Interdisciplinary researcher, Jane
de Almeida has been working in the arts, film and new media fields,
investigating the intersection among media, subjectivity and
perception.
As professor and researcher, she was Visiting Scholar in the Department
of Philosophy at Boston College (1999), Visiting Fellow in the Department
of Architecture and History of Art at Harvard University (2005), guest
researcher at MediaLabMadrid (2006), and Visiting Scholar in the Dept.
of Communication at University of California, San Diego (2007). She holds a Master degree and a Ph.D. in Communication and Semiotics from Catholic University of Sao Paulo.
She has been teaching at Mackenzie University in São Paulo,
Brazil and at the Visual Arts Department at University of California,
San Diego.
She is an independent curator and script writer, having written in
collaboration to others a script for the documentary 500 souls about
the identity of Brazilian natives showed and awarded in many countries,
besides the script for a fictional film based on the legendary Brazilian
film Limit from the 30’s, considered the best Brazilian film
in the occasion of the one hundred years of cinema. This script, called
The invention of Limit, was honored with the Hubert Bals Fund by the
International Film Festival Rotterdam, and has not yet been realized.
As curator, de Almeida organized an exhibition about Bispo do Rosario’s
works called Ordering and vertigo, in which participated more than
120 artists, among them musicians, performers, photographers, and
intellectuals lecturing about contemporary art, philosophy and subjectivity.
For this exhibition she co-organized a comprehensive catalog. Following
discussions about “form” and “film”, she also
curated the show Aisthesis: Cinema, with lectures by art and film
experts. Afterwards, she decided to investigate the relation between
new media and film in a showcase called Image’s strategies,
which also had a session of lectures. Pursuing the subject of politics
in cinema, she curated the exhibitions Metacinemas, bringing out the
debate about meta-language in film nowadays; the festival Dziga Vertov
Group, showing all movies made by the so called “Dziga Vertov
Group” leaded by Jean-Pierre Gorin and Jean-Luc Godard in the
60’s and 70’s. It was exhibited in Rio de Janeiro, São
Paulo and Brasília and it was released a catalog. She has been
organizing a series of lectures called The politic of images at the
Catholic University of São Paulo and the first lecturer invited
was the German filmmaker Margarethe Von Trotta. In 2007 and 2008 Jane
de Almeida curated a film festival about the German filmmaker Alexander
Kluge called "Alexander Kluge: the fifth act" in Sao Paulo, Rio de
Janeiro, Porto Alegre and Brasilia . All of these events and productions
have been extensively covered and evaluated by important Brazilian
newspapers and magazines.
In the field of New Media, she organized seminars such as Technocreations
at the Catholic University of São Paulo, along with the FILE
(Electronic Language International Festival), and for this seminar,
it was published a catalog with articles written by the guests, Ted
Nelson, George Landow and Paul Miller, and the foreword written by
her, concerning to the deconstruction of the computer technology and
culture. She has been member of the editorial and Scientific Board
of FILE since 2005. She also organized a seminar about Digital Media
called Aesthetic and New Technology.
Recently, Jane de Almeida has been developing two research projects:
one about films that have always requested other format than a single
screen, called Unbearable screen, which is also a project of installation
art, and other, theoretical, called How to explain to an inhabitant
of Sirius what is a computer? about distinct explanations of the computer’s
functions in terms of perception and subjectivity.
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