I wanna be a protocol: online media and electronic structures of kinship

Heidegger famously identified Modernity with a technological leveling of being to a single order of a “standing reserve.” In a radically different tone, Gilles Deleuze articulated a single “plane of immanence” within which ontological distinctions between mind and body, God and world, interiority and exteriority become indiscernible. Taking such philosophical declarations as points of departure, this panel will consider how a collapse of ontological distinction emerged as a thematic and structural trope in literary and cinematic modernisms. We hope to consider how writers and film-makers of the 20th c. utilize the resources of their media to ask “the question of being” that troubled their philosophical contemporaries and heirs. In this vein, we will examine how these modernist ontologies of immanence describe the crisis of a subject saturated and eclipsed by a world which comprises her while also remaining strange or opaque. Papers will ask what is lost with the departure of a distinctly human sense of “being” and how the historical arrival of an alternative ontological order may be evident in the lived experience of modernity. In this sense, the relationship to departures and arrivals becomes the modern subject’s suspicion that he is unable to do either vis á vis the world.

An information system to exploit the use of metadata within film and television production

The television and film industries are used to working on large projects. These projects use media and documents of various types, ranging from actual film and videotape to items such as PERT charts for project planning. Some items, such as scripts, evolve over a period and go through many versions. It is often necessary to attach information to these “objects” in order to manage, track, and retrieve them. On large productions there may be hundreds of personnel who need access to this material and who in their turn generate new items which form some part of the final production. The requirements for this industry in terms of an information system may be generalized and a distributed software architecture built, primarily using the internet, to serve the needs of these projects. This architecture must enable potentially very large collections of objects to be managed in a secure environment with distributed responsibilities held by many working on the production. Copyright © 2005 by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, Inc.