Scott Rettberg

Below is a flier (PDF) for Samuel Weber’s upcoming guest lecture on Monday, October 22nd from 14:15-16:00. The LLE Digital Culture Research group is cosponsoring Weber’s lecture along with the Institutt for Informasjons og Vittenskap.

Mandag 22. October. 1415-17
Seminarrom 548, plan 5.
Lauritz Meltzers hus, Fosswinkelgate 6

Samuel Weber: “Origins and relevance of Walter Benjamin’s Media Theory: From Reflexivity to ‘Sobriety’.”

Samuel Weber is professor at Northwestern University. He is a leading authority on the writings of Walter Benjamin. In his book “Mass Mediauras: Form,Technics, Media” (1996) Weber showed the continued importance of aura to the aesthetics of the media age. He has translated Benjamin, as well as Theodor Adorno and Jacques Derrida into English. In Bergen Weber will give a broad historical presentation and assessment of Benjamin’s media theory.

Below is a flier (PDF) for the New Aesthetic Technologies Conference, which will be held at the University of Bergen all day on Wednesday, October 17th, featuring guest speakers Bernard Stiegler and N. Katherine Hayles. The LLE Digital Culture Research group is cosponsoring N. Katherine Hayle’s visit along with the Institutt for Informasjons og Vittenskap. I’d particularly encourage anyone interested in Digital Culture to attend Hayle’s lecture “Electronic Literature and Distributed Cognition: What Happens to Literary Art When the Environment Starts to Think” in Lille auditorium, plan 2, Lauritz Meltzers hus, Fosswinkelgate 6 at 14.00.

N. Katherine Hayles, Distinguished Professor at UCLA, is one of the foremost scholars of the relationship between literature and science. She is the author of “Chaos Bound”, “How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics”, “Writing Machines” and “My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts.” Her book, “How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics”, won the Modern Language Association’s Rene Wellek Prize for the Best Book in Literary Theory for 1998-1999, and “Writing Machines” won the Media Ecology Association’s Suzanne Langer Award for Outstanding Scholarship.

(click for pdf)

We’re very pleased to be welcoming hypertext pioneer and new media innovator Stuart Moulthrop to UiB as a guest researcher for the next two weeks. If you’re in Bergen, please attend his lecture on the 22nd or his reading/demonstration on the 23rd.

Career in a Box, originally uploaded by srett.

I filed my application for the tenured permanent position in digital textuality and digital aesthetics in Humanistic Informatics at the University of Bergen today. My career in a box.

On Monday, we’re going to be at a department seminar in Solstrand. In the fall, Humanistic Informatics is becoming part of a larger department, with the easy-to-remember acronym of AHKKNT (just think of the noise you make when clearing your throat). The new mega-department will include us, linguistics, computational linguistics, art history, classic philology, theater, nordic studies, and possibly comparative literature (I think). We’re going to get together for a couple of days at a hotel to figure out if we can all work together by eating little finger sandwiches and having drinks together, and swimming together in the same pool while comparing computer games and electronic literature to the works of Aristotle, Saussure, Ibsen, and Munch. Should be an interesting hydra-headed group. My boss asked me to prepare a poster for the gathering highlighting the work Jill and I do in electronic literature. Click on the pic below for a larger version.