Events

Lithodomos VR is an innovative start-up based in Melbourne that secured substantial seed funding in 2016 to develop VR content based on archaeologically accurate material. In this presentation, the company’s founder Dr. Simon J. Young talks about the potential of Virtual Reality as an educational and research tool. Those of us who have studied the ancient world have wondered at times what it would have felt like to stand in the streets of some of the incredible places that have succumbed to the ravages of time. At the same time, archaeology, as a discipline, carefully collects and records traces of the past for publication and the presentation of research to the wider public. Now, VR provides us with a powerful tool to present and visualise the results of these investigations in a 360 stereoscopic immersive digital environment. This talk will explore some particular implications of these possibilities, and will feature spectacular digital reconstructions of the ancient world. There will also be a chance to experience the VR at the end of the talk.

Dr. Simon J. Young: Simon holds a PhD in classical archaeology from the University of Melbourne. His expertise lies in archaeologically correct digital recreations of the ancient world. His research interests also include ancient city planning and development, as well as the reception of architectural landscapes by ancient observers. Since he founded Lithodomos in 2016, he has travelled extensively throughout Europe launching onsite VR experiences at many archaeological sites, and was invited to present the company’s work at UNESCO’s first Digital Heritage Lab in Paris in 2018.

Game developer, Dr Katharine Neil, will be talking about the just released comedy game Astrologaster, which has been described as “Elizabethan medical astrology comedy with madrigals”.

Game narrative designers and writers are faced with a range of limitations that can vary widely depending on genre and platform. This talk covers some of the techniques used in the historical comedy game Astrologaster to work within and even leverage constraints to create comedy for an adult audience.

Bio: Katharine began her game development career at Beam Software in 1998 and since then has alternated between roles in design, programming, audio and narrative design. Her credits span a variety of game genres ranging from racing games to third-person shooters and management sims, on a range of console and handheld platforms. Her extra-curricular activities have included directing the social impact game Escape From Woomera in 2003, co-founding Australia’s annual independent game developers’ conference Freeplay in 2004, and completing a PhD researching tools for game design in 2015. Her recent work includes narrative design for the historical comedy game Astrologaster.

Two of TMT’s researchers discuss their current projects:

Melbourne International Expo 1880: Reloaded?
Flavia Marcello, (with Ali de Kruiff, Jeni Paay, Casey Dalbo)

This project tests a new methodology for fostering innovation in architectural history and design by recreating the exhibition spaces and pavilions of the Melbourne International Exhibition of 1880. In the 1870s, Melbourne made a plan to put itself and promote the fruits of its new-found economic prosperity on the world map by hosting an international expo to showcase new industrial products and the latest scientific The rooms of the UNESCO Heritage listed Exhibition are ever changing but their past iterations need to be properly documented. The project will use interaction design, VR digital technology and innovation to bring architectural history out of the pages of a book and into the realm of experience. As the pavilions of Triennale no longer exist in physical form, 3D models of these lost Pavilions will be constructed using photographs, plans, sections and descriptions available from historical documents.

Australian Media Arts Heritage: Towards a national distributed collection
Melanie Swalwell, Prof of Digital Media Heritage

Australian artists were significant contributors to the development of media arts internationally, yet only a relatively small portion of their work has to date made it into institutional collections. This scenario is not unique to Australia but is an international problem, as Christiane Paul has explained: few media artworks have been collected by Art Museums in part because the preservation of works that contain variable media elements is perceived to be outside the understanding of a traditional twentieth-century museum and as such too difficult (2015). This is a ‘Catch 22’, as artwork that is not collected is typically not preserved, nor exhibited: writing of video art, Buttrose recently noted, “little is seen…in the Australian art collection displays in our state and national galleries” (2017), a statement that also holds for CD-ROM, net, and software art, for example. Despite the publication of important local historical surveys (Zurbrugg, 1994; Jones, 2003; Tofts, 2005), many artworks still have not been documented. We are facing the loss of cultural memory and heritage. This paper discusses a current Linkage Project that attempts to remedy this situation, following the recent transfer of two Australian media art organisations’ archives (dLux media arts, ANAT) into cultural institutions (AGNSW, State Library of SA). The project is a digital preservation and emulation project with multiple partners. The intent is to establish a best practice method for preserving Australian digital media arts heritage, to lay the groundwork for digitisation and imaging at scale, and to work towards a distributed national collection. Whilst partners’ imperatives vary, the project team are cognisant of going beyond simply re-creating or displaying artworks, important though that is. Also significant are documenting changing processes in the development of artworks, being able to trace an intellectual lineage, and securing archives that will be the basis for future scholarship.

