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.”
I have had the good fortune to be a Faculty Research Fellow at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research over the past academic year, which has given me an opportunity to work on a new project that thinks about serialization in digital cultures as a vector of change. The larger project takes off from Sartre’s concept of “seriality” (as developed in his late Critique of Dialectical Reason) and connects it to forms of serialized media in order to think about reconfigurations of class, gender, and race. Back in March, I presented some of the work pertaining to gender and embodiment to my colleagues at the Clayman, and they have now posted a short write-up about it. Here’s the (controversial) crux:
Also enjoy this image that I used to illustrate my talk!
Please enjoy this goofy selfie with book and pandemic hair, which I made for Duke University Press’s virtual booth at the College Art Association’s annual conference. During the conference, Duke UP is having another big sale: from now until March 31, you can use the code CAA21 to save 40% off all in-stock books and journals, including Discorrelated Images: https://www.dukeupress.edu/discorrelated-images
Please join us for an exciting, interactive event next Tuesday, November 10th at 5 pm (PT) with libi rose striegl who runs the Media Archaeology Lab at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
libi will be giving a virtual tour and demonstration of pieces from the Media Archaeology Lab collection, followed by a defamiliarization exercise in the form of a Take It Apart(y). Participants are invited to take-apart-along with libi, dissecting and deciphering a piece of household technology. It’s probably best to use something already broken, if you’re not confident with re-assembly!
libi rose striegl is an artist, teacher and friend of mechanisms who currently manages the Media Archaeology Lab. She is perpetually ambivalent about technology. Her work ranges from anarchival exploration to large-scale installation, and she is co-founder of artrepreneurial start-up sharing turtle and one half of audiovisual experiment Prayer Generator. libi recently defended her dissertation ‘Voluntary De-Convenience’ for the PhD in Intermedia Arts, Writing and Performance at CU Boulder, and holds an MFA in Experimental Documentary Arts from Duke.
The Media Archaeology Lab (MAL) was founded in 2009 by Associate Professor Lori Emerson. Their motto is “the past must be lived so that the present can be seen.”Nearly all digital media labs are conceived of as a place for experimental research using the most up-to-date, cutting-edge tools available. By contrast, the MAL—which very well might be the largest of its kind in the world—is a place for cross-disciplinary experimental research and teaching using still functioning media from the past. The MAL is propelled equally by the need to preserve and maintain access to historically important media of all kinds—from magic lanterns, projectors, and typewriters, to early personal computers from the 1970s through the 1990s; as well as early works of digital literature/art which were originally created on the hardware and software housed in the MAL.
This is deeply weird. Google Books has a summary of Discorrelated Images up, and it’s definitely not from the publisher (compare Duke University Press’s summary here). While Google’s summary is not exactly *wrong* in anything that it says, it is far from a summary of what my book is actually about — and some sentences can’t really be judged in terms of truth or accuracy, as they just don’t make sense. (For example, the second sentence: “While film theory is based on past film techniques that rely on human perception to relate frames across time, computer generated images use information to render images as moving themselves.” What does that mean?!? It’s grammatical, and it *sounds* vaguely like something I might have written, but as far as I can tell, it is meaningless.)
Moreover, from this text it sounds like the book is primarily about Michael Bay’s TRANSFORMERS with a detour through Denis Villeneuve’s BLADE RUNNER 2049. To be clear, I do write about both of these, but I also write about Guy Maddin’s algorithmic SEANCES, about Basma Alsharif’s HOME MOVIES GAZA, about desktop horror, drones, speculative execution, animation, about the relations between the phenomenology of perception in relation to microtemporal and subperceptual events, about videogames, codecs, streaming video, and the end of the world.
Anyway, who wrote this summary? Why do I think it was a machine?
Critical Practices Unit (CPU) @CPUStanford gathered last week [February 25, 2020] for our first workshop on the topic of “SELF-ORGANIZED CRITICALITY”. Humans from 11 disciplines attended…
The inimitable @h_gerba opened with, “The idea is to generate a space, or more precisely an occasion, which allows us to disturb institutional distinctions between scholarship and other forms of creative work. We don’t suppose to know what critical practices means in advance nor reduce it to any meaning in particular. Axiomatics depend on an unwarranted sense of self-sufficiency and solidity, a law of non-contradiction which says A=A, full stop. We are much more interested in a fluid space which enjoys the oscillatory generativity of exploded contradiction.” (!!!)
And quoting Fred Moten, “It might be worthwhile to think of the gathering as contested matter, to linger in the break—the distance and nearness—between the thing and the case in the interest of the ones who are without interests but who are nevertheless a concern precisely because they gather, as they are gathered matter, the internally differentiated materiality of a collective head.”
Let us unfold! Much more to follow…journey along here @CPUStanford
I am happy to share the CFP for a special issue of Images Secondes on the topic of “Post-Cinema: Practices of Research and Creation,” edited by Chloé Galibert-Lainé and Gala Hernández López.
