Please note the time for my keynote at the “Questioning History in the Age of AI” symposium this coming Thursday, April 11 has been updated to 5-7pm.
The full conference schedule is posted above, and here is some additional info from the organizers:
Please join us at UC Berkeley on Thursday, April 11 and Friday April 12 for a symposium on the theme of “Questioning History in the Age of AI.”
Seminars will run each day, beginning at 10am, and will be held in the Social Sciences Matrix Our keynote, given by Shane Denson, will be held Thursday, 5–7pm in 142 Dwinelle
Please register HERE for the seminars, and we will send you the seminar papers in advance of the symposium.
On April 11, I’ll be giving a keynote titled “AI and the Future of (Media) History” at the symposium “Questioning History in the Age of Artificial Intelligence,” organized by David Bates, Julia Irwin, and Johan Fredrikzon. I’m excited to be in conversation with a stellar group of scholars thinking about what AI means for history and historical thinking!
I am pleased to announce our first event for spring quarter! Please join us in welcoming Nicholas Baer next week, who will present a talk titled “The Ends of Perfection: On a Limit Concept in Global Film and Media Theory” on Friday, April 5, 2:30-4:30pm 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. We look forward to seeing you there!
This talk examines the concept of aesthetic perfection against the backdrop of today’s digital mediascape, where the latest screen technologies promise sharp, pristine images with lossless compression and a lifelike appearance. While, in Hito Steyerl’s account, the circulation of “poor” or “imperfect” images can disrupt hegemonic media logics, I demonstrate that the very ideal of perfection is an engine of semantic instability in the modern age. Intervening in contemporary debates about “rich” and “poor” images, and “high” and “low” definition, my lecture offers a differentiated and historically dynamic understanding of perfection as a limit concept in global film and media theory. I argue that moving images played a crucial role in the redefinition of perfection, as classical conceptions of the term gradually and unevenly gave way to perfectionism, perfectibility, and an aesthetics of imperfection. Integrating Reinhart Koselleck’s method of conceptual history into the study of moving images, my talk reconceives the history of global film and media theory as one of semantic persistence, change, and radical novelty of meaning.
Bio:
Nicholas Baer is Assistant Professor of German at the University of California, Berkeley, with affiliations in Film & Media, Critical Theory, and Jewish Studies. He is author of Historical Turns: Weimar Cinema and the Crisis of Historicism (University of California Press, 2024) and co-editor of three volumes: The Promise of Cinema: German Film Theory, 1907–1933 (University of California Press, 2016), Unwatchable (Rutgers University Press, 2019), and Technics: Media in the Digital Age (Amsterdam University Press, 2024).
This event is generously co-sponsored by the Stanford Europe Center.
At long last, Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film is now available in a print edition! The 1000-page volume, originally published in open-access formats (HTML and PDF) in 2016, can now be purchased in a four-volume paperback format.
In accordance with the original Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND), the paperbacks are sold at cost; the purchase price covers only the printing. As a result, they are quite affordable (around $8.00 each).
The book as a whole asks: If cinema and television, as the dominant media of the 20th century, shaped and reflected our cultural sensibilities, how do new digital media in the 21st century help to shape and reflect new forms of sensibility? In this collection, editors Shane Denson and Julia Leyda have gathered a range of essays that approach this question by way of a critical engagement with the notion of “post-cinema.” The contributions take as their critical starting-points concepts such as David Bordwell’s “intensified continuity” or Steven Shaviro’s “post-cinematic affect” and “post-continuity.” They expand and build upon the ideas of these and a range of other thinkers, with the goal of coming to terms with an apparently new media ecology that requires us to search for a fresh critical vocabulary. By examining the experiential, technological, political, historical, and ecological aspects of the transition from a cinematic to a post-cinematic media regime, the chapters explore key questions in breaking this new ground, seeking and articulating both continuities and disjunctures between film’s first and second centuries. Questions of aesthetics and form overlap with investigations of changing technological and industrial practices, contemporary formations of capital, and cultural concerns such as identity and social inequalities. The impact of digitization on taken-for-granted conventions is also in play: intermediality, new forms of distribution both licit and illicit, academic and critical reliance on genres and discrete media formats – all of these come under scrutiny as paradigms shift in the post-cinematic era.
