefits of this practice, since narrative “is the universal way in which humans accommodate to finitude” (Writing Strategies 65).In the script’s development, I found my resilience lay in my capacity to imagine more positive alternatives for female agency. I focussed on writing a narrative that did not avoid life’s hardships and injustices, or require them to be “attenuated, veiled, sweetened, blunted, and falsified” (Nietzsche and Hollingdale 68), yet still involved a life-affirming sentiment. With this in mind, I reintroduced the three-act structure in the revised script as its affectivity and therapeutic denouement enabled me to experience a sense of agentic catharsis that turned “nauseous thoughts into imaginations with which it is possible to live” (Nietzsche 52). Nevertheless, I remained vigilant not to lapse into didacticism; to allow my female character to be free to transgress social conventions surrounding women’s agency. Indebted to Kaplan’s writing on the cinematic gaze, I chose to take up what she identifies as a ‘mutual gaze’; an ethical framework that enabled me to privilege the female character’s perspective and autonomy with a neutral subject-subject gaze rather than the “subject-object kind that reduces one of the parties to the place of submission” (Feminism and Film 135). I incorporated the filmic technique of the point of view (POV) shot for key narrative moments as it allows an audience to literally view the world through a character’s eyes, as well as direct address, which involves the character looking back down the lens at the viewer (us); establishing the highest level of identification between the spectator and the subject on screen.The most pertinent illustration of these significant scriptwriting changes through my engagement with narrative reframing and feminist film theory, is in the reworking of my family’s car crash which became a pivotal turning point in the final draft. In the scene, I use POV and direct address to turn the weaponised gaze back around onto the ‘paparazzi’ who are filming the spectacle. When the central (pregnant) character frees herself from the wreckage, she notices these men filming her and we see the moment from her point of view as she looks at these men laughing and revelling in the commercial potential of their mediatised act. Switching between POV and direct address, the men soon notice they have been exposed as the woman looks back down the lens at them (us) with disbelief, reproaching them (us) for daring to film her in this traumatic moment. She holds her determined gaze while they glance awkwardly back at her, until their laughter dissipates, they stop recording and appear to recognise the culpability of their actions. With these techniques of mutual gazing, I set out to humanise and empower the female victim and neutralise the power dynamic: the woman is now also a viewing agent, and the men equally perform the role of the viewed. In this creative reframing, I hope to provide an antidote to filmic violence against and/or by women as this female character reclaims her (my) experience of survival without adhering to the culture of female passivity or ressentiment.This article has examined how a serious car crash, being filmed against my will in its aftermath and the attendant damages that prevailed from this experience, catalysed a critical change of direction in my scriptwriting. The victimising event helped me recognise the manifest and latent forms of violence against women that are normalised through everyday ideological and institutional systems in film and prevent us from performing as active agents in our creative praxis. There is a critical need for more inclusive modes of practice – across the film industry, discourse and pedagogy – that are cognisant and respectful of women’s specificity and our difference to the androcentric landscape of mainstream film. We need to continue to exert pressure on changing violent mechanisms that marginalise us and ghettoise our stories. As this article has demonstrated, working outside dominant forms can enable important emancipatory opportunities for women, however, this type or deconstruction also presents risks that generally leave us powerless in everyday spaces. While I advocate that female filmmakers should look to techniques of feminist cinema for an alternative lens, we must also work within popular film to critique and subvert it, and not deny women the pleasures and political advantages of its restorative structure. By enabling female filmmakers to (re)humanise woman though encouraging empathy and compassion, this affective storytelling form has the potential to counter violence against women and mobilise female agency. Equally, CAP ethnography and narrative reframing are critical discourses for the retrieval and actualisation of female filmmakers’ agency as they allow us to contextualise our stories of resistance and survival within the framework of a larger picture of violence to gain perspective on our subjective experiences and render them as significant, informative and useful to the lives of others. This enables us to move from the isolated margins of subcultural film and discourse to reclaim our stories at the centre.ReferencesA Girl Walks Home at Night. Dir. Ana Lily Amirpour. Say Ahh Productions, 2014.Anatomy of Hell. Dir. Catherine Breillat. Tartan Films, 2004. Baise-Moi. Dirs. Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi. FilmFixx, 2000.Baldick, Robert, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Nausea. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965.Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. London: Thames and Hudson, 1976.Citron, Michelle. Women’s Film Production: Going Mainstream in Female Spectators: Looking at Film and Television. Ed. E. Deidre Pribram. London: Verso, 1988.Cixous, Helene. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1.4 (1976): 875-893.Cixous, Helene, and Deborah Jenson. "Coming to Writing" and Other Essays. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991.Dancyger, Ken, and Jeff Rush. Alternative Scriptwriting: Successfully Breaking the Rules. Boston, MA: Focal Press, 2002.De Lauretis, Teresa. Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.Dyer, Richard. The Matter of Images: Essays on Representation. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2002.Ellis, Carolyn. The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel about Autoethnography. California: AltaMira, 2004.Filming Desire: A Journey through Women's Cinema. Dir. Marie Mandy. Women Make Movies, 2000.Gillain, Anne. “Profile of a Filmmaker: Catherine Breillat.” Beyond French Feminisms: Debates on Women, Politics, and Culture in France, 1981-2001. Eds. Roger Célestin, Eliane Françoise DalMolin, and Isabelle de Courtivron. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. 206.Herman, Judith Lewis. Trauma and Recovery. London: Pandora, 1994.Homer, Sean. Jacques Lacan. London: Routledge, 2005.hooks, bell. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1990.In My Skin. Dir. Marina de Van. Wellspring Media, 2002. Kaplan, E. Ann. Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera. New York: Routledge, 1988.———. Feminism and Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.Kiesinger, Christine E. “My Father's Shoes: The Therapeutic Value of Narrative Reframing.” Ethnographically Speaking: Autoethnography, Literature, and Aesthetics. Eds. Arthur P. Bochner and Carolyn Ellis. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2002. 107-111.Lauzen, Martha M. “Thumbs Down - Representation of Women Film Critics in the Top 100 U.S. Daily Newspapers - A Study by Dr. Martha Lauzen.” Alliance of Women Film Journalists, 25 July 2012. 4-5.———. The Celluloid Ceiling: Behind-the-Scenes Employment of Women on the Top 100, 250, and 500 Films of 2018. Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film San Diego State University 2019. <https://womenintvfilm.sdsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/2018_Celluloid_Ceiling_Report.pdf>.Mansfield, Nick. Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Haraway. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2000.Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. London: Methuen, 2002.Mulvey, Laura. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema in Feminism and Film. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. 34-47.Nietzsche, Friedrich W. The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Francis Golffing. New York: Doubleday, 1956.Nietzsche, Friedrich W., and Richard Hollingdale. Beyond Good and Evil. London: Penguin Books, 1990.Raw. Dir. Julia Ducournau. Petit Film, 2016.Richardson, Laurel. Writing Strategies: Reaching Diverse Audiences. Newbury Park, California: Sage Publications, 1990.———. Fields of Play: Constructing an Academic Life. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997.———. “Writing: A Method of Inquiry.” Handbook of Qualitative Research. Eds. Norman K Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2000.Romance. Dir. Catherine Breillat. Trimark Pictures Inc., 2000.Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. London: Routledge, 1969.Sexton-Finck, Larissa. Be(com)ing Reel Independent Woman: An Autoethnographic Journey through Female Subjectivity and Agency in Contemporary Cinema with Particular Reference to Independent Scriptwriting Practice. 2009. <https://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/id/eprint/1688/2/02Whole.pdf>.Smelik, Anneke. And the Mirror Cracked: Feminist Cinema and Film Theory. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998.Smith, Hazel. The Writing Experiment: Strategies for Innovative Creative Writing. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2005.Thomas, Michelle. “10 Years of Dogme: An Interview with Susanne Bier.” Future Movies, 5 Aug. 2005. <http://www.futuremovies.co.uk/filmmaking.asp?ID=119>.Trouble Every Day. Dir. Claire Denis. Wild Bunch, 2001. Zemler, Mily. “17 Actresses Who Started Their Own Production Companies.” Elle, 11 Jan. 2018. <https://www.elle.com/culture/movies-tv/g14927338/17-actresses-with-production-companies/>.

Abstract:

The need to sustain and/or create a collective identity is regularly seen as one of the cultural priorities of diasporic peoples and this, in turn, depends upon the existence of a uniquely diasporic form of communication and connection with the country of origin. Today, digital media technologies provide easy information recording and retrieval, and mobile IT networks allow global accessibility and participation in the redefinition of identities. Vis-à-vis our understanding of the proximity and connectivity associated with globalisation, the role of ICTs cannot be underestimated and is clearly more than a simple instrument for the expression of a pre-existing diasporic identity. Indeed, the concept of “e-diaspora” is gaining popularity. Consequently, research into the role of ICTs in the lives of diasporic peoples contributes to a definition of the concept of diaspora, understood here as the result of the dispersal of all members of a nation in several countries. In this context, I will demonstrate how members of the Bulgarian diaspora negotiate not only their identities but also their identifications through one of the most popular community websites, Facebook. My methodology consists of the active observation of Bulgarian users belonging to the diaspora, the participation in groups and forums on Facebook, and the analysis of discourses produced online. This research was conducted for the first time between 1 August 2008 and 31 May 2009 through the largest 20 (of 195) Bulgarian groups on the French version of Facebook and 40 (of over 500) on the English one. It is important to note that the public considered to be predominantly involved in Facebook is a young audience in the age group of 18-35 years. Therefore, this article is focused on two generations of Bulgarian immigrants: mostly recent young and second-generation migrants. The observed users are therefore members of the Bulgarian diaspora who have little or no experience of communism, who don’t feel the weight of the past, and who have grown up as free and often cosmopolitan citizens. Communist hegemony in Bulgaria began on 9 September 1944, when the army and the communist militiamen deposed the country’s government and handed power over to an anti-fascist coalition. During the following decades, Bulgaria became the perfect Soviet satellite and the imposed Stalinist model led to sharp curtailing of the economic and social contacts with the free world beyond the Iron Curtain. In 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of the communist era and the political and economic structures that supported it. Identity, Internet, and Diaspora Through the work of Mead, Todorov, and boyd it is possible to conceptualise the subject in terms of both of internal and external social identity (Mead, Todorov, boyd). In this article, I will focus, in particular, on social and national identities as expressions