What do you think?
Rate this book
Discorrelated Images
In Discorrelated Images Shane Denson examines how computer-generated digital images displace and transform the traditional spatial and temporal relationships that viewers had with conventional analog forms of cinema. Denson analyzes works ranging from the Transformers series and Blade Runner 2049 to videogames and multimedia installations to show how what he calls discorrelated images—images that do not correlate with the abilities and limits of human perception—produce new subjectivities, affects, and potentials for perception and action. Denson's theorization suggests that new media theory and its focus on technological development must now be inseparable from film and cinema theory. There's more at stake in understanding discorrelated images, Denson contends, than just a reshaping of cinema, the development of new technical imaging processes, and the evolution of film and media discorrelated images herald a transformation of subjectivity itself and are essential to our ability to comprehend nonhuman agency.
- GenresFilm
320 pages, Paperback
Published October 9, 2020
2 people are currently reading
78 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
Read
May 17, 2021a very thoughtful, sustained diagnosis of our relationship with images in the contemporary period. like James J. Hodge's Sensations of History, the primary point of departure is a concern with the phenomenology of media, but this book expands outward from that concern in a more consistent and forceful manner. specifically, the book explores the ramifications of a single crucial media-theoretical observation: that we live in an era of "discorrelation," i.e. a moment in which the technologies that mediate our experiences and offer us pathways to subjectivation and self-making are increasingly decentered from "the human" as a universalizing avatar of perception as such. computers now generate and perceive images for other computers; our agency and autonomy, as well as our ability to phenomenologically capture and characterize such images, are increasingly sidelined or "lateralized" (to use Hodge's formulation) by new technologies and temporalities.
like Hodge, and Johnston, and to a lesser extent Lamarre (whomst I've been reading to put in conversation with one another for a review essay), Denson is concerned with the "transition" to digital media (or post-cinema, a term Denson is the only one to use) and how these technological developments and their accompanying perceptual effects might be historicized. Hodge doubles down on phenomenology, asking how "historical perception" occurs in the encounter with digital images; Johnston shows how abstract animation repeatedly and consistently fit into the boundaries between discourses of technology and perception; and Lamarre takes a very high-level discourse-analysis approach, consistently examining how media phenomena and cultural formations are tethered to or justified by "technopsychosocial" interfaces and the lines of power that flow across them. of the four, Lamarre is the most careful to avoid a Lev Manovich-style linear narrative of the "subsumption" of analog media by digital technologies, an account he treats genealogically to demonstrate how new and old media have always been imbricated and interrelated. while Denson, too, disclaims that narrative as oversimplistic, it is perhaps difficult to avoid falling back into the old rhythm of contrasting the kinds of aesthesis and perception enabled by old and new forms of media—though, to his credit, Denson is careful not to assert that "discorrelation" is something that only digital images can do. it is, rather, something they do in a very intense and urgent fashion in the contemporary period. in that sense, this book is a deep-dive into the media phenomenology of The Present.
for Denson, that phenomenological condition turns on the anticipatory and futural dimensions of computational image-making, as well as on the various formal features that shift "perception" as such away from the human subject (a correlation which the cinema was particularly amenable to in its first century or so of existence). from that observation, which all of the other authors i mention above touch on in various ways, we arrive at a position of deep ambivalence about the status of the human, which encompasses both the notion that we are the default perceiving agencies in the world and the looming threat of extinction which has become ever-clearer as more and more sophisticated digital image-making technologies have become parts of the environments/ecologies in which we live our daily lives. that ambivalence registers affectively, per Denson, in the form of various fears and anxieties which can be traced in and through post-cinematic media texts: Unfriended, Transformers, drone footage. ultimately, our discorrelation from digital images may allow us to anticipate a world in which de do not exist at all: a final opportunity to change course.
i am not sure that Shane would totally love my characterization of his book as a collection of fascinating outgrowths from a single idea, but that characterization reflects the strength of the core argument: today's media phenomenology—that is, the totality of our experience full-stop, including the experiences through and by which we understand ourselves as subjects at all—are fundamentally and profoundly characterized by a decentering of human subjectivity from the anthropotechnical interface. that point is hit home in a new way in each chapter, and it really feels to me like one that is going to stick. i hope that i can be part of the reason why.
like Hodge, and Johnston, and to a lesser extent Lamarre (whomst I've been reading to put in conversation with one another for a review essay), Denson is concerned with the "transition" to digital media (or post-cinema, a term Denson is the only one to use) and how these technological developments and their accompanying perceptual effects might be historicized. Hodge doubles down on phenomenology, asking how "historical perception" occurs in the encounter with digital images; Johnston shows how abstract animation repeatedly and consistently fit into the boundaries between discourses of technology and perception; and Lamarre takes a very high-level discourse-analysis approach, consistently examining how media phenomena and cultural formations are tethered to or justified by "technopsychosocial" interfaces and the lines of power that flow across them. of the four, Lamarre is the most careful to avoid a Lev Manovich-style linear narrative of the "subsumption" of analog media by digital technologies, an account he treats genealogically to demonstrate how new and old media have always been imbricated and interrelated. while Denson, too, disclaims that narrative as oversimplistic, it is perhaps difficult to avoid falling back into the old rhythm of contrasting the kinds of aesthesis and perception enabled by old and new forms of media—though, to his credit, Denson is careful not to assert that "discorrelation" is something that only digital images can do. it is, rather, something they do in a very intense and urgent fashion in the contemporary period. in that sense, this book is a deep-dive into the media phenomenology of The Present.
for Denson, that phenomenological condition turns on the anticipatory and futural dimensions of computational image-making, as well as on the various formal features that shift "perception" as such away from the human subject (a correlation which the cinema was particularly amenable to in its first century or so of existence). from that observation, which all of the other authors i mention above touch on in various ways, we arrive at a position of deep ambivalence about the status of the human, which encompasses both the notion that we are the default perceiving agencies in the world and the looming threat of extinction which has become ever-clearer as more and more sophisticated digital image-making technologies have become parts of the environments/ecologies in which we live our daily lives. that ambivalence registers affectively, per Denson, in the form of various fears and anxieties which can be traced in and through post-cinematic media texts: Unfriended, Transformers, drone footage. ultimately, our discorrelation from digital images may allow us to anticipate a world in which de do not exist at all: a final opportunity to change course.
i am not sure that Shane would totally love my characterization of his book as a collection of fascinating outgrowths from a single idea, but that characterization reflects the strength of the core argument: today's media phenomenology—that is, the totality of our experience full-stop, including the experiences through and by which we understand ourselves as subjects at all—are fundamentally and profoundly characterized by a decentering of human subjectivity from the anthropotechnical interface. that point is hit home in a new way in each chapter, and it really feels to me like one that is going to stick. i hope that i can be part of the reason why.
September 17, 2021
A powerful intervention into post-cinema, digital humanities, and media studies. See the interview I conducted with Christian Haines on our Gamers with Glasses site:
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews