My Intro to Global Animation class did a DIY phenakistoscope workshop this week. My students seemed to enjoy it and they made some creative phenakistoscopes as well.
Category: media history/archaelogy
This semester, I had the opportunity to take my Global Video Game Cultures seminar to visit the International Center for the History of Electronic Games at the Strong Museum of Play. I had actually planned this trip since last year, but due to unforeseen circumstances I did not get a chance to teach the seminar until this semester. So this time I made sure my class get a chance to visit the Museum as I believe it would provide my students with a hands-on experience to explore the broad and global history of video games and learn about the cultures that emerge from and around their worldwide circulation.
As part of the class trip, we went to see the World Video Game Hall of Fame, experienced the eGame Revolution interactive exhibit, perused some of the rare archives on Atari, and went for a behind the scene tour to see the Center’s collection storage rooms. All in all, I think my students enjoyed the trip and it was also recently covered by the HWS Update.
This coming March, I will be organizing a collaborative digital humanities workshop: Archives in Between-Digital Humanities and Material Culture in East Asian Studies, at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference in Chicago .
This workshop is part of an on-going collaboration that my CLIR fellow cohort, Michaela Kelly, and I are initiating.
It will feature two large-scale, on-going digital humanities projects at the University of Rochester and Lafayette College: Re-Envisioning Japan: Japan as Destination in 20th Century Visual and Material Culture and the East Asia Image Collection. Both are faculty-library collaborations offering innovative pathways for East Asian Studies scholarship, research, and teaching.
So, if you are planning to be at the conference, do come to our workshop session!
Here’s the link to the workshop flier that contains more info, including the location and time: link
Last Fall, I designed and taught a new course called Introduction to Global Animation for the Media and Society Program at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. It was a rewarding experience for both my students and I. We explored the history and practices of animation not only in the centers of global animation industry such as US and Japan, but also in places like Russia, China, and Iran. Through various case studies, we considered how local, national, regional, and transnational perspectives contribute to the historical trajectory of animation at a global scale.
In addition, to couple the writing assignments and exams, I asked the students to do a final group project creating a short stop motion animation covering one of the topics that we studied throughout the semester. At the end of the semester, many of them admitted that they gain a deeper knowledge about different aspects of global animation culture and that they really enjoyed the process of creating stop motion animation. I can’t say it enough that I am really proud of the overall students’ engagement in this class. Below is one of the best projects from the class, which discusses the historical role of women in animation industry. The title of the project is “The Dream of Feminine Aesthetic in Animation.” Enjoy!
The Dream of Feminine Aesthetic in Animation-Student Project from iskandar zulkarnain on Vimeo.
this post is originally from my old and abandoned blog:
i was reading the annals of the new york academy of sciences on computer culture in 1984 and this statement by a bell labs researcher reminds me how much has changed in the practice of computing:
“quite a few years i prided myself in the building of an early home-brew computer. people always asked me what it was good for. they still do. i have consistently answered that it is not good for anything. it does not control the heating of my house, nor does it balance my checkbook. it does not keep the inventory of our kitchen supplies or the names on our Christmas card list. no, i just like having it. i like to make it work, to write systems and applications programs that serve no purpose whatsoever.”
So couple days ago, I came across this image from the twitter feed of Alan Liu:
At first I thought it’s a funny advertisement from the past. But then, when I think again, the spirit of this ad still echoes in the time we live right now. We still see ads for technological gimmicks like this fridge that can tweet:
It makes me wonder that maybe we always have a blind optimism that technology is the inevitable agent for human progress. Especially with ‘there’s an app for that’ anthem in the computing industry.
On a funny note, when my son saw the calculating pencil ad, he told me that he wanted them. Maybe he needed it to work on his mathematical exercises 🙂