UCF hosts International Conference on Digital Media Futures

University College Falmouth hosted the inaugural Image 2.0: Digital Media Futures conference this month that brought together national and international theorists and practitioners to debate current and future trends in photography, video, animation and the visual arts.

Organised by Professor Jason Whittaker and Dr Anna Misiak, the aim of the conference was to highlight the ways in which new technologies are resulting in emergent visual practices as once discrete disciplines in media and the arts continue to converge.

Speakers and delegates attended from the USA, Canada, Japan, Spain, Ireland, and Finland as well as the UK to participate in an event of extraordinary breadth in terms of the varying range of techno-cultural analyses and procedures covered in the two days. The keynote speakers were Tanya Krzywinska, Professor of Screen Studies at Brunel University, and Martin Lister, Professor Emeritus of Visual Culture at the University of the West of England.

Professor Lister sought to retrace the possibilities of digital futures in its forgotten digital past, whereby the friendship of Henry Fox Talbot and Charles Babbage were just one strand of a potential alternative history in which photography could have followed very different routes.

For Professor Krzywinska, the apparent absence of adult sexuality in video games often masks a libidinal economy of play in which the erotics of gameplay is an important, and sometimes surprising, element of the visual aesthetics of such games.

During the two days, topics covered included media production in the digital age, challenges to photography, exciting opportunities in film and video and how painting and installation is mediated via new technologies. Practitioners engaged in lively and vigorous demonstrations of the prospects opened up by information technologies, while academic speakers provided critical perspectives on how our new media is transforming our perception of those practices.

In addition to the scope of outlooks provided by participants, examples of work were on display during the conference and can be seen at http://www.learningspace.falmouth.ac.uk/image

University College Falmouth offers undergraduate media degrees in Advertising, Digital Animation, Digital Media, English with Creative Writing, English with Media Studies, Film, Journalism, Marine & Natural History Photography, Photography, Press & Editorial Photography, Public Relations, and BA(Hons) Writing, as well as MAs in International Journalism, Multimedia Broadcast Journalism, Photography, Professional Writing and Television Production. For further information about University College Falmouth, visit http://www.falmouth.ac.uk/, email admissions@falmouth.ac.uk or telephone Admissions on 01326 213730.

University College Falmouth is the only independent Higher Education institution in Cornwall with the powers to award degrees in its own name. It has two campuses in Cornwall - at Woodlane in Falmouth and Tremough in Penryn (which it owns, and jointly manages with the University of Exeter) - and a third campus at Totnes in Devon, following its merger with Dartington College of Arts in 2008.

This merger created a new institution focusing on the expansion of Falmouth's expertise in Art, Design and Media and Dartington's expertise in Choreography, Music, Theatre, Art and Writing. The Devon-based courses will relocate to a new, high-specification Performance Centre at Tremough in 2010, paving the way for a new specialist Arts University in Cornwall by 2012/2013 that will be unique to the South West.

The College is a founding partner in the Combined Universities in Cornwall (CUC), a unique initiative to promote regional economic regeneration through Higher Education, funded mainly by the European Union (Objective One), the South West Regional Development Agency, and the Higher Education Funding Council for England, with support from Cornwall Council.

Ends

For further information about University College Falmouth, please contact Jilly Easterby MCIPR, Head of Public Affairs, Telephone: 01326 213792, or email: jilly.easterby@falmouth.ac.uk

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