Salamander Syncope
   HOME
*





Salamander Syncope
''Salamander Syncope'' (1971) 24-minute work directed and produced by Hamid Naficy on 2-inch, color videotape and 16mm film for his Master of Fine Arts thesis at University of California, Los Angeles. Naficy produced the work in conjunction with the UCLA computer department. He collaborated over two years with six computer engineering students including internet pioneer Vint Cerf. Long ignored in scholarly circles, the film has begun to be discussed as an early example of computer-generated cinema, specifically experimental and countercultural cinema produced in the United States by an Iranian immigrant. Influences The imagery in the film is abstract, generated by computers and subsequently manipulated with additional computers and video processing tools. It is thematically indebted to Stanley Kubrick's 1968 2001: A Space Odyssey, with imagery such as the origin of modern humans and the development to the transcendent "Star Child" evoked through abstract computer-generated imagery ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Hamid Naficy
Hamid Naficy ( fa, حمید نفیسی; born 1944) is an Iranian-born American filmmaker, writer, scholar, and educator. He is the Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani Professor in Communication at Northwestern University in the department of Radio/Film/Television, an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Art History, and a core member of the Middle East and North African Studies Program. His work focuses on the cultural studies of diaspora, exile, and postcolonial cinemas and media, and of Iranian and Middle Eastern cinemas. He has written on theories of exile and displacement, exilic and diaspora cinemas and media, and Iranian and Third World cinemas, publishing nearly a dozen books and scores of book chapters and journal articles. In addition, he has lectured nationally and internationally and his works have been cited and reprinted extensively and translated into many languages. His areas of research and teaching include these topics as well as documentary and ethnographic c ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Master Of Fine Arts
A Master of Fine Arts (MFA or M.F.A.) is a terminal degree in fine arts, including visual arts, creative writing, graphic design, photography, filmmaking, dance, theatre, other performing arts and in some cases, theatre management or arts administration. It is a graduate degree that typically requires two to three years of postgraduate study after a bachelor's degree, though the term of study varies by country or university. Coursework is primarily of an applied or performing nature, with the program often culminating in a thesis exhibition or performance. The first university to admit students to the degree of Master of Fine Arts was the University of Iowa in 1940. Requirements A candidate for an MFA typically holds a bachelor's degree prior to admission, but many institutions do not require that the candidate's undergraduate major conform with their proposed path of study in the MFA program. Admissions requirements often consist of a sample portfolio of artworks or a perform ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

University Of California, Los Angeles
The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California State Normal School (now San José State University). This school was absorbed with the official founding of UCLA as the Southern Branch of the University of California in 1919, making it the second-oldest of the 10-campus University of California system (after UC Berkeley). UCLA offers 337 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in a wide range of disciplines, enrolling about 31,600 undergraduate and 14,300 graduate and professional students. UCLA received 174,914 undergraduate applications for Fall 2022, including transfers, making the school the most applied-to university in the United States. The university is organized into the College of Letters and Science and 12 professional schools. Six of the schools offer undergraduate degre ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Internet Pioneer
Instead of having a single "inventor", the Internet was developed by many people over many years. The following are some Internet pioneers who contributed to its early and ongoing development. These include early theoretical foundations, specifying original protocols, and expansion beyond a research tool to wide deployment. The pioneers Claude Shannon Claude Shannon (1916–2001) called the "father of modern information theory", published "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" in 1948. His paper gave a formal way of studying communication channels. It established fundamental limits on the efficiency of communication over noisy channels, and presented the challenge of finding families of codes to achieve capacity. Vannevar Bush Vannevar Bush (1890–1974) helped to establish a partnership between U.S. military, university research, and independent think tanks. He was appointed Chairman of the National Defense Research Committee in 1940 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, app ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Vint Cerf
Vinton Gray Cerf (; born June 23, 1943) is an American Internet pioneer and is recognized as one of " the fathers of the Internet", sharing this title with TCP/IP co-developer Bob Kahn. He has received honorary degrees and awards that include the National Medal of Technology, the Turing Award,Cerf wins Turing Award
February 16, 2005
the ,2005 Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients
from the White House webs ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick (; July 26, 1928 – March 7, 1999) was an American film director, producer, screenwriter, and photographer. Widely considered one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, his films, almost all of which are adaptations of novels or short stories, cover a wide range of genres and are noted for their innovative cinematography, Black comedy, dark humor, realistic attention to detail and extensive set designs. Kubrick was raised in the Bronx, New York City, and attended William Howard Taft High School (New York City), William Howard Taft High School from 1941 to 1945. He received average grades but displayed a keen interest in literature, photography, and film from a young age, and taught himself all aspects of film production and directing after graduating from high school. After working as a photographer for ''Look (American magazine), Look'' magazine in the late 1940s and early 1950s, he began making short films on shoestring budgets, and made his first major Ho ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