Two of the Centre’s researchers will present on their research projects:

Generation Emigration?: New Media, Ageing, and Migration
– Liam Burke

At the height of the Global Financial Crisis more than a hundred Irish nationals emigrated from Ireland every day. This crop of Irish expatriates was dubbed “Generation Emigration” by the media, as if this was the first time the country had ever experienced a mass departure. However, from the Great Famine, through to the sustained migration of the 1950s, and the “lost” generation of the 1980s, modern Irish history has been marked by emigration. Yet, the Irish media was quick to suggest that with the immediacy, availability, and ease of new media this generation will not be ‘lost’, when they can so easily be tagged, Whats App’d and skyped. Yet the media tended to focus on new families and young professionals who emigrated in an era when this technology was widely available. This presentation will chart how Irish people who moved to Melbourne before the availability of digital technologies now make use of new media to connect with the Irish community in Australia and back in Ireland.

This presentation is based on a larger research project that examines how older migrants, who are often dismissed as falling on the other side of the digital divide, engage with social media to establish new meanings of community. Specifically, this presentation will draw on surveys with over forty older Irish people in Melbourne and more than a dozen on-camera interviews. Key topics the presentation will consider include: Long Distance Nationalism, Place Polygamy, the Ethnic Village, Continuity Theory of Normal Ageing, and Polymedia.

Liam Burke is the Cinema and Screen Studies discipline leader and a senior lecturer at Swinburne University of Technology, where he is also an investigator in the Centre for Transformative Media Technologies. His research interests include adaptation, transmedia storytelling, comic books, and new media and migration. Liam is a chief investigator of the Australian Research Council funded project Superheroes & Me.

Mediating Human – Robot performance through virtual environments
– John McCormick

In technology based performance it is not unusual for multiple mediums to contribute to the liveness of the interactions occurring on stage. Projections, soundscape and interactions between human and robot performers, which may be pre-recorded or generated in real time, are typically integrated to form complex multi-modal systems. In the case of real-time interaction and generation of movement, sound and image, the array of programs in use and coordination and synchronisation of these elements can be a great challenge. In this presentation I will reflect upon examples of the use of virtual environments as a means of collating the actions of human and robot performers, and of generating unique soundscapes, movement and 3D projections that emerge from the interactions of the performers.

The use of simulated environments to manage robot behaviour is not new. However, with the maturing of virtual and augmented environment development platforms such as Unity and Unreal Engine, real-time digital environments can be readily incorporated into live performance, extending the actions of the performers. Examples of artistic works will be used to illustrate the use of virtual environments as a mediating platform for human / robot performance.

John McCormick is a technology based artist and researcher with a major interest in human movement. John has collaborated on works worldwide, including at peak festivals ISEA, ZERO1SJ, SIGGRAPH, Melbourne Festival, Venice Biennale, Siggraph Asia, Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) London, Ars Electronica, Monaco Dance Forum and Art Science Museum Singapore.

Join us for these presentations by two of our PhD candidates will be talking about their PhD research.

The Prospect and Potential of TikTok in Documentary Theory and Practice
(PhD by Artefact and Exegesis)
– Shuai Li (Swinburne University of Technology, Faculty of Health, Arts and Design)

This practice-led research explores the short form video (15 – 60 seconds) for documentary production with a focus on city films. Ice City Harbin will develop a storytelling format which is original for emerging mobile networked media. This PhD research applies a creative arts method and will involve the production of a series of short networked videos on the video sharing platform TikTok. The theoretical framework will draw upon the concept “Cinema of Attractions” introduced by Tom Gunning (1990) and will be further refined through the “Mobile Cinema of Attractions” (Ok, 2012). The early cinema prior to 1907 as much as contemporary TikTok videos spark the curiosity of audiences through the magic moments, tricks or fancy images rather than the narrative constructs.

