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)
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.
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!
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.
Just in time for the new year, my article on “The New Seriality” is out now in the new issue of Qui Parle (issue 32.2, December 2023), and Duke University Press is offering 3 months of free access with this link.
Abstract:
Since at least the nineteenth century seriality and serialization have been among the most important formal and narrative strategies for popular media cultures and their negotiations with the radical changes brought on by industrialization and new communication technologies. Nothing less is at stake in popular seriality than the material and spatiotemporal ordering of the phenomenal world, with far-reaching political consequences. However, in an age of computation, predictive algorithms, and “personalized” media, the parameters of serialization are massively transformed. And because media forms and social formations are tightly intertwined, this transformation—or the shift from an “old” to a “new” form of seriality—brings with it crucial changes and uncertainties with respect to subjective and collective existence going forward. Centrally at stake in the new seriality is a set of techniques and technologies that aim to predictively “typify” subjects and preformat them vis-à-vis normative and statistically correlated categories of gender and race, among others. This article lays the groundwork for thinking seriality as a sociotechnics of typification, the scope and power of which is greatly expanded by algorithmic media.
Find the full issue here.
For our last Digital Aesthetics workshop of Fall 2023, please join us in welcoming Thomas Lamarre, who will present on “Harvesting Light” on December 5, 5-7PM PT. The event will take place in the Stanford Humanities Center Watt Dining Room, where refreshments will be served. Please find the abstract and bio below. We look forward to seeing you there!
Zoom link for those unable to join in-person: tinyurl.com/mrxahnbe
Abstract:
Discussions of environmental media tend, as if ineluctably, to introduce a rigid divide between economy and ecology, with infrastructures, markets, and geopolitical forces on one side of destruction, while ecology implies an utterly different, highly vulnerable set of processes. This talk aims to reconsider some of these seemingly insuperable divides through a focus on artificial photosynthesis, which often described as a form of bioinspiration, biomimicry, or homeotechnology. Part of what is interesting about artificial photosynthesis is that it tentatively blurs and contests the distinction between artificial and natural. It thus encourages a rethinking of the production of value in terms of a systematicity that does not rely on a strict divide between economy and ecology. Here I propose to explore the production of value by opening a dialogue between artificial photosynthesis and some recent thinkers of environmental Marxism such as Jason Moore and Saitō Kōhei. In this way, I hope also to reconsider what media studies has to offer environmental studies in an era of anthropogenetic climate change.
Bio:
Thomas Lamarre teaches in the departments of Cinema and Media Studies and East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Publications on media, thought, and material history include work on communication networks in 9thcentury Japan (Uncovering Heian Japan, 2000); silent cinema and the global imaginary (Shadows on the Screen, 2005); animation technologies (The Anime Machine, 2009) and infrastructure ecologies (The Anime Ecology, 2018). Major translations include Kawamata Chiaki’s Death Sentences (2012), Muriel Combes’s Gilbert Simondon and the Philosophy of the Transindividual (2012), David Lapoujade’s William James, Empiricism, and Pragmatism (2019), and Isabelle Stengers’s Making Sense in Common (2023).
I am happy to announce the call for papers for the 5th annual Stanford-Leuphana Academy for Media Studies, which will again take place in Berlin (June 24-28, 2024)!
Stanford-Leuphana Summer Academy
on Humanities and Media 2024
Open to advanced PhD candidates
Date: June 24-28, 2024
Location: Stanford Berlin, Haus Cramer, Pacelliallee 18, 14195 Berlin
Application Deadline: January 15, 2023
2024 topic: »Art, Technology, and the Problem of Acceleration«
For the last two hundred years, any number of writers and scholars have claimed that life is speeding up. As early as 1880 Goethe called the emerging industrial era “velociferous.” In today’s information era, such diagnoses flourish from popular punditry to Paul Virilio’s “Dromology,” Hartmut Rosa’s “Social Acceleration” and, of course, the philosophers of “Accelerationism.” An even older line of thought, a line we can trace back to Newton and Galileo, reminds us that in physics, and perhaps in the social world too, acceleration is always linked to forces of resistance, to inertia and redirection. Today such resistance ranges from a booming deceleration and disconnection industry to reactionary critiques of modernity, from institutional inertia and foot-dragging to the persistence of habits, emotions, mindsets, and values.
