Tag: Digital Aesthetics Workshop

“Forms in Motion: Elemental Effects in Contemporary Cinema” — Kartik Nair at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, Nov. 12, 2024

We’re pleased to announce our first event for the 24-25 Academic Year. Please join us in welcoming Kartik Nair, who will present on “Forms in Motion: Elemental Effects in Contemporary Cinema” on Tuesday, November 12, 5:00-7:00pm PT. The event will take place in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room, 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/4b8e75v4

Abstract:

Motion capture is the practice of recording the movements of human bodies and using those movements to animate computer-generated bodies, thereby producing virtual character movement on the screen. Current scholarship on motion capture has critically examined the construction of this technology in trade reportage, industry journalism, and film promotion, detecting a discursive ambivalence arising from a struggle for recognition between live actors and motion capture technicians over the future of film performance. This talk will use motion capture as a heuristic to understand the many other kinds of human movements that are being captured in the processes of digital image-making. I will track the pipeline of atmospheric effects. Such atmospheric effects are ubiquitous in contemporary blockbuster cinema. Dust, fire, smoke, light, water and other particulate proliferate in the mise en scene, helping to ground impossible worlds even as they fascinate us with their own expressive qualities. Replacing the logic of photographic capture with one in which the frame is a ‘blank canvas’ to which elements are selectively added, such atmospheric effects vividly attest to the claim that digital tools have re-linked filmmaking with painting. Yet, unlike the painted canvas, which preserves brushstrokes in frozen perpetuity, virtual effects inscribe a trace of and in motion: these are instances in which the creative and corporeal motion of visual effects artists is captured and conveyed as motion. This process unfolds along a transnational path along which the mobile trace moves. Even as those generating it may remain immobilized by visa regulations, server locations, and time-zone differentials, their physical moves are eventually ex-propriated and assimilated into screen movement. Closely read, then, the spectacular conventions of blockbuster cinema can become legible as archives in and of motion.

Bio:

Kartik Nair is a film scholar working at the intersection of transnational cinema, film historiography, materialist media theory, and infrastructure studies, with a focus on popular genres and South Asian cinema. His first book, Seeing Things, is about the production and circulation of low-budget horror films in 1980s India. His current research explores the physical pipelines of digital cinema. He is an Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Temple University in Philadelphia, and one of the core editors of BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies.

This event has been generously co-sponsored by the Department of Art & Art History and the Stanford Center for South Asia.

Six years of Digital Aesthetics Workshop

This past week marked the conclusion of our sixth year of the Digital Aesthetics Workshop at the Stanford Humanities Center, which we celebrated with a graduate symposium — the appropriately titled Digital Aesthetics Workshop-Workshop!

With nine events a year, six years is a lot of events! Here’s what we’ve done so far:

2017-2018 Events: 

    • Mark B. N. Hansen, “The Ontology of Media Operations, or, Where is the Technics in Cultural Techniques,” 10 October 2017
    • Claus Pias, “Computer Game Worlds,” 24 October 2017
    • Allison de Fren, “Post-Cinema and Videographic Criticism,” 14 November 2017
    • Bonnie Ruberg, “Video Games Have Always Been Queer,” 23 January 2018
    • Jacob Gaboury, “Techniques for Secondary Mediation: On the Screenshot as Image-Object,” 6 February 2018
    • Shane Denson, “Discorrelated Images,” 3 April 2018
    • Elizabeth Kessler, “Psychedelic Space and Anachronic Time: Photography and the Voyager’s Tour of the Solar System,” 10 April 2018
    • Jonathan Sterne, “Machine Learning, ‘AI,’ and the Politics of Media Aesthetics: Why Online Music Mastering (Sort of) Works,” 24 April 2018
    • Matthew Wilson Smith, “The Nostalgia of Virtual Reality,” 15 May 2018

2018-2019 Events: 

