Today I have a short piece in Outland on AI art and its embodied processing, as part of a larger suite of articles curated by Mark Amerika.
The essay offers a first taste of something I’m developing at the moment on the phenomenology of AI and the role of aesthetics as first philosophy in the contemporary world — or, AI aesthetics as the necessary foundation of AI ethics.
My book Post-Cinematic Bodies is now out!
An open-access version of the book can be downloaded for free from meson press (here), and a limited number of print copies are available for purchase at Hopscotch Reading Room in Berlin, where the book launch was held on July 3. Paperbacks will be more widely available soon; the book is currently listed on Amazon Germany, and it should be appearing for other regions in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!
Here are some pictures from the book launch, where I was in conversation with Mark Hansen. Turnout was great, and it was lots of fun!
Please note: Due to factors outside of my control, the book launch event for Post-Cinematic Bodies, originally scheduled for this Thursday June 29, has been postponed to next Monday, July 3 at 7pm.
I am happy to announce that I will be in conversation with Mark B. N. Hansen!
Please also note the change of venue, to the Kurfürstenstraße location of Hopscotch Reading Room!
[UPDATE: POSTPONED TO JULY 3 — MORE INFO HERE]
On Thursday, June 29, Hopscotch Reading Room (Gerichtstraße 43 in the Wedding district of Berlin) will be hosting a book launch event for my new book Post-Cinematic Bodies — which will be out both in print and open-access digital formats from meson press. There will be paperbacks available for purchase at the launch, and they’ll be more widely available soon afterwards. If you’re in town, come out around 7pm for a short reading, discussion, and drinks!
[UPDATE: POSTPONED TO JULY 3 — MORE INFO HERE]
On Wednesday, June 14, I’ll be presenting a paper called “AI Art as Tactile-Specular Filter” at the Film-Philosophy Conference at Chapman University (in Orange County, CA). It’s the first time I’ll be attending the conference, which is usually held in the UK, and I am excited to get to know the association, meet up with old and new friends, and hear their papers. The abstract for my paper is below:
AI Art as Tactile-Specular Filter
Though often judged by its spectacular images, AI art needs also to be regarded in terms of its materiality, its temporality, and its relation to embodied existence. Towards this end, I look at AI art through the lens of corporeal phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty writes in Phenomenology of Perception: “Prior to stimuli and sensory contents, we must recognize a kind of inner diaphragm which determines, infinitely more than they do, what our reflexes and perceptions will be able to aim at in the world, the area of our possible operations, the scope of our life.” This bodily “diaphragm” serves like a filtering medium out of which stimulus and response, subject and object emerge in relation to one another. The diaphragm corresponds to Bergson’s conception of affect, which is similarly located prior to perception and action as “that part or aspect of the inside of our bodies which mix with the image of external bodies.” For Bergson, too, the living body is a kind of filter, sifting impulses in a microtemporal interval prior to subjective awareness. In his later work, Merleau-Ponty adds another dimension with his conception of a presubjective écart or fission between tactility and specularity, thus complexifying the filtering operation of the body. With both an interiorizing function (tactility) and an exteriorizing one (specularity), the écart lays the groundwork for what I call the “originary mediality” of flesh—and a view of mediality itself which is always tactile in addition to any visual, image-oriented aspects. This is especially important for visual art produced with AI, as the underlying algorithms operate similarly to the body’s internal diaphragm: as a microtemporal filter that sifts inputs and outputs without regard for any integral conception of subjective or objective form. At the level of its pre-imagistic processing, AI’s external diaphragm thus works on the body’s internal diaphragm and actively modulates the parameters of tactility-specularity, recoding the fleshly mediality from whence images arise as a secondary, precipitate form.
This July, I am excited to be one of the faculty at the Media Aesthetics Summer Institute at Northwestern University, along with Nico Baumbach, Dahye Kim, Hannah Zeavin, and Chenshu Zhou. Please consider applying if this intensive, interdisciplinary workshop could benefit your work. The call for applications and further info are below:
Call for Applications
2023 Summer Institute in Rhetoric, Media, and Publics
Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208
In Person, July 17–21, 2023
The deadline for applications is Tuesday June 6, 2023
Media Aesthetics V:
The annual Rhetoric, Media, and Publics Summer Institute at Northwestern University is scheduled to be held on July 17-21, 2023 (with arrival July 16 and departure July 22).
Institute conveners are Dilip Gaonkar (Rhetoric, Media, and Publics, Northwestern University) and James J. Hodge (English, Northwestern University).
