Following the recent publication of Media of Serial Narrative, edited by Frank Kelleter, there is a 4-part interview with Kelleter conducted by Henry Jenkins over on the latter’s blog. The interview is far-ranging and offers a good introduction to the volume and to the broader work conducted by the Popular Seriality Research Unit from 2010 to 2016, continued in ongoing work today.
Media of Serial Narrative, edited by Frank Kelleter and published by The Ohio State University Press, is out now! The book includes 14 chapters, two of which I co-authored: “Spectral Seriality: The Sights and Sounds of Count Dracula” (co-authored with Ruth Mayer) and “Digital Seriality: On the Serial Aesthetics and Practice of Digital Games” (co-authored with Andreas Sudmann). Here’s the full table of contents:
I am pleased to announce that Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film, which I co-edited with Julia Leyda, is now available for download in PDF format.
The open-access book, which has been available in an online HTML version since earlier this year, weighs in at a whopping 990 pages (!) and can now be downloaded for offline reading in two versions (9mb or a higher-quality 13mb version).
There are also two new endorsements for the book. First, from Tanya Horeck at Anglia Ruskin University:
Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film is an intellectually exciting and important book. Editors Shane Denson and Julia Leyda have assembled an extraordinary range of notable contributors with the aim to open up a critical conversation on the very notion of the post-cinematic – something they achieve in a most novel and engaging way. Through essays and roundtable discussions, Post-Cinema formulates fresh and nuanced questions about the consumption and spectatorship of post-millennial film and other media as they circulate through contemporary digital media ecologies. As is fitting given its subject matter of changing media formats, the design and layout of this book – with its open access digitality and its collaborative dialogues – is as relevant and pioneering as its content. Inviting us to rethink received ideas about how 21st-century media reshape “new forms of sensibility,” Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film is critically imperative reading for anyone interested in ongoing vital transformations in moving image media.
– Tanya Horeck, Reader in Film, Media, and Culture, Anglia Ruskin University
And also an endorsement from Michael Lawrence at University of Sussex:
The essays and discussions that have been assembled in Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st–Century Film provide the reader with a remarkably comprehensive and compelling survey of the diverse critical and theoretical responses to the formal, technological, affective, political and ecological dimensions of our contemporary post-cinematic landscape. That landscape now has an authoritative and inspirational field guide: by gathering together foundational interventions alongside the most recent contributions this collection will prove indispensable to anyone wishing to take these conversations forward.
– Michael Lawrence, Reader in Film Studies, University of Sussex
More info and an official announcement can be found here.
Network Ecologies is a great new open-access collection edited by Amanda Starling Gould and Florian Wiencek and published by the Duke Franklin Humanities Institute. The collection takes advantage of the Scalar publishing platform to include a variety of media alongside scholarly texts. Among other things, it includes a collection of artworks by Karin Denson and myself, which we developed for an exhibit at Duke in 2015 (also organized by Amanda Starling Gould) and which grew out of a collaboration with the Duke S-1: Speculative Sensation Lab. There is also an archive of videos from a 2013 symposium, including contributions from Jussi Parikka, Mark Hansen, Stephanie Boluk, Patrick LeMieux, and many others. Lots of great things to discover here–check it out!
Here is a short “book trailer” for the open-access collection Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film, edited by Shane Denson and Julia Leyda (REFRAME Books, 2016).
Also, don’t forget that we’ll be having a book launch party at Pro qm Books in Berlin this coming Friday, June 24. See here for more info and a flyer.
On June 24, 2016, Julia Leyda and I will be celebrating the launch of our co-edited book Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film at Pro qm Books in Berlin. Several contributors will be on hand as well for a short book presentation, Q&A, and wine!
See the flyer above for details, and come out if you’re in the neighborhood!
My review of Dominic Pettman’s short book Infinite Distraction: Looking at Social Media is up now at the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB). In the review, I explore particularly the stakes of “distraction,” which Pettman borrows from Kracauer and Benjamin, and the way that their concept of Zerstreuung might help us to understand our age of “scatterbrained” multitasking and develop an appropriate response. With a nod to Marshall McLuhan and his notions of “hot” and “cool” media, I try to understand Pettman’s politics of distraction, which itself responds to Bernard Stiegler’s phenomenology of mediated temporality: “In the face of ultra-cool media, we have to learn to be ice cold. In the face of the always already ‘meta’ relation of social media to our divided, distracted attentions, we have to learn to be infinitely more distracted. Hypersynchronization and hypermodulation call for nothing less than hyperdistraction.” In the end, I am critical of what I refer to as the book’s “humanistic vision” and its “communicational bias,” but I certainly recommend engaging with Pettman’s thought-provoking and in many ways open-ended book, which I see sowing seeds for future thinking and action in the realm of social media.
