Jon Bois and Post-Human Media
A project by Ryan McCandless
Jon Bois is a writer/director who has been making various sports themed videos on YouTube for several years. First on his own channel and then for the sports site SB Nation. While other sports documentaries tend to focus solely on the sports or the players, Bois deemphasizes the importance of these aspects in his stories and emphasizes visualizing the data/statistics of these sports and the different ways these sports can be recorded through graphs, charts, measurements, and other ways forms of calculation.
The Bob Emergency, 2019
The History of the Seattle Mariners, 2020
The Search for the Saddest Punt in the World, 2019
These works function as a kind of a post-human documentary. The filmmaking, the storytelling emphasizes methods of compiling information that go beyond the ability of a single person and maps spaces, bodies, ways of thinking that function more within a virtual, technological realm. The powerful, vastly structured machines we use from day to day. However Bois complicates traditional post-human ideas that decentralize humanism by centering these calculated, machine like films on a subject which relies on the human body. Additionally, Bois’ personal narration to these documentaries focus on the importance of people. His work suggests the need for a post humanist way of thinking that takes into account the way he currently view the world as well as the different virtual spaces we inhabit, while also centering these machines on their ability to help people and still find importance in people within these systems.

 

                                                                How will it be set up?

 

1. My project will be a video essay which mimics the methods of Bois’ filmmaking by trying to present these ideas through the use of machines, specifically my computer.

2. My goal is to record my computer screen and use the different applications, websites, and functions of the computer to visualize the aforementioned ideas I will be narrating in the essay. Think Unfriended, Searching, but way less ambitious in my end goal.

3. My set up is to start by presenting an outline of what I mean by posthuman, then go into Jon Bois’ films and the meanings it has within this category.

4. Donna Haraway’s The Cyborg Manifesto is one of my current reference points but I’m also planning on adding in more references to texts on post humanism.

Questions
1. Does this idea make sense? 2. Do you have any reference ideas I can use for this project?

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