Volume I comprises the Introduction and Parts 1 & 2, “Parameters for Post-Cinema” and “Experiences of Post-Cinema”:
Volume II comprises Parts 3 and 4: “Techniques and Technologies of Post-Cinema” and “Politics of Post-Cinema”:
Volume III comprises Parts 5 and 6: “Archaeologies of Post-Cinema” and “Ecologies of Post-Cinema”:
Finally, Volume IV comprises the conversations and roundtables contained in Part 7: “Dialogues on Post-Cinema”:
On Sunday, March 17 (10:15am-12pm), I’ll be part of the panel “Endurance Media: Making, Breaking, and Remaking the Body,” co-chaired by Neta Alexander and Rachel Plotnick, and also featuring David Parisi.
My paper is titled “Interfacing with Metabolic Media.” In lieu of an abstract, here’s my talk as an animated gif:
We’re pleased to announce our last event of the winter quarter, slated for next week. Please join us in welcoming Akira Mizuta Lippit, who will present on “Shadowline” on Tuesday, March 12, 5-7pm PT. The event will take place in McMurtry 370, 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!
This paper looks at the unique visuality of an eclipse, a penumbra in which a dark object is revealed in and sometimes by the darkness that surrounds. When darkness envelops darkness, is vision negated or does a new form visibility emerge from the double negation of the visible? At its early stages of thought, this paper seeks to explore the cosmic event of an eclipse as a uniquely disruptive but revelatory instance of a collapsing visuality.
Bio:
Akira Mizuta Lippit is University Professor of film and literature at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Cinema without Reflection: Jaques Derrida’s Echopoiesis and Narcissism Adrift (2016); Ex-Cinema: From a Theory of Experimental Film and Video (2012); Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (2005); and Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (2000).
This event is generously co-sponsored by the Stanford Department of Art & Art History.
The Program in Modern Thought and Literature and Intermediations invite you to attend a lunch-time talk with Professor Regina Schober (American Studies, Heinrich-Heine-University Duesseldorf) on Female Algorithmic Selfhood, Literary Fiction, and the Digital Pharmakon.
This event will be taking place in the Terrace Room in Margaret Jacks Hall (Building 460, 4th Floor, room 426) on March 6th at 11am.
Lunch will be provided. If you are planning to intend, we invite you fill out an RSVP form for logistics and headcount. RSVPs are appreciated but not required. We ask that if you RSVP that you do so by March 1st.
If you have any questions or concerns about this event, please do not hesitate to reach out to Leah Chase at lachase@stanford.edu
Abstract:
While algorithms have increasingly come to shape the ways of writing the self, for example through data tracking and recording, personalized recommendation systems, and online identity curation, literary fiction has simultaneously negotiated such ways of being in and experiencing our algorithmically driven, digital environment. This talk will look at a selection of contemporary US American novels that critically inquire into modes of algorithmic self-writing, as they scrutinize the ways in which digital affect, automated scripts, and the dynamics of the attention economy play into the construction of selfhood. With a particular focus on female digital experiences, this talk reframes posthuman perspectives on human-/technology interactions in emphasizing affective and collective spaces of the “digital pharmakon” (Stiegler 2012). At the same time, these novels explore their own intermedial potential as counter-attentional forms in negotiating the ‘failed knowledges’ of scripting the digital female self.
