Course description for an independent studies course I’ll be teaching in the summer semester (April – July 2012):
Independent Study: Digital Media and Humanities Research
SE 2: nach Vereinbarung
Veranstalter/in: Denson
AAS6
This course is designed to accompany the seminar “Cultural and Media Theory: Media in Transition,” but it is open to all students in the Master of Advanced Anglophone Studies program for fulfillment of the “Independent Studies” module. Students in the course will investigate the impact and relevance of digital media for contemporary humanities research (including studies of literature, popular culture, film and other media). Beyond conducting a theoretical inquiry, however, we will be concerned with learning to use and evaluate the techniques, tools, and methods implemented in the “digital humanities” (DH) and related areas of academic research. Thus, we will experiment with applications for textual analysis, data visualization, digital video editing, social media, and blogs, to name a few, and put them to work in academic projects. Together, students will agree on a forum for the joint presentation of their work and organize a concluding event.
Students interested in participating should start familiarizing themselves with online discussions of “digital humanities” and looking at some of the tools used in various DH projects.
Required Reading
Please refer to the course page on StudIP.
Recommended Reading
n/a Assessment Tasks – will be specified ● Registration – StudIP 1.3.2012 – 31.3.2012 ● Size restriction – 25 ● Prerequisites – none ● Studiengänge – MA AAS ● Further Information – shane.denson@engsem.~
David Bowie turns 65 today, and among the various birthday tributes and other pieces written for the occasion is this article by David Hudson, appearing in mubi.com’s “The Daily” column: “Bowie @ 65“. Most interesting, to me, is Hudson’s identification of “Bowie’s #1 lesson in staying power: Create a persona and then kill it off with the next one.” Hudson is right, I believe, to single out what amounts to a principle of seriality as the open secret of Bowie’s success — a principle taken up, as Hudson also correctly observes, by Michael Jackson, Madonna, and Prince in the 1980s. As I’ve recently argued, it’s precisely this principle — with Bowie as a direct influence, no less — that Lady Gaga has begun adapting to the changed medial parameters of twenty-first century convergence culture (see here for a summary). I’ll have more to say about this sort of serialized celebrity soon, but for now: Happy birthday to one of the original progenitors of pop stardom qua serial media remix!
Over at her blog Judgmental Observer, Amanda Ann Klein has a great post up about Internet memes, their workings, and their humor. In addition to the central themes of “cruelty” and “self-loathing” that she sees at work, Klein points to two formal aspects of successful memes: “recognizability” and “repetition.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRXKL3fmlnc
This reminded me of Niklas Luhmann’s theory of media, itself a sort of “remediation” of psychologist Fritz Heider’s distinction of medium vs. thing, which comes down to a distinction between a “loose coupling” and a “tight coupling” of elements of a given sort (see Heider’s Ding und Medium). For Luhmann, mediality consists in the relation between a loosely coupled “medial substrate” and the tightly coupled “forms” that it is capable of assuming — or, in other words, in the “operative deployment of the difference of medial substrate and form” (Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft 195; my translation), which is itself relative to an observer or system.
(For more on Luhmann’s theory of media, see Chapter 3 (165-214) of Luhmann, Die Kunst der Gesellschaft (translated as Art as a Social System). See also Chapter 2 (190-412) of Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft.)
The connection with Klein’s notions of “recognizability” and “repetition” as formal elements of memification comes when Luhmann, on one occasion, notes that one way to elaborate his distinction of medial substrate and form is “by means of the distinction between redundancy and variety” (Art as a Social System 105). He explains:
The elements that form the medium through their loose coupling—such as letters in a certain kind of writing or words in a text—must be easily recognizable. They carry little information themselves, since the informational content of an artwork must be generated in the course of its formation. The formation of the work creates surprise and assures variety, because there are many ways in which the work can take shape and because, when observed slowly, the work invites the viewer to contemplate alternate possibilities and to experiment with formal variations. (105)
“Variety through repetition” is the formal basis of the Internet meme, as well as being a principle of seriality and a formal description of mediality itself (following Luhmann). As I recently argued for Lady Gaga, Nyan Cat can also be dubbed a “serial media remix”: Nyan Cat is the instantly recognizable, iconically redundant substrate out of which ever new forms are produced; these forms become available, in turn, for sampling, and they serve as the substrate of a higher-order mediality, thus proliferating in a (non-linear) serial explosion.
