Recent developments in machine learning and artificial intelligence are rapidly transforming contemporary media cultures. Text-to-image models and related generative AI tools (text-to-video, text-to-music, text-to-code) are currently changing the ways people around the globe communicate and create media content. Large language models are similarly shifting the ways people learn and gain knowledge. The AI Media research group investigates the transformative effects of machine learning and generative AI on media and society.

AI-powered media applications are complex socio-technical configurations that challenge the existing explanatory frameworks of media theory. Understanding the technological workings and societal impacts of these applications calls for transdisciplinary frameworks and new critical vocabularies. This includes developing knowledges about practices and conventions that transform technologies into media forms. The overall research goal of the AI Media research group is to develop such much-needed frameworks, vocabularies, and knowledges. 

The AI Media research group is made up of members with different but complementary backgrounds (humanities, social-science, computer science, and art). In this way, it seeks to build bridges and create an impactful dialogue across disciplines. In addition to the collaboration across departments and faculties at NTNU, the group engages in collaborations with several national and international research groups and centers. 

The research interests of the group include: 

• Machine vision
• AI-generated images and videos
• AI art
• Creative AI
• Deepfake AI

A further goal of the AI Media research group is to establish a collective learning environment that helps develop a critical digital literacy among colleagues and students. AI-powered digital tools, especially, are highly complex and impactful technical objects that seem to be evolving at an ever-quicker pace. This is why we are convinced that a joint effort to stay on top of these developments is the best way to move forward. 

Visit our website for more information

Group coordinators:

Aurora Hoel

Lukas R.A. Wilde

Ctenophora Drifter. Nordic Oil Constellations, 2020. Credits: Elly Stormer Vadseth

This group’s mission is to bridge documentary theory and practice through experimentation. We experiment with theoretical concepts and models to generate new insight into the workings of documentary media in contemporary culture. We engage with creative documentary practices to communicate novel perspectives about the world we live in. At the core of the work conducted at CreaDoc is the idea that creative documentary forms do not only show and tell what has been or what is; they actively shape the limits of the real and push reality to actualise in new ways.

CreaDoc is an interdisciplinary research group where the functions of documentary media are investigated in their intertwinement to, for instance, ecology, architecture, social justice, public policy, historiography, and technology.  

CreaDoc supports the research and creative productions of its members across all documentary media. It hosts symposia, screenings, and workshops, and provides an institutional platform for the development of scholarly and artistic projects.

Leader:

Ilona Hongisto

Faculty members:

Anna Ulrikke Andersen

Sara Brinch

Igor Devold

Aurora Hoel

Ilona Hongisto

Lukas Wilde

PhD candidates:

Denise Hauser

Samira Makki

Mads Outzen

Elly Stormer Vadseth

Affiliate members:

Amir Bashti Monfared (HiVolda)

Ole Christoffer Haga (Innlandet)

The Media, Data, Museums research group is based in the Department of Art and Media Studies, NTNU. Group members pursue collaborative as well as individual research projects that explore the nexus of media, data, and museums from historical as well as contemporary perspectives.

Media, Data, Museums supports research that engages with historical media, cultural data, and/or museum collections and practices. The group offers a capacious and inclusive umbrella for a wide range of research topics and approaches, and a supportive arena in which to practise research in its many stages, with a particular emphasis on enculturing PhD students.

Topics of current research among members include the collection and preservation of popular music as cultural heritage; the feminist legacy in art museums; potentials for imagining other art histories through museum archives; the impact of digitization on the sources of art history, and the hidden bias of metadata in digitized art collections.

