The Critical Making Collaborative at Stanford invites you to an evening of sharing and discussion with two recipients of the Critical Making Award, West Montgomery and Lloyd May, who will present their ongoing work in opera and haptic art—Friday, Nov. 22 (5PM) at the CCRMA Stage (3rd floor).
Democratizing Vibrations – Lloyd May (Music Technology)
What would it mean to put vibration and touch at the center of a musical experience? What should devices used to create and experience vibration-based art (haptic instruments) look and feel like? These questions are at the core of the Musical Haptics project that aims to co-design haptic instruments and artworks with D/deaf and hard-of-hearing artists.
Opera Machine – Westley Montgomery (TAPS)
Opera Machine is a work-in-process exploring music, measurement, and the sedimentation of culture in the bodies of performers. How does the cultural legacy of opera reverberate in the present day? How have the histories of voice-science, race “science,” and the gendering of the body co-produced pedagogies and styles of opera performance? What might it look like (sound like) to resist these histories?
We’re pleased to announce our first event for the 24-25 Academic Year. Please join us in welcoming Kartik Nair, who will present on “Forms in Motion: Elemental Effects in Contemporary Cinema” on Tuesday, November 12, 5:00-7:00pm PT. The event will take place in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room, where refreshments will be served. Below you will find the abstract and bio attached, as well as a poster for lightweight circulation. We look forward to seeing you there!
Motion capture is the practice of recording the movements of human bodies and using those movements to animate computer-generated bodies, thereby producing virtual character movement on the screen. Current scholarship on motion capture has critically examined the construction of this technology in trade reportage, industry journalism, and film promotion, detecting a discursive ambivalence arising from a struggle for recognition between live actors and motion capture technicians over the future of film performance. This talk will use motion capture as a heuristic to understand the many other kinds of human movements that are being captured in the processes of digital image-making. I will track the pipeline of atmospheric effects. Such atmospheric effects are ubiquitous in contemporary blockbuster cinema. Dust, fire, smoke, light, water and other particulate proliferate in the mise en scene, helping to ground impossible worlds even as they fascinate us with their own expressive qualities. Replacing the logic of photographic capture with one in which the frame is a ‘blank canvas’ to which elements are selectively added, such atmospheric effects vividly attest to the claim that digital tools have re-linked filmmaking with painting. Yet, unlike the painted canvas, which preserves brushstrokes in frozen perpetuity, virtual effects inscribe a trace of and in motion: these are instances in which the creative and corporeal motion of visual effects artists is captured and conveyed as motion. This process unfolds along a transnational path along which the mobile trace moves. Even as those generating it may remain immobilized by visa regulations, server locations, and time-zone differentials, their physical moves are eventually ex-propriated and assimilated into screen movement. Closely read, then, the spectacular conventions of blockbuster cinema can become legible as archives in and of motion.
Bio:
Kartik Nair is a film scholar working at the intersection of transnational cinema, film historiography, materialist media theory, and infrastructure studies, with a focus on popular genres and South Asian cinema. His first book, Seeing Things, is about the production and circulation of low-budget horror films in 1980s India. His current research explores the physical pipelines of digital cinema. He is an Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Temple University in Philadelphia, and one of the core editors of BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies.
This event has been generously co-sponsored by the Department of Art & Art History and the Stanford Center for South Asia.
I’m excited to report that the Digital Aesthetics Workshop at the Stanford Humanities Center has been renewed for another year — our seventh! Next year’s graduate student co-chairs are Grace Han and Rebecca Turner!
This past week marked the conclusion of our sixth year of the Digital Aesthetics Workshop at the Stanford Humanities Center, which we celebrated with a graduate symposium — the appropriately titled Digital Aesthetics Workshop-Workshop!
