The Digital Aesthetics Workshop invites you to join us for one final event next Wednesday, June 2 (5-7PM Pacific), for a conversation with Mary Beth Meehan & Fred Turner.
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Join photographer Mary Beth Meehan and historian Fred Turner in a conversation about their new book, Seeing Silicon Valley — Life in a Fraying America, and about the power of analog aesthetics in a digital era.
Mary Beth Meehan is a photographer and writer known for her large-scale, community-based portraiture centered on questions of representation, visibility, and social equity. She lives in New England, where she has lectured at Brown University, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
Fred Turner is Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University. He is the author of the award-winning history From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism among other books.
We’re excited to announce our next event at the Digital Aesthetics Workshop, a talk by writer and curator Legacy Russell, author of Glitch Feminism, which will take place next Thursday, May 20th at 10 am Pacific and is co-sponsored by the Clayman Institute for Gender Research.
Join writer and curator Legacy Russell in a discussion about the ways in which artists engaging the digital are building new models for what monuments can be in a networked era of mechanical reproduction.
Legacy Russell is a curator and writer. Born and raised in New York City, she is the Associate Curator of Exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Russell holds an MRes with Distinction in Art History from Goldsmiths, University of London with a focus in Visual Culture. Her academic, curatorial, and creative work focuses on gender, performance, digital selfdom, internet idolatry, and new media ritual. Russell’s written work, interviews, and essays have been published internationally. She is the recipient of the Thoma Foundation 2019 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art, a 2020 Rauschenberg Residency Fellow, and a recipient of the 2021 Creative Capital Award. Her first book Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020) is published by Verso Books. Her second book, BLACK MEME, is forthcoming via Verso Books.
Sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center. Made possible by support from Linda Randall Meier, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Co-sponsored by the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research.
On Tuesday, May 11th (5-7 pm Pacific), Adrian Daub will be discussing his recent book, What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley, at the Digital Aesthetics Workshop. Registration at tinyurl.com/DAWDaub.
About the event: Adrian Daub’s What Tech Calls Thinking is a lively dismantling of the ideas that form the intellectual bedrock of Silicon Valley. Equally important to Silicon Valley’s world-altering innovation are the language and ideas it uses to explain and justify itself. And often, those fancy new ideas are simply old motifs playing dress-up in a hoodie. From the myth of dropping out to the war cry of “disruption,” Daub locates the Valley’s supposedly original, radical thinking in the ideas of Heidegger and Ayn Rand, the New Age Esalen Foundation in Big Sur, and American traditions from the tent revival to predestination. Written with verve and imagination, What Tech Calls Thinking is an intellectual refutation of Silicon Valley’s ethos, pulling back the curtain on the self-aggrandizing myths the Valley tells about itself.
Adrian Daub is a professor of comparative literature and German studies at Stanford University, and the director of the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Studies. His research focuses on the intersection of literature, music, and philosophy in the nineteenth century.
Sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center. Made possible by support from Linda Randall Meier, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Above, the complete video from the conversation on April 2, 2021 between James Hodge and myself about our new books, Sensations of History and Discorrelated Images. Co-sponsored by the Center for Global Culture and Communication at Northwestern University and the Linda Randall Meier Research Workshop on Digital Aesthetics at Stanford University.
There’s a new review of Discorrelated Images in Film International. Reviewer T. R. Merchant-Knudsen (who goes by @CriticTMK on Twitter) remarks that pandemic year 2020 was paradoxically the perfect year for the book to appear, as it aims to illuminate the unprecedented role of digital screens in the reorganization of our lives, and judges the book overall “a fantastic meditation on post-cinema that begs the reader to consider both the horrors and possibilities afforded with technological advancements.”
Check out the full review here, and pick up the book for 50% off during Duke University Press’s Spring Sale (now through May 7) with code SPRING21 if you order directly from the publisher. (Outside North and South America, you can use the same code at international distributor Combined Academic Publishers.)
This Saturday, April 24, I will be participating in Stanford Continuing Studies and the Stanford Humanities Center’s annual event showcasing new books by Stanford authors, A Company of Authors. I will be presenting my book Discorrelated Imagesalongside Marci Kwon and Usha Iyer, both of whom are colleagues in the Department of Art & Art History, who will be presenting their recent books Enchantments: Joseph Cornell and American Modernism (Kwon) and Dancing Women: Choreographing Corporeal Histories of Hindi Cinema (Iyer).
The Fórum Internacional Cinemática III, organized by Giselle Gubernikoff, Edson Luiz Oliveira, and Daniel Perseguim of the Universidade de São Paulo, is taking place online from April 13-15, 2021. Dedicated this year to forms of documentary and “the real,” the conference will feature three plenary talks by Steven Shaviro (April 13), me (April 14), and Selmin Kara (April 15).
