Immaterial Bits and Material Bytes: Between Agency and Vulnerability
Giacomo Nencioni
Università della Tuscia
Ludovica Fales
University College London
Giorgio Busi Rizzi
Universiteit Gent
Bruno Surace
Università di Torino
Zero Views. Aesthetics and Experience of Failure in the Micro-celebrity Economy
Giacomo Nencioni
Amnesiac: Dementia as Metaphor for Media-Specific Preservation Issues in Sutu's "These Memories Won't Last"
This contribution will explore Sutu’s These Memories Won’t Last (2015), an autobiographical webcomic dealing with the evolving dementia of the ninety-three-year-old grandfather of the narrator. Sutu (Stuart Campbell) makes a novel use of the scroll structure that McCloud dubbed “infinite canvas” to unfold avertical narrative punctuated by a synchronized soundtrack that changes as we progress into the story, and, more importantly, by an animation effect that renders the panels increasingly foggy once the reader proceeds through the story; as a result, the ones that had been already read fade away to irretrievability. In doing so, Campbell’swork not only relies on medium-specific features in an original way, butembodies and stages the continuing erasure of the memories experienced by the elder man,building a site of narrative and mnemonic uncertainty.
Giorgio Busi Rizzi
Giorgio Busi Rizzi is a BOF post-doctoral fellow at Ghent University. He holds a PhD in Literaryand Cultural Studies with a joint supervision by the Universities of Bologna and Leuven, focusingon nostalgia in graphic novels. He is interested in comics studies, TV series, characterization,humour theory and translation.
Vulnerable Faces. A (not apocalyptic) Journey Through Narcissism, Solipsism, Anxiety, Depression and Other Marvelous Manifestations of Post-media Society
If vulnerable is what can be “wounded”, within which some kind of breach can be made, vulnerability is undoubtedly a dominant in post-media society. Not only for the media themselves, but also for those who populate the media, that is, individual subjects. The objective of this paper is to reflect on the vulnerability of the face in the post-media and post-cinematographic context: faces that have been manipulated either abusively (deepfakes, deep nostalgia, digital resurrections, memetic resemantizations…) or voluntarily (filters, face apps, social overexposure…) are in fact the common denominator in a sclerotic context, polarized between the obsession with controlling one's own appearance and the proprioception of an increasingly fragile, inadequate, vulnerable self.
This paper is part of FACETS - Face Aesthetics in Contemporary E-Technological Societies, a project funded by ERC (European Research Council) under the Horizon 2020 program (grant agreement: 819649).
Bruno Surace
Bruno Surace is a PhD in Semiotics and Media at the University of Turin, Post-Doc Research Fellow, Adjunct Professor of Semiotics and Cinema and Audiovisual Communication at the University of Turin. He has participated as a speaker at numerous conferences in Italy, Europe, China and the United States.