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Friday, May 16th,
11:30 am,
1714 Ellison Hall
Culture(s) in the Keyhole:
An Archaeology of Peep Media
Erkki Huhtamo
Professor of Media History and Theory
University of California Los Angeles,
Department of Design / Media Arts.
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 Peeping is one of those issues that psychologically inclined observers tend to consider as pre- (or infra-) cultural: belonging to the “human nature” and perhaps even to our “animal nature”. Whether it originated from our innate curiosity towards the “outside”, from the survival instinct, or from the shock of witnessing the “primal scene” are issues that are of no interest in this lecture. The focus will be on “peep media” as an aspect of interfacing with technology during the past five hundred years. The lecture considers peeping as a topos, a culturally determined construct that is effected by and effects in turn other cultural forms. Here are some of the questions that will be raised: When, how and why did “peep media” develop? How has the idea of peeping been “built into” technical apparatuses of vision? How has it been exploited and for what purposes?
 Erkki Huhtamo is a media archaeologist, writer,and
exhibition curator. He was born in Helsinki, Finland
in the last century and works as Professor of Media
History and Theory at the University of California
Los Angeles (UCLA), Department of Design | Media Arts. He has published extensively on media archaeology
and media arts, lectured worldwide, created television programs and
curated media art exhibitions. His recent research has dealt with topics like peep media, the pre-history of the screen, tactility in art history and the
archaeology of mobile media. He is just finishing a history of the moving
panorama (University of California Press), and working on two other books, one on the archaeology of interactivity and the other a collection of writings on media
archaeology (with Jussi Parikka).
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Friday, April 18th
12:00 noon, Ellison 1714
“Multimedia Applications for Media Study, and Making the Moving Image Smarter”
Stephen Mamber
Professor in the Critical Studies Program of the UCLA Department of Film, Television, and Digital Media |
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A Two-Part One-Hour Presentation
Part One
Brief demonstrations of some multimedia applications will be presented
in order to discuss approaches to film and media study in a digital
environment, particularly in relation to the use of visual databases, archival
materials, and 3D models.
These three will be discussed for sure, with perhaps a bit more of some others:
Alfred Hitchcock and The Birds
Stanley Kubrick's The Killing
Center for Hidden Camera Research
Part Two
Although DVD's and other forms of digital video are wildly popular,
the way we use them is still rooted somewhere in the VCR days of the
mid-1970's. Some ways to make video "smarter" and more useable will be
demonstrated. This will include:
1. Controlling DVD's within Microsoft Access, a database program,
so that you can store information about segments of a video you would
like to study and/or present.
2. Using programs which access films directly from a hard drive
(which can be plugged in externally), so that you can utilize
large numbers of films at any time, together with any information
about them you wish to store.
Other platforms (PDA's with Bluetooth, microprocessors) for controlling
DVD's will also be discussed.
Stephen Mamber is a Professor in the Critical Studies Program of the UCLA Department of Film, Television, and Digital Media. He is the author of CINEMA VERITE IN AMERICA (MIT Press) and numerous articles of film and television criticism. He is a former editor of CINEMA Magazine, and has been a film critic for Pacifica Radio, for which he received an Associated Press "Golden Mike" award. He has long been active in the area of multimedia, and has written a variety of tools and applications, principally for the study of films in a digital environment. He has been a Visiting Research Scientist at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York and has served as a National IBM Consulting Scholar. He is the author of two web projects, "Instrument of War: The True Story of the Yuba City Draft Board Murders" (mamber.filmtv.ucla.edu/InstrumentOfWar) and "Center for Hidden Camera Research" (mamber.filmtv.ucla.edu/HiddenCamera), and also worked on projects under a grant from the Intel Research Council. He is currently completing a web project called "Who Shot Liberty Valance?", about the John Ford film.
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Friday, February 22
1:00 p.m., 1415 South Hall
(First Floor of the Grad Tower)
"Digitime and Inscription in Postfilmic Screen Narrative"Garrett Stewart
Co-sponsored by: History of Art and Architecture, Department of English |
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Delivered initially to lead off a year-long symposium at the Yale Humanities Center on means of inscription across the arts, under the series rubric "From Scroll to Codex to Screen," my paper is an effort to bridge the separate methodologies of my last two books from the University of Chicago Press, THE LOOK OF READING: BOOK, PAINTING, TEXT (2006), and FRAMED TIMED: TOWARD A POSTFILMIC CINEMA (2007): the first on the site of inscription in the open book of painted reading from Rembrandt to Picasso; the second on the evolving implications of Lyotard's definition of cinema (writing with movement) for the age of digital inscription, with its various encroachments not only into non-photochemical screen technique but into narrative consciousness more broadly. Illustrated with new images of painted readers and of "cinematic" paintings collected since the former study, and with clips from films released since the latter, the lecture continues to explore, following Deleuze in part, how cinema has responded to new models of temporality in the epoch of real-time global connectivity and its virtual environments.
