[csaa-forum] Reminder: Misha Kavka, Affective Mattering and the felt materiality of the screen, Thursday 12th September

[Fiona Martin]

Media at Sydney and the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies present:

Assoc. Professor Misha Kavka
Department of Film, Television and Media Studies, University of Auckland

‘Affective Mattering and the felt materiality of the screen’

This paper approaches the materiality of cultural studies through a theory of affective matter(ing), in a conceptual attempt to answer Lawrence Grossberg’s call for work that ‘specif[ies] modalities and apparatuses of affect’ in the realm of lived realities (2010, 314-15). Affective mattering, or the way in which affect has a material bearing that causes things to matter, is to be distinguished from the Deleuzian virtual materiality of affect, which refers to ‘real, material, but incorporeal’ (Massumi 2002, 5) forces and intensities operating on a plane of immanence. What is lost in such desubjectivised accounts of affect, I argue, is the lived material body, individuated not only by its own matter but also by the affective relations which cause other bodies to matter to it. In place of impersonal affect, then, this paper will focus on interpersonal affect, specifically as mobilized by popular media screens that make us care about ‘real‘ bodies and beings despite their appearance on platforms of mediation. In this configuration, where the affective mattering of the body meets the affective permeability of the the screen, the screen brings its own materiality to bear as a conduit for felt relations. The paper will investigate these relations of mediated affect with reference to three exemplary screens: the intimate screen of television, the tactile screen of the touchpad, and the prosthetic screen of Google’s Project Glass.

Dr Misha Kavka teaches film, television, and media studies at the University of Auckland. She is the author of two books on reality television (Palgrave 2008 and Edinburgh UP 2012), and has published extensively on gothic cinema, New Zealand film and gender studies. She is currently working on a project about screen affects.
When: Thursday 3-5pm,
Where: New Law Seminar Rm. 030, New Law Building (F10)<http://sydney.edu.au/law/about/campus.shtml>
RSVPs to Madeleine King e: mkin5545 at uni.sydney.edu.au<mailto:mkin5545 at uni.sydney.edu.au>

Media at Sydney is presented by the Department of Media and Communications, University of Sydney
All seminars will be held on the University of Sydney Camperdown campus

For more information contact Dr Fiona Martin
T: 0428391122 or 02 90365098
E: fiona.martin at sydney.edu.au<mailto:fiona.martin at sydney.edu.au>
M: 0428 391 122
http://sydney.edu.au/arts/media_communications/


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