With nine events a year, six years is a lot of events! Here’s what we’ve done so far:
2017-2018 Events:
Mark B. N. Hansen, “The Ontology of Media Operations, or, Where is the Technics in Cultural Techniques,” 10 October 2017
Claus Pias, “Computer Game Worlds,” 24 October 2017
Allison de Fren, “Post-Cinema and Videographic Criticism,” 14 November 2017
Bonnie Ruberg, “Video Games Have Always Been Queer,” 23 January 2018
Jacob Gaboury, “Techniques for Secondary Mediation: On the Screenshot as Image-Object,” 6 February 2018
Shane Denson, “Discorrelated Images,” 3 April 2018
Elizabeth Kessler, “Psychedelic Space and Anachronic Time: Photography and the Voyager’s Tour of the Solar System,” 10 April 2018
Jonathan Sterne, “Machine Learning, ‘AI,’ and the Politics of Media Aesthetics: Why Online Music Mastering (Sort of) Works,” 24 April 2018
Matthew Wilson Smith, “The Nostalgia of Virtual Reality,” 15 May 2018
2018-2019 Events:
Carolyn L. Kane, “Chroma Glitch: Data as Style,” 9 October 2018
Camille Utterback, “Embodied Interactions & Material Screens,” 27 November 2018
Miryam Sas, “Plastic Dialectics: Community and Collectivity in Japanese Contemporary Art,” 4 December 2018
Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux, “Skin in the Game: Greymarket Gambling in the Virtual Economies of Counter-Strike,” 14 January 2019
N. Katherine Hayles, “Can Computers Create Meaning? A Cyber-Bio-Semiotic Perspective,” 12 February 2019
Kevin B. Lee, “Dreams and Terrors of Desktop Documentary,” 27 February 2019
Marion Fourcade, “A Maussian Bargain: The Give and Take of the Personal Data Economy,” 23 April 2019
Digital Aesthetics Symposium, featuring Stanford graduate students and faculty, 14-15 May 2019
Miyako Innoue, “Writing at the Speed of Thinking: The Japanese Kana Typewriter and the Rehabilitation of the Male Hand,” 28 May 2019
2019-2020 Events:
Jenny Odell, “Killing Time,” 23 October 2019
Scott Bukatman, “We Are Ant-Man,” 5 November 2019
Ben Peters, “Declining Russian Media Theory,” 21 November 2019
Rachel Plotnick, “Unclean Interface: Computation as a Cleanliness Problem,” 11 February 2020
Jean Ma, “At the Edges of Sleep,” 9 March 2020 [cancelled due to COVID-19]
Melissa Gregg, Title TBA, 7 April 2020 [cancelled due to COVID-19]
Sarah T. Roberts, “Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media,” 21 April 2020
Kris Cohen, “Bit Field Black,” 19 May 2020
Xiaochang Li, “How Language Became Data: Speech Recognition between Likeness and Likelihood,” 26 May 2020
2020-2021 Events:
Vivian Sobchack, in conversation with Scott Bukatman and Shane Denson, 29 September 2020 (additional follow-up event for Stanford graduate students, 14 October 2020)
“New Regimes of Imaging.” Roundtable discussion with Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal, Deborah Levitt, Bernard Geoghegan, and Shane Denson, 23 October 2020
libi rose striegl and the Media Archaeology Lab at the University of Colorado at Boulder, 10 November 2020
Shaka McGlotten, “Racial Chain of Being,” 8 December 2020
James J. Hodge and Shane Denson, “Dialogue in Digital Aesthetics: Sensations of History and Discorrelated Images,” 2 April 2021
Melissa Gregg, “The Great Watercooler in the Cloud: Distributed Work, Collegial Presence, and Mindful Labor Post-COVID,” 6 April 2021
Adrian Daub, “What Tech Calls Thinking,” 11 May 2021
Legacy Russell, “Cyberpublics, Monuments, and Participation,” 20 May 2021
Fred Turner and Mary Beth Meehan, “Seeing Silicon Valley – Life Inside a Fraying America,” 2 June 2021
2022-2023 Events:
Erich Hörl, “The Disruptive Condition,” 5 October 2022
Mark Algee-Hewitt, “Patterns of Text/Patterns of Analysis,” 15 November 2022
Jean Ma and Tung-Hui Hu, “In Conversation” (joint book event), 2 December 2022
Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, “The Violent Forensics of Digital Imagery: Abu Ghraib, Ukraine, and Cat Videos,” 17 January 2023
Melissa Gilliam and Patrick Jagoda, “Game Changer Lab” (co-sponsored with the Critical Making Collaborative), 26 January 2023
M. Beatrice Fazi, “On Digital Theory,” 28 February 2023
Alexander Galloway, “‘No Deconstruction without Computers’: Learning to Code with Derrida and Kittler,” 7 March 2023
Neta Alexander, “The Right to Speed-Watch (or, When Netflix Discovered its Blind Viewers),” 18 April 2023
Damon Young, “Selfie/Portrait,” 9 May 2023
Mihaela Mihailova, “Acting Algorithms: Animated Deepfake Performances in Contemporary Media,” 26 May 2023
2023-2024 Events:
Luciana Parisi, “The Negative Aesthetic of AI,” 20 October 2023
Ge Wang, “Artful Design and Artificial Intelligence: What Do We (Really) Want from AI?,” 14 November 2023
Thomas Lamarre, “Harvesting Light,” 5 December 2023
Bryan Norton, “Marx After Simondon: Metabolic Rift and the Analog of Computation,” 30 January 2024
Yvette Granata, “Mimetic Virtualities: Rendering the Masses and/or Feminist Media Art?,” 6 February 2024
Akira Mizuta Lippit, “Shadowline,” 12 March 2024
Nicholas Baer, “The Ends of Perfection: On a Limit Concept in Global Film and Media Theory,” 5 April 2024
James Hodge, “Six Theses on an Aesthetics of Always-On Computing,” 30 April 2024
Digital Aesthetics Workshop-Workshop, graduate student symposium, with responses from Angèle Christin and Shane Denson, 24 May 2024
Thanks to all of the graduate student coordinators over the years, including Jeff Nagy, Doug Eacho, Natalie Deam, Annika Butler-Wall, and this year’s coordinators Grace Han and Hank Gerba. (And congratulations to Hank on successfully defending their dissertation last week!)
