The Humanities Institute Presents its Faculty Lecture Series Spring 2008

Dr. Zabet Patterson, Department of Art, SUNY Stony Brook

"Splitting the Screen" Abstract"

Dr. Zabet Patterson specializes in the history and theory of digital media with a particular emphasis on the the intersection of computational media and art in the postwar period. She received her PhD in Rhetoric from UC Berkeley in 2007. Her dissertation, entitled Visionary Machines: A Genealogy of the Digital Image, was supported by fellowships from the Townsend Humanities Center, the Rhetoric Department, and the Josephine de Karman Foundation. Zabet spent 2005-6 as Visiting Assistant Professor in the departments of Art History and Art at Northwestern University. Her publications include 'Consuming Fantasy in the Digital Era', in PornographyOn/Scene, a collection edited by Linda Williams, as well as forthcoming articles on Jim Campbell and John and James Whitney. She is presently Assistant Professor in Art at Stony Brook University, and a member of the Consortium for Digital Arts, Culture, and Technology (cDACT).

Abstract

The single frame of the contemporary computer screen offers us access to many distinct forms of information: images both still and moving, text, and sound. These distinct aspects cannot be synthesized into a coherent singularity, but overlap and compete, restructuring our perceptual expectations as well as our habitual experience of space. Splitting the Screen takes the 1968 NLS—a computer system that brought together a variety of representational forms, including language, photographs and diagram, into a wildly heterogeneous screen space—as a primary point of origin for this contemporary structure and experience. I argue that the visual form of the NLS—from which a legacy of digital convergence would subsequently develop—was significantly influenced by the multimedia shows staged by Jordan Belson, USCO and others in San Francisco from 1957 to 1968. The keyword for these events was convergence: not only of light and sound, but also of theology, science and psychedelia. Teasing out this countercultural back-story from more straight-laced histories of computational technology, I explore the link between early computing technology and multimedia spectacle, finding surprising correspondences between these avant-garde artistic practices and what we now accept as the standard computational interface.

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Dr. Eileen Otis, Sociology, SUNY Stony Brook

"Beyond the Industrial Paradigm: Market-Embedded Labor and the Gender Organization of Global Service Labor in China Abstract"

Dr. Eileen Otis Eileen Otis is Assistant Professor of Sociology at SUNY Stony Brook. She received her PhD in Sociology from the University of California at Davis in 2003. In 2003 she was a Fellow at the Fairbank Center at Harvard University. She has published work in Politics and Society, Qualitative Sociology,

Abstract

Despite the growth services internationally, the study of global labor is defined by an industrial paradigm. Analyses of service work focus on U.S. firms, while studies of global labor concentrate on manufacturing. I develop a framework for analysis of global services by comparing ethnographic cases of labor in two global, luxury hotels in two Chinese cities. Each hotel is linked to the same global corporation, employing the same organizational template, recruiting same-aged female workers. At the first hotel workers silently catered to the preferences of guests, using customer preference data stored on computer files and enacting imported feminized practices, a labor regime termed virtual personalism. At the second they promoted hotel products, displaying expertise to distinguish themselves from sex workers frequenting the hotel, a labor regime termed virtuous professionalism. Why do distinctly gendered labor practices emerge in the different settings? To explain the regimes of labor I show that firms institutionalize consumer status struggles through the gendered organization of interactive labor. Institutionalization is mediated by workers’ interactive strategies and local workplace legacies. I term the entwining of consumer markets and labor practices market-embedded labor.

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click here for Dr. Helen LeMay's Abstract - Faculty Lecture Fall 2007

click here for Dr. Dan Levy's Abstract - Faculty Lecture Fall 2007