CeMoRe Seminar - the iPhone, Mobility and Magic
Date: 13 May 2010 Time: 4.15 to 6.00pm
Venue: Bowland North Seminar Room 5
Ryan Diduck, McGill University and CeMoRe
"Reach out and touch something that touches you back: the iPhone, Mobility and Magic"
Abstract: Touch screen technologies proliferate through our daily lives. Increasingly, they are found not only in banks or on the backs of airplane seats; they occupy our pockets in the form of cell phones, and branded mobile screen devices. Current critical discourses tell us that the images represented through these and other digital devices cease to retain an indexical link to their referent object. However, I argue in this essay that not only does indexicality remain intact, but also, specifically, Apple mobile touch screen devices use specific rhetoric to promise unprecedented visual access to -- and "magical" interaction with -- images across vast time and space. Furthermore, these totemic devices enable users to see haptically, a mode which privileges the simultaneous materiality and dynamism of the televisual space between users, devices, and the digital image.
Bio: Ryan Diduck is a Ph.D. candidate and SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship recipient in Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. He graduated magna cum laude from the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema in 2006 with a BFA in Film Production, and in '08 with an MA in Film Studies. His research interests include mobile screen devices, visual and material culture, motion picture advertising, and aesthetics of residual media. Under the name "Chester Desmond", Ryan is also an award-winning musician and filmmaker, whose works have showcased at festivals in New York, London and Montréal.
Contact:
Who can attend: Anyone
Further information
Associated staff: Monika Büscher
Organising departments and research centres: Centre for Mobilities Research (CeMoRe), Computing and Communications, ImaginationLancaster, Mobilities.Lab, Sociology
Keyword: Mobilities
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