Event

Jeff Scheible

Debts to Depth

This talk maps out part of a larger project that traces how two types of depth—visual and conceptual—have been historically linked, and how this linkage has changed in relation to digital media. It will particularly focus on the “deep web,” analyzing its structuring presence in Laura Poitras’s Oscar-winning documentary Citizenfour and other contemporary art projects. These works help reorient some debates in media theory about remediation, infrastructural visibility, and the logic of indexability.

Jeff Scheible is an Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies at SUNY Purchase College. His research is focused on theorizing and historicizing contemporary media. It is interdisciplinary and comparative, drawing on digital culture, film, television, video, philosophy, and art. His book, Digital Shift: The Cultural Logic of Punctuation, is forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press in 2015. A chapter from this, on parentheses, appears in a recent special issue of American Literature on new media. Other publications include an essay that looks at media circulation and redistribution after video store closures; an article about an emerging genre of computer-mediated romance narratives in recent cinema; a book chapter on the emergence of YouTube as it intersected with the occurrence of Hurricane Katrina; and entries on "depth of field" and the "long take" in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Film Theory. Scheible was in the inaugural cohort of the University of California–Santa Barbara’s PhD program in film and media studies, where he was a founding editor of Media Fields Journal. Most recently, he held a Banting postdoctoral fellowship in film studies at Concordia University in Montreal.