Author: shanedenson

Bride of Frankenstein [film|minutes] — Out now in print, open-access ebook, and special videographic/interactive editions!

My book on James Whale’s 1935 masterpiece Bride of Frankenstein, the inaugural volume in Lever Press’s new film|minutes book series, is out now! The book offers a minute-by-minute engagement with the film, combining close looking, philosophical speculation, historical contextualization, and a variety of other ekphrastic and experimental approaches. Print versions are available anywhere books are sold, including on the publisher’s website, where you can also read the open access version online or download a free EPUB or PDF.

In addition, I have programmed an interactive version of the book, which is available through the Stanford Digital Repository. There you can find apps for Mac and Windows that allow you to load a copy of the film and play it — on loop, one minute at a time — alongside the text corresponding to that minute. This way, you can immediately put my observations to the test and discover other details that complement or even challenge the claims that I make about the film. (Due to copyright restrictions, you will need to supply your own copy of the film, for example by ripping a copy from a DVD or BluRay [I used the 2018 Classic Monster Collection version], or grabbing a copy from Vimeo or the Internet Archive.)

The interactive book app is a dedicated “reader,” but if you’d prefer a different experience I have also prepared a packet of text files that can be loaded into the film|minutes video|graphic workstation — a platform for both reading and writing — that I released earlier this summer. The texts are available as a zip file at the same address as the interactive book (https://doi.org/10.25740/qj474bx8626), and the workstation is available here: https://doi.org/10.25740/xq320wq3449 (also for Windows and Mac). You’ll still need to supply your own copy of the film, but then you can load the text packet and not only read but also actively revise or rewrite my text, should you so choose.

Whether on paper, ebook, or interactive version, I hope you’ll check out this experimental book and revisit the film, which is iconic in its own right but perhaps newly relevant in an age of AI. Thanks to series editor Bernd Herzogenrath and senior acquiring editor Sean Guynes for their support of the project!

“To the Maxx: Bodies, Codes, and Hodological Space” — talk at Gray Area Festival, September 13, 2025

On Saturday, September 13 (1pm), I’ll be giving a talk titled “To the Maxx: Bodies, Codes, and Hodological Space” at this year’s Gray Area Festival.

The talk explores the tension between computational media’s drive toward perfection and the embodied realities of glitch, detour, and breakdown. Starting from Post-Cinematic Bodies, thinking through AI aesthetics, and reflecting on my artistic collaborations with the non/phenomenal collective (Brett Amory, Karin Denson, and myself), I trace how computational, architectural, and sociopolitical codes intersect to train and retrain perception, movement, and affect. From glitch aesthetics to low doorways and black-box spaces, I theorize hodological laboratories that stage encounters with the shifting conditions of embodied experience. To “go to the maxx” is to hazard the world: to inhabit its vulnerabilities, glitches, and horizons.

Introducing the film|minutes video|graphic workstation

I made a piece of software! It’s called the film|minutes video|graphic workstation. It’s pretty niche but cool if you want to take notes or do very close readings of films/videos.

It’s a combination video player and text editor designed for close analysis of moving image media in scholarly research and academic writing, including student writing about film and video. The app plays videos on loop, one minute at a time, while the user enters notes or commentary on that segment. Timestamped notes are saved as txt files that can be reloaded and revised at a later time. Accordingly, the app serves either as a writing tool (as an informal notebook, for example, or for composing more complex and detailed close readings of films) or as a platform for reading previously compiled texts. The app was designed to facilitate the type of writing featured in Lever Press’s film|minutes book series, from which the workstation takes its name. Each book in the series takes a minute-by-minute approach to an individual film and conducts a close analysis on this basis. I am also the author of the first book in the series, on the 1935 film Bride of Frankenstein. A demo featuring the video and corresponding text of the first ten minutes of the book/film are included in the app.

In addition to its use as a tool for writing, the app promotes reflection on the relation of text and image in an age of digital media, where conventional scholarly writing now competes with “videographic criticism” (or video essays). Instituting what might be called a videographic method, though not necessarily producing a strictly videographic product, the film|minutes video|graphic workstation invites users to reflect on the status of the seen (video) and the written (graphic) more generally.

