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New Roles at Stanford

This year I am excited to have taken on a couple of new roles at Stanford, and I wanted shout about them briefly to express my gratitude and hope.

First, I am honored to have received a courtesy appointment in German Studies from the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages. While my primary appointment remains in the Department of Art & Art History, I will now be able to teach and advise graduate students in German as well, and I am excited to collaborate more closely with my colleagues there.

Second, I have joined the Committee in Charge in Modern Thought & Literature, Stanford’s premier interdisciplinary humanities program. I have been working closely and learning from students in the program over the past couple of years, including serving on several dissertation committees, and I have discovered so many affinities with students and faculty alike, so officially joining the program feels in many ways like coming home.

Finally, for the duration of the 2020-2021 academic year, I am honored to have been awarded a Faculty Research Fellowship at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research, where I am learning from an amazing interdisciplinary cohort of peers while developing a new project around seriality and serialization. Taking up Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of “serialities” as anonymous, alienated collectives, as well as Iris Marion Young’s re-working of the concept with respect to gender and specifically feminist purposes, the project relates these socio-political conceptions of seriality to the serialization of experience and identity in contemporary digital media.

In all, I am feeling very grateful for these new and strengthened interdisciplinary networks, which give me hope for the future of the humanities at Stanford.

Videos of Two Recent Book-Related Talks

Discorrelation, or: Images between Algorithms and Aesthetics — Nov. 3, 2020 at CESTA, Stanford University

Here are videos of two recent talks related to my book Discorrelated Images. Above, a talk titled “Discorrelation, or: Images between Algorithms and Aesthetics,” delivered at Stanford’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) on November 3, 2020. And below, a talk titled “Discorrelated Images” from October 26, 2020 at UC Santa Barbara’s Media Arts and Technology Seminar Series.

Discorrelated Images — October 26, 2020 at MAT Seminar Series, UCSB

Discorrelation, or: Images between Algorithms and Aesthetics — Nov. 3 at CESTA

On November 3 (12pm Pacific), I’ll be giving a talk, via Zoom, titled “Discorrelation, or: Images between Algorithms and Aesthetics” at Stanford’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA). The talk will focus on my book Discorrelated Images, just out from Duke University Press (and 50% off right with code FALL2020).

In case you’re wondering, this is a different “book talk” than anything you might have seen recently, so check it out if you can! (Though I am told that there is something else going on on November 3rd, so only tune in if you’ve already voted!)

See here for more information and registration!

Rendered Worlds: New Regimes of Imaging — October 23, 2020

The Digital Aesthetics Workshop is extremely excited to announce a collaborative panel with UC Davis’ Technocultural Futures Research Cluster.

‘Rendered Worlds: New Regimes of Imaging‘ will take place on Friday, October 23 at 10am PDT. Co-organized by teams from Stanford University and University of California Davis, this event brings together a transatlantic group of scholars to discuss the social, historical, technical, and aesthetic entanglements of our computational images.

Talking about their latest work will be Deborah Levitt (The New School), Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal (UC Davis and Universität Siegen), Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan (King’s College London), and Shane Denson (Stanford). Hank Gerba (Stanford) and Jacob Hagelberg (UC Davis) will co-moderate the round-table. Please register at tinyurl.com/renderedworlds for your zoom link!

We hope to see you there! If you have any questions, please direct them to Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal (rjdhaliwal at ucdavis dot edu).

Sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center. Made possible by support from Linda Randall Meier, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

“How Language Became Data” — Xiaochang Li at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, May 26, 2020 (via Zoom)

The third Digital Aesthetics Workshop event of the Spring quarter is coming up next week: on May 26th, at 5 PM, we’ll host a workshop with Xiaochang Li, via Zoom. Please email Jeff Nagy (jsnagy at stanford dot edu) for the link by May 25th.

Professor Li will share research from her current project, How Language Became Data: Speech Recognition Between Likeness and Likelihood. Beginning in 1971, a team of researchers at IBM began to reorient the field of automatic speech recognition away from the study of human speech and language and towards a startling new mandate: “There’s no data like more data.” In the ensuing decades, speech recognition was refashioned as a problem of large-scale data acquisition and classification, one that was distinct from, if not antithetical to, explanation, interpretability, and expertise. The history of automatic speech recognition invites a glimpse into how making language into data helped make data into an imperative, opening the door for the expansion of algorithmic culture into everyday life.

