From 2013 to 2017, Hollywood actor Scarlett Johansson was the star vehicle in four unrelated science fiction films that saw her portray a posthuman female enabled by artificially intelligent technology. As such technologies become ever more ubiquitous in the world, so too are the burgeoning discourses around posthumanism and artificial intelligence, which are predominantly disseminated to non-specialists through science fiction and journalistic media. These discourses hold the power to influence our perceptions of incoming technological advancements. Therefore, it is important to (...) gain an interdisciplinary understanding of these discourses and their intersections in order to contribute to the cultivation of a general population that is technologically literate and empowered, as well as foster productive dialogues between specialists from within and across the sciences and humanities fields. The media’s configuration of Scarlett Johansson as an ‘exceptional’ woman, often by drawing upon the lexicon of science fiction, has initiated underlying connections between the actor and posthuman figures within the genre, contributing to her perceived suitability for such roles. Despite appearing to be the ‘ideal’ candidate for posthuman female roles, Johansson’s repeated casting poses several problematic implications, particularly when taken into consideration through a feminist lens. Not only does it contribute to an agenda that establishes improbable conceptions of how artificial, posthuman entities should look and behave, but it also perpetuates retrograde notions of gender roles. (shrink)

While vocal acts, such as interpellation and speech acts, constitute a network of theoretical nodes in Butler’s writings, her theory of gender performativity neglects to theorize the mediation of such acts through the voice and its technologies. In a close reading of Butler’s influential texts, the paper examines the ramifications of a notion of gender performativity that ignores the performative aspects of the voice, asking what it means to think a body without a voice. What notions of materiality and subjectivity (...) does such a thinking it assume? How does it understand the relationship of performativity, performance and sound technology? I argue that the repression of the sonoric aspects of the voice can be read as a symptom of the role of materiality in the theory of gender performativity. Despite Butler’s attempts to attend to the material body within a discourse of the performative, the notion of materiality is constrained through the economy of the sign and remains subordinated to the realm of intelligibility, a hierarchy that Butler explicitly rejects. However, the material voice will finally supplement and subvert the theory of gender performativity. (shrink)

Fugue and chaos are used in their contemporary meaning. Elements of the fugue, albeit a ‎small number of universals, will be demonstrated in the area of visual and verbal colors. ‎Chaos dominates the internet, fashion, and everyday life. The visual and verbal colors are ‎differentiated and their communicative potential is indicated alongside the diachronic changes. The prototypes of colors are the interface between visual and verbal colors.‎.

In this thesis, I use a close reading of the silent films of Charlie Chaplin to examine a question of listening posed by Jean-Luc Nancy, “Is listening something of which philosophy is capable” (Nancy 2007:1)? Drawing on the work of Nancy, Jacques Derrida and Gayatri Spivak, I consider a claim that philosophy has failed to address the topic of listening because a logocentric tradition claims speech as primary. In response to Derrida’s deconstruction of logocentrism, Nancy complicates the problem of listening (...) by distinguishing between l’écoute and l’entente. L’écoute is an attending to and answering the demand of the other and l’entente is an understanding directed inward toward a subject. Nancy could deconstruct an undervalued position of l’écoute, making listening essential to speech. I argue, Nancy rather asks what kind of listening philosophy is capable of. To examine this question, I focus on the peculiarly dialogical figure derived from Chaplin that communicates meaning without using speech. This discussion illustrates how Chaplin, in the role of a silent figure, listens to himself (il s’écoute) as other. Chaplin’s listening is Nancean resonance, a movement in which a subject refers back to itself as another subject, in constant motion of spatial and temporal non-presence. For Nancy, listening is a self’s relationship to itself, but without immediate self-presence. Moving in resonance, Chaplin makes the subject as other as he refers back to himself as other. I argue that Chaplin, through silent dialogue with himself by way of the other, makes his listening listened to. Chaplin refused to make his character speak because he believed speech would change the way in which his work would be listened to. In this way, Chaplin makes people laugh by making himself understood (se fait entendre) as he makes himself listened to (se fait écouter). In answer to Nancy’s question, I conclude philosophy is capable of meeting the demand of listening as both l’entente and l’écoute when it listens as Chaplin listens. (shrink)

Acousmatic sound is often defined as a sound whose source is unseen, that is, in terms of a separation between the senses of hearing and seeing. Discussions about the acousmatic have generally focused on the ontological relation between the sonic effect and the visually unavailable source that produces it. This article examines the function of acousmatic sound in Argentine auteur Lucrecia Martel's La ciénaga ( The Swamp, 2001), arguing that the film's distinctive employment of acousmatic sound and acousmatic listening constitutes (...) a strategy of disruption, challenging the traditional concept of the “animal” – an ideological and oppressive notion produced by dominant Western philosophical discourse. My reading gives close attention to what seems to be the barking of an unseen dog and its effects on human listeners, contending that, as the semiotic stability of the figure of the dog gradually erodes within Martel's cinematic territory, listening to the canine voice becomes an unsettling sensory-cognitive experience; the sound of the barks presents an irresolvable epistemic problem. I draw on Jacques Derrida's late writings on nonhuman animals, borrowing the term animot, to argue that Martel's film brings into audibility an animality irreducible plural: an alterity exceeding logocentric economies of knowledge. The film's experimental aesthetics and construction of narrative, I suggest, are concerned with perceiving and making perception itself perceptible, while exposing the limits of human perception – impassable limits marked by an animality which gradually withstands conceptual domestication. Through its use of acousmatic listening, La ciénaga expands our perception of ecological ontology. (shrink)

This article advances mutism as a creative mode and conceptual tool to treat silence in cinema. Whereas mutism can be a productive concept for the study of auditory and visual absence in a broader...

Podcasts have been described as “a cinema for the ears” and this application of a visual rhetoric to describe an audio-only experience results in an attempt to define what is still a relatively new medium. I argue that it is possible to consider something cinematic without the presence of moving images. Assertions in favour of the cinematic nature of podcasts often employ the visual imagination of listeners evoked by heightened audio characteristics that a particular podcast may possess. By focusing on (...) film-centred podcasts specifically, which, in terms of content and form, are implicitly and often explicitly concerned with properties of the cinematic, I argue for a more conceptual analysis of the idea of a visual form of audio. While many film-oriented podcasts provide a supplementary celebration of cinema culture rather than manifesting a unique cinematic experience of their own, there are examples of film-centred podcasts that attempt to actualise what I will call an “audio-cinematic” experience, deploying the creative potential of the podcast to manifest an experiential aura that evokes a cinematic imagination. I analyse the sonic dimensions of audio-cinematic podcasts including my work with Neil Fox on The Cinematologists Podcast. (shrink)