Please note the time for my keynote at the “Questioning History in the Age of AI” symposium this coming Thursday, April 11 has been updated to 5-7pm.
The full conference schedule is posted above, and here is some additional info from the organizers:
Please join us at UC Berkeley on Thursday, April 11 and Friday April 12 for a symposium on the theme of “Questioning History in the Age of AI.”
Seminars will run each day, beginning at 10am, and will be held in the Social Sciences Matrix Our keynote, given by Shane Denson, will be held Thursday, 5–7pm in 142 Dwinelle
Please register HERE for the seminars, and we will send you the seminar papers in advance of the symposium.
On April 11, I’ll be giving a keynote titled “AI and the Future of (Media) History” at the symposium “Questioning History in the Age of Artificial Intelligence,” organized by David Bates, Julia Irwin, and Johan Fredrikzon. I’m excited to be in conversation with a stellar group of scholars thinking about what AI means for history and historical thinking!
On March 11 (4:00-5:30pm, McMurtry Building 370), Gerui Wang and Unjoo Oh will be presenting work related to AI and the history of art and literature:
Gerui Wang, “Infinite Curves in Soungwen Chung’s Art: Towards Human-AI Collaborative Creativity”
This talk explores human-AI collaborations in the works of the contemporary artist Soungwen Chung. Chung designs her own robots for drawing operations. She utilizes computer vision technologies to train robots to observe, learn, and respond to her creative processes. Chung experiments possibilities and creative potential of AI systems when her brain waves are transmitted to the robot arms through an EEG device. The presentation investigates the visual effect of infinite curves in Chung’s art, varying in volume, color, density, tones, and directions. Chung’s works introduce an infinite reproducibility and variation that evokes aesthetics of the ink medium from East Asia. Do Chung’s completed works show legible differences between the marks made by herself and those made by the robot arms? Do “conversations” and collaborations between human creators and AI systems redefine our perceptions of creativity? How do AI systems change our engagement with cultural traditions? This talk invites you to think with these AI-infused artworks.
Gerui Wang is a Lecturer in the Department of History of Art and Visual Culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and at Stanford University’s Center for East Asian Studies (Spring 2024). Her research interests span arts, public policy, environment, and emerging technologies. Her book manuscript, Landscape, Governance, and Ecology in China, 1000-1400, demonstrates the overlooked ecological thinking and notions of “sustainability” manifested in flourishing landscape imagery across artistic media. Gerui’s new project examines artificial intelligence and contemporary art in Asia and its diaspora. Gerui holds a PhD in the history of art from the University of Michigan.
Unjoo Oh, “Visual Interfaces for Poetic Data: Early Modern and AI Technologies”
How might the sonnets of William Shakespeare and AI exist—or be made to exist—in symbiosis? This talk explores the mutual insights that Shakespeare’s Sonnets and AI tools (such as LLMs and text-to-image generators) offer to each other. At the intersection of textual criticism and artificial intelligence, it is possible to leverage bibliographical uncertainty and rethink the (re)presentation of Shakespeare’s poetry. Image (re)production can be newly considered in this process as a node for early modern print and generative AI. Most importantly, we can test the capabilities and biases of these models in processing poetic data and begin to construct visual interfaces that reorient literary analysis.
Unjoo Oh is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Stanford University. Her research centers around textual materiality, critical posthumanism, and digital humanities, investigating how (in)organic nonhumans affect notions of intelligence and the remediation of premodern texts. Her work has been published in Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies and the Journal of Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance English Literature. She is also a graduate coordinator of Renaissances at Stanford and an assistant editor of the Stanford Global Shakespeare Encyclopedia.
I am excited to announce that, with the support of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, I am hiring a one-year postdoctoral fellow working on issues around AI, art, and aesthetics. Please see the full call for applications here, and spread the word to anyone who might be interested!
The new issue of Journal of Visual Culturejust dropped, and I’m excited to see my article on AI art and aesthetics alongside work by Shannon Mattern, Bryan Norton, Jussi Parikka, and others. It looks like a great issue, and I’m looking forward to digging into it!
In this artist talk, Mark Amerika shares his creative process as a digital artist whose symbiotic relationship with both language and diffusion models informs his artistic and theoretical pursuits. Turning to his most recent book, My Life as an Artificial Creative Intelligence (Stanford University Press) and his just-released art project, Posthuman Cinema, Amerika will demonstrate, through personal narrative and theoretical asides, how different rhetorical uses of language can transform AI into a camera, a fiction writer, a poet and a philosopher.
