Karin Denson – medieninitiative

Pelicans and Glitches on California’s North Coast

I’ve been traveling a lot outside of California this summer, but whenever I get the chance I like to spend time up north in Mendocino or Fort Bragg, where my wife Karin is part of the artist collective at Edgewater Gallery.

Earlier in the summer, we observed tons of California brown pelicans and common murres (which look like penguins) camped out on some small offshore islands. The assembly has attracted a lot of attention — from locals, tourists, artists, and scientists. The local newspaper, The Mendocino Voice, just put out a long piece on the birds and the possible reasons for their convergence there, and they quoted Karin and featured a glitch collage that she did a while back.

Karin has been photographing, filming, glitching, and painting pelicans and other California wildlife for several years now. Check out more of her work at karindenson.com.

Discorrelated Images in Duke University Press Fall 2020 Catalog (and about that cover image)

I am excited to see my book Discorrelated Images alongside so many truly impressive books in Duke University Press’s Fall 2020 catalog, which went online today. Take a look; there is so much good stuff in there!

And take a closer look at my book’s cover, below, which I am doubly excited about — first, because the press’s designer Drew Sisk did such a beautiful job on it, and second because it features a painting by my partner-in-crime/partner-in-life Karin Denson! (And if you know what you’re looking at, it also depicts our dog Evie — so there’s a third reason I’m super excited about it!)

Check out more of Karin’s work on her website at karindenson.com.

*Discorrelated Images*, cover design by Drew Sisk, featuring artwork by Karin Denson

APPROXIMATELY 800cm3 OF PLA — Exhibition Catalog

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The exhibition catalog for APPROXIMATELY 800cm3 of PLA, curated by Gabriel Menotti at last year’s Center for 21st Century Studies conference on The Ends of Cinema (May 3-5, 2018 at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) is now online.

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Among the pieces featured was DataGnomeKD1.stl, a generative/deformative 3D-printed garden gnome that Karin Denson and I made a couple of years ago in the context of a larger project at the Duke S-1: Speculative Sensation Lab. (You can check out our publication here.)

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Thanks to Gabriel Menotti for putting together this playful show!

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On Display: Immemory, Soft Cinema, After Video

About two years ago, the exhibition On Display: Immemory, Soft Cinema, After Video at Bilkent University in Ankara brought together projects by Chris Marker, Lev Manovich, and the contributors to the “video book” after.video — including the collaborative AR piece “Scannable Images” that Karin Denson and I made. Recently, Oliver Lerone Schultz (one of the editors of after.video) brought to my attention this “critical tour” of the exhibition, which takes the form of a discussion between Ersan Ocak and Andreas Treske. It is audio only, and you might need to turn up the volume a bit, but it’s an interesting discussion of video and media art.

(See here for more on after.video. Also, I should note that the AR on “Scannable Images” is currently not working due to the ephemeral business models of AR platforms these days, but I hope to port it over to a new platform and get it up and running again soon!)

Out Now: Network Ecologies

Network Ecologies is a great new open-access collection edited by Amanda Starling Gould and Florian Wiencek and published by the Duke Franklin Humanities Institute. The collection takes advantage of the Scalar publishing platform to include a variety of media alongside scholarly texts. Among other things, it includes a collection of artworks by Karin Denson and myself, which we developed for an exhibit at Duke in 2015 (also organized by Amanda Starling Gould) and which grew out of a collaboration with the Duke S-1: Speculative Sensation Lab. There is also an archive of videos from a 2013 symposium, including contributions from Jussi Parikka, Mark Hansen, Stephanie Boluk, Patrick LeMieux, and many others. Lots of great things to discover here–check it out!

Post-Cinema AR

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The augmented reality piece featured on the cover of Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film (http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/post-cinema/), a collaborative piece made by Karin Denson and me, was displayed recently at a glitch-oriented gallery show organized by some nice people associated with Savannah College of Art and Design.

Try it out for yourself here: http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/post-cinema/artwork/.

After.Video at Libre Graphics 2016 in London

Recently, I posted about a project called after.video, which contains an augmented (AR) glitch/video/image-based theory piece that Karin Denson and I collaborated on. It has now been announced that the official launch of after.video, Volume 1: Assemblages — a “video book” consisting of a paperback book and video elements stored on a Raspberry Pi computer packaged in a VHS case, which will also be available online — will take place at the Libre Graphics Meeting 2016 in London (Sunday, April 17th at 4:20pm).

