Following the recent publication of Media of Serial Narrative, edited by Frank Kelleter, there is a 4-part interview with Kelleter conducted by Henry Jenkins over on the latter’s blog. The interview is far-ranging and offers a good introduction to the volume and to the broader work conducted by the Popular Seriality Research Unit from 2010 to 2016, continued in ongoing work today.
On Tuesday, May 9, 2017, Kathleen Loock (Freie Universität Berlin/University of Wisconsin-Madison) will be holding a guest lecture on “Cine-Serialities: The Industrial Logics, Aesthetic Pleasures, and Discursive Constructions of Cinema’s Serial Forms.” The lecture will take place at 1:30pm in the McMurtry Building, room 350.
Media of Serial Narrative, edited by Frank Kelleter and published by The Ohio State University Press, is out now! The book includes 14 chapters, two of which I co-authored: “Spectral Seriality: The Sights and Sounds of Count Dracula” (co-authored with Ruth Mayer) and “Digital Seriality: On the Serial Aesthetics and Practice of Digital Games” (co-authored with Andreas Sudmann). Here’s the full table of contents:
Flyer for my “Seriality” course, Spring 2017 at Stanford. Complete syllabus here.
Syllabus for my grad seminar on Seriality (spring 2017).
Syllabus for “Frankenstein and Film” (Spring 2017).
Syllabus for my Introduction to Media course, starting Monday, September 26.
Poster for the upcoming conference “Seriality Seriality Seriality: The Many Lives of the Field that Isn’t One” (final conference of the Popular Seriality Research Unit), taking place June 22-24, 2016 at the Freie Universität Berlin!
More info at the conference website.
On January 21, 2015 (3:00-4:00pm), the S-1 Speculative Sensation Lab will be presenting a collaborative artwork titled Manifest Data at The Edge, the new space in Duke University’s Bostock Library devoted to “interdisciplinary, data-driven, digitally reliant or team-based research.”
Manifest Data brings together programmers, 3-D printing specialists, sculptors, and theorists to reflect on the production of value in the digital age, the materiality of information, and the (non-)place of mediated relations.
Code written by Luke Caldwell captures data that would otherwise be leaked as we browse the web, and exploited by the likes of Google and Facebook; in a second step, this data is transformed into a coordinate system that can be mapped as a 3D object. In collaboration with other lab members, artist Libi Striegl prepares and prints out the resulting “data creatures.” Karin Denson has reimagined these forms as beautifully grotesque garden gnomes — thus reappropriating a figure that has become a symbol for 3D printing and a marketing tool for companies like MakerBot. Together, Karin and I have further translated these figures into the hybrid spaces of augmented reality, planting the gnomes strategically and in such a way as to instantiate a very personal system for creating value that — dare we hope? — is immune to corporate cooptation. Lab members David Rambo and Max Symuleski, among others, round out the project with artistic-theoretical statements connecting the project of Manifest Data with a critical questioning of contemporary manifest destiny and a new phrenology for the digital age.
The S-1 Lab is directed by Mark B. N. Hansen and Mark Olson in the Media Arts + Sciences Program at Duke. The Manifest Data project was initiated by Amanda Starling Gould, who has continued to provide it with a guiding aesthetic-theoretical vision.
More information about the presentation, which happens to be the inaugural presentation in the “What I Do With Data” series of the Digital Scholarship Services at Duke, can be found here.
My new book, Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface, has been out for about a month now — in Germany, at least. The American, British, French, and Japanese iterations of amazon list the book as appearing next week, on August 22 (but available for pre-order), and it may be September by the time the American distributor, Columbia University Press, gets it listed on their website. Meanwhile, living somewhere between these worlds, I was able to get my hands on a physical copy of the book yesterday, and I’m very happy with the job Transcript Verlag did!
For more information about the book, as well as a preview that includes Mark Hansen’s foreword and my introduction, see here or click the image above (the preview can be accessed by clicking “PDF,” just beneath the cover image, on the publisher’s page). Also, if you are in any position to do so, please consider requesting a copy for your university library.
Thanks to everyone who helped me get this out there! And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper. I have an affection for it, for it is the offspring of happy days…