ACMI Stories & Ideas Folgen

This episode is for anyone fascinated by celebrity culture. Sarah Scales is a PhD Candidate at Swinburne University researching the theory of parasocial relationships and breakups and the negotiation process fans experience following a celebrity scandal. The cinema is her greatest passion in life, and she is fascinated by why and how audiences engage with the content they do, and the effects media can have on people. An ACMI X resident, she is currently working with company Media Mentors. You can find Sarah on Twitter at @sarahscales

This episode is for deep thinking comedy lovers. Our guest is Emile Zile, an artist, filmmaker and performer who talks to us about his darkly comic practice – the critical re-use and re-encoding of media broadcasts, communication protocols and online platforms. His work reflects a distributed humanity, a yearning for transcendence and the limits of language. Building on a background of live and single-channel video, his work uses site-specific performance, portraiture and filmmaking to capture the traces of humanity within an accelerating digital culture.

For our season finale, we interview new-media artist, PHD candidate and Lecturer at RMIT University, Tyler Payne. Tyler's work focuses on the genre of self-portraiture in photography and video to investigate womens' embodiment through the lens of gendered advertising. She interrogates the impact that social media platforms such as Instagram have on women and their ability to visualise and share images of themselves. Using a combination of video, still photography and electro-bricolage, Tyler investigates "the oppressive nature of the platform and the damages inherent in fitness and celebrity culture". During our talk we discuss her primary research subject, Kim Kardashian.