We’re coming up on the final week of EXTRA/PHENOMENALITIES, with 20 amazing artists and collaboratives approaching the conditions of appearance and nonappearance from a wide variety of angles and mediums. The exhibition, curated by the non/phenomenal collective (Brett Amory, Karin Denson, and Shane Denson) is open Monday through Friday, 12-5pm, through March 13.
The video above, featuring drone footage shot by Shaun Roberts and edited by Shane Denson, provides an overview (literally) of the show.
Join us on February 23, 2026 (5-7pm, McMurtry Building, Oshman Hall) for an artist panel featuring participants from EXTRA/PHENOMENALITIES, on view at Stanford Art Gallery from January 22-March 13, 2026. Bringing together artists whose work explores the limits of experience, this program offers a special opportunity to hear directly from those behind the exhibition.
Each participating artist will give a brief talk reflecting on their work in the exhibition, followed by a moderated conversation led by Alexander Nemerov, Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities at Stanford, and audience Q&A.
Participating artists include Morehshin Allahyari, Mark Amerika, Will Luers, & Chad Mossholder, Brett Amory, Rebecca Baron + Douglas Goodwin, Jon Bernson, Daniel Brickman, Paul DeMarinis, Karin + Shane Denson, Ebti, Frank Floyd, Gabriel Harrison, DJ Meisner, Joshua Moreno, Carlo Nasisse, Miguel Novelo, Andy Rappaport, William Tremblay, Camille Utterback, and Kristen Wong.
The exhibition is curated by Brett Amory, Karin Denson, and Shane Denson.
Please join us in welcoming Katherine Behar, our next guest of the year, who will present “Isn’t Artisanal Intelligence K(NOT) AI?” on Wednesday, February 25, from 5-6:30PM PT. This event will take place in the Board Room at the Humanities Center; refreshments will be served. We hope to see you there.
“Isn’t Artisanal Intelligence K(NOT) AI?” unfolds a new theory of artisanal intelligence. Contextualized in Behar’s artistic practice, which concerns gender, race, class, and labor in digital culture, and specifically her current project, Inside Outsourcing, which takes inspiration from the un-automatability of basket-weaving, this lecture ties together neural networks and tacit knowledge to weigh the valuation of intelligences.
Bio:
Katherine Behar is an interdisciplinary artist who studies contemporary digital culture through feminism and materialism. She is Professor of New Media Arts at Baruch College and The Graduate Center, CUNY.
This event is generously co-sponsored by the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis and Fiber Optics: Materials & Media, a Stanford Humanities Center Research Workshop.
Join us for an artist panel featuring participants from EXTRA/PHENOMENALITIES, on view at Stanford Art Gallery from January 22-March 13, 2026. Bringing together artists whose work explores the limits of experience, this program offers a special opportunity to hear directly from those behind the exhibition.
Each participating artist will give a brief talk reflecting on their work in the exhibition, followed by a moderated conversation and audience Q&A.
Participating artists include Morehshin Allahyari, Mark Amerika, Will Luers, & Chad Mossholder, Brett Amory, Rebecca Baron + Douglas Goodwin, Jon Bernson, Daniel Brickman, Paul DeMarinis, Karin + Shane Denson, Ebti, Frank Floyd, Gabriel Harrison, DJ Meisner, Joshua Moreno, Carlo Nasisse, Miguel Novelo, Andy Rappaport, William Tremblay, Camille Utterback, and Kristen Wong.
The exhibition is curated by Brett Amory, Karin Denson, and Shane Denson.
Moderator to be announced.
VISITOR INFORMATION: Oshman Hall is located within the McMurtry Building on Stanford campus at 355 Roth Way. Visitor parking is available in designated areas and is free after 4pm on weekdays. Alternatively, take the Caltrain to Palo Alto Transit Center and hop on the free Stanford Marguerite Shuttle. If you need a disability-related accommodation or wheelchair access information, please contact Julianne White at jgwhite@stanford.edu. This event is open to Stanford affiliates and the general public. Admission is free.
After a one-year hiatus, the Stanford-Leuphana Summer Academy on Humanities and Media is back! The theme for 2026 is Periodization, and we’ll meet for the week of June 22-26 in Berlin.
How, why, and with what epistemic implications is history divided into temporal segments? Periodizations—whether in the form of epochs, ages, turning points, or more heroic “eras”—belong to the most fundamental and at the same time most frequently contested historiographical operations in literary, art, and media studies. Although they “have no witnesses” (Blumenberg), they constitute a persistent schematism that has proven extremely productive since the so‑called »saddle time« (Koselleck). Periodizations structure time and allow for “significant” markers, enable narrative schemes, stabilize institutions and epistemologies, and in this way also shape concepts of the future and of expected caesuras. They operate as lasting calls to recognize patterns which, when new ones are discovered, may dissolve or remain resilient and continue to have an effect. In recent years, a renewed problematization has emerged—in the name of re‑periodizations (“Anthropocene”), de‑periodizations (“broad present”), or comparative and global perspectives and other temporalities (“multiple modernities”). Yet these approaches do not escape the legacy of periodization; rather, they are often blind to its recursive and pattern‑forming operations.
The Stanford–Leuphana Summer Academy 2026: Periodization will address the following core areas: theories and models of periodization (e.g. epochal thresholds, longue durée, kairos, tipping points); epistemological foundations and implications of the division of time; critique of traditional concepts of epochs; media and disciplinary histories of periodization in different fields (history, literature, philosophy, art, theology, etc.); global perspectives on periodization (asynchronicity, but also cyclical, genealogical, or cosmological temporal orders); and the media and materialities of periodization (calendars, chronicles, exhibitions, textbooks, AI, forensics).
Core Faculty
1. Adrian Daub (Comparative Literature, Stanford)
2. Shane Denson (Film & Media Studies, Stanford)
3. Ute Holl (Media Studies, Basel)
4. Gertrud Koch (Film Studies, Leuphana)
5. Sybille Krämer (Philosophy, Leuphana)
6. Lea Pao (German Studies, Stanford)
7. Claus Pias (History and Epistemology of Media, Leuphana)
Timon Beyes (Sociology of Organization and Culture, Leuphana)
Wolfgang Ernst (Media Theory, Humboldt University Berlin)
further guests to be announced…
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,
Lastname_Abstract.pdf, Lastname_Letter_of_Intent.pdf. Please email your applications by March 13, 2026 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 on Humanities and Media 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.
Please join us in welcoming Patrick Keilty, our next guest of the year, who will present “Processing Pleasure” on Tuesday, February 3, from 5-6:30PM PT. This event will take place in the Board Room at the Humanities Center; refreshments will be served.
This talk examines the early history of electronic payment processing, as told by the engineers who developed the technology in the 1980s. Struggling to find a suitable customer for the invention, they initially sold their technology to adult magazines through the telecommunications giant, MCI. Little has been written about electronic payment’s origins within the sex industries, despite the ubiquity of electronic commerce today. Yet the sex industries have long been early adopters of new technologies. With electronic payment, adult magazines expanded the burgeoning phone sex industry through 1-900 phone sex lines, affording clients the anonymity and confidentiality of paying for pleasure. Electronic payment develops within a history of cultural and legal efforts to regulate, contain, limit, or eradicate the sex industries. When U.S. legal precedent ultimately centers the right to sexual pleasure in the home, the sex industries embraced technologies that did the same. Threatened with U.S. Congressional regulation, by the end of the decade, those same engineers sold their technologies to the growing televangelist industry. As a result, their payment infrastructure funded both sides of the U.S. “culture war.” This talk provides the historical context for a longer book chapter about the relationship between electronic payment, pleasure and desire, which are integral to the development of financial infrastructures that enable the social reproduction of capitalism.
Patrick Keilty is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information and Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. Professor Keilty’s research focuses on the politics of digital infrastructures in the sex industries, adult film, and the materiality of media. His writing and editorial work has appeared in Camera Obscura; Feminist Media Studies; Information Society; Archivaria; JDoc; Porn Studies; Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience; Scholar and Feminist Online; Feminist and Queer Information Studies Reader (Litwin Books, 2013); Uncertain Archives (MIT Press, 2021); Queer Data Studies (University of Washington Press, 2023); The Handbook of Adult Film and Media (Intellect, 2025); and elsewhere. He is currently working on two monographs — one examines the politics of technologies in the sex industries and the other is a history of two important French stag films from the 1920s.
This event is generously co-sponsored by the Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
EXTRA/PHENOMENALITIES opened last Thursday, January 22, and will be up until March 13, 2026 at the Stanford Art Gallery. Here are some impressions, along with my remarks, from the opening (courtesy of Anja Ulfeldt).
“Race, Repetition, and Seriality in Games and Contemporary Media.”
Videogames and race have intermingled since the earliest days of the medium, yet game studies has yet to develop a sustained methodology to contend with the racial logics and aesthetic practices embedded within game texts. How do videogames function as racial projects? Does race function as a structuring force within game design? How do the structures of repetition inherent to games hold and transmit racial meaning?
Please join us for a conversation around these questions and more between Austin Anderson (Provostial Fellow and Lecturer in English) on his in-progress book Racial Recursivity: A Methodology for Critical Race Game Studies and Shane Denson (Professor of Film & Media Studies) on his ongoing work in seriality across media forms.
On Feb 5, 2026 (5:00-6:30pm), I’ll be participating in the InterPlay Salon alongside Michele Elam and Charlotte McCurdy at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford. We’ll be presenting short PechaKucha-style talks. Mine will focus on my recent art and curatorial efforts with the non/phenomenal collective, including our current show EXTRA/PHENOMENALITES at the Stanford Art Gallery.
EXTRA/PHENOMENALITIES January 22–March 13, 2026 Stanford Art Gallery
OPENING RECEPTION: Thursday, January 22, 5-7pm
What are the limits of experience? This exhibition explores forms of appearance that press against the edges of perception—phenomena that are felt only indirectly, sensed as traces, intensities, or disturbances rather than as stable objects. “Extra/phenomenality” refers to this ambiguous zone of surplus and slippage: where aspects of the world exceed or elude our usual modes of noticing, while still shaping how we see, feel, and understand.
Such excess takes many forms. It can be found in natural processes whose scales outrun human attention; in cultural and spiritual traditions that treat appearance as layered or illusory; in psychological or bodily states that strain the coherence of conscious experience. It also takes shape in today’s technical environments—where images, signals, and decisions circulate through systems that operate faster than we can perceive. New modes of appearance are at stake, but also new zones of non-appearance—gaps, blind spots, and operations that remain perceptually inaccessible. In all of these cases, the limits of experience are stretched and reconfigured.
The artists gathered here engage this terrain of extension and attenuation. Some work with subtle shifts of color, rhythm, or material to draw attention to thresholds where perception begins to blur. Others stage encounters with forms that flicker between visibility and invisibility, inviting viewers to sense what hovers at experience’s margins. Still others explore how contemporary computational systems generate patterns that enter our lives without ever presenting themselves directly.
Taken together, the works invite reflection on how the phenomenal world is never given all at once, but is continually inflected by forces that lie just beyond phenomenality itself. EXTRA/PHENOMENALITIES asks viewers to slow down, to look again, and to inhabit the unstable relation between what appears and what exceeds appearing—an aesthetic space where the subtle, the oblique, and the barely perceptible can take on new significance.
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS: Morehshin Allahyari, Mark Amerika, Will Luers, & Chad Mossholder, Brett Amory, Rebecca Baron + Douglas Goodwin, Jon Bernson, Daniel Brickman, Paul DeMarinis, Karin + Shane Denson, Ebti, Frank Floyd, Gabriel Harrison, DJ Meisner, Joshua Moreno, Carlo Nasisse, Miguel Novelo, Andy Rappaport, William Tremblay, Camille Utterback, and Kristen Wong
CURATED BY: Brett Amory, Karin Denson, and Shane Denson
VISITOR INFORMATION: Stanford Art Gallery is located at 419 Lasuen Mall, off Palm Drive. The gallery is open Monday–Friday, 12–5pm (except on opening day, Jan. 22), and will be closed Presidents’ Day (Monday, Feb. 16). Visitor parking is available in designated areas and payment is managed through ParkMobile (free after 4pm, except by the Oval). Alternatively, take the Caltrain to Palo Alto Transit Center and hop on the free Stanford Marguerite Shuttle. This exhibition is open to Stanford affiliates and the general public. Admission is free.