Accordingly, the app continues a series of videographic and critical making projects aimed at probing the edges of what is possible in video as a self-reflexive medium for theory — not just a vehicle or container medium for theorization but a platform that potentially creates new modes of looking and seeing. My video essay “Sight and Sound Conspire: Monstrous Audio-Vision in James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931)” is an intertext in more ways than one; while it is more or less technically conventional, in that it is a linear video with beginning, middle, and end, its formal structure of repetition and variation on a single scene anticipates the kind of close looking that the film|minutes workstation (and the film|minutes book series) promotes. (More obviously, the focus on Frankenstein films is of course another point of conversation.) My interactive video essay “Don’t Look Now: Paradoxes of Suture” subsequently challenged the linear form and experimented with spatializing and looping structures to foster close looking; the film|minutes video|graphic workstation inherits from it the focus on interactivity and the loop. My critical making project “The Algorithmic Nickelodeon” went even further outside the bounds of linear video, using data from an EEG headset to influence playback in realtime and thus to open the focusing and capture of attention to scrutiny. While the film|minutes video|graphic workstation does not stage quite so radical a disruption of the video source, perhaps it opens similarly self-reflexive questions around the way, as Nietzsche put it, “our writing utensils work alongside us in the formation of our thoughts.” That is, the medium in and through which we write and think — whether that is pen and paper, word processor, or nonlinear digital editing platform — is not neutral with respect to the things we conceive and express. It is my hope that the film|minutes video|graphic workstation will help us to think through the transformation of writing about moving-image media in conjunction with ubiquitous digital video.

The app is open access (CC-BY-NC-SA) and available for Windows and Mac. You can download it here: https://doi.org/10.25740/xq320wq3449.

NON/PHENOMENALITIES — July 26 – Aug 30, 2025 at Gallery 120710 in Berkeley

NON/PHENOMENALITIES — a show that I am co-curating with artist Brett Amory at Gallery 120710 in Berkeley — opens July 26 with an amazing lineup of artists.

The title of this exhibition plays on the multiple senses of the “phenomenal.” On the one hand, the phenomenal is equated with spectacle and the spectacular, the exceptional appearance that dazzles its audience, like a pop phenomenon. On the other hand, phenomenality refers to the way anything whatsoever appears to our embodied senses; this less extravagant sense of the word “phenomenon” is at the heart of phenomenology and Kantian philosophy (where it is opposed to the noumenal, which can never appear to sensation).

Both senses of the phenomenal are contested and reconfigured in the contemporary networks of computational media and machine-learning algorithms. For example, AI produces a steady stream of spectacles, each more spectacular than the last, but the underlying operations are immune to human perception. In this interplay, not only the objects of perception but also the very conditions of experience are up for grabs. The phenomenal itself is conditioned by a new realm of nonphenomenality, which poses a special challenge for artists working with these new technologies.

As a way of approaching this new situation, we look to works that stage multiple aesthetic inversions of the phenomenal, ranging from the subtle or understated to the invisible. What comes to the fore when vision encounters computation’s resistance to consciousness, its “discorrelation” from the phenomenology of embodied experience? How can we perceive what artist Trevor Paglen has dubbed the “invisible images” that populate our world? And how can these inversions connect with or be illuminated by other traditions of the non/ phenomenal—for example Buddhist ideas of appearance as illusion, the Lacanian notion of the unperceived Real, or neuroscientific theories of consciousness as a nonsubstantial epiphenomenon?

Looking beyond the spectacles of contemporary technology, Non/phenomenalities asks us to imagine an aesthetics of the subtle, the muted, the “barely perceptible difference,” maybe even the boring.

New Article: “On the Very Idea of a (Synthetic) Conceptual Scheme” — Out now in Philosophy and Digitality

My article “On the Very Idea of a (Synthetic) Conceptual Scheme” has just been published in the open access journal Philosophy & Digitality, in a special issue on “LLMs and the Patterns of Human Language Use.”

The title of the piece plays on, and the article draws substantially on, Donald Davidson’s “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme.” By way of this classic text, I engage closely with M. Beatrice Fazi’s provocative article “The Computational Search for Unity: Synthesis in Generative AI.” I agree with Fazi that we have to take the outputs of LLMs as genuine language (contra the “stochastic parrots” crew), and that the best way to account for their operations is in terms of a kind of philosophical “synthesis.” But whereas Fazi sees LLMs synthesizing their own individual “worlds within,” I argue that the genuineness of their linguistic outputs (i.e. the fact that they produce real language) instead suggests that they refer to a world shared in common with human language-users (which commonality should not, however, detract from their alterity or alienness to our embodied Lebensform, or form of life).

In the same issue of Philosophy & Digitality, Fazi has a response to my article, titled “A Transcendental Philosophy of Large Language Models,” which I also highly recommend, and which brings our differences—as well as agreements—into sharper relief. I have the feeling this is the beginning of a longer exchange!

