Category: Talks

Animating Sites of Becoming — Poyen Wang and Heesoo Kwon at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, April 28, 2026

We are pleased to announce our first event of spring quarter! Poyen Wang and Heesoo Kwon will join us for a joint talk on Tuesday, April 28, from 5-6:30pm PT. The event, titled, “Animating Sites of Becoming,” will take place in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room. Refreshments will be served.

Zoom link for those unable to join in-person: tinyurl.com/mrx4ndz2

Poyen Wang | Cultvating Chora: CGI, Interiority, and Queer Presence

Through recent practice, Wang situates CGI world-building within the discursive terrains of psychoanalysis and queer theory, proposing a parallel mode of thinking in which digital environments function as both mental architectures and sites of becoming. Wang approaches CGI not simply as a representational tool but as a method of inquiry—one that constructs, destabilizes, and reconfigures interior worlds. Drawing on the concept of Chora as an ambiguous, unnamable, and unstable spatial condition, Wang treats CGI image-making as a form of writing through which narrative emerges not as a linear structure but as emotional accumulation, positioning queerness not as identity but as a condition of continual becoming. The work asks: how might digital image-making rearticulate interiority, and what forms of presence emerge when it is staged as a performative, psychological scene? 

Bio:

Poyen Wang is an artist and filmmaker born and raised in Taiwan, currently based in New York City. His work approaches the moving image as a theatrical, performative medium, staging psychologically charged scenes that explore intimacy, vulnerability, and power. Through cinematic tropes, spoken word, and atmospheric composition, he constructs a poetics of queer presence—fleeting, fractured, and unresolved—while interrogating the power dynamics of image-making. In his work, viewing becomes a charged exchange where gaze and presence interweave, dissolving the boundaries between spectator and subject.

Wang’s work has recently been included in Greater New York 2026 at the MoMA PS1. He has presented work at institutions and venues including Asia Art Archive in America; 99 Canal, New York; Essex Flowers, New York; Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn; Kasseler Kunstverein and Kasseler Dokfest, Kassel; Wassaic Project, New York; the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; Taipei Digital Art Center, Taipei; and 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica, among others. He teaches in the Department of Film and Media at Hunter College in New York City.

Heesoo Kwon | Between Body and Code 

Heesoo Kwon’s practice unfolds through Leymusoom, an ongoing autobiographical feminist religion she initiated in 2017. Her work brings together personal life, family histories, Korean mythology, and ritual practices to explore how memory, identity, and relationships evolve over time. Working across video, installation, photography, and digital media, Kwon uses CGI and AI to build interconnected worlds. Through projects such as Leymusoom Firefly and Premolt, she creates an evolving archive linking personal and ancestral memory, often reimagining her female ancestors as digital bodies. Her work reconsiders family, lineage, and time, exploring how digital and spiritual frameworks can reshape memory, the body, and collective experience.

Bio:

Heesoo Kwon is a Korean multimedia artist whose  work engages in ritualistic, autoethnographic, and archival practices. Employing 3D animation, modeling and artificial intelligence technologies as procreant tools to forge and traverse realms, Kwon engages in the rewriting of mythic matrilineal histories, the queering of familial relations, and the envisioning of decentralized communities and memoryscapes, notably through the self-referential, feminist religion Leymusoom, and the Firefly series which takes as its genesis AI-augmented family photographs from the artist’s childhood. In Kwon’s heterotopic hyperspaces, she abstracts concepts of time and memory, transcending the legacies of sacrifice, trauma and patriarchal violence to offer instead transformative modes of existence, liberation and community. 

Kwon received a Master of Fine Arts at the University of California, Berkeley, and is currently an Assistant Professor in the Animation department at the California College of the Arts. Her work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, Stanford; Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa; Buk Seoul Museum of Arts, Seoul; Huis Marseille, Amsterdam; V&A Museum, London; Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam; West Den Haag, The Hague; Centre Wallonie Bruxelles, Paris; M+, Hong Kong; and WMA Space, Hong Kong. Kwon is the recipient of the 2025 New & Experimental Works (NEW) Program Grant from the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, the 2025 Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation, the 2024 Trellis Art Fund Stepping Stone Grant, the 2023 Artadia Award, and the 2022 Hewlett 50 Arts Commission. Her work is in the permanent collections of KADIST, Cantor Arts Center, and Huis Marseille.