The theorization of media often begins with a story about the history of the senses and the sensorium and how that history might be understood in terms of the ways new technologies transform our individual and collective abilities to see, hear, and communicate. The 21st-century computational saturation of culture by mediated forms as the infrastructure of ordinary life poses new challenges to this project. While many projects emphasize the algorithmic and technical dimensions of the internet age, the media aesthetics project (now in its 5th year) is devoted to exploring ordinary experience. How, for instance, does the rise of internet culture into culture as such bring into being new forms of social belonging, personhood, and collective desire? What aesthetic forms — new or old — grant the most critical traction on grasping our historical present? What critical/interpretive languages do we need to devise to respond constructively to the politically vexed and culturally fragmented ethos of the present? In this project, we hope to explore and interrogate the mediated experience of the present as it mutates, propelled by the rapidly shifting dynamics of capitalist modernity, and while mutating both discloses and conceals the possibilities and perils before us.
Institute Format and Application Process
The institute will consist of five days of presentations and discussions led by visiting scholars and Northwestern faculty. This year’s visiting scholars include: Nico Baumbach (Columbia University), Shane Denson (Stanford University), Hannah Zeavin (Indiana University), and Chenshu Zhou (University of Pennsylvania). This year’s contributing Northwestern University faculty includes Dahye Kim (Asian Languages and Cultures).
The institute is sponsored by the Center for Global Culture and Communication (CGCC), an interdisciplinary initiative of Northwestern University’s School of Communication. The CGCC will subsidize transportation (up to $250), lodging (double-occupancy), and some meals (breakfast and lunch every day and two group dinners) for admitted students. Applicants should send a brief letter of nomination from their academic advisor, along with a one-page statement explaining their interest in participating in this year’s institute, to the summer institute coordinator Bipin Sebastian (bipinsebastian@u.northwestern.edu) We will adopt a policy of rolling admissions. Priority will therefore be granted to strong applications that are submitted in a timely fashion, preferably by June 6, 2023. All inquiries should be directed to Bipin Sebastian.
Summer Institute Schedule (tentative):
Monday 7/17
Welcome and Introductions (am): Dilip Gaonkar & James J. Hodge
Shane Denson talk (pm): “Of Algorithms, Aesthetics, and Embodied Existences”
Tuesday 7/18
Denson workshop (am)
Chenshu Zhou talk (pm): “The Boredom and Excitement of Live Streaming”
Dahye Kim talk (pm): “Korean Writing in the Age of Multilingual Word Processing: Reterritorialization of Scripts and the Cultural Technique of Writing”
Wednesday 7/19
Zhou workshop (am)
Nico Baumbach talk (pm): “Conspiracy as Theory, Theory as Conspiracy”
Thursday 7/20
Baumbach workshop (am)
Hannah Zeavin talk (pm): ” Screening Mother, Coding Baby: Attachment, Deprivation, and the American Prison”
Friday 7/21
Zeavin workshop (am)
Faculty Bios:
Nico Baumbach Nico Baumbach is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Columbia University. His research and teaching focus on critical theory, film and media theory, documentary, and the intersection of aesthetic and political philosophy. He is the author of Cinema/Politics/Philosophy (Columbia University Press, 2019) and The Anonymous Image: Cinema Against Control (Columbia University Press, Forthcoming). He is currently working on a book on the relationship between critical theory and conspiracy theory.
Shane Denson is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies and, by Courtesy, of German Studies and of Communication at Stanford University, where he also serves as Director of the PhD Program in Modern Thought & Literature. His research interests span a variety of media and historical periods, including phenomenological and media-philosophical approaches to film, digital media, and serialized popular forms. He is the author of Post-Cinematic Bodies (2023), Discorrelated Images (2020), and Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface (2014). See shanedenson.com for more information.
Dahye Kim is an Assistant Professor of Asian Languages and Cultures at Northwestern University. Her research and teaching focus on modern Korean literature and culture, critical approaches to media history, and the cultural dimensions of communication technologies in East Asia. Dahye is particularly interested in exploring the evolving significance and signification of literature and literacy in the digital age. Her current project, tentatively titled “Techno-fiction: Science Fictional Dreams of Linguistic Metamorphosis and the Informatization of Korean Writing,” delves into the radical transformation of writing and literature in the new technological environment of the 1980s and 1990s South Korea.
Hannah Zeavin is a scholar, writer, and editor. She is an Assistant Professor of the History of Science at the University of California at Berkeley (Department of History & The Berkeley Center for New Media). Zeavin is the author of The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (2021) and Mother’s Little Helpers; Technology in the American Family (forthcoming), both from MIT Press. She is the Founding Editor of Parapraxis.
Chenshu Zhou (she/her) is Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies in the History of Art Department and the Cinema and Media Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her PhD from Stanford University. Zhou’s research explores a variety of questions related to the moving images, in particular spectatorship, exhibition, and temporality. She is the author of Cinema Off Screen: Moviegoing in Socialist China (University of California Press, 2021), which received the 2022 Best First Book Award from the Society of Cinema and Media Studies. Her second ongoing book project investigates the relationship between work and screen media consumption against China’s transition from socialism to neoliberal authoritarianism.
