Post-Cinematic Bodies — pics from US book launch!
“What Do We (Really) Want from AI?” — Ge Wang at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, Nov. 14, 2023
For our second Digital Aesthetics workshop of the year, please join us in welcoming Ge Wang, who will present on “Artful Design and Artificial Intelligence: What do we (really) want from AI?” on November 14, 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 an abstract and bio, 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/yc5t7wde
Abstract:
We all design, shaping the world around us in the form of tools, policies, education, and communities. In recent months we’ve seen the growing emergence of “astoundingly competent” AI tools, leading many of us to wonder how AI might soon impact our work, our lives, our world. How do we (want to) live and work with artificial intelligence? How might we artfully design tools and systems that balance machine automation and human interaction? And perhaps the most basic question of all, what do we (really) want from AI?
In this presentation, we will engage with these questions through an artful design lens, considering factors such as aesthetics, ethics, and accountability. As a case study, we will draw from the teaching of “Music and AI”, a critical-making course at Stanford, and explore the power of human creativity in using AI not as an “oracle”, but as a tool for creative expression.
Bio:
Ge Wang is an Associate Professor at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). He researches the artful design of tools, toys, games, musical instruments, programming languages, expressive VR experiences, and interactive AI systems with humans in the loop. Ge is the architect of the ChucK audio programming language, the director of the Stanford Laptop Orchestra and the Stanford VR Design Lab. He is the Co-founder of Smule and the designer of the Ocarina and Magic Piano apps for mobile phones. He is a Senior Fellow and a Associate Directory of Stanford Human-Centered AI Institute. A 2016 Guggenheim Fellow,Ge is the author of /Artful Design: Technology in Search of the Sublime/, a photo comic book about how we shape technology — and how technology shapes us.
»Post-Cinematic Bodies« US Book Launch, November 6, 2023
On November 6, 2023 at 5:30 pm in the Margaret Jacks Hall Terrace Room (Building 460, Room 426), I will be presenting my new book Post-Cinematic Bodies (meson press, 2023), along with responses by Professor Scott Bukatman (Film & Media Studies, Stanford), and Dr. Annika Butler-Wall (Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Stanford MTL Ph.D. ’23).
Food and drinks will be provided. The first 40 attendees will receive a free copy of the book.
RSVPs are encouraged but not required. Please RSVP using the linked form by October 30th if you plan on attending.
About the book:
“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.”
Speaker and Respondents
Shane Denson is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of Art & Art History and, by Courtesy, of German Studies in the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages and of Communication in Stanford’s Department of Communication. He is currently the Director of the PhD Program in Modern Thought and Literature, as well as Director of Graduate Studies in Art History. His research and teaching interests span a variety of media and historical periods, including phenomenological and media-philosophical approaches to film, digital media, comics, games, and serialized popular forms.
Scott Bukatman is a cultural theorist and Professor of Film and Media Studies at Stanford University. His research explores how such popular media as film, comics, and animation mediate between new technologies and human perceptual and bodily experience. His books include Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction, one of the earliest book-length studies of cyberculture; a monograph on the film Blade Runner commissioned by the British Film Institute; and a collection of essays, Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century. The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animating Spirit, celebrates play, plasmatic possibility, and the life of images in cartoons, comics, and cinema.
Dr. Annika Butler-Wall is a Lecturer in the Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is an interdisciplinary scholar and teacher working at the intersections of gender studies, media studies, and science and technology studies (STS). Her current research project explores how digital platforms are restructuring forms of historically feminized labor by examining platforms such as TaskRabbit, Yelp, and LinkedIn Learning.
She holds a PhD in Modern Thought and Literature with a minor in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Stanford University and a BA in American Studies and Economics from Wesleyan University. Her research has been supported by the Clayman Institute for Gender Research and the Ric Weiland Graduate Research Fellowship among others.
This event is sponsored by The Program in Modern Thought & Literature and Intermediations.
“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).
Two Events on AI and Critical Making
I am happy to announce this year’s first two events of the Critical Making Collaborative at Stanford. Both events focus on critical and self-reflexive uses of AI at the intersection of theory and practice.
