literature – medieninitiative

MTL/Intermediations Presents: Regina Schober, “Female Algorithmic Selfhood, Literary Fiction, and the Digital Pharmakon,” March 6, 2024

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, 4^th Floor, room 426) on March 6^th 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 1^st.

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’.

AI in the History of Art and Literature — Gerui Wang and Unjoo Oh, March 11, 2024

On March 11 (4:00-5:30pm, McMurtry Building 370), Gerui Wang and Unjoo Oh will be presenting work related to AI and the history of art and literature:

Gerui Wang, “Infinite Curves in Soungwen Chung’s Art: Towards Human-AI Collaborative Creativity”

This talk explores human-AI collaborations in the works of the contemporary artist Soungwen Chung. Chung designs her own robots for drawing operations. She utilizes computer vision technologies to train robots to observe, learn, and respond to her creative processes. Chung experiments possibilities and creative potential of AI systems when her brain waves are transmitted to the robot arms through an EEG device. The presentation investigates the visual effect of infinite curves in Chung’s art, varying in volume, color, density, tones, and directions. Chung’s works introduce an infinite reproducibility and variation that evokes aesthetics of the ink medium from East Asia. Do Chung’s completed works show legible differences between the marks made by herself and those made by the robot arms? Do “conversations” and collaborations between human creators and AI systems redefine our perceptions of creativity? How do AI systems change our engagement with cultural traditions? This talk invites you to think with these AI-infused artworks.

Gerui Wang is a Lecturer in the Department of History of Art and Visual Culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and at Stanford University’s Center for East Asian Studies (Spring 2024). Her research interests span arts, public policy, environment, and emerging technologies. Her book manuscript, Landscape, Governance, and Ecology in China, 1000-1400, demonstrates the overlooked ecological thinking and notions of “sustainability” manifested in flourishing landscape imagery across artistic media. Gerui’s new project examines artificial intelligence and contemporary art in Asia and its diaspora. Gerui holds a PhD in the history of art from the University of Michigan.

Unjoo Oh, “Visual Interfaces for Poetic Data: Early Modern and AI Technologies”

How might the sonnets of William Shakespeare and AI exist—or be made to exist—in symbiosis? This talk explores the mutual insights that Shakespeare’s Sonnets and AI tools (such as LLMs and text-to-image generators) offer to each other. At the intersection of textual criticism and artificial intelligence, it is possible to leverage bibliographical uncertainty and rethink the (re)presentation of Shakespeare’s poetry. Image (re)production can be newly considered in this process as a node for early modern print and generative AI. Most importantly, we can test the capabilities and biases of these models in processing poetic data and begin to construct visual interfaces that reorient literary analysis.

Unjoo Oh is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Stanford University. Her research centers around textual materiality, critical posthumanism, and digital humanities, investigating how (in)organic nonhumans affect notions of intelligence and the remediation of premodern texts. Her work has been published in Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies and the Journal of Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance English Literature. She is also a graduate coordinator of Renaissances at Stanford and an assistant editor of the Stanford Global Shakespeare Encyclopedia.

Frankenstein 2018: 200 Years of Monsters (CFP)

The call for papers is now out for the “Frankenstein 2018: 200 Years of Monsters” conference hosted by the Australian National University and the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra, Australia (12 – 15 September 2018). I will be giving one of the four keynote talks — on Frankenstein in film and other media. Proposals are being solicited for talks on a range of Frankensteinian topics, including:

Literary studies, especially of the long eighteenth century, Romanticism, Victorian and neo‐Victorian literature
Re-tellings and re-‐imaginings of the Frankenstein story in various modes and genres, e.g. SF, steampunk, speculative fiction, slash fiction, etc.
Film, television, theatre and performance, and visual studies
Digital humanities, reception studies, histories of popular culture, and media ecologies
Gender studies, queer theory, and the history of sexuality
Disability studies and post‐humanism
The history of medicine, especially reproductive technologies
Science and technology studies; images and imaginaries of science and scientists
The history and philosophy of biology, especially in relation to vitalism
Eco‐criticism and the Anthropocene
Affect theory and the history of emotions
Frankenstein and race, colonialism, empire
Global and local Frankensteins, e.g. Australian Frankensteins
Frankenstein and material history
Cyborgs, robots, artificial intelligence, and machine learning
Synthetic biology, genetic engineering, and artificial life

For more info and the CFP, take a look at the conference website: http://rsha.cass.anu.edu.au/events/conference-frankenstein-two-hundred-years-monsters

Frankenstein@200

Happy to be on the steering committee for Frankenstein@200 — a year-long series of events taking place at Stanford in 2018. I’ll be participating in a number of ways, including talks and several courses related to Frankenstein, among other things. I’ll post details here in due time. Also be sure to check out the project website, which is still under construction, but which is already chock full of announcements and constantly being updated.

The year 2018 marks the 200th anniversary of the publishing of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. The novel is eerily relevant today as we face ethical dilemmas around appropriate use of stem cells, questions about organ donation and organ harvesting, as well as animal to human transplants. Additionally, the rise of artificial intelligence portends an uncertain future of the boundaries between machines and humans. Frankenstein@200, will be a year-long series of academic courses and programs including a film festival, a play, a lecture series and an international Health Humanities Conference that will examine the numerous moral, scientific, sociological, ethical and spiritual dimensions of the work, and why Dr. Frankenstein and his monster still capture the moral imagination today. This project will be sponsored by the Stanford Medicine & the Muse Program in partnership with the Stanford Humanities Center, the Stanford Arts Institute, the Office of Religious Life, the Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning, Stanford Continuing Studies, the Cantor Arts Center, the Department of Art & Art History, and the Center for Biomedical Ethics.