Prof. Leon Gurevitch (Wellington): Liminal Labour: Narrating the Quantified Career and the Symbolic Value of Visual Effects Production – Villa Tillmanns

Prof. Gurevitch will discuss the narration of career paths across spectacular media industries in the context of globalized labor precarity, socially networked ’self-employed‘ subjectivity, and the rise of the quantified self. His talk will combine emergent understandings of the global flows of digital attractions with an analysis of the ways in which digital image industry professionals deploy show-reels to promote themselves on the international jobs market. He will point out how ‚digital nomads‘ of the spectacular media industries exist at a nexus point of multiple overlapping (and sometimes competing) liminalities, as games and visual effects producers attempt to carve out careers in the space between rapidly changing production and consumption technologies that make insiders and outsiders of all involved.

Leon Gurevitch is Associate Professor at the School of Design at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Among his research interests are digital simulation, imaging industries, and areas of convergence between art and science as well as design and technology. He currently holds a research grant by the New Zealand Royal Society for a three-year project studying work cultures and global skills migration of the digital imaging industry.

This guest lecture takes place as part of a workshop by the DFG-funded network „Narrative Liminality.“ It is free and open to the public.

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http://americanstudies.uni-leipzig.de/content/guest-lecture-leon-gurevitch-liminal-labour