How can we understand this interplay of acceleration, technology, and inertia? What roles might media, art, and technology play in processes of acceleration and resistance? Can the study of literature or painting or multimedia sculpture, for instance, help us explore the forces driving acceleration? Give us new ways to understand the refusal to accelerate? What roles has aesthetics played in the economic, organizational, and technological changes under way around the world? And can we make new forms, new stories or images or objects, that let us imagine how we might do things differently?
We aim to bring together emerging scholars from a variety of fields to explore these and related questions. We welcome applications from across the humanities, the arts, and the social sciences. We hope to work collectively and to give participants a newly multidisciplinary toolkit with which to analyze acceleration and deceleration, in the past, the present, and the future.
Core Faculty
1. Timon Beyes (Sociology of Organization and Culture, Leuphana)
2. Shane Denson (Film & Media Studies/Modern Thought & Literature, Stanford)
3. Ute Holl (Media Studies, Basel)
4. Sybille Krämer (Philosophy, Leuphana)
5. Claus Pias (History and Epistemology of Media, Leuphana)
6. Aileen Robinson (Theater & Performance Studies/Modern Thought & Literature, Stanford)
7. Fred Turner (Communication, Stanford)
Special Guest
Wolfgang Ernst (Media Theory, Humboldt University Berlin)
Application
All applications from advanced doctoral candidates must be submitted electronically in PDF format. Please submit your CV (1-2 pages) along with a 500-word abstract of your topic and a short letter of intent explaining why you would like to attend this Summer Academy.
Please use the following naming convention for your application files: Lastname_CV.pdf,
Lastname_Abstract.pdf, Lastname_Letter_of_Intent.pdf.
Please email your applications by January 15, 2024 to stanleu@leuphana.de.
The working language of the Summer Academy will be English. The organizers will cover travel (economy) and accommodation costs for the time of the summer school. No additional fees will be charged.
General information
The Stanford-Leuphana Summer Academy addresses the intersection between individual humanities disciplines and studies of media and technology from a variety of historical, systematic, and methodological perspectives. As we live in a time when new technologies are emerging at an increasingly rapid pace, the Academy seeks to address vital questions about how different media can drive political and social change, but it also inquires into the assumptions and values that produce technological artifacts. Media studies and media theory intersect with various disciplines in the humanities and social sciences that treat the transmission of information, the formation of social networks, and the embodiment of knowledge in technological artifacts. Therefore, the Academy will bring together faculty and students from various branches of the humanities and social sciences to think about how »mediality« permeates these disciplines in distinct ways; we will approach these issues not only from a robustly interdisciplinary vantage but also by way of comparative cultural and historical perspectives. In this way, the Academy will contribute to our understanding of the fundamental ways that forms of media and technological mediation inform disciplinary knowledge across the humanities, as well as the ways that these disciplinary knowledge formations are an essential precondition to any serious thinking about mediality.
In this artist talk, Mark Amerika shares his creative process as a digital artist whose symbiotic relationship with both language and diffusion models informs his artistic and theoretical pursuits. Turning to his most recent book, My Life as an Artificial Creative Intelligence (Stanford University Press) and his just-released art project, Posthuman Cinema, Amerika will demonstrate, through personal narrative and theoretical asides, how different rhetorical uses of language can transform AI into a camera, a fiction writer, a poet and a philosopher.
Throughout the performance, Amerika will ask us to consider at what point a language artist becomes a language model and vice-versa. He will also question what new skills artists will have to develop as they co-evolve in a creative work environment where one must maintain a playful and dynamic relationship with the rapid technical maneuvering of the machinic Other. Will a more robust, intuitive yet interdependent relationship with AI models require artists to fine-tune what Amerika refers to as a cosmotechnical skill, one that is at once imaginative and indeterminate, playful and profound, grounded yet otherworldly in its aesthetic becoming? And how do we teach this skill at both the undergraduate and graduate level?
Borrowing from Beatnik poets and jazz musicians alike, Amerika suggests that a continuous call-and-response improvisational jam session with AI models may unlock personal insights that reveal how one’s own unconscious neural mechanism acts (performs) like a Meta Remix Engine. Engaging with other artists and writers who have tapped into their creative spontaneity as a primary research methodology, Amerika will discuss how digital artists can train themselves to intuitively select and defamiliarize datum for aesthetic effect. In so doing, Amerika suggests that this is how an artist connects with their own alien intelligence, a mediumistic sensibility that takes them out of their anthropocentric stronghold and invites them to reimagine what it means to be creative across the human-nonhuman spectrum.