Group coordinator: 

Nina Lager Vestberg

Faculty members:

Ulla Angkjær-Jørgensen

Thomas Brandt

Mattias Bäckström

Steffi de Jong

Guro Jørgensen

Christina Ådland Næss

PhD candidates:

Synnøve Engevik

Natalie Devin Hoage

Solveig Lønmo

Esther Momand

Pernille Zidore Nygaard

Affiliated members: 

Dimitra Christidou (National Museum)

Anna Näslund Dahlgren (Stockholm University)

Anne Ogundipe (Kulturdirektoratet)

Project Summary

Visualizing the Deep Sea in the Age of Climate Change (Deep Sea) is an interdisciplinary researcher project that brings humanities and social-science perspectives to bear on new and emerging marine technologies. The project asks how innovations in underwater sensors and robots open up a new frontier – the deep sea – for human exploration, expansion, and exploitation. It approaches marine technologies as media operations that institute new spaces of knowledge and action, and manage the human relationship with oceanic environments. The project examines the epistemic roles of these technologies, and their broader significance as enablers that allow the exploration of some of the last largely unknown areas on the planet for various types of purposes, ranging from new sources of food, energy, and minerals, via underwater cultural heritage, to environmental concerns relating to ocean heating and the imminent loss of marine biodiversity. The project investigates marine media operations along five interconnected lines: media-theoretical analyses of deep-sea remote sensing, marine-archaeological examinations of knowledge-production in unknown territories, social-anthropological ethnographies of control rooms for marine operations, art-historical investigations of the visual, historical, and economic dimensions of deep-sea explorations, and creative interventions that promote ocean literacy. The project is set up as a collaboration with the center of excellence Autonomous Marine Operations and Systems (AMOS) and the Applied Underwater Robotics Laboratory (AUR-Lab) at NTNU. 

Objectives of the Project

The main objective of the Deep Sea project is to contribute new knowledge about marine technologies as a driving force in societal changes pertaining to the ocean and to how humans relate to marine environments. It seeks to understand how marine technologies institute new knowledge and action spaces, and how they manage the human relationship with oceanic environments. This objective is reached through five sub-objectives: (1) to develop a conceptual framework for analyzing marine image operations as instances of remote sensing; (2) to develop heuristics for knowledge production in unknown underwater territories; (3) to map the settings of marine control rooms and compare them to other control-room settings (e.g., space operations); (4) to provide a deeper historical understanding of the socio-economic implications of today’s deep-sea mining activities; (5) to develop ocean literacy through creative projects and digital publications. 

Project leaders: Aurora Hoel and Pasi Väliaho

Read more about the project on our website

True Fabulations asks how documentary cinema looks to the future. At the core of this investigations is the concept of fabulation that is mobilized in the project to account for the ways in which documentary films actualize realities that are not yet. This conceptual work is undertaken in relation to the historical circumstances of the European transition period after 1989. In this context, the project explores how films from this period negotiate transition as a modality of time laden in uncertainty.

Project leader: Ilona Hongisto

Prosjektet har som mål å bidra til innsikt i og debatt om kvinnekarakterar i norsk filmhistorie, og då gjennom undersøkingar av eit utval kvinnelege hovudroller i tre epokar; stumfilmtida med mange sentrale kvinnekarakter, den modernistiske filmen på 1960- og 1970-talet og filmar frå samtida vår der kvinna på lerretet inngår i kulturpolitisk debatt omkring kvinners posisjon framme og bak kamera i norsk filmbransje.

Sentralt i prosjektet står ein diskusjon av korleis kvinnelege hovudkarakterar har bidrege til å levandegjera og visualisera ‘det norske', og då i lys av ei forståing av nasjonal film som ein diskurs der nasjonen blir forhandla, ikkje nødvendigvis blir styrkt og blir styrkt. Norskdom er tett knytt til hvithet. Studiar av hvithet og film peikar både mot det nordiske som ein overordna hvithetskategori og kvinnekarakteren som sentral i posisjoneringa av hvithet som moralsk og estetisk overopphøgd. Hvitheten er som idé bore fram av førestillingar om ein ideell kvinnelighet som i samanhengen vår kjem til uttrykk som Nordisk femininitet; eterisk skjønnheit saman med beskjeden uselviskhet. Spørsmålet er då korleis norske filmheltinner har vore iscenesette i forhold til slik ideal all den tid meir opprørske og uregjerlege kvinnestereotypar har fanga kinopublikums merksemd i større grad.

