Tag: digital media

Speculation

[vimeo 39947942 w=500 h=281]

Patrick Jagoda, assistant professor in the English Department at the University of Chicago and co-editor of Critical Inquiry, recently informed me of a project he’s been working on and asked me to spread the word, which I gladly do:

As Patrick puts it, it’s “a transmedia game (or ‘alternate reality game’)” that he’s “co-directing with Katherine Hayles (Duke) and Patrick LeMieux (Duke), and designing with several people at the University of Chicago, Duke, and the University of Waterloo. The game, called Speculation, launched just a few days ago and will continue for several weeks. It has a science fiction narrative and confronts finance culture and the recent economic crisis. The latest trailer is here: vimeo.com/39947942. It leads to the main game site at: http://speculat1on.net/ (complete with a discussion forum, cryptographic puzzles, games of various genres, narrative pieces, audio, and much more). There’s also a related Facebook page that belongs to Nex Noitaluceps.”

I’ve poked around the site a bit, and it’s really quite intriguing, so do check it out!

Dylan Trigg, Digital Media, and Phenomenology

Over at Figure/Ground Communication, there is a new interview up with Dylan Trigg (whose blog Side Effects you’ll find linked in the sidebar here). The whole interview is well worth your time, but especially interesting (and relevant to the focus of this blog) is the following question and answer:

Is phenomenology still relevant in this age of information and digital interactive media?

Phenomenology is especially relevant in an age of information and digital media. Despite the current post-humanist “turn” in the humanities, we remain for better or worse bodily subjects. This does not mean that we cannot think beyond the body or that the body is unchallenged in phenomenology. Phenomenology does not set a limit on our field of experience, nor is it incompatible with the age of information, less even speculative thinking about non-bodily entities and worlds. Instead, phenomenology reminds us of what we already know, though perhaps unconsciously: that our philosophical voyages begin with and are shaped by our bodily subjectivity.

It’s important to note here that phenomenology’s treatment of the body is varied and complex. It can refer to the physical materiality of the body, to the lived experience of the body, or to enigmatic way in which the body is both personal and anonymous simultaneously. In each case, the body provides the basis for how digital media, information, and post-humanity are experienced in the first place. Phenomenology’s heightened relevance, I’d say, is grounded in the sense that these contemporary artefacts of human life tend to take for granted our bodily constitution.

But phenomenology’s relevance goes beyond its privileging of the body. It has become quite fashionable to critique phenomenology as providing a solely human-centric access to the world.  This, I think, is wrong. One of the reasons why I’m passionately committed to phenomenology is because it can reveal to us the fundamentally weird and strange facets of the world that we ordinarily take to be clothed in a familiar and human light. Phenomenology’s gesture of returning to things, of attending to things in their brute facticity, is an extremely powerful move. Merleau-Ponty will speak of a “hostile and alien…resolutely silent Other” lurking within with the non-human appearance of things. For me, the lure of this non-human Other is a motivational force in my own work. It reminds us that no matter how much we affiliate ourselves with the familiar human world, in the act of returning to the things themselves, those same things stand ready to alienate us.

(The image at the top of this post, by the way — and lest there be any confusion about the matter — is not a picture of Dylan Trigg but of body-augmentor extraordinaire, performance artist Stelarc.)

Digital Humanities Resources

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cx9DRazb6ZE]

In preparation for the independent studies course on “Digital Media and Humanities Research” that I’ll be supervising in the summer semester 2012, I’m asking prospective students to familiarize themselves with discussions and debates around the digital humanities. To get started, I thought I’d pull together a few relevant links.

First, the four videos embedded in this post offer a quick sampling of DH projects through lightning talks by recipients of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities. (By clicking on any of these videos, you will be directed to the Youtube pages where you can find links to the individual projects presented.)

