UPDATE: I had something to share in relation to Julia's talk. See here if you're interested.

UPDATE 2: contact alston.dsilva@gmail.com

Alston D'Silva is terrible at writing bios—just god-awful at it. He is currently in his second year in Film and Media and will be defending his master's papers this quarter. He’s chosen to present work that represent two poles of his interest in the program. One paper examines the supercut, a vein of online video production organized around the practice of cutting and splicing pre-existing reiterations of a single element into one text (a supertext, so to speak). They might draw vertically down one type of media or trawls more widely across media. One famous, and perhaps founding, example is the “I’m not here to make friends” supercut that collects and collates instances of the phrase across reality television.  

You might have heard the supercutter Rich Juzwiak speak about the work on the This American Life episode "Frenemies." Clearly this work excavates some deeply engrained cultural tropes. But I'm also interested in how supercutters sometime exploit the grammar of film syntax to create unreal temporal and spatial dimensions in new media. Perhaps most evident of supercutter Branden Rush's work "Visualizing Time Travel" which also does work of demonstrating the the material paraphernalia of technophilia, the tightly enmeshed notions of velocity and mobility, and the deeply embodied expressions of pleasure, pain, awe and disorientation in our collective imagination of the concept. 

Visualizing Time Travel (Clip) from Branden Rush on Vimeo.

In my other work I investigate the satellite as an astronomical apparatus of vision that supplants the observatory. I particularly focused on the five Lunar Orbiter Mission (1966-68) in preparation of the manned Apollo mission. I was initially attracted to the project of moon mapping to help me conceptualize the relationship of island indigeniety to national bodies which trafficked in the same notion of appropriation, development and colonization, and paralleled tensions of proximity and distance. Here's an animated .gif of the moon revolving.

So that's what what I'm doing these days. I used to teach preschool in NYC for a good while and worked on documentary and journalism in Nepal before I came to ucsb.

edit: Also, I'm a little sad that I haven't gotten around to writing a seminar paper on gaming or smartphones. Or gaming on smartphones.