“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. 

CFP: Stanford-Leuphana Summer Academy on Humanities and Media 2026: Periodization

After a one-year hiatus, the Stanford-Leuphana Summer Academy on Humanities and Media is back! The theme for 2026 is Periodization, and we’ll meet for the week of June 22-26 in Berlin.

How, why, and with what epistemic implications is history divided into temporal segments? Periodizations—whether in the form of epochs, ages, turning points, or more heroic “eras”—belong to the most fundamental and at the same time most frequently contested historiographical operations in literary, art, and media studies. Although they “have no witnesses” (Blumenberg), they constitute a persistent schematism that has proven extremely productive since the so‑called »saddle time« (Koselleck). Periodizations structure time and allow for “significant” markers, enable narrative schemes, stabilize institutions and epistemologies, and in this way also shape concepts of the future and of expected caesuras. They operate as lasting calls to recognize patterns which, when new ones are discovered, may dissolve or remain resilient and continue to have an effect. In recent years, a renewed problematization has emerged—in the name of re‑periodizations (“Anthropocene”), de‑periodizations (“broad present”), or comparative and global perspectives and other temporalities (“multiple modernities”). Yet these approaches do not escape the legacy of periodization; rather, they are often blind to its recursive and pattern‑forming operations. 

The Stanford–Leuphana Summer Academy 2026: Periodization will address the following core areas: theories and models of periodization (e.g. epochal thresholds, longue durée, kairos, tipping points); epistemological foundations and implications of the division of time; critique of traditional concepts of epochs; media and disciplinary histories of periodization in different fields (history, literature, philosophy, art, theology, etc.); global perspectives on periodization (asynchronicity, but also cyclical, genealogical, or cosmological temporal orders); and the media and materialities of periodization (calendars, chronicles, exhibitions, textbooks, AI, forensics). 

Core Faculty

1. Adrian Daub (Comparative Literature, Stanford)

2. Shane Denson (Film & Media Studies, Stanford)

3. Ute Holl (Media Studies, Basel)

4. Gertrud Koch (Film Studies, Leuphana) 

5. Sybille Krämer (Philosophy, Leuphana)

6. Lea Pao (German Studies, Stanford)

7. Claus Pias (History and Epistemology of Media, Leuphana)

8. Aileen Robinson (Theater & Performance Studies, Stanford)

Special Guests

Timon Beyes (Sociology of Organization and Culture, Leuphana)

Wolfgang Ernst (Media Theory, Humboldt University Berlin)

further guests to be announced… 

Application

All applications from advanced doctoral candidates must be submitted electronically in PDF format. Please submit your CV (1-2 pages) along with a 500-word abstract of your topic and a short letter of intent explaining why you would like to attend this Summer Academy.

   Please use the following naming convention for your application files: Lastname_CV.pdf,

Lastname_Abstract.pdf, Lastname_Letter_of_Intent.pdf. Please email your applications by March 13, 2026 to stanleu@leuphana.de.

   The working language of the Summer Academy will be English. The organizers will cover travel (economy) and accommodation costs for the time of the summer school. No additional fees will be charged. 

General information

The Stanford-Leuphana Summer Academy on Humanities and Media addresses the intersection between individual humanities disciplines and studies of media and technology from a variety of historical, systematic, and methodological perspectives. As we live in a time when new technologies are emerging at an increasingly rapid pace, the Academy seeks to address vital questions about how different media can drive political and social change, but it also inquires into the assumptions and values that produce technological artifacts. Media studies and media theory intersect with various disciplines in the humanities and social sciences that treat the transmission of information, the formation of social networks, and the embodiment of knowledge in technological artifacts. Therefore, the Academy will bring together faculty and students from various branches of the humanities and social sciences to think about how »mediality« permeates these disciplines in distinct ways; we will approach these issues not only from a robustly interdisciplinary vantage but also by way of comparative cultural and historical perspectives. In this way, the Academy will contribute to our understanding of the fundamental ways that forms of media and technological mediation inform disciplinary knowledge across the humanities, as well as the ways that these disciplinary knowledge formations are an essential precondition to any serious thinking about mediality. 

Click the image above to read the full CFP!

“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 StudiesInformation Society; Archivaria; JDoc; Porn StudiesCatalyst: 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. 

“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. 

