According to the Duke Visualization Friday Forum website, my talk this Friday — “Visualizing Digital Seriality: Correlating Code and Community in the Super Mario Modding Scene” — will be streamed live: here.
The talk will take place at 12:00 Eastern time, Jan. 30, 2015.
On January 30, 2015 (12:00-1:00pm), I will be speaking about visualization techniques and game-related serialization processes at the Duke Visualization Friday Forum. Organized by Eric Monson and Angela Zoss, this is a very exciting and robustly interdisciplinary venue, as the long list of sponsors for the weekly forum indicates: Information Science + Information Studies, the Duke immersive Virtual Environment (or DiVE), Media Arts + Sciences, Data and Visualization Services, the Department of Computer Science, Research Computing at the Office of Information Technology, and Visualization & Interactive Systems.
As this list indicates, the Visualization Friday Forum has the potential to take just about anyone — but especially humanities-types like me — out of their comfort zone; but it does so in the most comfortable way possible: the informal setting of a lunchtime chat fosters a type of exchange that is interdisciplinary in the best sense. Artists, computer scientists, media scholars, digital humanists, historians, literary critics, mathematicians, and researchers in the natural sciences, among others, make a genuine effort to understand one another. And, to judge from the times I have been present or watched a live-stream of the Forum, this effort is usually quite successful.
So here’s hoping that my own effort at interdisciplinary dialogue will be as successful! In my talk, I will discuss an ongoing project, some preliminary findings of which I posted not too long ago. Here’s the abstract:
Visualizing Digital Seriality: Correlating Code and Community in the Super Mario Modding Scene
Shane Denson (DAAD Postdoctoral Fellow, Duke Literature)
Seriality is a common feature of game franchises, with their various sequels, spin-offs, and other forms of continuation; such serialization informs social processes of community-building among fans, while it also takes place at much lower levels in the repetition and variation that characterizes a series of game levels, for example, or in the modularized and recycled code of game engines. This presentation considers how tools and methods of digital humanities – including “distant reading” and visualization techniques – can shed light on serialization processes in digital games and gaming communities. The vibrant “modding” scene that has arisen around the classic Nintendo game Super Mario Bros. (1985) serves as a case study. Automated “reading” techniques allow us to survey a large collection of fan-based game modifications, while visualization software such as Tableau and Palladio help to bridge the gap between code and community, revealing otherwise invisible connections and patterns of seriality.
On January 21, 2015 (3:00-4:00pm), the S-1 Speculative Sensation Lab will be presenting a collaborative artwork titled Manifest Data at The Edge, the new space in Duke University’s Bostock Library devoted to “interdisciplinary, data-driven, digitally reliant or team-based research.”
Manifest Data brings together programmers, 3-D printing specialists, sculptors, and theorists to reflect on the production of value in the digital age, the materiality of information, and the (non-)place of mediated relations.
Code written by Luke Caldwell captures data that would otherwise be leaked as we browse the web, and exploited by the likes of Google and Facebook; in a second step, this data is transformed into a coordinate system that can be mapped as a 3D object. In collaboration with other lab members, artist Libi Striegl prepares and prints out the resulting “data creatures.” Karin Denson has reimagined these forms as beautifully grotesque garden gnomes — thus reappropriating a figure that has become a symbol for 3D printing and a marketing tool for companies like MakerBot. Together, Karin and I have further translated these figures into the hybrid spaces of augmented reality, planting the gnomes strategically and in such a way as to instantiate a very personal system for creating value that — dare we hope? — is immune to corporate cooptation. Lab members David Rambo and Max Symuleski, among others, round out the project with artistic-theoretical statements connecting the project of Manifest Data with a critical questioning of contemporary manifest destiny and a new phrenology for the digital age.
The S-1 Lab is directed by Mark B. N. Hansen and Mark Olson in the Media Arts + Sciences Program at Duke. The Manifest Data project was initiated by Amanda Starling Gould, who has continued to provide it with a guiding aesthetic-theoretical vision.
More information about the presentation, which happens to be the inaugural presentation in the “What I Do With Data” series of the Digital Scholarship Services at Duke, can be found here.
[UPDATE: Full video of the complete panel is now online: here.]
