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“Digital Seriality” — Panel at #SCMS15 in Montreal

At the upcoming conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (March 25-29, 2015 in Montréal), I will be participating in a panel on “Digital Seriality,” co-chaired by Andreas Jahn-Sudmann and Scott Higgins, along with Dominik Maeder and Daniela Wentz.

Here is our panel description, along with links (below) to the abstracts for the various papers:

Digital Seriality

Seriality and the digital are key concepts for an understanding of many current forms, texts, and technologies of media, and they are implicated in much broader media-historical trajectories as well. Beyond the forms and functions of specific cultural artifacts, they are central to our global media ecology. Surprisingly, though, relatively few attempts have been made at thinking the digital and the serial together, as intimately connected perspectives on media. This is precisely the task of the present panel. On the one hand, the papers interrogate the serial conditions, forms, and effects of digital culture; on the other hand, they question the role of the digital as technocultural embodiment, determinant, or matrix for serialized media aesthetics and practices. The panel thus brings together heretofore isolated perspectives from studies of new media culture (cf. Manovich 2001, Jenkins 2006) and emerging scholarship on seriality (cf. Kelleter 2012, Allen and van den Berg 2014).

Seriality and digitality are understood here in terms not only of their narrative/representational manifestations but also their technical-operational impacts on our media environments. Accordingly, Shane Denson and Andreas Jahn-Sudmann’s paper looks to the case of the Xbox One in order to show how computational platforms affect the serial forms and practices emerging within, among, and around digital games (“intra-,” “inter-,” and “para-ludic” serialities; cf. Denson and Jahn-Sudmann 2013), but also how these platforms inscribe themselves – as a serialized factor in their own right – into the parameters of computational expression. Whereas video games serve here to highlight the differences between digital and pre-digital serial forms, Dominik Maeder approaches things from the opposite direction, arguing that the interfaces of Netflix, Hulu, and other digital streaming services embody a form of spatio-temporal serialization that, already anticipated by TV series, is closely related to (pre-digital) televisual seriality. As a complementary perspective, Daniela Wentz’s paper shows how certain TV series anticipate their own digital afterlives in the form of fan-made gifs and memes. Finally, Scott Higgins provides an “archeological” perspective, exploring the ludic dimensions of the operational aesthetic, which anticipates computer games in pre-digital forms, thus offering a fruitful case for rethinking digital seriality from a media-comparative perspective.

Bibliography

Allen, Robert, and Thijs van den Berg, eds. Serialization in Popular Culture. London: Routledge, 2014.

Denson, Shane, and Andreas Jahn-Sudmann. “Digital Seriality: On the Serial Aesthetics and Practice of Digital Games.” Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture 7.1 (2013): 1-32.

Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York UP, 2006.

Kelleter, Frank, ed. Populäre Serialität: Narration – Evolution – Distinktion. Zum seriellen Erzählen seit dem 19. Jahrhundert. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2012.

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MIT, 2001.

Finally, here are links to the individual abstracts:

Shane Denson and Andreas Jahn-Sudmann, “The Xbox One as Serial Hardware: A Technocultural Approach to the Seriality of Computational Platforms”

Dominik Maeder, “Serial Interfaces: Publishing and Programming Television on Digital Platforms”

Daniela Wentz, “The Infinite Gesture: The Serial Culture of the Gif”

Scott Higgins, “Ludic Operations: Play and the Serial Action Sequence”

Alexander Starre, “Evolving Technologies, Enduring Media”

Abstract for Alexander Starre’s talk at the symposium “Imagining Media Change” (June 13, 2013, Leibniz Universität Hannover):

Evolving Technologies, Enduring Media: Material Irony in Octave Uzanne’s “The End of Books”

Alexander Starre

In the electric shockwaves sent through the United States by the World’s Columbian Exhibition of 1893, the French writer and publisher Octave Uzanne appeared to have lost his belief in the future of the book. As a reporter for Le Figaro, Uzanne spent three months touring the country, meeting President Grover Cleveland and inventor Thomas Edison, besides strolling the fairgrounds in Chicago. After his visit, he published the short story “The End of Books” in Scribner’s Magazine in 1894, which depicts a future in which books have been replaced by the phonograph. In the seminal volume Rethinking Media Change (ed. David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins), Priscilla Coit Murphy reads “The End of Books” as an exuberant embrace of new media. This paper aims to complicate Murphy’s analysis through a materialist perspective on Uzanne’s text as a historical artifact. “The End of Books” does not unfold its full complexity in the English text printed in Scribner’s. The French version “La fin des livres”, which forms part of the collection Contes pour les bibliophiles (1895), exposes the material irony embedded in the text. Octave Uzanne’s relationship to technology was strikingly ambivalent and manifested larger shifts in networks of communication and cultural distinction. While he was fascinated by new electro-mechanical inventions, his ultimate goal was to improve the quality of printed artifacts. From this peculiar case, my paper will extract several theoretical implications for current debates in media studies and book history.