A Space Odyssey (film)
''2001: A Space Odyssey'' is a 1968 science fiction novel written by Arthur C. Clarke and the 1968 film directed by Stanley Kubrick. It is a part of Clarke's '' Space Odyssey'' series, the first of four novels and two films. Both the novel and the film are partially based on Clarke's 1948 short story " The Sentinel", an entry in a BBC short story competition, and "Encounter in the Dawn", published in 1953 in the magazine '' Amazing Stories''. Resources After deciding on Clarke's 1948 short story "The Sentinel" as the starting point, and with the themes of man's relationship with the universe in mind, Clarke sold Kubrick five more of his stories to use as background materials for the film. These included "Breaking Strain", "Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Orbiting...", "Who's There?", "Into the Comet", and "Before Eden". Additionally, important elements from two more Clarke stories, "Encounter in the Dawn" and (to a somewhat lesser extent) "Rescue Party", made their way int ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Alan Watts
Alan Wilson Watts (6 January 1915 – 16 November 1973) was an English writer, speaker and self-styled "philosophical entertainer", known for interpreting and popularising Japanese, Chinese and Indian traditions of Buddhist, Taoist, and Hindu philosophy for a Western audience. Born in Chislehurst, England, he moved to the United States in 1938 and began Zen training in New York. He received a master's degree in theology from Seabury-Western Theological Seminary and became an Episcopal priest in 1945. He left the ministry in 1950 and moved to California, where he joined the faculty of the American Academy of Asian Studies. Watts gained a following while working as a volunteer programmer at the KPFA radio station in Berkeley. He wrote more than 25 books and articles on religion and philosophy, introducing the emerging hippie counterculture to '' The Way of Zen'' (1957), one of the first bestselling books on Buddhism. In ''Psychotherapy East and West'' (1961), he argued that Bu ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Aldous Huxley
Aldous Leonard Huxley (26 July 1894 – 22 November 1963) was an English writer and philosopher. He wrote nearly 50 books, both novels and non-fiction works, as well as wide-ranging essays, narratives, and poems. Born into the prominent Huxley family, he graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, with an undergraduate degree in English literature. Early in his career, he published short stories and poetry and edited the literary magazine ''Oxford Poetry'', before going on to publish travel writing, satire, and screenplays. He spent the latter part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death. By the end of his life, Huxley was widely acknowledged as one of the foremost intellectuals of his time. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature nine times, and was elected Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature in 1962. Huxley was a pacifist. He grew interested in philosophical mysticism, as well as universalism, addre ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Gene Youngblood
Gene Youngblood (May 30, 1942 – April 6, 2021) was an American theorist of media arts and politics, and a respected scholar in the history and theory of alternative cinemas. His best-known book, ''Expanded Cinema'', was the first to consider video as an art form and has been credited with helping to legitimate the fields of computer art and media arts.Trailer 1F''
Dir. Bryan Konefsky. Intvw. Steve Benedict, John Hanhardt, Chrissie Iles, and Steve Seid. ''Vimeo''. Web. July 29, 2010.
He is also known for his pioneering work in the media democracy movement, a subject on which he taught, wrote, and lectured, beginning in 1967.


Journalism


[...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Buckminster Fuller
Richard Buckminster Fuller (; July 12, 1895 – July 1, 1983) was an American architect, systems theorist, writer, designer, inventor, philosopher, and futurist. He styled his name as R. Buckminster Fuller in his writings, publishing more than 30 books and coining or popularizing such terms as " Spaceship Earth", "Dymaxion" (e.g., Dymaxion house, Dymaxion car, Dymaxion map), "ephemeralization", " synergetics", and "tensegrity". Fuller developed numerous inventions, mainly architectural designs, and popularized the widely known geodesic dome; carbon molecules known as fullerenes were later named by scientists for their structural and mathematical resemblance to geodesic spheres. He also served as the second World President of Mensa International from 1974 to 1983. Fuller was awarded 28 United States patents and many honorary doctorates. In 1960, he was awarded the Frank P. Brown Medal from The Franklin Institute. He was elected an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa in 1967, ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  




John Whitney (animator)
John Hales Whitney, Sr. (April 8, 1917September 22, 1995) was an American animator, composer and inventor, widely considered to be one of the fathers of computer animation. Life Whitney was born in Pasadena, California and attended Pomona College. He is a descendant of the Whitney family through his father's direct line. His first works in film were 8 mm movies of a lunar eclipse which he made using a home-made telescope. In 1937-38 he spent a year in Paris, studying twelve-tone composition under René Leibowitz. In 1939 he returned to America and began to collaborate with his brother James on a series of abstract films. Their work, ''Five Film Exercises'' (1940–45) was awarded a prize for sound at the First International Experimental Film Competition in Belgium in 1949. In 1948 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. During the 1950s, Whitney used his mechanical animation techniques to create sequences for television programs and commercials. In 1952, he directed engi ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]