Tag: media theory

Speculative Data #WeirdDH #MLA16 #S107

storify-mla16

The “Weird DH” panel at MLA 2016 in Austin, chaired by Mark Sample, was great fun, and it generated quite a bit of discussion, both online and off. Luckily, Eileen Clancy preserved the twitter discussion in a Storify (https://storify.com/clancynewyork/weird-dh), so in case you couldn’t make it out last week, you can still catch up on some of the topics and reactions to the talks by Jeremy Justus, Micki Kaufman, Kim Knight, and myself.

(If I get around to it, I will also be posting the full text of my talk very soon.)

Conversations in the Digital Humanities at Duke

page-events-dhduke

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)

  1. Project Vox (Andrew Janiak, and Liz Milewicz)
  2. NC Jukebox (Trudi Abel, Victoria Szabo)
  3. Visualizing Cultures: The Shiseido Project (Gennifer Weisenfeld)
  4. Going Global in Mughal India (Sumathi Ramaswamy)
  5. Israel’s Occupation in the Digital Age (Rebecca Stein)
  6. Digital Athens: Archaeology meets ArcGIS (Tim Shea, Sheila Dillon)
  7. Early Medieval Networks (J. Clare Woods)

3:45 – 4:00
Coffee Break

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

  1. Painting the Apostles – A Case Study in “The Lives of Things” (Mark Olson, Mariano Tepper, and Caroline Bruzelius)
  2. Digital Archaeology: From the Field to Virtual Reality (Maurizio Forte)
  3. The Memory Project (Luo Zhou)
  4. Veoveo, children at play (Raquel Salvatella de Prada)
  5. “Things to Think With”: Weird DH, Data, and Experimental Media Theory (S-1 Lab)
  6. s_traits, Generative Authorship and the Emergence Lab (Bill Seaman and John Supko)
  7. Found Objects and Fireflies (Scott Lindroth)
  8. Project Provoke (Mary Caton Lingold and others)

5:40 – 6:00 
Reception

Things to Think With

mindwave2

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.”

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

PA3

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!

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 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).

A Few Post-Cinematic Images #SCMS15

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.

Despite the early hour, people came out in droves to see Steven Shaviro, Patricia Pisters, Adrian Ivakhiv, and Mark Hansen.

Though I could not see it from my vantage point, people were even standing outside the room to hear these rich and energetic papers!

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!

Post-Cinema After Extinction

2015-02-05 08.49.54 pm

The 2015 Annual C21 Conference (April 30 – May 2, 2015 at the Center for 21st Century Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee) will be devoted to the theme “After Extinction,” which can be thought from a variety of related perspectives. As the conference CFP put it:

C21’s conference After Extinction will pursue the question of what it means to come “after” extinction in three different but related senses.

1) In temporal terms, what comes after extinction, not only the event of extinction but also the concept? After we think extinction what comes next? Are there historical models or examples of what comes after? Can these past extinctions measure up to present day events, or do the possible scales on which extinction might operate today make such comparisons incompatible? Is extinction something that only happens belatedly, after there are already species or forms or practices in place, or does extinction work prior to the emergence of species, as generative of the evolution or emergence of any form of life or being? Is extinction terminal or can species return, a la Jurassic Park or European projects to restore the auroch or Przewalski’s horse?  Can dead or dying languages be revitalized?

2) In an epistemological sense, what does it mean for an image, graphic, text, video or film to “take after” the concept of extinction, to mediate it in such a way as to resemble or be mimetic of extinction. What is “after extinction” in the sense that a painting is “after O’Keeffe” or a child “takes after” its parent? In order to be recognized as coming after extinction an event or occasion must be seen as being related to extinction, to have been consequent or emergent from the event of extinction. Thus we mean to explore the premediation of future extinctions in a variety of formal and informal, print, audiovisual, and networked media.  What forms of knowledge emerge in such anticipatory pursuits?

