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).
Last week I had the honor of presenting some new material at Leif Weatherby’s Digital Theory Lab at NYU, and this week I’ll be traveling to Siegen, Germany, to present another version of this material, focused on the “deep violence” of DeepFakes.
I’m especially excited to present this material, as it draws on a new book project, titled Post-Cinematic Bodies, a draft of which I have just completed! Stay tuned for more!
On Wednesday, December 8, 2021 (12:00 – 1:00pm Pacific time), I will be in conversation with Jacob Gaboury about his excellent new book Image Objects: An Archaeology of Computer Graphics for UC Berkeley’s Townsend Center for the Humanities.
The event will be livestreamed on YouTube and is therefore open for all to view.
Amerika, a renowned remix artist and theorist, has put together a fitting and original provocation, challenging the theory/practice divide by co-authoring his book with the open source artificial intelligence GPT-2. Appropriately enough, GPT-2’s successor, GPT-3, has provided a blurb for the book:
“This book is so radically different from anything else out there, it has the potential to revolutionize the way you think about human history and the origins of the world.”
“This book is an expression of the truth that you’re a robot.”
“This book explains how our society is turning into a mechanical paradise, and how we’re doomed.”
