workshop – Page 4 – medieninitiative

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.

What Tech Calls Thinking — Adrian Daub at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, May 11

On Tuesday, May 11th (5-7 pm Pacific), Adrian Daub will be discussing his recent book, What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley, at the Digital Aesthetics Workshop. Registration at tinyurl.com/DAWDaub.

About the event: Adrian Daub’s What Tech Calls Thinking is a lively dismantling of the ideas that form the intellectual bedrock of Silicon Valley. Equally important to Silicon Valley’s world-altering innovation are the language and ideas it uses to explain and justify itself. And often, those fancy new ideas are simply old motifs playing dress-up in a hoodie. From the myth of dropping out to the war cry of “disruption,” Daub locates the Valley’s supposedly original, radical thinking in the ideas of Heidegger and Ayn Rand, the New Age Esalen Foundation in Big Sur, and American traditions from the tent revival to predestination. Written with verve and imagination, What Tech Calls Thinking is an intellectual refutation of Silicon Valley’s ethos, pulling back the curtain on the self-aggrandizing myths the Valley tells about itself.

Adrian Daub is a professor of comparative literature and German studies at Stanford University, and the director of the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Studies. His research focuses on the intersection of literature, music, and philosophy in the nineteenth century.

Sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center. Made possible by support from Linda Randall Meier, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The Great Watercooler in the Cloud — Melissa Gregg at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, April 6

The Digital Aesthetics Workshop is happy to announce a long-awaited, COVID-postponed event with Melissa Gregg next week on Tuesday, April 6th 5-7 pm Pacific,”The Great Watercooler in the Cloud: Distributed work, collegial presence and mindful labor post-COVID.”

Please see below for details and register at tinyurl.com/DAW2021.

“The Great Watercooler in the Cloud: Distributed work, collegial presence and mindful labor post-COVID”

The immediate shift to so-called “remote work” in the pandemic created an extraordinary instance of corporate reckoning: hierarchies seemingly so solid and impenetrable evaporated within weeks as workers rapidly adjusted to doing their job in slippers. Previously commonsense notions of the day’s rhythms – the obligatory performance of a 9 to 5 persona – faced critical contaminants in the form of children, spouses and pets. Meanwhile the surprisingly social elements of office life became apparent in their obvious absence. Zoom fatigue replaced team-building drinks as the dominant affective mode. As the work world prepares for a return to something other than normal, this talk draws on multiple studies of technology users in lockdown and previous research on productivity to understand the condition of professional intimacy post-COVID. In doing so, it reflects on the psychological, physical and environmental burdens embedded in the idea of “work from anywhere.”

Melissa Gregg is Intel’s chief social scientist and thought leader for user experience (UX). With a PhD in gender and cultural studies, she is an international expert on the future of work and a specialist in applied ethnography. Her over 60 peer-reviewed publications and books have anticipated key shifts in the experience of connected work and home life, from Work’s Intimacy (Polity 2011) to Counterproductive (Duke 2018), The Affect Theory Reader (Duke 2010) to the new collection, Media and Management (Meson Press 2021).

Following an academic career in Australia, Melissa led Intel’s first university investment in social computing before building user research to a position of strategic impact in the PC business. Her team now guides the roadmap for product development and architecture across consumer and commercial segments, including the EVO brand. As Chief Technologist for Sustainability in the Client Computing Group, Melissa inspires technologists, colleagues, consumers and customers to accelerate the transition to carbon neutral computing. This requires a fundamental reckoning with business as usual for the PC industry, to ensure the finite resources providing connectivity today can continue in to the future.

Sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center. Made possible by support from Linda Randall Meier, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Exploring the Media Archaeology Lab: A Workshop with libi rose striegl at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, Nov. 10, 2020

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.

Please register here to get the Zoom link: tinyurl.com/ExploreMAL

Complete Video of Rendered Worlds: New Regimes of Imaging

Here is the complete video of the event Rendered Worlds: New Regimes of Imaging from October 23, 2020. Featuring Deborah Levitt (The New School), Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal (UC Davis and Universität Siegen), Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan (King’s College London), and Shane Denson (Stanford) discussing their recent work, with Hank Gerba (Stanford) and Jacob Hagelberg (UC Davis) co-moderating the round-table.

Sponsored by the Linda Randall Meier workshop on Digital Aesthetics (Stanford) and the Technocultural Futures Research Cluster (UC Davis), with support from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.