Beyond the Screen is an exhibition of desktop videos made by students in my Fall 2023 course on “The Video Essay.” The show, featuring three collaboratively made videos, is up from January 22-February 2, 2024 in the McMurtry Building (home of the Department of Art & Art History) at Stanford University.
Featured are:
Escape, by Karla Aguilar, Eric Wang, and Roisin Willis (14:52)
Pixilated Mimicry, by Lauren Boles and Michael Hemker (15:10)
Crypto Crisis, by Sheryl Hsu and Nathaniel Begay (12:40)
On display from January 6 to January 27, 2022 in Stanford’s McMurtry Building (home of the Department of Art & Art History) is SCREENTIME: An Exhibition of Desktop Videos.
The exhibition grows out of a collaboration between Stanford and Occidental College — between Shane Denson’s class “The Video Essay: Writing with Video about Media and Culture” and Allison de Fren’s “The Video Essay,” both of which were taught in Fall 2021.
Students in each class met online and worked through some of the more troubling aspects of online life, including online racism, radicalization, pornography, and politics. The resulting videos, all of which use the computer desktop as both a topic and a medium, reflect the troubled times of contemporary screentime, and the sonic cacophony in the exhibition space challenges viewers to come to terms with the ways that screens today compete for our attention.
Included in the exhibition are eleven remarkable videos:
I Love Kanye (2021) — D’Andre Jorge (sophomore, Stanford)
A Letter to My Younger Self, on the Dangers of the Internet (2021) — David Kolifrath (freshman, Occidental)
The Commercialization of Self Image (2021) — Ashton Berg (sophomore, Stanford)
Solace in Schadenfreude: r/HermanCainAward and Vaccine Misinformation (2021) — Tejas Narayanan (sophomore, Stanford)
A Brief Inquiry into Cultural Appropriation and Misogynoir Online (2021) — Micah Drigo (sophomore, Stanford)
Kids Content on YouTube (2021) — Finian Walsh (sophomore, Occidental)
Bots and Trolls and Hackers, Oh My! A Story of Russian Interference (2021) — Katherine Crandell (junior, Stanford)
Let’s Talk about Porn (2021) — Henry Liera (senior, Stanford)
Sustainable Brands and the Limits of “Radical Transparency” (2021) — Georgia Crawford (freshman, Occidental)
The Shallows of Hate (2021) — Ben Fischer (sophomore, Stanford)
Tiktok’s Devious Licks Trend (2021) — Zahir Choudhry (freshman, Occidental)
Poster for my talk tomorrow (Dec. 18, 2018) on “Desktop Horror” at Merz Akademie in Stuttgart!