Tag: video

The Algorithmic Nickelodeon

Yesterday was the first event on my trip to Germany and Switzerland: the symposium Videographic Criticism: Aesthetics and Methods of the Video Essay, organized by Kathleen Loock, and with talks/screenings from her, Allison de Fren, Chloé Galibert-Laîné and Kevin B. Lee, Liz Greene, David Verdeure, and myself.

Above, you will find my video contribution, “The Algorithmic Nickelodeon,” which builds on work started at the Duke S-1: Speculative Sensation Lab during my time there as a postdoc. The video is offered as proof-of-concept for an experimental approach to videographic theory–using video not (only) as a vehicle for theoretical expression but as a more radically transductive medium of media-theoretical exploration and transformation.

“The Algorithmic Nickelodeon” at ACUD-Kino Berlin — Symposium on Videographic Criticism

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Next Friday, June 21, 2019, I am excited to present “The Algorithmic Nickelodeon,” a literally mind-bending EEG-powered videographic experiment, in the context of the symposium on “Videographic Criticism: Aesthetics and Methods of the Video Essay.”

The symposium, organized by Kathleen Loock, will take place at the ACUD-Kino in Berlin, and will bring together lots of leading practitioners of videographic scholarship to screen their work and discuss questions of aesthetics, methods, and theory.

The event is free and open to the public, so come by if you’re in the neighborhood!

Talks and Events in Norway, March 2019

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In the week of March 25 – 29, 2019, I will be giving several talks and workshops in Norway — first at the Deapartment of Art And Media Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, and then at the Department of Nordic and Media Studies at the University of Agder in Kristiansand.

First, in Trondheim, on March 26 and 27, I will be participating on two workshops on videographic pedagogy and scholarship with Kathleen Loock.

Then, on March 28, also in Trondheim, I’ll be presenting work from my book project Discorrelated Images.

Finally, on March 29, in Kristiansand, I’ll be giving a talk on contemporary horror, also under the perspective of discorrelation.

Thanks to Julia Leyda for inviting me to Trondheim, and to Ahmet Gürata for the invitation to Kristiansand!

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Video: Desktop Horror at Merz-Akademie Stuttgart

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On December 18, 2018, I gave a talk titled “Desktop Horror” at the Merz-Akademie in Stuttgart. The talk was live-streamed, and a video is now available on the Merz-Akademie website. Thanks again to Kevin B. Lee for the kind invitation, and to his students Jasmin Rahman and Nik König for the entertaining intro video, which you’ll see at the beginning of the video. (Note that there are some sound problems — fittingly, audio glitches and feedback — at the beginning of my talk, but they clear up after about three minutes.)

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Videographic Criticism as Digital Research Practice — Dec. 20 at JFK Insitute, Berlin

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On Thursday, December 20, 2018 (2-4pm) at the JFK Institute at the Freie Universität Berlin, Kathleen Loock and I will be discussing “Videographic Criticism as Digital Research Practice.” Hoping to see some Berlin-based friends there!

Jason Mittell: “Videographic Deformations: How (and Why) to Break Your Favorite Films” — Oct. 10, 2018

 

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In conjunction with the exhibition Videographic Frankenstein (Sept. 26 – Oct. 26, 2018 in The Dr Sidney & Iris Miller Discussion Space, McMurtry Building, Stanford), television scholar and video essayist Jason Mittell (Middlebury College) will deliver a public lecture titled “Videographic Deformations: How (and Why) to Break Your Favorite Films.”

The lecture, which takes place at 5:30pm on October 10, 2018 in Oshman Hall (McMurtry Building), is in conversation with Frankenstein’s Television, Mittell’s contribution to the exhibition, and with a broader set of methodological concerns around the idea of “deformative” methods:

Deformative criticism has emerged as an innovative site of critical practice within media studies and digital humanities, revealing new insights into media texts by “breaking” them in controlled or chaotic ways. Media scholars are particularly well situated to such experimentation, as many of our objects of study exist in digital forms that lend themselves to wide-ranging manipulation. Building on Jason Mittell’s experiments with Singin’ in the Rain and his “Frankenstein’s Television” video (included in Stanford’s Videographic Frankenstein exhibit), this presentation discusses a range of deformations applied to film and television, considering what we can learn by breaking a media text in creative and unexpected ways.

Jason Mittell is Professor of Film & Media Culture and American Studies, and founder of the Digital Liberal Arts Initiative at Middlebury College. His books include Complex Television: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling (NYU Press, 2015), The Videographic Essay: Criticism in Sound and Image (with Christian Keathley; caboose books, 2016), and co-editor of How to Watch Television (with Ethan Thompson; NYU Press, 2013). He is project manager for [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies, co-director of the NEH-supported workshop series Scholarship in Sound & Image, and a Fellow at the Peabody Media Center.

See here for more information.

Criticism in Moving Images: The Video Essay in Theory and Practice (Sydney)

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“Criticism in Moving Images: The Video Essay in Theory and Practice” is the first of three events I’ll be involved in during a trip next month to Australia. On September 5 at the Power Institute (University of Sydney), Conor Bateman and I will present and discuss videographic work in conversation with Susan Potter:

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See here for more info, and register here.

On Display: Immemory, Soft Cinema, After Video

About two years ago, the exhibition On Display: Immemory, Soft Cinema, After Video at Bilkent University in Ankara brought together projects by Chris Marker, Lev Manovich, and the contributors to the “video book” after.video — including the collaborative AR piece “Scannable Images” that Karin Denson and I made. Recently, Oliver Lerone Schultz (one of the editors of after.video) brought to my attention this “critical tour” of the exhibition, which takes the form of a discussion between Ersan Ocak and Andreas Treske. It is audio only, and you might need to turn up the volume a bit, but it’s an interesting discussion of video and media art.

(See here for more on after.video. Also, I should note that the AR on “Scannable Images” is currently not working due to the ephemeral business models of AR platforms these days, but I hope to port it over to a new platform and get it up and running again soon!)

Virtual and Augmented Reality Digital (and/or Deformative?) Humanities Institute at Duke

I am excited to be participating in the the NEH-funded Virtual and Augmented Reality Digital Humanities Institute — or V/AR-DHI — next month (July 23 – August 3, 2018) at Duke University. I am hoping to adapt “deformative” methods (as described by Mark Sample following a provocation from Lisa Samuels and Jerome McGann) as a means of transformatively interrogating audiovisual media such as film and digital video in the spaces opened up by virtual and augmented reality technologies. In preparation, I have been experimenting with photogrammetric methods to reconstruct the three-dimensional spaces depicted on two-dimensional screens. The results, so far, have been … modest — nothing yet in comparison to artist Claire Hentschker’s excellent Shining360 (2016) or Gregory Chatonsky’s The Kiss (2015). There is something interesting, though, about the dispersal of the character Neo’s body into an amorphous blob and the disappearance of bullet time’s eponymous bullet in this scene from The Matrix, and there’s something incredibly eerie about the hidden image behind the image in this famous scene from Frankenstein, where the monster’s face is first revealed and his head made virtually to protrude from the screen through a series of jump cuts. Certainly, these tests stand in an intriguing (if uncertain) deformative relation to these iconic moments. In any case, I look forward to seeing where (if anywhere) this leads, and to experimenting further at the Institute next month.