Unstable Platforms? Film/Moving Image Studies Papers from MIT7 Media in Transition

Teaser image, courtesy of Warner Brothers, from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 out on July 15  (David Yates, 2011). Read Debora Lui's paper on Harry Potter: The Exhibition.

Today, Film Studies For Free brings you links to film and moving image related papers from the conference proceedings of the seventh annual Media in Transition conference, which will take place next week, May 13-15, 2011, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

Here's the conference's mission statement:

Has the digital age confirmed and exponentially increased the cultural instability and creative destruction that are often said to define advanced capitalism? Does living in a digital age mean we may live and die in what the novelist Thomas Pynchon has called “a ceaseless spectacle of transition”? The nearly limitless range of design options and communication choices available now and in the future is both exhilarating and challenging, inciting innovation and creativity but also false starts, incompatible systems, planned obsolescence. How are we coping with the instability of platforms? 

FSFF particularly liked "“Make Any Room Your TV Room:” Media Mobility, Digital Delivery, and Family Harmony" by film and media studies scholar and blogger extraordinaire Chuck Tryon, film and television scholar and media studies blogger extraordinaire Michael Z. Newman's paper 'The Television Image and the Image of the Television", and "Who Told You You Were Special Edition? The Commercialization of the Aura" by Justin Mack.

There are other great papers online connected to the conference theme of unstable platforms and the experience of mediatic transitions that don't treat moving image topics and you can access those here.

• Teaching Smart Cinema: DVD Add-ons and New Audience Pleasures, Pat Brereton

• The Digitization of Memory at the National Film Board of Canada,
  Morgan Charles

• Promise and Problems: Independent Production in Periods of Change, Aymar Jean Christian

• How New Media Change Our Experience of Stories, Teun Dubbelman

• Making Selves/Making Citizens in the Age of YouTube, Megan Fulwiler and Kim Middleton

• Virtual Bliss, Analog Horrors: Reading the Imperfect Digital Image in Film and the Video Game, Robert Furze

• Hoarding the Ethereal: How We Have more Things but with Less Clutter, Gayle Gatchalian

• Lessons from the Front: Rio’s War against Drug Trafficking, Participatory Culture and New Media Paradigms for Brazilian Soap Operas, Leandro Gejfinbein, Rejane Spitz

• Stories with Choices: Artist´s Multimedia Narratives, Raivo Kelomees

• Piracy, Circulation, and Cultural Control in Cyber-Age China, Jinying Li

• From the Theater to the Gallery: Harry Potter Engagements within the Museum, Debora Lui

• Who Told You You Were Special Edition? The Commercialization of the Aura
  Justin Mack

• New Platforms: More Choice – Less Freedom?: Mediated Narratives of Human History, Klaus Peter Muller

• Conserving Digital Art for the Ages, Francis Marchese

• The Television Image and the Image of the Television, Michael Newman

• A Story about Random Memories and Fragmented History on Screens, Katharina Niemeyer

• Remembering the Past in the Dynarchive: The State of Knowledge in Digital Archives, Julia Noordegraaf

• Preserving Digital Narratives in an Age of Present-Mindedness: the View from Toronto, Kamilla Pietrzyk

• Indiana Jones Fights the Communist Police: Text Adventures as a Transitional Media Form in the 1980’s Czechoslovakia, Jaroslav Svelch

• "Make Any Room Your TV Room:” Media Mobility, Digital Delivery, and Family Harmony, Chuck Tryon 

Lastingly good work on Ephemeral Media

The Psycho Shower Scene: A Reenactment: a YouTube fan video discussed by Barbara Klinger in her talk linked to below.

Today, Film Studies For Free is delighted to pass on details of some great freely accessible film and media studies research resources from the Institute of Film and Television at the University of Nottingham.

This summer, the Institute held two Arts and Humanities Research Council 'Beyond Text' workshops on ‘ephemeral media,’ focusing on the growth of the brief or ‘ephemeral’ texts that exist beyond, below and between the films, television programmes, and radio broadcasts more commonly isolated for analysis.

For those interested, the plenary sessions can be found as YouTube recordings and/or sound files on the Beyond Text website (following the photo and video gallery). Also see below.

The Ephemeral Media website has great resources links, too, so do please explore those.

1. The Promotional Surround: logos, promos, idents, trailers (Click here for the Abstracts)

• Charlie Mawer (Executive Creative Director, Red Bee Media) – Perspectives on media branding and TV design (this including a fascinating discussion of BBC idents and the branding of Dave, from a highly influential figure in media brand design) (YouTube)
  

• Professor William Uricchio (MIT) ‘The recurrent, the recombinatory, and the ephemeral: thoughts on a textual system in transition’ (YouTube)

• Professor John Caldwell (UCLA) - “The Insider’s Promotional Surround: Rationing Production Knowledge, Managing Unruly Machines, and Worker Buy” (MP3)

2. Internet Attractions: online video and user-generated ephemera (Click here for the Abstracts)

• Professor Barbara Klinger, ‘Reenactment: Fans Performing Movie Scenes from the Stage to Youtube’ (YouTube)
  

• Hugh Hancock (Strange Company) – Machinima (an overview from one of the pioneers of the genre) (YouTube)
  

• Professor Jon Dovey (UWE) –‘User-generated content: archeologies, economies and ecologies (YouTube)
  

• Rik Lander (U-soap Media) – Web drama (a practitioner’s perspective on the creative and business challenges of online drama) (MP3)