Please join the Critical Making Collaborative at Stanford for a presentation titled “Crystals, Genes, and Wool: Three Case Studies in Algorithmic Re-enactment” by Alexander R. Galloway, Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. This free event will take on Zoom on Tuesday, April 25th, from 5:00 pm to 7:00 pm PDT.
An algebraic textile pattern from 1947, a cellular automata simulation from 1953, a tabletop game from 1977 – in this online workshop, we will explore three lost or otherwise overlooked pieces of code from the deep history of computational culture. Using an experimental method dubbed “algorithmic re-enactment,” we will study these artifacts in their own historical context, while also bringing them to life again using current tools.
Alexander R. Galloway is a writer and computer programmer. He is the author of several books on digital media and critical theory, including most recently Uncomputable: Play and Politics in the Long Digital Age (Verso, 2021). Since 2001 he has worked with the Radical Software Group on Carnivore, Kriegspiel, and other software projects.
This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford. Please RSVP here to receive a Zoom link by email.
This talk previews my forthcoming book Post-Cinematic Bodies, in which I ask: How is human embodiment transformed in an age of algorithms? How do post-cinematic media technologies such as AI, VR, and robotics target and re-shape our bodies? Post-Cinematic Bodies grapples with these questions by attending both to mundane devices—such as smartphones, networked exercise machines, and smart watches and other wearables equipped with heartrate sensors—as well as to new media artworks that rework such equipment to reveal to us the ways that our fleshly existences are increasingly up for grabs. Through an equally philosophical and interpretive analysis, the book aims to develop a new aesthetics of embodied experience that is attuned to a new age of predictive technology and metabolic capitalism.
The Working Group in Literary and Visual Culture is sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center, made possible by support from an anonymous donor honoring the work of former SHC Director John Bender, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Please join us at the Digital Aesthetics Workshop on Tuesday March 7th, 5-7PM, for “‘No Deconstruction without Computers’: Learning to Code with Derrida and Kittler” with Alexander Galloway. We will meet in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room, as usual. This event is graciously co-sponsored by the Critical Making Collaborative, Art & Art History Department, and Communication Department.
Find a description of the talk below, and a poster for lightweight distribution. We look forward to seeing you there (and at M. Beatrice Fazi’s event next Tuesday the 28th) !
“‘No Deconstruction without Computers’: Learning to Code with Derrida and Kittler” Alexander R. Galloway
What are the machines that determine thinking? We may approach the question in a number of ways. The typical approach is to consider (or perhaps even craft) a philosophy of media. This comes under the name of media studies or media theory, where media artifacts are taken as the objects of thinking. Yet there is also an alternate approach, the media of philosophy, where the a priori conditions of philosophy themselves take center stage, engulfing thought as a kind of object. For if “media determine our situation,” as Friedrich Kittler once notoriously put it, is it not also true that philosophies shift according to the changing conditions of media technology? In this lecture we will explore the history of philosopher’s devices drawn from the domain of machines and computers, while focusing attention on two of them: Jacques Derrida’s Macintosh Plus and Friedrich Kittler’s MS-DOS machine (he migrated later to Gentoo Linux). This will serve as a backdrop for a different kind of inquiry, not simply that our writing instruments contribute to our thoughts, but also that our thoughts themselves are instruments.
Coming soon from meson press, in the Configurations of Film book series!
Post-Cinematic Bodies
How is human embodiment transformed in an age of algorithms? How do post-cinematic media technologies such as AI, VR, and robotics target and re-shape our bodies? Post-Cinematic Bodies grapples with these questions by attending both to mundane devices—such as smartphones, networked exercise machines, and smart watches and other wearables equipped with heartrate sensors—as well as to new media artworks that rework such equipment to reveal to us the ways that our fleshly existences are increasingly up for grabs. Through an equally philosophical and interpretive analysis, the book aims to develop a new aesthetics of embodied experience that is attuned to a new age of predictive technology and metabolic capitalism.
Please join us for our next event with M. Beatrice Fazi on Tuesday February 28 @ 5-7pm Pacific time. We’ll meet in the Stanford Humanities Center, as usual. Zoom Registration, if not able to attend IRL: https://tinyurl.com/39tsjc62
The topic of Beatrice’s talk is “On Digital Theory.”
Abstract:
What is digital theory? In this talk, M. Beatrice Fazi will advance and discuss two parallel propositions that aim to answer that question: first, that digital theory is a theory that investigates the digital as such and, second, that it is a theory that is digital insofar as it discretizes via abstraction. Fazi will argue that digital theory should offer a systematic and systematizing study of the digital in and of itself. In other words, it should investigate what the digital is, and that investigation should identify the distinctive ontological determinations and specificities of the digital. This is not the only scope of a theoretical approach to the digital, but it constitutes a central moment for digital theory, a moment that defines digital theory through the search for the definition of the digital itself. Fazi will also consider how, if we wish to understand what digital theory is, we must address the characteristics of theoretical analysis, which can be done only by reflecting on what thinking is in the first place. Definitions of the digital, definitions of thought, and definitions of theory all meet at a key conceptual juncture. To explain this, Fazi will discuss how to theorize is to engage in abstracting and that both are processes of discretization. The talk will conclude by considering whether the digital could be understood as a mode of thought as well as a mode of representing thought.
Bio:
M. Beatrice Fazi is Reader in Digital Humanities in the School of Media, Arts and Humanities at the University of Sussex, United Kingdom. Her primary areas of expertise are the philosophy of computation, the philosophy of technology and the emerging field of media philosophy. Her research focuses on the ontologies and epistemologies produced by contemporary technoscience, particularly in relation to issues in artificial intelligence and computation and to their impact on culture and society. She has published extensively on the limits and potentialities of the computational method, on digital aesthetics and on the automation of thought. Her monograph Contingent Computation: Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aestheticswas published by Rowman & Littlefield International in 2018.
The new issue of Senses of Cinema is out now with a special dossier on “The Geometry of Movement: Computer-Generated Imagery in Film,” edited by Luise Morke and Jack Seibert. The dossier is full of exciting articles, and it also includes my piece on “DeepFakes and the (Un)Gendering of the Flesh” — which previews some of what’s in store in my forthcoming book Post-Cinematic Bodies.
I am excited to be participating in the 2023 Wolf Conference on “Temporal Mediations in Digital Capitalism” on February 11 at the University of Pennsylvania. I am grateful to Chenshu Zhou for the invitation.
My talk is titled “On the Temporal Technics of Metabolic Capitalism”:
In this presentation, I hope to uncover the temporal dynamics of an emerging system of metabolic capitalism. This system takes aim at embodied and environmental exchanges, including organic processes such as heart rate, brainwave activity, and eye movement, targeting the body as both a resource to be mined and an object to be shaped. Wearables such as the Apple Watch, smart exercise machines like the Peloton or Mirror workout systems, and consumer-grade EEG devices marketed to help improve attention or to assist with mindfulness or meditation—all of these institute a system of “training” that aims to discipline the user’s bodymind and make it more productive. Unlike earlier disciplinary regimes, however, this newer one situates screens and other interfaces as the site of interactive real-time feedback between metabolic processes and subjective and social efforts to transform them. Accordingly, these apparatuses operationalize a temporality that undercuts the threshold of subjective perception, intervening directly in the prepersonal time of embodiment itself, thus enlisting users in an experiment with metabolic and phenomenological time that has far-reaching consequences for our embodied and social existences. (It goes without saying that corporations will extract value from the experiment regardless of its success or failure, however such outcomes might be defined.)
From a media-theoretical perspective, the new interventions mark a significant update from the past-oriented or memorial functions of recording technologies like the cinema as well as the “ontology of liveness” or presence attaching to television; in their place, post-cinematic technologies such as those discussed here are future-oriented or protentional, and they therefore participate in a potential pre-formatting of subjectivity and embodiment. In political economic terms, these technologies therefore also mark an important update in the organization of social materiality itself; that is, they shift from what Sartre in his late, Marxist work identified as the “practico-inert” (in light of the way that commodities and other forms of “worked matter” store past human praxis while condensing it into inert objective form), to a futural technics of what I call the “practico-alert”—where proactively surveillant technologies intervene more directly in subjectivation processes and put us, like the new machines, in a constant state of alert. Finally, whereas Sartre’s practico-inert organized social structures around itself (Sartre’s class-oriented formation of the “seriality,” for example, which Iris Marion Young takes as the basis for thinking gender as a socially enforced typification process), these new futural technologies must be interrogated also in terms of their social agencies as important vectors of typification (racialization, gendering, and dis/abling, among others) and futural or preemptive interpellation.
Further info about the conference, including the complete line-up of speakers and abstracts can be found here.
Today is publication day for Vilém Flusser’s Commmunicology: Mutations in Human Relations! This is the second volume in the Sensing Media series (which I co-edit with Wendy Hui Kyong Chun for Stanford University Press), and it includes a foreword by N. Katherine Hayles. Find more info here.
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.”
*~*~*~*!!! 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).
*~*~*~*!!! The Digital Aesthetics Workshop is back !!!~*~*~*