FU Berlin – medieninitiative

CFP: Seriality Seriality Seriality — Berlin, June 2016

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Seriality Seriality Seriality: The Many Lives of the Field That Isn’t One

On June 22-24, 2016, the Popular Seriality Research Unit (DFG Forschergruppe 1091 “Ästhetik und Praxis populärer Serialität”) will hold its final conference in Berlin, Germany.

After six years, thirteen subprojects, nine associated projects, numerous conferences, workshops, and publications it is time to reach some kind of conclusion.

Together with our international collaborators over the years, we would like to explore future possibilities and alternative visions of a “field” that we always claimed existed. Thus, the focus of our final conference will be on the histories, conceptualizations, and methodologies of seriality studies itself.

Trying to sidestep the formats of the project pitch, the case study, the “reading” of individual series according to pre-existing theoretical models or their translation into philosophical master vocabularies, we invite scholarly practices—including those just mentioned—to reflect on the challenges and limits of (their contributions to) seriality studies as an ongoing, perhaps fantastical, project that traverses disciplinary and methodological paradigms.

Each of the Research Unit’s current subprojects will organize a section. Section formats will vary but they will always stress discussion and exchange. Hence, workshops and panel discussions will provide at least 40 minutes for Q&A. Time limits for papers (20 minutes) and panel statements (5 minutes) will be strictly enforced.

We invite paper proposals for sections nos. 3, 7, & 11 by October 31, 2015. Please specify which of these sections you are applying for; note that other sections are already complete.

Please refer to the CFP above for details and application procedures, and visit our conference website at: http://www.popularseriality.de/en/konferenz/index.html

Nonhuman Perspectives and Discorrelated Images in Post-Cinema

As I mentioned recently, I will be speaking next week at the Post-Cinematic Perspectives conference taking place November 22-23, 2013 at the Free University Berlin. Below you’ll find the abstract for my talk:

Nonhuman Perspectives and Discorrelated Images in Post-Cinema

Shane Denson

With the shift to a digital and more generally post-cinematic media environment, moving images have undergone what I term their “discorrelation” from human embodied subjectivities and (phenomenological, narrative, and visual) perspectives. Clearly, we still look at – and we still perceive – images that in many ways resemble those of a properly cinematic age; yet many of these images are mediated in ways that subtly (or imperceptibly) undermine the distance of perspective, i.e. the quasi-spatial distance and relation between phenomenological subjects and the objects of their perception. At the center of these transformations are a set of strangely irrational mediators and “crazy” cameras – physical and virtual imaging apparatuses that seem not to know their place with respect to diegetic and nondiegetic realities, and that therefore fail to situate viewers in a coherently designated spectating-position. A phenomenological and post-phenomenological analysis of such mediating apparatuses points to the rise of a fundamentally post-perceptual media regime, in which “contents” and “perspectives” are ancillary to algorithmic functions and enmeshed in an expanded, indiscriminately articulated plenum of images that exceed capture in the form of photographic or perceptual “objects.” Post-cinema’s cameras thus mediate a nonhuman ontology of computational image production, processing, and circulation, where these images’ discorrelation from human perceptibility signals an expansion of the field of material affect: beyond the visual or even the perceptual, the images of post-cinematic media operate and impinge upon us at what might be called a “metabolic” level.

Post-Cinematic Perspectives

On November 22-23, 2013, I will be participating in the conference “Post-Cinematic Perspectives,” which is being organized by Lisa Åkervall and Chris Tedjasukmana at the Freie Universität Berlin. There’s a great line-up, as you’ll see on the conference program above. I look forward to seeing Steven Shaviro again (and hearing his talk on Spring Breakers), and to meeting all the other speakers. My talk, on the morning of the 23rd, is entitled “Nonhuman Perspectives and Discorrelated Images in Post-Cinema.” The conference is open to the public, and attendance is free.