Hosted by the Institute of Advanced Study and the Department of Film and Television Studies

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Lisa Purse (University of Reading, Author of Digital Imaging in Popular Cinema and Contemporary Action Cinema)

This symposium explores the ways in which depth imagery is constructed and consumed in contemporary digital practices, and the ways in which we might interpret it. Most digital platforms’ content is consumed through flat screens and yet many of their aesthetics seem anxious to convey the illusion of depth. This curious and ubiquitous paradox is visible, for example, in digital cinema’s most recent spate of 3-D films and the institutional dimensionality of videogames’ fictional environments through which the player wanders. In computing, also, user interfaces and head-up displays demonstrate a renegotiated relationship to the image that is dependent on deep spaces made immediately accessible for spectators and users.

This symposium will investigate the different media that characterise contemporary culture and the aesthetic, cultural and political implications of their digital depth. How is this illusion of depth constructed, and to what ends? The symposium will investigate avenues through which academia might read and interpret both these images and the changing mediascape of which they are a part. It will also ask what these digital constructions of depth demonstrate about the changing culture that they help to construct.

For full conference details (including the programme) click here.

Contact: o.b.weetch@warwick.ac.uk

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