I am excited to be serving as the current Mercator Fellow at the Konfigurationen des Films Graduiertenkolleg / Configurations of Film Graduate Program at the Goethe Universität in Frankfurt — via Zoom, of course — and to deliver a talk titled “Post-Cinematic Bodies” on November 23, 2020 (6pm European time). More info about the event can be found here, with registration details coming soon.
CFP Post-Cinema: Practices … by medieninitiative on Scribd
I am happy to share the CFP for a special issue of Images Secondes on the topic of “Post-Cinema: Practices of Research and Creation,” edited by Chloé Galibert-Lainé and Gala Hernández López.
The special issue, for which I am serving on the comité scientifique (which sounds a lot cooler than “review board”), will collect traditional scholarly articles as well as contributions in other media (such as videographic criticism and experimental digital forms). Proposals are due April 20, 2020, with final submissions due September 30.
Please spread the word to anyone who might be interested in contributing to what is sure to be an exciting publication!
This coming week I will be at Duke University for two events:
First, on Thursday, February 20 (5pm, exact location to be determined), I will be giving a talk titled “Aesthetics of Discorrelation” (drawing on work from my forthcoming book Discorrelated Images).
Then, on Friday, February 21 (1-3pm in Smith Warehouse, Bay 4), I will be participating in a follow-up event to the NEH Institute for Virtual and Augmented Reality for the Digital Humanities, or V/AR-DHI. I will present work on “Exploring Cinematic Mixed Realities: Deformative Methods for Augmented and Virtual Film and Media Studies” and participate in a roundtable discussion with other members of the Institute.
The Algorithmic Nickelodeon from Shane Denson on Vimeo.
Several weeks ago, Sight & Sound Magazine’s “Best Video Essays of 2019” came out, featuring 134 videos nominated by 39 contributors — including my “Algorithmic Nickelodeon” piece, picked by Jiří Anger from Charles University in Prague. He writes:
Despite its formal shortcomings, this must be one of the most thought-provoking videographic works I have seen. Denson’s theoretical manifesto imagines a form of audiovisual criticism that would not be merely expressive but transformative, reinventing our notion of subject-object relations. For this to happen, deformations of the image/object and displacements of the analyst/subject must take place simultaneously. Creative thinking joins forces with EEG headsets and editing programmes to create a media-theoretical ‘perpetuum mobile’, designed for constant questioning of what cinema means in the age of algorithms.
I am honored to have my work featured alongside many fascinating videos, many of which were made by friends and colleagues of mine (including especially noteworthy pieces by Chloé Galibert-Laîné, Kathleen Loock, Jason Mittell, Tracy Cox-Stanton, as well as Allison de Fren’s piece “Mad Science/Mad Love and the Female Body in Pieces,” which I commissioned for the Videographic Frankenstein exhibition at Stanford and published last year in Hyperrhiz).
By the way, I agree completely with Anger’s assessments of my video’s “formal shortcomings,” which stand out all the more against the background of all the excellent and polished work featured in the poll. In fact, my video was conceived and produced as a very rough proof-of-concept for a symposium organized by Kathleen Loock in Berlin last year (where I had hoped to do a live demo of the setup but was unable to due to technical limitations in the venue). A more polished video for the project is currently being planned, but in the meantime I’m quite happy with Anger’s assessment of it as “one of the most thought-provoking videographic works”!
On October 8, I will be giving a keynote lecture at “Cinemática II: O pós-cinema e a experimentação para além da tela” (Post-Cinema and Experimentation Beyond the Screen) at the Universidade de São Paulo in Brazil. My talk, titled “Discorrelated Images, Algorithmic Affects, and the Hyperinformatic Environment,” draws on my forthcoming book Discorrelated Images.
I am very excited to visit Brazil for the first time, and very grateful for the invitation from Prof. Giselle Gubernikoff of the Escola de Comunicações e Artes!
As I mentioned recently, I am getting ready for a trip to Bogotá, where I will be giving a series of workshops and two public lectures. Official announcements are now online for the talks, the first of which, on September 10 at the Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano, will be on “Animating Frankenstein: Film, Comics, and Serialized Visual Culture.” More info is online, here.
The second talk, on September 12 at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, deals with the topic of my forthcoming book: “Discorrelation and the Post-Perceptual Image.” More info is available here.
Both of the talks will apparently have live translation into Spanish!
This Thursday, May 16, I will be at the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto to talk about “Discorrelated Images” — the subject of my forthcoming book by the same title.
The next day, I’ll be speaking at the Spiral Film and Philosophy Conference about the idea of “animation” in a post-cinematic media regime.
Looking forward to being in Toronto and seeing lots of familiar faces!
Recently, I wondered whether it was time to leave social media and reboot the blog as a space of active thinking and sharing. The jury is still out on whether that is feasible and even desirable. But I would like to use this space to post more than just upcoming talks and publications. In that spirit, I’d like to point out Yvette Granata’s 360-degree video CLONE (2017), which you can see above (but which is better viewed on a smartphone through the YouTube app, and even better with Google Cardboard or similar contraption).
On her website, Granata describes the video thus:
CLONE (HD Video, 2017) is a 360 video essay and a para-sexual design fiction. It narrates a future time after global climate collapse and mass pollution have made sexual reproduction no longer viable. Both sexual reproduction and the networked technology of the 21st century have all melted from the humidity produced by runaway greenhouse gasses. In this speculative future, a Xenofeminist world government has re-purposed the data farms of former tech companies for Mono-auto-sexual cloning clinics — the artificial wombs for the hot asexuality of the future.
I have recently been writing about this remarkable video against the background of big-budget movies about artificial women, including Her (2013), Ex Machina (2014), and Blade Runner 2049 (2017). Those movies, all of which happen to be directed by white men, are interesting meditations on, or parables of, artificial creation in an age of computer-generated imagery. But Granata’s weird video, drawing inspiration from the Xenofeminist Manifesto, goes farther than any of those movies in raising questions about the interface between gender, capital, climate change, and moving-image media.
Here is a brief snippet of what I’ve been writing:
Next month, May 16-18, I will be in Toronto, where I’ll give two talks:
First, on May 16, I’ll be talking about my book project Discorrelated Images at the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto.
Then, on May 17, I will be giving a talk titled “Cinematic and Post-Cinematic Animation: Medium, Theme, Phenomenology” at the Spiral Film and Philosophy Conference (the theme of which is It’s Alive! Film/Form/Life). The full conference program is online, here: https://spiralfilmphilosophy.ca/program-2019/
On July 10, 2019, I will be giving a talk titled “Post-Cinematic Realism” at the LeibnizWerkstatt lecture series on Sprache, Migration, Vielfalt at the Leibniz Universität Hannover. Thanks to Radhika Natarajan for inviting me!