FilmEU_RIT

FilmEU_RIT will increase the Alliance’s competiveness and reinforce its ability to develop activities that span all the areas of the knowledge square: education, research, innovation, and service to society, while helping the creative sector to affirm its potential for innovation and resilience in a post COVID-19 context.

FILMEU_RIT’s main objective is the capacitation, in Research and Innovation terms, of the individual HEIs that integrate the Alliance via the joint design of strategies and action plans that ensure the transformation of the future European University into an Institution that puts Research and Innovation n the fields of Film and Media Arts at the centre of its activities and operates as a highly valuable critical cultural intermediary. This implies that by 2025 FILMEU must be constituted as an exemplary collaborative structure able to deepen the cooperation between all members of the Alliance and foster their ability to act locally, regionally, and globally in the cultural and creative industries and across other societal areas they impact. The Alliance will implement cooperatively designed policies and action plans in order to increase the profile of Film and Media Arts innovation and research, and develop projects supported by a common agenda for artistic practice-based research that, in a critical and reflexive manner, exploits technologies, consolidates alternative paths for PhDs in this field, and reinforces the societal impact of the knowledge produced in the institutions that integrate the alliance.

Specific Objectives:

   
• To promote the relevance of artistic research;

   

• To activate the research carried out in the Alliance;

   


• To benchmark our proposal with a variety of successful models for institutional transformation at the R&I level and define a model for the successful deployment of research and innovation activities in non-research intensive higher education institutions;

   

• To enable students, staff and teachers across all partner institutions with critical thinking, technical, and methodological skills that allow them to undertake research activities and can enhance student learning by joining theory with experience and thought with action;

   

• To support and promote the restructuring of funding policies and programmes at regional, national and European levels;

   

• To promote the securing and embedding of practice-based third-cycle studies in Higher Arts Education;

   

• To design and implement a network of centres of competences named “FILMEU HUB”;

   

• To design and implement common virtual spaces and digital tools for collaboration;

   

• To increase the ability of the Alliance to attract and retain talent;

   

• To design and agree upon joint management and governance structures for research;

   

• To implement a common framework for IP management and knowledge transfer namely in relation to the protection of creative rights and the development of projects with the industry;

   

• To globally reinforce the ability of the Alliance to act locally and globally and help the overall artistic educational sector;

   

• In the long-run, we seek to be recognized as a key critical cultural intermediary that develops relevant artistic practice-based research activities in the areas of Film and Media Arts at an International level;

   

• In the long run we endeavour to contribute, through our activities, to the legitimization and recognition of the relevance of artistic research (AR).

CALL FOR PILOT PROJECTS

FILMEU_RIT’s main objective is the capacitation, in Research and Innovation terms, of the individual HEIs that integrate the Alliance via the joint design of strategies and action plans that ensure the transformation of the future European University into an Institution that puts Research and Innovation in the fields of Film and Media Arts at the centre of its activities and operates as a highly valuable critical cultural intermediary.

At application stage a model was devised whereby a number of research clusters (5) were pre identified following an initial mapping exercise of existing competences in the four partner HEI. The proposed model engineers the Alliance as a network that hosts several clusters (each one a research group mixing individuals from the different HEIs in the consortium, according to their interests and areas of expertise) and then operates along several loops (implemented joint pilot projects) that represent various stages of relationships among members with the aim of achieving a successful collaborative network. These clusters are organized bottom-up and grow organically, driven by existing collaborations between researchers in the different HEIs. The purpose of the present call is to initiate this collaborative process and start facilitating the emergence of these clusters.

All pilot projects will be exploratory in nature and the objectives of the pilots are to consolidate teams inside the clusters and to support the definition of the research agenda of the Alliance by focusing on specific thematic areas.

The call – Seed funding

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Areas of Intervention (RITs)

RIT 1 Management

This WP deals with the overall project management for the funding period, including different activities that establish teamwork, decision making, communications and collaboration, reporting, financial management and quality control. 

RIT 2 R&I Resources and Strategical Agenda

This WP addresses the dual challenge of (1) strengthening the research profile of traditionally less research-intensive HEIs, and of (2) defining and developing the specific nature of that research – artistic research and practice-based research methods. By tackling these challenges in a concerted way, the FILMEU Alliance aims to act as a model for comparable institutions across Europe, mainly Institutes of Higher Art Education, enabling them to fully take up their role in the European Research Area.

RIT 3 – Impact & Engagement

All projects are exploratory in nature and the objectives of the pilots are to consolidate teams inside the clusters and to support the definition of the research agenda of the Alliance by focusing on specific thematic areas. The four pilots are briefly outlined below. We considered as key deliverables for each project the research work plan in the form of a case study and final results that highlight the potential of the research to be carried out by the Alliance in the domain of artistic practice-based research.

