This coming semester, the Initiative for Interdisciplinary Media Research is proud to present a series of events organized around the topic “Imagining Media Change.” The flyer above (click for a larger view) details these events, which include a series of film screenings, thematically focused discussion groups, and a symposium featuring keynotes by Jussi Parikka and Wanda Strauven!
More details to follow soon…
I have added a new rubric (Events) at the top of this page, where I will post future events and maintain a chronicle of past events. While putting this list together, it occurred to me that the media initiative has organized quite a few events over the (nearly) two years of its existence at the Leibniz University Hannover. Here’s a list of things we’ve done:
April 13, 2011: Inaugural meeting of the Initiative for Interdisciplinary Media Research
May 18, 2011: Shane Denson, “Mediatization & Serialization” (public lecture)
June 8, 2011: Media Initiative blog (medieninitiative.wordpress.com) goes online
July 13, 2011: Preliminary meeting of the Film & TV Reading Group
October 26, 2011: First regular meeting of the Film & TV Reading Group (text: Jason Mittell, “Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television” – moderators: Florian Groß, Shane Denson)
October 27, 2011: “Bollywood Nation” film series begins (organized by Jatin Wagle and Shane Denson, in conjunction with Jatin Wagle’s seminar “Long-Distance Hindu Nationalism and the Changing Figure of the Expatriate Indian in Contemporary Bollywood Cinema”); screening #1: Swades: We, the People (2004)
November 24, 2011: “Bollywood Nation” film series, screening #2: Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995)
November 30, 2011: Film & TV Reading Group (text: Lynn Spigel, “Television, the Housewife, and the Museum of Modern Art” – moderator: Bettina Soller)
December 8, 2011: “Bollywood Nation” film series, screening #3: Pardes (1997)
December 15-17, 2011: “Cultural Distinctions Remediated: Beyond the High, the Low, and the Middle.” International Conference, organized by Ruth Mayer, Vanessa Künnemann, Florian Groß, and Shane Denson. Sponsored by the DFG, DGfA, American Embassy in Berlin, CampusCultur, and in association with the DFG Research Unit “Popular Seriality—Aesthetics and Practice” and the Initiative for Interdisciplinary Media Research at the Leibniz University of Hannover. Keynote speakers: Jason Mittell and Lynn Spigel. Presentations by Media Initiative members Shane Denson, Florian Groß, Christina Meyer, and Bettina Soller.
December 21, 2011: Film & TV Reading Group (text: Steven Shaviro, “Contagious Allegories: George Romero” – moderator: Stefan Hautke) + film screening: Night of the Living Dead (1968)
January 5, 2012: “Bollywood Nation” film series, screening #4: Mr. and Mrs. Iyer (2002)
January 18, 2012: Film & TV Reading Group (text: Livia Monnet, “A-Life and the Uncanny in Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within” – moderator: Thomas Habedank)
January 26, 2012: “Bollywood Nation” film series, screening #5: Chak De! India (2007)
April 25, 2012: Film & TV Reading Group (text: Mark B. N. Hansen, “Media Theory” – moderator: Shane Denson)
April 26, 2012: “Chaos Cinema?” film series begins (organized by Felix Brinker, Shane Denson, and Florian Groß); screening #1: “Chaos Cinema” (video essays by Matthias Stork)
May 16, 2012: Film & TV Reading Group (text: Steven Shaviro, “Post-Continuity” – moderator: Felix Brinker)
May 24, 2012: “Chaos Cinema?” film series, screening #2: Gladiator (2000); curator: Florian Groß
June 20, 2012: Film & TV Reading Group (text: Rudmer Canjels, “Seriality Unbound” – moderator: Ilka Brasch)
June 21, 2012: “Chaos Cinema?” film series, screening #3: Transformers (2007); curator: Shane Denson (presentation: “Discorrelated Images: Chaos Cinema, Post-Cinematic Affect, and Speculative Realism”)
July 2, 2012: Public lecture – Mark B. N. Hansen, “Feed Forward, or the ‘Future’ of 21st Century Media”; First in a week-long series of events with Mark B. N. Hansen (Duke University), co-organized by Shane Denson and Felix Brinker. Grant secured through the Fulbright Senior Specialist Program. Sponsored by the Guest Professor Program of the Faculty of Humanities, American Studies / English Department, and the Initiative for Interdisciplinary Media Research at the Leibniz University of Hannover.
July 3, 2012: Mark B. N. Hansen, “The End of Pharmacology? Historicizing 21st Century Media”; Guest lecture in Shane Denson’s seminar, “Cultural and Media Theory: Media in Transition”
July 5, 2012: “Chaos Cinema?” film series, screening #4: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010); curator: Felix Brinker (presentation: “Scott Pilgrim Vs. The Movies: Intermedial Collage and Narrative Logic in Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World”)
July 6, 2012: Workshop with Mark B. N. Hansen, including presentations by Media Initiative members Ilka Brasch (“Mapping the Ends of Human Sense Perception”), Felix Brinker (“Between Life and Technics”), and Shane Denson (“Mediate. Discorrelate. Recalibrate.”)