Long live Nyan Cat: memifier of Internets, proliferator of serial forms, and media remixer extraordinaire! All your substrate are belong to us!!!11!
Works cited:
Heider, Fritz. Ding und Medium. 1926. Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2005.
Luhmann, Niklas. Art as a Social System. Trans. Eva M. Knodt. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000.
_____. Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1997.
_____. Die Kunst der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1995.
Anyway, as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I think that the “techno-phenomenological” approach I have taken towards the topic of televangelism may also be adaptable to fictional narrative television, and that it might thus provide a complement to — not a replacement for — more traditional (narratological-formal and industrial-social-contextual) approaches to television studies. This remains to be seen, of course, and I look forward to hearing your comments on the text itself and on the prospects of adapting its methodology to other sorts of projects.
Incidentally, though, since the time of suggesting that such adaptation might be possible, it has occurred to me that I once undertook a very cursory attempt at doing just that: in a very short essay, entitled “Techno-Habitats and Media Habits: Reflections on Contemporary Children’s Television” (originally published in Philament 12), I implicitly assumed a techno-phenomenological approach to young children’s TV shows like Teletubbies, Bob the Builder, or Lunar Jim. That paper, roughly contemporary with my initial work on the televangelism paper, just sketched out some ideas, presenting them in a literally essayistic manner, while the theoretical and methodological underpinnings were not explored. Now, with the publication of the televangelism paper, the methodology in particular has become available for inspection (the deeper theoretical implications, on the other hand, remain buried in the media-philosophical Part Two of my dissertation, Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface). So please take a look and let me know what you think about the prospects for a techno-phenomenological form of television studies.
On November 25-26, 2011, the Bauhaus University Weimar will be hosting the conference “Lost in Media,” where the focus will be on the television series Lost as a form of reflection and projection of media change. Among the speakers, two members of the DFG Research Unit “Popular Seriality–Aesthetics and Practice” will be giving talks at the conference:
Jason Mittell, Fellow of the Research Unit, will be giving a keynote address entitled “Getting Lost in Transmedia: The Perils and Possibilities of Mapping an Island Across Media,” and Andreas Jahn-Sudmann will be speaking on “Watching Lost and Exploring Outbidding (Überbietung) as a Serial Form.”
For further information and the full conference program click here. Here is the conference description:
Kaum eine Fernsehserie lässt sich aus so vielfältigen Perspektiven betrachten wie LOST. Die Serie bringt eine weitläufige wissenschaftliche Auseinandersetzung hervor, die um die Komplexität ihrer narrativen und zeitlichen Struktur kreist oder sich mit der Tatsache beschäftigt, dass kaum eine Serie bisher so massiv ihre Expansion in andere Medien vorangetrieben und so konsequent Genre-Grenzen unterlaufen hat. Zudem bildet sich um LOST eine sehr aktive Fangemeinde, die nicht nur auf die quasi-religiösen, quasi-philosophischen Eschatologien der Serie reagiert, sondern Lost auf einer Vielfalt neuer digitaler Medienplattformen rezipiert und dort mit den Themenkomplexen der Serie interagiert.
Gerade wegen ihrer thematischen und ästhetischen Reichhaltigkeit wird die Tagung eine ganz spezifische Interessenlage an die Serie herantragen. Es soll darum gehen, LOST als eine Agentur der Reflexion und der Projektion des (medialen) Wandels zu untersuchen. Dabei nimmt LOST allerdings auf faszinierende Weise eine widersprüchliche und ambivalente Rolle in Bezug auf Mediatisierung und medialen Wandel ein, die ein zentrales Motiv einer wissenschaftlichen Auseinandersetzung und der besonderen Reflexionsleistung der Serie darstellen: Während auf vielfältige Weise Effekte des medialen Wandels mit der Serie verknüpft sind – z. B. transmediales Erzählen, neue televisuelle Rezeptionsformen, TV III-Age – und die Serie in der Narration und Ästhetik Effekte des vernetzten, nicht-linearen Erzählens und der Genreüberschreitung realisiert, verweist die Serie selbst jedoch nicht unmittelbar auf die Mediatisierung, die sie symbolisiert und auch verursacht.
