I am happy to announce the call for papers for the 4th annual Stanford-Leuphana Academy for Media Studies, which will again take place in Berlin (June 25-30, 2023)!
The topic this year is “Media and Cultural Change”
Our core faculty this year are:
Timon Beyes (Sociology of Organisation and Culture, Leuphana)
Shane Denson (Film and Media Studies, Stanford)
Marisa Galvez (French, Italian, and German Studies, Stanford)
Karla Oeler (Film and Media Studies, Stanford)
Claus Pias (History and Epistemology of Media, Leuphana)
Fred Turner (Communication, Stanford)
Sybille Krämer (Philosophy, Leuphana)
Ruth Mayer (American Studies, Hannover)
Bernhard Siegert (History and Epistemology of Cultural Techniques, Weimar)
Special Guests:
Simon Denny (University of Fine Arts Hamburg)
Wolfgang Ernst (Media Studies, Humboldt University Berlin) — to be confirmed
As in previous years, travel and accommodation costs will be covered for graduate students accepted to the Academy, and there will be no additional fees for participation. So please consider applying and spread the word to qualified graduate students!
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 Thursday, March 31 (5pm Central US time), I’ll be participating along with Jihoon Kim, John Powers, and Deborah Levitt in a panel titled “(Post)Cinematic Operations: Envisioning Cameras from the Bolex to Smart Sensors” at this year’s (virtual) SCMS conference.
My paper is titled “AI, Deep Learning, and the Aesthetic Education of the ‘Smart’ Camera.” Here’s the abstract:
The merging of “smart” technologies with imaging technologies creates a number of conceptual difficulties for the definition of the word camera. It also creates a number of aesthetic and phenomenological problems for human sensation. As I argued in my book Discorrelated Images, the microtemporal speed of computational processing inserts itself in between the production and reception of images and endows the camera with an affective density that distinguishes it from a purely mechanical reproduction of visible forms; in processes like motion prediction and motion smoothing, the distinction between camera and screen itself breaks down as images are generated on the fly during playback. This presentation takes these considerations further to think about the ways that artificial intelligence further transforms inherited forms and functions of camera-mediation, both in physical apparatuses (e.g. smartphones and drones) and virtual ones (e.g. software-based image generation in videogames, DeepFake videos, AR, or VR). The analysis proceeds by looking at concrete instances such as the “Deep Fusion” technique employed on recent iPhones, which use the A15 Bionic processor—a so-called “neural engine”—to create a composite image combining pixels from a quick burst of digital photos. Beyond merely technical advances, I argue, such “smart” camera processes effect a subtle but significant transformation of our own aesthetic senses, insinuating computational processes in both our low-level processing of sensation and our high-level aesthetic judgments (and thus also algorithmically inserting racial and gendered biases, among other things). A techno-phenomenological analysis, which attends both to technological factors and to the embodied spatiotemporal parameters of human perception, provides the basis for a robustly cultural understanding the “smart” camera, including its role in “re-educating” our aesthetic senses.
On Saturday, October 2, 2021, at 1pm Eastern / 10am Pacific, I will be participating along with Hannah Zeavin, Casey Boyle, and Hank Gerba in a panel on “DeepFake Energies” at the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) conference (via Zoom).
The panel thinks about the energies invested and expended in DeepFake phenomena: the embodied, cognitive, emotional, inventive, and other energies associated with creating and consuming machine-learning enabled media (video, text, etc.) that simulate human expression, re-create dead persons, or place living people into fake situations. Drawing on resources from phenomenology, psychoanalysis, media theory, and computational exploration, panelists trace the ways that the generative energies at the heart of these AI-powered media transform subjective and collective experiences, with significant consequences for gender, race, and other determinants of political existence in the age of DeepFakes.
