Margaret Morse
Body Fictions: Virtualities
Date 4/8/98
Affiliation Professor of Film and Video, University of California, Santa Cruz
Abstract
Margaret Morse’s talk will draw on *Virtualities*, introducing "virtualities" as another species of fiction. Unlike the fiction of the past and the other scene that we know from theater, film and the novel, virtualities are fictions of presence that operate according to different rules. How fictions of presence or virtualities apply specifically to the body is explained using examples largely from media art to illustrate the shifting relation of the body to the screen, the idea of immersion, of interactivity and finally, of artificial life and artificial death.
Bio
Prof. Morse is Assoc. Prof. of Film and Video at UC Santa Cruz, who teaches new media theory and criticism. She has written widely on cultural subjects ranging from sport and aerobics, freeway driving and TV logo sequences to new media and art. Prof. Morse was the editor and principle author of the book Hardware, Software, Artware on computer-assisted art pieces that have come out of the last ten years at the Institute for Visual Media at the ZKM in Karlsruhe (Cantz Verlag 1997). Her book, Virtualities: Television, Media Art and Cyberculture, will be out from Indiana University Press in late April.
-- As of 4/8/98