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10.20.2004
We're proud announce the addition of Miriam Hansen and Jackie Stewart, and as faculty advisors to our research collective. More information will be available soon in the members area.

The Chicago School of Media Theory has been awarded an ATI (Provost's Program for Academic Information Technology) Grant for the development of the Media HyperAtlas, a virtual media taxonomy. We are currently working out the technical and conceptual foundations of the project in coordination with the University of Chicago Digital Media Lab and Humanities Research Computing. Meetings are being held on campus every other week, in which CSMT members and other collaborators discuss how to generate and plot data. Please direct questions to Kristan Hanson (ATI Grant Co-ordinator) or Andrew Mall (Technical Supervisor).

07.02.2004
We're proud announce the addition of Miriam Hansen, Jackie Stewart, and Hannah Higgins as faculty advisors to our research collective. More information will be available soon in the members area. Also, we've been awarded an ATI Grant to pursue development of the Media HyperAtlas.

05.12.2004
"Arts of Transmission" is an interdisciplinary conference, in conjunction with a special issue of Critical Inquiry, that calls together experts from a range of fields to examine relationships among ideas and cultures of communication, past and present. The conference takes place May 21-22 at the University of Chicago. Panels at the conference will address papers to be published in Critical Inquiry (Autumn 2004). Since these papers will not be read at the conference, you should consult them in advance here. Note that participants include three of our members: W. J. T. Mitchell, Bill Brown, and Joel Snyder.

05.09.2004
"Comix 101" is a lecture by Art Spiegelman, the 2004 Kestnbaum Writer-in-Residence. Spiegelman takes his audience on a chronological tour of the evolution of comics, all the while explaining the value of this medium and why it should not be ignored. He believes that in our post-literate culture the importance of the comic is on the rise, for 'comics echo the way the brain works. People think in iconographic images, not in holograms, and people think in bursts of language, not in paragraphs.'" The event takes place Thursday, May 27, 4:30 pm at the Court Theater (5535 South Ellis Ave).

On Friday, May 28, Spiegelman will join in a public discussion of the graphic novel with Chris Ware, recipient of the American Book Award in 2000 and the prestigious French comics award "L'Alph Art" in 2003 for his graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan — the Smartest Kid on Earth (4:30pm; Court Theater). This panel discussion, moderated by curator and critic Michael Rooks, will be followed by a reception. For more info on these two events, visit the site for The Festival of the Arts 2004.

05.07.2004
"Constru(ct)ing the Current: Theorizing Media in a New Millennium" (University of Chicago, May 14-15) is a two-day symposium at the University of Chicago that brings scholars together in an effort to collectively understand the social processes through which news, as a general category and set of particular cases, comes into being. Looking across media type and genre, panelists will examine how mass media construct and construe happenings as significant events, trends, and facts about the world. For more information, see conference program.

04.12.2004
Welcome new members! Look for more information about them soon on the Members page.

We are pleased to announce a special event, Medium Matters. W. J. T. Mitchell and Hans Belting, both members of our Advisory Board, will speak in dialogue about media theory. The event will take place on April 26, 2004, on the University of Chicago campus (Cochrane-Woods Art Center, Room 157, 4:30-6 PM), and a reception will follow at the Smart Museum of Art. See attached flyer (140kb).

04.10.2004
Welcome to The Chicago School of Media Theory Homepage. On April 23rd, Hans Belting and visiting scholars from the Karlsruhe Institute will be presenting at Northwestern University's "Art and Image" conference.

03.16.2004
We are proud to announce Nicholas Mirzoeff (Professor of Art and Comparative Literature, SUNY Stony Brook) as our newest member; click on his name to view his profile.

03.09.2004
Follow the link to view the recent Chicago Weekly article on CSMT: "The Message: From Newspapers to Arnold with the CSMT." Before downloading, please note that the article is 1.9MB.

03.07.2004
The informational session on membership procedures and guidelines will be held this Tuesday evening, March 9, from 7-8:30pm in Cobb 307. Details are availabe here. Please direct any questions to Andrew Mall or Dan Clinton.