This event is generously co-sponsored by the Asian American Research Center at Stanford and Asian American Art Initiative. 

“A Company of Authors” — April 18, 2026

On April 18, I’ll be part of the 23rd annual “A Company of Authors” event at Stanford, where faculty present their new books. This will be my third time! Talking about my recent book on Bride of Frankenstein.

More info about the event here: https://continuingstudies.stanford.edu/company-of-authors-spring-2026

Artist Panel: EXTRA/PHENOMENALITIES — Feb 23, 2026

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.

More info here: https://events.stanford.edu/event/artist-panel-extraphenomenalities

“Isn’t Artisanal Intelligence K(NOT) AI?” — Katherine Behar at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, Feb. 25, 2026

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. 

Zoom link for those unable to join in person: https://tinyurl.com/4rfhj2cs

Abstract:

“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. 

Artist Panel: EXTRA/PHENOMENALITIES — Feb. 23, 2026

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.

More info here: https://events.stanford.edu/event/artist-panel-extraphenomenalities

“Processing Pleasure” — Patrick Keilty at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, Feb. 3, 2026

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.

Zoom link for those unable to join in person: https://tinyurl.com/msswtafb

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. 

Methods Cafe: “Race, Repetition, and Seriality in Games and Contemporary Media” — Austin Anderson and Shane Denson in Conversation, Feb. 11, 2026

 “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. 

More info here.

InterPlay Salon at Cantor Arts Center, Feb 5, 2026

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.

More info and registration here.

“The Latent Space of Meaning and the Novel” — Hannes Bajohr at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, Jan. 13, 2026

We are excited to announce our first event of 2026! Hannes Bajohr will present on “The Latent Space of Meaning and the Novel” on Tuesday, January 13, from 5-6:30pm PT. The event will take place in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room. Refreshments will be served.

Zoom link for those unable to join in-person: tinyurl.com/3xm7rdku

We look forward to seeing you there!

Abstract: 

“A world – nothing less – is the theme and postulate of the novel,” German philosopher Hans Blumenberg wrote in 1963. At that same moment, AI research, already emerging from its early optimism, turned to “world models” as a means of stabilizing its brittle systems. Today, these two conceptions of “world” – the literary and the computational – converge in large language models (LLMs), which use their latent spaces not just to generate plausible sentences, but entire narratives, even novels, albeit with still uneven results. Yet in what sense are the “worlds” of novels and of AI analogous, and what can each illuminate about the other?

The talk proposes that both novels and LLMs operate within structured networks of relations – assemblages of events, inferences, and expectations – that can yield a form of coherence even when classical causality is weak or absent. Literary techniques from realism to modernism build patterned universes: realist and naturalist fiction through causal-social dynamics, genre fiction through explicit world-building, and modernism through fragmented but still intelligible world-logics. These traditions offer a vocabulary for assessing LLM-generated texts. 

Where early systems like SHRDLU pursued explicit symbolic world models and failed outside narrow domains, contemporary LLMs rely on distributed vector spaces that encode statistical regularities without grounding. My own experiments with a fine-tuned German-language model yielded narratives with stylistic unity but little causal depth. Like certain experimental novels, they evoke meaning through a “weak force” of association rather than strong narrative causality. This talk tries to follow these ideas and aims to resist both overhyping LLMs’ understanding and dismissing them as mere mimicry, thus placing AI-generated fiction, as the meeting points of the two uses of “world,” within a broader theory of modeling and meaning.

Bio:

Hannes Bajohr, is Assistant Professor of German at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on media studies, political philosophy, philosophical anthropology, and theories of the digital. Recent publications include: Thinking with AI: Machine Learning the Humanities (as editor, London: Open Humanities Press) and “Surface Reading LLMs: Synthetic Text and its Styles” (arXiv preprint, forthcoming in New German Critique). In 2027, the English-language translation of his LLM-co-generated novel (Berlin, Miami) will appear with MIT Press.

This event is generously co-sponsored by the Stanford Literary Lab and Stanford Department of English. 

“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.