workshop – Page 7 – medieninitiative

Life to Those Pixels: Imag(in)ing Future Bodies of Film and Media — Dec. 14 at University of Zurich

On December 14, 2018, I will be giving a talk titled “Life to Those Pixels: Imag(in)ing Future Bodies of Film and Media” at the University of Zurich, as part of the Imag(in)ing Future Bodies series hosted by the Doctoral Program of the English Department and organized by Morgane Ghilardi and Hannah Schoch. The lecture will be followed by a workshop in which we will discuss related work on post-cinema and discorrelated images.

For more information, see the program website here, or register for the event here.

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Chroma Glitch: Carolyn Kane at Digital Aesthetics Workshop

The Digital Aesthetics Workshop at the Stanford Humanities Center is entering its second year, and we are pleased to announce the first event: Carolyn L. Kane will share some of her current research with us, under the title Chroma Glitch: Data as Style. The discussion will encompass Takeshi Murata, Ryan Trecartin, and datamoshing, all within Kane’s broader project, tentatively titled Precarious Beauty: Glitch, Noise, and Aesthetic Failure. There will be a paper pre-circulated ahead of the talk; we will pass it along a week ahead of the event. We are thrilled Dr. Kane can join us – when we first came up with this idea for a workshop, her name became a token for the sort of scholarship we would want to bring in. She will launch a year already filling up with exciting speakers and a new graduate colloquium (more on that to come).

Carolyn L. Kane is the author of the award-winning Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code (U Chicago, 2014). [You can learn more about this fascinating project through this interview in Theory, Culture & Society.] She earned her Ph.D. from New York University’s Dept. of Media, Culture, and Communication in 2011, and was awarded the Nancy L. Buc Postdoctoral Fellowship in “Aesthetics and the Question of Beauty” at Brown University in 2014. From 2011 to 2014 she taught at Hunter College; she is now Associate Professor of Communication and Design at Ryerson University in Toronto.

This event will be held from 5-7p on Tuesday, Oct 9, 2018 at the Roble Arts Gym Lounge (TAPS department). Drinks and snacks will be served. Please RSVP to Doug Eacho (email in image above) if you can, and share widely.

Matthew Wilson Smith: The Nostalgia of VR

On Tuesday, May 15th, we’ll have our fourth and final Digital Aesthetics Workshop of the Spring quarter, “The Nostalgia of Virtual Reality” with Matthew Wilson Smith, at 4 PM in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room. In this workshop, we will discuss the degree to which emergent technologies of virtual reality are indebted to longstanding concepts of presence and disembodied consciousness.

Matthew Wilson Smith is an Associate Professor of German Studies and Theatre and Performance Studies at Stanford University. His interests include modern theatre; modernism and media; and relations between technology, science, and the arts. His book The Nervous Stage: 19th-century Neuroscience and the Birth of Modern Theatre explores historical intersections between the performing arts and the neurological sciences and traces the construction of a “neural subject” over the course of the nineteenth century. It was published by Oxford University Press in 2017. His previous book, The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace (Routledge, 2007), presents a history and theory of modern artistic synthesis, placing such diverse figures as Wagner, Moholy-Nagy, Brecht, Riefenstahl, Disney, Warhol, and contemporary cyber-artists within a genealogy of totalizing performance.

Jonathan Sterne: Machine Learning, ‘AI,’ and the Politics of Media Aesthetics

On April 24, 2018 (4-6pm in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room), Jonathan Sterne will be speaking at the Digital Aesthetics Workshop. The title of his talk is: “Machine Learning, ‘AI,’ and the Politics of Media Aesthetics: Why Online Music Mastering (Sort of) Works.”

Jonathan Sterne is Professor and James McGill Chair in Culture and Technology in the Department of Art History & Communication Studies at McGill University. His work is concerned with the cultural dimensions of communication technologies, especially their form and role in large-scale societies. One of his major ongoing projects has involved developing the history and theory of sound in the modern west. Beyond the work on sound and music, he has published over fifty articles and book chapters that cover a wide range of topics in media history, new media, cultural theory and disability studies. He has also written on the politics of academic labor and maintains an interest in the future of the university. His new projects consider instruments and instrumentalities; histories of signal processing; and the intersections of disability, technology and perception.

