Month: January 2026

“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 Studies; Information Society; Archivaria; JDoc; Porn Studies; Catalyst: 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. 

EXTRA/PHENOMENALITIES — Images and remarks from the exhibition opening, January 22, 2026

EXTRA/PHENOMENALITIES opened last Thursday, January 22, and will be up until March 13, 2026 at the Stanford Art Gallery. Here are some impressions, along with my remarks, from the opening (courtesy of Anja Ulfeldt).

Methods Cafe: “Race, Repetition, and Seriality in Games and Contemporary Media” — Austin Anderson and Shane Denson in Conversation, Feb. 11, 2026

 “Race, Repetition, and Seriality in Games and Contemporary Media.”

Videogames and race have intermingled since the earliest days of the medium, yet game studies has yet to develop a sustained methodology to contend with the racial logics and aesthetic practices embedded within game texts. How do videogames function as racial projects? Does race function as a structuring force within game design? How do the structures of repetition inherent to games hold and transmit racial meaning?

Please join us for a conversation around these questions and more between Austin Anderson (Provostial Fellow and Lecturer in English) on his in-progress book Racial Recursivity: A Methodology for Critical Race Game Studies and Shane Denson (Professor of Film & Media Studies) on his ongoing work in seriality across media forms. 

More info here.

InterPlay Salon at Cantor Arts Center, Feb 5, 2026

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 — Stanford Art Gallery — Opening Jan. 22, 2026

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

“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.