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STORIES OF FORTHCOMING

FORTHCOMING BOOK CHAPTERS: 

Accepted and forthcoming: “Cyborg Citizenship in Keiichi Matsuda’s Colombian short film, “Hyper-Reality” (2016)” a book chapter in Digital Encounters now under contract at University of Toronto Press. The volume is edited by Dr. Cecily Raynor and Rhian Lewis, 2019-2020.


Accepted and forthcoming: “Politicized Web Aesthetics in Mexican Animated Short Films: “Reality 2.0” (2012) and “Retrato Político” (2013), a book chapter for the edited volume, Animated Cinema in Mexico: Ideology, the Family, and Profit in the National Cinema now under an advanced contract at SUNY press, 2020. 

"Naturally Synth": A Landscape Music Telethon for Radical Resting

------ that is, the very slow and soothing program called “Bonne Nuit” on channel V. “Bonne Nuit” looks like a fixed camera on a certain frame of beautiful scenery around Quebec for about 20-30 minutes backed by a muzak soundtrack.

“Naturally Synth”: A Landscape Music Telethon for Radical Resting” is a feminist interpretation of cable television’s “Bonne Nuit” in which we, as women and women-identifying electronic musicians, will document, sample, sequence, stream, and re-broadcast the slow-tech sensation of Nature + Synthesizers + Radical resting. We (Lisa Teichmann, Estelle Schorpp, and Kate Bundy) hope to perform  and record the session at the same time as “Bonne Nuit” (2am to 6am) accompanied by a backdrop of livestream national park cameras around the world.

Our musical collaboration mimics the muzak and public access registers of “Bonne Nuit” and then bends these tropes to our particular interpretations by using samples of field recordings of nature. Lisa, Estelle, and myself will layer these textures and weave them into harmonious melodies and ambience of the livestream setting of natural landscapes. Our idea is to evolve this sound into moments of quietude and cacophony within four different ecosystems (mountains, desert, forest, and water) and eventually to welcome the early morning sun as a culmination point of the performance -- to wake up and to have embraced rest and conscious activity.

The atmosphere of the performance would ideally be a calm and safe space for the audience to listen, rest, sleep, meditate, dance, stretch, and circulate freely and respectfully. We can encourage attendees to bring yoga mats, cushions, blankets, hydration, and the space would allow for attendees to choose their approach to rest and enjoyment of the telethon for as long as they need. During the performance, we will livestream the musical telethon online, record the 4-hour musical session that will be synched to the landscapes in the background, and then send the session to the programming offices Ici Radio-Canada Télé, TVA, V and Télé-Québec as a proposal to broadcast on cable television during the regularly programmed hours of “Bonne Nuit.”

MY DOCTORAL DISSERATION: 
Ibero-American short films in Web 2.0 as indicators of (Trans)nationalism and Posthumanism

My dissertation project will illuminate how the World Wide Web 2.0 shifted ways of perceiving nationhood and national identity in Ibero-American[i]independent short film. Embedded in this shift is the question of how cyberspace dialogues with national territories, borders, and belonging -- and even the myth of the Internet as a “global village” of democracy, postnationalism, and postcolonialism. The regional or national short film has historically functioned as a government-subsidized, small-grant venture for budding filmmakers and animators (Felando 40), and the ways that regional cultural industries acquire, package, and distribute short film has been evolving alongside the new possibilities of Web 2.0. In this online era of participation and content generation, filmmakers can self-promote and market their projects outside or alongside their official distribution houses; thus, skirting or eliminating barriers of approval and gatekeeping in national and regional cultural industries. With these newfound Web 2.0 capabilities of sharing, “liking,” commenting, promoting, and fund-raising, short films that had been more closely bound to a locality for funding, equipment, production teams, actors, and languages could now rework and expand the connections between film production and national belonging.

In a parallel trajectory to the materialist approach to short film production in the digital age is the remarkable shift in the content of the films themselves and the questions that they propose about national identity in the digital age. Since short films are usually made with leaner budgets and less oversight than their feature-length counterparts, the timeframe from production to distribution can be less than 12 months, signifying a greater possibility for translating current cultural debates into scripts and productions in a timely manner. In the 2010s, the Web 2.0 was well underway, and headlines about cyberbullying, screen addictions, and data privacy breaches began communicating mass anxiety about the damaging effects on societies that are constantly connected and technology dependent. Reflecting the shift from analogue to digital, many Latin American and Spanish short films produced during Web 2.0 began to follow filmic trends that created narratives surrounding the post humanness of the web user and digital citizen in the Participatory Web. By theorizing within critical frameworks of posthumanism, close analysis of three contemporary Latin American and Spanish short films will dialogue with depictions of the technologized body, the feedback loop of human cognition and machine learning, and posthuman visions of a global future that reflect life in the Web 2.0. 

[i]

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