“Making Politics: Commemoration, Resistance, and Play” — Joseph DeLappe at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, Oct. 22, 2025

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. 

Roundtable on AI and Media — Sun-ha Hong, Johan Fredrikzon, Julia Irwin, and Hank Gerba at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, May 20, 2025

On May 20, 2025, the Digital Aesthetics Workshop will hold our final event for the year: a roundtable on AI and Media featuring Sun-ha Hong (UNC-Chapel Hill), Johan Fredrikzon (KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm), Julia Irwin (Stanford University), and Hank Gerba (University of Southern California).

The event will take place from 5:00-7:00pm PT in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room. Zoom link for those unable to join in-person: tinyurl.com/5n8mdpbb

Schedule :

5:00-5:15: Sun-ha Hong | Ruins of the Technofuture

5:15-5:30: Johan Fredrikzon | Prompting the Dead: Technological Spiritualism in the Age of Machine Learning

5:30-5:45: Julia Irwin | William James’s Neural Network, Fringe Consciousness, and Historical Time

5:45-6:00: Hank Gerba | The Generative Image

6:00-7:00: Q&A

Sun-ha Hong | Ruins of the Technofuture

Where are the ruins of artificial intelligence and the data-driven future, and what do they have to tell us? While abandoned data centres, electronics waste landfills, and vast mineral mining operations already cover large swathes of the planet in material destruction, we must also think of technofutures’ gleaming monuments as ruin: the litany of prototypes never to be built, the construction lots of AI-fuelled smart cities and utopian colonies (Neom), the loudly announced then quietly shriveled infrastructure projects (Stargate).

I will suggest three distinct genres of ruin, and the different theories of technological futures they prescribe: (1) the disavowed ruin, and contemporary AI futures’ total denial of decay and historicity, exemplified by the Bezos-funded 10,000 Year Clock; (2) the manufactured ruin, theorised by Albert Speer, the chief architect of the Third Reich; (3) the redemptory ruin in which, Walter Benjamin tells us, ruins provide a progressive alternative for articulating future visions.

Sun-ha Hong examines forms of uncertainty, doubt, speculation and (dis)belief around surveillance, smart machines & AI. He is Associate Professor in Data Science and Communication at UNC-Chapel Hill, and previous haunts include Stanford, Simon Fraser University, MIT and Penn. Sun-ha once wrote Technologies of Speculation (2020), and will one day complete Predictions Without Futures.

Johan Fredrikzon | Prompting the Dead: Technological Spiritualism in the Age of Machine Learning

Technical media of recording and playback have, since the 19th century at least, been employed in attempts to contact the spirits of the dead. In these histories of technological spiritualism, humans themselves have often played the role of “media.” In this talk, I compare the mid 20th century phenomenon of Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) where tape recorders allegedly picked up messages from “the other side” with so called deadbots: machine learning systems trained to simulate deceased people. In particular, the talk will note the significance of error and labor in these practices and how they distribute the effort of interpretation between user and machine.

Johan Fredrikzon is a researcher at the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. He is currently a visiting scholar at Stanford University. In 2022–2024 he was a visiting postdoc fellow at The University of California, Berkeley. Fredrikzon holds a Master of Computer Science from Stockholm University where he also received his Ph.D. in the History of Ideas in 2021. In his research, Fredrikzon has been interested in problems of erasure, disappearance, waste, and decay as conditioned by processes of data management, office work, and archival practices. During 2018–19 he was a research affiliate at Yale University. Fredrikzon’s current research project is a three-year study of the history of artificial intelligence (AI) from the perspective of errors and mistakes in humans and machines respectively, funded by the Swedish Research Council.

Julia Irwin | William James’s Neural Network, Fringe Consciousness, and Historical Time

This talk situates philosopher-psychologist William James as an originator of the neural network concept. I recover his ideas about the human mind and brain’s “fringe” qualities, which I argue are a precedent condition for human reason and creativity. Fringe consciousness is an ambiguous sensation—like the contents of one’s peripheral vision—that opens up the habituating nervous system to the possibility of novelty. It is also the very element within the mind and brain that cyberneticians overlooked; indeed, the electromechanical replication of the nervous system was possible because of the elision of fringe consciousness.

