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- Smith, Ashley, 1979-
(författare)
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The Archival Life of Home Movies : Regional Reflections and Negotiated Visions of a Shared Past
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This study investigates the ways in which private home movies are transformed into curated archival objects. Through the concept of the archival home movie, it explores the impact of preservation and content description on access, use, and, thus, regional historiography. Additionally, it maps out the relationship between ordinary home-movie imagery and regional meaning making.Using material from the University of Mississippi’s Home Movie Collection as a case study, the dissertation centers on the practice of researching family films and the possibilities for their contemporary cultural relevance. In recent years, home movies and amateur film have become topics of interest in studies of non-theatrical film as sources for unofficial histories. This dissertation intervenes into these discussions of the cultural value of home movies as a hands-on and self-reflexive investigation into the archive itself, as well as an activation of the archive. This methodology includes stagings of the home movie in live screenings, through which the dissertation investigates modes of spectator engagement with the historical material.Chapter 1 assesses strategies for working with archival home movies that draw from areas such as the study of family photography and photo albums, as well as the study of diaries. The following chapters each move further away from the familial point of origin of the home movie and toward regional re-readings and archival reuses. Using “home” as a starting point, Chapter 2 engages with the domestic elements in a selection of home movies shot on a cotton plantation during the late 1930s and early 1940s. Through an expanded notion of home, it argues that work and free time, public and private, and family and nonfamily are intertwined—both onscreen and off. Chapter 3 positions a collection of archival home movies shot in the Mississippi Delta in the 1950s as mediated witness to the ever-presence and—at times—invisibility of institutionalized racism in the mid-century American South. Chapter 4 maps the creative treatment of one collection of archival home movies in contemporary documentaries, museum installations, and experimental films. Finally, Chapter 5 evaluates the activation of home movies as constructed regional reflections in a series of live screenings associated with Home Movie Day.Previous studies of family photographs and family film have pointed to the ways these media function to obscure discord and present a harmonious picture. Overall, this study of southern home movies demonstrates how a double logic of obfuscation is at work in these films. In addition to a vision of familial harmony, this dissertation argues that the southern home movie also puts forth a vision of racial harmony. This onscreen racial harmony, when presented during the Jim Crow years, should be understood as the result of a specifically white fantasy of racial togetherness that, at the same time, upholds traditional hierarchies.
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| 2. |
- Eriksson, Maria, 1988-
(författare)
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Online music distribution and the unpredictability of software logistics
- 2019
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This compilation dissertation examines the role of software in online music distribution and critically scrutinizes the increased influence of digital technologies in everyday life. In particular, it explores how software coordinates and arranges things, people, and information surrounding music and thereby exerts a logistical power that makes music calculable and governable online. The dissertation consists of four case-studies that problematize the role of software and algorithms in regulating how digital music moves. Article I highlights the role of algorithms in organizing, evaluating, and creating knowledge about artistry, article II uncovers the material, political, and technical networks that facilitate streamed music, article III scrutinizes editorial playlists and their role in packaging and containing digital sound, and article IV traces how software is designed to identify and regulate how music moves and is monetized in the online domain. These case studies draw attention to issues concerning visibility, access, ownership, control, but also—as this dissertation especially aims to highlight—the elements of surprise, unpredictability, and unsettlement that are inherent to complex software technologies.The research contributes to three subfields in media and communication studies: music-oriented media studies, materialist media studies, and software studies. It contributes to music-oriented media research by accounting for the role of digital technologies in organizing musical practices and thereby illustrates how algorithms and software must be taken seriously as agents that shape cultural practices surrounding music. Relatedly, the research contributes to materialist- and softwareoriented media research by continuing the tradition of paying close attention to the technical constitution of media technologies and reflecting on the power and politics of software logistics and its unpredictabilities. Methodologically, the research builds on—and advocates—a mixed-methods approach that combines the use of digital methods, media archeological tactics, and a technology-oriented ethnographic approach. In combining these methods, the dissertation illustrates the benefit of experimental and qualitative methods in the study of digital technologies and highlights the need to approach software as both an object of study and a strategic research tool.Theoretically, the dissertation mainly draws upon materialist and German media theory (e.g., Kittler 1990; 1999; Ernst 2012; 2016), theorizations of logistical operations (e.g., Neilson 2012; Cowen 2014; Durham Peters 2013; Case 2013; Young 2014; 2015), and theories regarding technological accidents, ruptures and unpredictabilities (e.g., Frabetti 2010; Virilio 2007; Parikka and Sampson 2009; Fuller and Goffey 2012). In doing so, the dissertation highlights how the hidden and seemingly ‘grey’ and mundane task of regulating the movement of online music online is, in fact, a deeply cultural and subject to ongoing power struggles. Ultimately, the dissertation illustrates the continued relevance of media research that critically engages with software, adopts digital and experimental methods in the study of digital technologies, acknowledges the logistical power of software, and accounts for the unpredictable events that software technologies sometimes trigger.
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| 3. |
- Wickman, Annika, 1968-
(författare)
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Filmen i försvarets tjänst : Undervisningsfilm i svensk militär utbildning 1920–1939
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Film and other visual media played a significant role in the modernization efforts of the Swedish Armed Forces during the interwar period. Driving the effort to establish educational cinema within the armed forces was an association called Föreningen Armé-, Marin- och Flygfilm (AMF), run by military officers. AMF produced, distributed, and promoted hundreds of military training films over the years which, together with written documentation, are kept in its archives today.Based on empirical basic research, this dissertation discusses these educational activities from several angles. It presents an analysis of eighty instructional and orientation films; examines how military staff became film producers; and traces how educational cinema was gradually integrated into military education accompanied by related technologies, adapted teaching methods, and modified lecture halls. It also reconstructs official justifications for the use of cinema.The dissertation belongs to an evolving field of studies of useful cinema and specifically to a recent shift in international research interest toward military media practices undertaken in peacetime. It offers a first comprehensive study of the history of Swedish military cinema culture and complements previous work on early educational cinema.A general observation of the dissertation concerns the significant challenges proponents of educational cinema faced when attempting to establish it within the Swedish Armed Forces. Cinema was not useful per se. The dissertation proposes an explanation of the historical processes through the lens of assemblage (agencement) to highlight the dynamic entanglement of various heterogeneous actors and components over time. A network of alliances accommodated change and maintained continuity. Military educational cinema was established by those who produced and used the films; those who justified their practices; those who financed them; and those who believed they could gain from them. This military media constellation was also deeply connected to contemporary cinema culture.
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