Jim Campbell’s Discorrelated Images

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Last evening I had the pleasure of discussing Jim Campbell’s work with him at the Anderson Collection at Stanford, where he has a wonderful exhibition of LED-based works up right now. It was a far-ranging discussion, in a packed gallery, and great fun all around. Here are my opening remarks:

Before we start our conversation, I have the honor of offering some framing thoughts about Jim Campbell’s work. I want to use this opportunity to put that work into dialogue with some of my own interests and concerns as a theorist of the intersection between computational and moving-image media. I am concerned, in other words, with the historical and phenomenological encounter between the invisible processing of digital information and the visible forms that result from it—and it is precisely this encounter that Jim’s LED-based artworks enact or perform in a variety of thought-provokingly deformative ways. This is to say that his work, by means of occluding, blocking, and de-focusing our view, ironically makes perceptible the very mismatch between perception and computational processing that lies at the heart of digital video as it circulates online, on our smartphones, on DVDs and BluRays, on digital cable and satellite TV, and in the digital projection systems of contemporary movie theaters. In all of those contexts, digital processing remains resolutely invisible to perception (except, that is, through exceptional moments of glitching, buffering, and the like); but, those exceptional and denigrated moments aside, the perceptual “content” of digital video is privileged, thus blinding us to the ways that the medial form of video’s computational processing is changing the very parameters of our embodied perception, or the ways that, as Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan put it, our “sensory ratios” are being reformed by our encounter with a new media environment.

By re-valorizing the exceptional, or that which disrupts or impedes the easy transmission of visual “content,” Jim’s work offers an oblique view of the hidden parameters of this new environment; he makes what I call the “discorrelation” between our perception and its infrastructure perceptible—if only in a necessarily incomplete and volatile form. And the volatility of these operations is key: Jim’s works keep our eyes and our bodies moving, making us move now closer and then farther away, causing us to squint and then relax our focus, in order to catch a glimpse of something figural, recognizable, the so-called “content” of the moving images. Certainly, this content is not irrelevant, but it is hardly the ultimate telos or desideratum towards which the work directs our attention. The works are not simple puzzles that are “solved” once we identify their contents. Rather, the incessant oscillation between perception and non-perception, between seeing and not seeing, would seem to be closer to the point, as it is this oscillation that keeps everything at play, unsettling basic categories and forms. We shift our focus between individual LEDs, the screen or wall upon which they reflect, and an indirect, sometimes volumetric illumination of bodies or objects in motion. Our perception doesn’t come to rest upon a stable object or meaning, and this instability infects the broader conceptual context within which our perception is situated: Jim’s work upsets and makes us question so many basic distinctions—for example, between video art and sculpture, between art and engineering, between material substrates and perceptual forms, between perception and imagination. Through his destabilization of perception, he re-opens also the gap between art and technology, a gap created around the time of the industrial revolution, when thinkers like Immanuel Kant helped engineer a split between the aesthetic and the technical, or between the fine arts and the applied arts. Earlier, both the Greek term techne and the Latin ars referred indiscriminately to both arts and technologies. Now, the poets were to work with words while the engineers worked on steam engines; artists concerned themselves with the non-utilitarian forms of aesthetic experience while technologists made the machines that kept the factories running. However, in the space cleared between art and technology, a third thing emerged, a common ground for aesthetic and technological production alike: namely, media in its modern sense. A medium in this sense is not reducible to its “content” in a narrow way; rather, it is something that straddles perceptual form and infrastructure. Take, for example, the way the Sunday comics capitalized on innovations in four-color printing processes, or the way cinema responded to synchronized sound with new genres like the musical or the horror film, which involves its spectator through an offscreen space of screams and bumps in the night. It is in this sense that McLuhan proclaimed that “the medium is the message”—a claim that he explained with the example of the light bulb, a content-less medium, the message of which is the electrification of the world and the resulting transformation of agency, perception, and social relation. In order to explore the message or the meaning of more recent shifts in the media environment, Jim replaces McLuhan’s light bulb with LEDs—the same light emitting diodes that provide backlighting for flatscreen computer monitors and television sets, that power digital projectors, or that illuminate our increasingly “smart” homes. Routing perception through these characteristically digital-era lights, and powering them by way of unseen “custom electronics,” Jim defocuses intentional perception, foregrounds the obfuscation of infrastructure, and indirectly illuminates a media environment in which computation has finally (arguably) rendered the industrial-era split between art and technology untenable.

