Shane Denson – medieninitiative

Post-Cinema: Print edition now available!

At long last, Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film is now available in a print edition! The 1000-page volume, originally published in open-access formats (HTML and PDF) in 2016, can now be purchased in a four-volume paperback format.

In accordance with the original Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND), the paperbacks are sold at cost; the purchase price covers only the printing. As a result, they are quite affordable (around $8.00 each).

Here are the links to the individual volumes: Volume I, Volume II, Volume III, and Volume IV.

The book as a whole asks: If cinema and television, as the dominant media of the 20th century, shaped and reflected our cultural sensibilities, how do new digital media in the 21st century help to shape and reflect new forms of sensibility? In this collection, editors Shane Denson and Julia Leyda have gathered a range of essays that approach this question by way of a critical engagement with the notion of “post-cinema.” The contributions take as their critical starting-points concepts such as David Bordwell’s “intensified continuity” or Steven Shaviro’s “post-cinematic affect” and “post-continuity.” They expand and build upon the ideas of these and a range of other thinkers, with the goal of coming to terms with an apparently new media ecology that requires us to search for a fresh critical vocabulary. By examining the experiential, technological, political, historical, and ecological aspects of the transition from a cinematic to a post-cinematic media regime, the chapters explore key questions in breaking this new ground, seeking and articulating both continuities and disjunctures between film’s first and second centuries. Questions of aesthetics and form overlap with investigations of changing technological and industrial practices, contemporary formations of capital, and cultural concerns such as identity and social inequalities. The impact of digitization on taken-for-granted conventions is also in play: intermediality, new forms of distribution both licit and illicit, academic and critical reliance on genres and discrete media formats – all of these come under scrutiny as paradigms shift in the post-cinematic era.

Volume I comprises the Introduction and Parts 1 & 2, “Parameters for Post-Cinema” and “Experiences of Post-Cinema”:

Volume II comprises Parts 3 and 4: “Techniques and Technologies of Post-Cinema” and “Politics of Post-Cinema”:

Volume III comprises Parts 5 and 6: “Archaeologies of Post-Cinema” and “Ecologies of Post-Cinema”:

Finally, Volume IV comprises the conversations and roundtables contained in Part 7: “Dialogues on Post-Cinema”:

Sensations of History and Discorrelated Images — James J. Hodge and Shane Denson at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, Stanford / Center for Global Culture and Communication, Northwestern

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

To Register: https://northwestern.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcoc-mqpj8oGtzYRsInHSx38NRAQfAYTQin

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

Rendered Worlds: New Regimes of Imaging — October 23, 2020

The Digital Aesthetics Workshop is extremely excited to announce a collaborative panel with UC Davis’ Technocultural Futures Research Cluster.

‘Rendered Worlds: New Regimes of Imaging‘ will take place on Friday, October 23 at 10am PDT. Co-organized by teams from Stanford University and University of California Davis, this event brings together a transatlantic group of scholars to discuss the social, historical, technical, and aesthetic entanglements of our computational images.

Talking about their latest work will be Deborah Levitt (The New School), Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal (UC Davis and Universität Siegen), Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan (King’s College London), and Shane Denson (Stanford). Hank Gerba (Stanford) and Jacob Hagelberg (UC Davis) will co-moderate the round-table. Please register at tinyurl.com/renderedworlds for your zoom link!

We hope to see you there! If you have any questions, please direct them to Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal (rjdhaliwal at ucdavis dot edu).

Sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center. Made possible by support from Linda Randall Meier, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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!

Let’s Make a Monster! Critical Making (Stanford, Spring 2018)

