Coming soon from meson press, in the Configurations of Film book series!
Post-Cinematic Bodies
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.
Please join us for our next event with M. Beatrice Fazi on Tuesday February 28 @ 5-7pm Pacific time. We’ll meet in the Stanford Humanities Center, as usual. Zoom Registration, if not able to attend IRL: https://tinyurl.com/39tsjc62
The topic of Beatrice’s talk is “On Digital Theory.”
Abstract:
What is digital theory? In this talk, M. Beatrice Fazi will advance and discuss two parallel propositions that aim to answer that question: first, that digital theory is a theory that investigates the digital as such and, second, that it is a theory that is digital insofar as it discretizes via abstraction. Fazi will argue that digital theory should offer a systematic and systematizing study of the digital in and of itself. In other words, it should investigate what the digital is, and that investigation should identify the distinctive ontological determinations and specificities of the digital. This is not the only scope of a theoretical approach to the digital, but it constitutes a central moment for digital theory, a moment that defines digital theory through the search for the definition of the digital itself. Fazi will also consider how, if we wish to understand what digital theory is, we must address the characteristics of theoretical analysis, which can be done only by reflecting on what thinking is in the first place. Definitions of the digital, definitions of thought, and definitions of theory all meet at a key conceptual juncture. To explain this, Fazi will discuss how to theorize is to engage in abstracting and that both are processes of discretization. The talk will conclude by considering whether the digital could be understood as a mode of thought as well as a mode of representing thought.
Bio:
M. Beatrice Fazi is Reader in Digital Humanities in the School of Media, Arts and Humanities at the University of Sussex, United Kingdom. Her primary areas of expertise are the philosophy of computation, the philosophy of technology and the emerging field of media philosophy. Her research focuses on the ontologies and epistemologies produced by contemporary technoscience, particularly in relation to issues in artificial intelligence and computation and to their impact on culture and society. She has published extensively on the limits and potentialities of the computational method, on digital aesthetics and on the automation of thought. Her monograph Contingent Computation: Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aestheticswas published by Rowman & Littlefield International in 2018.
The new issue of Senses of Cinema is out now with a special dossier on “The Geometry of Movement: Computer-Generated Imagery in Film,” edited by Luise Morke and Jack Seibert. The dossier is full of exciting articles, and it also includes my piece on “DeepFakes and the (Un)Gendering of the Flesh” — which previews some of what’s in store in my forthcoming book Post-Cinematic Bodies.
I am excited to be participating in the 2023 Wolf Conference on “Temporal Mediations in Digital Capitalism” on February 11 at the University of Pennsylvania. I am grateful to Chenshu Zhou for the invitation.
My talk is titled “On the Temporal Technics of Metabolic Capitalism”:
In this presentation, I hope to uncover the temporal dynamics of an emerging system of metabolic capitalism. This system takes aim at embodied and environmental exchanges, including organic processes such as heart rate, brainwave activity, and eye movement, targeting the body as both a resource to be mined and an object to be shaped. Wearables such as the Apple Watch, smart exercise machines like the Peloton or Mirror workout systems, and consumer-grade EEG devices marketed to help improve attention or to assist with mindfulness or meditation—all of these institute a system of “training” that aims to discipline the user’s bodymind and make it more productive. Unlike earlier disciplinary regimes, however, this newer one situates screens and other interfaces as the site of interactive real-time feedback between metabolic processes and subjective and social efforts to transform them. Accordingly, these apparatuses operationalize a temporality that undercuts the threshold of subjective perception, intervening directly in the prepersonal time of embodiment itself, thus enlisting users in an experiment with metabolic and phenomenological time that has far-reaching consequences for our embodied and social existences. (It goes without saying that corporations will extract value from the experiment regardless of its success or failure, however such outcomes might be defined.)
