Category: Talks

“Computing, Intimately” — Scott Richmond at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, March 14, 2025

We’re delighted to welcome our next speaker for the Digital Aesthetics Workshop: Scott Richmond will present a hands-on demo, titled, “Computing, Intimately: On Computational Transitional Objects” on Friday, March 14, from 11:30am-1pm PT. We request that participants also take a look at the paper he has generously provided us with in advance (please email Grace Han for a copy: ghahahan at stanford dot edu). The event will take place in the Board Room at the Stanford Humanities Center and lunch will be served.

Zoom link for those unable to join in-person: tinyurl.com/mrzjv77d

Abstract:

This hands-on workshop will engage computing historically, theoretically, and aesthetically. Drawing on the work of MIT computer scientist Seymour Papert in the 1970s, whose team made the Logo pedagogical programming environment, we will attend to the psychic and aesthetic dimensions of the computational transitional object as it emerged around 1970. Papert theorized the computational transitional object as our surrogate in the microworld of the computer. Participants will be asked to read a pre-circulated paper about Papert. They should bring a laptop to do hands-on coding in Ludus, a translation of Logo. No programming experience of any kind is required, and those who already know how to code should come with beginners’ mind.

Bio:

Scott C. Richmond is Associate Professor of Cinema and Digital Media in the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto, where they also direct the Centre for Culture and Technology. Their work lies at the intersection of film and media theory, queer and affect theory, avant-garde and experimental media aesthetics, and the history of computing. They are author of two books, Cinema’s Bodily Illusions: Flying, Floating, and Hallucinating (Minnesota, 2016) and Find Each Other: Networks, Affects, and Other Queer Encounters (Duke, under contract).

This event is generously co-sponsored by the Stanford Media Studies Colloquium.

“Borrowed Time: Mediating the Nonevental” — Rizvana Bradley at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, March 4, 2025

The Digital Aesthetics Workshop is looking forward to welcoming Rizvana Bradley, who will present “Borrowed Time: Mediating the Nonevental” on Tuesday, March 4, at 5-7pm PT. The event will take place in the Watt Dining Room at the Humanities Center, where refreshments will be served. Below you will find the Bradley’s bio and a brief abstract, as well as the poster for the event. See you there!

Zoom link for those unable to join in-person: https://stanford.zoom.us/meeting/register/mc9g6VF9SIyeMQ7L-bVFAw#/registration

Abstract:

This talk approaches the concept of mediality, which gets to the heart of a number of theoretical questions concerning the entanglements of raciality, mediation, and immediation, and the worldly violence of the everyday. Interrogating the racialized grammars of ontology, phenomenology, and (aesthetic) form, one can begin to further understand the depth of the violence and scope of the implications of what Bradley theorizes as black mediality. Black mediality has massive implications for both the grammar of technics that predominates in the philosophy of media, as well as the conception of mediality this grammar inscribes. Moving by way of artistic example, the talk demonstrates how both mediatic forms and the perceived technological exteriorizations of the modern human subject are bound to normative, phenomenological conceptions of temporality.

Bio:

Rizvana Bradley is Associate Professor of Film and Media and Affiliated Faculty in the History of Art and the Center for Race and Gender at the University of California, Berkeley.

Bradley’s book, Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form (Stanford University Press, 2023), moves across multiple histories and geographies, artistic mediums and forms—from nineteenth-century painting and early cinema, to contemporary text-based works, video installations, and digital art—in order to inaugurate a new method for interpretation, an ante-formalism, which demonstrates black art’s recursive deconstruction of the aesthetic forms that remain foundational to modernity.

Bradley serves on the Advisory Board of October. Her articles appear in journals such as Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism, Film Quarterly, Black Camera: An International Film Journal, Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, TDR: The Drama Review, Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, and Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory. Her art criticism has also been published in The Yale Review, Artforum, e-flux, Art in America, November, and Parkett, as well as numerous exhibition catalogs, including for the Serpentine Galleries, the New Museum, Whitechapel Gallery, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, and the Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art. Bradley has curated a number of academic arts symposia, including events at the British Film Institute, London, the Serpentine Galleries, London, and the Stedelijk Museum of Art, Amsterdam.

“A Sexual History of the Internet” — Mindy Seu at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, Jan. 28, 2025

The Digital Aesthetics Workshop is proud to welcome Mindy Seu, who will present “A Sexual History of the Internet: Lecture Performance Beta Test” on Tuesday, January 28, 5-7pm PT. The event will take place in Wallenberg Hall 433A, where refreshments will be served. Below you will find the speaker’s bio and a brief abstract, as well as the poster for the event. We hope to see you there!

Zoom link for those unable to join in-person: https://tinyurl.com/3t6y9fd9

Abstract:

“A Sexual History of the Internet” is a revisionist techno-history that introduces device-mediated relationships, the computer mouse as vulva, and the sex workers who built the internet.

