On May 7, 2024 (4:30pm in McMurtry 115), the Critical Making Collaborative at Stanford is proud to present a screening of Sunset with a Sky Background, followed by a discussion on AI aesthetics with filmmaker J. Makary and respondent Caitlin Chan.
J. Louise Makary is a filmmaker and Ph.D. candidate in art history specializing in film studies and lens-based art practices. She is interested in using methodologies foundational to the study of cinema, such as psychoanalysis and semiotics, to interpret emergent visual forms of A.I. with film in mind. Her works have been exhibited at ICA Philadelphia, Bauhaus University, the Slought Foundation, Mana Contemporary (Jersey City and Chicago), Human Resources LA, Moore College, SPACES Cleveland, and the Spring/Break Art Show.
Caitlin Chan is a second year Ph.D. student in art history. She is currently working on a project that historicizes the aesthetics and phenomenology of A.I.-generated images by tracing a genealogy to early 19th-century photographic practices of making and viewership.
The Critical Making Collaborative at Stanford proudly presents Hideo Mabuchi, Professor of Applied Physics and Denning Family Director of the Stanford Arts Institute, for a presentation titled “Weaving as Coding: Complexity and Nostalgia.” The presentation will take place on Monday, March 4 (12:30-2:00pm in the McMurtry Building, room 370). All are welcome!
In Hideo’s words:
Weaving as Coding: Complexity and Nostalgia
Textiles are cultural objects that organically support nested layers of coding. In this talk I’ll first illustrate what I mean by this with brief examples borrowed from papers in anthropology and media studies, and then discuss a small textile piece I recently wove on an eight-shaft table loom. My piece employs a traditional block draft (Bronson spot lace) and weft-faced weaving to mimic the appearance of a seven-segment numeral display, as can be found in common LED alarm clocks, and spells out the “calculator word” h-E-L-L-0 as the upside-down view of the digit string 07734. To complete the arc of the story I’ll offer a semantic mash-up of Boymian reflective nostalgia with the information-theoretic concept of algorithmic complexity, and argue on this basis that hand-weaving offers a rich paradigm for critical making that undermines framings of generative AI as a tool that augments human creativity.
As a quantum physicist devoted to the traditional crafts of ceramics and weaving, I live a kind of spiral between abstraction and materiality that keeps me dithering over what it means to know something. I profess this equivocation in my teaching, which increasingly looks to the humanities for help in relativizing rigorous thought and embodied understanding. The project I’ll discuss grew out of class prep for teaching APPPHYS100B “The Questions of Cloth: Weaving, Pattern Complexity, and Structures of Fabrics”, but I’ve only picked up on its critical making aspect as a result of things I learned while co-teaching ARTHIST284/484 “Material Metonymy: Ceramics and Asian America” with Marci Kwon.
I was pleasantly surprised to receive a copy of Cuerpos Post-Cinemáticos, a Spanish translation of Post-Cinematic Bodies, in the mail today — especially surprised since I had no idea it was being made!
Zenaida Osorio, a professor in the School of Graphic Design at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá, undertook the project with her students as a sort of critical making project. They are open about the fact that they used ChatGPT and DeepL to make the first pass at translating the open-access text, but then a team of 11 students (Alejandro Guerrero, David Inagán, Natalia Correa, Natalia Montaña, Natalie Martin, Roxana Ayala, Selina Ojeda, Sofía Bernal, Santiago Narváez, William Camacho, and Wilmer Casallas) revised and corrected the translation. The whole team added a glossary of technical terms, a commentary (in English and Spanish) before each chapter and at the end of the book, and a set of QR-code–activated “visual comments” — a set of wonderfully designed objects that link the ideas of the book to the students’ lived experience in Bogotá. They also sent me printed copies of these beautiful objects. The final product is finely crafted.
My family and I had the honor to spend a week in Bogotá at Professor Osorio’s invitation back in 2019, where I saw first-hand the amazing work that she and her students are doing there. It was a truly memorable week, which I often look back on fondly, and I hope to return there again someday. Today, I am very touched by this wonderful and unexpected gift!
I just stumbled upon this interesting looking video response from Kevin Munger to Vilém Flusser’s Communicology: Mutations in Human Relations?, which appeared in the “Sensing Media” book series that I edit with Wendy Chun for Stanford University Press.
The above (posted on Twitter here) is an excerpt of a longer video accessible if you subscribe to the New Models Patreon or Substack. I haven’t subscribed, so I’m 100% sure what to expect, but it looks provocative!
Yesterday, TheStanford Daily ran an article by student reporter Joshua Kim about the book launch of Post-Cinematic Bodies, which you can find here. Interestingly, it seems that the article was immediately picked up, processed with AI (I can only assume), and (re)published in machinically modified form, complete with a listicle-like FAQs section, by a certain “Simon Smith,” on a website illustrated exclusively with AI-generated images. Welcome, as Matthew Kirschenbaum writes, to the Textpocalypse!
I am happy to announce this year’s first two events of the Critical Making Collaborative at Stanford. Both events focus on critical and self-reflexive uses of AI at the intersection of theory and practice.
