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Speculative Data: Full Text, MLA 2016 #WeirdDH

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Below you’ll find the full text of my talk from the Weird DH panel organized by Mark Sample at the 2016 MLA conference in Austin Texas. Other speakers on the panel included Jeremy Justus, Micki Kaufman, and Kim Knight.

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Speculative Data: Post-Empirical Approaches to the “Datafication” of Affect and Activity

Shane Denson, Duke University

A common critique of the digital humanities questions the relevance (or propriety) of quantitative, data-based methods for the study of literature and culture; in its most extreme form, this type of criticism insinuates a complicity between DH and the neoliberal techno-culture that turns all human activity, if not all of life itself, into “big data” to be mined for profit. Now, it may sound from this description that I am simply setting up a strawman to knock down, so I should admit up front that I am not wholly unsympathetic to the critique of datafication. But I do want to complicate things a bit. Specifically, I want to draw on recent reconceptions of DH as “deformed humanities” – as an aesthetically and politically invested field of “deformance”-based practice – and describe some ways in which a decidedly “weird” DH can avail itself of data collection in order to interrogate and critique “datafication” itself.

My focus is on work conducted in and around Duke University’s S-1: Speculative Sensation Lab, where literary scholars, media theorists, artists, and “makers” of all sorts collaborate on projects that blur the boundaries between art and digital scholarship. The S-1 Lab, co-directed by Mark Hansen and Mark Olson, experiments with biometric and environmental sensing technologies to expand our access to sensory experience beyond the five senses. Much of our work involves making “things to think with,” i.e. experimental “set-ups” designed to generate theoretical and aesthetic insight and to focus our mediated sensory apparatus on the conditions of mediation itself. Harnessing digital technologies for the work of media theory, this experimentation can rightly be classed, alongside such practices as “critical making,” in the broad space of the digital humanities. But due to their emphatically self-reflexive nature, these experiments challenge borders between theory and practice, scholarship and art, and must therefore be qualified, following Mark Sample, as decidedly “weird DH.”

One such project, Manifest Data, uses a piece of “benevolent spyware” that collects and parses data about personal Internet usage in such a way as to produce 3D-printable sculptural objects, thus giving form to data and reclaiming its personal value from corporate cooptation. In a way that is both symbolic and material, this project counters the invisibility and “naturalness” of mechanisms by which companies like Google and Facebook expropriate value from the data we produce. Through a series of translations between the digital and the physical—through a multi-stage process of collecting, sculpting, resculpting, and manifesting data in virtual, physical, and augmented spaces—the project highlights the materiality of the interface between human and nonhuman agencies in an increasingly datafied field of activity. (If you’re interested in this project, which involves “data portraits” based on users’ online activity and even some weird data-driven garden gnomes designed to dispel the bad spirits of digital capital, you can read more about it in the latest issue of Hyperrhiz.)

Another ongoing project, about which I will say more in a moment, uses data collected through (scientifically questionable) biofeedback devices to perform realtime collective transformations of audiovisual materials, opening theoretical notions of what Steven Shaviro calls “post-cinematic affect” to robustly material, media-archaeological, and aesthetic investigations.

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These and other projects, I contend, point the way towards a truly “weird DH” that is reflexive enough to suspect its own data-driven methods but not paralyzed into inactivity.

Weird DH and/as Digital Critical (Media) Studies:

So I’m trying to position these projects as a form of weird digital critical (media) studies, designed to enact and reflect (in increasingly self-reflexive ways) on the use of digital tools and processes for the interrogation of the material, cultural, and medial parameters of life in digital environments.

