Congratulations to Bernard Dionysus Geoghegan, who has been elected new Co-Chair of the SCMS Philosophy & Theory SIG! And thanks to Will Brown for running in the election. It was a very tight race, and we were extremely proud to present the SIG with two amazing candidates.
It has been an honor to serve in the role of Co-Chair for the past three years, first alongside Co-Chair Victor Fan and Secretary John Winn, and more recently Co-Chair Deborah Levitt and Secretary Hank Gerba. It has been a pleasure working with them all.
I look forward to seeing where Bernie, Deborah, and Hank take the SIG in the coming years!
Please note the time for my keynote at the “Questioning History in the Age of AI” symposium this coming Thursday, April 11 has been updated to 5-7pm.
The full conference schedule is posted above, and here is some additional info from the organizers:
Please join us at UC Berkeley on Thursday, April 11 and Friday April 12 for a symposium on the theme of “Questioning History in the Age of AI.”
Seminars will run each day, beginning at 10am, and will be held in the Social Sciences Matrix Our keynote, given by Shane Denson, will be held Thursday, 5–7pm in 142 Dwinelle
Please register HERE for the seminars, and we will send you the seminar papers in advance of the symposium.
On April 11, I’ll be giving a keynote titled “AI and the Future of (Media) History” at the symposium “Questioning History in the Age of Artificial Intelligence,” organized by David Bates, Julia Irwin, and Johan Fredrikzon. I’m excited to be in conversation with a stellar group of scholars thinking about what AI means for history and historical thinking!
On Sunday, March 17 (10:15am-12pm), I’ll be part of the panel “Endurance Media: Making, Breaking, and Remaking the Body,” co-chaired by Neta Alexander and Rachel Plotnick, and also featuring David Parisi.
My paper is titled “Interfacing with Metabolic Media.” In lieu of an abstract, here’s my talk as an animated gif:
On Monday, January 29, 2024 (6pm in the Terrace Room, 4th floor of Margaret Jacks Hall), four PhD students will present talks originally given at the 2023 Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) conference: Danielle Adair (Theater & Performance Studies), Hank Gerba (Film & Media Studies/Art History), Grace Han (Film & Media Studies/Art History), and Kola Heyward-Rotimi (Modern Thought & Literature).
The panel, entitled “Mediation Between the Lines,” will be accompanied by some finger food and refreshments. Please RSVP here so that we have an idea of how many to expect.
I am happy to announce the call for papers for the 5th annual Stanford-Leuphana Academy for Media Studies, which will again take place in Berlin (June 24-28, 2024)!
Stanford-Leuphana Summer Academy on Humanities and Media 2024
Open to advanced PhD candidates
Date: June 24-28, 2024
Location: Stanford Berlin, Haus Cramer, Pacelliallee 18, 14195 Berlin
Application Deadline: January 15, 2023
2024 topic: »Art, Technology, and the Problem of Acceleration«
For the last two hundred years, any number of writers and scholars have claimed that life is speeding up. As early as 1880 Goethe called the emerging industrial era “velociferous.” In today’s information era, such diagnoses flourish from popular punditry to Paul Virilio’s “Dromology,” Hartmut Rosa’s “Social Acceleration” and, of course, the philosophers of “Accelerationism.” An even older line of thought, a line we can trace back to Newton and Galileo, reminds us that in physics, and perhaps in the social world too, acceleration is always linked to forces of resistance, to inertia and redirection. Today such resistance ranges from a booming deceleration and disconnection industry to reactionary critiques of modernity, from institutional inertia and foot-dragging to the persistence of habits, emotions, mindsets, and values.
How can we understand this interplay of acceleration, technology, and inertia? What roles might media, art, and technology play in processes of acceleration and resistance? Can the study of literature or painting or multimedia sculpture, for instance, help us explore the forces driving acceleration? Give us new ways to understand the refusal to accelerate? What roles has aesthetics played in the economic, organizational, and technological changes under way around the world? And can we make new forms, new stories or images or objects, that let us imagine how we might do things differently?
We aim to bring together emerging scholars from a variety of fields to explore these and related questions. We welcome applications from across the humanities, the arts, and the social sciences. We hope to work collectively and to give participants a newly multidisciplinary toolkit with which to analyze acceleration and deceleration, in the past, the present, and the future.
Core Faculty
1. Timon Beyes (Sociology of Organization and Culture, Leuphana)
2. Shane Denson (Film & Media Studies/Modern Thought & Literature, Stanford)
3. Ute Holl (Media Studies, Basel)
4. Sybille Krämer (Philosophy, Leuphana)
5. Claus Pias (History and Epistemology of Media, Leuphana)
Wolfgang Ernst (Media Theory, Humboldt University Berlin)
Application
All applications from advanced doctoral candidates must be submitted electronically in PDF format. Please submit your CV (1-2 pages) along with a 500-word abstract of your topic and a short letter of intent explaining why you would like to attend this Summer Academy.
