The next event of the Digital Aesthetics Workshop will be next Tuesday, November 15, from 5-7pm with Mark Algee-Hewitt. Find below a brief description of his talk, “Patterns of Text / Patterns of Anaysis,” and we hope to see you there!
This hybrid event will take place in the Board Room of the Stanford Humanities Center, with online option via Zoom: https://tinyurl.com/36z56wuk (registration link)
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At first glance, the study of aesthetics and computational analysis would seem to be antithetical to each other. The former focuses, among other things, on the interplay between the formal features of the text, its larger social context and its reception; while the later largely aggregates formal features. However, the patterns produced by such computational work can not only shed new light on the specifics of how words produce aesthetic effects, but in and of themselves, they reveal a new set of aesthetic conditions that can only be visualized and explored through these methods. In this talk, I’ll toggle between large and small scales of analysis, using examples of quantitative analysis to demonstrate the ways that cultural analytics operates across scales to reveal new aspects of both poetics and our understanding of the interrelations between genres and periods of literature.
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Mark Algee-Hewitt’s research focuses on the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in England and Germany and seeks to combine literary criticism with digital and quantitative analyses of literary texts. In particular he is interested in the history of aesthetic theory and the development and transmission of aesthetic and philosophic concepts during the Enlightenment and Romantic periods. He is also interested in the relationship between aesthetic theory and the poetry of the long eighteenth century. Although his primary background is in English literature, he also has a degree in computer science. As the director of the Stanford Literary Lab, he is working to bring his interests in quantitative analysis, digital humanities and eighteenth-century literature to bear on a number of new collaborative projects. His current book project, The Afterlife of the Sublime, explores the history of the sublime by tracing its discursive patterns through over 11,000 texts from the long eighteenth century, seeking clues to the disappearance of the term at the end of the Romantic period. As a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at McGill University, working with the Interacting with Print Research group, Dr. Algee-Hewitt was also involved in a variety of projects that combine literary interpretation with quantitative analysis. He is a co-coordinator of the Book History BiblioGraph, a new dynamic online resource and recommendation engine that visualizes connections between contemporary resources on Book History using statistical methods. He is also working with Andrew Piper on the Werther Topologies: a project that seeks to identify lexical patterns that will aid in tracing the impact of Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther on the nineteenth-century development of the German novel. Dr. Algee-Hewitt has taught a variety of courses in literary history and theory in both the English and German departments at McGill University, Rutgers University and New York University where he received his PhD in 2008.
As the inaugural event of INTERMEDIATIONS, a new workshop and lecture series foregrounding issues of intermediality and interdisciplinarity, Mads Rosendahl Thomsen will be giving a talk titled “Adjusting to the Age of Automated Writing” on November 16, 2022 (4pm in the Terrace Room, Margaret Jacks Hall room 426).
Abstract:
Writing was for at least six to seven thousand years a humanly hand-crafted product. Now we encounter several kinds of technologies that change the production of text profoundly. Chatbots, automated translation, grammar assistants, and large language models are examples of how text generation permeates writing from many angles. In this presentation, Professor Mads Thomsen will sketch out key issues of the rapid developments in text generation and the interdisciplinary collaboration needed to understand these, before turning to how GPT-3 “reads” William Carlos Williams’ poem “The Red Wheelbarrow.”
Bio:
Mads Rosendahl Thomsen is Professor of Comparative Literature at Aarhus University, Denmark. He has published in the fields of literary historiography, modernist literature, world literature, digital humanities, and posthumanism. His most recently submitted publication is a short book on the concept and history of text.
He is the author of Mapping World Literature: International Canonization and Transnational Literatures (2008),The New Human in Literature: Posthuman Visions of Changes in Body, Mind and Society after 1900 (2013), a co-author with Stefan Helgesson ofLiterature and the World (2019), and the editor of fourteen books, includingWorld Literature: A Reader (2012), The Posthuman Condition: Ethics, Aesthetics and Politics of Biotechnological Challenges (2012),Danish Literature as World Literature (2017), Literature: An Introduction to Theory and Analysis (2017), and The Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism (2020).
Thomsen has been director of the Digital Arts Initiative (2017-21) and the research program Human Futures (2016-22), both at Aarhus University. Thomsen was co-director of the research project Posthuman Aesthetics (2014-18), and he is the PI of the VELUX FONDEN-funded project Fabula-NET which investigates literary preferences and quality using digital methods (2021-25).
