Author: shanedenson

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!

“The Horror of Discorrelation” — JCMS 60.1 (Fall 2020)

JCMS 60.1

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.

Out Now and 50% OFF: Discorrelated Images

Image: David Parisi on Twitter

Discorrelated Images is now available from Duke University Press, and during the Fall Sale from now until November 23, you can get it (and any in-stock Duke UP book) for 50% off with code FALL2020 if you order directly from the press: https://www.dukeupress.edu/discorrelated-images

With the discount, the book costs just under $13!

If you’re in Europe or the UK, the code also works if you order from distributor Combined Academic Publishers, which will save you on shipping and get the book into your hands quicker!

Vivian Sobchack in Conversation — Digital Aesthetics Workshop, Sept. 29, 2020

Poster by Hank Gerba

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.

Screen Serialities

As a member of the Advisory Board for the Screen Serialities book series at Edinburgh University Press, I wanted to make sure that people are aware of our upcoming releases and to encourage anyone working on seriality and serialized media to pitch their work for consideration.

Next month, the first book in the series will be published: Film Reboots, edited by Daniel Herbert and Constantine Verevis, will look at reboots in terms of industry, narrative, politics, and reception. The second volume in the series, Maria Sulimma’s Seriality and Gender, will be out in February.

There’s already lots of other good stuff in the works, but there’s room in this series for a wide range of topics and approaches. Feel free to reach out to me with any informal questions, or get in touch with Film Studies Senior Commissioning Editor Gillian Leslie (Gillian.Leslie at eup.ed.ac.uk) if you have a proposal.

A Discorrelated Summary of Discorrelated Images

This is deeply weird. Google Books has a summary of Discorrelated Images up, and it’s definitely not from the publisher (compare Duke University Press’s summary here). While Google’s summary is not exactly *wrong* in anything that it says, it is far from a summary of what my book is actually about — and some sentences can’t really be judged in terms of truth or accuracy, as they just don’t make sense. (For example, the second sentence: “While film theory is based on past film techniques that rely on human perception to relate frames across time, computer generated images use information to render images as moving themselves.” What does that mean?!? It’s grammatical, and it *sounds* vaguely like something I might have written, but as far as I can tell, it is meaningless.)

Moreover, from this text it sounds like the book is primarily about Michael Bay’s TRANSFORMERS with a detour through Denis Villeneuve’s BLADE RUNNER 2049. To be clear, I do write about both of these, but I also write about Guy Maddin’s algorithmic SEANCES, about Basma Alsharif’s HOME MOVIES GAZA, about desktop horror, drones, speculative execution, animation, about the relations between the phenomenology of perception in relation to microtemporal and subperceptual events, about videogames, codecs, streaming video, and the end of the world.

Anyway, who wrote this summary? Why do I think it was a machine?

Out Now: “Dividuated Images” in Coils of the Serpent

Coils of the Serpent: Journal for the Study of Contemporary Power has a new special issue reflecting on the 30-year anniversary of Deleuze’s “Postscript on the Control Societies.” The first of two volumes, Control Societies I: Media, Culture, Technology brings together 14 articles, by such esteemed contributors as Andrew Culp, Sabine Hark, Daniela Voss, Dominic Pettman, Jens Schröter, Bernd Herzogenrath, Michaela Ott, Gerald Raunig, and many others.

Also included is my essay “Dividuated Images,” which provides a preview of an argument I develop at much greater length in my forthcoming book Discorrelated Images.

“Towards a Historical Aesthetics of Encounter”: My review of James J. Hodge, Sensations of History, in Critical Inquiry

My review of Jim Hodge’s excellent book Sensations of History: Animation and New Media Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) is online now at Critical Inquiry. This is an important book — definitely check it out!