of the process of sharing stories, experiences, and understanding between individuals. In this respect, the phenomenon of Facebook is especially well placed to mediate between identifications which, according to Freud, facilitate the plural subjectivities and the establishment of an emotional network of mutual bonds between the individual and the group (Freud). This research also draws on Goffman who, from a sociological point of view, demystifies the representation of the Self by developing a dramaturgical theory (Goffman), whereby identity is constructed through the "roles" that people play on the social scene. Social life is a vast stage where the actors are required to adhere to certain socially acceptable rituals and guidelines. It means that we can consider the presentation of Self, or Others, as a facade or a construction of socially accepted features. Among all the ICTs, the Internet is, by far, the medium most likely to facilitate free expression of identity through a multitude of possible actions and community interactions. Personal and national memories circulate in the transnational space of the Internet and are reshaped when framed from specific circ*mstances such as those raised by the migration process. In an age of globalisation marked by the proliferation of population movements, instant communication, and cultural exchanges across geographic boundaries, the phenomenon of the diaspora has caught the attention of a growing number of scholars. I shall be working with Robin Cohen’s definition of diaspora which highlights the following common features: (1) dispersal from an original homeland; (2) the expansion from a homeland in search of work; (3) a collective memory and myth about the homeland; (4) an idealisation of the supposed ancestral homeland; (5) a return movement; (6) a strong ethnic group consciousness sustained over a long time; (7) a troubled relationship with host societies; (8) a sense of solidarity with co-ethnic members in other countries; and (9) the possibility of a distinctive creative, enriching life in tolerant host countries (Cohen). Following on this earlier work on the ways in which diasporas give rise to new forms of subjectivity, the concept of “e-diaspora” is now rapidly gaining in popularity. The complex association between diasporic groups and ICTs has led to a concept of e-diasporas that actively utilise ICTs to achieve community-specific goals, and that have become critical for the formation and sustenance of an exilic community for migrant groups around the globe (Srinivasan and Pyati). Diaspora and the Digital Age Anderson points out two key features of the Internet: first, it is a heterogeneous electronic medium, with hardly perceptible contours, and is in a state of constant development; second, it is a repository of “imagined communities” without geographical or legal legitimacy, whose members will probably never meet (Anderson). Unlike “real” communities, where people have physical interactions, in the imagined communities, individuals do not have face-to-face communication and daily contact, but they nonetheless feel a strong emotional attachment to the nation. The Internet not only opens new opportunities to gain greater visibility and strengthen the sense of belonging to community, but it also contributes to the emergence of a transnational public sphere where the communities scattered in various locations freely exchange their views and ideas without fear of restrictions or censorship from traditional media (Appadurai, Bernal). As a result, the Web becomes a virtual diasporic space which opens up, to those who have left their country, a new means of confrontation and social participation. Within this new diasporic space, migrants are bound in their disparate geographical locations by a common vision or myth about the homeland (Karim). Thanks to the Internet, the computer has become a primary technological intermediary between virtual networks, bringing its members closer in a “global village” where everyone is immediately connected to others. Thus, today’s diasporas are not the diaspora of previous generations in that the migration is experienced and negotiated very differently: people in one country are now able to continue to participate actively in another country. In this context, the arrival of community sites has increased the capacity of users to create a network on the Internet, to rediscover lost links, and strengthen new ones. Unlike offline communities, which may weaken once their members have left the physical space, online communities that are no longer limited by the requirement of physical presence in the common space have the capacity to endure. Identity Strategies of New Generations of Bulgarian Migrants It is very difficult to quantify migration to or from Bulgaria. Existing data is not only partial and limited but, in some cases, give an inaccurate view of migration from Bulgaria (Soultanova). Informal data confirm that one million Bulgarians, around 15 per cent of Bulgaria’s entire population (7,620,238 inhabitants in 2007), are now scattered around the world (National Statistical Institute of Bulgaria). The Bulgarian migrant is caught in a system of redefinition of identity through the duration of his or her relocation. Emigrating from a country like Bulgaria implies a high number of contingencies. Bulgarians’ self-identification is relative to the inferiority complex of a poor country which has a great deal to do to catch up with its neighbours. Before the accession of Bulgaria to the European Union, the country was often associated with what have been called “Third World countries” and seen as a source of crime and social problems. Members of the Bulgarian diaspora faced daily prejudice due to the bad reputation of their country of origin, though the extent of the hostility depended upon the “host” nation (Marcheva). Geographically, Bulgaria is one of the most eastern countries in Europe, the last to enter the European Union, and its image abroad has not facilitated the integration of the Bulgarian diaspora. The differences between Bulgarian migrants and the “host society” perpetuate a sentiment of marginality that is now countered with an online appeal for national identity markers and shared experiences. Facebook: The Ultimate Social Network The Growing Popularity of Facebook With more than 500 million active members, Facebook is the most visited website in the world. In June 2007, Facebook experienced a record annual increase of 270 per cent of