Transcriptions/Literature.Culture.Media

Thursday, November 19th
1 PM
SH 2635

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

DATE: Friday, January 30, 2009
TIME: 10am-Noon
ROOM: Literature.Culture.Media Center (2509 South Hall, formerly the Transcriptions Studio)

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.

Monday, December 1, 12:00-2:00p.m., South Hall 2509

Guest speaker: Aaron McLeran, MAT

The LCM’s Film.Literature.Software series is pleased to present a software demo of the recently-released Spore. This newest game from the makers of SimCity and The Sims is perhaps the most sweeping simulation ever, starting from a cellular organism and ending with a spacefaring civilization.

MAT graduate student Aaron McLeran, who worked on the game’s generative music during software development, will be on hand to discuss his work. The Creature Creator program will also be available to allow for a hands-on experience with this unique content-authoring software.

Friday, October 24, 2:00-4:00, South Hall 2635
Guest: Elizabeth Losh, UC Irvine

Liz will give a short opening presentation outlining her career trajectory from PhD in English to Writing Director of the Humanities Core at UC Irvine. We will then have an open discussion oriented around the following topics:

• challenges of working and seeking positions outside one’s PhD granting department
• what do humanities departments mean by “media”?
• strategies for showcasing technical work in job applications (e.g. RA appts, wiki projects, blogs)
• nomenclature and the shape of the field: new media, the digital humanities, electronic literacies, et al
• the place of new media in rhet/comp departments (job opportunities, research questions)
• what is the place of practical or applied research in the humanities?
• the place of gaming in new media studies

// Liz’s links for our discussion available here.

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Questions job candidates should be prepared to answer (Elizabeth Swanstrom; postdoctoral fellow in the digital humanities, Brandeis University)

• What do the digital humanities/new media have to contribute to our (English/Communication) department?
• What makes “New Media” new?
• Why does a literature department need you?
• What do you think about technological determinism?
• Describe the kind of class/texts you would teach in our department.
• What kinds of production classes could you teach & how would you teach them?
• How would you incorporate the study of new media/digital humanities into/within a composition course?
• How would you balance your own research interests against a full-time teaching load that would include core/survey courses?
• How is your work interdisciplinary?

The LCM is pleased to present a talk and reading by Stephanie Strickland.

Thursday, October 2, 3:30pm
South Hall 2635

Stephanie Strickland lives in New York. Her fifth book of print poems, Zone : Zero, includes two interactive poems on CD. One, slippingglimpse, was introduced at e-Poetry Paris, 2007; and the other, Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot, was chosed by Heather McHugh for the Boston Review Prize. Two of her books, True North and V: WaveSon.nets/Losing L’una, have won Di Castagnola Prizes from the Poetry Society of America, chosen by Barbara Guest and Brenda Hillman respectively. The Red Virgin: A Poem of Simone Weil was awarded the Brittingham Prize.

A director of the Electronic Literature Organization, she co-edited the first volume of the Electronic Literature Collection with N. Katherine Hayles, Nick Montfort, and Scott Rettberg; co-edited a recent issue of the Iowa Review Web on Flash artists; and published “Writing the Virtual: Eleven Dimensions of E-Poetry” in Leonardo Electronic Almanac. She has taught hypermedia literature as part of experimental poetry at many colleges and universities, this semester at the University of Utah.

The Literature.Culture.Media (LCM) Center continues the work in digital humanities and new media begun in 1998 by the Transcriptions project. Our overall goal is “to build a working paradigm of a humanities department of the future that takes the information revolution to its heart as something to be seriously learned from, wrestled with, and otherwise [...]