Diese konkrete Fragestellung ist eingebettet in eine generelle Vermutung zum Verhältnis des Fernsehens und des (medialen) Wandels, wonach das Medium eine dreifache Funktion im Geschehen des Medienwandels seit 1950 und insbesondere in der aktuellen Gegenwart erfüllt. Es beobachtet – erstens – den Wandel und macht ihn so auf strukturierte Weise sichtbar. Diese Beobachtungen stellt es dann dem Sinnhaushalt, dem Selbstbeschreibungs- und Selbstverfertigungszyklus der Gesellschaft zur Verfügung. In dem Umfang, in dem es dabei – zweitens – insbesondere den Medien eine z.B. technologische, institutionelle oder epistemische Mitwirkung oder gar Urheberschaft am beobachteten Wandel beimisst, ist es selbst Agent des Wandels und beobachtet sich selbst auf diese Funktion hin. Schließlich ist es – drittens – dem beobachteten Wandel bzw. seinen Folgen wiederum seinerseits ausgesetzt und muss die Formen und Formate seiner Beobachtungen ständig den Wirkungen des beobachteten Wandels aussetzen, muss den Wandel an sich selbst mitvollziehen. Insbesondere der Fernsehserie, auf Grund ihrer Fiktionskraft und spezifischen Temporalität, kommt dabei, so die These, eine herausgehobene Position zu.
Am Beispiel von LOST soll dieser These nachgegangen werden. Angesprochen ist dabei vor allem der mediale Grenzgang der Serie selbst, deren Ausweitung in andere Medien nichts weniger aufwirft als die Frage nach dem Status ihres Herkunftsmediums Fernsehen innerhalb der rezenten multiplen Medienlandschaft, aber auch etwa ihre komplexe Temporalität, welche die Theoretisierung televisiver Zeitlichkeit und auch Historizität vor neue Herausforderungen stellt.
What’s there to be afraid of anyway? The video above, which I repost here for Halloween, offers one sort of approach to this question by recontextualizing cinematic horror against a more diffuse sort of horror that emanates from a changing media environment.
The talk attempts to excavate a forgotten experiential dimension–an experience of crisis related to changes in the media landscape–that uncannily informs the iconic image of Frankenstein’s monster. The notion that media changes precipitate phenomenological crises, as I put forward here, is informed by Mark Hansen’s view that media define “the environment for life” (or, more generally, the environment for agency, as I propose in Postnaturalism). While media are embodied in discrete apparatic technologies, they are inseparable from the total milieu of agential capacities; media changes thus have both a local and a global dimension, and it is this global aspect (and the networked distribution of human and technical agencies that it signifies) that explains why media changes might occasion affective states of crisis, anxiety, the uncanny, or present themselves as just plain scary.
My talk is also informed by a variety of concerns that I share with people like Jussi Parikka, who along with Garnet Hertz has argued for a conception of “zombie media,” according to which media never simply die but continue to exert a haunting influence that can be appropriated for media-theoretical and artistic purposes. Their essay “Zombie Media: Circuit Bending Media Archaeology into an Art Method,” which Hertz and Parikka presented at the transmediale 2011 in Berlin, is introduced thus:
There is always a better camera, laptop, mobile phone on the horizon: new media always becomes old. We approach this phenomenon under the umbrella term of media archaeology and aim to extend the media archaeological interest of knowledge into an art methodology. Hence, media archaeology becomes not only a method for excavation of the repressed, the forgotten, the past, but extends itself into an artistic method close to Do-It-Yourself (DIY) culture, circuit bending, hardware hacking, and other exercises that are closely related to the political economy of information technology, as well as the environment. Media embodies memory, but not only human memory; memory of things, of objects, of chemicals, and circuits that are returned to nature, so to speak, after their cycle. But these can be resurrected. This embodiment of memory in things is what relates media archaeology to an ecosophic enterprise as well.
