Centre for Media & Culture Research: Spring 2010 Events

Double Bill: Lev Manovich and N. Katherine Hayles

Monday 8 March, 1pm, Lecture Theatre 4, K2 Building, Keyworth Street

This special event is open to all, but places are limited. To reserve a place please email Anna Reading, Head of the Centre for Media and Culture Research, at readinam@lsbu.ac.uk

How to study 1000000 Manga pages? Visualization methods for humanities and media studies

Over the last 20 years, information visualization became a common tool in science and also a growing presence in the arts and culture at large. However, the use of visualization in humanities is still in its infancy. Based on the work in the analysis of video games, cinema, TV, animation, Manga and other media carried out in Software Studies Initiative at University of California, San Diego over last two years, this paper presents a possible taxonomy of visualization techniques and methods particularly useful for cultural and media research.

Software studies initiative: http://lab.softwarestudies.com / Examples of media visualizations: www.flickr.com/photos/culturevis

Lev Manovich is Professor of Visual Culture at the University of California, San Diego. His books include Software Takes Command (released under CC license, 2008), Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database (MIT Press, 2005), and The Language of New Media (MIT Press, 2001), hailed as ‘the most suggestive and broad ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan.’

Tech-TOC: Complex Temporalities in Digital Media

Theorists of technology such as Gilbert Simondon, Bruno Latour and Adrian Mackenzie argue that the creation, transmission and use of technical objects emerge from a temporal ‘folding’ in which past, present and future intermingle. At stake is not only the nature of temporalities but also the complex ways in which humans and technical objects engage in technogenesis, that is, cycles of mutual co-evolution. These theories will be interrogated to propose a model whereby our contemporary technological landscapes interact with human cognition and biology on both conscious and unconscious levels. The model will then be explored through Steve Tomasula's electronic multi-modal novel, TOC, in which time, biology, and technology interpenetrate one another.

N. Katherine Hayles, Professor of Literature at Duke University, teaches and writes on the relations of science, technology and literature in the 20th and 21st centuries. Her book How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics won the Rene Wellek Prize for the Best Book in Literary Theory for 1998-99, and her book Writing Machines won the Suzanne Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship. Other recent books include My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts and Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. She is currently writing a book entitled How We Think: The Transforming Power of Digital Technologies.

Wednesday 17 March, 3pm, Studio 55, Keyworth Street

Place and Space in Jazz

Elina Hytönen is a researcher at the University of Eastern Finland and is spending this semester as a Visiting Research Fellow at LSBU. As a musicologist and a cultural researcher interested in jazz, she has paid special attention to the places in which jazz is being performed and what kinds of discussions are taking place around the issue. Through the use of observation and interviews her research also ponders how we could improve the musician’s work environment.

Wednesday 28 April, 3pm, Studio 55, Keyworth Street

Media, War and Terrorism Seminar Series

This seminar series addresses news and documentary representations of contemporary war and terrorism. Further seminars are planned for 2010—11.

Pockets of Resistance: British media, war, theory and the 2003 invasion of Iraq

Piers Robinson is Senior Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Manchester and author of the influential book The CNN Effect (Routledge, 2002). He previously taught Political Communication in the School of Politics and Communication Studies at the University of Liverpool, and his publications include articles for the European Journal of Communication, Review of International Studies, and Media, War & Conflict. Piers is currently completing a two-year ESRC funded project on ‘News Media Performance and Media Management During the 2003 Iraq War’ – the topic of this paper.

Thursday 10 June, 3pm, Studio 55, Keyworth Street

Virginia Woolf: Walking the City

Margaret Kinsman is Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of Arts, Media & English at LSBU. Margaret’s main area of research interest is detective fiction: she is executive editor of CLUES: A Journal of Detection, a member of the Crime Writers’ Association and a member of the judges' panel for the Gold Dagger award for the best crime novel of the year. Taking Virginia Woolf’s essay ‘Street Haunting’ as its point of departure, this session will incorporate a literary walk around Southwark.