Beyond the Screen is an exhibition of desktop videos made by students in my Fall 2023 course on “The Video Essay.” The show, featuring three collaboratively made videos, is up from January 22-February 2, 2024 in the McMurtry Building (home of the Department of Art & Art History) at Stanford University.
Featured are:
Escape, by Karla Aguilar, Eric Wang, and Roisin Willis (14:52)
Pixilated Mimicry, by Lauren Boles and Michael Hemker (15:10)
Crypto Crisis, by Sheryl Hsu and Nathaniel Begay (12:40)
On display from January 6 to January 27, 2022 in Stanford’s McMurtry Building (home of the Department of Art & Art History) is SCREENTIME: An Exhibition of Desktop Videos.
The exhibition grows out of a collaboration between Stanford and Occidental College — between Shane Denson’s class “The Video Essay: Writing with Video about Media and Culture” and Allison de Fren’s “The Video Essay,” both of which were taught in Fall 2021.
Students in each class met online and worked through some of the more troubling aspects of online life, including online racism, radicalization, pornography, and politics. The resulting videos, all of which use the computer desktop as both a topic and a medium, reflect the troubled times of contemporary screentime, and the sonic cacophony in the exhibition space challenges viewers to come to terms with the ways that screens today compete for our attention.
Included in the exhibition are eleven remarkable videos:
I Love Kanye (2021) — D’Andre Jorge (sophomore, Stanford)
A Letter to My Younger Self, on the Dangers of the Internet (2021) — David Kolifrath (freshman, Occidental)
The Commercialization of Self Image (2021) — Ashton Berg (sophomore, Stanford)
Solace in Schadenfreude: r/HermanCainAward and Vaccine Misinformation (2021) — Tejas Narayanan (sophomore, Stanford)
A Brief Inquiry into Cultural Appropriation and Misogynoir Online (2021) — Micah Drigo (sophomore, Stanford)
Kids Content on YouTube (2021) — Finian Walsh (sophomore, Occidental)
Bots and Trolls and Hackers, Oh My! A Story of Russian Interference (2021) — Katherine Crandell (junior, Stanford)
Let’s Talk about Porn (2021) — Henry Liera (senior, Stanford)
Sustainable Brands and the Limits of “Radical Transparency” (2021) — Georgia Crawford (freshman, Occidental)
The Shallows of Hate (2021) — Ben Fischer (sophomore, Stanford)
Tiktok’s Devious Licks Trend (2021) — Zahir Choudhry (freshman, Occidental)
CFP Post-Cinema: Practices … by medieninitiative on Scribd
I am happy to share the CFP for a special issue of Images Secondes on the topic of “Post-Cinema: Practices of Research and Creation,” edited by Chloé Galibert-Lainé and Gala Hernández López.
The special issue, for which I am serving on the comité scientifique (which sounds a lot cooler than “review board”), will collect traditional scholarly articles as well as contributions in other media (such as videographic criticism and experimental digital forms). Proposals are due April 20, 2020, with final submissions due September 30.
Please spread the word to anyone who might be interested in contributing to what is sure to be an exciting publication!
The Algorithmic Nickelodeon from Shane Denson on Vimeo.
Several weeks ago, Sight & Sound Magazine’s “Best Video Essays of 2019” came out, featuring 134 videos nominated by 39 contributors — including my “Algorithmic Nickelodeon” piece, picked by Jiří Anger from Charles University in Prague. He writes:
Despite its formal shortcomings, this must be one of the most thought-provoking videographic works I have seen. Denson’s theoretical manifesto imagines a form of audiovisual criticism that would not be merely expressive but transformative, reinventing our notion of subject-object relations. For this to happen, deformations of the image/object and displacements of the analyst/subject must take place simultaneously. Creative thinking joins forces with EEG headsets and editing programmes to create a media-theoretical ‘perpetuum mobile’, designed for constant questioning of what cinema means in the age of algorithms.
I am honored to have my work featured alongside many fascinating videos, many of which were made by friends and colleagues of mine (including especially noteworthy pieces by Chloé Galibert-Laîné, Kathleen Loock, Jason Mittell, Tracy Cox-Stanton, as well as Allison de Fren’s piece “Mad Science/Mad Love and the Female Body in Pieces,” which I commissioned for the Videographic Frankenstein exhibition at Stanford and published last year in Hyperrhiz).
