Stanford Humanities Center – Page 2

“The Negative Aesthetic of AI” — Luciana Parisi at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, Oct. 20, 2023

We are happy to announce the first Digital Aesthetics Workshop event of the year. Please join us in welcoming Luciana Parisi, who will present on “The negative aesthetic of AI” on October 20, 2-4PM PT. The event will take place in the Stanford Humanities Center Boardroom, 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/3fx49d8p

Abstract:

Does AI have an aesthetic form? Perhaps one can argue that this form may entail a thinking without self-reflectivity and yet one may still hang on a function of imagination for artificial thinking. But one cannot neglect that self-reflectivity precisely defines the procedure by which reason is supplemented by imagination – a generative function that grants the system not to fall into its dogmatic premises. From this standpoint, the function of imagination seems to collide with the role of noise and randomness in generative AI. The scope here however is not to establish a direct correlation between imagination and noise or even to argue for a machine aesthetics that carries through the project of aesthetic judgment in the moment of the sublime, namely the encounter with the incalculable and the unmeasurable. Instead of a prosthetic extension of aesthetic judgement, this talk discusses the negative function of imagination in Generative AI as an instance of a negation of aesthetics: a socio-techno-genic insurgence of radical alienness from where the recursive iteration of the sublime fails its task of rebooting the system.

Bio:

Luciana Parisi’s research lays at the intersection of continental philosophy, information sciences, digital media, computational technologies. Her writings investigate technology in terms of ontological and epistemological possibilities of transformation in culture, aesthetics and politics. Her publications address the techno-capitalist investment in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, nanotechnology to explore challenges to conceptions of gender, race and class. She has also written extensively within the fields of media philosophy and computational design in order to investigate metaphysical possibilities of instrumentality.

She was a member of the CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit) and currently a co-founding member of CCB (Critical Computation Bureau) through which she co-ideated the Symposium Recursive Colonialism, Artificial Intelligence and Speculative Computation (Dec 2020) https://recursivecolonialism.com/home/

In 2004, she published Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire, which investigates capitalist experimentations in molecular strata of nature together with non-linear theories of endosymbiosis to argue against biocentric models of sexual reproduction and conceptions of sex and gender in terms of biodigital replications and non-filiative bacterial sex. Her book Contagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics and Space (2013) explores algorithms in architecture and interaction design as a symptom of global cultural transformation, where algorithmic computation represents a mode of thought that challenges dominant models of human cognition. Her current project, Automating Philosophy (forthcoming) explores the possibilities of a radical thought and critique which starts with inhuman intelligence and cosmocomputations. Part of this research has been published in recent articles “Media Ontology and Transcendental Instrumentality” (2019) and “Xenopatterning: Predictive Intuition and Automated Imagination” (2019).

“Acting Algorithms” — Mihaela Mihailova at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, May 26, 2023

Please join the Digital Aesthetics Workshop for our last event of the year with Mihaela Mihailova, who will present “Acting Algorithms: Animated Deepfake Performances in Contemporary Media” on Friday, May 26 from 1-3PM PT, where lunch will be served. The event will take place in McMurtry 007.

Zoom link for those unable to join in-person: https://tinyurl.com/3nnj32et

Abstract:

From the moving Mona Lisa deepfake created by the Moscow Samsung AI Center to the (re)animated life-size digital avatar of Salvador Dalí who greets visitors at the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, algorithmically generated performances are becoming integral to emerging media forms. As products of the collaboration between tech researchers, coders, animators, digital artists, and actors, as well as the labor of the (often deceased) makers of the original works, such amalgamated, multi-modal performances challenge existing definitions and conceptualizations of acting in/for the animated medium, along with notions of authorship and authenticity. Additionally, they expand the disciplinary reach and relevance of the subject, highlighting the necessity of thinking through contemporary digital animation’s relationship with data science and machine learning in order to better understand its ever-growing variety of non-filmic permutations.

