Thomas Internship: Film Archives Assistant at UO Knight Library

Position: Film Archives Assistant
Location: Knight Library, Special Collections and University Archives
Duration: Fall 2014, Winter 2015 and Spring 2015 academic terms
Hours: 120 hours per term, to be arranged
Pay: $11.05/hour
Deadline: November 17, 2014

Project Description:
The Thomas Intern will assist with an ambitious project to create an online viewing environment for the 4,000 films from 1930s-2000s in the University Archives Athletics Films collection. In collaboration with University Athletics, Special Collections and University Archives will digitize the films and present them in a customized interface that allows users to search by team, season, and opponent.

Under supervision from the University Archivist and the Curator of Moving Images, the Thomas Intern will create a finding aid for the collection; enhance descriptive metadata for individual items; clean, repair, and otherwise prepare films for digitization; upload digital files to the online database of films; and classify digital files according to a pre-determined schema (i.e., team, season, and opponent).

Qualifications for the Thomas Internship:

  •  Both undergraduate and graduate students may apply.
  •  Students must be currently enrolled and will be required to provide proof of enrollment if selected.
  •  Some exceptions may be considered.
  •  This position requires excellent manual skills and a basic skills assessment test will be required.

Preference will be given to:

  •  Oregon residents.
  • Students enrolled for at least six credits in an American Library Association-accredited master’s degree program in library or information science/studies anywhere in the U.S. or Canada; you will be required to provide proof of enrollment if selected.
  •  Students (undergraduate or graduate) enrolled in UO’s School of Architecture and Allied Arts.

To Apply:
Please submit the following documents to Ms. Laine Stambaugh, Human Resources Librarian,
Knight Library, libapps@uoregon.edu, by November 17, 2014:
1. Cover letter introducing yourself and describing your interest in this assignment
2. Current Résumé
3. List of three references who may be contacted if you are a finalist
4. Completed Thomas Internship Application for 2014-2015 (see
http://library.uoregon.edu/admnpers/thomasintern.html)

The Perils of Post-Internet Art

Excerpts from the Art in America article “The Perils of Post-Internet Art,” by Brian Droitcour:

Photo from DIS’s online project “Competing Images: Art vs. People,” 2012.

Most people I know think “Post-Internet” is embarrassing to say out loud. But so is most of the language that’s used to write about contemporary art, and “Post-Internet” does the job of artspeak so efficiently that people keep saying it, embarrassment be damned. The “Post-” part conjures an aura of historical significance, the mantle of the avant-garde; “Internet” supplies social relevance. Together they lacquer art with an intellectual finish as thin as it is opaque.

The term has recently appeared in a variety of far-flung contexts: a talk at Frieze Art Fair, a forum at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, a panel at the College Art Association conference. Unlike “Neo-Expressionism” or “Neo-Geo,” “Post-Internet” avoids anything resembling a formal description of the work it refers to, alluding only to a hazy contemporary condition and the idea of art being made in the context of digital technology.

Whether people like it, hate it or feel indifferent toward it, they all seem to know what “Post-Internet” means today but are unable to articulate it with much precision. “I know it when I see it”—like porn, right? It’s not a bad analogy, because Post-Internet art does to art what porn does to sex—renders it lurid. The definition I’d like to propose underscores this transactional sensibility: I know Post-Internet art when I see art made for its own installation shots, or installation shots presented as art. Post-Internet art is about creating objects that look good online: photographed under bright lights in the gallery’s purifying white cube (a double for the white field of the browser window that supports the documentation), filtered for high contrast and colors that pop.

…Post-Internet art is in love with advertising, like a lot of art since Warhol, but it’s the obsession with art-world power systems—as represented by the installation shot—that irks me the most about it. After a century that has witnessed art in newspapers, art on the radio, art in the mail, art on television and art on the Internet, here’s a self-styled avant-garde that’s all about putting art back in the rarefied space of the gallery, even as it purports to offer profound insights about how a vast, non-hierarchical communications network is altering our lives.

**To learn more about Post-Internet art read Brian Droitcour’s full article on Art in America at: http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazine/the-perils-of-post-internet-art/

Challenging Methods: Lüneburg Summer School for Digital Cultures

The Lüneburg Summer School for Digital Cultures is now accepting applications for its week-long summer school. The Lüneburg Summer School provides advanced training in the study of media, their theory, aesthetics and history.

This year’s topic, “Challenging Methods”, reacts to the demands for a discussion of methods that recently have become prevalent in the context of media studies. Historically and institutionally, this field of research originated when scholars from a variety of fields started to confront their disciplines and specifically their methodologies with the questions of media epistemology. From those investigations of the hitherto overlooked media-­‐theoretical presumptions and media practices of their original fields, a discourse emerged that was labeled media studies – “Medienwissenschaften”.

The Lüneburg Summer School for Digital Cultures will bring together a group of around 18 young international scholars with renowned faculty to investigate the status and challenge of methods in media studies. Connecting scholars from different fields, it aims to open up discussions in media studies, while at the same time offering the chance to investigate the specific mediality of methods in other fields.

Schedule: This year’s program will take place September 20-26, 2015 at Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, Germany.
The week long Summer School is structured as a series of shared seminars, keynote lectures and three streams taught in small groups. The first stream will investigate the promise of digital tools; the second stream will tackle the dimensions of a politics of methods; and the third stream will confront methods as cultural techniques.

To Apply: The Lüneburg Summer School on Digital Cultures invites applications from outstanding doctoral candidates, but also master students at the end of their exams, throughout the world in media studies and related fields such as film studies, literary studies, philosophy, art history, architecture, sociology, politics, the history of science and visual culture.

All application materials should be sent by email to florian.sprenger@leuphana.de and must be received by November 10, 2014. Applicants who have been admitted will be notified by the end of November.

The working language of the Summer School is English. Applications are accepted in English or German, and should be submitted electronically in PDF format and include the following:

  • Letter of Intent indicating academic experience, interest in the Summer School’s annual topic and the selection of one of the three streams (max. 300 words)
  • Curriculum Vitae (max. 2 pages)
  • Abstract of a possible presentation at the Lüneburg Summer School for Digital Cultures. No more than 2000 words, double spaced, with standard margins
  • Contact information (name, institutional address, email) of two potential references

We have a limited amount of need-­‐based travel funding available. Please indicate in your application letter if you wish to apply for travel funding.

The Museum Interface (Art in America)

Article from Art in America, by Sarah Hromack and Rob Giampietro
ROB GIAMPIETRO is principal at Project Projects, a design studio in New York.
SARAH HROMACK is director of digital media at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. 

Two experts assess the impact of digital media and new design on today’s cultural institutions:

“It’s no longer a question of whether art institutions should have a virtual presence. Rather, the onus is being placed on designers to facilitate meaningful interactions with art that might occur in the gallery, via Web-based applications or in new hybrid spaces that merge the real and the virtual. Any attempt to augment an encounter with artwork using technological means invariably raises questions about the values we assign to certain modes of viewing. After all, isn’t visiting a museum inherently tied to a very deep, very primary real-life experience? The promises and pitfalls of new technologies are forcing museums to rebalance their traditional mandates to care for a collection of physical objects while enabling scholarship and providing the wider public an opportunity to engage with works of art. “R.G. and S.H.

In his 1955 book Designing for People, industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss was one of the first to write of designing a “man-machine interface”—in that case, a more accessible cockpit for pilots in WWII. By applying techniques from the emerging fields of ergonomics and information theory, Dreyfuss and his team aimed to integrate controls, seating and instrumentation in order to close the gap between a pilot and his aircraft. Like the full-room scale of the first mainframe computers, the cockpit subsumed its human operator—it was an interface that was also an environment, operating at the scale of architecture.

Henry Dreyfuss: “Basic Visual Data,” from the book The Measure of Man, Human Factors in Design, 1959

In the same book, Dreyfuss turns his attention from the hard lessons of war to the soft power of culture, evoking another bit of architecture that might be reshaped by the new logic of the interface: the museum.

“A half-hour’s tour through a museum with a TV camera,” he wrote, “can bring to life a wealth of art and knowledge that could otherwise not be seen in months.”1

Once again Dreyfuss was aiming to close a gap, to give people immediate access to all the world’s artwork. Paradoxically, his scheme for facilitating this immediacy required the mediating device of broadcast television.

To read the full conversation between Sarah Hromack and Rob Giampietro, click here to see the full article over at Art in America.

Collaborations in Feminism and Technology: October Video Dialogue Schedule

Collaborations in Feminism and Technology Sept-Dec 2014:

Each week from Sept 22­ to Dec 1st FemTechNet will feature a Video Dialogue on their website and host an Online Open Office Hour (OOOH) for anyone involved or interested in FemTechNet to join. The OOOH times differ from week to week, so please take note of these dates and times.

The Video Dialogue schedule for FemTechNet  for October is posted below. For any questions please contact T.L. Cowan.

  • October 28, 2014: Making Bodies
    Discussion with Skawennati and Heather Cassils moderated by T.L. Cowan.
    Office Hour Discussion led by: T.L. Cowan and K. Surkan
    Date/Time: Tuesday Oct. 28 3­4pm ET
    Readings:
  • October 29, 2014: Bodies 2013 at Illinois
    Discussion featuring Dorothy Roberts and Karen Flynn moderated by Sharon Irish.
    Office Hour Discussion led by: Sharon Irish
    Date/Time: Wed. Oct 29, 4­5pm EST
    Readings:

    Excerpts from Frankenstein, esp. chs. 5, 11, 12, 16, 24
    http://www.literature.org/authors/shelley­mary/frankenstein/index.html
    on Bluejeans or Google hang­out

 

Digital “Globalization(s)”

Join the Fembot Collective on Thursday, October 23rd, 2014, in welcoming Radhika Gajjala, and taking part in a conversation about Digital “Globalization(s).”

