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!
The new issue of Cinephile, the University of British Columbia’s film and media journal, is just out. The theme of the issue is “(Un)Recovering the Future,” and it’s all about nostalgia, malaise, history, and (endangered) futurities.
In this context, I am happy to have contributed a piece called “Artificial Imagination” on the relation between AI and (visual) imagination. The essay lays some of the groundwork for a larger exploration of AI and its significance for aesthetics in both broad and narrow senses of the word. It follows from the emphasis on embodiment in my essay “From Sublime Awe to Abject Cringe: On the Embodied Processing of AI Art,” recently published in Journal of Visual Culture, as part of a larger book project tentatively called Art & Artificiality, or: What AI Means for Aesthetics.
Thanks very much to editors Will Riley and Liam Riley for the invitation to contribute to this issue!
The new issue of Journal of Visual Culture just dropped, and I’m excited to see my article on AI art and aesthetics alongside work by Shannon Mattern, Bryan Norton, Jussi Parikka, and others. It looks like a great issue, and I’m looking forward to digging into it!
Just in time for the new year, my article on “The New Seriality” is out now in the new issue of Qui Parle (issue 32.2, December 2023), and Duke University Press is offering 3 months of free access with this link.
Abstract:
Since at least the nineteenth century seriality and serialization have been among the most important formal and narrative strategies for popular media cultures and their negotiations with the radical changes brought on by industrialization and new communication technologies. Nothing less is at stake in popular seriality than the material and spatiotemporal ordering of the phenomenal world, with far-reaching political consequences. However, in an age of computation, predictive algorithms, and “personalized” media, the parameters of serialization are massively transformed. And because media forms and social formations are tightly intertwined, this transformation—or the shift from an “old” to a “new” form of seriality—brings with it crucial changes and uncertainties with respect to subjective and collective existence going forward. Centrally at stake in the new seriality is a set of techniques and technologies that aim to predictively “typify” subjects and preformat them vis-à-vis normative and statistically correlated categories of gender and race, among others. This article lays the groundwork for thinking seriality as a sociotechnics of typification, the scope and power of which is greatly expanded by algorithmic media.
Find the full issue here.
Today I have a short piece in Outland on AI art and its embodied processing, as part of a larger suite of articles curated by Mark Amerika.
The essay offers a first taste of something I’m developing at the moment on the phenomenology of AI and the role of aesthetics as first philosophy in the contemporary world — or, AI aesthetics as the necessary foundation of AI ethics.
The new issue of Senses of Cinema is out now with a special dossier on “The Geometry of Movement: Computer-Generated Imagery in Film,” edited by Luise Morke and Jack Seibert. The dossier is full of exciting articles, and it also includes my piece on “DeepFakes and the (Un)Gendering of the Flesh” — which previews some of what’s in store in my forthcoming book Post-Cinematic Bodies.
Recently, at long last, the 2020 edition of Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture, a special issue “On the Philosophy of Computer Games,” came out — followed immediately by the 2021 issue, so you might have missed it!
Included, among other things, is my article “Gaming and the ‘Parergodic’ Work of Seriality in Interactive Digital Environments,” which begins the work of reading seriality in a double register, as both a medial and a social phenomenon (following Sartre’s late work in the Critique of Dialectical Reason, among others).
Be sure also to check out Doug Stark’s excellent “Training for the Military? Some Historical Considerations Towards a Media Philosophical Computer Game Philosophy”!
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.
A new issue of Media Fields Journal is out, titled “At the Edge” and edited by Jeremy Moore and Nicole Strobel. There is a lot of great work in here, which I look forward to digging into.
I am happy to have contributed a short piece called “Edge Detection,” which departs from the sex scene in Blade Runner 2049 to think about computer vision, DeepFakes, and human/technological interfaces and their impact on perception more generally.
The latest issue of NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies has just come out. As always, it is freely accessible as an open-access publication, and it is chock full of articles, reviews, audiovisual essays, and a special section on “Mapping.”
Among the feature articles is an article I co-authored with Ruth Mayer on “Border Crossings: Serial Figures and the Evolution of Media” — a text that outlines some of the topics we covered in our research project within the DFG Research Unit on “Popular Seriality” from 2010 – 2013. This is a slightly revised translation of a text that first appeared in German in Frank Kelleter’s edited collection Populäre Serialität: Narration – Evolution – Distinktion. Zum seriellen Erzählen seit dem 19. Jahrhundert. We are happy to see this text made available in English, and especially happy that it found a home at NECSUS, which is the perfect venue for this transatlantic and interdisciplinary kind of media studies work.
Check out the whole issue here!