Ice City Harbin will be composed of two parts. One disseminated via TikTok and one edited on iPhone. With the introduction of Adobe Premiere Rush and LumaFusion editing and post-production can be conducted anywhere and on location. This research will examine the creative process and will re-define preproduction and postproduction. The linearity will shift to an ephemeral characteristic, which further develops the mobile media aesthetics “This aesthetic emphasizes the importance of location, space and also non-space – being here, being anywhere, but here is where the phone is and not any fixed place.”(Baker, Schleser, & Molga, 2009). Simultaneously, “short online videos shared on social media platforms, or micro-videos, have arisen as a new medium for creative expression”(Redi, OHare, Schifanella, Trevisiol, & Jaimes, 2014). TikTok as a short from video platform, previously known as Musical.ly, has attracted the attention of the young generation and has rapidly expanded globally. The increasingly dynamic mobile media environment recognises network media as a “site of practice” (Miles, 2014).

Shuai Li is a PhD researcher in smartphone filmmaking at Swinburne University of technology. He received his B.A. from Renmin University of China and his M.A. from The University of Melbourne. His background includes live streaming, video editing, color grading. He is Co-Founder of Grandshow video production company based in Melbourne focusing on the video productions in micro film, commercials, news, sports, and music videos.

A Smartphone documentation to preserve a vibrant Culture in Ghana (Africa)
(PhD by Artefact and Exegesis)
– Felix Amofa  Gyebi  (Department of Film & Television)

In the last decade, the mobile phone can be described as one of the most disruptive technologies in Africa. The populace in Africa who hitherto had limited to or no access to digital tools, are now exposed to screen production and storytelling through smartphones. As accessible documentary production devices this includes apps for filming and editing. While there are great opportunities for Africa, to date, however, there has been little documentation and engagement of smartphone video applications for documentary filmmaking in Africa. This PhD research project follows a practice-led method and applies the theoretical framework of collaborative documentary filmmaking (Zimmerman & De Michiel 2017, Schleser2012). The research project Trash to Treasure engages the Krobo youth at Upper Manya Krobo District a community in Ghana, West Africa with opportunities to articulate their unique stories into a collaborative smartphone documentary, which explores the recycling of glass into fashionable beads. This presentation explores the book Open Space Documentary framework: A Toolkit for Theory and Practice (Zimmermann et al. 2017) and the concept of Cellphilms (Tomaselli 2009; Oliver 2019) as key theoretical frameworks for this research.

Felix Amofa Gyebi (B.A., Dip., MPhil.)  is a versatile artist and a teacher with vested interest in the use of mixed media to produce artefacts. He is currently a PhD candidate at Swinburne University under FHAD. He is passionate about Emerging Media and Smartphone Filmmaking for the advancement of community engagement through storytelling

Gender inclusivity and female participation in new screen industry ecologies
Proposed ARC Linkage: ACMI Screen Goddesses Exhibition

This presentation outlines a collaborative project with ACMI that is being developed by the research team for an ARC Linkage grant submission. The research project will work towards ACMI’s 2021 exhibition “Screen Goddesses”, as well as a series of other events and outcomes including an international conference, online archive or deep map of female and gender diverse screen industry histories, and a number of collaborative and sole-authored publications. The presentation will outline the early plans for the ACMI exhibition, the current shape of the ARC Linkage application, and constitution of the research team.

This project aims to contribute new understandings of how gender inclusivity in the screen industries is impacted by technological and industrial change. Research will examine current developments in screen production and distribution technology that are reshaping screen industries, such as subscription streaming video on demand (SVOD) platforms, to assess the level of gender inclusion such developments offer. The aim is to uncover how female and gender diverse screen industry practitioners are supported, accounted for, and/or hindered in new and emerging industry ecologies. Research into new developments will be carefully historicised, as the project will also examine how key historical junctures of technological and industrial change impacted gender inclusion and participation. For instance, the project will assess how changes in film editing and camera technologies across history intersect with industrial changes affecting gender inclusion. The project aims to ascertain how new screen industry paradigms across production, distribution, and exhibition can offer windows of opportunity for female or gender diverse practitioners, and how to best harness these windows before structural gender imbalances become entrenched. The project will offer new interventions and strategies to support gender inclusion policies and practices across different sectors of the film and television industries. As well as assessing the level of female and gender diverse participation in new and emerging screen industry ecologies, the project will also examine how audiences engage with gender representation in an increasingly fragmented and personalised on-demand screen content landscape.

