Techniques of the Player – the observing body and organs of the senses
11 December 2017 – Swinburne University of Technology
Room AS404 (Applied Science building).
In Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, Jonathan Crary traces a shift in the concept of ‘the observer’ from a stable point in geometrical space (with the camera obscura as a key trope and model) to a figure caught up in the fragmented visuality of modern media. The perceiving subject is increasingly subject to processes of quantification and normalisation: ‘there is an irreversible clouding over of the transparency of the subject-as-observer’ (1992, 70). Crafting human attention, or modulating what Buck-Morss (1992) has termed ‘a spiral of aesthetics and anaesthetics’, prefigures contemporary concerns with the ‘attention economy’.
Crary’s argument challenges both technophilic accounts of a drive to ever-greater verisimilitude, and modernist claims to decisively break with mimesis and realism. Instead, the entanglement of the observing body and the observation of the organs of sense engender a subject with senses that must be technically disciplined as much as enabled: ‘How is the body, including the observing body, becoming a component of new machines, economies, apparatuses, whether social, libidinal, or technological?’ (1992, 2).
In posing the question of ‘Techniques of the Player’, this symposium will re-evaluate Crary’s question in light of contemporary media intensities: VR headsets and locative AR; found-footage and IMAX cinema; e-sports stars and anonymous gold farmers; immersive sims and casual mobile gaming.
Panelists: Steven Conway (Swinburne University), Leena van Deventer (RMIT University), Dan Golding (Swinburne University), Darshana Jayemanne (Abertay University), Angela Ndalianis (Swinburne University), Emma Witkowski (RMIT University).
Buck-Morss, S., 1992. Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered. October 62, 3.
Crary, J., 1992. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
12:00 Panel 1 (Three Speakers, 20 mins each)
13:10 Discussion Forum
14:00 Lunch
15:00 Panel 2 (Three Speakers, 20 mins each)
16:10 Final Discussion Forum
17:00 Drinks/Debrief