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SUMMARY:« Now you see him\, now you don’t » : Electronic (Absent) Pres
 ence and H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man
DTSTART:20151014T161500
DTSTAMP:20260501T042252Z
UID:5de6e9d547ba21675511763fa924a4c04dcf116f333e6f7e45daabb0
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Keith Williams\, University of Dundee\nBio: Dr Williams's rese
 arch interests include:\n    literature and culture of the pre-1945 per
 iod\;\n    special emphasis on H.G. Wells and James Joyce\;\n    int
 erdisciplinary interests\, especially in writing and cinematicity\, docume
 ntary and reportage.\nHe is currently supervising a doctoral research proj
 ect on 'The Gendering of the Visual: Katherine Mansfield and Visual Cultur
 e'.\nIn the late nineteenth-century\, the growing interface between humans
  and technology with potential to radically alter the conception of physic
 al presence was strongly reflected in the early fiction of H.G. Wells. His
  imaginative speculations about the impact of new discoveries on the elect
 romagnetic spectrum are particularly significant in the transformation of 
 visual presence in The Invisible Man (1896). Its protagonist renders himse
 lf transparent through a mysterious form of radiation beyond the newly dis
 covered X-rays and with even more uncanny properties. The text also prefig
 ures how reconstitution and transmission of the body and the voice through
  new electronic media would become a powerful and potentially dangerous fo
 rce in the twentieth century.\nThis topical theme is picked up and expande
 d in the highly fraught context of the 1930s by the first sound film adapt
 ation by James Whale\, with its close association between invisible megalo
 maniac and new auditory media\, especially radio. Moreover\, this situatio
 n is even more saturating for us now: we live in world where electronic 
 ‘tele-presences’ are taken for granted everywhere in our mundane lives
  through a multitude of devices\; where human agency is routinely displace
 d or acts at planetary distances\; where invisible electronic forces rule 
 the instantaneous flow of capital and information to an extent that would 
 have seemed supernatural or inconceivable to our ancestors.
LOCATION:Centre Est 101 http://plan.epfl.ch/?zoom=18&recenter_y=5864171.30
 702&recenter_x=731340.23924&layerNodes=fonds\,batiments\,labels\,informati
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STATUS:CONFIRMED
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