“Weaving as Coding: Complexity and Nostalgia” — Hideo Mabuchi at Critical Making Collaborative, March 4, 2024

The Critical Making Collaborative at Stanford proudly presents Hideo Mabuchi, Professor of Applied Physics and Denning Family Director of the Stanford Arts Institute, for a presentation titled “Weaving as Coding: Complexity and Nostalgia.” The presentation will take place on Monday, March 4 (12:30-2:00pm in the McMurtry Building, room 370). All are welcome!

In Hideo’s words:

Weaving as Coding: Complexity and Nostalgia

Textiles are cultural objects that organically support nested layers of coding.  In this talk I’ll first illustrate what I mean by this with brief examples borrowed from papers in anthropology and media studies, and then discuss a small textile piece I recently wove on an eight-shaft table loom.  My piece employs a traditional block draft (Bronson spot lace) and weft-faced weaving to mimic the appearance of a seven-segment numeral display, as can be found in common LED alarm clocks, and spells out the “calculator word” h-E-L-L-0 as the ​upside-down view of the digit string 07734.  To complete the arc of the story I’ll offer a semantic mash-up of Boymian reflective nostalgia with the information-theoretic concept of algorithmic complexity, and argue on this basis that hand-weaving offers a rich paradigm for critical making that undermines framings of generative AI as a tool that augments human creativity.

As a quantum physicist devoted to the traditional crafts of ceramics and weaving, I live a kind of spiral between abstraction and materiality that keeps me dithering over what it means to know something.  I profess this equivocation in my teaching, which increasingly looks to the humanities for help in relativizing rigorous thought and embodied understanding.  The project I’ll discuss grew out of class prep for teaching APPPHYS100B “The Questions of Cloth: Weaving, Pattern Complexity, and Structures of Fabrics”, but I’ve only picked up on its critical making aspect as a result of things I learned while co-teaching ARTHIST284/484 “Material Metonymy: Ceramics and Asian America” with Marci Kwon.

Intermediations/MTL Presents: Ruth Mayer, “The ‘Girl’ in Weimar Germany,” February 22

I am very excited to be hosting Ruth Mayer, Professor of American Studies at the Leibniz Universität Hannover, for a series of events at Stanford this quarter. The Program in Modern Thought & Literature nominated her as an International Visitor at the Stanford Humanities Center, where she’ll present her current research in March. First, though, there are two events in MTL:

The Program in Modern Thought and Literature invites you to a special event: On Thursday, February 22, at 4pm in the Terrace Room (4th floor, Margaret Jacks Hall), Professor Ruth Mayer will be giving a talk titled “The ‘Girl’ in Weimar Germany:  Illustrated Magazines in Trans-Atlantic Circulation.” The talk will be followed by a reception with food and drink.

Please RSVP here by Tuesday, February 20, so that we have a head-count.

The talk explores the ways in which illustrated magazines of the Weimar period act contribute to a larger gendering of transnational exchange particularly through image-text doubling and shifts. It takes the Weimar society magazine Uhu as a major reference point, investigating how it modeled itself on American lifestyle and ‘smart’ magazines and made use of the iconic figure of the ‘Girl’ to carve out a spatiotemporal continuum between ‘Amerika’ and Europe. While the Girl is a figure of the stage and screen as much as of the modern magazine, it is in the magazine that this figure comes into her own. The Girl incorporates modernity as a multimodal and multifaceted configuration much like the modern magazine itself. The talk argues that the Girl enters the illustrated magazines not only as a subject matter but also as a tool of gendered self-reflection, particularly in the work of female writers, illustrators and photographers.

Prof. Ruth Mayer holds the chair of American Studies, teaching American literature and culture from the 17th century to the present time, with a strong focus on theoretical and formal questions. Her research focuses on aspects of popular culture (particularly seriality and serialization), media history, globalization, science studies, and cultural contact. Her book Serial Fu Manchu: The Chinese Super-Villain and the Spread of Yellow Peril Ideology appeared in 2013 with Temple University Press and in 2019 she co-edited Modernities and Modernization in the United States (Winter). She is currently directing the research projects “Contingency and Contraction: Modernity and Temporality in the United States, 1880-1920″ and “Multiplication: Modernity, Mass Culture, Gender.” The Program in Modern Thought and Literature is currently hosting Prof. Mayer as an International Visitor at the Stanford Humanities Center.

In addition to the talk on 2/22, Prof. Mayer will also be holding a workshop session for grad students on the following day, 2/23, from 11am-2pm in the Terrace Room. Lunch will be served.

