Today I have a short piece in Outland on AI art and its embodied processing, as part of a larger suite of articles curated by Mark Amerika.
The essay offers a first taste of something I’m developing at the moment on the phenomenology of AI and the role of aesthetics as first philosophy in the contemporary world — or, AI aesthetics as the necessary foundation of AI ethics.
Please note: Due to factors outside of my control, the book launch event for Post-Cinematic Bodies, originally scheduled for this Thursday June 29, has been postponed to next Monday, July 3 at 7pm.
I am happy to announce that I will be in conversation with Mark B. N. Hansen!
Please also note the change of venue, to the Kurfürstenstraße location of Hopscotch Reading Room!
[UPDATE: POSTPONED TO JULY 3 — MORE INFO HERE]
On Thursday, June 29, Hopscotch Reading Room (Gerichtstraße 43 in the Wedding district of Berlin) will be hosting a book launch event for my new book Post-Cinematic Bodies — which will be out both in print and open-access digital formats from meson press. There will be paperbacks available for purchase at the launch, and they’ll be more widely available soon afterwards. If you’re in town, come out around 7pm for a short reading, discussion, and drinks!
[UPDATE: POSTPONED TO JULY 3 — MORE INFO HERE]
I had the good fortune to attend the Getty Graduate Symposium, featuring graduate students from all of the PhD-granting Art History programs in California, this February at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Videos of all the talks are now online here.
Above, I am just posting the final session, the final talk of which features an excellent talk by my advisee Grace Han, who spoke about “re-animating Lost Time through remixed time: Jacolby Satterwhite, Jon Rafman, and the Generative Archive” (starting around 45 min. in).
I have been sitting on this news for a while now, and I am excited that I can finally share it: Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and I are editing a new book series at Stanford University Press called “Sensing Media” that is devoted to the aesthetics, philosophies, and cultures of media.
We are especially interested in contributions that rethink media aesthetics, understood broadly to include both artistic uses of media and their sensory dimensions; that conceive media as the site where art and technology converge; and that expand the scope of media-philosophical discussions to include global and heretofore marginalized perspectives. We are excited to explore the connections between sensory forms and their infrastructures, between media technologies and aesthetic sensibilities, and more generally between media and the many possible worlds they disclose.
Please spread the word about the new series, and consider submitting your manuscripts. If you have questions, you can direct them to me, Wendy Chun, or Executive Editor Erica Wetter, with whom we are thrilled to be working on this series. We look forward to learning about your work!
The Digital Aesthetics Workshop is excited to announce our second event of the Spring quarter: on May 19th, at 5 PM, we’ll host a workshop with Kris Cohen, via Zoom. This workshop has been co-organized with Stanford’s Critical Practices Unit (CPU), whom you can (and should!) follow for future CPU events here. Please email Jeff Nagy (jsnagy at stanford dot edu) by May 18th for the Zoom link.
Professor Cohen will discuss new research from his manuscript-in-progress, Bit Field Black. Bit Field Black accounts for how a group of Black artists working from the Sixties to the present were addressing, in ways both belied and surprisingly revealed by the language of abstraction and conceptualism, nascent configurations of the computer screen and the forms of labor and personhood associated with those configurations.
Professor Cohen is Associate Professor of Art and Humanities at Reed College. He works on the relationship between art, economy, and media technologies, focusing especially on the aesthetics of collective life. His book, Never Alone, Except for Now (Duke University Press, 2017), addresses these concerns in the context of electronic networks.
A poster with all the crucial information is attached for lightweight recirculation.
Thank you to all of the very many of you who logged on for our first Spring workshop with Sarah T. Roberts. We hope you will also join us on the 19th, and keep an eye out for an announcement of our third Spring workshop, with Xiaochang Li, coming up on May 26th
As Catie Cuan (@CatieCuan) writes over on twitter:
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
Next Wednesday, November 6, 2019, I will be in conversation with media artist Jim Campbell at the Anderson Collection at Stanford, where a stunning exhibition of his LED-based works is currently on show.
Works from the course “Let’s Make a Monster: Critical Making,” which I co-taught this quarter with my art practice colleague Paul DeMarinis, are currently on display in the Shriram Center for Bioengineering and Chemical Engineering at Stanford University. The show, which officially opened today, is up through Friday, June 8.
We are particularly excited to take this work across campus and show it in the context of a space devoted to cutting-edge engineering work, where we hope that it provokes thought and discussion about the transformations of technology, experience, and life itself taking place in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. Thanks especially to Prof. Drew Endy for his help in facilitating and making this show possible.
Here are just a few glimpses of the work on display.
Nora Wheat, Decode (2018)
Hieu Minh Pham, The Knot (2018)
Raphael Palefsky-Smith, Brick (2018) — more info here
David Zimmerman, Eigenromans I-III (2018)
Jennifer Xilo, Mirror for Our Upturned Palms (2018)
Jackie Langelier, Creepers (2018)
Somehow I forgot to post the syllabus for “Let’s Make A Monster! Critical Making,” which Paul DeMarinis and I are currently teaching as a hybrid Film & Media Studies and Art Practice class in the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford. The main focus of the course, as the title indicates, is the production of monsters in a variety of media and informed by reading literary, philosophical, and other critical texts on making and monstrosity. Students have been making some truly astounding work, and I look forward to being able to present some of it later in the quarter. We will be organizing an exhibition of works on campus, and I will post images here.