Machinology

Submitted! The final version of our introduction article with Caroline Evans for the special issue “Archaeologies of Fashion Film” is now in with the journal. Forthcoming in Journal of Visual Culture, the text – and the issue – emerge from the AHRC project that I posted about earlier (the project ran 2017-2019) – here’s the original (not updated anymore) project website. Below the abstract of our article.

Caroline Evans and Jussi Parikka
Touch, Click, and Motion: Archaeologies of Fashion Film After Digital Culture

This article functions as the introduction to the theme issue on Archaeologies of Fashion Film. The text introduces fashion film as a genre and as a historically dynamic form of audiovisual expression that we approach through fashion history, media archaeology, and new film history. While introducing key concepts and approaches, we propose a form of ‘parallax historiography’, a term emerging from Thomas Elsaesser’s work, that links different time periods from early cinema to recent digital platforms, even ‘post-cinema’. The introduction makes references to the contributions in this issue that address historical conditions of emergence, marginal voices in the historical record, and unexcavated archival materials; and the issue shows how they all contain feedback loops or recursive traits that resonate in contemporary practice where infrastructures of platforms and data frame the moving image. Fashion film is thus seen as both a historical and a constantly practiced audiovisual form of expression that is not contained in its own industry genre, although that industry should not be ignored either. This article then helps to set the stage for acknowledging the current accelerated change in contemporary fashion communications, and offers visual cultural insights in order to rethink new modalities of fashion, film and bodies in motion.

The issue also contains articles by Marketa Uhlirova, Nick Rees-Roberts, Marie-Aude Lous Baronian, Lucy Moyse-Ferreira, and Wanda Strauven.