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.

Nora Alter talk at Swarthmore

The Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility Presents a Lecture by

Nora Alter

Chair and Professor of Film and Media Arts
Temple University

The Cat Has Nine Lives: Chris Marker and the Essay Film

Wednesday, February 9, 7pm
Scheuer Room, Swarthmore College

Elusive French filmmaker (and cat lover) Chris Marker has produced a remarkable body of politically engaged film and media over the past four decades. Nora Alter, author of a monograph on Marker, will speak informally about his work and the essay film in conjunction with the Documentary Practicum taught by Louis Massiah, this year's Lang Professor for Issues of Social Change.

Nora M. Alter is Chair and Professor of Film and Media Arts at Temple University. Her teaching and research have been focused on twentieth and twenty first century cultural and visual studies from a comparative perspective. She is author of Vietnam Protest Theatre: The Television War on Stage (1996), Projecting History: Non-Fiction German Film (2002), Chris Marker (2006) and co-editor with Lutz Koepnick of Sound Matters: Essays on the Acoustics of Modern German Culture (2004). She has published over fifty essays on German and European Studies, Film and Media Studies, Cultural and Visual Studies and Contemporary Art. She is completing a new book on the international essay film and has begun research on a new study devoted to sound.