These four pilots should be regarded as proof-of-concept instruments. They will support the implementation of joint teams and the definition of a common agenda for research, but also will help in identifying barriers to cooperation and support the production of a number of recommendations for follow up steps towards the implementation of a joint research agenda.

Pilot 1 – Researching the networks of migration within European film archives

(leader Lusófona Univ.)

The history of European film culture is more about connections, networking, and cooperation than about barriers. The spirit of FILMEU’s program perfectly mirrors this idea of cooperation, with people and teaching methods constantly traveling between cultures and institutions. Based on this idea, FILMEU_RIT will provide a platform for research across networks of European film from an archival perspective. The focus of research will be on the historical background of these film networks but, as a practical result, it will provide innovative tools and methods for archival work. Since a significant part of the European film heritage is still considered lost (se www.lost-films.eu/index), especially from the early nitrate period, and there is an urge to identify and preserve the films shot on the vulnerable early film base, the timeframe examined by the research would be the period between 1895 and 1953.

The project addresses the core topic of preserving and digitizing cultural heritage in a context where photographic or filmic documentation of cultural heritage is gaining more and more importance. Making the materiality of our cultural heritage available for consultation and research in a digital and decentralized way can contribute for an idea of common European space and shared cultural heritage as explained in the report of the European Commission Cultural Heritage: Digitization, Online Accessibility and Digital Preservation. In order to make an effective photographic digitalization of this heritage it is necessary to establish protocols that use the technological means available in each historical context. These protocols must undergo updates and adaptations to each moment and historical context, and the decision-makers who deal with the archives, whether they are public or private, must recognize the necessity of implementation.

Supported by existing protocols – Metamorfoze Preservation Guidelines and Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative: FADGI – we intend to propose updates to these protocols and put them into practice, ensuring high quality standards, while at the same time conceptually test the proposed models and techniques by focusing on the specific context of migrations. Some of the objectives of the project include:

1. Creation of a photographic documentation laboratory for 2d and 3d cultural heritage;

2. Establishment of photographic and filmic digitalization protocols for several specificities of originals;

3. Mapping the routes of professional migration, setting up a database of emigrant filmmakers and filmmakers connected to countries other than their homeland;

4. Mapping archival content focused on professional immigrants.

The pilot would focus only on some of these tasks and lay the groundwork for a bigger project to be submitted, likely to a call on cultural heritage in the context of Horizon Europe.

Pilot 2 – Stereoscopic visions of Europe

(leader: LUCA)

Before stereoscopic photography, peeping was a popular media practice. Since the 18th Century lensed and boxed apparatuses have aroused wonder and seduced audiences by showing daylight scenes of distant cities turning into enchanting night views. These mysterious eye machines have developed a culture of peeping (Huhtamo, 2006) sustained by a solid media system whose role in the rapid success of later peep media, such as stereoscopic photography, remains unstudied. Against this background, our project aims to examine the particular contribution of the media system of cosmoramas to the rapid implementation of stereoscopic photography in the four countries that integrate the Alliance in the 19th century. Emerging after the panoramas and a few years before the diorama, the cosmoramas, or views of the world, were the most enduring ‘orama’ shows and the only ones with a peeping system. These new and sophisticated 19th-century curiosity shows followed the curiosity cabinets and peep shows that had previously occupied the fairgrounds. Installed in large and permanent premises in city centres, these fashionable picture galleries placed their images behind walls, accustoming the bourgeois public to observe them through lenses. The visual pleasure of peeking into an image with modelled space and an enhanced depth both corresponded to a new way of observing, and satisfied curiositas, that is, the intellectual curiosity recognized since the Enlightenment as a legitimate exercise of knowledge. Our pilot sets out to integrate these previous optical media in the history of stereoscopic photography, and to rethink the success of the latter within a wider, more multifaceted historical, cultural, and conceptual framework that combines Media Theory concepts with a Media Archaeology methodology. The project will stem from a preliminary study developed by researchers in the Alliance that has identified in the Portuguese and Spanish press a wide network of cosmoramas distributed by the main cities of the Peninsula and which had integrated stereoscopic photography in their exhibitions since the 1860’s. Through the cosmoramas advertisements published between 1822 and 1872 in the Iberian newspapers, the project will analyse one of the first media networks for the production, distribution and exhibition of images in Europe. This information will trigger a search for optical and stereoscopic views in four European countries’ (Portugal, Ireland, Estonia and Belgium) art and cinema collections which will be incorporated into a digital catalogue, a geolocation visualization, and a virtual reality app; media technologies that will be used as tools to study the circulation of the images, their subject matters, and in particular, to examine and compare their depth and light effects. This will be a material and visual analysis that will allow us to assess how these extra visual features boosted these media as early traveling and instruction systems. On the other hand, it will also enable the examination of their intermedia practices through case studies such as the stereo transparencies or the large pierced photographs for the megaletoscope. In parallel, the discourse analysis of the cosmorama advertisements will be undertaken with the aim of identifying the topoï, or frequent figures employed by the rhetoric of these shows in the four studied countries. This Media Archaeology methodology will also allow us a deeper analysis of the cosmos imaginary fabricated by these discourses promoting a Mondo Nuovo while exhibiting at the same time a Eurocentric iconography which fenced off the colonial territories.

