Discorrelated Images

Shane Denson shares work from his new book project, Discorrelated Images.

Discorrelated Images 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, the project articulates 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.

Please email Jeff Nagy (jsnagy@stanford.edu) for the precirculated reading.

Shane Denson is assistant professor of film and media studies in the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford University. Previously, he held appointments and affiliations at a number of institutions in the United States and Germany. Most recently (2014-2016), he was a DAAD Postdoctoral Fellow at Duke University, where he was a visiting scholar in the Program in Literature, associate in research in the S-1 Speculative Sensation Lab (housed in Media Arts + Sciences / Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies), and teaching fellow in Information Science + Information Studies. From 2013-2016, he co-directed the project "Digital Seriality: The Serial Aesthetics and Practice of Digital Games" — part of a research collective on popular seriality funded by the German Research Foundation and based at the Freie Universität Berlin. From 2010 to 2016, he was also assistant professor (Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter) in American studies at the Leibniz Universität Hannover. He is the author of Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface (Transcript-Verlag/Columbia University Press, 2014) and co-editor of several collections: Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives (Bloomsbury, 2013), Digital Seriality (special issue of Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture, 2014), and Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film (REFRAME Books, 2016).