Category: Books

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!

Out Now and 50% OFF: Discorrelated Images

Image: David Parisi on Twitter

Discorrelated Images is now available from Duke University Press, and during the Fall Sale from now until November 23, you can get it (and any in-stock Duke UP book) for 50% off with code FALL2020 if you order directly from the press: https://www.dukeupress.edu/discorrelated-images

With the discount, the book costs just under $13!

If you’re in Europe or the UK, the code also works if you order from distributor Combined Academic Publishers, which will save you on shipping and get the book into your hands quicker!

Screen Serialities

As a member of the Advisory Board for the Screen Serialities book series at Edinburgh University Press, I wanted to make sure that people are aware of our upcoming releases and to encourage anyone working on seriality and serialized media to pitch their work for consideration.

Next month, the first book in the series will be published: Film Reboots, edited by Daniel Herbert and Constantine Verevis, will look at reboots in terms of industry, narrative, politics, and reception. The second volume in the series, Maria Sulimma’s Seriality and Gender, will be out in February.

There’s already lots of other good stuff in the works, but there’s room in this series for a wide range of topics and approaches. Feel free to reach out to me with any informal questions, or get in touch with Film Studies Senior Commissioning Editor Gillian Leslie (Gillian.Leslie at eup.ed.ac.uk) if you have a proposal.

A Discorrelated Summary of Discorrelated Images

This is deeply weird. Google Books has a summary of Discorrelated Images up, and it’s definitely not from the publisher (compare Duke University Press’s summary here). While Google’s summary is not exactly *wrong* in anything that it says, it is far from a summary of what my book is actually about — and some sentences can’t really be judged in terms of truth or accuracy, as they just don’t make sense. (For example, the second sentence: “While film theory is based on past film techniques that rely on human perception to relate frames across time, computer generated images use information to render images as moving themselves.” What does that mean?!? It’s grammatical, and it *sounds* vaguely like something I might have written, but as far as I can tell, it is meaningless.)

Moreover, from this text it sounds like the book is primarily about Michael Bay’s TRANSFORMERS with a detour through Denis Villeneuve’s BLADE RUNNER 2049. To be clear, I do write about both of these, but I also write about Guy Maddin’s algorithmic SEANCES, about Basma Alsharif’s HOME MOVIES GAZA, about desktop horror, drones, speculative execution, animation, about the relations between the phenomenology of perception in relation to microtemporal and subperceptual events, about videogames, codecs, streaming video, and the end of the world.

Anyway, who wrote this summary? Why do I think it was a machine?

“Towards a Historical Aesthetics of Encounter”: My review of James J. Hodge, Sensations of History, in Critical Inquiry

My review of Jim Hodge’s excellent book Sensations of History: Animation and New Media Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) is online now at Critical Inquiry. This is an important book — definitely check it out!

Discorrelated Images in Duke University Press Fall 2020 Catalog (and about that cover image)

I am excited to see my book Discorrelated Images alongside so many truly impressive books in Duke University Press’s Fall 2020 catalog, which went online today. Take a look; there is so much good stuff in there!

And take a closer look at my book’s cover, below, which I am doubly excited about — first, because the press’s designer Drew Sisk did such a beautiful job on it, and second because it features a painting by my partner-in-crime/partner-in-life Karin Denson! (And if you know what you’re looking at, it also depicts our dog Evie — so there’s a third reason I’m super excited about it!)

Check out more of Karin’s work on her website at karindenson.com.

Discorrelated Images, cover design by Drew Sisk, featuring artwork by Karin Denson

Vivian Sobchack on Discorrelated Images

As I mourn the cancellation (due to the novel coronavirus) of my SCMS panel with the great Vivian Sobchack, I discover her blurb for my book Discorrelated Images, which has just appeared next to Steven Shaviro’s on the Duke University Press website. I am deeply honored and grateful to read these words of praise from a theorist whose work and words have been formative for me.

Steven Shaviro’s Blurb for Discorrelated Images

The world is falling apart, but my book Discorrelated Images is still set to come out in October — and I just discovered that Steven Shaviro has blurbed it! Also, the Duke University Press webpage for the book lists an affordable $25.95 cover price for the paperback!

New Review of Post-Cinema in Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft 18 (2018)

Screen Shot 2018-05-02 at 11.09.08 AM

There is a new review of several works on all things post-cinematic, including Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film (which I co-edited with Julia Leyda), alongside Francesco Casetti’s The Lumière Galaxy; Malte Hagener, Vinzenz Hediger, and Alena Strohmaier’s edited collection The State of Post-Cinema; Vinzenz Hediger and Miriam de Rosa’s special issue Post-What? Post-When?; and Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky’s Queeres Post-Cinema.

The review, in German, is titled “Werden/Weiter/Denken: Rekapitulation eines Post-Cinema Diskurses” (roughly: Becoming/Further/Thinking — suggesting a thinking in flux and a thinking beyond — Recapitulation of a Post-Cinema Discourse). The text, by Elisa Linseisen from the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, appears in Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft 18 (2018). The full text is available as an open-access PDF.