Please use the following naming convention for your application files: Lastname_CV.pdf,
Please email your applications by January 15, 2024 to stanleu@leuphana.de.
The working language of the Summer Academy will be English. The organizers will cover travel (economy) and accommodation costs for the time of the summer school. No additional fees will be charged.
General information
The Stanford-Leuphana Summer Academy addresses the intersection between individual humanities disciplines and studies of media and technology from a variety of historical, systematic, and methodological perspectives. As we live in a time when new technologies are emerging at an increasingly rapid pace, the Academy seeks to address vital questions about how different media can drive political and social change, but it also inquires into the assumptions and values that produce technological artifacts. Media studies and media theory intersect with various disciplines in the humanities and social sciences that treat the transmission of information, the formation of social networks, and the embodiment of knowledge in technological artifacts. Therefore, the Academy will bring together faculty and students from various branches of the humanities and social sciences to think about how »mediality« permeates these disciplines in distinct ways; we will approach these issues not only from a robustly interdisciplinary vantage but also by way of comparative cultural and historical perspectives. In this way, the Academy will contribute to our understanding of the fundamental ways that forms of media and technological mediation inform disciplinary knowledge across the humanities, as well as the ways that these disciplinary knowledge formations are an essential precondition to any serious thinking about mediality.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, “Pulse Index”, 2010. “Recorders”, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2011. Photo by: Antimodular Research
On Saturday, September 30, at 9am Pacific Time, I’ll be giving the following talk at ASAP/14 (online):
Correlative Counter-Capture in Contemporary Art
Computational processing takes place at speeds and scales that are categorically outside human perception, but such invisible processing nevertheless exerts significant effects on the sensory and aesthetic—as well as political—qualities of artworks that employ digital and/or algorithmic media. To account for this apparent paradox, it is necessary to rethink aesthetics itself in the light of two evidently opposing tendencies of computation: on the one hand, the invisibility of processing means that computation is phenomenologically discorrelated (in that it breaks with what Husserl calls the “the fundamental correlation between noesis and noema”); on the other hand, however, when directed toward the production of sensory contents, computation relies centrally on statistical correlations that reproduce normative constructs (including those of gender, race, and dis/ability). As discorrelative, computation exceeds the perceptual bond between subject and object, intervening directly in the prepersonal flesh; as correlative, computation not only expresses “algorithmic biases” but is capable of implanting them directly in the flesh. Through this double movement, a correlative capture of the body and its metabolism is made possible: a statistical norming of subjectivity and collectivity prior to perception and representation. Political structures are thus seeded in the realm of affect and aesthesis, but because the intervention takes place in the discorrelated matter of prepersonal embodiment, a margin of indeterminacy remains from which aesthetic and political resistance might be mounted (with no guarantee of success). In this presentation, I turn to contemporary artworks combining the algorithmic (including AI, VR, or robotics) with the metabolic (including heartrate sensors, ECGs, and EEGs) in order to imagine a practice of dis/correlative counter-capture. Works by the likes of Rashaad Newsome, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Hito Steyerl, or Teoma Naccarato and John MacCallum point to an aesthetic practice of counter-capture that does not elude but re-engineers mechanisms of control for potentially, but only ever locally, liberatory purposes.
This July, I am excited to be one of the faculty at the Media Aesthetics Summer Institute at Northwestern University, along with Nico Baumbach, Dahye Kim, Hannah Zeavin, and Chenshu Zhou. Please consider applying if this intensive, interdisciplinary workshop could benefit your work. The call for applications and further info are below:
Call for Applications
2023 Summer Institute in Rhetoric, Media, and Publics
Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208 In Person, July 17–21, 2023 The deadline for applications is Tuesday June 6, 2023
Media Aesthetics V: The annual Rhetoric, Media, and Publics Summer Institute at Northwestern University is scheduled to be held on July 17-21, 2023 (with arrival July 16 and departure July 22).
Institute conveners are Dilip Gaonkar (Rhetoric, Media, and Publics, Northwestern University) and James J. Hodge (English, Northwestern University).
The theorization of media often begins with a story about the history of the senses and the sensorium and how that history might be understood in terms of the ways new technologies transform our individual and collective abilities to see, hear, and communicate. The 21st-century computational saturation of culture by mediated forms as the infrastructure of ordinary life poses new challenges to this project. While many projects emphasize the algorithmic and technical dimensions of the internet age, the media aesthetics project (now in its 5th year) is devoted to exploring ordinary experience. How, for instance, does the rise of internet culture into culture as such bring into being new forms of social belonging, personhood, and collective desire? What aesthetic forms — new or old — grant the most critical traction on grasping our historical present? What critical/interpretive languages do we need to devise to respond constructively to the politically vexed and culturally fragmented ethos of the present? In this project, we hope to explore and interrogate the mediated experience of the present as it mutates, propelled by the rapidly shifting dynamics of capitalist modernity, and while mutating both discloses and conceals the possibilities and perils before us.
Institute Format and Application Process
The institute will consist of five days of presentations and discussions led by visiting scholars and Northwestern faculty. This year’s visiting scholars include: Nico Baumbach (Columbia University), Shane Denson (Stanford University), Hannah Zeavin (Indiana University), and Chenshu Zhou (University of Pennsylvania). This year’s contributing Northwestern University faculty includes Dahye Kim (Asian Languages and Cultures).
The institute is sponsored by the Center for Global Culture and Communication (CGCC), an interdisciplinary initiative of Northwestern University’s School of Communication. The CGCC will subsidize transportation (up to $250), lodging (double-occupancy), and some meals (breakfast and lunch every day and two group dinners) for admitted students. Applicants should send a brief letter of nomination from their academic advisor, along with a one-page statement explaining their interest in participating in this year’s institute, to the summer institute coordinator Bipin Sebastian (bipinsebastian@u.northwestern.edu) We will adopt a policy of rolling admissions. Priority will therefore be granted to strong applications that are submitted in a timely fashion, preferably by June 6, 2023. All inquiries should be directed to Bipin Sebastian.
Summer Institute Schedule (tentative):
Monday 7/17
Welcome and Introductions (am): Dilip Gaonkar & James J. Hodge
Shane Denson talk (pm): “Of Algorithms, Aesthetics, and Embodied Existences”
Tuesday 7/18
Denson workshop (am)
Chenshu Zhou talk (pm): “The Boredom and Excitement of Live Streaming”
Dahye Kim talk (pm): “Korean Writing in the Age of Multilingual Word Processing: Reterritorialization of Scripts and the Cultural Technique of Writing”
Wednesday 7/19
Zhou workshop (am)
Nico Baumbach talk (pm): “Conspiracy as Theory, Theory as Conspiracy”
Thursday 7/20
Baumbach workshop (am)
Hannah Zeavin talk (pm): ” Screening Mother, Coding Baby: Attachment, Deprivation, and the American Prison”
Friday 7/21
Zeavin workshop (am)
Faculty Bios:
Nico Baumbach Nico Baumbach is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Columbia University. His research and teaching focus on critical theory, film and media theory, documentary, and the intersection of aesthetic and political philosophy. He is the author of Cinema/Politics/Philosophy (Columbia University Press, 2019) and The Anonymous Image: Cinema Against Control (Columbia University Press, Forthcoming). He is currently working on a book on the relationship between critical theory and conspiracy theory.
Shane Denson is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies and, by Courtesy, of German Studies and of Communication at Stanford University, where he also serves as Director of the PhD Program in Modern Thought & Literature. His research interests span a variety of media and historical periods, including phenomenological and media-philosophical approaches to film, digital media, and serialized popular forms. He is the author of Post-Cinematic Bodies (2023), Discorrelated Images (2020), and Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface (2014). See shanedenson.com for more information.
Dahye Kim is an Assistant Professor of Asian Languages and Cultures at Northwestern University. Her research and teaching focus on modern Korean literature and culture, critical approaches to media history, and the cultural dimensions of communication technologies in East Asia. Dahye is particularly interested in exploring the evolving significance and signification of literature and literacy in the digital age. Her current project, tentatively titled “Techno-fiction: Science Fictional Dreams of Linguistic Metamorphosis and the Informatization of Korean Writing,” delves into the radical transformation of writing and literature in the new technological environment of the 1980s and 1990s South Korea.
Hannah Zeavin is a scholar, writer, and editor. She is an Assistant Professor of the History of Science at the University of California at Berkeley (Department of History & The Berkeley Center for New Media). Zeavin is the author of The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (2021) and Mother’s Little Helpers; Technology in the American Family (forthcoming), both from MIT Press. She is the Founding Editor of Parapraxis.
Chenshu Zhou (she/her) is Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies in the History of Art Department and the Cinema and Media Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her PhD from Stanford University. Zhou’s research explores a variety of questions related to the moving images, in particular spectatorship, exhibition, and temporality. She is the author of Cinema Off Screen: Moviegoing in Socialist China (University of California Press, 2021), which received the 2022 Best First Book Award from the Society of Cinema and Media Studies. Her second ongoing book project investigates the relationship between work and screen media consumption against China’s transition from socialism to neoliberal authoritarianism.
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.
This year’s Berkeley-Stanford Symposium will again take place at SFMOMA on April 28, 2023. This is always an exciting event, open to graduate student presenters working in art history, visual culture, film and media studies, and interdisciplinary spaces. This year’s theme is “In-Between: Art and Cultural Practices from Here.”
Please see the CFP above. Those interested should submit an abstract no longer than 300 words and a brief bio by February 28th to berkeleystanford2023@gmail.com.
