Starting this quarter, I am excited to serve as faculty coordinator for the Stanford Humanities Center Geballe Research Workshop “Digital Aesthetics: Critical Approaches to Computational Culture.” We have a great lineup for the 2017-2018 academic year, details of which I’ll be sharing here.
In the meantime, take a look at all of this year’s research workshops at the Stanford Humanities Center on their website.
A selection of video essays from the exhibition Post-Cinema: Videographic Explorations, which ran May 1-12, 2017 at Stanford University, is now available for viewing online.
The video essays, by leading filmmaker-scholars Kevin B. Lee and Allison de Fren as well as students in my “Post-Cinema” seminar (winter 2017), deal with a variety of contemporary media forms and phenomena – including digital animation, Beyoncé’s Lemonade and the visual album, contemporary horror, slow cinema, post-cinematic television and transmedia franchises, among others.
You can find the video essays on my website, under “Videographic Scholarship” on the catch-all “STUFF®” page (where you’ll also find a variety of digital and creative projects). Or go straight to the exhibition page.
Above, the schedule for the Spring 2017 Games and Interactive Media Series (GAIMS) at Stanford. Among the many great speakers this quarter, we have Dennis Fong (one of the first professional gamers) and Allan Alcorn (the engineer who designed the classic Atari PONG). Check it out!
Next week, on April 7, 2017, I’ll be giving a talk titled “Post-Cinematic Artifacts: Digital Glitch and the Ruins of Perception” at the 2017 Media Fields conference, “RUINS,” at UC Santa Barbara.
Building on recent work I’ve been doing, I’ll be arguing “that new forms of sensibility and collectivity may become thinkable in the spaces opened up by post-cinematic media – that new ways of being and relating to the world may arise from the ruins of perception.”
The full conference program is posted on the conference website.
If you’re in Chicago for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference this week, come check out our workshop on “Deformative Criticism and Digital Experimentations in Film and Media Studies” on Friday, March 24 at 9am. More info here.
I am proud to have a piece on “Pre-Sponsive Gestures” and the work of French media artist Grégory Chatonsky included in the new issue of the Montreal-based ETC Media. Looks like a great issue, and happy to be in such good company!
CURRENT ISSUE // 110
GRÉGORY CHATONSKY: APRÈS LE RÉSEAU / AFTER THE NETWORKIssue 110 of ETC MEDIA is dedicated to Grégory Chatonsky, who has curated the form and content of this special issue. A Montreal resident for the last ten years, the artist is a pioneer of net art, founding Incident.net in 1994, and an unflagging explorer of the relationships between technology and anonymous existence. In this issue, the artist and a few other friends, artists, philosophers, art historians, and art critics reconsider the last two decades of experimentation, a time in which the world drastically changed through the widespread use of the Internet to reach a digital omnipresence that heralds a near extinction. Divided into 3 sections—“infinitude,” “hyperproduction,” “without ourselves”—ETC MEDIA becomes a platform for navigating in our era and gaining a better understanding of a future whose portents remain deeply ambivalent—promising and threatening all at once. Rather than being reduced to trendy notions often misunderstood by the contemporary art milieu, the concepts of post-digital, accelerationism, and speculative materialism constellate a world in the process of perishing and being born.
Collaborators
Grégory Chatonsky
Eve K. Tremblay
Pau Waelder
Bertrand Gervais and Arnaud Regnauld
Shane Denson
DeForrest Brown Jr.
Goliath Dyèvre
Pierre Cassou-Noguès
Erik Bordeleau
Nora N. Khan
Dylan Trigg
Pierre-Alexandre Fradet
Jussi Parikka
At the upcoming SCMS conference in Chicago, I will be participating in a workshop on “Deformative Criticism and Digital Experimentations in Film & Media Studies” (panel K3 on Friday, March 24, 2017 at 9:00am):
Deformative criticism has emerged as an innovative site of critical practice within media studies and digital humanities, revealing new insights into media texts by “breaking” them in controlled or chaotic ways. Deformative criticism includes a wide range of digital experiments that generate heretical and non-normative readings of media texts; because the results of these experiments are impossible to know in advance, they shift the boundaries of critical scholarship. Media scholars are particularly well situated to such experimentation, as many of our objects of study exist in digital forms that lend themselves to wide-ranging manipulation. Thus, deformative criticism offers a crucial venue for defining not only contemporary scholarly practice, but also media studies’ growing relationship to digital humanities.
