Shanti Sumartojo

On atmosphere and darkness at Australia's Anzac Day Dawn Service

The Anzac Dawn Service is an established and increasingly well-commemorated Australian national day. Its rhythms include music, readings of ritual texts and moments of scripted silence and stillness, all of which take place in familiar commemorative environments. This article takes up the role of darkness in shaping how and what participants perceive of the Dawn Service. It draws on renderings of darkness as generative of atmosphere, linking this to national identity and commemoration. It dwells on three analytical points: that darkness recasts the built environment as mysterious and shadowy, drawing together representational and non-representational aspects of the event; second, that darkness conjures the crowd of participants as unknowable and therefore imagined to each other; and finally, that the dawning light introduces a sense of special temporality, as the inevitability of the changing light conditions moves participants through a range of affective states linked to a specifically national narrative.

Designing Atmospheres: introduction to Special Issue

In this special issue, we focus on the ways in which atmospheres are designed by a range of affective and sensory engineers. The contributions take the visual as a springboard for considering the relationships between such designed atmospheres and those who are cast into their midst, revealing how they play out differently at public ceremonies, art events, shopping malls, tourist sites and in domestic settings. Atmospheres, according to Gernot Böhme (2008: 2), ‘imbue everything, they ... bathe everything in a certain light, unify a diversity of impressions’, and moreover, are ‘distributed yet palpable, a quality of environmental immersion that registers in and through sensing bodies whilst also remaining diffuse, in the air, ethereal’ (McCormack, 2008: 413). As Bille et al. (2014: 2) point out, when we become aware of the atmospheres that surround us, we may not know ‘whether we should attribute them to the objects or environments from which they proceed or to the subjects who experience them’. And though Böhme (2008: 3) considers powerful atmospheres to be ‘something which can come over us, into which we are drawn, which takes possession of us like an alien power’, he also insists that they are intermediate phenomena, belonging neither in the world out there nor in the individual person. Accordingly, while an atmosphere might be ‘a certain mental or emotive tone permeating a particular environment’, attuning the mood of an individual, it may also merge with how an individual feels (Böhme, 2002). More emphatically, Böhme (2008: 2) asserts that atmospheres, ‘without the sentient subject ... are nothing’. The properties of an atmosphere are thus captured in the intersection of the objective and the subjective. 582305 VCJ0010.1177/1470357215582305Visual Communication research-article2015

Mundane data: The routines, contingencies and accomplishments of digital living

This article develops and mobilises the concept of ‘mundane data’ as an analytical entry point for understanding Big Data. We call for in-depth investigation of the human experiences, routines, improvisations and accomplishments which implicate digital data in the flow of the everyday. We demonstrate the value of this approach through a discussion of our ethnographic research with self-tracking cycling commuters. We argue that such investigations are crucial in informing our understandings of how digital data become meaningful in mundane contexts of everyday life for two reasons: first because there is a gap in our understanding of the contingencies and specificities through which big digital data sets are produced, and second because designers and policy makers often seek to make interventions for change in everyday contexts through the presentation of mundane data to consumers but with little understanding of how people produce, experience and engage with these data.

The Fourth Plinth: creating and contesting national identity in Trafalgar Square, 2005–2010

Since 1999 the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square has seen the installation of a range of contemporary artworks that have prompted a national discussion about national identity, tolerance, diversity and history in the context of Trafalgar Square. This article explores aspects of the narrative around the Fourth Plinth scheme since 2005 to discuss the relationship between different versions of national identity and public place, and how the use of historical narratives can shore up contemporary versions of national identity.

Assemblages of creativity: Material practices in the creative economy

This article questions the anthropocentrism of existing treatments of creative work, creative industries and creative identities, and then considers various strategies for overcoming this bias in novel empirical analyses of creativity. Our aim is to begin to account for the nonhuman, ‘more-than-human’, bodies, actors and forces that participate in creative work. In pursuing this aim, we do not intend to eliminate the human subject from analysis of creative practice; rather we will provide a more ‘symmetrical’ account of creativity, alert to both the human and nonhuman constituents of creative practice. We draw from Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of the assemblage to develop this account. Based on this discussion, we will define the creative assemblage as a more or less temporary mixture of heterogeneous material, affective and semiotic forces, within which particular capacities for creativity emerge, alongside the creative practices these capacities express. Within this assemblage, creativity and creative practice are less the innate attributes of individual bodies, and more a function of particular encounters and alliances between human and nonhuman bodies. We ground this discussion in qualitative research conducted in Melbourne, Australia, among creative professionals working in diverse fields. Based on this research, we propose a ‘diagram’ of one local assemblage of creativity and the human and nonhuman alliances it relies on. We close by briefly reflecting on the implications of our analysis for debates regarding the diversity of creative work and the character of creative labour.

