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Conversations in the Digital Humanities at Duke

Today, Oct. 2, 2015, the Franklin Humanities Institute, the Wired! Lab, the PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge, and HASTAC@Duke will be presenting “Conversations in the Digital Humanities,” the inaugural event of the new Digital Humanities Initiative at Duke University. More information about the event, in which I will be participating alongside colleagues from the S-1: Speculative Sensation Lab, can be found on the FHI website.

Also, all of the 10-minute “lightning talks” will be live-streamed. The first block of sessions, from 2:15-3:45pm EST, will be streamed here, and the second block, from 4:00-5:40pm, will be viewable here. (Apparently, the videos will be archived and available after the fact as well.)

Here is the complete schedule:

2:00 – 2:15
Welcome and Introduction to Digital Humanities Initiative

2:15 – 3:45
Session 1 (10 minutes per talk)

Project Vox (Andrew Janiak, and Liz Milewicz)

NC Jukebox (Trudi Abel, Victoria Szabo)

Visualizing Cultures: The Shiseido Project (Gennifer Weisenfeld)

Going Global in Mughal India (Sumathi Ramaswamy)

Israel’s Occupation in the Digital Age (Rebecca Stein)

Digital Athens: Archaeology meets ArcGIS (Tim Shea, Sheila Dillon)

Early Medieval Networks (J. Clare Woods)

3:45 – 4:00
Coffee Break

4:00 – 5:40
Session 2 (10 minutes per talk)

Painting the Apostles – A Case Study in “The Lives of Things” (Mark Olson, Mariano Tepper, and Caroline Bruzelius)

Digital Archaeology: From the Field to Virtual Reality (Maurizio Forte)

The Memory Project (Luo Zhou)

Veoveo, children at play (Raquel Salvatella de Prada)

“Things to Think With”: Weird DH, Data, and Experimental Media Theory (S-1 Lab)

s_traits, Generative Authorship and the Emergence Lab (Bill Seaman and John Supko)

Found Objects and Fireflies (Scott Lindroth)

Project Provoke (Mary Caton Lingold and others)

5:40 – 6:00
Reception

Hyperrhiz: Kits, Plans, and Schematics (Art Exhibit at Rutgers Camden)

I’m very proud to be a part of this art exhibition at the Digital Studies Center at Rutgers University Camden, which opens October 14 and serves also to launch the issue 13 of Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures. Data gnomes, data portraits, and other physical and augmented elements of Manifest Data, a project of the Duke S-1 Speculative Sensation Lab in collaboration with Karin Denson, will be on display alongside other contributions to this special issue on “Kits, Plans, and Schematics.”

From ‘Suture’ to ‘Scan’ in Paranormal Activity 3

My video essay “VHS Found Footage and the Material Horrors of Post-Cinematic Images” is now online over at In Media Res, where it kicks off a week of discussions on the topic of found-footage aesthetics. Take a look and join the conversation!

Gaming and the ‘Parergodic’ Work of Seriality in Interactive Digital Environments — Shane Denson

My abstract for the panel “Video Games’ Extra-Ludic Echoes” at SLSA 2015 in Houston:

“Gaming and the ‘Parergodic’ Work of Seriality in Interactive Digital Environments”

Shane Denson, Duke University and Leibniz University of Hannover

Twentieth-century serial figures like Tarzan, Frankenstein’s monster, or Sherlock Holmes enacted a “parergonal” logic; as plurimedial figures, they continually crossed the boundaries between print, film, radio, and televisual media, slipped in and out of their frames, and showed them – in accordance with a Derridean logic of the parergon – to be reversible. In the twenty-first century, the medial logics of serial figures have been transformed in conjunction with the rise of interactive, networked, and convergent digital media environments. A figure like Batman exemplifies this shift as the transition from a broadly “parergonal” to a specifically “parergodic” logic. The latter term builds upon Espen Aarseth’s notion of “ergodic” gameplay – where ergodics combines the Greek ergon (work) and hodos (path), thus positing nontrivial labor as the aesthetic mode of players’ engagement with games. These new, ergodic serial forms and functions, as embodied by a figure like Batman, raise questions about the blurring of relations between work and play, between paid labor and the incidental work culled from our entertainment practices. Following Batman’s transitions from comics to graphic novels, to the films of Tim Burton and Christopher Nolan, and on to the popular and critically acclaimed Arkham series of videogames, I will demonstrate that the dynamics of border-crossing which characterized earlier serial figures has now been re-functionalized in accordance with the ergodic work of navigating computational networks – in accordance, that is, with work and network forms that frame all aspects of contemporary life.

Complete Panel Video — Post-Cinema and/as Speculative Media Theory #SCMS15

On March 27, 2015, at the annual conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies in Montreal, Steven Shaviro, Patricia Pisters, Adrian Ivakhiv, and Mark B. N. Hansen participated in a panel I organized on “Post-Cinema and/as Speculative Media Theory.” It was standing room only, and many people were unable to squeeze into the room (some images are posted here). Thankfully, all of the presenters agreed to have their talks recorded on video and archived online.

(I have posted these videos here before, but for the sake of convenience I wanted to pull them together in a single post, so that the entire panel is available in one place.)

Above, you’ll find my brief general introduction to the panel, and below the four presentations:

Steven Shaviro’s proposal for a “Cinema 3.0”: the rhythm-image (following Deleuze’s movement-image and time-image)

Patricia Pisters, whose own proposal for a third image-type she calls the “neuro-image,” on the politics of post-cinema

Adrian Ivakhiv on the material, ecological dimensions of (post-)cinema in the Anthropocene and/or Capitalocene

Mark B. N. Hansen on the microtemporal and sub-perceptual dimensions of digital, post-cinematic images

Finally, you can look forward to hearing more from the panel participants, all of whom are contributing to an open-access collection titled Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film, co-edited by myself and Julia Leyda (forthcoming this year from REFRAME Books). More details soon, so stay tuned!

Video: Post-Cinema and/as Speculative Media Theory, Part 5: Mark B. N. Hansen, “Speculative Protention” — #SCMS15

Above, Mark B. N. Hansen’s talk “Speculative Protention, or, Are 21st Century Media Agents of Futurity” — the last 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.

Video: Post-Cinema and/as Speculative Media Theory, Part 4: Adrian Ivakhiv, “Speculative Ecologies of (Post)Cinema” — #SCMS15

Above, Adrian Ivakhiv’s talk “Speculative Ecologies of (Post)Cinema, or, The Art of Morphogenesis: Cinema in & beyond the Capitalocene” — the fourth 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: Mark B. N. Hansen. Stay tuned!

Network Ecologies Arts in the Edge

Poster for the Network Ecologies exhibition, which pairs Rebecca Norton‘s affine geometry-based work with the data-driven, generative, and AR-enhanced pieces that Karin and I have assembled under the title “Making Mining Networking.”

Opening event next Monday, April 20, 2015:

Full Schedule
All events in the Edge Workshop Room unless otherwise specified

2:00: Exhibit Opens (Edge Open Lab), Artists available for questions

3:00 Formal events begin: Welcome & Introduction

3:30 Artist Talk, Shane + Karin Denson + Q&A
4:00 Artist Talk, Rebecca Norton + Q&A

4:30 Mini Hands-on Digital Arts Workshop with Artist Rebecca Norton – make your own digital affine image!

Reception to follow.

Register: http://tinyurl.com/edge-netcologies
#netcologies

More info here: http://sites.duke.edu/digital/training-events/

Video: Post-Cinema and/as Speculative Media Theory, Part 2: Steven Shaviro, “The Rhythm-Image” — #SCMS15

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!

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).