Sean Redmond

When we decided on the theme of Desecrating Celebrity for the Fourth Celebrity Studies International Conference at Sapienza University in Rome, 2018, none of the most powerful examples of contemporary desecration had yet occurred. We were still to see the allegations of rape, sexual assault and sexual abuse laid by over eighty women against Hollywood film producer, Harvey Weinstein. This in turn gave rise to the #metoo movement and the flood of male stars and celebrities who were accused of using their positions of power for their own ends, including Kevin Spacey. We were still to see: Bill Cosby’s final metamorphosis from the beloved, cuddly patriarch of The Coby Show, into an inveterate predator; the tax evasion scandal that engulfed Cristiano Ronaldo, and the subsequent rape allegations levelled against him; the ferocious divorce between cult and mainstream idol Johnny Deep and Amber Heard, including allegations of spousal abuse; the demise of Brangelina’s marriage and the battle over alimony and who would be custodians over their children; and the airing of the HBO documentary Leaving Neverland which accuses Michael Jackson of paedophilia. There are numerous other examples, a veritable polluted sea of falls from grace and the perversion of star and celebrity images: it was if desecration was now the dominant, the central determinant of celebrity culture. Of course, many of the examples listed here are tied to sexual power and the ideologies that shape them.
Even if such determination can be questioned – stars and celebrities continue to provide cohering social myths to bind with - the issues of degradation, desecration and decelebrification are an integral part of the complex phenomenon of celebrity.

Not Here.

David Bowie has always been a significant figure of the screen. Through appearing in experimental music videos, tense television interviews, controversial live performances, biographical documentaries, and auteur
and genre films, he was a seminal, shimmering part of screen culture for more than forty years. His first television appearance was on the BBC’s Tonight program, in 1964, where he was interviewed about his newly founded Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Long-Haired Men. At this stage, when he was still called David Jones, we are introduced to not only his hunger for publicity but also his closeness to difference, of not quite fitting in.

David Bowie is, of course, not a single or singular star image: he has appeared as David Bowie and in and through various high-voltage, liminal, gender-bending personae, including Aladdin Sane (1971); he has appeared in self-reflexive cameo roles in such films as Zoolander (Ben Stiller, 2001); and he has taken on various serious acting roles, including the outcast poet-musician Baal in Baal (Alan Clarke, BBC, 1982), the vampire John Blaylock in The Hunger (Tony Scott, 1983), the murderous Pontius Pilate in The Last Temptation of Christ (Martin Scorsese, 1988), and the enigmatic inventor Nikola Tesla in The Prestige (Christopher Nolan, 2006).

Across the body of David Bowie’s screen work, one finds a great diversity in the type of roles he has taken on and the performances he has given, even if they are, nonetheless, all loosely bound by a profound alterity— a signification of difference...

Screen media form the connective tissue of Melbourne’s cultural and artistic life. From key moments in early cinema, such as the production of the world’s first feature film, The Story of the Kelly Gang (Charles Tait, 1906), to the broadcast of national sporting events such as the Melbourne Cup and AFL Grand Final, to early video game developers such as Beam Software, which established its first offices in the city, there is barely a section of Melbourne that has not been illuminated and transformed by the pulsating arteries and veins of the city’s neon-soaked screen culture.

The articles that constitute this special dossier emerged from the Screening Melbourne symposium held in Melbourne from 22-24 February 2017. The symposium fruitfully connected scholars, industry, practitioners and the public to celebrate the city’s diverse and ongoing contribution to global, national and local screen cultures. In particular, it was intended to address four interlocking strands with the corollary intention of creating a unique space for scholars, practitioners and industry representatives to engage with the ways in which Melbourne functions and has functioned as a location and set of productive forces. The symposium posited four central and entwined strands for exploring the incandescent screens that capture this modern metropolis...

The four videographic essays that make up this special edition have developed out of the work pioneered by the Eye Tracking and the Moving Image Research group. ETMI was set up in late 2012 by Jodi Sita, a neuroscientist, and Sean Redmond, a film and television theorist, with two central goals in mind: one, they wanted to utilise eye tracking technology more centrally in the analysis and examination of the moving image; and two, they wanted to draw together scholars and practitioners from the Sciences and the (Creative) Arts and Humanities so that different modes of enquiry, and theoretical and methodological apparatuses, were placed in the same analytical arena. They felt that by having a room full of filmmakers, artists, film and cultural theorists, screenwriters, visual ethnographers, vision scientists and neuroscientists, new and exciting conversations and deliberations about how viewers engage with the moving image would be born.  This would be in stark contrast to what they felt had gone before where eye tracking analysis of film had been dominated by cognitive, neo-formalist approaches (see Redmond, and Batty, 2015). The formation of the group, then, created a strong commitment to inter-disciplinary and cross-institutional relationships, and to what was considered a necessary dialogue between different disciplines united by a shared desire: to investigate vision regimes in relation to the affecting power and beauty of the moving image. From its inception ETMI was also committed to the poetics of eye tracking and its potential to recast the way research could and should be carried out (see Redmond, 2016). The very first seeds of ETMI involved the blossoming talk of how the videographic essay would best capture its always exciting and equally vexing findings.

