[-empyre-] Introducing Tom Lamarre and Lev Manovich

[Renate Ferro]

This month’s February edition of –empyre “Theorizing Animation: Content
and Context is moderated by Renate Ferro (US) www.renateferro.net/
artist-conceptual/new media, Department of Art, Cornell University, and
Tim Murray (US), Curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art,
Cornell University.

We would like to welcome two friends of ours to kick off Week 1 of
Theorizing Animation: Content and Context Tom Lamarre and Lev Manovich.
We attended the Digital Arts and Culture Conference at Irvine this past
December with Lev Manovich.  We found ourselves intersecting at The
HAASTAC panel among others.  And Tom is a neighbor of sorts, living about
five hours away in Montreal so we see him more often. We are thrilled that
they will lead our discussion off this month and have generously offered
to lend their expertise to our discussion.  We have included their
biographies below and we welcome them warmly.

Thomas Lamarre is a professor in the Department of East Asian Studies and
associate in Communications Studies at McGill University. He has written
three books on the history of media and material culture in Japan. The
first, Uncovering Heian Japan: An Archaeology of Sensation and
Inscription, centres on the formation of inter-imperial media networks
linking 9th century Japan to kingdoms in Korea and China, showing how
calligraphic styles and poetic exchanges served to ground a cosmopolitical
order. The second, Shadows on the Screen: Tanizaki Jun’ichirō on
Cinema and Oriental Aesthetics, looks at how cinema in 1910s and 1920s
Japan radically transformed urban experiences of space and time, resulting
in a new image of world and world history wherein Japan was reconfigured
as the Oriental subject and object of empire. The third, The Anime
Machine: A Media Theory of Animation, explores how animation technologies
spurred the formation of distinctive lineages of technological thought in
Japan of the 1980s and 1990s. With funding from SSHRC, he is currently
finishing a book entitled Otaku Movement: Capitalism and Fan Media (under
contract with MIT) that explores fan activities, transformations in
labour, and cultural activism in contemporary Japan. He is a participant
in a CFI grant to construct at Moving Image Research Laboratory.

Thomas Lamarre (Department of East Asian Studies, McGill University) is a
specialist in Japanese history, literature, cinema and new media. His
primary research interest is the historical transformations of technology
and media and its impacts on the emergence of historically specific power
formations, systems of exchange, and material cultures.

Lev Manovich's <http://www.manovich.net> books include Software Takes
Command (released under CC license, 2008), Soft Cinema: Navigating the
Database (The MIT Press, 2005), and The Language of New Media (The MIT
Press, 2001) which is hailed as "the most suggestive and broad ranging
media history since Marshall McLuhan." He has written 90+ articles which
have been reprinted over 300 times in 30+ countries. Manovich is a
Professor in Visual Arts Department, University of California -San Diego,
a Director of the Software Studies Initiative at California Institute for
Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), and a Visiting
Research Professor at Goldsmith College (University of London), De
Montfort University (UK) and College of Fine Arts, University of New South
Wales (Sydney). He is much in demand to lecture around the world, having
delivered 300+ lectures, seminars and workshops during the last 10 years.

Renate Ferro
Visiting Assistant Professor
Department of Art
Cornell University, Tjaden Hall
Ithaca, NY  14853

Email:   <rtf9 at cornell.edu>
Website:  http://www.renateferro.net


Co-moderator of _empyre soft skinned space
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Art Editor, diacritics
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/dia/