Mlab Doctor of Arts programme, MA students are more than welcome as well.

Angela Dalle Vacche: The Difference of Cinema in the System of the Arts

In this lecture I will argue that the arts, especially literature, theatre and painting, are useful to answer Andre Bazin’s famous question “What is Cinema?” The place of architecture and design in regard to cinema will also be discussed.

However, the scientific origins of this medium are, in the end, even more crucial than its aesthetic ones. Based on illusion and belief, the cinema is also how and where the world can record itself in the image of itself, because the non-human eye of the camera, instead of the human hand, is in charge of the tracing.

In the end, by grounding cinema into science and technology much more than in the arts, the cinema is really about the problem of the human soul, the oscillation between religion and science, absence and presence. For “What is Cinema?” After all, nothing more nor less than the flickering produced by still photo-grams running through the sprockets of the projector at 24 frames per second.

– – – – – – –

Angela Dalle Vacche is a specialist in the intersection of aesthetic theory and film history, Angela Dalle Vacche was born in Venice, Italy and came to the United States in 1978. She has graduate degrees in American Studies and in Film Studies from Mount Holyoke College and the University of Iowa. She has been the recipient of a Fulbright Travel Grant, a Mellon Fellowship, a Rockefeller Bellagio Grant, and a Leverhulme Distinguished Professorship at the University of London, Birkbeck College, History of Art. Her retrospective: Italian Silent Divas: Passion and Defiance, for the 2000 New York Film Festival was voted as “Best Event Of The Year” by Art Forum. Dalle Vacche regularly works with the Cineteca di Bologna, The Nederlands Film Museum, Anthology Film Archive in New York, and DAMS/Gorizia in Italy. She has also lectured in Dublin, Vienna, Paris, and Portugal.

Marja Seliger is Professor of Graphic Design Research at Aalto University, School of Arts, Design and Architecture.

Her doctoral dissertation (2008) was a research about visual rhetoric in outdoor advertising. Currently she continues to research graphic design and visual communication in multidisciplinary projects combining design research, communication studies, sustainability and visual culture. She teaches graphic design and supervises doctoral students at Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture.

Marja Seliger has an extensive working experience as a professional graphic designer in Finland and abroad. She worked over six years as a UNESCO graphics and production expert in educational projects in Africa and in the Caribbean region. In 1990’s she led the graphic design department in Edita, a Finnish printing and publishing house.

In 2001 Marja Seliger was employed by the University of Lapland to start a Graphic Management Masters’ of Art programme. She was an acting professor of graphic design at the University of Lapland and since 2009 a graphic design researcher at the Aalto University.

Marja Seliger is the vice-president of Grafia, the Association of Professional Graphic Designers in Finland.

Research projects and publications:

https://reseda.taik.fi/Taik/jsp/taik/Researcher.jsp?lang_global=en&id=24016

Doctoral Writing Seminars (4 ECTS)
From conference contribution to journal manuscript

After successfully writing down your research in a paper and presenting it at a conference, you are faced with a new challenge: How to extend the conference paper into a journal manuscript. The purpose of this doctoral seminar series is to support you in this, following a very hands-on approach.

In a series of five small-group seminars, we will cover the practical challenges of locating a suitable journal, as well as how to sharpen your writing. In each seminar, a specific aspect of journal publishing is studied through presentations and exercises. In addition, you will be developing your manuscript further in take-home assignments.  Upon completion of all the seminars, you should have a first draft for a journal manuscript as well as a plan for how to finalize it.

As a first introduction to journal publishing, the seminar series is intended for second- and third-year doctoral students that have written a couple of conference papers and now are in the process of preparing their first journal submission.  The seminar series will be limited to a maximum of eight doctoral students to facilitate in-depth discussions of all participants’ work. You need to participate in all the seminars and do all the assignments to receive the course credits.

In applying for the seminar series, please submit the conference article you wish to develop by participating in the seminars and a short description of the current state of your PhD research (max 200 words) to Oscar Person (oscar.person@aalto.fi) before the 13th of April. All doctoral students at the School of Arts, Design and Architecture are invited to apply.

Schedule

9 May, 13.00 – 16.00: Selecting a suitable format and outlet for your manuscript

24 May, 13.00 – 16.00: Establishing a ‘hook’ in the introduction

14 June, 13.00 – 16.00: Positioning your work and its contribution

22 Aug, 13.00 – 16.00: Reporting your method

12 Sep, 13.00 – 16.00: The final (and important) details at the beginning and the end

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Jussi Parikka – Reader, Winchester School of Art
Christian McCrea – Program Director for Games, RMIT University
Anna Munster – Associate Professor at the College of Fine Arts, UNSW

DESCRIPTION
Code is the invisible force at the heart of contemporary media and
games, routinely obscured by the gadget fetish of breathless tech
marketing and scholarly focus on more visible social and technical
interfaces. With the recent material turn in media studies and the
refinement of new approaches including software studies and platform
politics, which emphasise interrogating the formal characteristics and
underlying technical architecture of contemporary media, the time has
come to bring code out into the open.