Jessica Balanzategui is a Lecturer in the Cinema and Screen Studies program at Swinburne.

Liam Burke is a Senior Lecturer in and Head of the Cinema and Screen Studies program at Swinburne.

Mark Freeman is a Lecturer in and Course Coordinator of the Film and Television program at Swinburne.

Eloise Ross is a Lecturer/Academic Tutor in the Film and Television program at Swinburne.

Videogame ‘worlds’ are usually discussed in the literature of game studies as narrative and/or transmedia constructs; as catch-alls, essentially. Yet the term ‘world-building’ is understood in videogame production vernacular as backgrounds, environments, narrative and art explorable by players. Defined as the creative development of a fictional setting that is usually (but not always) focussed at the planetary (or whole fiction) scale, the practice allows the art, design and technical development to be creatively focussed, coherent and comprehensible. Built worlds unfurl and unstitch in satisfying ways. This talk will explore how this common understanding is already materially situated within the science-fiction tradition, and what productive meaning can emerge from taking world-building seriously as both a production and consumption paradigm.

Christian McCrea is a researcher writing on science fiction, film, videogames, animation, and the popular digital arts. He is a lecturer in the School of Design at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia.

Imagining the Impossible: World Building and the Fantastic Symposium is co-hosted by the Imagining the Impossible Network and the Centre for Transformative Media Technologies, and  focuses on the relationship between world building and the fantastic.

The symposium is made possible by the research network titled, Imagining the Impossible: The Fantastic as Media Entertainment and Play. Led by Associate Professor Rikke Schubart (University of Southern Denmark), the project is funded by the Danmarks Frie Forskningsfond/The Danish Independent Research Fund across three Danish institutions with international partners in the US, the UK, and Australia. The network asks why the fantastic has exploded in contemporary entertainment, how we create, design, and engage with the fantastic, and why the fantastic is important for human existence.

List of presenters

Imagining the Impossible team:
Anita Nell Bech Albertsen, University of Southern Denmark
Cristina Bacchilega, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa
Stephanie Green, Griffith University
Amanda Howell, Griffith University
Angela Ndalianis, Swinburne University of Technology
Rikke Schubart, University of Southern Denmark
Jakob Ion Wille, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts

Invited researchers:
Jessica Balanzategui, Swinburne University of Technology
Stephanie Harkin, Swinburne University of Technology
Tara Lomax, University of Melbourne
Christian McCrea, RMIT

December 3, Tuesday – Swinburne University of Technology, Building AMDC 502 (5th floor), Burwood Road

9.30–11              Theme I: Design & fantastic worlds

Angela Ndalianis, Swinburne University of Technology: “World building and Science Fiction: When fantasy becomes reality”

Jakob Ion Wille, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts: “Some Reflections on Design and World–Building in Contemporary Danish Film Production”

Stephanie Green, Griffith University: “Lace Collars and Cowboy Cravats: World-building in Penny Dreadful”

11–11.30            Coffee Break

11.30–13            Theme II: Seeing and feeling fantastic worlds (genre, aesthetics, affects)

Stephanie Harkin, Swinburne University of Technology: “Gothic Liminality and Postfeminist Sensibilities in Night School Studio’s Oxenfree”

Cristina Bacchilega, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa: “Maleficent: Mistress of Evil: Genre Play and Darkness in the Back & Forth between Fantastic Worlds”

Jessica Balanzategui, Swinburne University of Technology: “Haunted Nostalgia in Digital Cultures: Vernacular Creativity, Residual Media, and the digital gothic”

13–14                 Lunch

14–15.30            Theme III: Tropes, characters, and elements in fantastic worlds (e.g. beasts, characters, settings)

Amanda Howell, Griffith University: “Genre Play, World-building, and the Making of a Monstrous Female Anti-Hero in A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night”

Rikke Schubart, University of Southern Denmark: “Wrinkles and Face Work in Terminator: Dark Fate (2019): Reflections on Linda Hamilton’s Face and Character Development in a Sci–Fi Franchise”

15.30–16            Coffee

16–17.30            Theme IV: Story expansion & fantastic worlds

Christian McCrea, RMIT University: “The Videogame Fantastic: Science-Fiction World-Building and Adapting To Technological Change”

