Archive for August, 2004
CFP: fan fiction, cinema technologies, academic blogging, and collage culture
Aug 31st
For those who need to care about such things, here are some upcoming calls for papers in cognate fields (and yes, I am aware that this is a poor excuse for a blog entry):
Theorizing Fan Fiction and Fan Communities (essay collection)
Calling all academic bloggers:
Lore: An E-journal for Teachers of Writing seeks submissions for the Digressions section of the Fall 2004 issue. In the past year or so, blogging has become something of a national pastime with academics becoming a core group using blogs for personal and professional reasons. Yet even though many people embrace blogging, many others have no idea what it is or why anyone would do it. In this issue of Lore, we want to explore the roll that blogging plays for compositionists and the composition classroom.
Lore invites two types of writers to participate in this discussion. First, there are those who recognize a place for blogging in the profession. Do you keep a blog as part of your professional identity? Do you have your students keep blogs or read them for class assignments? What roles do you think blogs can play in a range of professional contexts? Second, there are those who keep blogs for personal reasons. What attracts you to the “blogosphere”? Do you keep an anonymous or pseudononymous blog and how did you come to that decision?
We recognize that many writers may see themselves in both groups, and no one needs to choose one over the other. We simply want to explore how blogs influence both the teaching of writing and those who teach it. Furthermore, you do not have to be a composition instructor to join the conversation; we hope to hear from a range of academics who keep their own blogs about how and why they do it. If you do keep a blog that withholds personal details like name or location, we will certainly respect your choice and will publish essays under whatever name you choose.
In Digressions, writers compose a response of approximately 1000 words. Please place URLs in brackets after the underlined text that you would like to use as a link. While we recognize that writing on the web is in the public domain, we also recommend that writers get permission from any bloggers you quote, or at least let them know that you are possibly exposing them to a wider audience.
Please submit your responses as an attachment in Word or RTF to Staff Editor, Nels P. Highberg
by Wednesday, September 22, 2004. He will respond to everyone within the following week. While those who have previously written for Lore are again welcome to contribute, we are always seeking a wide-range of perspectives and new voices, especially those of graduate students and adjuncts. Feel free to view the current issue for ideas about structure and style:
http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/lore/
Lore needs to hear what you have to say!
Cinema and Technology Conference
Call for papers
Cinema & Technology Conference
6-9 April 2005
Institute for Cultural Research
Lancaster University
Lancaster
United KingdomThe Institute for Cultural Research at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom, will host a major international conference around the broad theme of “Cinema and Technology.” The conference will take place at Lancaster University and venues in the city of Lancaster from 6 to 9 April 2005.
Our aim is to address the digitisation of the film image and the consequences of this process for theories of history, subjectivity, agency and perception. Within this general framework, participants will be encouraged to engage with the dematerialisation of the film image, the uses of digital cameras, the forms of contemporary cinematic experience, and revisionist debates about the meanings of technology. The conference will feature a public keynote address, two major plenary sessions, and a range of parallel sessions focusing on issues such as:
The digital imagination
Changing forms of cinematic consumption
Histories of film technologies
The apparatus and technologies of vision
Cinema/technology/ideology
Sound and light in cinema
The politics of cinema technologies
Technologies of new media
Other related topicsThere will also be a series of related events in and around Lancaster that highlight the conference themes in a more informal setting.
Scholars in any discipline are invited to submit proposals for papers that address the implications of technology for cinematic practice and theory.
Proposal should include: provisional title, an abstract of up to 250 words, your name and contact details (including an email address), and should be sent to June Rye (icr@lancaster.ac.uk) by 1 September 2004.
Collage as Cultural Practice (conference):
Collage as Cultural Practice seeks to examine interventionist collage practices in all media, with an emphasis on the social, political, and legal implications of this method of appropriation. The conference, taking place March 24?26, 2005, at the University of Iowa, will interrogate the political and social dimensions of collage as a practice that enables oppositional commentary across the cultural spectrum: from the leftist collages of the Dadaists and the Situationists to the unauthorized use of corporate trademarks, interventions by queer activists, and the more recent flurry of Internet-distributed antiwar video collage pieces that appropriate from the mainstream media in satirical ways. We seek to bring together scholars of, and practitioners in, the media of film and video, music, literature, visual arts and beyond?putting together a series of panels, performances and screenings, and an exhibition at the University of Iowa Museum of Art on Interventionist Collage: From Dada to Negativland. Confirmed speakers include: Patricia R. Zimmermann, Rosemary Coombe, Carrie McLaren, Mark Hosler, Lloyd Dunn, Philo Farnsworth, Douglas Kahn, and Xmena Cuevas. Possible session topics are: Collage and the Beat Movement; Collage and Copyright; Found Footage Film and Video; Dada and Surrealist Collage; Situationist and Fluxus Collages; Feminist Strategies of Appropriation; Collage in the Digital Age; Collage: Remixing Cultures; Collage:
The Cultural Politics of Appropriation; Collage: From musique concr?te to Hip Hop; and Collage: Queer Interventions. Send 250-word proposals for papers to Rudolf Kuenzli at rudolf-kuenzli@uiowa.edu or Kembrew McLeod at kembrew-mcleod@uiowa.edu. Conference registration is free. Deadline: October 15, 2004.