In this issue the convergence comes to life, with four essays that each explore and demonstrate the natural fit of the videographic format for eye tracking research. The two phenomena converge around the problem of substitution: eye tracking research works with predominantly visual data that is then translated into prose, and the video essay interferes in the ekphrastic challenge of expressing spectatorship through the written medium. When drawing, as the ETMI group does, upon the former to examine the latter, the ability of the video essay to conduct analysis on the terms of its object – i.e., moving images and sounds – is uniquely valuable (see Keathley and Mittell, 2016). Preserving the live data of audiences watching images as they move enables the dynamic illustration that eye tracking as technology and methodology requires. Further, though, the video essay showcases the uncanny nature of eye tracking research, where researchers are compelled to watch the traces of their subjects watching. By putting the audience into this vital position of spectatorship, the video essay primes its viewer to experientially consider the poetic and phenomenological pathways that eye tracking can open up.

This collection showcases these diverse ways in which eye tracking can inform and support both critical and creative screen analysis, starting with Unseen Screens: Eye Tracking, Magic and Misdirection by Tessa Dwyer and Jenny Robinson. This piece introduces some key concepts and visualisation techniques in moving-image eye tracking research including attentional synchrony, edit blindness, heat mapping, and aggregate gaze plot data. Navigating through these fixtures, Unseen Screens drills down into misdirection, foregrounding continuities between seeing and not seeing, illusion and transparency, film and magic. This piece is followed by two interconnected works that unfold around the thematic of sound: Materialisation, Emotion & Attention: Tracking Sound’s Perceptual Effects in Film by Darrin Verhagen, and The Ear that Dreams: Eye Tracking Sound in the Moving Image by Sean Redmond. With humour and insight, Verhagen explores and debunks a range of sound/image theories and principles to argue for the ability of sound design to transform attention by deepening levels of engagement. Redmond further probes the affordances of film sound – its immersive, bi-sensorial and synesthetic effects – to explore the intensities that eye tracking data cannot image but only imagine. In this way, The Ear That Dreams prepares ground for embodied eye tracking methodologies. These tandem works on sound are followed by Dead Time, a piece by Catherine Fowler, Claire Perkins, and Andrea Rassell that institutes a dramatic change of pace, dramatising and massaging the tensions and challenges inherent within ‘slow cinema’. Dead Time reverses the usual tendency in eye tracking research to examine data through a quantitative lens. Instead, Fowler, Perkins, and Rassell ‘unbundle’ eye tracking to focus on the experiential idiosyncrasies of individualised viewing patterns. The order in which these works are presented moves from exposition to abstraction, orienting viewers initially through a mapping of misdirection and screen/sound relations before leading into an exploration of emotion, engagement, and affective poetics to settle finally upon an unflinching moment of meditative self-reflexion. Together these works chart eye tracking methods, approaches and data sets, yet they also acknowledge how charts and maps are themselves representations —part fiction, part fact. In doing so, they question and broaden understandings of eye tracking and the arts/science nexus.

See: http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/intransition/theme-week/2017/36/journal-videographic-film-moving-image-studies-43-2017

References

Keathley, Christian, Mittell, Jason (2016). The Videographic Essay: Criticism in Sound and Image. caboose.

Redmond, Sean, Batty, Craig (2015). ‘Seeing into Things: Eye Tracking the Moving Image’. Refractory 25. See: http://refractory.unimelb.edu.au/2015/02/06/redmond-batty/

Redmond, Sean (2016). ‘The Love Particles of Eye Tracking’. brief 54: 111-120. Available at:  https://www.academia.edu/27920420/The_Love_Particles_of_Eye_Tracking

We had three intentions in mind when employing the circuit of culture model (du Gay et al. 1997) to ‘intersect’ the cultural signicance of David Bowie. First, we felt that by traversing the  five points on the circuit – representation, identity, production, consumption and regulation – all the ways in which David Bowie enters and circulates within contemporary culture would open out to us in richly vexing and dynamically connecting articulations. We felt that by unravelling David Bowie in this way would allow us to critically understand media culture more broadly. By running David Bowie through the circuit of culture we would not only get to understand his stardom and celebrity but how cultural forms are established, maintained, circulated and circumnavigated. Exploring Bowie in this way would allow us to historicize and contemporize media culture in equally exciting and provocative ways.

