PARTICIPANTS
Marsha Kinder

Marsha Kinder is a cultural theorist specializing in new media, narrative theory, national media culture, and children's media; and a film scholar whose work on Spanish cinema has been particularly influential. She is author of Playing with Power in Movies, Television and Video Games, Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain; editor of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and Kids's Media Culture; and was founding editor of Dreamworks (1980-1988), a quarterly on dreams and the arts, and The Spectator, a University of Southern California critical journal. Since 1977 she has served on the editorial board of Film Quarterly and guest edited two issues of QRFV.

As a multimedia producer, Kinder's CD-ROMs include Blood Cinema; Runaways (with Mark Harris); and three electronic fictions made in collaboration with independent filmmakers Nina Menkes and Pat O'Neill and novelist John Rechy. Mysteries & Desire: Searching the Worlds of John Rechy won the NewMedia INVISION 2000 Gold Award for Overall Design, and all three fictions premiered at MOCA and have been exhibited at several international festivals, including Sundance.

    Symposium Abstract: "Designing Viable Digital Cultures"

    In a world progressively dominated by an economic logic of profit and loss, universities must take an active role in helping to create a place for a viable digital art/media practice. I will describe three specific projects at USC that all work toward this end and discuss some of their strategies and problems they encounter. The first is the Labyrinth Project, a research initiative on interactive narrative that I've been directing at USC's Annenberg Center for Communication since 1997.

    Poised at the pressure point between theory and practice and funded primarily by grants, Labyrinth is producing DVD-ROMs, websites and museum installations in collaboration with independent writers and filmmakers while building its own team of graphic artists and interface designers and recruiting talented students from USC's school of cinema-television as production assistants (who are trained in the process). It is also developing collaborations with art museums and academic publishers to find ways of marketing these projects.

    The second is an experimental e-learning course on Russian Modernism and its International Reverberations, which emphasizes concepts like constructivism, material culture, and dialectic montage that have much to contribute to the development of digital art and media. This on-line course is being developed in collaboration with three leading Slavic studies scholars from Berkeley, U. of Chicago, and USC and will eventually have a strong game component at its center.

    The third is the Multimedia Literacy Project, which is teaching a conceptual and collaborative approach to interface design to faculty and students from a wide range of disciplines throughout the university. This program not only helps generate more new media artists but also helps cultivate a savy, enthusiastic audience for such projects. Though each of these projects has its own independent funding, staff and goals, together they help create a broader culture that encourages this kind of experimentation with new digital media throughout the entire university community.