This mixed-media series launched the Department of Modern Culture and Media's archaeology of multi-media project. Media objects ranged from screenings of multi-media work by Brown faculty (Tony Cokes and Todd Winkler) to a live performance/lecture by the award-winning UK- and Jamaica-based digital collective Mongrel; from early films by the Lumiere Brothers to recent limited-release features (Time Code).

The series will ran every Thursday (from September 21 till November 2) at 8 p.m.. Smith-Buonanno, rm 106.

• Black Celebration (1988 17:00)
• Confession (1992 28:00)
• Just Bcz Ur Paranoid... (1993 10:00)
• No Sell Out... (1996 6:00)
• AD Vice (1999 6:36)
• 2@ (2000 6:00)

Q&A session with Professor Cokes after the screenings.

Time Code (Mike Figgis, 2000, U.S.A., 97 minutes)

• Time Code is a motion picture shot entirely with hand-held digital cameras, in a single continuous take, with no editing. On a quadruple-split screen, four separate storylines unfold simultaneously in real time, building to a final, climactic moment in which they all unexpectedly come together. The plot-a black comedy thriller set against Los Angeles lifestyles-literally unfolded before the cameras as the actors each forged a trajectory for their characters based on the central elements of an affair, a murder and the chaos of a Hollywood production office. The cast worked with charts, maps and a time line in lieu of a script.

Society of the Spectacle (Guy Debord, France, 1973, 90 minutes)

• Debord's 1973 adaptation of his 1967 book by the same name, Society of the Spectacle is based upon the Situationist theory of "detournement," the recontextualization of pre-existing images as a form of social critique.The film is structured around intertitles in the form of voice overs of passages from Debord's 1967 text, as well as acknowledged and unacknowledged quotations from Hegel, Marx, Cieszkowski, von Clausewitz and others.

The Suicide Box (The Bureau for Inverse Technology, U.S.A., 1996, 13 minutes)

• A documentary video about the B.I.T Suicide Box, this vertical motion triggered device is designed to capture a video record of anything that falls from the Golden Gate Bridge in order to provide an accurate measure of the suicide rate at the bridge and providing an accurate measure of a social phenomena not previously adequately quantified, what B.I.T termed, the Despondency Index.

• Called actuaries, the Lumieres' films represent a mode of early motion pictures which claimed to let the film camera's basic function-the mechanical reproduction of visual reality-remain at the center of the film's interest.
• The French company Pathe Freres dominated film distribution worldwide in the 1900s. The company produced more films and pushed aesthetic boundaries (color, Orientalist and "other worldly" spectacle) with higher budgets than other comparable companies in this period.

Digital Objects: Little Movies (online films by Lev Manovich) + selected work by Alan Sondheim

Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America (Craig Baldwin, U.S.A., 1992, 48) + Spectres of the Spectrum (Craig Baldwin, U.S.A., 1999, U.S.A., 94 minutes)

• Two "media acheologies," one a pseduo-dcoumentary the other a narrative, Baldwin's work uses found footage such as kineoscopes, daytime tv, cartoons, James Bond movies etc... pieced together to create a narrative.Tribulation 99 purposrts to tell the stories of how aliens have secretly controlled American poltics, while Spectres of the Spectrum, follows a young woman and her father as they travel back in time to save the planet while also tracing the increasing corporate control of the media.

"Artistic Applications of Movement Sensing Systems in Computer Music, Dance, and Art Installations"

• This lecture presents several years of research and creative work in interactive music and video systems, with examples taken from three dance productions, "Hitches Bitches," "Songs for the Body Electric" and "Dark Around the Edges." These works use the Very Nervous System, a motion-sensing device which uses a video camera to analyze movement. The musical score is played entirely by the movement of the dancers. Winkler will also show examples from a recent sound and video installation, "Maybe...1910," where participants actions within a room trigger video and audio files.

Q&A session with Professor Winkler after the lecture.

Mongrel

1. a U.K.- and Jamaica-based artists group set up to explore issues of race, technology and new-eugenics
2. an agency to co-ordinate and set up other new media projects so that those locked out of the mainstream can gain strength without getting locked into power structures

archaeology
this term does not imply the search for a beginning; it does not relate analysis to a geological excavation. it designates the general theme of a description that questions the already-said at the level of its existence: of the enunciative function that operates within it, of the discursive formation, and the general archive system to which it belongs. archaeology describes discourses as practices specified in the element of the archive. (michel foucault, the archaeology of knowledge)

of
VII. Indicating the material or substance of which anything is made or consists. (OED)

multi-media
designating or pertaining to a form of artistic, educational, or commercial communication in which more than one medium is used....1968 Sun (Baltimore) 4 July A. 16/3 The notes of one conference we attended a few weeks ago..show that speakers were using such terms..as..multi-media and multi-mode curriculum. (OED