The Critical Making Collaborative at Stanford invites you to an evening of sharing and discussion with two recipients of the Critical Making Award, West Montgomery and Lloyd May, who will present their ongoing work in opera and haptic art—Friday, Nov. 22 (5PM) at the CCRMA Stage (3rd floor).
Democratizing Vibrations – Lloyd May (Music Technology)
What would it mean to put vibration and touch at the center of a musical experience? What should devices used to create and experience vibration-based art (haptic instruments) look and feel like? These questions are at the core of the Musical Haptics project that aims to co-design haptic instruments and artworks with D/deaf and hard-of-hearing artists.
Opera Machine – Westley Montgomery (TAPS)
Opera Machine is a work-in-process exploring music, measurement, and the sedimentation of culture in the bodies of performers. How does the cultural legacy of opera reverberate in the present day? How have the histories of voice-science, race “science,” and the gendering of the body co-produced pedagogies and styles of opera performance? What might it look like (sound like) to resist these histories?
On Sunday, June 16, it was my honor to “hood” Hank Gerba, who earned their doctoral degree in Art History with a concentration in Film & Media Studies, and to make the following remarks at our departmental commencement ceremony:
Hank Gerba’s dissertation, “Digital Disruptions: Moiré, Aliasing, and the Stroboscopic Effect,” is exceptional in a number of ways. While it is a work primarily in media theory, or even media philosophy (itself an exceptional or eccentric subfield within film and media studies), the dissertation stages its argument by way of close engagement with a number of digital processes and devices, but also a number of analog artworks. Accordingly, it is exceptionally well suited for an interdisciplinary graduate program like ours, where students like Hank graduate with a PhD in Art History but are able to specialize also in Film & Media Studies, and where all of our students are expected to gain some acquaintance with both fields.
Still, it is rare for a dissertation to be so agnostic about traditional disciplinary divisions and to speak across boundaries in a way that goes straight to their root: in this case, straight to the root of aesthetic and technical processes or forms. The division between technology or the technical, and art or the aesthetic, is a fairly recent invention, just a little over 200 years old. It is only in the wake of this split that we can speak of the supposedly disparate fields of art history and media studies. Exceptionally, Hank’s dissertation challenges that split, along with a number of other more or less conventional categorizations. And it does so by foregrounding a number of exceptional phenomena: the shimmer of moiré silk, pixely appearances on computer screens, and stroboscopic flickers of film—digital disruptions, according to the title of Hank’s dissertation, when digital and analog logics come into conflict with one another, when blocky grids clash with smooth contours or a film’s discrete frames line up with the movement of wagon wheels or helicopter blades to make it seem as though they were standing still.
In framing the project this way, however, Hank not only challenges disciplinary boundaries but significantly relocates the digital/analog divide. The digital is not just about computers but applies also to the clashing grids of watered silk, which give rise to the analog shimmer that we see in the fabric and in artworks made with it. Digital and analog come to name not particular types of technologies or media, but fundamental modes of organizing aesthetic experience itself. This is an important media-philosophical argument, and it lays important groundwork for thinking about the ways that contemporary media, such as AI, are actively transforming our visual and aesthetic worlds.
I’ll just mention, finally, that Hank is the first student for whom I served as primary advisor, and the first PhD student whose progress I have accompanied from admission to the program to all the way to defending their dissertation. So it kind of feels like I’m graduating today as well. But it’s Hank who did the work and in many respects surpassed their mentor. I am grateful to have learned from Hank, both through their scholarship and through their work across the university, including at the Digital Aesthetics Workshop at the Stanford Humanities Center, where we have collaborated for several years. Hank is graduating with the Christopher Meyer Prize, one of the highest honors that we can bestow on graduating PhD students, in recognition not only of excellent scholarship but also outstanding service to the departmental and university community.
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!)
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.
I am excited to announce that, with the support of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, I am hiring a one-year postdoctoral fellow working on issues around AI, art, and aesthetics. Please see the full call for applications here, and spread the word to anyone who might be interested!
Beyond the Screen is an exhibition of desktop videos made by students in my Fall 2023 course on “The Video Essay.” The show, featuring three collaboratively made videos, is up from January 22-February 2, 2024 in the McMurtry Building (home of the Department of Art & Art History) at Stanford University.
