Honoring the Past and Creating the Future in Cyberspace: New Technologies and Cultural Specificity

After tracing my academic journey from eighteenth-century English literary scholarship to new media production, I interweave three discursive strands: descriptions and demonstrations of several experimental interdisciplinary projects being produced at the Labyrinth Project, a research initiative on interactive narrative that I direct at the University of Southern California Annenberg Center for Communication; five general principles learned while making these projects; and tentative suggestions about how they might be applied to Pacific Island studies. Despite the diversity of works presented (Mysteries and Desire: Searching the Worlds of John Rechy, an interactive memoir about gay Chicano novelist John Rechy; The Danube Exodus, a museum installation developed in collaboration with Hungarian filmmaker Péter Forgács; The Dawn at My Back: a Memoir of a Black Texas Upbringing, a dvd-rom based on an autobiography by African- American photographer Carroll Parrott Blue; an e-learning course on Russian Modernism with an online role-playing game at its center; a computer game for teens called Runaways; and a website called Dreamwaves), all adhere to five basic principles: honoring the past, emphasizing conceptualization over technical mastery, taking a collaborative approach to interface design, searching for culturally specific metaphors, and leveraging the transformative potential of database narratives

Face to Face: facial close-ups and joint attention in Science and the Visual Arts

This essay examines the contrasting visions of the expressive powers of the human face—both from neuroscientific approaches rooted in Darwin which argue for a codified system of six basic emotions universally recognized (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, surprise) and from the visual arts of cinema, television and portraiture painting that rely on facial close-ups to represent an emotional fluidity that is always subjective. As a means of reconciling the two approaches, it turns to the current study of infants by developmental psychologists (like Peter Mundy and Daniel Stern) who stress the importance of an infant’s ability to read the mother’s face, which facilitates joint attention, the acquisition of verbal language and social interactions with the world. Although Stern’s imaginative dialogues sound literary and subjective, his description of the infant’s encounter with the mother’s face is actually consistent with the explanation by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio (1999) of how consciousness is first launched in the “core self.” By treating the mother’s face as the crucial object in the infant’s early development and by perceiving this encounter awash in reflective feelings (which Damasio distinguishes from basic emotions shared with other species), he helps explain the dichotomy between the two systems of emotive facial expressions: reading the specific codified emotions (in humans and other species) versus experiencing the flow of (what Damasio calls) “background feelings” that continuously play across the human face. By emphasizing the theories of Béla Balázs and films of Ingmar Bergman and Chick Strand, which literally teach us how to read these background feelings moving across the human face, this essay claims facial close-ups do not distract us from our social circumstances or political action as Walter Benjamin argued. Instead they can have an ideological edge in a wide range of genres as they enable us to see this emotional engagement in joint attention both as a form of interpellation and as a means of survival—not only for infants but for all those engaged with the visual narrative arts

Musikvideo og tilskuer: Fjernsyn, ideologi og drøm

Denne artikel af Marcha Kinder er allerede en klassiker. I næsten al litteratur om musikvideoer henvises der til den - også herhjemme. Det er især hendes typologi over musikvideoerne, som der refereres til, mens artiklens percep- tionspsykologiske sammenligninger mellem musikvideoer og drømme næsten ikke har været inddraget i debatten. Marcha Kinder har arbejdet med medier i en årrække og udgav sammen med Beverle Houston "Self and Cinema A Transformalist Perspective" /(Redgrave Publishing Vompany) i 1980. Artiklen "Musikvideo og tilskuer" er oversat i sin helhed fra "Music Video and the Spectator": Television, Ideology and Dream, Film Quarterly, vol. XXXVIII, no. I 1984 af Jim Høyer

Musikvideo og tilskuer: Fjernsyn, ideologi og drøm

Denne artikel af Marcha Kinder er allerede en klassiker. I næsten al litteratur om musikvideoer henvises der til den - også herhjemme. Det er især hendes typologi over musikvideoerne, som der refereres til, mens artiklens percep- tionspsykologiske sammenligninger mellem musikvideoer og drømme næsten ikke har været inddraget i debatten. Marcha Kinder har arbejdet med medier i en årrække og udgav sammen med Beverle Houston "Self and Cinema A Transformalist Perspective" /(Redgrave Publishing Vompany) i 1980. Artiklen "Musikvideo og tilskuer" er oversat i sin helhed fra "Music Video and the Spectator": Television, Ideology and Dream, Film Quarterly, vol. XXXVIII, no. I 1984 af Jim Høyer

Playing with power in movies, television, and video games: from Muppet Babies to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

How do children today learn to understand stories? Why do they respond so enthusiastically to home video games and to a myth like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? And how are such fads related to multinational media mergers and the "new world order"? In assessing these questions, Marsha Kinder provides a brilliant new perspective on modern media