This past week marked the conclusion of our sixth year of the Digital Aesthetics Workshop at the Stanford Humanities Center, which we celebrated with a graduate symposium — the appropriately titled Digital Aesthetics Workshop-Workshop!
With nine events a year, six years is a lot of events! Here’s what we’ve done so far:
2017-2018 Events:
- Mark B. N. Hansen, “The Ontology of Media Operations, or, Where is the Technics in Cultural Techniques,” 10 October 2017
- Claus Pias, “Computer Game Worlds,” 24 October 2017
- Allison de Fren, “Post-Cinema and Videographic Criticism,” 14 November 2017
- Bonnie Ruberg, “Video Games Have Always Been Queer,” 23 January 2018
- Jacob Gaboury, “Techniques for Secondary Mediation: On the Screenshot as Image-Object,” 6 February 2018
- Shane Denson, “Discorrelated Images,” 3 April 2018
- Elizabeth Kessler, “Psychedelic Space and Anachronic Time: Photography and the Voyager’s Tour of the Solar System,” 10 April 2018
- Jonathan Sterne, “Machine Learning, ‘AI,’ and the Politics of Media Aesthetics: Why Online Music Mastering (Sort of) Works,” 24 April 2018
- Matthew Wilson Smith, “The Nostalgia of Virtual Reality,” 15 May 2018
2018-2019 Events:
- Carolyn L. Kane, “Chroma Glitch: Data as Style,” 9 October 2018
- Camille Utterback, “Embodied Interactions & Material Screens,” 27 November 2018
- Miryam Sas, “Plastic Dialectics: Community and Collectivity in Japanese Contemporary Art,” 4 December 2018
- Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux, “Skin in the Game: Greymarket Gambling in the Virtual Economies of Counter-Strike,” 14 January 2019
- N. Katherine Hayles, “Can Computers Create Meaning? A Cyber-Bio-Semiotic Perspective,” 12 February 2019
- Kevin B. Lee, “Dreams and Terrors of Desktop Documentary,” 27 February 2019
- Marion Fourcade, “A Maussian Bargain: The Give and Take of the Personal Data Economy,” 23 April 2019
- Digital Aesthetics Symposium, featuring Stanford graduate students and faculty, 14-15 May 2019
- Miyako Innoue, “Writing at the Speed of Thinking: The Japanese Kana Typewriter and the Rehabilitation of the Male Hand,” 28 May 2019
2019-2020 Events:
- Jenny Odell, “Killing Time,” 23 October 2019
- Scott Bukatman, “We Are Ant-Man,” 5 November 2019
- Ben Peters, “Declining Russian Media Theory,” 21 November 2019
- Rachel Plotnick, “Unclean Interface: Computation as a Cleanliness Problem,” 11 February 2020
- Jean Ma, “At the Edges of Sleep,” 9 March 2020 [cancelled due to COVID-19]
- Melissa Gregg, Title TBA, 7 April 2020 [cancelled due to COVID-19]
- Sarah T. Roberts, “Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media,” 21 April 2020
- Kris Cohen, “Bit Field Black,” 19 May 2020
- Xiaochang Li, “How Language Became Data: Speech Recognition between Likeness and Likelihood,” 26 May 2020
2020-2021 Events:
- Vivian Sobchack, in conversation with Scott Bukatman and Shane Denson, 29 September 2020 (additional follow-up event for Stanford graduate students, 14 October 2020)
- “New Regimes of Imaging.” Roundtable discussion with Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal, Deborah Levitt, Bernard Geoghegan, and Shane Denson, 23 October 2020
- libi rose striegl and the Media Archaeology Lab at the University of Colorado at Boulder, 10 November 2020
- Shaka McGlotten, “Racial Chain of Being,” 8 December 2020
- James J. Hodge and Shane Denson, “Dialogue in Digital Aesthetics: Sensations of History and Discorrelated Images,” 2 April 2021
- Melissa Gregg, “The Great Watercooler in the Cloud: Distributed Work, Collegial Presence, and Mindful Labor Post-COVID,” 6 April 2021
- Adrian Daub, “What Tech Calls Thinking,” 11 May 2021
- Legacy Russell, “Cyberpublics, Monuments, and Participation,” 20 May 2021
- Fred Turner and Mary Beth Meehan, “Seeing Silicon Valley – Life Inside a Fraying America,” 2 June 2021
2022-2023 Events:
- Erich Hörl, “The Disruptive Condition,” 5 October 2022
- Mark Algee-Hewitt, “Patterns of Text/Patterns of Analysis,” 15 November 2022
- Jean Ma and Tung-Hui Hu, “In Conversation” (joint book event), 2 December 2022
- Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, “The Violent Forensics of Digital Imagery: Abu Ghraib, Ukraine, and Cat Videos,” 17 January 2023
- Melissa Gilliam and Patrick Jagoda, “Game Changer Lab” (co-sponsored with the Critical Making Collaborative), 26 January 2023
- M. Beatrice Fazi, “On Digital Theory,” 28 February 2023
- Alexander Galloway, “‘No Deconstruction without Computers’: Learning to Code with Derrida and Kittler,” 7 March 2023
- Neta Alexander, “The Right to Speed-Watch (or, When Netflix Discovered its Blind Viewers),” 18 April 2023
- Damon Young, “Selfie/Portrait,” 9 May 2023
- Mihaela Mihailova, “Acting Algorithms: Animated Deepfake Performances in Contemporary Media,” 26 May 2023
2023-2024 Events:
- Luciana Parisi, “The Negative Aesthetic of AI,” 20 October 2023
- Ge Wang, “Artful Design and Artificial Intelligence: What Do We (Really) Want from AI?,” 14 November 2023
- Thomas Lamarre, “Harvesting Light,” 5 December 2023
- Bryan Norton, “Marx After Simondon: Metabolic Rift and the Analog of Computation,” 30 January 2024
- Yvette Granata, “Mimetic Virtualities: Rendering the Masses and/or Feminist Media Art?,” 6 February 2024
- Akira Mizuta Lippit, “Shadowline,” 12 March 2024
- Nicholas Baer, “The Ends of Perfection: On a Limit Concept in Global Film and Media Theory,” 5 April 2024
- James Hodge, “Six Theses on an Aesthetics of Always-On Computing,” 30 April 2024
- Digital Aesthetics Workshop-Workshop, graduate student symposium, with responses from Angèle Christin and Shane Denson, 24 May 2024
Thanks to all of the graduate student coordinators over the years, including Jeff Nagy, Doug Eacho, Natalie Deam, Annika Butler-Wall, and this year’s coordinators Grace Han and Hank Gerba. (And congratulations to Hank on successfully defending their dissertation last week!)