July 11, 2012: Film & TV Reading Group (text: Jack G. Shaheen, “Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People” – moderator: Malte Mühle)
July 17, 2012: Presentations by participants in Shane Denson’s “Digital Media and Humanities Research” course: Linda Kötteritzsch, Julia Schmedes, and Mandy Schwarze, “Bonfire of the Televised Profanities” (blog presentation and discussion of the intersection of TV studies and digital media; Urthe Rehmstedt and Maren Sonnenberg, “Digital Humanities” (video essays).
July 19, 2012: “Chaos Cinema?” film series, screening #5: WALL-E (2008); curator: Shane Denson (presentation: “WALL-E vs. Chaos (Cinema)”)
November 8, 2012: “M: Movies, Machines, Modernity” film series begins (organized by Ilka Brasch, Felix Brinker, and Shane Denson); screening #1: Metropolis (1927); curator: Shane Denson (presentation: “M: Movies, Machines, Modernity – An Introduction”)
November 14, 2012: Film & TV Reading Group (text: Walter Benjamin, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit” – moderator: Shane Denson)
November 29, 2012: “M: Movies, Machines, Modernity” film series, screening #2: Man with a Movie Camera (1929); curator: Felix Brinker (presentation: “Movies, Machines, Modernity: On Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera”)
December 5, 2012: Film & TV Reading Group (text: Jean Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy of Communication” – moderator: Julia Schmedes)
December 13, 2012: “M: Movies, Machines, Modernity” film series, screening #3: M – Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder; curator/presenter: Urs Büttner
December 15, 2012: Shane Denson, “Batman and the ‘Parergodic’ Work of Seriality in Interactive Digital Environments”; presentation in conjunction with the American Studies Research Colloquium
January 16, 2013: Film & TV Reading Group (text: Theodor W. Adorno, “Prolog zum Fernsehen” – moderator: Felix Brinker)
January 17, 2013: “M: Movies, Machines, Modernity” film series, screening #4: Modern Times (1936); curator: Ilka Brasch (presentation: “M: Movies, Machines, Media – Modern Times)
January 22, 2013: Campus-Cultur-Prize 2013 awarded to the Initiative for Interdisciplinary Media Research and the Film & TV Reading Group by CampusCultur e.V. and the Faculty of Humanities of the Leibniz University of Hannover
January 25, 2013: Shane Denson, “On the Phenomenology of Reading Comics”; guest lecture in Felix Brinker’s “Introduction to Visual Culture” seminar
On Friday, January 25, 2013, I will give a talk “On the Phenomenology of Reading Comics” in the context of Felix Brinker‘s “Introduction to Visual Culture” seminar (12 pm in room 615, Conti-Hochhaus). Anyone interested in attending the talk is asked to contact either me or Felix.
In the last teaching week of this semester the English Theatre Group will present Our Country’s Good by Timberlake Wertenbaker.
Based on historical events, the play concerns the arrival in 1788 of the first British convict ships in Botany Bay, South Australia. The treatment of the prisoners at the hands of military officers is brutal. However, the Governor of the colony has high ideals about creating a civilized society and about how the convicts should be treated. Believing that “the theatre is an expression of civilization”, he encourages a certain officer to produce a play with the convicts as actors. Our Country’s Good dramatizes the challenges of rehearsing George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer in the face of contempt of most of the officers and a lack of unity amongst the convicts.
The play was written in 1988 and first presented at London’s Royal Court Theatre.
Performances will take place at 7.30pm each evening on
Monday 28 January
Tuesday 29 January
Wednesday 30 January
(no Thursday performance)
Friday 1 February, and
Saturday 2 February
at
Hildesheimer Straße 39A
30169 Hannover
(U-Bahn Schlägerstraße)
Tickets can be purchased in advance from the sales point in the foyer of the Conti-Hochaus at Königsworther Platz 1 during the advance ticket-selling hours:
weekdays from 10am until 4pm, Monday 14 January through to Friday 25 January.
On Wednesday, January 16, 2013 (6-8 pm in room 103, Conti-Hochhaus), my colleague (and co-editor) Christina Meyer will hold a talk on mass culture, the emergence of the yellow press in America, and the role of color comic strips; the presentation will take place in the context of the seminar “Massenkultur: Unterhaltung, Konsum, Medialität” [Mass Culture: Entertainment, Consumption, Mediality], which is being taught jointly by Ruth Mayer and Michael Gamper. Here is a short abstract for the talk:
“Massenkultur und Sensationsjournalismus: Die amerikanische ‘Yellow Press’ im späten 19. Jahrhundert”
Christina Meyer
Im Zentrum des Vortrags steht die amerikanische yellow press des späten 19. Jahrhunderts. Ziel ist es, zum einen, das Aufkommen der Massenpresse seit den 1830er Jahren (penny press) und die Entwicklungen des Zeitungsmarktes bis zum Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts nachzuzeichnen. Zum anderen sollen die populären Sonntagsausgaben der zwei führenden New Yorker Massenblättern der 1890er Jahre (das New York Journal und die New York World) durchleuchtet werden. Besonderer Fokus liegt hierbei auf den Comicbeilagen, die ab 1893 regelmäßig und in Farbe gedruckt wurden.
