Two talks: Galloway and McGonigal

Center for Humanities at Temple
Digitial Humanities in Theory
Lecture: "The Unworkable Interface" 
by Alex Galloway
Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University

Tuesday, November 13
4:00–5:30 pm,
CHAT Lounge (10th flr Gladfelter)

Interfaces are back, or perhaps they never left. The familiar Socratic conceit from the “Phaedrus” of communication as the process of writing directly on the soul of the other has, since the 1980s and ‘90s, returned to center stage in the discourse around culture and media. Windows, doors, airport gates and other thresholds are those transparent devices that achieve more the less they do: for every moment of virtuosic immersion and connectivity, for every moment of inopacity, the threshold becomes one notch more invisible, one notch more inoperable. This lecture examines the interface, what Gérard Genette called a “zone of indecision” between the inside and outside of media. What is a computer interface and how does it structure interaction, work, and play?

Swarthmore College
Talk: "Games to Change the World" 
by Jane McGonigal

November 14th, 2012
7:30 PM
LPAC Pearson-Hall Theater
Swarthmore College

Game designer Jane McGonigal is harnessing the power of Internet games in new ways to help solve some of the biggest challenges facing our world. Her public talk is based on her book Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make us Better and How They Can Change the World, as well as recent game designs. She asks her audience to imagine a world in which every great challenge we face is a quest; where the harder a task is, the more people want to do it; where people take pleasure in failing and come back invigorated; and where they communicate spontaneously with their collaborators to pool their knowledge toward shared solutions. It turns out that world already exists-in games.

Henry Jenkins at Swarthmore

Spreadable Media: Creating Meaning and Value in a Networked Culture
A Public Lecture by Henry Jenkins

Swarthmore College

Science Center 101

Thursday, February 9

at 7:00 PM

ABSTRACT: Of all of the changes in the new media environment over the past two decades, perhaps the biggest has been a shift in how media content circulates—away from top-down corporate controlled distribution and into a still emerging hybrid system where everyday people play an increasingly central role in how media spreads.

Cultural Studies has historically been centered on issues of production and reception and has had much less to say about circulation. What issues emerge when we put the process of grassroots (often unauthorized) circulation at the center of our focus? How does it change our accounts of the relationships between mass media and participatory culture? How might it shake up existing models of viral media and web 2.0?

This far-reaching talk, based on a forthcoming book authored with Sam Ford and Joshua Green, offers snapshots of a culture-in-process, a media ecology still taking shape, suggesting what it means not only for the futures of entertainment but also of civic life.

Henry Jenkins is Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. He has written and edited more than a dozen books on media and popular culture, including Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2006). His other published works reflect the wide range of his research interests, touching on democracy and new media, the “wow factor” of popular culture, science-fiction fan communities, and the early history of film comedy.

As one of the first media scholars to chart the changing role of the audience in an environment of increasingly pervasive digital content, Jenkins has been at the forefront of understanding the effects of participatory media on society, politics, and culture. His research gives key insights to the success of social-networking websites, networked computer games, online fan communities, and other advocacy organizations, as well as emerging news media outlets.

Penn talks this week

Tomorrow, Wed., Feb. 23, Tanji Gilliam, a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, will be giving a colloquium talk titled, "or colored girls who also saw PRECIOUS and the rainbow is always outside":

Left, after the historic stereotyping of black women's bodies as sexually available, and the disciplined silences around rape and other forms of domestic violence, is the project of sharing black women's intimate experiences with violence when they have, however uncharacteristically, permitted this. This must be done in a way that makes use of silence, an agency that black women have historically enacted. This talk is excerpted from a larger manuscript, do you have any scars?/The Architecture of Violence. It looks at the cartographic record of domestic violence in Brooklyn’s Marcy Houses and maps popular representations of vernacular architecture in film and video in relationship to that media.

Wednesday, February 23, 2011 - 12:00pm
330 Fisher-Bennett Hall

Friday, Dan Cohen from George Mason University will be giving a lecture on "The Ivory Tower and the Open Web":

Dan Cohen will share insights from his new book The Ivory Tower and the Open Web. The Web is now over twenty years old, and there is no doubt that the academy has taken advantage of its tremendous potential for disseminating resources and scholarship. But a full accounting of the academic approach to the Web shows that compared to the innovative vernacular forms that have flourished over the past two decades, we have been relatively meek in our use of the medium, often preferring to impose traditional ivory tower genres on the Web rather than import the open web's most successful models. For instance, we would rather digitize the journal we know than explore how blogs and social media might supplement or change our scholarly research and communication. In this talk, Dan explores what might happen if we reversed that flow and more wholeheartedly embraced the genres of the open Web.

Friday, February 25, 2011 - 10:30am
Class of '55 Conference Room, Van Pelt Dietrich Library Center

Penn Colloquia: Caitlin McGrath and Tim Murray

University of Pennsylvania's Cinema Studies continues its colloquium series with two talks this week:

Caitlin McGrath
"'Seasickness is Decidedly Pleasant': Display and Movement in Late-Silent-Era Film Aesthetics"

What connects the rollercoaster in Hindle Wakes, the display window in Asphalt, and the trolley in Sunrise? They all use mobile camera work and experimental editing techniques to recreate the perceptual experience of modern life for the viewer. This paper will consider the role of these three sites in the modern urban environment—the department store, the city street, and the amusement park – in cinematic visualizations of modernization and industrialization. Examining this mix of pleasure and discomfort through the lens of the history of perceptual psychology becomes a means of exploring the affective dimension of the history of film style from early cinema through to Classical Hollywood.

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

12:00pm
330 Fisher-Bennett Hall

University of Pennsylvania

Timothy Murray (Cornell Univ.)
"Performing the Future, or Longing in the Age of New Media"

The talk will consider "longing" within the context of a psycho-philosophical approach to new media studies. The place of longing will be discussed not so much in a material context (the vanishing of materials) but more in a spectral sense: from consideration of models of mourning and melancholia in relation to the "loss" of analogue textual and cinematic formats to a reformulation of the dynamics of "analogy" in the digital age. In considering a number of performance pieces and new media artworks from Asia, the talk will raise the possibility of a flexible model of "the fold," in contrast to the mechanics of perspective, while positioning the valence of longing in relation to the future pull of informatics rather than the past lament of lost artifacts.

Thursday, February 10, 2011

5:00pm
401 Fisher-Bennett Hall

University of Pennsylvania