Talks – Page 7 – medieninitiative

The Great Watercooler in the Cloud — Melissa Gregg at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, April 6

The Digital Aesthetics Workshop is happy to announce a long-awaited, COVID-postponed event with Melissa Gregg next week on Tuesday, April 6th 5-7 pm Pacific,”The Great Watercooler in the Cloud: Distributed work, collegial presence and mindful labor post-COVID.”

Please see below for details and register at tinyurl.com/DAW2021.

“The Great Watercooler in the Cloud: Distributed work, collegial presence and mindful labor post-COVID”

The immediate shift to so-called “remote work” in the pandemic created an extraordinary instance of corporate reckoning: hierarchies seemingly so solid and impenetrable evaporated within weeks as workers rapidly adjusted to doing their job in slippers. Previously commonsense notions of the day’s rhythms – the obligatory performance of a 9 to 5 persona – faced critical contaminants in the form of children, spouses and pets. Meanwhile the surprisingly social elements of office life became apparent in their obvious absence. Zoom fatigue replaced team-building drinks as the dominant affective mode. As the work world prepares for a return to something other than normal, this talk draws on multiple studies of technology users in lockdown and previous research on productivity to understand the condition of professional intimacy post-COVID. In doing so, it reflects on the psychological, physical and environmental burdens embedded in the idea of “work from anywhere.”

Melissa Gregg is Intel’s chief social scientist and thought leader for user experience (UX). With a PhD in gender and cultural studies, she is an international expert on the future of work and a specialist in applied ethnography. Her over 60 peer-reviewed publications and books have anticipated key shifts in the experience of connected work and home life, from Work’s Intimacy (Polity 2011) to Counterproductive (Duke 2018), The Affect Theory Reader (Duke 2010) to the new collection, Media and Management (Meson Press 2021).

Following an academic career in Australia, Melissa led Intel’s first university investment in social computing before building user research to a position of strategic impact in the PC business. Her team now guides the roadmap for product development and architecture across consumer and commercial segments, including the EVO brand. As Chief Technologist for Sustainability in the Client Computing Group, Melissa inspires technologists, colleagues, consumers and customers to accelerate the transition to carbon neutral computing. This requires a fundamental reckoning with business as usual for the PC industry, to ensure the finite resources providing connectivity today can continue in to the future.

Sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center. Made possible by support from Linda Randall Meier, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Video: “Post-Cinematic Bodies” (Mercator Lecture, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt)

The video of my Mercator Lecture for the Configurations of Film Graduiertenkolleg at the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, “Post-Cinematic Bodies” (from November 23, 2020), is now online. Hope you enjoy!

Post-Cinematic Bodies — Mercator Fellow Lecture, Nov. 23, 2020

I am excited to be serving as the current Mercator Fellow at the Konfigurationen des Films Graduiertenkolleg / Configurations of Film Graduate Program at the Goethe Universität in Frankfurt — via Zoom, of course — and to deliver a talk titled “Post-Cinematic Bodies” on November 23, 2020 (6pm European time). More info about the event can be found here, with registration details coming soon.

Videos of Two Recent Book-Related Talks

Discorrelation, or: Images between Algorithms and Aesthetics — Nov. 3, 2020 at CESTA, Stanford University

Here are videos of two recent talks related to my book Discorrelated Images. Above, a talk titled “Discorrelation, or: Images between Algorithms and Aesthetics,” delivered at Stanford’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) on November 3, 2020. And below, a talk titled “Discorrelated Images” from October 26, 2020 at UC Santa Barbara’s Media Arts and Technology Seminar Series.

Discorrelated Images — October 26, 2020 at MAT Seminar Series, UCSB

Discorrelation, or: Images between Algorithms and Aesthetics — Nov. 3 at CESTA

On November 3 (12pm Pacific), I’ll be giving a talk, via Zoom, titled “Discorrelation, or: Images between Algorithms and Aesthetics” at Stanford’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA). The talk will focus on my book Discorrelated Images, just out from Duke University Press (and 50% off right with code FALL2020).

In case you’re wondering, this is a different “book talk” than anything you might have seen recently, so check it out if you can! (Though I am told that there is something else going on on November 3rd, so only tune in if you’ve already voted!)

See here for more information and registration!

Discorrelated Images at UCSB Media Arts and Technology Seminar Series, Oct. 26, 2020

Next Monday, October 26, 2020 (1pm Pacific time), I’ll be speaking about my book Discorrelated Images at the Media Arts and Technology Seminar Series at University of California Santa Barbara. Of course, the event will be online via Zoom: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/87911890791

Rendered Worlds: New Regimes of Imaging — October 23, 2020

The Digital Aesthetics Workshop is extremely excited to announce a collaborative panel with UC Davis’ Technocultural Futures Research Cluster.

‘Rendered Worlds: New Regimes of Imaging‘ will take place on Friday, October 23 at 10am PDT. Co-organized by teams from Stanford University and University of California Davis, this event brings together a transatlantic group of scholars to discuss the social, historical, technical, and aesthetic entanglements of our computational images.

Talking about their latest work will be Deborah Levitt (The New School), Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal (UC Davis and Universität Siegen), Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan (King’s College London), and Shane Denson (Stanford). Hank Gerba (Stanford) and Jacob Hagelberg (UC Davis) will co-moderate the round-table. Please register at tinyurl.com/renderedworlds for your zoom link!

We hope to see you there! If you have any questions, please direct them to Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal (rjdhaliwal at ucdavis dot edu).

Sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center. Made possible by support from Linda Randall Meier, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

“How Language Became Data” — Xiaochang Li at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, May 26, 2020 (via Zoom)

The third Digital Aesthetics Workshop event of the Spring quarter is coming up next week: on May 26th, at 5 PM, we’ll host a workshop with Xiaochang Li, via Zoom. Please email Jeff Nagy (jsnagy at stanford dot edu) for the link by May 25th.

Professor Li will share research from her current project, How Language Became Data: Speech Recognition Between Likeness and Likelihood. Beginning in 1971, a team of researchers at IBM began to reorient the field of automatic speech recognition away from the study of human speech and language and towards a startling new mandate: “There’s no data like more data.” In the ensuing decades, speech recognition was refashioned as a problem of large-scale data acquisition and classification, one that was distinct from, if not antithetical to, explanation, interpretability, and expertise. The history of automatic speech recognition invites a glimpse into how making language into data helped make data into an imperative, opening the door for the expansion of algorithmic culture into everyday life.

Xiaochang Li is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Stanford University. Her research examines questions surrounding the relationship between information technology and knowledge production and its role in the organization of social life.

“Bit Field Black” — Kris Cohen at Digital Aesthetics Workshop/CPU, May 19, 2020 (via Zoom)

The Digital Aesthetics Workshop is excited to announce our second event of the Spring quarter: on May 19th, at 5 PM, we’ll host a workshop with Kris Cohen, via Zoom. This workshop has been co-organized with Stanford’s Critical Practices Unit (CPU), whom you can (and should!) follow for future CPU events here. Please email Jeff Nagy (jsnagy at stanford dot edu) by May 18th for the Zoom link.

Professor Cohen will discuss new research from his manuscript-in-progress, Bit Field Black. Bit Field Black accounts for how a group of Black artists working from the Sixties to the present were addressing, in ways both belied and surprisingly revealed by the language of abstraction and conceptualism, nascent configurations of the computer screen and the forms of labor and personhood associated with those configurations.

Professor Cohen is Associate Professor of Art and Humanities at Reed College. He works on the relationship between art, economy, and media technologies, focusing especially on the aesthetics of collective life. His book, Never Alone, Except for Now (Duke University Press, 2017), addresses these concerns in the context of electronic networks.

A poster with all the crucial information is attached for lightweight recirculation.

Thank you to all of the very many of you who logged on for our first Spring workshop with Sarah T. Roberts. We hope you will also join us on the 19th, and keep an eye out for an announcement of our third Spring workshop, with Xiaochang Li, coming up on May 26th

“Behind the Screen” — Sarah T. Roberts at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, April 21, 2020 (via Zoom)

We’re excited to announce a last-minute workshop with Sarah T. Roberts, next Tuesday, April 21st, from 5 to 7 PM. The workshop will take place via Zoom; please email Jeff Nagy (jsnagy at stanford dot edu) for the link.

Professor Roberts is the leading authority on commercial content moderation, the mostly invisible, increasingly globalized labor that keeps digital platforms free(-ish) of hate speech, pornography, and other kinds of unwanted material. Her research has become even more crucial over the last few months, as we increasingly spend the bulk of our professional and social lives online, and we hope you’ll join us to discuss it.

Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media

Faced with mounting pressures and repeated, very public crises, social media firms have taken a new tack since 2017: to respond to criticism of all kinds and from numerous quarters (regulators, civil society advocates, journalists, academics and others) by acknowledging their long-obfuscated human gatekeeping workforce of commercial content moderators. Additionally, these acknowledgments have often come alongside announcements of plans for exponential increases to that workforce, which now represents a global network of laborers – in distinct geographic, cultural, political, economic, labor and industrial circumstances – conservatively estimated in the several tens of thousands and likely many times that. Yet the phenomenon of content moderation in social media firms has been shrouded in mystery when acknowledged at all. In this talk, Sarah T. Roberts will discuss the fruits of her decade-long study the commercial content moderation industry, and its concomitant people, practices and politics. Based on interviews with workers from Silicon Valley to the Philippines, at boutique firms and at major social media companies, she will offer context, history and analysis of this hidden industry, with particular attention to the emotional toll it takes on its workers. The talk will offer insights about potential futures for the commercial internet and a discussion of the future of globalized labor in the digital age.

Sarah T. Roberts is an assistant professor of Information Studies at the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies, specializing in Internet culture, social media, and the intersection of media, technology and society. She is founding co-director, along with Dr. Safiya Noble, of the forthcoming UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry. Her book, Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media, was released in June 2019 (Yale University Press).