CLOSE-UP 2

Categories:: visual cognition

An event organized by the new Center for Film, Performance, and Media Arts (CFPMA) was held today in Edinburgh University discussing recent topics in… film, performance, and media arts.

It was an interesting group of people that strangely somehow all had much in common. I had the fortune of presenting my research as it relates to DIEM in the place of Tim J. Smith.

The schedule:

Close-Up 2: Schedule for Wednesday 17^th June 2009

10am coffee and tech checks (G.11, William Robertson Building)

10.30 Welcome, Annette Davison (Music, ACE and Director, Cfpma), Martine Beugnet (LLC, Convener of Film Studies)

Who is who, where is what? People and resources for which the Cfpma will provide a point of convergence.

11am Individual Presentations (MAX 10 mins each):

Andrew Lawrence (African Studies, SSPS) — Difficult satire under austerity: the films of Sissako and Amoussou

Martine Beugnet (Film, LLC) — “The Wounded Screen”

Richard Williams (Architecture, ACE) — “The Modernist City on Film”

Stephen Cairns (Architecture, ACE) — “Cultures of Legibility: Emergent Urban Landscapes in Southeast Asia”

Simon Frith and Annette Davison (Music, ACE) — “The Role of Cinemas in the History of Live Music”

Mary Fogarty (Music, ACE) — “The New Silent Cinema in Live”

Yoko Matsumoto-Sturt (Asian Studies, LLC) — “Japanese language and culture in J-pop”

Kriss Ravetto (Film, LLC) — “Spectres of the Digital”

Eric Laurier (Geosciences) — “Agreements in Editing”

Parag Mital (Visual Cognition Lab, PPLS) — “Dynamic Images and Eye Movements”

Smita Kheria (Law) — “Copyright law and new media art

Lunch: 1-2pm

2pm – joint presentations

Richard Coyne, Penny Travlou, Mark Wright (ACE, ECA, and Informatics) — “Emerging forms of digital media and the democratization of urban discourse”

Jolyon Mitchell, Alina Birzache, Milja Radovic, Yasmin Fedda (Divinity) — “Seeing Through Film, Religion and Ethics

3pm COFFEE

3.30pm DISCUSSION FORUM 1

Cross-Subject/School /Institution teaching and research supervision: current/future plans

Chair: Kriss Ravetto

With Martine Beugnet, Sarah Colvin, John Lee, Fiona Littleton, Martine Pierquin

4pm INFO and UPDATES

Knowledge Transfer and Exchange: Anne-Sofie Laegran

Cfpma Web Presence: Annette Davison

‘Film in the Public Space’ and the Roberts Fund: Martine Beugnet

4.20pm DISCUSSION FORUM 2

The future of the Cfpma.

Chair: Annette and Martine

What could the Centre usefully do/encourage to support its members and foster research collaboration?

5pm BREAK – and move to David Hume Tower conference room

5.15pm Professor Tim Lenoir, CONTEMPLATING SINGULARITY

Cinet (Cinema Network) talk, followed by wine reception and launch of CFPMA

The talk explores how the postbiological and posthuman future has haunted cultural studies of technoscience for two decades. Concern (and in some quarters enthusiasm) that contemporary technoscience is on a path leading beyond simple human biological improvements and prosthetic enhancements to a complete human makeover has been sustained by the exponential growth in power and capability of computer technology since the early 1990s. The deeper fear is that somehow digital code and computer-mediated communications are getting under our skin, and in the process we are being transformed.

Tim Lenoir is the Kimberly Jenkins Chair for New Technologies and Society at Duke University. He has published several books and articles on the history of biomedical science from the nineteenth century to the present. His more recent work has focused on the introduction of computers into biomedical research from the early 1960s to the present, particularly the development of computer graphics, medical visualization technology, the development of virtual reality and its applications in surgery and other fields. Lenoir has also been engaged in constructing online digital libraries for a number of projects, including an archive on the history of Silicon Valley. Two recent projects include a web documentary project to document the history of bioinformatics funded by the Bern Dibner and Alfred P. Sloan Foundations, and How They Got Game, a history of interactive simulation and video games. With economists Nathan Rosenberg, Henry Rowen, and Brent Goldfarb he has just completed a collaborative study for Stanford University on Stanford’s historical relationship to Silicon Valley entitled, Inventing the Entrepreneurial Region: Stanford and the Co-Evolution of Silicon Valley. In support of these projects, Lenoir has developed software tools for interactive web-based collaboration. In this connection he is currently engaged with colleagues at UC Santa Barbara in developing the NSF-supported Center for Nanotechnology in Society, where he contributes to the effort to document the history, societal, and ethical implications of bionanotechnology.

There were those interested in the slides of my presentation and I thought to include it online:

The videos shown in the slides are available online on our Vimeo and Youtube accounts: