I am excited to be serving as the current Mercator Fellow at the Konfigurationen des Films Graduiertenkolleg / Configurations of Film Graduate Program at the Goethe Universität in Frankfurt — via Zoom, of course — and to deliver a talk titled “Post-Cinematic Bodies” on November 23, 2020 (6pm European time). More info about the event can be found here, with registration details coming soon.
Here are videos of two recent talks related to my book Discorrelated Images. Above, a talk titled “Discorrelation, or: Images between Algorithms and Aesthetics,” delivered at Stanford’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) on November 3, 2020. And below, a talk titled “Discorrelated Images” from October 26, 2020 at UC Santa Barbara’s Media Arts and Technology Seminar Series.
Please join us for an exciting, interactive event next Tuesday, November 10th at 5 pm (PT) with libi rose striegl who runs the Media Archaeology Lab at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
libi will be giving a virtual tour and demonstration of pieces from the Media Archaeology Lab collection, followed by a defamiliarization exercise in the form of a Take It Apart(y). Participants are invited to take-apart-along with libi, dissecting and deciphering a piece of household technology. It’s probably best to use something already broken, if you’re not confident with re-assembly!
libi rose striegl is an artist, teacher and friend of mechanisms who currently manages the Media Archaeology Lab. She is perpetually ambivalent about technology. Her work ranges from anarchival exploration to large-scale installation, and she is co-founder of artrepreneurial start-up sharing turtle and one half of audiovisual experiment Prayer Generator. libi recently defended her dissertation ‘Voluntary De-Convenience’ for the PhD in Intermedia Arts, Writing and Performance at CU Boulder, and holds an MFA in Experimental Documentary Arts from Duke.
The Media Archaeology Lab (MAL) was founded in 2009 by Associate Professor Lori Emerson. Their motto is “the past must be lived so that the present can be seen.”Nearly all digital media labs are conceived of as a place for experimental research using the most up-to-date, cutting-edge tools available. By contrast, the MAL—which very well might be the largest of its kind in the world—is a place for cross-disciplinary experimental research and teaching using still functioning media from the past. The MAL is propelled equally by the need to preserve and maintain access to historically important media of all kinds—from magic lanterns, projectors, and typewriters, to early personal computers from the 1970s through the 1990s; as well as early works of digital literature/art which were originally created on the hardware and software housed in the MAL.
Please register here to get the Zoom link: tinyurl.com/ExploreMAL
On November 3 (12pm Pacific), I’ll be giving a talk, via Zoom, titled “Discorrelation, or: Images between Algorithms and Aesthetics” at Stanford’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA). The talk will focus on my book Discorrelated Images, just out from Duke University Press (and 50% off right with code FALL2020).
In case you’re wondering, this is a different “book talk” than anything you might have seen recently, so check it out if you can! (Though I am told that there is something else going on on November 3rd, so only tune in if you’ve already voted!)
Just out with meson press: Pandemic Media is an open-access collection edited by Philipp Dominik Keidl, Laliv Melamed, Vinzenz Hediger, and Antonio Somaini. To say that the collection is timely is of course a truism, but in line with the strange temporality of life in the pandemic, I think you’ll find that many of the articles are in fact “untimely” (in the Nietzschean sense), and that they might help create distance where that seems impossible.
I am honored to have a short piece included in the collection, titled “‘Thus isolation is a project.’ Notes toward a Phenomenology of Screen-Mediated Life.” Here I try to think critically and phenomenologically about the Zoom-sphere and about the new forms of sociality that are emerging and will be required in the future.
An HTML version of the collection is available now, and a print edition is coming in December. Check it out!
Here is the complete video of the event Rendered Worlds: New Regimes of Imaging from October 23, 2020. Featuring Deborah Levitt (The New School), Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal (UC Davis and Universität Siegen), Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan (King’s College London), and Shane Denson (Stanford) discussing their recent work, with Hank Gerba (Stanford) and Jacob Hagelberg (UC Davis) co-moderating the round-table.
Sponsored by the Linda Randall Meier workshop on Digital Aesthetics (Stanford) and the Technocultural Futures Research Cluster (UC Davis), with support from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Next Monday, October 26, 2020 (1pm Pacific time), I’ll be speaking about my book Discorrelated Images at the Media Arts and Technology Seminar Series at University of California Santa Barbara. Of course, the event will be online via Zoom: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/87911890791
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.
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!
My article “The Horror of Discorrelation” is coming out in the Fall 2020 issue of JCMS, and it offers a preview of some of my arguments in Discorrelated Images. Since a preview is supposed to come out before the main attraction, I’ve gone ahead and posted the PDF of the article on my website: https://shanedenson.com/articles.html. (The JCMS issue is delayed due to the journal moving to a new press and a new website, to be unveiled soon.)
If you’ve already picked up a copy of my book or are about to, you’ll see that Chapter 5 expands this article, which deals with the fictional “desktop horror” of UNFRIENDED, to include a long section on the real-world horrors of terrorism-related videos not included in the JCMS article.