Tag: Stanford

Super Star Trek — Scholars Select Exhibit at Stanford’s Green Library

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For the Scholars Select Exhibit at Stanford’s Green Library — in commemoration of the library’s 100th anniversary — I was asked to choose an object from Special Collections and write something about its significance for my work. I chose a letter to Bob Leedom contained in the September 1974 issue of the People’s Computer Company newsletter, published around the corner in Menlo Park:

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The letter discusses Super Star Trek, a game I have written about in “Digital Seriality: On the Serial Aesthetics and Practice of Digital Games” (co-authored with Andreas Sudmann). Here, in much more condensed form, is what I wrote about it for the exhibition:

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And here’s the letter itself:

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You can find the full issue of the People’s Computer Company online, through the Stanford Libraries website: here.

Check out the full exhibition, which will be on display January 24 – April 19, 2019. More info here.

Skin in the Game: Greymarket Gambling in the Virtual Economies of Counter-Strike — Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux at Digital Aesthetics Workshop

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Next Monday (January 14, 2018), we will be joined at the Digital Aesthetics Workshop by Stephanie Boluk & Patrick LeMieux. They are coming to us from UC-Davis, where Stephanie is Associate Professor of English and of Cinema and Digital Media, and where Patrick is Assistant Professor of Cinema and Digital Media. Boluk & LeMieux are scholars, critics, and artists who work largely around videogames and digital art. Their book Metagaming (Minnesota, 2017) wrenches open the ‘texts’ of videogames to consider them as tools, materials, platforms, and stages for all sorts of new social practices – it is easily one of the best works in game studies yet published. They have also co-created several critical games of their own that you can easily run on your laptop.

On Monday, they will be sharing in-progress material from their next book project, Money Games. Join us on Monday, January 14, 2018 (5-7pm in the Roble Arts Gym Lounge), and RSVP if you can! There will not be pre-circulated reading, though their games are recommended.

Here is the blurb for the event:

In 1987, a pyramid scheme called the “Plane Game” funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars from the pockets of “passengers,” landing at least six of the game’s “pilots” in jail. In 2018, more ubiquitous moneygames are played with smaller stakes across far wider fields. From the Valve Corporation’s Flatland to grey market gambling with Counter-Strike gun skins, this talk will move from from the Steam Workshop to the Steam Marketplace to series of third-party websites that explore the way in which money operates as a game mechanics and how game mechanics have come to operate as money. Although strict distinctions are made between gambling and gaming in both US law as well as 20th century philosophies of games and play, these terms’ etymological roots are tightly wound. In a post-2008 age of precarity, the wage has once again become a wager. In 2012, Alex Galloway proclaimed “we are all goldfarmers,” but gun skins and skin gambling represent an even more complex and complete financialization in that players have moved from one mode in which labour time is exchanged for a clear wage (even if it’s grinding in World of Warcraft) to one in which labour time itself becomes a wager. Ultimately skins are not simply texture files that wrap around the polygonal geometry of virtual weapons. Instead, they are objects of affinity and status, digital cash and casino chips, and a gun skins’ procedurally generated pattern, determined by a 9-digit floating point number selected upon unboxing, is more cryptocurrency than art asset. In this talk we follow the money, the skin, the flow, and the flight of new “plane games” as metagames become moneygames.

Embodied Interactions & Material Screens: Camille Utterback at Digital Aesthetics Workshop

Utterback Poster

After a refreshing fall break, the Digital Aesthetics workshop will return with sessions on November 27th and December 4th . First up, we are thrilled to host Camille Utterback, Assistant Professor of Art Practice and Computer Science here at Stanford. We have always wanted to host an artist in the workshop, and could not be happier to build a conversation around Camille’s fascinating work and current questions. We look forward to seeing you there – please consider RSVPing so we can supply refreshments appropriately.

Embodied Interactions & Material Screens

w/ Camille Utterback

Tues, Nov 27, Roble Lounge, 5-7

rsvp to deacho at stanford.edu

After an overview of her interactive installation work, Camille will present on current works-in-progress which examine combinations of custom kiln-formed glass and digital animations. Her goal with her new work is to explore the possibilities of dimensional display surfaces that address the subtleties of our depth perception. What can be gained from more hybrid analog/digital and less “transparent” digital surfaces? What is at stake when our display surfaces maintain the illusion of a frictionless control vs an more complex and interdependent materiality? Camille is interested in developing a dialog around this new work, and welcomes a variety of critical input as she attempts to with situate her artworks in a theoretical framework. She has recently been reading Sensorium (ed. Caroline A. Jones), and  Meredith Hoy’s From Point to Pixel.

Camille Utterback is a pioneer in the field of digital and interactive art. Her work ranges from interactive gallery installations, to intimate reactive sculptures, to architectural scale site-specific works. Utterback’s extensive exhibit history includes more than fifty shows on four continents. Her awards include a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2009), Transmediale International Media Art Festival Award (2005), Rockefeller Foundation New Media Fellowship (2002), Whitney Museum commission for their ArtPort website (2002), and a US Patent (2001). Recent commission include works for The Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, Santa Cruz, California (2016), The Liberty Mutual Group, Boston, Massachusetts (2013), The FOR-SITE Foundation, San Francisco, California (2012), and the City of Sacramento, California (2011). Camille’s “Text Rain” piece, created with Romy Achituv in 1999, was the first digital interactive installation acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Camille holds a BA in Art from Williams College a Masters degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Art & Art History Department, and by courtesy in Computer Science, at Stanford University. Her work is represented by Haines Gallery in San Francisco.