At the same time, fan-made deepfakes, ranging from movie mashups to unauthorized pornographic edits, further complicate the aesthetic and legal landscape of animated algorithmic performance. Juxtaposing these amateur, free, often low-quality videos and images with the commissioned, well-funded works described above reveals fascinating tensions between the institutional implementations of deepfakes and their popular use on online platforms.

This talk explores the application, dissemination, and ontological status of deepfake performances across a variety of contexts, including digital artworks, viral videos, museum initiatives, and tech demos. It interrogates the practical, ideological, and ethical implications of their means of creation, including the digital “resurrection” of deceased individuals, the repurposing and rebranding of centuries-old artwork, and the superimposition of actors’ faces onto footage of other performers’ roles. It asks the following questions: who (or what) do these animated performances belong to? What new terms and approaches might be necessary in order to fully evaluate and account for their complicated relationship with existing theories of acting? How are they shaping – and being shaped by – contemporary animated media?

Bio:

Mihaela Mihailova is Assistant Professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University. She is the editor of Coraline: A Closer Look at Studio LAIKA’s Stop-Motion Witchcraft (Bloomsbury, 2021). She has published in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, [in]Transition, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, Feminist Media Studies, animation: an interdisciplinary journal, and Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema.

This event is generously co-sponsored by the Stanford McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Image credit goes to The Zizi Show, A Deepfake Drag Cabaret.

“Selfie/Portrait” — Damon Young at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, May 9, 2023

Please join the Digital Aesthetics Workshop for our next event with Damon Young, who will present “Selfie/Portrait” on Tuesday, May 9 from 5-7PM PT. The event will take place, as usual, in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room. Find an abstract and bio attached, as well as a poster for lightweight circulation. Looking forward to seeing you there !

Zoom link for those unable to join in-person: tinyurl.com/aty2zf2a

Abstract:
The selfie, ubiquitous and quotidian, is a media form that has risen to preeminence in the digital environments of the twenty-first century. While it appears banal and superficial, I argue that it is for this very reason that the selfie indexes a larger transformation of subjectivity, akin to the kind Walter Benjamin, one hundred years ago, associated with the invention of early photography. The “self” of the selfie appears in a fundamental relationship to transformation (in both analog forms of body modification and surgery, and digital forms of filters and retouching) in the context of a circulation economy. These same terms indicate the axes along which the selfie refashions contemporary gender and sexuality. On the one hand, drawing unapologetically (if not always consciously) from the visual archive of pornography, the selfie advances the legacy of the “male gaze,” familiar from the history of narrative cinema. At the same time, it destabilizes both the gendered positions associated with that gaze, and their implicit heterosexuality. Moreover, unlike the cinema, the selfie is no longer a voyeuristic medium, but a medium of address. But to whom is it addressed? The answer to that question bears on the way it reconfigures the mediated field of contemporary sexuality. Often said to embody a contemporary “narcissism” — itself a feminized concept— the selfie also puts on view a subject who is no longer an individual but is becoming-generic. At the fault line between historically transforming media paradigms in their intersection with transforming paradigms of gender, sexuality, and desire, the selfie allows us to take the measure of the tensions between the common and the singular, the generic and the particular, as well as the self-satisfied and the anxious, that shape the contours of a contemporary cultural logic.

Bio:
Damon Young is co-appointed with the department of French and is affiliated with the Program in Critical Theory, the Berkeley Center for New Media, the Institute for European Studies, and the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender & Sexuality. He teaches courses on art cinema, on sexuality and media, and on topics in digital media and film theory (including classical film theory, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, semiotics, feminist and queer theory). His first book, Making Sex Public and Other Cinematic Fantasies was published in the Theory Q series at Duke University Press in 2018, and shortlisted for the 2019 Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize. That book examines fears and fantasies about women’s and queer sexualities—as figures for social emancipation or social collapse–in French and US cinema since the mid-1950s. It also considers the way cinema produces a new model of the private self as it challenges the novel’s dominance in the twentieth century. The latter idea is the basis for Professor Young’s current book project, After the Private Self, which explores the technical and technological ground of subjectivity across media forms, from the written diary through to big data, algorithms, and contemporary Internet cultures. Is the self of Rousseau’s Confessions the same as the self of the digital selfie? The inquiry integrates topics in digital media theory with “earlier” questions of language and subjectivity.

Algorithmic Embodiment, Lit-Vis Working Group at Stanford Humanities Center, March 2

The Working Group in Literary and Visual Culture at Stanford University invites you to Algorithmic Embodiment

Presented by Shane Denson, Associate Professor of Film & Media Studies, Department of Art and Art History

Thursday, March 2nd, 1:00 pm — Stanford Humanities Center Boardroom

Lunch Will Be Served

PLEASE RSVP HERE: https://forms.gle/RBt1PkEUcePbcHmZ6

Abstract:

This talk previews my forthcoming book Post-Cinematic Bodies, in which I ask: How is human embodiment transformed in an age of algorithms? How do post-cinematic media technologies such as AI, VR, and robotics target and re-shape our bodies? Post-Cinematic Bodies grapples with these questions by attending both to mundane devices—such as smartphones, networked exercise machines, and smart watches and other wearables equipped with heartrate sensors—as well as to new media artworks that rework such equipment to reveal to us the ways that our fleshly existences are increasingly up for grabs. Through an equally philosophical and interpretive analysis, the book aims to develop a new aesthetics of embodied experience that is attuned to a new age of predictive technology and metabolic capitalism.

The Working Group in Literary and Visual Culture is sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center, made possible by support from an anonymous donor honoring the work of former SHC Director John Bender, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

“Code” — Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan at Digital Aesthetics Workshop (Jan. 17, 2023)

Please join us on Tuesday, January 17th @ 5-7pm, in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room, for a very special event with Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan. Bernard’s new book, Code: From Information Theory to French Theory, releases just 3 days later on January 20th (https://www.dukeupress.edu/code) ! At Digital Aesthetics he will be discussing the book as well as his future project, Screenscapes: How Formats Render Territories.

Zoom registration, if you can’t make it IRL: https://tinyurl.com/4dhyjuna.

Bio:
Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan is a Reader in the History and Theory of Digital Media (loosely equivalent to associate or w2 professorship). An overarching theme of his research is how “cultural” sciences shape—and are shaped by—digital media. This concern spans his writing on the mutual constitution of cybernetics and the human sciences, ethnicity and AI, and the role of mid-twentieth century military vigilance in the development of interactive, multimedia computing. His attention to cultural factors in technical systems also figured in his work as a curator, notably for the Anthropocene and Technosphere projects at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt.

Bernard’s book Code: From Information Theory to French Theory examines how liberal technocratic projects, with roots in colonialism, mental health, and industrial capitalism, shaped early conceptions of digital media and cybernetics. It offers a revisionist history of “French Theory” as an effort to come to terms with technical ideas of communications and as a predecessor to the digital humanities. N. Katherine Hayles wrote of this book that it “upends standard intellectual histories” and Lev Manovich that “after reading this original and fascinating book, you will never look at key thinkers of the twentieth century in the same way.” Early drafts of the book’s argument appeared in journals including Grey Room and Critical Inquiry.

Bernard’s current book project, Screenscapes: How Formats Render Territories, draws on infrastructure studies and format studies to offer a radical account of how digital screens produce global space. It considers the digital interface in terms of articulation, i.e., in its technoscientific formatting of territories, temporalities, and practices as “ecologies of operations.” Excerpts appear in Representations (An Ecology of Operations) and MLN (The Bitmap is the Territory).

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.

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.”

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).

Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside a Fraying America — Mary Beth Meehan and Fred Turner at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, June 2

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.

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More information about the book can be found here: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo90479007.html