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.
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.
More info here: https://art.stanford.edu/events/extraphenomenalities
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.
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.
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:
We had an awesome opening for Phase 1 of Non/phenomenalities at 120710 Gallery this past Saturday. Looking forward to the Phase 2 opening on August 16!!!
NON/PHENOMENALITIES — a show that I am co-curating with artist Brett Amory at Gallery 120710 in Berkeley — opens July 26 with an amazing lineup of artists.
The title of this exhibition plays on the multiple senses of the “phenomenal.” On the one hand, the phenomenal is equated with spectacle and the spectacular, the exceptional appearance that dazzles its audience, like a pop phenomenon. On the other hand, phenomenality refers to the way anything whatsoever appears to our embodied senses; this less extravagant sense of the word “phenomenon” is at the heart of phenomenology and Kantian philosophy (where it is opposed to the noumenal, which can never appear to sensation).
Both senses of the phenomenal are contested and reconfigured in the contemporary networks of computational media and machine-learning algorithms. For example, AI produces a steady stream of spectacles, each more spectacular than the last, but the underlying operations are immune to human perception. In this interplay, not only the objects of perception but also the very conditions of experience are up for grabs. The phenomenal itself is conditioned by a new realm of nonphenomenality, which poses a special challenge for artists working with these new technologies.
As a way of approaching this new situation, we look to works that stage multiple aesthetic inversions of the phenomenal, ranging from the subtle or understated to the invisible. What comes to the fore when vision encounters computation’s resistance to consciousness, its “discorrelation” from the phenomenology of embodied experience? How can we perceive what artist Trevor Paglen has dubbed the “invisible images” that populate our world? And how can these inversions connect with or be illuminated by other traditions of the non/ phenomenal—for example Buddhist ideas of appearance as illusion, the Lacanian notion of the unperceived Real, or neuroscientific theories of consciousness as a nonsubstantial epiphenomenon?
Looking beyond the spectacles of contemporary technology, Non/phenomenalities asks us to imagine an aesthetics of the subtle, the muted, the “barely perceptible difference,” maybe even the boring.
The Critical Making Collaborative at Stanford invites you to our Spring event — an evening of sharing and discussion with two recipients of the Critical Making Award, Lemon Guo and J. Makary, who will present their ongoing work in music and performance on Friday, May 16 (6PM) at the CCRMA Stage (3rd floor).
Lemon Guo — where do old sounds go to die?
Since 2017, I have been visiting the Kam villages in Guizhou, China to work with the elder women singers. In my recent trips, I noticed that a sound that used to pulse through the village in all waking hours had disappeared. To make textile for clothing, many women used to spend months at a time hammering cotton outdoors. I made several field recordings of this practice, when it seemed commonplace and quotidian. As cultural tourism transformed the village soundscape, I started to listen to these files in my hard drive. In this piece, the performers were only allowed to listen to these recordings in the first rehearsal. They were not told that the field recordings would be taken away from them. This performance is made from what they can remember.
J. Makary — murnau model
For murnau model, I used a machine learning model trained on still frames from F. W. Murnau’s 1924 silent film The Last Laugh/Der letzte Mann to generate new hypothetical images that emerge from its lengthy dream sequence. After subsequent interventions to guide image generation and alter their evolution, the images were “married” back to the film through photographic capture of individual frames of the physical filmstrip. By embedding these digital apparitions into the material substrate of celluloid, I intended to create a dialogue between analog and digital dreams, from film to data and back again. The resulting work becomes a reflection on cinema’s dual nature as both technological process and dream machine.
This coming Sunday, April 20, I’ll be on a roundtable with Halim Madi, Jill Miller, and Asthma Kazmi, moderated by Kate Hollenbach, organized by Gray Area at the San Francisco Art Fair.
In today’s cultural landscape, artificial intelligence has moved beyond buzzword status: machine learning-driven processes are thoroughly integrated—both visibly and invisibly—into the tools we use every day. Hailed as democratizing digital labor yet decried for diluting human creativity and agency, AI is clearly here to stay. As creators continue to experiment with AI, what has stuck? Beyond the hype, which tools and processes are making a real difference in artists’ studios, and how is that impacting a broader visual culture? How can artists reclaim agency over algorithmic processes, and take command of their own learning models? In this panel discussion presented by Gray Area, scholars of AI aesthetics and visual practitioners working with AI, will come together to map the current state of artificial intelligence and artistic creation. The panel includes Shane Denson (Professor, Stanford University Department of Communication), Halim Madi (Programmer, poet, and storyteller), Jill Miller (Visual artist and Professor, Department of Art Practice, UC Berkeley), and Asma Kazmi (artist). The discussion will be moderated by Kate Hollenbach, Education Director, Gray Area.
More info here: https://sanfranciscoartfair.com/events/unintended-outcomes-ai-in-the-artists-studio/
The Critical Making Collaborative at Stanford invites you to an evening of sharing and discussion with two recipients of the Critical Making Award, Daniel Jackson and Kimia Koochakzadeh-Yazdi, who will present their ongoing work in music and performance—Monday, March 10 (4PM) at the CCRMA Stage (3rd floor).
Alloy Resonator 0.2 – Kimia Koochakzadeh-Yazdi (Music Composition)
Alloy Resonator, a hybrid wearable instrument, embraces the fragility and rigidity of the body as an expressive medium for playing electronic music. It experiments with physical thresholds and explores ways to position the performer’s body at the center of the performance. The goal is to have every movement, whether subtle or exaggerated, become an amplified sonic gesture.
The Unit Operations Here Are Highly Specific – Daniel Jackson (Theater and Performance Studies)
The Unit Operations Here Are Highly Specific is a devised, movement-based work exploring the relationship between text, performance, and reception by allowing each audience member to choose from and switch between soundtracks while they watch a choreographed performance. The work playfully confronts the limits of personalization in the context of collective experience while interrogating how meaning is generated and where meaning resides in complex performance-media environments.