The Critical Making Collaborative is proud to present Raissa Simpson, John Eric Henry, and Marc Cunanan Chappelle, who will be discussing their work with AI and drones on Friday, April 26 at 4:30pm in Roble 139.
We’re pleased to announce the second event of the Digital Aesthetics Workshop for spring quarter. Please join us in welcoming James J. Hodge, who will present on “Six Theses on an Aesthetics of Always-On Computing” on Tuesday, April 30, 5:00-7:00pm PT. The event will take place in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room, where refreshments will be served. Below you will find the abstract and bio. We look forward to seeing you there!
This talk comes from my book project, “Ordinary Media: An Aesthetics of Always-On Computing.” The premise of the project is that the smartphone has become for many the signature technology and engine of experience in the twenty-first century. One of the project’s larger claims is that ambient givenness of smartphones in contemporary life has significantly reorganized the human sensorium and, moreover, has elevated the significance of experience at the level of the skin’s surface, or what the psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden terms “boundedness.” This talk attends to the ways in which this dramatic shift in the general orientation of experience entails a sea change in the general nature of aesthetics native and responsive to the always-on world. Discussing a variety of examples from film, literature, video, games, digital art, and vernacular aesthetic forms and genres, this talk explores six “theses” of aesthetics in this still-novel yet ordinary arena.
Bio:
James J. Hodge is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Northwestern University. His essays on digital aesthetics have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Postmodern Culture, TriQuarterly, Film Criticism, and elsewhere. He is the author of Sensations of History: Animation and New Media Art (Minnesota, 2019).
We’re pleased to announce the return of the Digital Aesthetics Workshop – Workshop. In the spirit of the Digital Aesthetics series – which invites faculty from various institutions to speak about their work – we envision the DAW-W to be a space for graduate students to share any work-in-progress research in a half-day workshop at the Stanford Humanities Center.
We welcome 250-word abstracts from Stanford graduate students for 15-20 minute presentations. Presentations can be about papers, practice-based projects, and alternative forms of research relevant to the theme of “digital aesthetics,” broadly understood. Presentations will then be workshopped with their peers and faculty mentors Shane Denson (Art History) and Angèle Christin (Communication). Lunch and refreshments will be provided to attendees.
Please send your abstracts to Hank Gerba (hankg@stanford.edu) and Grace Han (ghahahan@stanford.edu) by 6 May 2024, with the email title “DAW-W Abstract.” Acceptances will be sent out shortly after.
We’re pleased to announce our last event of the winter quarter, slated for next week. Please join us in welcoming Akira Mizuta Lippit, who will present on “Shadowline” on Tuesday, March 12, 5-7pm PT. The event will take place in McMurtry 370, where refreshments will be served. Below you will find the abstract and bio attached, as well as a poster for lightweight circulation. We look forward to seeing you there!
This paper looks at the unique visuality of an eclipse, a penumbra in which a dark object is revealed in and sometimes by the darkness that surrounds. When darkness envelops darkness, is vision negated or does a new form visibility emerge from the double negation of the visible? At its early stages of thought, this paper seeks to explore the cosmic event of an eclipse as a uniquely disruptive but revelatory instance of a collapsing visuality.
Bio:
Akira Mizuta Lippit is University Professor of film and literature at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Cinema without Reflection: Jaques Derrida’s Echopoiesis and Narcissism Adrift (2016); Ex-Cinema: From a Theory of Experimental Film and Video (2012); Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (2005); and Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (2000).
This event is generously co-sponsored by the Stanford Department of Art & Art History.
