http://screenaesthetics.com What is the nature of our involvement with what we see on screen? Sat, 02 Jan 2010 07:26:19 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en One of the things the Coen brothers already knew that no doubt attracted them to Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men was the importance of theoretical physics for 20th and 21st century aesthetics. That the nature of matter involved at the most fundamental levels chance, uncertainty, and vast dense ... http://screenaesthetics.com/?p=21 As in the first Modern Warfare game Infinity Ward's latest FPS delivers a fine range of military aesthetics, the sounds sights and movements of shooting over distances and using the environment as a palette for lethal human interaction. As in all of the Call of Duty games, death is accompanied ... http://screenaesthetics.com/?p=20 For the past seven months I've been running a reading group on Donald Sassoon's 2006 book, The Culture of the Europeans, working our way through its 1600+ pages; yesterday Professor Sassoon himself turned up at the University of Queensland to give a masterclass on the book, and what a class ... http://screenaesthetics.com/?p=19 I attended what turned out to be a somewhat bizarre event at my home university yesterday, a symposium on the past, present and future of cultural studies. The speakers were: Graeme Turner, who introduced the book he is writing which is pretty much the title of the symposium; Frances Bonner ... http://screenaesthetics.com/?p=17 One of the many attractions of the You Suck at Photoshop is its visualisation of performance and subjectivity in the form of interaction with software. Juxtaposed with the brilliant vocal performance by Troy Hitch the mouse pointer's manipulation of Photoshop's complex devices is a beautiful transformation of flat, 2-D surfaces ... http://screenaesthetics.com/?p=15 Copyright:  Stephen Crofts   First of all, there’s so much in it.  Take the TV hour (probably 42 minutes) of last night’s episode (Channel 7, 8 September 2008).  In terms of intellectual substance, it includes legal and ethical debate, plus political analysis, about euthanasia; and political debate about nuclear deterrence.  There is ... http://screenaesthetics.com/?p=14 I was reading Patrice Petro's Aftershocks of the New (2002) this morning since I'm working on a paper about distraction and boredom and I came across this: ...this collection hopes to contribute to the larger task of restoring richness, complexity and vitality to our understanding of feminism and film history in ... http://screenaesthetics.com/?p=13 Guy Rundle is without doubt the one of the finest political and cultural commentator/journalists working today. His coverage of the US elections for the Australian electronic magazine Crikey is worth the price of subscription alone. A couple of things he's written about television recently have grabbed my attention as they ... http://screenaesthetics.com/?p=12 Sound can be crucial to our experience of screen: it can extend textures and meaning, deepen space, enhance or question the sense of what we see. As a regular radio listener (although it has to be said my consumption of radio is mostly non-broadcast radio: that is downloaded podcasts of ... http://screenaesthetics.com/?p=11 Screenaesthetics.com has been on a bit of a break since launching in October: this is mostly because I have been caught up in various things to do with moving from one job to another. In 2008 the site will be a lot more active and will involve more contributors and points ... http://screenaesthetics.com/?p=10