Tag: media art

“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.

Correlative Counter-Capture in Contemporary Art @ ASAP/14

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, “Pulse Index”, 2010. “Recorders”, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2011. Photo by: Antimodular Research

On Saturday, September 30, at 9am Pacific Time, I’ll be giving the following talk at ASAP/14 (online):

Correlative Counter-Capture in Contemporary Art

Computational processing takes place at speeds and scales that are categorically outside human perception, but such invisible processing nevertheless exerts significant effects on the sensory and aesthetic—as well as political—qualities of artworks that employ digital and/or algorithmic media. To account for this apparent paradox, it is necessary to rethink aesthetics itself in the light of two evidently opposing tendencies of computation: on the one hand, the invisibility of processing means that computation is phenomenologically discorrelated (in that it breaks with what Husserl calls the “the fundamental correlation between noesis and noema”); on the other hand, however, when directed toward the production of sensory contents, computation relies centrally on statistical correlations that reproduce normative constructs (including those of gender, race, and dis/ability). As discorrelative, computation exceeds the perceptual bond between subject and object, intervening directly in the prepersonal flesh; as correlative, computation not only expresses “algorithmic biases” but is capable of implanting them directly in the flesh. Through this double movement, a correlative capture of the body and its metabolism is made possible: a statistical norming of subjectivity and collectivity prior to perception and representation. Political structures are thus seeded in the realm of affect and aesthesis, but because the intervention takes place in the discorrelated matter of prepersonal embodiment, a margin of indeterminacy remains from which aesthetic and political resistance might be mounted (with no guarantee of success). In this presentation, I turn to contemporary artworks combining the algorithmic (including AI, VR, or robotics) with the metabolic (including heartrate sensors, ECGs, and EEGs) in order to imagine a practice of dis/correlative counter-capture. Works by the likes of Rashaad Newsome, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Hito Steyerl, or Teoma Naccarato and John MacCallum point to an aesthetic practice of counter-capture that does not elude but re-engineers mechanisms of control for potentially, but only ever locally, liberatory purposes.

Notes toward a Phenomenology of AI Art

Jon Rafman Counterfeit Poast, 2022 4K stereo video 23:39 min MSPM JRA 49270 film still

Today I have a short piece in Outland on AI art and its embodied processing, as part of a larger suite of articles curated by Mark Amerika.

The essay offers a first taste of something I’m developing at the moment on the phenomenology of AI and the role of aesthetics as first philosophy in the contemporary world — or, AI aesthetics as the necessary foundation of AI ethics.

BOOK LAUNCH UPDATE: New Date (July 3) and Location! In conversation with Mark B. N. Hansen

Please note: Due to factors outside of my control, the book launch event for Post-Cinematic Bodies, originally scheduled for this Thursday June 29, has been postponed to next Monday, July 3 at 7pm.

I am happy to announce that I will be in conversation with Mark B. N. Hansen!

Please also note the change of venue, to the Kurfürstenstraße location of Hopscotch Reading Room!

BOOK LAUNCH! June 29, 2023: Hopscotch Reading Room, Berlin

[UPDATE: POSTPONED TO JULY 3 — MORE INFO HERE]

On Thursday, June 29, Hopscotch Reading Room (Gerichtstraße 43 in the Wedding district of Berlin) will be hosting a book launch event for my new book Post-Cinematic Bodies — which will be out both in print and open-access digital formats from meson press. There will be paperbacks available for purchase at the launch, and they’ll be more widely available soon afterwards. If you’re in town, come out around 7pm for a short reading, discussion, and drinks!

[UPDATE: POSTPONED TO JULY 3 — MORE INFO HERE]

Getty Graduate Symposium 2023 Videos

I had the good fortune to attend the Getty Graduate Symposium, featuring graduate students from all of the PhD-granting Art History programs in California, this February at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Videos of all the talks are now online here.

Above, I am just posting the final session, the final talk of which features an excellent talk by my advisee Grace Han, who spoke about “re-animating Lost Time through remixed time: Jacolby Satterwhite, Jon Rafman, and the Generative Archive” (starting around 45 min. in).

