Please join the Chicago Film Seminar at 6:30 pm on Thursday, November 7 to welcome James Hodge (Northwestern) for his talk, "Lateral Time." Daniel Morgan (UChicago) will provide the response. The CFS will be held at DePaul's Loop Campus in the Daley Building at 14 E. Jackson Blvd., Room LL 102, using the State St. entrance located at 247 S. State.
Thursday, November 7 at 6:30pm
James Hodge, Northwestern
"Lateral Time"
Respondent: Daniel Morgan, UChicago
Hodge describes his talk as follows:
This talk comes from the second chapter of my book project, Animate Archaeology: Digital Media and the Aesthetics of History. In the book I argue for the novel significance of animation for the aesthetic expression of historical temporality in the age of new media. This talk examines the concept of lateral time, which I define as the temporal regime native to processes operating beyond the threshold of human experience. Building upon Paul Ricoeur, I argue for the centrality of lateral time for the task of articulating historical temporality in the context of digital networks. Moving beyond the primacy Ricoeur accords the written trace, I also argue that animation plays a crucial role in opening up encounters with the lateral time of networks. In the latter sections of the talk I pursue these arguments through the analysis of two long duration experimental, digital art works: John F. Simon Jr.'s Every Icon and Barbara Lattanzi's Optical De-dramatization Engine. The stakes for this argument rest (1) with the contemporary specification of historical temporality and (2) with the elucidation of the critical role played by digital moving image aesthetics in that endeavor.
Film Strip image from Wikimedia Commons
Showing posts with label Temporality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Temporality. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 23, 2013
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
February 2: Noa Steimatsky on Barthes, Warhol and the Face
Please join the Chicago Film Seminar at 6:30 pm on Thursday, February 2 to welcome Noa Steimatsky (UChicago) for her talk, "Death at Work: Barthes and Warhol Look at the Face." Scott Durham (Northwestern) will provide the response. The CFS will be held, as always, in the Flaxman Theater, Room 1307 of the School of the Art Institute's building at 112 S. Michigan Ave.
Thursday, February 2 at 6:30pm
Noa Steimatsky, UChicago
"Death at Work: Barthes and Warhol Look at the Face"
Respondent: Scott Durham, Northwestern
Steimatsky describes her talk as follows:
Enframed in a consideration of Andy Warhol’s mid-1960s film portraiture, my talk for the Chicago Film Seminar will dwell on Roland Barthes’s “modern anthropology” of the cinematic face. A deep ambivalence, involving de-mythifying and re-mythifying maneuvers, haunts Barthes’s reflection on the facial image, and foreshadows some of the deepest concerns of Pop in the following decade. Especially in the almost forgotten essay, “Visages et figures,” Barthes diagnoses a fallacy of “expressivity” of the contemporary movie star juxtaposed with a vision of lost plenitude (real or imagined) invested in an earlier moment of film history. The up-front material artifice of late-silent and Classical cinema is predicated on a layering and masking that endow it with cultic, auratic charge. Yet the archaic functions of the mask might still be operative in Warhol’s deployment of multiplicity and temporality in his great film portraits.
Thursday, February 2 at 6:30pm
Noa Steimatsky, UChicago
"Death at Work: Barthes and Warhol Look at the Face"
Respondent: Scott Durham, Northwestern
Steimatsky describes her talk as follows:
Enframed in a consideration of Andy Warhol’s mid-1960s film portraiture, my talk for the Chicago Film Seminar will dwell on Roland Barthes’s “modern anthropology” of the cinematic face. A deep ambivalence, involving de-mythifying and re-mythifying maneuvers, haunts Barthes’s reflection on the facial image, and foreshadows some of the deepest concerns of Pop in the following decade. Especially in the almost forgotten essay, “Visages et figures,” Barthes diagnoses a fallacy of “expressivity” of the contemporary movie star juxtaposed with a vision of lost plenitude (real or imagined) invested in an earlier moment of film history. The up-front material artifice of late-silent and Classical cinema is predicated on a layering and masking that endow it with cultic, auratic charge. Yet the archaic functions of the mask might still be operative in Warhol’s deployment of multiplicity and temporality in his great film portraits.
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Summary: Mark Williams on MINORITY REPORT
On Thursday, Dec 2, 2010, Mark Williams (Dartmouth) presented a talk entitled “Closely Belated? Thoughts on Real-Time Media Publics and Minority Report” at the Chicago Film Seminar. James Lastra (University of Chicago) provided the response.
