On Thursday, March 31 (5pm Central US time), I’ll be participating along with Jihoon Kim, John Powers, and Deborah Levitt in a panel titled “(Post)Cinematic Operations: Envisioning Cameras from the Bolex to Smart Sensors” at this year’s (virtual) SCMS conference.
My paper is titled “AI, Deep Learning, and the Aesthetic Education of the ‘Smart’ Camera.” Here’s the abstract:
The merging of “smart” technologies with imaging technologies creates a number of conceptual difficulties for the definition of the word camera. It also creates a number of aesthetic and phenomenological problems for human sensation. As I argued in my book Discorrelated Images, the microtemporal speed of computational processing inserts itself in between the production and reception of images and endows the camera with an affective density that distinguishes it from a purely mechanical reproduction of visible forms; in processes like motion prediction and motion smoothing, the distinction between camera and screen itself breaks down as images are generated on the fly during playback. This presentation takes these considerations further to think about the ways that artificial intelligence further transforms inherited forms and functions of camera-mediation, both in physical apparatuses (e.g. smartphones and drones) and virtual ones (e.g. software-based image generation in videogames, DeepFake videos, AR, or VR). The analysis proceeds by looking at concrete instances such as the “Deep Fusion” technique employed on recent iPhones, which use the A15 Bionic processor—a so-called “neural engine”—to create a composite image combining pixels from a quick burst of digital photos. Beyond merely technical advances, I argue, such “smart” camera processes effect a subtle but significant transformation of our own aesthetic senses, insinuating computational processes in both our low-level processing of sensation and our high-level aesthetic judgments (and thus also algorithmically inserting racial and gendered biases, among other things). A techno-phenomenological analysis, which attends both to technological factors and to the embodied spatiotemporal parameters of human perception, provides the basis for a robustly cultural understanding the “smart” camera, including its role in “re-educating” our aesthetic senses.
Today I presented a short paper on “Post-Cinematic Animation” as part of a roundtable discussion at the Society for Animation Studies. The roundtable, on “Expanded Animation,” was organized by Deborah Levitt and Phillip Thurtle, and also included Heather Warren-Crow, Misha Mihailova, and Thomas Lamarre—all of whom gave excellent papers. Here’s mine:
My recent book Discorrelated Images (Duke UP 2020) is not first and foremost intended as an intervention in the field of animation studies. Rather, it is an attempt to bring together some of the primarily aesthetic concerns of cinema studies and visual culture more generally with media philosophical and media archaeological interests in the invisible, or anaesthetic if not positively anti-aesthetic, dimensions of technical infrastructures in order to understand how, on the one hand, images have become unyoked from subjective perception and how, on the other hand, this post-phenomenological “discorrelation” opens new avenues of political control and subjectivation. In short, algorithmic images are processed in microtemporal intervals that elude the window of subjective perception; operating faster than us, they thus not only exceed perceptual objecthood but also anticipate our subjectivities; with their predictive or protentional, future-oriented operations, such images mark a significant departure from the past-based recording paradigm of a cinematic media regime, such that post-cinematic media become potent agencies or vectors that lead the way in shaping who we will be; and they do this by operating at or on the cusp between the visible and the invisible, the subjective and the pre-subjective, the aesthetic and the insensible.