I’d like to thank Sybille Krämer and Christoph Durt for inviting my participation in the special issue and shepherding it toward publication–and for soliciting Fazi’s response. And thanks, above all, to Beatrice Fazi for producing such thought-provoking work in the philosophy of AI and computation!

Out Now: Power Shift: Keywords for a New Politics of Energy

I am happy to have a short piece on the “Digital” among the 101 keywords in this exciting new volume, Power Shift: Keywords for a New Politics of Energy, edited by Imre Szeman and Jennifer Wenzel. The book brings together scholars, artists, and activists, and it provides a robustly multifaceted approach to questions of energy, the environment, climate change, and much, much more — including some pieces that will be of great interest to scholars of media, infrastructure, networks, etc.

Right now you can get 20% off with code SZEMAN20 at wvupress.com

“The Risk of Serialized Reality: On ‘Big Fiction’ and ‘The New Seriality'” — Mesha Maren in The Metropolitan Review

In a recent article for The Metropolitan Review, novelist Mesha Maren reads Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature together with my article “The New Seriality” (Qui Parle 32.2, Dec 2023). Maren’s essay, which is concerned primarily with literary publishing but illuminating for contemporary culture more generally, is worth your time!

Bride of Frankenstein Minute-by-Minute: First talk on my forthcoming book!

This Tuesday, June 17, I’ll be giving my first talk on my forthcoming book on Bride of Frankenstein at Leibniz Universität Hannover — where I first started thinking about Frankenstein films about 20 years ago!

More info here.

“Dimensionality, Perspective, and Imagination in Computational Media” — Talk at UC Berkeley conference on Dimensional Vision in Flux, May 29-31, 2025

I’m excited to be speaking, alongside an amazing lineup of scholars, at a conference this week (May 29-31, 2025) on Dimensional Vision in Flux: The Stereo-Aesthetics and Politics of 3D Cinema and Media, hosted by the Department of Film & Media at UC Berkeley. I’ll be giving a talk on “Dimensionality, Perspective, and Imagination in Computational Media.”

The complete program can be found here. And here’s my abstract:

Dimensionality, Perspective, and Imagination in Computational Media

Dimensional vision finds itself in flux, as the title of this symposium would have it. The flux in question has to do with recent and contemporary transformations in visual media: witness the many booms and busts of 3D cinema, recall the short-lived push to put 3D televisions in our living rooms, and consider the rapidly changing landscape of VR, AR, MR, XR, whatever-R. In order to get a handle on the flux of dimensional vision in relation to such media-technological changes, however, I would like to take a step back and observe that dimensional vision has always and only ever been in flux. I mean this, first, in the sense that dimensionality is given to human experience immediately and inseparably from the spatiotemporal flux of embodied existence; this “microperceptual” dimension (in Don Ihde’s terms) is epitomized in Edmund Husserl’s descriptions of the flux of “adumbrations” as he walks around a tree, whereby a multidimensional model of “the tree,” never wholly seen, takes shape in his mind. In a second, more historical sense, dimensional vision has always been in flux in a way that is more closely attuned to the media changes described above; rather than exceptional, however, such flux is a constant because there is no natural or neutral state apart from mediation: the “microperceptual” level of embodied experience can never be thought apart from what Ihde calls the “macroperceptual” level of cultural and technological conditioning (and vice versa).

Taken seriously, this means that dimensionality and perspectival vision are inherently contingent and deeply political—not just perspectival representation, but the embodied experience of perceptual perspective and spatial orientation itself. And while I argue that this has always been the case for humans as an essentially biotechnical species, the political stakes are heightened in an era of computational media. The latter, including VR and similar media of 3D visuality, operate faster than and bypass human perception, opening dimensional vision to fine-grained reengineering. In order to make this argument, I turn to Kant’s notion of the productive imagination (Einbildungskraft) and the stereotyping operation of the “schematism” that connects visual stimuli to concepts of the understanding. Following philosophers Wilfrid Sellars and Alan Thomas, schemata are perspectivally indeterminate but determinable, and through them the Kantian imagination is responsible for our empirical experience of things as having depth and unseen backsides—responsible, that is, for our sense of the world as a dimensional, volumetric space within which I am positioned. Meanwhile, computational media are constructing their own spatial models of the world (or worlds), models that exceed and resist human perceptual access while positioning us both virtually and physically. In this way, they assume functions of the imagination and modulate the flux of dimensional vision at both microperceptual and macroperceptual scales.