Conferences and Invited Presentations

Respondent, The Cultural Logics of Replay, Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Spring 2011

Invited Presenter, DATABASE | NARRATIVE | ARCHIVE: An International Symposium on Nonlinear Digital Storytelling, Spring 2011

Moderator and Presenter, “Realizing Scalar Capacities to Transform Media Archive Scholarship” at Reimagining the Archive, Fall 2010

Panel Chair: Visible Evidence XVI, Emerging Modes of Documentary: Mobile, Computational, Distributed, Summer 2009

Workshop: The Korsakow System: A Database Documentary Workshop, Visible Evidence XVI, Summer 2009

Paper Presentation, “Fair Use and the Future of Media Studies: the Case for Critical Commons,” Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Summer 2009

Respondent, Installation, Energy Monitor Project: Visualizing Energy Consumption, Mobilities and Metadata Flows, Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Summer 2009

Invited Presentation: Open Video Conference, “Fair Use and Critical Commons,” Summer 2009

Paper Presentation: Games For Change: Documentary Games: The Case for Computational Documentary, Spring 2009

Invited presentation: “Interface Epistemologies: Designing New Paradigms of Knowledge” at American Comparative Literature Association conference, Spring 2008

Invited presentation: Respondent to Tracy Fullerton, “The Potential of Play: Digital Game Innovation” at Getty Research Center Works in Progress Lecture Series, Spring 2008

Panel Chair: State of the Art at 24/7: A DIY Video Summit with Henry Jenkins, Alex Juhasz, Juan Devis, Sam Gregory and Thenmozhi Soundararajan, February 2008

Workshop leader: Designing Interactive Narratives at 24/7: A DIY Video Summit, February 2008

Invited presentation: “Scholarship at the Interface” at Harvard Digital Humanities Center, November 2007

Invited presentation: “Multimedia Literacy in Higher Education” WASC Annual Conference, San Jose March 2007

Panel Chair: “The Roots and Future of Remix” at TransFormations I: Remixing the Archive, November 2006

Workshop: “San Jose Remixed: An Open Source Interactive Narrative Workshop” at ISEA (Inter-Society for Electronic Arts) San Jose, Summer 2006

Panel Chair: “The Future of Digital Education” Panel discussion held in Second Life, November 2006

Paper presentation: “Coming to Terms with the Digital Avant-Garde” Inter-Society for Electronic Arts, San Jose 2006

Poster session: “Re-Imagining the Electronic Journal” at Inter-Society for Electronic Arts, San Jose 2006

Workshop: “Designing Interactive Documentaries” SIGGRAPH Guerilla Studio, Boston 2006

Workshop: “Experiments in Interactive Panoramic Cinema” Electronic Imaging Science and Technology Symposium, San Jose 2006

Invited presentation: “Open Source Scholarship” Massive Multimedia Database, Annenberg Center for Communication, 2006

Invited presentation: “From Paper Prints to Fast Film: Techno-Syncretism and Digital Materiality” Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral lecture, Swarthmore College 2003

Paper presentation: “Steal This Archive: The Demise of Intellectual Property in the Digital Millennium” Society for Cinema Studies, Denver 2002

Paper presentation: “Past Indiscretions: Interactive Media and Recombinant History” Visible Evidence IX, Brisbane, Australia 2001

Paper presentation: “Where History Lies: Fact, Fiction and the Margins of History” Society for Cinema Studies, Chicago 2000

Panel chair: Spatializing History and Memory Interactive Frictions, USC 1999

Paper presentation: “Landscape Historicide: Textualizing the Past in James Benning’s Southwest Trilogy” Visible Evidence VII, UCLA 1999

Panel chair: Hollywood Cinema/Visionary Film Society for Cinema Studies, San Diego 1998

Paper presentation: “Dis(re)membering the Past: Experimental Film and Narrative History” Society for Cinema Studies, San Diego 1998

Paper presentation: “Politicizing the Past: The Materialist History Films of Jean-Marie Straub and Daniéle Huillet” Making/Unmaking History, USC 1998

Paper presentation: “Appropriated Images: Home Movies and Autobiographical Film” Visible Evidence V, Northwestern University 1997

Paper presentation: “Creative Remembering: The Significance of Anti-Realist History on Film and Television” International Association of Media and History Salisbury State University 1997

UCLA Reimagining the Archive conference

Mark Williams organized this panel titled “Realizing Scalar Capacities To Transform Media Archives” with Erik Loyer, Craig Dietrich and myself, which was to be our first public debut of our work on Scalar for the Reimagining the Archive conference at UCLA on November 13, 2010. Unfortunately, Mark was unable to attend but was ably replaced by Jackson Stakeman, who stole the show with an improvised VJ set using sampled video sequences from his project about Walter White, incubated during the NEH funded Broadening the Digital Humanities seminar at USC last summer. You can download my presentation from the conference site as a PDF here; Erik’s slides are here.