LetsMakeAMonster

Ever since Frankenstein unleashed his monster onto the world in Mary Shelley’s novel from 1818, the notion of “technology-out-of-control” has been a constant worry of modern societies, plaguing more optimistic visions of progress and innovation with fears that modern machines harbor potentials that, once set in motion, can no longer be tamed by their human makers. In this characteristically modern myth, the act of making — and especially technological making — gives rise to monsters. As a cautionary tale, we are therefore entreated to look before we leap, to go slow and think critically about the possible consequences of invention before we attempt to make something radically new. However, this means of approaching the issue of human-technological relations implies a fundamental opposition between thinking and making, suggesting a split between cognition as the specifically human capacity for reflection versus a causal determinism-without-reflection that characterizes the machinic or the technical. Nevertheless, recent media theory questions this dichotomy by asserting that technologies are inseparable from humans’ abilities to think and to act in the world, while artistic practices undo the thinking/making split more directly and materially, by taking materials — including technologies — as the very medium of their critical engagement with the world. Drawing on impulses from both media theory and art practice, “critical making” names a counterpart to “critical thinking” — one that utilizes technologies to think about humans’ constitutive entanglements with technology, while recognizing that insight often comes from errors, glitches, malfunctions, or even monsters. Co-taught by a practicing artist and a media theorist, this course will engage students in hands-on critical practices involving both theories and technologies. Let’s make a monster!

ARTSTUDI 233, FILMSTUD 233/433 — Spring 2018 — Profs. Paul DeMarinis & Shane Denson — Thursdays 3:00-5:50pm

Post-Cinema as a Generative Media Regime — Shane Denson

generativity

My abstract for the panel “Generativity and Creative Agency in Post-Cinematic Media” at SLSA 2016 in Atlanta:

Post-Cinema as a Generative Media Regime

Shane Denson, Stanford University

This presentation examines recent theories and approaches to post-cinema, understood broadly as the informatically informed audio-visual media regime that follows in the wake of electronic and digital media’s absorption and re-tooling of cinematic technologies and modes of representation. Taking cues from Steven Shaviro’s Post-Cinematic Affect (2010) and the diverse contributions to the collection Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film (2016, co-edited by Shane Denson and Julia Leyda), among others, I aim in particular to foreground the ways in which what has often been conceived in terms of loss (e.g. the loss of indexicality, the demise of celluloid, or the death of cinema as an institution or context for collective reception) inevitably also involves an additive or generative moment—a moment of technical and cultural creation informed by the microtemporal and computational processes that displace and transform the photographic ontology of cinema. Such generativity has been glimpsed in a variety of critical and theoretical statements, such as Lev Manovich’s argument that digital processes render all images “animation,” Steven Shaviro’s focus on “affect” as the pre-perceptual site of these images’ registration, or Vivian Sobchack’s recent meditations on the emergence of a new spatiotemporal dimension within the “screen-sphere” that now encompasses all of human life. As of yet, however, these approaches have not been synthesized into a more general, comprehensive framework of post-cinematic generativity. This talk aims to make a step in this direction by identifying the technical, phenomenological, and pre-personal foundations of the post-cinematic media regime and its particular mechanisms of creative agency.

Out Now — Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film

I am happy to announce, at long last, the publication of Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film, edited by Shane Denson and Julia Leyda, which is out today as a completely free and open-access volume with REFRAME Books.

If cinema and television, as the dominant media of the 20th century, shaped and reflected our cultural sensibilities, how do new digital media in the 21st century help to shape and reflect new forms of sensibility? In this collection, editors Shane Denson and Julia Leyda have gathered a range of essays that approach this question by way of a critical engagement with the notion of “post-cinema.” Contributors explore key experiential, technological, political, historical, and ecological aspects of the transition from a cinematic to a post-cinematic media regime and articulate both continuities and disjunctures between film’s first and second centuries.

The book will appear in several digital formats: the web-based version is online today, and several ebook formats will be appearing soon.

The book brings together foundational texts by some of the key voices in the discussion of post-cinema and places them next to a range of brand-new chapters, as well as a series of roundtable discussions.