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Using digital techniques to reflect on the affordances and limitations of digital media and interfaces, these projects are close in spirit to new media art, but they are also apposite with practices and theories of “digital rhetoric,” as described by Doug Eyman, with Gregory Ulman’s “electracy,” or with Casey Boyle’s posthuman rhetoric of multistability, which celebrates the rhetorical affordances of digital glitches in exposing the affordances and limitations of computational media in the broader realm of an interagential relational field that includes both humans and nonhumans. In short, these projects enact what we might call, following Stanley Cavell, the “automatisms” of digital media – the generative affordances and limitations that are constantly produced, reproduced, and potentially transformed or “deformed” in creative engagements with media. Digital tools are used in such a way as to problematize their very instrumentality, hence moving towards a post-empirical or post-positivistic form of datafication as much as towards a post-instrumental digitality.

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Algorithmic Nickelodeon / Datafied Attention:

My key example is a project tentatively called the “algorithmic nickelodeon.” Here we use consumer-grade EEG headsets to interrogate the media-technical construction and capture of human attention, and thus to complicate datafication by subjecting it to self-reflexive, speculative, and media-archaeological operations. The devices in question cost about $100 and are marketed as tools for improving concentration, attention, and memory. The headset measures a variety of brainwave activity and, by means of a proprietary algorithm, computes values for “attention” and “meditation” that can be tracked and, with the help of software applications, trained and supposedly optimized. In the S-1 Lab, we have sought to tap into these processes in order not just to criticize the scientifically dubious nature of these claims but rather to probe and better understand the nature of the automatisms and interfaces taking place here and in media of attention more generally. Specifically, we have designed a film- and media-theoretical application of the apparatus, which allows us to think early and contemporary moving images together, to conceive pre- and post-cinema in terms of their common deviations from the attention economy of classical cinema, and to reflect more broadly on the technological-material reorganizations of attention involved in media change. This is an emphatically experimental (that is, speculative, post-positivistic) application, and it involves a sort of post-cinematic reenactment of early film’s viewing situations in the context of traveling shows, vaudeville theaters, and nickelodeons. With the help of a Python script written by lab member Luke Caldwell, a group of viewers wearing the Neurosky EEG devices influence the playback of video clips in real time, for example changing the speed of a video or the size of the projected image in response to changes in attention as registered through brain-wave activity.

At the center of the experimentation is the fact of “time-axis manipulation,” which Friedrich Kittler highlights as one of the truly novel affordances of technical media, like the phonograph and cinema, that arose around 1900 and marked, for him, a radical departure from the symbolic realms of pre-technical arts and literature. Now it became possible to inscribe “reality itself,” or to record a spectrum of frequencies (like sound and light) directly, unfiltered through alphabetic writing; and it became possible as well to manipulate the speed or even playback direction of this reality.

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Recall that the cinema’s standard of 24 fps only solidified and became obligatory with the introduction of sound, as a solution to a concrete problem introduced by the addition of a sonic register to filmic images. Before the late 1920s, and especially in the first two decades of film, there was a great deal of variability in projection speed, and this was “a feature, not a bug” of the early cinematic setup. Kittler writes: “standardization is always upper management’s escape from technological possibilities. In serious matters such as test procedures or mass entertainment, TAM [time-axis manipulation] remains triumphant. [….] frequency modulation is indeed the technological correlative of attention” (Gramophone Film Typewriter 34-35). Kittler’s pomp aside, his statement highlights a significant fact about the early film experience: Early projectionists, who were simultaneously film editors and entertainers in their own right, would modulate the speed of their hand-cranked apparatuses in response to their audience’s interest and attention. If the audience was bored by a plodding bit of exposition, the projectionist could speed it up to get to a more exciting part of the movie, for example. Crucially, though: the early projectionist could only respond to the outward signs of the audience’s interest, excitement, or attention – as embodied, for example, in a yawn, a boo, or a cheer.

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But with the help of an EEG, we can read human attention – or some construction of “attention” – directly, even in cases where there is no outward or voluntary expression of it, and even without its conscious registration. By correlating the speed of projection to these inward and involuntary movements of the audience’s neurological apparatus, such that low attention levels cause the images to speed up or slow down, attention is rendered visible and, to a certain extent, opened to conscious and collective efforts to manipulate it and the frequency of images now indexed to it.