Featured are:
Escape, by Karla Aguilar, Eric Wang, and Roisin Willis (14:52)
Pixilated Mimicry, by Lauren Boles and Michael Hemker (15:10)
Crypto Crisis, by Sheryl Hsu and Nathaniel Begay (12:40)
I am happy to announce the call for papers for the 4th annual Stanford-Leuphana Academy for Media Studies, which will again take place in Berlin (June 25-30, 2023)!
The topic this year is “Media and Cultural Change”
Our core faculty this year are:
Timon Beyes (Sociology of Organisation and Culture, Leuphana)
Shane Denson (Film and Media Studies, Stanford)
Marisa Galvez (French, Italian, and German Studies, Stanford)
Karla Oeler (Film and Media Studies, Stanford)
Claus Pias (History and Epistemology of Media, Leuphana)
Fred Turner (Communication, Stanford)
Sybille Krämer (Philosophy, Leuphana)
Ruth Mayer (American Studies, Hannover)
Bernhard Siegert (History and Epistemology of Cultural Techniques, Weimar)
Special Guests:
Simon Denny (University of Fine Arts Hamburg)
Wolfgang Ernst (Media Studies, Humboldt University Berlin) — to be confirmed
As in previous years, travel and accommodation costs will be covered for graduate students accepted to the Academy, and there will be no additional fees for participation. So please consider applying and spread the word to qualified graduate students!
The next event of the Digital Aesthetics Workshop will be next Tuesday, November 15, from 5-7pm with Mark Algee-Hewitt. Find below a brief description of his talk, “Patterns of Text / Patterns of Anaysis,” and we hope to see you there!
This hybrid event will take place in the Board Room of the Stanford Humanities Center, with online option via Zoom: https://tinyurl.com/36z56wuk (registration link)
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At first glance, the study of aesthetics and computational analysis would seem to be antithetical to each other. The former focuses, among other things, on the interplay between the formal features of the text, its larger social context and its reception; while the later largely aggregates formal features. However, the patterns produced by such computational work can not only shed new light on the specifics of how words produce aesthetic effects, but in and of themselves, they reveal a new set of aesthetic conditions that can only be visualized and explored through these methods. In this talk, I’ll toggle between large and small scales of analysis, using examples of quantitative analysis to demonstrate the ways that cultural analytics operates across scales to reveal new aspects of both poetics and our understanding of the interrelations between genres and periods of literature.
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Mark Algee-Hewitt’s research focuses on the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in England and Germany and seeks to combine literary criticism with digital and quantitative analyses of literary texts. In particular he is interested in the history of aesthetic theory and the development and transmission of aesthetic and philosophic concepts during the Enlightenment and Romantic periods. He is also interested in the relationship between aesthetic theory and the poetry of the long eighteenth century. Although his primary background is in English literature, he also has a degree in computer science. As the director of the Stanford Literary Lab, he is working to bring his interests in quantitative analysis, digital humanities and eighteenth-century literature to bear on a number of new collaborative projects. His current book project, The Afterlife of the Sublime, explores the history of the sublime by tracing its discursive patterns through over 11,000 texts from the long eighteenth century, seeking clues to the disappearance of the term at the end of the Romantic period. As a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at McGill University, working with the Interacting with Print Research group, Dr. Algee-Hewitt was also involved in a variety of projects that combine literary interpretation with quantitative analysis. He is a co-coordinator of the Book History BiblioGraph, a new dynamic online resource and recommendation engine that visualizes connections between contemporary resources on Book History using statistical methods. He is also working with Andrew Piper on the Werther Topologies: a project that seeks to identify lexical patterns that will aid in tracing the impact of Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther on the nineteenth-century development of the German novel. Dr. Algee-Hewitt has taught a variety of courses in literary history and theory in both the English and German departments at McGill University, Rutgers University and New York University where he received his PhD in 2008.
On November 10, 2022 (4pm in the Terrace Room, Margaret Jacks Hall), the Program in Modern Thought & Literature will be hosting Darieck Scott, Professor of African American Studies at UC Berkeley, for the Monica P. Moore Speaker Series. Professor Scott will be talking about Black queer fantasy and superhero comics, the topic of his recent book Keeping It Unreal (NYU Press, 2022).
There will be two respondents: Scott Bukatman, Professor of Film & Media Studies at Stanford and author of a new book on Black Panther; and Lucas Williams, Ph.D Candidate in MTL.
We’re still getting used to the hybrid setup, so the framing isn’t always great, but I’m happy to share the video of Erich Hörl’s talk at the Digital Aesthetics Workshop: “The Disruptive Condition.”
