flynn033

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.  Build...

Please join the Chicago Film Seminar at 6:30 pm on Thursday, March 8 to welcome Jim Collins (Notre Dame) for his talk, " Portable Media Devices and Playlist Culture ." Max Dawson (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, March 8 at 6:30pm Jim Collins , Notre Dame "Portable Media Devices and Playlist Culture" Respondent: Max Dawson , Northwestern Collins describes his talk as follows: My paper will reflect on some of the issues raised by Professor Eivind Røssaak raised in the insightful paper he presented to the Chicago Film seminar this past November("The Performative Archive: The Archival Turn in Film, Art and New Media Practices”) but I will be talking about how portable media devices-- iPods, smart tablets, and ereaders --function as personal digital archives. What kind of “performativity” do we as amateur c...

On Thursday, April 7 at 6:30pm, Michelle Citron (Columbia College) will present "Is This Cinema? Narrative and the Digital," a talk and screening of her short films. Patrick Jagoda (University of Chicago) will provide the response. The meeting will take place, as always, in the Flaxman Theater, Room 1307, of the School of the Art Institute's building at 112 S. Michigan Ave. Citron describes her talk as follows: "My reading of Andrew’s What Cinema Is! raises the question: How far can you push the medium (be it film, video, or digital) and still call it cinema? I will show two works, Leftovers (2010) and Mixed Greens (2004). Leftovers , a linear narrative created from photographs, 16mm film, and cameraless digital images, raises issues about the camera and the real (in Bazin's sense). Mixed Greens , an interactive non-linear narrative created from photographs, 16mm film, video, and cameraless digital images, foregrounds issues about editing/ellipsis and aud...

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 ...

The Chicago Film Seminar welcomes Dartmouth's Mark Williams to deliver his talk "Closely Belated? Thoughts on Real-Time Media Publics and Minority Report ." Williams describes his talk as follows: Minority Report (Spielberg, 2002) is renowned as an exemplary instance of the cyber-noir thriller. Even in an age of media convergence and consolidation, motion pictures can function as key sites of interlocution for the structuring of desires and anxieties about political and socio-economic dynamics and effects. Minority Report is rather rich in such opportunities for analysis, although despite the assuredness of its conceit and dramatic structure, I find more compelling what the film cannot resolve quite so neatly--what we might call its belated thematics. Via methods that derive from television studies, I will consider the film in relation to what I call "real-time" desires that condition its configurations of digital culture, the techno-future, and personal/so...

On Thursday, Nov 4, Andrew Johnston of the University of Chicago delivered his talk “Coding Patterns: The Algorithmic Mechanisms of John Whitney, Larry Cuba and Early Digital Animation,” from a chapter of his dissertation. Jon Cates, from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, provided the response. Johnston proposed an understanding of digitality based in what he likes to call the “stuff of the digital” – its materials, the processes by which it works and is made, its hardware and its software. To do this he explored the techniques used by abstract animators John Whitney and Larry Cuba to create digital films in the 1960s and 1970s. Using research from interviews he conducted with the filmmakers and programmers as well as from a study of the Whitney archives, Johnston described the complex and time-consuming (as well as time-delayed) methods by which Whitney and Cuba developed computer animation from what might be understood as the aesthetics of the algorithm. Whitney’s animation...

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 ...