The School of Architecture and Allied Arts is excited to announce the next A&AA Interdisciplinary Lecture – Thursday, February 27, 2017 at 6:00 p.m, LA 177. 

Erkki Huhtamo: “Screenology, or Media Archaeology of the Screen”

“Media screens are both present and absent, both well known and unknown. Pervasive use makes them ‘vanish.’ We look through them, not at them. Even cracked smartphone screens do not attract attention to their wounded surfaces. The users read messages and “realities” through the cracks which they barely notice. Screens not only disguise themselves; they hide the history of their own becoming. The media archaeologist’s task is to make the screens visible again and to excavate the cultural contexts where they have been used and given meanings – even hundreds of years ago. This lecture is based on the author’s forthcoming book Screenology, or Media Archaeology of the Screen. It demonstrates one possible way of researching screens, suggesting a new approach for media studies.”

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Erkki Huhtamo is known as a founding figure of media archaeology. He has published extensively on media culture and media arts, lectured worldwide, given stage performances, curated exhibitions, and directed TV programs. He is a professor at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), Departments of Design Media Arts, and Film, Television, and Digital Media. His most recent book is Illusions in Motion. Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles (The MIT Press, 2013).

This 2^nd annual A&AA Interdisciplinary Lecture is sponsored by the School of Architecture & Allied Arts with special thanks to History of Art and Architecture Department, Product Design Department, Art and Administration Program and Art and Technology Program for their support.

Gabrielle Jennings is an LA-based multi-media artist and Associate Professor teaching in the Graduate Art program at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. This lecture is associated with the recently published collection of essays edited by Jennings, entitled Abstract Video: The Moving Image in Contemporary Art, which centers around the question of abstraction in the moving image arts.

Looking for an NMCC class to take this Spring? Interested in engaging with our contemporary data-driven society through a philosophical and historical lens? Try Colin Koopman’s PHIL 607: Seminar in Data Genealogy

“What makes possible the formatting of selfhood that we perform on social media?  What motivates our idyllic dreams for big and ever-bigger data?  What historical cunning informs the obsessive surveillance of today’s corporate and governmental surveillance regimes?  How new—and how old—are new media, cutting-edge information technologies, and the informatics of our present?

The course will have two aims in taking up these questions.  Firs, through the  philosophical methodologies of archaeology and genealogy associated with the work of Michel Foucault and media archaeologist Friedrich Kittler.  Equipped with this methodological apparatus, we will consider various approaches to what might be considered a genealogy (in a broader sense) of contemporary informational assemblages.  The class will draw on a variety of disciplines and read (at a relatively quick pace) texts authored by philosophers and historians of science, historians of technology, historians of literature, and a range of other critical genealogists.  Some of the books we will read from include Tung-Hui Hu’s A Prehistory of the Cloud, Bernard Harcourt’s Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age, and James Purdon’s Modernist Informatics: Literature, Information, and the State.”

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Colin is currently working on a book manuscript project on these subjects, tentatively entitled How We Became Our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational Person.  The project engages with contemporary debates in new media theory and political theory in order to frame an argument around early twentieth-century informatics technologies in such domains as personality psychology, identity documentation, and the racialization of property. See more about Colin on his blog.

The University of Oregon Cinema Studies Program presents the Feminist Media Studies Symposium in honor of the outstanding legacy of Professor Emerita Kathleen Rowe Karlyn, founding director of the Cinema Studies Program and internationally renowned feminist media scholar.

This Symposium will bring together the most interesting research at the intersection of the fields that Professor Karlyn helped define in ways that both engage with the intellectual questions central to her oeuvre and build on them to suggest the new directions in which feminist media studies is now moving. This will include presentations by colleagues and former students of Professor Karlyn, UO alumni, and others who have high profile careers in media production and content creation outside of academia. The symposium will also showcase graduate and undergraduate research in film and media studies at the University of Oregon.

Welcome Reception: Friday, February 10, 5:00 pm – 8:00 pm, White Stag Block

Symposium: Saturday, February 11, 9:00 am – 4:30 pm, White Stag Block

Breakfast and lunch provided 

Pre-registration is required for attendance at this event.

• Faculty and Guest Registration

• UO Undergraduate Student Registration