Second, we wanted to, both demonstrate the usefulness, and some of the limitations, of the circuit of culture model in fostering cultural understanding. The intention was to extend its application beyond products, goods and services. In essence, we wanted to embody the circuit of culture.

Third, we wanted to recognize the signicance and legacy of Stuart Hall’s later cultural studies work, particularly the way new forms of cultural empowerment  flooded his writing and reignited his understanding of, and belief in, active agency and ideological resistance.

There is science in art – the alchemy of paint, the binary codes computing away in a camera, the expressive anatomy in portraiture and sculpture.

There is art in science – the artistic precision of the scalpel, the cool aesthetics of the laboratory, and the intimate observations undertaken by scientists to discover new materials and microbes living unseen in the world.

Bio-art, an artistic genre that took hold in the 1980s, solidifies, extends and enriches this organic relationship. According to the artist and writer Frances Stracey, it represents:

a crossover of art and the biological sciences, with living matter, such as genes, cells or animals, as its new media

Bio-artists might use and incorporate imaging technologies within the artistic space; bringing living and dead matter into the gallery. They draw upon biology metaphors to imbue artwork with healing and wounding propensities...

The question that has led and organised this special edition on David Bowie draws provocative attention to the way his career has been narrated by the constant transformation and recasting of his star image. By asking who is he now? the edition recognises that Bowie is a chameleon figure, one who reinvents himself in and across the media and art platforms that he is found in. This process of renewal means that Bowie constantly kills himself, an artistic suicide that allows for dramatic event moments to populate his music, and for a rebirth to emerge at the same time or shortly after he expires. Bowie has killed Major Tom, Ziggy Stardust, Halloween Jack, Aladdin Sane, and the Thin White Duke to name but a few of his alter-egos. In this environment of death and resurrection, Bowie becomes a heightened, exaggerated enigma, a figure who constantly seems to be artificial or constructed and yet whose work asks us to look for his real self behind the mask – to ask the question, is this now the real Bowie that faces us? Of course, the answer is always no because Bowie is a contradictory constellation of images, stories and sounds whose star image rests on remaining an enigma, and like all stars in our midst, exists as a representation. Nonetheless, with Bowie - with this hyper- schizophrenic, confessional artist – the fan desire to get to know him, to immerse oneself in his worlds, fantasises, and projections - is particularly acute. With the unexpected release of The Next Day ((Iso/Columbia) on the 8th March 2013, the day of his 66th birthday, Bowie was resurrected again. The album and subsequent music videos drew explicitly on the question of who Bowie was and had been, creating a media frenzy around his past work, fan nostalgia for previous Bowie incarnations, and a pleasurable negotiation with his new output. In this special edition, edited by life-long Bowie fans, with contributions from die-hard Bowie aficionados, we seek to find him in the fragments and remains of what once was, and in the new enchantments of his latest work.

Seeing into Screens: Eye Tracking and the Moving Image is the first dedicated anthology that explores vision and perception as it materializes as viewers watch screen content. While nearly all moving image research either 'imagines' how its audience responds to the screen, or focuses upon external responses, this collection utilizes the data produced from eye tracking technology to assess seeing and knowing, gazing and perceiving.

The editors divide their collection into the following four sections: eye tracking performance, which addresses the ways viewers respond to screen genre, actor and star, auteur, and cinematography; eye tracking aesthetics which explores the way viewers gaze upon colour, light, movement, and space; eye tracking inscription, which examines the way the viewer responds to subtitles, translation, and written information found in the screen world; and eye tracking augmentation which examines the role of simulation, mediation, and technological intervention in the way viewers engage with screen content. At a time when the nature of viewing the screen is extending and diversifying across different platforms and exhibitions, Seeing into Screens is a timely exploration of how viewers watch the screen.

