Author: shanedenson

Norms in the Age of Intelligent Machines: Bodies, Knowledge, Governmentality — Dec. 4 & 5 at Stanford

Norms in the Age of Intelligent Machines — a two-day conference organized by Shane Denson, Armen Khatchatourov, and Johan Fredrikzon and sponsored by the France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, Villa Albertine, and the Stanford Department of Art & Art History — will take place at Stanford on December 4-5, 2025.

Speakers
Morehshin Allahyari (Stanford)
Hannes Bajohr (UC Berkeley)
David Bates (UC Berkeley)
Bilel Benbouzid (University Gustave Eiffel, Paris)
Shane Denson (Stanford)
Jean-Pierre Dupuy (Stanford)
Noel Fitzpatrick (TU Dublin)
Johan Fredrikzon (KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm)
Julia Irwin (Stanford)
Armen Khatchatourov (DICEN / University Gustave Eiffel, Paris)
Helen Nissenbaum (Cornell Tech)
Warren Sack (UC Santa Cruz)
Antonio Somaini (University Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3)
Fred Turner (Stanford)

The prospect of intelligent machines challenges our societal norms. Matters of debate over the past half century concerning digital networks – e.g. access, privacy, subjectivity, participation – must be reconsidered in the age of machine learning. More specifically, the proliferation of AI-based systems leads to new ways of understanding what normativity is. Social norms don’t change overnight; however, the mechanisms and processes that drive these changes are increasingly influenced by AI-based infrastructures, characterized by a heightened level of automation, while being opaque, inscrutable, and anthropomorphic.

Faced with such conditions, we have to ask, first, what it means to instill or break a norm and, second, what norms even mean or represent. This landscape presents both profound challenges to maintain just and stable means of interaction and, at the same time, novel and creative opportunities for alternative modes of being.

The two conferences (December 4-5, 2025 at Stanford, April or May in Paris) aim to investigate how norms of embodiment, forms of knowledge, and techniques of governmentality operate in the age of AI, and to address the imbrication of two movements: how the evolution of social norms is reflected in new algorithmic practices, and how these algorithms influence social norms in various domains. It will bring together the humanities, social sciences, and law to address issues of crucial contemporary importance.

Sponsored by France – Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, Villa Albertine, and Stanford Department of Art & Art History

Image: Brett Amory, Archive Drift ⧑⧗⧖⧔. Photo: Shaun Roberts

More info here

View the full conference program with agenda, abstracts, and speaker bios

Registration

“The Bride of Frankenstein Minute-by-Minute” — Monday Night Seminar at the Coach House, Centre for Culture and Technology, Toronto, Nov. 10

Rounding out my trip to Canada, I’ll be giving a talk about my recent book on Bride of Frankenstein at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Culture and Technology on Nov. 10! Info and registration here.

“Non/phenomenalities: A Hodological Laboratory for Unstable Times” — Artist Talk with Karin Denson at Western Film & Art Festival, London, Ontario, Nov. 9, 2025

On Nov. 9, 2025, Karin Denson and I will give an artist talk, titled “Non/phenomenalities: A Hodological Laboratory for Unstable Times,” at the Western Film & Art Festival. In line with the festival theme of “Emerging Visions of AI, Art, and Environment,” we will be discussing our recent artistic and curatorial collaborations around AI and environments, both natural and computational. Selected pieces from our ongoing series GlitchesAreLikeWildAnimalsInLatentSpace! will also be screening throughout the festival.

“AI as Existential(ist) Risk and Aesthetic Opportunity” — Keynote at Media Theory Conference 2025 in Toronto, Nov. 7-8

I’m excited to be giving one of the keynotes at the Media Theory Conference 2025 at the Centre for Culture and Technology in Toronto. On Nov. 8, I’ll give a talk titled “AI as Existential(ist) Risk and Aesthetic Opportunity.” Here is the abstract:

Contemporary debates around artificial intelligence often frame the technology in terms of “existential risk.” Yet such framings rarely pause to consider what existential might mean in the existentialist sense. In this talk I return to Heidegger’s account of the “worldhood of the world” and Sartre’s concept of “hodological space” to argue that the risk posed by AI is not confined to catastrophic scenarios of planetary survival, but lies more immediately in the reconfiguration of subjectivity itself. AI systems bypass conscious perception, modulating aesthesis—the sensory, affective, and preconscious conditions of experience—and in doing so recalibrate the orientations that make ethical deliberation possible in the first place.