According to Hugo Münsterberg, who wrote one of the first book-length works of film theory in 1916, cinema’s images anyway embody, externalize, and make visible the faculties of human psychology; “attention,” for example, is said to be embodied by the close-up. With our EEG setup, we can literalize Münsterberg’s claim by correlating higher attention levels with a greater zoom factor applied to the projected image. If the audience pays attention, the image grows; if attention flags, the image shrinks. But this literalization raises more questions than it answers, it would seem. On the one hand, it participates in a process of “datafication,” turning brain wave patterns into a stream of data called “attention,” but whose relation to attention in ordinary senses is altogether unclear. But this datafication simultaneously opens up a space of affective or aesthetic experience in which the problematic nature of the experimental “set-up” announces itself to us in a self-reflexive doubling: we realize suddenly that “it’s a setup”; “we’ve been framed” – first by the cinema’s construction of attentive spectators and now by this digital apparatus that treats attention as an algorithmically computed value.

So in a way, the apparatus is a pedagogical/didactic tool: it not only allows us to reenact (in a highly transformed manner) the experience of early cinema, but it also helps us to think about the construction of “attention” itself in technical apparatuses both then and now. In addition to this function, it also generates a lot of data that can indeed be subjected to statistical analysis, correlation, and visualization, and that might be marshaled in arguments about the comparative medial impacts or effects of various media regimes. Our point, however, remains more critical, and highly dubious of any positivistic understanding of this data. The technocrats of the advertising industry, the true inheritors of Münsterberg the industrial psychologist, are anyway much more effective at instrumentalizing attention and reducing it to a psychotechnical variable. With a sufficiently “weird” DH approach, we hope to stimulate a more speculative, non-positivistic, and hence post-empirical relation to such datafication. Remitting contemporary attention procedures to the early establishment of what Kittler refers to as the “link between physiology and technology” (73) upon which modern entertainment media are built, this weird DH aims not only to explore the current transformations of affect, attention, and agency – that is, to study their reconfigurations – but also potentially to empower media users to influence such configuration, if only on a small scale, rather than leave it completely up to the technocrats.

Demon Debt

I am pleased to announce that on Friday, January 17, 2014 (12:00 pm in room 609, Conti-Hochhaus), Prof. Julia Leyda from Sophia University in Tokyo will be giving a talk on “Demon Debt: Paranormal Activity as Recessionary Post-Cinematic Allegory.” The lecture will take place in the context of my seminar on 21st-century film, but attendance is open to all.

Julia Leyda has participated in the two roundtable discussions on “post-cinematic affect” that have appeared to date in the pages of La Furia Umana, and she served as respondent at SCMS 2013 on a panel that included papers by Steven Shaviro, Therese Grisham, and myself. Among other projects, she is currently collaborating with me on the preparation of an edited collection on “post-cinematic theory” that we hope to see published in 2014! (More details soon…)

Here is the abstract for her talk in January:

Demon Debt: Paranormal Activity as Recessionary Post-Cinematic Allegory

Julia Leyda

The Paranormal Activity film franchise serves as a case study in twenty-first-century neoliberal post-cinema. The demon in the Paranormal films comes to claim a debt resulting from a contract with an ancestor, who has in a sense “mortgaged” her future offspring in exchange for power and wealth; the demon here is an allegory of debt under capitalism, invisible, conveyed through digital media, and inescapable. Set entirely inside feminine spaces of the home — bedroom, kitchen, and nursery — the films construct a post-feminist narrative that reconfigures the gender politics of horror cinema. But the post-cinematic moment also demands analysis of form in addition to a thematic reading. Digital data constitutes the “film” itself in the form of video footage, like transnational finance capital and the intangible systems of consumer credit, and like the unseen and immaterial demon. The incursion of debtor capitalism and financialization into the home in these films has turned deadly. Finally, like the demonic home invasion, the financialization of private life drafts the immaterial labor of the audience into the branding of the film.

