The S-1 Speculative Sensation Lab at Duke University, with which I have had the honor of collaborating on an exciting set of art/tech/theory projects over the past couple of months, has a new website: http://s-1lab.org
It’s still under development at this point, but you can already get an idea of the kind of work that’s going on in the lab, under the direction of Mark B. N. Hansen and Mark Olson. Check it out!
Click the image above to view the slides and hear the audio track recorded at our January 21, 2015 presentation of Manifest Data, a collaborative art/theory project by the Duke University S-1 Speculative Sensation Lab (directed by Mark B. N. Hansen and Mark Olson). This is an ongoing project, with further elaborations/iterations and presentations/exhibitions in the planning (more soon!).
The presentation took place at The Edge, the new digital and interactive learning space at Duke’s Bostock Library. The presenters (in the order of their appearance) were: Amanda Starling Gould, Luke Caldwell, Shane Denson (me), and David Rambo.
For more info about the project, see here and here — and stay tuned for more!.
According to the Duke Visualization Friday Forum website, my talk this Friday — “Visualizing Digital Seriality: Correlating Code and Community in the Super Mario Modding Scene” — will be streamed live: here.
The talk will take place at 12:00 Eastern time, Jan. 30, 2015.
Above, another poster for the Manifest Data event on January 21, 2015, which I posted about a few days ago. Again, we’ll be presenting “a project that includes a 3D printed manifestation of personal Internet browsing data and an AR-enhanced data-based garden gnome” (as Amanda Starling Gould summed it up succinctly). If you’re in the Triangle area, do swing by! The event is free and open to all. (And if that’s not enough to entice you: as the poster says, “Light refreshments will be served!”)
See also the posts about the project on the HASTAC digital humanities network (here and here), as well the full list of events in the Duke Digital Scholarship Services series this semester (here).
On January 30, 2015 (12:00-1:00pm), I will be speaking about visualization techniques and game-related serialization processes at the Duke Visualization Friday Forum. Organized by Eric Monson and Angela Zoss, this is a very exciting and robustly interdisciplinary venue, as the long list of sponsors for the weekly forum indicates: Information Science + Information Studies, the Duke immersive Virtual Environment (or DiVE), Media Arts + Sciences, Data and Visualization Services, the Department of Computer Science, Research Computing at the Office of Information Technology, and Visualization & Interactive Systems.
As this list indicates, the Visualization Friday Forum has the potential to take just about anyone — but especially humanities-types like me — out of their comfort zone; but it does so in the most comfortable way possible: the informal setting of a lunchtime chat fosters a type of exchange that is interdisciplinary in the best sense. Artists, computer scientists, media scholars, digital humanists, historians, literary critics, mathematicians, and researchers in the natural sciences, among others, make a genuine effort to understand one another. And, to judge from the times I have been present or watched a live-stream of the Forum, this effort is usually quite successful.
So here’s hoping that my own effort at interdisciplinary dialogue will be as successful! In my talk, I will discuss an ongoing project, some preliminary findings of which I posted not too long ago. Here’s the abstract:
Visualizing Digital Seriality: Correlating Code and Community in the Super Mario Modding Scene
Shane Denson (DAAD Postdoctoral Fellow, Duke Literature)
Seriality is a common feature of game franchises, with their various sequels, spin-offs, and other forms of continuation; such serialization informs social processes of community-building among fans, while it also takes place at much lower levels in the repetition and variation that characterizes a series of game levels, for example, or in the modularized and recycled code of game engines. This presentation considers how tools and methods of digital humanities – including “distant reading” and visualization techniques – can shed light on serialization processes in digital games and gaming communities. The vibrant “modding” scene that has arisen around the classic Nintendo game Super Mario Bros. (1985) serves as a case study. Automated “reading” techniques allow us to survey a large collection of fan-based game modifications, while visualization software such as Tableau and Palladio help to bridge the gap between code and community, revealing otherwise invisible connections and patterns of seriality.
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.
At long last, I am excited to announce that my application for a 2-year postdoctoral fellowship at Duke University has been approved for funding through the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service). At Duke, I will be working closely with Mark B. N. Hansen and other scholars of media and culture to develop a media-archaeological perspective on serialization processes in video games and digital media culture more generally. The fellowship, which runs from August 2014 to July 2016, will allow me to conduct archival research in the US that will supplement and expand my work in the project “Digital Seriality” that I co-direct with Andreas Jahn-Sudmann in the context of the DFG Research Unit “Popular Seriality — Aesthetics and Practice.” Needless to say, I am very excited about this, and I will continue to post updates here! More soon…
