STEREO THEATRE

Featured Theatre Presentations

GUEST SPEAKER THURSDAY NIGHT, 8:30 - 9:30 PM

Dr. Melody Davis: The Audience for Narrative Stereo -- Yesterday and Today. Dr. Melody Davis will speak on the topic of her book, Women's Views: The Narrative Stereograph in Nineteenth-Century America, and related scholarship on stereo. The narrative stereoview's appeal to domestic audiences created a market for the female customer in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This market was well-documented by Davis' twenty-year study of comic and sentimental (narrative) stereographs. She examines the development of both market and viewing public, interpreting the flow of historical change in women's lives as represented in narrative subjects, and their 3D form. Davis will discuss new research on collecting and gifting habits among women, presenting original discoveries on the culture of women's dirty jokes in stereo, print making, and comic farces. Thanks to digital information, we can reconstruct the lives behind the collecting habits that contributed to stereography's great historical popularity. Davis will discuss digital projects in the Humanities and virtual reality as new resources for access to history and the reinvigoration of its narratives.

Biography: Melody Davis is an Associate Professor of art history at The Sage Colleges, where she teaches the history of stereography and photography. Her study, Women's Views: The Narrative Stereograph in Nineteenth-Century America, was published in 2015 by the University of New Hampshire Press and has since become a college textbook. Davis has published and spoken internationally, most recently for Concordia University's annual Speaking of Photography lecture. She has received a Henry Luce/ACLS fellowship and Schact grants (Sage College) for her scholarship. She is also the author of a study on the male nude in photography and three books of poetry. She has held National Endowment for the Arts and Pennsylvania Council of the Arts fellowships for her poetry and nonfiction.

GUEST SPEAKER FRIDAY AFTERNOON, 4 - 5 PM

Jeff Boller: Smitten 3D: An Animated Work in Progress. Join award-winning animator/filmmaker/composer Jeff Boller as he screens excerpts from his 3D animated music video movie, Smitten 3D. He will be interspersing the completed animated segments with stereoscopic behind-the-scenes demonstrations of his often unorthodox CG filmmaking techniques. This presentation will be 50% artistic, 50% technical, and 100% fun!

Biography: Jeff Boller is an award-winning American filmmaker and composer. He founded the Pittsburgh, PA-based power pop outfit The Simple Carnival and has had a critically acclaimed album (Girls Aliens Food) land on a number of critics' year-end "best of" lists. In recent years, he has been attracting attention with his animated 3D music videos.

Boller is currently creating Smitten 3D, a 40-minute animated music video movie. Smitten 3D is intended to be a companion piece to The Simple Carnival's final album released in 2017, Smitten. Boller's low-budget techniques for animated stereoscopic filmmaking typically include the use of hand-drawn animation, painted backgrounds, construction paper cutouts, and lots of custom software development. You can find out more about his work at www.sundriftproductions.com or follow him on Twitter at @sundriftprod.

GUEST SPEAKER FRIDAY NIGHT, 9:00 - 9:30 PM

Paul Schenk: New Horizons. Paul's discussion will be a summary of the New Horizons missions, how stereo images were obtained and processed, and, of course, simply a survey of the best 3-D shots and the perspective views generated from the resulting topography.

New Horizons launched on Jan. 19, 2006 and conducted a six-month-long reconnaissance flyby study of Pluto and its moons in summer 2015, culminating with Pluto's closest approach on July 14, 2015. As part of an extended mission, the spacecraft is expected to encounter a small trans-Neptunian object on January 1, 2019, heading farther into the Kuiper Belt to examine another of the ancient, icy mini-worlds in that vast region, at least a billion miles beyond Neptune's orbit.

Biography: A space-groupie since Gemini days in the mid 1960's, Paul's first formal introduction to planetary sciences was as a NASA Planetary Geology summer intern in 1979 at JPL during the Voyager 2 Jupiter encounter. Working for Voyager during one of its encounters was an unforgettable experience for him. Since 1992 he has also been an intern advisor for the Lunar and Planetary Institute's (LPI) summer intern program. In 1988 Paul completed his Ph.D. at Washington University in St. Louis under Dr. William B. McKinnon. Since arriving at the LPI in 1991, he has been using Voyager, Galileo, and Cassini stereo and monoscopic images to map the topography and geology of the icy outer planet satellites (and dabbled a bit on Mars and the Moon).

Paul has also been a stereo image aficionado for many years, and in 1997 completed an educational/fun CD-ROM entitled 3-D Tour of the Solar System showing the planets in 3-D. Other interests include 20th Century history, the Titanic, volleyball, stained glass, scuba, and deep sea diving. In 2012, his Atlas of the Galilean Satellites (copyright 2010) was published. As of 2012, Paul is a Participating Scientist on the DAWN (at Vesta) and Cassini missions, studying impact cratering on small bodies and plume deposition processes on Enceladus. He has also been a co-investigator on the New Horizons mission to Pluto and beyond, responsible for cartography and topography.

GUEST SPEAKER SATURDAY NIGHT, 8:30 - 9:30 PM

Denis Pellerin: . When the refracting stereoscope was introduced in Great Britain at the 1851 Great Exhibition the census of the time shows that there were only 51 "photographists" and daguerreotypists in the whole of England! Soon after, however, the patents taken out by Talbot and Claudet came to an end and lots of photographic studios opened, many of them specializing in stereoscopic portraits. Some of the photographers that took up stereoscopy became masters of the genre and their production remains unequalled. Photo historian Denis Pellerin takes us on a 3-D tour of the most popular studios of the time, with a look at their continental counterparts. Discover the Victorians as you have never seen them before but as they appeared to their loved ones through the lenses of Claudet, Beard, Mayall, Kilburn, T. R. Williams and others!

Biography:: Denis Pellerin was a teacher for thirty years before being "liberated" by Brian May who made him the curator of his extensive collection of Victorian stereographs and enabled him to indulge in his long-standing passion for history and stereoscopy. Denis has been in charge of the collection for six years and in 2105 was appointed Director of the London Stereoscopic Society. Denis is well known by the readers of Stereo World for his column "European Gems". He has written and co-written several books and articles, both in French and English, and delights in researching the early years of Stereoscopy and adding to Brian's collection. He has been giving lots of 3-D talks lately on a whole range of different subjects and holds his main mission to be keeping Brian May's collection alive and spreading the word that 3-D photography is far better than its mono counterpart. What could be wrong with that?

Stereo Theater Presentation Proposal