Forutan forankringa innan hvithetsstudier og film og feltet film og nasjon, trekkjer prosjektet fram nyare feministisk filmhistoriografi, internasjonale studiar av kvinnelege filmkarakter, og dessutan kulturhistorisk kjønnsforsking med interesse for kvinnebiletets sentralitet og tvimeining.

Project leader: Anne Marit Myrstad

Gelatinous Epistemes: Interspecies hydro-choreography and the expanded moving image is a transdisciplinary PHD project in artistic research. The project focuses on the evolving planetary dance between native and emerging species constellations.

The background for the project is dramatic ocean change: coastal ecosystems are in the process of adapting to new ocean realities. Fish populations are declining or migrating from their nested ecologies, while the gelatinous migratory ctenophora and jellyfish seem to thrive and continue their cyclical survival choreographies. Marine biological scientists are predicting that the biomass of ctenophores and jellyfish will increase in the ocean, possibly with less biodiversity of other marine species.

The project deploys choreography, site-specific video installation and virtual technology to shed light on oceanic forms of communication and emerging ontologies. The project will take place in two climate zones marked by human activity and the migration of the ctenophora (the tempered cold zone of the Oslofjord/NO and the subtropic zone of Chioggia/IT), as well as in the Arctic coastal zone where the ctenophora might migrate to in the future (Bearalváhki – Berlevåg/ Sápmi – NO).

For the final artistic result, synchronization technology will be employed to interweave the research from the different sites into a multichannel video-installation. In the three-dimensional space between screens/projections, the ‘gelatinous episteme’ will be animated through an interactive approach where the viewer is invited to actively explore entangled interspecies worlds.

PhD-kandidat: Elly Stormer Vadseth

This PhD project explores the notion, experiences and aesthetics of belonging in the contemporary cinemas of Palestine and Israel. The project takes as its point of departure the capricious nature of belonging: To be in or long for a place; to experience homesickness or sickness of home; to be distraught, as the desire to stay and the fear to linger clash. The paradox of belonging informs the project’s take on Palestine and Israeli films where home and homemaking is depicted in a constant state of flux, oscillating between entrapment in and breaking away from hegemonic structures of belonging. By looking at the experiential and aesthetic dimensions of belonging in these films, the project argues for a new conceptualization of belonging as a liminal space and time. This opens up the possibility to re-evaluate the political potential of film in the region.

PhD candidate: Samira Makki

To what extent may institutional bias be identified in the annotation of digitized images, and, if they are present, what are the implications of these biases? 

In this research project, I will analyze the descriptive metadata of digitized image collections of three art museums in three different countries, selected as they are prominent art institutions situated in countries with legacies of colonialism with collections that potentially reflect these histories. They are also at the forefront of the movement to digitize their collections and have invested in the development of online platforms which make the images available to the public. These institutions face the challenge of working with legacy metadata that could present an obstacle to the goal of inclusive accessibility. By taking a closer look at their institutional metadata the opportunity emerges to compare and contrast how these institutions have dealt with the fraught and often contested histories of their collections.

PhD candidate: Esther Momand

This PhD project in artistic research asks how animated documentaries enable us to gain knowledge about unfamiliar states of mind and mental experiences through prompting our imagination. By utilising a practise-based, self-reflexive artistic approach, the project explores and materializes the subjective experiences of three female filmmakers through the evocative use of space in mixed media moving image. 

The final artistic outcome, a hybrid film located between documentary and fiction, builds on interviews with three female filmmakers intertwined with the director’s own experiences. The final work is an experimentation with artistic methods combining live action and animation.

PhD candidate: Denise Hauser

Dette PhD-prosjektet handlar om populærmusikk som kulturarv. Det analyserer korleis musikalske praksisar i samtida materialiserer seg, og korleis dei blir samla inn og bevart i museum, bibliotek og arkiv, med hovudvekt på museum. Avhandlinga spør kva det er som særpregar dette materiale, og kva omsyn som må tas når kulturarvsinstitusjonar skal ta vare på det.

