Final Programme for 2018 S&I Media Conferece is already available!
This year we will have a nineteenth-century inspired daguerreotype studio. You will be able to witness this amazing process and take the result home with you!
As in our previous edition, there will also be 3D film screenings! Edgar Pêra, Esther Jacopin and Florent Médina are some of the experimental 3D cinema directors S&I Media will feature. You will also be able to talk with the directors in a debate following the screenings.
We planned a visit to the Museum of Mechanical Music, next to Lisbon, which has a collection of more than 600 sound and musical items that move exclusively through mechanical systems from the late 1800s to the 1930s. In 2017, the Museum was awarded the Visitable Colection and Best Website Awards by the Portuguese Museology Association. Visitable Colection Award distinguishes “public or private spaces, with the presentation of a set of cultural goods that follows all the standards of communication, security and conservation”.
We are glad to announce the six projects selected for our very first exhibition Imersivo | Immersive:
Daydream Nation, Sandra Zuzarte Ferreira
This multimedia installation, created after Gerhard Richter’s work, suggests the deconstruction of a stereoscopic visualization process and a reflection on the act of seeing itself, while evoking the Schrödinger’s paradox to illustrate the creation of ghosts and simulacra.
Wandering Gaze, Ana Teresa Vicente
This project explores the relation established between the observer’s gaze and a certain image. Through the use of eye-tracking technology, this interactive installation suggests the suspension of gravity by a hidden force through the experience of a prosthetic gaze that pierces the observed object.
Passagem, Ana Catarina Teixeira
With this work, the artist seeks an approach to sleep, creating interactions between the concepts of vulnerability and human existence. This sound installation reflects on sleep as a verge state between two worlds and falling asleep as the moment of exterior absence, evoking the threshold between life and death.
Eccentric Spaces, Águeda Simó
This video installation explores the plasticity of stereo depth and its immersive qualities. Stereo depth can be manipulated to create eccentric dimensions and reveal hidden worlds that only exist inside the stereoscopic projections.
Atmosmancy, Ivo Louro
Atmosmancy is an immersive sound installation that explores the sonification of environmental data on climate changes and atmosphere pollution in Portugal. Atmosmancy transforms this monitored and projected data into corresponding sound streams, spatializing them via 10 audio speakers.
Her Fears / Her Dreams, Jennifer Crane
Series of stereoscopic photographs (7”x 3” archival pigment prints) based on historical views of western Canada and on the photographic archives of William Notman, who owned and operated one of the largest photographic studios in Canada during the nineteenth century.
This year, S&I Media will have a session entirely dedicated to stereo photography in Spain. Taking place on the 28 of June at Lusófona University, this session will be delivered by researchers Celia Cuenca (Barcelona University), Juan A. Fernández Rivero e Maria Teresa García Ballesteros (Fernández Rivero Colection, Málaga) and José Antonio Hernández Latas (Zaragoza University). We look forward to discovering the details of their research!
For more information on this and other sessions, check our program here.
Research Center Digital Communication and Media Innovation (DKMI), Director Master’s Program International Media Cultural Work (IMC), Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences, Faculty of Media, Germany
Abstract
Since around one decade, the word „immersion“ has become one of the major terms relating to current developments in digital media. Being able to (re-)create the experience of being surrounded by and immersed in sensory impressions is widely considered as a main characteristic of nowaday’s digital technologies, as for example in games, in 360° film or in 3D audio. As in 3D audio, immersion’s aesthetic strength is mainly assigned to cohesiveness as well as to its capability to create an “as if” experience. By this it is coming very close to the experience of reality, and is touching, if not transgressing the boundaries to Virtual Reality.
Concerning sound and audiomedia, there is, however, an interesting history of critical approach, when it comes to illusionism and realism made possible and enhanced by new technologies. – This presentation will not only point out critical aspects of immersion as a goal for media experience in general, but show artistic methods and strategies, by which the critique can be made fruitful, expanding 3D-audio’s aesthetic potential beyond the limitations of the merely obvious.
Kim Timby, photography historian, curator and teacher at the École du Louvre, whose research explores the cultural history of photographic technologies, will deliver a presentation titled: The construction of the integral-image utopia.
In the mid-twentieth-century, it was widely believed that innovations in photographing movement, color, and depth would one day afford complete mastery of the simulation of visual perception. This collective representation of purpose and of progress in photography was eloquently expressed as the “myth of total cinema” by André Bazin (1946), who argued that the longing for “integral realism” had always marked mechanical reproduction, inspiring inventors since the nineteenth century.
The present article historicizes this integral-image utopia, mapping the expression of its intellectual mechanisms in the first accounts of photography then in photography’s emerging historiography. This research reveals the absence of a shared project around “complete” perceptual realism for most of the nineteenth century. The idea of prgress toward a total image reproducing vision emerged and came to prevail in the popular imagination at a very particular moment—in 1896, following the invention of cinema—, transforming how people thought about the future of photography and told the story of its past.
Dr Michael Pritchard FRPS, Chief Executive of the Royal Photographic Society and author of a number of books on the history of the camera and photography will deliver a presentation titled: Protecting and exploiting photography through patents and trademarks in nineteenth century Britain.
We are delighted to announce the title for the keynote session by Denis Pellerin at Universidade Lusófona. The specialist in Stereo Photography will deliver a presentation titled: The Stereoscope: Claudet’s “general panorama of the world”.
Antoine Claudet opened Britain’s second photographic studio in April 1841, and by 1845 he had already photographed hundreds of aristocratic and middle class customers as well as dozens of personalities, celebrities and royalties. When the refracting stereoscope was introduced at the 1851 Great Exhibition he was the first photographer to advertise binocular portraits and three dimensional views of the Crystal Palace. To the end of his life he championed the “magical instrument” and wrote extensively about it. Claudet was not only a talented photographer and a populariser of stereoscopy whose 3-D portraits still delight viewers today; he worked relentlessly to improve photographic technique and processes and he even experimented with 3-D movement. He could simply not be absent from a seminar devoted to all things stereoscopic.
A nineteenth-century inspired daguerreotype studio will be installed at the conference venue, Universidade Lusófona.
Thanks to LUPA – Luís Pavão Lda. (www.lupa.com.pt), you will rediscover one of the first techniques of photography and take the result back home with you.
This unique experience will take around 2 hours, during which you will be invited to participate in the several stages of the process: polishing the brass plate, preparing a pose with clothing and props of your choice, exposure of the plate to iodine vapors to create a light-sensitive surface, image development, fixation and gilding, and finally the packaging of the plate in a case specifically designed for this event.