Contemporary discourse on AI either takes the position that statistically driven AI can merely rearrange past phenomena in the dataset or that deep-learning systems’ capacity to re-write their own objectives will bring about unprecedented calamity. History is either frozen or marked by an imminent radical break. Yet neither stance helps us understand what it means to be an agent of history in the age of artificial intelligence. In re-animating James’s concept, I articulate a new path for thinking with and against today’s intelligent machines, one that pushes us beyond replacement vs. augmentation narratives.

Julia Irwin is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Art and Art History and the Institute for Human-Centered AI at Stanford University. She researches the history and philosophy of artificial intelligence, with a focus on the relationship between theories of intelligence and automation. Her writing has appeared in Grey Room, Film History, and Ki (Qui Parle). She holds a PhD in Film & Media from UC Berkeley.

Hank Gerba | The Generative Image

What does artificial intelligence signal about the nature of images? This talk investigates the way in which AI externalizes and operationalizes the imaginative capacities which influence the genetic process of image-formation.

Hank Gerba holds a Ph.D from Stanford’s Film & Media Program within the Art & Art History Department. Their work focuses on media aesthetics and AI. Currently, Hank is a researcher at the University of Southern California, combining narrative theory with generative AI.

“Streaming Capital” — Thomas Pringle at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, April 29, 2025

Please join the Digital Aesthetics Workshop in welcoming Thomas Pringle, who will present “Streaming Capital: Digital Aesthetics and Natural Infrastructure” on Tuesday, April 29, from 5:00-7:00pm PT. The event will take place in the Board Room at the Stanford Humanities Center. We look forward to seeing you there!

Zoom link for those unable to join in-person: https://tinyurl.com/34unt7nc

Abstract:

In 2022, Netflix launched “Net Zero + Nature,” a program offsetting the streaming giant through purchase of carbon credits generated by the Wildlife Works Kasigau Corridor REDD+ Project. Promotional materials assert that trees growing in Kenya are an infrastructure supporting resource-intensive streaming media. Recent digital media have been critiqued as industrial, environmentally destructive processes. Yet this project suggests that the isomorphic relationships between an image and its ecological impact are aesthetic, with the Netflix offset program indexing a broader media-historical rationality linking digital representation to economically conditioned forms of physical change. What media-historical a priori lend legibility to the statement: environments are media infrastructure? 

In the late 1950s, cybernetic ecologist Howard Odum studied Corpus Christi Bay during his tenure at the Marine Institute at the University of Texas. Concerned with how ongoing petroleum logistical development threatened the turtle grass beds crucial to the estuary ecosystem, Odum drew on images of electrical circuitry to analogize seagrass to the local hay market, estimating that the work performed by the bay’s photosynthesis was worth $97.46 per acre per year. Turtle grass conservation would thus support various modes of production: fishing, tourism, natural gas electricity generation, and the ecological metabolism of industrial sludge. This humble act of labor-free monetization is among the first recorded arguments that conserved environments serve as infrastructure, or in Odum’s words as “life support functions supporting the economy without much conscious recognition.” In the context of recent degrowth advocacy, this case initiates a media historical narration of the aesthetic forms signifying the productivity of “natural infrastructures.” 

Bio:

Thomas Patrick Pringle is Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. With Gertrud Koch and Bernard Stiegler, he is the co-author of Machine (Meson and University of Minnesota Press, 2019). Pringle’s research on environmental media appears in NECSUS: European Journal of Media StudiesJournal of Film and VideoMedia-N, and New Media and Society, as well as the volumes Toxic Immanence: Decolonizing Nuclear Legacies and Futures (2022) and Power Shift: Keywords for a New Politics of Energy (2025). 

This event has been generously co-sponsored by the Woods Institute for the Environment, the Department of English, the Department of Communication, and the Program in Science, Technology, and Society.

“where do old sounds go to die?” and “murnau model” — Critical Making Collaborative, May 16, 2025

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.

“Forms in Motion” — Kartik Nair at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, April 25, 2025

Please join us in welcoming our next speaker at the Digital Aesthetics Workshop, Kartik Nair, who will present on “Forms in Motion: Elemental Effects in Contemporary Cinema” on Friday, April 25, 1:00-3:00pm PT. The event will take place in McMurtry 370, where lunch will be served.

