Series of talks: Image Worlds - Knowledge Worlds. Dialogues between Art and Science 5
Cinemedia: Archaeologies of Computation in Cinema
Since its origins, cinema has been riveted by both mechanization and culture, by its material apparatuses and its evolving metaphors. The 'presence' of the machine, as omnipotent technical gaze or as observer of mechanization itself, fills the archives of cinema history. By the 1950s the computer made its appearance in mainstream, experimental, and documentary film. Simultaneously a range of materials emerged from corporate archives, promotional films, television documentaries. Science gone awry, scientists gone mad, machines out of control were replaced by autonomous technologies, malevolent programmers, sentient - and ultimately sovereign - computers were contrasted by celebrations of astonishing progress, laments over the consequences of automation, or the dangers of machine intelligence.
Godard's Alphaville, Fassbinder's Welt am Draht, Marker's Level 5, Scott's Bladerunner, the Wachowski's The Matrix, Rusnack's The 13th Floor, Cronenberg's eXistenZ, the list is long, are indicative of an on-going interrogation of the reverberations of computing, simulation, and artificial intelligence in cinema. Documentaries like The Machine that Changed the World, Computer Pioneers, Dammbeck's Das Netz, or Curtis' The Century of the Self, looked more specifically at stages and implications in the development of computer culture. Numerous promotional materials films and videos tracked particular technologies and implementations.
This presentation will be copiously illustrated with excerpts from this material with a particular focus on developing both a historical approach to a fascinating tradition and a critical assessment of the appeal of simulation, the consequences of artificial intelligence, the significance of these materials as a crucial component in the evolving histories of the media arts.
Bio:
Timothy Druckrey is Director of the Graduate Photography and Digital Imaging program at the Maryland Institute, College of Art. He also works as a curator, writer, and editor living in New York City. He lectures internationally about the social impact of electronic media, the transformation of representation, and communication in interactive and networked environments. He co-organized the international symposium Ideologies of Technology at the Dia Center of the Arts and co-edited the book Culture on the Brink: Ideologies of Technology (Bay Press). He also co-curated the exhibition Iterations: The New Image at the International Center of Photography and edited the book by the same name published by MIT Press. He edited Electronic Culture: Technology and Visual Representation and is Series Editor for Electronic Culture: History, Theory, Practice published by MIT Press. These books now include Ars Electronica: Facing the Future, net_condition: art and global media (with Peter Weibel), Geert Lovink's, Dark Fiber, and Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary After Film (edited by Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel), Stelarc: The Monograph (edited by Marquard Smith), Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means (Siegfried Zielinski). Recent exhibitions he has curated include Bits and Pieces, Critical Conditions and co-curated New Media Beijing (2006). He has been Guest Professor at the University of Applied Art, Vienna (2004) and Richard Koopman Distinguished Chair for the Visual Arts at the University of Hartford (2005).
Kindly supported by:
