The collection is a collaboration of the DFG Graduate Research Program “Configurations of Film,” the Concordia University’s Platform Lab, and the Digital Cinema-Hub (DiCi-Hub).

Accidental Archivism brings together programmatic statements and proposals to explore an artistic space between archiving and activism, a space where remnants of the past become the building blocks of new ways of making, showing, teaching and thinking cinema.

The serendipitous genesis of the great archives of Arsenal in Berlin is a pure delight to explore. This volume records how a wealth of visual history accumulated as if by accident to form a fascinating whole which is so much more than its parts: a fragmented and recomposed visual archive of memories of the world in the second half of the twentieth century. A feast for any historian, artist and cinephile.

—Bénédicte Savoy, Collège de France/TU Berlin

Accidental archivism, creative spaces and the reaches of technology: the mix is a world of communication and artistic possibilities. Perhaps, equally significant, the mix does transform the cinema’s public into that quintessential wayfarer who takes a backward glance o’er travelled roads to better see the road ahead.

—Hyginus Ekwuazi, University of Ibadan, founding rector of the National Film Institute, Jos

A lively, hugely ambitious and generative collection, that is at once both reflective and provocative, offering a state of play and a call to action for those engaging with archives today. From manifestos to interviews, global case studies to personal accounts, this expansive collection of works expertly places in dialogue curators, artists, archivists and scholars (and the many that fall in between).

—Tom Rice, University of St. Andrews

Read the book online at archivism.meson.press.

Endorsements

We have long been feeling how the type of embodied identification suggested by the Hollywood classics was in a process of dissolution. Thanks to a sophisticated mediation between the phenomenology of perception and theories of digital media, Shane Denson provides us with concepts and a first understanding of this transition and its far-reaching existential consequences.

—Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Stanford University

What if digital media changed not only traditional forms of communication, but also our very bodies, because of the way they address us? In this brilliant study, Shane Denson suggests that, from a phenomenological perspective, our bodies are always at the forefront of our mediation with the world; digital media involve our sensorium in an unprecedented way and this commitment represents their true “revolution.” A myriad of examples, including screens in gyms aimed at enhancing our exercises, are proof of this. Philosophically dense, analytically sharp, this book unearths what lies beneath our digital experiences.

—Francesco Casetti, Yale University

Refusing both the perfunctory valorization of the body as site of resistive potentiality and the diametric reflex to dismiss theories of embodiment as exercises in the foreclosure of criticality, Shane Denson advances a rigorous theory of mediated corporeality within the metabolic life of post-cinema, with profound implications for the politics of (counter-)capture across microtemporalities and planetary scales.

—Rizvana Bradley, University of California, Berkeley

Reviews

Throughout the book, Denson provides a sharp and lucid investigation into the influences of post-cinematic media on our bodies, providing us with profuse examples and objects for reflexion. From VR/AR to AI and machine vision, by way of smart exercise devices and ECGs, the reader is invited to question the pervasiveness and apparent innocuousness of the objects discussed, which are part of many people’s daily lives. Never alarmist, Denson scrutinises the social, political, aesthetic and metabolic stakes at play in the increasing entanglement between the body and the media. If the author concludes on a hopeful note for our future, he is upfront at every step of his writing about the already harmful biases and exclusions programmed in and perpetuated by post-cinematic media. Whether it is racial exclusion, gendered oppression or capitalistic exploitation, Denson reminds us that if the more general threat of human disembodiment through computational media discorrelation is real and should concern us on a philosophical level, then people are already subject to such violence.

—Emma Dussouchaud-Esclamadon, Film-Philosophy Vol. 28, No. 3

Comprising a wide range of case studies on the standards, practices, and politics of formats from scholars of photography, film, radio, television, and the Internet, Format Matters charts the many ways in which formats shape and are shaped by past and present media cultures. This volume represents the first sustained collaborative effort to advance the emerging field of format studies.