No surprise that the avatar is represented as a decapitated head or a cadaver sometimes, which also become a metaphor of cinema as a producer of death. Of particular interest is the atmosphere of depression that surrounds these alienated beings, which deal with issues like illness – cancer in particular – and death. This paper takes into account Atkins’s productionfocusing on the role of avatar performances in his films. Some of them show hyper-real melancholic self-portraits, avatars that talk about loneliness and illness. His high-definition video animations are conceived as Lacanian momentsof retrospection and stream of consciousness that explores materiality and corporeality in the digital era. Therefore, the paper will address the aesthetical problems connected with the genre and will offer a first attempt to theoretically analyze a subgenre that has yet to receive this kind of attention.Īmong the most interesting artists of the emerging post-internet generation, Ed Atkins (Oxford, b.1982)refers to both the history of cinema and electronic media in his lm production. In this sense this kind of movies seem to resonate with some intriguing theoretical positions on the semantic consistency of the expression “to shoot” and on the role of operational images in contemporary visual culture (see Theweleit or Farocki). Screencasting horror appears to be the natural prosecution of the aesthetic that was typical of found footage horror, and yet the proper visual problem connected with it appears to be different: in this specific case we share the point of view of a machine (as in Unfriended), that is both a visual and killing apparatus. This is the case of screencasting horror, a new and yet unexplored subgenre that the paper will address to underline the new ways in which (new) technologies are used to create fear. ![]() Given that nowadays we are living in an historical moment where technology changes rapidly, we can expect to identify new trends in horror or specific films that deal with the innovations that concern the ways in which we see, produce and work with images. In this sense, this kind of horror offer a peculiar point of view on the politic of the gaze that is inscribed within the technology that we use every day. is the fact that the grammar of fear is constructed using the same apparata that constitute our contemporary mediasphere. Assuming a Foucauldian perspective, the most intriguing element in movies such as The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity etc. Previous instalments-entitled respectively “Toward a Dialogical and Postmimetic Realism,” “Classic Realism, the Nostalgic View,” “Modernist Antirealism: Existential Alienation and the Solace of Form,” and “The Thingless Sign: The Structuralist and Poststructuralist Challenge against Referential Illusion,” and “The Politics of Mimesis”-are also available on .įear 2000 Horror Now Conference (Sheffield Hallam University, 6-7 April 2018) Lots of interesting contributions have been written on found-footage horror movies and on the ways in which technology and its narrative presence can become a vehicle for the representation and diffusion of fear. This paper is the sixth instalment of a book-length study provisionally entitled On Virtual Grounds: A Blueprint for a Postmimetic, Dialogical Realism. The argument suggests that, more than a matter of semiological analysis, what is at stake here is an axiomatic judgment about the consistency and stability of the lifeworld. Against these uncompromisingly antirealist claims, the paper sketches out a theoretical framework by means of which visual evidence may be reclaimed for realism. ![]() ![]() This semiological skepticism, the paper points out, informs the analysis of still photographs, cinema, and computer-generated images. Saussurean semiology, in particular, deals with photographs as with any other arbitrary sign. It is argued that Saussurean semiology, as well as, to a lesser extent, Peircean semiotics, do not support the concept of photographic images as unchallengeable signs. This paper examines the objections leveled by semiologist and theoreticians of the visual media against the widely held belief that photographic and cinematographic images may act as realist maps of the extradiscursive world on the basis of their intrinsic features.
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