    • Carolyn L. Kane, “Chroma Glitch: Data as Style,” 9 October 2018
    • Camille Utterback, “Embodied Interactions & Material Screens,” 27 November 2018
    • Miryam Sas, “Plastic Dialectics: Community and Collectivity in Japanese Contemporary Art,” 4 December 2018
    • Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux, “Skin in the Game: Greymarket Gambling in the Virtual Economies of Counter-Strike,” 14 January 2019
    • N. Katherine Hayles, “Can Computers Create Meaning? A Cyber-Bio-Semiotic Perspective,” 12 February 2019
    • Kevin B. Lee, “Dreams and Terrors of Desktop Documentary,” 27 February 2019
    • Marion Fourcade, “A Maussian Bargain: The Give and Take of the Personal Data Economy,” 23 April 2019
    • Digital Aesthetics Symposium, featuring Stanford graduate students and faculty, 14-15 May 2019
    • Miyako Innoue, “Writing at the Speed of Thinking: The Japanese Kana Typewriter and the Rehabilitation of the Male Hand,” 28 May 2019

2019-2020 Events:

    • Jenny Odell, “Killing Time,” 23 October 2019
    • Scott Bukatman, “We Are Ant-Man,” 5 November 2019
    • Ben Peters, “Declining Russian Media Theory,” 21 November 2019
    • Rachel Plotnick, “Unclean Interface: Computation as a Cleanliness Problem,” 11 February 2020
    • Jean Ma, “At the Edges of Sleep,” 9 March 2020 [cancelled due to COVID-19]
    • Melissa Gregg, Title TBA, 7 April 2020 [cancelled due to COVID-19]
    • Sarah T. Roberts, “Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media,” 21 April 2020
    • Kris Cohen, “Bit Field Black,” 19 May 2020
    • Xiaochang Li, “How Language Became Data: Speech Recognition between Likeness and Likelihood,” 26 May 2020

2020-2021 Events:

    • Vivian Sobchack, in conversation with Scott Bukatman and Shane Denson, 29 September 2020 (additional follow-up event for Stanford graduate students, 14 October 2020)
    • “New Regimes of Imaging.” Roundtable discussion with Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal, Deborah Levitt, Bernard Geoghegan, and Shane Denson, 23 October 2020
    • libi rose striegl and the Media Archaeology Lab at the University of Colorado at Boulder, 10 November 2020
    • Shaka McGlotten, “Racial Chain of Being,” 8 December 2020
    • James J. Hodge and Shane Denson, “Dialogue in Digital Aesthetics: Sensations of History and Discorrelated Images,” 2 April 2021
    • Melissa Gregg, “The Great Watercooler in the Cloud: Distributed Work, Collegial Presence, and Mindful Labor Post-COVID,” 6 April 2021
    • Adrian Daub, “What Tech Calls Thinking,” 11 May 2021
    • Legacy Russell, “Cyberpublics, Monuments, and Participation,” 20 May 2021
    • Fred Turner and Mary Beth Meehan, “Seeing Silicon Valley – Life Inside a Fraying America,” 2 June 2021

2022-2023 Events:

    • Erich Hörl, “The Disruptive Condition,” 5 October 2022
    • Mark Algee-Hewitt, “Patterns of Text/Patterns of Analysis,” 15 November 2022
    • Jean Ma and Tung-Hui Hu, “In Conversation” (joint book event), 2 December 2022
    • Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, “The Violent Forensics of Digital Imagery: Abu Ghraib, Ukraine, and Cat Videos,” 17 January 2023
    • Melissa Gilliam and Patrick Jagoda, “Game Changer Lab” (co-sponsored with the Critical Making Collaborative), 26 January 2023
    • M. Beatrice Fazi, “On Digital Theory,” 28 February 2023
    • Alexander Galloway, “‘No Deconstruction without Computers’: Learning to Code with Derrida and Kittler,” 7 March 2023
    • Neta Alexander, “The Right to Speed-Watch (or, When Netflix Discovered its Blind Viewers),” 18 April 2023
    • Damon Young, “Selfie/Portrait,” 9 May 2023
    • Mihaela Mihailova, “Acting Algorithms: Animated Deepfake Performances in Contemporary Media,” 26 May 2023

2023-2024 Events:

    • Luciana Parisi, “The Negative Aesthetic of AI,” 20 October 2023
    • Ge Wang, “Artful Design and Artificial Intelligence: What Do We (Really) Want from AI?,” 14 November 2023
    • Thomas Lamarre, “Harvesting Light,” 5 December 2023
    • Bryan Norton, “Marx After Simondon: Metabolic Rift and the Analog of Computation,” 30 January 2024
    • Yvette Granata, “Mimetic Virtualities: Rendering the Masses and/or Feminist Media Art?,” 6 February 2024
    • Akira Mizuta Lippit, “Shadowline,” 12 March 2024
    • Nicholas Baer, “The Ends of Perfection: On a Limit Concept in Global Film and Media Theory,” 5 April 2024
    • James Hodge, “Six Theses on an Aesthetics of Always-On Computing,” 30 April 2024
    • Digital Aesthetics Workshop-Workshop, graduate student symposium, with responses from Angèle Christin and Shane Denson, 24 May 2024

Thanks to all of the graduate student coordinators over the years, including Jeff Nagy, Doug Eacho, Natalie Deam, Annika Butler-Wall, and this year’s coordinators Grace Han and Hank Gerba. (And congratulations to Hank on successfully defending their dissertation last week!)

