Online now: Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal’s discussion with me and Brooke Belisle about our books Post-Cinematic Bodies and Depth Effects. Check it out!
Category: Video
“Why Are Things So Weird?” — Kevin Munger on Flusser’s COMMUNICOLOGY
I just stumbled upon this interesting looking video response from Kevin Munger to Vilém Flusser’s Communicology: Mutations in Human Relations?, which appeared in the “Sensing Media” book series that I edit with Wendy Chun for Stanford University Press.
The above (posted on Twitter here) is an excerpt of a longer video accessible if you subscribe to the New Models Patreon or Substack. I haven’t subscribed, so I’m 100% sure what to expect, but it looks provocative!
Video: Erich Hörl, “The Disruptive Condition” (Oct. 5, 2022 at Digital Aesthetics Workshop)
We’re still getting used to the hybrid setup, so the framing isn’t always great, but I’m happy to share the video of Erich Hörl’s talk at the Digital Aesthetics Workshop: “The Disruptive Condition.”
SCREENTIME: An Exhibition of Desktop Videos
On display from January 6 to January 27, 2022 in Stanford’s McMurtry Building (home of the Department of Art & Art History) is SCREENTIME: An Exhibition of Desktop Videos.
The exhibition grows out of a collaboration between Stanford and Occidental College — between Shane Denson’s class “The Video Essay: Writing with Video about Media and Culture” and Allison de Fren’s “The Video Essay,” both of which were taught in Fall 2021.
Students in each class met online and worked through some of the more troubling aspects of online life, including online racism, radicalization, pornography, and politics. The resulting videos, all of which use the computer desktop as both a topic and a medium, reflect the troubled times of contemporary screentime, and the sonic cacophony in the exhibition space challenges viewers to come to terms with the ways that screens today compete for our attention.
Included in the exhibition are eleven remarkable videos:
I Love Kanye (2021) — D’Andre Jorge (sophomore, Stanford)
A Letter to My Younger Self, on the Dangers of the Internet (2021) — David Kolifrath (freshman, Occidental)
The Commercialization of Self Image (2021) — Ashton Berg (sophomore, Stanford)
Solace in Schadenfreude: r/HermanCainAward and Vaccine Misinformation (2021) — Tejas Narayanan (sophomore, Stanford)
A Brief Inquiry into Cultural Appropriation and Misogynoir Online (2021) — Micah Drigo (sophomore, Stanford)
Kids Content on YouTube (2021) — Finian Walsh (sophomore, Occidental)
Bots and Trolls and Hackers, Oh My! A Story of Russian Interference (2021) — Katherine Crandell (junior, Stanford)
Let’s Talk about Porn (2021) — Henry Liera (senior, Stanford)
Sustainable Brands and the Limits of “Radical Transparency” (2021) — Georgia Crawford (freshman, Occidental)
The Shallows of Hate (2021) — Ben Fischer (sophomore, Stanford)
Tiktok’s Devious Licks Trend (2021) — Zahir Choudhry (freshman, Occidental)
Video: Sensations of History and Discorrelated Images: James Hodge and Shane Denson in Conversation
Above, the complete video from the conversation on April 2, 2021 between James Hodge and myself about our new books, Sensations of History and Discorrelated Images. Co-sponsored by the Center for Global Culture and Communication at Northwestern University and the Linda Randall Meier Research Workshop on Digital Aesthetics at Stanford University.
Video: “Post-Cinematic Bodies” (Mercator Lecture, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt)
The video of my Mercator Lecture for the Configurations of Film Graduiertenkolleg at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, “Post-Cinematic Bodies” (from November 23, 2020), is now online. Hope you enjoy!
Videos of Two Recent Book-Related Talks
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.
Complete Video of Rendered Worlds: New Regimes of Imaging
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.
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 Algorithmic Nickelodeon featured in Sight & Sound’s Best Video Essays of 2019
The Algorithmic Nickelodeon from Shane Denson on Vimeo.
Several weeks ago, Sight & Sound Magazine’s “Best Video Essays of 2019” came out, featuring 134 videos nominated by 39 contributors — including my “Algorithmic Nickelodeon” piece, picked by Jiří Anger from Charles University in Prague. He writes:
Despite its formal shortcomings, this must be one of the most thought-provoking videographic works I have seen. Denson’s theoretical manifesto imagines a form of audiovisual criticism that would not be merely expressive but transformative, reinventing our notion of subject-object relations. For this to happen, deformations of the image/object and displacements of the analyst/subject must take place simultaneously. Creative thinking joins forces with EEG headsets and editing programmes to create a media-theoretical ‘perpetuum mobile’, designed for constant questioning of what cinema means in the age of algorithms.
I am honored to have my work featured alongside many fascinating videos, many of which were made by friends and colleagues of mine (including especially noteworthy pieces by Chloé Galibert-Laîné, Kathleen Loock, Jason Mittell, Tracy Cox-Stanton, as well as Allison de Fren’s piece “Mad Science/Mad Love and the Female Body in Pieces,” which I commissioned for the Videographic Frankenstein exhibition at Stanford and published last year in Hyperrhiz).
By the way, I agree completely with Anger’s assessments of my video’s “formal shortcomings,” which stand out all the more against the background of all the excellent and polished work featured in the poll. In fact, my video was conceived and produced as a very rough proof-of-concept for a symposium organized by Kathleen Loock in Berlin last year (where I had hoped to do a live demo of the setup but was unable to due to technical limitations in the venue). A more polished video for the project is currently being planned, but in the meantime I’m quite happy with Anger’s assessment of it as “one of the most thought-provoking videographic works”!