medieninitiative

As a late addition to the program, the Duke S-1 Speculative Sensation Lab will be participating in “Conversations in the Digital Humanities” this coming Friday, October 2, 2015, at the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke. The event, which will consist of a series of brief “lightning talks” on a range of topics that run the gamut of current DH work, will take place from 2:00-6:00pm in the FHI Garage in Smith Warehouse, Bay 4. More info here: Conversations in the Digital Humanities.

Here is the abstract for the S-1 Lab’s presentation, which I will be participating in along with Lab co-director Mark Olson and our resident programmer Luke Caldwell:

“Things to Think With”: Weird DH, Data, and Experimental Media Theory

S-1 Speculative Sensation Lab

The S-1 Speculative Sensation Lab, co-directed by Mark Hansen and Mark Olson, experiments with biometric and environmental sensing technologies to expand our access to sensory experience beyond the five senses. Much of our work involves making “things to think with,” i.e. experimental “set-ups” designed to generate theoretical and aesthetic insight and to focus our mediated sensory apparatus on the conditions of mediation itself. Harnessing digital technologies for the work of media theory, this experimentation can rightly be classed, alongside such practices as “critical making,” in the broad space of the digital humanities. But due to their emphatically self-reflexive nature, these experiments challenge borders between theory and practice, scholarship and art, and must therefore be qualified, following Mark Sample, as decidedly “weird DH.”

In this presentation, we discuss a current project that utilizes consumer-grade EEG headsets, in conjunction with a custom Python script by lab member Luke Caldwell, to reflect on the contemporary shape of “attention,” as it is constructed and addressed in individual and networked forms across media ranging from early cinema to “post-cinema.”