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SNLab develops projects with academia, public institutions and private industry in order to generate efficient networks that optimize interdisciplinary and creative approaches to innovation. New media, the intersections between fine arts, science and technology, regeneration projects, environmental and sustainability issues, secular society and virtual reality environments are some of the areas explored. SNLab works on the conception and development of creative content for exhibitions and media projects, collaborative synergies and the management of interdisciplinary networks.

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Digital Culture

I am getting ready to leave for Stockholm for the Norlit conference ‘Codex and Code: Aesthetics, Language and Politics in an Age of Digital Media.

The paper I am presenting is titled TEXT AND DIGITAL MEDIA: THE VISUALIZATION OF CODE, CODEX AND CONTEXT.

The changes in the definition of text and image provoked by contemporary digital media have altered the traditional concepts of political and social hierarchies as well as blurred the boundaries between text based and image based disciplines. The concepts of interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity as well as those of transnationalism and multiculturalism offer insight into the relationships that have developed between disciplines within both global and local contexts. These relationships are framed within a digital media structure based on processes of mediation, remediation and transmediation that reflect the digital transformations that have blurred the boundaries between classic and new media (Lev Manovich; Henry Jenkins).

In this context literary works are no longer part of a standalone discipline but can be visually represented in multiple visual formats, both digital and analogue. The text itself with its context, real and/or virtual, becomes a visual structure that can be manipulated and engaged with beyond its original purpose.

The paper will focus on demonstrating, through a visual artwork titled Help Me To Be Friends With Her, how the richness of contemporary digital media offers the opportunity to create images from literary texts that, having originated as written word, are transformed into digital artworks that can be transferred into analogue formats.

The paper will conclude by demonstrating the relevance and vitality of literature within the contemporary digital hybridization processes which display words, as both textual and visual artworks, as well as stress the ruptures in the socio-political hierarchies that these unorthodox practices generate.
 

I am catching up with all the things that have happened during the semester. One of the most pleasant events was this conference in Carrara sponsored by La Scuola di Nuove Tecnologie dell’Arte dell’Accademia di Belle Arti di Carrara, Il centro studi UCAN and Neural Magazine.

I had the possibility of discussing issues related to the preservation of digital media. It was a really good meeting and I hope to meet again both Tommaso Tozzi and Alessandro Ludovico. Check the magazine out (http://www.neural.it/).
 

I was in Glasgow for the Screen Studies Conference 2009 and its 50th anniversary. Had a blast of a time and of course met old friends and made new ones. (http://www.gla.ac.uk/services/screen/conference2009/) I chaired a really good session with two young academics; their names are Roya Rastegar who presented "New Frontiers off the Screen: Physical Cinema at the Sundance Film Festival" and Ariel Rogers with a paper titled "From Immersion to Connection: Digital Cinematic Experience in Light of Widescreen." The session titled AFTER CINEMA: Digital Screens was chaired by Aylish Wood. The panel was very well matched and my thanks go to Aylish Wood, Suzanne Buchan with "Theorizing Animation as the Manipulated Moving Image," and Dale Hudson with "Mobile Screens, Global Networks, Digital Structures and Politicizing ‘Film’". The title of my own paper and the abstract are below. UBIQUITOUS DIGITAL SCREENS: IMAGES ACROSS MEDIA FROM MOBILE PHONES TO GIANT SCREENS The paper will address issues of image reproducibility in new media and the de-evaluation of content re-presented across multiple screens. Is the continuous process of image reproducibility in new media and the de-evaluation of content re-presented across multiple screens producing more than a ‘witness/documentary’ society? Is the ubiquity of the image the cause underpinning a process of homogenization and commodification of content increasingly devoid of meaning, as Jean Baudrillard describes it? Are multiple screens altering forms of behavioral interactions, creating a metastructure able to enforce social homogenized behavioral responses? The desire to engage with multiple screens at any time and in any space does not necessarily reflect a deeper engagement either with content or with its mediated re-presentation across media. Remediation and transmediation, across multiple screens, provide the opportunity for a deeper participatory engagement although, as Paul Virilio states, these engagements can be characterized by instantaneity and ephemerality. Screens as multiple representations become nothing more than a tool to simulate an interactive experience that is void of meaning. The question raised by both Baudrillard and Virilio is if there is a value in contemporary images represented across multiple screens that provide the impression of an egalitarian democracy of participation. The paper will conclude by analyzing the opportunities and challenges that multiple screens offer for behavioral interactions when representing images that reduce social interactions to simulated reproductions of void.