Frankenstein 2018: 200 Years of Monsters (CFP)

Screen Shot 2018-01-15 at 4.03.09 PM

The call for papers is now out for the “Frankenstein 2018: 200 Years of Monsters” conference hosted by the Australian National University and the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra, Australia (12 – 15 September 2018). I will be giving one of the four keynote talks — on Frankenstein in film and other media. Proposals are being solicited for talks on a range of Frankensteinian topics, including:

  • Literary studies, especially of the long eighteenth century, Romanticism, Victorian and neo­‐Victorian literature
  • Re-tellings and re-­‐imaginings of the Frankenstein story in various modes and genres, e.g. SF, steampunk, speculative fiction, slash fiction, etc.
  • Film, television, theatre and performance, and visual studies
  • Digital humanities, reception studies, histories of popular culture, and media ecologies
  • Gender studies, queer theory, and the history of sexuality
  • Disability studies and post‐humanism
  • The history of medicine, especially reproductive technologies
  • Science and technology studies; images and imaginaries of science and scientists
  • The history and philosophy of biology, especially in relation to vitalism
  • Eco‐criticism and the Anthropocene
  • Affect theory and the history of emotions
  • Frankenstein and race, colonialism, empire
  •  Global and local Frankensteins, e.g. Australian Frankensteins
  • Frankenstein and material history
  • Cyborgs, robots, artificial intelligence, and machine learning
  • Synthetic biology, genetic engineering, and artificial life

For more info and the CFP, take a look at the conference website: http://rsha.cass.anu.edu.au/events/conference-frankenstein-two-hundred-years-monsters

Video Games Have Always Been Queer: Bonnie Ruberg at Digital Aesthetics Workshop

Bonnie Ruberg DAW

On Tuesday, January 23, 2018, Bonnie Ruberg, assistant professor of digital media and games in the Department of Informatics at UC Irvine, will be presenting work from their forthcoming monograph Video Games Have Always Been Queer. The event will take place from 4-6pm in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room as part of the Geballe Research Workshop on Digital Aesthetics: Critical Approaches to Computational Culture.

For more information, please refer to the Stanford Humanities Center website: http://shc.stanford.edu/workshop/meetings/video-games-have-always-been-queer

Rethinking Temporalities in Cinema and Digital Media, SLSA 2017

SLSA-2017

At this year’s SLSA conference, “Out of Time,” hosted by Arizona State University, I will be chairing a panel titled “Rethinking Temporalities in Cinema and Digital Media” (Saturday, November 11, 2017; 4:00-5:30pm). My own talk is titled “Pre-Sponsive Gestures: Post-Cinema Out of Time.” Here is the complete list of panelists and topics:

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Claus Pias at Stanford

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Next week, media theorist Claus Pias, Professor for the Theory and History of Media at Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, will be visiting Stanford for a series of events: on Monday, October 23 (5:30 – 7:00pm), he will be delivering a public lecture titled “Between Information Aesthetics and Design Amplification,” which will be held in my home department of Art & Art History. (More info here.)

The following day, Tuesday, October 24 (11:30am – 1:00pm), he will be discussing his book Computer Game Worlds, which is newly translated into English, at a lunchtime event with the Digital Aesthetics Workshop. (See the poster below or find more info here.)

Claus Pias DAW poster

Digital Aesthetics Workshop: Mark B.N. Hansen, “The Ontology of Media Operations”

Mark Hansen DAW poster

I am pleased to announce the first event in the new Digital Aesthetics Workshop at the Stanford Humanities Center. On Tuesday, October 10, Mark B. N. Hansen (Duke University) will be speaking on the topic of “The Ontology of Media Operations, or, Where is the Technics in Cultural Techniques?”

Future workshops will welcome Claus Pias, Allison de Fren, Bonnie Ruberg, Jacob Gaboury, Jonathan Sterne, and more. Stay tuned!

What Is Monster? What Is Human? (Update)

F200 Opening Colloquium 10 2017 poster

This is the updated poster for the opening colloquium for Stanford’s Frankenstein@200 Initiative, October 17, 2017 (7:00-8:30pm in Cubberley Auditorium, Stanford School of Education). I’ll be speaking alongside Denise Gigante (English Department), Aleta Hayes (Theater and Performance Studies), Russ Altman (Bio-Engineering, Genetics, Medicine, Computer Science), and Hank Greely (Law and Genetics), moderated by Jane Shaw (Dean for Religious Life).

Free and open to the public: All humans, monsters, cyborgs, others welcome.

What is Monster? What is Human?

Frankenstein-Opening-Colloquium

Poster for the opening colloquium for Stanford’s Frankenstein@200 Initiative, October 17, 2017. I’ll be speaking alongside Denise Gigante, Aleta Hayes, Russ Altman, and Hank Greely, moderated by Jane Shaw. Location TBA.

Free and open to the public: All humans, monsters, cyborgs, others welcome.

Cine-Serialities

Kathleen-Guest-Lecture copy

On Tuesday, May 9, 2017, Kathleen Loock (Freie Universität Berlin/University of Wisconsin-Madison) will be holding a guest lecture on “Cine-Serialities: The Industrial Logics, Aesthetic Pleasures, and Discursive Constructions of Cinema’s Serial Forms.” The lecture will take place at 1:30pm in the McMurtry Building, room 350.

Stanford Games and Interactive Media Series (GAIMS) schedule, Spring 2017

 

Spring_2017_Games and Interactive Media

Above, the schedule for the Spring 2017 Games and Interactive Media Series (GAIMS) at Stanford. Among the many great speakers this quarter, we have Dennis Fong (one of the first professional gamers) and Allan Alcorn (the engineer who designed the classic Atari PONG). Check it out!

Post-Cinematic Artifacts at Media Fields Conference

RuinsPoster

Next week, on April 7, 2017, I’ll be giving a talk titled “Post-Cinematic Artifacts: Digital Glitch and the Ruins of Perception” at the 2017 Media Fields conference, “RUINS,” at UC Santa Barbara.

Building on recent work I’ve been doing, I’ll be arguing “that new forms of sensibility and collectivity may become thinkable in the spaces opened up by post-cinematic media – that new ways of being and relating to the world may arise from the ruins of perception.”

The full conference program is posted on the conference website.