Bio:

Mindy Seu is a designer and technologist based in New York City and Los Angeles. Her expanded practice involves archival projects, techno-critical writing, performative lectures, and design commissions. Her latest writing surveys feminist economies, historical precursors of the metaverse, and the materiality of the internet. Mindy’s ongoing Cyberfeminism Index, which gathers three decades of online activism and net art, was commissioned by Rhizome, presented at the New Museum, and awarded the Graham Foundation Grant. She has lectured internationally at cultural institutions (Barbican Centre, New Museum), academic institutions (Columbia University, Central Saint Martins), and mainstream platforms (Pornhub, SSENSE, Google), and been a resident at MacDowell, Sitterwerk Foundation, Pioneer Works, and Internet Archive. Her design commissions and consultation include projects for the Serpentine Gallery, Canadian Centre for Architecture, and MIT Media Lab. Her work has been featured in Vanity Fair, Frieze, Dazed, Brooklyn Rail, i-D, and more. Mindy holds an M.Des. from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and a B.A. in Design Media Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles. As an educator, Mindy was formerly an Assistant Professor at Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts and Critic at Yale School of Art. She is currently an Associate Professor at University of California, Los Angeles in the Department of Design Media Arts. 

This event is generously co-sponsored by the d.school, the Asian American Research Center at Stanford, and the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis.

“The Environmental Data Stack” — Jussi Parikka at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, January 7, 2025

We’re pleased to announce our first event of 2025! Please join us in welcoming Jussi Parikka, who will present on “The Environmental Data Stack” on Tuesday, Jan 7, 5-7pm PT. The event will take place in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room, where refreshments will be served. We look forward to seeing you there after the holiday break!

Zoom link for those unable to join in-person: tinyurl.com/ykhvtu63

Abstract:

This talk tests the notion of “environmental data stack” as a particular kind of a methodological problem space (Lury 2021). The term defines the multiple levels of “problematics” of grounding environmental data in alternating scales of reference, in different technological forms of capture of data, and in various interacting registers of sensing.  The environmental data stack builds on existing work in critical data studies where the situated, even spatialized notions of data are developed – and it also lends itself to a sense of the politics and aesthetics of data, where aesthetics is not necessarily about art (it can be though) but about the wider context of materials, sensing, and modeling. This work relates to my interest in cultural techniques of data and software studies, including the intersection of ecomedia and computational practices. The talk will thus feature some examples from recent and on-going work in different projects such as the Design and Aesthetics for Enviornmental Data (https://cc.au.dk/en/dafed/).

Bio:

Jussi Parikka is professor of Digital Aesthetics and Culture at Aarhus University where he leads the Digital Aesthetics Research Centre (DARC) as well as is the founding co-director of the Environmental Media and Aesthetics -research program. He also holds a visiting professorship at Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton). His books have addressed media archaeology, the ecological underpinnings of discourses of digital culture from animals to geology, and most recently, transformations of visual culture. The more recent books include Operational Images (2023) as well as the co-authored Living Surfaces: Images, Plants, and Environments of Media (2024, with Abelardo Gil-Fournier). Both are available as open access. His books have been translated into 12 languages. Currently he is developing a new project on datafication of agriculture.

This event is generously co-sponsored by The Europe Center.

“Rise of the Machines” — Spiral Film and Philosophy Conference, May 23-24 2025

Spiral – Rise of the Machines – CFPDownload

I am excited to announce that I will be giving the keynote lecture at the Spiral Film & Philosophy conference in May. I attended Spiral back before the pandemic, when Deborah Levitt gave the keynote, and I have been wanting to return ever since.

They’ve put together an excellent theme this year — please share the CFP widely!

“Digital Orreries: Meditations on Material and Media Cosmologies” — Aileen Robinson at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, Dec. 3, 2024

We’re pleased to announce our next event of the year. Please join us in welcoming Aileen Robinson, who will present on “Digital Orreries: Meditations on Material and Media Cosmologies” on Tuesday, Dec 3, 6:30-8:30pm PT. The event will take place in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room, where refreshments (and dinner!) will be served.

Zoom link for those unable to join in-person: tinyurl.com/4mnk7wmn

Bio:

Aileen Robinson is a historian of performance and technology with specializations in 18th and 19th century technological performance and Black cultural performances. Working across the history of science, technology, and theatre, Robinson explores how systems of knowledge, connected to the body and the object, overlapped to produce practices of research, dissemination, and valuation.  Robinson’s current book manuscript, Instruments of Illusion, explores intersections between technological, scientific, and theatrical knowledge in early nineteenth-century interactive science museums. She teaches across the history of science and performance, magic and technology, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century stagecraft, and 19th and 20th-century Black artistic production.

This event has been generously co-sponsored by Stanford TAPS: Department of Theater and Performance Studies.

“Forms in Motion: Elemental Effects in Contemporary Cinema” — Kartik Nair at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, Nov. 12, 2024

We’re pleased to announce our first event for the 24-25 Academic Year. Please join us in welcoming Kartik Nair, who will present on “Forms in Motion: Elemental Effects in Contemporary Cinema” on Tuesday, November 12, 5:00-7:00pm PT. The event will take place in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room, where refreshments will be served. Below you will find the abstract and bio attached, as well as a poster  for lightweight circulation. We look forward to seeing you there!

Zoom link for those unable to join in-person: tinyurl.com/4b8e75v4

Abstract:

Motion capture is the practice of recording the movements of human bodies and using those movements to animate computer-generated bodies, thereby producing virtual character movement on the screen. Current scholarship on motion capture has critically examined the construction of this technology in trade reportage, industry journalism, and film promotion, detecting a discursive ambivalence arising from a struggle for recognition between live actors and motion capture technicians over the future of film performance. This talk will use motion capture as a heuristic to understand the many other kinds of human movements that are being captured in the processes of digital image-making. I will track the pipeline of atmospheric effects. Such atmospheric effects are ubiquitous in contemporary blockbuster cinema. Dust, fire, smoke, light, water and other particulate proliferate in the mise en scene, helping to ground impossible worlds even as they fascinate us with their own expressive qualities. Replacing the logic of photographic capture with one in which the frame is a ‘blank canvas’ to which elements are selectively added, such atmospheric effects vividly attest to the claim that digital tools have re-linked filmmaking with painting. Yet, unlike the painted canvas, which preserves brushstrokes in frozen perpetuity, virtual effects inscribe a trace of and in motion: these are instances in which the creative and corporeal motion of visual effects artists is captured and conveyed as motion. This process unfolds along a transnational path along which the mobile trace moves. Even as those generating it may remain immobilized by visa regulations, server locations, and time-zone differentials, their physical moves are eventually ex-propriated and assimilated into screen movement. Closely read, then, the spectacular conventions of blockbuster cinema can become legible as archives in and of motion.

Bio:

Kartik Nair is a film scholar working at the intersection of transnational cinema, film historiography, materialist media theory, and infrastructure studies, with a focus on popular genres and South Asian cinema. His first book, Seeing Things, is about the production and circulation of low-budget horror films in 1980s India. His current research explores the physical pipelines of digital cinema. He is an Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Temple University in Philadelphia, and one of the core editors of BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies.

This event has been generously co-sponsored by the Department of Art & Art History and the Stanford Center for South Asia.

Video: Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous (LASER) Talks, June 10, 2024

Thanks to Piero Scaruffi for inviting me to present at the Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous (LASER) series here at Stanford last night, alongside Virginia San Fratello, Fiorenza Micheli, and Tom Mullaney. It was a great conversation, with lots of unexpected resonances!

“How is Human Embodiment Transformed in an Age of Algorithms?” — Stanford LASER Talks, June 10, 2024

On June 10, 2024 (7pm at Li Ka Shing Center 120), I will be presenting an informal talk titled “How is Human Embodiment Transformed in an Age of Algorithms?” as part of a Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous (LASER) Talks event.

The four talks that evening are:

– Shane Denson (Stanford/ Film and Media) on “How is Human Embodiment Transformed in an Age of Algorithms?”

– Virginia San Fratello (San Jose State Univ/ Art) on “3D Printing the Future”

– Fiorenza Micheli (Stanford/ Center for Ocean Solutions) on “Harnessing the data revolution for ocean and human health”

– Tom Mullaney (Stanford/ History) on “The Audacity of Chinese Computing”

The event is open to the public. More info is available here: https://events.stanford.edu/event/four-laser-talks-human-embodiment-3d-printing-ocean-health-chinese-computing

Sunset with a Sky Background — Screening and discussion on AI Aesthetics with filmmaker J. Makary and respondent Caitlin Chan

On May 7, 2024 (4:30pm in McMurtry 115), the Critical Making Collaborative at Stanford is proud to present a screening of Sunset with a Sky Background, followed by a discussion on AI aesthetics with filmmaker J. Makary and respondent Caitlin Chan.

J. Louise Makary is a filmmaker and Ph.D. candidate in art history specializing in film studies and lens-based art practices. She is interested in using methodologies foundational to the study of cinema, such as psychoanalysis and semiotics, to interpret emergent visual forms of A.I. with film in mind. Her works have been exhibited at ICA Philadelphia, Bauhaus University, the Slought Foundation, Mana Contemporary (Jersey City and Chicago), Human Resources LA, Moore College, SPACES Cleveland, and the Spring/Break Art Show.

Caitlin Chan is a second year Ph.D. student in art history. She is currently working on a project that historicizes the aesthetics and phenomenology of A.I.-generated images by tracing a genealogy to early 19th-century photographic practices of making and viewership.