Steve’s Lightning talk at Open Video 2009

My five-minute presentation sketching the origins, goals and context of Critical Commons for attendees at the 2009 Open Video conference.

IKEA as ARG project at HASTAC conference

On Friday April 16 as part of the HASTAC Grand Challenges and Global Innovations virtual conference, I will be “presenting” (live via pre-recorded video) a project from my class last semester titled “Interactive Experience and World Design: IKEA as ARG” in which graduate students from USC’s Interactive Media program infiltrated an IKEA retail outlet to analyze the spatial and narrative design of the store as part of an Alternate Reality Game experience. The video offers a summary of the course context and project assignment, focusing on the concept of “scripted spaces,” drawn from Norman Klein’s book The Vatican to Vegas. This video also marks the first time I have had content automatically removed from my YouTube account due to the inclusion of copyrighted material. In representing the transmedia context for this project, the video includes clips of television programs, feature films, advertisements and popular music, at least one of which was flagged by YouTube’s copyright-filtering system on behalf of the Fox/News Corp. media conglomerate. I have filed a counter-takedown notice with YouTube in the hopes of having the video reinstated for public viewing, but for now, it is viewable as a Quicktime file or on Vimeo.

Project Documentation Talk at Art Center

I just gave a talk at Art Center College of Design to students in the graduate Media Design Program about video documentation. My basic thesis was that, for many interactive media projects, installations, performances (etc.), the documentation can be as important as the work itself. Good documentation begins well before the project is complete, often incorporating video and still images of the process, iteration and underlying technologies associated with the project. Although I have been teaching documentation strategies for many years, this was the first time I have attempted to outline a taxonomy of documentation genres. Slides from my presentation are posted on Slideshare; most of the video samples are available online.

Presentation to Interactive Media seminar

A two-part presentation by Steve Anderson at the Interactive Media 511 seminar September 24, 2008: “Evocative Knowledge Objects” and “The War Between Theory and Practice.”

Administration: program design and direction

During the past six years, I have participated in the creation and administration of two academic programs at USC that are devoted to merging theory and practice through the use of media and technology. I was the principle architect and for three years (2004-07) served as Director of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy’s Honors in Multimedia Scholarship program, a four-year undergraduate program that seeks to develop innovative, media-rich modes of academic production across multiple disciplines. In 2008, the program graduated its first cohort of 31 students from disciplines as diverse as Biophysics, Engineering, Theater, Music, Cinematic Arts, Classics, East Asian Literature, Linguistics, Broadcast Journalism, International Relations and Business, each of whom had created a media-rich project based on research in his/her major; the program currently enrolls more than 150 students from across the university.

In my current position as Director of the interdivisional Media Arts & Practice Ph.D. program, which I helped design and found in 2007, I have had a rare opportunity to create a graduate program that responds to rapidly shifting practices in media and technology-enhanced scholarship. Having welcomed our fourth cohort of students to the program in fall 2010, I believe iMAP has the potential to set an international standard among universities seeking to recognize emerging forms of scholarship at the intersection of theory and practice.

USC’s establishment and support of these programs signals the importance of research that responds to changing paradigms of scholarship in the 21st century. Indeed, the university’s visionary strategic “Plan for Increasing Academic Excellence” (2004) cites the need for USC to continue its commitment to scholarly work that links fundamental research with applied research as a key element of its future success. I am proud to be associated with several of this university’s most provocative efforts in this direction, from the reshaping of undergraduate and graduate education through media and technology to the redefining of scholarly research and publication at the faculty level.

New to the School of Cinematic Arts in 2007, the interdivisional program in Media Arts and Practice (iMAP) situates technology and creative production alongside the historical and theoretical contexts of critical media studies. This practice-oriented Ph.D. program provides students with both practical experience and theoretical knowledge as they work to define new modes of research and production in the 21st century.

Media Arts and Practice was inspired by recent developments in media and technology that have altered the landscape of media production, analysis, distribution and display. Our goal is to support a new generation of scholar-practitioners who are able to combine historical and theoretical knowledge with creative and critical design skills. Students who complete a Ph.D. in Media Arts and Practice will be uniquely prepared to shape the future of media and scholarship, and to actively engage in the emerging cultural, technological and political dynamics of a global media ecology.

Honors in Multimedia Scholarship is an innovative four-year program for undergraduate students from across the USC campus who are interested in exploring new forms of scholarship and research. Working closely with leading USC faculty, students develop critical and creative abilities in the use of images, video, sound, text and interactivity, crafting media-rich forms of scholarship.

