Abstract: 43RD SOCIETY FOR PHOTOGRAPHIC EDUCATION NATIONAL CONFERENCE CHICAGO, ILLINOIS MARCH 23-26, 2006 While many recent national conferences of the Society for Photographic Education (SPE) have addressed the influence of new technologies and the changing nature of academia, whether directly or by default, this year's gathering flew overtly under the banner of A New Pluralism: Photography's Future. Covering this topic in any comprehensive manner in one weekend is a tall order but after forty-three years the organization is ripening into middle age, accepting inevitable change, and progressively looking forward to future eras. This theme invited preliminary conversations around such issues as how photographic practice is redefined as a result of digital technologies and the potential of photographic education within the increasing milieu of multidisciplinary academic practices. Henry Jenkins, professor of Humanities and director of the Comparative Media Studies program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, opened the proceedings with an engaging Keynote Address. The indomitable Jenkins, author or co-author of such books as Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (1992), Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (2003), and From Barbie [R] to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games (2000), presented I Want to Teach the World to See: Amateur Photography, Participatory Culture, and Media built upon ideas raised in his forthcoming book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. He first defined technological as interplay between old and new media, a cultural process whereby a community pools knowledge, referencing Pierre Levy's notion of collective intelligence. Jenkins discussed how relationships between existing technologies, markets, industries, and audiences are changed by this process. Convergence, he explained, alters the logic by which media industries operate and by which media consumers process news and entertainment. He clarified convergence as a process, not an endpoint: contrary to the predictions (and fears) of some, all media will not converge into a single-source conveyance. Instead, we can look forward to a future where media will be everywhere. Jenkins, always equipped with a wealth of pop culture referents, provided numerous examples of convergence from the Sims to cell phones to amateur video to Flickr. Honored Educator Carl Toth, artist-in-residence and head of the Photography Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, utilized familial images and a personal history of imagemaking to examine the interpretation of photographs. Featured Speaker Barbara Stafford, a professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago presented Beyond the Atomistic Aperture: The Spiritual History of the Apparatus. Stafford drew upon the objects she gathered for Devices of Wonder, an exhibition at the Getty Museum in 2001 that explored the historical underpinnings of the concepts of multimedia and virtual reality by documenting human interest in sense-enhancing and imagemaking technologies since the Renaissance. …
Publication Year: 2006
Publication Date: 2006-05-01
Language: en
Type: article
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