Future Cinema and the Digital ImaginaryProfessor Jeffrey Shaw Tuesday 17th August 2004 at 11am AbstractDespite the cinema's origins in technological and creative diversity, it is Hollywood that has come to define its dominant forms of production and distribution, its technological apparatus and its narrative forms. But this hegemony of Hollywood's approach to movie making/watching is being increasingly challenged by radically new digital techniques of production and presentation, which are enabling innovative mixed reality platforms to evolve in the cinematic domain. In his presentation Professor Jeffrey Shaw will discuss the convergent multiplicity of these new technologies of cinematic representation and intercommunication including highly immersive visualisation environments, co-evolutionary interaction systems and distributed multi-user modalities of participation, and show examples where these are being researched and developed in the field of international new media art practice. Short resumeBorn in Melbourne in 1944, Jeffrey Shaw has been a leading figure in new media art since its emergence from the performance, expanded cinema and installation paradigms of the 1960s to its present day technology-informed and virtualized forms. In a prolific oeuvre of widely exhibited and critically acclaimed works (www.jeffrey-shaw.net) he has pioneered and set benchmarks for the creative use of digital media technologies in the fields of virtual and augmented reality, immersive visualization environments, navigable cinematic systems, algorithmic software techniques, and interactive narrative. He was the founding director (1991-2003) of the ZKM | Institute for Visual Media Karlsruhe, where he initiated, supervised and curated a seminal international art-science research program. He recently curated the FUTURE CINEMA exhibition at the ZKM Karlsruhe, ICC Tokyo and KIASMA Helsinki, the catalogue of which has been published by MIT Press. Jeffrey Shaw is the founding executive director of the iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Research at UNSW (www.icinema.unsw.edu.au) and was awarded an Australian Research Council Federation Fellowship in 2003. He is also director of international projects at the ZKM | Institute for Visual Media and visiting professor at the University of Art and Media, Karlsruhe |