Coming Soon: after.video

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I just saw the official announcement for this exciting project, which I’m proud to be a part of (with a collaborative piece I made with Karin Denson).

after.video, Volume 1: Assemblages is a “video book” — a paperback book and video stored on a Raspberry Pi computer packaged in a VHS case. It will also be available as online video and book PDF download.

Edited by Oliver Lerone Schultz, Adnan Hadzi, Pablo de Soto, and Laila Shereen Sakr (VJ Um Amel), it will be published this year (2016) by Open Humanities Press.

The piece I developed with Karin is a theory/practice hybrid called “Scannable Images: Materialities of Post-Cinema after Video.” It involves digital video, databending/datamoshing, generative text, animated gifs, and augmented reality components, in addition to several paintings in acrylic (not included in the video book).

Here’s some more info about the book from the OpenMute Press site:

Theorising a World of Video

after.video realizes the world through moving images and reassembles theory after video. Extending the formats of ‘theory’, it reflects a new situation in which world and video have grown together.

This is an edited collection of assembled and annotated video essays living in two instantiations: an online version – located on the web at http://after.video/assemblages, and an offline version – stored on a server inside a VHS (Video Home System) case. This is both a digital and analog object: manifested, in a scholarly gesture, as a ‘video book’.

We hope that different tribes — from DIY hackercamps and medialabs, to unsatisfied academic visionaries, avantgarde-mesh-videographers and independent media collectives, even iTV and home-cinema addicted sofasurfers — will cherish this contribution to an ever more fragmented, ever more colorful spectrum of video-culture, consumption and appropriation…

Table of Contents

Control Societies
Peter Woodbridge + Gary Hall + Clare Birchall
Scannable images: materialities of Post-Cinema after Video
Karin + Shane Denson
Isistanbul
Serhat Köksal
The Crying Selfie
Rózsa Zita Farkas
Guided Meditation
Deborah Ligotrio
Contingent Feminist Tacticks for Working with Machines
Lucia Egaña Rojas
Capturing the Ephemeral and Contestational
Eric Kiuitenberg
Surveillance Assemblies
Adnan Hadzi
You Spin me Round – Full Circle
Andreas Treske

Editorial Collective

Oliver Lerone Schultz
Adnan Hadzi
Pablo de Soto
Laila Shereen Sakr (VJ Um Amel)

Tech Team

Jacob Friedman – Open Hypervideo Programmer
Anton Galanopoulos – Micro-Computer Programmer

Producers

Adnan Hadzi – OHP Managing Producer
Jacob Friedman – OHV Format Development & Interface Design
Joscha Jäger – OHV Format Development & Interface Design
Oliver Lerone Schultz – Coordination CDC, Video Vortex #9, OHP

Cover artwork and booklet design: Jacob Friedman
Copyright: the authors
Licence: after.video is dual licensed under the terms of the MIT license and the GPL3
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html
Language: English
Assembly On-demand
OpenMute Press

Acknowledgements

Co-Initiated + Funded by

Art + Civic Media as part of Centre for Digital Cultures @ Leuphana University.
Art + Civic Media was funded through Innovation Incubator, a major EU project financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and the federal state of Lower Saxony.

Thanks to

Joscha Jaeger – Open Hypervideo (and making this an open licensed capsule!)
Timon Beyes – Centre for Digital Cultures, Lüneburg
Mathias Fuchs – Centre for Digital Cultures, Lüneburg
Gary Hall – School of Art and Design, Coventry University
Simon Worthington – OpenMute

http://www.metamute.org/shop/openmute-press/after.video

DEMO Video: Post-Cinema: 24fps@44100Hz

As Karin posted yesterday (and as I reblogged this morning), our collaborative artwork Post-Cinema: 24fps@44100Hz will be on display (and on sale) from January 15-23 at The Carrack Modern Art gallery in Durham, NC, as part of their annual Winter Community Show.

Exhibiting augmented reality pieces always brings with it a variety of challenges — including technical ones and, above all, the need to inform viewers about how to use the work. So, for this occasion, I’ve put together this brief demo video explaining the piece and how to view it. The video will be displayed on a digital picture frame mounted on the wall below the painting. Hopefully it will be both eye-catching enough to attract passersby and it will effectively communicate the essential information about the process and use of the work.