On June 10, 2024 (7pm at Li Ka Shing Center 120), I will be presenting an informal talk titled “How is Human Embodiment Transformed in an Age of Algorithms?” as part of a Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous (LASER) Talks event.
The four talks that evening are:
– Shane Denson (Stanford/ Film and Media) on “How is Human Embodiment Transformed in an Age of Algorithms?”
– Virginia San Fratello (San Jose State Univ/ Art) on “3D Printing the Future”
– Fiorenza Micheli (Stanford/ Center for Ocean Solutions) on “Harnessing the data revolution for ocean and human health”
– Tom Mullaney (Stanford/ History) on “The Audacity of Chinese Computing”
The Program in Modern Thought and Literature and Intermediations invite you to attend a lunch-time talk with Professor Regina Schober (American Studies, Heinrich-Heine-University Duesseldorf) on Female Algorithmic Selfhood, Literary Fiction, and the Digital Pharmakon.
This event will be taking place in the Terrace Room in Margaret Jacks Hall (Building 460, 4th Floor, room 426) on March 6th at 11am.
Lunch will be provided. If you are planning to intend, we invite you fill out an RSVP form for logistics and headcount. RSVPs are appreciated but not required. We ask that if you RSVP that you do so by March 1st.
If you have any questions or concerns about this event, please do not hesitate to reach out to Leah Chase at lachase@stanford.edu
Abstract:
While algorithms have increasingly come to shape the ways of writing the self, for example through data tracking and recording, personalized recommendation systems, and online identity curation, literary fiction has simultaneously negotiated such ways of being in and experiencing our algorithmically driven, digital environment. This talk will look at a selection of contemporary US American novels that critically inquire into modes of algorithmic self-writing, as they scrutinize the ways in which digital affect, automated scripts, and the dynamics of the attention economy play into the construction of selfhood. With a particular focus on female digital experiences, this talk reframes posthuman perspectives on human-/technology interactions in emphasizing affective and collective spaces of the “digital pharmakon” (Stiegler 2012). At the same time, these novels explore their own intermedial potential as counter-attentional forms in negotiating the ‘failed knowledges’ of scripting the digital female self.
About the speaker:
Regina Schober is Professor of American Studies at Heinrich-Heine-University Duesseldorf. Her research interests include literary negotiations of networks and algorithmic selfhood, theories of failure, and intermediality. She is author of ‘Spiderweb, Labyrinth, Tightrope Walk: Networks in US-American Literature and Culture’ (De Gruyter, 2023), of ‘Unexpected Chords: Musicopoetic Intermediality in Amy Lowell’s Poetry and Poetics’ (Winter, 2011), editor of ‘Data Fiction: Naturalism, Numbers, Narrative’ (special issue of Studies in American Naturalism, with James Dorson, 2017), ‘The Failed Individual: Amid Exclusion, Resistance, and the Pleasure of Non-Conformity’ (Campus, 2017, with Katharina Motyl) of ‘Laboring Bodies and the Quantified Self’ (Transcript, with Ulfried Reichardt, 2020), and of ‘Network Theory and American Studies’ (Special Issue of Amerikastudien/American Studies, 2015, with Ulfried Reichardt and Heike Schäfer. She is part of the DFG Research Network ‘The Failure of Knowledge/Knowledges of Failure’, the DFG Research Network ‘Model Aesthetics: Between Literary and Economic Knowledge’, and the interdisciplinary BMBF Project ‘AI4All’.
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.
Please join the Digital Aesthetics Workshop for our last event of the year with Mihaela Mihailova, who will present “Acting Algorithms: Animated Deepfake Performances in Contemporary Media” on Friday, May 26 from 1-3PM PT, where lunch will be served. The event will take place in McMurtry 007.
From the moving Mona Lisa deepfake created by the Moscow Samsung AI Center to the (re)animated life-size digital avatar of Salvador Dalí who greets visitors at the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, algorithmically generated performances are becoming integral to emerging media forms. As products of the collaboration between tech researchers, coders, animators, digital artists, and actors, as well as the labor of the (often deceased) makers of the original works, such amalgamated, multi-modal performances challenge existing definitions and conceptualizations of acting in/for the animated medium, along with notions of authorship and authenticity. Additionally, they expand the disciplinary reach and relevance of the subject, highlighting the necessity of thinking through contemporary digital animation’s relationship with data science and machine learning in order to better understand its ever-growing variety of non-filmic permutations.
At the same time, fan-made deepfakes, ranging from movie mashups to unauthorized pornographic edits, further complicate the aesthetic and legal landscape of animated algorithmic performance. Juxtaposing these amateur, free, often low-quality videos and images with the commissioned, well-funded works described above reveals fascinating tensions between the institutional implementations of deepfakes and their popular use on online platforms.
This talk explores the application, dissemination, and ontological status of deepfake performances across a variety of contexts, including digital artworks, viral videos, museum initiatives, and tech demos. It interrogates the practical, ideological, and ethical implications of their means of creation, including the digital “resurrection” of deceased individuals, the repurposing and rebranding of centuries-old artwork, and the superimposition of actors’ faces onto footage of other performers’ roles. It asks the following questions: who (or what) do these animated performances belong to? What new terms and approaches might be necessary in order to fully evaluate and account for their complicated relationship with existing theories of acting? How are they shaping – and being shaped by – contemporary animated media?
Bio:
Mihaela Mihailova is Assistant Professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University. She is the editor of Coraline: A Closer Look at Studio LAIKA’s Stop-Motion Witchcraft (Bloomsbury, 2021). She has published in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, [in]Transition, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, Feminist Media Studies, animation: an interdisciplinary journal, and Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema.
This event is generously co-sponsored by the Stanford McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Image credit goes to The Zizi Show, A Deepfake Drag Cabaret.
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.
I recently gave a talk with the unwieldy title “Post-Cinematic Seriality and the Algorithmic Conditions of Identity and Difference” for the Center for Inter-American Studies at the University of Graz and the Austro-American Society for Styria in Austria (see the *somewhat creepy, but appropriately so, lol* flyer below); and on October 12, 2021 (at 6:30pm Central European time / 9:30am Pacific US time) I’ll be giving a related talk with the much more wieldy (possibly misleadingly simple) title “Seriality and Digital Cultures” at the University of Zurich’s English Department (see the flyer with registration info above).
Both of these talks are related to a larger project that I am developing, which will link seriality as a medial form (in both popular and artistic media) and as a social form (following the late Sartre, Iris Marion Young, Benedict Anderson, and others) in order to think about the ways that — with the shift from a broadly “cinematic” media regime (with its past-oriented, memorial, recording, retentional functions) to a “post-cinematic” one (with its future-oriented, anticipatory, predictive, protentional functions) — algorithmic media are poised to transform categories and lived realities of class, gender, and race.
