All posts tagged with 'radio'
Jen Heuson is a scholar, traveler, and media artist currently pursuing her Ph.D. in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. Her work critically engages the mediated production, consumption, and circulation of knowledge, culture, memory, and identity during travel, both real and imagined. Specifically, she is interested in exploring links between experience, sensation, and liveness or everydayness, on one hand, and media, epistemology, and politics, on the other. She has engaged these questions through traditional academic forms (conference, journal, thesis) and through various multimedia inquiries (sound ethnography, film documentary, radio and print journalism). Her award-winning films have screened internationally at venues as diverse as FLEX Fest, Big Muddy, Black Maria, and the Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival. Her forthcoming publications include a multimedia portrait of the Black Hills (Sensate Journal of Sensory Ethnography 2011) and an acoustic biography of Martin Heidegger (Contemporary Music Review 2011). Jen holds an MA in Film and Television Studies and an MA in Philosophy and Cultural Analysis from the University of Amsterdam as well as a BA in Philosophy from the University of Northern Colorado. For more about Jen and her collaborative work with partner Kevin T. Allen, visit smallgauge.org.
Panel: The Multimodal Dissertation
Digging Deeper: Media Archaeology
1:30 p.m., Saturday, April 16, room 716 | Faculty respondent: Shannon Mattern
Reconsidering the Radio in Media Studies
Media studies today largely concerns itself with issues relating to “new media,” but what ever happened to good ol’ radio? This paper aims to highlight current perspectives and uses of radio to demonstrate its continued relevance to the discussion and debates within media studies. Proclaimed by some as an obsolete medium, radio still finds many uses, such as serving social/grassroots movements and being instrumental to policy-making processes worldwide. Now widely accessible, radio is in use by the majority of the world’s population yet is largely excluded from the debates, research and criticism within the academy. From local, low frequency, digital, regional, pirate, and governmental broadcasting arrangements, for many, radio still functions as their primary source of information that prompts their social activities and political participation. Constituting a severe oversight in media scholarship, reconsidering the use of radio and their cultural effects will stimulate interest in understanding the contemporary configurations of this outmoded media technology both domestically and abroad. Confronting the fact that the history and practices of radio are not the same all over the world, by exploring the current state of the oft-forgotten medium in its international scope, questions at the nexus of media, culture, globalization and political economy will emerge as being central to the discussion of the current media moment, the history of technology, and more generally, the composition of the global information economy.
The Primacy of Projection in Cinema
It is hard to contest the inherent heterogeneity of cinema, a medium born from the combination of different languages and techniques. Even today, as it goes through radical transformations of its material underpinnings, formal possibilities and dynamics of circulation, cinema retains a rather stable identity. To a certain extent, it is not only possible to specify what cinema is, but also to use it as a parameter to qualify other mediatic practices (e.g. soft-cinema, live cinema and database cinema) or their historical circumstances (as pre-cinematographic or post-cinematographic).
Among all visual media, cinema seems to be privileged as the logic through which technological changes are rationalized. Because of this epistemic relevance of the cinematographic medium, we propose that the investigation of its ontology can be advantageous to the field of media studies in general. This paper aims to contribute to this endeavour by focusing on the moment that is celebrated as inaugural to cinema.
Based on the critical analysis of the first screenings performed by the brothers Lumière and their commercial triumph over Thomas Edison’s kinetoscope, we propose projection to be the central technique around which the specificity of the medium is defined and sustained. We conclude by trying to extend the technical definition of projection (as an ambivalent transport of images) to a conceptual level, in an attempt to promote it as the operational principle behind every dispositif, opposed to the stable capacities of storage and transmission.
Supplementary materials: Through the Dark Room (PDF)
Net Art and the Agency of Things
Blogs, Flickr accounts, Facebook profiles, Twitter feeds, Second Life avatars: our personalities in the ever-expanding virtual world continue to merge with those in the actual world, forcing us to rethink relationships and identities. Yet, even a quick study of icons of the Middle Ages would show that virtual worlds have existed long before the invention of computers. Centuries before the advent of Wi-Fi, premodern Christians believed they could instantly traverse space via the connection of objects from holy sites. Today, because we must adhere to the strict language designed by companies such as Facebook, we question how well our identities are translated through our online profiles. However, images, icons and books of hours also had to adhere to a strict visual vocabulary. Those who used these objects nonetheless perceived them as accurate representations of that which they worshipped. The pious would pray before these virtual representations of the divine—before their “profiles,” their avatars—and were led to imagine that they stood before Christ himself.
The paper will examine a range of Net Art from the late 1990s to present day, which functions through and comments upon our working relationship with the internet and computers. Looking simultaneously at parallel dialectics within icons and religious objects of the Middle Ages, we will see that our blossoming obsession with new media mirrors the piety experienced during the premodern era.