03.01.2004
February's Andy Warhol film series concludes this Thursday (March 4) with a lecture by the renowned art historian and cultural theorist Douglas Crimp. Former editor of the journal October, Crimp is well known as a founding influence in AIDS activism and the field of queer theory. Among his many publications are On the Museum's Ruins (MIT Press,1993), and Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (MIT Press, 2002). Entitled "Coming Together to Stay Apart: Andy Warhol's Collaboration with Ronald Tavel," Professor Crimp's lecture draws on his current research for a book on Warhol's films and the 1960s avant-garde. This event will take place at The University of Chicago Film Studies Center (Cobb 307), and will begin at 4:30pm. For more information about the film series and the lecture please follow this link.

02.08.2004
"The Theory and Analysis of Performance" Conference will take place on March 5-6 at The Franke Institute for the Humanities at the University of Chicago. Sessions include: Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht (Comparative Literature, Stanford) on "Types of Athletic Performance and their Limits" with discussants Bill Brown (English, University of Chicago) and Deborah Nelson (English, University of Chicago); Christopher Balme (Theater Studies, Mainz/Amsterdam) on "Intermediality: Rethinking the Relationship between Theatre and Media" with discussants Tracy C. Davis (Theatre, Performance Studies, Northwestern University), Loren Kruger (English, Comparative Literature, and Theater and Performance Studies, University of Chicago). More information on the other sessions may be viewed here. The conference is sponsored by the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on German Literature and Culture at the University of Chicago.

02.20.2004
The 2004 Media Taxonomy Models are now available—to view them, select from the list or use the spiraling ribbon interface. New essays from the 2004 Theories of Media Keywords Glossary will be added in the coming weeks.

02.04.2004
"Media and the Body" is a one-day symposium being held at Northwestern University on Feb 13, from 3-7pm in the Frances Searle room 2-107 (second floor). This event will feature a graduate student panel in the morning, followed by a series of guest speakers in the afternoon: Ann Weinstone on "How to Make an Avatar Body," Laura Kipnis on "Defending Fat," Justine Cassell on "Living from Hand to Mouse: Technology and the Body, and the Body as Technology," and Virginia Blum on "Transformational Fantasies of American Media and the Culture of Cosmetic Surgery."

The event is being sponsored by media r/evolutions, a new multidisciplinary collaborative of faculty and graduate students, mostly from the New Media, Technology and Society Ph.D. program in the School of Communications at Northwestern University.

02.02.2004
The Department of Art History, the Committee on the Visual Arts, and Critical Inquiry present "Out of the Archive and into the Streets: Zoe Leonard's The Fae Richards Archive," a lecture by Abigail Solomon-Godeau (UC-Santa Barbara). Professor Solomon-Godeau will discuss the The Fae Richards Archive in the context of the artists' book as a medium itself.

Emulating the form of a fan's scrapbook, and originally created for Cheryl Dunye's film The Watermelon Woman, the Archive is an exploration of the lost history of black actresses in the Hollywood film industry in the post world war II period, but it also a meditation on historical absence and the limits of the archive with respect to the representation of what has been rendered invisible. In providing a perspective on the marginalization of black women—especially black lesbian women—in American culture, the Archive invites us to consider the uses of marginal forms. The lecture will take place on Friday, February 6th, at 4:30pm in the Cochrane Woods Art Center.

01.24.2004
Welcome to the Chicago School of Media Theory homepage. On Wednesday January 28, Rebecca Reynolds will be giving her lecture entitled, "Sculpture and Its Others: Art in An Expanded Field." Mal Ahern, Roberto Kutcher, and Adam Shapiro are working with the Digital Media Lab to edit and prepare the Hypercube presentation for online streaming while other members are working on grant applications with Humanities Research and Computing.

Nick Oberly's performance of "Gender as Medium" and Dan Clinton's presentation, "Genre and Medium: A Detective Story," will soon be viewable in the "Projects" area. Lectures and presentations from Eduardo de Almeida ("The Posthuman Condition"), Roberto Kutcher ("Holography: the Abject Dinosaur of New Media"), Ben Buckley ("Media-Definitional Videogame Logics: Text, Pattern, Emergence"), Andrew Mall ("Community, Authenticity, and Independent Music") will follow in the coming weeks. See the calendar in the "Members" area for more information.


[Click to view 2003 news...]