Appeasing the Trolls: Contextualising New Screen Practices with Smartphones

Abstract

This chapter focuses on practice-led research in screen production to explore how mobile media platforms and applications can provide contexts for new screen practices. Smartphones, social media, apps and other digital platforms and technologies have had a significant influence on contemporary everyday creativity and have precipitated a shift in the places, spaces and ecologies for exhibiting screen work. Moments in people’s lives are represented through granular social media artefacts and positioned in different places and contexts. The locative capabilities of apps deliver explicit context to these everyday moments, while co-present others offer new ways of interacting, as well as new ways of making media projects. The ‘logic of lulz’ sees both supportive followers and trolls engage with people’s work online. Experimental filmmakers have adopted the smartphone camera as a tool for screen production, to push filmmaking into new forms and genres that engage the functionalities of mobile media applications. This chapter provides a case study to illustrate the relationships between new screen practices with smartphone platforms, for example, engagements on Instagram inspired Kelly’s film, North, which screened at the MINA (Mobile Innovation Network and Association) 3rd International Mobile Innovation Screening. Many apps are becoming significant tools for screen production, post-production and distribution, utilising the locative, networked and participatory capabilities of smartphones and social media. These digital tools can be used in combination to explore new ways of undertaking screen production. The chapter presents how the ability to locate, comment and juxtapose photographs and videos in social, mobile and digital media is providing new spaces, places and ecologies for exhibiting screen works, and how this in turn is providing abundant opportunities for practice-led research into new screen practices.