On May 22 (4:30pm, Bldg. 200, room 307), David W. Bates (Department of Rhetoric, UC Berkeley) will be discussing his new book An Artificial History of Natural Intelligence: Thinking with Machines from Descartes to the Digital Age. Merve Tekgürler will provide a response.
The Program in Modern Thought & Literature is a proud co-sponsor of the event — along with History of Philosophy & Science, the Program in Science, Technology, & Society, Stanford Communication, the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, and Stanford Symbolic Systems.
I am excited to announce that Technoskepticism: Between Possibility and Refusal, by The DISCO Network, will be the sixth volume in the Sensing Media book series! See below for a description, and see here for more info.
From Munchausen by Tiktok to wellness apps to online communities to AI, the DISCO Network explores the possibilities that technoskepticism can create.
This is a book about possibility and refusal in relation to new technologies. Though refusal is an especially powerful mode—particularly for those who have historically not been given the option to say no—people of color and disabled people have long navigated the space between saying yes and saying no to the newest technologies. Technoskepticism relates some of these stories to reveal the possibilities skepticism can create.
The case for technoskepticism unfolds across three sections: the first focused on disability, the creative use of wellness apps, and the desire for diagnosis; the second on digital nostalgia and home for Black and Asian users who produced communities online before home pages gave way to profiles; and the third focused on the violence inherent in A.I.-generated Black bodies and the possibilities for Black style in the age of A.I. Acknowledging how the urge to refuse new technologies emerges from specific racialized histories, the authors also emphasize how care can look like an exuberant embrace of the new.
About the author
The DISCO Network is an intergenerational collective of researchers, artists, technologists, policymakers, and practitioners working together to challenge digital social and racial inequalities. Participants include David Adelman, André Brock, Aaron Dial, Stephanie Dinkins, Rayvon Fouché, Huan He, Jeff Nagy, Lisa Nakamura, Catherine Knight Steele, Rianna Walcott, Kevin Winstead, Remi Yergeau, and Lida Zeitlin-Wu.
Just out in print and open access: Technics (edited by Nicholas Baer and Annie van den Oever) is a wide-ranging and in-depth exploration of contemporary technologies, techniques, and technics more broadly.
I am happy to have made a small contribution to the volume, one of “Ten Statements on Technics,” by André Brock, Dominique Chateau, Beth Coleman, Shane Denson, Amanda Egbe, Yuriko Furuhata, Tom Gunning, Jeffrey West Kirkwood, Laura Mulvey, and Jean-Christoph Plantin.
Take a look at the whole volume — there’s a lot of good stuff in there!
At long last, Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film is now available in a print edition! The 1000-page volume, originally published in open-access formats (HTML and PDF) in 2016, can now be purchased in a four-volume paperback format.
In accordance with the original Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND), the paperbacks are sold at cost; the purchase price covers only the printing. As a result, they are quite affordable (around $8.00 each).
The book as a whole asks: If cinema and television, as the dominant media of the 20th century, shaped and reflected our cultural sensibilities, how do new digital media in the 21st century help to shape and reflect new forms of sensibility? In this collection, editors Shane Denson and Julia Leyda have gathered a range of essays that approach this question by way of a critical engagement with the notion of “post-cinema.” The contributions take as their critical starting-points concepts such as David Bordwell’s “intensified continuity” or Steven Shaviro’s “post-cinematic affect” and “post-continuity.” They expand and build upon the ideas of these and a range of other thinkers, with the goal of coming to terms with an apparently new media ecology that requires us to search for a fresh critical vocabulary. By examining the experiential, technological, political, historical, and ecological aspects of the transition from a cinematic to a post-cinematic media regime, the chapters explore key questions in breaking this new ground, seeking and articulating both continuities and disjunctures between film’s first and second centuries. Questions of aesthetics and form overlap with investigations of changing technological and industrial practices, contemporary formations of capital, and cultural concerns such as identity and social inequalities. The impact of digitization on taken-for-granted conventions is also in play: intermediality, new forms of distribution both licit and illicit, academic and critical reliance on genres and discrete media formats – all of these come under scrutiny as paradigms shift in the post-cinematic era.
Volume I comprises the Introduction and Parts 1 & 2, “Parameters for Post-Cinema” and “Experiences of Post-Cinema”:
Volume II comprises Parts 3 and 4: “Techniques and Technologies of Post-Cinema” and “Politics of Post-Cinema”:
Volume III comprises Parts 5 and 6: “Archaeologies of Post-Cinema” and “Ecologies of Post-Cinema”:
Finally, Volume IV comprises the conversations and roundtables contained in Part 7: “Dialogues on Post-Cinema”:
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!
Book launch in the Terrace Room, Margaret Jacks Hall, Nov. 6, 2023It was a packed house. Gave away 40 copies of my book!A long overdue gathering of friends and colleagues. My last book came out in the deepest Zoom time of the pandemic, so I had to make up for it!Discussing Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Pulse series, which I write about in Chapter 5.Wonderful response from Annika Butler-Wall, focusing on the implications of my book for feminist studies of technology.Hank Gerba introducing Scott BukatmanScott Bukatman’s excellent response focused on the continuities in spirit, and changes in the world, from his Terminal Identity (1993) to my Post-Cinematic Bodies (2023)Bryan NortonTRONPavle LeviWith Sepp GumbrechtWith Grace HanCheers!
