CineWorlding: Scenes of Cinematic Research-Creation

Using cine-ethnomusicology as a focus, Cineworlding introduces readers to ways of thinking eco-cinematically. Screens are omnipresent, we carry digital cinema production equipment in our pockets, but this screen-based technological revolution has barely impacted social science scholarship. Mixing existential phenomenological fiction about social science digital cinema research practice followed by theoretical reflection and discussion of methods, this book has emerged from a decade-long inquiry into cineworlding and a desire to help others produce digital media to engage creatively with the digital networks that surround us.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements Introduction: A Cinematic Style of Thought 1. Cineworlding with Musics’ Undercommons 2. A Worlding Proposition For/From an Alternate Reality 3. Living Flame of Love: Creative Practice Research and Practical Musicology 4. Virtual and Actual in Posthumanography 5. Diagrammatic Posthumanography of Margø’s “In Between” 6. Bodying in Intensive and Extensive Spaces: “John Wort Hannam is a Poor Man” 7. Quartet 2 and Affective Vectoring 8. Crystal Image in Cinematic Research-Creation: Pimachihowan, A Case Study 9. The Crowd Behind the Lens: We’re Too Loud 10. Elders’ Room: The Opportunities and Challenges of Decoloniality 11. Activist Minor Cinema Notes Index

About the Author :
Michael B. MacDonald is Associate Professor of Music at the MacEwan University Faculty of Fine Arts and Communications, Canada. He is the founding program chair of the MusCan Film Series, serves on the editorial board of the journal Intersections, is the program committee for KISMIF (Keep it Simple, Make it Fast), is on the scientific committee for COMbART, and is an active member of the International Council of Traditional Music Study Group on Audiovisual Ethnomusicology. He is the author of Playing for Change (2016), Remix and Life Hack in HipHop (2016), and Finding Phish (2020).

Review :
CineWorlding is a deep dive into MacDonald’s highly original approach to digital audiovisual filmmaking and perhaps the most nuanced articulation of research-creation yet to come out of music studies. Ethnomusicology is exploding. CineWorlding throws fuel on the flames and offers exciting new critical pathways for scholars and students. Don’t try to contain it, or sequester it in a discipline, or organize it into a method. CineWorlding is more-than making a film, it is the very making-thinking worlding calls for when it becomes cinematic. More-than human, more-than sited, cineworlding is a practice that must be experimented to do its work. It is neither your work alone, nor mine. It is what occurs in the interstices, in the ecotone 'where individual ecologies, digital cinema technology ecosystem, ethnographic research ecosystem, philosophy ecosystem, cinematic art ecosystem interfere/entangle/interpenetrate each other to produce a rich ecological zone where new complex beings proliferate.' Take cineworlding as a lure and move it into your pedagogical practices. Make it a technique, and be made by it. With CineWorlding, musician, ethnographer and filmmaker Michael MacDonald poetically demonstrates how the cinematic medium creates new forms of thinking, knowing, and experiencing the audio-visual world we increasingly inhabit.