New Media Workshop

On Friday, June 1st, the New Media Workshop will join with the Ludic Union for the Investigation of Gaming Interfaces in co-sponsoring the inaugural showcase of the University of Chicago Library’s newly-established videogame collection.

A six-hour event spanning from 3 PM to 9 PM, the showcase will be broken into half-hour sessions, each of which will focus on a specific genre, gameplay element, visual idiom, or subject matter. Positioned at the intersection of art and technology, videogames have seen astounding formal changes throughout their fifty-year history.  This showcase has been designed to highlight both what videogames have drawn from other media and what makes them uniquely worthy of study and preservation.

Visitors will have opportunities both for hands-on play or simple viewing, and are encouraged to drop in an out at their convenience.

The Department of Cinema and Media studies presents its 8th annual graduate student conference, “Cinematic Diasporas: New Media Cultures and Experiences.”  This conference centers on the question, or rather metaphor, of whether various new media experiences and cultures can be understood as diasporas of cinema. In this manner, we wish to push the boundaries of the term ‘diaspora’ further, so that it may not only be used to describe dispersed populations, but also to describe dispersed forms of cinema.

Complete details available at the conference blog.

Anna Everett, Professor of Film, Television and New Media Studies and former Chair of the department of Film and Media Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, author of Digital Diaspora: A Race for Cyberspace (2009, SUNY Press) and co-editor with John T. Caldwell of New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality (2003, Routledge) will be delivering the keynote presentation for this conference, “‘If You Can Type, You Can Make Movies’: Ontologies of Cinematic Diasporas.”

Additionally, as part of her visit, Anna Everett will also be presenting a paper entitled “The Power of Play: The Portrayal and Performance of Race in Video Games” on Friday, April 13th at the Mass Culture Workshop (10:30 AM to 12:30 PM in Cobb 307).  For more information, and to download pre-circulated materials, visit here.

Film Studies Center: 5811 South Ellis Ave, Cobb Hall 306, Chicago, IL

On Friday, March 30, Mette-Marie Zacher Sørensen, PhD student in the Department of Aesthetics and Culture at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, will present her paper “Letters with Cybernetic Senses: Questions of Multimodality, Programming and Liveness in Digital Poetry.”

This paper is no longer available for download.

The New Media Workshop meets from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM in Cobb 310.

On Friday, March 9th, Ian Jones, PhD student in Cinema and Media Studies, will present a draft of the proposal for his dissertation, tentatively titled Getting to Know It All the Way: The Phenomenology of Videogame Worlds.

The proposal is no longer available for download.

The New Media Workshop meets from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM in Cobb 310.

Wednesday, March 7th, the New Media Workshop, in collaboration with the American Literatures and Cultures Workshop, welcomes Richard Jean So, Assistant Professor in the department of English Language and Literature, presenting his paper “Litearary Information Warfare: Eileen Chang, the U.S. State Department, Cold War Media Aesthetics.”  Hadji Bakara (PhD student, English) will respond.

This paper is no longer available for download.

This meeting will take place in Rosenwald 405, at 4:30 PM.

On Friday, February 24, the New Media, Mass Culture, Theater and Performance Studies, and Contemporary Arts workshops join together to host a conversation with the artist Anthony McCall.

Occupying a space between sculpture, cinema and drawing, the historical importance of Anthony McCall’s work has been internationally recognized in such exhibitions as “Into the Light: the Projected Image in American Art 1964-77” at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2001-2), “The Expanded Screen: Actions and Installations of the Sixties and Seventies” at Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna (2003-4), “The Expanded Eye” at Kunsthaus Zurich (2006), “Beyond Cinema: the Art of Projection” at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2006-7), “The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality and the Projected Image” at Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC (2008), “The Geometry of Motion 1920s/1970s”, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2008), and “On Line”, Museum of Modern Art (2010-11).  McCall’s work has also been exhibited at, amongst others, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2004, Tate Britain, London, 2004, Institut d’Art Contemporain, Villeurbanne, France (2006), Musée de Rochechouart, France (2007), SFMoMA (2007), Serpentine Gallery, London (2007-8), Hangar Bicocca, Milan (2009), Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2009), Adam Art Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand (2010), Sprueth Magers/Ambika P3, London (2011), and Serralves, Porto (2011). A solo exhibition will open in April 2012 at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin.

McCall is currently working on an Arts Council England sculpture commission, which will be part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad, to realize his Column in North-West England: a spinning column of cloud that rises vertically from the surface of the water into the sky.

The format of this workshop is intended to provide an opportunity for interested students and faculty to take part in a Q&A with McCall.  Recommended texts to read in preparation for the discussion are no longer available for download.

As a part of the cluster of events surrounding the symposium Phenomenologies of Projection, Aesthetics of Transition: Anthony McCall 1970-1979, 2001–, the workshop joins two other events:

On Friday, February 24 through Saturday, February 25, Experimental Station (6100 S. Blackstone Ave.) will be exhibiting McCall’s pieces You and I, Horizontal (2005), Line Describing a Cone (1973), and Line Describing a Cone 2.0 (2010).

On Saturday, February 25, from 1:00 PM to 5:30 PM, the Film Studies Center will be hosting a symposium featuring an artist talk with McCall followed by a roundtable discussion.

Please note the change in time and place from the standard New Media workshop schedule:  This workshop will take place at 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM (rather than the usual 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM) in Cobb 307 (rather than the usual Cobb 310).

On Friday, January 27, Peter Shultz, PhD candidate in the department of Music, will present and discuss “On Cues and Clues: Investigating Musical Space and Persona in L. A. Noire.”

“While film composers, sound designers, and scholars have long distinguished between diegetic and non-diegetic music (or ‘source’ and ‘score’), others have pointed out that film music frequently straddles this supposed boundary. For example, what initially sounds like underscore may be turn out to be a kitchen radio in the scene, and diegetic characters in musicals sing along with non-diegetic orchestras. Video-game scholars such as Kristine Jørgensen and Mark Grimshaw have observed that music and sound in games raises new problems for the diegetic concept of audio: agents in the game world may address the player directly, and player-controlled characters respond to audio cues that they cannot ‘hear.’ This paper uses evidence from L. A. Noire (Rockstar/Team Bondi 2011) to interrogate existing models of music and space, proposing that a theory of persona, adapted from the work of Edward Cone in the 1970s and reinterpreted through recent research on cognition and perception, affords a richer understanding of musical expression.”

There are no pre-circulated materials for this presentation.

The New Media Workshop meets from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM in Cobb 310.

On Friday, January 13, Hannah Frank, PhD student in the department of Cinema and Media Studies, will present her paper “The Invisible Visible and the Inaudible Audible: Testing the Limits of Vertov’s Kino-Eye.”

“This paper reconsiders Dziga Vertov’s conception of the camera’s role in filmmaking practice, the Kino-Eye, through an investigation of his approach to both animation and sound. To test the limits of Vertov’s radical documentary project, whereby cinematic technology affords the filmmaker a privileged access to the truth, I explore experiments in so-called “synthetic sound” (sound that is produced by visual patterns applied directly to the optical soundtrack) by his contemporaries in the Soviet Union and abroad—experiments Vertov dismissed. In other words, Vertov, who used a variety of animation techniques in service of the Kino-Eye project, was unwilling to treat sound in the same manner he did images. I argue, however, that Vertov, in keeping with the logic of his film theory and practice, very well might have embraced synthetic sound.”

This paper is no longer available for download.

The New Media Workshop meets from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM in Cobb 310.