connections in one year (source: comScore World Metrix). More than 70 translations of the site are available to date, including the Bulgarian version. What makes it unique is that Facebook positively encourages identity games. Moreover, Facebook provides the symbolic building blocks with which to build a collective identity through shared forms of discourse and ways of thinking. People are desperate to make a good impression on the Internet: that is why they spend so much time managing their online identity. One of the most important aspects of Facebook is that it enables users to control and manage their image, leaving the choice of how their profile appears on the pages of others a matter of personal preference at any given time. Despite some limitations, we will see that Facebook offers the Bulgarian community abroad the possibility of an intense and ongoing interaction with fellow nationals, including the opportunity to assert and develop a complex new national/transnational identity. Facebook Experiences of the Bulgarian Diaspora Created in the United States in 2004 and extended to use in Europe two or three years later, Facebook was quickly adopted by members of the Bulgarian diaspora. Here, it is very important to note that, although the Internet per se has enabled Bulgarians across the globe to introduce Cyrillic script into the public arena, it is definitely Facebook that has made digital Cyrillic visible. Early in computer history, keyboards with the Cyrillic alphabet simply did not exist. Thus, Bulgarians were forced to translate their language into Latin script. Today, almost all members of the Bulgarian population who own a computer use a keyboard that combines the two alphabets, Latin and Cyrillic, and this allows alternation between the two. This is not the case for the majority of Bulgarians living abroad who are forced to use a keyboard specific to their country of residence. Thus, Bulgarians online have adopted a hybrid code to speak and communicate. Since foreign keyboards are not equipped with the same consonants and vowels that exist in the Bulgarian language, they use the Latin letters that best suit the Bulgarian phonetic. Several possible interpretations of these “encoded” texts exist which become another way for the Bulgarian migrants to distinguish and assert themselves. One of these encoded scripts is supplemented by figures. For example, the number “6” written in Bulgarian “шест” is applied to represent the Bulgarian letter “ш.” Bulgarian immigrants therefore employ very specific codes of communication that enhance the feeling of belonging to a community that shares the same language, which is often incomprehensible to others. As the ultimate social networking website, Facebook brings together Bulgarians from all over the world and offers them a space to preserve online memorials and digital archives. As a result, the Bulgarian diaspora privileges this website in order to manage the strong links between its members. Indeed, within months of coming into online existence, Facebook established itself as a powerful social phenomenon for the Bulgarian diaspora and, very soon, a virtual map of the Bulgarian diaspora was formed. It should be noted, however, that this mapping was focused on the new generation of Bulgarian migrants more familiar with the Internet and most likely to travel. By identifying the presence of online groups by country or city, I was able to locate the most active Bulgarian communities: “Bulgarians in UK” (524 members), “Bulgarians in Chicago” (436 members), “Bulgarians studying in the UK” (346 members), “Bulgarians in America” (333 members), “Bulgarians in the USA” (314 members), “Bulgarians in Montreal” (249 members), “Bulgarians in Munich” (241 members), and so on. These figures are based on the “Groups” Application of Facebook as updated in February 2010. Through those groups, a symbolic diasporic geography is imagined and communicated: the digital “border crossing,” as well as the real one, becomes a major identity resource. Thus, Bulgarian users of Facebook are connecting from the four corners of the globe in order to rebuild family links and to participate virtually in the marriages, births, and lives of their families. It sometimes seems that the whole country has an appointment on Facebook, and that all the photos and stories of Bulgarians are more or less accessible to the community in general. Among its virtual initiatives, Facebook has made available to its users an effective mobilising tool, the Causes, which is used as a virtual noticeboard for activities and ideas circulating in “real life.” The members of the Bulgarian diaspora choose to adhere to different “causes” that may be local, national, or global, and that are complementary to the civic and socially responsible side of the identity they have chosen to construct online. Acting as a virtual realm in which distinct and overlapping trajectories coexist, Facebook thus enables users to articulate different stories and meanings and to foster a democratic imaginary about both the past and the future. Facebook encourages diasporas to produce new initiatives to revive or create collective memories and common values. Through photos and videos, scenes of everyday life are celebrated and manipulated as tools to reconstruct, reconcile, and display a part of the history and the identity of the migrant. By combating the feelings of disorientation, the consciousness of sharing the same national background and culture facilitates dialogue and neutralises the anxiety and loneliness of Bulgarian migrants. When cultural differences become more acute, the sense of isolation increases and this encourages migrants to look for company and solidarity online. As the number of immigrants connected and visible on Facebook gets larger, so the use of the Internet heightens their sense of a substantial collective identity. This is especially important for migrants during the early years of relocation when their sense of identity is most fragile. It can therefore be argued that, through the Internet, some Bulgarian migrants are replacing alienating face-to-face contact with virtual friends and enjoying the feeling of reassurance and belonging to a transnational community of compatriots. In this sense, Facebook is a propitious ground for the establishment of the three identity strategies defined by Herzfeld: cultural intimacy (or self-stereotypes); structural nostalgia (the evocation of a time when everything was going better); and the social poetic (the strategies aiming to retrieve a particular advantage and turn it into a permanent condition). In this way, the willingness to remain continuously in virtual contact with other Bulgarians often reveals a desire to return to the place of birth. Nostalgia and outsourcing of such sentiments help migrants to cope with feelings of frustration and disappointment. I observed that it is just after their return from summer holidays spent in Bulgaria that members of the Bulgarian diaspora are most active on the Bulgarian forums and pages on Facebook. The “return tourism” (Fourcade) during the summer or for the winter holidays seems to be a central theme in the forums on Facebook and an important source of emotional refuelling. Tensions between identities can also lead to creative formulations through Facebook’s pages. Thus, the group “You know you’re a Bulgarian when...”, which enjoys very active participation from the Bulgarian diaspora, is a space where everyone is invited to share, through a single sentence, some fact of everyday life with which all Bulgarians can identify. With humour and self-irony, this Facebook page demonstrates what is distinctive about being Bulgarian but also highlights frustration with certain prejudices and stereotypes. Frequently these profiles are characterised by seemingly “glocal” features. The same Bulgarian user could define himself as a Parisian, adhering to the group “You know you’re from Paris when...”, but also a native of a Bulgarian town (“You know you’re from Varna when...”). At the same time, he is an architect (“All architects on Facebook”), supporting the candidacy of Barack Obama, a fan of Japanese manga (“maNga”), of a French actor, an American cinema director, or Indian food. He joins a cause to save a wild beach on the Black Sea coast (“We love camping: Gradina Smokinia and Arapia”) and protests virtually against the slaughter of dolphins in the Faroe Islands (“World shame”). One month, the individual could identify as Bulgarian, but next month he might choose to locate himself in the country in which he is now resident. Thus, Facebook creates a virtual territory without borders for the cosmopolitan subject (Negroponte) and this confirms the premise that the Internet does not lead to the convergence of cultures, but rather confirms the opportunities for diversification and pluralism through multiple social and national affiliations. Facebook must therefore be seen as an advantageous space for the representation and interpretation of identity and for performance and digital existence. Bulgarian migrants bring together elements of their offline lives in order to construct, online, entirely new composite identities. The Bulgarians we have studied as part of this research almost never use pseudonyms and do not seem to feel the need to hide their material identities. This suggests that they are mature people who value their status as migrants of Bulgarian origin and who feel confident in presenting their natal identities rather than hiding behind a false name. Starting from this material social/national identity, which is revealed through the display of surname with a Slavic consonance, members of the Bulgarian diaspora choose to manage their complex virtual identities online. Conclusion Far from their homeland, beset with feelings of insecurity and alienation as well as daily experiences of social and cultural exclusion (much of it stemming from an ongoing prejudice towards citizens from ex-communist countries), it is no wonder that migrants from Bulgaria find relief in meeting up with compatriots in front of their screens. Although some migrants assume their Bulgarian identity as a mixture of different cultures and are trying to rethink and continuously negotiate their cultural practices (often through the display of contradictory feelings and identifications), others identify with an imagined community and enjoy drawing boundaries between what is “Bulgarian” and what is not. The indispensable daily visit to Facebook is clearly a means of forging an ongoing sense of belonging to the Bulgarian community scattered across the globe. Facebook makes possible the double presence of Bulgarian immigrants both here and there and facilitates the ongoing processes of identity construction that depend, more and more, upon new media. In this respect, the role that Facebook plays in the life of the Bulgarian diaspora may be seen as a facet of an increasingly dynamic transnational world in which interactive media may be seen to contribute creatively to the formation of collective identities and the deformation of monolithic cultures. References Anderson, Benedict. L’Imaginaire National: Réflexions sur l’Origine et l’Essor du Nationalisme. Paris: La Découverte, 1983. Appadurai, Ajun. Après le Colonialisme: Les Conséquences Culturelles de la Globalisation. Paris: Payot, 2001. Bernal, Victoria. “Diaspora, Cyberspace and Political Imagination: The Eritrean Diaspora Online.” Global Network 6 (2006): 161-79. boyd, danah. “Social Network Sites: Public, Private, or What?” Knowledge Tree (May 2007). Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. London: University College London Press. 1997. Goffman, Erving. La Présentation de Soi. Paris: Editions de Minuit, Collection Le Sens Commun, 1973. Fourcade, Marie-Blanche. “De l’Arménie au Québec: Itinéraires de Souvenirs Touristiques.” Ethnologies 27.1 (2005): 245-76. Freud, Sigmund. “Psychologie des Foules et Analyses du Moi.” Essais de Psychanalyse. Paris: Petite Bibliothèque Payot, 2001 (1921). Herzfeld, Michael. Intimité Culturelle. Presse de l’Université de Laval, 2008. Karim, Karim-Haiderali. The Media of Diaspora. Oxford: Routledge, 2003. Marcheva, Marta. “Bulgarian Diaspora and the Media Treatment of Bulgaria in the French, Italian and North American Press (1992–2007).” Unpublished PhD dissertation. Paris: University Panthéon – Assas Paris 2, 2010. Mead, George Herbert. L’Esprit, le Soi et la Société. Paris: PUF, 2006. Negroponte, Nicholas. Being Digital. Vintage, 2005. Soultanova, Ralitza. “Les Migrations Multiples de la Population Bulgare.” Actes du Dolloque «La France et les Migrants des Balkans: Un État des Lieux.” Paris: Courrier des Balkans, 2005. Srinivasan, Ramesh, and Ajit Pyati. “Diasporic Information Environments: Reframing Immigrant-Focused Information Research.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 58.12 (2007): 1734-44. Todorov, Tzvetan. Nous et les Autres: La Réflexion Française sur la Diversité Humaine. Paris: Seuil, 1989.

