Session #3: Andrew Johnston on Early Digital Animation (Nov 4)

It's that time again! This Thursday, November 4, the Chicago Film Seminar welcomes Andrew Johnston, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago to present his talk "Coding Patterns: The Algorithmic Mechanisms of John Whitney, Larry Cuba and Early Digital Animation." Jon Cates, Associate Professor of Film, Video, New Media & Animation at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, will provide the formal response before opening Q&A to the whole group.

Here is the brief abstract Johnston has submitted in advance of his talk:

This paper examines the development of digital filmmaking and animation technologies in the 1960s and 1970s through an analysis of John Whitney and Larry Cuba’s films. Whitney made some of the first digital animations while an artist in residence at IBM from 1966-1969 and later worked with a variety of programmers through the 1970s, including Larry Cuba on "Arabesque" (1975). Through an analysis of the materials employed in the construction of Whitney and Cuba’s films, my paper attempts to make an intervention into contemporary discourses that highlight the ephemeral nature of digital film or that neglect the importance of how specific platforms and programming languages affect both visual aesthetics and notions of digital technology. I show how these filmmakers were each deeply invested in working through a negotiation with digital technology that attempts to reveal both the mechanism’s expressive logic and its limitations while simultaneously exploring the nature of animation.

Location: This session will meet in our usual space, at the School of the Art Institute, 112 S. Michigan Ave, Room 1307, starting promptly at 6:30pm.

Session #2: Christian Quendler on Descartes and Vertov (Oct 14)

This Thursday, October 14, the Chicago Film Seminar begins its regular season meetings with Christian Quendler of the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and currently a visitor to the Radio/TV/Film Department of Northwestern University. He will present his talk "Camera-Eye and Dispositif: René Descartes vs. Dziga Vertov." The response will be provided by Yuri Tsivian of the University of Chicago.

What follows is a brief abstract Quendler has submitted for this talk:

Metaphors of the camera eye are among the oldest and most powerful tropes to depict human vision and subjectivity. As a proto-cybernetic metaphor that lends itself both to anthropomorphic and mechanomorphic readings, the camera eye has become a double agent of subjectivity. It has served as midwife for a modern philosophy of the subject in René Descartes's discourse on Optics and as a gravedigger for classical notions of subjectivity in Dziga Vertov's radically constructivist aesthetics of the kino-eye. By looking at Descartes's early modern and Vertov's modernist notions of the camera eye as two paradigmatic case studies, this paper examines the intricate relation between subjectivity and mediality. It examines figures of the camera eye as conceptual metaphors that construct subjective relations to orders of discourse and media spaces. Drawing on Joachim Paech's reflections on the dispositif for a theory of the order(ing) of media, Quendler will review the concept of the dispositif as a strategic place in the alignment of medium, discourse and genre.

Location: Unlike our kickoff, this session will meet in our usual space, at the School of the Art Institute, 112 S. Michigan Ave, Room 1307, starting promptly at 6:30pm.

Session #1: Responding to What Cinema Is! (Sept 23)

(Note: read to bottom of message for important info about unusual location for this session and follow-up meal!)

The Chicago Film Seminar kicks off its annual season of formal presentations on Thursday, September 23 at 6:30pm with a moderated workshop of short responses to Dudley Andrew's What Cinema Is!: Bazin's Quest and Its Charge, the cornerstone text for this year's CFS programming. Hometown all-stars James Lastra (U.Chicago), Lynn Spigel (Northwestern), Virginia Wright Wexman (UIC), and Pamela Robertson Wojcik (Notre Dame) will commence the session with a series of 10-minute reactions to Andrew's book, including the claims it ventures and the larger questions it prompts, all of which will ramify—in spirit, thought not always to the letter—across the rest of this year's presentations.

After our series of invited responses, the workshop session will open outward to a general discussion of the book and the speakers' points, as moderated by Scott Curtis of Northwestern. We encourage you to read what you can of Andrew's book before next Thursday, to facilitate the most substantial possible exchanges. However, both the book and the workshop format are structured to solicit commentary from a wide range of perspectives, relating to issues of key pertinence for anyone in the field. Indeed, the subtitle for our workshop is "The State of Film & Media Studies Today," in which we all have strong investments. So come one, and come all!

Location: This session will not meet in our usual Michigan Avenue location, but in Room 150 of the Arthur Rubloff Building at the Northwestern University School of Law (375 E. Chicago Ave). Suggestions for parking are here and here. The Red Line Chicago/State stop is also a great option, as are a dozen CTA bus lines and, for those with access, the Northwestern Intercampus Shuttle.

Dinner: An on-site dinner reception to celebrate the new year of CFS will immediately follow the seminar. If you plan on attending the reception, please RSVP using this link to our new CFS coordinator, Adam Hart, by Monday, Sept. 20th.

Links: Check in with our previous blog entry to read more about What Cinema Is! and its role in this year's programming for CFS, including links where you can buy the book. Click on the names of all four of our speakers in the right-hand sidebar to access their faculty bios.

In the Comments: Have you already read Andrew's book? Do you have specific thoughts or questions you'll be bringing to Thursday's session, or that you hope our speakers might engage?