Books – Page 4 – medieninitiative

Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside a Fraying America — Mary Beth Meehan and Fred Turner at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, June 2

The Digital Aesthetics Workshop invites you to join us for one final event next Wednesday, June 2 (5-7PM Pacific), for a conversation with Mary Beth Meehan & Fred Turner.

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Join photographer Mary Beth Meehan and historian Fred Turner in a conversation about their new book, Seeing Silicon Valley — Life in a Fraying America, and about the power of analog aesthetics in a digital era.

Mary Beth Meehan is a photographer and writer known for her large-scale, community-based portraiture centered on questions of representation, visibility, and social equity. She lives in New England, where she has lectured at Brown University, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

Fred Turner is Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University. He is the author of the award-winning history From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism among other books.

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More information about the book can be found here: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo90479007.html

What Tech Calls Thinking — Adrian Daub at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, May 11

On Tuesday, May 11th (5-7 pm Pacific), Adrian Daub will be discussing his recent book, What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley, at the Digital Aesthetics Workshop. Registration at tinyurl.com/DAWDaub.

About the event: Adrian Daub’s What Tech Calls Thinking is a lively dismantling of the ideas that form the intellectual bedrock of Silicon Valley. Equally important to Silicon Valley’s world-altering innovation are the language and ideas it uses to explain and justify itself. And often, those fancy new ideas are simply old motifs playing dress-up in a hoodie. From the myth of dropping out to the war cry of “disruption,” Daub locates the Valley’s supposedly original, radical thinking in the ideas of Heidegger and Ayn Rand, the New Age Esalen Foundation in Big Sur, and American traditions from the tent revival to predestination. Written with verve and imagination, What Tech Calls Thinking is an intellectual refutation of Silicon Valley’s ethos, pulling back the curtain on the self-aggrandizing myths the Valley tells about itself.

Adrian Daub is a professor of comparative literature and German studies at Stanford University, and the director of the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Studies. His research focuses on the intersection of literature, music, and philosophy in the nineteenth century.

Sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center. Made possible by support from Linda Randall Meier, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Possibilities of Post-Cinema: Review of Discorrelated Images in Film International

There’s a new review of Discorrelated Images in Film International. Reviewer T. R. Merchant-Knudsen (who goes by @CriticTMK on Twitter) remarks that pandemic year 2020 was paradoxically the perfect year for the book to appear, as it aims to illuminate the unprecedented role of digital screens in the reorganization of our lives, and judges the book overall “a fantastic meditation on post-cinema that begs the reader to consider both the horrors and possibilities afforded with technological advancements.”

Check out the full review here, and pick up the book for 50% off during Duke University Press’s Spring Sale (now through May 7) with code SPRING21 if you order directly from the publisher. (Outside North and South America, you can use the same code at international distributor Combined Academic Publishers.)

A Company of Authors — Saturday, April 24

This Saturday, April 24, I will be participating in Stanford Continuing Studies and the Stanford Humanities Center’s annual event showcasing new books by Stanford authors, A Company of Authors. I will be presenting my book Discorrelated Images alongside Marci Kwon and Usha Iyer, both of whom are colleagues in the Department of Art & Art History, who will be presenting their recent books Enchantments: Joseph Cornell and American Modernism (Kwon) and Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema (Iyer).

The panel, which consists of very short book presentations and a brief Q&A, is at 1pm Pacific time via Zoom. Registration for the event is here: https://continuingstudies.stanford.edu/company-of-authors-spring-2021

Sensations of History and Discorrelated Images — James J. Hodge and Shane Denson at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, Stanford / Center for Global Culture and Communication, Northwestern

A presentation and dialogue on two recent books in digital aesthetics: Sensations of History: Animation and New Media Art by James J. Hodge (Northwestern University) and Discorrelated Images by Shane Denson (Stanford University).

On Zoom, Friday, April 2, 2021, at 2 p.m. CST/ 12 p.m. PST
REGISTRATION REQUIRED

To Register: https://northwestern.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcoc-mqpj8oGtzYRsInHSx38NRAQfAYTQin

Organized by Center for Global Culture and Communication (CGCC), Department of Communication Studies, Northwestern University, Linda Randall Meier Research Workshop on Digital Aesthetics at Stanford University, Stanford Humanities Center

Books in Conversation: Discussing Discorrelated Images with Caetlin Benson-Allott

Over at ASAP/J, the open-access platform of ASAP/Journal, a conversation with Caetlin Benson-Allott and myself on the topic of Discorrelated Images has just gone online. We talk about archives, coups, Zoom, and Janelle Monáe, among other things. Check it out here!

Sensing Media: New Book Series at Stanford University Press

I have been sitting on this news for a while now, and I am excited that I can finally share it: Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and I are editing a new book series at Stanford University Press called “Sensing Media” that is devoted to the aesthetics, philosophies, and cultures of media.

We are especially interested in contributions that rethink media aesthetics, understood broadly to include both artistic uses of media and their sensory dimensions; that conceive media as the site where art and technology converge; and that expand the scope of media-philosophical discussions to include global and heretofore marginalized perspectives. We are excited to explore the connections between sensory forms and their infrastructures, between media technologies and aesthetic sensibilities, and more generally between media and the many possible worlds they disclose.

Please spread the word about the new series, and consider submitting your manuscripts. If you have questions, you can direct them to me, Wendy Chun, or Executive Editor Erica Wetter, with whom we are thrilled to be working on this series. We look forward to learning about your work!

Discorrelated Images: 40% Off until March 31

Please enjoy this goofy selfie with book and pandemic hair, which I made for Duke University Press’s virtual booth at the College Art Association’s annual conference. During the conference, Duke UP is having another big sale: from now until March 31, you can use the code CAA21 to save 40% off all in-stock books and journals, including Discorrelated Images: https://www.dukeupress.edu/discorrelated-images

Pandemic Media — full PDF now available

The full PDF of Pandemic Media, an open-access collection edited by Philipp Dominik Keidl, Laliv Melamed, Vinzenz Hediger, and Antonio Somaini, is now available for download (here).

The volume contains 37 short chapters on various aspects of media and mediated experience under conditions of the pandemic, divided into 5 sections: Time/Temporality, Space/Scale, Technologies/Materialities, Education/Instruction, and Activism/Sociability.

The last section includes my essay on Zoom and related screen-based forms of interaction: “‘Thus isolation is a project.’ Notes toward a Phenomenology of Screen-Mediated Life.” There are lots of other things to discover in this book, though, so check it out!

Out Now: Pandemic Media

Just out with meson press: Pandemic Media is an open-access collection edited by Philipp Dominik Keidl, Laliv Melamed, Vinzenz Hediger, and Antonio Somaini. To say that the collection is timely is of course a truism, but in line with the strange temporality of life in the pandemic, I think you’ll find that many of the articles are in fact “untimely” (in the Nietzschean sense), and that they might help create distance where that seems impossible.

I am honored to have a short piece included in the collection, titled “‘Thus isolation is a project.’ Notes toward a Phenomenology of Screen-Mediated Life.” Here I try to think critically and phenomenologically about the Zoom-sphere and about the new forms of sociality that are emerging and will be required in the future.

An HTML version of the collection is available now, and a print edition is coming in December. Check it out!