Jenna Ng is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Film and Interactive Media at the University of York, UK. https://www.york.ac.uk/tfti/staff/academic/jenna-ng/#profile-content
This video essay explores the implications of highly realistic images that appear, interact and s... more This video essay explores the implications of highly realistic images that appear, interact and socialise with human users, often seemingly “live” in real-time. Through readings of film and media theory, archival research, textual readings (across paintings, digital art, cinema, performance, VR, apps and architecture) and media archaeology, the essay argues for virtuality as a multi-paradoxical and discombobulating vacillation: believed yet disbelieved; manipulated yet recognisable; realistic yet fake. This renewed understanding of the virtual also signals the pliability of post-truth and its concomitant challenges to frameworks of disbelief, reliability and certainty. It constitutes the new battleground for understanding the politics of current and future realities and histories.
This article analyses the ‘live’ virtual human in ABBA Voyage, the long-awaited concert reunion o... more This article analyses the ‘live’ virtual human in ABBA Voyage, the long-awaited concert reunion of the Swedish pop group ABBA, via Vilém Flusser’s concept of the digital apparition. It first argues for these virtual performers (dubbed ‘ABBA-tars’) to be understood as externalized computational codes which shift the grounds of ownership over and consent to the use of one’s likeness. They are also key to disproportionate and as yet unaccountable power held by technology companies. Secondly, ABBA Voyage’s presentation of ABBA as their past selves places time in a capitalism of immateriality profiting from the protean temporality of bodies. This temporal discombobulation thwarts finitude and confounds time in meanings of life, death and growth. The article thus addresses urgent confrontations between actual and virtual humans placed in the same physical environment, and paves the way for thinking about how we are going to deal and live with their virtuality.
Our multimedia website project, “The New Virtuality”, explores the implications of highly realist... more Our multimedia website project, “The New Virtuality”, explores the implications of highly realistic images that interact and socialise with human users, often seemingly “live” in real‑time. Created with imaging technologies such as holographic projection or virtual reality (VR) and usually boosted by AI and machine learning, we argue that these images present unprecedented directions in understanding how reality, liveness and presence are discerned and believed. Radically breaking down differences between real and unreal, they point to an era of blurred boundaries, dematerialization and limbic spaces which converges visual media with twenty-first century politics of dis/misinformation, post-truth and deep fakery. In this project, we discuss this era as “the new virtuality.” These developments underpin the project’s research questions: how to understand this media that so freely and near-seamlessly mix virtual and actual realities? How to place this phenomenon in media’s long history...
The Forgotten Victims of Sexual Violence in Film, Television and New Media
#MeToo is a contemporary global feminist movement against sexual violence and rape culture, inclu... more #MeToo is a contemporary global feminist movement against sexual violence and rape culture, including media representations that normalize gendered violence. But #MeToo has also re-centered white, western, middle-class, heteronormative, and able-bodied women. This collection explores who is left out of mainstream media stories of sexual violence, critiquing feminist media studies work that ignores black feminist and intersectional scholarship. Topics include 1990s filmic representations of white working-class girls; the disposability of televisual sex workers; the fetishizing and/or disappearing of racialized characters in order to center white heroism and/or heteronormativity; the explicit construction of fat women as impossible victims; and rape-revenge films in Japanese cinema. Finally, outside traditional media, topics include Canadian true crime podcasts on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women; problematic tropes on reality television; the coding of sexual violence in digital assistants; and the subversive potential of stand-up comedy shows that center the experiences of rape victims.