Garrett Stewart is the James O. Freedman Professor of Letters at University of Iowa in the Department of English. In teaching as well as scholarship, he works not only at the crosscurrents of disciplines, theories, and media but at their points of textual undertow. His book on stylistic registers in Dickens (1974) drew his next to the inner structure and verbal slippages of represented dying in Victorian and modern fiction for DEATH SENTENCES (1984). A linguistic account of subvocal effects in literary writing (REACING VOICES, 1990) was then pursued across media into the filmic (or photogrammatic) "undertext" of cinema for BETWEEN FILM AND SCREEN: MODERNISM'S PHOTO SYNTHESIS (1999). A concern with both the staging of reading and the rhetorical maneuvers of audience address in Victorian fiction (DEAR READER, 1996) has since spread to an adjacent medium. Turning again to visual textuality (he has come to think of the ongoing approach as "semioptics"), he has attempted a cultural stylistics of the scene of reading in western painting from Rembrandt to Picasso, where formal devices are continually borrowed and redeployed to shore up an image of the inward human subject-or to expose its fractures. His work since has returned to literature and film to develop a medium-specific "narratography" of their different processes.
Website: http://english.uiowa.edu/faculty/stewart/index.html |
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Friday, February 8
3:00 p.m., Ellison 1714
“The 2004 Election Did Not Take Place:
Bush, Spectacle and the Media Non-Event”
Kevin Glynn
It is arguable that the George W. Bush regime makes a more systematically intensive strategic effort to mobilize the management and control of media images as a primary mode of governance than any other U.S. presidency we have yet seen. This paper explores aspects of the Bush White House's media-imagineering and draws upon notions of media spectacle, along with Baudrillard's widely misunderstood analysis of the 1991 Gulf War and often overlooked theory of media non-events, in order to examine the 2004 US presidential election in particular. It also identifies and draws on what we might see as image insurgencies emerging from the Internet, the alternative press and the mainstream media in order to raise the prospect that the more fully a regime of power seeks to exert control over and through images, the more vulnerable it becomes to the generation of counter-images, counter-narratives and counter-spectacles.
Kevin Glynn is Professor of American Studies at the University of Canterbury in Christ Church, New Zealand. He is the author of [Tabloid Culture: Trash Taste, Popular Power, and the Transformation of American Television] (Duke UP, 2000) as well as numerous articles on the politics of television culture. |
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Friday, January 25
1:00 p.m., Ellison 1714
“Within, Aside, and Too Much: On Parentheticality Across Media”
Jeff Scheible
This presentation takes three uses of parentheses (in Derrida’s writing, in criticism of the laugh track, and in the film Me and You and Everyone We Know) as its multiple starting points to explore a theory of “parentheticality,” which is here used to think through ins and outs of not only writing but also disciplinarity, academic affectation, cultural syntax, the sounds we hear, the ways we imagine them, humor, sexuality, new media, narrative structure, and independent filmmaking.
“Animation and the Production of Environmental Knowledge”
Nicole Starosielski
Over the last forty years, the genre of environmental animation has offered a variety of innovative, experimental, and yet also conventional and didactic representations of environmental issues. Focusing on a series of films from the height of the genre in the early 1990's, this presentation explores the relationship between animation practice and the production of environmental knowledge, with particular attention to how media technologies themselves are depicted as agents of environmental change.
Jeff Scheible and Nicole Starosielski joined the first graduate student cohort of the Film and Media Studies Department in Fall 2005. They worked together on their first assignment in the program (attending a cuddle party in Los Angeles and analyzing it as a semiotic event). In Spring 2006, Nicole and Jeff went on to collaborate on an experimental multi-media project, "The Difference Between Walking and Laughing," structured around mediations of, representations of, and interventions in five different processes. They were both co-organizers of the conference "Media Fields," which brought together graduate students and scholars from around the country to explore issues relating to space, epistemology, and the work of media study. Jeff and Nicole both received their MAs from the department in Spring 2007. Their interests converge (and diverge) around the practice of theory, the theory of practice, distance reading, the ways that language frames thought, and comparative media studies.
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Friday, February 8
1:00 p.m., Ellison 1714
Cancelled
“Youth as New Dwellers of Network Society in South Korea”
Haejoang Cho
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Dan Reynolds
Videogame Environments and Environmentalism
and
Hye Jean Chung
Cinema as archaeology: The Multiple Layering of Temporality and Spatiality through the Acousmatic Voice
Friday, Dec. 14th, 2:15-4:45 p.m., Ellison 1714
Dan Reynolds
Videogame Environments and Environmentalism
Modern environmentalism has been troubled by people's tendency to think of themselves as separate from their surroundings. The environment, in the conceptions of many, is something "out there" rather than a system that includes us among its parts. Because of their enactive and environmentally immersive nature, videogames represent an opportunity for complex and provocative explorations of the relationships between
individuals and the spaces they occupy. Overtly environmentalist games have not been very successful, thus far, at integrating their messages into gameplay; these games' environmentalist thematic content is not convincingly reflected in their ludic forms. Some games, however, have fostered strong feelings of connection between players and their environments, connections encouraged through gameplay itself, but have not
been overtly environmentalist in their themes. The success of these games points to the potential of the medium for the encouragement and complication of environmental and environmentalist thought.
