Just out in print and open access: Technics (edited by Nicholas Baer and Annie van den Oever) is a wide-ranging and in-depth exploration of contemporary technologies, techniques, and technics more broadly.
I am happy to have made a small contribution to the volume, one of “Ten Statements on Technics,” by André Brock, Dominique Chateau, Beth Coleman, Shane Denson, Amanda Egbe, Yuriko Furuhata, Tom Gunning, Jeffrey West Kirkwood, Laura Mulvey, and Jean-Christoph Plantin.
Take a look at the whole volume — there’s a lot of good stuff in there!
I am happy to announce the call for papers for the 5th annual Stanford-Leuphana Academy for Media Studies, which will again take place in Berlin (June 24-28, 2024)!
Stanford-Leuphana Summer Academy on Humanities and Media 2024
Open to advanced PhD candidates
Date: June 24-28, 2024
Location: Stanford Berlin, Haus Cramer, Pacelliallee 18, 14195 Berlin
Application Deadline: January 15, 2023
2024 topic: »Art, Technology, and the Problem of Acceleration«
For the last two hundred years, any number of writers and scholars have claimed that life is speeding up. As early as 1880 Goethe called the emerging industrial era “velociferous.” In today’s information era, such diagnoses flourish from popular punditry to Paul Virilio’s “Dromology,” Hartmut Rosa’s “Social Acceleration” and, of course, the philosophers of “Accelerationism.” An even older line of thought, a line we can trace back to Newton and Galileo, reminds us that in physics, and perhaps in the social world too, acceleration is always linked to forces of resistance, to inertia and redirection. Today such resistance ranges from a booming deceleration and disconnection industry to reactionary critiques of modernity, from institutional inertia and foot-dragging to the persistence of habits, emotions, mindsets, and values.
How can we understand this interplay of acceleration, technology, and inertia? What roles might media, art, and technology play in processes of acceleration and resistance? Can the study of literature or painting or multimedia sculpture, for instance, help us explore the forces driving acceleration? Give us new ways to understand the refusal to accelerate? What roles has aesthetics played in the economic, organizational, and technological changes under way around the world? And can we make new forms, new stories or images or objects, that let us imagine how we might do things differently?
We aim to bring together emerging scholars from a variety of fields to explore these and related questions. We welcome applications from across the humanities, the arts, and the social sciences. We hope to work collectively and to give participants a newly multidisciplinary toolkit with which to analyze acceleration and deceleration, in the past, the present, and the future.
Core Faculty
1. Timon Beyes (Sociology of Organization and Culture, Leuphana)
2. Shane Denson (Film & Media Studies/Modern Thought & Literature, Stanford)
3. Ute Holl (Media Studies, Basel)
4. Sybille Krämer (Philosophy, Leuphana)
5. Claus Pias (History and Epistemology of Media, Leuphana)
Wolfgang Ernst (Media Theory, Humboldt University Berlin)
Application
All applications from advanced doctoral candidates must be submitted electronically in PDF format. Please submit your CV (1-2 pages) along with a 500-word abstract of your topic and a short letter of intent explaining why you would like to attend this Summer Academy.
Please use the following naming convention for your application files: Lastname_CV.pdf,
Please email your applications by January 15, 2024 to stanleu@leuphana.de.
The working language of the Summer Academy will be English. The organizers will cover travel (economy) and accommodation costs for the time of the summer school. No additional fees will be charged.
General information
The Stanford-Leuphana Summer Academy addresses the intersection between individual humanities disciplines and studies of media and technology from a variety of historical, systematic, and methodological perspectives. As we live in a time when new technologies are emerging at an increasingly rapid pace, the Academy seeks to address vital questions about how different media can drive political and social change, but it also inquires into the assumptions and values that produce technological artifacts. Media studies and media theory intersect with various disciplines in the humanities and social sciences that treat the transmission of information, the formation of social networks, and the embodiment of knowledge in technological artifacts. Therefore, the Academy will bring together faculty and students from various branches of the humanities and social sciences to think about how »mediality« permeates these disciplines in distinct ways; we will approach these issues not only from a robustly interdisciplinary vantage but also by way of comparative cultural and historical perspectives. In this way, the Academy will contribute to our understanding of the fundamental ways that forms of media and technological mediation inform disciplinary knowledge across the humanities, as well as the ways that these disciplinary knowledge formations are an essential precondition to any serious thinking about mediality.
For our final event of this year’s Digital Aesthetics Workshop (which, we can now confirm, will return next year!), Stanford’s own Miyako Inoue will be presenting her current research on the Japanese typewriter. Her session promises to consider the effects of media on thought, to push technology studies towards the history of empire, and to argue with Friedrich Kittler. Needless to say, we are thrilled to have her!
The event takes place on Tuesday, May 29, from 5-7 in the Board Room of the Stanford Humanities Center.
There is no pre-circulated reading. However, attendees are encouraged to familiarize themselves with Kittler’s “Typewriter” chapter in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter.
Writing at the Speed of Thinking: The Japanese Kana Typewriter and the Rehabilitation of the Male Hand
Tuesday, May 29, 5:00-7:00
The invention of the Japanese syllabic (kana) typewriter in the beginning of the 20th century was a modular articulation between the Japanese syllabary and the engineered metal body of the English typewriter. With keys and type bars for Japanese syllabaries neatly conjoined with it, the kana typewriter promised Japan’s industrial efficiency and productivity of repetitive inscription labor. While the kana-typewriter was originally used in business and government offices to streamline the production of invoices, order forms, utility bills, and so on, the postwar portable models attracted allies for personal use among male intellectuals, industrialists, scientists, and colonial officers, for whom the kana typewriter meant “the liberation from Chinese characters,” or Japan’s break from “Asia” (and its return as a colonizer), and a renewed connection with Western industrial modernity. Friedrich Kittler argues that the western typewriter led to the de-sexualization of writing, liberating (hand)writing from its organic and exclusive ties with the male hand and allowing women to enter the white-collar workplace as typists. In this presentation, I would like to discuss how the kana-typewriter led, in fact, to the re-sexualization of writing as a masculine enterprise, and to the reunion of the man’s hand with language, as its portability allowed elite Japanese (type)writers in international scientific communities, in colonial administrations and associated overseas business communities to synchronize writing and thinking and to re-enact the western subject-position of auto-affect in writing.