OUT NOW: “From Sublime Awe to Abject Cringe: On the Embodied Processing of AI Art” in Journal of Visual Culture

The new issue of Journal of Visual Culture just dropped, and I’m excited to see my article on AI art and aesthetics alongside work by Shannon Mattern, Bryan Norton, Jussi Parikka, and others. It looks like a great issue, and I’m looking forward to digging into it!

Cuerpos Post-Cinemáticos — Spanish translation of Post-Cinematic Bodies

I was pleasantly surprised to receive a copy of Cuerpos Post-Cinemáticos, a Spanish translation of Post-Cinematic Bodies, in the mail today — especially surprised since I had no idea it was being made!

Zenaida Osorio, a professor in the School of Graphic Design at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá, undertook the project with her students as a sort of critical making project. They are open about the fact that they used ChatGPT and DeepL to make the first pass at translating the open-access text, but then a team of 11 students (Alejandro Guerrero, David Inagán, Natalia Correa, Natalia Montaña, Natalie Martin, Roxana Ayala, Selina Ojeda, Sofía Bernal, Santiago Narváez, William Camacho, and Wilmer Casallas) revised and corrected the translation. The whole team added a glossary of technical terms, a commentary (in English and Spanish) before each chapter and at the end of the book, and a set of QR-code–activated “visual comments” — a set of wonderfully designed objects that link the ideas of the book to the students’ lived experience in Bogotá. They also sent me printed copies of these beautiful objects. The final product is finely crafted.

My family and I had the honor to spend a week in Bogotá at Professor Osorio’s invitation back in 2019, where I saw first-hand the amazing work that she and her students are doing there. It was a truly memorable week, which I often look back on fondly, and I hope to return there again someday. Today, I am very touched by this wonderful and unexpected gift!

“Mimetic Virtualities” — Yvette Granata at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, February 6, 2024

Please join us for the next Digital Aesthetics Workshop, when we will welcome Yvette Granata for her talk on “Mimetic Virtualities: Rendering the Masses and/or Feminist Media Art?” on February 6, 5-7pm 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 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/2r285898

Abstract: 

From stolen election narratives to Q-anon cults, the politics of the 21st century are steeped in the mainstreaming of disinformation and the hard-core pursuit of false realities via any media necessary. Simultaneously, the 21st century marks the rise of virtual reality as a mass media. While spatial computing technologies behind virtual reality graphics and head-mounted displays have been in development since the middle of the 20th century, virtual reality as a mass media is a phenomenon of the last decade. Concurrently with the development of VR as a mass media, the tools of virtual production have proliferated – such as motion capture libraries, 3D model and animation platforms, and game engine tools. Does the pursuit of false realities and the proliferation of virtual reality technologies have anything to do with each other? Has virtual reality as a mass medium shaped the aesthetics of the digital masses differently? Looking to the manner in which virtual mimesis operates via rendering methods of the image of crowds, from 2D neural GAN generators to the recent development of neural radiance fields (NERFs) as a form of mass 3D rendering, I analyze the politics and aesthetics of mimetic virtualities as both a process of rendering of the masses and as a process of the distribution of the sensibility of virtualized bodies. Lastly, I present all of the above via feminist media art practice as a critical, creative method.

Bio:

Yvette Granata is a media artist, filmmaker, and digital media scholar. She is Assistant Professor at University of Michigan in the department of Film, Television and Media and the Digital Studies Institute. She creates immersive installations, video art, VR experiences,  and interactive environments, and writes about digital culture, media art, and media theory. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at film festivals and art institutions including, Slamdance, CPH:DOX, The Melbourne International Film Festival, The Annecy International Animation Festival, Images Festival, Harvard Carpenter Center for the Arts, The EYE Film Museum, McDonough Museum of Art, and Hallwalls Contemporary Art, among others. Her most recent VR project,  I Took a Lethal Dose of Herbs, premiered at CPH:DOX in 2023, won best VR film at the Cannes World Film Awards, and received an Honorable Mention at Prix Ars Electronica in Linz Austria. Yvette has also published in Ctrl-Z: New Media Philosophy, Trace Journal, NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, International Journal of Cultural Studies and AI & Society. She lives in Detroit.

Intermediations/MTL Presents: Mediation Between the Lines — January 29, 2024

On Monday, January 29, 2024 (6pm in the Terrace Room, 4th floor of Margaret Jacks Hall), four PhD students will present talks originally given at the 2023 Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) conference: Danielle Adair (Theater & Performance Studies), Hank Gerba (Film & Media Studies/Art History), Grace Han (Film & Media Studies/Art History), and Kola Heyward-Rotimi (Modern Thought & Literature).

The panel, entitled “Mediation Between the Lines,” will be accompanied by some finger food and refreshments. Please RSVP here so that we have an idea of how many to expect. 

