shanedenson

Video Games Have Always Been Queer: Bonnie Ruberg at Digital Aesthetics Workshop

On Tuesday, January 23, 2018, Bonnie Ruberg, assistant professor of digital media and games in the Department of Informatics at UC Irvine, will be presenting work from their forthcoming monograph Video Games Have Always Been Queer. The event will take place from 4-6pm in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room as part of the Geballe Research Workshop on Digital Aesthetics: Critical Approaches to Computational Culture.

For more information, please refer to the Stanford Humanities Center website: http://shc.stanford.edu/workshop/meetings/video-games-have-always-been-queer

Essays in Sight and Sound — Exhibition Opens Today

Essays-in-Sight-and-Sound

Essays in Sight and Sound — an exhibition of video essays that I am co-curating with Spencer Slovic at Stanford — opens today. The wall text (above) outlines the aims and objectives of the show. Here is a list of the 13 works included:

Explorations of Narrative

On-Again, Off-Again Relationships: A Recurring Theme, 2017
Gita Krishna
Video, 5:33

TALLADEGA NIGHTS: A Reinvention of the Tragic Hero, 2017
Robin Fierberg
Video, 5:56

Crafting a Cinematic Universe, 2017
Antonio Avalos
Video, 8:37

THE LAST OF US: What’s in a Moment?, 2017
Matt Bernstein
Video, 3:52

Focus on Color

Minelli Red, 2017
Carlos Valladares
Video, 19:10

Character Design in Pixar, 2017
Rogelio Salinas
Video, 5:55

Sound, Form, Aesthetics

Sight and Sound Conspire: Monstrous Audio-Vision in James Whale’s FRANKENSTEIN, 2015
Shane Denson
Video, 8:47

The Arc Shot, 2017
Sabrina Medler
Video, 5:17

LOCK UP: Tonal Dissonance and Homoeroticism, 2017
Francesca Watkins
Video, 10:33

Culture, Context, Contour

You Eat with Your Eyes First: Comparing the Eastern and Western “Foodie” Movie Genres, 2017
Rose Adams
Video, 11:05

Healing Waters, 2017
Zoe Mhungu
Video, 5:21

Flexing Culture, 2017
Eleni Aneziris
Video, 4:46

The Animal in the Lake: Ambient Sound in CEMETERY OF SPLENDOR, 2018
Spencer Slovic
Video, 4:30

Essays in Sight and Sound: An Exhibition of Video Essays

Essays in Sight and Sound-web

Essays in Sight and Sound: An Exhibition of Video Essays brings together a number of works produced in the Fall 2017 course “The Video Essay: Writing with Video about Film and Media.”

The assembled videos deal with cinema, television, video games, and online media, which they approach from a variety of angles. Together, these works not only probe our changing media landscape but explore the critical affordances of the video essay as a means of writing with sight and sound.

The exhibition will be on view January 12 – 26, 2018 in the Gunn Foyer of the McMurtry Building, home of the Department of Art & Art History, on the Stanford University campus.

WTF IS THAT? Allison de Fren at Digital Aesthetics Workshop

Allison de Fren DAW poster

On Tuesday, November 14, 2017, media maker/scholar Allison de Fren will be discussing post-cinema and videographic criticism with the Digital Aesthetics Workshop at the Stanford Humanities Center, focusing on her video essay “WTF IS THAT? The Pre- and Post-Cinematic Tendencies of Paranormal Activity” and Steven Shaviro’s article “The Glitch Dimension: Paranormal Activity and the Technologies of Vision.”

This event follows a screening of de Fren’s documentary and videographic work on fembots the night before (more details here).

Rethinking Temporalities in Cinema and Digital Media, SLSA 2017

SLSA-2017

At this year’s SLSA conference, “Out of Time,” hosted by Arizona State University, I will be chairing a panel titled “Rethinking Temporalities in Cinema and Digital Media” (Saturday, November 11, 2017; 4:00-5:30pm). My own talk is titled “Pre-Sponsive Gestures: Post-Cinema Out of Time.” Here is the complete list of panelists and topics:

2017-11-04 12.29.24 pm

Game Studies (Winter 2018)

Game-Studies-2018-flyer-b

Above, a flyer for my upcoming “Game Studies” course. Below, the syllabus:

Fembots: From Representation to Reality

deFren-Poster

On Monday, November 13, 2017 (5:30pm in Oshman Hall, McMurtry Building), media maker/scholar Allison de Fren (Occidental College) will be on hand for a screening of her 2010 documentary The Mechanical Bride and her 2015 video essay Fembot in a Red Dress. The screening, which is free and open to the public, will be followed by a Q&A.

Sponsored by the Stanford Department of Art & Art History, the Documentary Film Program, and Stanford’s Frankenstein@200 Initiative.

Claus Pias at Stanford

Next week, media theorist Claus Pias, Professor for the Theory and History of Media at Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, will be visiting Stanford for a series of events: on Monday, October 23 (5:30 – 7:00pm), he will be delivering a public lecture titled “Between Information Aesthetics and Design Amplification,” which will be held in my home department of Art & Art History. (More info here.)

The following day, Tuesday, October 24 (11:30am – 1:00pm), he will be discussing his book Computer Game Worlds, which is newly translated into English, at a lunchtime event with the Digital Aesthetics Workshop. (See the poster below or find more info here.)

Digital Aesthetics Workshop: Mark B.N. Hansen, “The Ontology of Media Operations”

I am pleased to announce the first event in the new Digital Aesthetics Workshop at the Stanford Humanities Center. On Tuesday, October 10, Mark B. N. Hansen (Duke University) will be speaking on the topic of “The Ontology of Media Operations, or, Where is the Technics in Cultural Techniques?”

Future workshops will welcome Claus Pias, Allison de Fren, Bonnie Ruberg, Jacob Gaboury, Jonathan Sterne, and more. Stay tuned!

Announcing the Digital Aesthetics Workshop

Starting this quarter, I am excited to serve as faculty coordinator for the Stanford Humanities Center Geballe Research Workshop “Digital Aesthetics: Critical Approaches to Computational Culture.” We have a great lineup for the 2017-2018 academic year, details of which I’ll be sharing here.

In the meantime, take a look at all of this year’s research workshops at the Stanford Humanities Center on their website.