Tag: Stanford

Discorrelated Images — Digital Aesthetics Workshop, April 3

DAW-poster copy

On Tuesday, April 3, 2018 (4:00-6:00pm), I will be giving a talk titled “Discorrelated Images” in the context of the Digital Aesthetics Workshop at the Stanford Humanities Center. The talk draws on my current book project of the same title and will address primarily temporal and affective relations and transformations occasioned by digital images.

Participants are encouraged (but not required) to read my chapter “Crazy Cameras, Discorrelated Images, and the Post-Perceptual Mediation of Post-Cinematic Affect” prior to the event.

Stanford Film & Media Studies 2018 Symposium: “Pieces”

Pieces-FMS-Symposium-sm

The inaugural Stanford Film and Media Studies Symposium takes place on Friday April 13, 2018 in Oshman Hall. The theme of the conference is “Pieces” and talks will address questions concerning how bits of film and media make us rethink the relation of part to whole and what methods artists use to make discrete pieces—temporal, spatial, material, performative—that may or may not fit into larger collaborative works.

The keynote speakers are Lotte Hoek (University of Edinburgh) on “Anthropology and the Cinematic Fragment in South Asia” and Steven Shaviro (Wayne State University) on “Speculative Time.” In addition, there will be two panels. The first will feature an artist’s talk by Srdan Keca (Documentary Film and Video); Daniel Cohen (Art & Art History) on “Chinese Comedy and the Postsocialist Art of Deflation”; Heather Rastovac Akbarzadeh (Dance Studies) on “Sensorial Performativity of the ‘Veil’ in Aisan Hoss’s Dance-Theater The Pleasant Pain”; and Dustin Condren (Slavic) on Sergei Eisenstein’s film scenario MMM. Terry Berlier (Art Practice) will deliver an artist’s talk on the second panel, followed by Tiffany Naiman (Thinking Matters) on “Memory, Meaning, and Fragmentation in David Bowie’s ‘Blackstar’; Henry Rownd (Art & Art History) on the marked disjuncture between widescreen and pan-and-scan in Otto Preminger’s late work Skidoo (1968); and Max Suechting (Modern Thought and Literature) on “Fragments and Wholes in J Dilla’s Donuts.”

9:30am – Welcome
9:50am – Opening Remarks
10:00am – Keynote Speaker
11:30am – Panel 1
2:30pm – Panel 2
4:30pm – Keynote Speaker
5:45 pm – Closing Remarks

Department of Art & Art History, Film & Media Studies, thanks their sponsors: Center for South Asia, Office of the Vice President for the Arts, CREEES Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies, Stanford Global Studies Division, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Iranian Studies, The Program in Modern Thought & Literature, Department of Communication, Thinking Matters.

See also the official announcement here: https://art.stanford.edu/events/stanford-film-and-media-studies-symposium-pieces

Let’s Make a Monster! Critical Making (Stanford, Spring 2018)

LetsMakeAMonster

Ever since Frankenstein unleashed his monster onto the world in Mary Shelley’s novel from 1818, the notion of “technology-out-of-control” has been a constant worry of modern societies, plaguing more optimistic visions of progress and innovation with fears that modern machines harbor potentials that, once set in motion, can no longer be tamed by their human makers. In this characteristically modern myth, the act of making — and especially technological making — gives rise to monsters. As a cautionary tale, we are therefore entreated to look before we leap, to go slow and think critically about the possible consequences of invention before we attempt to make something radically new. However, this means of approaching the issue of human-technological relations implies a fundamental opposition between thinking and making, suggesting a split between cognition as the specifically human capacity for reflection versus a causal determinism-without-reflection that characterizes the machinic or the technical. Nevertheless, recent media theory questions this dichotomy by asserting that technologies are inseparable from humans’ abilities to think and to act in the world, while artistic practices undo the thinking/making split more directly and materially, by taking materials — including technologies — as the very medium of their critical engagement with the world. Drawing on impulses from both media theory and art practice, “critical making” names a counterpart to “critical thinking” — one that utilizes technologies to think about humans’ constitutive entanglements with technology, while recognizing that insight often comes from errors, glitches, malfunctions, or even monsters. Co-taught by a practicing artist and a media theorist, this course will engage students in hands-on critical practices involving both theories and technologies. Let’s make a monster!

ARTSTUDI 233, FILMSTUD 233/433 — Spring 2018 — Profs. Paul DeMarinis & Shane Denson — Thursdays 3:00-5:50pm

Video: What is Monster? What is Human?

Video is now online from the opening colloquium of Stanford’s Frankenstein@200 Initiative: “What is Monster? What is Human?” (October 17, 2017, Cubberley Auditorium, Stanford University).

My talk, “Frankenstein, Film, and the Mediation of Media Change,” is embedded above.

Below you will find talks by my colleagues Denise Gigante (English), Aleta Hayes (Theater and Performance Studies), Russ Altman (Bioengineering, Genetics, Medicine), and Hank Greely (Law, Genetics).

Essays in Sight and Sound — Exhibition Opens Today

Essays-in-Sight-and-Sound

Essays in Sight and Sound — an exhibition of video essays that I am co-curating with Spencer Slovic at Stanford — opens today. The wall text (above) outlines the aims and objectives of the show. Here is a list of the 13 works included:

Explorations of Narrative

On-Again, Off-Again Relationships: A Recurring Theme, 2017
Gita Krishna
Video, 5:33

TALLADEGA NIGHTS: A Reinvention of the Tragic Hero, 2017
Robin Fierberg
Video, 5:56

Crafting a Cinematic Universe, 2017
Antonio Avalos
Video, 8:37

THE LAST OF US: What’s in a Moment?, 2017
Matt Bernstein
Video, 3:52

Focus on Color

Minelli Red, 2017
Carlos Valladares
Video, 19:10

Character Design in Pixar, 2017
Rogelio Salinas
Video, 5:55

Sound, Form, Aesthetics

Sight and Sound Conspire: Monstrous Audio-Vision in James Whale’s FRANKENSTEIN, 2015
Shane Denson
Video, 8:47

The Arc Shot, 2017
Sabrina Medler
Video, 5:17

LOCK UP: Tonal Dissonance and Homoeroticism, 2017
Francesca Watkins
Video, 10:33

Culture, Context, Contour

You Eat with Your Eyes First: Comparing the Eastern and Western “Foodie” Movie Genres, 2017
Rose Adams
Video, 11:05

Healing Waters, 2017
Zoe Mhungu
Video, 5:21

Flexing Culture, 2017
Eleni Aneziris
Video, 4:46

The Animal in the Lake: Ambient Sound in CEMETERY OF SPLENDOR, 2018
Spencer Slovic
Video, 4:30

 

WTF IS THAT? Allison de Fren at Digital Aesthetics Workshop

Allison de Fren DAW poster

On Tuesday, November 14, 2017, media maker/scholar Allison de Fren will be discussing post-cinema and videographic criticism with the Digital Aesthetics Workshop at the Stanford Humanities Center, focusing on her video essay “WTF IS THAT? The Pre- and Post-Cinematic Tendencies of Paranormal Activity” and Steven Shaviro’s article “The Glitch Dimension: Paranormal Activity and the Technologies of Vision.”

This event follows a screening of de Fren’s documentary and videographic work on fembots the night before (more details here).

Fembots: From Representation to Reality

deFren-Poster

On Monday, November 13, 2017 (5:30pm in Oshman Hall, McMurtry Building), media maker/scholar Allison de Fren (Occidental College) will be on hand for a screening of her 2010 documentary The Mechanical Bride and her 2015 video essay Fembot in a Red Dress. The screening, which is free and open to the public, will be followed by a Q&A.

Sponsored by the Stanford Department of Art & Art History, the Documentary Film Program, and Stanford’s Frankenstein@200 Initiative.