This talk considered the “relationship between issues of citizenship, temporality, and media culture through an address to particular configurations of the techno-future” in Steven Spielberg’s 2003 science fiction film, Minority Report. Set in a future in which crime is prevented before it happens, the film builds its premise around the issue of human choice, and how this important principle, and its technological mediation, can define the actions of the state. Building on previous work of his, in which he discussed how the significant relationship between what are termed televisual “liveness” and computer-mediated “real time” form an electronic culture dispositif.
The term “liveness”, Williams asserts, has shifted in meaning from a broadcast that is taking place simultaneous to its electronic transmission to any description of what an electronic medium is representing at this moment, what it is showing now. The transmission of electronic media become less “live” (in the original sense of the term) and as the temporality of its consumption grows more complex with the development of surfing, zipping and time-shifting devices (first VCR’s and now DVR’s). In this way, it is helpful to understand “liveness” as a mutable, historically situational effect. Computer-related electronic media, in contrast, are characterized by the properties and desires of “real time,” as evidenced by demand for ever-faster data processing and downloading capabilities.
Taken together, “liveness” and “real time” can be understood to possess the synergistic capacity for a frenzy of the temporal, such that reference to time as a traditional anchor for certainty achieves a fluidity that questions the relationship of the present to what might have and what will occur. Williams introduces the phrase “real-time subjunctive” to describe these creative dynamics within cyber-culture. The rise of digital culture, and its attendant pressure to render and actualize the near future, can thus be seen to have produced evidence of a pressure toward different states of belief as regards our relationships to media, typically taken for granted, and the complexities of which we disavow. Minority Report addresses subjectivity through these terms of mediated belief, temporality and disavowal. In particular, the film utilizes a DVR-like device that then allows the possibility not just of replay and pausing the image, but of representing what is to come in the near future. This premise of “subjunctive temporal fluidity” is situated within two temporalities in the film: the mobile, interactive consumerist public sphere in which each person is bombarded with a persistent “now” of advertisements responding to his individual history and movement, and the temporality of trauma, represented here through one protagonist grieving the loss of his child and another the murder of her mother. Traumatic traces, in the form of moving images of deceased loved ones, complicate a provocative possible relationship between the tropes of mediated temporal frenzy and those of the temporal dynamics of societal trauma, especially as regards the politics of media and public memory.
This talk considered the “relationship between issues of citizenship, temporality, and media culture through an address to particular configurations of the techno-future” in Steven Spielberg’s 2003 science fiction film, Minority Report. Set in a future in which crime is prevented before it happens, the film builds its premise around the issue of human choice, and how this important principle, and its technological mediation, can define the actions of the state. Building on previous work of his, in which he discussed how the significant relationship between what are termed televisual “liveness” and computer-mediated “real time” form an electronic culture dispositif.
The term “liveness”, Williams asserts, has shifted in meaning from a broadcast that is taking place simultaneous to its electronic transmission to any description of what an electronic medium is representing at this moment, what it is showing now. The transmission of electronic media become less “live” (in the original sense of the term) and as the temporality of its consumption grows more complex with the development of surfing, zipping and time-shifting devices (first VCR’s and now DVR’s). In this way, it is helpful to understand “liveness” as a mutable, historically situational effect. Computer-related electronic media, in contrast, are characterized by the properties and desires of “real time,” as evidenced by demand for ever-faster data processing and downloading capabilities.
Taken together, “liveness” and “real time” can be understood to possess the synergistic capacity for a frenzy of the temporal, such that reference to time as a traditional anchor for certainty achieves a fluidity that questions the relationship of the present to what might have and what will occur. Williams introduces the phrase “real-time subjunctive” to describe these creative dynamics within cyber-culture. The rise of digital culture, and its attendant pressure to render and actualize the near future, can thus be seen to have produced evidence of a pressure toward different states of belief as regards our relationships to media, typically taken for granted, and the complexities of which we disavow. Minority Report addresses subjectivity through these terms of mediated belief, temporality and disavowal. In particular, the film utilizes a DVR-like device that then allows the possibility not just of replay and pausing the image, but of representing what is to come in the near future. This premise of “subjunctive temporal fluidity” is situated within two temporalities in the film: the mobile, interactive consumerist public sphere in which each person is bombarded with a persistent “now” of advertisements responding to his individual history and movement, and the temporality of trauma, represented here through one protagonist grieving the loss of his child and another the murder of her mother. Traumatic traces, in the form of moving images of deceased loved ones, complicate a provocative possible relationship between the tropes of mediated temporal frenzy and those of the temporal dynamics of societal trauma, especially as regards the politics of media and public memory.
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