Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli
Biographic Data
| ID | 295352 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kriss |
| FAMILY NAME | Ravetto-Biagioli |
| SIGNATURE | RAVETTO-BIAGIOLI K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Los Angeles |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1205-8985 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 21 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 14 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Vestigial Unconscious and Oceanic Feelings
According to Sigmund Freud, the unconscious is full of contradictions (wild emotional impulses, baseless fears, and repressive forces) but it is also a control mechanism. It is no wonder that digital platforms—requiring uniformity, reliable protocols, secure transmissions and proprietary algorithms as well as an enormous database about human desire and impulses—would gravitate toward a model of control, or more specifically, the ideal of automati…
Inhabiting the Face
The face has had a privileged status in visual media, enrapturing cinematic audiences with its beauty and intensity of emotion. Yet, the study of the face and its social relevance is also the subject of pseudo-sciences like physiognomy and eugenics. This article examines how the media help to capture the intimate details inscribed within the face in what I will argue is an artificial discourse of authenticity, identity, and intimacy by looking at…
Spectral Forensics
Gina Kim's 3D immersive vr trilogy-Bloodless (2017), Tearless (2020), and Comfortless (2023)-traces the twin legacy of "comfort women" and u.s. militaristic settler imperialism in South Korea by drawing attention to the presence of sex workers who have often been disregarded, dismissed, or simply treated as a national embarrassment. While the signs of the women's presence are omnipresent in Kim's vr films, the women featured appear only as ghosts…
Phantom Images, Phantom Limbs, Phantoms of Empire
Kader Attia’s Refléchir la Mémoire (Reflecting Memory, 2016) and Cyprien Gaillard’s 3D motion picture Nightlife (2015) engage the politics of memory by invoking the musical practice of dubbing to convey a sense of haunting. Yet this is not a haunting that simply conjures ghostly voices, images or sounds from the past. It is, instead, a practice of mixing, remixing and distorting − making something hidden or invisible critically present. Rather th…
Riffing off intellectual property in contemporary dance
Dance disappears the moment it becomes visible, the complexity of its ontology matching that of its production and of its intellectual property status. Its creative process is both collaborative and hierarchical, involving the transmission of knowledge from one body to another, remembering steps, recognizing moves, mimicking, and improvising gestures as well as coordinating the roles of dancers, choreographers, and studios. Matthias Sperling's Ri…
Dancing with and within the Digital Domain
Digital cameras and motion capture technologies that document and share creative practices have transformed the way we think about dance as an embodied knowledge as well as the way we experience it bodily. Computational media, which not only records and archives but also calculates, analyses and models dance, further complicates its ontological status. This move to document and inscribe dance in a tangible medium marks a shift from understanding …
Whose Dance Is It Anyway
Until recently, dance was not considered to warrant copyright protection because it existed only as a live performance that was not fixed in a 'tangible medium of expression'. Not being an object, it could not be property. But the more we try to fold dance into existing modes of copyright and conventional notions of property, the more it resists, upsetting the core assumptions of Locke's social contract theory. Legal scholars argue that the expan…
Alphaville
Alphaville is a fully peer-reviewed journal edited and published by staff, PhD students and postdoctoral researchers in Film and Screen Media at University College Cork, Ireland. The journal offers a dynamic international forum open to the discussion of all aspects of film and screen media history, theory and criticism
The digital uncanny and ghost effects
Technology is at the heart of the debate over what constitutes the 'uncanny'. Freud opens his classical text on the subject by questioning Ernst Jentsch's claim that the uncanny is produced by a 'doubt as to whether an apparently living being really is animate and, conversely, doubt as to whether a lifeless object may not in fact be animate'. 1 What Jentsch is referring to is the character of Olympia in E. T. A. Hoffmann's story 'Der Sandmann' -a…
Theory by other means
Vertigo and the Vertiginous History of Film Theory
Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli is a senior lecturer in film studies at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics (University of Minnesota Press, 2001) and has published articles on digital and performance art, modernism, feminism, nationalism, representations of violence, and postsocialist cinema. She is currently working on a manuscript entitled “Mythopoetic Cinema at the Margins of Europe.”
Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics
Shadowed by Images
This essay explores how the large-scale video-installation art of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer uses the illusion of confrontation, contact, and interactivity to create what many spectators describe as an uncanny experience. Like Freud's uncanny, Lozano-Hemmer's work undermines stable subject positions and thus the possibility of the specific symbolic meaning for the installation. The ungrounding of subjectivity does not necessarily point to the subjects'…
Mytho‐poetic Cinema
Alphaville
Alphaville is a fully peer-reviewed journal edited and published by staff, PhD students and postdoctoral researchers in Film and Screen Media at University College Cork, Ireland. The journal offers a dynamic international forum open to the discussion of all aspects of film and screen media history, theory and criticism
Whose Dance Is It Anyway
Until recently, dance was not considered to warrant copyright protection because it existed only as a live performance that was not fixed in a 'tangible medium of expression'. Not being an object, it could not be property. But the more we try to fold dance into existing modes of copyright and conventional notions of property, the more it resists, upsetting the core assumptions of Locke's social contract theory. Legal scholars argue that the expan…
Dancing with and within the Digital Domain
Digital cameras and motion capture technologies that document and share creative practices have transformed the way we think about dance as an embodied knowledge as well as the way we experience it bodily. Computational media, which not only records and archives but also calculates, analyses and models dance, further complicates its ontological status. This move to document and inscribe dance in a tangible medium marks a shift from understanding …
Phantom Images, Phantom Limbs, Phantoms of Empire
Kader Attia’s Refléchir la Mémoire (Reflecting Memory, 2016) and Cyprien Gaillard’s 3D motion picture Nightlife (2015) engage the politics of memory by invoking the musical practice of dubbing to convey a sense of haunting. Yet this is not a haunting that simply conjures ghostly voices, images or sounds from the past. It is, instead, a practice of mixing, remixing and distorting − making something hidden or invisible critically present. Rather th…
The digital uncanny and ghost effects
Technology is at the heart of the debate over what constitutes the 'uncanny'. Freud opens his classical text on the subject by questioning Ernst Jentsch's claim that the uncanny is produced by a 'doubt as to whether an apparently living being really is animate and, conversely, doubt as to whether a lifeless object may not in fact be animate'. 1 What Jentsch is referring to is the character of Olympia in E. T. A. Hoffmann's story 'Der Sandmann' -a…
Vertigo and the Vertiginous History of Film Theory
Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli is a senior lecturer in film studies at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics (University of Minnesota Press, 2001) and has published articles on digital and performance art, modernism, feminism, nationalism, representations of violence, and postsocialist cinema. She is currently working on a manuscript entitled “Mythopoetic Cinema at the Margins of Europe.”
Shadowed by Images
This essay explores how the large-scale video-installation art of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer uses the illusion of confrontation, contact, and interactivity to create what many spectators describe as an uncanny experience. Like Freud's uncanny, Lozano-Hemmer's work undermines stable subject positions and thus the possibility of the specific symbolic meaning for the installation. The ungrounding of subjectivity does not necessarily point to the subjects'…
Mytho‐poetic Cinema
Mytho‐poetic Cinema
Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics
Shadowed by Images
This essay explores how the large-scale video-installation art of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer uses the illusion of confrontation, contact, and interactivity to create what many spectators describe as an uncanny experience. Like Freud's uncanny, Lozano-Hemmer's work undermines stable subject positions and thus the possibility of the specific symbolic meaning for the installation. The ungrounding of subjectivity does not necessarily point to the subjects'…
Vertigo and the Vertiginous History of Film Theory
Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli is a senior lecturer in film studies at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics (University of Minnesota Press, 2001) and has published articles on digital and performance art, modernism, feminism, nationalism, representations of violence, and postsocialist cinema. She is currently working on a manuscript entitled “Mythopoetic Cinema at the Margins of Europe.”
