Following the Ball: Ping Pong and the Moving Image Event
- Time:
- 16:00
- Date:
- 20 February 2024
- Venue:
- Avenue Campus, Highfield Road Southampton SO17 1BF
Event details
This presentation considers the intertwined and parallel histories of ping pong and the moving image, exploring ping pong as an exemplary cinematic thing. Looking at a variety of examples across film and media history, I delineate how ping pong and cinema synchronously emerge as popular leisure activities in the late 1800s due to shared material circumstances and argue that stagings of the game especially accumulate around moments of technical transition to foreground key problems and paradigms in film history and in cinematic thinking—around editing, rhythm and sound, the fascination with movement, the manipulation of scale and perspective, visual effects, new media, global modernity, and reconfigurations of the public sphere.
Speaker information
Jeff Scheible, is Senior Lecturer and MA Programme Convenor in the Department of Film Studies at King's College London. His co-edited book Deep Mediations: Thinking Space in Cinema and Digital Cultures (University of Minnesota Press, 2021) received SCMS's Best Edited Collection Award and his monograph Digital Shift: The Cultural Logic of Punctuation (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) received the Media Ecology Association's Susanne K. Langer Award.