He is a co-editor of Orbis Litterarum, an advisory board member of the book series Literatures as World Literature(Bloomsbury Academic), and a member of the editorial board of Journal of World Literature. Thomsen is a member of the Academia Europaea (2010-), the advisory board of The Institute for World Literature (2010-13, 2018-22), and the general assembly of DARIAH (2022-).
Thomsen was a visiting scholar at Stanford University four times between 2001-2015.
On November 10, 2022 (4pm in the Terrace Room, Margaret Jacks Hall), the Program in Modern Thought & Literature will be hosting Darieck Scott, Professor of African American Studies at UC Berkeley, for the Monica P. Moore Speaker Series. Professor Scott will be talking about Black queer fantasy and superhero comics, the topic of his recent book Keeping It Unreal (NYU Press, 2022).
There will be two respondents: Scott Bukatman, Professor of Film & Media Studies at Stanford and author of a new book on Black Panther; and Lucas Williams, Ph.D Candidate in MTL.
We’re still getting used to the hybrid setup, so the framing isn’t always great, but I’m happy to share the video of Erich Hörl’s talk at the Digital Aesthetics Workshop: “The Disruptive Condition.”
I am grateful to Ji-hoon Kim for organizing two talks in South Korea this October. The first was on Oct. 11 at the Busan International Film Festival, on a panel with Dork Zabunyan from Paris 8 University, Jeong-ha Lee from Dankook University, and Ji-hoon Kim from Chung-Ang University (who both presented and moderated the panel).
The next talk is coming up on Oct. 27, as part of the Cinema and Media Studies Colloquium at Chung-Ang University in Seoul. See the poster above for details and registration information for remote participation.
✨*~*~*~*!!! The Digital Aesthetics Workshop is back !!!~*~*~*✨
After a yearlong sabbatical, we are extremely excited to announce the return of DAW. Please join us Wednesday October 5, 5-7PM in the Stanford Humanities Center’s Watt Dining Room for “The Disruptive Condition” with Erich Hörl.
The lecture develops ›disruption‹ as a key term for the analytics of the present. In this context, ›disruption‹ denotes the form of historical experience that is specific to us. In a first step, the being-in-disruption is elaborated, which in Bernard Stiegler’s thinking of history represents the core determination of computational nihilism—for him, the historical completion of nihilism in general. In a second step, against the background of Reinhart Koselleck’s theory of history, Stiegler’s diagnosis is expanded toward what I call the disruptive condition as an epochal signature of 21st century.
Erich Hörl holds the Chair of Media Culture and Media Philosophy at Leuphana University Lüneburg. He works on the conceptualization of a general ecology and publishes internationally on the history, the problems and challenges of the contemporary technological condition. Among his publications are General Ecology. The New Ecological Paradigm (ed., London 2017); Die technologische Bedingung (ed., Berlin 2011); Sacred Channels: On the Archaic Illusion of Communication (Amsterdam 2018); Gérard Granel: Die totale Produktion, ed. and with an introduction by Erich Hörl (Vienna 2020).
Last week I had the honor of presenting some new material at Leif Weatherby’s Digital Theory Lab at NYU, and this week I’ll be traveling to Siegen, Germany, to present another version of this material, focused on the “deep violence” of DeepFakes.
I’m especially excited to present this material, as it draws on a new book project, titled Post-Cinematic Bodies, a draft of which I have just completed! Stay tuned for more!
I am happy to announce that Vilém Flusser’s Communicology, edited and translated by Rodrigo Maltez Novaes and with a foreword by N. Katherine Hayles, will be published this December in the Sensing Media book series that I co-edit with Wendy Hui Kyong Chun for Stanford University Press!
There are already some great endorsements of the book:
“Flusser is a painter of oblique strokes, dismantling familiar perspectives. Never less than entertaining, Communicology refreshes, challenges and blasts open unexpected vistas.”
—Seán Cubitt, University of Melbourne
“If you are in search of Flusser the media theorist, indeed, if you are seeking to understand how information works, Communicology is it. Flusser teases out the kinds of fundamental questions that are at the core of the human experience.”
