Film Screening: TASKAFA, October 7 6:30PM

THE COLLOQUIUM FOR UNPOPULAR CULTURE @ DRAPER presents:

TASKAFA, STORIES OF THE STREET (dir. Andrea Luka Zimmerman, 2013), 66 min. – presented by Ilker Hepkaner and Daniel Hoffman-Schwartz

WHEN: Friday 7 October 2016, 6:30pm

WHERE: Hagop Kevorkian Center, 50 Washington Square South [at 255 Sullivan Street]

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Sponsored by the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at New York University

TASKAFA is an exploration of memory and belonging told through the sometimes-shocking history of Istanbul’s community of street dogs. In spite of attempts over the last 400 years by the city’s rulers to exterminate them, the dogs have refused to accept they have no right to live there. TASKAFA offers a collage of testimonials from Istanbul’s residents, and uses readings by John Berger from his novel King – a story of hope, dreams and resistance told from the perspective of a dog – to create a moving and sometimes joyful essay-film about modernity, about foreign-ness, about who cities are for.

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ILKER HEPKANER, a doctoral student at the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at NYU, is writing a dissertation on the relation between heritage practices, visuality, and space in Turkey and Israel. He is also a literary translator.

DANIEL HOFFMAN-SCHWARTZ is currently a lecturer in Comparative Lecturer at Princeton University. After receiving his PhD from NYU in 2012 he was a lecturer for two years in the Humanities Program at Bogazici University in Istannbul. He is the co-editor of Flirtations: Rhetoric and Aesthetics This Side of Seduction (2015), and currently at work on a monograph on the concept of political romanticism.

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Thanks to Andrea Luka  Zimmerman

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QUERIES: ss162[at]nyu.edu

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HyperCities: Thick Mapping in the Digital Humanities January 15

Thursday January 15, 5:00 – 6:30PM

Reception to follow; Books available for sale.

Jurow Lecture Hall at New York University Silver Center, Room 101, 100 Washington Square East (entrance on Washington Place)

Todd Presner discusses his collaboratively authored new book, co-edited with David Shepard and Yoh Kawano, a metaLAB project from Harvard University Press, and tours its companion website http://www.hypercities.com. Todd Presner is Sady and Ludwig Kahn Director of the Center for Jewish Studies, Professor of Germanic Languages and Comparative Literature, and Chair of the Digital Humanities Program at the University of California, Los Angeles.

In conversation with:

Matthew K. Gold, Associate Professor of English and Digital Humanities, Graduate Center, CUNY; Director of the CUNY Academic Commons and Editor of Debates in the Digital Humanities (University of Minnesota Press, 2012)

Laura Kurgan, Associate Professor of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, and Director of the Spatial Information Design Lab at Columbia University, and author of Close Up, at a Distance: Mapping, Technology, Politics (Zone Books, the MIT Press, 2013)

Introduced by Thomas Augst, Associate Professor of English and Acting Director of Digital Humanities, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, New York University

Part of the metaLAB series of books about the digital humanities, HyperCities: Thick Mapping in the Digital Humanities (2014) is a collaboratively authored and designed exploration of mapping cities over time. The primary authors are Todd Presner, David Shepard, and Yoh Kawano, with contributions by Philip Ethington, Mike Blockstein, Reanne Estrada, Chris Johanson, Diane Favro, and Xarene Eskandar. A digital platform transmogrified into a book, it profiles the ambitious online project of the same name that maps the historical layers of city spaces in an interactive, hypermedia environment. The authors examine the media archaeology of Google Earth and the cultural–historical meaning of map projections, and explore recent events—the “Arab Spring” and the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster—through social media mapping that incorporates data visualizations, photographic documents, and Twitter streams. HyperCities includes a “ghost map” of downtown Los Angeles, polyvocal memory maps of LA’s historic Filipinotown, avatar-based explorations of ancient Rome, and hour-by-hour mappings of the 2009 Tehran election protests.

This in an NYC-DH event, sponsored by NYU Libraries, in partnership with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of New York University.

Call for Papers: Abiding Cities, Remnant Sites

The students of the Department of Comparative Literature and the Italian Specialization at the CUNY Graduate Center present the annual interdisciplinary conference entitled Abiding Cities, Remnant Sites to be held on November 13 and 14, 2014.

