RESEARCH VISIT
CIAC HOSTS INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH VISIT
João Paulo Reis, a Doctorate student in Communication and Culture from the University of Sorocaba (Brazil), is currently on a research visit at CIAC, until April 2023. The researcher received a scholarship from CAPES (Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel – Brazilian Federal Government) for a six months research visit at the University of Algarve, under the mentorship of CIAC coordinator Mirian Tavares.
João holds a degree in Cinema from FAAP (Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado — São Paulo), and in Advertising and Propaganda from UNISO (University of Sorocaba-SP). He attended his Master’s degree and is now pursuing his doctorate from The Graduate Program in Communication and Culture. Before starting his master’s, João Paulo also concluded a postgraduate degree lato sensu (specialization) in Graphic Design from Senac Campinas (Brazil).
His professional career has always pointed towards working with images (particularly moving images). While pursuing his degree in advertising, he worked in UNISO’s communication laboratory, where he edited videos and animations for academic works of Communications undergraduate students. After that, he worked at TV Sorocaba, editing journalistic texts for the station’s regional newscasts. On TV TEM, an affiliate of Rede Globo, he worked as a videography designer. He then joined the audiovisual production company Batuta Filmes, where he continued his work in video editing, animation, and motion graphics. In this company, João Paulo created institutional videos, television and internet ads, programs, and series that had national exposure by SBT, as well as major productions for YouTubers.
João is passionate about cinema and his academic research work focuses specifically on cinematographic language and image production technology, as well as how these are articulated in the creation of expressive forms and the conception of meanings.
In his master’s thesis, João Paulo investigated—in the light of the concepts and taxonomy for cinematographic images developed by Deleuze—how the conception of meanings occurs in a film with multiple screens. The work chosen for the corpus of the investigation was the film Time Code (2000), by Mike Figgis, a film created in digital video, where the screen is permanently divided into four simultaneous images.
If in his master’s degree, João focused on the relationship between cinema and digital technology in the past, in his current doctorate research, he intends to focus on the present and the future of this relationship. That means, how current digital technology (with a variety of devices and applications for the production and consumption of moving images with which we interact daily) articulates with audiovisual language and manages to innovate and generate new expressive forms and narratives typical of technological contemporaneity. On that note, the researcher also seeks to investigate future developments in the audiovisual language.
In this research visit, João Paulo Reis aspires to gather information for his thesis and produce articles, in partnership with CIAC, that document the results of the research he is carrying out. In addition—and as proposed in the project for CAPES—João intends to produce an audiovisual work that contemplates these results and incorporates, as far as possible, the language innovations found.