Prosjektet har ein empirisk ståstad i Noreg, og utgangspunktet for undersøkingane er dømer frå innsamlings- og forvaltingspraksis ved Rockheim – det nasjonale museet for populærmusikk og Nasjonalbiblioteket. Metoden og analysen baserer seg på aktør-nettverksteori. Praksisen med å produsere «autorisert» musikkarv er brutt ned i fire hovudkategoriar, som er tema for fire kapittel. Spørsmåla desse kapitla svarar på er: Korleis er samlarar og arkivskaparar utanfor etablerte institusjonar med på å påverke den «autoriserte» arva? Kva agens har sjølve kulturarvsmateriale, eksemplifisert gjennom konkrete lyd-, foto- og AV-opptak? Korleis er kuratorisk subjektivitet, institusjonsidentitet og organisasjonskultur med på å forme kulturarva? Og til sist, kva er agendaen til samlingsforvaltingssystema nytta i institusjonane? Oppgåva med å samle og bevare musikkarv i kulturarvsinstitusjonar er nokså uoverkommeleg i vår gjennom-kommersialiserte, globale og massive medierøynd. Kunnskapen produsert i dette prosjektet er eit bidrag i diskursen kring den generelle utviklinga i ABM-sektoren, då denne medierøynda pregar mange ulike sider ved samtida.

PhD-kandidat: Synnøve Engevik

The interdisciplinary research group focuses on visual art, primarily Art History, Film Studies and film and art production. We hold that art, the work as well as processes of production and reception, creates, negotiates, and recreates culture. With a focus on gender and diversity, we investigate the complex interactions between the artist, the work of art, and art’s aesthetic and societal impact. Our projects cover:

1. Artists. Under this headline, we discuss what happens to the production of meaning and identity when the authoritative and masculine position of the artist is challenged.
2. Representations. Under this rubric, we ask ourselves how different kinds of art works, through formal qualities, themes, and production contexts, are shaped by and challenge dominant discourses of identity
3. Institutions. This refers to studies of how art works by women are valued in critical discourse and represented in public space and cultural narratives.

Group coordinators: 

Ulla Angkjær Jørgensen

Anne Marit Myrstad

Group members:

Denise Hauser

Samira Makki

Pernille Zidore Nygaard

Affiliated members:

Margrete Abelsen (Utstillingsprodusent ved Trøndelag senter for samtidskunst

The project aspires from Asbjørn Tiller's previous research within Film Audio, and sound in Installation Art. The focal point of the project is the use of sound and sound's function in documentary-, experimental documentary- and ethnigrapic film.

Outcome: Presentation of paper "Asynchronism in non-fiction film", at The third Work Symposium, Hunter College, New York.

The project is to be developed throughout 2016, in collaboration with interdiciplineray partners from other NTNU Faculties and international partners. 

Project leader: Asbjørn Tiller

Collaborator: Marit Kathryn Corneil

Dagens medieforskere er enige om at mediene som omgir oss ikke er nøytrale teknologier, men hva gjør mediene? Og hvordan former mediene våre moderne omgivelser? Forskergruppen Media Acts undersøker hvordan mediene fungerer som agenter og hvordan mediene formgir perspektiver på mennesker, klimaendringer eller terror.

Bymiljøkampen er ein dokumentar under produksjon, som trekkjer linjer gjennom 100 års historie om bydelane Møllenberg og Bakklandet i Trondheim. Frå arbeidarfamiliane som hadde sitt virke i industrien rundt hundreårsskiftet, til studentane som busette seg der på 70-talet og reiste bymiljøkampen som redda bydelane frå forslumming og rivning. I dag blir det igjen mobilisert til bymiljøkamp i området, med fokus på hyblifiseringen, forslumming, skyhøge husleiger og vanskane til dei unge med å komma seg inn på bustadmarknaden. Filmen undersøkjer om minne frå livet og engasjementet i fortida kan inspirera til innsats for ein sosial bustadpolitikk og bymiljøkampen i dag?

