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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?

CPU Workshop on “Self-Organized Criticality”

As Catie Cuan (@CatieCuan) writes over on twitter:

Critical Practices Unit (CPU) @CPUStanford gathered last week [February 25, 2020] for our first workshop on the topic of “SELF-ORGANIZED CRITICALITY”. Humans from 11 disciplines attended…

The inimitable @h_gerba opened with, “The idea is to generate a space, or more precisely an occasion, which allows us to disturb institutional distinctions between scholarship and other forms of creative work. We don’t suppose to know what critical practices means in advance nor reduce it to any meaning in particular. Axiomatics depend on an unwarranted sense of self-sufficiency and solidity, a law of non-contradiction which says A=A, full stop. We are much more interested in a fluid space which enjoys the oscillatory generativity of exploded contradiction.” (!!!)

And quoting Fred Moten, “It might be worthwhile to think of the gathering as contested matter, to linger in the break—the distance and nearness—between the thing and the case in the interest of the ones who are without interests but who are nevertheless a concern precisely because they gather, as they are gathered matter, the internally differentiated materiality of a collective head.”

Let us unfold! Much more to follow…journey along here @CPUStanford

CFP(articipants): CPU Media/Arts Workshop on SELF-ORGANIZED CRITICALITY

CPU, the Critical Practices Unit, is bifurcating. In addition to hosting events, such as last quarter’s exploration of robotics and performativity, CPU is inaugurating a media/arts workshop.

This will be a space, organized around periodic themes, in which we will plan, discuss, and create projects which disturb the unhappily inherited oppositions of theory/practice, life/art, art/science, and scholarship/the rest. Writers, artists, coders, musicians, everybody (anybody), with a desire to explore alternate ways of making-alongside-theory is welcome. We are looking for critical making, art, manifestos, noise, digital humanities, novel forms of publication, works in progress, and more. There will be no imposed limitation to the scale, medium, or temporality of these projects—only a dotted timeline of informal get-togethers (with snacks) in which we can provide feedback, support, and a shared (if distributed) space for one another. If you’re already working on something (or know someone who is (please forward widely !)), or want to start something, let us know !

CPU’s first workshop theme will be SELF-ORGANIZED CRITICALITY.

Plucked from complexity sciences, SoC is a speculative mechanism which describes how “natural systems,” such as life, might form out of chaos. The term prompts, among many potential questions: How do we(?) position criticality (historically, socially, ontologically) ? Is there any pleasure in critique ? How to navigate porosities or closures between the humanities and sciences (physis/nomos, physis/techne) ? What does it mean for material to gather ? Can material be maternal, or sex abstract ? Who is the ‘self’ which organizes, and how is it oriented (toward/against futures, origins, vortices, decay) ? What does it mean to do all this at Stanford ? Word-play is encouraged—no association is too loose.

We’ll be organizing a first get-together soon.

Again, if interested, please reach out to Hank Gerba: hankg@stanford.edu

“Unclean Interface: Computation as a Cleanliness Problem” — Rachel Plotnick at Digital Aesthetics Workshop

Announcing the Digital Aesthetics Workshop’s first event of 2020: On February 11th, at 5 PM in the Stanford Humanities Center’s Watt Common Room, we’ll be hosting Rachel Plotnick, who will share some recent research on cleanliness and computation.

Dr. Plotnick is an Assistant Professor in the Media School at the University of Indiana-Bloomington. Her (fantastic!) first book, Power Button: a History of Pleasure, Panic, and the Politics of Pushing, is just out from MIT Press.

Here is the abstract for her talk:

Unclean Interface: Computation as a Cleanliness Problem

Histories of computing tend to focus on particular elements of computation (such as invention of computers; early PC use; interface design, or viruses), but this study aims to approach computing from a novel, alternative angle – mess. From the earliest advent and use of computers, mess has been a particularly thorny problem that gets defined differently in different contexts, across technologies and spaces, and through a variety of computing practices. Computing is inherently messy: screens, mice, disks and keyboards pick up dirt, dust and crumbs; messy bodies touch and handle computers day in and day out; air is full of unclean particles; and problems of humidity, temperature, and static are routine. At the level of software, too, metaphors of cleanliness and dirtiness persist in terms of “clean” design, “dirty” content or data, desktop icon organization, and fears over contagion and contamination from viruses and spam. By beginning from the vantage point of mess, it becomes possible to crystallize a very different history of computing driven from efforts to contain, control and eliminate dirt, to valorize cleanliness, and to enforce particular protocols, habits, and behaviors. In the messy interface between bodies, environments, software, and hardware one can find persistent concerns about what it means to be “human” and what it means to be “technology.” At the same time, this approach weaves in discussions of care, maintenance, and repair into computing, recognizing that innovation is not the only – or always most salient – way to understand human-technology relations, and that in fact much of everyday interactions with computers take place in acts of protection and cleaning. Innovation may also occur as a result of particular messiness problems, rather than the other way around. Lest we think of mess as a computing problem of the past (given ethereal metaphors of “cloud” computing and increasingly encased computing devices), recent examples of messiness demonstrate the ongoing problem of cleanliness in computing. A few representative cases include: Apple’s continued problems with its butterfly keyboard; concerns over “dirty” databases and how to clean big data; and the booming market for cases, screen protectors, and cleaning devices for tablets, laptops and smartphones.

“Declining Russian Media Theory” — Ben Peters at Digital Aesthetic Workshop

DAW_Peters_Poster

Next week, on Thursday, November 21, the Digital Aesthetics Workshop will host Ben Peters for our third workshop of the 2019-2020 season, for a talk entitled “Declining Russian Media Theory.” We’ll meet in the Humanities Center Board Room at 5 PM.

More info:

A first step toward a larger project, Peters test runs ways to decline, in both senses, the problem of Russian media theory. It is a curious fact that nowhere does there exist today, despite the ample intellectual materials, anything that might be called “Russian media theory.” Other scholars have identified various schools of media thought as distinctively German, Canadian, American, French, and British and yet, while the lumber and ruins are ample, no single school of media thought stands today that is recognizably Russian or otherwise discernibly Slavic. Why not? Peters argues not that some kind of Russian media theory should exist (in fact, he offers several reasons why it should not). Rather it is simply to speculate beyond the curious observation that, given the sustained interest in the subject, no distinctively Russian theoretical approach to media has emerged to date. This brief, in turn modest and immodest, and necessarily speculative essay aims not to articulate such a theory, nor to lament its nonexistence, nor even to call for further commentary in that direction. Instead this talk aims to take a step backwards to reflect on the causes of that curious fact, to navigate some obstacles standing in the way of its articulation, to sound out and explore the declensions of such a media theoretic grammar, and to excavate the pre-dispositional grounds of possibility for a Russian—or perhaps Slavic—media theoretic tradition.

Benjamin Peters is a media scholar interested in plumbing uncharted media histories and theories, particularly in the Soviet century. He is also author of How Not to Network a Nation (MIT Press 2016), editor of Digital Keywords (Princeton UP 2016), the Hazel Rogers Associate Professor and Chair of Media Studies at the University of Tulsa, and an affiliated fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School.