AMMI guest lecture - VIVIAN SOBCHACK (UCLA): "Rendering Time, or the Digital Transformation of (Meta)Physical Reality"

Guest lecture organized by the theme group Arts, Medium and Moving Images.

Vivian Sobchack, Professor Emerita, University of California, Los Angeles
"Rendering Time, or the Digital Transformation of (Meta)Physical Reality"

Abstract

In her guest lecture, film scholar Vivian Sobchack will reflect on the radical, if sometimes transparent, shifts in our experience and understanding of time as it has been "rendered" by the pervasive (and correspondent) technological digitizing of cinema and culture since the new millennium. It takes its major inspiration from phenomenological historian Stephen Kern's The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918, which addresses "new" technology's direct and indirect transformations of temporal and spatial experience and thought in this previous millennial period, and also provides a methodological and comparative basis for highlighting the radical transformations of our own.

About the speaker

Vivian Sobchack (Professor Emerita, UCLA) is one of the most influential American film theorists of the past quarter-century. At the beginning of the 1990s she was the main driving force behind the recuperation of phenomenology as a viable methodology in film studies with her book The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton University Press, 1992). Insisting on the bodily and material foundations of film viewing, she has fervently defended an existential-phenomenological approach to moving image media ever since, perhaps nowhere more elegantly than in the essays of Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (University of California Press, 2004). Sobchack was the first woman elected President of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS), from which she also received the Distinguished Career Achievement Award (2012). She also served for two decades as the only academic on the Board of Directors of the American Film Institute (AFI).