From a media-theoretical perspective, the new interventions mark a significant update from the past-oriented or memorial functions of recording technologies like the cinema as well as the “ontology of liveness” or presence attaching to television; in their place, post-cinematic technologies such as those discussed here are future-oriented or protentional, and they therefore participate in a potential pre-formatting of subjectivity and embodiment. In political economic terms, these technologies therefore also mark an important update in the organization of social materiality itself; that is, they shift from what Sartre in his late, Marxist work identified as the “practico-inert” (in light of the way that commodities and other forms of “worked matter” store past human praxis while condensing it into inert objective form), to a futural technics of what I call the “practico-alert”—where proactively surveillant technologies intervene more directly in subjectivation processes and put us, like the new machines, in a constant state of alert. Finally, whereas Sartre’s practico-inert organized social structures around itself (Sartre’s class-oriented formation of the “seriality,” for example, which Iris Marion Young takes as the basis for thinking gender as a socially enforced typification process), these new futural technologies must be interrogated also in terms of their social agencies as important vectors of typification (racialization, gendering, and dis/abling, among others) and futural or preemptive interpellation.
Further info about the conference, including the complete line-up of speakers and abstracts can be found here.
This year’s Berkeley-Stanford Symposium will again take place at SFMOMA on April 28, 2023. This is always an exciting event, open to graduate student presenters working in art history, visual culture, film and media studies, and interdisciplinary spaces. This year’s theme is “In-Between: Art and Cultural Practices from Here.”
Please see the CFP above. Those interested should submit an abstract no longer than 300 words and a brief bio by February 28th to berkeleystanford2023@gmail.com.
I am happy to announce the call for papers for the 4th annual Stanford-Leuphana Academy for Media Studies, which will again take place in Berlin (June 25-30, 2023)!
The topic this year is “Media and Cultural Change”
Our core faculty this year are:
Timon Beyes (Sociology of Organisation and Culture, Leuphana)
Shane Denson (Film and Media Studies, Stanford)
Marisa Galvez (French, Italian, and German Studies, Stanford)
Karla Oeler (Film and Media Studies, Stanford)
Claus Pias (History and Epistemology of Media, Leuphana)
Fred Turner (Communication, Stanford)
Sybille Krämer (Philosophy, Leuphana)
Ruth Mayer (American Studies, Hannover)
Bernhard Siegert (History and Epistemology of Cultural Techniques, Weimar)
Special Guests:
Simon Denny (University of Fine Arts Hamburg)
Wolfgang Ernst (Media Studies, Humboldt University Berlin) — to be confirmed
As in previous years, travel and accommodation costs will be covered for graduate students accepted to the Academy, and there will be no additional fees for participation. So please consider applying and spread the word to qualified graduate students!
Recently, I announced an upcoming event featuring the Game Changer Lab Chicago, founded by Melissa Gilliam and Patrick Jagoda, as part of the new Critical Making Collaborative at Stanford. I am pleased now to announce another event featuring Patrick Jagoda, the following day, as part of my other new initiative this year at Stanford: the Intermediations series, which is dedicated to exploring the intersections of intermediality and interdisciplinarity.
On January 27, at 12pm in the Terrace Room of Margaret Jacks Hall, Professor Jagoda of the University of Chicago will be presenting on “Metagames and Media Aesthetics.” Please see below for an abstract and bio, and hope to see some of you there!
“Metagames and Media Aesthetics”
Broadly circulating humanistic terms such as “metafiction” (William H. Gass), “metapictures” (WJT Mitchell), and “metacomics” (M. Thomas Inge) point to heightened self-reflexivity within a medium or form. Particularly since the 2010s, we have seen an increased volume of “metagames” or games about games that include prominent independent game examples such as The Stanley Parable (2013),Doki Doki Literature Club! (2017), and There is No Game (2020). This presentation explores different theories and categories of metagames en route to the question of why metagames are so important to understanding our contemporary media ecology in 2023. Video games in general, and metagames in particular, call for an expanded sense of media aesthetics that exceed Roland Barthes’s earlier triumvirate of image, music, and text. This talk theorizes the videogame sensorium and its broader implications for media studies.
Bio:
Patrick Jagoda is the William Rainey Harper Professor of Cinema & Media Studies, English, and Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Chicago. He is Executive Editor of Critical Inquiry and director of the Weston Game Lab, as well as co-founder of the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab and Transmedia Story Lab. Patrick’s books include Network Aesthetics (2016), The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer (2016 with Michael Maizels), Experimental Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification (2020), and Transmedia Stories: Narrative Methods for Public Health and Social Justice (2022 with Ireashia Bennett and Ashlyn Sparrow). He has also co-edited five special issues or edited volumes, and published over fifty essays and interviews. Patrick designs transmedia, digital and analog games, including the climate change alternate reality game Terrarium (2019), which received the 2020 IndieCade award for the best Location Based and Live Play Design. He is a recipient of a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship.