About the speaker:
Regina Schober is Professor of American Studies at Heinrich-Heine-University Duesseldorf. Her research interests include literary negotiations of networks and algorithmic selfhood, theories of failure, and intermediality. She is author of ‘Spiderweb, Labyrinth, Tightrope Walk: Networks in US-American Literature and Culture’ (De Gruyter, 2023), of ‘Unexpected Chords: Musicopoetic Intermediality in Amy Lowell’s Poetry and Poetics’ (Winter, 2011), editor of ‘Data Fiction: Naturalism, Numbers, Narrative’ (special issue of Studies in American Naturalism, with James Dorson, 2017), ‘The Failed Individual: Amid Exclusion, Resistance, and the Pleasure of Non-Conformity’ (Campus, 2017, with Katharina Motyl) of ‘Laboring Bodies and the Quantified Self’ (Transcript, with Ulfried Reichardt, 2020), and of ‘Network Theory and American Studies’ (Special Issue of Amerikastudien/American Studies, 2015, with Ulfried Reichardt and Heike Schäfer. She is part of the DFG Research Network ‘The Failure of Knowledge/Knowledges of Failure’, the DFG Research Network ‘Model Aesthetics: Between Literary and Economic Knowledge’, and the interdisciplinary BMBF Project ‘AI4All’.
On March 11 (4:00-5:30pm, McMurtry Building 370), Gerui Wang and Unjoo Oh will be presenting work related to AI and the history of art and literature:
Gerui Wang, “Infinite Curves in Soungwen Chung’s Art: Towards Human-AI Collaborative Creativity”
This talk explores human-AI collaborations in the works of the contemporary artist Soungwen Chung. Chung designs her own robots for drawing operations. She utilizes computer vision technologies to train robots to observe, learn, and respond to her creative processes. Chung experiments possibilities and creative potential of AI systems when her brain waves are transmitted to the robot arms through an EEG device. The presentation investigates the visual effect of infinite curves in Chung’s art, varying in volume, color, density, tones, and directions. Chung’s works introduce an infinite reproducibility and variation that evokes aesthetics of the ink medium from East Asia. Do Chung’s completed works show legible differences between the marks made by herself and those made by the robot arms? Do “conversations” and collaborations between human creators and AI systems redefine our perceptions of creativity? How do AI systems change our engagement with cultural traditions? This talk invites you to think with these AI-infused artworks.
Gerui Wang is a Lecturer in the Department of History of Art and Visual Culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and at Stanford University’s Center for East Asian Studies (Spring 2024). Her research interests span arts, public policy, environment, and emerging technologies. Her book manuscript, Landscape, Governance, and Ecology in China, 1000-1400, demonstrates the overlooked ecological thinking and notions of “sustainability” manifested in flourishing landscape imagery across artistic media. Gerui’s new project examines artificial intelligence and contemporary art in Asia and its diaspora. Gerui holds a PhD in the history of art from the University of Michigan.
Unjoo Oh, “Visual Interfaces for Poetic Data: Early Modern and AI Technologies”
How might the sonnets of William Shakespeare and AI exist—or be made to exist—in symbiosis? This talk explores the mutual insights that Shakespeare’s Sonnets and AI tools (such as LLMs and text-to-image generators) offer to each other. At the intersection of textual criticism and artificial intelligence, it is possible to leverage bibliographical uncertainty and rethink the (re)presentation of Shakespeare’s poetry. Image (re)production can be newly considered in this process as a node for early modern print and generative AI. Most importantly, we can test the capabilities and biases of these models in processing poetic data and begin to construct visual interfaces that reorient literary analysis.
Unjoo Oh is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Stanford University. Her research centers around textual materiality, critical posthumanism, and digital humanities, investigating how (in)organic nonhumans affect notions of intelligence and the remediation of premodern texts. Her work has been published in Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies and the Journal of Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance English Literature. She is also a graduate coordinator of Renaissances at Stanford and an assistant editor of the Stanford Global Shakespeare Encyclopedia.
I am excited to announce that, with the support of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, I am hiring a one-year postdoctoral fellow working on issues around AI, art, and aesthetics. Please see the full call for applications here, and spread the word to anyone who might be interested!
