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M. Beatrice Fazi at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, February 28!

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 Aesthetics was published by Rowman & Littlefield International in 2018.

CFP: 2023 Stanford-Leuphana Academy for Media Studies — “Media and Cultural Change”

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!

Intermediations: Patrick Jagoda, “Metagames and Media Aesthetics” (January 27, 2023)

Recently, I announced an upcoming event featuring the Game Changer Lab Chicago, founded by Melissa Gilliam and Patrick Jagoda, as part of the new Critical Making Collaborative at Stanford. I am pleased now to announce another event featuring Patrick Jagoda, the following day, as part of my other new initiative this year at Stanford: the Intermediations series, which is dedicated to exploring the intersections of intermediality and interdisciplinarity.

On January 27, at 12pm in the Terrace Room of Margaret Jacks Hall, Professor Jagoda of the University of Chicago will be presenting on “Metagames and Media Aesthetics.” Please see below for an abstract and bio, and hope to see some of you there!

“Metagames and Media Aesthetics”

Broadly circulating humanistic terms such as “metafiction” (William H. Gass), “metapictures” (WJT Mitchell), and “metacomics” (M. Thomas Inge) point to heightened self-reflexivity within a medium or form. Particularly since the 2010s, we have seen an increased volume of “metagames” or games about games that include prominent independent game examples such as The Stanley Parable (2013),Doki Doki Literature Club! (2017), and There is No Game (2020). This presentation explores different theories and categories of metagames en route to the question of why metagames are so important to understanding our contemporary media ecology in 2023. Video games in general, and metagames in particular, call for an expanded sense of media aesthetics that exceed Roland Barthes’s earlier triumvirate of image, music, and text. This talk theorizes the videogame sensorium and its broader implications for media studies.

Bio:

Patrick Jagoda is the William Rainey Harper Professor of Cinema & Media Studies, English, and Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Chicago. He is Executive Editor of Critical Inquiry and director of the Weston Game Lab, as well as co-founder of the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab and Transmedia Story Lab. Patrick’s books include Network Aesthetics (2016), The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer (2016 with Michael Maizels), Experimental Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification (2020), and Transmedia Stories: Narrative Methods for Public Health and Social Justice (2022 with Ireashia Bennett and Ashlyn Sparrow). He has also co-edited five special issues or edited volumes, and published over fifty essays and interviews. Patrick designs transmedia, digital and analog games, including the climate change alternate reality game Terrarium (2019), which received the 2020 IndieCade award for the best Location Based and Live Play Design. He is a recipient of a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship.

“Code” — Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan at Digital Aesthetics Workshop (Jan. 17, 2023)

Please join us on Tuesday, January 17th @ 5-7pm, in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room, for a very special event with Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan. Bernard’s new book, Code: From Information Theory to French Theory, releases just 3 days later on January 20th (https://www.dukeupress.edu/code) ! At Digital Aesthetics he will be discussing the book as well as his future project, Screenscapes: How Formats Render Territories.

Zoom registration, if you can’t make it IRL: https://tinyurl.com/4dhyjuna.

Bio:
Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan is a Reader in the History and Theory of Digital Media (loosely equivalent to associate or w2 professorship). An overarching theme of his research is how “cultural” sciences shape—and are shaped by—digital media. This concern spans his writing on the mutual constitution of cybernetics and the human sciences, ethnicity and AI, and the role of mid-twentieth century military vigilance in the development of interactive, multimedia computing. His attention to cultural factors in technical systems also figured in his work as a curator, notably for the Anthropocene and Technosphere projects at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt.

Bernard’s book Code: From Information Theory to French Theory examines how liberal technocratic projects, with roots in colonialism, mental health, and industrial capitalism, shaped early conceptions of digital media and cybernetics. It offers a revisionist history of “French Theory” as an effort to come to terms with technical ideas of communications and as a predecessor to the digital humanities. N. Katherine Hayles wrote of this book that it “upends standard intellectual histories” and Lev Manovich that “after reading this original and fascinating book, you will never look at key thinkers of the twentieth century in the same way.” Early drafts of the book’s argument appeared in journals including Grey Room and Critical Inquiry.

Bernard’s current book project, Screenscapes: How Formats Render Territories, draws on infrastructure studies and format studies to offer a radical account of how digital screens produce global space. It considers the digital interface in terms of articulation, i.e., in its technoscientific formatting of territories, temporalities, and practices as “ecologies of operations.” Excerpts appear in Representations (An Ecology of Operations) and MLN (The Bitmap is the Territory).

