This Saturday, April 24, I will be participating in Stanford Continuing Studies and the Stanford Humanities Center’s annual event showcasing new books by Stanford authors, A Company of Authors. I will be presenting my book Discorrelated Imagesalongside Marci Kwon and Usha Iyer, both of whom are colleagues in the Department of Art & Art History, who will be presenting their recent books Enchantments: Joseph Cornell and American Modernism (Kwon) and Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema (Iyer).
The Fórum Internacional Cinemática III, organized by Giselle Gubernikoff, Edson Luiz Oliveira, and Daniel Perseguim of the Universidade de São Paulo, is taking place online from April 13-15, 2021. Dedicated this year to forms of documentary and “the real,” the conference will feature three plenary talks by Steven Shaviro (April 13), me (April 14), and Selmin Kara (April 15).
My talk, titled “Documenting the Post-Cinematic Real,” draws on a line of questioning about computational media and realism that I explore in the latter half of chapter 5 in Discorrelated Images:
“In its classical formulation, cinematic realism is based in the photographic ontology of film, or in the photograph’s indexical relation to the world, which allegedly grants to film its unique purchase on reality; upon this relation also hinged, for many realist filmmakers and theorists, the political promise of realism. Digital media, meanwhile, are widely credited with disrupting indexicality and instituting an alternative ontology of the image, but does that mean that realism as a potentially political power of connection with the world is dead? If we consider the extent to which reality itself is shaped and mediated through digital media today, the question begins to seem strange. As I will demonstrate with reference to a variety of moving-image texts dealing with drone warfare, online terrorism recruitment, and computationally mediated affects, post-cinematic media might in fact be credited with a newly intensified political relevance through their institution of a new, post-cinematic realism. As a result, the question of “documenting the post-cinematic real,” which any contemporary theory of documentary must raise, will necessarily take us beyond the documentary as it is traditionally understood; it will take us into spaces of the computer desktop, of online and offline subjectivities and collectives, and of post-indexical technologies and environments. How can these spaces, which resist traditional coordinates of cinematic realism, be documented?”
Here are the links to view the plenary talks:
Steve Shaviro, “The Ontology of Post-cinematic Images, and Examples from Music Videos,” April 13 (5pm Brazil, 4pm Eastern, 1pm Pacific) — https://youtu.be/7t6GEB6a-tI
The Digital Aesthetics Workshop is happy to announce a long-awaited, COVID-postponed event with Melissa Gregg next week on Tuesday, April 6th 5-7 pm Pacific,”The Great Watercooler in the Cloud: Distributed work, collegial presence and mindful labor post-COVID.”
“The Great Watercooler in the Cloud: Distributed work, collegial presence and mindful labor post-COVID”
The immediate shift to so-called “remote work” in the pandemic created an extraordinary instance of corporate reckoning: hierarchies seemingly so solid and impenetrable evaporated within weeks as workers rapidly adjusted to doing their job in slippers. Previously commonsense notions of the day’s rhythms – the obligatory performance of a 9 to 5 persona – faced critical contaminants in the form of children, spouses and pets. Meanwhile the surprisingly social elements of office life became apparent in their obvious absence. Zoom fatigue replaced team-building drinks as the dominant affective mode. As the work world prepares for a return to something other than normal, this talk draws on multiple studies of technology users in lockdown and previous research on productivity to understand the condition of professional intimacy post-COVID. In doing so, it reflects on the psychological, physical and environmental burdens embedded in the idea of “work from anywhere.”
Melissa Gregg is Intel’s chief social scientist and thought leader for user experience (UX). With a PhD in gender and cultural studies, she is an international expert on the future of work and a specialist in applied ethnography. Her over 60 peer-reviewed publications and books have anticipated key shifts in the experience of connected work and home life, from Work’s Intimacy (Polity 2011) to Counterproductive (Duke 2018), The Affect Theory Reader (Duke 2010) to the new collection, Media and Management (Meson Press 2021).
Following an academic career in Australia, Melissa led Intel’s first university investment in social computing before building user research to a position of strategic impact in the PC business. Her team now guides the roadmap for product development and architecture across consumer and commercial segments, including the EVO brand. As Chief Technologist for Sustainability in the Client Computing Group, Melissa inspires technologists, colleagues, consumers and customers to accelerate the transition to carbon neutral computing. This requires a fundamental reckoning with business as usual for the PC industry, to ensure the finite resources providing connectivity today can continue in to the future.
Sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center. Made possible by support from Linda Randall Meier, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
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
This Friday, March 19, 2021 (3pm Central, 1pm Pacific), I will be presenting alongside Deborah Levitt, Joel McKim, and Vivian Sobchack in panel L24: “Rendering: Times, Powers, Perceptions.” Sponsored by the Film Philosophy SIG!
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 help spread the word about this call for papers for the 2021 Berkeley/Stanford Symposium, organized by graduate students in each university’s respective art history programs, to be held (virtually) in conjunction with SFMOMA. Open to all graduate students. Queries and applications to berkeley.stanford.symposium.2021@gmail.com
I have been sitting on this news for a while now, and I am excited that I can finally share it: Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and I are editing a new book series at Stanford University Press called “Sensing Media” that is devoted to the aesthetics, philosophies, and cultures of media.
We are especially interested in contributions that rethink media aesthetics, understood broadly to include both artistic uses of media and their sensory dimensions; that conceive media as the site where art and technology converge; and that expand the scope of media-philosophical discussions to include global and heretofore marginalized perspectives. We are excited to explore the connections between sensory forms and their infrastructures, between media technologies and aesthetic sensibilities, and more generally between media and the many possible worlds they disclose.
Please spread the word about the new series, and consider submitting your manuscripts. If you have questions, you can direct them to me, Wendy Chun, or Executive Editor Erica Wetter, with whom we are thrilled to be working on this series. We look forward to learning about your work!
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
The full PDF of Pandemic Media, an open-access collection edited by Philipp Dominik Keidl, Laliv Melamed, Vinzenz Hediger, and Antonio Somaini, is now available for download (here).
The volume contains 37 short chapters on various aspects of media and mediated experience under conditions of the pandemic, divided into 5 sections: Time/Temporality, Space/Scale, Technologies/Materialities, Education/Instruction, and Activism/Sociability.
The last section includes my essay on Zoom and related screen-based forms of interaction: “‘Thus isolation is a project.’ Notes toward a Phenomenology of Screen-Mediated Life.” There are lots of other things to discover in this book, though, so check it out!