The Palgrave Handbook of Digital and Public Humanities
This collection seeks to bring together some of the most recent international scholarship and dev... more This collection seeks to bring together some of the most recent international scholarship and developments in the interdisciplinary fields of digital and public humanities. Alongside a critical exploration of the production, distribution and scholarship of culture in relation to digital media and technologies, the collection will examine the possibilities and challenges of publicly engaged scholarship in the digital humanities and beyond
Acknowledgements Preface Henry Lowood Introduction Jenna Ng I. Thinking Machinima 1. Machinima: C... more Acknowledgements Preface Henry Lowood Introduction Jenna Ng I. Thinking Machinima 1. Machinima: Cinema in a minor or multitudinous key? William Brown and Matthew Holtmeier 2. Beyond Bullet Time: Media in the knowable space Chris Burke 3. Be(ing)Dazzled: Living in machinima Sheldon Brown 4. Moving Digital Puppets Michael Nitsche, Ali Mazalek and Paul Clifton 5. Facing the Audience: A dialogic perspective on the hybrid animated film Lisbeth Fr lunde 6. Dangerous Sim Crossings: Framing the Second Life art machinima Sarah Higley II. Using Machinima 7. The Art of Games: Machinima and the limits of art games Larissa Hjorth 8. Playing Politics: Machinima as live performance and document Joseph DeLappe 9. Virtual Lens of Exposure: Aesthetics, theory, and ethics of documentary filmmaking in Second Life Sandra Danilovic 10. Call It a Vision Quest: Machinima in a First Nations context Beth Aileen Dillon and Jason Edward Lewis 11. World of Chaucer: Adaptation, pedagogy, and interdisciplinarity Chris Moore and Graham Barwell 12. A Pedagogy of Craft: Teaching Culture Analysis with machinima Jenna Ng and James Barrett Agency, Simulation, Gamification, Machinima: An interview with Isabelle Arvers Isabelle Arvers and Jenna Ng Notes on Contributors Glossary Index
The Post-Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections, 2021
This chapter explicates Virtual Reality (VR) as the first instantiation of the post-screen. Speci... more This chapter explicates Virtual Reality (VR) as the first instantiation of the post-screen. Specifically, it interrogates VR’s sense of immersion via two vectors in the post-screen’s “forgetting” of screen boundaries – confinement of a viewer’s visual field with restricted viewing devices; and engulfment by being surrounded with large screens. The chapter’s key idea is its alternative expression of VR’s relations of reality as an immersive media form, which it argues shifts from the critical paradigms of replacement to re-placement. Through theoretical critique and readings of various applications of VR, the chapter argues for re-placement as a more ethical and generative space for thinking through VR’s relations of the real. In turn, where and how the actual and the virtual is re-placed informs the very purpose of media itself.
The Post-Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections, 2021
This Conclusion/Coda summarizes the book’s key argument: the postscreen as a visual phenomenon wh... more This Conclusion/Coda summarizes the book’s key argument: the postscreen as a visual phenomenon which, through contemporary instantiations via Virtual Reality, holographic and light projections, blurs boundaries between virtuality and actuality, and re-formulates conditions of media, reality, death, life, matter and history. The Conclusion also points the post-screen towards two further ideas which drive its concept: difference, in terms of screen boundaries demarcating image against surroundings, and on difference without positive terms; and gluttony of visual media, specifically in relation to play between the real and the unreal. Both ideas not only serve the diminished boundaries of the post-screen in terms of the book’s analyses, but also render the post-screen a framework for today’s politics of post-truth, misinformation and deepfakes as a moment of media history. Finally, the Conclusion extends the post-screen to the (as of writing) current Covid-19 pandemic as a mirror of th...
We are entering a new era of technological determinism and solutionism in which governments and b... more We are entering a new era of technological determinism and solutionism in which governments and business actors are seeking data-driven change, assuming that Artificial Intelligence is now inevitable and ubiquitous. But we have not even started asking the right questions, let alone developed an understanding of the consequences. Urgently needed is debate that asks and answers fundamental questions about power. This book brings together critical interrogations of what constitutes AI, its impact and its inequalities in order to offer an analysis of what it means for AI to deliver benefits for everyone. The book is structured in three parts: Part 1, AI: Humans vs. Machines, presents critical perspectives on human-machine dualism. Part 2, Discourses and Myths About AI, excavates metaphors and policies to ask normative questions about what is ‘desirable’ AI and what conditions make this possible. Part 3, AI Power and Inequalities, discusses how the implementation of AI creates important ...
