May 2020 – medieninitiative

“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.

Discorrelated Images in Duke University Press Fall 2020 Catalog (and about that cover image)

I am excited to see my book Discorrelated Images alongside so many truly impressive books in Duke University Press’s Fall 2020 catalog, which went online today. Take a look; there is so much good stuff in there!

And take a closer look at my book’s cover, below, which I am doubly excited about — first, because the press’s designer Drew Sisk did such a beautiful job on it, and second because it features a painting by my partner-in-crime/partner-in-life Karin Denson! (And if you know what you’re looking at, it also depicts our dog Evie — so there’s a third reason I’m super excited about it!)

Check out more of Karin’s work on her website at karindenson.com.

*Discorrelated Images*, cover design by Drew Sisk, featuring artwork by Karin Denson

“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