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFSyMgVbHpg]

Next, a really great place to get started is with a blog post entitled, appropriately enough, “Getting Started in the Digital Humanities” (over at Lisa Spiro’s blog Digital Scholarship in the Humanities). In fact, there are enough links collected there, all usefully contextualized, to get a really good feel for the type of work going on in the digital humanities, so if getting started and getting oriented were the only objectives, I could basically just leave it at that. Certainly, one could do worse than to just follow Spiro’s links (and then the further links to be found at the pages thus linked) — DH is a highly networked field of inquiry, discussion, and debate, so in this way (i.e. starting from that blog post) you’d likely run into just about all the critical sites and positions in the field in due time.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RClZF4Sroi8]

Nevertheless, I also wanted to point more explicitly to some of the debates going on in and around DH, which is not only one of the fastest growing but also one of the most contested areas of humanities at the current moment. One of the best resources here is the brand new collection Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold. But there are (of course) also lots of relevant pieces online, and these are just a few:

Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s positive, inspiring message, “Do ‘the Risky Thing’ in Digital Humanities,” speaks to the excitement that a lot of scholars (and students) feel when they come into contact with DH. Stanley Fish’s New York Times opinion piece, “The Old Order Changeth,” puts forward a much more skeptical view of this excitement, while Fish’s follow-up piece, “The Digital Humanities and the Transcending of Mortality,” goes so far as to call it a positively “theological” fervor. Needless to say, Fish’s interventions have stirred up quite a controversy among DH people.

Though not a direct rejoinder to Fish’s criticisms, another piece by Kathleen Fitzpatrick, “Networking the Field,” might be profitably read with an eye to evaluating Fish’s take on DH; however, Fitzpatrick’s paper (originally a talk she gave at MLA 2012) is much more than that, as it offers an eloquent assessment of what she takes to be some of the central challenges (rather than theological dogmas) of digital humanities today. (Meanwhile, Fish has continued to pronounce the divide he sees between digital humanities and traditional humanities in another controversial piece, “Mind Your P’s and B’s: The Digital Humanities and Interpretation.”)

Finally, Ian Bogost has added a very different skeptical voice to the debates. Bogost is, among other things, a game designer and scholar, so his skepticism is hardly directed at the “digital” in “digital humanities.” Instead, in his posts “The Turtlenecked Hairshirt” and (the more recent) “This is a Blog Post About the Digital Humanities,” Bogost’s skepticism is directed at the self-referential, meta-level discourse about the digital humanities that he sees DH indulging in at the expense of making, building, or creating something. Whether or not one agrees with Bogost’s criticism, he certainly speaks to a central tension, and to the search for balance, between the levels of (meta-)theory and practice that in many ways shape the field of DH.

Again, these are just starting points, hardly a comprehensive guide to contemporary positions, debates, methodologies, or research perspectives. Again, for a significant step in that direction, I recommend Matthew K Gold’s new edited volume, Debates in the Digital Humanities. Finally, I welcome (and would very much appreciate) comments and links to other sites that might be of value to students just getting oriented in DH!

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxQKApXu3Xk]

CFP: Contemporary Screen Narratives

Contemporary Screen Narratives: Storytelling’s Digital and Industrial Contexts

Conference to be held on 17 May 2012

Hosted by Department of Culture, Film and Media, University of Nottingham

Keynote speakers: Henry Jenkins and Jason Mittell

This one-day conference looks to trace connections between the narratives of contemporary screen media and their contexts of production, distribution and consumption. We refer here to narrative as the presentation and organisation of story via the semiotic phenomena of image, sound and written/spoken word. We anticipate that speakers will explore ways in which stories and their on-screen telling are informed by contemporary industrial and technological conditions. We invite contributions from postgraduate and early-career researchers working across screen-based narrative media, such as film, television, comics, literature, video games and other areas of new media. We are interested to receive all paper proposals pertinent to the conference topic, though we particularly welcome those that engage with the following themes and questions:

Industrial determinants. In what ways are stories and their telling contingent on the production cultures, distribution methods, revenue models and governmental policies that configure a given creative industry?

Digital Technologies. How has the construction and/or reception of narratives been influenced by digital production equipment, distribution tech, online platforms and consumer hardware devices?

Seriality and Transmedia: In what ways do serial narrative forms, whether disseminated within a given medium or across multiple media, reflect industrial and technological contexts?

Audio and Visual Styles: How are the sounds and visions of contemporary screen narratives informed by conditions of production and reception technologies?

Paratextual Surround: In what ways do promotional materials, practitioner discourses, fan cultures and critical/journalistic responses discursively frame screen narratives?

Send abstracts of 250 words to both:

Anthony Smith – aaxas4@nottingham.ac.uk

and

Aaron Calbreath-Frasieur – aaxac2@nottingham.ac.uk

Papers should not exceed twenty minutes in length.

The deadline for proposal submission is Monday 13 February 2012.

Deadline for proposal submission is now: 4 March 2012.

(Original CFP here: http://contemporaryscreennarratives.tumblr.com/)