Sara Malou Strandvad

Materializing ideas: A socio-material perspective on the organizing of cultural production:

Based on a qualitative study of development processes in the Danish film industry, this article sketches a socio-material perspective for analysing the production of culture. Whereas previous studies of cultural production have identified social factors in cultural production, this article sets out to investigate how the evolving object may form an active part in the collaborative process of its making. The article identifies three moments when the evolving object becomes decisive for the collaboration: the idea has to be detached to enable collaboration; attachments between collaborators are made via the evolving object; and closure of the product is postponed to enhance creative development. Thus, the article suggests that cultural objects and the processes of their making are co-produced, evolve simultaneously and are mutually constitutive. In this way, the object may have effects even while it is becoming materialized.Based on a qualitative study of development processes in the Danish film industry, this article sketches a socio-material perspective for analysing the production of culture. Whereas previous studies of cultural production have identified social factors in cultural production, this article sets out to investigate how the evolving object may form an active part in the collaborative process of its making. The article identifies three moments when the evolving object becomes decisive for the collaboration: the idea has to be detached to enable collaboration; attachments between collaborators are made via the evolving object; and closure of the product is postponed to enhance creative development. Thus, the article suggests that cultural objects and the processes of their making are co-produced, evolve simultaneously and are mutually constitutive. In this way, the object may have effects even while it is becoming materialized.

Attached by the Product: A Socio-Material Direction in the Sociology of Art

The sociology of art tends to reduce the cultural product to an outcome of social causality. As an alternative, this article pursues the aim of developing a cultural sociological approach which includes both sociality and materiality. The article builds on an empirical analysis of a case about the development of a film project, which ends in a devastating quarrel and consequently no film. In the analysis, the evolving product is portrayed as a mediator of the social relations around it. The article suggests that the human participants are attached or detached to the project based on their experiences of the evolving product. Thus the argument proposes that the product and the social relations are being co-produced, and that this is overlooked if the product is not included in the socialogical analysis.

New Danish Screen – an organizational facilitation of creative initiatives: gatekeeping and beyond

This article looks at how the film consultant directing the subsidy scheme New Danish Screen carries out this job. The aim of the article is to provide an understanding of the function of an organizational representative who succeeds in generating the making of innovative cultural products. The article illustrates how the job of the film consultant does not only imply choosing between different products but also entails involvement in the making of these products. As a result of this, the article argues that to understand the job of the organizational representative the term gatekeeper should be connected to the concept cultural intermediary which highlights involvement in the production process.

Is this what we should be comparing when comparing film production regimes? A systematic typological scheme and application

Abstract This article develops and applies a ten parameter typological scheme for comparative analysis of film production regimes. The ten parameters are applied to three ideal typical models — an ‘auteur’ model, a High Concept (Hollywood) model and a model derived from contemporary Danish film production. This application facilitates the elaboration and illustration of the ten parameters and displays the capacity of the typological scheme in structuring comparison and leading inductive enquiry into film production regimes. Thus, in contrast to many typological schemes that are taxonomical, this scheme is intended to direct empirical research. In plying the middle ground between detailed, single case studies on the one hand, and mono or bi-dimensional comparisons on the other, we capture the virtues of comparative research — discerning the origins of and factors impacting variation, divergence and convergence between regimes — while also facilitating the construction of models detailed enough to track changes within regimes over time.

The promises of talent: Performing potentiality:

In this paper we address the question of talent from a performative perspective. Instead of entering the discussion about whether talent should be considered an individual or a social construction, we suggest looking into how talents are performed. Inspired by the sociology of expectations, we explore when talents are made and what effects they have. Based on studies of Danish film directors and designers, our research suggests that talent is constituted during three processes: identification, self-technology, and materialization. Identification is when others locate potentiality in the individual. Self-technology describes the work which the individual carries out to cultivate his or her talent. Materialization refers to the objects that manifest the talent and the necessity of enrolling other participants to create these objects.

Symmetrical ethnography: a study of filmmakers portraying academia

As a part of an organisational sociological study of Danish film projects, I followed the development of a feature film over a one-year period in 2006–2007. Coincidentally, this film came to be about a drama in the academic world. Thus, while I researched the filmmakers, they investigated life in Academia, using me as an informant. In that way, the positions of researcher and informants were turned upside-down. Or rather, a two-way relation of mutual investigations was introduced between the filmmakers and me. In the empirical analysis of the filmmakers work, I employ the concept of symmetrical ethnography, which has been introduced by the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Vivieros de Castro in an attempt to equalise the knowledge practices of informants to those of ethnographers. Vivieros de Castro suggests that such symmetry entails a turn from epistemology to ontology. Hence I discuss whether the filmmakers’ work can be seen as an invention of ontologies. Whereas studies in organisational aesthetics and sociological appraisals of documentaries within visual sociology have a tendency to compare art to academic work, I suggest looking into the filmmakers’ ‘point of view on point of view’, suggesting that the filmmakers and I may not be representing the same world differently but representing different worlds.

The Disappearing Act

This collaborative interdisciplinary essay explores how competitive freediving (observed at Vertical Blue 2015 in Long Island, The Bahamas) challenges commonplaces about performance by perforating the edge zones of beach and sea, air and water, surface and depth across horizontal and vertical planes. Competitive freediving, which combines the regimentation of a rule-bound sport with the grace and self-mastery of yoga, disturbs and defies paradigms of the limits of human endurance and the precarity of life through its paradigmatic physiological effects on body and mind. The paradox of the striving athlete and the fully relaxed freediver makes this an unusually challenging pursuit. The necessity for managing a single inhalation for the duration of the dive and ascent invites a superficial resemblance with other sporting performances, but the effects of breath-holding makes the physical feats incommensurable. The sea intensifies the challenge of gravitational force and atmospheric pressure with each vertical metre traversed. This necessitates intense physical as well as mental discipline, but how the latter is achieved—and experienced—varies considerably among those interviewed for the essay. Freediving is fundamentally a disappearing act. On the surface there are all the trappings of a sport (timekeepers, medics, coaches, supporters and spectators) that provides a lively mise en scène, but the vertical dimension is where the performance is achieved. Here, the surface worlds preoccupation with reason and judgement, which seeks to optimize divers achievements while regulating their authenticity, is at odds with freedivers proprioceptic experience of depth.

Auteurism and the secondary agency of portfolios

Based on an ethnographic study of evaluators micro-practices during the admission test at a prominent Danish design school, this paper looks into the decisions made by evaluators when selecting future students.Two rounds make up the test in question: A first round where evaluators review portfolios made by anonymous candidates and a second round where a number of candidates are invited to interviews based on positive reviews of their portfolios. Following the two-tier course of the test, the analysis discusses the co-constitutive relationship between portfolios and candidates. Whereas the first round of the admission test clearly builds on the principle that talent can be identified in applicants work, the second round introduces the premise that the person in question may be more important than the work. Hence, while objects constitute active participants during the review round, they tend to become neglected when applicants step in. To consider the selection processes during the test, the paper draws inspiration from the anthropologist of art Alfred Gells art nexus that consists of artist, recipients, art objects and prototypes. With these four cardinal points, it becomes possible to identify relations made between evaluators and candidates along with portfolios and conventions which they refer to. That is, rather than seeing the test as a social game played solely by evaluators and applicants, the art nexus calls attention also to the roles played by portfolios and aesthetic conventions. However, based on the structure of the test, evaluators rank the subjectivity of candidates as paramount, while portfolios become in Gells words ‘secondary agents’. By introducing a specific form of personhood as the final selection parameter, the admission test continues a long tradition of auteurism, which may have problematic effects, as previous studies of cultural education have demonstrated within fashion design and the congruent domains of film and fine art.

Analyzing Production from a Socio-material Perspective

While film studies is showing growing interest in production studies, the sociology of art and cultural production is turning its attention to the role of artworks.1 As sociologists have begun to emphasize the organizational implications of material products, film studies have started to highlight the social dimensions of the way production is organized. In this chapter, I aim to pursue and combine these lines of thought to suggest that the social analyses of cultural production could be taken further by including objects as potential actors, thereby developing what may be called a socio-material perspective. This perspective is well developed within science and technology studies (STS). My proposal for a socio-material perspective on cultural production therefore implies drawing on insights from developments within this field. Others have made similar transfers of ideas, by comparing the laboratory and the studio for instance.2 By considering artworks as objects, the socio-material perspective questions the traditional distinction between the sociology of art and art studies. I will therefore begin this chapter by outlining this distinction and by suggesting that it should be transgressed. I will then present three examples of the socio-material analyses of cultural products to show how this perspective can be used in cultural production analyses. These examples are taken from the work of cultural sociologists who have carried out music, architecture, and film production analyses from a socio-material perspective. Finally, I will briefly discuss some of the potential criticisms and limitations linked to this perspective.