—Anke Finger, University of Connecticut
“Communicology is a central work for any appraisal of Flusser’s thinking, and an innovative and singular introduction to media theory.”
—Erick Felinto, State University of Rio de Janeiro
“Communicology is an important work for the study of media theory in general and, more specifically, Flusser’s own communication theory.”
—Rodrigo Petronio, Armando Alvares Penteado Foundation
To these I wanted to add a few more detailed notes, as series co-editor, on why this book, written in the late 1970s, might be of interest to readers today:
Communicology: Mutations in Human Relations is an important entry in the oeuvre of Vilém Flusser, the Czech-Brazilian thinker whose work has in recent years become an important point of reference in discussions within media theory, philosophy of technology, and posthumanism, among others. The significance of Communicology within this larger body of work is at least fourfold: 1) it is perhaps the clearest statement of Flusser’s theory of communication as involving a variably mediated relation between humans and the world, and hence an existential relation that has entered into a period of crisis with the transition from a textual-literary code to the media of “technical images” (such as photography, film, television, and digital imaging processes); 2) as the most systematic statement of this theory, which provocatively covers human communication from prehistoric to contemporary forms (from early uses of images to the rise of alphabetic writing to scientific and popular forms of technical media), the book provides essential context and background for more well-known but more narrowly focused works, such as Into the Universe of Technical Images (English translation published in 2011 with University of Minnesota Press); 3) it furthermore provides one of the most accessible entry points into Flusser’s work, and may thus also serve as a useful introduction for readers not yet familiar (and it should be emphasized that Flusser’s work, despite the increasing frequency with which he is cited, still remains only vaguely understood, in part because key works such as this one are not yet available in English); 4) finally, it offers a provocative view of a media situation that, while aimed at diagnosing and confronting political-communicational crises of the late 1970s (when it was composed), has uncanny resonances with our own “post-truth” era.
This is to say that Flusser’s Communicology is of interest for historical and theoretical reasons alike, and that it is capable of speaking to both specialized, academic readerships and broader, uninitiated audiences as well. As a historical document, it records an attempt to come to terms with changes happening in the moment—changes involving a massive and indeed global transformation of the technical infrastructures of mediated communication, which the author sees as the very infrastructures of perception and of thought. As such, the effort to think or take stock of these changes is radically precarious, without a stable foundation; notions of causality and truth are up for grabs, and with them the meaning not only of specific communications but of human existence itself. Flusser’s theory of communication is clearly informed by existentialism (an influence that peeks through in occasional references to Heidegger or Sartre, for example), but it is even more centrally informed by cybernetics and information theory: by the notion of feedback, for example, which is both exemplified in Flusser’s analyses of humans’ “programming” by the codes of traditional and technical media but which also, from a formal perspective, challenges the autonomous place or standpoint from which Flusser is able to theorize such processes—a challenge of which Flusser is fully aware, and which he incorporates into his vision of a new media regime, or a new humanity, bootstrapping itself into existence. Remarkably, however, Flusser is able to communicate this complex image without detailed technical discussions of the underlying philosophical and information-theoretical models; his analysis of the existential stakes of the shift in communication and the rise of technical images is accomplished instead by way of a subtly self-reflexive method: eschewing the scholarly apparatus of footnotes and the careful documentation of philosophical debates, Flusser nevertheless maintains precision and clarity by resorting to technical images of his own. The many diagrams that populate the book are not simply illustrations of his ideas; rather, they are “technical images” in the precise sense that Flusser defines them: images that mediate concepts and hence begin to overcome the crisis of conceptual thinking that, he claims, plagues our world. In other words, while Flusser is describing these images as part of his attempt to gain a foothold and establish communication with the reader, he is also providing a tacit education in the deciphering of technical images—or helping to inculcate the foundations of the “technical imagination” that he is convinced we so desperately need if we are to survive and find meaning in the contemporary world.