I am happy to announce the inaugural event of the Critical Making Collaborative at Stanford — a new initiative that my colleagues Jean Ma (Film & Media Studies), Matthew Wilson Smith (Theater and Performance Studies/German), and myself established to probe the intersections of theory and practice:
Please join the Critical Making Collaborative at Stanford University in the Clark Center Auditorium at Bio-X (318 Campus Drive) on Thursday, January 26th, from noon to 1:30 pm for a presentation by collaborators Melissa L. Gilliam and Patrick Jagoda. The Clark Center Auditorium is located below the Clark Center Courtyard, accessible by the courtyard staircase or by the elevators in the east wing lobby.
In this talk, Dr. Gilliam and Dr. Jagoda will present the Center for Interdisciplinary Inquiry and Innovation in Sexual and Reproductive Health (Ci3), with a particular emphasis on the Game Changer Chicago (GCC) Design Lab, which they co-founded at the University of Chicago. This interdisciplinary collaboration brings together high school youth from the South Side of Chicago, graduate and undergraduate students, and full-time game design staff. Together, they create digital stories and games about health and social justice issues to improve young people’s health and well-being.
Projects include a suite of board games that tackle health issues in Chicago (Hexacago), a game-based narrative about sexual violence (Bystander), a mobile game about HIV testing among men who have sex with men (The Test), a roleplaying video game to encourage youth underrepresented in STEM to explore this area (Caduceus Quest), a multimedia intervention based in India (Kissa Kahani), and a birth control counseling tool (Tangible Tool). These research projects raise questions about intersections among the humanities, arts, and sciences, digital media and learning, emerging cultural and narrative genres, and the social and emotional health of youth.
This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford, as well as the Digital Aesthetics Workshop and the Medical Humanities Workshop, both of which are sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center.
Please join us on Tuesday, January 17th @ 5-7pm, in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room, for a very special event with Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan. Bernard’s new book, Code: From Information Theory to French Theory, releases just 3 days later on January 20th (https://www.dukeupress.edu/code) ! At Digital Aesthetics he will be discussing the book as well as his future project, Screenscapes: How Formats Render Territories.
Bio: Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan is a Reader in the History and Theory of Digital Media (loosely equivalent to associate or w2 professorship). An overarching theme of his research is how “cultural” sciences shape—and are shaped by—digital media. This concern spans his writing on the mutual constitution of cybernetics and the human sciences, ethnicity and AI, and the role of mid-twentieth century military vigilance in the development of interactive, multimedia computing. His attention to cultural factors in technical systems also figured in his work as a curator, notably for the Anthropocene and Technosphere projects at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt.
Bernard’s book Code: From Information Theory to French Theory examines how liberal technocratic projects, with roots in colonialism, mental health, and industrial capitalism, shaped early conceptions of digital media and cybernetics. It offers a revisionist history of “French Theory” as an effort to come to terms with technical ideas of communications and as a predecessor to the digital humanities. N. Katherine Hayles wrote of this book that it “upends standard intellectual histories” and Lev Manovich that “after reading this original and fascinating book, you will never look at key thinkers of the twentieth century in the same way.” Early drafts of the book’s argument appeared in journals including Grey Room and Critical Inquiry.
Bernard’s current book project, Screenscapes: How Formats Render Territories, draws on infrastructure studies and format studies to offer a radical account of how digital screens produce global space. It considers the digital interface in terms of articulation, i.e., in its technoscientific formatting of territories, temporalities, and practices as “ecologies of operations.” Excerpts appear in Representations (An Ecology of Operations) and MLN (The Bitmap is the Territory).
Today is publication day for Vilém Flusser’s Commmunicology: Mutations in Human Relations! This is the second volume in the Sensing Media series (which I co-edit with Wendy Hui Kyong Chun for Stanford University Press), and it includes a foreword by N. Katherine Hayles. Find more info here.