Bymiljøkampen er eit tverrfagleg kunstbasert forskingsprosjekt ved IKM, NTNU. Første fase av prosjektet har fokus på minneinnsamling og filmproduksjon i kontekst. I andre fase blir utvida prosjektets teknologiske og tverrkunstneriske forskingsplattform og moglegheita for eit større vandreteater/performance basert på innsamla minnemateriale eit mogleg resultat.

Kontaktpersonar: Barbro Rønning, Jon B. Huseby

Funded by: Research Council of Norway

This project pursues its aim of understanding terrorism from the perspective of critical media aesthetics by focusing on the face of terror -- a term that goes to the core of the communicative and mediated aspects of terrorism: The face is a primary site of contact with fellow human beings and a contested marker of identity, while in a broader sense it is also a cultural interface that distributes and redistributes visibility and power.

Taking the mediated face as its entry-point, the project investigates the identity work that goes into terrorist acts as well as into the cultural responses to such acts.

Anne Gjelsvik is project leader, Aud Sissel Hoel is co-project leader, Ingvild Folkvord (NTNU) and Mette Mortensen (University of Copenhagen) are core member of the research group, which also has international co-operation.

A PhD-position is to be announced.

The project is finished.

The goal of this research project is, through film analysis and literature reviews, to map down and illuminate different forms of Arctic Cinema. The project’s first step will be the organization of a two-day symposium hosted by IKM. More details here: http://luisantunes4.wix.com/arctic-cinema

Arctic Cinema gives expression to an eco-ethnography that represents, through different film genres and modes, how local and regional cultures, but also geography and climate in the Arctic area have been depicted by film and translated into film aesthetics. Some directors, such as Jan Troell and Knut Erik Jensen, have revealed the Arctic in captivating new ways, showing that the Arctic is not about snow and ice alone but about how local cultures relate to those sensory elements. Moreover, the Arctic has a history that is not exclusively environmental but is cultural and ethnographic too. There are numerous aspects why Arctic Cinema is such a strong and emergent line of research on the fields of film and ethnographic studies. The main reason is that it results from a confluence of elements that function in two ways. One one hand, the Arctic Cinema serves as an ethnographic investigation of its local communities. One the other hand, it projects those cultural and ethnographic elements onto a global context. Film is a privileged medium to record many of the experiential aspects of the Arctic and it is through the authorial language of some of the directors from the Arctic Cinema that those experiential aspects find a global projection and reach audiences that may never have been acquainted with the Arctic but are nevertheless exposed to it in its cinematic form.

Film and literature scholars Anna Westerståhl Stenport (University of Illinois, USA) and Scott MacKenzie (Queen’s University, Canada) have recently authored and edited several publications where they bring forth an innovative and original concept of Arctic Cinema. In their work, they trace the historical context of Arctic Cinema and map down different cinematic approaches with the unifying element of the Arctic. Especially in their edited volumes entitled Films on Ice: Cinemas of the Arctic (Edinburgh University Press, 2014) and Arctic Environmental Modernities: From the Age of Polar Exploration to the Era of the Anthropocene (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016; Lill-Ann Körber, Scott MacKenzie & Anna W. Stenport, eds. ), but also in their co-authored chapter entitled “All That’s Frozen Melts Into Air – Arctic Cinemas at the End of the World”

Collaborators are Cinema Scandinavia. Faculty of Humanities (NTNU); Department of Art and Media Studies (NTNU); The Institute for Comparative Research in Human Culture . A special number of Cinema Scandinavia has already been secured for the publication of the symposium’s proceedings. More contacts are being established aiming to secure further publications. Trailer symposium: https://vimeo.com/154872549

The project, the symposium in specific, is funded by Faculty of Humanities (NTNU); Department of Art and Media Studies (NTNU); The Institute for Comparative Research in Human Culture.

Project leader and contact: Luis Rocha Antunes

The project is finished.