Zoom link for those unable to join in-person: https://tinyurl.com/y48zask7

Abstract:

Motion capture is the practice of recording the movements of human bodies and using those movements to animate computer-generated bodies, thereby producing virtual character movement on the screen. Current scholarship on motion capture has critically examined the construction of this technology in trade reportage, industry journalism, and film promotion, detecting a discursive ambivalence arising from a struggle for recognition between live actors and motion capture technicians over the future of film performance. This talk will use motion capture as a heuristic to understand the many other kinds of human movements that are being captured in the processes of digital image-making. I will track the pipeline of atmospheric effects. Such atmospheric effects are ubiquitous in contemporary blockbuster cinema. Dust, fire, smoke, light, water and other particulate proliferate in the mise en scene, helping to ground impossible worlds even as they fascinate us with their own expressive qualities. Replacing the logic of photographic capture with one in which the frame is a ‘blank canvas’ to which elements are selectively added, such atmospheric effects vividly attest to the claim that digital tools have re-linked filmmaking with painting. Yet, unlike the painted canvas, which preserves brushstrokes in frozen perpetuity, virtual effects inscribe a trace of and in motion: these are instances in which the creative and corporeal motion of visual effects artists is captured and conveyed as motion. This process unfolds along a transnational path along which the mobile trace moves. Even as those generating it may remain immobilized by visa regulations, server locations, and time-zone differentials, their physical moves are eventually ex-propriated and assimilated into screen movement. Closely read, then, the spectacular conventions of blockbuster cinema can become legible as archives in and of motion.

Bio:

Kartik Nair is a film scholar working at the intersection of transnational cinema, film historiography, materialist media theory, and infrastructure studies, with a focus on popular genres and South Asian cinema. His first book, Seeing Things, is about the production and circulation of low-budget horror films in 1980s India. His current research explores the physical pipelines of digital cinema. He is an Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Temple University in Philadelphia, and one of the core editors of BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies.

This event has been generously co-sponsored by the Department of Art & Art History and the Stanford Center for South Asia.

“The Productivity of Artificial Flatness” — Sybille Krämer at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, April 8, 2025

We’re delighted to welcome our next speaker for the Digital Aesthetics Workshop, the first of the Spring quarter. Sybille Krämer present on “The Productivity of Artificial Flatness: On Digitality, The Cultural Technique of Flattening, and Artificial Intelligence” on Tuesday, April 8, from 5-7pm PT. The event will take place in the Board Room at the Stanford Humanities Center, where refreshments will be served.

Zoom link for those unable to join in-person: tinyurl.com/38vjpaz6

Abstract:

Do chatbots understand human language? This is one of the most debated issues about contemporary artificial intelligence, oscillating between the opposing answers ‘able to understand’ (meaning-sensitive) and ‘unable to understand’ (meaning-blind). In this talk, I argue in favor of meaning blindness by highlighting several issues that are not considered enough in the debate. My arguments are based on a media-philosophical and cultural-technical approach. Artificial intelligence is becoming a ‘cultural technique’ in transitioning from print culture to digital literacy. However, it is an alien and non-human kind of performing intelligence and processing language. Not similarity and homology but difference and diversity are the foundations for successful interaction between humans and AI. This is explained by analogy with the ‘cultural technique of flattening’: Projecting visual and textual information into the two-dimensionality of inscribed and illustrated surfaces is not deformation and impoverishment, but a creative force. What is the key to the scientific and artistic productivity of artificial flatness (images, writings, diagrams, maps, screens)? And what is the connection between the cultural technique of flattening and Chatbots’ token-statistical operations?

Speaker Bio:

Sybille Krämer was a Full Professor for Philosophy at the Free University Berlin; since retirement in 2018, a guest professor at the Institute Cultures and Aesthetics of Digital Media, Leuphana University Lueneburg. Previously a member of the German ‘Scientific Council’ (2000-2006), of the European Research Council (2007-2014)); member of the ‘Senat’ of the ‘German Research Foundation’ (2009-2015), ‘Permanent Fellow’ at the ‘Wissenschaftskolleg’ zu Berlin/ Institute for Advanced Study (2005-2008). Several International Visiting Professorships and Fellowships (Oxford, UC Santa Barbara, Yale, Vienna, Seoul, Shanghai, Tokyo); 2016 Honorary Doctorate by Linköping University/Sweden.

This event is generously co-sponsored by the Stanford Literary Lab.