Accordingly, Communicology is directly and literally engaged in the project of “sensing media” that names the book series in which it appears, and it is the directness of its attempt that will make it of broad interest and appeal, beyond the specialist discourses in which Flusser’s name is already familiar. Of course, many of the specifics of the book—including, centrally, its discussions of photography, film, and video from a point in time before they were so radically transformed by digital, interactive, and networked media—will seem dated. Nevertheless, it is in terms of the broad and compellingly provocative picture painted of a world in transition that Flusser’s book remains of contemporary theoretical interest. It is impossible to read his diagnosis of the crisis precipitated by an explosion of technical images, and our lack of agreed upon means for coding and decoding them, without thinking about our current “post-truth” moment. Indeed, the erosion of shared codes with which to communicate, the political turmoil that ensues when communication breaks down, and the return to a pseudo-magical form of consciousness: all of these resonate strongly with contemporary social media bubbles, the rise of “meme magic,” and fascist-leaning movements like Qanon. My point is not that Flusser was prophetic, or that he saw any of this coming (at least not in the forms that it actually took), but I do want to suggest that the urgency of developing a “technical imagination” is more pressing than ever, and that Flusser’s book is extremely useful in terms of impressing upon its readers that urgency. Furthermore, its proposals for developing the needed imagination (or imagistic literacy) are, for all their limitations, occasionally quite inspired and can, at the very least, provide a baseline for further media-philosophical attempts. Indeed, Flusser understands his book as provisional at best, and he ends it with a modest plea for readers to improve upon his attempts and to take up the “commitment to communication” that he sees in peril.
In sum, Communicology will be of great interest to specialists in media philosophy and posthumanism, but it also has the potential to reach broader audiences, including non-specialist readers interested in our current media-technical and political predicament.
There are a couple of new reviews of Discorrelated Images, for which I am very grateful — one in the most recent issue of Film-Philosophy, by Christian de Moulipied Sancto, and another (in Italian) by Angela Maiello in Imago.
Sancto calls the book “virtuosic,” and writes: “For anyone concerned with digital media in particular and media theory in general, Discorrelated Images is essential reading.”
Maiello compares my project to that of Bernard Stiegler, writing: “The theoretical stakes of the book … are very high: it is neither a question of looking at these developments of the digital image as a mere aesthetic question of style, nor of remaining trapped in the problem of the technical infrastructure underlying these images. It is a question of understanding the transformative impact that new image technologies have in explaining experience, in the establishment of the subject-object relationship and therefore in the process of individuation, to return to Stiegler, both singular and collective.”
Finally, as a bonus, here is the (unedited) audio of the German book launch of Discorrelated Images, which took place on June 23, 2022 at Hopscotch Reading Room in Berlin. Thanks to Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan for organizing the event and for discussing the book with me!
On Thursday, March 31 (5pm Central US time), I’ll be participating along with Jihoon Kim, John Powers, and Deborah Levitt in a panel titled “(Post)Cinematic Operations: Envisioning Cameras from the Bolex to Smart Sensors” at this year’s (virtual) SCMS conference.
My paper is titled “AI, Deep Learning, and the Aesthetic Education of the ‘Smart’ Camera.” Here’s the abstract:
The merging of “smart” technologies with imaging technologies creates a number of conceptual difficulties for the definition of the word camera. It also creates a number of aesthetic and phenomenological problems for human sensation. As I argued in my book Discorrelated Images, the microtemporal speed of computational processing inserts itself in between the production and reception of images and endows the camera with an affective density that distinguishes it from a purely mechanical reproduction of visible forms; in processes like motion prediction and motion smoothing, the distinction between camera and screen itself breaks down as images are generated on the fly during playback. This presentation takes these considerations further to think about the ways that artificial intelligence further transforms inherited forms and functions of camera-mediation, both in physical apparatuses (e.g. smartphones and drones) and virtual ones (e.g. software-based image generation in videogames, DeepFake videos, AR, or VR). The analysis proceeds by looking at concrete instances such as the “Deep Fusion” technique employed on recent iPhones, which use the A15 Bionic processor—a so-called “neural engine”—to create a composite image combining pixels from a quick burst of digital photos. Beyond merely technical advances, I argue, such “smart” camera processes effect a subtle but significant transformation of our own aesthetic senses, insinuating computational processes in both our low-level processing of sensation and our high-level aesthetic judgments (and thus also algorithmically inserting racial and gendered biases, among other things). A techno-phenomenological analysis, which attends both to technological factors and to the embodied spatiotemporal parameters of human perception, provides the basis for a robustly cultural understanding the “smart” camera, including its role in “re-educating” our aesthetic senses.