Anita Nell Bech Albertsen, University of Southern Denmark: “Transmedia Worldbuilding and Mash-up Cosmology in the Penny Dreadful TV Series and Comic Book Series”

Tara Lomax, Melbourne University: “Assembling Fantastic Worlds: The Transtextual Aesthetics of World-Building in the Marvel Cinematic Universe”

Paper Abstracts and Speaker Bios:

Anita Nell Bech Albertsen, University of Southern Denmark
Transmedia Worldbuilding and Mash-up Cosmology in the Penny Dreadful TV Series and Comic Book Series

A crucial element of building fantastic worlds is the construction of cosmologies (mythology, religion and culture), adding aspects, depth and complexity to an imaginary space and its inhabitants – that is its characters. This paper examines the transmedia worldbuilding and storytelling in the Penny Dreadful TV series (Showtime 2014-16) and Comic book series by focusing on the merged and interfigural nature of the characters of this continuing series. Many characters in the TV series are of literary origin. Furthermore, they are woven into a complex cosmology that blends a great deal of mythological source material – for example Egyptian and Christian mythologies with classical gothic elements. By analyzing the mash-up cosmology of the Penny Dreadful universe, this paper seeks to discuss the relationships of fantastic worlds and transmedial characters, which are fictional figures whose adventures are told in different media platforms, each one adding details to their story, as they are rewritten, altered or extended. An interesting question is why characters has remained a minor issue in many theories of transmediality (Jenkins 2003, Long 2007, Dena 2009, Scolari 2009), that seem to have been developed mainly around the concept of world-building rather than character-building. In contrast, characters are more prominent to other storyworld-centered approaches such as the cognitive narratological Text World Theory (Werth, Paul 1999; Gavins, Johanna 2007). Through this discussion I seek to argue that there is a different logic of construction of transmedia storytelling, centered in characters than in world-building.

Anita Nell Bech Albertsen is an Associate Professor of Danish Literature at the University of Southern Denmark where she teaches courses in Danish literature, Literary theory, Media studies and Creative Writing. Her research interests include narrative theory, e.g. text world theory, anti-narration and cognitive theory. Her recent publications include articles in Danish on televisual documentaries and narrative theory and, in English, ‘The Contaminant Cobweb: Complex Characters and Monstrous Mashup’ in Identity and the Fantastic, eds Rikke Schubart, Amanda Howell, Stephanie Green and Anita Nell Bech Albertsen, Refractory: A Journal of Entertainment Media. Vol 28 (2017): http://refractory.unimelb.edu.au/2017/06/14/bech-albersten/

Cristina Bacchilega, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa
Maleficent: Mistress of Evil: Genre Play and Darkness in the Back & Forth between Fantastic Worlds

Maleficent 2 presents itself as a Disney fairy-tale film but also as an epic fantasy. This paper asks questions about genre play in Maleficent 2, first of all, whether it succeeds or not, and if it does not—as many reviewers note—what does this mishmash signify? Relevant queries are: which genre-specific expectations and emotions does the film seek to mobilize in audiences? How does the film’s use of color and costuming, or the film’s character development of Malefient work to evoke fairy-tale or epic intertextual links? And how is the film’s genre play related to the adaptation industry’s anxieties and Disney’s swallowing of other top fantastic-worldbuilding studios? Serving to ground these queries is my analysis of the representation of and relationship among the three different worlds coming into contact with each other in Maleficent 2: the Kingdom of Ulstead, that Prince Philip is meant to inherit; the magical Moors, where Aurora is Queen and which Maleficent protects; and the nest-like island-world where the Dark Fay or Fae live in hiding. Border crossing, which is showcased in the film’s very first scene, has its own stories to tell about world building and race & gender relations as envisioned in the film’s plot and genre investments.

Cristina Bacchilega is a Professor at the University of Hawai‘i-Mānoa where she teaches fairy tales and their adaptations, folklore and literature, and cultural studies. She co-edits Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies; her most recent publications are the book Fairy Tales Transformed? 21^st-Century Adaptations and the Politics of Wonder and essays in Narrative Culture, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Routledge Companion to Fairy-Tale Cultures and Media, and The Fairy Tale World. With Anne Duggan, she co-edited the 2019 “Thinking with Stories in Times of Trouble ”special issues of Journal of American Folklore, Marvels & Tales, and Narrative Culture; also out in 2019 is The Penguin Book of Mermaids, which she co-edited with Marie Alohalani Brown.