The first event, on Friday, October 13 (12-2pm in the McMurtry Building, room 360), includes a screening of Carlo Nasisse’s short film “Uncanny Earth.” In this film — which is equally about technology, ecology, human and nonhuman agency — an AI attempts to tell a story about the earth and its inhabitants. Following the screening, we will discuss the film and the many issues it raises for working and thinking critically with AI with the filmmaker.
Carlo Nasisse is a director and cinematographer. His work has been featured in the New Yorker, PBS, SXSW, Slamdance, and the New Orleans Film Festival. His most recent short film, “Direcciones”, won the Golden Gate Award for Best Documentary Short at the San Francisco Film Festival. He is currently completing his MFA at Stanford University.
RSVPs to shane.denson@stanford.edu are appreciated, though not required, so I have a rough headcount for refreshments.
The second event, on Friday, November 3 (4:30pm, location TBA), will feature Prof. Matt Smith and his wonderfully weird graphic novel remix of Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lies in an Nonmoral Sense” composed in awkward and agonistic collaboration with the AI graphics engine Midjourney — it may be humanity’s last artwork!
Matthew Wilson Smith is Professor of German Studies and of Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford. His interests include modern theatre and relations between science, technology, and the arts. His book The Nervous Stage: 19th-century Neuroscience and the Birth of Modern Theatre (Oxford, 2017) explores historical intersections between theatre and neurology and traces the construction of a “neural subject” over the course of the nineteenth century. It was a finalist for the George Freedley Memorial Award of the Theater Library Association. His previous book, The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace (Routledge, 2007), presents a history and theory of attempts to unify the arts; the book places such diverse figures as Wagner, Moholy-Nagy, Brecht, Riefenstahl, Disney, Warhol, and contemporary cyber-artists within a coherent genealogy of multimedia performance. He is the editor of Georg Büchner: The Major Works, which appeared as a Norton Critical Edition in 2011, and the co-editor of Modernism and Opera (Johns Hopkins, 2016), which was shortlisted for an MSA Book Prize. His essays on theater, opera, film, and virtual reality have appeared widely, and his work as a playwright has appeared at the Eugene O’Neill Musical Theater Conference, Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater, and other stages. He previously held professorships at Cornell University and Boston University as well as visiting positions at Columbia University and Johannes Gutenberg-Universität (Mainz).
Timon Beyes, Organizing Color: Toward a Chromatics of the Social (Sensing Media)
I am excited to announce that Timon Beyes’s Organizing Color: Toward a Chromatics of the Social will be the fifth volume in the Sensing Media book series! See below for a description, and see here for more info.
We live in a world that is saturated with color, but how should we make sense of color’s force and capacities? This book develops a theory of color as fundamental medium of the social.
Constructed as a montage of scenes from the past two hundred years, Organizing Color demonstrates how the interests of capital, management, governance, science, and the arts have wrestled with colour’s allure and flux. Beyes takes readers from Goethe’s chocolate experiments in search of chromatic transformation to nineteenth-century Scottish cotton mills designed to modulate workers’ moods and productivity, from the colonial production of Indigo in India to globalized categories of skin colorism and their disavowal. Tracing the consumption, control and excess of industrial and digital color, other chapters stage encounters with the literary chromatics of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow processing the machinery of the chemical industries, the red of political revolt in Godard’s films, and the blur of education and critique in Steyerl’s Adorno’s Grey.
Contributing to a more general reconsideration of aesthetic capitalism and the role of sensory media, this book seeks to pioneer a theory of social organization—a “chromatics of organizing”—that is attuned to the protean and world-making capacity of color.
Timon Beyes is Professor of Sociology of Organisation and Culture at Leuphana University Lüneburg.
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Endorsements:
“The immanent critique and ‘tender empiricism’ of this book, its eloquence and capacity to move from detailed grounding to exciting passages of speculative thought, ensures that Organizing Color escapes ‘the archaic stillness of the book.’ Impressively researched and written.”
—Seán Cubitt, University of Melbourne
“Inventive, brilliantly written, and very readable, Organizing Color recovers and explicates the relevance of color to social form—be that chromatic or racialized color.”
—Esther Leslie, Birkbeck, University of London
“Organizing is often imagined as a functional concept that belongs in business schools. In this beautifully written and illustrated book, Timon Beyes sprinkles aesthetics and politics over this black and white picture. The result is a breathtaking work that will change the way we understand how to ‘see’ organization.”
—Martin Parker, University of Bristol
Correlative Counter-Capture in Contemporary Art @ ASAP/14
On Saturday, September 30, at 9am Pacific Time, I’ll be giving the following talk at ASAP/14 (online):
Correlative Counter-Capture in Contemporary Art
Computational processing takes place at speeds and scales that are categorically outside human perception, but such invisible processing nevertheless exerts significant effects on the sensory and aesthetic—as well as political—qualities of artworks that employ digital and/or algorithmic media. To account for this apparent paradox, it is necessary to rethink aesthetics itself in the light of two evidently opposing tendencies of computation: on the one hand, the invisibility of processing means that computation is phenomenologically discorrelated (in that it breaks with what Husserl calls the “the fundamental correlation between noesis and noema”); on the other hand, however, when directed toward the production of sensory contents, computation relies centrally on statistical correlations that reproduce normative constructs (including those of gender, race, and dis/ability). As discorrelative, computation exceeds the perceptual bond between subject and object, intervening directly in the prepersonal flesh; as correlative, computation not only expresses “algorithmic biases” but is capable of implanting them directly in the flesh. Through this double movement, a correlative capture of the body and its metabolism is made possible: a statistical norming of subjectivity and collectivity prior to perception and representation. Political structures are thus seeded in the realm of affect and aesthesis, but because the intervention takes place in the discorrelated matter of prepersonal embodiment, a margin of indeterminacy remains from which aesthetic and political resistance might be mounted (with no guarantee of success). In this presentation, I turn to contemporary artworks combining the algorithmic (including AI, VR, or robotics) with the metabolic (including heartrate sensors, ECGs, and EEGs) in order to imagine a practice of dis/correlative counter-capture. Works by the likes of Rashaad Newsome, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Hito Steyerl, or Teoma Naccarato and John MacCallum point to an aesthetic practice of counter-capture that does not elude but re-engineers mechanisms of control for potentially, but only ever locally, liberatory purposes.
Post-Cinematic Bodies in Spanish and Chinese
My new book Post-Cinematic Bodies has not, as far as I know, been translated, but it is getting some discussion in languages other than English. An interview I gave recently for Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences has been circulating on other sites, including this Spanish translation. And now there’s also what appears to be an hour-long walkthrough of the book in Chinese by a Shanghai-based YouTuber.
Incidentally, a new volume is out in Chinese, titled Flash-Forward, which includes translations of a number of chapters from the 2016 open-access book that I co-edited with Julia Leyda: Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film.
Pelicans and Glitches on California’s North Coast
I’ve been traveling a lot outside of California this summer, but whenever I get the chance I like to spend time up north in Mendocino or Fort Bragg, where my wife Karin is part of the artist collective at Edgewater Gallery.
Earlier in the summer, we observed tons of California brown pelicans and common murres (which look like penguins) camped out on some small offshore islands. The assembly has attracted a lot of attention — from locals, tourists, artists, and scientists. The local newspaper, The Mendocino Voice, just put out a long piece on the birds and the possible reasons for their convergence there, and they quoted Karin and featured a glitch collage that she did a while back.
Karin has been photographing, filming, glitching, and painting pelicans and other California wildlife for several years now. Check out more of her work at karindenson.com.
The Film Comment Podcast: A Long Night of Dreaming about the Future of Intelligence, with Shane Denson
Audio of my talk on “The Future of Intelligence and/or the Future of Unintelligibility” (from the Locarno Film Festival’s Long Night of Dreaming about the Future of Intelligence, Aug. 9, 2023), followed by a conversation with Film Comment Co-Deputy Editor Devika Girish, is now online on the Film Comment Podcast.
I was dealing with jet lag, and it was a late evening event, so the talk gets off to a somewhat rocky start but fairly quickly settles into a groove. Devika Girish was a great interlocutor and asked very good questions.
Listen here, or see the Film Comment website for more info. Also available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, RadioPublic, iHeart Radio, and Amazon Music.