Abstract:

Ways of Seeing"Images … define our experiences more precisely in areas where words are inadequate." (Berger 33)"Different skins, you know, different ways of seeing the world." (Morrison)The research question animating this article is: 'How does an individual creative worker re-present themselves as a contemporary - and evolving - brand?' Berger notes that the "principal aim has been to start a process of questioning" (5), and the raw material energising this exploration is the life's work of Richard Morrison, the creative director and artist who is the key moving force behind The Morrison Studio collective of designers, film makers and visual effects artists, working globally but based in London. The challenge of maintaining currency in this visually creative marketplace includes seeing what is unique about your potential contribution to a larger project, and communicating it in such a way that this forms an integral part of an evolving brand - on trend, bleeding edge, but reliably professional. One of the classic outputs of Morrison's oeuvre, for example, is the title sequence for Terry Gilliam's Brazil.Passion cannot be seen yet Morrison conceives it as the central engine that harnesses skills, information and innovative ways of working to deliver the unexpected and the unforgettable. Morrison's perception is that the design itself can come after the creative artist has really seen and understood the client's perspective. As he says: "What some clients are interested in is 'How can we make money from what we're doing?'" Seeing the client, and the client's motivating needs, is central to Morrison's presentation of self as a brand: "the broader your outlook as a creative, the more chance you have of getting it right". Jones and Warren draw attention to one aspect of this dynamic: "Wealthy and private actors, both private and state, historically saw creative practice as something that money was spent on - commissioning a painting or a sculpture, giving salaries to composers to produce new works and so forth. Today, creativity has been reimagined as something that should directly or indirectly make money" (293). As Berger notes, "We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves…The world-as-it-is is more than pure objective fact, it includes consciousness" (9, 11). What is our consciousness around the creative image?Individuality is central to Berger's vision of the image in the "specific vision of the image-maker…the result of an increasing consciousness of individuality, accompanying an increasing awareness of history" (10). Yet, as Berger argues "although every image embodies a way of seeing, our perception or appreciation of an image depends also upon our own way of seeing" (10). Later, Berger links the meanings viewers attribute to images as indicating the "historical experience of our relation to the past…the experience of seeking to give meaning to our lives" (33). The seeing and the seeking go hand in hand, and constitute a key reason for Berger's assertion that "the entire art of the past has now become a political issue" (33). This partly reflects the ways in which it is seen, and in which it is presented for view, by whom, where and in which circ*mstances.The creation of stand-out images in the visually-saturated 21st century demands a nuanced understanding of ways in which an idea can be re-presented for consumption in a manner that makes it fresh and arresting. The focus on the individual also entails an understanding of the ways in which others are valuable, or vital, in completing a coherent package of skills to address the creative challenge to hand. It is self-evident that other people see things differently, and can thus enrich the broadened outlook identified as important for "getting it right". Morrison talks about "little core teams, there's four or five of you in a hub… [sometimes] spread all round the world, but because of the Internet and the way things work you can still all be connected". Team work and members' individual personalities are consequently combined, in Morrison's view, with the core requirement of passion. As Morrison argues, "personality will carry you a long way in the creative field".Morrison's key collaborator, senior designer and creative partner/art director Dean Wares lives in Valencia, Spain whereas Morrison is London-based and their clients are globally-dispersed. Although Morrison sees the Internet as a key technology for collaboratively visualising the ways in which to make a visual impact, Berger points to the role of the camera in relation to the quintessential pre-mechanical image: the painting. It is worth acknowledging here that Berger explicitly credits Walter Benjamin, including the use of his image (34), as the foundation for many of Berger's ideas, specifically referencing Benjamin's essay "The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction". Noting that, prior to the invention of the camera, a painting could never be seen in more than one place at a time, Berger suggests that the camera foments a revolutionary transformation: "its meaning changes. Or, more exactly, its meaning multiplies and fragments into many meanings" (19). This disruption is further fractured once that camera-facilitated image is viewed on a screen, ubiquitous to Morrison's stock in trade, but in Berger's day (1972) particularly associated with the television:The painting enters each viewer's house. There it is surrounded by his wallpaper, his furniture, his mementoes. It enters the atmosphere of his family. It becomes their talking point. It lends its meaning to their meaning. At the same time it enters a million other houses and, in each of them, is seen in a different context. Because of the camera, the painting now travels to the spectator, rather than the spectator to the painting. In its travels, its meaning is diversified. (Berger, 19-20)Even so, that image, travelling through space and time is seen on the screen in a sequential and temporal context: "because a film unfolds in time and a painting does not. In a film the way one image follows another, their succession constructs an argument which becomes irreversible. In a painting all its elements are there to be seen simultaneously." Both these dynamics, the still and the sequence, are key to the work of a visual artist such as Morrison responsible for branding a film, television series or event. But the works also create an unfolding sequence which tells a different story to each recipient according to the perceptions of the viewer/reader. For example, instead of valorising Gilliam's Brazil, Morrison's studio could have been tagged with Annaud's Enemy