As promised, I'm going to recap a few of the highlights from the Visible Memories Conference held at Syracuse University this past weekend. Due to the magnitude of the proceedings, and the multiple breakout panels presenting at any given time, I only was able to attend a portion of the talks. However, the dozen or so presentations that I saw were of a very high calibre and I'm now somewhat intoxicated by the many exciting multidisciplinary research projects that I was able to taste test. Leading up to the event, the panel that I was most looking forward was Digital Aesthetics and Mnemonic Interfaces and what follows are brief synopses of two presentations from that session.
David S. Heineman is faculty in the Communications Studies department at the University of Pennsylvania. David presented a talk entitled Collective Memory and Digital Aesthetics: Redefining Democracy in God of War, 300 and HBO's Rome, which explored specific representations of Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire in gaming, film, and television. I wasn't so surprised to hear that Heineman was scrutinizing the CGI-constructed aesthetics of Zach Snyder's gorgeous 2006 film 300 (pictured above) and SCE Studios' God of War franchise - as both have been benchmarks in production design in their respective mediums. What did catch me off guard about Heineman's research was that he was using these precedents and the HBO series Rome to think about contemporary conceptions and representations of democracy.
Heineman's presentation really clicked when he showcased various scenes of legislation and governance in Rome and 300 alongside some examples from the contemporary American political arena (like the podium and stage-set for the 2008 Republican Convention pictured above). I appreciated the manner in which his research combined media and cultural studies while keeping an eye on representations of the past - in the present. I only wish David unpacked God of War a little more as it didn't seem to get as much attention as the other precedents.
Kevin Hamilton and Ned O'Gorman's presentation Nuclear Memory at the Interface was undoubtedly my favourite of the entire conference. Diving right into the thick of the Cold War, the two researchers sketched out the "interface aesthetics" of the nuclear age. The duo started out by introducing military theorist Bernard Brodie's famous assertion that the arrival of the atomic bomb rendered most military theory obsolete. They then proceeded to catalogue numerous instances of interface technology being used as the key image to facilitate communication about nuclear arsenals and protocols from military command centres out to the general public. Evidently the military assumed the blinking lights of a sterile control panel coupled with the figure of an educated technician tending to it conveyed a sense of machine precision and infallibility. This conversation is definitely poignant and maps quite nicely on to contemporary discussions about bomb/interface politics and aesthetics when you consider mobile, low-tech contraptions like Richard Reid's (aka the Shoe Bomber) kit above.
Also discussed (and something I'm planning on looking into) was the output of Lookout Mountain Laboratory, a Los Angeles-based military facility responsible for the production of a number of films and images for the U.S. Department of Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission between 1947 and 1969.
Kevin Hamilton and Ned O'Gorman are based at the Art and Design and Communication Departments at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I'm definitely interested on catching up with this research once it is published.
Chema Cobo
Marc Chagall
Chema Madoz
