Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts

Editorial v15 n2

2024-04-15T22:00:46+00:00

Arts and Gaming, Convergent Feminism and Speculative Futures

2024-04-15T22:01:04+00:00

For this Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts special edition, we called for research papers that reflected the theme of Arts and Games, Convergent Feminism and Speculative Futures. We were interested in exploring and experimenting with the intricate relationships and coalitions between the arts, convergent feminism and digital and analog technologies, bringing together codes and algorithms, creativity and community involvement. This invitation sparked the interest of some authors with diverse points of view and diverse arts-based research. This special edition presents articles that are likely to pick the interest of a wide audience which questions the role of artificial intelligence in the arts and seeks examples of art-based research that takes advantage of transmedia ecologies and gaming to generate sustainable futures.

These Gray Hairs Really Scream Out at me: the Confessional I and Autofiction as Feminist Writing in Gray Hairs

2024-04-16T18:52:21+00:00

This article is a practitioner reflection on confessional writing as feminist writing in my transmedia artwork Gray hairs. Gray hairs is a web-based linear narrative which unfolds through my voice (and text transcript) when readers pluck graying hairs on screen. This article gives an overview of confessional writing, autofiction and digital writing as feminist writing, and reflects on these theoretical discourses through a practitioner perspective on how these theories are and are not implicated in Gray hairs. The article concludes with a practitioner reflection that speculates on how born-digital confessional writing can and could be more aligned with feminist ideas of multiple perspectives and polyphonic voices while keeping in line with the early roots of the feminist movement through the idea that the personal is political.

Digitálias: a Women Art Collective in the Fight Against Gender Violence Through Co-Creative Net Art

2024-04-16T18:08:11+00:00

In this article, we present and discuss the ongoing co-creative net art and transmedia labs with Digitálias, a female collective in the fight against gender violence. Since 2018, we have been organising art labs with the Associação Ser Mulher (ASM), based in Évora, aimed at female victims of intimate partner violence living in a Shelter House, as well as ASM technicians. The labs are part of an exploratory research whose main aim is to analyse how the community artistic practice of net art can play a social role as a tool for empowerment, self-esteem, and identity, using an arts-based action research methodology through the creation, production, and dissemination of practical artistic projects (project-based research), and using women from shelters who are victims of domestic violence as a case study.

Exploring Empathy and Intersectionality in Gaming: a Case Study of Sweetxheart (Small, 2019)

2024-04-15T22:01:57+00:00

This study examines the ability of the game SweetXHeart – a genre-defying slice-of-life creation by Catt Small (2019) – to promote empathy and consciousness of microaggressions, specifically among participants whose characteristics differ from the game's main character – a white male-dominated sample. The study included 39 undergraduate students from a Bachelor’s Degree in videogames, offering a distinct chance to examine the reactions of this specific demographic to feminist and intersectional ideas in gaming. After playing the game, participants were surveyed, and a mixed-methods approach, including quantitative and content analysis, was applied to their answers. The obtained results emphasize how players gain empathy by adopting the game character’s perspective and experiencing her life, and fostering connections. However, the game’s effectiveness in raising awareness depends on the participants’ understanding of intersectionality and the challenges faced by people in positions of privilege.

Instructions and Reflections on How to Play with Time: an Illustrated Story Around the Futuroscopio

2024-04-15T22:02:13+00:00

This contribution delves into the philosophy and design process behind Futuroscopio, a tabletop roleplay game aimed at recovering the players’ agency to transform their present. The article charts the multiple prototypes and insights gained along its iterative development across manifold scenarios. Upon assessment, Futuroscopio emerged as a tool fostering exploration, collaboration, and dialogue, adept at addressing weighty subjects while maintaining players’ engagement. Aligned with Farnè’s Pedagogy of Play, this experience embodies the two fundamental states of education: a spontaneous immersion in natural chaos and a structured reflective process that leads players to learn what they need at their own pace. The conclusions point into an unexplored territory, where play is not limited to basic education, but entails an open attitude for discovery across multiple professional fields, therefore transversal to disciplinary thinking; where games act as provocations to imagine alternative scenarios and transform our present into better possible places.

