Category: Performing Arts

Book Review: From Méliès to New Media: Spectral Projections

Reviewed by Amy Ione, August 2020
Leonardo Reviews, https://www.leonardo.info/review/2020/08/from-melies-to-new-media-spectral-projections

From Méliès to New Media: Spectral Projections is an exploration of the presence and importance of film history in contemporary digital culture. Using a media archaeology approach, the author, Wendy Haslem, aims to demonstrate that innovative new media forms are not only indebted to, but firmly embedded within the traditions and conventions of early film culture. Throughout the book Haslem presents an array of projects that deftly move through topics, like indexicality, semiotics, memory, and digital restoration to light, materiality/immateriality, creative experimentation, time and obsolescence. While the overall goal is to introduce a new language of cinema and an alternative approach to historiography, the net result is a good start but falls short. The study is strongest and most original when presenting contemporary projects and examples of spectacle. Haslem tells us:

“Many of the films that I explore in this book favour spectacle over realism, some prioritize non-linear, experimental narration over linear, classical narrative form. Many of the older (and some of the newer) films exhibit surfaces etched with markers of time, and as such, they provide a rich surface aesthetic to encounter and explore. My approach to writing on film has always been to try to explore the surface of the film itself. That means prioritizing the aesthetic, looking for moments where details of the spectacle reveal history. My tendency is to zoom into surface details, focusing on the traces of celluloid that remain present within a digital ecology. Material detail, surface, aesthetic and mise-en-scéne drive my film analysis. This is also an approach that prioritizes the senses. (p. 28)

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New Health Humanities Initiative: CoVid-19: Critical/Creative Studies in Music, Image, and Text

As the outlook surrounding the crisis continues to worsen in the US and around the world, the project carries with it a critical commitment to supporting artists and theorists developing new work and thought responding to the pandemic in real time.

Registration in advance is required, here

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RIP: Jonathan Miller (1934-2019)

Jonathan Miller (1934-2019) was an English theatre and opera director, actor, author, television presenter, humorist and medical doctor. After training in medicine and specializing in neurology in the late 1950s, he came to prominence in the early 1960s in the comedy revue Beyond the Fringe with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett. He died 27 November 2019 at the age of 85. Obituary here.

At the age of 12, at the St. Paul’s School, his lifelong friendship with Dr. Oliver Sacks began. Indeed, the neurologist’s journey to international fame began when Mr. Miller showed the original manuscript of Dr. Sacks’s book “Awakenings” to a London publisher.

Another noteworthy interdisciplinary project was in 1983 with “States of Mind.” He interviewed the art historian Ernst Gombrich, the philosopher and scientist Daniel Dennett and others about consciousness and the brain.

In 1978 he presented “The Body in Question,” a 13-part BBC series about human biology during which he performed an autopsy on a dead vagrant. The book from that series, The Body in Question, is available here.

EVENT: Einstein’s Wife by David C. Cassidy

Einstein’s Wife by David C. Cassidy
Wednesday, May 29th 7:30PM
Playroom Theater, 151 West 46th Street, 8th Floor

Mileva Marić confronts the challenges of disability and discrimination, love and fate, and her marriage to Albert Einstein. Based on actual events.
Time: Fall 1893.
Place: Zagreb, Croatia, Austro-Hungarian Empire

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CFP: American Art and Visual Culture Seminar

CALL FOR PROPOSALS:
Submission Deadline: Monday, June 3, 2019

The Newberry Seminar in American Art and Visual Culture is open to those working in the art history and visual culture of the United States, from the colonial era to the present. They are inviting papers that cross and challenge borders both within and outside the discipline that engage questions of methodology and ideology, examine exhibition and provenance history, probe the categories of race, ethnicity, class, and gender, and reflect critically on the state and outlook of the field.

They also welcome topics focusing on Chicago art and design within the larger national and international contexts, such as: thematic studies on world’s fairs, Chicago’s Gilded Age, institutional/private/corporate display practices, urban landscapes, African-American art past and present, and self-taught artists.

Flyer about the seminar
More information: scholarlyseminars@newberry.org
Submit a proposal at https://www.newberry.org/seminar-proposal-form

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Proposing a Molecular Music and Dance Project

The Dance of Life image

Here is a link to Jonathan Zilberg’s “The Dance of Life” project, an outcome of the call for participation in gauging the global scope of the emerging SEAD community through the National Science Foundation Grant, NSF Grant No. 1142510, IIS, “Human Centered Computing. Collaborative Research: EAGER Network for Science, Engineering, Arts and Design (NSEAD).