Research talk AUB: “Between Software and Image: Autodesk Maya”
Skwigly
WEDNESDAY 3rd APRIL
Arts University Bournemouth
ROOM B001
4.30-6.00pm
If you wish to attend, please contact Paul Ward (pward@aub.ac.uk) for directions
There are many visible digital spaces, and they are often seen on-screen: computer generated and manipulated entities and environments that inhabit the moving image world. But there is another side to digital space, one that remains more intangible as it exists out of reach behind and beyond the screens through which digital constructions appear. One example of such a digital space is associated with software. My presentation describes the process of researching Autodesk Maya via a methodology informed by software studies. With a complex interface for users, and an output of images variously rendered for games, narratives, information and adverts, the computer and software tend to be taken as nonvisual and transparent. A closer look at the user interface of Autodesk Maya reveals that it offers a hybrid space. The more familiar 3D space of objects that become drawn into the realities of fictions, coexist with intangible spaces configured by software processes and procedures. The latter are understood through a range of texts: interviews carried out with users of the interface within different industrial sectors, training and also publicity materials, including on-line tutorials and discussion forums generated by the Maya community.
Biography
Aylish Wood is a Reader at the University of Kent. She has published articles in Screen, New Review of Film and Video, Games and Culture, Film Criticism and Animation: an Interdisciplinary Journal. She has studied images of science and technology (Technoscience in Contemporary American Film, 2002) and her book Digital Encounters (2007) is a cross media study of digital technologies in cinema, games and installation art. She received an Arts and Humanities Research Fellowship to look at the intersections between software and the production of moving images. This study encompasses games, animations, visual effects cinema, and science visualizations.