BLACKOUT. Cinema and Other Visions

Cinema and audiovisual media are undergoing profound transformation in recent years, driven by technological evolution, media convergence, and shifts in production, distribution, and consumption practices for moving images. The emergence of digital platforms, complex seriality, and hybrid forms of cinema, television, video games, and the visual arts, as well as the impact of artificial intelligence and immersive technologies, have led to a radical redefinition of the traditional boundaries of the audiovisual medium.

In its 0th issue, BLACKOUT presents a thematic dossier in the Focus On section, titled The New Frontiers of Cinema and Audiovisuals. This section critically interrogates these processes and explores the aesthetic, narrative, industrial, and cultural transformations shaping the contemporary audiovisual landscape. In this context, BLACKOUT invites scholars to reflect on new forms of the visible, on the shifts in languages, and on the emerging practices that are redefining the relationship between images, spectators, and media.

The topic is approached from different theoretical, historical, analytical, and interdisciplinary perspectives, in line with the journal’s approach to cinema and film studies, media studies, television studies, and visual studies. The various essays in this section analyze the transformations of cinematic language in the digital age, those of post-media cinema and hybrid forms of audiovisual media; the relationships between cinema, video games, and transmedia narratives; innovations related to artificial intelligence and algorithms in audiovisual production, virtual reality, augmented reality, and immersive cinema; new aesthetics of the digital image; the new spectatorship between fruition and participatory practices; digital archives, found footage, and the reuse of images; expanded cinema and dialogues with the visual arts; audiovisual policies and new representations of contemporaneity.