Virtual Cinematography and the Digital Real : (Dis)placing the Moving Image Between Reality and S... more Virtual Cinematography and the Digital Real : (Dis)placing the Moving Image Between Reality and Simulacra
This video essay explores the implications of highly realistic images that appear, interact and s... more This video essay explores the implications of highly realistic images that appear, interact and socialise with human users, often seemingly “live” in real-time. Through readings of film and media theory, archival research, textual readings (across paintings, digital art, cinema, performance, VR, apps and architecture) and media archaeology, the essay argues for virtuality as a multi-paradoxical and discombobulating vacillation: believed yet disbelieved; manipulated yet recognisable; realistic yet fake. This renewed understanding of the virtual also signals the pliability of post-truth and its concomitant challenges to frameworks of disbelief, reliability and certainty. It constitutes the new battleground for understanding the politics of current and future realities and histories.
This article analyses the ‘live’ virtual human in ABBA Voyage, the long-awaited concert reunion o... more This article analyses the ‘live’ virtual human in ABBA Voyage, the long-awaited concert reunion of the Swedish pop group ABBA, via Vilém Flusser’s concept of the digital apparition. It first argues for these virtual performers (dubbed ‘ABBA-tars’) to be understood as externalized computational codes which shift the grounds of ownership over and consent to the use of one’s likeness. They are also key to disproportionate and as yet unaccountable power held by technology companies. Secondly, ABBA Voyage’s presentation of ABBA as their past selves places time in a capitalism of immateriality profiting from the protean temporality of bodies. This temporal discombobulation thwarts finitude and confounds time in meanings of life, death and growth. The article thus addresses urgent confrontations between actual and virtual humans placed in the same physical environment, and paves the way for thinking about how we are going to deal and live with their virtuality.
Our multimedia website project, “The New Virtuality”, explores the implications of highly realist... more Our multimedia website project, “The New Virtuality”, explores the implications of highly realistic images that interact and socialise with human users, often seemingly “live” in real‑time. Created with imaging technologies such as holographic projection or virtual reality (VR) and usually boosted by AI and machine learning, we argue that these images present unprecedented directions in understanding how reality, liveness and presence are discerned and believed. Radically breaking down differences between real and unreal, they point to an era of blurred boundaries, dematerialization and limbic spaces which converges visual media with twenty-first century politics of dis/misinformation, post-truth and deep fakery. In this project, we discuss this era as “the new virtuality.” These developments underpin the project’s research questions: how to understand this media that so freely and near-seamlessly mix virtual and actual realities? How to place this phenomenon in media’s long history...
The Forgotten Victims of Sexual Violence in Film, Television and New Media
#MeToo is a contemporary global feminist movement against sexual violence and rape culture, inclu... more #MeToo is a contemporary global feminist movement against sexual violence and rape culture, including media representations that normalize gendered violence. But #MeToo has also re-centered white, western, middle-class, heteronormative, and able-bodied women. This collection explores who is left out of mainstream media stories of sexual violence, critiquing feminist media studies work that ignores black feminist and intersectional scholarship. Topics include 1990s filmic representations of white working-class girls; the disposability of televisual sex workers; the fetishizing and/or disappearing of racialized characters in order to center white heroism and/or heteronormativity; the explicit construction of fat women as impossible victims; and rape-revenge films in Japanese cinema. Finally, outside traditional media, topics include Canadian true crime podcasts on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women; problematic tropes on reality television; the coding of sexual violence in digital assistants; and the subversive potential of stand-up comedy shows that center the experiences of rape victims.