Code can be defined in two distinct but related ways: as an underlying
technological process, a set of rules and instructions governing, for
instance, the permutations of all those 0s and 1s obscured behind user
interfaces, but also as a cultural framework navigated and understood
socially and performatively, as is the case with legal, social and
behavioural codes. As an operative principle, code’s significance thus
extends far deeper than its current digital manifestation. For this
conference, we invite submissions of papers and creative works that
consider the role of code as a simultaneously material and semiotic
force that operates across the wider cultural, social and political
field, with particular emphasis on media, games and art.

The conference theme is also an opportunity to reflect on how, as
academics and creative practitioners, we often participate in but can
also challenge the disciplinary and institutional codes that can
arbitrarily separate these domains. CODE will be a transdisciplinary
event that brings media studies, media arts and games studies into
dialogue through individual papers, combined panels, master classes and
an included exhibition.

THEMES
We welcome submissions related to any aspect of code in all its
diversity. Possible considerations might include, but are not limited
to:

– Code and the in/visible: what are the technical, ideological and
academic aspects that work to obscure codes? And what might be the
strategies for making codes visible again? Topics: ‘screen essentialism’
(Kirschenbaum 2008); race and/as technology (Chun 2009); glitch and
error; programming activism; DIY coding; game exploits.

– Code and/as ideology: as something that both carries and obscures
meaning, what is code’s relationship to ideology? Topics: Black-boxing;
the fetish of visualisation (Chun 2011); ‘there is no software’ (Kittler
2005); code as social frame; encoding/decoding.

– Coding the disciplines: media and games studies. How do these closely
related disciplinary formations account for their existence? What
epistemological and methodological insights might they share or
contribute to one another, perhaps through emergent fields like software
studies and platform politics? Or should they remain distinct?

– The deeper history of code: as a principle of information exchange,
code’s centrality in media and communications technologies goes beyond
the digital. What is the role of code in the deeper history of media,
and what are the media archaeological resonances or links between ‘old’
and ‘new’ forms of code? Can their emergence often be traced back to the
military-industrial complex? Topics: Prehistory of code; Morse code and
semaphore; encryption and cryptography; cybernetics and early computing;
pre- and non-digital games.

– Code and the public/private: What are the historical, legislative,
technological and cultural settings for the emergence of ‘public
privacy’, in which public signifying systems are vehicles for highly
personal messages? Topics: public, private and intimate spheres;
epistolary networks; social media; reality programming; celebrity;
geolocating identity, meaning and destination.

– ‘Code and other laws of media’: the continuities and discontinuities
of different codes. Just as legal codes embedded in technical protocols
like digital rights management may disastrously overextend copyright
protections (Lessig 1999), how else do different codes meet, overlap,
extend and come into conflict with one another? Topics: Copyright and
intellectual property; distribution; technical, legal, social and
behavioural codes.

– Security codes: Though code often serves to secure and obscure
authority, it remains vulnerable to hacking, raising the spectre of a
whole new form of risk society operating at the level of code and
through its breaches and accidents – how does this play out across
networked information, communication and entertainment environments?
Topics: phone hacking; Wikileaks; Anonymous and software-based protest;
gaming hacks and cracks; data theft.

– Code and agency: Interactive media, games, art and cultural practice
can all deal with the relationship between the interacting participant
and the coded system. What aesthetics and politics are at work when the
participant’s presumed agency and the coded constraints are in tension?
Topics: aesthetics of code-based media; interface; participant
experience; emergence/counter-play; proceduralism and performativity.

– Bodies in code: how do information and code, not only interfaces and
devices, reconfigure the social, political and corporeal body, and vice
versa? How might we conceptualise the materiality and ontology of code
in relation to phenomenologies of embodiment and new materialism?
Topics: post-humanism (Hayles 1999); new and vital materialism (Bennett
2010); genetics and other codes for the body; disembodiment and
immateriality.

– Failures of code: Much of code’s power lies in its invisibility, a
transparency that allows it to be embedded as the ‘common sense’ of
everyday life, but what happens when code fails, socially culturally,
politically or technologically, or is exploited? Topics: rules and
disobedience; comedy; subversion; disruption; revolution.