My talk, titled “Documenting the Post-Cinematic Real,” draws on a line of questioning about computational media and realism that I explore in the latter half of chapter 5 in Discorrelated Images:
“In its classical formulation, cinematic realism is based in the photographic ontology of film, or in the photograph’s indexical relation to the world, which allegedly grants to film its unique purchase on reality; upon this relation also hinged, for many realist filmmakers and theorists, the political promise of realism. Digital media, meanwhile, are widely credited with disrupting indexicality and instituting an alternative ontology of the image, but does that mean that realism as a potentially political power of connection with the world is dead? If we consider the extent to which reality itself is shaped and mediated through digital media today, the question begins to seem strange. As I will demonstrate with reference to a variety of moving-image texts dealing with drone warfare, online terrorism recruitment, and computationally mediated affects, post-cinematic media might in fact be credited with a newly intensified political relevance through their institution of a new, post-cinematic realism. As a result, the question of “documenting the post-cinematic real,” which any contemporary theory of documentary must raise, will necessarily take us beyond the documentary as it is traditionally understood; it will take us into spaces of the computer desktop, of online and offline subjectivities and collectives, and of post-indexical technologies and environments. How can these spaces, which resist traditional coordinates of cinematic realism, be documented?”
Here are the links to view the plenary talks:
Steve Shaviro, “The Ontology of Post-cinematic Images, and Examples from Music Videos,” April 13 (5pm Brazil, 4pm Eastern, 1pm Pacific) — https://youtu.be/7t6GEB6a-tI
The Digital Aesthetics Workshop is happy to announce a long-awaited, COVID-postponed event with Melissa Gregg next week on Tuesday, April 6th 5-7 pm Pacific,”The Great Watercooler in the Cloud: Distributed work, collegial presence and mindful labor post-COVID.”
“The Great Watercooler in the Cloud: Distributed work, collegial presence and mindful labor post-COVID”
The immediate shift to so-called “remote work” in the pandemic created an extraordinary instance of corporate reckoning: hierarchies seemingly so solid and impenetrable evaporated within weeks as workers rapidly adjusted to doing their job in slippers. Previously commonsense notions of the day’s rhythms – the obligatory performance of a 9 to 5 persona – faced critical contaminants in the form of children, spouses and pets. Meanwhile the surprisingly social elements of office life became apparent in their obvious absence. Zoom fatigue replaced team-building drinks as the dominant affective mode. As the work world prepares for a return to something other than normal, this talk draws on multiple studies of technology users in lockdown and previous research on productivity to understand the condition of professional intimacy post-COVID. In doing so, it reflects on the psychological, physical and environmental burdens embedded in the idea of “work from anywhere.”
Melissa Gregg is Intel’s chief social scientist and thought leader for user experience (UX). With a PhD in gender and cultural studies, she is an international expert on the future of work and a specialist in applied ethnography. Her over 60 peer-reviewed publications and books have anticipated key shifts in the experience of connected work and home life, from Work’s Intimacy (Polity 2011) to Counterproductive (Duke 2018), The Affect Theory Reader (Duke 2010) to the new collection, Media and Management (Meson Press 2021).
Following an academic career in Australia, Melissa led Intel’s first university investment in social computing before building user research to a position of strategic impact in the PC business. Her team now guides the roadmap for product development and architecture across consumer and commercial segments, including the EVO brand. As Chief Technologist for Sustainability in the Client Computing Group, Melissa inspires technologists, colleagues, consumers and customers to accelerate the transition to carbon neutral computing. This requires a fundamental reckoning with business as usual for the PC industry, to ensure the finite resources providing connectivity today can continue in to the future.
Sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center. Made possible by support from Linda Randall Meier, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
A presentation and dialogue on two recent books in digital aesthetics: Sensations of History: Animation and New Media Art by James J. Hodge (Northwestern University) and Discorrelated Images by Shane Denson (Stanford University).
On Zoom, Friday, April 2, 2021, at 2 p.m. CST/ 12 p.m. PST REGISTRATION REQUIRED
Organized by Center for Global Culture and Communication (CGCC), Department of Communication Studies, Northwestern University, Linda Randall Meier Research Workshop on Digital Aesthetics at Stanford University, Stanford Humanities Center
This Friday, March 19, 2021 (3pm Central, 1pm Pacific), I will be presenting alongside Deborah Levitt, Joel McKim, and Vivian Sobchack in panel L24: “Rendering: Times, Powers, Perceptions.” Sponsored by the Film Philosophy SIG!
