Category: Conferences

Andreas Jahn-Sudmann, “Independent Games and the Cultural Logic of Distinction”

Abstract for Andreas Jahn-Sudmann’s talk at “Cultural Distinctions Remediated: Beyond the High, the Low, and the Middle” (Leibniz University of Hannover, 15-17 December 2011):

Desperately Seeking the Mainstream. Independent Games and the Cultural Logic of Distinction

Andreas Jahn-Sudmann (Media Studies, Göttingen)

For decades, the label “independent” has been associated with a form and practice of film that evidently seeks to distance itself from Hollywood as the epitome of the cultural mainstream. At the same time, a closer look at the history of American cinema reveals that independent films never just represented a radical alternative to Hollywood cinema; au contraire. In fact, one can argue that especially the success of many contemporary American indie films results from their ability to combine and balance the logic of the popular (accessibility, intelligibility, coherency) with the logic of radical distinction and anti-conventionality, thus shaping the values and forms of “edginess” and “hipness” that have become so central for our postmodern culture.

In my contribution, I would like to show how, since the 1990s, designers and producers of digital games have taken note of American independent film’s popularity, presence, and cultural capital, and how indie films serve as a cultural model and reflective agency for the evolving independent games movement. Comparing these two cultural spheres, their similarities are as interesting as their differences. While in the world of digital games the independent label is also closely connected to the ideas and rhetorics of (autonomous) creativity and innovation, I would argue that, distinguished from film culture, contemporary independent games still lack a formal logic of opposition that could be understood as challenging the forms and practices of mainstream games.

Florian Groß, “‘Quality TV’ and ‘Graphic Novel’: What’s in a Name?”

Abstract for Florian Groß’s talk at “Cultural Distinctions Remediated: Beyond the High, the Low, and the Middle” (Leibniz University of Hannover, 15-17 December 2011):

‘Quality TV’ and ‘Graphic Novel’: What’s in a Name?

Florian Groß (American Studies, Hannover)

The terms Quality TV and Graphic Novel have become almost synonymous with a broad revaluation of television and comics, two media that have traditionally been related exclusively to popular, even mass, culture. And yet, both terms are less about a democratization of taste than about new forms of cultural distinction. Reminiscent of, though by no means identical with, historical processes of cultural distinction, both Quality TV and Graphic Novel refer to a certain subset of texts with higher aesthetic value and emphasize the role of creativity and education in their production as well as reception. Given the media to which these two categories of cultural distinction are applied and the timeframe in which they have developed, it is necessary to come to terms with their specific forms of distinction, which can no longer be read along the lines of high/low culture, but rather as embedded processes of an ever-expanding popular culture that ultimately have to be considered on their own.

Through an analysis of the terms Quality TV and Graphic Novel with respect to collaborative and individual authorship/production, seriality, and media convergence, this talk attempts to highlight the specific cultural work performed by the terms and thus shed light on related intra-/intermedial developments. Furthermore, it will explore their instrumentality in redefining television and comics, as well as media culture in general, in times of a rapidly changing media landscape.

Christina Meyer, “Popular Visions of War, Gender, and Nation in [High]-Art-Advertising-Comics”

Abstract for Christina Meyer’s talk at “Cultural Distinctions Remediated: Beyond the High, the Low, and the Middle” (Leibniz University of Hannover, 15-17 December 2011):

Popular Visions of War, Gender, and Nation in [High]-Art-Advertising-Comics: Reading Nell Brinkley’s Newspaper Romance Serials

Christina Meyer (American Studies, Osnabrück)

This paper will engage with the female newspaper illustrator, artist, and writer Nell Brinkley (1886-1944). It will focus on her graphic serials, asking how they locate themselves in the discourse of gendered mass culture and how, while drawing on conventions of sentimental fiction and the conventionalized cliffhanger continuity of nineteenth-century serialized narratives, they defy the ideology of feminine domesticity mediated, for example, in the visual language of the well-known and popular Gibson Girl illustrations by Charles Dana Gibson.

Looking at Nell Brinkley’s serialized First World War saga “Golden-Eyes and Her Hero, Bill” (1918-1919) and situating it within the wider socio-historical context, this paper seeks to trace the intersections of the following discourses: patriotism, female identity, and representation in the battles over standards of taste in art and advertising and modern nation swirling around Brinkley’s popular success. It will further be argued that these and Brinkley’s other pages exemplify the cross-infiltrations of cultural forms (e.g. vaudeville, film, advertisement, poster art); in the debate about women’s social and political roles that took place across a range of media, Brinkley’s romance serials interact with, negotiate, and re-mediate, the widely disseminated images of (at times allegorical) female figures of the era. An analysis of Brinkley’s “serial queen heroines” (Lambert, 2009: 6) reveals not only the changing attitudes about the roles available to women during the 1910s and 1920s; it also allows for new insights into the interconnection between sentimental themes, commercial success and the economic context of (cultural) consumption in the first two decades of the twentieth century.

