Chercheur·e du réseau

At its Canadian premiere, Dominic Gagnon’s Of the North (November 2015) launched a passionate debate regarding the ethics of image appropriation and digital filmmaking about Indigenous communities.  Of the North follows Gagnon’s “natively” digital method, which involves the sampling and montage of public domain images and sounds posted by internauts themselves with the stated intent of documenting how people represent themselves online. In a controversy that crystallized around questions of “digital sovereignty,” Inuit critics decried the recontextualization of personal video posts by a film, they argued, that did not promote an Inuit view of Inuit experience. This article addresses the ways in which Gagnon’s digital method collapsed cultural contexts, bringing to light divergent cultural and generational expectations regarding digital presence and sovereignty. An analysis of the film’s heated reception and new digital works by young Indigenous filmmakers suggests an intercultural ethics for visual ethnographies.

Visible Evidence. Buenos Aires, Argentine. Été 2017.

Live-streaming from Malheur Refuge, Oregon, activists invoked a notion of imagined community, albeit, a broken one, ‘we’re hear fighting for your rights and they’re out to get us.’ That mingled affect of individualist heroism and the felt responsibility to protect liberalism coupled with the conspiratorial undertones of rightwing movements are easily read across the blogs and vlogs of the extreme right. This paper attends to the affective maneuvers audible in the Malheur livestream, paying attention to the specificity of the liveness, presence, and intimacy invoked by the narrowcasting of the vlog and compares these emotional-aesthetic appeals with progressive cinema’s reframing of these same movements in contemporary cinema. While there currently exists a solid body of communications research regarding rightwing movements online, this paper asserts that neither the metaphor of the imagined community (print/broadcast media) nor that of the echo chamber (social media) suffice to explain the affective work of rightwing media in the digital age.