Jessica Balanzategui
Biographic Data
| ID | 3042866 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jessica Balanzategui |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jessica |
| FAMILY NAME | Balanzategui |
| SIGNATURE | BALANZATEGUI J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Swinburne University of Technology |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2612-6862 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 5 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 12 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Salad Fingers
In 2004, artist David Firth launched the lo-fi animation Salad Fingers in the user-generated content sharing platform Newgrounds. The series, focused on a strange, unsettling narrative about a character that acts as a child but commits unhinged violent acts, went on to become viral in the earliest days of YouTube. Created with the software Flash (launched by Macromedia and then acquired by Adobe), which generates vector images, Salad Fingers is a…
What is ‘children’s television’ in the streaming era
In line with international trends, increasing numbers of children in Australia use streaming video platforms to watch television on-demand from extensive catalogues. Child viewers thus tend to negotiate platform interfaces organised by algorithmic curation to select content, rather than accessing content via scheduled linear TV. The deeper implications of this substantial shift in child audience habits around television have yet to be robustly re…
Skinamarink and the algorithmic uncanny interface between children's and horror film TikTok cultures
Skinamarink , the surprise micro-budget horror film sensation of 2023, gained unexpected international exposure by going viral on TikTok after the film was accidentally leaked online. The film's virality was propelled by an algorithmically driven cross-pollination between forces at seemingly oppositional ends of the taste-cultural spectrum – horror film and children's cultures. Extending theorisations of the digital and algorithmic uncanny, the a…
Heritage child stars on Disney
Disney is a brand long associated with the production of family content and a continually replenished suite of child stars. The 2019 launch of Disney+ leveraged these heritage child stars in its tightly curated home page, stressing nostalgia and a wholesome brand image around the figure of the child. This article explores how the Disney+ interface aesthetics, catalogue organisation and other paratexts negotiate heritage child stars in the context…
The child celebrity as palimpsest
Visual tactility
This article contributes to research on children’s YouTube, online video genres and media consumption practices by focusing on genres that take shape at the intersection of digital media content and embodied sensation and in particular ‘oddly satisfying’ (OS) videos. This type of content has become popular on YouTube, where examples of satisfying and OS content include the manipulation or movement of a range of colourful or tactile materials such…
Shudder” and the Aesthetics and Platform Logics of Genre-Specific SVOD services
Major subscription-video-on-demand (SVOD) services including Netflix and Apple TV+ target a wide range of consumers through catalogs that house a diverse variety of genres. However, as the SVOD ecology has evolved, services have emerged that focus on particular genres, and thus target enthusiasts of specific content types. This article examines the horror-focused SVOD service “Shudder” to highlight how these genre-specific SVOD services curate co…
Disturbing’ children’s YouTube genres and the algorithmic uncanny
Since late 2017, journalists, advocacy groups, and policy-makers have expressed serious concerns about popular genres of video content on YouTube that target child viewers but which are not child-appropriate according to extant definitions and cultural expectations. This article combines a discourse and thematic analysis of 54 news articles and opinion pieces about ‘disturbing’ children’s genres on YouTube with textual analysis of the two genres …
What would Bandit do
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the multifaceted socio-cultural functions of Australian children's television. As social distancing measures forced school students to study from home, local children's TV producers and distributors contributed to home-based learning. Yet, in response to the pandemic, the Federal Government has indefinitely suspended Australian children's television quotas, the regulatory framework that sets minimum hours of …
Creepypasta, ‘Candle Cove’, and the digital gothic
Throughout the past decade, a multimodal type of internet storytelling has developed that extends upon the early Web 2.0 viral narrative practices of chain emails as well as pre-digital folkloric storytelling traditions such as the ghost story and urban legend. This popular mode of digital storytelling, known broadly as ‘Creepypasta’, is produced and consumed according to folkloric practices that in turn shape its form and aesthetics. The author …
The Babadook and the haunted space between high and low genres in the Australian horror tradition
The horror genre is a particularly fraught category in academic and mainstream critical discourse about Australian film genres. Australian horror films are often framed as either ‘Australian Gothic’ or ‘Ozploitation,’ terms that prioritise issues of national identity, class and taste rather than genre. The oppositional relationship of these terms presents an obstacle to the widespread acceptance – both scholarly and popular – of local horror film…
The Receptacle for all that is Monstrous and Vile
In Shutter Island (Scorsese, 2010), the gothic mental asylum metonymises the symbolic powers of madness. The asylum’s position on an isolated island encodes a dichotomy between nature and culture homologous to the film’s depiction of madness and rationality, while marking the asylum as an uncanny domain subversive of the rational structures of mainland society
Disturbing’ children’s YouTube genres and the algorithmic uncanny
Since late 2017, journalists, advocacy groups, and policy-makers have expressed serious concerns about popular genres of video content on YouTube that target child viewers but which are not child-appropriate according to extant definitions and cultural expectations. This article combines a discourse and thematic analysis of 54 news articles and opinion pieces about ‘disturbing’ children’s genres on YouTube with textual analysis of the two genres …
Heritage child stars on Disney
Disney is a brand long associated with the production of family content and a continually replenished suite of child stars. The 2019 launch of Disney+ leveraged these heritage child stars in its tightly curated home page, stressing nostalgia and a wholesome brand image around the figure of the child. This article explores how the Disney+ interface aesthetics, catalogue organisation and other paratexts negotiate heritage child stars in the context…