Jessica Balanzategui, Swinburne University of Technology
Haunted Nostalgia in Digital Cultures: Vernacular Creativity, Residual Media, and the digital gothic 

This presentation provides an overview of the monograph I am currently developing, Haunted Nostalgia in Digital Cultures: Vernacular Creativity, Residual Media, and the digital gothic, the first book-length examination of a popular mode of online vernacular creativity that has crystallized in the 2010s which I designate “the digital gothic.” The book examines the key genres that constitute the digital gothic, illuminating how they harness their collaborative, mundane online contexts to incite eerie frisson and the uncanny. This mode of online gothic cultural production ranges from the folkloric scary storytelling practice known broadly as “Creepypasta” – which has been responsible for some of the 21^st century’s most iconic monsters, including the Slender Man – to simulated historical archives like Richard Littler’s “Scarfolk”, ghost stories delivered via social media such as Adam Ellis’s viral epistolary Twitter tale “Dear David”, and the uncanny outsider video art of the early YouTube era, such as Eric Fournier’s “Shaye Saint John”. I will address the digital gothic’s preoccupation with folkloric and related types of pre-digital vernacular cultural production and argues that this mode deploys a range of narrative and aesthetic strategies to showcase the ontological value of residual, obsolete, superseded, and untimely media technologies in the networked digital era.

Jessica Balanzategui is a Lecturer in Cinema and Screen Studies at Swinburne University of Technology. Jessica’s research examines childhood, history, and national identity in global film and TV; vernacular storytelling and aesthetics in digital cultures (particularly the “digital gothic”); the impact of technological and industrial change on screen genres; and intersections between cultural institutions and entertainment industries. Jessica’s work has appeared in refereed journals and edited collections and her book, The Uncanny Child in Transnational Cinema: Ghosts of Futurity at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century, was be published in 2018 with Amsterdam University Press/The University of Chicago Press.

Stephanie Green, Griffith University
Lace Collars and Cowboy Cravats (or Salons and Saloons?): World-building in Penny Dreadful

Produced by Sam Mendes and John Logan, the original three-season television series Penny Dreadful (Showtime/Sky, 2014-16) takes famous supernatural characters and settings from nineteenth and early twentieth century popular fiction, evoking the idea of a haunted past to create stories of a world on the brink of unimaginable change. Martin Dines alludes to the way that the penny dreadful conveyed ‘the sensuous pleasures of the disorderly city’ as a cheap, showy fictional world which seems ‘more real than real life’ (2017, 101). In this discussion I will explore the way that the series uses representations of historical motifs and tropes, including costume and design elements, to situate its stories in a world that is at once strange and familiar. The series is wrought through the decadence and incipient modernity of fin de siècle literary London and the grand, dangerous landscapes of an American wild west, as we are transported directly back in time, not from the nineteenth-century fin de siècle itself, but from popular screen culture (Loutit 2016: Crow 2016).

Stephanie Green lectures in writing, literature and culture in the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science at Griffith University (Australia). She is the author of a recent collection of prose poetry Breathing in Stormy Seasons (2019). She is co-editor of and contributing author to Hospitality, Rape and Consent in Vampire Popular Culture (Palgrave-Macmillan 2017) with David Baker and Agnieszka Stasiewicz-Bieńkowska; ‘As if’: women in genres of the fantastic, cross-platform entertainments and transmedial engagements’, a special issue of Continuum  (2019) co-edited with Amanda Howell, and Rikke Schubart.; and ‘Identity and the Fantastic’. Refractory: A Journal Of Entertainment Media Vol 28 2017, co-edited  with Rikke Schubart, Amanda Howell and Anita Nell Bech Albertsen 2017.