Shane Denson, “Lady Gaga’s Mainstream Queer”

[UPDATE: a revised version of this paper was presented at the “Nonhuman Turn” conference in Milwaukee, May 2012. A screencast video of the complete presentation is available here: Object-Oriented Gaga.]

Abstract for Shane Denson’s talk at “Cultural Distinctions Remediated: Beyond the High, the Low, and the Middle” (Leibniz University of Hannover, 15-17 December 2011):

Lady Gaga’s Mainstream Queer: A Serial Media Remix

Shane Denson (American Studies, Hannover)

In this paper, I propose looking at Lady Gaga as a “serial figure”—as a persona that, not unlike Batman, Frankenstein, Dracula, or Tarzan, is serially instantiated across a variety of media, repeatedly restaged and remixed through an interplay of repetition and variation, thus embodying seriality as a plurimedial interface between trajectories of continuity and discontinuity. As was the case with classic serial figures, whose liminal, double, or secret identities broker traffic between disparate—diegetic and extradiegetic, i.e. medial—times and spaces, so too does Lady Gaga articulate together various media (music, video, fashion, social media) and various sociocultural spheres, values, and identifications (mainstream, alternative, kitsch, pop/art, straight, queer). In this sense, Gaga may be seen to follow in the line of Elvis, David Bowie, and Madonna, among others. Setting these stars in relation to iconic fictional characters shaped by their many transitions between literature, film, radio, television, and digital media promises to shed light on the changing medial contours of contemporary popularity. Serial figures define a nexus of seriality and mediality, and by straddling the divide between medial “inside” and “outside” (e.g. between diegesis and framing medium, fiction and the “real world”), they are able to track media transformations over time and offer up images of the interconnected processes of medial and cultural change. This ability is grounded, then, in the inherent “queerness” of serial figures, which Lady Gaga transforms from a medial condition into an explicit ideology, one which sits uneasily between the mainstream and the exceptional. As a serial figure, I propose, Lady Gaga may be an image of our contemporary convergence culture itself.

Lynn Spigel, “Designer TV”

Abstract for Lynn Spigel’s keynote at “Cultural Distinctions Remediated: Beyond the High, the Low, and the Middle” (Leibniz University of Hannover, 15-17 December 2011):

Designer TV: Television and the Taste for Modernism in Mid-Century America

Lynn Spigel (Screen Cultures/Communication, Northwestern University)

This talk explores the history of television, modern design, and taste cultures in mid-century America. Television’s rise in mid-century America coincided with the boom in mid-century modern design, and the widespread idea among designers that “good design” (if made affordable to average consumers) could elevate American tastes.  In the first period of television’s commercial rise TV was a virtual showroom for new trends in modern design, from graphic design to set design to furniture design to package design for products advertised on TV. Numerous leaders in graphic and industrial design  (from Saul Bass to Ben Shahn to Charles and Ray Eames to Ronald Searle) all worked for the networks and helped to introduce TV audiences to these new forms of mid-century modernism. More than just a visual style, the aesthetics of modern design on television had broad industrial, national, political, and social dimensions. Television’s modern design aesthetic was integral to how mid-century publics would literally see the world and their place in it. At least in the view of some of the loftier marketers and designers for television, modern design would ultimately democratize taste, elevate the ‘masses,’ invigorate consumption, and re-design America itself as the leader of the modern world.  Yet not all people shared the enthusiasm for avant-gardism on television or in design, and some viewers and industry workers protested the use of a mass medium for visual styles that they associated with the intellectual, “highbrow,” and (in some people’s minds) “communist” goals of democracy through design. This talk considers those broader concerns and explores how American tastes (and distastes) for modern art and design relate to the history of television as an aesthetic and cultural form.

CFP: The Nonhuman Turn

Honeycomb image

This promises to be a great event at the Center for 21st Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, with an excellent lineup of speakers:

May 4-5, 2012
The Nonhuman Turn in 21st Century Studies

This conference takes up the “nonhuman turn” that has been emerging in the arts, humanities, and social sciences over the past few decades. Intensifying in the 21st century, this nonhuman turn can be traced to a variety of different intellectual and theoretical developments from the last decades of the 20th century:

actor-network theory, particularly Bruno Latour’s career-long project to articulate technical mediation, nonhuman agency, and the politics of things

affect theory, both in its philosophical and psychological manifestations and as it has been mobilized by queer theory

animal studies, as developed in the work of Donna Haraway, projects for animal rights, and a more general critique of speciesism

the assemblage theory of Gilles Deleuze, Manuel DeLanda, Latour, and others

new brain sciences like neuroscience, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence

new media theory, especially as it has paid close attention to technical networks, material interfaces, and computational analysis

the new materialism in feminism, philosophy, and marxism

varieties of speculative realism like object-oriented philosophy, vitalism, and panpsychism

and systems theory in its social, technical, and ecological manifestations

Such varied analytical and theoretical formations obviously diverge and disagree in many of their aims, objects, and methodologies. But they are all of a piece in taking up aspects of the nonhuman as critical to the future of 21st century studies in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.