Post-Cinematic Perspectives

On November 22-23, 2013, I will be participating in the conference “Post-Cinematic Perspectives,” which is being organized by Lisa Åkervall and Chris Tedjasukmana at the Freie Universität Berlin. There’s a great line-up, as you’ll see on the conference program above. I look forward to seeing Steven Shaviro again (and hearing his talk on Spring Breakers), and to meeting all the other speakers. My talk, on the morning of the 23rd, is entitled “Nonhuman Perspectives and Discorrelated Images in Post-Cinema.” The conference is open to the public, and attendance is free.

Imagining Cinematic Transformation

On Wednesday, May 8, 2013 (at 6:00 pm in room 608 in the Conti-Hochhaus), the Film & TV Reading Group will meet to discuss two texts relevant to the larger theme of “Imagining Cinematic Transformation” (part of a semester-long series of events detailed here). The texts are:

1) Francesco Casetti, “The Relocation of Cinema,” _NECSUS_ 2 (2012): online at http://www.necsus-ejms.org/the-relocation-of-cinema/

2) Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener, “Conclusion: digital cinema — the body and the senses refigured?”, in: _Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses_. New York and London: Routledge, 2010. 170-187.

We are always happy to welcome new participants to our informal discussion group! For more information, please contact Felix Brinker.

M: Movies, Machines, Modernity — An Introduction

Above, a somewhat streamlined and re-focused version of the talk I gave last Thursday at the first screening in our film series “M: Movies, Machines, Modernity.” Text and video: Shane Denson. Music: Jared C. Balogh, “Break in the Action,” licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Sharealike License.

M: Movies, Machines, Modernity. A Film Series

This semester the Initiative for Interdisciplinary Media Research at the Leibniz Universität Hannover will again be organizing a series of film screenings. We have decided to show public domain versions of the films so that we can make the screenings free and open to all. (Feel free also to bring along snacks and refreshments.)

The topic this semester is “M: Movies, Machines, Modernity”:

From the beginning, movies have presented themselves as the preeminent machines of modernity. On the one hand, they have served as a medium for imagining and envisioning modern landscapes and machinic cities. On the other hand, the movies were involved directly in the making of said modernity. The image of a machine is often a movie’s reflexive image of itself, or of that which it imagines itself to be…

Screenings will take place in the rooms of the English Department / American Studies (room 615, Conti-Hochhaus — all screenings begin at 6:00 pm). The schedule, put together this time by Felix Brinker, Ilka Brasch, and Shane Denson, includes the following four films:

November 8, 2012: Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927)

November 29, 2012: Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929)

December 13, 2012: M – Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder (Fritz Lang, 1931)

January 17, 2013: Modern Times (Charlie Chaplin, 1936)

[UPDATE: See here for a brief video introduction to the topic of our series.]

Animation and the Delimitation of Cinema

What is cinema? This question has been posed innumerable times, and innumerable answers have been offered in response — some of them good, some less satisfying, but most of them in some way biased, partial, and in any case less than comprehensive. If I wager an answer of my own, it will surely suffer from the same incompleteness — and how could it be otherwise, unless the cinema had ceased evolving, been frozen in time, or superseded and relegated to the junk pile of “dead” media? This is hardly the case, I think, even if the material infrastructure of cinema has been radically transformed in its transition to digital production and playback technologies.

Nevertheless, attendant changes in the cinema, as part of the larger media environment in which we live and breathe, have been momentous enough to warrant discussion of “post-cinematic affect” (in Steven Shaviro‘s term) as the emergent episteme or “structure of feeling” informing life today. And the film historians of the past several decades (chief among them Tom Gunning and Miriam Hansen) have demonstrated with sufficient clarity that early cinema, far from being a “primitive” version of “classical” cinema, was indeed a different beast altogether. Together, these perspectives suggest that cinema — classical (and post-classical) cinema: cinema proper as the dominant medium of the twentieth century — can be approached as a (relatively) bounded object, not neatly encapsulated but nevertheless defined by some fuzzy borders near the beginning and the end of “its” century.

