Event/Experience Response Opportunity - Just Added!

This looks like a great screening, and you can write about it for the event/experience response portion of your grade...

Tuesday, October 2 – 7pm – Free Screening

Union Theatre, UWM

MACHINIMA:
Beneath the Structural Skin

A diverse program of machinima where contemporary film and video makers perform modern acts of alchemy, transforming the computer gaming environments of Second Life, Grand Theft Auto, Vice City, World of Warcraft and others into incisive works of ethnography, social critique, explorations of landscape and deeply felt portraiture. Including work by Peggy Ahwesh, Valerie Brewer, Jacqueline Goss, Kent Lambert, Mark Lapore and Phil Solomon.

(Various directors, approx 90 min., video, 2001-2007)

Immersive Environments, Part One

Erkki Huhtamo, “From Kaleidoscomaniac to Cybernerd"
(You do not need to read Jonathan Crary's Technologies of the Observer that is listed as required reading in the syllabus)

Question:

First, discuss one thing that you found interesting about Craig Baldwin's Sonic Outlaws with regard to re-mix and copyright. This can be regarding the way that the film was made (i.e. style) or the themes explored within it.

Second, define (in your own words) the concept of "topoi" that Erkki Huhtamo introduces in his article - how does he define the term and how does he relate it back to technologies such as the kaleidoscomaniac, the stereoscomaniac, and the cybernerd? In other words, what do these technologies have in common? What link does he establish between topoi and the media archaeology method?

Re-Mix Culture, Part One

Reading:
Lawrence Lessing, Free(ing) Culture for Remix
No Copyright? Sonic Outlaws Director Craig Baldwin
(sorry that the Lessing .pdf is a little blurry)

What argument is Lessing making about the relationship between copyright and creativity throughout the history of art/media technology? After reading Lessing and Baldwin's perspectives, what do you see as the pros and cons of copyright in re-mix culture?

Connection Machines

Reading:
Eric Kluitenberg, "Connection Machines"

In his article, "Connection Machines" Eric Kluitenberg makes the following claim,

"It is difficult to escape the economic rationale that favoured the rapid development of telecommunications technology from the mid nineteenth century onwards. The continued expansion of global trade created the social and economic context for this particular breed of technology to flourish. Yet, if we rely exclusively on this all too obvious economic explanation for the rise of contemporary electronic connection machines, deeper layers of motivation that inform the creation and the wider adoption of these technologies will continue to elude us. To grasp these rather hidden motives it is necessary to excavate some of the seemingly irrational undercurrents that accompany much of the visible history of technology, and thus to probe more deeply into the realm of the mythological."

Present arguments both supporting and retorting Kluitenberg's claims that we should consider connection machines' mythological resonance. Cite specific examples from the article to support your arguments on both sides and relate your points back to his concept of "'the existential sublime."

(P.S. I know that this article and these concepts are challenging. Please just do your best.)

Considering Media Archaeology

Readings Due Next Week (9/13):

Henry Jenkins, “YouTube and the Vaudeville Aesthetic”

Bruce Sterling, “The Dead Media Manifesto”

Timothy Druckery, “Imaginary Futures”

Question:

The following is the (fairly lengthy) quote from Erkki Huhtamo that opened the lecture today. Having engaged with various issues related to media archaeology in today's class, respond to Huhtamo's contentions about the differences between traditional history and the type of historical engagement offered by media archaeology.

"[H]istory belongs to the present as much as it belongs to the past. It cannot claim an objective status; it can only become conscious of its ambiguous role as a mediator and a "meaning processor" operating between the present and the past (and, arguably, the future). Instead of purporting to belong to the realm of infallible truth (with religion and the Constitution) historical writing is emerging as a conversational discipline, as a way of negotiating with the past.

I would like to propose [media archaeology] as a way of studying such recurring cyclical phenomena which (re)appear and disappear and reappear over and over again in media history and somehow seem to transcend specific historical contexts. In a way, the aim of media archaeology is to explain the sense of deja vu when looking back from the present reactions into the ways in which people have experienced technology in earlier periods."