Seen from this angle, the hazard of AI is not external to us but infrastructural, shaping our movements, postures, and affective attunements. At the same time, this hazard can be taken up as an opportunity: artworks that use machine learning to stage glitches, detours, or dissonances do not merely represent technological change but provide laboratories for inhabiting it, exposing how bodies and worlds are being rewritten. If AI marks an existentialist risk, it also opens an occasion to engage aesthetically with the reorganization of perception and orientation, and to confront the stakes of ethics where they begin—in the aesthetic, in the felt conditions of living and acting in a changing world.

“Making Politics: Commemoration, Resistance, and Play” — Joseph DeLappe at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, Oct. 22, 2025

With apologies for the late announcement, the Digital Aesthetics Workshop is delighted to welcome our first speaker of the 2025-26 academic year! Joseph DeLappe will present on “Making Politics: Commemoration, Resistance, and Play” on Wednesday, October 22, from 5-6:30pm PT. The event will take place in Wallenberg 433A, at the Stanford Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA). Dinner will be served.

Zoom link for those unable to join in-person: tinyurl.com/5cjwfmej

Below you will find the Joseph DeLappe’s bio and abstract. We look forward to seeing you there!

Abstract: 

Can art be a catalyst for change in times of war and conflict? What role can creative acts of counter-memorialization, interventionist practices, play, and participatory art take to change how we perceive and act upon issues of contemporary and historical violence and in the broader politics of memory? Media artist and activist Joseph DeLappe will share documentation from a diversity of creative projects and actions developed over the past several decades that utilize digital and analogue processes to creatively address such questions. A lineage of works, including video games, public actions (online and IRL), participatory making, performance, play, protest and memorialization will illuminate upon his critical and interrogative strategies engaging the intersections of art, technology, and social engagement.

Bio: 

Joseph DeLappe, born San Francisco 1963, is an artist, activist and educator, he relocated to Scotland in 2017 after 23 years directing the Digital Media program at the University of Nevada, Reno. Working with electronic and digital media since 1983, projects in online gaming performance, sculpture and electromechanical installation have been shown throughout the world. In 2006 he began the project dead‐in‐iraq, to type consecutively, all names of America’s military casualties from the war in Iraq into the America’s Army first person shooter online recruiting game. More recently he developed the concept behind Killbox (funded in part by a Creative Scotland), an interactive computer game about drone warfare created with the Biome Collective in Scotland. Killbox was nominated for a BAFTA Scotland (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) as “Best Computer Game”. His works have been featured in the New York Times, The Australian Morning Herald, Art in America, The Guardian and the BBC. He has authored several book chapters, including “Me and My Predator(s): Tactical Remembrance and Critical Atonement, Drone Aesthetics: War, Culture, Ecology, Open Humanties Press, 2022 and “Making Politics: Engaged Social Tactics, A conversation between Joseph DeLappe and Laura Leuzzi”, Art as Social Practice: Technologies for Change, Routledge, 2022. DeLappe was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Fine Arts in 2017.

This event is co-sponsored by the Silicon Valley Archives and the Patrick Suppes Center for History & Philosophy of Science. 

Book Launch and Film Screening — Bride of Frankenstein at Gray Area, October 30, 2025

I’m excited to announce a book launch event for my new book on Bride of Frankenstein, followed by a screening of the 1935 film, on Oct. 30, 2025 at Gray Area in San Francisco! Doors open at 6:30pm, and the event starts at 7:00. I’ll have copies of the book on hand and will be happy to sign them too! More info here!

Art & Artifice: Or, What AI Means for Aesthetics — John Fekete Distinguished Lecture, Trent University, November 6, 2025

I am honored to be delivering this year’s John Fekete Distinguished Lecture at Trent University. On November 6, 2025, I will speak about my current book project, Art & Artifice: Or, What AI Means for Aesthetics.