In an attempt to understand this object better, we might consider that a wide variety of attempts to define cinema suffer from a common shortcoming: they marginalize or otherwise fail to account for “animation.” But perhaps there is something essential about this marginalization, and maybe we could say — knowing full well that any such categorical pronouncement is surely guilty of a similar selectiveness — that animation provides the frame within which cinema in its dominant form has been defined. In order to serve as such a frame, it would therefore not be by accident but indeed as an enabling condition of “cinema” that animation should be pushed thus to the margins. (In this context it is perhaps important, though, to recall Derrida’s meditations on the frame qua parergon…).

What would it mean, though, and what reason is there to say that cinema is “framed” by animation as a border condition? The idea, in short, is that “cinema” (a normative construct historically instantiated in both discursive and material forms) is bookended, delimited historically and conceptually by an initial and an ultimate indistinction of animation and live-action film — such that cinema is defined not as live-action film, narrowly and in exclusion of animation, but on the grounds of the distinction between, or via the more basic distinguishability of, animation and live-action film. For it is precisely (though not solely) this distinction that is at stake in the transition from early to classical and again from cinematic to post-cinematic forms or regimes.

We must recall that it remained common, until well into the 1910s, to refer to film generally as “animated film” — in distinction to static photographs, which had become associated in the nineteenth century with death (an association that was not purely philosophical but practically instantiated in the Victorian-era memento mori). The movies brought these images back to life — animated them: an idea that motivated corporate names such as Biograph and Vitagraph (while the connection might seem even more palpable to us today in a hand-cranked flip-book machine like the Mutoscope). And it was the camera/projector apparatus itself — the main “attraction” of early cinema — that was the life-giving force: “animation” was thus an apparatic spectacle, something that inhered in the very machinery of the movies, not in a certain type of film (see also Paul Ward’s instructive article, “Defining ‘Animation'”).

This is not to say, of course, that early audiences were so bedazzled by moving pictures that they couldn’t tell the difference between live-action sequences and “animation” in its narrower (and later) sense. Rather, the point is merely that this distinction was relatively unimportant in the “cinema of attractions” — where “enchanted drawings,” trick effects, and stop-motion spectacles were widespread. The meaningfulness of the distinction, which emerges in the transition to classical film, depends on the marginalization of animation, which is no longer seen as the essence of film but as an exceptional kind of it. The trick effect becomes a “special effect.” More generally, “life” is no longer given by the apparatus but is merely recorded, witnessed by it in the case of live-action filmmaking, which it now makes sense to distinguish from animation; life, in other words, is located in front of the camera, as a pro-filmic property of actors that filmmakers can at best harness and pass on to their diegetic characters. The once central operation of film — animation — henceforth occupies a subordinate position as the apparatus of classical cinema undergoes its disenchantment.

Again, though, it is less this subordination than the sheer separability of animation that I think might be seen as a defining factor, a framing condition, of cinema in its dominant or proper form as the central medium of the twentieth century. And one of the key developments marking our transition to a post-cinematic era is precisely a reversal of this process: most obviously, CGI and digital compositing render the distinction between apparatically animated and pro-filmically animate images again indeterminate. (But surely the anima at stake is not just a narrowly technical agency, but also the life we call our own, the parameters of which are radically revised by global communications technologies, through microtemporal encounters with the digital, and in the imbrication of our affective lives with the algorithms of global finance). Such indeterminacy, the indistinction of animation, therefore constitutes the initial and the ultimate state, while the cinema is defined in/as the space between.

