Join us for a viewing of the short film “Autopoesis” (2005) by Ravikant Sharma and Prabhat Kumar Jha, realized in collaboration with Sarai Media Lab. All are invited to this lunchtime conversation about the use of technology and new media by populations that have been denied opportunities to record their lives and their surroundings by poverty and a lack of access to communication technologies. The Raqs Media Collective is a group of Indian media practitioners who curate and create art shows, installations, and online art. This group founded “Sarai” in Delhi, an educational and artistic program dedicated to both researching and using new media in an urban context. We will also discuss a selection of critical texts and other artistic projects produced by Raqs and Sarai that focus on media in the context of the post-colonial, globalized city. The suggested readings are available at the links below.

Lunch will be provided.

Suggested Short Readings:

http://www.uweb.ucsb.edu/~msatris/activist_art_online.pdf
“Rethinking the F Word: A Review of Activist Art on the Internet”
Mary Flanagan and Suyin Looui. 2007 NWSA Journal, Vol. 19 No. 1 (Spring)
-Pages 181-186.

http://www.noemalab.org/sections/ideas/ideas_articles/caloud_sarai.html
Interview of a founder of Sarai in Rhizome

http://www.fluctuat.net/tourdumonde/intw_2.htm
Interview about tech, computers, and Sarai (French)

http://www.sarai.net/publications/readers/03-shaping-technologies/resolveUid/b5f8258fcea9eb30084b316a5bbbf622
Griffiths , Simon. “Lowtech: Escape from the Tyranny of the Leading Edge.” Sarai Reader 03: Shaping Technologies (2003)
Note: The entirety of this Reader is available online, as are several of the earlier volumes.

http://www.sarai.net/publications/readers/02-the-cities-of-everyday-life/cybermohalla.pdf
- Cybermohalla diaries. These writings can be seen as a database of narrative, comment, observation, word-play and reflection. This selection evokes a sense of the everyday that gestures towards an intricate social ecology. The Cybermohalla Ensemble, a flexible constellation of young, working-class media practitioners in Delhi, has a five-year history of interventions in informal common spaces and contexts in the city.

Related Projects

http://www.sarai.net/publications/readers/03-shaping-technologies/177_183_raqsmediac.pdf

-text by Raqs: “Call Centre Calling: Technology, Network and Location”

http://www.sarai.net/practices/media-forms/a-wall-and-a-sofa-1/Wall_Sofa.mpg (watch with sound off)
- Cybermohalla video clip. Sometimes an alleyway can become a salon. The inhabitants of crowded cities create islands of conviviality when and where they can. A bench leaning against a wall can become a sofa: an invitation to sit for a while, chat, relax and relish the passage of time in the course of a busy day.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbnSth4cxOY
-Cybermohalla memory card project, interspersing cell-phone video with a poem

http://www.sarai.net/practices/cybermohalla/minor-practices/making-videos/resolveUid/a7ce378f3c66154dca8543cae344fffd
- Introduction to the memory card project

Readings for talk available here: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/3/000065.html

Dr. Patrick Svensson will explore the current landscape of digital humanities, starting out with an overview and discussion of digital humanities and digital humanists. Dr. Svensson draws on three case studies and distinguishes between the paradigmatic modes of engagement of the humanities and information technology: information technology as a tool, an object of study, an exploratory laboratory, an expressive medium, and an activist venue. This paper is partly based on the second in a series of four articles on the digital humanities, and Dr. Svensson will sketch out the goals of the whole project and his work at HUMlab at Umeå  University.  The first essay in the four-part series is available at the link above.

Patrik Svensson is the director of HUMlab at Umeå University and a docent in the humanities and information technology. His research concerns digital humanities as a field, learning and information technology, cyberinfrastructure for the humanities and new media studies. He currently leads the DH3P project (Digital Humanities as Paradigm, Practice and Projection), YouTube as a Performative Arena and a major initiative to strengthen research in the humanities and information technology at Umeå University. In 2008 he published Language Education in a Digital World: Information Technology, Communication and Learning (Norstedts: 2008, in Swedish).

If you plan to attend, please email msatris@umail.ucsb.edu by October 20th

“Meaning What We Play”
Talk by Noah Wardrip-Fruin
Author of Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies
SH 2635; Thursday, October 29; 3:00 PM
Today’s games have well-developed models of spatial movement, combat, and economics. But their models of fiction barely deserve the name. Even those supporting the most ambitious games are burdensome and bug-prone for authors – while providing the player quite limited ranges of meaningful choice. This talk discusses examples of more dynamic approaches to fiction, considering lessons past work presents for designers wishing to craft models that express their visions for playable fiction. At the same time, the talk argues that critics need to begin to interpret the computational processes of computer games (and digital media generally) and connect them to an understanding of audience experience. http://www.noahwf.com/expressive-processing. Light refreshments.