Daniel Reynolds is from Portland, Oregon. He received a BA in Linguistics from the University of Oregon in 2001 and an MFA in Film Studies from Boston University in 2004. In the two years before he came to UCSB, he was a Teaching Assistant in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. Dan is interested in film and video game aesthetics and issues relating to consciousness and cognition.
Hye Jean Chung
Cinema as archaeology: The Multiple Layering of Temporality and Spatiality through the Acousmatic Voice
Michel Chion's concept of the "acousmêtre" is particularly evocative in the way it troubles the false sense of unity that is created by the synchronization of sound and image, as the acousmatic presence is quite unique in its invocation of off-screen space through sound. Chion asserts that the acousmêtre's powers - ubiquity, panopticism, omniscience, and omnipotence - derive from the fact that the acousmatic presence is a voice that is heard but "not-yet-seen," and thus situated in a paradoxical position - either "at once inside and outside" or "neither inside nor outside." I will explore how the acousmêtre destabilizes the seemingly unified, contained realm of the film by expanding the temporal and spatial boundaries of the diegesis. I focus on two films, Y Tu Mama Tambien (Alfonso Cuaron, 2001) and Calendar (Atom Egoyan, 1993), in which the acousmêtre expands the realm of the cinematic narrative by performing an "archaeological" task that reveals the multiplicity of temporal and spatial layers in the text, that is, by combining "elements from different strata" of time and space (Laura Marks). This idea of multiple layers, or "sheets," to use a Deleuzean term, is enabled in cinema through the asynchronization of image and sound.
Hye Jean Chung is a PhD student in the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her interests include historicization of memory and personal testimony, intersections of race and gender, questions of performativity and subjectivity, manifestations of voice in cinema, and the triangular relation among filmmaker, subject and spectator in documentary films. Recently she has become intrigued by how the multiple layers of time and space are manifested in the cinematic realm.
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Movie Talk: NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (now playing in theaters)
A roundtable discussion of the film
Friday, November 30th,
2:30 p.m.,
Ellison 1714
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DIGITAL MATTERS:
Video Games and the Cultural Transcoding of
Nanotechnology
Monday, Nov. 5th 4:00-5:30 p.m., McCune Room, HSSB
Prof. Colin Milburn, Assistant Professor of English and Science and
Technology, University of California, Davis
(Co-sponsored by the Center for Nanotechnology in Society)
At the level of both hardware and software, video games have been deeply
entangled with the ongoing evolution of nanoscale sciences and
technologies. Nanoscientists create haptic interfaces for scanning pro be
microscopes by converting force-feedback controllers originally designed
for video-game consoles. Professional game designers produce videographic
publicity materials for nanoresearch centers, such as the MIT Institute for
Soldier Nanotechnologies, by using the same computer-animation conventions
established for action-adventure games. The simulated molecular systems
studied by computational nanotechnology research frequently rely on modes
of operational interactivity with digital environments characteristic of
computer-gaming platforms broadly. And increasingly, consumer video games
feature plotlines and images inspired by nanotechnological predictions for
an onrushing age of "digital matter" or "programmable matter." This talk
examines the cross-traffic between the worlds of nanoscience and the worlds
of video games, focusing on how exchanges of specific technologies,
narratives, images, and patterns of conditioned response for human-computer
interactions shape the way that both scientific and popular cultures
understand nanotechnology. Consumer gaming systems lend themselves to
technical research agendas seeking to develop instrumental controls in an
imagined "digital" realm of materiality, transcoding the molecular as the
computational. These same gaming systems provide popular audiences with
narrative media objects and opportunities for interacting with "programmable matter" that reinforce the beliefs and assumptions of
nanoresearch laboratories, conditioning in advance the social reception of
our molecular future.
Colin Milburn joined the UC Davis faculty in 2005. His research focuses on
the cultural relations between literature, science, and technology. His
interests include science fiction; Gothic horror; the history of biology;
the history of physics; comic books, film and new media; critical theory;
and posthumanism.
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Prof. George Lipsitz, Department of Black Studies, UCSB
Putting the Drums Up Front: When Samba Meets Sampling in BRASILINTIME.
Friday, Oct. 26th, 2:15-3:45, Ellison 1714; RECEPTION TO FOLLOW
Brian Cross's film BRASILINTIME brings together U.S. turntable artists
active in hip hop with some of the Brazilian samba percussionists whose
break beats they have used for years. The film asks and answers important
questions about the African diaspora, about the possibility of close
connections between people who have never met, and about the complexities
of time and space in the contemporary world. 
George Lipsitz is Professor of Black Studies and Sociology at the
University of California, Santa Barbara. His newest book is FOOTSTEPS IN
THE DARK: HIDDEN HISTORIES OF POPULAR MUSIC (University of Minnesota
Press, 2007). Lipsitz is a member of the Improvisation, Community, and
Social Practice Research initiative and edits the Critical American
Studies series at the University of Minnesota Press. His publications
include TIME PASSAGES, DANGEROUS CROSSROADS, AMERICAN STUDIES IN A
MOMENT OF DANGER, and THE POSSESSIVE INVESTMENT IN WHITENESS.
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