Digital Aesthetics Workshop: Mark B.N. Hansen, “The Ontology of Media Operations”

Mark Hansen DAW poster

I am pleased to announce the first event in the new Digital Aesthetics Workshop at the Stanford Humanities Center. On Tuesday, October 10, Mark B. N. Hansen (Duke University) will be speaking on the topic of “The Ontology of Media Operations, or, Where is the Technics in Cultural Techniques?”

Future workshops will welcome Claus Pias, Allison de Fren, Bonnie Ruberg, Jacob Gaboury, Jonathan Sterne, and more. Stay tuned!

What Is Monster? What Is Human? (Update)

F200 Opening Colloquium 10 2017 poster

This is the updated poster for the opening colloquium for Stanford’s Frankenstein@200 Initiative, October 17, 2017 (7:00-8:30pm in Cubberley Auditorium, Stanford School of Education). I’ll be speaking alongside Denise Gigante (English Department), Aleta Hayes (Theater and Performance Studies), Russ Altman (Bio-Engineering, Genetics, Medicine, Computer Science), and Hank Greely (Law and Genetics), moderated by Jane Shaw (Dean for Religious Life).

Free and open to the public: All humans, monsters, cyborgs, others welcome.

What is Monster? What is Human?

Frankenstein-Opening-Colloquium

Poster for the opening colloquium for Stanford’s Frankenstein@200 Initiative, October 17, 2017. I’ll be speaking alongside Denise Gigante, Aleta Hayes, Russ Altman, and Hank Greely, moderated by Jane Shaw. Location TBA.

Free and open to the public: All humans, monsters, cyborgs, others welcome.

Cine-Serialities

Kathleen-Guest-Lecture copy

On Tuesday, May 9, 2017, Kathleen Loock (Freie Universität Berlin/University of Wisconsin-Madison) will be holding a guest lecture on “Cine-Serialities: The Industrial Logics, Aesthetic Pleasures, and Discursive Constructions of Cinema’s Serial Forms.” The lecture will take place at 1:30pm in the McMurtry Building, room 350.

Stanford Games and Interactive Media Series (GAIMS) schedule, Spring 2017

 

Spring_2017_Games and Interactive Media

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!

Post-Cinematic Artifacts at Media Fields Conference

RuinsPoster

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.

#SCMS17 Deformative Criticism Workshop — Slides, Videos, Tutorials, Stuff

2017-03-24 01.40.14 pm

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.

#SCMS17 Conference Program

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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.”

Deformative Criticism at #SCMS17

ScannableImages-smallgif

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.