Abstract:

Genre films are constructed out of narrative patterns and plot points that involve or are predicted on crisis, on danger. This is the logic of much if not all mainstream genre cinema: drama has to take place for there to be a story to be told, and for pleasure and identification to be arrested and enthused. Forms of threatening disequilibrium can be personal, domestic, familial, local, external, supernatural and murderous; a way of life can be threatened as well as life itself. There are ideological dimensions at play; the crisis threatens to destabilize patriarchy, heterosexuality, social norms and expectations. Feelings and modes of affect are set in dangerous motion as the crisis unfolds. Trouble may emerge from a wayward or transgressive family member, or it may arrive in town on horses, stagecoaches, trains, cars, spaceships, and on the wind and in the water. The main (and minor) characters in the film are at the center of this storm, and that places viewers at the epicenter of the danger, also. The genre film places us all in danger. The genre film, then, has phenomenal, phenomenological and bio-political potential as a site of cognitive, ideological and carnal endangerment.
Publication Date: Jul 7, 2015
Publication Name: Endangering Science Fiction Film

Companion to Celebrity presents a multi-disciplinary collection of original essays that explore myriad issues relating to the origins, evolution, and current trends in the field of celebrity studies.

    Offers a detailed, systematic, and clear presentation of all aspects of celebrity studies, with a structure that carefully build its enquiry
    Draws on the latest scholarly developments in celebrity analyses
    Presents new and provocative ways of exploring celebrity’s meanings and textures
    Considers the revolutionary ways in which new social media have impacted on the production and consumption of celebrity

The study of celebrity begins in wonder. And, at the end, when critical thought has done its best, the wonder remains…

Endangering Science Fiction Film explores the ways in which science fiction film is a dangerous and endangering genre. The collection argues that science fiction's cinematic power rests in its ability to imagine ‘Other’ worlds that challenge and disturb the lived conditions of the ‘real’ world, as it is presently known to us. From classic films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Solaris to modern blockbusters including World War Z and Gravity, and directors from David Cronenberg to Alfonso Cuarón, contributors comment on the way science fiction film engages with dangerous encounters, liminal experiences, sublime aesthetics, and untethers space and time to question the very nature of human existence. With the analysis of a diverse range of films from Europe, Asia, North and South America, Endangering Science Fiction Film offers a uniquely interdisciplinary view of the evolving and dangerous sentiments and sensibility of this genre.

A longstanding, successful and frequently controversial career spanning more than four decades establishes David Bowie as charged with contemporary cultural relevance. That David Bowie has influenced many lives is undeniable to his fans. He requisitions and challenges his audiences, through frequently indirect lyrics and images, to critically question sanity, identity and essentially what it means to be 'us' and why we are here.

Enchanting David Bowie explores David Bowie as an anti-temporal figure and argues that we need to understand him across the many media platforms and art spaces he intersects with including theatre, film, television, the web, exhibition, installation, music, lyrics, video, and fashion. This exciting collection is organized according to the key themes of space, time, body, and memory - themes that literally and metaphorically address the key questions and intensities of his output. - See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/enchanting-david-bowie-9781628923056/#sthash.XyYd0s8z.dpuf

Historically, a great deal of audience research within film studies either rests on an imagined viewer, or involves qualitative memory work, interviews and focus groups. There is nascent work on the neurological and physiological transformations that viewers undergo while watching a film (Hasson 2008), but little empirical work on what the eyes actually focus upon; at what viewers actually gaze at when watching a movie. The eye-tracking technology employed by the authors of this chapter affords us the opportunity to find out what viewers actually gaze at, for what length of time, and with what intensity. However, the authors of this chapter consider sound to be one of the key determinants in directing or influencing gaze patterns: we recognize that as an object of study film is an audio-visual medium with a complex and multi-layered sonic field in operation.

Drawing on cinematic theories of sound, and neuroscientific understandings of the eye and the gaze, we undertake a comparative analysis of two film sequences: the ‘chase sequence’ from the animated film, Monsters, Inc. (Docter et al. 2001), and the first five minutes of the Omaha Beach landing scene from Saving Private Ryan (Spielberg, 1998). Both films involve complex sound design, moments of perceptual shock, spatial and temporal shifts in sound, and heightened sonic agency.

Six viewers were eye tracked, and the data gathered analyzed through a combination of close textual analysis and the statistical interpretation of collated gaze patterns (with the generation of heat and contour maps, for example). The viewers were shown these sequences twice: once with its normal audio field playing, and once with the sound taken out. In this chapter we interpret this data to answer the following questions: to what extent do viewers’ eyes follow narrative-based sound cues? How does the soundtrack affect viewer engagement and attention to detail? Is there an element of prediction and predictability in the way a viewer sees and hears? Do viewers’ eyes ‘wander’ when there is no sound to guide them where to look? Ultimately, we ask how important is sound to the cinematic experience of vision?

