The Digital in
Depth:
An Interdisciplinary
Symposium on Depth in Digital Media
Friday 30th May,
2014
Hosted by the Institute
of Advanced Study and the Department of Film and Television Studies, Millburn
House, University of Warwick.
Keynote Speaker: Dr.
Lisa Purse (University of Reading, Author of Digital Imaging in Popular Cinema
and Contemporary Action Cinema)
This symposium
explores the ways in which depth imagery is constructed and consumed in
contemporary digital practices, and the ways in which we might interpret it.
Most digital platforms’ content is consumed through flat screens and yet many
of their aesthetics seem anxious to convey the illusion of depth. This curious
and ubiquitous paradox is visible, for example, in digital cinema’s most recent
spate of 3-D films and the institutional dimensionality of videogames’
fictional environments through which the player wanders. In computing, also,
user interfaces and head-up displays demonstrate a renegotiated relationship to
the image that is dependent on deep spaces made immediately accessible for
spectators and users.
The symposium investigates
the different media that characterise contemporary culture and the aesthetic,
cultural and political implications of their digital depth. How is this
illusion of depth constructed, and to what ends? The symposium will investigate
avenues through which academia might read and interpret both these images and
the changing mediascape of which they are a part. It will also ask what these
digital constructions of depth demonstrate about the changing culture that they
help to construct.
David Woods will be
presenting a paper on HFR in this event. High Framerate Cinema (HFR) is
promoted as a leap forward in the cinema experience. This paper will illustrate
how some of the claims made by its creators echo very closely those surrounding
the introduction of widescreen processes in the 1950s. Chief amongst these is
the promise of increased immersiveness, an idea which is of course also
associated with 3D. However, then as now immersiveness proves to be a complex
and contradictory notion in promotional and popular discourse, and the outlines
of its principal meanings will be charted. While some of the issues raised by
the term have remained constant across the period, the paper argues that the
psychovisual characteristics of HFR do point to new configurations between
cinema and other media platforms, specifically television and videogames, and
prompt further investigation of the potential for new forms of onscreen
presence. Moreover, these characteristics can operate in combination with other
technologies such as 3D or IMAX but are autonomous from them, suggesting the
possibility of an increasingly intricate and diverse media landscape.
For the event details: http://thedigitalindepth.wordpress.com/