WHEN: Thursday, October 23rd, 2014, 2:00 – 3:30 PM
WHERE: 230 Lawrence Hall

Refreshments will be provided. This event is open to all departments.
Contact/Inquiries: shamid@uoregon.edu

Radhika Gajjala, aka Cyber Diva, is a Professor of Media and Communication (joint appointed faculty in American Culture Studies) at Bowling Green State University. She has published books on Cyberculture and the Subaltern (Lexington Press, 2012) and Cyberselves: Feminist Ethnographies of South Asian Women was published (Altamira, 2004). She has co-edited collections on Cyberfeminism 2.0 (2012), Global Media Culture and Identity (2011), South Asian Technospaces (2008) and Webbing Cyberfeminist Practice (2008).

Currently, Radhika is continuing work on Affect, Labor and Placement in online worlds and social networks. Following trajectories of local and global, online and offline, her research examines the connections between social media practices, neoliberal entrepreneurship with a focus on “women’s work,” and presentations of self/identity and value in global work-space and virtual worlds.

Radhika is also a member of the Fembot Collective and FemTechnet (participated in the Femtechnet Beta teaching and in the DOCC 2013 nodal teaching project), is co-editor of “ADA: Journal of Gender, New Media and Technology,” and an avid crocheter and spinner of yarn.

Wendy Chun to Co-teach NMCC Topics Course

Wendy Chun is Professor and Chair of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She will be co-teaching a course on “Habitual New Media” with Colin Koopman in Winter 2015. This course will fulfill the Topics course requirement for the New Media Certificate, and NMCC students have enrollment priority. So be sure to take advantage of this fantastic opportunity to study with an eminent media scholar.

       

To stay up to date on Chun’s latest work, you can also follow Wendy Chun on twitter at @whkchun

 

 

NMCC Student Lands Research Fellowship with Intel

http://journalism.uoregon.edu/user/bpeake/
Bryce Peake (PhD Candidate, Media Studies):

“I received one of UO’s inaugural Julie and Rocky Dixon Awards in Graduate Innovation. As part of the award, I will spend next year at Intel as a technology research scientist working on a few projects. My research charts a socially conscious pathway for wearable technology innovation by grounding the development of wearables in the postcolonial histories and sociotechnical lives of deaf prostheses. The NMCC was crucial to making this happen, and it is because of the great courses I took through the certificate that I was able to connect my research with the innovation work Intel was doing. So, kudos to the certificate program!”

Kudos right back at you, Bryce!

Bryce Peake is a Julie and Rocky Dixon Doctoral Fellow in Graduate Innovation at Intel Labs, and a PhD Candidate in Media Studies in the School of Journalism & Communication. His research draws on science and technology studies, feminist standpoint theory, and historical anthropology to explore the somatic technopolitics of gender and media imperialism.

To learn more about Bryce, and what he has been up to with the aid of the Julie and Rocky Dixon Award, check out the Dixon Spotlight for more information.

Come to Convergence: an International Summit on Art + Technology

November 27-29, The Banff Centre

 

Tickets are going fast for Convergence, which will be held at the Banff Centre November 27-29.
Bringing together the finest minds in Art + Technology, Convergence is your chance to experience cutting edge dance, lasers, projections exhibitions, performances and robotics.

The Banff Center Convergence Summit http://www.banffcentre.ca/programs/convergence/

 

The Banff Center is also happy to announce that you can also pitch your project in an open mic session or pull up a comfy chair and relax in the National Film Board screening room.

To learn about some of the keynote speakers, featured presenters and performances, take a look at the full schedule and overview here.

To reserve your spot and book your room at The Banff Centre, click here.

What is the Banff Center?:

“The Banff Centre is the largest arts and creativity incubator on the planet. Our mission is inspiring creativity. Over 8,000* artists, leaders, and researchers from across Canada and around the world participate in programs at The Banff Centre every year. Through its multidisciplinary programming, The Banff Centre provides them with the support they need to create, to develop solutions, and to make the impossible possible.”

For more information about Banff, visit their website.

Graduate Affiliates Program Openings, UO Digital Scholarship Center

The University of Oregon Libraries Digital Scholarship Center seeks applicants for its 2015 Graduate Affiliates Program, which will take place during the Winter and Spring terms. The Graduate Affiliates Program is an opportunity for a small group of graduate students to benefit from the resources of the Digital Scholarship Center and engage collaboratively with each other.

Graduate Affiliates will:

  • Have access to the Digital Scholarship Center (the space as well as hardware and software);
  • Receive close consultation and assistance on their own digital scholarship projects (teaching or research);
  • Participate in Graduate Affiliates colloquia;
  • Have opportunities to share their knowledge and skills with other graduate students, faculty, or undergraduates;
  • Be expected to make a formal presentation on their research toward the end of the Spring term.


Applicants must submit a CV, a brief research proposal that describes a research or instructional project to be carried out as well as what assistance might be needed, and a brief letter of support from your advisor.

The deadline for applications is December 1, 2014. 

Applications and questions should be directed to John Russell, Scholarly Communications Librarian.