Video: Mads Thomsen, “Adjusting to the Age of Automated Writing” (Intermediations, Nov. 16, 2022)

Video from the inaugural event of INTERMEDIATIONS, a new workshop and lecture series foregrounding issues of intermediality and interdisciplinarity: Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, “Adjusting to the Age of Automated Writing” from November 16, 2022.

Abstract:

Writing was for at least six to seven thousand years a humanly hand-crafted product. Now we encounter several kinds of technologies that change the production of text profoundly. Chatbots, automated translation, grammar assistants, and large language models are examples of how text generation permeates writing from many angles. In this presentation, Professor Mads Thomsen sketches out key issues of the rapid developments in text generation and the interdisciplinary collaboration needed to understand these, before turning to how GPT-3 “reads” William Carlos Williams’ poem “The Red Wheelbarrow.”

Bio:

Mads Rosendahl Thomsen is Professor of Comparative Literature at Aarhus University, Denmark. He has published in the fields of literary historiography, modernist literature, world literature, digital humanities, and posthumanism. His most recently submitted publication is a short book on the concept and history of text.

He is the author of Mapping World Literature: International Canonization and Transnational Literatures (2008),The New Human in Literature: Posthuman Visions of Changes in Body, Mind and Society after 1900 (2013), a co-author with Stefan Helgesson ofLiterature and the World (2019), and the editor of fourteen books, includingWorld Literature: A Reader (2012), The Posthuman Condition: Ethics, Aesthetics and Politics of Biotechnological Challenges (2012),Danish Literature as World Literature (2017), Literature: An Introduction to Theory and Analysis (2017), and The Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism (2020).

In Conversation: Jean Ma and Tung-Hui Hu at Digital Aesthetics Workshop (December 2)

Please join us for the Digital Aesthetics Workshop’s next event, “In Conversation: Jean Ma & Tung-Hui Hu.” The two authors will discuss their recently released books—Jean Ma’s At the Edges of Sleep: Moving Images and Somnolent Spectators and Tung-Hui Hu’s Digital Lethargy—before moving into a more synthetic conversation. A version of this event was originally scheduled in 2020 as a discussion of work in Jean Ma’s book-to-be, but was cancelled due to the pandemic. We are *thrilled* to bring the event back as, in part, a celebration of the book’s launch : )

The meeting will be held December 2nd, 10am-12, in McMurtry 370. Breakfast will be provided !

Zoom registration if unable to attend in-person: tinyurl.com/3nujuzkr

Jean Ma is the Victoria and Roger Sant Professor in Art in Stanford’s Department of Art & Art History. She has published books on the temporal poetics of Chinese cinema (Melancholy Drift: Marking Time in Chinese Cinema), singing women on film (Sounding the Modern Woman: The Songstress in Chinese Cinema), and the relationship of cinema and photography (Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography). She is the coeditor of “Music, Sound, and Media,” a book series at the University of California Press. Her writing has appeared in Camera Obscura, Criticism, Film Quarterly, Grey Room, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, and October. Her new book At the Edges of Sleep: Moving Images and Somnolent Spectators is the recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writer Book Grant. To access the open-source digital edition, please visit: luminosoa.org/site/books/m/10.1525/luminos.132/

Tung-Hui Hu is a poet and scholar of digital media. The winner of a Rome Prize and a NEA fellowship for literature, Hu has also received an American Academy in Berlin Prize for his research. He is the author of A Prehistory of the Cloud (MIT Press, 2015), described by The New Yorker as “mesmerizing… absorbing [in] its playful speculations”. His research has been featured on CBS News, BBC Radio 4, Boston Globe, New Scientist, Art in America, and Rhizome.org, among other venues. His brand-new book, an exploration of burnout, isolation, and disempowerment in the digital underclass, is Digital Lethargy (MIT Press, October 2022).

“Patterns of Text / Patterns of Analysis,” Mark Algee-Hewitt at Digital Aesthetics Workshop (Nov. 15)

The next event of the Digital Aesthetics Workshop will be next Tuesday, November 15, from 5-7pm with Mark Algee-Hewitt. Find below a brief description of his talk, “Patterns of Text / Patterns of Anaysis,” and we hope to see you there!

