CW2001 Program - Computers and Writing

1:30 — 3:00 Session H.6
Representations of Technology in Film and New Media
RB 292
Cynthia Selfe, moderator
Joe Essid
Life Out of Balance–Cinematic Hypertext and the Hopi Idea of
Koyaanisqatsi
In Godfrey Reggio’s film Koyaanisqatsi, filmgoers in the 1980s entered
a world out of control, ready to fly apart from pressure of technology
on the human psyche and the natural landscape. The talk considers
the methods used by Reggio and Glass and the ongoing project of
Reggio’s to capture, in documentaries without words or plot, the
essence of “life out of balance.”
Mike Keller
Cinematic Hypertext and Reader Agency in Eric Rodenbeck’s
Electronic Texts
Hypertext/media, multimedia, cross-genre texts, net art, new media,
or as Word (www.word.com) calls their featured media pieces, “things”:
this wide variety of electronic texts defy easy classification. Rodenbeck’s
texts provide readers with agency for non-linear navigation while
containing looped or sequential moving images within the larger work.
Erin Smith
A Memoir in Motion: The Role of Writing in Eneriwoman’s Flash
Interface
This presentation explores how eneriwoman uses writing within the
multimedia format of Flash to resist the closure of metaphor in favor of
the contingency of metonymy. In so doing, eneriwoman plays upon and
against traditional notions of private and public, of natural and produced.
Sharon Cogdill
Interiorizing Technology: Bookworms, Netrats, and How We Imagine
Virtuality
Max Headroom, Edward Scissorhands, and the ten Teletubby films now
out (among others) offer a theory of how we represent the process by
which we become, as a culture, electronically literate. The electronic
arts are uniquely situated for representing what e-literacy is because
postmodern self-awareness and reflexivity make the medium available
to us and because art can help us see what we can’t know.
Computers & Writing 2001
97