Psychedelic Space and Anachronic Time: Elizabeth Kessler at Digital Aesthetics Workshop

On Tuesday, April 10 (4-6pm in the Board Room of the Stanford Humanities Center), Elizabeth Kessler (Stanford, American Studies) will deliver a talk, titled “Psychedelic Space and Anachronic Time: Photography and the Voyager’s Tour of the Solar System,” in the context of the Digital Aesthetics Workshop.

Elizabeth Kessler’s research and teaching focus on 20th and 21st century American visual culture. Her diverse interests include: the role of aesthetics, visual culture, and media in modern and contemporary science, especially astronomy; the interchange between technology and ways of seeing and representing; the history of photography; and the representation of fashion in different media. Her first book, Picturing the Cosmos: Hubble Space Telescope Images and the Astronomical Sublime, on the aesthetics of deep space images, was published in 2012. She’s currently writing on book on extraterrestrial time capsules, as well as developing a new project on fashion photography.

See here for more information.

Digital Aesthetics Workshop Spring 2018 Lineup

April 10: Elizabeth Kessler

April 24: Jonathan Sterne

May 15: Matthew Wilson Smith

All events held in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room, 4-6pm.

Discorrelated Images — Digital Aesthetics Workshop, April 3

On Tuesday, April 3, 2018 (4:00-6:00pm), I will be giving a talk titled “Discorrelated Images” in the context of the Digital Aesthetics Workshop at the Stanford Humanities Center. The talk draws on my current book project of the same title and will address primarily temporal and affective relations and transformations occasioned by digital images.

Participants are encouraged (but not required) to read my chapter “Crazy Cameras, Discorrelated Images, and the Post-Perceptual Mediation of Post-Cinematic Affect” prior to the event.

Screenshot Genealogies: Jacob Gaboury at Digital Aesthetics Workshop

On Tuesday, February 6, 2018, Jacob Gaboury will present new work on a genealogy of the screenshot, drawn from an ongoing project on the history of computer screens and visualization.

Jacob Gaboury is an Assistant Professor of New Media History and Theory in the Department of Film & Media at the University of California, Berkeley. His work engages the history and theory of digital media, with particular focus on digital images and visual culture. His work has appeared in a wide range of popular and academic publications, including most recently the Journal of Visual Culture, Camera Obscura, Debates in the Digital Humanities, Rhizome, continent., and Art Papers.

The event will take place from 4-6pm in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room as part of the Geballe Research Workshop on Digital Aesthetics: Critical Approaches to Computational Culture. All are welcome!

Video Games Have Always Been Queer: Bonnie Ruberg at Digital Aesthetics Workshop

On Tuesday, January 23, 2018, Bonnie Ruberg, assistant professor of digital media and games in the Department of Informatics at UC Irvine, will be presenting work from their forthcoming monograph Video Games Have Always Been Queer. The event will take place from 4-6pm in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room as part of the Geballe Research Workshop on Digital Aesthetics: Critical Approaches to Computational Culture.

For more information, please refer to the Stanford Humanities Center website: http://shc.stanford.edu/workshop/meetings/video-games-have-always-been-queer

WTF IS THAT? Allison de Fren at Digital Aesthetics Workshop

On Tuesday, November 14, 2017, media maker/scholar Allison de Fren will be discussing post-cinema and videographic criticism with the Digital Aesthetics Workshop at the Stanford Humanities Center, focusing on her video essay “WTF IS THAT? The Pre- and Post-Cinematic Tendencies of Paranormal Activity” and Steven Shaviro’s article “The Glitch Dimension: Paranormal Activity and the Technologies of Vision.”

This event follows a screening of de Fren’s documentary and videographic work on fembots the night before (more details here).