The first event, on Friday, October 13 (12-2pm in the McMurtry Building, room 360), includes a screening of Carlo Nasisse’s short film “Uncanny Earth.” In this film — which is equally about technology, ecology, human and nonhuman agency — an AI attempts to tell a story about the earth and its inhabitants. Following the screening, we will discuss the film and the many issues it raises for working and thinking critically with AI with the filmmaker.
Carlo Nasisse is a director and cinematographer. His work has been featured in the New Yorker, PBS, SXSW, Slamdance, and the New Orleans Film Festival. His most recent short film, “Direcciones”, won the Golden Gate Award for Best Documentary Short at the San Francisco Film Festival. He is currently completing his MFA at Stanford University.
RSVPs to shane.denson@stanford.edu are appreciated, though not required, so I have a rough headcount for refreshments.
The second event, on Friday, November 3 (4:30pm, location TBA), will feature Prof. Matt Smith and his wonderfully weird graphic novel remix of Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lies in an Nonmoral Sense” composed in awkward and agonistic collaboration with the AI graphics engine Midjourney — it may be humanity’s last artwork!
Matthew Wilson Smith is Professor of German Studies and of Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford. His interests include modern theatre and relations between science, technology, and the arts. His book The Nervous Stage: 19th-century Neuroscience and the Birth of Modern Theatre (Oxford, 2017) explores historical intersections between theatre and neurology and traces the construction of a “neural subject” over the course of the nineteenth century. It was a finalist for the George Freedley Memorial Award of the Theater Library Association. His previous book, The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace (Routledge, 2007), presents a history and theory of attempts to unify the arts; the book places such diverse figures as Wagner, Moholy-Nagy, Brecht, Riefenstahl, Disney, Warhol, and contemporary cyber-artists within a coherent genealogy of multimedia performance. He is the editor of Georg Büchner: The Major Works, which appeared as a Norton Critical Edition in 2011, and the co-editor of Modernism and Opera (Johns Hopkins, 2016), which was shortlisted for an MSA Book Prize. His essays on theater, opera, film, and virtual reality have appeared widely, and his work as a playwright has appeared at the Eugene O’Neill Musical Theater Conference, Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater, and other stages. He previously held professorships at Cornell University and Boston University as well as visiting positions at Columbia University and Johannes Gutenberg-Universität (Mainz).
A short text of mine titled “Streaming Mind, Streaming Body” was recently published online at In Media Res as part of a theme week on “The Contemporary Streaming Style II.” The piece connects reflections stemming from Bernard Stiegler’s philosophy of media to recent body-oriented streaming platforms like the Peloton.
You can find my piece here and the rest of the theme week (with contributions from Neta Alexander, Ethan Tussey, Carol Vernallis, and Jennifer Barker) here.
Please join the Critical Making Collaborative at Stanford for a presentation titled “Crystals, Genes, and Wool: Three Case Studies in Algorithmic Re-enactment” by Alexander R. Galloway, Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. This free event will take on Zoom on Tuesday, April 25th, from 5:00 pm to 7:00 pm PDT.
An algebraic textile pattern from 1947, a cellular automata simulation from 1953, a tabletop game from 1977 – in this online workshop, we will explore three lost or otherwise overlooked pieces of code from the deep history of computational culture. Using an experimental method dubbed “algorithmic re-enactment,” we will study these artifacts in their own historical context, while also bringing them to life again using current tools.
Alexander R. Galloway is a writer and computer programmer. He is the author of several books on digital media and critical theory, including most recently Uncomputable: Play and Politics in the Long Digital Age (Verso, 2021). Since 2001 he has worked with the Radical Software Group on Carnivore, Kriegspiel, and other software projects.
This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford. Please RSVP here to receive a Zoom link by email.
Please join the Critical Making Collaborative at Stanford for a presentation titled “Crystals, Genes, and Wool: Three Case Studies in Algorithmic Re-enactment” by Alexander R. Galloway, Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. This free event will take place in Room 115 at the McMurtry Building (355 Roth Way, Stanford, CA 94305) on Wednesday, March 8th, from 3:00 pm to 5:00 pm.
An algebraic textile pattern from 1947, a cellular automata simulation from 1953, a tabletop game from 1977 – in this workshop, we will explore three lost or otherwise overlooked pieces of code from the deep history of computational culture. Using an experimental method dubbed “algorithmic re-enactment,” we will study these artifacts in their own historical context, while also bringing them to life again using current tools.
Alexander R. Galloway is a writer and computer programmer. He is author of several books on digital media and critical theory, including most recently Uncomputable: Play and Politics in the Long Digital Age (Verso, 2021). Since 2001 he has worked with the Radical Software Group on Carnivore, Kriegspiel, and other software projects.
This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford.
Amerika, a renowned remix artist and theorist, has put together a fitting and original provocation, challenging the theory/practice divide by co-authoring his book with the open source artificial intelligence GPT-2. Appropriately enough, GPT-2’s successor, GPT-3, has provided a blurb for the book:
“This book is so radically different from anything else out there, it has the potential to revolutionize the way you think about human history and the origins of the world.”
“This book is an expression of the truth that you’re a robot.”
“This book explains how our society is turning into a mechanical paradise, and how we’re doomed.”