(Quoted from here at the transmediale website.) And here is a video of the complete talk:
In his “manifesto for digital spectrology,” Parikka expands on the ghostly side of all this, bringing the notion of hauntology into close connection with the materiality of media-technologies and the ecology of media evolution:
Digital Spectrology is that dirty work of a cultural theorist who wants to understand how power works in the age of circuitry. Power circulates not only in human spaces of cities, organic bodies or just plain things and objects. Increasingly, our archaeologies of the contemporary need to turn inside the machine, in order to illuminate what is the condition of existence of how we think, see, hear, remember and hallucinate in the age of software. This includes things discarded, abandoned, obsolete as much as the obscure object of desire still worthy of daylight. As such, digital archaeology deals with spectres too; but these ghosts are not only hallucinations of afterlife reached through the media of mediums, or telegraphics, signals from Mars, the screen as a window to the otherwordly; but in the electromagnetic sphere, dynamics of software, ubiquitous computing, clouds so transparent we are mistaken to think of them as soft. Media Archaeology shares a temporality of the dead and zombies with Hauntology. Dead media is never actually dead. So what is the method of a media archaeologist of technological ghosts? She opens up the hood, looks inside, figures out what are the processual technics of our politics and aesthetics: The Aesthetico-Technical.
– inspired by the work of MicroResearchlab – Berlin/London, the short text was written for Julian Konczak/Telenesia.
Finally, it should not be forgotten that the media-ecological horror of media change is always embedded in (and itself provides a material and affective context for) a political landscape in which technologies are harnessed for oppression, for the maintenance of unequal power distributions, and, of course, for profit. Here, then, are some real-life zombies from #OccupyWallStreet:
Friedrich Kittler, whose name has become synonymous with so-called “German media theory,” passed away this week, on October 18, 2011. Kittler’s proclamation that “media determine our situation,” and his use of the phrase “der sogenannte Mensch” to refer to “us” (i.e. humans and our subjectivities), have long been occasions for controversy: for some, they are signs of Kittler’s “genius,” expressed paradoxically in his unrelenting break with the anthropocentric sympathies that would underwrite any such claim to genius; for others, they are merely signs of antihumanism and technological determinism. Whatever one decides, the significance of Kittler’s work cannot be denied; it will undoubtedly continue to play a controversial role and to exert a variety of influences on our attempts to think media in the future. Here, then, are some links that reflect on Kittler’s legacy:
News of Kittler’s death and reflections on his life and work appeared in virtually all the German newspapers. Die Zeit ran an article by Maximilian Probst here, and the taz had a piece by Stefan Heidenreich here. Norbert Bolz’s article in the Tagesspiegel can be found here. Die Welt reprinted parts of an interview with Kittler from earlier this year (here), as well as an obituary by Ulf Poschardt here. Christian Schlüter’s piece in the Berliner Zeitung is here, and Thomas Steinfeld’s obituary in the Süddeutsche Zeitung is here. Jürgen Kaube’s piece in the FAZ is here.
Meanwhile, in the blogosphere, Thomas Groh has put together a collection of Kittler video clips on his blog Filmtagebuch here.
Finally, for some English-language reflections on Kittler’s legacy, see Jussi Parikka’s thoughts here on his blog Machinology, and Bernard Geogehan’s obituary at Critical Inquiry’s blog here.
In the future – at least if we believe the big media/tech corporations like Apple, Amazon, Google, and the rest – everything will be in “the cloud.” Physical media like records and CDs have already lost significance, but even having a local copy in mp3 format may become less important as we move away from click-wheel iPods to constantly connected devices that pull our music directly from the cloud – wirelessly, effortlessly, and without the need for ever-increasing local storage capacities. We’re not quite there yet, of course, and many of us have reason to believe that we never in fact want to get there. Intellectual property, digital rights management, surveillance, and the marketing of our virtual profiles indicate just a few of the challenges and worries that accompany the move to the cloud. Nevertheless, whether we like it or not, it is increasingly easy to at least imagine a future in which all of “our” media will one day reside in the virtual no-place place of the cloud. Not just music, but also films, games, and even books.
The e-book has of course long been a controversial entity – subject of fantasy but also of scorn. As academics, we have of course learned the advantages of searchable text, and yet many of us insist on the superiority of a physical book in a physical hand. Regardless, though, of what one thinks about efforts to digitize text and to make our primary channel of access to it the computer or some other electronic device, and quite distinct from reservations we may hedge about efforts to put all our books in the cloud, I would like to make a case for another book/cloud relation: in the future, whether or not every book resides in the cloud, a cloud should reside in every book!
