Intermedia Research Group

Easter Term 2009

Sessions:

Thursday 23 April  No meeting today

Thursday 7 May, 2.00-4.00pm   TBC 

Thursday 21 May, 2.00-4.00pm TBC

Thursday  4 June, 2.00-4.00pm
Speaker: Paige McGinley
 "Cottonopoli:" The Blues and Gospel Train arrives in Chorltonville 

Past events: 

October 23
Festival of Ideas
Seamless, Fine Tuned and In  Control? Investigating the World of IPod Users
Michael Bull (Univ of Sussex) & Intermedia Research Group show how tuning in is becoming the new tuning out

November 6 at 5pm in Room G-R 05 in the Faculty of English`(PLEASE NOTE CHANGE OF VENUE AND TIME FOR THIS MEETING)
Practices of representation: war and genocide
Poitr Cieplak (St Catherine's College, MML) and Mark Nicol (Author of  Condor Blues: British Soldiers at War ; Last Round: Red caps, the Paras, and the Battle of Majar,   and several other books on British soldiers' experience in Iraq and Afghanistan)
Piotr Ciepalk will present his research on the nature of the practice of representation in the events of the 1994 Rwandian genocide and its aftermath. Mark Nicol is currently converting his second major work to a screenplay, and will discuss the difference in and the stakes of writi

November 20 at 2pm
Photographing war
Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin (Photographers and artists)

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin will be discussing their most recent photographic practices in an exhibition at Paradise Row gallery in London, as well as their current practices in Afganistan and Iraq. They will deal with the issues of testimony/witness/and archive the difficult position these concepts hold in relation to photographic practice.

November 27 at 5pm (Please note change of time for this seminar)
“My humping” the Prime Minister: sound-image power play in podcast politics of Singapore
Dr Shzr Ee Tan (Royal Holloway)

At the height of general elections fervour in Singapore, 2006, the republic’s prime minister Lee Hsien-Loong became the unlikely subject of a music video re-mix featuring hiphop group Black Eyed Peas’ hit, My Humps. The remix was uploaded onto the internet as a podcast, first appearing as a streaming sound file on an independent blog – and later on YouTube. It was a defiant response to government criticism of political podcasts in Singapore. This paper makes a case study of the local and virtual controversies which erupted in the wake of the said podcast. In particular, I will investigate the amphibian as well as literal relationships between music, image and text manipulated within the podcast and in its thriving aftermath. How are the semiotics involved unpacked in relation to each other, and how do political commentators in Singapore make use of ambiguities in such relationships to camouflage direct criticism of the government as a celebration
  of kitsch performance, or as deliberately mistranslated music/image codes? Power play in this game is further complicated by the encoding and dissemination of the above processes and products on the Internet, in a virtual environment where – in spite of its false sense of democracy - parallel-world identities and anonymous (and therefore illusorily non-culpable) communities can be created as fast as YouTube files are downloaded and spread through viral mails.

Lent Term 2009 

Sessions:

Thursday 29 January (cancelled)

Thursday 12 February (no meeting today)

Thursday 26 February
Presentation with film clips by Dr Drehli Robnik
Rewriting “Valkyrie”. From G. W. Pabst to Bryan Singer: The Aesthetics of Historicity in Cinematic Images of the July 20th Plot against Hitler   

Thursday 12 March
Speaker: Mike Pearson  (Aberystwyth) 
Who are you looking at?  Or: analogue responses to a digital world

Conference:

Friday 20 and Saturday 21 March
The Media of Translation / Translation between Media

Keynote speakers: Clive Scott (UEA), Prof Mary Jacobus (CRASSH, Cambridge)

 

Return to top Return to top
Print Page Print Page