Click the image above to view the slides and hear the audio track recorded at our January 21, 2015 presentation of Manifest Data, a collaborative art/theory project by the Duke University S-1 Speculative Sensation Lab (directed by Mark B. N. Hansen and Mark Olson). This is an ongoing project, with further elaborations/iterations and presentations/exhibitions in the planning (more soon!).
The presentation took place at The Edge, the new digital and interactive learning space at Duke’s Bostock Library. The presenters (in the order of their appearance) were: Amanda Starling Gould, Luke Caldwell, Shane Denson (me), and David Rambo.
For more info about the project, see here and here — and stay tuned for more!.
Above, another poster for the Manifest Data event on January 21, 2015, which I posted about a few days ago. Again, we’ll be presenting “a project that includes a 3D printed manifestation of personal Internet browsing data and an AR-enhanced data-based garden gnome” (as Amanda Starling Gould summed it up succinctly). If you’re in the Triangle area, do swing by! The event is free and open to all. (And if that’s not enough to entice you: as the poster says, “Light refreshments will be served!”)
See also the posts about the project on the HASTAC digital humanities network (here and here), as well the full list of events in the Duke Digital Scholarship Services series this semester (here).
I have written before about Karin Denson’s crazy hand-crafted garden gnomes, based on figures from popular culture, philosophy, and modern art (see here for a piece I posted about them last year). Recently, Karin’s gnomes have taken on new dimensions — quite literally, in fact — as she has transformed personal data collected during Internet browsing sessions into a sort of “portrait” of the user, subsequently turning this image of the interface into a gnome’s “data face,” and then subjecting the poor creature to a strict (but playful) regimen of photogrammetry, AR enhancement, and 3D printing. These new aspects, developed as part of the collaborative Manifest Data project, have further expanded the gnome’s artistic questioning of popular and high-art cultural formations, material and immaterial labor processes, class consciousness, national identity, and the role of seriality in all of them.
It is only fitting, then, that as we prepare for next week’s presentation of Manifest Data, in which context Karin’s data gnomes mount a brave attempt to reverse the neo-cyber-Marxian dictum that “all that’s solid melts into zeroes and ones,” another of Karin’s gnomes is also currently on display: Karl Marx himself, or his gnomic Doppelgänger, is haunting the gallery, bringing things down to earth, and making them concrete (literally: solid concrete). This week only, the Karl Marx gnome can be seen at The Carrack Modern Art, where he’s participating in a community show featuring 100 local artists from the Triangle area of North Carolina. The show runs today through Friday, 12-6pm, and Saturday 2-5pm. Also, as part of “Third Friday Durham,” there will be a reception with food, wine, and music this Friday, January 16, 2015, from 7-10pm. If you’re in or around Durham, don’t miss it!
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.
I am very happy to announce that the panel I will be chairing at this year’s SCMS conference, “Post-Cinema and/as Speculative Media Theory,” has been chosen as one of eight panels to be officially sponsored by the Media and the Environment Special Interest Group. The group, of which I am proud to be a member, defines its mission thus:
The Media and the Environment Scholarly Interest Group (MESIG) aims to provide a forum for shared discussion of research and pedagogy at the intersections of media and environment. We believe that nearly every aspect of film and media practice and studies–from materials manufacturing and physical infrastructures, to filming locations and resources, to audiovisual aspects and themes, and beyond to marketing, preservation, obsolescence, and also scholarly discourse–touches matters of the environment and sustainability. Various approaches from an environmentalist perspective have been taken and more are still being developed to investigate how our mediated cultural practices have, do, and will position humans in relation to physical and natural worlds. How can we further film and media studies as a global–read planetary–concern, focused on dire changes and issues affecting the Earth and our natural surroundings? We believe our field has much to contribute to discussions and findings more frequently held in and attributed to science disciplines and Environmental Studies. With this Scholarly Interest Group, we seek to cultivate the study of significant matters of media and the environment within our field and through the representative collective that is SCMS.
I am honored that our panel — which includes one explicitly environmental film/media theorist (Adrian Ivakhiv) but also three others (Steven Shaviro, Patricia Pisters, and Mark Hansen) who are helping to define the subject of post-cinema in broadly ecological terms — has been chosen for sponsorship by the Media and the Environment SIG, and I am grateful for their recognition of the topic’s relevance for our ongoing attempts to rethink the relations between humans, our media technologies, and the environments that we inhabit, access, and transform with and through them.
Here, finally, is a list of all eight panels sponsored by the SIG:
A23: Ecocriticism
F8: Fossils, Films, and Sedimentation: Ecocritical Approaches to Archival Moving Images
G4: Media Waste: Technological Systems and the Environment
H22: Excess Hollywood: Economies of Waste in Media Industries
J12: Engaging Ecocinema: The Affects and Effects of Environmental Documentaries
J17: Media Environments
K7: Post-Cinema and/as Speculative Media Theory
P4: Cinema in/of the Anthropocene
The preliminary schedule for the Society of Cinema and Media Studies 2015 conference in Montreal is now online (here). As I posted recently, I will be involved in two separate panels:
First, I will be chairing the panel on “Post-Cinema and/as Speculative Media Theory” (panel K7, Friday, March 27, 2015, 9:00-10:45am) — with presenters Steven Shaviro, Patricia Pisters, Adrian Ivakhiv, and Mark B. N. Hansen. You can find the complete panel description, as well as individual abstracts, here. Note also that all participants on this panel are contributors to the forthcoming Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film, which I am co-editing with Julia Leyda.
Second, I will be participating in a panel on “Digital Seriality” (panel Q20, Saturday, March 28, 2015, 3:00-4:45pm) — along with Andreas Jahn-Sudmann, Scott Higgins, Dominik Maeder, and Daniela Wentz. Panel description and abstracts can be found here. And, as with the other panel, this one too has a tie-in with a publication: all the participants on this panel were contributors to the special issue of Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture that Andreas Jahn-Sudmann and I edited on the topic of “Digital Seriality.”