On Display: Immemory, Soft Cinema, After Video

About two years ago, the exhibition On Display: Immemory, Soft Cinema, After Video at Bilkent University in Ankara brought together projects by Chris Marker, Lev Manovich, and the contributors to the “video book” after.video — including the collaborative AR piece “Scannable Images” that Karin Denson and I made. Recently, Oliver Lerone Schultz (one of the editors of after.video) brought to my attention this “critical tour” of the exhibition, which takes the form of a discussion between Ersan Ocak and Andreas Treske. It is audio only, and you might need to turn up the volume a bit, but it’s an interesting discussion of video and media art.

(See here for more on after.video. Also, I should note that the AR on “Scannable Images” is currently not working due to the ephemeral business models of AR platforms these days, but I hope to port it over to a new platform and get it up and running again soon!)

Out Now: ETC Media 110

etc_media_110

I am proud to have a piece on “Pre-Sponsive Gestures” and the work of French media artist Grégory Chatonsky included in the new issue of the Montreal-based ETC Media. Looks like a great issue, and happy to be in such good company!

CURRENT ISSUE // 110
GRÉGORY CHATONSKY: APRÈS LE RÉSEAU / AFTER THE NETWORK

Issue 110 of ETC MEDIA is dedicated to Grégory Chatonsky, who has curated the form and content of this special issue. A Montreal resident for the last ten years, the artist is a pioneer of net art, founding Incident.net in 1994, and an unflagging explorer of the relationships between technology and anonymous existence. In this issue, the artist and a few other friends, artists, philosophers, art historians, and art critics reconsider the last two decades of experimentation, a time in which the world drastically changed through the widespread use of the Internet to reach a digital omnipresence that heralds a near extinction. Divided into 3 sections—“infinitude,” “hyperproduction,” “without ourselves”—ETC MEDIA becomes a platform for navigating in our era and gaining a better understanding of a future whose portents remain deeply ambivalent—promising and threatening all at once. Rather than being reduced to trendy notions often misunderstood by the contemporary art milieu, the concepts of post-digital, accelerationism, and speculative materialism constellate a world in the process of perishing and being born.

Collaborators

Grégory Chatonsky
Eve K. Tremblay
Pau Waelder
Bertrand Gervais and Arnaud Regnauld
Shane Denson
DeForrest Brown Jr.
Goliath Dyèvre
Pierre Cassou-Noguès
Erik Bordeleau
Nora N. Khan
Dylan Trigg
Pierre-Alexandre Fradet
Jussi Parikka

Deformative Criticism at #SCMS17

ScannableImages-smallgif

At the upcoming SCMS conference in Chicago, I will be participating in a workshop on “Deformative Criticism and Digital Experimentations in Film & Media Studies” (panel K3 on Friday, March 24, 2017 at 9:00am):

Deformative criticism has emerged as an innovative site of critical practice within media studies and digital humanities, revealing new insights into media texts by “breaking” them in controlled or chaotic ways. Deformative criticism includes a wide range of digital experiments that generate heretical and non-normative readings of media texts; because the results of these experiments are impossible to know in advance, they shift the boundaries of critical scholarship. Media scholars are particularly well situated to such experimentation, as many of our objects of study exist in digital forms that lend themselves to wide-ranging manipulation. Thus, deformative criticism offers a crucial venue for defining not only contemporary scholarly practice, but also media studies’ growing relationship to digital humanities.

Also participating in the workshop will be Jason Mittell (Middlebury College), Stephanie Boluk (UC Davis), Kevin L. Ferguson (Queens College, City University of New York), Mark Sample (Davidson College), and Virginia Kuhn (USC).

My own presentation/workshop contribution will focus on glitches and augmented reality as a deformative means of engaging with changing media-perceptual configurations, including the following case study:

Glitch, Augment, Scan

Scannable Images is a collaborative art/theory project by Karin + Shane Denson that interrogates post-cinema – its perceptual patterns, hyperinformatic simultaneities, and dispersals of attention – through an assemblage of static and animated images, databending and datamoshing techniques, and augmented reality (AR) video overlays. Viewed through the small screen of a smartphone or tablet – itself directed at a computer screen – only a small portion of the entire spectacle can be seen at once, thus reflecting and emulating the selective, scanning regard of post-cinematic images and confronting the viewer with the materiality of the post-cinematic media regime through the interplay of screens, pixels, people, and the physical and virtual spaces they occupy.