When I recently spoke to him on the phone, Jim identified himself not as an artist but as an engineer—and certainly he holds the degrees, the patents, and the experience to justify that statement. But he is an engineer of a special sort: an engineer of perception in an age when perception teeters precariously atop invisible circuits and computational infrastructures not cut to our measure, an engineer of experience when experience is routed through ubiquitous circuits of computational processing. Occluding both the image and its digital infrastructure, Jim’s work puts our perceptual experience in motion, incessantly circulating between what we can and cannot see. The work arouses a curiosity about the conditions of this circulation, including the means by which the LEDs, and hence also our perception, have been programmed. In the context of nineteenth-century magic shows and scientific expositions, this curiosity about how the spectacle works has been called an “operational aesthetic”—an aesthetic that, fittingly for the era of industrial media, includes an enjoyment in the sight of technical operation. In the twenty-first-century context of ubiquitous computational processing and experiential engineering, Jim offers us something slightly different, I suggest: an operational aesthetic of perception itself, a questioning of our ability and the means of seeing in an age of discorrelation, when visibility is rendered ambiguously at the margins of human signs and invisible informatic signals.

“The Processual Turn: Images, Logistics, Operations” (SLSA 2019 Panel)

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This week I will be heading to Irvine for the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) 2019 conference, where I’ll be participating in a panel on “The Processual Turn: Images, Logistics, Operations” along with Jason LaRiviere, Matthew Hockenberry, and Yvette Granata. (The panel is at 8am on Saturday, November 9.)

Here are the abstracts:

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Critical Practices Unit (CPU)

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I am excited to announce the inaugural session of Critical Practices Unit (CPU), on November 19 at 6:30pm (in McMurtry 360).

In this interdisciplinary and practice-based group, with support from the Vice President for the Arts, we hope to stage collisions between the various epistemes and critical frameworks we all know and love through performances, art-objects, interactive media, and “critical making” projects, which, in some sense to be explored, materialize critical reflection.

In fidelity to these objects’ disobedience to any specific field, we want to stress that CPU is for those in the humanities, sciences, and arts. These conversations—spanning computation, performance, race, personhood, gesture, interaction, and more—will be made all the richer by a diversity of perspectives.

For our first event, we will be playing with haptic devices for underwater robots graciously loaned by The Stanford Robotics Lab, involving ourselves in a live performance piece / installation by Catie Cuan, and settling into a conversation about the grafting of robotics and performativity. We are overjoyed that situating this discussion will be Sydney Skybetter, Lecturer in Theater and Performance Studies at Brown University, and Matthew Wilson Smith, Professor of German Studies and Performance Studies here at Stanford.

“We Are Ant-Man” — Scott Bukatman at Digital Aesthetics Workshop

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The next meeting of the Digital Aesthetics Workshop is right around the corner! On Tuesday, November 5, 2019 (5-7pm in McMurtry 370), Scott Bukatman will be talking about digital bodies, superheroes, and more, in a talk titled “We Are Ant-Man.”

We Are Ant-Man

Scott Bukatman

The body of the 21st-century cinematic superhero is often a digital body, in whole or in part. It offers itself as a particularly visible digital effect (or effect of the digital). It somatizes the mutability afforded by digital technology. It speaks to the sense that bodies (and therefore selves) in the digital age are no more inviolate than any other form of coded information. But having said that they “speak to” such conditions, what do they say beyond the fact of our own hybridity? Do these bodies tell us anything useful about our digital lives? Comedies have long served to mediate new technologies for audiences, so to pursue this, I’m going to concentrate on Ant-Man and the Wasp (Peyton Reed, 2018), perhaps thesunniest and most classically comedic film of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. What do the film’s particular emphases — the nature of its gags, its depiction of technology, and the state of knowledge of both protagonists and audience — tell us about our digital condition?

Though not required, workshops participants are encouraged to watch Ant-Man and the Wasp prior to the event. Snacks and drinks will be served, and all are welcome!

Frankenstein, Film, and Chemistry

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The following is the text of my short presentation on “Frankenstein, Film, and Chemistry,” which I delivered on October 18, 2019 at the “Chemistry and Film: Experiments in Living” joint symposium of the Stanford Departments of Chemistry and of Art & Art History.

Frankenstein, Film, and Chemistry”

Shane Denson

It has been estimated, perhaps with a bit of exaggeration, that there are over 200 cinematic adaptations of Frankenstein. These films are sometimes more, sometimes less true to the letter and the spirit of Mary Shelley’s Gothic novel, but they are all, in the words of today’s symposium title, what might be called “experiments in living”—aesthetic, narrative, and technological experiments in giving, shaping, and controlling life.

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The most iconic versions of the tale (such as James Whale’s 1931 film starring Boris Karloff as the flat-headed monster with electrodes in his neck) generally frame these efforts as studies in electrical engineering rather than applied chemistry.

