"Animating Archives: Making New Media Matter"

The Malcolm S. Forbes for Research in Culture and Media Studies and the
Cogut Center for the Humanities are collaborating to bring together
three dozen leading scholars and practitioners in the field of new media
to share their thoughts and projects under one roof. The result is a
ground-breaking conference entitled "Animating Archives: Making New
Media Matter." The conference runs from December 3-5, 2009 at the Cogut
Center's home, historic Pembroke Hall on the campus of Brown University,
Providence, RI.

Background:  The paradox of modern media is that it is everywhere and
nowhere at once.  New media accentuates the "frenzy of the visible"
ushered in by film and photography so that we now live in a world
saturated with screens, images and objects-from gigantic public screens
to cell phones-all demanding that we look at them. 

At the same time, however, they also work invisibly, turning every day
events into fodder for surveillance, adding an invisible layer of
code-and a formerly inconceivable amount of data-onto the world.  The
uptake of these digital telecommunications technologies is thus
generating new questions, methods and approaches, the more pressing of
which are focused on the archive and archival practice.  

How does the new vernacular archive-the flood of YouTube videos, cell
phone novels and Facebook entries, as well as "bottom up" archiving
sites such as del.icio.us-challenge the traditional function of "public
records," their place and their authority?  How do changing archiving
formats change history (both in terms of historical events and
narratives)?  What new global and globalizing memories and fevers are
infecting our archives?

For more information on the topics, speakers and conference schedule,
visit Animating Archives
<http://www.brown.edu/Conference/animating/index.html> .