In this interdisciplinary research project we examine the impact of public and private digitization initiatives on diversity. Diversity is a key objective in culture and media policy documents and securing a public infrastructure is a primary task. New digital conditions for production, distribution and consumption imply new challenges for policy making and public funding. This research project will contribute to the production of knowledge of relevance for a new digital culture and media policy. The Digitization and Diversity project divides its attention across four industries: the library and book sector (e-books), museums (digital collections), film (digital cinema and movie files), and the press, especially local newspapers (e-papers). Focusing on the interaction between public and private actors, the research addresses content production, user patterns of digital consumption, private and public distribution and dissemination channels, as well as the new technological production conditions relating to interfaces, software (algorithms) and new methods of analysis (Big Data). The overarching objective of the project is to determine how digitization influences different diversity dimensions in the culture and media sector. The research project is a collaboration between the Norwegian Business School (BI), the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), the National Library of Norway and the University of Copenhagen. Role: Co-leader of WP on museums. Hoel’s contribution focuses on the use of computational tools in the exploration of visual (big) data.

Kontaktperson: Aud Sissel Hoel

The project is finished.

European Commission, Horizon 2020, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Individual Fellowships Programme, 2015-2017

Advanced imaging technologies are currently transforming operating rooms into sophisticated augmented reality studios that explore recent developments in computer visualization, navigation applications, and robotic systems. The new imaging methods promise to increase precision and improve health outcomes. However, as medical diagnosis and therapy grow more dependent on images, the status and roles of these images become increasingly controversial. Image-guided applications reshape clinical practices, impact medical decisions, and transform the relationship between physician and patient. The objective of the project is to develop a new framework that accounts for the active role of images in surgical contexts, providing a systematic basis for handling the impact of these images and assessing their controversial aspects. The project pursues its goal through a collaborative and interdisciplinary effort that involves medical practitioners. It articulates the visual knowledge of medical practitioners by undertaking in-depth operational analyses of three image-guided technologies in current use: the 3D Slicer software application, the da Vinci surgical system, and the CyberKnife robotic radiosurgery system. The analyses introduce the notion of styles

of objectivity, which accounts for the key features of these applications, including agency, alignment, and automation, while acknowledging that images have a certain agency and that there is an inner connection between aesthetic and epistemic factors. A second objective of the project is to contribute to conceptual and methodological innovation through a two-way transfer of visual literacies across medicine and humanities/social science domains, by operationalising the visual knowledge of medical practitioners so that it can be fed into visual/media/science studies, and vice versa. This includes developing concepts for new ways of teaching the visual knowledge of medicine. The project is hosted by the excellence cluster Image Knowledge Gestaltung: An Interdisciplinary Laboratory, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany. Role: MSCA Fellow.

Kontaktperson: Aud Sissel Hoel

The project is finished.

How does digitization add value to the image collections of museums, and to what extent do different stakeholders (users, institutions, policy makers) identify different features as adding digital value? This project will explore the potentials and limitations of computational tools in both production and participation aspects of an online platform for Norwegian museums. One case study addressing the aesthetic and techno-cultural dimensions of diversity will analyse how «digital value» is added visually to the featured collections by the online interface. A second case study will be exploring the extent to which accessible metadata may produce added value in the shape of searchable textual information about the image files, through a specific attempt to produce a digital history of (analogue) photographic practices in Norwegian museums by mining the metadata of digitized photographic reproductions featured on the online museum platform. This case study will be performed in collaboration with Professor Stephen Brown and his team at the Photographic History Research Centre (PHRC) at DeMontfort University, UK.

This project is part of a work package within Digitization and Diversity: Potentials and Challenges for Diversity in the Culture and Media Sector - a joint project with the Norwegian Business School, Handelshøyskolen BI, and is supported by the Research Council of Norway through its KULMEDIA programme.