Here are the abstracts:
On the Embodied Phenomenology of DeepFakes (Shane Denson, Stanford)
DeepFake videos pose significant challenges to conventional modes of viewing. Indeed, the use of machine learning algorithms in these videos’ production complicates not only traditional forms of moving-image media but also deeply anchored phenomenological categories and structures. By paying close attention to the exchange of energies around these videos, including the consumption of energy in their production but especially the investment of energy on the part of the viewer struggling to discern the provenance and veracity of such images, we discover a mode of viewing that both recalls pre-cinematic forms of fascination while relocating them in a decisively post-cinematic field. The human perceiver no longer stands clearly opposite the image object but instead interfaces with the spectacle at a pre-subjective level that approximates the nonhuman processing of visual information known as machine vision. While the depth referenced in the name “DeepFake” is that of “deep learning,” the aesthetic engagement with these videos implicates an intervention in the depths of embodied sensibility—at the level of what Merleau-Ponty referred to as the “inner diaphragm” that precedes stimulus and response or the distinction of subject and intentional object. While the overt visual thematics of these videos is often highly gendered (their most prominent examples being involuntary synthetic pornography targeting mostly women), viewers are also subject to a”ective syntheses and pre-subjective blurrings that, beyond the level of representation, open their bodies to fleshly “ungenderings” (Hortense Spillers) and re-typifications with far-reaching consequences for both race and gender.
No More Dying (Hannah Zeavin, UC Berkeley)
“No More Dying” concerns itself with the status of DeepFakes in psychic life on the grounds of DeepFakes that reprise the dead. In order to think about whether DeepFakes as surrogates constitute an attempt at eluding pain—a psychotic technology—or are a new form of an ancient capacity to symbolize pain for oneself (Bion 1962), I will return to the status of objects as melancholic media and what this digital partial-revivification might do to and for a psyche. Is creating a virtual agent in the likeness of a lost object a new terrain (a new expression of omnipotent fantasy) or is it more akin to the wish fulfillment at the center of transitional phenomena and dreaming? Does a literal enactment and acting out lead to, as Freud would have it, a mastery and working through—or does the concrete nature of gaming trauma lead to a melancholic preservation of an internal object via an investment in the mediatized external object? Beyond the psychical implications of this form of reviving the dead, the paper troubles the assumptions and politics of this nascent practice by asking whose dead, and whose trauma, are remediated and remedied this way. More simply, which dead are eligible for reliving and, recalling Judith Butler’s question—which lives are grievable?
Low Fidelity in High Definition (Casey Boyle, UT Austin)
When thinking about DeepFakes, it is easy to also think about theorist Jean Baudrillard. It was Baudrillard who, early and often, rang alarm bells regarding the propensity of images and/as information to become unmoored from any direct referent. DeepFakes seem to render literal the general unease with the ongoing mediatization that Baudrillard traced. However, the uncertainty about a “real” is not only because of this severing real from fake, but is also because of a prior condition of media since, as Baudrillard claims, “… a completely new species of uncertainty results not from the lack of information but from information itself and even from an excess of information” (Baudrillard, 1985). The excessive overload of mediatization enables DeepFakes to persist as a threat because the energy and e”ort required to validate any given piece of media is an unsustainable practice when there are so many to verify. It seems then the only response to overload is to generate…more. This presentation reports on an ongoing project to re-energize Baudrillard by computationally generating new texts. Using an instance of GPT-3 machine learning—one trained on Baudrillard’s texts—the presenter will rely on “new” primary texts to comment on the rise of DeepFakes, Post-Truth, and Fake News. Ultimately, this presentation, relying on “new” primary work from Baudrillard, argues that we are not entering an era of Post- Truth but of Post-Piety, which is an era in which we have failed to spend energy building agreement and commonplace.
A Gestural Technics of Individuation as Descent (Hank Gerba)
Googling “What is a DeepFake?” returns a vertiginous list of results detailing the technical processes involved in their production. Operational images par excellence, DeepFakes have spawned an industry of verification practices meant to buttress the epistemological doubt their existence sows. It would seem then that to be concerned with DeepFakes is to be concerned with veridicality, but, as this presentation argues, this problematic is derivative of, and entangled with, an aesthetic encounter. What if we approach DeepFakes otherwise, arriving at, rather than departing from, a causal understanding of their technicity? When a DeepFake “works,” it succeeds in satisfactorily producing gestures characteristic of the person it has “learned” to perform—through these gestures it means them, and only them. The question DeepFakes pose, then, is no longer simply “Is this video a true representation of X?” but “Is this performance true to X?” Gestures therefore plunge us into the aesthetics of personhood; they are, as Vilém Flusser argues, that which mediate personhood by bringing it into the social manifold of meaning. By linking Flusser’s theory of gesture with Gilbert Simondon’s theory of individuation, this presentation concludes by arguing that DeepFakes are a gestural technics of individuation—machinic operations which enfold personhood within the topological logic of gradient descent.
