The Screen is the Message

Table Of Contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Questions From the Screen: Manifestations and Reflections of Art and Audiovisual Post-Production in Contemporaneity
• Part I Fundamentals and Technologies in the Audiovisual Arts
• Cinematography as a Transmitter of Pictorial Imagery in Filmmaking
• From Analog Photography to Digital Construction: A Journey from Kindel to Post-Photography
• Tron: Art and Technology at the Dawn of the Computer-Generated Image
• The Digital Sinister: The Revolution of Emerging Technologies in Hyperrealist Sculpture and the Fantastic Genre
• Part II Techniques, Creative Processes and Audiovisual Narratives
• Art and Aesthetics in the Post-Production Workflow of an Indie Fantasy Film
• Rotoscoping and Other Animation Techniques: Audiovisual Hybrids for Storytelling
• Sex, Death and Magic: Metamorphoses in the Sand Animation Films of Gisèle Ansorge
• Evolution of the Classic Script Structure in Interactive Cinema: Black Mirror: Bandersnatch
• Liminality and the Epistemological Boundaries Within the Series Attack on Titan from a Mythoanalytical and Existentialist Perspective
• Part III Genders, Representation and Identity
• Pulp and Science Fiction Press Comics: Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon
• The Fantastic and the Influence of Science Fiction Cinema in the Audiovisual Work of Marina Núñez
• Filmic Ekphrases: Artistic Portrayals of Old Age in Contemporary Art Horror Films
• Dying of Laughter: The Awakening of Hope in Post-Apocalyptic Cinema Through Warm Bodies
• Queer Reveal: Anagnorisis and Post-Production in Music Videos
• The Model Is Galatea but Which of the Two Male Leads Is Pygmalion? Calcifying Galatea and Referencing the Pygmalion Myth in The Song of Songs (Mamoulian, 1933)
• Part IV History and Education
• The TV Fanta-Horror of the 1970s. An Example of Italian Media “Folklore”
• Mythmaking and Oblivion: The Construction of Spanish History in Video Games
• The Art of Horror Movie Posters: A Study Through Analysis, Research, and Innovation in Teaching
• Education in Children’s and Youth Classrooms Through Folklore, Audiovisual Media, and the Fantasy Genre
• Notes on Contributors

Questions From the Screen: Manifestations and Reflections of Art and Audiovisual Post-Production in Contemporaneity

Dr. Mario-Paul Martínez1, Dr. Fran Mateu2

1. Aesthetics of post-production

It is difficult to find on today’s screens any shot or scene that has not been filtered through the digital sieve or that, in this sense, has not been altered using computerized tools to enhance the result. From those scenes that greet us with their overwhelming special effects in cinemas (Pirates of the Caribbean, Avatar, The Avengers, etc.3) or in video games (The Last of Us II, GTA V, etc.)4, to those that we open in the windows of web pages or social networks under the crudest of their design templates (such as the image filters of Instagram or TikTok).

The same could be said of another vast number of works that, being exhibited in different cultural circuits, such as museums or art galleries, configure their screens in a digital regime equally important as far as their plastic production is concerned. Whether in terms of their planning or aesthetic discourse, or in the way in which they relate to the viewer or the exhibition space itself. The immersive and multi-projection installations of creators such as Marina Núñez, Rafaël Rozendaal or Tony Oursler would be, among many other examples, a direct sample of these forces and positions of digital post-production in contemporary art proposals. But, in the same way, so would be the paintings or sculptures by artists such as Albert Oehlen, Tony Cragg or Jeff Koons which, in principle, might seem alien to these digital screens, when in fact they contain a computer root in their sketches or in the works prior to their execution—when they are the direct method of their development-, equally relevant if we wish to understand the essence of these works.

Based on these examples and qualities, it would be possible to point out two tendencies regarding the use (and the footprint) of digital post-production in the artistic and cultural field. The one that does not usually reveal the “tricks” that comprise its digital development; that is, that naturalizes them on stage, seeking their integration in a plausible construct or close to reality. And that which, at the other extreme, displays its pyrotechnics as the ostensible flag of the work itself, making digital post-production a shared boast between the message and the medium.

The first option, as mentioned above, involves applying post-production processes as a mechanism or as one more layer in the constructive exercise of the work, whose presence, in reality, is not intended to acquire a significant role, but to operate in the background as a stimulant intended to favor the visual result of the product.

In the second option, on the other hand, we have works that advocate not only for making this special effect the main verb of their discourse, but also for showing the “entrails” of the project. Plotting (meta)exercises that unveil or exalt the backstage of its post-production, or that show us the wiring, the connections, the supports and other pieces that feed and generate the work in its own constructive and instructive process.

Lev Manovich would very lucidly call these audiovisual phenomena as “cinema-brush” (2005), referring to screen productions doped with post-­production by digital software. Darley (2003) or Riambau (2001), extending these concepts to a broader plastic spectrum, would coin these modes under the terms of “cine-spectacle” or “concert films.” Underlining the relevance acquired by the digital in this kind of cinema, and its inherent relationship with the new means of entertainment and communication such as video games, internet, virtual reality, etc. (Martínez, 2024) and proposing a scopic regime where the “digital visual culture” is the dominant one in the contemporary space.

But these are just some of the many examples cited in this preamble and in this book dedicated to shed light on this phenomenon of digital ­visuality—simple or baroque, covert or exuberant—and dedicated to highlighting, in any of the cases, the importance of digital post-production as a medium and message of contemporary audiovisuals.

Having pointed out, therefore, these fundamental aspects of post-­production through the computer, we should take a step beyond the questions that concern its typology or the development of its technique, to ask ourselves not only what these representations are or how they operate, but also what they are trying to tell us or express. In other words, what do the authors who make digital post-production the medium and/or the message of their own work intend? This is, in essence, the leitmotiv and the primary idea of the volume that the reader has in his or her hands: to expose the aspects and phenomenology of digital post-production through the cases and tendencies that contemporaneity brings us.