Read the whole review here.
I am happy to announce, at long last, the publication of Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film, edited by Shane Denson and Julia Leyda, which is out today as a completely free and open-access volume with REFRAME Books.
If cinema and television, as the dominant media of the 20th century, shaped and reflected our cultural sensibilities, how do new digital media in the 21st century help to shape and reflect new forms of sensibility? In this collection, editors Shane Denson and Julia Leyda have gathered a range of essays that approach this question by way of a critical engagement with the notion of “post-cinema.” Contributors explore key experiential, technological, political, historical, and ecological aspects of the transition from a cinematic to a post-cinematic media regime and articulate both continuities and disjunctures between film’s first and second centuries.
The book will appear in several digital formats: the web-based version is online today, and several ebook formats will be appearing soon.
The book brings together foundational texts by some of the key voices in the discussion of post-cinema and places them next to a range of brand-new chapters, as well as a series of roundtable discussions.
The long list of contributors includes:
Caitlin Benson-Allott, Paul Bowman, Felix Brinker, Kristopher L. Cannon, Francesco Casetti, Steen Christiansen, Elena del Río, Shane Denson, Rosalind Galt, Therese Grisham, Richard Grusin, Leon Gurevitch, Mark B. N. Hansen, Bruce Isaacs, Adrian Ivakhiv, Kylie Jarrett, Selmin Kara, Julia Leyda, Patricia MacCormack, Lev Manovich, Ruth Mayer, Michael O’Rourke, Patricia Pisters, Alessandra Raengo, David Rambo, Nicholas Rombes, Sergi Sánchez, Karin Sellberg, Steven Shaviro, Michael Loren Siegel, Vivian Sobchack, Billy Stevenson, Andreas Sudmann
Here is the table of contents:
A brief “press release” with a description of the book and the complete table of contents is available here (opens as a PDF): POST-CINEMA-Press-Release
Recently, I posted about a project called after.video, which contains an augmented (AR) glitch/video/image-based theory piece that Karin Denson and I collaborated on. It has now been announced that the official launch of after.video, Volume 1: Assemblages — a “video book” consisting of a paperback book and video elements stored on a Raspberry Pi computer packaged in a VHS case, which will also be available online — will take place at the Libre Graphics Meeting 2016 in London (Sunday, April 17th at 4:20pm).
The latest issue of MEDIENwissenschaft: Rezensionen/Reviews includes a nice review of my book Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface.
For those of you who read German, you can find the entire text of the review, by Anya Heise-von der Lippe (Tübingen/Berlin), here. For everyone else, here is a (rough) translation of the reviewer’s summary statement:
“Postnaturalism offers a philosophical approach and an engagement with fundamental ontological and phenomenological questions of human and nonhuman materiality, which is indispensable especially for a post-postmodernity characterized by resource scarcity, climate change, and species extinctions, as well as the threat of a return to essentialist positions in politics and popular culture. Adapting a phrase from Bruno Latour, Denson counters the latter with a postnatural position: “We have never been natural” (24). Furthermore, Denson’s detailed examination — at the level of content, reception, and production — of Frankenstein adaptations is an asset for the analytical and production-aesthetic [produktionsästhetische] investigation of a central text (or modern myth) and its many adaptations in a wide range of text-critical disciplines: from media studies to literary to cultural studies.”
(Again, the translation is rough. Tweaks are more than welcome! Especially if you have suggestions for produktionsästhetisch or for making that first sentence more readable, drop me a line in the comments below…)
Finally, make sure you check out the entire issue of MEDIENwissenschaft, which is chock full of great stuff. Of particular interest to readers of this blog, among other things: the “Perspectives” section contains a longer piece on seriality and television series’ interrelations by Tanja Weber and Christian Junklewitz.
Check out the full contents of the issue here.