Recently I wrote about an enticing forthcoming conference at Swansea University on The Computational Turn, which, alas, I was unable to attend. Well, good news has arrived for us all in London, and indeed, the South East of England. The two keynotes of that conference – N. Katherine Hayles and Lev Manovich – have been grabbed on their way to Swansea by the Centre for Media and Culture Research at London South Bank University to give a double-bill seminar. The event takes place on Monday, 8 March 2010 at 1pm in Lecture Theatre 4, K2 Building, Keyworth Street, London SE1. It’s an open event, but places are limited, so you need to reserve your place by emailing Anna Reading, the Head of the Centre for Media and Culture Research, at readinam@lsbu.ac.uk

Below are the abstracts for the Manovich and Hayles seminars

How to study 1000000 Manga pages? Visualization methods for humanities and media studies

Over the last 20 years, information visualization became a common tool in science and also a growing presence in the arts and culture at large. However, the use of visualization in humanities is still in its infancy. Based on the work in the analysis of video games, cinema, TV, animation, Manga and other media carried out in Software Studies Initiative at University of California, San Diego over last two years, this paper presents a possible taxonomy of visualization techniques and methods particularly useful for cultural and media research.

Software studies initiative: http://lab.softwarestudies.com / Examples of media visualizations: www.flickr.com/photos/culturevis

Lev Manovich is Professor of Visual Culture at the University of California, San Diego. His books include Software Takes Command (released under CC license, 2008), Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database (MIT Press, 2005), and The Language of New Media (MIT Press, 2001), hailed as ‘the most suggestive and broad ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan.’

Tech-TOC: Complex Temporalities in Digital Media

Theorists of technology such as Gilbert Simondon, Bruno Latour and Adrian Mackenzie argue that the creation, transmission and use of technical objects emerge from a temporal ‘folding’ in which past, present and future intermingle. At stake is not only the nature of temporalities but also the complex ways in which humans and technical objects engage in technogenesis, that is, cycles of mutual co-evolution. These theories will be interrogated to propose a model whereby our contemporary technological landscapes interact with human cognition and biology on both conscious and unconscious levels. The model will then be explored through Steve Tomasula’s electronic multi-modal novel, TOC, in which time, biology, and technology interpenetrate one another.

N. Katherine Hayles, Professor of Literature at Duke University, teaches and writes on the relations of science, technology and literature in the 20th and 21st centuries. Her book How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics won the Rene Wellek Prize for the Best Book in Literary Theory for 1998-99, and her book Writing Machines won the Suzanne Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship. Other recent books include My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts and Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. She is currently writing a book entitled How We Think: The Transforming Power of Digital Technologies.