What I mean is this: the back cover and/or inside flap of a book’s dusk jacket has long been the place for a short summary, a teaser, for attention-getters, blurbs, and other textual snippets designed to give us an idea of what the book is all about. Why not add a cloud – of the sort we know from blogs as the “tag cloud”? I.e. an automatically generated representation of word or topic frequency which accords a larger font size to words appearing more often and smaller font to less frequently used words. As a machine-generated entity, the book’s cloud is a posthuman textual production – created without regard for what we, as authors or readers believe is most significant about a text, but instead offering an uncensored view of actual practice, based on the words that actually appear on the page, weighted according to their sheer frequency. With virtually all contemporary text “born digital” anyway, there’s nothing to stand in the way of generating this sort of cloud, and the results can be revealing for readers and authors alike.
Inspired by something I saw at Lance Strate’s blog, I decided to put the theory into practice. I opened a PDF file of my dissertation, Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface, hit “select all,” “copied,” and “pasted” all 400 pages of it into the free (as in beer) text-cloud making service at wordle.net. What you see here are the results. And, in some cases, these results are surprising to me. The importance (i.e. frequency) of “human” is greater than I would have expected. The size of the word “must” indicates the predominance of an imperative tone that is slightly embarrassing to me. And I would have expected “phenomenology” to appear more prominently in the cloud. But these surprises, I suggest, are significant. And they are the product of a confrontation of my human-centered expectations, values, and beliefs about the significance of my own work with the nonhuman agency of a machine: surprise – and also significance – result from a posthuman or postnatural production that deserves a place next to human-authored summaries and the like on the (virtual) back cover of any book – a postnatural cloud on every book!
And it’s easy to imagine going further, not only putting a cloud on every book, but also setting up a database of text-clouds of this sort for all books available in digital form – which now includes all the classics of literature and philosophy, and nearly any book published today. This would be a postnatural cloud in the postnatural sky.
May 4-5, 2012 The Nonhuman Turn in 21st Century Studies
This conference takes up the “nonhuman turn” that has been emerging in the arts, humanities, and social sciences over the past few decades. Intensifying in the 21st century, this nonhuman turn can be traced to a variety of different intellectual and theoretical developments from the last decades of the 20th century:
actor-network theory, particularly Bruno Latour’s career-long project to articulate technical mediation, nonhuman agency, and the politics of things
affect theory, both in its philosophical and psychological manifestations and as it has been mobilized by queer theory
animal studies, as developed in the work of Donna Haraway, projects for animal rights, and a more general critique of speciesism
the assemblage theory of Gilles Deleuze, Manuel DeLanda, Latour, and others
new brain sciences like neuroscience, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence
new media theory, especially as it has paid close attention to technical networks, material interfaces, and computational analysis
the new materialism in feminism, philosophy, and marxism
varieties of speculative realism like object-oriented philosophy, vitalism, and panpsychism
and systems theory in its social, technical, and ecological manifestations
Such varied analytical and theoretical formations obviously diverge and disagree in many of their aims, objects, and methodologies. But they are all of a piece in taking up aspects of the nonhuman as critical to the future of 21st century studies in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.
Running roughly parallel to this nonhuman turn in the past few decades has been the“posthuman turn” articulated by such important theoretical works as Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman and Cary Wolfe’s What Is Posthumanism? Thinking beyond the human, as posthumanism is sometimes characterized, clearly provides one compelling model for 21st century studies. But the relation between posthumanism and humanism, like that of postmodernism to modernism, can sometimes seem as much like a repetition of the same as the emergence of something different.
Thus, one of the questions that this conference is meant to take up is the relation between posthumanism and the nonhuman turn, especially the ways in which taking the nonhuman as a matter of critical, artistic, and scholarly concern might differ from, as well as overlap with, the aims of posthumanism. In pursuing answers to such questions, the conference is meant to address the future of 21st century studies by exploring how the nonhuman turn might provide a way forward for the arts, humanities, and social sciences in light of the difficult challenges of the 21st century.
In addition to the invited speakers, the conference will hold several breakout sessions for additional participants to present their work. Please refer to this Call for Papers for details and deadlines.
Artist James Hance, maker of really cool stuff, has graciously allowed us to use his “Dark Starry Knight” image for the posters we’re putting together for our conference, “Cultural Distinctions Remediated: Beyond the High, the Low, and the Middle,” which will be held December 15-17 at the Leibniz University of Hannover. What you see above is a mock-up, not the final deal. More info on the conference coming soon. In the meantime, in case you missed it: here’s the “promo video” for the conference–with superheroes on a subway!
