Correlative Counter-Capture in Contemporary Art @ ASAP/14

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, “Pulse Index”, 2010. “Recorders”, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2011. Photo by: Antimodular Research

On Saturday, September 30, at 9am Pacific Time, I’ll be giving the following talk at ASAP/14 (online):

Correlative Counter-Capture in Contemporary Art

Computational processing takes place at speeds and scales that are categorically outside human perception, but such invisible processing nevertheless exerts significant effects on the sensory and aesthetic—as well as political—qualities of artworks that employ digital and/or algorithmic media. To account for this apparent paradox, it is necessary to rethink aesthetics itself in the light of two evidently opposing tendencies of computation: on the one hand, the invisibility of processing means that computation is phenomenologically discorrelated (in that it breaks with what Husserl calls the “the fundamental correlation between noesis and noema”); on the other hand, however, when directed toward the production of sensory contents, computation relies centrally on statistical correlations that reproduce normative constructs (including those of gender, race, and dis/ability). As discorrelative, computation exceeds the perceptual bond between subject and object, intervening directly in the prepersonal flesh; as correlative, computation not only expresses “algorithmic biases” but is capable of implanting them directly in the flesh. Through this double movement, a correlative capture of the body and its metabolism is made possible: a statistical norming of subjectivity and collectivity prior to perception and representation. Political structures are thus seeded in the realm of affect and aesthesis, but because the intervention takes place in the discorrelated matter of prepersonal embodiment, a margin of indeterminacy remains from which aesthetic and political resistance might be mounted (with no guarantee of success). In this presentation, I turn to contemporary artworks combining the algorithmic (including AI, VR, or robotics) with the metabolic (including heartrate sensors, ECGs, and EEGs) in order to imagine a practice of dis/correlative counter-capture. Works by the likes of Rashaad Newsome, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Hito Steyerl, or Teoma Naccarato and John MacCallum point to an aesthetic practice of counter-capture that does not elude but re-engineers mechanisms of control for potentially, but only ever locally, liberatory purposes.

Discorrelated Images Shortlisted for ASAP 2021 Book Prize!

I am excited and honored that my book Discorrelated Images has been shortlisted for the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP) 2021 Book Prize. It is in amazing company:

Jennifer Bajorek, Unfixed: Photography and Decolonial Imagination in West Africa (Duke 2020)

Sarah Chihaya, Merve Emre, Katherine Hill, and Jill Richards, The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism (Columbia 2020)

Shane Denson, Discorrelated Images (Duke 2020)

Fernando Domínguez Rubio, Still Life: Ecologies of the Modern Imagination at the Art Museum (Chicago 2020)

Matthew Hart, Extraterritorial: A Political Geography of Contemporary Fiction (Columbia 2020)

Jessica Hurley, Infrastructures of Apocalypse: American Literature and the Nuclear Complex (Minnesota 2020)

Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (Harvard 2020)

Samantha Pinto, Infamous Bodies: Early Black Women’s Celebrity and the Afterlives of Civil Rights (Duke 2020)

Thanks to the committee for the 2021 Book Prize: Ignacio Sánchez Prado (Chair, Professor, Spanish, Latin American Studies, & Film and Media Studies, Washington University in St. Louis), Lauren M. Cramer (Assistant Professor, Cinema Studies, University of Toronto), and Min Hyoung Song (Professor, English, Boston College).

And congratulations to all of the shortlisted authors!

Books in Conversation: Discussing Discorrelated Images with Caetlin Benson-Allott

Over at ASAP/J, the open-access platform of ASAP/Journal, a conversation with Caetlin Benson-Allott and myself on the topic of Discorrelated Images has just gone online. We talk about archives, coups, Zoom, and Janelle Monáe, among other things. Check it out here!

Images of Discorrelation at ASAP/10 in New Orleans

Screen Shot 2018-10-12 at 10.58.39 AM

Next week, Oct. 17-20, 2018, the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP) will be holding its annual conference in New Orleans. There I will be on a panel, called “Images Otherwise,” with some excellent co-panelists: Andrew Johnston (NC State), Brooke Belisle (SUNY Stony Brook), and Jacob Gaboury (UC Berkeley). I will be presenting work related to my forthcoming book, Discorrelated Images.

Here is my abstract:

Images of Discorrelation

Shane Denson, Stanford University

This presentation deals with the ongoing transition from a cinematic to a post-cinematic media regime. Situated at the cusp between film studies and digital media studies, “images of discorrelation” names a variety of contemporary visual phenomena (glitches, artifacts, motion-smoothing, etc.) and seeks to articulate a theory of the perceptual, actional, and above all affective impacts of the thoroughgoing computationalization of moving-image media. The concept of “discorrelation” concerns the severing of phenomenological relations between viewing subjects and image-objects; it results from the failure, on the part of contemporary cameras and other imaging devices, to situate spectators in a coherently articulated viewing position. Furthermore, discorrelation is an effect of the microtemporal processing of computational images, which impacts viewers’ own embodied processing of time at a subperceptual level, prior to the articulation of subject-object relations. This generative dimension implicates computational imaging systems, including their use in mainstream movies and other media, in a fundamental transformation of human-technological relations.