I am grateful to Ji-hoon Kim for organizing two talks in South Korea this October. The first was on Oct. 11 at the Busan International Film Festival, on a panel with Dork Zabunyan from Paris 8 University, Jeong-ha Lee from Dankook University, and Ji-hoon Kim from Chung-Ang University (who both presented and moderated the panel).
The next talk is coming up on Oct. 27, as part of the Cinema and Media Studies Colloquium at Chung-Ang University in Seoul. See the poster above for details and registration information for remote participation.
There are a couple of new reviews of Discorrelated Images, for which I am very grateful — one in the most recent issue of Film-Philosophy, by Christian de Moulipied Sancto, and another (in Italian) by Angela Maiello in Imago.
Sancto calls the book “virtuosic,” and writes: “For anyone concerned with digital media in particular and media theory in general, Discorrelated Images is essential reading.”
Maiello compares my project to that of Bernard Stiegler, writing: “The theoretical stakes of the book … are very high: it is neither a question of looking at these developments of the digital image as a mere aesthetic question of style, nor of remaining trapped in the problem of the technical infrastructure underlying these images. It is a question of understanding the transformative impact that new image technologies have in explaining experience, in the establishment of the subject-object relationship and therefore in the process of individuation, to return to Stiegler, both singular and collective.”
Finally, as a bonus, here is the (unedited) audio of the German book launch of Discorrelated Images, which took place on June 23, 2022 at Hopscotch Reading Room in Berlin. Thanks to Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan for organizing the event and for discussing the book with me!
Marcus Maloney has a perceptive new review of Discorrelated Images in Thesis Eleven (as an open-access online-first article). While not uncritical, Maloney’s review includes some high praise for the book, including this passage that I can only hope to live up to:
“I have always wondered what it might have been like to read the first edition of, say, Daniel Bell’s The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), or Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society (1992) – that is, before such texts became widely recognized as the important works they are. Reading Denson’s dense and ambitious book is as close as I have yet come to achieving that feeling.”
I am excited and honored that my book Discorrelated Images has been shortlisted for the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP) 2021 Book Prize. It is in amazing company:
Thanks to the committee for the 2021 Book Prize: Ignacio Sánchez Prado (Chair, Professor, Spanish, Latin American Studies, & Film and Media Studies, Washington University in St. Louis), Lauren M. Cramer (Assistant Professor, Cinema Studies, University of Toronto), and Min Hyoung Song (Professor, English, Boston College).
And congratulations to all of the shortlisted authors!
A couple of weeks ago, I was interviewed by Roger Whitson and Christian Haines for the Gamers with Glasses podcast. I don’t wear glasses, and I’m honestly not much of a gamer these days, but we still found lots of things to talk about, like:
what the Transformers movies might teach us about philosophy, how streaming has transformed how we literally see things, the appeal of vinyl records, and how Netflix and Hulu might just be responsible for the end of the world!
We also talked a little about my book Discorrelated Images (which is currently 50% off during Duke University Press’s Fall Sale with code FALL21). Check it out!
Above, the complete video from the conversation on April 2, 2021 between James Hodge and myself about our new books, Sensations of History and Discorrelated Images. Co-sponsored by the Center for Global Culture and Communication at Northwestern University and the Linda Randall Meier Research Workshop on Digital Aesthetics at Stanford University.
There’s a new review of Discorrelated Images in Film International. Reviewer T. R. Merchant-Knudsen (who goes by @CriticTMK on Twitter) remarks that pandemic year 2020 was paradoxically the perfect year for the book to appear, as it aims to illuminate the unprecedented role of digital screens in the reorganization of our lives, and judges the book overall “a fantastic meditation on post-cinema that begs the reader to consider both the horrors and possibilities afforded with technological advancements.”
Check out the full review here, and pick up the book for 50% off during Duke University Press’s Spring Sale (now through May 7) with code SPRING21 if you order directly from the publisher. (Outside North and South America, you can use the same code at international distributor Combined Academic Publishers.)
A presentation and dialogue on two recent books in digital aesthetics: Sensations of History: Animation and New Media Art by James J. Hodge (Northwestern University) and Discorrelated Images by Shane Denson (Stanford University).
On Zoom, Friday, April 2, 2021, at 2 p.m. CST/ 12 p.m. PST REGISTRATION REQUIRED
Organized by Center for Global Culture and Communication (CGCC), Department of Communication Studies, Northwestern University, Linda Randall Meier Research Workshop on Digital Aesthetics at Stanford University, Stanford Humanities Center
Over at ASAP/J, the open-access platform of ASAP/Journal, a conversation with Caetlin Benson-Allott and myself on the topic of Discorrelated Images has just gone online. We talk about archives, coups, Zoom, and Janelle Monáe, among other things. Check it out here!
Please enjoy this goofy selfie with book and pandemic hair, which I made for Duke University Press’s virtual booth at the College Art Association’s annual conference. During the conference, Duke UP is having another big sale: from now until March 31, you can use the code CAA21 to save 40% off all in-stock books and journals, including Discorrelated Images: https://www.dukeupress.edu/discorrelated-images