By the way, I agree completely with Anger’s assessments of my video’s “formal shortcomings,” which stand out all the more against the background of all the excellent and polished work featured in the poll. In fact, my video was conceived and produced as a very rough proof-of-concept for a symposium organized by Kathleen Loock in Berlin last year (where I had hoped to do a live demo of the setup but was unable to due to technical limitations in the venue). A more polished video for the project is currently being planned, but in the meantime I’m quite happy with Anger’s assessment of it as “one of the most thought-provoking videographic works”!
I am happy to announce Amalgamate, an exhibition of videos made by students in my course on “The Video Essay” (Fall 2019). Works range from analytical to experimental, with activist impulses and cinephilic sensitivities sprinkled throughout. The show runs from January 10-31, 2020 in the Gunn Foyer, McMurtry Building, at Stanford.
In addition to Introduction to Media, I will again be teaching my practice-based course on The Video Essay this Fall.
Recently, I posted my my video, “The Algorithmic Nickelodeon,” which I presented on June 21 at the ACUD-Kino in Berlin, in the context of a symposium on “Videographic Criticism: Aesthetics and Methods of the Video Essay” organized by Kathleen Loock.
Now the videos of the two roundtable discussions with Allison de Fren, Kathleen Loock, Chloé Galibert-Laîné, and Kevin B. Lee (moderated by Julia Leyda), and with Liz Greene, David Verdeure, and myself (and moderated by Evelyn Kreutzer) are online, here.
Thanks again to Kathleen Loock for organizing and to the ACUD-Kino for hosting this event!
Next Friday, June 21, 2019, I am excited to present “The Algorithmic Nickelodeon,” a literally mind-bending EEG-powered videographic experiment, in the context of the symposium on “Videographic Criticism: Aesthetics and Methods of the Video Essay.”
The symposium, organized by Kathleen Loock, will take place at the ACUD-Kino in Berlin, and will bring together lots of leading practitioners of videographic scholarship to screen their work and discuss questions of aesthetics, methods, and theory.
The event is free and open to the public, so come by if you’re in the neighborhood!
In the week of March 25 – 29, 2019, I will be giving several talks and workshops in Norway — first at the Deapartment of Art And Media Studies at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, and then at the Department of Nordic and Media Studies at the University of Agder in Kristiansand.
First, in Trondheim, on March 26 and 27, I will be participating on two workshops on videographic pedagogy and scholarship with Kathleen Loock.
Then, on March 28, also in Trondheim, I’ll be presenting work from my book project Discorrelated Images.
Finally, on March 29, in Kristiansand, I’ll be giving a talk on contemporary horror, also under the perspective of discorrelation.
Thanks to Julia Leyda for inviting me to Trondheim, and to Ahmet Gürata for the invitation to Kristiansand!
On Wednesday, February 27 (5-7pm in the Board Room of the Stanford Humanities Center), the Digital Aesthetics Workshop will be hosting Kevin B. Lee for an event titled “Dreams and Terrors of Desktop Documentary”:
Desktop documentary is a form that both presents and critically reflects on the world as experienced through computer screens and online interfaces. Treating the desktop as a medium for non-fiction storytelling proposes a unique set of epistemological dilemmas, affective dimensions and aesthetic discoveries. These factors inform Bottled Songs, a collaborative investigation by Kevin B. Lee and Chloé Galibert-Laîné of online terrorist media. Screening excerpts from the project, Lee will elaborate on the desktop documentary approach and its applications in exploring the underlying networks — both human and technological — informing online terrorism.
Kevin B. Lee is a US-born filmmaker and critic. He has produced over 360 video essays exploring film and media. His award-winning film Transformers: The Premake played in several festivals and was named one of the best documentaries of 2014 by Sight & Sound. He was Artist in Residence of the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin. He is now Professor of Crossmedia Publishing at the Merz Akademie, Stuttgart. In 2018 he and Chloé Galibert-Laîné were grantees of the Sundance Institute Art of Nonfiction Fund and artists-in-residence of the European Media Art Platform (EMAP).