I am excited to visit Bogotá, Colombia for the first time this coming September, where I will be giving a series of workshops and public lectures. And I am equally excited to see these very cool images that the people there made for my visit!
The public lectures are as follows:
September 10, 2019 (time TBD): “Animating Frankenstein: Film, Comics, and Serialized Visual Culture.” Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano.
September 12, 2019 (6pm): “Discorrelation and the Post-Perceptual Image.” Universidad Nacional de Colombia.
I will also be holding some workshops at the Visual Research Laboratory in the Program in History and Theory of Art, Architecture, and the City at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Thanks very much to the people there for making this happen, and thanks especially to Visual Research Lab director Zenaida Osorio Porras for the invitation!
A new issue of Media Fields Journal is out, titled “At the Edge” and edited by Jeremy Moore and Nicole Strobel. There is a lot of great work in here, which I look forward to digging into.
I am happy to have contributed a short piece called “Edge Detection,” which departs from the sex scene in Blade Runner 2049 to think about computer vision, DeepFakes, and human/technological interfaces and their impact on perception more generally.
On June 29, 2019, I will be presenting work from my forthcoming book, Discorrelated Images, at the media-philosophical workshop on “Reflexivity in Digital Media” at the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste. Thanks to Katerina Krtilova for organizing, and thanks to Dieter Mersch for the invitation to be a part of this!
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.
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).
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 June 26, 2019, I’ll be giving a talk titled “Desktop Horror: Screening Fear/Fearing Screens” at the Culture/Literature Research Colloquium at the JFK Institute for North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. Thanks to Frank Kelleter, Alexander Starre, and everyone else involved for inviting me and making this happen!
On July 3, 2019, I will be giving a talk titled “Images of Discorrelation” at the Center for Digital Cultures/Institute for Advanced Studies on Media Cultures of Computer Simulation at the Leuphana University in Lüneburg, Germany, in the context of a research fellowship I’ll be doing there this summer. Thanks to Florian Hoof, Claus Pias, and everyone at CDC/MECS for making this happen!
This week, thanks to a kind invitation from Julia Leyda, I have been in Trondheim, Norway, where I’ve led two workshops on videographic scholarship and pedagogy with Kathleen Loock and, today, gave a talk on “Screen Time.” Tomorrow, March 29, 2019, I will head down south, where I will be speaking on “The Horror of Discorrelation” at University of Agder in Kristiansand, Norway. Thanks to Ahmet Gürata for inviting me!
In the week of March 25 – 29, 2019, I will be giving several talks and workshops in Norway — first at the Deapartment of Art And Media Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, and then at the Department of Nordic and Media Studies at the University of Agder in Kristiansand.
First, in Trondheim, on March 26 and 27, I will be participating on two workshops on videographic pedagogy and scholarship with Kathleen Loock.
Then, on March 28, also in Trondheim, I’ll be presenting work from my book project Discorrelated Images.
Finally, on March 29, in Kristiansand, I’ll be giving a talk on contemporary horror, also under the perspective of discorrelation.
Thanks to Julia Leyda for inviting me to Trondheim, and to Ahmet Gürata for the invitation to Kristiansand!
