Yesterday, TheStanford Daily ran an article by student reporter Joshua Kim about the book launch of Post-Cinematic Bodies, which you can find here. Interestingly, it seems that the article was immediately picked up, processed with AI (I can only assume), and (re)published in machinically modified form, complete with a listicle-like FAQs section, by a certain “Simon Smith,” on a website illustrated exclusively with AI-generated images. Welcome, as Matthew Kirschenbaum writes, to the Textpocalypse!
I am happy to announce this year’s first two events of the Critical Making Collaborative at Stanford. Both events focus on critical and self-reflexive uses of AI at the intersection of theory and practice.
The first event, on Friday, October 13 (12-2pm in the McMurtry Building, room 360), includes a screening of Carlo Nasisse’s short film “Uncanny Earth.” In this film — which is equally about technology, ecology, human and nonhuman agency — an AI attempts to tell a story about the earth and its inhabitants. Following the screening, we will discuss the film and the many issues it raises for working and thinking critically with AI with the filmmaker.
Carlo Nasisse is a director and cinematographer. His work has been featured in the New Yorker, PBS, SXSW, Slamdance, and the New Orleans Film Festival. His most recent short film, “Direcciones”, won the Golden Gate Award for Best Documentary Short at the San Francisco Film Festival. He is currently completing his MFA at Stanford University.
RSVPs to shane.denson@stanford.edu are appreciated, though not required, so I have a rough headcount for refreshments.
The second event, on Friday, November 3 (4:30pm, location TBA), will feature Prof. Matt Smith and his wonderfully weird graphic novel remix of Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lies in an Nonmoral Sense” composed in awkward and agonistic collaboration with the AI graphics engine Midjourney — it may be humanity’s last artwork!
Matthew Wilson Smith is Professor of German Studies and of Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford. His interests include modern theatre and relations between science, technology, and the arts. His book The Nervous Stage: 19th-century Neuroscience and the Birth of Modern Theatre (Oxford, 2017) explores historical intersections between theatre and neurology and traces the construction of a “neural subject” over the course of the nineteenth century. It was a finalist for the George Freedley Memorial Award of the Theater Library Association. His previous book, The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace (Routledge, 2007), presents a history and theory of attempts to unify the arts; the book places such diverse figures as Wagner, Moholy-Nagy, Brecht, Riefenstahl, Disney, Warhol, and contemporary cyber-artists within a coherent genealogy of multimedia performance. He is the editor of Georg Büchner: The Major Works, which appeared as a Norton Critical Edition in 2011, and the co-editor of Modernism and Opera (Johns Hopkins, 2016), which was shortlisted for an MSA Book Prize. His essays on theater, opera, film, and virtual reality have appeared widely, and his work as a playwright has appeared at the Eugene O’Neill Musical Theater Conference, Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater, and other stages. He previously held professorships at Cornell University and Boston University as well as visiting positions at Columbia University and Johannes Gutenberg-Universität (Mainz).
A short text of mine titled “Streaming Mind, Streaming Body” was recently published online at In Media Res as part of a theme week on “The Contemporary Streaming Style II.” The piece connects reflections stemming from Bernard Stiegler’s philosophy of media to recent body-oriented streaming platforms like the Peloton.
You can find my piece here and the rest of the theme week (with contributions from Neta Alexander, Ethan Tussey, Carol Vernallis, and Jennifer Barker) here.
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.
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 place in Room 115 at the McMurtry Building (355 Roth Way, Stanford, CA 94305) on Wednesday, March 8th, from 3:00 pm to 5:00 pm.
An algebraic textile pattern from 1947, a cellular automata simulation from 1953, a tabletop game from 1977 – in this 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 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.
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.”
I have had the good fortune to be a Faculty Research Fellow at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research over the past academic year, which has given me an opportunity to work on a new project that thinks about serialization in digital cultures as a vector of change. The larger project takes off from Sartre’s concept of “seriality” (as developed in his late Critique of Dialectical Reason) and connects it to forms of serialized media in order to think about reconfigurations of class, gender, and race. Back in March, I presented some of the work pertaining to gender and embodiment to my colleagues at the Clayman, and they have now posted a short write-up about it. Here’s the (controversial) crux:
Also enjoy this image that I used to illustrate my talk!
Please enjoy this goofy selfie with book and pandemic hair, which I made for Duke University Press’s virtual booth at the College Art Association’s annual conference. During the conference, Duke UP is having another big sale: from now until March 31, you can use the code CAA21 to save 40% off all in-stock books and journals, including Discorrelated Images: https://www.dukeupress.edu/discorrelated-images
Please join us for an exciting, interactive event next Tuesday, November 10th at 5 pm (PT) with libi rose striegl who runs the Media Archaeology Lab at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
libi will be giving a virtual tour and demonstration of pieces from the Media Archaeology Lab collection, followed by a defamiliarization exercise in the form of a Take It Apart(y). Participants are invited to take-apart-along with libi, dissecting and deciphering a piece of household technology. It’s probably best to use something already broken, if you’re not confident with re-assembly!
libi rose striegl is an artist, teacher and friend of mechanisms who currently manages the Media Archaeology Lab. She is perpetually ambivalent about technology. Her work ranges from anarchival exploration to large-scale installation, and she is co-founder of artrepreneurial start-up sharing turtle and one half of audiovisual experiment Prayer Generator. libi recently defended her dissertation ‘Voluntary De-Convenience’ for the PhD in Intermedia Arts, Writing and Performance at CU Boulder, and holds an MFA in Experimental Documentary Arts from Duke.
The Media Archaeology Lab (MAL) was founded in 2009 by Associate Professor Lori Emerson. Their motto is “the past must be lived so that the present can be seen.”Nearly all digital media labs are conceived of as a place for experimental research using the most up-to-date, cutting-edge tools available. By contrast, the MAL—which very well might be the largest of its kind in the world—is a place for cross-disciplinary experimental research and teaching using still functioning media from the past. The MAL is propelled equally by the need to preserve and maintain access to historically important media of all kinds—from magic lanterns, projectors, and typewriters, to early personal computers from the 1970s through the 1990s; as well as early works of digital literature/art which were originally created on the hardware and software housed in the MAL.
This is deeply weird. Google Books has a summary of Discorrelated Images up, and it’s definitely not from the publisher (compare Duke University Press’s summary here). While Google’s summary is not exactly *wrong* in anything that it says, it is far from a summary of what my book is actually about — and some sentences can’t really be judged in terms of truth or accuracy, as they just don’t make sense. (For example, the second sentence: “While film theory is based on past film techniques that rely on human perception to relate frames across time, computer generated images use information to render images as moving themselves.” What does that mean?!? It’s grammatical, and it *sounds* vaguely like something I might have written, but as far as I can tell, it is meaningless.)
Moreover, from this text it sounds like the book is primarily about Michael Bay’s TRANSFORMERS with a detour through Denis Villeneuve’s BLADE RUNNER 2049. To be clear, I do write about both of these, but I also write about Guy Maddin’s algorithmic SEANCES, about Basma Alsharif’s HOME MOVIES GAZA, about desktop horror, drones, speculative execution, animation, about the relations between the phenomenology of perception in relation to microtemporal and subperceptual events, about videogames, codecs, streaming video, and the end of the world.
Anyway, who wrote this summary? Why do I think it was a machine?
