A Discorrelated Summary of Discorrelated Images

This is deeply weird. Google Books has a summary of Discorrelated Images up, and it’s definitely not from the publisher (compare Duke University Press’s summary here). While Google’s summary is not exactly *wrong* in anything that it says, it is far from a summary of what my book is actually about — and some sentences can’t really be judged in terms of truth or accuracy, as they just don’t make sense. (For example, the second sentence: “While film theory is based on past film techniques that rely on human perception to relate frames across time, computer generated images use information to render images as moving themselves.” What does that mean?!? It’s grammatical, and it *sounds* vaguely like something I might have written, but as far as I can tell, it is meaningless.)

Moreover, from this text it sounds like the book is primarily about Michael Bay’s TRANSFORMERS with a detour through Denis Villeneuve’s BLADE RUNNER 2049. To be clear, I do write about both of these, but I also write about Guy Maddin’s algorithmic SEANCES, about Basma Alsharif’s HOME MOVIES GAZA, about desktop horror, drones, speculative execution, animation, about the relations between the phenomenology of perception in relation to microtemporal and subperceptual events, about videogames, codecs, streaming video, and the end of the world.

Anyway, who wrote this summary? Why do I think it was a machine?

FrankensteinsDeepDream

Creation scene and aftermath, as described in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (Chapter 5, 1831 edition) and interpreted by Cris Valenzuela’s text-to-image machine-learning demo (http://t2i.cvalenzuelab.com) utilizing AttnGAN (Attentional Generative Adversarial Networks).

Made for the upcoming Videographic Frankenstein exhibition at the Department of Art & Art History, Stanford University (Sept. 26 – Oct. 26, 2018). More info here: https://art.stanford.edu/exhibitions/videographic-frankenstein

Jonathan Sterne: Machine Learning, ‘AI,’ and the Politics of Media Aesthetics

Sterne poster DAW

On April 24, 2018 (4-6pm in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room), Jonathan Sterne will be speaking at the Digital Aesthetics Workshop. The title of his talk is: “Machine Learning, ‘AI,’ and the Politics of Media Aesthetics: Why Online Music Mastering (Sort of) Works.”

Jonathan Sterne is Professor and James McGill Chair in Culture and Technology in the Department of Art History & Communication Studies at McGill University. His work is concerned with the cultural dimensions of communication technologies, especially their form and role in large-scale societies. One of his major ongoing projects has involved developing the history and theory of sound in the modern west. Beyond the work on sound and music, he has published over fifty articles and book chapters that cover a wide range of topics in media history, new media, cultural theory and disability studies. He has also written on the politics of academic labor and maintains an interest in the future of the university. His new projects consider instruments and instrumentalities; histories of signal processing; and the intersections of disability, technology and perception.