Here is the abstract for Steven Shaviro’s paper on the panel “Post-Cinema and/as Speculative Media Theory” at the 2015 SCMS conference in Montréal:
Reversible Flesh
Steven Shaviro (Wayne State University)
FKA twigs has made a series of mesmerizing music videos over the last three years. My talk will concentrate on one of these, “Papi Pacify” (directed by FKA twigs and Tom Beard). The video deals starkly, but also obliquely, with issues of intimacy, trust, sexuality, and violence. The video is shot in continually shifting black and white, with glitter and flash effects, and composed entirely of close-ups of the faces and upper bodies of the artist (often staring directly at the camera) and her partner. The video’s editing rhythms are complex and nonlinear, involving looping via animated GIF effects, together with quick inserts and apparent slow motion. The music combines trip hop and r&b; it is floating and ambient, sung in a breathless near-whisper, with periods of instrumental intensification but no tonal shift or climax. Overall, the video disconcertingly reorders human sexuality, by means of its novel articulation of spacetime relations, of the sensorium, and of the relation between viewer/listener and work. In this way, “Papi Pacify,” and FKA twigs’ audiovisual work more generally, itself functions as a speculative revision of media theory.
Bibliography:
Battin, Carrie (2013). “FKA twigs: Interview.” Pitchfork. http://pitchfork.com/features/rising/9183-rising-fka-twigs/.
Friedlander, Emily (2013). “How FKA twigs is Pushing Female Sexuality Beyond Miley Cyrus and Sinead.” The Fader. http://www.thefader.com/2013/10/14/miley-cyrus-sinead-o-connor-female-se/.
Noakes, Tim (2014). “FKA twigs: Future Shock.” Dazed Digital. http://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/20259/1/fka-twigs-future-shock.
Author Bio:
Steven Shaviro is the DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University. He is the author of The Cinematic Body, Post-Cinematic Affect, and Melancholia, Or, The Romantic Anti-Sublime.
[UPDATE: Full video of the complete panel is now online: here.]
Here is the abstract for Patricia Pisters’s paper on the panel “Post-Cinema and/as Speculative Media Theory” at the 2015 SCMS conference in Montréal:
The Filmmaker as Metallurgist: Post-Cinema’s Commitment to Radical Contingency
Patricia Pisters (University of Amsterdam)
Contemporary film, television series, and visual arts have a particular temporal and narrative aesthetics that show how the future, always speculative and multiple, has become the dominant time for thinking. I propose calling this aesthetic mode of the digital age “the neuro-image” (Pisters 2012). Following Gilles Deleuze’s movement-images and time-images, neuro-images increasingly present us time as multiple feedback loops from possible futures, parallel worlds, and complex narrations where subtle differences can cause a world of (micropolitical) variations, different pasts for different futures.
This presentation will look at the ways in which contemporary artists and filmmakers are committed to the radical contingency of the audio-visual archive – committed to revealing hidden dimensions of history and/in our collective audio-visual archive, in order to revive new perspectives and reveal new versions of the past that seem necessary for the future of “a people to come.” In her project The Archival Fourth Dimension, for example, artist Sarah Pierce revisits newsreel archives and proposes to uncover “a different past” in Irish and colonial history. In his installation homage to Stuart Hall, The Unfinished Conversation (2012), John Akomfrah shows how personal and collective archival footage are in a perpetual dialogue where poetry and politics form an intractable bond and history becomes a speculative world of alternative histories. Silvia Kolbowski resurrects Ulrike Meinhoff in A Few Howls Again (2010) and speaks up for her corps, giving a voice to haunting questions of war, violence, and terrorism. And in Zandj Revolution (2013), filmmaker Tariq Teguia makes a journey from Algeria, to Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, and Greece to find inspiration not only in a past revolution – the ninth-century revolution of the Zandj slaves in Iraq – but also in a rebellious and migratory cinematographic style that captures and foreshadows the spirit of the Arab revolution.
Looking at examples such as these, the presentation aims to show how filmmakers become “metallurgists” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994) following the matter-flows of the archive, bending it in concrete forms that can escape from the mnemonic depths and take on a new life, an afterlife. As a politics and a cinematic aesthetics, this undertaking becomes a never-ending story of “trying again, failing again, failing better” with a radical and speculative commitment to the contingencies of history.