On a very basic level, this is bound to be a fascinating book. after all, the object of study - celebrity - clearly fascinates. the media, in its various guises, are absolutely filled with stories of the famed and celebrated. Online culture in all its many mobile and social media structures continues to use celebrity as the "click-bait" to draw attention and guide the searching users though all manner of content and stories. At the same time, all this activity, all these vignettes on stars and the notorious have generally been seen by cultural critics and audiences alike as the ephemera of culture and history, the flotsam and jetsam of contemporary culture that, like a piece of sea-glass, attracts the eye but we know that in its origins had only a momentary utility that led to its current stats as a discarded and forgotten fragment of an object....

Genre films are constructed out of narrative patterns and plot points that involve or are predicted on crisis, on danger. This is the logic of much if not all mainstream genre cinema: drama has to take place for there to be a story to be told, and for pleasure and identification to be arrested and enthused. Forms of threatening disequilibrium can be personal, domestic, familial, local, external, supernatural and murderous; a way of life can be threatened as well as life itself. There are ideological dimensions at play; the crisis threatens to destabilize patriarchy, heterosexuality, social norms and expectations. Feelings and modes of affect are set in dangerous motion as the crisis unfolds. Trouble may emerge from a wayward or transgressive family member, or it may arrive in town on horses, stagecoaches, trains, cars, spaceships, and on the wind and in the water. The main (and minor) characters in the film are at the center of this storm, and that places viewers at the epicenter of the danger, also. The genre film places us all in danger. The genre film, then, has phenomenal, phenomenological and bio-political potential as a site of cognitive, ideological and carnal endangerment.

Within the world of contemporary entertainment, the production and consumption of gossip has become a constant feature and is now found circulating across a wide range of media texts and interfaces. From legacy media formats including soap operas, chat shows, and news bulletins, to the emergent digital platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, gossip provides both an internal, narrative mechanism for the appearance of elevated drama, surprise and revelation, and an external forum for individual boundary testing and for shared and extended conversation to take place amongst reporters, interviewers, bloggers, fans and consumers. In this chapter we would like to enter this contested terrain about the value of celebrity gossip to women, by focusing particularly on young women, since one outstanding question that arises from examining either of these positions is how gossip works in relation to teenage girls? In doing so, we have chosen to focus on Miley because of the complex nature of her star and celebratory trajectory – from innocent child star of Hannah Montana to the young woman who is overly sexual, sexualised, and ‘can't be tamed’. Miley provides a rich discourse for understanding the gendered value of celebrity gossip for teenage girls.

The cultural representations and discourses of the Covid-19 pandemic have taken up two central pillars: one where citizenship and civility are seen to break down and the forces of exploitative global capitalism take greater hold; and one where productive citizenship is activated through acts of kindness, generosity, and heroism, or through resistance and protest strategies. These representations and discourses often sit side by side, revealing both the ideological contradictions inherent in the representations and discourses of Covid-19, and the economic and social divisions that in part have shaped human responses to the pandemic.

What interests this special edition is this dialectic: Covid-19 being the prism through which we can see how contemporary life moves and is moved by the tectonic plates of global capitalism. This dialectical approach allows us to explore how the pandemic has been majorly mobilized to shine a light on productive citizenship and the way ‘everyday’ agency has energized and renewed forms of creative participation in the social world. Conversely, the dialectic of the pandemic has also allowed us to question whether these forms of productive citizenship have in fact destabilized the power structures of global capitalism or are demotic only – illusionary in their ability to be reformatory...

In this article we focus upon the ways that " migrants " in Melbourne have used David Bowie to story and make sense of their arrival to Australia, often as refugees or as people looking for a better life. In relation to identity and belonging, some recent work on music fandom (Groene and Hettinger 2015; Lowe 2003), has imposed a meta-frame on the empirical method, substituting voices for a top-down analysis and interpretation. Our approach is to instead draw both upon auto-ethnography and to allow our fellow fans to " story " their own responses, in an attempt to get beneath the modes of feeling that music fandom ignites – situated within the narratives that people construct as they talk these stories. We argue that Bowie's alternative and outsider status resonates keenly with people who find themselves " strangers " in a new land.

Thursday 18 – Saturday 20 June, 2020 | University of Winchester, UK.
http://celebritystudiesconference.com/ | #celebritystudies2020 | celebritystudies@gmail.com

Sponsored by the Culture-Media-Text Research Centre , Faculty of Arts, University of Winchester.

Routledge and the University of Winchester are delighted to announce Transformations in Celebrity Culture: The Fifth International Celebrity Studies Journal conference.

Keynote speakers (confirmed) :
● Dr. Nandana Bose, FLAME University, India.
● Dr. Anthea Taylor, University of Sydney, Australia.
● Prof. Brenda R. Weber, Indiana University Bloomington, USA.
● Dr. Milly Williamson, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK.