medieninitiative

Edmund Mendelssohn, White Musical Mythologies (Sensing Media)

I am happy to announce that Edmund Mendelssohn’s White Musical Mythologies: Sonic Presence in Modernism will be the fourth volume in the Sensing Media book series! See below for a description, and see here for more info or to pre-order!

In a narrative that extends from fin de siècle Paris to the 1960s, Edmund Mendelssohn examines modernist thinkers and composers who engaged with non-European and pre-modern cultures as they developed new conceptions of “pure sound.” Pairing Erik Satie with Bergson, Edgard Varèse with Bataille, Pierre Boulez with Artaud, and John Cage with Derrida, White Musical Mythologies offers an ambitious critical history of the ontology of sound, suggesting that the avant-garde ideal of “pure sound” was always an expression of western ethnocentrism.

Each of the musicians studied in this book re-created or appropriated non-European forms of expression as they conceived music ontologically, often thinking music as something immediate and immersive: from Satie’s dabblings with mysticism and exoticism in bohemian Montmartre of the 1890s to Varèse’s experience of ethnographic exhibitions and surrealist poetry in 1930s Paris, and from Boulez’s endeavor to theorize a kind of musical writing that would “absorb” the sounds of non-European musical traditions to Cage, who took inspiration from Eastern thought as he wrote about sound, silence, and chance. These modernist artists believed that the presence effects of sound in their moment were more real and powerful than the outmoded norms of the European musical past. By examining musicians who strove to produce sonic presence, specifically by re-thinking the concept of musical writing (écriture), the book demonstrates that we cannot fully understand French theory in its novelty and complexity without music and sound.

Edmund Mendelssohn is Lecturer in Music at the University of California, Berkeley.

Endorsements for Post-Cinematic Bodies

My book Post-Cinematic Bodies, coming soon from meson press, now has a great set of endorsements (blurbs) from three scholars that I greatly respect and admire: Rizvana Bradley, Francesco Casetti, and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht — a group of scholars that reflects the interdisciplinary conversation I hope to provoke across film and media studies, literary theory/philosophical aesthetics, and the study of gender and race in contemporary art and visual culture.

We have long been feeling how the type of embodied identification suggested by the Hollywood classics was in a process of dissolution. Thanks to a sophisticated mediation between the phenomenology of perception and theories of digital media, Shane Denson provides us with concepts and a first understanding of this transition and its far-reaching existential consequences.
—Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Stanford University

What if digital media changed not only traditional forms of communication, but also our very bodies, because of the way they address us? In this brilliant study, Shane Denson suggests that, from a phenomenological perspective, our bodies are always at the forefront of our mediation with the world; digital media involve our sensorium in an unprecedented way and this commitment represents their true “revolution.” A myriad of examples, including screens in gyms aimed at enhancing our exercises, are proof of this. Philosophically dense, analytically sharp, this book unearths what lies beneath our digital experiences.
—Francesco Casetti, Yale University

Refusing both the perfunctory valorization of the body as site of resistive potentiality and the diametric reflex to dismiss theories of embodiment as exercises in the foreclosure of criticality, Shane Denson advances a rigorous theory of mediated corporeality within the metabolic life of post-cinema, with profound implications for the politics of (counter-)capture across microtemporalities and planetary scales.
—Rizvana Bradley, University of California, Berkeley

See the meson press website for more information.

Streaming Mind, Streaming Body

A short text of mine titled “Streaming Mind, Streaming Body” was recently published online at In Media Res as part of a theme week on “The Contemporary Streaming Style II.” The piece connects reflections stemming from Bernard Stiegler’s philosophy of media to recent body-oriented streaming platforms like the Peloton.

You can find my piece here and the rest of the theme week (with contributions from Neta Alexander, Ethan Tussey, Carol Vernallis, and Jennifer Barker) here.

“Selfie/Portrait” — Damon Young at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, May 9, 2023

Please join the Digital Aesthetics Workshop for our next event with Damon Young, who will present “Selfie/Portrait” on Tuesday, May 9 from 5-7PM PT. The event will take place, as usual, in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room. Find an abstract and bio attached, as well as a poster for lightweight circulation. Looking forward to seeing you there !

Zoom link for those unable to join in-person: tinyurl.com/aty2zf2a

Abstract:
The selfie, ubiquitous and quotidian, is a media form that has risen to preeminence in the digital environments of the twenty-first century. While it appears banal and superficial, I argue that it is for this very reason that the selfie indexes a larger transformation of subjectivity, akin to the kind Walter Benjamin, one hundred years ago, associated with the invention of early photography. The “self” of the selfie appears in a fundamental relationship to transformation (in both analog forms of body modification and surgery, and digital forms of filters and retouching) in the context of a circulation economy. These same terms indicate the axes along which the selfie refashions contemporary gender and sexuality. On the one hand, drawing unapologetically (if not always consciously) from the visual archive of pornography, the selfie advances the legacy of the “male gaze,” familiar from the history of narrative cinema. At the same time, it destabilizes both the gendered positions associated with that gaze, and their implicit heterosexuality. Moreover, unlike the cinema, the selfie is no longer a voyeuristic medium, but a medium of address. But to whom is it addressed? The answer to that question bears on the way it reconfigures the mediated field of contemporary sexuality. Often said to embody a contemporary “narcissism” — itself a feminized concept— the selfie also puts on view a subject who is no longer an individual but is becoming-generic. At the fault line between historically transforming media paradigms in their intersection with transforming paradigms of gender, sexuality, and desire, the selfie allows us to take the measure of the tensions between the common and the singular, the generic and the particular, as well as the self-satisfied and the anxious, that shape the contours of a contemporary cultural logic.

Bio:
Damon Young is co-appointed with the department of French and is affiliated with the Program in Critical Theory, the Berkeley Center for New Media, the Institute for European Studies, and the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender & Sexuality. He teaches courses on art cinema, on sexuality and media, and on topics in digital media and film theory (including classical film theory, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, semiotics, feminist and queer theory). His first book, Making Sex Public and Other Cinematic Fantasies was published in the Theory Q series at Duke University Press in 2018, and shortlisted for the 2019 Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize. That book examines fears and fantasies about women’s and queer sexualities—as figures for social emancipation or social collapse–in French and US cinema since the mid-1950s. It also considers the way cinema produces a new model of the private self as it challenges the novel’s dominance in the twentieth century. The latter idea is the basis for Professor Young’s current book project, After the Private Self, which explores the technical and technological ground of subjectivity across media forms, from the written diary through to big data, algorithms, and contemporary Internet cultures. Is the self of Rousseau’s Confessions the same as the self of the digital selfie? The inquiry integrates topics in digital media theory with “earlier” questions of language and subjectivity.

RESCHEDULED: Alexander R. Galloway at Critical Making Collaborative (via Zoom), April 25, 2023

Please join the Critical Making Collaborative at Stanford for a presentation titled “Crystals, Genes, and Wool: Three Case Studies in Algorithmic Re-enactment” by Alexander R. Galloway, Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. This free event will take on Zoom on Tuesday, April 25th, from 5:00 pm to 7:00 pm PDT.

An algebraic textile pattern from 1947, a cellular automata simulation from 1953, a tabletop game from 1977 – in this online workshop, we will explore three lost or otherwise overlooked pieces of code from the deep history of computational culture. Using an experimental method dubbed “algorithmic re-enactment,” we will study these artifacts in their own historical context, while also bringing them to life again using current tools.

Alexander R. Galloway is a writer and computer programmer. He is the author of several books on digital media and critical theory, including most recently Uncomputable: Play and Politics in the Long Digital Age (Verso, 2021). Since 2001 he has worked with the Radical Software Group on Carnivore, Kriegspiel, and other software projects.

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford. Please RSVP here to receive a Zoom link by email.

“The Right to Speed-Watch (or, When Netflix Discovered its Blind Users)” — Neta Alexander at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, April 18, 2023

Please join us for our next Digital Aesthetics Workshop event with Neta Alexander, who will deliver “The Right to Speed-Watch (or, When Netflix Discovered its Blind Users).” The meeting will take place April 18th from 5-7pm in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room, as usual. Below find a description of the talk, a bio for Neta, and a poster for lightweight distribution. Looking forward to seeing you there!

Zoom registration for those unable to attend in person: https://tinyurl.com/2yc6eshy

Description:
Speed-watching, an understudied-yet-ubiquitous spectatorial mode, is often described by users as a productivity tool that can help them become digital “super-users.” This talk situates this emerging mode of spectatorship within longer histories of media consumption, connecting it to both efficiency and disability activism. Using Netflix as a case study, I focus on the recent public debate surrounding its failed attempt to add a playback speed feature to its streaming platform. World-renowned filmmakers pushed Netflix to shelve this idea when it was first introduced in 2018, claiming their films were not intended to be watched twice as fast. Yet, citing “requests from deaf and blind subscribers,” Netflix decided to add this feature to its interface in August 2020, when millions were sheltering-in-place due to the pandemic. This presentation asks what led to this decision, and what can the marketing discourse surrounding it teach us about how corporations monetize “accessibility.” Theorizing the difference between “time-shifting” and “time-hacking”, I argue that speed-watching is a mode of survival enabling different users to advance a wide range of goals: media literacy, the thrill of speed, and avoiding a mortifying fear of boredom.

Bio:
Neta Alexander is an Assistant Professor of Film and Media at Colgate University, NY and an Assistant Editor of the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (JCMS). Her articles have appeared in Journal of Visual Culture, Cinema Journal, Cinergie, Film Quarterly, Media Fields Journal, and Flow Journal, among other publications. Her first book, Failure (co-authored with Arjun Appadurai; Polity, 2020) studies how Silicon Valley and Wall Street monetize failure and forgetfulness.

Getty Graduate Symposium 2023 Videos

I had the good fortune to attend the Getty Graduate Symposium, featuring graduate students from all of the PhD-granting Art History programs in California, this February at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Videos of all the talks are now online here.

Above, I am just posting the final session, the final talk of which features an excellent talk by my advisee Grace Han, who spoke about “re-animating Lost Time through remixed time: Jacolby Satterwhite, Jon Rafman, and the Generative Archive” (starting around 45 min. in).

Algorithmic Embodiment, Lit-Vis Working Group at Stanford Humanities Center, March 2

The Working Group in Literary and Visual Culture at Stanford University invites you to Algorithmic Embodiment

Presented by Shane Denson, Associate Professor of Film & Media Studies, Department of Art and Art History

Thursday, March 2nd, 1:00 pm — Stanford Humanities Center Boardroom

Lunch Will Be Served

PLEASE RSVP HERE: https://forms.gle/RBt1PkEUcePbcHmZ6

Abstract:

This talk previews my forthcoming book Post-Cinematic Bodies, in which I ask: How is human embodiment transformed in an age of algorithms? How do post-cinematic media technologies such as AI, VR, and robotics target and re-shape our bodies? Post-Cinematic Bodies grapples with these questions by attending both to mundane devices—such as smartphones, networked exercise machines, and smart watches and other wearables equipped with heartrate sensors—as well as to new media artworks that rework such equipment to reveal to us the ways that our fleshly existences are increasingly up for grabs. Through an equally philosophical and interpretive analysis, the book aims to develop a new aesthetics of embodied experience that is attuned to a new age of predictive technology and metabolic capitalism.

The Working Group in Literary and Visual Culture is sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center, made possible by support from an anonymous donor honoring the work of former SHC Director John Bender, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

“Crystals, Genes, and Wool: Three Case Studies in Algorithmic Re-enactment” — Alexander R. Galloway at Critical Making Collaborative, March 8, 2023

Please join the Critical Making Collaborative at Stanford for a presentation titled “Crystals, Genes, and Wool: Three Case Studies in Algorithmic Re-enactment” by Alexander R. Galloway, Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. This free event will take place in Room 115 at the McMurtry Building (355 Roth Way, Stanford, CA 94305) on Wednesday, March 8th, from 3:00 pm to 5:00 pm.

An algebraic textile pattern from 1947, a cellular automata simulation from 1953, a tabletop game from 1977 – in this workshop, we will explore three lost or otherwise overlooked pieces of code from the deep history of computational culture. Using an experimental method dubbed “algorithmic re-enactment,” we will study these artifacts in their own historical context, while also bringing them to life again using current tools.

Alexander R. Galloway is a writer and computer programmer. He is author of several books on digital media and critical theory, including most recently Uncomputable: Play and Politics in the Long Digital Age (Verso, 2021). Since 2001 he has worked with the Radical Software Group on Carnivore, Kriegspiel, and other software projects.

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford.

“No Deconstruction without Computers” — Alexander R. Galloway at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, March 7, 2023

Please join us at the Digital Aesthetics Workshop on Tuesday March 7th, 5-7PM, for “‘No Deconstruction without Computers’: Learning to Code with Derrida and Kittler” with Alexander Galloway. We will meet in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room, as usual. This event is graciously co-sponsored by the Critical Making Collaborative, Art & Art History Department, and Communication Department.

Please register here if attending in person: https://tinyurl.com/mt5n58rf
Zoom, if unavailable in person: https://tinyurl.com/2jyr5f2d

Find a description of the talk below, and a poster for lightweight distribution. We look forward to seeing you there (and at M. Beatrice Fazi’s event next Tuesday the 28th) !

“‘No Deconstruction without Computers’: Learning to Code with Derrida and Kittler”
Alexander R. Galloway

What are the machines that determine thinking? We may approach the question in a number of ways. The typical approach is to consider (or perhaps even craft) a philosophy of media. This comes under the name of media studies or media theory, where media artifacts are taken as the objects of thinking. Yet there is also an alternate approach, the media of philosophy, where the a priori conditions of philosophy themselves take center stage, engulfing thought as a kind of object. For if “media determine our situation,” as Friedrich Kittler once notoriously put it, is it not also true that philosophies shift according to the changing conditions of media technology? In this lecture we will explore the history of philosopher’s devices drawn from the domain of machines and computers, while focusing attention on two of them: Jacques Derrida’s Macintosh Plus and Friedrich Kittler’s MS-DOS machine (he migrated later to Gentoo Linux). This will serve as a backdrop for a different kind of inquiry, not simply that our writing instruments contribute to our thoughts, but also that our thoughts themselves are instruments.