Tracking the Moving Image, Mapping the Screen: News
1. Film studies conference
In March, the entire group attended the international film studies conference "In the Very Beginning, At the Very End" in Udine, Italy where they co-delivered a plenary panel paper entitled "Archive, Surveillance, Attention: Tracking the Screen in Public Spaces"
2. Dr. Pasi Valiaho
27 April 2009, 5.15-7.00 pm, Small Hall (Cinema), Richard Hoggart Building, Goldsmiths
'On Cinematic Gestures'
Working through the trick films of early cinema, we can see how the then new medium of moving images started as a particular type of corporeal modulation. Sudden dislocations, metamorphoses, corporeal decompositions, tics and jerks in the style of Georges Méliès bear witness to how the cinema captured the dynamics of our gestures - gestures which organize the world into meaningful patterns and establish psychic consistency. This talk addresses the affective, technological and political forces that the cinema thus implemented, and still continues to mobilize, in its aesthetics.
3. Public Screens Research Group
The Public Screens Research Group exists to host outside speakers and provide a forum for faculty and research students to present work on public screens, screen and film studies, and related areas of interest.
The Public Screens Research Group responds to a convergence of media forms and platforms of delivery. As the interface for the extensive exercise of choice, the computer occupies an iconic position. Yet the computer is but one mode of distribution and access to media, which apparently enable increasing opportunities to personalise the relationship to culture. As individualised modes of screen culture have grown, screens have proliferated in public space; from the back of aeroplane seats to the ubiquity of electronic screens in city centres.
We see three key frames through which to examine the transformation of distinct cultural forms and practices. First, what are the new modes of dissemination of screen cultures, and how do they impact on and constitute our understanding of public and private space? Second, what is the effect of convergence on forms of screen culture itself? How is the narrative and auratic form of film, and the immediate and sequential axes of television, affected by new modes of dissemination; and what new hybrid cultures are produced? Third, what forms of engagement do we have with screen culture, and how does it transform our perception of what is real and what is fictional, of what is proximate and distant, of what is present and past?
Through our activities we hope to create a forum for the presentation of research on and debate about these questions.
To be put on a mailing list for notices about the group's forthcoming events, please email Chris Berry at c.berry (@gold.ac.uk).
4. Public Lecture
Monday 16 March 2009, 5.15-7.00 pm, Small Hall (Cinema), Richard Hoggart Building, Goldsmiths
Dangerous Modulations: Grace Jones' Corporate Cannibal
(Prof. Steven Shaviro, Wayne State University, Michigan)
Grace Jones has always been a transgressive figure, confounding boundaries between male and female, and between black and white. But in her recent song and video "Corporate Cannibal" -- which marks her return to the arena of popular culture for the first time in nearly twenty years -- she pushes the transformations of her persona to a new extreme, addressing both the radical potentialities of the new digital media, and the increasing depredations of neoliberal capitalism.
Steven Shaviro is the DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University. He is the author of “The Cinematic Body” (1993), “Doom Patrols: A Theoretical Fiction About Postmodernism” (1997), “Connected, Or, What It Means To Live In the Network Society” (2003), and “Without Criteria: Kant Whitehead, Deleuze and Aesthetics” (forthcoming, 2009), as well as numerous essays about film, video and new media, comics, science fiction, cultural theory, and contemporary American popular culture. He blogs at The Pinocchio Theory.
5. Chris Berry & Janet Harbord presented the pilot study work and our initial attempts to develop a theoretical framework for the project at the "Technovisuality and Cultural Reenchantment" conference. The title of their paper was “Archive, Attention, Surveillance: Tracking the Screen in Public Spaces.”
The conference was held in Hong Kong from 20-22 November 2008, and co-organized by Chinese University of Hong Kong and Hong Kong Shue Yan University.
6. Screen Group member Chris Berry recently took part in the “Narrascape: Urban Environment as Narrative System in the UK and China” workshop at Cambridge University. The event was highly inter-disciplinary and, alongside talks, incorporated a wide range of screenings.
7. The Screen Group have been conducting weekly research walks -observing the various use of the screen-throughout London as part of their pilot project.
So far, we have visited King's Cross-St.Pancras, Brent Cross shopping centre (where we were forbidden from taking photos pretty soon upon arrival), the Science Museum and Bromley-by-Bow (including Three Mills film and TV studio).
We have noticed a wide variety of screen usage: as advertising space; as sites for informational material (from Sky News footage, to interactive programming in museums); as commodities; and as part of surveillance technology systems utilized by both the public and the private sectors.
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| King cross foyer | St. Chad's street housing block | Security camera outside | Shopping centre |
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| Science Museum | Science Museum | ||
8. Gabriel Menotti has now arrived at Goldsmiths and started up his Leverhulme-funded PhD studentship with us.
Gabriel will be researching what he calls low impedance cinema, a particular kind of highly participative environment favored by digital media and through which the authority and conventional film grammar lose their density.
Examples include the practices of scratch-video, anime fansubbers and live audiovisual performances. In order to carry out these investigations, Gabriel will be exploring the circuits of audiovisual production, distribution and exhibition as expanded apparatuses and interfaces between moving images and different spaces and audiences, all of which inevitably mutate their meaning and value.
For a sense of the kind of screen-generated work that Gabriel was curating in Sao Paulo before coming to the UK, please visit this link.