Toward an Artist-Centred AI

2024-04-15T22:02:27+00:00

Awareness about the immense impact that artificial intelligence (AI) might have or already has made on the social, economic, political, and cultural realities of our world has become part of the mainstream public discourse. Attributes such as ethical, responsible, or explainable emerge as associative and descriptive nominal references in guidelines that influence perspectives on AI application and development. This paper contextualizes the notions of suitability and desirability of principles, practices, and tools related to the use of AI in the arts. The result is a framework drafted as a set of atomic attributes that summarize the values of AI deemed important for artistic creativity. It was composed by examining the challenges that AI poses to art production, distribution, consumption, and monetization. Considering the differentiating potentials of AI and taking a perspective aside from the purely technical ontology, we argue that artistically pertinent AI should be unexpected, diversified, affordant, and evolvable.

The Human-World Relation Mediated by Images

2024-04-15T22:02:40+00:00

In the relation between human and machine vision, as mediators of a world understanding, there are differences associated with the subjective point of view (inherent to humans) and the objective point of view (inherent to machines). How machine vision contributes to our global awareness, even if it represents perspectives that are not accessible to us? The use of technologies thus influences our knowledge and, although we can obtain answers and solutions through them, such as when we use artificial intelligence, the meaning of this knowledge always requires a creative approach, a critical thinking. The aim is to question the degree to which these aspects can be present in artistic processes and the importance of the subjective gaze.

Video Games Against the Male Gaze

2024-04-15T22:02:56+00:00

Video games are a medium that creates content often based on male gaze, allowing heteronormative and patriarchal portrayals that limit the representation of social minorities. In this article, we will study how video games counter the male gaze through realistic, diverse, and in-depth portrayals of their main characters. The case studies will be the characters Chloe Price from Life is Strange: Before the Storm (2017) by Deck Nine, Ellie and Abby from The Last of Us Part II (2020) by Naughty Dog, and Billie Lurk from Dishonored: Death of the Outsider (2017) by Arkane Studios. These video games feature strong female main characters who go against social norms and represent a diversity of sexuality, bodies, and cultures. Through this article, we intend to understand how these video games, which belong to series for a mass audience, are a step towards a commonplace of acceptance, accessibility, and awareness.

A Mani-Pedi-Anti-Counter-FESTO for Queer Screen Production Practice

2024-04-15T22:03:13+00:00

In this audiovisual essay, four practitioner-academics seek to identify and address the need to reimagine queer screen production. Traditional heteronormative storytelling dominates the screen production landscape, necessitating a challenge to create more inclusive and diverse narratives. Through the creation of a manifesto essay film, the researchers collectively reflect on their creative practices, synthesize their approaches, and develop a new vision for queer screen production. The result demonstrates the value of embracing: sustainable practices, queer kinship-making as filmmaking, alternatives to hegemonic forms, queer shame, queer failure, eternal adolescence, and the disruption of the ever-forward momentum (among other approaches). Manifesto-making as a method encourages creative practitioners to question the status quo of screen production contexts and strategies, and to think critically about the storytelling norms in broader creative practice. The researchers argue that such an approach can enable creative practitioners to pave the way for new, innovative collaborations and contribute to a more inclusive and diverse creative landscape.

This film enacts the opportunities that arise when considering the spectrum of screen production in broader, ‘queerer’, ways, through notions of kinship-making, polyphony and the ‘queer art of failure’ (Halberstam 2011). The disruption of dominant narrative models can be considered in the context of queer theory’s critiques of heteronormative temporality, asking how queer approaches to narrative construction might challenge the heteronormative markers of success and happiness, or what Elizabeth Freeman calls ‘chrononormativity’ (2010). Using ‘manifesto as method’, the film combines the authors’ separate practices in filmmaking, screenwriting, mobile media and documentary in ways that deviate from mainstream categorisations, production hierarchies and workflows.

