Tag: Shane Denson

Making Mining Networking

MakingMiningNetworking-Poster-small On April 20, 2015, Karin and I will present our collaborative art project Making Mining Networking at the opening of the Network Ecologies exhibition at The Edge at Duke University. Also participating will be Rebecca Norton, whose work will make up the other half of the exhibition, which will be on display from April 20 until August 2015. We are very excited to show our work in this venue! (Stay tuned for the program of events on the 20th.) Above, our exhibit statement (scan the QR code for a brief video “user’s guide” that will give you a taste of what you can expect at the exhibit). Finally, here is the info about the exhibition posted on the Duke Libraries + Digital Scholarship website:

apr 20 Digital Studio KEYNOTE EVENT, Network Ecologies Arts in the Edge, Rebecca Norton & Karin + Shane Denson (The Edge, Bostock Library, Level 1, West Campus, Duke University campus map) The Network Ecologies Arts in the Edge exhibition will bring together two collaborative collections that will be featured in the Network Ecologies digital scalar publication. Combining machinic and human agencies in the form of generative sculpture, painting, and augmented reality (AR), the works by Karin + Shane Denson probe the material and virtual valences of “mining” in today’s networked ecology. Rebecca Norton uses affine geometry to explore actions and intuitions of intermediacy – what she describes as a feeling of being suspended in the middle stages of a process.  For this exhibition, Rebecca will be presenting a range of works, created in collaboration with Eddie Eliot, Erik S Guzman, and Kari Britta Lorenson, that include paintings, digital interactive artworks, and image stills from her current video project. This exhibition is an extension of Amanda Starling Gould’s multipart Ecology of Networks project which has already produced an online scholarly conversation (2012), a successful in-person Network_Ecologies Symposium at Duke University that featured keynotes Mark BN Hansen and Jussi Parikka (2013), a live-blogged digital scholarly publication design sprint and a second round of contribution accompanied by an innovative internal, ‘networked’ peer review process (2014), and plans to culminate in a multiauthored curated digital scalar publication, co-designed with Florian Wiencek, to be completed in winter 2015. The Ecology of Networks project has been sponsored by the Franklin Humanities Institute (FHI) and the Duke PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge, and generously supported by various Duke University departments. The core Network Ecologies Arts in the Edge exhibition will be open from April 20, 2015 – August 2015. On April 20, 2015 we will have an opening event with artist talks, hands-on demonstrations, and one-day exhibitions by our artists that will include a giant AR gnome, an AR treasure hunt, and a screening of a networked video that will be projected onto the walls of the Duke Edge Digital Research Commons. The Network Ecologies Arts in the Edge exhibition and event will be co-sponsored by the FHI, the Duke PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge, and Duke Digital Scholarship Services. Rebecca Norton: rebeccajnorton.com Shane Denson: medieninitiative.wordpress.com  Karin Denson: thenewkrass.wordpress.com For full event details, stay tuned here on our Duke Digital Scholarship Services Events Calendar. #netcologies

Audiovisualities Lab — Film Screening and Project Showcase

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On April 8, 2015, I will be participating in this event, hosted by the Duke Audiovisualities Lab. During the “project showcase” portion of the event, several of the people involved in Bill Seaman and John Supko‘s Generative Media Authorship seminar — including Eren Gumrukcuoglu, Aaron Kutnick, and myself — will be presenting generative works. I will be showing some of the databending/glitch-video work I’ve been doing lately (see, for example, here and here). Refreshments and drinks will be served!

Video: Post-Cinema and/as Speculative Media Theory, Part 1 — #SCMS15

Above, the first of five videos documenting the “Post-Cinema and/as Speculative Media Theory” panel I chaired on March 27, 2015 at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies annual conference in Montreal.

The room was jam-packed with people (as you can see in the images here), and the panel was equally jam-packed with dense theoretical discussions of post-cinema. These videos are meant to compensate for the limited space and the limited time (and cognitive capacity) to process these thinkers’ ideas on the spot, preserving and opening their presentations to a wider audience.

This, the shortest of the videos, contains my introductory remarks outlining my overall rationale for organizing the panel.

Stay tuned for videos of talks by Steven Shaviro, Patricia Pisters, Adrian Ivakhiv, and Mark B. N. Hansen, which will be appearing here in the coming weeks (if you like, you can subscribe to the blog to make sure you don’t miss them; see the link on the upper right-hand side of the screen). In the meantime, you can read their abstracts here:

Steven Shaviro, “Reversible Flesh”

Patricia Pisters, “The Filmmaker as Metallurgist: Post-Cinema’s Commitment to Radical Contingency”

Adrian Ivakhiv, “Speculative Ecologies of (Post-)Cinema”

Mark B. N. Hansen, “Speculative Protention, or, Are 21st Century Media Agents of Futurity?”

Finally, you can look forward to contributions by all four speakers (and many more as well) to the open-access collection Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film, which I am currently co-editing with Julia Leyda for REFRAME Books (and which will be coming out later this year).

