re: the McGann idea of interpretation + performance = “deformance.” The making of new art out of other art (how does this relate to bricolage?) In his project “Volumetric Cinema,” Kevin Ferguson (who co-taught the DH Praxis with Matt Gold last semester) digitally manipulates film clips to show that cinema should be seen as, “neither a window nor a frame but a volume.”

What’s Interesting – and what ties the project to “deformance” for me – is that he goes into the project with the idea of “browsing” rather than “searching”: he is not looking for a specific answer, but the process of research is accidental. Kevin uses, for example, a digital imaging tool that is designed for medical imaging – rather than anything that had been used to explore questions in the humanities before. And that’s one of the aspects of McGann’s “deformance” that I’m attached to: it aims to change (“deform) the questions or “rules” of the questions that are being asked; to look for “data” that you wouldn’t have known to look for before.

The video documentation of his project can be found here (also note the journal, “[in]Transition,” which is a cool place to find this kind of thing, tho Kevin’s Project is perhaps on the experimental side) : http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/intransition/2015/03/10/volumetric-cinema