Stephanie Harkin, Swinburne University of Technology
Gothic Liminality and Postfeminist Sensibilities in Night School Studio’s Oxenfree

The videogame Oxenfree (Night School Studios, 2016) exhibits a hybrid of fantasy genres including fantastic realism, the supernatural, horror and the gothic. Focussing on the game’s gothic workings, this paper draws on anthropological studies of rituals to identify the text’s transgressive articulations of liminality; a core coordinate of the gothic. In his foundational ethnographic study, Arnold van Gennep (1960 [1909], p. 11) identifies three stable stages that comprise of the rites of passage: preliminal (separation), liminal (transition) and postliminal (reincorporation). These stages have been frequently appropriated toward understandings of human development (specifically adolescence) and narrative formulas, particularly the linear structures of coming-of-age, or Bildungsroman texts. Liminality is prevalent to gothic fiction, for the liminal represents suspended and unregulated space that is separate from normative and monitored institutions; central to the gothic’s secluded and ambiguous settings. Gothic heroines are also frequently liminal subjects themselves, navigating the uncertain and relatively unrestricted space between childhood and adulthood. I frame Oxenfree as transgressive of van Gennep’s trajectory, while also situating its protagonist Alex as a “postfeminist gothic heroine,” empowered by her liminal status.

Stephanie Harkin is a PhD candidate with the Centre for Transformative Media Technologies at Swinburne University of Technology. Her research focuses on representations of girlhood in videogames.

Amanda Howell, Griffith University
Genre Play, World-building, and the Making of a Monstrous Female Anti-Hero in A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night

Both the Western hero and the anti-hero of the Spaghetti Westerns that emulated and ironically commented on Hollywood’s generic entertainments were men of great solitude and few words. Our understanding of them, as a consequence, tended to be dependent on their setting, their relationship with their environment. What, then, do we make of the world of the Girl With No Name who haunts the margins of Bad City in Ana Lily Amirpour’s 2014 film, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night? Working from the assumption that her heroism, no less than that of her male predecessors, is intimately tied to and imaged by the world that has been audio-visually constructed for her, this discussion will reflect on its character in terms of world building, genre quotation, and play.

Amanda Howell teaches screen studies in the School of Humanities, Languages, and Social Sciences. An expert in contemporary American cinema, television, and screen cultures, she convenes on-campus courses in Hollywood Cinema and World Cinema and OUA courses in Classic Hollywood and Auteur cinemas. Her academic publications focus on gender, genre, and screen aesthetics and are recurrently concerned with ‘body’ genres: action, war, horror, and the musical. Her most recent major publication is the Routledge monograph, A Different Tune: Popular Film Music and Masculinity in Action (2015), which looks at how contemporary screen representations of masculinity have combined American cinema’s long-standing investment in violence-as-spectacle with similarly body-focused pleasures of contemporary youth music.

Tara Lomax, Melbourne University
Assembling Fantastic Worlds: The Transtextual Aesthetics of World-Building in the Marvel Cinematic Universe

Fantastical storyworlds are often constituted by multiple texts and media platforms. The expansiveness of fictional worlds facilitates dynamic narrative and aesthetic relations between these texts and mediums, which can be conceptualised as a transtextualisation of form and style. In this context, fictional storyworlds should not only be characterised by narrative expansion and dispersal across media, but also through the aesthetic dialogue between media. The concept of transtextual aesthetics addresses the intersection of medium specificity and transmedia world-building by examining the nature of cinematic style and mise-en-scene in fantastical storyworlds. Using the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a case study, this paper asks what it mean to be ‘cinematic’ in a transmedia storyworld, and how can world-building be examined using the concept of transtextual aesthetics?

Tara Lomax is a PhD candidate in Screen Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her research focuses on the networked conditions of franchise cinema and the relationship between creativity and industry in contemporary Hollywood cinema. She has published numerous articles in anthologies and journals on world building and storytelling, franchises, the Marvel and Star Wars universe.

Christian McCrea, RMIT University
The Videogame Fantastic: Science-Fiction World-Building and Adapting
To Technological Change

This paper will focus on videogame science-fiction as a means to understand the widespread vernacular idea of ‘world-building’ as both production system and consumption practice. Videogame ‘worlds’ are usually discussed in game studies literature as narrative and/or transmedia constructs. Through the term ‘world-building’ – understood in videogame production vernacular as backgrounds, environments, narrative and art explorable by players – I will explain how my research will focus on ‘worlds’ as a lens to read videogame production and consumption, using their in-game art, production materials and evidence of ongoing investment by players, to give them meaningful historical agency. The practice of world-building also has a particular historical role in videogames – explaining and embracing the step changes in technology that games involve. This talk will touch on four history examples of fantastic world-building becoming part of the adaptive process of gameplay as a way to explore these intersections.

