By Nico Carpentier
“Power and Gardens” is a four-part video essay by Nico Carpentier that investigates how human-nature relationships are condensed in the gardens of the European cities of Paris, Lyon and Prague. Driven by a discursive-material analysis, the essay is a reflection on how gardens are locations where nature is tamed, and how they often perform an anthropocentric ideology that is strengthened by a series of other discourses, such as capitalism and colonialism. These discourses are not disconnected from the material world; they are, on the contrary, entangled with a series of material gardening practices where nature is used as a sculpting element, where the threat of the wilderness is removed, where exotic nature becomes an object of display, where humans organize commemoration and entertainment, and where biotic life is created. While the first part (“Domesticating Nature”) provides the more theoretical backbone of this discursive-material analysis, the second part of the essay (“Ways of Taming”) discusses the taming mechanisms that tilt the power relations towards humans. The third part (“Gardens and Class”) then moves away from the royal gardens, and shows how gardens have been, for centuries, sites of societal struggle, for instance between different class positions, and between the logic of privatization and the commons. The fourth and final part (“Nature’s Agency”) analyses how nature resists the human disciplining attempts, and can exercise its own agencies. This final part of the essay concludes with a reflection on the ideal garden, and the need to develop more (and new) synergetic models for gardens that rethink the power relations between humans and nature in more fundamental ways.
Click here for "Power & Gardens" in Tecmerin: Journal of Audiovisual Essays, 12, 2023(2).
"Conceptualization of Change" (audiovisual essay)
By Kristýna Kopivová, Nico Carpentier and Vaia Doudaki
“Conceptualization of Change” is a 12-minute film that provides a theoretical reflection on the signifier “change”, and its five dimensions: Normativity, Scale and Intensity, Focus, Control and Time. Filmed in Prague, with the integration of archive material that is mostly related to the 1989 Velvet Revolution, the essay unpacks the significatory complexity of change, mapping the diversity of meanings that have been allocated to this notion. The film’s five chapters organize a dialogue between fast-paced and still poetic imaginaries and voice-overs, starting with the normativity of change, and its utopian and dystopian meanings. The Scale and Intensity chapter reflects on the sometimes minute and sometimes all-encompassing nature of change, combined with its hegemonic and counter-hegemonic roles. The Focus chapter deals with the autonomy and dependency of change, while the Control chapter focusses on how change can be controlled and controlling. Finally, the Time chapter brings in differences between process and outcome, and patterns and events. Analytically and methodologically, the film uses a post-structuralist paradigm to assist theory formation, grounded in, and combined with, an analysis of the content produced for the Mediating Change Colloquium, that took place in Prague on 20 and 21 November 2020. To render this source of inspiration and analysis visible, the film starts with a one-minute preamble, including a selection of voices from this Colloquium, in order to then shift to a more general theoretical discussion on change, with its five dimensions.
Click here for "Conceptualization of Change" in the Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts, 15(1).
"A Visit to Moulding Nature" (short film)
By Nico Carpentier
A Visit to Moulding Nature is a brief video impression of the “Moulding Nature: Discursive Struggles Over the Environment” Exhibition organized at Färgfabriken (Stockholm, Sweden) from 26 August to 26 November 2023.
"The Environmental Ideologies Map: An artistic-academic intersection at Färgfabriken" (short film)
By Nico Carpentier
The Environmental Ideologies Map: An artistic-academic intersection at Färgfabriken is an introductory video by Nico Carpentier about the Environmental Ideologies Map displayed at the “Moulding Nature: Discursive Struggles Over the Environment” Exhibition organized at Stockholm-based art centre Färgfabriken from 26 August to 26 November 2023. The map, developed by Nico Carpentier (with a design by Irene Straccuzzi), explores competing ideological projects over human-nature relationships and the more-than-human world(s).
"Scissors, glue and other machines: The materiality of the Prague zine scene in the post-digital era" (audiovisual essay)
By Miloš Hroch and Nico Carpentier
Published in Tecmerin, issue 8
This video essay studies the role of the material in four Prague-based so-called zines (Atton, 2010; Duncombe, 2008; Hroch, 2017; Liming, 2010; Piepmeier, 2008, 2009). The study of subcultures (and zines) has been traditionally focused on their meanings, using more culturalist perspectives. This video essay argues for paying more attention to the material as material, moving away from the exclusive focus on the discursive and the representational. The argument finds support in the concept of post-digital (Cramer, 2014; Ludovico, 2012, 2016), which allows thinking beyond the old dichotomies of the virtual and the real, or the digital and the material.
