Recently, I asked the participants in the independent studies course on “Digital Media and Humanities Research” to experiment a bit with presentation software, including the freely available Prezi — which the students running the “Profanity TV” blog did with very impressive results: here is their elaborate presentation on Quality TV. (And in case you missed it, make sure you check out their introductory “trailer” video for the site, which explains what the blog, i.e. their project for the course, is all about.)
Everyone knows “the duck-rabbit,” the figure seen above, which Wittgenstein elevated to the lovably cute and velvety philosophical icon of visual multistability. Well, Mr. Duck-Rabbit, meet your evil cousin, “Harmlos wirkender Rattentod” (Seemingly Harmless Rat-Death), as conceived by my son Ari:
Tomorrow (Wednesday, May 16, 2012, at 6:00 pm in room 615 of the Conti-Hochhaus), the Film & TV Reading Group will meet to discuss Steven Shaviro’s take on the “chaos cinema” debates (and his alternative idea of “post-continuity”). Felix Brinker will be moderating the discussion, which will center around a recent talk by Shaviro on the topic (which can be found on his blog, here: http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=1034).
For the independent studies course I’m directing this semester on the topic of “Digital Media and Humanities Scholarship,” three students have set up a nice looking blog, Bonfire of the Televised Profanities (or “Profanity TV” for short), which went online today. They’ve even put together a video “trailer” for the blog, which provides some context and gives a taste of what they’ll be doing there. Check it out!
Here’s the announcement I just received from Bernd Herzogenrath for an exciting conference coming up soon (May 31 – June 2, 2012) in Frankfurt. Be sure to click the link above for the conference program, list of speakers (including Bill Morrison, Thomas Köner, Lorenz Engell, and Hanjo Berressem), registration, and other info.
The 2012 media|matter conference reflects the increased interest in the material aspects of our culture, triggered by the material turn as postulated by Deleuze & Guattari, Varela & Maturana, Serres, and others. In consequence we will assess the implications of this blossoming field of research which focuses rather on what represents, than on what is represented.
The aim of our conference is to re-focus approaches in culture- and media-sciences and to open up and foster new, interdisciplinary perspectives and concepts towards a revised understanding of media. By highlighting the materiality of the medium and reading this very materiality as medium, questions occur: can content and form still be regarded as separate? Or shouldn’t we rather acknowledge that the matter of the medium affects the message that is conveyed and represented? Shouldn’t we consequently speak of informed matter and of materialized information?
In the same way, social- and cultural-sciences cannot ignore the findings of the life-sciences, especially in the fields of complexity-theory and non-linear systems. Thus this conference also intends to bring together artists and researchers from diverse disciplines with differing understandings of media and materiality, not only to create feedback-loops between natural- and cultural-sciences, but also to re-think the somewhat fuzzy concepts of nature and culture.
In chapter 6 of my dissertation, I ask: “what would it mean to think media beyond correlationism?” In the above video, a computer (or code) repeatedly asks another computer (or code): “What would it mean to think media non-correlationally?”
According to the (presumably human-generated) description of the video on YouTube, the famous “Eliza algorithm discusses about object oriented ontology with another code that selects sentences from a corpus of related material. Result is an object oriented (alien) version of Turing test.”
Interestingly, though not surprisingly, Eliza has no answer to the question of what it would mean to think media non-correlationally. She/it responds with other questions: “What comes to mind when you ask that?”, “Why do you ask?”, “Have you asked anyone else?”, or “Does that question interest you?” On the whole, fair questions, I suppose.
[Incidentally, I just googled the question as worded by the computer, i.e. “What would it mean to think media non-correlationally?”, to see what corpus the code is drawing on. Interestingly, it seems that those were in fact my own words, which I posted in a comment on Jussi Parikka’s blog Machinology back in December (his post here: “OOQ — Object-Oriented-Questions”). I’m intrigued now to know who posted the video — who the YouTube user TheTuib is, if in fact it’s a human person…]
Above, “Crosseyed and Painless” by the Talking Heads: this is the video which set the stage for Timothy Morton’s energetic and thought-provoking talk at the Nonhuman Turn conference the other day (you can find a video of the complete talk here, and the slides are posted on Morton’s blog here). The music video itself is amazing enough to warrant posting it here separately, though, and I am quite sympathetic to Morton’s rereading of its so-called “postmodernism” in terms of an awareness of the nonhumans that are progressively reshaping our world (in the guises of capital and ecological disaster, for example, but also media changes). Enjoy!
Plenary talk by Mark Hansen, recorded May 5, 2012, at the “Nonhuman Turn” conference at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Center for 21st Century Studies.
