Events

This conversation examines the changing shape of actors and announcers employment and of the live performance and related media industries within which they work. Our starting point for discussion will be historical and contemporary census data on acting and announcing and the live performance and other industries that support these starting from 1933. Our conversation will range over the historical trajectory of actors and announcers since then including their employment within theatre and other live performance spaces and other media industries right up to and including the impact of platforms and platformisation most recently. Presenters: Tom O’Regan and Chris Hay.

This public lecture by internationally renowned dramaturg and researcher Katalin Trencsényi will examine this on two levels: micro-dramaturgy (the level of individual performance-making), and macro-dramaturgy (institutional processes).

Talk by Paris-based curator, editor and writer Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, co-presented with the University of Queensland's School of Languages & Cultures and School of Communication & Arts.

David Lyon presents key arguments from his most recent book The Culture of Surveillance: Watching as a way of life. In this book he examines how surveillance is not only something ‘done to us’ – it is something we do in everyday life. He focuses on our varied, mundane experiences of surveillance, insisting that it is time to stop using Orwellian metaphors and find ones suited to twenty-first-century surveillance. Lyon argues that the culture of surveillance may help to domesticate and naturalise surveillance of unwelcome kinds, and considers which kinds of surveillance might be fostered for the common good and human flourishing.

One-Day Symposium

This one day symposium looks across a range of disciplines to consider the coming together of the body with digital devices and media platforms. In this formulation, the body is tracked, networked, coded, monitored and represented on a range of digital media platforms. This involves a making available of the body to the algorithmic and participatory logics of digital media platforms and an entangling of its experiences with these architectures. The networked body is explored as fundamental to understandings of both the body and the digital economy. Presenters: Elizabeth Stephens, Gavin J.D. Smith, Lisa Bode, Shanti Sumartojo, and Sarah Pink.
VIDEO AVAILABLE

New Directors, New Plays, New Work
Three nights of new theatre

Shakespeare and statistics is not an obvious pairing, but digital texts of his plays and poems are now widely available, and scholars are getting used to analysing them with computers.

This presentation considers book blogs as shared expressions of readers' aesthetic conduct across print and digital formats, connected to the publishing industry (including through self-publishing) while also aligned with recreation and pleasure. To tease out some of the distinctions within book blogging, I describe two contrasting networks: highbrow literary blogs, and romance fiction blogs. While new media enables increased participation of readers in book culture, this participation is stratified into taste-based groups, which are themselves further stratified by hierarchy as bloggers accumulate a specific kind of ‘readerly capital’. Presenter: Beth Driscoll.
VIDEO AVAILABLE

Despite being of utmost importance for interpreting speech, most commercial conversation bots and speech analysis systems ignore the wider pragmatics of talk. Pitch, pause, intensity, gaze, and other important modalities are discarded by bots, which also refrain from interrupting or talking over their human counterpart, despite its equally important role in natural conversation. In this talk I will look at recent trends towards the inclusion of pragmatics in bot technology, including some of our own original analytic tools for analysis of pitch, pause and intensity in conversation. Presenter: Dan Angus.
VIDEO AVAILABLE

Two studies on relationship among acculturation orientations of Chinese Hongkongers, their perceptions toward South/South-East Asian minority members, and Chinese cultural value orientations as well as intercultural communication competence.

This workshop stresses the important ways in which contemporary Platform Media and their associated economic forms are connected with, extensions and modifications of previous arrangements in communication and media infrastructures, logistics and legal treatment. The workshop will trace the ways in which various aspects of platformisation are part of longer histories and connected to previous attempts to shape media as infrastructures under varying degrees of corporate control. Presenters: Vibodh Parthasarathi, Julian Thomas, Ramon Lobato, Dan Angus, Nic Carah, Tom O’Regan, Allison Fish, Barbora Jedlickova, and Andrew Ventimiglia.

This one day symposium will examine the ways in which the growing platformisation of not just the media but business and governmental operations are occurring in India. With India the second largest country in the world by population and likely to overtake China as the largest in the next twenty years India’s experience of and development of its platform economy is likely to become increasingly central to the global digital economy. Presenters: Vibodh Parthasarathi, Shishir Jha, Scott Fitzgerald, Pradip Thomas, and Adrian Athique.