Betsy Pike & Michael Lee: “Students play with NDI technology: A case study of live-streaming SuperParty @ Ball State University”
How do you professionally live stream a 90-minute event that spans three buildings showcasing 30 student groups with a team of only 10 students, one faculty member, and limited equipment? Live streaming, once a technology-heavy, costly business was nearly impossible for higher education institutions to adopt in their classrooms. However, with the flourish of YouTube channels and increasing affordability of live streaming technology, covering live events is more accessible. In 2020, “916 million hours of content were streamed across all major platforms…representing a 45.4 percent increase from the 629 million hours of content broadcast in 2019” (Climent, 2022). We, as educators, wanted to teach our students not only how to live stream an event, but to do so at a professional level with multiple cameras, graphics, and switching.
Josie Cutrara, “Blank-xious Space”
In the United States, each year, approximately 20% (40 million) of adults and 7% of children struggle with a form of over-anxiety. On a global scale, nearly 4% of the world face the same struggle—and that remains only in accordance with a record taken in 2018. In a competitive country and greater world, it has been articulated that a racing, desire to win nature is human nature, and while biology to a certain extent deems that true, this imaginary “race” that everyone is attempting to win is unachievable and has transformed into a never ending game of mental over-exertion and personal conflict. Despite its encapsulating effect, anxiety remains to be a personalized mental battle that rarely is understood or wanted for be understood by another, allowing it to exist as an avalanche issue that is triggered and grown overtime and independently. The isolative experience of over-anxiousness remains to be a terrifying feat faced by the entire population collectively, yet the issue remains often alone and untouched in our own minds.
Since the beginning of the pandemic at the start of 2020, these statistics have only grown. Isolation has triggered a domino-effect of increasing rates of anxiety–in social realms, in existential means, and numerous other extensions–and, not to mention, overall mental health has deteriorated due to the de-habilitating global loneliness that the pandemic has issued. Thus, this project is meant to give viewers the opportunity to visualize the anxieties that ever-so crowd the mind in isolation.
In particular, this exhibition is a cultivation of three elements of isolation–internalized anxiety, dissociation, and self-reflection. Internalized anxiety fabricates in the blank and white patterned computational drawings, all organically processed and created, infinite layers slowly occupying the black and white canvases. Dissociation is embodied through the letters “A,” “B,” “C”: the generative typography built to be only legible through the assembly of opportune separate forms. Self-reflection is depicted with refracted self-portraits, only cultivated through light and shadow to represent the loss of self clarity anxiety imposes aside despite only being around yourself. Utilizing Processing, a p5.js art and code software developed by Ben Fry and Casey Reas, these combined sections came together to create this “blank-xious” space of an over-occupied emptiness.
Jon Heggestad: “Film’s Queer Parenthesis”
A recent surge in films featuring LGBTQ characters has meant a proliferation of narratives about coming out, conversion therapy, and queer history. Yet, in addition to works that are about queer lives and queer experiences, many films that center around queer characters explicitly avoid calling attention to this aspect of their identities. In Miranda July’s Kajillionaire (2020), Old Dolio is a con artist whose sexual preference is never addressed, for example, even when she begins a romantic relationship with another female character. The MCU’s 2021 Eternals similarly includes a prominent gay character, and while his onscreen kiss caused a controversy, he’s never explicitly identified as gay. By excluding terms like “queer,” “gay,” or “lesbian” from the narrative, these works point to an emerging “post-gay” trend in Western cinema.
Eve Ng observes that journalists have been using this term since the 1990s, referring to “post-gay” as a contemporary rejection of labels, a move towards “the sense that labels are not necessary.” While this stance might aid some individuals by promoting a sense of sameness (as opposed to difference), it certainly doesn’t benefit all in equal measure.
Furthermore, “post-gay” characters function similarly to the “coded” gay and lesbian characters in film that Vito Russo drew readers’ attention to 35 years ago in the publication of The Celluloid Closet. As defined by Wendy Gay Pearson, queer-coded characters are those who are made to “hide in plain sight,” “the narrative equivalent of the ‘open secret,’ the one which everybody knows, but no one wishes to call attention to.” The post-gay character, too, operates as an open secret. In tracing out the similarities between these frameworks, I suggest they illustrate a Queer Parenthesis model, a small window in which “queerness” could be identified as such in mainstream films before it became an open secret once more. While this emerging trend is still fairly nascent, it borrows from the more established Gutenberg Parenthesis model, which proposed print culture as a temporary anomaly between cultures dominated by speech.
As Elyse Graham notes, however, in discussing the Gutenberg Parenthesis model, “Any return to ways of being that can be identified as ‘past’ must be a return with a substantial difference.” Accordingly, in looking to post-gay trends in contemporary cinematic works, I call attention to both its potential benefits and pitfalls.
