Above, Patricia Pisters’s talk “The Filmmaker as Metallurgist” — the third 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.
See here for more information and a general introduction to the panel.
Up next: Adrian Ivakhiv. Stay tuned!
This piece collects a variety of images circulating online and thinks about the status of what Hito Steyerl calls “the poor image.” Of particular interest is the conjunction of technological, political, socio-economic, and aesthetic facets, factors, and practices that Steyerl identifies in her provocative essay on the subject. Significantly, Steyerl breaks with both nostalgic or backwards-looking approaches to the “end” or “death” of cinema and with the one-sided celebration of a so-called “participatory culture,” which tends to ignore the capitalist framework within which fan-based acts of appropriation and expansion are themselves appropriated as “immaterial labor” in the service of big-business entertainment franchises. This project seeks to highlight the ambivalent status of the poor image, utilizing techniques of datamoshing and databending, themselves fan-based techniques for image impoverishment that have also been employed in high-profile projects (e.g. big-budget music videos) and projects with a high-cultural cachet (e.g. gallery art).
In order to question the confluence of technical and socio-economic/political considerations at work in the poor image while avoiding too much editorial interference or interpretation on my part, the video above works generatively – drawing materials from YouTube and collating them according to the itinerary dictated by the search results for the term “poor image.” That is, the first 44 search results (from a query conducted on April 8, 2015) are cycled three times, in the order of their appearance in the list of results – initially taking the first ten seconds of each clip, then the next five, and finally the next second. After combining the images, in this order, all I-frames were removed (so-called “datamoshing”), thus establishing unexpected – and, I think, interesting and sometimes telling – connections between the clips.
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
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!
Above, Steven Shaviro’s talk “The Rhythm-Image” — the second 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.
See here for more information and a general introduction to the panel.
Up next: Patricia Pisters. Stay tuned!
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).
On April 23-24, 2015, I will be participating in the conference “Thinking Serially: Repetition, Continuation, Adaptation,” hosted by the Department of Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center, CUNY. You can find the full program here, and here is the abstract for the talk I’ll be giving:
Ludic Serialities: Levels of Serialization in Digital Games and Gaming Communities
Shane Denson (Duke University, Program in Literature)
In this paper, I outline several layers of seriality that are operative in and around the medium of digital games. Some of these resemble pre-digital forms of popular seriality, as they have been articulated in commercial entertainments since the nineteenth century; others would seem to be unique to digital formats and the ludic forms of interactivity they facilitate. Thus, the “inter-ludic” seriality of sequels, remakes, and spinoffs that constitute popular game franchises are recognizable in terms of the (predominantly narrative) seriality that has characterized serialized novels, films serials, television series, cinematic remakes and blockbuster trilogies. But these franchises also give rise to “para-ludic” forms of seriality that are more squarely at home in the digital age: games form parts of larger transmedia franchises, which depend in many ways on the infrastructure of the Internet to support exchanges among fans. On the other hand, games also articulate low-level “intra-ludic” serialities through the patterns of repetition and variation that characterize game “levels” and game engines. These serialized patterns are often non-narrative in nature, manifesting themselves in the embodied rhythms instantiated as players interface with games; they therefore challenge the traction of pre-digital conceptions and point to what would appear an unprecedented form of “infra-ludic” serialization at the level of code and hardware. Interestingly, however, such ultra-low-level serialities remain imbricated with the high-level seriality of socio-cultural exchange; levels of code and community cross, for example, in highly serialized modding communities.
This presentation takes a comparative approach in order to identify historical, cultural, and medial specificities and overlaps between digital and pre-digital forms of seriality. Besides outlining the levels of seriality described above, I will also look at methodological challenges for studying these new forms, as well as several approaches (including both close and “distant” forms of reading) designed to meet these challenges.
Bibliography:
Boluk, Stephanie, and Patrick LeMieux. “Hundred Thousand Billion Fingers: Seriality and Critical Game Practices.” Leonardo Electronic Almanac 17.2 (2012): 10-31. http://www.leoalmanac.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/LEAVol17No2- BolukLemieux.pdf
Denson, Shane, and Andreas Jahn-Sudmann. “Digital Seriality: On the Serial Aesthetics and Practice of Digital Games.” Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture 7.1 (2013): 1-32. http://www.eludamos.org/index.php/eludamos/article/view/vol7no1-1/7-1-1- pdf
Denson, Shane, and Andreas Jahn-Sudmann, eds. Digital Seriality. Special issue. Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture 8.1 (2014). http://www.eludamos.org/index.php/eludamos/issue/view/vol8no1
Kelleter, Frank, ed. Populäre Serialität: Narration – Evolution – Distinktion. Zum seriellen Erzählen seit dem 19. Jahrhundert. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2012.
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…
Standing room only in "Post-Cinema and/as Speculative Media Theory" #scms15 pic.twitter.com/UTNp85YnX4
— Matthew Payne (@Ludology) March 27, 2015
Here are a few images, all taken from Twitter, from the “Post-Cinema and/as Speculative Media Theory” panel that I chaired this morning, bright and early at 9am.
Full house! Looks like @shaviro is 1 popular dude && #postcinema is hottest topic in a cinema conference #SCMS15 pic.twitter.com/80ltDuDX1b
— Kevin B. Lee (@alsolikelife) March 27, 2015
Despite the early hour, people came out in droves to see Steven Shaviro, Patricia Pisters, Adrian Ivakhiv, and Mark Hansen.
Crowd overflow at the post-cinema & media theory panel!! pic.twitter.com/gLha5CC1Ts
— JCMS @ SCMS (@JCMS_SCMS) March 27, 2015
Though I could not see it from my vantage point, people were even standing outside the room to hear these rich and energetic papers!
Some post-cinema of my own from the post-cinema K7 panel @ #scms15. https://t.co/7H9emKHS0j
— wjrcbrown (@wjrcbrown) March 27, 2015
And a little meta-post-cinema…
Finally, if you couldn’t make it, couldn’t see the speakers, couldn’t hear them, or couldn’t follow all the intricacies of their very rich and theoretically dense papers this morning, you may be interested to know that the entire panel was videotaped and will be available here soon!
Karin and Shane Denson, “Sculpting Data (& Painting Networks)” — teaser video.