Kontaktperson: Nina Lager Vestberg

A project under development with Nina Lager Vestberg and Jon Raundalen which explores how an environmentally aware media studies might look. The project is still at the planning stage, and builds on earlier collaborations on the pilot project «Ethical and environmental aspects of modern media technologies» (funded by the Norwegian Media Authority 2011) and the edited collection Media and the Ecological Crisis (Routledge 2015), co-edited by Jon and me together with Richard Maxwell at Queens College-CUNY.

How are metaphors used in DV (digital visualisation) to make information more cognitive comprehensible and how are different metaphors interpreted by DV-readers?

The goal of this research project is to present a theory of how cognitive mind sets and the affordances of media technologies and software applications interact in visual tropes found in digital data visualizations.

Visualizations of ‘big data’ has brought along a growing consciousness about the potentials for forming knowledge through data visualizations and infographics, as well as a focus on the beauty and aesthetics of visualization as such. Some studies also focus on how DVs generate knowledge parallel to written discourse. In this research project image studies oriented theories on visual figures, theories of visual analytics and George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s work on how we relate to and engage with metaphors in our everyday life will be combined with theories of media aesthetics. The purpose of this is to analyse figural strategies found in various visualization practices (infographics included), exemplified in a material based on ‘best practice’ presentations, with a particular focus on information concerning natural resources and climate. The result will be a comparative study of the tropes found both in analogue and digital visualizations, implying that the project also has a historical aspect.

The research project apply text analysis and user study as methods.  Categories of DVs derived from analysing the text material in the initial part of the project will form a basis for protocol interviews with a strategic selection of informants. Samples exemplifying various metaphors will be tested on the informants. The results of this study will be brought back into a final theoretical reflection on the aesthetics of digital metaphors and the forms of literacy related to understanding information through the means of visualization.

Kontaktperson: Sara Brinch

The project is finished.

The digital revolution is seen both as a new challenge and a new opportunity by actors in the industry, and our project aims to investigate how the industry in Norway act in this new environment. Digitalisation changes every aspect of the production chain and will continue to influence all aspects of Norwegian film production.

"The Chain Reaction of Digital Transformation (CReDiT): Investigating the Norwegian film value chain in a digital environment" sets out to explore the impact digital distribution has (or may come to have) for Norwegian film, both in terms of aesthetics and content and how different actors develop, plan production and marketing of films in a digital environment.

The main research questions are: How does digital distribution change the role of the distributor? How does the digital transition change how actors in the Norwegian film industry (distributors, producers, film festivals, etc.) operate? And, how should this influence Norwegian film policy?

The project is empirical and case-study driven, and the researchers will follow new Norwegian film projects and productions that are developed and/or produced and/or distributed between 2017-19 in close collaborations with actors in the film industry. The chosen methods range from large data surveys of social media and streaming statistics, to qualitative interviews and participant observations.

Anne Gjelsvik is project leader, Svein Høier (NTNU), Audun Engelstad, Tore Helseth, Jo Sondre Moseng and Atle Hauge (HiL) are core member of the research group, which also has international co-operation.

This research project focus on the soundtracks of film and television of today, and have so far resulted in conference papers and published essays. Topics range from the sound of mediation in film trailers (Mediekultur), Norwegian dubbing (Z), the sonic qualities of voices in redubs (The New Soundtrack), point of audition in television (Journal of Sonic Studies), to surround sound (Nordicom Review). New essays on "macro sounds" and the use of sub-woofers and low frequencies are under development, and the project will in the future continue to discuss new phenomenon within soundtracks.    

Project leader: Svein Høier (Individual project 2017 – )

The screenplay format has been very robust since the introduction of talkies in the late twenties. This, even if screenplays to a very little degree describes elements that are very important in finished films (like cinematography and editing), and even if the format only give room for very sparse description of elements like mise-en-scène, music, sound effects and atmospheres. Are these media specific differences of screenplays and films unproblematic or not? This project focus on the qualities, the limitations and the digital alternatives to screenplays, and the end result is essays that discuss both format and functions of screenplays today.

Project leader: Svein Høier (Individual project 2017 – )