[-empyre-] Welcome to the October Discussion:

[Timothy Conway Murray]

Welcome to October, everyone.  Renate and I really delighted to be hosting this month's discussion on "Convergence: expanding time-based media." We have guests who work widely across the disciplines and from varying perspectives across the globe so are eager to see how things develop.

Our first guest will be Youngmin Kim who is one of Korea's leading interdisciplinary scholars and on the organizing of the Busan International Film Festival which, as Renate mentioned, has chosen the concept "Convergence" for the conference framing the Festival.  Since Busan is Asia's most prestigious film festival, it is exciting that it has opened the doors to reflecting on the shifting ontologies of film, screen culture, and global media.  I'm particularly keen to hear empyreans' thoughts on the implications of the convergence of media in which the screen(s) is ubiquitous, audiences are mobile if not virtual, and forms that used to be distinct, from film and video to installation, interactive platforms, listservs, animation, and digital sound and image convergence in recombined forms.

So one of the questions we'll be asking is how to understand the current moment of convergence.  I was at a conference last weekend on comparative media and a very influential film scholar made a passionate claim that cinema shares with literature the access to profundity in a way that "media" can't.  Although I can understand the historical background of such a claim, I found it so curious in an age when profundity has been democratized, stretched, challenged, and mobilized by interactive performance, mobile technologies, and cross-platform exhibition.  I'll expound on remarks that I'll be making at Busan in the following week, but my sense is that the very convergence of technologies in the context of global screen cultures challenges and complicates the very universalist claim of profundity upon which my colleague relies.

After Youngmin wakes up (6am his time), I'll look forward to his opening thoughts.  Welcome to a new month on -empyre-.  We're looking forward to an active discussion.

Best,

Tim
Director, Society for the Humanities
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
A. D. White House
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York. 14853
________________________________________
From: empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] on behalf of Renate Ferro [rtf9 at cornell.edu]
Sent: Friday, October 04, 2013 10:13 AM
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: [-empyre-] Welcome to the October Discussion:

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