This hybrid event will take place in the Board Room of the Stanford Humanities Center, with online option via Zoom: https://tinyurl.com/36z56wuk (registration link)

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At first glance, the study of aesthetics and computational analysis would seem to be antithetical to each other. The former focuses, among other things, on the interplay between the formal features of the text, its larger social context and its reception; while the later largely aggregates formal features. However, the patterns produced by such computational work can not only shed new light on the specifics of how words produce aesthetic effects, but in and of themselves, they reveal a new set of aesthetic conditions that can only be visualized and explored through these methods. In this talk, I’ll toggle between large and small scales of analysis, using examples of quantitative analysis to demonstrate the ways that cultural analytics operates across scales to reveal new aspects of both poetics and our understanding of the interrelations between genres and periods of literature.

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Mark Algee-Hewitt’s research focuses on the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in England and Germany and seeks to combine literary criticism with digital and quantitative analyses of literary texts. In particular he is interested in the history of aesthetic theory and the development and transmission of aesthetic and philosophic concepts during the Enlightenment and Romantic periods. He is also interested in the relationship between aesthetic theory and the poetry of the long eighteenth century. Although his primary background is in English literature, he also has a degree in computer science. As the director of the Stanford Literary Lab, he is working to bring his interests in quantitative analysis, digital humanities and eighteenth-century literature to bear on a number of new collaborative projects. His current book project, The Afterlife of the Sublime, explores the history of the sublime by tracing its discursive patterns through over 11,000 texts from the long eighteenth century, seeking clues to the disappearance of the term at the end of the Romantic period. As a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at McGill University, working with the Interacting with Print Research group, Dr. Algee-Hewitt was also involved in a variety of projects that combine literary interpretation with quantitative analysis. He is a co-coordinator of the Book History BiblioGraph, a new dynamic online resource and recommendation engine that visualizes connections between contemporary resources on Book History using statistical methods. He is also working with Andrew Piper on the Werther Topologies: a project that seeks to identify lexical patterns that will aid in tracing the impact of Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther on the nineteenth-century development of the German novel. Dr. Algee-Hewitt has taught a variety of courses in literary history and theory in both the English and German departments at McGill University, Rutgers University and New York University where he received his PhD in 2008.

The Disruptive Condition — Erich Hörl at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, October 5, 2022

✨*~*~*~*!!! 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 event will be hybrid, so if you are unable to attend in person you may register for the Zoom link here: https://stanford.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYqdO2grj8qG9O9wbi0juLi-WG_lcWKv_fU

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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).

Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside a Fraying America — Mary Beth Meehan and Fred Turner at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, June 2

The Digital Aesthetics Workshop invites you to join us for one final event next Wednesday, June 2 (5-7PM Pacific), for a conversation with Mary Beth Meehan & Fred Turner.

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Join photographer Mary Beth Meehan and historian Fred Turner in a conversation about their new book, Seeing Silicon Valley — Life in a Fraying America, and about the power of analog aesthetics in a digital era.

Mary Beth Meehan is a photographer and writer known for her large-scale, community-based portraiture centered on questions of representation, visibility, and social equity. She lives in New England, where she has lectured at Brown University, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

Fred Turner is Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University. He is the author of the award-winning history From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism among other books.

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More information about the book can be found here: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo90479007.html

CYBERPUBLICS, MONUMENTS, AND PARTICIPATION — Legacy Russell at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, May 20

We’re excited to announce our next event at the Digital Aesthetics Workshop, a talk by writer and curator Legacy Russell, author of Glitch Feminism, which will take place next Thursday, May 20th at 10 am Pacific and is co-sponsored by the Clayman Institute for Gender Research.

Please register in advance at: tinyurl.com/GFDAW.

About the event:

“CYBERPUBLICS, MONUMENTS, AND PARTICIPATION”

Join writer and curator Legacy Russell in a discussion about the ways in which artists engaging the digital are building new models for what monuments can be in a networked era of mechanical reproduction.

Legacy Russell is a curator and writer. Born and raised in New York City, she is the Associate Curator of Exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Russell holds an MRes with Distinction in Art History from Goldsmiths, University of London with a focus in Visual Culture. Her academic, curatorial, and creative work focuses on gender, performance, digital selfdom, internet idolatry, and new media ritual. Russell’s written work, interviews, and essays have been published internationally. She is the recipient of the Thoma Foundation 2019 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art, a 2020 Rauschenberg Residency Fellow, and a recipient of the 2021 Creative Capital Award. Her first book Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020) is published by Verso Books. Her second book, BLACK MEME, is forthcoming via Verso Books.

Sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center. Made possible by support from Linda Randall Meier, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Co-sponsored by the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research.