The 14 Steps Towards a Wonderful Failure

2024-04-15T21:59:33+00:00

"Ufffff! So what are we going to do?" ... this is how this film/essay begins. It starts with a conversation between three (maybe more) people in the kitchen of an apartment. The situation seems to be tense, but at the same time, with some charge of emotion. In the upper right edge of the image, we can find an image with the Palestinian flag. Today is November 12, 2023, the armed conflict that began in the city of Gaza a few weeks ago and slowly destroys the city and inhabitants, is still active. This methodology, which is intended to be decidedly anachronistic, in its sense of current against linear narrative time, acts interdependently with the content of each embrace. The unexpected form in which this audiovisual essay manifests itself is entirely related to the form of the project and the content of its non-narrative.

Narrative Structure in 'Pulp Fiction'

2024-04-15T22:03:28+00:00

In this audiovisual essay, the narrative structure of the film Pulp Fiction (Tarantino, 1994) has been analyzed, locating the essential structural vicissitudes of the film in its original montage and linear story, seeking to investigate the reasons that prompted the director to choose such a particular narrative proposal. This audiovisual essay places the two narrative proposals in the same image. The linear story appears on a large screen and the original story is presented on a panel on the right side of the image. The chronological order of the stories has been listed and arranged as counted. The proposed essay shows us that the two stories work, but that perhaps the original story is a more dynamic and innovative exercise in style than the linear story, and that in some moments the vicissitudes and structures of the two narrative proposals coincide. Also that the original story is the story of Jules and his redemption, and the linear one is the story of Butch.

Beyond Non-Linearity: Tracing 'Pulp Fiction'’s Structure and Meaning

2024-04-15T22:03:43+00:00

This article, inspired by Taborda-Hernández’s audiovisual essay, examines Pulp Fiction’s non-linear narrative and its role in the story that is told. Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 masterpiece transformed cinematic storytelling by deviating from traditional narrative structures. Tarantino’s non-linear approach mirrors the deliberate fragmentation seen in postmodern literature, eliciting diverse audience interpretations. Taborda-Hernández’s audiovisual essay delves into Tarantino’s departure from linear storytelling, introducing an experimental linear perspective that prompts inquiries into the story’s efficacy in both linear and non-linear frameworks. This exploration highlights the complex interplay between narrative, characters, and the film’s non-linear structure. Thematic depth within non-linear storytelling enriches the viewing experience prompting reflection on the complex interweaving of human existence and morality, echoing Pulp Fiction’s multi-layered structure. This article contends that the film not only promoted but successfully achieved a continuous dialogue between the audience and the filmmaker, catalyzed by the film’s use of a non-linear structure and its consequential effects.

Review: From Reproducing to Passing On - Publishing as Part of a Critical Spatial Practice

2024-04-15T22:03:57+00:00

Making Futures (Specor Books, 2021) presents a critical, experimental and collective architectural practice that focuses on a project of the same name that took place between 2018 and 2021. Beyond the strong content contributions, the publication is an attempt to find an adequate publication format for this contemporary architectural practice, i.e. to not only question the norms and standards of the editor’s own disciplines, but also of bookmaking and project documentation. In my review, I attempt to address the difficulties of such an endeavor in general and the specific approach of the Making Futures publication.

Review: Playing at a Distance - Borderlands of Videogame Aesthetic

2024-04-15T22:04:13+00:00

Sonia Fizek's Playing at Distance: Borderlands of Video Game Aesthetic navigates the intricate intersection of digital technology, aesthetics, and play in the context of video games, challenging conventional ideas of player agency. This critical recension delves into the book's contributions, highlighting its innovative exploration of mediated distance, interactivity, delegation, automation, ambience, spectacle, and the evolving nature of player engagement. While acknowledging its theoretical depth, this review emphasizes the book's significance in reshaping our understanding of video game aesthetics and the complex relationship between humans, machines, and digital play.