Bibliography:
Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guatttari. A Thousand Plateaus. London: The Athlone Press, 1994.
Eisenstein, Sergei. The Film Sense. Trans. Jay Leyda. San Diego, New York & London: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1947.
Shaviro, Steven. Post Cinematic Affect. Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2010.
Pisters, Patricia. The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy for Digital Screen Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012.
Author Bio:
Patricia Pisters is professor of film studies in the department of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. She is one of the founding editors of Necsus: European Journal of Media Studies. Publications include The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory (Stanford University Press, 2003) and The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture (Stanford University Press, 2012).
[UPDATE: Full video of the complete panel is now online: here.]
Here is the abstract for Adrian Ivakhiv’s paper on the panel “Post-Cinema and/as Speculative Media Theory” at the 2015 SCMS conference in Montréal:
Speculative Ecologies of (Post-)Cinema
Adrian Ivakhiv (University of Vermont)
Three sets of intellectual developments frame this paper: (1) debates over the “end of cinema” (and rise of “post-cinema”) in the wake of digital media; (2) recognition across diverse fields that global ecological change—especially, though not solely, impending climate change—is forcing a rearticulation of disciplinary goals and broad societal values; and (3) an upsurge in speculative philosophy, including film and media philosophy, that reconceptualizes sociality, materiality, and relationality in diverse and mutually imbricated ways.
This paper sets out to articulate these three developments together. The emergence of cinema as the “eye of the [twentieth] century” (Cassetti 2008) and its subsequent mutation into something different at the beginning of the twenty-first, and the emergence of ecology as a dominant way of understanding the human-Earth relationship, have not yet been brought and thought together in a sustained way. To do this, I propose a speculative model of cinema, technology, and reality—a process-relational, semiotic-machinic, and “morphogenetic” model rooted in Whitehead, Peirce, and Deleuze/Guattari—to make sense of the ways in which digital cinema reaffirms the lively, kinematic animacy of all things cinematic and extra-cinematic.
Articulating the connections between cinema, semiosis, and materiality makes it possible to conceive of cinema (including digital cinema) as a particular political-ecological articulation of carbon-based life (or biosemiosis). But life, or the semiotic (in Peirce’s terms), exceeds the living. It is machinic (in Deleuzo-Guattarian terms), networked (in Bruno Latour’s), morphogenetic and perpetually differentiating (Deleuze/DeLanda). In this light, I consider what a “post-carbon” cinematic materiality, a materiality beyond the era of petrochemicals—the Capitalocene—might look like, and how digitality, with its proliferation of new forms and its shift to technologies of “the cloud,” affects the possibilities for reclaiming a semiotic commons.
Bibliography:
Bozak, Nadia. The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera, Natural Resources. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011.
Cassetti, Francesco. Eye of the Century: Film, Experience, Modernity. Tr. E. Larkin with J Pranolo. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.
Ivakhiv, Adrian, Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature. Waterloo, Ontario, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013.
Mullarkey, John, Refractions of Reality: Philosophy and the Moving Image. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Shaviro, Steven, Post-Cinematic Affect. Winchester: Zero Books, 2010.
Author Bio:
Adrian Ivakhiv is Professor of Environmental Thought and Culture at the University of Vermont. His research focuses at the intersections between ecology, culture, media, affect, and identity. His books include Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature (2013) and the forthcoming Why Objects Fly Out the Window: An Eventology Manifesto, in the Whiff of its Passing. He blogs at Immanence: EcoCulture, GeoPhilosophy, MediaPolitics.
[UPDATE: Full video of the complete panel is now online: here.]
Here is the abstract for Mark Hansen’s paper on the panel “Post Cinema and/as Speculative Media Theory” at the 2015 SCMS conference in Montréal:
Speculative Protention, or, Are 21st Century Media Agents of Futurity?
Mark B. N. Hansen (Duke University)
In his effort to develop a philosophical account of time-consciousness in the media age, Bernard Stiegler has invoked cinema (as a stand-in for global, realtime, audiovisual fluxes) as the media object par excellence, the technical temporal object that brokers, models, and operates as surrogate for the temporalization responsible for conscious life. Since the publication of the first volume of Stiegler’s Technics and Time, critics have responded to Stiegler’s project with a mix of enthusiasm and skepticism: enthusiasm for the reworking of seemingly moribund themes of deconstruction into a powerful engagement with contemporary media technologies; skepticism concerning the focus on consciousness and representation as the privileged agent and domain of media’s operationality. One particularly striking consequence of Stiegler’s focus on cinema as temporal technical object is a certain temporal bias toward the past, and a recapitulation of the impasse of protention that plagued Husserl’s account of time-consciousness. So long as protention (the “just-to-come’” futurity that is part of the sensory present on the Husserlian model) is taken to be symmetrical to, and indeed is modelled on or derived from retention (the “just-past” of the sensory present), it cannot but be restricted to something that (1) is already possible from the standpoint of the present, is a mode of possibility belonging to the present, and (2) is representational in the sense of being a “content” of consciousness.
The wide-ranging proliferation of so-called “new media” technologies (what I have called 21st century media in my recent work) affords the opportunity to expand the technical off-loading of time-consciousness that informs the core of Stiegler’s neo-Husserlian thought. Most crucially, 21st century media technologies break the correlation of media with conscious cognition, and thus expand the domain of conjunction to what I have called “worldly sensibility” (the meeting of embodied sensibility and worldly impressionality). In my paper, I shall explore two key aspects of this expansion that directly concern the operationality of “speculative media theory”: 1) how the shift from consciousness to sensibility liberates protentionality from its twin restrictions (possibility of the present and representation of consciousness); and 2) how this shift requires a speculative mode of theorization that is an immediate function of the uncertainty and unrepresentatibility of the future.
Bibliography:
Hansen, Mark B. N. Feed-Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First-Century Media. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2014.
Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, Vol. 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2010.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality: An Essay on Cosmology. New York: The Free Press, 1978.
Author Bio:
Mark Hansen teaches in the Literature Program and in Media Arts & Sciences at Duke University. He is author of Embodying Technesis: Technology Beyond Writing, New Philosophy for New Media, and Bodies in Code, and has co-edited The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, Emergence and Embodiment: New Essays on Second-Order Systems Theory, and Critical Terms for Media Studies. His book Feed-Forward: the Future of 21st Century Media will be published by Chicago in Fall 2014.
Here is the abstract for Shane Denson and Andreas Jahn-Sudmann’s paper on the panel “Digital Seriality” at the 2015 SCMS conference in Montréal:
The Xbox One as Serial Hardware: A Technocultural Approach to the Seriality of Computational Platforms
Shane Denson (Duke University) and Andreas Jahn-Sudmann (Free University Berlin)
In order to fully understand the serial aesthetics and practices of digital game culture, seriality must be addressed not only on the level of software or gameplay, but also as a hardware phenomenon. The (un)official numbering of console generations serves to mark innovations serially (e.g. PlayStation, PS2, PS3, PS4), and this accords generally with the way in which the technical, aesthetic, and economic evolution of game software and hardware follows a serial logic of “one-upmanship” (cf. Jahn-Sudmann and Kelleter 2012). However, some systems like the new Xbox One ostensibly refuse the additive logic of innovation (the would-be “Xbox 720”) and perform a symbolic reboot instead (cf. Denson and Jahn-Sudmann 2013). Yet this revolutionary rhetoric, along with its connotation of exclusivity, seems hardly compatible with the serial remake-logic of game engines, for instance. These engines function not only to allow games to be run on various platforms (PC, consoles, etc.) with only minor changes to their source code, but also serve to make the reusability of core software components easier and faster, thus increasing the economic viability of game series. Already against this backdrop, the technical development of consoles has to be conceptualized, almost inevitably, as a process of media evolution rather than of media revolution.