“The Landscape of Digital Humanities”
Talk by Patrik Svensson
SH 2635; Thursday, November 12th; 3:00 PM
Patrik Svensson is the director of HUMlab at Umeå University, a digital humanities center started in 1998. He writes: In this presentation, I explore the current landscape of digital humanities starting out from a provisional territorial fly-through and discussion of digital humanities and digital humanists. I draw on three case studies as well as a distinction between paradigmatic modes of engagement between the humanities and information technology: information technology as a tool, an object of study, an exploratory laboratory, an expressive medium and an activist venue. This paper is the second in a series of four articles on the digital humanities, and I will give an overview of the whole project. Furthermore, I will briefly present HUMlab at Umeå University (through photos and film clips). Light refreshments.

LCM Graduate Student Event
LCM Center:  Thursday, November 19th
Details to be announced

Literature.Culture.Media Center Research Slam
Where poster session meets poetry slam!

Friday, May 22, 2009

1:00 – 5:00 pm
Department of English, South Hall Second Floor

1:00 – 1:10 Opening Remarks, SH 2635

1:15 – 2:00 Session I, SH 2635

Nick Alward – Special Content
Hypertext-based project exploring forced simulated torture and our perception of war through both a narrative structured around a hypothetical CIA black site in New Mexico and an essay discussing World of Warcraft.

Salman Bakht – _object.soundingspace.textfield
Sound installation designed for an academic conference setting exploring dichotomies found in language: speech/text, semantics/phonology, sense/nonsense, etc.

Jenna Frazier – Sitt-Marie Rose: The Deaf-Mute Perspective
Using web design and text-analysis tools to explore the significance of the deaf-mute sections in Etel Adnan’s Sitt Marie-Rose.

Bola C. King – Pedagogical Affordances and Opportunities in Second Life
Discussing general teaching possibilities and a look at UCSB Lane and its possibilities and limitations.

Julia Panko – Literature on the Record: Mourning, Memory, and Information Storage in The Raw Shark Texts
Exploring how Hall’s print novel performs crucial digital humanities work by situating these themes within the intersections between narrative, storage technologies, print, and contemporary information culture.

2:10 – 2:55 Session II, SH 2509

Anne Cong-Huyen – CouchSurfing Toward Self: Identity in Literary and Virtual Space
Exploring contemporary identities that are continually constructed and evolving within digital spaces and communities.

Kim Knight – Describing the Viral
Tag clouds that are drawn from the descriptive labels applied to a sampling of content on YouTube.

Richard Lau – Sacco on Sacco
Analyzing the role of authorial self-insertion in Joe Sacco’s landmark works of New Journalism, graphic novels /Safe Area: Gorazde /and /Palestine/.

Amanda Phillips – The Uncanny Abyss: Reflections on Anxiety, Robots, and Intersubjective Relations
Reworking Masahiro Mori’s Uncanny Valley, theorizing the anxiety induced by robots, realistic CGI, and artificial intelligence.

3:10 – 3:40 Discussion, SH 2635
Led by Anne Cong-Huyen, Julia Panko, and Amanda Phillips

3:40 – 3:50 Closing Remarks

3:50 – 5:00 Reception

TALK: “What Has the Computer Done for the Word?”
Marie-Laure Ryan (English, University of Colorado)
Friday, February 27 / 4:00
English Department Seminar Room, SH 2635
Sponsored by the Department of English, Literature.Culture.Media, the Program in Literature and the Mind, and the Department of Film and Media Studies.

“When Geeks Go Camping: Cyberspace and the Outdoor Life”

English Department / Literature.Culture.Media Center Talk
Tuesday, Feb. 24th, 3:30-5
SH 2635

This talk examines the evolution of nature metaphors in computing and cyberspace via some examples of the influence of Californian outdoor life on computer culture in Silicon Valley and beyond.  It is drawn from research for a book-length study, The Wild Surmise: Nature and Cyberspace, which discusses the many ways in which we use our experiences of nature to situate and comprehend our experiences of cyberspace.

Sue Thomas is a Research Professor based at De Montfort University, UK, and works in both the Institute of Creative Technologies and the Faculty of Humanities.  She is currently a Visiting Scholar in the Department of English, UCSB, funded by the British Academy to research the California section of The Wild Surmise project.  More information about Prof. Thomas is available at http://www.suethomas.net

Talk:  “I.nterpret”
Thursday, February 19
SH 2635
3:30-5:00

Our campus has seen technologies such as course mangement systems, Facebook, blogs, and wikis utilized in both graduate and undergraduate courses; there has been recent interest in how these work and what they’re good for. Join us for a panel and roundtable discussion on incorporating these and other technologies into a humanities or cultural-studies classroom. Our panel includes faculty and graduate students from the English department who will share their success stories as well as suggestions and advice on what different applications can do, how you can get your students engaged, and how easy some of this stuff really is.