Kriss Ravetto Talk
| What | |
|---|---|
| When |
2008-04-02 04:00 PM
2008-04-02 05:30 PM
April 02, 2008 from 04:00 pm to 05:30 pm |
| Where | Voorhies Hall, Room 126 |
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"The Digital Uncanny: Reconfiguring Embodiment in the Age of Surveillance"
April 2, 2008
4:00 - 5:30pm
Voorhies Hall, Room 126
Co-sponsored by English, Film Studies, Cultural Studies, Technocultural Studies, Science & Technology Studies, and the Davis Humanities Institute
"The Digital Uncanny: Reconfiguring Embodiment in the Age of Surveillance"
For Freud the uncanny is bound up with subjective emotions like dread, terror, uneasiness and anticipation. The digital uncanny alludes to some of the same motifs - the dopplegänger, the doubling and redoubling of shadows, the déjà vu - but does not depend on relations between sensory perception and a predetermined symbolic order (repression of traumatic events, castration anxiety, etc). The digital uncanny does not refer to human anxieties projected onto non-human devices (automaton, dolls, avatars), but rather to how non-human devices (surveillance technologies, code, and data flows) anticipate or perhaps control human gestures, actions and interactions. Through an analysis of the digital installation art of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, I show how the digital uncanny points to the disjuncture between recognizing and reacting to being followed (by images, interfaces, and tracking devices) and recognizing and reacting to the fact that these devices already anticipate our movements,
desires, and trajectories.
Kriss Ravetto is Senior Lecturer of Film and Modern Thought at the University of Aberdeen. She is the author of The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics (Minnesota, 2001), as well as numerous articles on film, media, gender studies, critical theory, and the digital humanities. Her work ranges over several central topics, including representations and theorizations of sexual violence in media; identity politics in the post-Soviet reconfiguration of Europe; and the relation of image to gesture and experience in media theory. She is currently completing a new book on cinema at the margins of Europe, as well as another project on the phenomenology of digital art. In addition to her theoretical work, Dr. Ravetto has also been curator for exhibitions of new media, such as the 2006 New York show, “Interstices: Mediated Gestures, Mechanical Vision, and Fluid Architectures.”
California STS Network!