When One Idea Led to Another: Re-inscribing and Recombining Thinking Spaces Using Night-time Projections at the Australian National University

ABSTRACT Large-scale projections onto urban architecture are an increasingly established form of public art, dazzling audiences and re-narrating the places and structures they are projected onto. This article examines one such projection work, Thinking Spaces, a two-week installation on the campus of the Australian National University in 2013. The artists sought to use the indistinct, fleeting, and ghostly aspects of illumination to practice a non-representational poetics of affect, re-inscribing a documented archive of relationships and “thinking spaces” onto present-day facades of selected university buildings. The article explores the creation of this artwork through three distinct layers: its historical site-specificity, as it related to the documentary archive from which it drew; its focus on rendering temporal geographies as non-representational, affective spatial practices; and the atmospheres that the artworks co-constituted with visitors. In doing so, this article adopts a necessarily interdisciplinary approach to describing the practices through which place, time, and spatial experience might be investigated through projection and illumination.

Empathetic Visuality: GoPros and the Video Trace

Body-mounted action cameras are increasingly used in social science research to account for and understand mobile experiences of the world. In this chapter, we explore the possibilities such technologies offer us for encountering and analysing aspects of other people’s and our own (as researchers) experiences through ethnographic theory and practice. In doing so, we focus on the notion of the video trace—that is, the idea that such cameras do not so much offer us the possibility to capture the world as it appears in front of the camera lens, but instead record a video trace through the world as created by our movement in specific environmental, sensory and affective configurations. We use this approach to examine what we might learn by making such recordings, and how the possibility of empathetic co-creation of sensory knowledge between researcher, research participants and potential audiences emerges. As such, we do not treat video as a ‘record’ of experience so much as we foreground its capacity to generate new knowledge by constituting a particular trace that enables a process of reflection, discussion and understanding. This process uses the recording as a springboard for knowledge-making rather than treating it as capturing something that already exists.

Empathetic technologies: digital materiality and video ethnography

In this article, we advance recent theoretical and methodological discussions regarding the use of video techniques for generating empathetic encounters. We do so through a focus on how these techniques might be rendered in research conducted through sites of action and experience that are explicitly constituted through forms of digital materiality, whereby the digital and material are understood as relational and emergent. We argue for a processual view of digital materiality and in correspondence with this, of the research process, whereby empathetic imagining is itself understood as emergent from the research encounter. By way of example we draw on recent video ethnography research that has used GoPro and researcher-held video recording in collaboration with participants, in order to record and develop understandings of their experiences of self-tracking and cycle commuting.

The lit world: living with everyday urban automation

Abstract In this article, we develop and advance the concept of the lit world by bringing together literatures about everyday lighting, automation in everyday life and human perception, along with our ethnographic research into people’s experience of automated lighting in Melbourne, Australia. In doing so we formulate and argue for an approach to automation that situates it as part of everyday mundane worlds and acknowledges its entanglement with the emergent and experiential qualities of everyday environments as they unfold. We demonstrate this through the example of automated lighting, understood as a situated technology that has contingent effects and participates in the making of particular ways of seeing and feeling the world. We thereby argue for an account of automation that reaches beyond its potential for the management of human (and other) behaviour, to ask how the qualities and affordances of automated technologies might seep out of their intended domains, and create new perceptual and experiential opportunities. In a context where automation is increasingly prevalent in everyday life, such attention to the experience and use of automated technologies which already exist on a large scale is needed. Urban lighting is an example par excellence of automation in the world because it has a long history beyond the recent association of automated technologies with code and digital infrastructures. As scholars debate how automated technologies will become part of our future digital lives, understanding how people live in a lit world offers a starting point for considering how we might live with other anticipated algorithmic forms of automation.

Tweeting from the past: Commemorating the Anzac Centenary @ABCNews1915:

This article argues that the digital world has introduced new complexities to state commemoration of the past and public engagement with those efforts. It focuses on how national narratives are transmitted by and through particular digital lieux de mémoire; on how the archival trace of the past is presented as lively and emergent, even when the people it represents are long dead; and the implications for the temporalities of national history and memory of new digital forms of state commemoration. To make these arguments, it draws on the April 2015 ‘live tweeting’ by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation of the Anzac landing on the Gallipoli peninsula. It will use material from Twitter handle @ABCNews1915 to trace some of the links between state commemoration and the digital world, a relationship that has become more urgent in light of the increasing use of social media to articulate state-sponsored history and to communicate between states and individuals.