Today I presented a short paper on “Post-Cinematic Animation” as part of a roundtable discussion at the Society for Animation Studies. The roundtable, on “Expanded Animation,” was organized by Deborah Levitt and Phillip Thurtle, and also included Heather Warren-Crow, Misha Mihailova, and Thomas Lamarre—all of whom gave excellent papers. Here’s mine:
My recent book Discorrelated Images (Duke UP 2020) is not first and foremost intended as an intervention in the field of animation studies. Rather, it is an attempt to bring together some of the primarily aesthetic concerns of cinema studies and visual culture more generally with media philosophical and media archaeological interests in the invisible, or anaesthetic if not positively anti-aesthetic, dimensions of technical infrastructures in order to understand how, on the one hand, images have become unyoked from subjective perception and how, on the other hand, this post-phenomenological “discorrelation” opens new avenues of political control and subjectivation. In short, algorithmic images are processed in microtemporal intervals that elude the window of subjective perception; operating faster than us, they thus not only exceed perceptual objecthood but also anticipate our subjectivities; with their predictive or protentional, future-oriented operations, such images mark a significant departure from the past-based recording paradigm of a cinematic media regime, such that post-cinematic media become potent agencies or vectors that lead the way in shaping who we will be; and they do this by operating at or on the cusp between the visible and the invisible, the subjective and the pre-subjective, the aesthetic and the insensible.
But if, as I have said, this argument is not primarily framed in terms of animation studies, it necessarily implicates animation as both a thematic and a medial site of change. In a thread that runs through the book, the question of animation becomes a question precisely of the difference between cinema and post-cinema, one that resonates, in many ways, with Lev Manovich’s argument in the mid-1990s that the postindexical images of “digital cinema” are closer in spirit (and, in some respects, closer materially) to pre-cinematic technologies of animation—phenakistiscopes, thaumatropes, zoetropes, and the like—than to cinema in its classical form. Beyond formal and technical dimensions, I am interested in the philosophical implications, such as those foregrounded by Alan Cholodenko who, writing even earlier than Manovich, argued that “the idea of animation” should be approached “as a notion whose purchase would be transdisciplinary, transinstitutional, implicating the most profound, complex and challenging questions of our culture, questions in the areas of being and becoming, time, space, motion, change—indeed, life itself.” My approach to animation, as the locus of a media-historical transformation that also concerns a reconfiguration of subjectivation’s material parameters, therefore mediates between Manovich’s technical focus and Cholodenko’s philosophical one. I therefore follow Deborah Levitt in her recent probing of animation as “the dominant medium of our time”—by which she refers not to a specific technique but to a broad cultural and sociotechnical condition, which is related as much to moving-image technologies as to biomedical ones (from “novel developments in the biological sciences that open possibilities for producing living beings” to antidepressants and hormone therapy for transgender people); for Levitt, in short, ours is “the age of the animatic apparatus.”
Two other recent theoretical interventions, by Esther Leslie and Joel McKim (writing in a special issue of Animation) and Jim Hodge (in his book Sensations of History: Animation and New Media Art), both suggest that animation mediates between human sense and the insensible processes of computation—a suggestion that helps ground the interrelation of concrete changes in media infrastructure and the forms of subjectivity that they subtend. For example, processes like motion smoothing, in which our so-called “smart TVs” algorithmically compute new images between visible frames and engage in a real-time generative tweening operation, or DeepFake and related AI-driven imaging processes that categorically elude perception in their black boxed operation—such acts of animation in its computationally expanded field activate what Merleau-Ponty referred to as the “inner diaphragm” between subjectivity and objectivity, which, “prior to stimuli and sensory contents, […] determines, infinitely more than they do, what our reflexes and perceptions will be able to aim at in the world, the area of our possible operations, the scope of our life.” That is, algorithmic animation is situated between embodied sensation and the circuits of computational processing, and it thus sets such a pre-subjective and likewise pre-objective membrane in motion, fundamentally recomputing what counts as an image and what our relation to it is. If this means that what Husserl called “the fundamental correlation between noesis and noema,” or the relational bond between perceptual consciousness and its intentional objects, is called into question by computational processes, then animation’s central role as mediator ensures that such discorrelation is not the end but the reinvigoration of embodied sensation—indeed, a redefinition of life itself in the contemporary world.
