Philosophy of Screen Media Symposium

This symposium aims to explore the intersection of philosophy and research on screen media including film, gaming, and handheld screens. Traversing both the problems that screen media raise for the discipline of philosophy, and philosophical approaches to screen hermeneutics, the symposium foregrounds critical and speculative approaches to understanding the proliferation of screen technologies in the 20th and 21st centuries, and the cultures that have formed around them. The project will feature a keynote lecture from Steven Conway (Swinburne) as well as presentations from Melbourne- and Sydney-based philosophers, film scholars, and games studies scholars.

All are welcome, registrations not required. Light refreshments will be provided during breaks.

Location: John Medley Level 4 Linkway

Time: 9:30-17-30

Organisers: Andrea Andiloro (Swinburne), Corey Cribb (Melbourne) and Marilyn Stendera (Wollongong)

Schedule:

9:30 – Welcome

9:45-10:45 – Keynote

Steven Conway (Swinburne)

10:45-11:15

Break

11:15-12:45 – Panel

Andrea Andiloro (Swinburne): “Beyond the Ruins: A Heideggerian Analysis of Videogames, Technology and the End of the World”

Jacqueline Moran (Swinburne): “The heroic subject: the existential importance of goals in Campbell's hero's journey”

Marilyn Stendera (Wollongong): “Agency and Ambiguity: From Beauvoir to Nguyen on the Existentialist Art of Videogames”

12:45-13:45 – Lunch

13:45-15:15 – Panel

Ali Alizadeh (Monash): “Gravediggers at the Gate in Ils (Them, 2006)”

Conall Cash (St Francis Xavier): “Why Walter White Had To Be Killed: Television, Temporality, and the Criminality of Aesthetic Experience”

Nonie May (Melbourne): “ Nostalgia, Screen Memories, and Cinematic Narratives of the Return to Childhood in Aftersun (2022”

15:15-15:45 – Break

15:45-17:15 – Panel

Annie Sandrussi (Macquarie): “Diversity on Film: Representational or Phenomenological?”

Michelle Menzies (Melbourne): “The Environment of Mediation: the dispositif, or ‘the set-up’”

Corey Cribb (Melbourne): “Christian Metz Contra Phenomenology”