Category: Watching
Reframing Screen Studies: Videographic Criticism and Collaborative Scholarship
By Samuel Santiago, Jacob Reese, and Meg Healy As a burgeoning field of audiovisual analysis, videographic criticism allows film and screen studies scholars to analyze, dissect, and reimagine screen media in ways that promote insights previously limited by traditional modes of scholarship. Just as literary scholars produce written scholarship, film and screen studies scholars have
Buildings and Brutality in RoboCop
Cyberpunk, as a subgenre of science fiction, speculates more about socioeconomics than it does technology. While imaginary gadgets of all sorts still populate cyberpunk settings, the genre predicates those settings upon worldbuilding features such as transnational monopolies and governments dominated by corporate interests, exaggerating the trends witnessed in our late-capitalist reality. As illustrated by the
Ad Astra: Eduardo Kac and Narratives of Progress
On January 15th, 2025, the private aerospace company Firefly launched its first ever lunar lander aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. At my time of writing, the rocket is currently en route to the surface of the moon. This collaboration between Firefly and SpaceX is the latest example of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative,
Natural Hauntings: A Return to the Creaturely
“Humans,” art historian Glenn Peers contends, “have slipped into a modern faith in knowingness that thinks it exceeds the scale and complexity of our world…, blind[ing] us to other human possibilities.” The statement embodies the recent artworks of Pakistani multimedia artist Huma Bhabha in her 2024 exhibition entitled, “Welcome…to the one who came.” Primarily a
Transcending Boundaries: A Mother’s Work
Referencing his mother’s passing in 1992, Nathaniel Mary Quinn’s “aim as an artist [was] to make a work that [was] so palpable and so dynamic and so incredibly felt that [his] Mom could literally walk off the surface of the canvas and back to life.”[1] The result was Untitled (Portrait of the Artist’s Mother) from
I Came By
Babak Anvari’s 2022 film I Came By tells the disjointed story of graffiti artists Jay and Toby. Set in the contemporary United Kingdom, the story addresses colonialism, race, and the curious characteristics of modern, industrial societies in this follow-up to Anvari’s 2016 debut film Under the Shadow. In many ways, I Came By resembles recent
A Painfully Honest Portrayal of Beauty
Tracey Emin, Like A Cloud of Blood, 2022, acrylic on canvas, 59 7/8 x 71 5/8 in. (152 x 182cm) The difficulty in comprehending Tracey Emin’s Like A Cloud of Blood (2022) is the paradox of witnessing a disappearing figure coming into being. In Emin’s painting, an incomplete and empty body lies isolated in curled
A Patriotic Reflection of a Broken Image
The nature of quilting implies a coming together of disparate elements to create a pleasing and cohesive whole. Rachel Clark’s quilt, These Colors Should Run, utilizes these formal qualities to reimagine the American flag, conveying an unsettling and paradoxical image of a nation in disrepair. Clarke is a Professor at Syracuse University’s School of Information
Under the Shadow: Islamic Horror and Shadows of the Djinn
In the last 25 years, the American media landscape has been flooded by stories of war and conflict in the Middle East. In the perspective of many American spectators, the Middle East is a chaotic and even frightening place full of terrorists and extremism. While such terrors exist in the Middle East, attending to the
Attempting to Wrangle Video Game Genre Adaptation
When used in relation to video games, the term “genre” primarily functions as a descriptor of the types of interactive play present in the text—e.g. role-playing, shooting, driving, etc. Games’ systems of interaction often become the main identifiers by which they get categorized. While a plethora of genres defined by narrative and theme are represented