3) In spatial terms, what will remain physically after extinction?  Extinction is not simply death or absence but a geophysical event that occurs in space.  What does it mean to pursue extinction, to go “after” it with technologies and scientific techniques of making extinction legible by premediating its possible occurrence through climate change modeling or pandemic forecasting?  How should one act “after extinction” in order to plan for, prevent, or preempt the end of crucial life forms, for example, by establishing seed banks or stockpiling DNA? How does the extinction of one species threaten the lifeblood of the entire biosphere (e.g., the impact of bee colony collapse on particular flora and fauna as well as on human practices like agriculture)?  Have new artifacts surfaced either as sentinels or fossils of extinction (e.g., animal carcasses washed up on shore filled with plastic, or mutant plants in irradiated nuclear test fields)? Even if extinction has always been thought of as impacting a larger ecology, has the scale of risk changed in light of the accelerated networks of the 21st century?

I am very happy to have the opportunity to return to Milwaukee this year in order to pursue these questions at what promises to be another great C21 event! My own paper, which was just accepted, will focus on questions of extinction in relation to the concept of post-cinema.

Here is my abstract:

Post-Cinema after Extinction

Shane Denson

In this presentation, I argue that contemporary, digital moving-image media – what some critics have come to see as properly “post-cinematic” media – are related materially, culturally, and conceptually to extinction as their experiential horizon. Materially and technologically, post-cinema emerges as a set of aesthetic responses to the real or imagined extinction of film qua celluloid or to the death of cinema qua institution of shared reception. Significantly, however, such animating visions of technocultural transformation in the wake of the demise of a formerly dominant media regime are linked in complex ways to another experience of extinction: that of the human. That is, post-cinema is involved centrally in the (pre-)mediation of an experience of the world without us – both thematically, e.g. in films about impending or actual extinction events, and formally, in terms of a general “discorrelation” of moving images from the norms of human embodiment that governed classical cinema. Such discorrelation is evidenced in violations of classical continuity principles, for example, but it is anchored more fundamentally in a disruption of phenomenological relations established by the analogue camera. Digital cameras and algorithmic image-processing technologies confront us with images that are no longer calibrated to our embodied senses, and that therefore must partially elude or remain invisible to the human. Anticipating and intimating the eradication of human perception, post-cinema is therefore “after extinction” even before extinction takes place: it envisions and transmits affective clues about a world without us, a world beyond “correlationism,” that arises at the other end of the Anthropocene – or that we inhabit already.

Bibliography:

Denson, Shane, and Julia Leyda, eds. Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film. Sussex: REFRAME Books, forthcoming.

Kara, Selmin. “Beasts of the Digital Wild: Primordigital Cinema and the Question of Origins.” Sequence 1.4 (2014).

Shaviro, Steven. Post-Cinematic Affect. Winchester: Zero Books, 2009.

Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992.

_____. “The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Photographic, Cinematic, and Electronic Presence.” Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 2004. 135-162.

“Post-Cinema and/as Speculative Media Theory” — Panel at #SCMS15 in Montreal

post-cinema-glitch

[UPDATE: Full video of the complete panel is now online: here.]

At the upcoming conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (March 25-29, 2015 in Montréal), I will be chairing a panel on “Post-Cinema and/as Speculative Media Theory,” which brings together four of the most significant voices in the ongoing attempt to theorize our current media situation: Steven Shaviro, Patricia Pisters, Adrian Ivakhiv, and Mark B. N. Hansen.

(Not quite incidentally, all four speakers are also contributors to the forthcoming volume Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film, which I am co-editing with Julia Leyda.)

Here is the panel description, along with links (below) to the abstracts for the various papers:

Post-Cinema and/as Speculative Media Theory

Following debates over “the end” of film and/or cinema in the wake of the massive digitalization of moving-image media, recent film theory has begun considering the emergence of a new, properly “post-cinematic” media regime (cf. Shaviro 2010; Denson and Leyda, forthcoming). The notion of post-cinema takes up the problematic prefix “post-,” which debates over postmodernism and postmodernity taught us to treat not as a marker of definitive beginnings and ends, but as indicative of a more subtle shift or transformation in the realm of culturally dominant aesthetic and experiential forms (cf. Jameson 1991). In the context of post-cinema, this suggests not so much a clear-cut break with traditional media forms but a transitional movement taking place along an uncertain timeline, following an indeterminate trajectory, and characterized by juxtapositions and overlaps between the techniques, technologies, and aesthetic conventions of “old” and “new” moving-image media.

The ambiguous temporality of the “post-,” which intimates a feeling both of being “after” something and of being “in the middle of” uncertain changes – hence speaking to the closure of a certain past as much as a radical opening of futurity – necessitates a speculative form of thinking that is tuned to experiences of contingency and limited knowledge. With respect to twenty-first century media, theories of post-cinema inherit this disposition, relating it to concrete media transformations while speculating more broadly about the effects they might have on us, our cognitive and aesthetic sensibilities, our agency, or our sense of history.

Bringing together several key figures in the theoretical discussions of post-cinema, this panel seeks to explore and expand this speculative dimension. Steven Shaviro looks at a recent FKA twigs music video as an encapsulation of the post-cinematic media regime at large, theorizing the speculative theoretical work done by the video itself. Patricia Pisters argues that post-cinematic appropriations of archival materials lead to a necessarily speculative revision of history. Adrian Ivakhiv brings the discussion into contact with pressing issues of ecological change. Finally, Mark B. N. Hansen offers a media-philosophical perspective on post-cinema as a future-oriented mode of experience. Together, these interventions articulate post-cinema’s media-technical, aesthetic, ecological, and philosophical vectors in order to develop an emphatically speculative media theory.

Bibliography:

Denson, Shane, and Julia Leyda. Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film. Sussex: REFRAME Books, forthcoming.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.

Shaviro, Steven. Post-Cinematic Affect. Winchester: Zero Books, 2010.

Chair Bio:

Shane Denson is a DAAD postdoctoral fellow at Duke University and a member of the research unit “Popular Seriality—Aesthetics and Practice.” He is the author of Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface (Transcript 2014) and co-editor of several collections: Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives (Bloomsbury, 2013), Digital Seriality (special issue of Eludamos, forthcoming), and Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st Century Film (REFRAME, forthcoming).

Finally, here are links to the individual abstracts:

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?”

[UPDATE: Full video of the complete panel is now online: here.]

Steven Shaviro, “Reversible Flesh” #SCMS15

fka-twigs-datamosh

[UPDATE: Full video of the complete panel is now online: here.]

Here is the abstract for Steven Shaviro’s paper on the panel “Post-Cinema and/as Speculative Media Theory” at the 2015 SCMS conference in Montréal:

Reversible Flesh

Steven Shaviro (Wayne State University)

FKA twigs has made a series of mesmerizing music videos over the last three years. My talk will concentrate on one of these, “Papi Pacify” (directed by FKA twigs and Tom Beard). The video deals starkly, but also obliquely, with issues of intimacy, trust, sexuality, and violence. The video is shot in continually shifting black and white, with glitter and flash effects, and composed entirely of close-ups of the faces and upper bodies of the artist (often staring directly at the camera) and her partner. The video’s editing rhythms are complex and nonlinear, involving looping via animated GIF effects, together with quick inserts and apparent slow motion. The music combines trip hop and r&b; it is floating and ambient, sung in a breathless near-whisper, with periods of instrumental intensification but no tonal shift or climax. Overall, the video disconcertingly reorders human sexuality, by means of its novel articulation of spacetime relations, of the sensorium, and of the relation between viewer/listener and work. In this way, “Papi Pacify,” and FKA twigs’ audiovisual work more generally, itself functions as a speculative revision of media theory.

Bibliography:


Battin, Carrie (2013). “FKA twigs: Interview.” Pitchfork. http://pitchfork.com/features/rising/9183-rising-fka-twigs/.

Friedlander, Emily (2013). “How FKA twigs is Pushing Female Sexuality Beyond Miley Cyrus and Sinead.” The Fader. http://www.thefader.com/2013/10/14/miley-cyrus-sinead-o-connor-female-se/.

Noakes, Tim (2014). “FKA twigs: Future Shock.” Dazed Digital. http://www.dazeddigital.com/music/article/20259/1/fka-twigs-future-shock.

Author Bio:


Steven Shaviro is the DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University. He is the author of The Cinematic Body, Post-Cinematic Affect, and Melancholia, Or, The Romantic Anti-Sublime.