Lora Markova

Panel 5E: Cinematic Transcodifications/3
Session 5 – July 3, 11:00 – 13:00

Cultural and Creative Transcoding in European Transmedia Art Projects

This paper studies how transmedia arts and critical media participation could enhance cross-cultural understanding and the construction of an inclusive European imaginary by taking into consideration the transmedia initiative Remapping Europe, A Remix Project (DocNext Network, 2014). The project allows young media makers from Poland, Spain, Turkey and the UK to deconstruct mass media discourses on migration in Europe and create alternative (self-) representations by remixing personal, film and TV news archives. The study argues that the participatory aspects of our convergence culture (Jenkins 2006) and the active role of both artists and audiences in encoding/decoding (Hall 1973/1980) and potentially transcoding meanings (Lotman 1965) should be taken into consideration while studying processes of transculturation. The analysis aims to articulate the emergence of a shared aesthetic language, defined by several complementary modalities of cultural and creative transcoding: representation of transcultural identities as a discursive strategy for the negotiation of cultural differences; sampling of cultural repertoires in intertextual and intermedial order as the generation of third spaces between cultures; encoding-decoding-encoding cycle of critical media participation, defined by the generation of new meanings at the receiving end; and embodied cross-cultural affiliation that destabilizes discursively produced binary oppositions at a non-verbal, sensorial and affective level.

Bio

Lora Markova’s research interests and publications focus on transcultural aesthetics, European imaginary, film and media arts. Her PhD (Cum Laude 2017) was completed at Deusto University – Bilbao, Spain with research mobilities at the University of Birmingham, UK and Goldsmiths – University of London, UK. Lora’s professional background involves positions at the former Netherlands Media Art Institute-NIMk, the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage-ICN, Greenpeace International (Amsterdam) and the European Commission (Brussels). Since 2012 Markova is a member of the Union of Bulgarian Artists (UBA) and has served as a selected EACEA/2007 Expert for the EU Culture and MEDIA programmes.