The Palgrave Handbook of Digital and Public Humanities
This collection seeks to bring together some of the most recent international scholarship and dev... more This collection seeks to bring together some of the most recent international scholarship and developments in the interdisciplinary fields of digital and public humanities. Alongside a critical exploration of the production, distribution and scholarship of culture in relation to digital media and technologies, the collection will examine the possibilities and challenges of publicly engaged scholarship in the digital humanities and beyond
Acknowledgements Preface Henry Lowood Introduction Jenna Ng I. Thinking Machinima 1. Machinima: C... more Acknowledgements Preface Henry Lowood Introduction Jenna Ng I. Thinking Machinima 1. Machinima: Cinema in a minor or multitudinous key? William Brown and Matthew Holtmeier 2. Beyond Bullet Time: Media in the knowable space Chris Burke 3. Be(ing)Dazzled: Living in machinima Sheldon Brown 4. Moving Digital Puppets Michael Nitsche, Ali Mazalek and Paul Clifton 5. Facing the Audience: A dialogic perspective on the hybrid animated film Lisbeth Fr lunde 6. Dangerous Sim Crossings: Framing the Second Life art machinima Sarah Higley II. Using Machinima 7. The Art of Games: Machinima and the limits of art games Larissa Hjorth 8. Playing Politics: Machinima as live performance and document Joseph DeLappe 9. Virtual Lens of Exposure: Aesthetics, theory, and ethics of documentary filmmaking in Second Life Sandra Danilovic 10. Call It a Vision Quest: Machinima in a First Nations context Beth Aileen Dillon and Jason Edward Lewis 11. World of Chaucer: Adaptation, pedagogy, and interdisciplinarity Chris Moore and Graham Barwell 12. A Pedagogy of Craft: Teaching Culture Analysis with machinima Jenna Ng and James Barrett Agency, Simulation, Gamification, Machinima: An interview with Isabelle Arvers Isabelle Arvers and Jenna Ng Notes on Contributors Glossary Index
The Post-Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections, 2021
This chapter explicates Virtual Reality (VR) as the first instantiation of the post-screen. Speci... more This chapter explicates Virtual Reality (VR) as the first instantiation of the post-screen. Specifically, it interrogates VR’s sense of immersion via two vectors in the post-screen’s “forgetting” of screen boundaries – confinement of a viewer’s visual field with restricted viewing devices; and engulfment by being surrounded with large screens. The chapter’s key idea is its alternative expression of VR’s relations of reality as an immersive media form, which it argues shifts from the critical paradigms of replacement to re-placement. Through theoretical critique and readings of various applications of VR, the chapter argues for re-placement as a more ethical and generative space for thinking through VR’s relations of the real. In turn, where and how the actual and the virtual is re-placed informs the very purpose of media itself.
The Post-Screen Through Virtual Reality, Holograms and Light Projections, 2021
This Conclusion/Coda summarizes the book’s key argument: the postscreen as a visual phenomenon wh... more This Conclusion/Coda summarizes the book’s key argument: the postscreen as a visual phenomenon which, through contemporary instantiations via Virtual Reality, holographic and light projections, blurs boundaries between virtuality and actuality, and re-formulates conditions of media, reality, death, life, matter and history. The Conclusion also points the post-screen towards two further ideas which drive its concept: difference, in terms of screen boundaries demarcating image against surroundings, and on difference without positive terms; and gluttony of visual media, specifically in relation to play between the real and the unreal. Both ideas not only serve the diminished boundaries of the post-screen in terms of the book’s analyses, but also render the post-screen a framework for today’s politics of post-truth, misinformation and deepfakes as a moment of media history. Finally, the Conclusion extends the post-screen to the (as of writing) current Covid-19 pandemic as a mirror of th...
We are entering a new era of technological determinism and solutionism in which governments and b... more We are entering a new era of technological determinism and solutionism in which governments and business actors are seeking data-driven change, assuming that Artificial Intelligence is now inevitable and ubiquitous. But we have not even started asking the right questions, let alone developed an understanding of the consequences. Urgently needed is debate that asks and answers fundamental questions about power. This book brings together critical interrogations of what constitutes AI, its impact and its inequalities in order to offer an analysis of what it means for AI to deliver benefits for everyone. The book is structured in three parts: Part 1, AI: Humans vs. Machines, presents critical perspectives on human-machine dualism. Part 2, Discourses and Myths About AI, excavates metaphors and policies to ask normative questions about what is ‘desirable’ AI and what conditions make this possible. Part 3, AI Power and Inequalities, discusses how the implementation of AI creates important ...
Virtual Cinematography and the Digital Real : (Dis)placing the Moving Image Between Reality and S... more Virtual Cinematography and the Digital Real : (Dis)placing the Moving Image Between Reality and Simulacra
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