References:
Cholodenko, Alan. “Introduction.” In The Illusion of Life, edited by Alan Cholodenko, 9-36. Sydney: Power Publications, 1991.
Denson, Shane. Discorrelated Images. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020.
Hodge, James J. Sensations of History: Animation and New Media Art. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019.
Husserl, Edmund. The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness. Translated by James Churchill. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964.
Leslie, Esther, and Joel McKim. “Life Remade: Critical Animation in the Digital Age.” Animation 12.3 (2017): 207-213.
Levitt, Deborah. The Animatic Apparatus: Animation, Vitality, and the Futures of the Image. Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2018.
Manovich, Lev. “What Is Digital Cinema?” In Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film, edited by Shane Denson and Julia Leyda, 20-50. Falmer, UK: REFRAME Books, 2016.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. New York: Routledge, 2002.
The Fórum Internacional Cinemática III, organized by Giselle Gubernikoff, Edson Luiz Oliveira, and Daniel Perseguim of the Universidade de São Paulo, is taking place online from April 13-15, 2021. Dedicated this year to forms of documentary and “the real,” the conference will feature three plenary talks by Steven Shaviro (April 13), me (April 14), and Selmin Kara (April 15).
My talk, titled “Documenting the Post-Cinematic Real,” draws on a line of questioning about computational media and realism that I explore in the latter half of chapter 5 in Discorrelated Images:
“In its classical formulation, cinematic realism is based in the photographic ontology of film, or in the photograph’s indexical relation to the world, which allegedly grants to film its unique purchase on reality; upon this relation also hinged, for many realist filmmakers and theorists, the political promise of realism. Digital media, meanwhile, are widely credited with disrupting indexicality and instituting an alternative ontology of the image, but does that mean that realism as a potentially political power of connection with the world is dead? If we consider the extent to which reality itself is shaped and mediated through digital media today, the question begins to seem strange. As I will demonstrate with reference to a variety of moving-image texts dealing with drone warfare, online terrorism recruitment, and computationally mediated affects, post-cinematic media might in fact be credited with a newly intensified political relevance through their institution of a new, post-cinematic realism. As a result, the question of “documenting the post-cinematic real,” which any contemporary theory of documentary must raise, will necessarily take us beyond the documentary as it is traditionally understood; it will take us into spaces of the computer desktop, of online and offline subjectivities and collectives, and of post-indexical technologies and environments. How can these spaces, which resist traditional coordinates of cinematic realism, be documented?”
Here are the links to view the plenary talks:
Steve Shaviro, “The Ontology of Post-cinematic Images, and Examples from Music Videos,” April 13 (5pm Brazil, 4pm Eastern, 1pm Pacific) — https://youtu.be/7t6GEB6a-tI
This Friday, March 19, 2021 (3pm Central, 1pm Pacific), I will be presenting alongside Deborah Levitt, Joel McKim, and Vivian Sobchack in panel L24: “Rendering: Times, Powers, Perceptions.” Sponsored by the Film Philosophy SIG!
Please help spread the word about this call for papers for the 2021 Berkeley/Stanford Symposium, organized by graduate students in each university’s respective art history programs, to be held (virtually) in conjunction with SFMOMA. Open to all graduate students. Queries and applications to berkeley.stanford.symposium.2021@gmail.com
Very excited to be participating in this “conference on the state of the interdisciplines,” organized by Modern Thought and Literature and taking place this Thursday and Friday at the Stanford Humanities Center!
I am very honored to be speaking alongside some very distinguished thinkers this December at the LIT+ Conference on the State of the Interdisciplines, sponsored by Stanford’s Program in Modern Thought and Literature (MTL), Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (FemGen), the Stanford Law School, and the Stanford Humanities Center. Watch this space for more info soon!