It is closely related to the theoretical model of the discursive-material knot (Carpentier, 2017). This model, situated at the crossroads of discourse theory (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985) and new materialism (e.g., Barad, 2003; Dolphijn & Van der Tuin, 2012) aims to capture the entanglement of the discursive and the material, without privileging one over the other. The importance of the discursive realm is acknowledged in this model because the discursive is seen to create the frameworks of intelligibility that allow us to think the social world. The material matters because it has its own agencies, evidenced by its ability to dislocate discourses and to invite for discourses to become articulated with it. In other words, the discursive and the material are knotted together, inseparably and incessantly interacting with each other.
The theoretical framework of the discursive-material knot is then used to analyse a case study that is focused on the production and distribution of zines. Methodologically, the case study on four Prague-based zines combines the qualitative textual analysis of ten interviews and the content of four zine issues, with an ethnography of the zines’ production and distribution processes, including zine festivals. In particular the content of the zine issues and the photographic material generated through the ethnography feature prominently in the video, showing the role of networks of bodies, spaces, paper and related objects, many different machines, and (scarce) capitals in these zines, and their production. This analysis supports the argument that the material is omnipresent in zine production and distribution, but also that the material transcends the digital, also in intermaterial (combining materials) and transmaterial (transforming materials) ways (see Whitelaw, 2012) . Importantly, the essay argues that the use of particular materials also contributes to the discourses of alternativity that these zines communicate, thus demonstrating the entanglement of the discursive and the material.
"A Visit to the Mirror Palace of Democracy" (short film)
By Nico Carpentier
"A Visit to the Mirror Palace of Democracy" is a walk-through of the Mirror Palace of Democracy Installation at the Respublika! Participation Matters Exhibition, NeMe Arts Centre, Limassol Cyprus (December 2017/January 2018). A film by Nico Carpentier. Voice-over by Nico Carpentier. Actors: Emil Brulin, Vaia Doudaki, Åsa Forsblad Morisse, Gary Gumpert and Annika Waern. Production assistant: Siddharth Chadha. Construction: Stravos Anastasiou. Overall support: NeMe. Funding: Cultural Services of the Cyprus Ministry of Education and Culture, Cypriot Community Media Research Programme of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and Department of Informatics and Media of Uppsala University. Support: Cyprus Community media centre, Medochemie, Sheila Pinkel and Uppsala Stadsteater.
Click here for the Respublika! webpage on Mirror Palace of Democracy.
"A Visual Report on the R! Participation Matters Exhibition" (short film)
By Nico Carpentier
The film documents the 14 art projects of the Respublika! Participation Matters Exhibition, which ran from 8 December 2017 until 19 January 2018, at the NeMe Arts Centre in Limassol, Cyprus, and was curated by Nico Carpentier. Film by Nico Carpentier, and photography by the artists of PM, Nico Carpentier, Olga Yegorova, Orestis Tringides and Vuk osi. For R! credits, see respublika.neme.org/who/
By Yiannis Christidis and Nico Carpentier
The starting point of this translation experiment is a 2014 book chapter, entitled The democratic (media) revolution: a parallel genealogy of political and media participation, authored by Nico Carpentier, Peter Dahlgren and Francesca Pasquali. The main aims of this translation are 1) to experiment with alternative (non-textual) ways of communicating academic knowledge, and 2) to gain a better understanding of the opportunities that a sonification process offers to both genres. The chapter's reference is: Carpentier, Nico, Dahlgren, Peter, Pasquali, Francesca (2014) “The democratic (media) revolution: A parallel history of political and media participation”, in Nico Carpentier, Kim Schrøder and Lawrie Hallett (eds.) Audience transformations. Shifting audience positions in late modernity. London: Routledge, pp. 123-141.
Click here for the book chapter "Translating an Academic Text into Sound Art. An Experiment with a Communication Studies’ Text on Participation", by Yiannis Christidis and Nico Carpentier, that reports on this translation experiment.
"Rescuing Participation" (audiovisual essay)
By the Visual Sociology Study Group
"Rescuing Participation" is a visual essay that is based on the chapter "Participation, access and interaction: changing perspectives" of the book "New Media Worlds" (OUP, edited by Virginia Nightingale and Tim Dwyer). In this essay, the Visual Sociology Study group features Jeff, who takes us through the different stages of an analytical model on access, interaction and participation. In his search for the differences in meaning between those three concepts, Jeff's main objective is to flesh out the distinctness of participation, attempting to rescue it from semantic reductionism or even discursive replacement. Jeff (and the essay) argues that through the strengthened articulation of participation with power, we can provide participation with an analytical surplus-value. In doing so, we can avoid that a fundamental division in society - the division between the ‘control-haves’ and ‘control-have-nots’ - becomes normalised ever further.
