Month: November 2024

GlitchesAreLikeWildAnimalsInLatentSpace! CANINE! — Karin + Shane Denson

CANINE! (2024)

Karin & Shane Denson

Canine! is a part of the GlitchesAreLikeWildAnimalsInLatentSpace! series of AI, generative video, and painting works. Inspired in equal parts by glitch-art vernaculars, the chronophotography of Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey, the cut-up methods of Brion Gysin and William Burroughs, and generative practices from Oulipo to Brian Eno and beyond, our ongoing series GlitchesAreLikeWildAnimalsInLatentSpace! stages an encounter between human imagination and automated image-making — including the mental “schematisms” theorized by Kant and now embodied in algorithmic stereotypes.

This is a screen recording of a real-time, generative/combinatory video.

Canine! is a sort of “forest of forking paths,” consisting of 64 branching and looping pathways, with alternate pathways displayed in tandem, along with generative text, all composited in real time. It is mathematically possible but virtually impossible that the same combination of image, sound, and text will ever be repeated.

The underlying video was generated in part with RunwayML (https://runwayml.com). Karin’s glitch paintings (https://karindenson.com) were used to train a model for image generation. Prompting the model with terms like “Glitches are like wild animals” (a phrase she has been working with for years, originally found in an online glitch tutorial, now offline), and trying to avoid the usual suspects (lions, tigers, zebras), produced a set of species-indeterminate canines, which Karin painted with acrylic on canvas. The painting was fed back into RunwayML as the seed for a video clip (using Gen-2 in spring/summer 2024), which was extended a number of times in branching paths before looping back. The resulting video was glitched with databending methods (in Audacity). The soundtrack was produced by feeding a jpg of the original canine painting into Audacity as raw data, interpreted with the GSM codec.

Onscreen and spoken text is generated by a Markov model trained on Shane’s article “Artificial Imagination” (https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/cinephile/article/view/199653).

Made with Max 8 (https://cycling74.com/products/max) on a 2023 Mac Studio (Mac 14,14, 24-core Apple M2 Ultra, 64 GB RAM) running macOS Sonoma (14.6.1). Generative text is produced with Pavel Janicki’s MaxAndP5js Bridge (https://www.paweljanicki.jp/projects_maxandp5js_en.html) to interface Max with the p5js (https://p5js.org) version of the RiTa tools for natural language and generative writing (https://rednoise.org/rita/). Jeremy Bernstein’s external Max object, shell 1.0b3 (https://github.com/jeremybernstein/shell/releases/tag/1.0b3), passes the text to the OS for text-to-speech.

See also: Bovine! (https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/1013903632)

“Rise of the Machines” — Spiral Film and Philosophy Conference, May 23-24 2025

Spiral – Rise of the Machines – CFPDownload

I am excited to announce that I will be giving the keynote lecture at the Spiral Film & Philosophy conference in May. I attended Spiral back before the pandemic, when Deborah Levitt gave the keynote, and I have been wanting to return ever since.

They’ve put together an excellent theme this year — please share the CFP widely!

“Digital Orreries: Meditations on Material and Media Cosmologies” — Aileen Robinson at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, Dec. 3, 2024

We’re pleased to announce our next event of the year. Please join us in welcoming Aileen Robinson, who will present on “Digital Orreries: Meditations on Material and Media Cosmologies” on Tuesday, Dec 3, 6:30-8:30pm PT. The event will take place in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room, where refreshments (and dinner!) will be served.

Zoom link for those unable to join in-person: tinyurl.com/4mnk7wmn

Bio:

Aileen Robinson is a historian of performance and technology with specializations in 18th and 19th century technological performance and Black cultural performances. Working across the history of science, technology, and theatre, Robinson explores how systems of knowledge, connected to the body and the object, overlapped to produce practices of research, dissemination, and valuation.  Robinson’s current book manuscript, Instruments of Illusion, explores intersections between technological, scientific, and theatrical knowledge in early nineteenth-century interactive science museums. She teaches across the history of science and performance, magic and technology, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century stagecraft, and 19th and 20th-century Black artistic production.

This event has been generously co-sponsored by Stanford TAPS: Department of Theater and Performance Studies.

“Democratizing Vibrations” and “Opera Machine” — Critical Making Collaborative, Nov. 22, 2024

The Critical Making Collaborative at Stanford invites you to an evening of sharing and discussion with two recipients of the Critical Making Award, West Montgomery and Lloyd May, who will present their ongoing work in opera and haptic art—Friday, Nov. 22 (5PM) at the CCRMA Stage (3rd floor). 

Democratizing Vibrations – Lloyd May (Music Technology)

What would it mean to put vibration and touch at the center of a musical experience? What should devices used to create and experience vibration-based art (haptic instruments) look and feel like? These questions are at the core of the Musical Haptics project that aims to co-design haptic instruments and artworks with D/deaf and hard-of-hearing artists. 

Opera Machine – Westley Montgomery (TAPS)

Opera Machine is a work-in-process exploring music, measurement, and the sedimentation of culture in the bodies of performers. How does the cultural legacy of opera reverberate in the present day? How have the histories of voice-science, race “science,” and the gendering of the body co-produced pedagogies and styles of opera performance? What might it look like (sound like) to resist these histories? 

“Forms in Motion: Elemental Effects in Contemporary Cinema” — Kartik Nair at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, Nov. 12, 2024

We’re pleased to announce our first event for the 24-25 Academic Year. Please join us in welcoming Kartik Nair, who will present on “Forms in Motion: Elemental Effects in Contemporary Cinema” on Tuesday, November 12, 5:00-7:00pm PT. The event will take place in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room, where refreshments will be served. Below you will find the abstract and bio attached, as well as a poster  for lightweight circulation. We look forward to seeing you there!

Zoom link for those unable to join in-person: tinyurl.com/4b8e75v4

Abstract:

Motion capture is the practice of recording the movements of human bodies and using those movements to animate computer-generated bodies, thereby producing virtual character movement on the screen. Current scholarship on motion capture has critically examined the construction of this technology in trade reportage, industry journalism, and film promotion, detecting a discursive ambivalence arising from a struggle for recognition between live actors and motion capture technicians over the future of film performance. This talk will use motion capture as a heuristic to understand the many other kinds of human movements that are being captured in the processes of digital image-making. I will track the pipeline of atmospheric effects. Such atmospheric effects are ubiquitous in contemporary blockbuster cinema. Dust, fire, smoke, light, water and other particulate proliferate in the mise en scene, helping to ground impossible worlds even as they fascinate us with their own expressive qualities. Replacing the logic of photographic capture with one in which the frame is a ‘blank canvas’ to which elements are selectively added, such atmospheric effects vividly attest to the claim that digital tools have re-linked filmmaking with painting. Yet, unlike the painted canvas, which preserves brushstrokes in frozen perpetuity, virtual effects inscribe a trace of and in motion: these are instances in which the creative and corporeal motion of visual effects artists is captured and conveyed as motion. This process unfolds along a transnational path along which the mobile trace moves. Even as those generating it may remain immobilized by visa regulations, server locations, and time-zone differentials, their physical moves are eventually ex-propriated and assimilated into screen movement. Closely read, then, the spectacular conventions of blockbuster cinema can become legible as archives in and of motion.

Bio:

Kartik Nair is a film scholar working at the intersection of transnational cinema, film historiography, materialist media theory, and infrastructure studies, with a focus on popular genres and South Asian cinema. His first book, Seeing Things, is about the production and circulation of low-budget horror films in 1980s India. His current research explores the physical pipelines of digital cinema. He is an Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Temple University in Philadelphia, and one of the core editors of BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies.

This event has been generously co-sponsored by the Department of Art & Art History and the Stanford Center for South Asia.