:: For further discussion, please view the conference website:
http://code2012.wikidot.com

CREATIVE WORKS
Code operates, as if by stealth, beneath the materiality of networked
media performances, software art, games, mobile apps, locative and
social media. But code also presents artists, performers and creative
practitioners with opportunities to construct innovative hybrid media
forms that can extend our understanding of contemporary art practice.
From video installations in the 1960s, through to sophisticated
interactive media and augmented reality applications, artists have
arguably been at the forefront of innovation, adopting the language of
the computer to forge new creative frontiers. We invite contributions
that examine the creative potential of code, including but not limited
to, the implications of code for contemporary art/ists, code as art
and/or performance, code as avant-garde, virus and anti-art.

The CODE conference will include a thematic exhibition. We are seeking
submissions of screen-based works, pervasive games, and locative media
projects that respond to the conference themes. Projected and
performance works will also be considered.

SUBMISSIONS
– Individual 20 minute paper presentations: 300 word abstract.

– Panel submissions: panel submission should include three/four
individual abstracts of 300 words, a panel title, and a 200 words
rationale for the panel as a whole.

– Artists should submit a 250 word outline of the proposed creative
work including links to supporting documentation (10 stills or up to 3
minutes of video).

All submissions are due 31 May 2012 and should be emailed to
codeconference@groupwise.swin.edu.au

Please include your name, affiliation, contact details, and a brief
bio.

A special journal issue or edited collection on the conference theme is
planned.

FURTHER INFORMATION
– Conference website: http://code2012.wikidot.com (includes venue and
registration information, thematic discussion, reading list, etc.)
– Contact: codeconference@groupwise.swin.edu.au

Dr Esther Milne
Deputy Head, Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
Convenor, BA Honours Program
Faculty of Life and Social Sciences
Swinburne University of Technology
emilne@swin.edu.au
Letters, Postcards, Email: Technologies of Presence (Routledge 2010):
http://bit.ly/cUXvXH

The Department of Communication and Theatre Arts at Old Dominion University invites applications for a position at the rank of Assistant Professor (tenure-track). Successful candidates will hold a Ph.D. in Communication, Media Arts, or related disciplines, and have expertise in digital media. Possible interests include one or more of the following areas: creative industries, digital arts and production, media history-criticism, identity studies, media activism, narrative and storytelling, new media technologies, and/or web studies. Candidates should be committed to undergraduate and graduate teaching, and are expected to participate in university/college/departmental service activities. Send a letter of application that addresses the position, a curriculum vitae, a sample publication, and the names and contact information of three references to: Dr. Robert Arnett Search Committee Chair, Department of Communication and Theatre Arts, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, Virginia 23529-0087. Review of applications will begin on April 13, 2012 and will continue until the position is filled. Old Dominion University is an equal opportunity, affirmative action employer and requires compliance with the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986
—————————————————————————————–
Avi Santo, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Communication and Theatre Arts
Old Dominion University
Office: Batten Arts & Letters 3014
Tel: 757-683-6971
E-mail: asanto@odu.edu

Co-Creator, Flow: A Critical Forum on Television and Media Culture (http://flowtv.org)
Co-Creator, MediaCommons: A Digital Scholarly Network (http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org)
Creator and Coordinating Editor, In Media Res (http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr)

The presentation yesterday was very comprehensive. Heidi took us through her artistic projects from the last ten years and then explained which ones she was selecting for the thesis and why. She then continued by focusing on her latest project “At hand”. This important project was exhibited as part of the Media Facades Festival in 2011 and was the subject of an article in a peer-reviewed publication last semester.

After the presentation there was a good critical discussion of many of the issues elaborated such as: How is the Other represented in the work? Why is it this way? How does the artist seek to instantiate a critical practice? What about the representation of technology and its visibility (or invisibility)? How can this work for the installation? Does it help to create a new aesthetic experience to the work?

Attendance was ok. but we could use a larger audience: Sinikka Laine, Ferhat Sen, Mia Muurimäki, Callum Goddard, James Nesfield, Mika Tuomola, Susanna Ånas, and Lily Díaz.

I encourage all our students and staff to attend these seminars!

Lily

http://re-new.org/

http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/critical-issues/ethos/immersive-worlds-and-transmedia-narratives/call-for-papers/

And one more to a portal for communication and media conferences worldwide:

http://www.conferencealerts.com/media.htm

Helsinki Photomedia is a big (140 participants) international photography research conference which is now organized here for the first time, and will continue every second year. We hope that it will become an important venue for photography researchers.

