New Media Workshop

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.

On Friday, December 2, David J. Alworth, PhD candidate in the department of English Language and Literature, will present his paper “Site Reading: Pynchon’s Malta.”  Daniel Harris (PhD candidate, English) will respond.

This paper is no longer available for download.

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

Friday, November 11th, the New Media Workshop is pleased to welcome Tracy Fullerton, experimental game designer, writer, and associate professor in the Interactive Media Division of the USC School of Cinematic Arts.  Among other projects, Fullerton is the author of the textbook Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Designing Innovative Games (Morgan Kaufman, 2nd ed. 2008), the faculty advisor for the award-winning student games Cloud and flOw, and game designer for The Night Journey, a unique game/art project with media artist Bill Viola.  She will be presenting on and discussing recent works.

There are no pre-circulated materials for this presentation.

This workshop will be followed by a lunch with Tracy Fullerton.

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

The Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science, which brings together researchers and scholars in the humanities and computer science to examine the current state of digital humanities as a field of intellectual inquiry and to identify and explore new directions and perspectives for future research, will be hosted by Loyola University Chicago on November 19-21, 2011.

The Arts|Science Initiative, in collaboration with the Office of the Vice President for Research and for National Laboratories, is launching a pilot program of Arts|Science Graduate Collaboration Grants to encourage independent cross-disciplinary research between students in the arts and the sciences.

Graduate students from areas such as art history, music, cinema and media studies, theater and performance, creative writing, or visual arts are encouraged to pair up with graduate students from astronomy and astrophysics, biological sciences, chemistry, computer science, geophysical sciences, math, physics, or statistics areas for joint creative projects. Each group may consists of two or more graduate students, with at least one in the arts and one from the sciences, who work together over the course of two quarters to investigate a subject from the perspectives offered by their disciplines.

Projects will be conducted between January–May 2012, with a public presentation scheduled at the end of the academic year. The projects may take the form of a publishable paper, photographs, film, music score, performance, theater piece, or documented research experiment, etc. Proposals will be reviewed and selected in the fall quarter by a faculty jury comprised of members from the arts and the sciences.

Teams may request up to $2,000.  Application deadline is December 5th.

For more information, visit the website or contact Julie Marie Lemon at jmlemon [at] uchicago [dot] edu.

On Friday, October 28th, Marianna Martin, PhD candidate in the department of Cinema and Media Studies, will present “Feminists and Fanboys: Constructing the Whedonverse,” a chapter from her dissertation.

This paper is no longer available for download.

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

Artist, University of Chicago professor, and New Media Workshop faculty advisor Jason Salavon will be conversing with Hamza Walker for “The Computational Artist” at the Chicago Humanities Festival, Sunday, October 23rd.

This event will take place from 2:30 to 3:30 PM at the Kent Chemical Laboratory, 1020 E 58th St. More information can be found here.