Kris Paulsen Receives Anne Friedberg Award for Innovative Scholarship
Alum Kris Paulsen, an associate professor at Ohio State University, has received the prestigious Anne Friedberg Award for Innovative Scholarship from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) for her book Here/There: Telepresence, Touch, and Art at the Interface (MIT Press, 2017).
The Anne Friedberg Innovative Scholarship Award recognizes the best new scholarly work that exemplifies rigorous, interdisciplinary and theoretical inquiry into issues of vision and visuality. Funded by a generous gift from her estate, the Anne Friedberg Award recognizes innovative work that expands the discipline of film and media studies, emphasizing its relationship to other visual fields, including architecture, art history, and digital media. Believing that "how the world is framed may be as important as what is contained within that frame,” Friedberg was known for her intellectually agile examination of the increasingly visual nature of contemporary culture and its representation on a gamut of screens: at movie theaters, on televisions and computers, on iPhones, BlackBerrys and other hand-held devices. The author of two books on these subjects, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (1994) and The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (2006), Anne Friedberg was President-Elect of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies before her untimely death in 2009.
In Here/There, Kris examines telepresence technologies through the lens of contemporary artistic experiments, from early video art through current “drone vision” works. Kris traces an arc of increasing interactivity, as video screens became spaces for communication and physical, tactile intervention. She explores the work of artists who took up these technological tools and questioned the aesthetic, social, and ethical stakes of media that allow us to manipulate and affect far-off environments and other people—to touch, metaphorically and literally, those who cannot touch us back.
You can hear more about screens and interfaces from Kris at her upcoming Art, Technology, and Culture Collqouium and History and Theory of New Media Lecture "Indexical Ambivalence" on January 29, 2018 at 6:30pm at BAMPFA!