Please join the Digital Aesthetics Workshop for our last event of the year with Mihaela Mihailova, who will present “Acting Algorithms: Animated Deepfake Performances in Contemporary Media” on Friday, May 26 from 1-3PM PT, where lunch will be served. The event will take place in McMurtry 007.
Zoom link for those unable to join in-person: https://tinyurl.com/3nnj32et
Abstract:
From the moving Mona Lisa deepfake created by the Moscow Samsung AI Center to the (re)animated life-size digital avatar of Salvador Dalí who greets visitors at the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, algorithmically generated performances are becoming integral to emerging media forms. As products of the collaboration between tech researchers, coders, animators, digital artists, and actors, as well as the labor of the (often deceased) makers of the original works, such amalgamated, multi-modal performances challenge existing definitions and conceptualizations of acting in/for the animated medium, along with notions of authorship and authenticity. Additionally, they expand the disciplinary reach and relevance of the subject, highlighting the necessity of thinking through contemporary digital animation’s relationship with data science and machine learning in order to better understand its ever-growing variety of non-filmic permutations.
At the same time, fan-made deepfakes, ranging from movie mashups to unauthorized pornographic edits, further complicate the aesthetic and legal landscape of animated algorithmic performance. Juxtaposing these amateur, free, often low-quality videos and images with the commissioned, well-funded works described above reveals fascinating tensions between the institutional implementations of deepfakes and their popular use on online platforms.
This talk explores the application, dissemination, and ontological status of deepfake performances across a variety of contexts, including digital artworks, viral videos, museum initiatives, and tech demos. It interrogates the practical, ideological, and ethical implications of their means of creation, including the digital “resurrection” of deceased individuals, the repurposing and rebranding of centuries-old artwork, and the superimposition of actors’ faces onto footage of other performers’ roles. It asks the following questions: who (or what) do these animated performances belong to? What new terms and approaches might be necessary in order to fully evaluate and account for their complicated relationship with existing theories of acting? How are they shaping – and being shaped by – contemporary animated media?
Bio:
Mihaela Mihailova is Assistant Professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University. She is the editor of Coraline: A Closer Look at Studio LAIKA’s Stop-Motion Witchcraft (Bloomsbury, 2021). She has published in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, [in]Transition, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, Feminist Media Studies, animation: an interdisciplinary journal, and Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema.
This event is generously co-sponsored by the Stanford McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Image credit goes to The Zizi Show, A Deepfake Drag Cabaret.
I am happy to announce that Edmund Mendelssohn’s White Musical Mythologies: Sonic Presence in Modernism will be the fourth volume in the Sensing Media book series! See below for a description, and see here for more info or to pre-order!
In a narrative that extends from fin de siècle Paris to the 1960s, Edmund Mendelssohn examines modernist thinkers and composers who engaged with non-European and pre-modern cultures as they developed new conceptions of “pure sound.” Pairing Erik Satie with Bergson, Edgard Varèse with Bataille, Pierre Boulez with Artaud, and John Cage with Derrida, White Musical Mythologies offers an ambitious critical history of the ontology of sound, suggesting that the avant-garde ideal of “pure sound” was always an expression of western ethnocentrism.
Each of the musicians studied in this book re-created or appropriated non-European forms of expression as they conceived music ontologically, often thinking music as something immediate and immersive: from Satie’s dabblings with mysticism and exoticism in bohemian Montmartre of the 1890s to Varèse’s experience of ethnographic exhibitions and surrealist poetry in 1930s Paris, and from Boulez’s endeavor to theorize a kind of musical writing that would “absorb” the sounds of non-European musical traditions to Cage, who took inspiration from Eastern thought as he wrote about sound, silence, and chance. These modernist artists believed that the presence effects of sound in their moment were more real and powerful than the outmoded norms of the European musical past. By examining musicians who strove to produce sonic presence, specifically by re-thinking the concept of musical writing (écriture), the book demonstrates that we cannot fully understand French theory in its novelty and complexity without music and sound.
Edmund Mendelssohn is Lecturer in Music at the University of California, Berkeley.
My book Post-Cinematic Bodies, coming soon from meson press, now has a great set of endorsements (blurbs) from three scholars that I greatly respect and admire: Rizvana Bradley, Francesco Casetti, and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht — a group of scholars that reflects the interdisciplinary conversation I hope to provoke across film and media studies, literary theory/philosophical aesthetics, and the study of gender and race in contemporary art and visual culture.
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
See the meson press website for more information.
A short text of mine titled “Streaming Mind, Streaming Body” was recently published online at In Media Res as part of a theme week on “The Contemporary Streaming Style II.” The piece connects reflections stemming from Bernard Stiegler’s philosophy of media to recent body-oriented streaming platforms like the Peloton.
You can find my piece here and the rest of the theme week (with contributions from Neta Alexander, Ethan Tussey, Carol Vernallis, and Jennifer Barker) here.