by Linda Wang
The way we relate time to images has fundamentally changed because of digital technology, Stanford University film professor Shane Denson recently told a UC Santa Barbara audience.
Denson, author of the book Discorrelated Images, said digital technologies require moving images to be regenerated every time we watch them. Without algorithms, digital objects would be mere retentions residing on the hard drives of computers.
Stanford University professor Shane Denson talks about his book Discorrelated Images at a MAT Seminar Series.
“This new element of chance involved in image reproduction implies that we are now much more closely related to the images we see in terms of different spatial, temporal, and time scales,” Denson said at a Zoom seminar presented by UCSB’s Media Arts and Technology (MAT) graduate program.
Denson examines how computer generated digital images transform the traditional spatial and temporal relationship that viewers perceive. He analyzes works ranging from cinema, videogame, and multimedia installation to show how “discorrelated images,” or images that do not anticipate the abilities of human perception, will produce new potential for understanding action. His analysis suggests a new media theory on how technological development became inseparable from film and cinema theory.
While the field has always been interdisciplinary, media studies at one university can mean something completely different elsewhere.
“Here at Stanford, film and media studies resides in the department of art and art history, a fact that has significantly shaped my own attempt at interdisciplinarity over the past couple of years,” Denson said.
“Being surrounded by people dedicated to images, sensory qualities, and political agencies has made me acutely aware of the potential difficulties introduced by more traditional modes of humanities thinking and of the need for a more robust interdisciplinarity in contemporary media studies.”
A scene from Basma Alsharif’s short video art piece, Home Movies Gaza, shown by author Shane Denson to illustrate his theory.
Dissecting his book into two parts, Denson introduced the first half to convey his concept of “discorrelation” as an idea of computationally generated and processed images operating in dimensions outside human perception. He asserts that discorrelated images are what change our spatial relations to the visual field. The remainder of his work expands on looking at objects ranging from blockbuster sci-fi films to low budget horror movies to digital artworks in order to think about how to make sense of discorrelation in both a cognitive and perceptual sense.
A scene from Basma Alsharif’s short video art piece, Home Movies Gaza. This scene shows a young girl practicing a single note on her cello, which Standford film scholar Shane Denson used to explain the ‘discorrelation’ aesthetic.
During the latter half of the seminar, Denson broke down a video art piece directed in 2013 by Palestinian artist Basma Alsharif, Home Movies Gaza, to question what might be called post-cinematic realism and the politics of discorrelated aesthetics. Through a selection of short scenes, this film grants a new sense of realism which is not dependent on a direct and unbroken transmission, Denson said.
“No matter how far interfacing gets away from the body, there is still no experience without the body, the center of our aesthetic experience,” Denson said. “While the natural consequence of trajectory moves things farther from human sensation and embodiment, discorrelated images will always be impacting us organically.”
Linda Wang is a third-year Communication major at UC Santa Barbara. She wrote this article for her Writing Program class Journalism for Web and Social Media.