Individual Listing

HUMANITIES SOCSCI
University of California
Riverside, CA 92521

Tobias, James S

Associate Professor of English

College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

English


Biography

James Tobias is a digital media scholar and artist whose research interests center around interactive gesture, and include the visual representation of music, narrativity, media authoring, theories of the body, gender, and sexual orientation, and, broadly, the interface between corporeality and technesis. His publications have appeared in FILM QUARTERLY in addition to other publications in the disciplines of film, video, and interactive media. He has recently edited a special volume of the USC Spectator on THE ACT: GESTURES OF FILM, VIDEO, AND INTRACTIVE MEDIA. An excerpt from his doctoral dissertation MUSIC, IMAGE, GESTURE: THE GRAPHICAL SCORE AND THE VISUAL REPRESENTATION OF MUSIC is forthcoming in FILM QUARTERLY. His current research project investigates narrativity and navigation in digital media, and is provisionally entitled DEVICES OF FICTION: INTERACTIVITY, THE MEDIAL AGENT, AND THE FUTURE HISTORY OF NEW MEDIA. 

Former Institution

 Visiting Assistant Professor, Program in Film and Video Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Degrees

Ph.D. Critical Studies/Cinema-Television 2001

University of Southern California

M.F.A. Interactive Communications 1994

New York University

B.A. Linguistics 1985

UC Berkeley

Awards

MYSTERIES AND DESIRE (for which I directed the "Cruising Zone" section) included in Official Digital Selection, January 2001
MYSTERIES AND DESIRE awarded Gold Medal for Best Overall Design, In-Vision Awards, November 2000
MYSTERIES AND DESIRE selected for European Media Arts Festival, May 2000
Getty Dissertation Writing Workshop, Getty Research Institute, April 2000
In recognition of the 1999 interactive installation TO LIVE AND DRIVE IN LA, named one of '25 New Faces of Indie Film," FILMMAKER Vol. 7, No. 4, Summer 1999
Interactive Frictions Conference Installation Grant, 1998-1999
Pre-doctoral merit fellowship, USC, 1998-1999
Award for pioneering work in interactivity, New York University, May 1994


Research Area

New Media Studies

Publications

"Cinema, Scored: Toward a Comparative Methodology for Music in Media," FILM QUARTERLY (forthcoming in 2003).
"Devices of Fiction: Interactivity, the Medial Agent, and the Future History of New Media," in 'The Act: Gestures of Film, Video, and Interactive Media,' SPECTATOR, Vol. 21 No. 2 Spring 2001.
"Video Games," in Clement, Priscilla Ferguson, and Reinier, Jacqueline S., eds., BOYHOOD IN AMERICA: AN ENCYCLOPEDIA, Vol. II (Santa Barbara, CA, Oxford: ABC-CLIO, 2001).
"Hearing Voices, Seeing Demons: Call and Response in the Works of Steina and Woody Vasulka," TURBULENCE VIDEO (Paris: Videoformes, 1999).
"Bunuel's Network: Performative Doubles in the Impossible Narrative of THE PHANTOM OF LIBERTY," in FILM QUARTERLY, Vol. 52 No. 2, Winter 1999.
"Bunuel's Network: The Detour Trilogy," in Kind, Marsha, ed., THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
"Pandemonium Regained: Sync, Dissonance, and the Devil," in 'AUDIOvisual Media,' SPECTATOR, Vol. 17 No. 2, Spring/Summer 1997.