Extending Play: Rutgers Media Studies Conference

Thanks to Aaron Trammell, who was scheduled to be on the “Game Studies as Media Studies” roundtable with me at the FLOW 2012 Conference, but who was unable to make it due to Hurricane Sandy, I have just learned of an exciting conference going on April 19-20, 2013 at Rutgers University (Aaron is on the organizing committee). The conference is entitled “Extending Play,” and it’s not too late to submit a proposal (but hurry, the deadline is December 1!). Here’s the CFP:

Can we still define play as an organizing principle in today’s technologically mediated world?

Play can be hard work and serious business, and it’s time to push beyond the conceptualization of play as merely the pursuit of leisure and consider how the issues of power, affect, labor, identity, and privacy surround the idea and practice of play. The Rutgers Media Studies Conference: Extending Play invites submissions that seek to understand play as a mediating practice, and how play operates at the center of all media.

We are interested in all approaches to the traditions, roles, and contexts of play, and hope to explore how play can be broadly defined and incorporated as a fundamental principle extending into far-flung and unexpected arenas. Johan Huizinga characterizes man as the species that plays: “Law and order, commerce and profit, craft and art, poetry, wisdom and science. All are rooted in the primaeval soil of play” (Homo Ludens, p.5). How does play operate as a civilizing function — or is it perhaps a technology that produces order?

Play is a means of exploring and joining various disciplines: Social media, mash-ups, and blogs have altered how we communicate and create; game design has influenced how businesses relate to consumers; citizen journalists have shifted the role of the professional in mediating information and forging a public sphere.

To explore these questions, we invite scholars, students, tinkerers, visionaries, and players to the first ever Rutgers Media Studies Conference: Extending Play, to be held April 19th and 20th, 2013 on the Rutgers University campus in New Brunswick, NJ. Confirmed speakers for our keynote conversations include Fred Turner (Stanford University) & Stephen Duncombe (New York University) and Trevor Pinch (Cornell University) & Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky (The European Graduate School).

We invite individuals from media studies and related fields in the humanities and social sciences to participate. Potential topics for paper, panel, roundtable, and workshop may include, but are not limited to:

-Playing with labor: work-like games and game-like work
-Play as resistance (culture jamming, situationist art, or other contexts)
-Gendering (and gendered) play
-Music and performance
-Linguistic play
-Play and social media
-Playing with identity
-Love and play (flirtation, AI relationships, robotica, etc)
-Gamification and games in nontraditional settings
-Transgression, cheating, and “gaming” systems
-Darker side of play (trolling, gambling, or corruption)
-Game studies

The Rutgers Media Studies Conference: Extending Play promises to offer a memorable meeting of scholarship, and to that end, we are looking to play with standard conference conventions. One track throughout the conference will be a series of public workshop sessions in which scholars and practitioners will host roundtable discussions on contemporary issues that bring together an audience of experts and interested parties. In the academic panel track, each presenter will have a maximum of 15 minutes to offer his or her ideas as a presentation or interactive conversation, and will choose one of the following methods of presentation:
–material accompaniment (hand out a zine, scrapbook, postcard series, etc)
–performance (spoken word, song, verse, dance, recording, etc)
–limited visuals (a maximum of 3 slides and 25 total words)
–game (create rules and incorporate audience play)
For additional ideas on how to play with media, play with time, or play with space during your presentation, visit our Style Guide.

The deadline for proposals is Saturday, December 1, 2012. We invite individual proposals, full panel proposals (of four members), and proposals for roundtable and workshop sessions. Please email an abstract of approximately 247 words, along with your name, affiliation, presentation method, and a short biography to mediacon@rutgers.edu. If you are interested in proposing a topic for our public workshop track, or are interested in participating in one, please indicate that as well. Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by mid-January 2013.

For more info, see the conference website: mediacon.rutgers.edu

Lectures & Workshop with Mark B. N. Hansen (Duke University)

On the occasion of his visit to the Leibniz University of Hannover, the American Studies department / English Seminar and the Initiative for Interdisciplinary Media Research are proud to present a series of lectures and workshops with renowned media theorist Mark Hansen.