Abstract:

The rapid spread of generative AI tools has sparked urgent debates about ethics, governance, and even existential risk. These concerns are real, but they often miss a prior and constitutive dimension: the aesthetic. In this talk, I argue that no adequate understanding of artificial intelligence—and no robust AI ethics—can be developed without sustained attention to the aesthetic forms through which AI enters human experience.

Today, many critical responses to AI focus on transparency, bias, or political economy. Yet when machine learning systems generate images, sounds, and texts, or when they infiltrate experience in subtler ways, they reshape foundational lived relations to the sensible world. Aesthetics is not merely a matter of artistic style but of the mediation of experience itself—a matter of the ways we sense, interpret, and imagine.

Accordingly, to speak of “AI aesthetics” is to invoke both aesthesis—the broad field of perception and sensation—and aesthetics in the narrower sense of artistic form. Both are crucially at stake in today’s machine-learning algorithms. AI systems like Midjourney, DALL-E, or GPT-5 not only generate potential artworks but also make otherwise invisible computational processes indirectly perceptible and actionable; in so doing they insinuate themselves into the fabric of experience and reshape the very conditions of perception. In this sense, aesthetic forms are not secondary embellishments but essential mediators of how AI becomes intelligible to us—as well as crucial vectors with respect to who “we,” as perceiving, deliberating, and agential subjects, are. By analyzing artworks that grapple with these new technologies, I show that AI aesthetics is foundational to the cultural, political, and ethical challenges now unfolding. 

More info here.

Installation at GearBox Gallery, Oakland — opening Nov. 1!

I’m excited to announce that GlitchesAreLikeWildAnimals! — BOVINE, part of a larger series of collaborations between me and Karin Denson, will be installed at GearBox Gallery in Oakland. The opening is Saturday, November 1 (1-4pm), and it will be on view through December 6 (with a closing event and artist talk starting at 2pm).

The installation comprises a set of paintings and custom software that runs a real-time generative audiovisual experience. You can read more about the piece here and here.

And here are a couple of installation shots from a recent show at 120710 Gallery in Berkeley:

Bride of Frankenstein [film|minutes] — Out now in print, open-access ebook, and special videographic/interactive editions!

My book on James Whale’s 1935 masterpiece Bride of Frankenstein, the inaugural volume in Lever Press’s new film|minutes book series, is out now! The book offers a minute-by-minute engagement with the film, combining close looking, philosophical speculation, historical contextualization, and a variety of other ekphrastic and experimental approaches. Print versions are available anywhere books are sold, including on the publisher’s website, where you can also read the open access version online or download a free EPUB or PDF.

In addition, I have programmed an interactive version of the book, which is available through the Stanford Digital Repository. There you can find apps for Mac and Windows that allow you to load a copy of the film and play it — on loop, one minute at a time — alongside the text corresponding to that minute. This way, you can immediately put my observations to the test and discover other details that complement or even challenge the claims that I make about the film. (Due to copyright restrictions, you will need to supply your own copy of the film, for example by ripping a copy from a DVD or BluRay [I used the 2018 Classic Monster Collection version], or grabbing a copy from Vimeo or the Internet Archive.)

The interactive book app is a dedicated “reader,” but if you’d prefer a different experience I have also prepared a packet of text files that can be loaded into the film|minutes video|graphic workstation — a platform for both reading and writing — that I released earlier this summer. The texts are available as a zip file at the same address as the interactive book (https://doi.org/10.25740/qj474bx8626), and the workstation is available here: https://doi.org/10.25740/xq320wq3449 (also for Windows and Mac). You’ll still need to supply your own copy of the film, but then you can load the text packet and not only read but also actively revise or rewrite my text, should you so choose.

Whether on paper, ebook, or interactive version, I hope you’ll check out this experimental book and revisit the film, which is iconic in its own right but perhaps newly relevant in an age of AI. Thanks to series editor Bernd Herzogenrath and senior acquiring editor Sean Guynes for their support of the project!