Friday, September 26, 2008

Temple University Center City Campus (TUCC) [Directions to TUCC]

Room 420

5:30-7:00pm

Roderick Coover, Temple University

"The Digital Panorama and the Cinematic Image: Contiguity, Continuity, and Aesthetics of the Electronic Image"

Respondent: Bob Rehak, Swarthmore College

Among the changes brought about by computing technology are the ways in which digital tools enable the integration of temporal and spatial imagery on a common surface and, the ways they both minimize and maximize a fundamental dialectic of cinema, that of continuity and montage. For example, one thing that is new about new media is the potential to maintain an illusion of temporal continuity and spatial contiguity, while, at the same time, allowing also for montage, collage, layering, compositing, and other forms of media-mixing. Once dialectically opposed methods of panoramic art and cinema, such as those of continuity and montage, of close-up and long-shot, and of exposition and narrative, now co-exist. This paper takes up these issues through a discussion of contiguity, continuity, rhetoric, and aesthetics, wth examples drawn from works by the Labyrinth Project, Jeffrey Shaw, John Cayley and Roderick Coover.

R. Coover. Something That Happened Only Once (hybrid work for DVD)

R. Coover. Voyage Into The Unknown (interactive Flash-based work).

Roderick Coover's works include videos, CD-ROMs, DVDs, and essays in print including Cultures in Webs (Eastgate Systems), From Verite to Virtual (D.E.R), The Theory of Time Here (Video Data Bank), The Language of Wine (RLCP), and Something That Happened Only Once. Coover's works have been exhibited internationally at locations such as Siggraph, Philadelphia International Film Festival, and Documenta Madrid. Coover has received awards from USIS-Fulbight, a LEF Foundation, the Chicago Group on Modern France, and the Mellon Foundation, among others. He lives in Philadelphia and teaches in the Film and Media Arts Department at Temple University. URL: http://www.roderickcoover.com.

Bob Rehak is an assistant professor of Film and Media Studies at Swarthmore College, where his teaching and research interests include special effects, videogames, animation, and new media. He has published chapters in The Video Game Theory Reader (2003), Videogame/Player/Text (2007), and the second edition of the Cybercultures Reader (forthcoming). His essays have appeared in the journals Information, Communication, and Society, Film Criticism, and Flow. He is an editorial board member of the new journal Transformative Works and Culture, and he blogs at Graphic Engine (http://graphic-engine.swarthmore.edu).