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Postgraduate Masterclass Program: 24 July

Masterclass

9.4510 Tea/registration

1010.15 Introduction10.1511.15 Robin Curtis:

Immersion: the Here and Now of Audio-visual Media

Chair:

11.1511.45 Morning tea

11.4512.45 John Cayley:

Programmatology, The Readers Project, and How It Is in Common Tongues

Chair:

12.451.45 Lunch

1.452.45 Angela dalle Vacche:

Film, Painting, New Media

Chair:

2.453.15 Afternoon tea

3.154.15 Jhave:Tools as tools: simple practice-led software case-studies

Chair:

4.155 Plenum

Masterclass Abstracts

Immersion: the Here and Now of Audio-visual Media

Prof. Dr. Robin Curtis, Heinrich-Heine-University Dsseldorf

As soon as one attempts to pin down its workings in a systematic fashion, the

conception of immersion proves, in many respects, to be nothing more than an empty

shell, a kind of placeholder for forms of experience, that likely vary quite broadly

both historically and culturally, that each highlight a particular set of parameters of

corporeal experience. In this masterclass I will look at the relationship between

empathy, affect and immersive experience and the way in which each of these modes

of participatory experience are contingent on context. Furthermore I will outline the

ways in which I have worked with these terms as the basis for interdisciplinary

research projects funded by the German Research Foundation.

Programmatology, The Readers Project, and How It Is in Common Tongues

John Cayley

Cayley's seminar/workshop will be a participatory introduction to his work

concentrating on his long-standing collaboration with Daniel C. Howe, _The Readers

Project_, http://thereadersproject.org, and including some presentation and

performance from _How It Is in Common Tongues_, one of the project's recent

significant outcomes. The Readers Project is an aesthetically oriented system of

software entities designed to explore the culture of human reading. These entities, or

'readers,' navigate texts according to specific reading strategies based upon linguisticfeature analysis and real-time probability models harvested from search engines. As

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such, they function as autonomous text generators, writing machines that becomevisible within and beyond the typographic dimension of the texts on which they

operate. As the structures on which these readers operate are culturally and

aesthetically implicated, they shed critical light on a range of institutional practices

and question what it means to engage with the literary in digital media, and with the

linguistic commons as it is aggregated by big software corporate entities like Googleand Facebook

Film, Painting, New Media

Professor Angela Dalle Vacche, Professor of Film Studies at the Georgia Institute of

Technology.

Cinema is an anti-anthropocentric medium where the director can express a personal

vision within a dialectical understanding of whatever is not controllable or predictable

in the ways of the world. By using Olivier Assayas Summer Hours (2008), a film

about generational issues, the art museum, and the dispersion of objects, Dalle Vacche

will argue that digital imaging is much closer to the museum display than to thecinematic mise-en-scene characterized by contingency.

Digital media are based on design and numerical images, whereas contingency is a

constitutive element of the European art film. Furthermore, the photographically-based filmic image is molecular, and not numerical. By virtue of its design and

computational component, the human origin of digital imaging makes it

anthropocentric and closer to painting where the link between hand and eye plays a

major role.

Tools as tools: simple practice-led software case-studies

Jhave, digital poet,School of Creative Media at the City University of Hong KongThis class does not require any specialized technical knowledge,

but will provide insight into the influence of software on inspiration

and tools as origins of culture.

As tools, both language and software tend to operate transparently; that is, as

competence accumulates, we are less and less aware of the tools as tools.Practice-led

software-studies must mitigate against this tendency in order to reveal the implicit

biases imposed by the tools. I focus on one specific feature of animation software, the

timeline, to offer a critique of how this design-feature imposes a temporal model thatnegates the instrumentality necessary for a living language.

The class will proceed by case-studies of a series of my works and autopsy how theywere made, examine the implications of software choices (Flash, Javascript, After

Effects, MaxMSP, Unity), and explore future potentialities.