Also participating in the workshop will be Jason Mittell (Middlebury College), Stephanie Boluk (UC Davis), Kevin L. Ferguson (Queens College, City University of New York), Mark Sample (Davidson College), and Virginia Kuhn (USC).
My own presentation/workshop contribution will focus on glitches and augmented reality as a deformative means of engaging with changing media-perceptual configurations, including the following case study:
Glitch, Augment, Scan
Scannable Images is a collaborative art/theory project by Karin + Shane Denson that interrogates post-cinema – its perceptual patterns, hyperinformatic simultaneities, and dispersals of attention – through an assemblage of static and animated images, databending and datamoshing techniques, and augmented reality (AR) video overlays. Viewed through the small screen of a smartphone or tablet – itself directed at a computer screen – only a small portion of the entire spectacle can be seen at once, thus reflecting and emulating the selective, scanning regard of post-cinematic images and confronting the viewer with the materiality of the post-cinematic media regime through the interplay of screens, pixels, people, and the physical and virtual spaces they occupy.
Syllabus for the next iteration of my seminar “Post-Cinema” (senior capstone / graduate seminar), Department of Art & Art History, Winter 2017.
I am pleased to announce that Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film, which I co-edited with Julia Leyda, is now available for download in PDF format.
The open-access book, which has been available in an online HTML version since earlier this year, weighs in at a whopping 990 pages (!) and can now be downloaded for offline reading in two versions (9mb or a higher-quality 13mb version).
There are also two new endorsements for the book. First, from Tanya Horeck at Anglia Ruskin University:
Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film is an intellectually exciting and important book. Editors Shane Denson and Julia Leyda have assembled an extraordinary range of notable contributors with the aim to open up a critical conversation on the very notion of the post-cinematic – something they achieve in a most novel and engaging way. Through essays and roundtable discussions, Post-Cinema formulates fresh and nuanced questions about the consumption and spectatorship of post-millennial film and other media as they circulate through contemporary digital media ecologies. As is fitting given its subject matter of changing media formats, the design and layout of this book – with its open access digitality and its collaborative dialogues – is as relevant and pioneering as its content. Inviting us to rethink received ideas about how 21st-century media reshape “new forms of sensibility,” Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film is critically imperative reading for anyone interested in ongoing vital transformations in moving image media.
– Tanya Horeck, Reader in Film, Media, and Culture, Anglia Ruskin University
And also an endorsement from Michael Lawrence at University of Sussex:
The essays and discussions that have been assembled in Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st–Century Film provide the reader with a remarkably comprehensive and compelling survey of the diverse critical and theoretical responses to the formal, technological, affective, political and ecological dimensions of our contemporary post-cinematic landscape. That landscape now has an authoritative and inspirational field guide: by gathering together foundational interventions alongside the most recent contributions this collection will prove indispensable to anyone wishing to take these conversations forward.
– Michael Lawrence, Reader in Film Studies, University of Sussex
More info and an official announcement can be found here.
My abstract for the panel “Generativity and Creative Agency in Post-Cinematic Media” at SLSA 2016 in Atlanta:
Post-Cinema as a Generative Media Regime
Shane Denson, Stanford University
This presentation examines recent theories and approaches to post-cinema, understood broadly as the informatically informed audio-visual media regime that follows in the wake of electronic and digital media’s absorption and re-tooling of cinematic technologies and modes of representation. Taking cues from Steven Shaviro’s Post-Cinematic Affect (2010) and the diverse contributions to the collection Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film (2016, co-edited by Shane Denson and Julia Leyda), among others, I aim in particular to foreground the ways in which what has often been conceived in terms of loss (e.g. the loss of indexicality, the demise of celluloid, or the death of cinema as an institution or context for collective reception) inevitably also involves an additive or generative moment—a moment of technical and cultural creation informed by the microtemporal and computational processes that displace and transform the photographic ontology of cinema. Such generativity has been glimpsed in a variety of critical and theoretical statements, such as Lev Manovich’s argument that digital processes render all images “animation,” Steven Shaviro’s focus on “affect” as the pre-perceptual site of these images’ registration, or Vivian Sobchack’s recent meditations on the emergence of a new spatiotemporal dimension within the “screen-sphere” that now encompasses all of human life. As of yet, however, these approaches have not been synthesized into a more general, comprehensive framework of post-cinematic generativity. This talk aims to make a step in this direction by identifying the technical, phenomenological, and pre-personal foundations of the post-cinematic media regime and its particular mechanisms of creative agency.