—
Mark Amerika has exhibited his art in many venues including the Whitney Biennial, the Denver Art Museum, ZKM, the Walker Art Center, and the American Museum of the Moving Image. His solo exhibitions have appeared all over the world including at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the University of Hawaii Art Galleries, the Marlborough Gallery in Barcelona and the Norwegian Embassy in Havana.
Amerika has had five early and/or mid-career retrospectives including the first two Internet art retrospectives ever produced (Tokyo and London). In 2009-2010, The National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, Greece, featured Amerika’s comprehensive retrospective exhibition entitled UNREALTIME. The exhibition included his groundbreaking works of Internet art GRAMMATRON and FILMTEXT as well as his feature-length work of mobile cinema, Immobilité. In 2012, Amerika released his large-scale transmedia narrative, Museum of Glitch Aesthetics (MOGA), a multi-platform net artwork commissioned by Abandon Normal Devices in conjunction with the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. His public art project, Glitch TV, was featured at the opening of the “video towers” at Denver International Airport.
He is the author of thirteen books including My Life as an Artificial Creative Intelligence, the inaugural title in the “Sensing Media” series published in 2022 by Stanford University Press.
See here for more information.
The Department of Art & Art History presents a special screening of the documentary film Invisible Landscapes. This event is free & open to the public. A Q&A with Ivo Bystřičan (Director) and Tereza Swadoschova (Producer) will be held after the screening.
It sounds like a bird’s song, and you can’t take your ears off it. But it’s not – it’s just the popping bubbles of a melting glacier. A group of musicians equipped with sensitive microphones and headphones set out on an exploration. They head to places in the Czech and Icelandic countryside both marred by industry and untouched by man to discover and understand the sound of catastrophe – the sound of ongoing climate change, which in itself can be far more beautiful, and more imaginative, than what it heralds. While sight allows phenomena and things to be encompassed in a static state and in a certain entirety, hearing allows us to understand how they affect and clash with their surroundings. Sound is the consequence of an event that happened in the past and points towards a future now being decided, one that may potentially be inevitable and destructive for us. It cannot yet be seen in the invisible landscapes, but – if we listen carefully – it is already there.
Czech Republic, 2022, 48 minutes.
Ivo Bystřičan is Czech documentary director, dramaturg, screenwriter and producer. His work focuses on social and environmental topics with a sociological accent. His feature documentary debut Byeway (2014) focuses on the controversial role of the state in the construction of the highway as a public good. In his films, he dives into the tobacco industry, industrial agriculture, resource extraction, refugee crisis or the evolution of industrial capitalism. He focuses on uncovering the latent functions of institutions and the unintended consequences of an action. Invisible Landscapes is his latest film as a part of the multidisciplinary project Future Landscapes. He also works as a dramaturg of documentary films and audio podcasts, and lecturer of film workshops. He is the author of several documentary podcast series. He graduated from sociology at Masaryk University, Brno and documentary filmmaking at FAMU, Prague.
Tereza Swadoschová is a Czech producer and programmer. Her work engages with science, using art as a primary tool, and emphasizes social and environmental themes. “Future Landscapes,” her latest project, delves into the insights that sound can provide about our future. This is represented through documentaries, a podcast series, a music album, and artistic interpretations of rituals. Tereza is the head of the Inspiration Forum at the Jihlava IDFF. This platform annually hosts discussions on a range of topics from social, political, cultural to environmental issues. She co-founded the first platform in the Czech Republic dedicated to the ethics of documentary filmmaking. A graduate of Masaryk University, Tereza is currently collaborating with artist Kateřina Šedá on a project that focuses on the role of industry in marginalized areas.
VISITOR INFORMATION: Oshman Hall is located in the McMurtry Building on Stanford campus at 355 Roth Way. Visitor parking is free all day on weekends and after 4 pm on weekdays, except by the Oval. Alternatively, take the Caltrain to Palo Alto Transit Center and hop on the free Stanford Marguerite Shuttle. If you need a disability-related accommodation or wheelchair access information, please contact Julianne Garcia at juggarci@stanford.edu.
This event is made possible with the generous support of:
CREEES Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies
Department of Art & Art History
Department of English
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
Film and Media Studies
Yesterday, The Stanford Daily ran an article by student reporter Joshua Kim about the book launch of Post-Cinematic Bodies, which you can find here. Interestingly, it seems that the article was immediately picked up, processed with AI (I can only assume), and (re)published in machinically modified form, complete with a listicle-like FAQs section, by a certain “Simon Smith,” on a website illustrated exclusively with AI-generated images. Welcome, as Matthew Kirschenbaum writes, to the Textpocalypse!
