Beyond the Screen is an exhibition of desktop videos made by students in my Fall 2023 course on “The Video Essay.” The show, featuring three collaboratively made videos, is up from January 22-February 2, 2024 in the McMurtry Building (home of the Department of Art & Art History) at Stanford University.
Featured are:
Escape, by Karla Aguilar, Eric Wang, and Roisin Willis (14:52)
Pixilated Mimicry, by Lauren Boles and Michael Hemker (15:10)
Crypto Crisis, by Sheryl Hsu and Nathaniel Begay (12:40)
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)
I am happy to announce Amalgamate, an exhibition of videos made by students in my course on “The Video Essay” (Fall 2019). Works range from analytical to experimental, with activist impulses and cinephilic sensitivities sprinkled throughout. The show runs from January 10-31, 2020 in the Gunn Foyer, McMurtry Building, at Stanford.
The exhibition catalog for APPROXIMATELY 800cm3 of PLA, curated by Gabriel Menotti at last year’s Center for 21st Century Studies conference on The Ends of Cinema (May 3-5, 2018 at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) is now online.
Among the pieces featured was DataGnomeKD1.stl, a generative/deformative 3D-printed garden gnome that Karin Denson and I made a couple of years ago in the context of a larger project at the Duke S-1: Speculative Sensation Lab. (You can check out our publication here.)
Thanks to Gabriel Menotti for putting together this playful show!
I am excited to announce that the Videographic Frankenstein exhibit, which ran September 26 – November 2, 2018 at Stanford, lives on in an online version — out now in Hyperrhiz 19! There you will find 10 video works on various facets of Frankenstein‘s moving-image legacy, from early film to television and digital animation, along with creators’ statements that reflect on this history and its relations to videographic scholarship, among other monstrosities.
Thanks again to the Stanford Medicine and the Muse Frankenstein@200 Initiative and the Stanford Department of Art & Art History and Program in Film & Media Studies for their generous support of the project.
Thanks also to Helen Burgess, editor at Hyperrhiz, for entertaining the notion of publishing an exhibition of creative and scholarly videos, and for working with me to find the right format.
And thanks, finally, to the contributors for all their hard work: Matthew Fishel, Jason Mittell, Allison de Fren, David Verdeure, Carlos Valladares, Lester Friedman, Kristine Vann, and Spencer Slovic!
Also, be sure to check out the full issue of Hyperrhiz, which is chock full of more excellent scholarly and creative work!
There is a short article in today’s Stanford News about the Scholars Select exhibition that’s on right now until until April 14 at Green Library. The centerpiece of the article is this set of pictures by University Photographer Linda A. Cicero, who shot a selection of scholars and their objects. Each image links to the short statement that the faculty member prepared about their object. Take a look!
For the Scholars Select Exhibit at Stanford’s Green Library — in commemoration of the library’s 100th anniversary — I was asked to choose an object from Special Collections and write something about its significance for my work. I chose a letter to Bob Leedom contained in the September 1974 issue of the People’s Computer Company newsletter, published around the corner in Menlo Park:
The letter discusses Super Star Trek, a game I have written about in “Digital Seriality: On the Serial Aesthetics and Practice of Digital Games” (co-authored with Andreas Sudmann). Here, in much more condensed form, is what I wrote about it for the exhibition:
And here’s the letter itself:
You can find the full issue of the People’s Computer Company online, through the Stanford Libraries website: here.
Check out the full exhibition, which will be on display January 24 – April 19, 2019. More info here.
The Videographic Frankenstein exhibition at Stanford came to a close today, but like any good monster its demise is only temporary… On November 8, 2018, the show will be resurrected in the form of an augmented reality pop-up exhibition at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., as part of an event called “Playtest: An Open House for Emerging Media in the Digital Humanities” organized by Tahir Hemphill.
Incidentally, the Library of Congress has just made a beautiful new restoration of Thomas Edison’s 1910 Frankenstein available here.
Check it out!
The Videographic Frankenstein exhibition has been extended an additional week, until November 2, 2018! If you’re in the Bay Area and haven’t been able to check it out, you’ve still got (a little) time!
See here for more details, and stay tuned for a few related events/developments!
Videographic Frankenstein–the exhibition that I am curating at Stanford–opens today. The show runs from Sept. 26 through Oct. 26, 2018 in the Dr. Sidney and Iris Miller Discussion Space, McMurtry Building.
Works featured:
Frankenstein (2018), 2018
Matthew Fishel
Silent Animation LoopSpark of Being, 2010
Bill Morrison
Found Footage Film, 1:07:11Frankenstein’s Television, 2018
Jason Mittell
Video, 10:02Mad Science/Love and the Body in Pieces, 2018
Allison de Fren
Video, 17:18The Meaning of “Animation” in Edison’s FRANKENSTEIN, 2017
Shane Denson
Video, 12:57Red, Not Blood: Godard, Frankenstein, and Eastman Red, 2018
Carlos Valladares
Video, 6:46Persona versus Frankenstein, 2015
David Verdeure, a.k.a. Filmscalpel
Video, 4:15On Galvanism: Electricity, Frankenstein, and the Moving Image, 2018
Spencer Slovic
Video, 7:30Sight and Sound Conspire: Monstrous Audio-Vision in James Whale’s FRANKENSTEIN (1931), 2015
Shane Denson
Video, 8:47Questioning the Human Machine in EX MACHINA, 2016
Allison de Fren
Video, 10:26Horror and Humor: Frankenstein’s Comic Offspring, 2018
Lester D. Friedman and Kristine Vann
Video, 17:38
The exhibition was made possible by a Frankenstein@200 Initiative grant from the Medicine and the Muse Program at Stanford.
More information about the exhibition can be found here.