medieninitiative

Ioana B. Jucan, Malicious Deceivers: Thinking Machines and Performative Objects (Sensing Media)

I am happy to announce that Ioana B. Juan’s Malicious Deceivers will be the third volume in the Sensing Media book series! See below for a description, and see here for more info or to pre-order!

In Malicious Deceivers, Ioana B. Jucan traces a genealogy of post-truth intimately tied to globalizing modernity and connects the production of repeatable fakeness with capitalism and Cartesian metaphysics. Through case studies that cross times and geographies, the book unpacks the notion of fakeness through the related logics of dissimulation (deception) and simulation (performativity) as seen with software/AI, television, plastics, and the internet. Specifically, Jucan shows how these (dis)simulation machines and performative objects construct impoverished pictures of the world, ensuring a repeatable sameness through processes of hollowing out embodied histories and lived experience.

Through both its methodology and its subjects-objects of study, the book further seeks ways to counter the abstracting mode of thinking and the processes of voiding performed by the twinning of Cartesian metaphysics and global capitalism. Enacting a model of creative scholarship rooted in the tradition of writing as performance, Jucan, a multimedia performance-maker and theatre director, uses the embodied “I” as a framing and situating device for the book and its sites of investigation. In this way, she aims to counter the Cartesian voiding of the thinking “I” and to enact a different kind of relationship between self and world from the one posited by Descartes and replayed in much Western philosophical and — more broadly — academic writing: a relationship of separation that situates the “I” on a pedestal of abstraction that voids it of its embodied histories and fails to account for its positionality within a socio-historical context and the operations of power that define it.

Ioana B. Jucan is Assistant Professor of Social and Cultural Inquiry, Emerson College.

Video: Mads Thomsen, “Adjusting to the Age of Automated Writing” (Intermediations, Nov. 16, 2022)

Video from the inaugural event of INTERMEDIATIONS, a new workshop and lecture series foregrounding issues of intermediality and interdisciplinarity: Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, “Adjusting to the Age of Automated Writing” from November 16, 2022.

Abstract:

Writing was for at least six to seven thousand years a humanly hand-crafted product. Now we encounter several kinds of technologies that change the production of text profoundly. Chatbots, automated translation, grammar assistants, and large language models are examples of how text generation permeates writing from many angles. In this presentation, Professor Mads Thomsen sketches out key issues of the rapid developments in text generation and the interdisciplinary collaboration needed to understand these, before turning to how GPT-3 “reads” William Carlos Williams’ poem “The Red Wheelbarrow.”

Bio:

Mads Rosendahl Thomsen is Professor of Comparative Literature at Aarhus University, Denmark. He has published in the fields of literary historiography, modernist literature, world literature, digital humanities, and posthumanism. His most recently submitted publication is a short book on the concept and history of text.

He is the author of Mapping World Literature: International Canonization and Transnational Literatures (2008),The New Human in Literature: Posthuman Visions of Changes in Body, Mind and Society after 1900 (2013), a co-author with Stefan Helgesson ofLiterature and the World (2019), and the editor of fourteen books, includingWorld Literature: A Reader (2012), The Posthuman Condition: Ethics, Aesthetics and Politics of Biotechnological Challenges (2012),Danish Literature as World Literature (2017), Literature: An Introduction to Theory and Analysis (2017), and The Bloomsbury Handbook of Posthumanism (2020).

In Conversation: Jean Ma and Tung-Hui Hu at Digital Aesthetics Workshop (December 2)

Please join us for the Digital Aesthetics Workshop’s next event, “In Conversation: Jean Ma & Tung-Hui Hu.” The two authors will discuss their recently released books—Jean Ma’s At the Edges of Sleep: Moving Images and Somnolent Spectators and Tung-Hui Hu’s Digital Lethargy—before moving into a more synthetic conversation. A version of this event was originally scheduled in 2020 as a discussion of work in Jean Ma’s book-to-be, but was cancelled due to the pandemic. We are *thrilled* to bring the event back as, in part, a celebration of the book’s launch : )

The meeting will be held December 2nd, 10am-12, in McMurtry 370. Breakfast will be provided !

Zoom registration if unable to attend in-person: tinyurl.com/3nujuzkr

Jean Ma is the Victoria and Roger Sant Professor in Art in Stanford’s Department of Art & Art History. She has published books on the temporal poetics of Chinese cinema (Melancholy Drift: Marking Time in Chinese Cinema), singing women on film (Sounding the Modern Woman: The Songstress in Chinese Cinema), and the relationship of cinema and photography (Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography). She is the coeditor of “Music, Sound, and Media,” a book series at the University of California Press. Her writing has appeared in Camera Obscura, Criticism, Film Quarterly, Grey Room, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, and October. Her new book At the Edges of Sleep: Moving Images and Somnolent Spectators is the recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writer Book Grant. To access the open-source digital edition, please visit: luminosoa.org/site/books/m/10.1525/luminos.132/

Tung-Hui Hu is a poet and scholar of digital media. The winner of a Rome Prize and a NEA fellowship for literature, Hu has also received an American Academy in Berlin Prize for his research. He is the author of A Prehistory of the Cloud (MIT Press, 2015), described by The New Yorker as “mesmerizing… absorbing [in] its playful speculations”. His research has been featured on CBS News, BBC Radio 4, Boston Globe, New Scientist, Art in America, and Rhizome.org, among other venues. His brand-new book, an exploration of burnout, isolation, and disempowerment in the digital underclass, is Digital Lethargy (MIT Press, October 2022).

“Patterns of Text / Patterns of Analysis,” Mark Algee-Hewitt at Digital Aesthetics Workshop (Nov. 15)

The next event of the Digital Aesthetics Workshop will be next Tuesday, November 15, from 5-7pm with Mark Algee-Hewitt. Find below a brief description of his talk, “Patterns of Text / Patterns of Anaysis,” and we hope to see you there!

This hybrid event will take place in the Board Room of the Stanford Humanities Center, with online option via Zoom: https://tinyurl.com/36z56wuk (registration link)

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At first glance, the study of aesthetics and computational analysis would seem to be antithetical to each other. The former focuses, among other things, on the interplay between the formal features of the text, its larger social context and its reception; while the later largely aggregates formal features. However, the patterns produced by such computational work can not only shed new light on the specifics of how words produce aesthetic effects, but in and of themselves, they reveal a new set of aesthetic conditions that can only be visualized and explored through these methods. In this talk, I’ll toggle between large and small scales of analysis, using examples of quantitative analysis to demonstrate the ways that cultural analytics operates across scales to reveal new aspects of both poetics and our understanding of the interrelations between genres and periods of literature.

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Mark Algee-Hewitt’s research focuses on the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in England and Germany and seeks to combine literary criticism with digital and quantitative analyses of literary texts. In particular he is interested in the history of aesthetic theory and the development and transmission of aesthetic and philosophic concepts during the Enlightenment and Romantic periods. He is also interested in the relationship between aesthetic theory and the poetry of the long eighteenth century. Although his primary background is in English literature, he also has a degree in computer science. As the director of the Stanford Literary Lab, he is working to bring his interests in quantitative analysis, digital humanities and eighteenth-century literature to bear on a number of new collaborative projects. His current book project, The Afterlife of the Sublime, explores the history of the sublime by tracing its discursive patterns through over 11,000 texts from the long eighteenth century, seeking clues to the disappearance of the term at the end of the Romantic period. As a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at McGill University, working with the Interacting with Print Research group, Dr. Algee-Hewitt was also involved in a variety of projects that combine literary interpretation with quantitative analysis. He is a co-coordinator of the Book History BiblioGraph, a new dynamic online resource and recommendation engine that visualizes connections between contemporary resources on Book History using statistical methods. He is also working with Andrew Piper on the Werther Topologies: a project that seeks to identify lexical patterns that will aid in tracing the impact of Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther on the nineteenth-century development of the German novel. Dr. Algee-Hewitt has taught a variety of courses in literary history and theory in both the English and German departments at McGill University, Rutgers University and New York University where he received his PhD in 2008.

Intermediations: Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, “Adjusting to the Age of Automated Writing” (Nov. 16)

As the inaugural event of INTERMEDIATIONS, a new workshop and lecture series foregrounding issues of intermediality and interdisciplinarity, Mads Rosendahl Thomsen will be giving a talk titled “Adjusting to the Age of Automated Writing” on November 16, 2022 (4pm in the Terrace Room, Margaret Jacks Hall room 426).

Abstract:

Writing was for at least six to seven thousand years a humanly hand-crafted product. Now we encounter several kinds of technologies that change the production of text profoundly. Chatbots, automated translation, grammar assistants, and large language models are examples of how text generation permeates writing from many angles. In this presentation, Professor Mads Thomsen will sketch out key issues of the rapid developments in text generation and the interdisciplinary collaboration needed to understand these, before turning to how GPT-3 “reads” William Carlos Williams’ poem “The Red Wheelbarrow.”

Bio:

Thomsen has been director of the Digital Arts Initiative (2017-21) and the research program Human Futures (2016-22), both at Aarhus University. Thomsen was co-director of the research project Posthuman Aesthetics (2014-18), and he is the PI of the VELUX FONDEN-funded project Fabula-NET which investigates literary preferences and quality using digital methods (2021-25).

He is a co-editor of Orbis Litterarum, an advisory board member of the book series Literatures as World Literature(Bloomsbury Academic), and a member of the editorial board of Journal of World Literature. Thomsen is a member of the Academia Europaea (2010-), the advisory board of The Institute for World Literature (2010-13, 2018-22), and the general assembly of DARIAH (2022-).

Thomsen was a visiting scholar at Stanford University four times between 2001-2015.

“Keeping It Unreal” — Darieck Scott, Monica P. Moore Lecture in Modern Thought & Literature

On November 10, 2022 (4pm in the Terrace Room, Margaret Jacks Hall), the Program in Modern Thought & Literature will be hosting Darieck Scott, Professor of African American Studies at UC Berkeley, for the Monica P. Moore Speaker Series. Professor Scott will be talking about Black queer fantasy and superhero comics, the topic of his recent book Keeping It Unreal (NYU Press, 2022).

There will be two respondents: Scott Bukatman, Professor of Film & Media Studies at Stanford and author of a new book on Black Panther; and Lucas Williams, Ph.D Candidate in MTL.

Video: Erich Hörl, “The Disruptive Condition” (Oct. 5, 2022 at Digital Aesthetics Workshop)

We’re still getting used to the hybrid setup, so the framing isn’t always great, but I’m happy to share the video of Erich Hörl’s talk at the Digital Aesthetics Workshop: “The Disruptive Condition.”

Talks in Busan and Seoul, South Korea

I am grateful to Ji-hoon Kim for organizing two talks in South Korea this October. The first was on Oct. 11 at the Busan International Film Festival, on a panel with Dork Zabunyan from Paris 8 University, Jeong-ha Lee from Dankook University, and Ji-hoon Kim from Chung-Ang University (who both presented and moderated the panel).

The next talk is coming up on Oct. 27, as part of the Cinema and Media Studies Colloquium at Chung-Ang University in Seoul. See the poster above for details and registration information for remote participation.

The Disruptive Condition — Erich Hörl at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, October 5, 2022

✨*~*~*~*!!! The Digital Aesthetics Workshop is back !!!~*~*~*✨

After a yearlong sabbatical, we are extremely excited to announce the return of DAW. Please join us Wednesday October 5, 5-7PM in the Stanford Humanities Center’s Watt Dining Room for “The Disruptive Condition” with Erich Hörl.

The event will be hybrid, so if you are unable to attend in person you may register for the Zoom link here: https://stanford.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYqdO2grj8qG9O9wbi0juLi-WG_lcWKv_fU

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The lecture develops ›disruption‹ as a key term for the analytics of the present. In this context, ›disruption‹ denotes the form of historical experience that is specific to us. In a first step, the being-in-disruption is elaborated, which in Bernard Stiegler’s thinking of history represents the core determination of computational nihilism—for him, the historical completion of nihilism in general. In a second step, against the background of Reinhart Koselleck’s theory of history, Stiegler’s diagnosis is expanded toward what I call the disruptive condition as an epochal signature of 21st century.

Erich Hörl holds the Chair of Media Culture and Media Philosophy at Leuphana University Lüneburg. He works on the conceptualization of a general ecology and publishes internationally on the history, the problems and challenges of the contemporary technological condition. Among his publications are General Ecology. The New Ecological Paradigm (ed., London 2017); Die technologische Bedingung (ed., Berlin 2011); Sacred Channels: On the Archaic Illusion of Communication (Amsterdam 2018); Gérard Granel: Die totale Produktion, ed. and with an introduction by Erich Hörl (Vienna 2020).

Deep Violence — Talks at NYU Digital Theory Lab and University of Siegen

Last week I had the honor of presenting some new material at Leif Weatherby’s Digital Theory Lab at NYU, and this week I’ll be traveling to Siegen, Germany, to present another version of this material, focused on the “deep violence” of DeepFakes.

I’m especially excited to present this material, as it draws on a new book project, titled Post-Cinematic Bodies, a draft of which I have just completed! Stay tuned for more!