[UWcinema] Mar 7: "Mark Weiser’s Minority Report" Book Talk by Gerald Sim

[UW Cinema Studies List via Uwcinema]

Hi All,

Please find below the details for the Book Talk on Screening Big Data: Films that Shape Our Algorithmic Literacy<https://www.routledge.com/Screening-Big-Data-Films-That-Shape-Our-Algorithmic-Literacy/Sim/p/book/9780367772635> (Friday, Mar 7th, 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM, CMU 202, Simpson Center):

Title: Mark Weiser’s Minority Report
[cid:64389d22-50b5-4954-9827-c3e3955ae48a]

Synopsis: Gerald Sim introduces his recent book, Screening Big Data, and highlights the ways in which films like Moneyball and Coded Bias structure public understanding of current tech debates and controversies. Following that discussion, he examines how Spielberg’s Minority Report has transcended Philip K. Dick’s 1956 novella, largely on the strength of two iconic sequences whose production designs are hailed as technologically prescient. Celebrated most prominently by Wired, the film's origin story features a cadre of luminaries from the techno-media-industrial complex who consulted during preproduction. That historical myth effaces the contribution of computing visionary Mark Weiser, whose philosophical writing about ubiquitous computing illuminates the enduring relevance of Minority Report and reminds us of the technologists who preached caution and foresaw AI harms long before the current techlash.

Speaker's Bio: Gerald Sim is a professor of film and media studies at Florida Atlantic University. He is the author of Screening Big Data: Films that Shape Our Algorithmic Literacy (Routledge 2024), and articles about digital culture, data politics, and new media history in Television & New Media, Convergence, Projections, and the collection The Netflix Effect (Bloomsbury 2016). His work on Edward Said’s influence on film studies, CNBC personality Jim Cramer, film music theory, and Asian cinemas can be found in Discourse, Rethinking Marxism, positions, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Asian Cinema, and Film Quarterly. His first two books are Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema: Poetics of Space, Sound, and Stability (Amsterdam UP 2020), and The Subject of Film and Race: Retheorizing Politics, Ideology, and Cinema (Bloomsbury 2014).


Feel free to forward this to interested parties, thank you. Hope to see you there!

Cheers,
Mavis Siu
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman11.u.washington.edu/pipermail/uwcinema/attachments/20250226/398f3cc8/attachment-0001.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image.png
Type: image/png
Size: 2271429 bytes
Desc: image.png
URL: <http://mailman11.u.washington.edu/pipermail/uwcinema/attachments/20250226/398f3cc8/attachment-0001.png>