“Abiding cities” refers to the traces that remain not only physically but also in our imagination, especially when sites undergo transformation and disruption. Throughout history, geographic and metaphorical places have been a source of inspiration as well as lasting products of the artistic process. Real and imaginary settings, from New York and Rome to Helicon and the Land of Oz, have been built and recast by a variety of authors who have forged cities within our collective imaginary. Among them are writers and scientists, philosophers and cartographers, film directors and explorers: Plato, St. Augustine, Shakespeare, Marco Polo, Thomas More, Piranesi, Balzac, Borges, Woolf, Elsa Morante, Christa Wolf, Thomas Mann, Amitav Ghosh, Ben Okri, Vikram Chandra, Norman Bel Geddes, Federico Fellini, Woody Allen, Italo Calvino, and many others.

We invite papers from all disciplines focusing on works from any period that explore the idea of “abiding cities” in literature, philosophy, theory, visual arts, film, and social sciences.

For full details please visit the Conference Website.

Please email a 250 word abstract to Fall2014GCCuny@gmail.com by 20 September 2014, and include your Name, Affiliation, Paper Title and any technology requests.

Call for Scholarly Articles: InVisible Culture, an Electronic Journal for Visual Culture

For its twenty-third issue, InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture invites scholarly articles and creative works that consider the multiple valences of the topic: blueprints.

In his theoretical manifesto, Toward An Architecture, Le Corbusier wrote, “The plan is the generator. Without plan there can be neither grandeur of aim and expression, nor rhythm, nor mass, nor coherence. . . . The plan is what determines everything; it is the decisive moment.” The plan or blueprint is the primary tool of the architect’s and the drafter’s trades—a technical document that bridges creative impulse and constructive labor, intent and execution, virtuality and materiality. Taking shape as a conversation among concept, form, and representation, a blueprint insistently nudges its spectator’s gaze outside its frame. It is understood as a necessary stage on the way to something larger, something grander, something more, and is usually seen not as a self-contained object, but as prescription directed toward a particular outcome. Yet a blueprint may also be the terminus of the unrealized and the unrealizable. Étienne-Louis Boullée’s Cénotaphe à Newton, Le Corbusier’s Ville Contemporaine, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacres, and the Chicago Spire are among the many visionary designs abandoned at the drawing board, whose construction in real space we may now only imagine.

In Issue 23, we would like contributors to consider how blueprints—and more broadly, agendas, manifestos, models, or prophesies—negotiate between the present and an imagined, idealized, or impossible future. What qualities and limitations are shared by conceptual architecture and other speculative mediums? How do plans and prototypes function as a critique of present realities? What is the aesthetic value of diagrams, renderings, sketches, or preparatory studies? What occurs when we no longer consider the model as process, but as finished product? What are the mechanisms through which the plan attempts to fill the gap between language and image or event?

We welcome papers and artworks that further the various understandings of blueprints. Possible topics of exploration include, but are not limited to:

Conceptual architecture
Models, prototypes, renderings, and preparatory studies
Graphs, cyanotypes, etchings, and other media related to tracing
Political manifestos
Prophecy and speculation
Disparity between concept and execution
Representations of utopia or dystopia
World’s Fairs and Expos
Storyboards and scripts
Unfinished or posthumously completed works
Dance and performance notation
Digital urban planning
Please send completed papers (with references following the guidelines from the Chicago Manual of Style) of between 4,000 and 10,000 words to ivc[dot]rochester[at]gmail[dot]com by October 15, 2014. Inquiries should be sent to the same address.

Creative/Artistic Works
In addition to written materials, InVisible Culture is accepting work in other media (video, photography, drawing, code) that reflect upon the theme as it is outlined above. For questions or more details concerning acceptable formats, go tohttp://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/contribute or contact ivc[dot]rochester[at]gmail[dot]com.

Reviews
InVisible Culture is also currently seeking submissions for book, exhibition, and film reviews (600-1,000 words). To submit a review proposal, go tohttp://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/contribute or contact ivc[dot]rochester[at]gmail[dot]com.

Blog
The journal also invites submissions to its blog feature, which will accommodate more immediate responses to the topic of the current issue. For further details, please contact us at ivc[dot]rochester[at]gmail[dot]com with the subject heading “blog submission.”

* InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture (IVC) is a student run interdisciplinary journal published online twice a year in an open access format. Through peer reviewed articles, creative works, and reviews of books, films, and exhibitions, our issues explore changing themes in visual culture. Fostering a global and current dialog across fields, IVC investigates the power and limits of vision.

InVisible Culture
503A Morey Hall
University of Rochester
Rochester, NY 14627

http://ivc.lib.rochester.edu

LOOPY (A Vine Symposium)

Check out the Draper Program’s own Nina Hien speaking about this new medium, along with some of the most exciting work being done by Viners right now.

More information available here: http://bricartsmedia.org/events/loopy-a-vine-art-symposium.