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However, a minor strand of Frankenstein films, including Thomas Edison’s 1910 film and Hammer Studios’ 1957 Curse of Frankenstein, attend also to chemistry—picking up on Victor Frankenstein’s keen interest in alchemy, as suggested in Shelley’s novel, and focusing it towards the cinematic medium’s own photochemical processes. In this way, narrative and medial chemistries mix in self-reflexive spectacles that foreground the material processes of giving life to, or “animating,” moving images as much as the monsters they depict.

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Both the self-reflexive impulse of these films and their focus on chemistry have their roots in Mary Shelley’s novel, first published in 1818. Most famously, with respect to self-reflexivity, Shelley established a relation between literary authorship and the book’s monstrous act of creation when, in the Introduction to the 1831 revised edition of the novel, she “bid [her] hideous progeny go forth and prosper.” Author and creator, medium and monster were thus linked around the question of life-giving and its legitimate means. But what were these means?

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The novel devotes just a single paragraph to the creation scene, eliding any detailed description of “the instruments of life” employed, but suggestively indicating Frankenstein’s goal of “infus[ing] a spark of being” into the creature. Shelley’s 1831 Introduction returned to this scene, but it focused more on the author’s own act of creation during a dreary summer spent at Lake Geneva, where Shelley listened to ghost stories as well as reports of scientific advances, prior to having a waking dream that revealed to her the terrifying sight of the monster stirring to life.

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The Introduction does add one other detail to the fictional act of creation, attributing it to “the working of some powerful engine.”

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Furthermore, the author reports listening to conversations between Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley on “the nature of the principle of life,” paraphrasing or elaborating that “Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given token of such things.” Connecting the “spark of being” to galvanism, this would seem to be the source of the electrical interpretation of Frankensteinian creation.

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However, it is important to note that the novel itself indicates that the young Frankenstein was obsessed with alchemical authors, and he later declares that “natural philosophy, and particularly chemistry, in the most comprehensive sense of the term, became nearly my sole occupation.” A recent article by Mary Fairclough argues convincingly that, for both Mary Shelley and the characters in her novel, electricity and chemistry were intimately entwined, and with them also questions of physiology.

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It is possible that the “powerful engine” envisioned by Shelley was a “battery” of “galvanic piles,” a device invented by Alessandro Volta to refute Galvani’s claim that he had discovered so-called “animal electricity.” The device, applied widely in early 19th-century chemistry, was alternately seen as demonstrating that chemical reactions produced electricity, or that electricity was responsible for producing said chemical reactions. In any case, life—and the physiological reactions of living and dead bodies to the operation of the galvanic pile—remained a crucial site of practical and theoretical concern around this intersection of chemistry and electricity.

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In the 20thcentury, the cinema would return again and again to Frankenstein, due in no small part to the fact that Shelley’s tale provided a seductive allegory for the life-giving powers of the medium of film itself. Like Frankenstein selecting parts from corpses and infusing life into a composite body, filmmakers utilized the technical means of film to (re)animate the “dead” (or photographically preserved) traces of living organisms (such as actors) into new visual narrative compositions. Discourses of animation, or the giving of life, were central to the early cinema’s understanding of itself, as is evidenced in the names of companies and devices such as Vitascope and Biograph. Given this overarching concern with the life-giving force of moving images, the Frankenstein tale provided an opportunity for reflecting on the changing conditions of animation, or the life of kinetic images. Seen in this light, a focus on electricity versus chemistry is less a matter of competing interpretations of Shelley’s narrative, and more a matter of cinema’s interpretation of its own media-historical situation at any given juncture.

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Consider, for example, Thomas Edison’s Frankenstein from 1910, which stands between the early, image-technology oriented “cinema of attractions” and the coming narrative-oriented classical Hollywood style that would take shape around 1917. In 1910, the medium was in transition, torn between lowbrow technological spectacle and an uncertain reorientation along the lines of the respectable theater. Accordingly, advertising for the film emphasized both the “photographic marvel” of the creation sequence and the story’s origin in “Mrs. Shelley’s […] work of art.” The film aimed to be both visual and technological spectacle and narrative high culture. And this multiple address relates directly to the uncertain significance of “animation” at this historical juncture.

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The creation sequence’s so-called “marvel” consists of footage of a burning mannequin projected in reverse—a bit of cinematic magic that, in the context of early film, served to exhibit cinematic technology by focusing attention on the filmic images themselves rather than the objects they depict. Frankenstein’s reactions here channel the scopophilic pleasure of a “primitive” viewer, for whom he stands in as a proxy. Importantly, “animation” here is a self-reflexive topos which links the monster’s creation with the term “animated photography,” still common in 1910 as a description of film in general. And the vaguely chemical or alchemical means of creation serve to link Frankenstein’s act to that of photochemical exposure and development processes—to the chemistry of film itself as the material basis of the images onscreen.