Curating

Curating has been a significant aspect of my university service as well as being integrated with my own research and creative practice. But most importantly, I see it as a means of giving visibility to alternative media practices. As co-Chair of 24/7: A DIY Video Summit, I helped curate more than twelve hours of genre-based screening programs as part of a three-day festival at USC in 2008, with a follow-up event in 2010; and in 2007, I curated the USC Arts & Humanities Initiative Visions & Voices event Remixing the Archive, which included workshops, screenings, performances and panels devoted to an in-depth investigation of remix culture. The previous year, I curated two programs for the Annenberg Center’s Networked Publics media festival: The Digital Handmade and Political Remix. And in 2002, I co-curated with Holly Willis the Digital Media Salon for the Race in Digital Space 2.0 conference, which featured performances, sound art, interactive installations, a net art exhibit and multiple video programs. For more than a decade I served on the Board of Directors of Filmforum, Los Angeles’ oldest venue for experimental media, and for the past eight years I have co-curated with Holly Willis the screening series Blur + Sharpen at USC, which showcases new work by digital artists in the fields of design, motion graphics, animation, video and interactive media. Due to the rapidly evolving nature of contemporary digital media, these curatorial efforts allow me to remain current with often ephemeral work by cutting edge designers, artists and amateurs, while also allowing me to serve as an advocate for work that is particularly innovative, challenging or provocative. For me, curating also serves to enrich the creative and intellectual culture in Los Angeles and provides inspiration for my own scholarly and creative work.

24/7: Collective Action
Co-curator with Mimi Ito and Holly Willis
A one-hour program of DIY videos highlighting collaborative and collective practices in online video
Fall 2010

Blur + Sharpen
Co-curator with Holly Willis
A screening series at USC for recent digital media
2001-present

24/7: A DIY Video Summit
Co-chair (with Mimi Ito)
Three-day international conference and festival at USC
Spring 2008

The Digital Handmade
Curator, screening program; moderator of panel discussion for artists
Networked Publics Conference and Media Festival
Annenberg Center for Communication
Spring 2006

Political Remix
Co-curator, screening program and interactive display
Networked Publics Conference and Media Festival
Annenberg Center for Communication
Spring 2006

Race in Digital Space 2.0 Digital Salon
An evening of performances, screenings and interactive artwork for the Race in Digital Space 2.0 conference
Fall 2002

Los Angeles Filmforum
Member of Board of Directors
LA’s oldest screening venue for experimental film and video
Spring 1999-2010

Committees

Chair, Envisioning the Future Committee, USC School of Cinematic Arts, 2009-2010

Chair, Media Arts & Practice Steering Committee, USC School of Cinematic Arts, 2007-2010

Chair, Media Arts & Practice Admissions Committee, USC School of Cinematic Arts, 2007-2010

Member of Interactive Media Job Search Committee, USC School of Cinematic Arts, 2009

Member of Interactive Media Graduate Admissions Committee, USC School of Cinematic Arts, 2009

Member of Curriculum Committee, USC School of Cinematic Arts, 2007-2010

Member of E-learning Committee, USC School of Cinematic Arts, 2006-8

Blur+Sharpen returns Thursday 2/26: Time Out of Place

The Blur + Sharpen Screening series presents: “Time Out of Place”
Thursday, February 26 at 8:00pm in SCA 108
The city becomes both a focal point and the backdrop for a series of videos made over the last decade that reflect a fascination with urban space, movement, mapping and the possibility of art. Highlights include Thomson & Craighead’s “desktop documentary” titled Flat Earth, Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt’s Time Out of Place, which attempts to portray the city’s past, present and future simultaneously, and the usual array of music videos and design shorts.

Fair Use Day Monday October 27

With fear, uncertainty and misinformation dominating the discourse of copyright and intellectual property, Fair Use has become one of the most vexing issues in today’s academic landscape. This day-long event at USC’s Annenberg Research Park addresses these issues head-on with a series of presentations and discussions with key players in the advancement and redefinition of fair use, coupled with a faculty showcase and hands-on workshops at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy. The goal of this event is to bring clarity to questions of fair use for scholars, students and educators working with copyrighted media for research, teaching and electronic publication.
Visiting presenters include Peter Jaszi, legal architect of the Center for Social Media’s Best Practices in Fair Use guides, Eric Faden, creator of the viral Disney cutup A Fair(y) Use Tale, Eric Steuer, Creative Director of Creative Commons, who brought the world the remixable Wired CD, and Francesca Coppa, co-founder of the Organization for Transformative Works.
We believe this event will facilitate some much-needed discussion of the state of contemporary Fair Use and where we should be setting our sights for the future. The event is free and open to the public. See complete schedule below.

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EKO & Theory/Practice presentations

A couple of people have asked to see the presentations from this week’s seminar on Evocative Knowledge Objects and The War Between Theory and Practice, so here are links via Vuvox and Slideshare:
Vuvox: Evocative Knowledge Objects
Slideshare: The War Between Theory and Practice