Extended till Nov. 2: Videographic Frankenstein

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The Videographic Frankenstein exhibition has been extended an additional week, until November 2, 2018! If you’re in the Bay Area and haven’t been able to check it out, you’ve still got (a little) time!

See here for more details, and stay tuned for a few related events/developments!

It’s Alive! Videographic Frankenstein

 

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Videographic Frankenstein–the exhibition that I am curating at Stanford–opens today. The show runs from Sept. 26 through Oct. 26, 2018 in the Dr. Sidney and Iris Miller Discussion Space, McMurtry Building.

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Works featured:

Frankenstein (2018), 2018
Matthew Fishel
Silent Animation Loop

Spark of Being, 2010
Bill Morrison
Found Footage Film, 1:07:11

Frankenstein’s Television, 2018
Jason Mittell
Video, 10:02

Mad Science/Love and the Body in Pieces, 2018
Allison de Fren
Video, 17:18

The Meaning of “Animation” in Edison’s FRANKENSTEIN, 2017
Shane Denson
Video, 12:57

Red, Not Blood: Godard, Frankenstein, and Eastman Red, 2018
Carlos Valladares
Video, 6:46

Persona versus Frankenstein, 2015
David Verdeure, a.k.a. Filmscalpel
Video, 4:15

On Galvanism: Electricity, Frankenstein, and the Moving Image, 2018
Spencer Slovic
Video, 7:30

Sight and Sound Conspire: Monstrous Audio-Vision in James Whale’s FRANKENSTEIN (1931), 2015
Shane Denson
Video, 8:47

Questioning the Human Machine in EX MACHINA, 2016
Allison de Fren
Video, 10:26

Horror and Humor: Frankenstein’s Comic Offspring, 2018
Lester D. Friedman and Kristine Vann
Video, 17:38

The exhibition was made possible by a Frankenstein@200 Initiative grant from the Medicine and the Muse Program at Stanford.

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More information about the exhibition can be found here.

Stanford – Leuphana Summer Academy 2019

Stanford-Leuphana

Introducing the inaugural Stanford – Leuphana Summer Academy:

Stanford–Leuphana Summer Academy 2019

»Against presentism. Historicizing mediality«

Thinking about technological changes or revolutions is often marked by a presentist, ahistorical mode of thinking and debate.  Consider the contemporary discussion about »digital culture« and its technologies.  The tropes mobilized are usually technicist and innovation- or even disruption-oriented, in both their affirmative and critical guises.  Little attention is given to historical precursors of technologically driven social change.  Even less attention is given to concepts and theories from other historical periods that might help investigate and understand our current predicament.

The Stanford-Leuphana Summer Academy seeks to change perspectives by focusing on concepts and theories that break with the myopia of presentism.  In seeking to formulate a new research area in terms of other periods (e.g. premodern or early modern) and fields (e.g. anthropology, religious studies, art history, etc.), this 5-day seminar seeks to historicize mediality in productive and innovative ways.  If »digital cultures« are not only modernity’s final product, but also brought an end to modernity, then it might be inspiring to think about digital cultures beyond or apart from modern concepts.  What terms are historically specific for an age or culture, and what concepts apply broadly to various phenomena from the premodern to the present age?  In what ways do preliterate, oral, or ritualistic cultures intersect with digital modes of information?  How can these other perspectives change our thinking about the present?

Key terms:»ritual«, »authorship«, »sovereignty«, »arcane«, »orality«, »participation«, »public sphere«, »social construction of time«, »art«, »literature«, »history«, »philosophy«, »history of science«, »historiography«

 

Date: June 24 – 28, 2019

Location: Stanford Berlin, »Haus Cramer«, Pacelliallee 18, 14195 Berlin

 

Faculty

  1. Timon Beyes (Sociology of Organisation and Culture, Leuphana)
  2. Shane Denson (Film and Media Studies, Stanford)
  3. Elena Esposito (Sociology, Modena/Reggio Emilia)
  4. Marisa Galvez (French, Italian, and German Studies, Stanford)
  5. Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht (Comparative Literature and German Studies, Stanford)
  6. Thomas Macho (Cultural History, IFK Vienna)
  7. Karla Oeler (Film and Media Studies, Stanford)
  8. Claus Pias (History and Epistemology of Media, Leuphana)
  9. Fred Turner (Communication, Stanford)
  10. Sigrid Weigel (Literature and Cultural Science, Berlin)

 

Application

All applications 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 to Nelly Y. Pinkrah (nelly.pinkrah@leuphana.de).

This summer school is designed for graduate students. The deadline for applications for the summer school is December 15, 2018.  All applicants will be informed about the selection of participants by end of January 2019.  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.

Contact

Claus Pias (pias@leuphana.de)

Please spread the word to graduate students who might benefit from an interdisciplinary effort to rethink mediality and its relation to history.

FrankensteinsDeepDream

Creation scene and aftermath, as described in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (Chapter 5, 1831 edition) and interpreted by Cris Valenzuela’s text-to-image machine-learning demo (http://t2i.cvalenzuelab.com) utilizing AttnGAN (Attentional Generative Adversarial Networks).

Made for the upcoming Videographic Frankenstein exhibition at the Department of Art & Art History, Stanford University (Sept. 26 – Oct. 26, 2018). More info here: https://art.stanford.edu/exhibitions/videographic-frankenstein