Today, the second of three events in Australia: “Posthuman/Post-Cinema,” hosted by Bruce Isaacs at the University of Sydney.
Tag: media theory
Digital Aesthetics Workshop Spring 2018 Lineup
April 10: Elizabeth Kessler
April 24: Jonathan Sterne
May 15: Matthew Wilson Smith
All events held in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room, 4-6pm.
Twenty-First Century Mediations of Subjectivity, ACLA 2018 #ACLA2018
At this year’s conference of the American Comparative Literature Association, taking place March 29 – April 1, 2018 in Los Angeles, I will be participating in a great seminar/panel stream on “Twenty-First Century Mediations of Subjectivity,” organized by Jim Hodge of Northwestern University.
I’m looking forward to all of the talks, on such a rich set of topics. Here is the abstract for my talk:
Post-Cinema and the Phenomenology of External Time-Consciousness
Shane Denson
Something about the temporality of media has changed, and with it the relation of media to the temporality of subjective experience. In Technics and Time, Bernard Stiegler famously argued for just such a change, which he located in the advent of “tertiary memories” – externalized, reproducible experiences stored by industrial media objects. Using the term “cinema” to designate not only a specific apparatus but also the broad media regime or epoch instituted by recording technologies from photography and phonography to television and digital technologies, Stiegler identifies a threat to our subjective experience – exacerbated with the advent of live media in “the televisual epoch of cinema” – whereby media colonize consciousness by pre-formatting our immediate awareness (primary retention) with the images of tertiary retention. One thing Stiegler’s argument fails to account for, however, is the emergence of a protentional dimension that distinguishes computational media as decidedly “post-cinematic.” No longer simply memorial or mnemotechnical, post-cinema’s protentional images are generated on the fly according to compression algorithms rather than photochemical processes, thus disrupting the stability of tertiary memory while producing an external homologue to internal time-consciousness. This paper seeks to trace the impact of post-cinematic temporality on the production of subjective experience.
Review of Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film, Screen 59:1 (2018)
Lisa Åkervall has a review out in the latest issue of Screen, covering three works on post-cinema: 1) the open-access volume that I edited with Julia Leyda, Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film; 2) the special issue of Cinéma & Cie (16:26-27, 2016), titled ‘Post-what? Post-when? Thinking moving images beyond the post-medium/post-cinema condition,’ edited by Miriam de Rosa and Vinzenz Hediger (which also includes my article on “Speculation, Transition, and the Passing of Post-Cinema”); and 3) Malte Hagener, Vinzenz Hediger, and Alena Strohmeier’s edited collection The State of Post-Cinema: Tracing the Moving Image in the Age of Digital Dissemination.
About the collection I co-edited with Julia Leyda, Åkervall writes:
“Shane Denson and Julia Leyda’s comprehensive volume Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film, an open access online publication by Reframe Books, presents a multifaceted compendium. […] The editors’ framing in Post-Cinema is precise and penetrating, flexible enough to accommodate enduring themes in film and media studies while also making allowances for new questions associated with topics such as digital media aesthetics, media archaeology and environmental studies. Their volume rejects the idea that postcinema is merely a successor to cinema or a step in the teleological digitalization of all media, instead identifying it with competing perspectives on a changing media situation that bears on cinema as an institution, a practice and a medium. In this respect the volume admirably addresses our changing media landscape.”
Read the full review here.
Currents in Media Theory (Stanford, Spring 2018)
FILMSTUD 252/452 — Spring 2018 — Prof. Shane Denson — Tuesdays 10:30-1:20
The NRA vs. Media Theory
Syllabus: Currents in Media Theory (Stanford, Spring 2018)
Syllabus for my graduate seminar “Currents in Media Theory” (Stanford, Spring 2018).
Claus Pias at Stanford
Next week, media theorist Claus Pias, Professor for the Theory and History of Media at Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, will be visiting Stanford for a series of events: on Monday, October 23 (5:30 – 7:00pm), he will be delivering a public lecture titled “Between Information Aesthetics and Design Amplification,” which will be held in my home department of Art & Art History. (More info here.)
The following day, Tuesday, October 24 (11:30am – 1:00pm), he will be discussing his book Computer Game Worlds, which is newly translated into English, at a lunchtime event with the Digital Aesthetics Workshop. (See the poster below or find more info here.)
Announcing the Digital Aesthetics Workshop
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.
Introduction to Media, Fall 2017
Start of the fall quarter is coming up fast!