“Six Theses on an Aesthetics of Always-On Computing” — James J. Hodge at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, April 30, 2024

We’re pleased to announce the second event of the Digital Aesthetics Workshop for spring quarter. Please join us in welcoming James J. Hodge, who will present on “Six Theses on an Aesthetics of Always-On Computing” on Tuesday, April 30, 5:00-7:00pm PT. The event will take place in the Stanford Humanities Center Board 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/27afjatd

Abstract:

This talk comes from my book project, “Ordinary Media: An Aesthetics of Always-On Computing.” The premise of the project is that the smartphone has become for many the signature technology and engine of experience in the twenty-first century. One of the project’s larger claims is that ambient givenness of smartphones in contemporary life has significantly reorganized the human sensorium and, moreover, has elevated the significance of experience at the level of the skin’s surface, or what the psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden terms “boundedness.” This talk attends to the ways in which this dramatic shift in the general orientation of experience entails a sea change in the general nature of aesthetics native and responsive to the always-on world. Discussing a variety of examples from film, literature, video, games, digital art, and vernacular aesthetic forms and genres, this talk explores six “theses” of aesthetics in this still-novel yet ordinary arena.

Bio:

James J. Hodge is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Northwestern University. His essays on digital aesthetics have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Postmodern Culture, TriQuarterly, Film Criticism, and elsewhere. He is the author of Sensations of History: Animation and New Media Art (Minnesota, 2019).

Digital Aesthetics Workshop-Workshop, May 24, 2024

Digital Aesthetics Workshop – Workshop

Stanford University, May 24, 2024 

We’re pleased to announce the return of the Digital Aesthetics Workshop – Workshop. In the spirit of the Digital Aesthetics series – which invites faculty from various institutions to speak about their work – we envision the DAW-W to be a space for graduate students to share any work-in-progress research in a half-day workshop at the Stanford Humanities Center.

We welcome 250-word abstracts from Stanford graduate students for 15-20 minute presentations. Presentations can be about papers, practice-based projects, and alternative forms of research relevant to the theme of “digital aesthetics,” broadly understood. Presentations will then be workshopped with their peers and faculty mentors Shane Denson (Art History) and Angèle Christin (Communication). Lunch and refreshments will be provided to attendees.

Please send your abstracts to Hank Gerba (hankg@stanford.edu) and Grace Han (ghahahan@stanford.edu) by 6 May 2024, with the email title “DAW-W Abstract.” Acceptances will be sent out shortly after.

“The Ends of Perfection: On a Limit Concept in Global Film and Media Theory” — Nicholas Baer at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, April 5, 2024

I am pleased to announce our first event for spring quarter! Please join us in welcoming Nicholas Baer next week, who will present a talk titled “The Ends of Perfection: On a Limit Concept in Global Film and Media Theory” on Friday, April 5, 2:30-4:30pm PT. The event will take place in the Stanford Humanities Center Board 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: https://tinyurl.com/4ry559an

Abstract:

This talk examines the concept of aesthetic perfection against the backdrop of today’s digital mediascape, where the latest screen technologies promise sharp, pristine images with lossless compression and a lifelike appearance. While, in Hito Steyerl’s account, the circulation of “poor” or “imperfect” images can disrupt hegemonic media logics, I demonstrate that the very ideal of perfection is an engine of semantic instability in the modern age. Intervening in contemporary debates about “rich” and “poor” images, and “high” and “low” definition, my lecture offers a differentiated and historically dynamic understanding of perfection as a limit concept in global film and media theory. I argue that moving images played a crucial role in the redefinition of perfection, as classical conceptions of the term gradually and unevenly gave way to perfectionism, perfectibility, and an aesthetics of imperfection. Integrating Reinhart Koselleck’s method of conceptual history into the study of moving images, my talk reconceives the history of global film and media theory as one of semantic persistence, change, and radical novelty of meaning.