In our paper, we seek to explore how game consoles like the Xbox One not only enable and constrain aesthetic forms and practices of ludic seriality, but also how these platforms themselves emerge as serial factors of technocultural expression. The presentation focuses particularly on two questions: First, and more generally, how can the theoretical and historical perspective of “platform studies” (as advocated by Montfort and Bogost 2009) contribute to the study of digital seriality? Second, in how far can we think of the game console as a computational platform that mediates different levels of ludic seriality (forms of serialization within the game, between games, and “outside” the game) while also shaping the cultural forms of what we call “collective serialization” (i.e. processes of community-formation in connection with the consumption of serialized media) and “serial interfacing” (i.e. the temporal-serial experiences that transpire at the interface between humans and digital technologies) (Denson and Jahn-Sudmann 2013)?
Bibliography
Denson, Shane, and Andreas Jahn-Sudmann. “Digital Seriality: On the Serial Aesthetics and Practices of Digital Games.” Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture 7.1 (2013): 1-32.
Jahn-Sudmann, Andreas, and Frank Kelleter. “Die Dynamik serieller Überbietung: Amerikanische Fernsehserien und das Konzept des Quality TV.” Populäre Serialität: Narration-Evolution-Distinktion. Zum seriellen Erzählen seit dem 19. Jahrhundert. Ed. Frank Kelleter. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2012. 205-224.
Montfort, Nick, and Ian Bogost. Racing the Beam. The Atari Video Computer System. Cambridge; London: The MIT Press, 2009.
Author Bios:
Shane Denson is a DAAD postdoctoral fellow at Duke University and a member of the research unit “Popular Seriality—Aesthetics and Practice.” He is the author of Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface (Transcript 2014) and co-editor of several collections: Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives (Bloomsbury, 2013), Digital Seriality (special issue of Eludamos, forthcoming), and Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st Century Film (REFRAME, forthcoming).
Andreas Jahn-Sudmann is assistant professor at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies (Freie Universität Berlin) and a member of the research unit “Popular Seriality—Aesthetics and Practice,” in which he co-directs the project “Digital Seriality.” He is the author of a book on American independent film, Der Widerspenstigen Zähmung? (Transcript, 2006), and co-editor of several anthologies, among them: Computer Games as a Sociocultural Phenomenon (Palgrave, 2008).
Here is the abstract for Dominik Maeder’s paper on the panel “Digital Seriality” at the 2015 SCMS conference in Montréal:
Serial Interfaces: Publishing and Programming Television on Digital Platforms
Dominik Maeder (University of Siegen)
Digital streaming platforms such as Netflix, Hulu, and Watchever are frequently dubbed “the future of television” due to their technical features of increased selectability, flexibility, and user-centred generation of programming flows. Few scholars, however, have actually analyzed and theorized the aesthetic forms through which these platforms arrange and organize their “content” or the operations that the websites’ interfaces enable with respect to well-established accounts of television programming.
In this paper I shall argue that digital streaming platforms not only host and influence the production processes and aesthetic forms of television series, but that these platforms themselves perform a specific kind of spatio-temporal seriality on the level of their interfaces. This seriality of interfaces can be described, following Manovich (2001), as a conceptual form that is located between narrative and database logics and that permits databases themselves to appear as potential narratives. In so far as the arrangement of content in digital platforms is also a screening of meta-data (cf. Chamberlain 2011), we may more specifically locate the interfaces’ seriality as a result of the automated observation and algorithmic organization of media consumption (cf. Adelmann 2012). This algorithmic automatization, as will be demonstrated with regard to Netflix’s House of Cards, lends itself to a phantasm of the non-human production of the “new” and thereby closely connects to a very modernistic conception of industrial seriality.
Bibliography:
Adelmann, Ralf. “‘There is no correct way to use the system.’ Das doppelte Subjekt in Datenbanklogiken.” Sortieren, Sammeln, Suchen, Spielen. Die Datenbank als mediale Praxis. Eds. Stefan Böhme, Rolf F. Nohr, and Serjoscha Wiemer. Münster: LIT, 2012. 253-268.
Chamberlain, Daniel. “Scripted Spaces: Television Interfaces and the Non-Places of Asynchronous Entertainment.” Television as Digital Media. Eds. James Bennett and Niki Strange. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011. 230-254.
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge: MIT, 2001.
Author Bio:
Dominik Maeder (M.A.) is a research assistant in Media Studies at the University of Siegen (Germany). He is writing a PhD thesis on Televisual Governmentality and has published several papers on the aesthetics of TV series, reality TV, and transmedia television.