Christian McCrea is a researcher writing on science fiction, film, videogames, animation, and the popular digital arts. He is a lecturer in Media and Communication in the School of Design at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. He has written many articles in journals and magazines, and his book on David Lynch’s Dune was published in 2018.

Angela Ndalianis, Swinburne University of Technology
World building and Science Fiction: When fantasy becomes reality

In this paper, I will explore the unique capacity that world building in science fiction cinema has to traverse the boundaries of fantasy and enter and shape the real world that we inhabit. Focusing on the films Blade Runner and Minority Report, I will outline the dramatic impact that both films’ fantasyscapes had on real-world design in the fields of architecture, design and technological innovation. In particular, analysis will centre on the approach developed by Alex McDowell, production designer on the film Minority Report (2002), which is where he first implemented his influential world building approach. Of all the genres that fall under the fantasy umbrella, why is it that science fiction fantasy can have real world impact?

Angela Ndalianis is a Research Professor and Director of the Centre for Transformative Media Technologies at Swinburne University of Technology. Her research focuses on entertainment media and the history of media technologies and how they mediate our experience of the world around us. She has published numerous articles and her books include Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (2004), Science Fiction Experiences (2010), The Horror Sensorium: Media and the Senses (2012) and the edited books The Superhero Symbol (2019), The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero (2009) and Neo-baroques: From Latin America to the Hollywood Blockbuster (2016). She is currently involved in the Danish-funded research project Imagining the Impossible: The Fantastic as Media Entertainment and Play, which is led by A/Prof Rikke Schubart.

Rikke Schubart, University of Southern Denmark
Wrinkles and Face Work in Terminator: Dark Fate (2019): Reflections on Linda Hamilton’s Face and Character Development in a Sci–Fi Franchise

“I wanted people to go, ‘Wow, that’s not the old Sarah Connor, that’s the old Sarah Connor” ~ Linda Hamilton, 2019

In this presentation, I discuss the performance of actress Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor in Terminator: Dark Fate (2019) and aging in a sci–fi franchise. I draw on world–building, social gerontology (Gilleard and Higgs 2013), and identity as performance (Goffman 1955, 1986). The presentation examines how Hamilton’s performance as an aged Connor challenges the negative gender stereotype and Hollywood’s norm of female beauty as “ruined” by signs of aging (Ginn and Arber 1993). It discusses how face is complexly linked to character development in a sci–fi franchise, where characters may travel in time or be rebooted. The paper is part of a larger project on fantastic trauma and women (Schubart 2017, 2019).

Rikke Schubart is associate professor at the University of Southern Denmark. Her research is on emotions, gender, and the fantastic. Recent publications are Mastering Fear: Women, Emotions, and Contemporary Horror (Bloomsbury, 2018) and Women of Ice and Fire: Gender, Game of Thrones, and Multiple Gender Engagements (Bloomsbury, 2016, edited with A. Gjelsvik). She recently published articles in NordLit on Charlize Theron as middle age witch, on Gal Gadot and Wonder Woman in Continuum, and she co–edited (with A. Howell and S. Green) a special issue of Continuum on women in the transmedia fantastic.

Jakob Ion Wille, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts
Story World Design – Reflections on World–Building method

Story Worlds are usually thought of as fictional worlds associated with fantastic genres as fantasy, science fiction, super-hero adventure, horror or fairy tales often delivered through trans-media channels. In reality most artwork or at least artworks with any affiliation to narration from painting, poetry and photoplays suggests fictional or non-fictional diegetic worlds. When it comes to story world building this can either be perceived as an activity in the mind of the “reader” or real-life activities by fans extending popular fiction through fan art, fan fiction, role play and cosplay. From a production point of view story world building and design are often affiliated with the usage of new digital pre-visualization and virtual production technologies in big scale media productions.

This paper discusses how methods of story world building or design as an approach towards content development in the context of visual media however still needs to be mapped and tested. This paper draws upon a series of workshops conducted at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Design and The National Danish Film School, which were designed to collect knowledge on story world building methods for creative development of format free of media agnostic content.

Jakob Ion Wille is Associate Professor at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Design where he is also Head of the Production Design master program, and Game & Production Design Bachelor program. He has been working as a scriptwriter, script consultant and consultant on exhibition design. He is currently involved in a research project Imagining the Impossible: The Fantastic as Media Entertainment and Play.