Xiaochang Li is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Stanford University. Her research examines questions surrounding the relationship between information technology and knowledge production and its role in the organization of social life.

“Bit Field Black” — Kris Cohen at Digital Aesthetics Workshop/CPU, May 19, 2020 (via Zoom)

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

“At the Edges of Sleep” — Jean Ma at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, March 9, 2020

We are excited to announce our next event of the Digital Aesthetics Workshop, a late-breaking addition to our calendar, a week from today with Jean Ma. We’ll meet on Monday, March 9th, from 5 to 7 PM in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room.

Professor Ma teaches in the Film and Media Studies Program of Stanford’s Department of Art and Art History. On Monday, we’ll discuss some of her recent research on sleep in film and moving image art.

More information on the talk is below. There will be snacks and wine, and there is no pre-circulated reading for this workshop. Please feel free to circulate widely!

At the Edges of Sleep
This talk introduces my current research on sleep in film and moving image art, as both a subject matter to explore and a state to induce in the audience. An example of the recent turn to sleep is Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s SLEEPCINEMAHOTEL (2018), a work addressed to viewers presumed to be unconscious for the better part of its duration. The proposition made by SLEEPCINEMAHOTEL – that sleep can be more than a negative reflection on the work that arouses it – flies in the face of standard ideas about reception. I relate the provocation of sleepy spectatorship to a larger set of shifting conceptions of sleep, in disciplines of knowledge as well as popular discourse. As sleep emerges from the shadows into a newfound visibility, it undergoes a reevaluation. On the one hand, changing notions of the relationship between sleep and waking life reflect a new stage of the reign of instrumental reason, marked by nascent (bio)technological capacities to convert life processes into units of productivity. But on the other hand, as the boundaries between sleep and wake are displaced and reinscribed, we are also presented with an opportunity. What is the value of sleep? What can be preserved by carving out a space for sleep?

Syllabus: Media Technology Theory — Stanford 2020 (co-taught with Fred Turner)

Denson Turner Media Tech Theory Syllabus 2020 by medieninitiative on Scribd

Syllabus for “Media Technology Theory,” which I’ll be co-teaching Spring 2020 with Fred Turner.

CFP: Stanford-Leuphana Summer Academy on Humanities and Media 2020: “Technologies of Bureaucracy: Before and After the Digital Turn”

Stanford-Leuphana Summer Ac… by medieninitiative on Scribd

I am happy to announce the call for papers for the 2nd annual Stanford-Leuphana Summer Academy on Humanities and Media, which will take place June 22-26, 2020 in Berlin!

The topic this year is “Technologies of Bureaucracy: Before and After the Digital Turn!”

Our faculty and guest speakers this year are:

Timon Beyes (Sociology of Organisation and Culture, Leuphana)
Wendy Chun (New Media, Vancouver)
Shane Denson (Film and Media Studies, Stanford)
Monika Dommann (History, Zurich)
Marisa Galvez (French, Italian, and German Studies, Stanford)
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Comparative Literature, Stanford)
Robin Holt (Organization Studies, Copenhagen)
Karla Oeler (Film and Media Studies, Stanford)
Claus Pias (History and Epistemology of Media, Leuphana)
Hito Steyerl (Experimental Film and Video, Berlin)
Peter Stohschneider (Medieval Studies, Munich) tbc
Fred Turner (Communication, Stanford)

As in the previous year, travel and accommodation costs will be covered for graduate students accepted to the Summer Academy, and there will be no additional fees for participation. So please consider applying and spread the word to qualified graduate students!

Amalgamate: An Exhibition of Video Works

I am happy to announce Amalgamate, an exhibition of videos made by students in my course on “The Video Essay” (Fall 2019). Works range from analytical to experimental, with activist impulses and cinephilic sensitivities sprinkled throughout. The show runs from January 10-31, 2020 in the Gunn Foyer, McMurtry Building, at Stanford.