Bio: 

Nicholas Baer is Assistant Professor of German at the University of California, Berkeley, with affiliations in Film & Media, Critical Theory, and Jewish Studies. He is author of Historical Turns: Weimar Cinema and the Crisis of Historicism (University of California Press, 2024) and co-editor of three volumes: The Promise of Cinema: German Film Theory, 1907–1933 (University of California Press, 2016), Unwatchable (Rutgers University Press, 2019), and Technics: Media in the Digital Age (Amsterdam University Press, 2024).

This event is generously co-sponsored by the Stanford Europe Center.

“Shadowline” — Akira Mizuta Lippit at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, March 12, 2024

We’re pleased to announce our last event of the winter quarter, slated for next week. Please join us in welcoming Akira Mizuta Lippit, who will present on “Shadowline” on Tuesday, March 12, 5-7pm PT. The event will take place in McMurtry 370, 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/bdf4ed4f

Abstract: 

This paper looks at the unique visuality of an eclipse, a penumbra in which a dark object is revealed in and sometimes by the darkness that surrounds. When darkness envelops darkness, is vision negated or does a new form visibility emerge from the double negation of the visible? At its early stages of thought, this paper seeks to explore the cosmic event of an eclipse as a uniquely disruptive but revelatory instance of a collapsing visuality.

Bio: 

Akira Mizuta Lippit is University Professor of film and literature at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Cinema without Reflection: Jaques Derrida’s Echopoiesis and Narcissism Adrift (2016); Ex-Cinema: From a Theory of Experimental Film and Video (2012); Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (2005); and Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (2000).

This event is generously co-sponsored by the Stanford Department of Art & Art History.

“Mimetic Virtualities” — Yvette Granata at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, February 6, 2024

Please join us for the next Digital Aesthetics Workshop, when we will welcome Yvette Granata for her talk on “Mimetic Virtualities: Rendering the Masses and/or Feminist Media Art?” on February 6, 5-7pm PT. The event will take place in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room, 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/2r285898

Abstract: 

From stolen election narratives to Q-anon cults, the politics of the 21st century are steeped in the mainstreaming of disinformation and the hard-core pursuit of false realities via any media necessary. Simultaneously, the 21st century marks the rise of virtual reality as a mass media. While spatial computing technologies behind virtual reality graphics and head-mounted displays have been in development since the middle of the 20th century, virtual reality as a mass media is a phenomenon of the last decade. Concurrently with the development of VR as a mass media, the tools of virtual production have proliferated – such as motion capture libraries, 3D model and animation platforms, and game engine tools. Does the pursuit of false realities and the proliferation of virtual reality technologies have anything to do with each other? Has virtual reality as a mass medium shaped the aesthetics of the digital masses differently? Looking to the manner in which virtual mimesis operates via rendering methods of the image of crowds, from 2D neural GAN generators to the recent development of neural radiance fields (NERFs) as a form of mass 3D rendering, I analyze the politics and aesthetics of mimetic virtualities as both a process of rendering of the masses and as a process of the distribution of the sensibility of virtualized bodies. Lastly, I present all of the above via feminist media art practice as a critical, creative method.

Bio:

Yvette Granata is a media artist, filmmaker, and digital media scholar. She is Assistant Professor at University of Michigan in the department of Film, Television and Media and the Digital Studies Institute. She creates immersive installations, video art, VR experiences,  and interactive environments, and writes about digital culture, media art, and media theory. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at film festivals and art institutions including, Slamdance, CPH:DOX, The Melbourne International Film Festival, The Annecy International Animation Festival, Images Festival, Harvard Carpenter Center for the Arts, The EYE Film Museum, McDonough Museum of Art, and Hallwalls Contemporary Art, among others. Her most recent VR project,  I Took a Lethal Dose of Herbs, premiered at CPH:DOX in 2023, won best VR film at the Cannes World Film Awards, and received an Honorable Mention at Prix Ars Electronica in Linz Austria. Yvette has also published in Ctrl-Z: New Media Philosophy, Trace Journal, NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, International Journal of Cultural Studies and AI & Society. She lives in Detroit.

“Marx After Simondon” — Bryan Norton at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, Jan. 30, 2024

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.

“Harvesting Light” — Thomas Lamarre at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, Dec. 5, 2023

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).