Open keynote lectures:

Charlotte Cotton: Media and Mediums: photography’s place in culture.
Wednesday, March 28, 13:15 – 15:00, Sampo Auditorium.
This lecture considers the contemporary impact of the past forty years of advocacy for photography’s place in cultural institu- tions. This lecture considers the mitigating circumstances that shape the possible future of photography as a museological subject including the rise of amateur or crowd-sourced image-making, the popularity of ‘interdisciplinary’ working methods in cultural institutions and the impending retirement of the first generation of photography curators. Cotton explores the redundancies and potential offered at this distinctly mercurial epoch in photography’s history.

Ariella Azoulay: Un-photographs
Thursday, March 29, 17:00–18:30, Sampo Auditorium.
The encounter between the photographed persons and the person holding a camera is no less important than the one between the spectators and the photograph. These two encounters take place in two different realms. Although the link between them is far from linear – and sometimes circular – to hypothesize about its existence is extremely helpful in situations where photographs are missing. In my lecture i’ll present two types of missing images – “untaken photograph”, “unshowable photograph”.

David Bate: The Distribution of the Face
Friday, March 30, 9:00-10:30, Sampo Auditorium.
The new modes of distributing photographic images offer an expanded forum in which to re-consider the representational value of the human form. Whether it is in the different images of ‘the people’ or the ‘individual’, the face is enmeshed in a politics of visibility, and conflictual identificatory practices. Given the long and now vast history of the photographic description of human bodies and, in particular, the human face, this paper will focus on particular case studies, contemporary and historical, to draw out the critical issues of their production in relation to their circulation.

The lectures are in Sampo auditorium and open for public, while the conference workshops are only for registered participants. For more information about lecturers and the conference, see:

http://helsinkiphotomedia.aalto.fi/

Mlab Doctor of Arts programme, MA students are more than welcome as well.

Angela Dalle Vacche is a specialist in the intersection of aesthetic theory and film history, Angela Dalle Vacche was born in Venice, Italy and came to the United States in 1978. She has graduate degrees in American Studies and in Film Studies from Mount Holyoke College and the University of Iowa. She has been the recipient of a Fulbright Travel Grant, a Mellon Fellowship, a Rockefeller Bellagio Grant, and a Leverhulme Distinguished Professorship at the University of London, Birkbeck College, History of Art. Her retrospective: Italian Silent Divas: Passion and Defiance, for the 2000 New York Film Festival was voted as “Best Event Of The Year” by Art Forum. Dalle Vacche regularly works with the Cineteca di Bologna, The Nederlands Film Museum, Anthology Film Archive in New York, and DAMS/Gorizia in Italy. She has also lectured in Dublin, Vienna, Paris, and Portugal.

Dear colleagues and friends,

We would like to thank everyone who responded to our survey on Mobile Music Interfaces, and we would like to inform you that one of the outcomes is a workshop we will organise at the Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) conference 2012; a one day workshop on Designing Musical Interactions for Mobile Systems on Tuesday 12th June 2012 at Culture Lab, Newcastle University. This might be of interest to some of you.

We are inviting submissions for participation in the workshop, below. For further information on the workshop, including details on how to register, please see the workshop website: http://sopi.media.taik.fi/mobilemusic/ Please forward this call to people you think might be interested.

Workshop at Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) conference 2012:
Designing Musical Interactions for Mobile Systems
Tuesday 12 June 2012, Culture Lab Newcastle

Mobile music technology is a vast growth area, and has emerged as a field in which many of the specific design challenges and affordances of mobile technologies can be explored. The mobile is not just a smaller computer, and requires different tactics and strategies for user interaction. This workshop will discuss the specific interaction design challenges for building engaging and creative musical activities on mobile devices. Participants will share knowledge on interface design models that push the limits of what a mobile can offer for creating rich musical interactions. The workshop will culminate in an evening event, a public concert of mobile music.

SUBMISSION
Please download the position paper template from the workshop website,
http://sopi.media.taik.fi/mobilemusic
Email the 2-pager position papers submission in PDF format to: mobilemusic2012@gmail.com

Deadline for submissions is March 16, 2012.
Notification of acceptance by April 16, 2012.
** All workshop participants must register for both the workshop and for at least one day of the main conference. For some early indication on prices, please see the last year’s workshop & conference pricing: http://www.dis2010.org/index.php?registration

Organizers:
Koray Tahiroglu, Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture (FI)
Atau Tanaka, Goldsmiths Digital Studios, University of London (UK)
Adam Parkinson, Culture Lab, Newcastle University (UK)
Stephen Gibson, School of Design, Northumbria University (UK)

best,
Koray