at the Gates or, even, the contemporary Sky series, Niel Jordan's Riviera. Knowing this sequence, and that the back catalogue begins with The Who's Quadrophenia (1979), changes the way we see what the Morrison Studio is doing now.Ways of WorkingRichard Morrison harnesses an evolutionary metaphor to explain his continuing contribution to the industry: "I've adapted, and not been a dinosaur who's just sunk in the mud". He argues that there is a need to explore where "the next niche is and be prepared for change 'cause the only constant thing in life is change. So as a creative you need to have that known." Effectively, adaptation and embracing innovation has become a key part of the Morrison Studio's brand. It is trumpeted in the decision that Morrison and Ware made when they decided to continue their work together, even after Ware moved to Spain. This demonstrated, in an age of faxes and landlines, that the Morrison Studio could make cross country collaboration work: the multiple locations championed the fact that they were open for business "without boundaries".There was travel, too, and in those early pre-Internet days of remote location Morrison was a frequent visitor to the United States. "I'd be working in Los Angeles and he'd be wherever he was […] we'd use snail mail to actually get stuff across, literally post it by FedEx […]." The intercontinental (as opposed to inter-Europe) collaboration had the added value of offering interlocking working days: "I'd go to sleep, he wakes up […] We were actually doubling our capacity." If anything, these dynamics are more entrenched with better communications. Currah argues that Hollywood attempts to manage the disruptive potential of the internet by "seeking to create a 'closed' sphere of innovation on a global scale […] legitimated, enacted and performed within relational networks" (359). The Morrison Studio's own dispersed existence is one element of these relational networks.The specific challenge of technological vulnerability was always present, however, long before the Internet: "We'd have a case full of D1 tapes" - the professional standard video tape (1986-96) - "and we'd carefully make sure they'd go through the airport so they don't get rubbed […] what we were doing is we were fitting ourselves up for the new change". At the same time, although the communication technologies change, there are constants in the ways that people use them. Throughout Morrison's career, "when I'm working for Americans, which I'm doing a lot, they expect me to be on the telephone at midnight [because of time zones]. […] They think 'Oh I want to speak to Richard now. Oh it's midnight, so what?' They still phone up. That's constant, that never goes away." He argues that American clients are more complex to communicate with than his Scandinavian clients, giving the example that people assume a UK-US consistency because they share the English language. But "although you think they're talking in a tongue that's the same, their meaning and understanding can sometimes be quite a bit different." He uses the example of the A4 sheet of paper. It has different dimensions in the US than in the UK, illustrating those different ways of seeing.Morrison believes that there are four key constants in his company's continuing success: deadlines; the capacity to scope a job so that you know who and how many people to pull in to it to meet the deadline; librarian skills; and insecurity. The deadlines have always been imposed on creative organisations by their clients, but being able to deliver to deadlines involves networks and self-knowledge: "If you can't do it yourself find a friend, find somebody that's good at adding up, find somebody that's good at admin. You know, don't try and take on what you can't do. Put your hand up straight away, call in somebody that can help you". Chapain and Comunian's work on creative and cultural industries (CCIs) also highlights the importance of "a new centrality to the role of individuals and their social networks in understanding the practice of CCIs" (718).Franklin et al. suggest that this approach, adopted by The Morrison Studio, is a microcosm of the independent film sector as a whole. They argue that "the lifecycle of a film is segmented into sequential stages, moving through development, financing, production, sales, distribution and exhibition stages to final consumption. Different companies, each with specialized project tasks, take on responsibility and relative financial risk and reward at each stage" (323). The importance that Morrison places on social networks, however, highlights the importance of flexibility within relationships of trust - to the point where it might be as valid to engage someone on the basis of a history of working with that person as on the basis of that person's prior experience. As Cristopherson notes, "many creative workers are in vaguely defined and rapidly changing fields, seemingly making up their careers as they go along" (543).The skills underlying Morrison's approach to creative collaboration, however, include a clear understanding of one's own strength and weaknesses and a cool evaluation of others, "just quietly research people". This people-based research includes both the capabilities of potential colleagues, in order to deliver the required product in the specified time frame, along with research into creative people whose work is admired and who might provide a blueprint for how to arrive at an individual's dream role. Morrison gives the example of Quentin Tarantino's trajectory to directing: "he started in a video rental and all he did is watch lots and lots of films, particularly westerns and Japanese samurai films and decided 'I can do that'". One of his great pleasures now is to mentor young designers to help them find their way in the industry. That's a strategy that may pay dividends into the future, via Storper and Scott's "traded and untraded interdependencies" which are, according to Gornostaeva, "expressed as the multiple economic and social transactions that the participants ought to conduct if they wish to perpetuate their existence" (39).As for the library skills, he says that they are crucial but a bit comical:It's a bit like being a constant librarian in old-fashioned terms, you know, 'Where is that stuff stored?' Because it's not stored in a plan chest anymore where you open the drawer and there it is. It's now stored in, you know, big computers, in a cloud. 'Where did we put that file? Did we dump it down? Have we marked it up? […] Where's it gone? What did we do it on?'While juggling the demands of technology, people and product The Morrison brand involves both huge confidence and chronic insecurity. The confidence is evident in the low opinion Morrison has of the opportunities offered by professional disruptor sites such as 99designs: "I can't bear anything like that. I can see why it's happening but I think what you're doing is devaluing yourself even before you start […] it would destroy your self-belief in what you're doing". At the same time, Morrison says, his security is his own insecurity: "I'm always out hunting to see what could be next […] the job you finish could be your last job."Ways of BrandingChristopherson argues that there is "considerable variation in the occupational identities of new media workers among advanced economies. In some economies, new media work is evolving in a form that is closer to that of the professional [in contrast to economies where it is] an entrepreneurial activity in which new media workers sell skills and services in a market" (543). For The Morrison Studio, its breadth, history and experience supports their desire to be branded as professional, but their working patterns entirely resonate with, and are integrated within, the entrepreneurial. Seeing their activity in this way is a juxtaposition with the proposition advanced by Berger that:The existing social conditions make the individual feel powerless. He lives in the contradiction between what he is and what he would like to be. Either he then becomes fully conscious of the contradiction and its causes, and so joins the political struggle for a full democracy which entails, among other things, the overthrow of capitalism; or else he lives, continually subject to an envy which, compounded with his sense of powerlessness, dissolves into recurrent day-dreams (148).The role of the brand, and its publicity, is implicated by Berger in both the tension between what an individual is and what s/he would like to be; and in the creation of an envy that subjugates people. For Berger, the brand is about publicity and the commodifying of the future. Referring to publicity images, Berger argues that "they never speak of the present. Often they refer to the past and always they speak of the future". Brands are created and marketed by such publicity images that are often, these days, incorporated within social media and websites. At the same time, Berger argues that "Publicity is about social relationships, not objects [or experiences]. Its promise is not of pleasure, but of happiness: happiness as judged from the outside by others. The happiness of being envied is glamour." It is the dual pressure from the perception of the gap between the individual's actual and potential life, and the daydreaming and envy of that future, that helps construct Berger's powerless individual.Morrison's view, fashioned in part by his success at adapting, at not being a dinosaur that sinks into the mud, is that the authenticity lies in the congruence of the brand and the belief. "A personal brand can help you straight away but as long as you believe it […] You have to be true to what you're about and then it works. And then the thing becomes you [… you] just go for it and, you know, don't worry about failure. Failure will happen anyway".Berger's commentary on publicity is partially divergent from branding. Publicity is generally a managed message, on that is paid for and promoted by the person or entity concerned. A brand is a more holistic construction and is implicated in ways of seeing in that different people will have very different perceptions of the same brand. Morrison's view of his personal brand, and the brand of the Morrison Studio, is that it encompasses much more than design expertise and technical know-how. He lionises the role of passion and talks about the importance of ways of managing deadlines, interlocking skills sets, creative elements and the insecurity of uncertainty.For the producers who hire Morrison, and help build his brand, Berger's observation of the importance of history and the promise for the future remains key to their hiring decisions. Although carefully crafted, creative images are central to the Morrison Studio's work, it is not the surface presentation of those images that determines the way their work is perceived by people in the film industry, it is the labour and networks that underpin those images. While Morrison's outputs form part of the visual environment critiqued in Ways of Seeing, it is informed by the dynamics of international capitalism via global networks and mobility. Although one of myriad small businesses that help make the film industry the complex and productive creative sphere that it is, Morrison Studios does not so much seek to create a public brand as to be known and valued by the small group of industry players upon whom the Studio relies for its existence. Their continued future depends upon the ways in which they are seen.ReferencesBenjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. United States of America, 1969.Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin Books, 1972.Brazil. Dir. Terry Gilliam. Universal Pictures. 1985. Film. Chapain, Caroline, and Roberta Comunian. "Enabling and Inhibiting the Creative Economy: The Role of the Local and Regional Dimensions in England." Regional Studies 44.6 (2010): 717-734. Christopherson, Susan. "The Divergent Worlds of New Media: How Policy Shapes Work in the Creative Economy." Review of Policy Research 21.4 (2004): 543-558. Currah, Andrew. "Hollywood, the Internet and the World: A Geography of Disruptive Innovation." Industry and Innovation 14.4 (2007): 359-384. Enemies at the Gates. Dir. Jean-Jacques Annaud. Paramount. 2001. FilmFranklin, Michael, et al. "Innovation in the Application of Digital Tools for Managing Uncertainty: The Case of UK Independent Film." Creativity and Innovation Management 22.3 (2013): 320-333. Gornostaeva, Galina. "The Wolves and Lambs of the Creative City: The Sustainability of Film and Television Producers in London." Geographical Review (2009): 37-60. Jones, Phil, and Saskia Warren. "Time, Rhythm and the Creative Economy." Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 41.3 (2016): 286-296. Morrison, Richard. Personal Interview. 13 Oct 2016.The Morrison Studio. The Morrison Studio, 2017. 16 June 2017 <https://themorrisonstudio.com/>.Quadrophenia. Dir. Franc Roddam. Brent Walker Film Distributing. 1979. Film.Riviera. Dir. Neil Jordan. Sky Atlantic HD. 2017. Film.Storper, Michael, and Scott, Allen. "The Geographical Foundations and Social Regulation of Flexible Production Complexes". The Power of Geography: How Territory Shapes Social Life. Eds. Jennifer Wolch and Michael Dear. New York: Routledge, 1989. 21-40.