The special issue, for which I am serving on the comité scientifique (which sounds a lot cooler than “review board”), will collect traditional scholarly articles as well as contributions in other media (such as videographic criticism and experimental digital forms). Proposals are due April 20, 2020, with final submissions due September 30.
Please spread the word to anyone who might be interested in contributing to what is sure to be an exciting publication!
Exploring Cinematic Mixed Realities: Deformative Methods for Augmented and Virtual Film and Media Studies
Arguably, all cinema, with its projection of three-dimensional spaces onto a two-dimensional screen, is a form of mixed reality. But some forms of cinema are more emphatically interested in mixing realities—like Hale’s Tours (dating back to 1904), which staged its kinesthetic, rollercoaster-like spectacles of railway travel inside of a train car that rocked back and forth but otherwise remained stationary. Here the audience of fellow “passengers” experienced thrills that depended not so much on believing as on corporeally feelingthe effects of the simulation, an embodied experience that was at once an experience of simulated travel and of the technology of simulation. Evoking what Neil Harris has called an “operational aesthetic,” attention here was split, as it is in so many of our contemporary augmented and virtual reality experiences, between the spectacle itself and its means of production. That is, audiences are asked both to marvel at the fictional scenario’s spectacular images and, as in the case of the “bullet time” popularized a century later by The Matrix, to wonder in amazement at the achievement of the spectacle by its underlying technical apparatus. The popularity of “making of” videos and VFX reels attests to a continuity across cinematic and computational (or post-cinematic) forms of mixed reality, despite very important technological differences—including most centrally the emergence of digital media operating at scales and speeds that by far exceed human perception. Seen from this angle, part of the appeal—and also the effectiveness—of contemporary AR, VR, and other mixed reality technologies lies in this outstripping of perception, whereby the spectacle mediates to us an embodied aesthetic experience of the altogether nonhuman dimensionality of computational processing. But how, beyond theorizing historical precursors and aesthetic forms, can this insight be harnessed practically for the study of film and moving-image media?
Taking a cue from Kevin L. Ferguson’s volumetric explorations of cinematic spaces with the biomedical and scientific imaging software ImageJ, I have been experimenting with mixed-reality methods of analysis and thinking about the feedback loops they initiate between embodied experience and computational processes that are at once the object and the medium of analysis. Here, for example, I have taken the famous bullet-time sequence and imported it as a stack of images into ImageJ, using the 3D Viewer plugin to transform what Gilles Deleuze called cinema’s presentation of a “bloc of space-time” into a literal block of bullet-time. This emphatically post-cinematic deformation uses transparency settings to gain computational insight into the virtual construction of a space that can be explored further in VR and AR settings as abstract traces of informational processing. Turned into a kind of monument that mixes human and computational spatiotemporal forms, this is a self-reflexive mixed reality that provides aesthetic experience of low-level human-computational interfacing—or, more pointedly, that re-constitutes aesthesis itself as mixed reality.
Clearly, this is an experimental approach that is not interested in positivistic ideas of leveraging digital media to capture and reconstruct reality, but instead approaches AR and VR technologies as an opportunity to transform and re-mix reality through self-reflexively recursive technoaesthetic operations. Here, for example, I have taken the bullet-time sequence, produced with the help of photogrammetric processes along with digital smoothing and chromakeying or green-screen replacement, and fed it back into photogrammetry software in order to distill a spatial environment and figural forms that can be explored further in virtual and augmented scenarios. Doing so does not, of course, present to us a “truth” understood as a faithful reconstruction of pro-filmic reality. On the contrary, the abstraction and incoherence of these objects foreground the collision of human and informatic realities and incompatible relations to time and space. If such processes have analytical or theoretical value, it resides not in a positivistic but rather a deformative relation to data, both computational and experiential. Indeed, the payoff, as I see it, of interacting with these objects is in the emergence of a new operational aesthetic, one that transforms the original operational aesthetic of the scenario—its splitting of attention between spectacle and apparatus—and redirects it to a second-order awareness of our involvement in mixed reality as itself a volatile mixture of technoaesthetic forms. Ultimately, this approach questions the boundaries between art and technology and reimagines the “doing” of digital media theory as a form of embodied, operational, and aesthetic practice.
This coming week I will be at Duke University for two events:
First, on Thursday, February 20 (5pm, exact location to be determined), I will be giving a talk titled “Aesthetics of Discorrelation” (drawing on work from my forthcoming book Discorrelated Images).
Then, on Friday, February 21 (1-3pm in Smith Warehouse, Bay 4), I will be participating in a follow-up event to the NEH Institute for Virtual and Augmented Reality for the Digital Humanities, or V/AR-DHI. I will present work on “Exploring Cinematic Mixed Realities: Deformative Methods for Augmented and Virtual Film and Media Studies” and participate in a roundtable discussion with other members of the Institute.
