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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.

Rendered Worlds: New Regimes of Imaging — October 23, 2020

The Digital Aesthetics Workshop is extremely excited to announce a collaborative panel with UC Davis’ Technocultural Futures Research Cluster.

‘Rendered Worlds: New Regimes of Imaging‘ will take place on Friday, October 23 at 10am PDT. Co-organized by teams from Stanford University and University of California Davis, this event brings together a transatlantic group of scholars to discuss the social, historical, technical, and aesthetic entanglements of our computational images.

Talking about their latest work will be Deborah Levitt (The New School), Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal (UC Davis and Universität Siegen), Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan (King’s College London), and Shane Denson (Stanford). Hank Gerba (Stanford) and Jacob Hagelberg (UC Davis) will co-moderate the round-table. Please register at tinyurl.com/renderedworlds for your zoom link!

We hope to see you there! If you have any questions, please direct them to Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal (rjdhaliwal at ucdavis dot edu).

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

Vivian Sobchack in Conversation — Digital Aesthetics Workshop, Sept. 29, 2020

I am pleased to announce the Digital Aesthetics Workshop’s first event of the 2020-2021 academic year, taking place on September 29 (5-7pm PT via Zoom) with Vivian Sobchack, who will be in conversation with Stanford professors Scott Bukatman and Shane Denson. Please email Annika Butler-Wall (annikabw@stanford.edu) for the Zoom link.

Vivian Sobchack, a pioneer in the phenomenological study of visual media and a leading theorist of science fiction cinema, has long been a central voice in discussions of technology’s relation to experience and culture. Indeed, her work articulates questions that are at the very heart of the Digital Aesthetics Workshop. What is the relation of the body to the technologically mediated image? How does this relation change with the shift from cinematic to digital media? How does the materiality of the medium shape our perception of it and of ourselves? Is there such a thing as an aesthetic of the digital, or is “digital aesthetics” itself an oxymoron? In this conversation with Scott Bukatman and Shane Denson (both professors in Stanford’s Film & Media Studies program in the Department of Art & Art History), we hope to explore these and other questions and to reflect on the significance of Professor Sobchack’s groundbreaking work for the study of digital cultures.

Vivian Sobchack is Professor Emerita in the Department of Film, Television and Digital Media at UCLA. She was the first woman elected President of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and served on the Board of Directors of the American Film Institute. Her essays have appeared in journals such as Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Film Comment, camera obscura, Film Quarterly, and Representations. Her books include Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film; The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience; and Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, and she has edited two anthologies: Meta-Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick-Change; and The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event.

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

“How Language Became Data” — Xiaochang Li at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, May 26, 2020 (via Zoom)

The third Digital Aesthetics Workshop event of the Spring quarter is coming up next week: on May 26th, at 5 PM, we’ll host a workshop with Xiaochang Li, via Zoom. Please email Jeff Nagy (jsnagy at stanford dot edu) for the link by May 25th.

Professor Li will share research from her current project, How Language Became Data: Speech Recognition Between Likeness and Likelihood. Beginning in 1971, a team of researchers at IBM began to reorient the field of automatic speech recognition away from the study of human speech and language and towards a startling new mandate: “There’s no data like more data.” In the ensuing decades, speech recognition was refashioned as a problem of large-scale data acquisition and classification, one that was distinct from, if not antithetical to, explanation, interpretability, and expertise. The history of automatic speech recognition invites a glimpse into how making language into data helped make data into an imperative, opening the door for the expansion of algorithmic culture into everyday life.

Xiaochang Li is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Stanford University. Her research examines questions surrounding the relationship between information technology and knowledge production and its role in the organization of social life.

“Bit Field Black” — Kris Cohen at Digital Aesthetics Workshop/CPU, May 19, 2020 (via Zoom)

The Digital Aesthetics Workshop is excited to announce our second event of the Spring quarter: on May 19th, at 5 PM, we’ll host a workshop with Kris Cohen, via Zoom. This workshop has been co-organized with Stanford’s Critical Practices Unit (CPU), whom you can (and should!) follow for future CPU events here. Please email Jeff Nagy (jsnagy at stanford dot edu) by May 18th for the Zoom link.

Professor Cohen will discuss new research from his manuscript-in-progress, Bit Field Black. Bit Field Black accounts for how a group of Black artists working from the Sixties to the present were addressing, in ways both belied and surprisingly revealed by the language of abstraction and conceptualism, nascent configurations of the computer screen and the forms of labor and personhood associated with those configurations.