Another PhD blog
Aug 20th
cool! Marika’s PhD (in media and comm at the University of Oslo) on the interplay of personal media in the everyday lives of young people is right up my alley. And she has an excellent blog, which will go straight on my blogroll.
Happy Birthday C/M
Aug 19th
It barely seems possible that a whole year ago I started gathering together ideas and resources for a possible PhD project on amateur content production. But here we are.
Happy Birthday, blog.
OurMedia
Aug 18th
Look at this: an idea whose time has come, to my mind. There’s a graphic depiction of how it will work here.
It’s been a long time since I stumbled across some cool new web project that spoke to a niggling question raised by my research – and there are always a lot of niggling questions. In this case: why don’t digital storytellers, as well as amateur music producers, photographers, film-makers, animators, etc. have a networked space of their own? Why is the production and consumption of digital stories, for example, so static and limited? (eg someone attends a workshop, makes a story, the story gets uploaded to the “community media” project or the BBC’s website, attributed to a name without any kind of cultural presence on the web, and then that’s it – people can view it and sometimes comment, but there is little that the individual producer can leverage beyond saying “look. I made this story”).
So with this new project, it is not only the idea of a “repository” of multiple genres of independent and amateur broadband content, where users and upload and download, and remake content at will, subject to Creative Commons licensing that sparks my interest. This is obviously a damn good experiment.
But much more interesting to me are the hints of an intention to build communities of practice in and around the content – this has been the splinter in my brain keeping me up at night lately.
There are a lot of things I’m curious about, eg. how “repurposed” proprietary content (fan films, mashups, etc) will be handled, etc. But at least in theory, the idea of open media is a nice little birthday present for creativity/machine, which is one year old tomorrow.
Real thesis thoughts
Aug 16th
Late in the day, two readings from my own field helped me to place some bricks in the hole where my sanity and my conviction about the political importance of “ordinary” grassroots cultural production used to be: Jim McGuigan’s The Cultural Public Sphere (MS Word), and Chris Atton’s The Mundane and Its Reproduction in Alternative Media.
McGuigan traces the development of the Habermasian public sphere and takes issue with neo-Habermasians’ dominant emphasis on the cognitive over the affective dimensions of public life and democratic participation:
The concept of a cultural public sphere refers to the articulation of politics, public and personal, as a contested terrain through affective – aesthetic and emotional – modes of communication
. McGuigan’s cultural public sphere is literally that – imagined as a central space filled with mass mediated cultural texts, a space fringed with “ordinary” cultural consumers; I want to imagine it as boundless and interconnected, and filled with networks of “ordinary” cultural producers who may or may not reference those same mass mediated cultural texts; I also worry continuously about how the almost purely affective domain of (electronic) music will fit in to even this fluid model; but it’s a start.
Chris Atton’s (2001) article on the representation of the mundane in personal homepages is significant to me because it disarticulates “resistance” and the mundane or banal in studies of media and everyday life, i.e. he refuses to find extraordinariness in depictions of the ordinary. And because there are some characterisations of such media so close to what I’ve been getting at that reading them feels like coming home. I particularly like this argument about what might happen when we place attention on mundane alternative media:
What happens when ‘ordinary’ people produce their own media? I want to explore some aspects of ‘popular’ media production and its intersection with everyday life. To do so will be to [...] take to the notion of ‘everyday production’ and its place in identity-formation to a different place: to that of the originating producer within everyday life. Popular media production might then be considered a primary form of everyday cultural production
Exactly. Although…apart from worrying that such media might escape our notice, he never really gets to the consumption and evaluation of these media: it seems to be enough for the producer simply to produce.
Going a bit further than both of these arguments, I want to push (at least conceptually) for a viral, networked model of a public sphere where everyday cultural production is both a matter of course and a peer-legitimated field of cultural practice. But it’s nice to find familiar voices in cultural studies in sympathy with my barely articulate notions. Happy now.
resources on personal essay filmmaking
Aug 16th
useful list of secondary resources on personal essay filmmaking from the center for social media.
a picture of the inside of my head
Aug 13th
As if anyone needed further proof that the pathway to a complete PhD is far from smooth…
Here’s a mindmap of the current conceptual state of my thesis, made in a fit of OII-stimulated inspiration on the train to Brighton while sleep-deprived a couple of weeks ago.
It’s been sitting crumpled at the bottom of my bag ever since, hence the added patina (signifying mental effort and creative authenticity, I’m sure).
What do you mean August started without me?
Aug 9th
Contrary to appearances, I am
a. still alive
b. still thinking, and
c. still a blogger
Just trying to reorient myself to the world outside the white walls, leafy spaces, and idea-and-smoke filled pubs of Oxford. And trying to climb out from under a backlog of *stuff* that has to be done.
I still have thousands of words of seminar notes to synthesise and blog. There, I’ve blogged that I’m going to blog them, so blog them I will…