The long list of contributors includes:

Caitlin Benson-Allott, Paul Bowman, Felix Brinker, Kristopher L. Cannon, Francesco Casetti, Steen Christiansen, Elena del Río, Shane Denson, Rosalind Galt, Therese Grisham, Richard Grusin, Leon Gurevitch, Mark B. N. Hansen, Bruce Isaacs, Adrian Ivakhiv, Kylie Jarrett, Selmin Kara, Julia Leyda, Patricia MacCormack, Lev Manovich, Ruth Mayer, Michael O’Rourke, Patricia Pisters, Alessandra Raengo, David Rambo, Nicholas Rombes, Sergi Sánchez, Karin Sellberg, Steven Shaviro, Michael Loren Siegel, Vivian Sobchack, Billy Stevenson, Andreas Sudmann

Here is the table of contents:

A brief “press release” with a description of the book and the complete table of contents is available here (opens as a PDF): POST-CINEMA-Press-Release

The Gnomes Are Back: Business cARd 2.0

gnome-cARd

Ever since our old AR platform was bought out and shut down by Apple, the “data gnomes” that Karin and I developed in conjunction with the Duke S-1: Speculative Sensation Lab’s “Manifest Data” project have been bumbling about in digital limbo, banished to 404 hell. So today I finally made the first steps in migrating our beloved creatures over to a new AR platform (Wikitude), where they’re starting to feel at home. While I was at it, I went ahead and reprogrammed my business card:

2016-01-31 12.21.55 pm

The QR code on the front now redirects the browser to shanedenson.com, while the AR content on the back side is made visible with the Wikitude app (free on iOS or Android) — just search for “Shane Denson” and point your phone/tablet’s camera at the image below:

2016-01-31 12.22.20 pm

(In case you’re wondering what this is: it’s a “data portrait” generated from my Internet browsing behavior. You can make your own with the code included in the S-1 Lab’s Manifest Data kit.)

Making Mining Networking: Video Documentation

Above, some video documentation of the pieces included in Making Mining Networking, the exhibition that Karin and I have going on until September at Duke University. As I posted recently, the augmented reality platform we used to make the interactive components (Metaio) has been sold to Apple and will be going offline at the end of the year. All the more reason to document everything now — but until December 15 you can still try out the pieces yourself, either in person at the exhibition or on your own computer screen with a smart device (see the images here)!

The (generative, network-driven) music is from the project “Listen to Wikipedia,” by Hatnote — which seemed a perfect match for the theme of Making Mining Networking!

Video Games’ Extra-Ludic Echoes — SLSA 2015

I am excited to be a part of the panel “Video Games’ Extra-Ludic Echoes,” which will be chaired by my colleague David Rambo at the upcoming conference of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) — hosted in Houston this year by Rice University, November 12-15, 2015. Below you will find the panel description and links to the individual abstracts.

Video Games’ Extra-Ludic Echoes

Chair: David Rambo

Each of the three presentations in this panel perform their own media-theoretical approach to comprehend how video games extend and consolidate the sociotechnical logics surrounding their conception, production, and reception. We intend to kindle a discussion about the ways certain video games order significant ideologies and activities of human life: from multimedial culture industries to the blurred division between life and labor to the concealment of racism in the techniques of 20th-century entertainment. All three share a motivation to delineate various cultural and economic inheritances of video games and the transformative ways in which video games echo those inheritances.

Shane Denson’s contribution attends to the serial manifestations of Batman across genres and media. He hones in on the subsumption of life-time under work-time that is common to the computational networks of daily life and to the crossed borders of serial figures such as Batman. In Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux’s “White Hand, Black Box,” we learn to recognize in the maniculed pointer of various softwares’ interfaces and especially in the Master Hand of Super Smash Brothers the now concealed tradition of black minstrelsy as it was imbued by Disney in the gloved hands of Mickey Mouse and other characters. David Rambo deploys a Spinozist theoretical framework to categorize the video game, Diablo III in particular, as a neoliberal enterprise that extrinsically determines the player’s desire and even will to live. Spinoza’s Ethics thereby offers a way to conceptualize the video game both as an autonomous entity marked with finite, and thus fulfillable, completeness, and as a node in a much broader regime of affections that orders capital’s socioeconomic system.

These three presentations depict the video game as an artifactual conduit eminently bound up with the cultural forces that ineluctably structure our civilization, from its marginal groups to its most powerful systemic imperatives.

Abstracts for the individual papers:

Shane Denson, “Gaming and the ‘Parergodic’ Work of Seriality in Interactive Digital Environments”

Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux, “White Hand, Black Box: The Manicule from Mickey to Mario to Mac OS”

David Rambo, “Spinoza on Completion and Authorial Forces in Video Games”