Beyond the Screen: Exhibition of Desktop Videos

Beyond the Screen is an exhibition of desktop videos made by students in my Fall 2023 course on “The Video Essay.” The show, featuring three collaboratively made videos, is up from January 22-February 2, 2024 in the McMurtry Building (home of the Department of Art & Art History) at Stanford University.

Featured are:

Escape, by Karla Aguilar, Eric Wang, and Roisin Willis (14:52)

Pixilated Mimicry, by Lauren Boles and Michael Hemker (15:10)

Crypto Crisis, by Sheryl Hsu and Nathaniel Begay (12:40)

Intermediations/MTL Presents: Celine Parreñas Shimizu on “Crafting Oneself in Community: Theory, Practice, and the Interdisciplinary PhD”

On Thursday, 1/25, from 5-7pm in the Terrace Room, MTL alumna Celine Shimizu (’01) will be returning to Stanford to give a presentation, “Crafting Oneself in Community: Theory, Practice, and the Interdisciplinary Ph.D.” Prof. Shimizu’s presentation will be followed by a conversation with Prof. Shane Denson, as well as a Q&A. Light food and refreshments will be provided. Please RSVP here if you plan to attend so that we have a rough headcount. 

Prof. Shimizu is a film scholar and filmmaker, as well as Dean of the Division of the Arts and Distinguished Professor of Film and Media at the University of California at Santa Cruz. She wrote The Proximity of Other Skins (2020), Straitjacket Sexualities (2012), and The Hypersexuality of Race (2007) and co-edited The Feminist Porn Book (2013) and The Unwatchability of Whiteness (2018). Her new book The Movies of Racial Childhoods: Screening Self-Sovereignty in Asian / America, is forthcoming from Duke University Press. 

Her numerous peer-reviewed articles appear in top journals in the fields of cinema, performance, ethnic, feminist, sexuality studies, and transnational popular culture in Asia and Asian America. She is formerly Associate Editor of Gay and Lesbian Quarterly (GLQ), founding USA editor of Asian Diasporas and Visual Cultures of the Americas and Associate Editor of Women Studies International Forum. Her latest film 80 Years Later (2022) screened in over 50 film festivals and won 15 awards including for best historical documentary and excellence in directing. Her previous film The Celine Archive (2020) won several festival awards and both are distributed by Women Make Movies and available on demand via wmm.com. 

“Why Are Things So Weird?” — Kevin Munger on Flusser’s COMMUNICOLOGY

I just stumbled upon this interesting looking video response from Kevin Munger to Vilém Flusser’s Communicology: Mutations in Human Relations?, which appeared in the “Sensing Media” book series that I edit with Wendy Chun for Stanford University Press.

The above (posted on Twitter here) is an excerpt of a longer video accessible if you subscribe to the New Models Patreon or Substack. I haven’t subscribed, so I’m 100% sure what to expect, but it looks provocative!

“Marx After Simondon” — Bryan Norton at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, Jan. 30, 2024

Happy New Year! For our first Digital Aesthetics workshop of 2024, please join us in welcoming Bryan Norton, who will present on “Marx after Simondon: Metabolic Rift and the Analog of Computation” on January 30, 5-7PM PT. The event will take place in the Stanford Humanities Center Watt Dining Room, where refreshments will be served. Below you will find the abstract and bio. We look forward to seeing you there!

Zoom link for those unable to join in-person: tinyurl.com/s8248e2e

Abstract: 

A growing number of scholars have recently urged a return to German Idealism to account for the relationship between computation and cognition. This paper will elucidate this trend by tracing the centrality of analogy in theories of computation back to the unstable formalization of the concept in Immanuel Kant’s epistemology. While Kant viewed analogy as a cognitive operation capable of revealing hidden similarities between life and thought, analogy also leads humans to seek false connections between biology and geology. This divide Kant creates between life, cognition, and geological process has drastic consequences for how we consider twentieth century analogies between cognition and computation, as Gilbert Simondon has noted. Turning ultimately to recent artwork that addresses the role of geology in digital infrastructures, this paper seeks to highlight the ongoing relevance of Marx’s notion of metabolic rift for theories of computation, as it presents a post-Kantian synthesis of geology, biology, and cognition.

Bio:

Bryan Norton is a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities at Stanford University and Lecturer in the Department of German Studies. He is the editor of a forthcoming volume, Negentropy and the Future of the Digital (with Mark Hansen), and is completing a monograph on media and the environment in German romantic philosophy and poetry, titled Planetary Idealism. A preview of this book, “Novalis and Simondon: Notes for a Romantic Mechanology,” is forthcoming from SubStance. Other recent writings can be found in Cultural Politics, Philosophical Salon, and the Journal of Visual Culture.