Theory by other means
The digital uncanny and ghost effects
Technology is at the heart of the debate over what constitutes the 'uncanny'. Freud opens his classical text on the subject by questioning Ernst Jentsch's claim that the uncanny is produced by a 'doubt as to whether an apparently living being really is animate and, conversely, doubt as to whether a lifeless object may not in fact be animate'. 1 What Jentsch is referring to is the character of Olympia in E. T. A. Hoffmann's story 'Der Sandmann' -a…
Alphaville
Alphaville is a fully peer-reviewed journal edited and published by staff, PhD students and postdoctoral researchers in Film and Screen Media at University College Cork, Ireland. The journal offers a dynamic international forum open to the discussion of all aspects of film and screen media history, theory and criticism
Dancing with and within the Digital Domain
Digital cameras and motion capture technologies that document and share creative practices have transformed the way we think about dance as an embodied knowledge as well as the way we experience it bodily. Computational media, which not only records and archives but also calculates, analyses and models dance, further complicates its ontological status. This move to document and inscribe dance in a tangible medium marks a shift from understanding …
Whose Dance Is It Anyway
Until recently, dance was not considered to warrant copyright protection because it existed only as a live performance that was not fixed in a 'tangible medium of expression'. Not being an object, it could not be property. But the more we try to fold dance into existing modes of copyright and conventional notions of property, the more it resists, upsetting the core assumptions of Locke's social contract theory. Legal scholars argue that the expan…
Phantom Images, Phantom Limbs, Phantoms of Empire
Kader Attia’s Refléchir la Mémoire (Reflecting Memory, 2016) and Cyprien Gaillard’s 3D motion picture Nightlife (2015) engage the politics of memory by invoking the musical practice of dubbing to convey a sense of haunting. Yet this is not a haunting that simply conjures ghostly voices, images or sounds from the past. It is, instead, a practice of mixing, remixing and distorting − making something hidden or invisible critically present. Rather th…
Riffing off intellectual property in contemporary dance
Dance disappears the moment it becomes visible, the complexity of its ontology matching that of its production and of its intellectual property status. Its creative process is both collaborative and hierarchical, involving the transmission of knowledge from one body to another, remembering steps, recognizing moves, mimicking, and improvising gestures as well as coordinating the roles of dancers, choreographers, and studios. Matthias Sperling's Ri…
Vestigial Unconscious and Oceanic Feelings
According to Sigmund Freud, the unconscious is full of contradictions (wild emotional impulses, baseless fears, and repressive forces) but it is also a control mechanism. It is no wonder that digital platforms—requiring uniformity, reliable protocols, secure transmissions and proprietary algorithms as well as an enormous database about human desire and impulses—would gravitate toward a model of control, or more specifically, the ideal of automati…
Inhabiting the Face
The face has had a privileged status in visual media, enrapturing cinematic audiences with its beauty and intensity of emotion. Yet, the study of the face and its social relevance is also the subject of pseudo-sciences like physiognomy and eugenics. This article examines how the media help to capture the intimate details inscribed within the face in what I will argue is an artificial discourse of authenticity, identity, and intimacy by looking at…
Spectral Forensics
Gina Kim's 3D immersive vr trilogy-Bloodless (2017), Tearless (2020), and Comfortless (2023)-traces the twin legacy of "comfort women" and u.s. militaristic settler imperialism in South Korea by drawing attention to the presence of sex workers who have often been disregarded, dismissed, or simply treated as a national embarrassment. While the signs of the women's presence are omnipresent in Kim's vr films, the women featured appear only as ghosts…
Art (10 works) · Aesthetics (7 works) · Cinema and Media Studies (7 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Law (5 works) · Political science (5 works) · Visual arts (5 works) · Epistemology (4 works) · Law (4 works)