Professor of Literature at Duke University since 2008, Mark Hansen is the author of the monographs Bodies in Code: Interfaces with Digital Media (2006), New Philosophy for New Media (2004), and Embodying Technesis: Technology Beyond Writing (2000), as well as numerous other publications in the field of media theory. In addition to two guest lectures, a workshop will provide the opportunity to discuss Prof. Hansen’s research on the basis of selected texts.

Mon, 2 July 2012, 6:00 pm: Lecture: “Feed Forward, or the ‘Future’ of 21^st Century Media”

Tue, 3 July 2012, 10:00 am: Guest lecture: “The End of Pharmacology?: Historicizing 21^st Century Media.”

Fri, 6 July 2012, 2:00 – 5:00 pm: Workshop on selected media-theoretical texts by Mark Hansen  (to participate in the workshop, please register via email)

(All events will take place in room 615 in the “Conti-Hochhaus”: building 1502 at Königsworther Platz 1.) For further information and to register for the workshop, please contact Shane Denson.

“Take anything and make it a matter of expression”: media | matter conference

media|matter:
the matter of media | the mediality of matter

Here’s the announcement I just received from Bernd Herzogenrath for an exciting conference coming up soon (May 31 – June 2, 2012) in Frankfurt. Be sure to click the link above for the conference program, list of speakers (including Bill Morrison, Thomas Köner, Lorenz Engell, and Hanjo Berressem), registration, and other info.

The 2012 media|matter conference reflects the increased interest in the material aspects of our culture, triggered by the material turn as postulated by Deleuze & Guattari, Varela & Maturana, Serres, and others. In consequence we will assess the implications of this blossoming field of research which focuses rather on what represents, than on what is represented.

The aim of our conference is to re-focus approaches in culture- and media-sciences and to open up and foster new, interdisciplinary perspectives and concepts towards a revised understanding of media. By highlighting the materiality of the medium and reading this very materiality as medium, questions occur: can content and form still be regarded as separate? Or shouldn’t we rather acknowledge that the matter of the medium affects the message that is conveyed and represented? Shouldn’t we consequently speak of informed matter and of materialized information?

In the same way, social- and cultural-sciences cannot ignore the findings of the life-sciences, especially in the fields of complexity-theory and non-linear systems. Thus this conference also intends to bring together artists and researchers from diverse disciplines with differing understandings of media and materiality, not only to create feedback-loops between natural- and cultural-sciences, but also to re-think the somewhat fuzzy concepts of nature and culture.

CFP: Contemporary Screen Narratives

Contemporary Screen Narratives: Storytelling’s Digital and Industrial Contexts

Conference to be held on 17 May 2012

Hosted by Department of Culture, Film and Media, University of Nottingham

Keynote speakers: Henry Jenkins and Jason Mittell

This one-day conference looks to trace connections between the narratives of contemporary screen media and their contexts of production, distribution and consumption. We refer here to narrative as the presentation and organisation of story via the semiotic phenomena of image, sound and written/spoken word. We anticipate that speakers will explore ways in which stories and their on-screen telling are informed by contemporary industrial and technological conditions. We invite contributions from postgraduate and early-career researchers working across screen-based narrative media, such as film, television, comics, literature, video games and other areas of new media. We are interested to receive all paper proposals pertinent to the conference topic, though we particularly welcome those that engage with the following themes and questions:

Industrial determinants. In what ways are stories and their telling contingent on the production cultures, distribution methods, revenue models and governmental policies that configure a given creative industry?

Digital Technologies. How has the construction and/or reception of narratives been influenced by digital production equipment, distribution tech, online platforms and consumer hardware devices?

Seriality and Transmedia: In what ways do serial narrative forms, whether disseminated within a given medium or across multiple media, reflect industrial and technological contexts?

Audio and Visual Styles: How are the sounds and visions of contemporary screen narratives informed by conditions of production and reception technologies?

Paratextual Surround: In what ways do promotional materials, practitioner discourses, fan cultures and critical/journalistic responses discursively frame screen narratives?

Send abstracts of 250 words to both:

Anthony Smith – aaxas4@nottingham.ac.uk

and

Aaron Calbreath-Frasieur – aaxac2@nottingham.ac.uk

Papers should not exceed twenty minutes in length.

The deadline for proposal submission is Monday 13 February 2012.

Deadline for proposal submission is now: 4 March 2012.

(Original CFP here: http://contemporaryscreennarratives.tumblr.com/)