Pilot 3 – Future visions – volumetric cinema prototype

(leader: IADT)

Cinema is always in a state of becoming. We are constantly revising what cinema stands for as a concept, a construct and a social activity. There are now more ways of producing and experiencing films than ever before and with this pilot project we particularly want to address the question of how the affordances of new cinematic modalities (in particular VR and XR) and new forms of outlets (in particular physical 3d spaces) affect the Unitarian understanding of the medium. We are focusing on cinematic experiences that go beyond the screen and in order to explore this we will prototype and test a volumetric cinema pilot episode of a drama series co-produced between the four schools in the consortium. Our research can be labelled as audience studies on spaces of reception, but besides exploring new modes of spectatorship, we also explore the technological and artistic implications of this mode of production and its implications for both artists and industry. The pilot will last a total of 24 months including six months for actual production of the volumetric cinema prototype. This pilot is regarded as the initial exploratory stage in a much larger project on the affordances of volumetric cinema. We will apply to specific local funding for further development of the project.

Pilot 4 – Future sounds – 360º immersive sound applications and mapping

(leader: BFM/TLU)

With the advancement of sound recording and reproduction technology, and with its use in new technologies, from games to cinema and music, immersive sound enhances the realization, centred on the subject, of a space delineated by sound and time. With the torsion of these two primordial elements, space and time, which are part of any human experience, the use of immersive sound deepens the field of the figurative spectrum and its materialities. New means of sound transmission, combined with increasingly individual and three-dimensional reception, allow for a scenic and sonic density that is the result of a constant interaction of the “spectator” or auditory with the creation and its progression, whether dealing with the tradtional filmic categories of music, dialogue or sound fx, synchronized to an image, or accompanying the development of acts or a live performance.As with other activities in the creative industries, immersive sound has produced a deterritorialization of the spectrum and functions as an agent that enhances greater affinities with content, overcoming the relationship that human beings developed in the 20th century between action and reaction and even interaction. The creative moment arises from the simultaneity of an act in permanent construction in space and time, developed by the immersive sound and the general virtuality promoted by technology. The appearance of recording and sound reproduction technology that approached the spatial effects of the sound source was only possible with the passage of a stereo and surrounding sound for diffusion, even using image and broadcasting, based on the use of recently emerged technologies such as Dolby Atmos Home and MPEG-H 3D Audio. Thus, all content that requires a strong presence of sound, and where this is a central element of phenomenology or meaning, the recording and diffusion in these new technologies enable greater immersion in the three- dimensionality of the film or the game (as examples). The academy should investigate which arts and creative content are best suited to these new sound spectra, and also promote their use in new audio-visual realities, individually or collectively.

Pilot 5- Policies

(leader: BFM/TLU& UL)

In a context of profound transformation and fast-paced change, film and audiovisual are being molded by new regulatory frameworks, emergent technologies and changing audience behaviors. Research endeavors in this domain should target all these elements with a clear focus on the identification of trends and changing patterns and how these processes generate new creative and artistic opportunities but also create new needs on the producers and creators’ side and impel transformations that should be studied.

RIT 4 – Talent

The main objective of this WP is to promote a joint policy and action plan for the improvement of research competences in the Alliance and the increase in critical mass, along with a joint strategy for HR management, recruiting and rewarding.

We consider this WP to be central to the objectives of FILMEU_RIT following initial analyses and objectives. Rhizomatic sustainability education requires (re)imagining of scholarship.

RIT 5 Networking

This Work Package addresses the need for the overall valorisation and legitimization of the Alliance and involves exploring joint structures and sharing best practices across European Universities, facilitating collaboration in activities that could be common to all alliances and generally increasing the ability of the Alliance to intervene at a policy-making level. It includes two pilot actions: one that will explore cooperation with other European Universities and another targeting collaboration across the artistic sector in order to reinforce the artistic research agenda.

RIT 6 Dissemination

The main objective of the WP is the design and implementation of a sustainability and dissemination strategy that collates the results of the activity of the Alliance into the production of transferable assets including a final toolkit, reflecting our approach to artistic research and the positioning of the Alliance.