Professor Cohen is Associate Professor of Art and Humanities at Reed College. He works on the relationship between art, economy, and media technologies, focusing especially on the aesthetics of collective life. His book, Never Alone, Except for Now (Duke University Press, 2017), addresses these concerns in the context of electronic networks.

A poster with all the crucial information is attached for lightweight recirculation.

Thank you to all of the very many of you who logged on for our first Spring workshop with Sarah T. Roberts. We hope you will also join us on the 19th, and keep an eye out for an announcement of our third Spring workshop, with Xiaochang Li, coming up on May 26th

“Behind the Screen” — Sarah T. Roberts at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, April 21, 2020 (via Zoom)

We’re excited to announce a last-minute workshop with Sarah T. Roberts, next Tuesday, April 21st, from 5 to 7 PM. The workshop will take place via Zoom; please email Jeff Nagy (jsnagy at stanford dot edu) for the link.

Professor Roberts is the leading authority on commercial content moderation, the mostly invisible, increasingly globalized labor that keeps digital platforms free(-ish) of hate speech, pornography, and other kinds of unwanted material. Her research has become even more crucial over the last few months, as we increasingly spend the bulk of our professional and social lives online, and we hope you’ll join us to discuss it.

Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media

Faced with mounting pressures and repeated, very public crises, social media firms have taken a new tack since 2017: to respond to criticism of all kinds and from numerous quarters (regulators, civil society advocates, journalists, academics and others) by acknowledging their long-obfuscated human gatekeeping workforce of commercial content moderators. Additionally, these acknowledgments have often come alongside announcements of plans for exponential increases to that workforce, which now represents a global network of laborers – in distinct geographic, cultural, political, economic, labor and industrial circumstances – conservatively estimated in the several tens of thousands and likely many times that. Yet the phenomenon of content moderation in social media firms has been shrouded in mystery when acknowledged at all. In this talk, Sarah T. Roberts will discuss the fruits of her decade-long study the commercial content moderation industry, and its concomitant people, practices and politics. Based on interviews with workers from Silicon Valley to the Philippines, at boutique firms and at major social media companies, she will offer context, history and analysis of this hidden industry, with particular attention to the emotional toll it takes on its workers. The talk will offer insights about potential futures for the commercial internet and a discussion of the future of globalized labor in the digital age.

Sarah T. Roberts is an assistant professor of Information Studies at the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies, specializing in Internet culture, social media, and the intersection of media, technology and society. She is founding co-director, along with Dr. Safiya Noble, of the forthcoming UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry. Her book, Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media, was released in June 2019 (Yale University Press).

“At the Edges of Sleep” — Jean Ma at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, March 9, 2020

We are excited to announce our next event of the Digital Aesthetics Workshop, a late-breaking addition to our calendar, a week from today with Jean Ma. We’ll meet on Monday, March 9th, from 5 to 7 PM in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room.

Professor Ma teaches in the Film and Media Studies Program of Stanford’s Department of Art and Art History. On Monday, we’ll discuss some of her recent research on sleep in film and moving image art.

More information on the talk is below. There will be snacks and wine, and there is no pre-circulated reading for this workshop. Please feel free to circulate widely!

At the Edges of Sleep
This talk introduces my current research on sleep in film and moving image art, as both a subject matter to explore and a state to induce in the audience. An example of the recent turn to sleep is Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s SLEEPCINEMAHOTEL (2018), a work addressed to viewers presumed to be unconscious for the better part of its duration. The proposition made by SLEEPCINEMAHOTEL – that sleep can be more than a negative reflection on the work that arouses it – flies in the face of standard ideas about reception. I relate the provocation of sleepy spectatorship to a larger set of shifting conceptions of sleep, in disciplines of knowledge as well as popular discourse. As sleep emerges from the shadows into a newfound visibility, it undergoes a reevaluation. On the one hand, changing notions of the relationship between sleep and waking life reflect a new stage of the reign of instrumental reason, marked by nascent (bio)technological capacities to convert life processes into units of productivity. But on the other hand, as the boundaries between sleep and wake are displaced and reinscribed, we are also presented with an opportunity. What is the value of sleep? What can be preserved by carving out a space for sleep?