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Andrew W. Mellon Regional Fellows
in the Humanities,
Arcana Albright
Assistant Professor, French, Albright College
Literary Screens: Television Viewed through Contemporary French Fiction
Out of words writers of fiction create virtual worlds. Television, meanwhile, constitutes what Anne Friedberg has aptly called a “virtual window” onto the world. Since the 1980s, cultural critics from Baudrillard to Bourdieu have taken television to task, but how do writers of fiction view this (supposed) rival? Over the past fifteen years, a variety of “TV fictions” has emerged on the literary scene in France. This project examines not only how these fictions characterize television and articulate a postmodern televisual subjectivity, but also the extent to which they appropriate television to esthetic ends, that is, as a vehicle to explore new literary forms. The project also explores how television functions as a screen onto which are projected anxieties, desires, and fears that extend beyond the realm of television.
Oliver Gaycken
Assistant Professor, English, Temple University
The Living Book of Knowledge: Visions of the Moving-Image Encyclopedia from Marey to the Internet
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, as chronophotography made it possible to record movements, scientists began to dream of a comprehensive archive of moving phenomena. This research project will locate the vision of a moving-image encyclopedia within the longer history of archival fantasies of total knowledge. It will construct a history of the attempts to realize this dream over the course of the late-nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries, culminating with a consideration of the flourishing of such projects in the age of digital media. A guiding question will be why the promise of such a moving-image encyclopedia has been both so persistent and so difficult to realize.
Susan Jacobson
Assistant Professor, Journalism, Temple University
Playing the Narrative: Virtuality, Video Games and
Digital Journalism
Journalism is undergoing a transformation into a mostly digital product. Thrust into the realm of the virtual, journalism in its digital form occupies a domain that is native to video games. Not surprisingly, journalism presentations with video game-like qualities have emerged in recent years. Games theorist Joost Rassens argues that society is moving from a narrative view of reality towards game-like “ludic” constructions of reality. If the emergence of game-like treatments of news stories is a symptom of this change, journalists may need to think about journalistic storytelling as an opportunity to allow the audience play the narrative of news stories. This study examines the impact of video game-like virtuality on the traditional libertarian values of the press.
Homay King
Associate Professor, History of Art, Bryn Mawr College
The Dream of the Virtual: Digital Frontiers and the Flight from Earth
Dreams of the Virtual is a book about how we imagine digital media: the fantasies and narratives that we project onto virtual space, and how questions of race, class, gender and lived subjectivity map onto virtual worlds and manifest in the digital age. The project is structured around an analogy between digital space and the historical American west. Through analysis of works of electronic visual media, this project explors the exclusions, exploitations, and myths that underlie the fantasy of a limitless, open, and flat digital frontier, taking into account both utopic and dystopic aspects of digital culture.
Mimi Sheller
Professor, Sociology, Drexel University
Virtual Caribbeans: Inventing Island Edens, Economies, and Elsewheres
New software-supported “hybrid” spatialities can be said to mix materiality (physical
worlds) and virtuality (digital worlds) not only in contexts of advanced metropolitan
urbanism, but also in remote Caribbean islands and other geographically peripheral
regions. Rather than assuming that there are “digital ghettoes” of disconnectivity, this
project seeks to explore the differential and disjunctive ways in which software is recoding,
re-scaling, and re-mediating island space, assembling islands into new
configurations of territoriality, (im)mobilities, and governance. This includes the complex
transnational assemblages of material and virtual interventions mobilized in the recent
response to the earthquake in Haiti. Paying attention to virtually-augmented islands and
Caribbean “information territories” offers a key terrain for thinking about the
contemporary respatialization of Caribbean states, islands, and territories. This project
will examine three aspects of the Virtual Caribbean: 1) Virtual Edens: the tourism and
leisure destinations that are being disembedded from national territories and repackaged
as virtual-natural enclaves connected to global metropolitan transport, media, and data
flows; 2) Virtual Economies: the imaginary “offshore” economies that function as
deregulated in-between realms of digitized financial transactions and cyber-property,
interstitial zones that are both within and without the state; and 3) Virtual Diasporas: the
emergence of the online virtual Caribbean as a site of citizenship and participation,
which is bridging localities and international communities in new ways.
Matthew Shoaf
Assistant Professor, Art History, Ursinus College
Clamorous Images: Voice, Identity, and Verisimilitude in Gothic Italy
Narratives of spiritual salvation painted in fourteenth-century Italy have long been admired for their bold claims to represent human psychological and sensory experience. Their scenes abound with figures that appear vividly to communicate. Yet painters reserved representions of oral utterance for relatively few kinds of persons, including singers, women, Jews, and sinners. My project considers the artistic and social significance of virtual orality during a time marked by profound changes in relationships between people and material images. I investigate veristic pictorial evocations of voice as ways of engaging public audiences both with events depicted in Tuscan and Umbrian mural art and with late medieval discourses of the body, morality, and social difference articulated in literature, rhetoric, sermons, theology, music, drama, and communal legislation.
Mark Zaki
Assistant Professor, Music, Rutgers University-Camden
Beyond Synchronization: Formal Coherence in Computer-Generated Visual Music
The digital "revolution" of the 1990s and convergence of video and audio software has given composers wide access to the rapidly expanding field of computer-generated visual music. Despite established conventions borrowed from film and other visual media, there are creative challenges for composers interested in the intersection between musical and visual languages. Compositional strategy often relies on virtual processes and “artificial creativity” as part of the composer’s methodology. In many cases, audio and video are synchronized according to an aesthetic and predetermined hierarchy. This study looks at the possibilities defining a compositional logic with a more sophisticated syntactical coherence between audio and video, leading towards conceptual models that support highly integrated, abstract visual music.
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