On March 11 (4:00-5:30pm, McMurtry Building 370), Gerui Wang and Unjoo Oh will be presenting work related to AI and the history of art and literature:
Gerui Wang, “Infinite Curves in Soungwen Chung’s Art: Towards Human-AI Collaborative Creativity”
This talk explores human-AI collaborations in the works of the contemporary artist Soungwen Chung. Chung designs her own robots for drawing operations. She utilizes computer vision technologies to train robots to observe, learn, and respond to her creative processes. Chung experiments possibilities and creative potential of AI systems when her brain waves are transmitted to the robot arms through an EEG device. The presentation investigates the visual effect of infinite curves in Chung’s art, varying in volume, color, density, tones, and directions. Chung’s works introduce an infinite reproducibility and variation that evokes aesthetics of the ink medium from East Asia. Do Chung’s completed works show legible differences between the marks made by herself and those made by the robot arms? Do “conversations” and collaborations between human creators and AI systems redefine our perceptions of creativity? How do AI systems change our engagement with cultural traditions? This talk invites you to think with these AI-infused artworks.
Gerui Wang is a Lecturer in the Department of History of Art and Visual Culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and at Stanford University’s Center for East Asian Studies (Spring 2024). Her research interests span arts, public policy, environment, and emerging technologies. Her book manuscript, Landscape, Governance, and Ecology in China, 1000-1400, demonstrates the overlooked ecological thinking and notions of “sustainability” manifested in flourishing landscape imagery across artistic media. Gerui’s new project examines artificial intelligence and contemporary art in Asia and its diaspora. Gerui holds a PhD in the history of art from the University of Michigan.
Unjoo Oh, “Visual Interfaces for Poetic Data: Early Modern and AI Technologies”
How might the sonnets of William Shakespeare and AI exist—or be made to exist—in symbiosis? This talk explores the mutual insights that Shakespeare’s Sonnets and AI tools (such as LLMs and text-to-image generators) offer to each other. At the intersection of textual criticism and artificial intelligence, it is possible to leverage bibliographical uncertainty and rethink the (re)presentation of Shakespeare’s poetry. Image (re)production can be newly considered in this process as a node for early modern print and generative AI. Most importantly, we can test the capabilities and biases of these models in processing poetic data and begin to construct visual interfaces that reorient literary analysis.
Unjoo Oh is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Stanford University. Her research centers around textual materiality, critical posthumanism, and digital humanities, investigating how (in)organic nonhumans affect notions of intelligence and the remediation of premodern texts. Her work has been published in Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies and the Journal of Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance English Literature. She is also a graduate coordinator of Renaissances at Stanford and an assistant editor of the Stanford Global Shakespeare Encyclopedia.
Please join us for the next Digital Aesthetics Workshop, when we will welcome Yvette Granata for her talk on “Mimetic Virtualities: Rendering the Masses and/or Feminist Media Art?” on February 6, 5-7pm PT. The event will take place in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room, where refreshments will be served. Below you will find the abstract and bio attached, as well as a poster for lightweight circulation. We look forward to seeing you there!
From stolen election narratives to Q-anon cults, the politics of the 21st century are steeped in the mainstreaming of disinformation and the hard-core pursuit of false realities via any media necessary. Simultaneously, the 21st century marks the rise of virtual reality as a mass media. While spatial computing technologies behind virtual reality graphics and head-mounted displays have been in development since the middle of the 20th century, virtual reality as a mass media is a phenomenon of the last decade. Concurrently with the development of VR as a mass media, the tools of virtual production have proliferated – such as motion capture libraries, 3D model and animation platforms, and game engine tools. Does the pursuit of false realities and the proliferation of virtual reality technologies have anything to do with each other? Has virtual reality as a mass medium shaped the aesthetics of the digital masses differently? Looking to the manner in which virtual mimesis operates via rendering methods of the image of crowds, from 2D neural GAN generators to the recent development of neural radiance fields (NERFs) as a form of mass 3D rendering, I analyze the politics and aesthetics of mimetic virtualities as both a process of rendering of the masses and as a process of the distribution of the sensibility of virtualized bodies. Lastly, I present all of the above via feminist media art practice as a critical, creative method.
Bio:
Yvette Granata is a media artist, filmmaker, and digital media scholar. She is Assistant Professor at University of Michigan in the department of Film, Television and Media and the Digital Studies Institute. She creates immersive installations, video art, VR experiences, and interactive environments, and writes about digital culture, media art, and media theory. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at film festivals and art institutions including, Slamdance, CPH:DOX, The Melbourne International Film Festival, The Annecy International Animation Festival, Images Festival, Harvard Carpenter Center for the Arts, The EYE Film Museum, McDonough Museum of Art, and Hallwalls Contemporary Art, among others. Her most recent VR project, I Took a Lethal Dose of Herbs, premiered at CPH:DOX in 2023, won best VR film at the Cannes World Film Awards, and received an Honorable Mention at Prix Ars Electronica in Linz Austria. Yvette has also published in Ctrl-Z: New Media Philosophy, Trace Journal, NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, International Journal of Cultural Studies and AI & Society. She lives in Detroit.