Running roughly parallel to this nonhuman turn in the past few decades has been the“posthuman turn” articulated by such important theoretical works as Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman and Cary Wolfe’s What Is Posthumanism? Thinking beyond the human, as posthumanism is sometimes characterized, clearly provides one compelling model for 21st century studies. But the relation between posthumanism and humanism, like that of postmodernism to modernism, can sometimes seem as much like a repetition of the same as the emergence of something different.

Thus, one of the questions that this conference is meant to take up is the relation between posthumanism and the nonhuman turn, especially the ways in which taking the nonhuman as a matter of critical, artistic, and scholarly concern might differ from, as well as overlap with, the aims of posthumanism. In pursuing answers to such questions, the conference is meant to address the future of 21st century studies by exploring how the nonhuman turn might provide a way forward for the arts, humanities, and social sciences in light of the difficult challenges of the 21st century.

Invited speakers (to date) include:

Jane Bennett (Political Science, Johns Hopkins)

Ian Bogost (Literature, Communication, Culture, Georgia Tech)

Bill Brown (English, Chicago)

Wendy Chun (Media and Modern Culture, Brown)

Mark Hansen (Literature, Duke)

Erin Manning (Philosophy/Dance, Concordia University, Montreal)

Brian Massumi (Philosophy, University of Montreal)

Tim Morton (English, UC-Davis)

In addition to the invited speakers, the conference will hold several breakout sessions for additional participants to present their work. Please refer to this Call for Papers for details and deadlines.

Preview of Coming Attractions

Artist James Hance, maker of really cool stuff, has graciously allowed us to use his “Dark Starry Knight” image for the posters we’re putting together for our conference, “Cultural Distinctions Remediated: Beyond the High, the Low, and the Middle,” which will be held December 15-17 at the Leibniz University of Hannover. What you see above is a mock-up, not the final deal. More info on the conference coming soon. In the meantime, in case you missed it: here’s the “promo video” for the conference–with superheroes on a subway!

Comics – Intermedial & Interdisziplinär

“Comics – Intermedial & Interdisziplinär”
9.-10.12.2011 in den Räumlichkeiten von Situation Kunst /
Ruhr-Universität Bochum

Ein interdisziplinäres Symposium zur Förderung und Vernetzung der
Comicforschung.

Seit seinen Anfängen ist der Comic intermediale Verbindungen mit anderen Medien/medialen Formen eingegangen. Dabei haben sich nicht nur Medien, wie z.B. Film oder Fernsehen regelmäßig vom Comic inspirieren lassen. Auch der Comic selbst ist im Laufe seiner Entwicklung sowohl auf inhaltlicher als auch auf formal-ästhetischer Ebene immer wieder von anderen Medien beeinflusst worden. Im Rahmen des zweitägigen Symposiums wird der Forschungsgegenstand Comic aus unterschiedlichen
wissenschaftlichen Perspektiven (Medienwissenschaft, Gender- und Queer
Studies, Literaturwissenschaft, Kulturwissenschaft, Kunstgeschichte
etc.) heraus betrachtet und im Hinblick auf seinen intermedialen Kontext – also mit Blick auf die Frage nach dem Comic in den Medien und den Medien im Comic – beleuchtet. Aufgrund der Integration von Text und Bild stellt der Comic bereits in seiner grundlegenden Beschaffenheit ein intermediales Phänomen dar, daher wird nicht nur das intermediale
Potential des Comics im Verbund mit anderen Medien, sondern auch der
intermediale Charakter des Comics selbst Gegenstand des Symposiums sein.

Bei dem zweitägigen Symposium handelt es sich um eine Kooperation des
Instituts für Medienwissenschaft, dem Lehrstuhl für American Studies und dem Lehrstuhl für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaften der
Ruhr-Universität Bochum.

Weitere Informationen zum Comic Symposium sind online unter www.comic-symposium.de verfügbar.

Anmeldungen zum Symposium sind bis zum 20.11.2011 möglich.
Bei Interesse schicken Sie bitte eine kurze E-Mail an folgende Adresse:
veronique.sina@rub.de