Post-Cinematic Bodies — pics from US book launch!
Tag: Scott Bukatman
»Post-Cinematic Bodies« US Book Launch, November 6, 2023
On November 6, 2023 at 5:30 pm in the Margaret Jacks Hall Terrace Room (Building 460, Room 426), I will be presenting my new book Post-Cinematic Bodies (meson press, 2023), along with responses by Professor Scott Bukatman (Film & Media Studies, Stanford), and Dr. Annika Butler-Wall (Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Stanford MTL Ph.D. ’23).
Food and drinks will be provided. The first 40 attendees will receive a free copy of the book.
RSVPs are encouraged but not required. Please RSVP using the linked form by October 30th if you plan on attending.
About the book:
“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.”
Speaker and Respondents
Shane Denson is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of Art & Art History and, by Courtesy, of German Studies in the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages and of Communication in Stanford’s Department of Communication. He is currently the Director of the PhD Program in Modern Thought and Literature, as well as Director of Graduate Studies in Art History. His research and teaching interests span a variety of media and historical periods, including phenomenological and media-philosophical approaches to film, digital media, comics, games, and serialized popular forms.
Scott Bukatman is a cultural theorist and Professor of Film and Media Studies at Stanford University. His research explores how such popular media as film, comics, and animation mediate between new technologies and human perceptual and bodily experience. His books include Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction, one of the earliest book-length studies of cyberculture; a monograph on the film Blade Runner commissioned by the British Film Institute; and a collection of essays, Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century. The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animating Spirit, celebrates play, plasmatic possibility, and the life of images in cartoons, comics, and cinema.
Dr. Annika Butler-Wall is a Lecturer in the Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is an interdisciplinary scholar and teacher working at the intersections of gender studies, media studies, and science and technology studies (STS). Her current research project explores how digital platforms are restructuring forms of historically feminized labor by examining platforms such as TaskRabbit, Yelp, and LinkedIn Learning.
She holds a PhD in Modern Thought and Literature with a minor in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Stanford University and a BA in American Studies and Economics from Wesleyan University. Her research has been supported by the Clayman Institute for Gender Research and the Ric Weiland Graduate Research Fellowship among others.
This event is sponsored by The Program in Modern Thought & Literature and Intermediations.
“Keeping It Unreal” — Darieck Scott, Monica P. Moore Lecture in Modern Thought & Literature
On November 10, 2022 (4pm in the Terrace Room, Margaret Jacks Hall), the Program in Modern Thought & Literature will be hosting Darieck Scott, Professor of African American Studies at UC Berkeley, for the Monica P. Moore Speaker Series. Professor Scott will be talking about Black queer fantasy and superhero comics, the topic of his recent book Keeping It Unreal (NYU Press, 2022).
There will be two respondents: Scott Bukatman, Professor of Film & Media Studies at Stanford and author of a new book on Black Panther; and Lucas Williams, Ph.D Candidate in MTL.
Complete Video: Vivian Sobchack in Conversation with Scott Bukatman and Shane Denson
Here is the complete video of the Digital Aesthetics Workshop event from September 29, 2020: Vivian Sobchack in conversation with Scott Bukatman and myself. This was a lively and far-ranging discussion, which we were honored to host. Please enjoy!
Vivian Sobchack in Conversation — Digital Aesthetics Workshop, Sept. 29, 2020
I am pleased to announce the Digital Aesthetics Workshop’s first event of the 2020-2021 academic year, taking place on September 29 (5-7pm PT via Zoom) with Vivian Sobchack, who will be in conversation with Stanford professors Scott Bukatman and Shane Denson. Please email Annika Butler-Wall (annikabw@stanford.edu) for the Zoom link.
Vivian Sobchack, a pioneer in the phenomenological study of visual media and a leading theorist of science fiction cinema, has long been a central voice in discussions of technology’s relation to experience and culture. Indeed, her work articulates questions that are at the very heart of the Digital Aesthetics Workshop. What is the relation of the body to the technologically mediated image? How does this relation change with the shift from cinematic to digital media? How does the materiality of the medium shape our perception of it and of ourselves? Is there such a thing as an aesthetic of the digital, or is “digital aesthetics” itself an oxymoron? In this conversation with Scott Bukatman and Shane Denson (both professors in Stanford’s Film & Media Studies program in the Department of Art & Art History), we hope to explore these and other questions and to reflect on the significance of Professor Sobchack’s groundbreaking work for the study of digital cultures.
Vivian Sobchack is Professor Emerita in the Department of Film, Television and Digital Media at UCLA. She was the first woman elected President of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and served on the Board of Directors of the American Film Institute. Her essays have appeared in journals such as Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Film Comment, camera obscura, Film Quarterly, and Representations. Her books include Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film; The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience; and Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, and she has edited two anthologies: Meta-Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick-Change; and The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event.
Sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center. Made possible by support from Linda Randall Meier, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
“We Are Ant-Man” — Scott Bukatman at Digital Aesthetics Workshop
The next meeting of the Digital Aesthetics Workshop is right around the corner! On Tuesday, November 5, 2019 (5-7pm in McMurtry 370), Scott Bukatman will be talking about digital bodies, superheroes, and more, in a talk titled “We Are Ant-Man.”
We Are Ant-Man
Scott Bukatman
The body of the 21st-century cinematic superhero is often a digital body, in whole or in part. It offers itself as a particularly visible digital effect (or effect of the digital). It somatizes the mutability afforded by digital technology. It speaks to the sense that bodies (and therefore selves) in the digital age are no more inviolate than any other form of coded information. But having said that they “speak to” such conditions, what do they say beyond the fact of our own hybridity? Do these bodies tell us anything useful about our digital lives? Comedies have long served to mediate new technologies for audiences, so to pursue this, I’m going to concentrate on Ant-Man and the Wasp (Peyton Reed, 2018), perhaps thesunniest and most classically comedic film of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. What do the film’s particular emphases — the nature of its gags, its depiction of technology, and the state of knowledge of both protagonists and audience — tell us about our digital condition?
Though not required, workshops participants are encouraged to watch Ant-Man and the Wasp prior to the event. Snacks and drinks will be served, and all are welcome!