Iluminace, 2024 (vol. 36), issue 2
Editorial
Configuring Computer Labor in Film and Audiovisual Media:
An Introduction to a Special Issue
Veronika Hanáková
Iluminace 2024, 36(2):5-22 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1786 
This text invites a critical examination of how computer labor – in all its diverse forms, modes, and manifestations – has been represented, constructed, and reflected through the formal capacities of audiovisual media from the 20th century to the present day. In a world where technological advancements constantly introduce new gadgets, software, platforms, and algorithms, our perception of information technology is in perpetual motion. Computer labor encompasses all forms of work facilitated by information technologies, whether performed by humans, machines, or through human-machine collaboration. This concept provides a lens for...
Theme Articles
Envisioning the Interface
Steve F. Anderson
Iluminace 2024, 36(2):21-28 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1779
Envisioning the Interface presents an interpretive chronology of Hollywood’s imaginings of computer interfaces from the 1950s to the present. Although not rigidly chronological, this video essay observes a historical evolution from early visions of gestural interfaces when computers were linked with superhuman or extra-terrestrial intelligence, to the mundane, physical and punch-card based interfaces of the mainframe era, followed by a wave of strangely recalcitrant voice and anthropomorphic interfaces that emerged in the PC era. Drawing on the concept of cinema as a source of “diegetic prototypes” for the technology industries, this...
The Allure and Threat of the Cine-Computer:
A Supercut of Onscreen Computers in Speculative Screen Fiction
Daniel O’Brien
Iluminace 2024, 36(2):29-40 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1780
This video essay explores the enticement and anxiety of onscreen computers across a range of films and television programmes. The onscreen computer is a frequent prop of dystopian fiction within the sci-fi genre, often presented as an allure that promises increased power or knowledge balanced by the anxiety of technophobic otherness. From the late 1950s onwards, cinema and television, particularly sci-fi and speculative fiction, have used computers as a form of adversary, which eventually turns on their human operators. The video essay portrays the evolvement of computing in regard to apparatus and embodiment through user interfaces, software, and...
Ordinatrices: About the Negative Spaces of Early Computing
Occitane Lacurie
Iluminace 2024, 36(2):41-50 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1781
The history of computing is notoriously incomplete when it comes to the women who have shaped it as engineers, scientists, and theorists. This video essay hypothesizes that this invisibility originated well before that, in the age of computing as manual labor, a profession once known as secretarial work. Two images support this view. The opening shot of Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, showing a colossal New York building full of rows of busy secretaries as far as the eye can see, might seem like a computer tower to the 21st-century eye that has since contemplated the humanoid programs that populate the mainframes of Tron. In the same...
Do Corporate Films Dream of Cybernetic Governance?
Computers (as Metaphors of) Industrial Labor and Society in Olivetti-Sponsored Films
Simone Dotto
Iluminace 2024, 36(2):51-70 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1783
Addressing the audiovisual construction of computer labor, the essay focuses on the relationship between computers and film in their lifetimes as useful media. It analyzes the films sponsored by the leading Italian IT manufacturing company Olivetti between the late 1950s and the 1970s. Questioning Vinzenz Hediger’s hypothesis on industrial cinema’s inability to make computing visible, it argues that the cinematic representation of computers is invested with broader rhetorical functions and responds to a specific form of governmentality, inflected by the application of cybernetics in scientific management. Based on this premise, the essay...
Techniques and Technologies to Compensate for Powerlessness
Matěj Pavlík
Iluminace 2024, 36(2):71-78 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1782
The video essay Techniques and Technologies to Compensate for Powerlessness is an artistic research output that exemplifies Matěj Pavlík’s approach to historiography, developed through individual projects and interdisciplinary collaborations. Pavlík’s work often focuses on a reflexive approach to fiction, speculation, or myth-making. In this essay, the artist examines the role of borderline science technologies invented in late socialist Czechoslovakia. These technologies (e.g., telesthesia, healing, and locating geopathogenic zones) were linked to research in borderline scientific fields like psychotronics and psychoenergetics. The artist...
Who Is Awful? Black Mirror and the Dystopian Imaginary of AI Labor
Tibor Vocásek
Iluminace 2024, 36(2):79-106 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1784
The future of labor has become one of the most urgent topics in the current public debate regarding Artificial Intelligence. Related imaginaries, primarily following the emergence of Chat GPT, have gravitated towards blaming the technology for threatening people’s livelihoods. However, these visions suffer from “sociotechnical blindness” and overlook the human actors who create and hold the decisive power behind AI. One of the most mediatized examples of this was the strike by Hollywood workers in 2023. Pop culture, notably sci-fi television series, has been an influential source of inspiration for these dystopian visions. Despite...
Nostalgia Isn’t What it Used to Be:
On Vaporwave’s Glitched, Aspirational Aesthetics
David Álvarez
Iluminace 2024, 36(2):107-126 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1788
Vaporwave is an internet-native aesthetic movement that emerged in the early 2010s. It directly addresses the presumed condition of living at the “end of history” that was proposed during the 1990s by enmeshing images from aspirational consumerism into an audiovisual aesthetic. This aesthetic is mainly distinguished by its use of the glitch as a unifying element, ironically fusing different forms of noise, muzak and interference with visual and aural refrains and pop culture objects and other images belonging to neoliberal consumerism. This article argues that Vaporwave’s “glitched” aesthetics are the manifestation of...
Reviews
Karlovy Vary Film Festival as a Platform for Cultural Exchange and a Weapon of Hybrid Warfare
Ondřej Zach
Iluminace 2024, 36(2):127-132 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1785
Book review: Jindřiška Bláhová, ed., Proplétání světů: Mezinárodní filmový festival Karlovy Vary v období studené války (Praha: Národní filmový archiv, 2023).
Seriously Unserious: Theoretical Implications of the Gimmick for Film and Media Studies
Veronika Hanáková
Iluminace 2024, 36(2):133-139 | DOI: 10.58193/ilu.1787
Book review: Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020).