But if, as I have said, this argument is not primarily framed in terms of animation studies, it necessarily implicates animation as both a thematic and a medial site of change. In a thread that runs through the book, the question of animation becomes a question precisely of the difference between cinema and post-cinema, one that resonates, in many ways, with Lev Manovich’s argument in the mid-1990s that the postindexical images of “digital cinema” are closer in spirit (and, in some respects, closer materially) to pre-cinematic technologies of animation—phenakistiscopes, thaumatropes, zoetropes, and the like—than to cinema in its classical form. Beyond formal and technical dimensions, I am interested in the philosophical implications, such as those foregrounded by Alan Cholodenko who, writing even earlier than Manovich, argued that “the idea of animation” should be approached “as a notion whose purchase would be transdisciplinary, transinstitutional, implicating the most profound, complex and challenging questions of our culture, questions in the areas of being and becoming, time, space, motion, change—indeed, life itself.” My approach to animation, as the locus of a media-historical transformation that also concerns a reconfiguration of subjectivation’s material parameters, therefore mediates between Manovich’s technical focus and Cholodenko’s philosophical one. I therefore follow Deborah Levitt in her recent probing of animation as “the dominant medium of our time”—by which she refers not to a specific technique but to a broad cultural and sociotechnical condition, which is related as much to moving-image technologies as to biomedical ones (from “novel developments in the biological sciences that open possibilities for producing living beings” to antidepressants and hormone therapy for transgender people); for Levitt, in short, ours is “the age of the animatic apparatus.”
Two other recent theoretical interventions, by Esther Leslie and Joel McKim (writing in a special issue of Animation) and Jim Hodge (in his book Sensations of History: Animation and New Media Art), both suggest that animation mediates between human sense and the insensible processes of computation—a suggestion that helps ground the interrelation of concrete changes in media infrastructure and the forms of subjectivity that they subtend. For example, processes like motion smoothing, in which our so-called “smart TVs” algorithmically compute new images between visible frames and engage in a real-time generative tweening operation, or DeepFake and related AI-driven imaging processes that categorically elude perception in their black boxed operation—such acts of animation in its computationally expanded field activate what Merleau-Ponty referred to as the “inner diaphragm” between subjectivity and objectivity, which, “prior to stimuli and sensory contents, […] determines, infinitely more than they do, what our reflexes and perceptions will be able to aim at in the world, the area of our possible operations, the scope of our life.” That is, algorithmic animation is situated between embodied sensation and the circuits of computational processing, and it thus sets such a pre-subjective and likewise pre-objective membrane in motion, fundamentally recomputing what counts as an image and what our relation to it is. If this means that what Husserl called “the fundamental correlation between noesis and noema,” or the relational bond between perceptual consciousness and its intentional objects, is called into question by computational processes, then animation’s central role as mediator ensures that such discorrelation is not the end but the reinvigoration of embodied sensation—indeed, a redefinition of life itself in the contemporary world.
References:
Cholodenko, Alan. “Introduction.” In The Illusion of Life, edited by Alan Cholodenko, 9-36. Sydney: Power Publications, 1991.
Denson, Shane. Discorrelated Images. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020.
Hodge, James J. Sensations of History: Animation and New Media Art. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019.
Husserl, Edmund. The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness. Translated by James Churchill. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964.
Leslie, Esther, and Joel McKim. “Life Remade: Critical Animation in the Digital Age.” Animation 12.3 (2017): 207-213.
Levitt, Deborah. The Animatic Apparatus: Animation, Vitality, and the Futures of the Image. Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2018.
Manovich, Lev. “What Is Digital Cinema?” In Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film, edited by Shane Denson and Julia Leyda, 20-50. Falmer, UK: REFRAME Books, 2016.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. New York: Routledge, 2002.
The Digital Aesthetics Workshop is extremely excited to announce a collaborative panel with UC Davis’ Technocultural Futures Research Cluster.
‘Rendered Worlds: New Regimes of Imaging‘ will take place on Friday, October 23 at 10am PDT. Co-organized by teams from Stanford University and University of California Davis, this event brings together a transatlantic group of scholars to discuss the social, historical, technical, and aesthetic entanglements of our computational images.
Talking about their latest work will be Deborah Levitt (The New School), Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal (UC Davis and Universität Siegen), Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan (King’s College London), and Shane Denson (Stanford). Hank Gerba (Stanford) and Jacob Hagelberg (UC Davis) will co-moderate the round-table. Please register at tinyurl.com/renderedworlds for your zoom link!
We hope to see you there! If you have any questions, please direct them to Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal (rjdhaliwal at ucdavis dot edu).
Sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center. Made possible by support from Linda Randall Meier, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