Seen from this (undoubtedly biased, partial, and perhaps even perverse) perspective, Winsor McCay — whose comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland premiered 107 years ago today, on October 15, 1905, in the pages of The New York Herald — was not only a pioneer of animation (as it is more conventional to claim on the basis of his filmic work with Nemo and the later Gertie the Dinosaur), but in fact a pioneer of cinema proper, which he helped to define by wresting it from animation, from an indistinction of life — from an indistinction into which we plunge again today…

Required Reading: Shaviro on Melancholia

I’m not teaching any courses right now, but if I were then Steven Shaviro’s “MELANCHOLIA, or the Romantic Anti-Sublime” would definitely be required reading! This is an important essay, and the new open-access journal in which it appears, Sequence: Serial Studies in Media, Film, and Music, is sure to establish itself as an important site of media research. Founded and co-edited by Catherine Grant (of Film Studies for Free fame), the peer-reviewed journal responds to the medial specificities of its digital environment in an innovative — but nevertheless quite “natural” — way: by structuring itself in terms of seriality. From the “About” page:

SEQUENCE will use its position outside of established academic publishing frameworks to work adaptively and responsively, using a sequential edited-collection format – its publication schedule set by its authors and readers, and their research and concerns. In other words, it will make an open-access virtue of its own low-fi, D.I.Y., modular blog format. It can only do this meaningfully, of course, because of the generous labour and research expertise of its authors, and of the editorial and advisory boards of its publisher REFRAME.

Each new scholarly SEQUENCE will begin with the publication of one valuable contribution to research in the fields of media, film or music – on a particular theme named in the issue title. But the editors of each individual SEQUENCE won’t necessarily know what the next in their series will be, or when exactly it will come. Each SEQUENCE could, theoretically, turn out to be ‘infinite’, or only as long as the first, self-contained contribution – a hopefully interesting and worthy, if possibly melancholic, kind of monograph.

In any case, each contribution to a SEQUENCE, and each evolving SEQUENCE as a whole, will go on to be published in a variety of electronic viewing and reading formats, with the web version only the first in a series of digital iterations.

Instead of regularity, we aim above all for spreadability and engagement. Readers will find out about new SEQUENCES, and new contributions and updates to existing SEQUENCES through the paraphernalia and pullulations of contemporary online serial publication: primarily, the project’s blog, its RSS feeds, and its Twitter and Facebook pages, and, hopefully, sharings on from those.

In this spirit, check out Shaviro’s excellent article, share it, and spread the word about this important new venue for online, peer-reviewed, open-access scholarship!

“…where everything is marginal or contiguous to everything else…”

[UPDATE: You can find the complete text of the roundtable discussion here.]

Currently, I am engaged in a roundtable discussion with Therese Grisham, Julia Leyda, and Steven Shaviro on the topic of the post-cinematic. The discussion, organized and moderated by Therese, is to appear in the excellent online journal La Furia Umana, where it will follow an earlier discussion of the topic (which focused on the first two Paranormal Activity films). I don’t want to give away too much right now, but I thought I’d offer a short preview here. What follows is the crux — and in this context, “the crux” is synonymous with “some marginal snippets” — of my answer to an excellent question posed by Therese. You’ll have to wait, though, to find out what the question was…

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…whereas the characters in classical cinema provided the central focus and occasions for dramatic interest in a story-world that unfolds according to its own internally defined logics, and whereas the camera served alternately to disclose this world in the manner of a transparent window or, more exceptionally, to announce its own presence as an (uncanny or self-reflexive) object of perception, the radically indeterminate cameras of post-cinematic filmmaking serve … to displace the characters, to take them out of the center of perceptual attention and instead situate them marginally with respect to a total environment of inhuman image production, processing, and circulation – and to situate us as viewers accordingly.

…there is a reversible relation between the post-cinematic diegesis and the nondiegetic ecology of our post-cinematic world, and it is occasioned precisely by a camera that no longer situates us as subjects vis-à-vis the film-as-object, but instead institutes a pervasive relation of marginality, where everything is marginal or contiguous to everything else. This corresponds to a specifically post-cinematic mode of address: the camera no longer frames actions, emotions, and events in a given world, but instead provides the color, look, and feel of the film qua material component or aspect of the world – of our world…

The post-cinematic camera, in short, modulates the affective character of the wider world; it does not bracket that world out or substitute one of its own making – for it remains indeterminately contiguous to every level of the contemporary real, including the physical, the imaginary, and the virtual.