Above, the schedule for the Spring 2017 Games and Interactive Media Series (GAIMS) at Stanford. Among the many great speakers this quarter, we have Dennis Fong (one of the first professional gamers) and Allan Alcorn (the engineer who designed the classic Atari PONG). Check it out!
Next week, on April 7, 2017, I’ll be giving a talk titled “Post-Cinematic Artifacts: Digital Glitch and the Ruins of Perception” at the 2017 Media Fields conference, “RUINS,” at UC Santa Barbara.
Building on recent work I’ve been doing, I’ll be arguing “that new forms of sensibility and collectivity may become thinkable in the spaces opened up by post-cinematic media – that new ways of being and relating to the world may arise from the ruins of perception.”
The full conference program is posted on the conference website.
Click here or on the image above to view the slides from today’s workshop on “Deformative Criticism & Digital Experimentations in Film & Media Studies” at the 2107 SCMS conference.
Also, see here for a Google Doc with my contribution (“Glitch Augment Scan”) — including thoughts on AR, examples, and a super-simple AR tutorial — as well as links to videos, code, experiments, and deformations by my co-panelists Stephanie Boluk, Kevin Ferguson, Virginia Kuhn, Jason Mittell, and Mark Sample.
If you’re in Chicago for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference this week, come check out our workshop on “Deformative Criticism and Digital Experimentations in Film and Media Studies” on Friday, March 24 at 9am. More info here.
The new issue of Cinéma & Cie, edited by Miriam de Rosa and Vinzenz Hediger, is out now. The special issue, which goes to the heart of recent discussions of post-cinema, is provocatively titled “Post-What? Post-When?,” and it includes my own contribution, titled “Speculation, Transition, and the Passing of Post-Cinema” alongside pieces by Malcolm Turvey & Ted Nannicelli, Sabrina Negri, Rachel Schaff, Saige Walton, and Monica Dall’Asta. The contributions are framed by a “Conversation on the ‘Posts’ of Post-Media and Post-Cinema” by Miriam de Rosa & Vinzenz Hediger.
General description of the special issue:
If we live in a post-media and post-cinema condition, how much longer will it last, and how will it end? Picking up on the recent debate about post-media and post-cinema, this special issue of Cinéma & Cie addresses the question of temporality and periodization in media history and asks what exactly the ‘post’ in post-cinema means. The contributions approach this question from a variety of perspectives and discuss a number of key issues, from the question of medium ontology to that of medium specificity, from the development of digital and hybrid cinematic forms to the problems and pitfalls of preservation. Exploring new analytical and theoretical frameworks that account for the moving image in the multiplicity of its configurations, the contributions open up new avenues of research and provide a sense of what may lie beyond our current post-media and post-cinema condition.
Flyer for my “Seriality” course, Spring 2017 at Stanford. Complete syllabus here.
Flyer for my “Frankenstein and Film” class, Spring 2017 at Stanford. Complete syllabus here.
I am proud to have a piece on “Pre-Sponsive Gestures” and the work of French media artist Grégory Chatonsky included in the new issue of the Montreal-based ETC Media. Looks like a great issue, and happy to be in such good company!
CURRENT ISSUE // 110
GRÉGORY CHATONSKY: APRÈS LE RÉSEAU / AFTER THE NETWORKIssue 110 of ETC MEDIA is dedicated to Grégory Chatonsky, who has curated the form and content of this special issue. A Montreal resident for the last ten years, the artist is a pioneer of net art, founding Incident.net in 1994, and an unflagging explorer of the relationships between technology and anonymous existence. In this issue, the artist and a few other friends, artists, philosophers, art historians, and art critics reconsider the last two decades of experimentation, a time in which the world drastically changed through the widespread use of the Internet to reach a digital omnipresence that heralds a near extinction. Divided into 3 sections—“infinitude,” “hyperproduction,” “without ourselves”—ETC MEDIA becomes a platform for navigating in our era and gaining a better understanding of a future whose portents remain deeply ambivalent—promising and threatening all at once. Rather than being reduced to trendy notions often misunderstood by the contemporary art milieu, the concepts of post-digital, accelerationism, and speculative materialism constellate a world in the process of perishing and being born.
Collaborators
Grégory Chatonsky
Eve K. Tremblay
Pau Waelder
Bertrand Gervais and Arnaud Regnauld
Shane Denson
DeForrest Brown Jr.
Goliath Dyèvre
Pierre Cassou-Noguès
Erik Bordeleau
Nora N. Khan
Dylan Trigg
Pierre-Alexandre Fradet
Jussi Parikka
The conference program for the 2017 SCMS conference in Chicago is now available online (opens as PDF). As I mentioned recently, I will be participating in panel K3 (Friday, March 24, 2017, 9:00-10:45am) — a workshop dedicated to “Deformative Criticism and Digital Experimentations in Film & Media Studies.”
At the upcoming SCMS conference in Chicago, I will be participating in a workshop on “Deformative Criticism and Digital Experimentations in Film & Media Studies” (panel K3 on Friday, March 24, 2017 at 9:00am):
Deformative criticism has emerged as an innovative site of critical practice within media studies and digital humanities, revealing new insights into media texts by “breaking” them in controlled or chaotic ways. Deformative criticism includes a wide range of digital experiments that generate heretical and non-normative readings of media texts; because the results of these experiments are impossible to know in advance, they shift the boundaries of critical scholarship. Media scholars are particularly well situated to such experimentation, as many of our objects of study exist in digital forms that lend themselves to wide-ranging manipulation. Thus, deformative criticism offers a crucial venue for defining not only contemporary scholarly practice, but also media studies’ growing relationship to digital humanities.
Also participating in the workshop will be Jason Mittell (Middlebury College), Stephanie Boluk (UC Davis), Kevin L. Ferguson (Queens College, City University of New York), Mark Sample (Davidson College), and Virginia Kuhn (USC).
My own presentation/workshop contribution will focus on glitches and augmented reality as a deformative means of engaging with changing media-perceptual configurations, including the following case study:
Glitch, Augment, Scan
Scannable Images is a collaborative art/theory project by Karin + Shane Denson that interrogates post-cinema – its perceptual patterns, hyperinformatic simultaneities, and dispersals of attention – through an assemblage of static and animated images, databending and datamoshing techniques, and augmented reality (AR) video overlays. Viewed through the small screen of a smartphone or tablet – itself directed at a computer screen – only a small portion of the entire spectacle can be seen at once, thus reflecting and emulating the selective, scanning regard of post-cinematic images and confronting the viewer with the materiality of the post-cinematic media regime through the interplay of screens, pixels, people, and the physical and virtual spaces they occupy.