Last summer (2012), I participated in a roundtable discussion with Therese Grisham and Julia Leyda on the subject of “Post-Cinematic Affect: Post-Continuity, the Irrational Camera, Thoughts on 3D.” Drawing on Steven Shaviro’s book Post-Cinematic Affect, and looking at films such as District 9, Melancholia, and Hugo, the roundtable appeared in the multilingual online journal La Furia Umana (issue 14, 2012). For some reason, the LFU site has been down for a few weeks, and I have no information about whether or when it will be back up. Accordingly, I wanted to point out for anyone who is interested that you can still find a copy of the roundtable discussion here (as a PDF on my academia page). Enjoy!
On June 12, 2013 (6:00 pm in room 615, Conti-Hochhaus), the Initiative for Interdisciplinary Media Research is proud to present the third installment of our ongoing series of film screenings, “Imagining Media Change.” (See here for a flyer with more details about our film series and related events, and here for a description of the symposium that forms the conceptual centerpiece.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylu-uCR4ZZI
In a departure from our usual format of screening feature-length movies, this time we will watch a handful of recent science-fiction-themed ‘digital’ short films – among them Derek Van Gorder’s and Otto Stockmeier’s Kickstarter-funded short C (299,792 kilometers per second) (2013), Neill Blomkamp’s Alive in Joburg (2006) – the proof-of-concept for what became 2009’s District 9 – and the first episode of RCVR (2011), a Motorola-sponsored Web-TV series released via Machinima.com and Youtube. All of these films – as products of a throughly digitalized media environment – not only point us to the various transformations connected to contemporary media change (from crowd-funding to the use of digital video and the viral distribution of content via online video sites); as science-fiction films, they are also centrally about futuristic and/or alien technology and present us with their own takes on media change.
As always, the screening is free and open for all! Finally, the films themselves are embedded here in case you can’t make it.