Our film series “M: Movies, Machines, Modernity” winds up on January 17, 2013 (6:00 pm in room 615, Conti-Hochhaus) with our final screening for the semester: Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. The screening is free and open to all, so spread the word to anyone who might be interested in joining us. Feel free also to bring along snacks and refreshments. And for more info about the film series, see here: M: Movies, Machines, Modernity.
On January 16, 2013, the Film & TV Reading Group will meet (at 4 pm in room 613, Conti-Hochhaus) to discuss “Prolog zum Fernsehen” [Prologue to TV] by Theodor W. Adorno (pp. 507 – 517 in Adorno’s Gesammelte Schriften, Band 10.2: Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft II — Eingriffe, Stichworte, Anhang). Felix Brinker will moderate the discussion. As always, all are welcome to join us! (Feel free to contact me for more info — email address can be found on the “About” page.)
I am pleased to announce that this year’s Campus-Cultur Prize has been awarded to the Film & TV Reading Group and the student members of the Initiative for Interdisciplinary Media Research!
The award recognizes students’ active participation, initiative, and creativity in curricular and extracurricular contexts. The prize is awarded annually by CampusCultur, an association dedicated to promoting the cultural life of the humanities and social sciences at the Leibniz University of Hannover.
The Film & TV Reading Group offers interested students from all disciplines the opportunity to engage with key texts on film, television, and media theory. In conjunction with the film series, lectures, and other activities of the Initiative for Interdisciplinary Media Research, it offers students and instructors a space in which to discuss relevant media phenomena and media-theoretical issues.
Congratulations and thank you to everyone who helped make this possible, particularly to the student members of the reading group and media initiative!
As announced recently, our screening of Fritz Lang’s M will take place this Thursday, Dec. 13, at 6 pm in room 615 of the Conti-Hochhaus. There will be Glühwein and, following the screening, a presentation and discussion with Urs Büttner. See here for more info.
On Saturday, December 15 (11:30 am, 6th floor of the Conti-Hochhaus, room TBA) — in the context of a research colloquium of the American studies department — I will be presenting some work in progress from my “Habilitation” project Figuring Serial Trajectories (more info about my project here; also, more info about the larger collaborative project with Ruth Mayer on serial figures here, and the website of the overarching research group on popular seriality here).
The topic of my talk will be Batman, computer games, and digital media environments. I will be expanding on, and trying to make somewhat more concrete, the idea of “parergodicity” which I presented at the recent FLOW conference (see here for my position paper).
Here is the abstract for my talk:
Batman and the “Parergodic” Work of Seriality in Interactive Digital Environments
Shane Denson
In the twentieth century, serial figures like Tarzan, Frankenstein’s monster, and Sherlock Holmes enacted a broadly “parergonal” logic; that is, in their plurimedial instantiations (in print, film, radio, TV, etc.), they continually crossed the boundaries marked by these specific media, slipped in and out of their frames, and showed them – in accordance with the logic of the parergon as described by Jacques Derrida – to be reversible. Through such oscillations, serial figures were able to transcend the particularity of any single iteration, and more importantly they were able to constitute themselves as higher-order frames or media, within which the transformations of first-order (i.e. apparatically concrete) media could be traced in the manner of an ongoing – though not altogether linear – series.
In the twenty-first century, many classic serial figures have declined in popularity, while the basic functions and medial logics of those that remain have been transformed in conjunction with the rise of interactive, networked, and convergent digital media environments. As I will argue in this presentation, the figure of Batman exemplifies this shift as the transition from a broadly “parergonal” to a specifically “parergodic” logic; the latter term builds upon Espen Aarseth’s notion of the “ergodic” situation of gameplay – where ergodics combines the Greek ergon (work) and hodos (path), thus positing nontrivial labor as the aesthetic mode of players’ engagement with games. Expanded beyond narrowly ludological frames of reference to include a wider variety of interactive and participatory potentials in contemporary culture, ergodic media give rise to new forms of seriality that accompany, probe, and trace the developmental trajectories of the new media environment. These new forms and functions of seriality, as embodied by a figure like Batman, raise questions about the blurring of relations between work and play, between paid labor and the incidental work or “immaterial labor” culled from our leisure activities and entertainment practices, in the age of the “control society” (Deleuze) or of “post-cinematic affect” (Shaviro). Following Batman’s transitions from comics to graphic novels, to the films of Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan, and on to the popular and critically acclaimed videogames Arkham Asylum and Arkham City, I will demonstrate that the dynamics of border-crossing which characterized earlier serial figures has now been re-functionalized in accordance with the ergodic work of navigating computational networks – in accordance, that is, with work and network forms that frame all aspects of contemporary life.