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I have already noted how James Whale’s Frankenstein from 1931 changes course and places electricity at the center of creation, but this is again less about a specific reading of Shelley’s novel, and more about the cinema’s then-current means of animation. The film follows right on the heels of the massive transition from silent to sound cinema. And cinematic sound was widely associated with electricity, due to the revolution of vacuum-based amplification processes and the spread of radio in the 1920s. The noisy electrified lab where the monster is created gives objective form to the association, but it ironically gives birth to a mute, hyperphotographic monster—which is to say, a monster that didn’t quite live up to the electric promise of sound but instead reverted to the chemical base of filmic inscription. In any case, these media-historical aspects and associations faded from view as the Karloff monster was rendered an icon, or a visual cliché. After the sound transition faded from memory, only the narrative role of electricity as a life-giving force remained.

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But there would be further opportunities for chemical reflection, most notably following the introduction of Eastmancolor, a cheaper alternative to the expensive and proprietary Technicolor process, which required studios to rent equipment and a technician to operate a special camera that recorded colors onto three separate strips of film. Eastmancolor, which recorded its images on a single strip of film, and thus allowed filmmakers to use standard black-and-white cameras for color shooting, was an innovation in terms both of chemistry and of economics. In terms of chemistry, the new color film superimposed three emulsion layers onto a single support, each responding to either blue, green, or red light. Each layer contains silver halide grains, gelatin as a binder, and what technicians at the time called a “color former,” a chemical that reacts with certain developing agents to produce a colored dye in the direct vicinity of exposed silver halide grains.

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In terms of economics, this new process made color filmmaking available to lower budget productions, including B-movie exploitation films like I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (from 1957), which switched from black-and-white to color for the final, shocking scene. The result was a heightened “medium sensitivity” on the part of viewers, who were effectively confronted with the material difference between black-and-white and color film stocks—and made sensitive, on a visceral if not cognitive level, to the different sensitivities of their emulsions.

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Also in 1957, the British Hammer Studios made creation itself a thoroughly chemical process in Curse of Frankenstein. Here, the camera positively dwells on lab equipment with bubbling liquids. Unlike the electric lab of Whale’s 1931 film, this is a thoroughly chemical lab—a perfect negative, in fact, to the darkroom lab in which the chemical processes of color film processing take place. Red, in particular, is a recurring color, associated with blood: the blood infused into the body of a monstrous corpse, and the blood spilled of innocent victims. But, ultimately, it would seem, a remark made by Jean-Luc Godard in reference to his own filmmaking rings true: Ne c’est pa du sang, c’est du rouge. It’s not blood, it’s red. Indeed, life is at stake, but the significance of red is unstable, wavering between the lifeblood of biology and the chemical emulsion of film’s own body.

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Killing Time — Jenny Odell at Digital Aesthetics Workshop

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I am excited to announce our first meeting of the Linda Randall Meier Research Workshop on “Digital Aesthetics: Critical Approaches to Computational Culture” (more colloquially known as the Digital Aesthetics Workshop) for the 2019-2020 year — our third year. On October 23rd, 5-7 PM, in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room, we’ll host artist and critic Jenny Odell, who will share some research from her new book project.

One of the threads of Odell’s last book, the critically acclaimed How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, concerned the ways in which the “time is money” equation has become more and more pervasive, extending into realms of leisure and even sleep. This talk will examine the history of how time became money in the modern sense; contrast homogeneous, commodified time with heterogeneous ecological time (migrations, flowering events, stages of succession, etc.); and delineate the increasing clash between these two views of time within the context of climate change.

Discorrelation and the Post-Perceptual Image (Bogotá, video en español)

Video (in Spanish) of my talk, “Discorrelation and Post-Perceptual Image,” from September 12, 2019 at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá is now online.

Minutes before the talk, I was whisked away to give two separate interviews — one for an article that is now online, and one for a local television station (!), which I have not yet seen…

James Leo Cahill, “Neo-Zoological Dramas: Comparative Anatomy by Other Means”

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I am happy to announce that James Leo Cahill, Associate Professor and Director of the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto, will be holding a workshop session devoted to his recent book Zoological Surrealism at Stanford on November 13, 2019 (2-4pm in McMurtry 370). We are aiming for a discussion more than a lecture, and participants are asked to read the first chapter of Cahill’s book prior to the event.