Sculpting Data (& Painting Networks) — Full Video

Above, a video explaining the collaborative art/theory work that my wife Karin and I have been doing lately — both as a part of the Duke S-1 Speculative Sensation Lab‘s Manifest Data project and in a spin-off project that will be going on display at Duke University next month. The video is being shown right now (at the time of this posting) at North Carolina State University — at the 6th annual AEGS conference “How do you do humanities?,” where Karin is representing the two of us and presenting alongside Amanda Starling Gould, Luke Caldwell, Libi Striegl, and David Rambo.

Wish I could be there, but I’ve got another panel here at SCMS in Montreal today…

#SCMS15 — Post-Cinema, Digital Seriality, and a Book Giveaway!

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Only two weeks until the 2015 Society for Cinema and Media Studies annual conference (March 25-29 in Montreal)! In case you haven’t seen it already, the official program is now up here (warning: opens as a PDF).

As I have posted before, I will be participating in two panels this year:

First, I will be serving as chair on the “Post-Cinema and/as Speculative Media Theory” panel (Session K7: Friday, March 27, 9:00 – 10:45am), for which I feel extremely lucky to have secured an all-star lineup of panelists: Steven Shaviro, Patricia Pisters, Adrian Ivakhiv, and Mark B. N. Hansen (click on each name to read the panelists’ abstracts). I also feel very honored that the Media and the Environment Special Interest Group has chosen this panel for official sponsorship!

Second, I will be co-presenting a paper on “Hardware Seriality” with my colleague Andreas Jahn-Sudmann in the “Digital Seriality” panel (Session Q20: Saturday, March 28, 3:00 – 4:45pm). Other panelists include Scott Higgins and Dominik Maeder (click for their abstracts). (Unfortunately, Daniela Wentz will not be able to attend the conference.)

Finally, just for fun: A BOOK GIVEAWAY! The first person to ask me (in person, during the conference) about my book Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface (excerpt here) will get a free copy! So be on the lookout!

Manifest Data @ Media Arts + Sciences Rendez-Vous

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This Thursday, March 5, 2015 (4:15pm, Bay 10, Smith Warehouse at Duke University), members of the S-1 Speculative Sensation Lab, including Amanda Starling Gould, Luke Caldwell, David Rambo, and myself, will be presenting our collaborative art/theory project Manifest Data. As usual, there will be drinks and light refreshments!

Network Ecologies Exhibition: Sneak Preview

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Above, a sneak peak at some of the work that Karin and I have been preparing for the Network Ecologies exhibition at The Edge, Duke University, April 20 – May 10, 2015. The paintings you see here are functioning QR codes (but the programming has not been finalized yet, hence the oblique presentation here). When finished, they will activate a variety of contents and scenarios that have to do with the theme of Network Ecologies. More info soon!

Emergence Lab at Duke Media Arts + Sciences Rendezvous

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This Thursday, February 26, 2015, the Emergence Lab (headed by media artist Bill Seaman and composer John Supko) will be taking over the Duke Media Arts + Sciences Rendezvous. If you don’t know their work already, be sure to check out Seaman and Supko’s collaborative album s_traits (also available on iTunes and elsewhere), which has been getting a lot of attention in the media lately — including a mention in the New York Times list of top classical recordings of 2014:

‘S_TRAITS’ Bill Seaman, media artist; John Supko, composer (Cotton Goods). This hypnotic disc is derived from more than 110 hours of audio sourced from field recordings, digital noise, documentaries and piano music. A software program developed by the composer John Supko juxtaposed samples from the audio database into multitrack compositions; he and the media artist Bill Seaman then finessed the computer’s handiwork into these often eerily beautiful tracks. VIVIEN SCHWEITZER

In their Generative Media Authorship seminar, which I have been auditing this semester, we have been exploring similar (and wildly different) methods for creating generative artworks and systems in a variety of media, including text, audio, and images in both analog and digital forms. The techniques and ideas we’ve been developing there have dovetailed nicely with the work that Karin Denson and I have been doing lately with the S-1 Lab as well (in particular, the generative sculpture and augmented reality pieces we’ve been making for the lab’s collaborative Manifest Data project). I have experimented with writing Markov chains in Python and javascript, turning text into sound, making sound out of images, and making movies out of all-of-the-above — and I have witnessed people with far greater skills than me do some amazing things with computers, cameras, numbers, books, and fishtanks!

On Thursday (at 4:15pm) several of us will be speaking about our generative experiments and works-in-progress. I will be talking about video glitches and post-cinema, as discussed in my two previous blog posts (here and here), while I am especially excited to see S-1 collaborator Aaron Kutnick‘s demonstration of his raspberry pi-based eidetic camera and to hear composer Eren Gumrukcuoglu‘s machine-based music. I also look forward to meeting Duke biology professor Sönke Johnsen and composer Vladimir Smirnov. All around, this promises to be a great event, so check it out if you’re in the area!