Miyako Inoue is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University, where she also has a courtesy appointment with the Department of Linguistics. She teaches linguistic anthropology and the anthropology of Japan. Her first book, Vicarious Language: the Political Economy of Gender and Speech in Japan (U. of California Press), examines a phenomenon commonly called “women’s language” in Japanese modern society, and offers a genealogy showing its critical linkage with Japan’s national and capitalist modernity. Professor Inoue is currently working on a book-length project on a social history of “verbatim” in Japanese. She traces the historical development of the Japanese shorthand technique used in the Diet for its proceedings since the late 19th century, and of the stenographic typewriter introduced to the Japanese court for the trial record after WWII. She is interested in learning what it means to be faithful to others by copying their speech, and how the politico-semiotic rationality of such stenographic modes of fidelity can be understood as a technology of a particular form of governance, namely, liberal governance.
Works from the course “Let’s Make a Monster: Critical Making,” which I co-taught this quarter with my art practice colleague Paul DeMarinis, are currently on display in the Shriram Center for Bioengineering and Chemical Engineering at Stanford University. The show, which officially opened today, is up through Friday, June 8.
We are particularly excited to take this work across campus and show it in the context of a space devoted to cutting-edge engineering work, where we hope that it provokes thought and discussion about the transformations of technology, experience, and life itself taking place in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. Thanks especially to Prof. Drew Endy for his help in facilitating and making this show possible.
Here are just a few glimpses of the work on display.
Nora Wheat, Decode (2018)
Hieu Minh Pham, The Knot (2018)
Raphael Palefsky-Smith, Brick (2018) — more info here
David Zimmerman, Eigenromans I-III (2018)
Jennifer Xilo, Mirror for Our Upturned Palms (2018)
The 2018 International Health Humanities Consortium Conference will be held at Stanford University from April 20-22, 2018. The keynote speakers are:
Alexander Nemerov
Professor, Art and Art History at Stanford University
Lester Friedman
Professor, Media and Society at Hobart and William Smith Colleges
Alvan Ikoku
Assistant Professor, Comparative Literature and Medicine at Stanford University
Catherine Belling
Associate Professor, Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University
In addition, there will be a number of great events around campus. You can find more information here.
I will be participating in the conference in two ways:
First, on Friday, April 20 (2:30-3:30pm in McMurtry 115) I will be presenting a screening session of videographic works related to “Frankenstein & Film.” I will be showing a few of my own pieces (which you can see here and here), as well as works by video essayists like Allison de Fren, alongside commercial “making of” videos, art film reimaginations, and other moving-image forms that treat the history of Frankenstein films from Thomas Edison’s 1910 production up to the present day.
Second, on Sunday, April 22 (11:15am), I will be presenting a paper titled “Frankenstein and Bioethics Beyond Chance and Choice.” The paper draws upon and rethinks ideas that I put forward in one of my very first publications: “Frankenstein, Bioethics, and Technological Irreversibility.” That paper, published in 2007, can be found here.
Ever since Frankenstein unleashed his monster onto the world in Mary Shelley’s novel from 1818, the notion of “technology-out-of-control” has been a constant worry of modern societies, plaguing more optimistic visions of progress and innovation with fears that modern machines harbor potentials that, once set in motion, can no longer be tamed by their human makers. In this characteristically modern myth, the act of making — and especially technological making — gives rise to monsters. As a cautionary tale, we are therefore entreated to look before we leap, to go slow and think critically about the possible consequences of invention before we attempt to make something radically new. However, this means of approaching the issue of human-technological relations implies a fundamental opposition between thinking and making, suggesting a split between cognition as the specifically human capacity for reflection versus a causal determinism-without-reflection that characterizes the machinic or the technical. Nevertheless, recent media theory questions this dichotomy by asserting that technologies are inseparable from humans’ abilities to think and to act in the world, while artistic practices undo the thinking/making split more directly and materially, by taking materials — including technologies — as the very medium of their critical engagement with the world. Drawing on impulses from both media theory and art practice, “critical making” names a counterpart to “critical thinking” — one that utilizes technologies to think about humans’ constitutive entanglements with technology, while recognizing that insight often comes from errors, glitches, malfunctions, or even monsters. Co-taught by a practicing artist and a media theorist, this course will engage students in hands-on critical practices involving both theories and technologies. Let’s make a monster!
ARTSTUDI 233, FILMSTUD 233/433 — Spring 2018 — Profs. Paul DeMarinis & Shane Denson — Thursdays 3:00-5:50pm
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
Next week, media theorist Claus Pias, Professor for the Theory and History of Media at Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, will be visiting Stanford for a series of events: on Monday, October 23 (5:30 – 7:00pm), he will be delivering a public lecture titled “Between Information Aesthetics and Design Amplification,” which will be held in my home department of Art & Art History. (More info here.)
The following day, Tuesday, October 24 (11:30am – 1:00pm), he will be discussing his book Computer Game Worlds, which is newly translated into English, at a lunchtime event with the Digital Aesthetics Workshop. (See the poster below or find more info here.)