On November 6, 2023 at 5:30 pm in the Margaret Jacks HallTerrace Room (Building 460, Room 426), I will be presenting my new book Post-Cinematic Bodies (meson press, 2023), along with responses by Professor Scott Bukatman (Film & Media Studies, Stanford), and Dr. Annika Butler-Wall (Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Stanford MTL Ph.D. ’23).
Food and drinks will be provided. The first 40 attendees will receive a free copy of the book.
RSVPs are encouraged but not required. Please RSVP using the linked form by October 30th if you plan on attending.
About the book:
“How is human embodiment transformed in an age of algorithms? How do post-cinematic media technologies such as AI, VR, and robotics target and re-shape our bodies? Post-CinematicBodies grapples with these questions by attending both to mundane devices—such as smartphones, networked exercise machines, and smart watches and other wearables equipped with heartrate sensors—as well as to new media artworks that rework such equipment to reveal to us the ways that our fleshly existences are increasingly up for grabs. Through an equally philosophical and interpretive analysis, the book aims to develop a new aesthetics of embodied experience that is attuned to a new age of predictive technology and metabolic capitalism.”
Speaker and Respondents
Shane Denson is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of Art & Art History and, by Courtesy, of German Studies in the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages and of Communication in Stanford’s Department of Communication. He is currently the Director of the PhD Program in Modern Thought and Literature, as well as Director of Graduate Studies in Art History. His research and teaching interests span a variety of media and historical periods, including phenomenological and media-philosophical approaches to film, digital media, comics, games, and serialized popular forms.
Scott Bukatman is a cultural theorist and Professor of Film and Media Studies at Stanford University. His research explores how such popular media as film, comics, and animation mediate between new technologies and human perceptual and bodily experience. His books include Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction, one of the earliest book-length studies of cyberculture; a monograph on the film Blade Runner commissioned by the British Film Institute; and a collection of essays, Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century. The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animating Spirit, celebrates play, plasmatic possibility, and the life of images in cartoons, comics, and cinema.
Dr. Annika Butler-Wall is a Lecturer in the Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is an interdisciplinary scholar and teacher working at the intersections of gender studies, media studies, and science and technology studies (STS). Her current research project explores how digital platforms are restructuring forms of historically feminized labor by examining platforms such as TaskRabbit, Yelp, and LinkedIn Learning.
She holds a PhD in Modern Thought and Literature with a minor in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Stanford University and a BA in American Studies and Economics from Wesleyan University. Her research has been supported by the Clayman Institute for Gender Research and the Ric Weiland Graduate Research Fellowship among others.
This event is sponsored by The Program in Modern Thought & Literature and Intermediations.
I am excited to announce that Timon Beyes’s Organizing Color: Toward a Chromatics of the Social will be the fifth volume in the Sensing Media book series! See below for a description, and see here for more info.
We live in a world that is saturated with color, but how should we make sense of color’s force and capacities? This book develops a theory of color as fundamental medium of the social.
Constructed as a montage of scenes from the past two hundred years, Organizing Color demonstrates how the interests of capital, management, governance, science, and the arts have wrestled with colour’s allure and flux. Beyes takes readers from Goethe’s chocolate experiments in search of chromatic transformation to nineteenth-century Scottish cotton mills designed to modulate workers’ moods and productivity, from the colonial production of Indigo in India to globalized categories of skin colorism and their disavowal. Tracing the consumption, control and excess of industrial and digital color, other chapters stage encounters with the literary chromatics of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow processing the machinery of the chemical industries, the red of political revolt in Godard’s films, and the blur of education and critique in Steyerl’s Adorno’s Grey.
Contributing to a more general reconsideration of aesthetic capitalism and the role of sensory media, this book seeks to pioneer a theory of social organization—a “chromatics of organizing”—that is attuned to the protean and world-making capacity of color.
Timon Beyes is Professor of Sociology of Organisation and Culture at Leuphana University Lüneburg.
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Endorsements:
“The immanent critique and ‘tender empiricism’ of this book, its eloquence and capacity to move from detailed grounding to exciting passages of speculative thought, ensures that Organizing Color escapes ‘the archaic stillness of the book.’ Impressively researched and written.”
—Seán Cubitt, University of Melbourne
“Inventive, brilliantly written, and very readable, Organizing Color recovers and explicates the relevance of color to social form—be that chromatic or racialized color.”
—Esther Leslie, Birkbeck, University of London
“Organizing is often imagined as a functional concept that belongs in business schools. In this beautifully written and illustrated book, Timon Beyes sprinkles aesthetics and politics over this black and white picture. The result is a breathtaking work that will change the way we understand how to ‘see’ organization.”