Shudder” and the Aesthetics and Platform Logics of Genre-Specific SVOD services
Major subscription-video-on-demand (SVOD) services including Netflix and Apple TV+ target a wide range of consumers through catalogs that house a diverse variety of genres. However, as the SVOD ecology has evolved, services have emerged that focus on particular genres, and thus target enthusiasts of specific content types. This article examines the horror-focused SVOD service “Shudder” to highlight how these genre-specific SVOD services curate co…
What would Bandit do
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the multifaceted socio-cultural functions of Australian children's television. As social distancing measures forced school students to study from home, local children's TV producers and distributors contributed to home-based learning. Yet, in response to the pandemic, the Federal Government has indefinitely suspended Australian children's television quotas, the regulatory framework that sets minimum hours of …
The Receptacle for all that is Monstrous and Vile
In Shutter Island (Scorsese, 2010), the gothic mental asylum metonymises the symbolic powers of madness. The asylum’s position on an isolated island encodes a dichotomy between nature and culture homologous to the film’s depiction of madness and rationality, while marking the asylum as an uncanny domain subversive of the rational structures of mainland society
The Babadook and the haunted space between high and low genres in the Australian horror tradition
The horror genre is a particularly fraught category in academic and mainstream critical discourse about Australian film genres. Australian horror films are often framed as either ‘Australian Gothic’ or ‘Ozploitation,’ terms that prioritise issues of national identity, class and taste rather than genre. The oppositional relationship of these terms presents an obstacle to the widespread acceptance – both scholarly and popular – of local horror film…
Creepypasta, ‘Candle Cove’, and the digital gothic
Throughout the past decade, a multimodal type of internet storytelling has developed that extends upon the early Web 2.0 viral narrative practices of chain emails as well as pre-digital folkloric storytelling traditions such as the ghost story and urban legend. This popular mode of digital storytelling, known broadly as ‘Creepypasta’, is produced and consumed according to folkloric practices that in turn shape its form and aesthetics. The author …
Disturbing’ children’s YouTube genres and the algorithmic uncanny
Since late 2017, journalists, advocacy groups, and policy-makers have expressed serious concerns about popular genres of video content on YouTube that target child viewers but which are not child-appropriate according to extant definitions and cultural expectations. This article combines a discourse and thematic analysis of 54 news articles and opinion pieces about ‘disturbing’ children’s genres on YouTube with textual analysis of the two genres …
What would Bandit do
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the multifaceted socio-cultural functions of Australian children's television. As social distancing measures forced school students to study from home, local children's TV producers and distributors contributed to home-based learning. Yet, in response to the pandemic, the Federal Government has indefinitely suspended Australian children's television quotas, the regulatory framework that sets minimum hours of …
Visual tactility
This article contributes to research on children’s YouTube, online video genres and media consumption practices by focusing on genres that take shape at the intersection of digital media content and embodied sensation and in particular ‘oddly satisfying’ (OS) videos. This type of content has become popular on YouTube, where examples of satisfying and OS content include the manipulation or movement of a range of colourful or tactile materials such…
Shudder” and the Aesthetics and Platform Logics of Genre-Specific SVOD services
Major subscription-video-on-demand (SVOD) services including Netflix and Apple TV+ target a wide range of consumers through catalogs that house a diverse variety of genres. However, as the SVOD ecology has evolved, services have emerged that focus on particular genres, and thus target enthusiasts of specific content types. This article examines the horror-focused SVOD service “Shudder” to highlight how these genre-specific SVOD services curate co…
Heritage child stars on Disney
Disney is a brand long associated with the production of family content and a continually replenished suite of child stars. The 2019 launch of Disney+ leveraged these heritage child stars in its tightly curated home page, stressing nostalgia and a wholesome brand image around the figure of the child. This article explores how the Disney+ interface aesthetics, catalogue organisation and other paratexts negotiate heritage child stars in the context…
The child celebrity as palimpsest
Salad Fingers
In 2004, artist David Firth launched the lo-fi animation Salad Fingers in the user-generated content sharing platform Newgrounds. The series, focused on a strange, unsettling narrative about a character that acts as a child but commits unhinged violent acts, went on to become viral in the earliest days of YouTube. Created with the software Flash (launched by Macromedia and then acquired by Adobe), which generates vector images, Salad Fingers is a…
What is ‘children’s television’ in the streaming era
In line with international trends, increasing numbers of children in Australia use streaming video platforms to watch television on-demand from extensive catalogues. Child viewers thus tend to negotiate platform interfaces organised by algorithmic curation to select content, rather than accessing content via scheduled linear TV. The deeper implications of this substantial shift in child audience habits around television have yet to be robustly re…
Skinamarink and the algorithmic uncanny interface between children's and horror film TikTok cultures
Skinamarink , the surprise micro-budget horror film sensation of 2023, gained unexpected international exposure by going viral on TikTok after the film was accidentally leaked online. The film's virality was propelled by an algorithmically driven cross-pollination between forces at seemingly oppositional ends of the taste-cultural spectrum – horror film and children's cultures. Extending theorisations of the digital and algorithmic uncanny, the a…
Art (10 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Aesthetics (7 works) · Digital Games and Media (7 works) · Cinema and Media Studies (6 works) · Literature (6 works) · Media studies (6 works) · Visual arts (6 works) · World Wide Web (5 works)