“Video is a Container”

Thursday, January 14, 2016 at 6:00 pm in Lawrence Hall 115

“Brian Bress, a Los Angeles-based artist and filmmaker, creates absurd, circularly narrative films driven by the circumstances of a bizarre cast of ridiculously costumed characters, more often than not played by Bress himself. Though they rely predominantly on homemade props and costumes, Bress’s videos are visually innovative and their inherent silliness and rambling pace only serve to intensify the examination of assumptions about the nature of reality. He is also known for his collage-like portraits that feature costumed actors wearing strange masks that obscure their faces. By disguising the identities of the sitters, Bress heightens the level of uncertainty in the work to humorous levels. For his lecture at UO, Brian Bress unpacks 10 years of navigating the agenda of painting through the medium of photography and video.

Brian received a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and a MFA from University of California, Los Angeles. His collages, photographs, videos and paintings have been exhibited in various group shows and film festivals in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York, including Spike and Mike’s Festival of Animation, Black Maria Film Festival, New York Director’s Club Biennial and The LA Weekly Biennial. Current and upcoming solo exhibitions include a ten-year retrospective at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City and the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver in 2016. Bress has recently had solo exhibitions and projects at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Museo d’arte contemporanea, Rome, Italy; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA; and New Museum, New York, NY. Brian is represented by Cherry and Martin.”

Original Event Post

Dr. Tara Fickle is an Assistant Professor in English at the University of Oregon and an affiliated faculty member of the New Media and Culture Certificate. She received her Ph.D. from UCLA in 2014 and, she is interested in many areas of research including Asian and Asian American literature, Game Studies, 20th and 21st century American literature, Ethnic literature, digital humanities, graphic fiction, and children’s literature. She is currently working on her project, American Peril, American Pastime: When Race Becomes Play, which “argues for the centrality of games both literal and metaphorical to minority American literature.”

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal Webcomic

Next term, she will be offering a course called New Media & Digital Culture: Games as Theory and Culture through the English Department.  The following is a description of the course courtesy of Dr. Fickle:

“Chess. Sudoku. World of Warcraft. Battleship. Candy Crush. Basketball. Roulette. These are all things we call games – but what exactly do they all have in common? This course introduces students to the basics of games as a cultural phenomenon. Beginning with a seemingly obvious question which has frustrated generations of scholars and theorists – what is a game? – we will go on to examine games in terms of function, purpose, mechanics, design, and audience. Students will learn how to talk about games and then how to put that knowledge to work in designing their own games.”

Along the main questline

You can also take a look at Dr. Fickle’s “game manual,” a creative alternative to a traditional course syllabus. If her  course description alone doesn’t convince you to add the class, the manual will. Included in this manual are a list of achievements (course goals), a guide to getting started (necessary materials for the class), a guide to leveling up (scoring), quest tutorials (assignments), and more.  She describes the class further in her opening lines of the introduction,

“In this course, you will have an opportunity to explore some of the most influential ideas and exciting developments of the 20th and 21st centuries related to games of all kinds, from board games to video games to sporting contests and everything in between. In the process, you will develop considerable insight into the nature of games both as important cultural phenomenon and burgeoning economic industry. You may or may not be a gamer or game designer, but you will almost certainly some day have to decide how to transform something “ordinary” — a product, an idea, a task — into an extraordinary, play-worthy experience. This course will help you make those “gamification” decisions wisely. It will also help you understand more about how your own relationship to play, and to work, is intertwined with how you identify yourself (and with others) in terms of culture, nationality, gender, class, and more”

A helpful guide to the canvas site, game-style

For more information about Dr. Fickle, including a list of courses she has offered, see her personal website.

Interested in being NMCC’s next Prof Pick? Email us!

Current Research:

My dissertation research focuses on military recruiting advertisements during the era of the all volunteer force, 1973 to the present. In focusing on print ads targeted towards women and people of color, I am interested in the ways that recruiting ads have used representations of difference in making appeals to potential recruits. Ground in archival research, I explore how representations of difference emerging at the intersections of gender, race, sexuality, and class articulate and reflect ideals of citizenship. While my dissertation research focuses on print advertisements, I used tools learned while completing my NMCC certificate to digitize my archive of military recruiting advertisements.

Discovery of NMCC:

I discovered the New Media and Culture Certificate while taking a course on Histories and Theories of New Media in the School of Journalism and Communication. As a feminist media studies scholar interested in the ways media representations and technologies shape, and are shaped by, cultural understandings and material practices, I was excited about the opportunity to engage in a transdisciplinary program. Since then I’ve taken a number of NMCC courses, including a course on Informational Politics in the Philosophy Department, a Habitual New Media course in Comparative Literature, and a Digital Ethnography course. All the courses I’ve taken as part of the NMCC have shaped my research interests and have provided me with the opportunity to engage with students and faculty from across the university who I otherwise might not have met. The NMCC has been incredibly influential in shaping my experience as a grad student at the UO.

Useful Resources for New Media Students:

Outside of the faculty and fellow students I’ve met while pursuing the NMC certificate, I’ve found a number of useful resources. The Digital Scholarship Center has been a fantastic resource as has the Fembot Collective. Through the DSC and the Fembot Collective I also had the opportunity to meet with numerous scholars from a variety of disciplines who have a vast wealth of knowledge to share. I also just recently discovered The Programming Historian, which has a variety of lessons and tutorials on techniques for digital scholarship.

Influential Reads:

The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age– Allucquère Rosanne Stone

Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet– Lisa Nakamura

Programmed Visions: Software and Memory– Wendy Hui Kyong Chun

Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature– Donna J. Haraway

Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women– Anne Balsamo

What My Year Looks Like:

This year I am planning on continuing my dissertation research while also exploring other research interests. I’m working with the Digital Scholarship Center to construct an interactive archive based on my primary source research on military advertising. I’m also working with the DSC and the Fembot Collective in designing a tutorial on using digital tools for social activism. I’ll also be serving as a Fembot Grad Student Intern and helping with new initiatives for the academic year, including Ms. Fembot 2016 in LA this spring

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