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Deformative Criticism & Digital Experimentations in Film & Media Studies

Note: see last slide for live links to videos!

Stephanie Boluk (University of California, Davis) @chouxsalad

Shane Denson (Stanford University) @medieninitiativ

Kevin Ferguson (Queens College, CUNY) @kevinlferguson

Virginia Kuhn (University of Southern California) @vkuhn

Jason Mittell (Middlebury College) @jmittell

Mark Sample (Davidson College) @samplereality

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Digital Humanities Scholarship

vs.

Digital Humanities Research

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Northern California Digital Humanities

vs.

Southern California Digital Humanities

(h/t Tom Scheinfeldt)

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Warning:

#WeirdDH

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A Weird Genealogy of Deformative Criticism

Text

Video

Process

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Text

Deformance = performance + deform

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Video

Supercuts

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Video

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Process

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Pecha Kucha Deformance

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videogrep

And finally, a deformance that combines text, video, and process. This technique uses a Python module called videogrep. Grep refers to a Unix program that lets you search files. Videogrep will search the subtitle file of any video and use that to automatically assemble a supercut of whatever word you’re searching for. But I don’t think of the videogrep results as supercuts so much as hypercuts. The example I have here comes from Zach Whalen, who used the subtitles of one of the Trump/Clinton debates to deform the debate. In this case, Zach told videogrep to only include video whose audio was transcribed as quote “noise.” We’re left with this.

Similar to Palin’s breathing, except this hypercut was generated entirely algorithmically. And it raises questions, all sorts of questions, about what counts as noise, what counts as signal, the audio/written divide, intentionality, the practices of transcription, and so on. Back in 1999 Samuels and McGann pointed out that “deformative scholarship is all but forbidden, the thought of it either irresponsible or damaging to critical seriousness” (Samuels & McGann 34–35). We’re here today to tell you that things are changing.

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Stephanie

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Glitch, Augment, Scan

Shane Denson, Stanford

goo.gl/bUwZCJ

Augmented Reality as Phenomenological Deformation

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Glitch, Augment, Scan

Shane Denson, Stanford

goo.gl/bUwZCJ

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Glitch, Augment, Scan

Shane Denson, Stanford

Karin + Shane Denson. “Scannable Images: Materialities of Post-Cinema after Video.” After.video, Volume 1: Assemblages. Eds. Oliver Lerone Schultz, Adnan Hadzi, and Pablo de Soto. Open Humanities Press, 2016.

goo.gl/bUwZCJ