As part of our next workshop in the Narrative Liminality network, we would like to invite all interested students and scholars to two guest lectures on April 26 and April 27:
Prof. Leon Gurevitch (Victoria University of Wellington) will speak on the topic "Liminal Labour: Narrating the Quantified Career and the Symbolic Value of Visual Effects Production." His talk takes place on Friday, April 26, 5.30pm at the Villa Tillmanns (Wächterstr. 30, 04107 Leipzig).
Prof. Gurevitch will discuss the narration of career paths across spectacular media industries in the context of globalized labor precarity, socially networked 'self-employed' subjectivity, and the rise of the quantified self. His talk will combine emergent understandings of the global flows of digital attractions with an analysis of the ways in which digital image industry professionals deploy show-reels to promote themselves on the international jobs market. He will point out how 'digital nomads' of the spectacular media industries exist at a nexus point of multiple overlapping (and sometimes competing) liminalities, as games and visual effects producers attempt to carve out careers in the space between rapidly changing production and consumption technologies that make insiders and outsiders of all involved.
Leon Gurevitch is Associate Professor at the School of Design at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Among his research interests are digital simulation, imaging industries, and areas of convergence between art and science as well as design and technology. He currently holds a research grant by the New Zealand Royal Society for a three-year project studying work cultures and global skills migration of the digital imaging industry.
Prof. Jeremy Douglass (UC Santa Barbara) will speak on the topic "Interactive Narrative across Media: Gameplay Structures, Symbols, and Forms." His talk takes place on Saturday, April 27, 9.30am at the Villa Tillmanns (Wächterstr. 30, 04107 Leipzig).
Prof. Douglass will discuss how interactive narratives across print, film, and digital media are understood, represented, and experienced. He will particularly focus on the Transverse Reading Project, which has compiled a catalog and atlas of the structures of hundreds of interactive stories, with initial surveys in branching narrative genres including print gamebooks, hypertext fictions, visual novels, and digital Twine games. His talk reviews the project survey of the multitude of graph data formats and the eventual development of a simple, human-editable plain-text data format to describe the structural aspects of narrative branches in a relatively media-independent way.
Jeremy Douglass is Assistant Professor at the Department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He specializes in interactive narrative, games, and electronic literature, especially with the methods of software studies, critical code studies, and cultural analytics. He is the faculty director of the Digital Arts and Humanities Commons at US Santa Barbara.