Throughout the performance, Amerika will ask us to consider at what point a language artist becomes a language model and vice-versa. He will also question what new skills artists will have to develop as they co-evolve in a creative work environment where one must maintain a playful and dynamic relationship with the rapid technical maneuvering of the machinic Other. Will a more robust, intuitive yet interdependent relationship with AI models require artists to fine-tune what Amerika refers to as a cosmotechnical skill, one that is at once imaginative and indeterminate, playful and profound, grounded yet otherworldly in its aesthetic becoming? And how do we teach this skill at both the undergraduate and graduate level?
Borrowing from Beatnik poets and jazz musicians alike, Amerika suggests that a continuous call-and-response improvisational jam session with AI models may unlock personal insights that reveal how one’s own unconscious neural mechanism acts (performs) like a Meta Remix Engine. Engaging with other artists and writers who have tapped into their creative spontaneity as a primary research methodology, Amerika will discuss how digital artists can train themselves to intuitively select and defamiliarize datum for aesthetic effect. In so doing, Amerika suggests that this is how an artist connects with their own alien intelligence, a mediumistic sensibility that takes them out of their anthropocentric stronghold and invites them to reimagine what it means to be creative across the human-nonhuman spectrum.
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Mark Amerika has exhibited his art in many venues including the Whitney Biennial, the Denver Art Museum, ZKM, the Walker Art Center, and the American Museum of the Moving Image. His solo exhibitions have appeared all over the world including at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the University of Hawaii Art Galleries, the Marlborough Gallery in Barcelona and the Norwegian Embassy in Havana.
Amerika has had five early and/or mid-career retrospectives including the first two Internet art retrospectives ever produced (Tokyo and London). In 2009-2010, The National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, Greece, featured Amerika’s comprehensive retrospective exhibition entitled UNREALTIME. The exhibition included his groundbreaking works of Internet art GRAMMATRON and FILMTEXT as well as his feature-length work of mobile cinema, Immobilité. In 2012, Amerika released his large-scale transmedia narrative, Museum of Glitch Aesthetics (MOGA), a multi-platform net artwork commissioned by Abandon Normal Devices in conjunction with the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. His public art project, Glitch TV, was featured at the opening of the “video towers” at Denver International Airport.
He is the author of thirteen books including My Life as an Artificial Creative Intelligence, the inaugural title in the “Sensing Media” series published in 2022 by Stanford University Press.
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!
For our second Digital Aesthetics workshop of the year, please join us in welcoming Ge Wang, who will present on “Artful Design and Artificial Intelligence: What do we (really) want from AI?” on November 14, 5-7PM PT. The event will take place in the Stanford Humanities Center Watt Dining Room, where refreshments will be served. Below you will find an abstract and bio, as well as a poster for lightweight circulation. We look forward to seeing you there!
We all design, shaping the world around us in the form of tools, policies, education, and communities. In recent months we’ve seen the growing emergence of “astoundingly competent” AI tools, leading many of us to wonder how AI might soon impact our work, our lives, our world. How do we (want to) live and work with artificial intelligence? How might we artfully design tools and systems that balance machine automation and human interaction? And perhaps the most basic question of all, what do we (really) want from AI?
In this presentation, we will engage with these questions through an artful design lens, considering factors such as aesthetics, ethics, and accountability. As a case study, we will draw from the teaching of “Music and AI”, a critical-making course at Stanford, and explore the power of human creativity in using AI not as an “oracle”, but as a tool for creative expression.
Bio:
Ge Wang is an Associate Professor at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). He researches the artful design of tools, toys, games, musical instruments, programming languages, expressive VR experiences, and interactive AI systems with humans in the loop. Ge is the architect of the ChucK audio programming language, the director of the Stanford Laptop Orchestra and the Stanford VR Design Lab. He is the Co-founder of Smule and the designer of the Ocarina and Magic Piano apps for mobile phones. He is a Senior Fellow and a Associate Directory of Stanford Human-Centered AI Institute. A 2016 Guggenheim Fellow,Ge is the author of /Artful Design: Technology in Search of the Sublime/, a photo comic book about how we shape technology — and how technology shapes us.
We are happy to announce the first Digital Aesthetics Workshop event of the year. Please join us in welcoming Luciana Parisi, who will present on “The negative aesthetic of AI” on October 20, 2-4PM PT. The event will take place in the Stanford Humanities Center Boardroom, where refreshments will be served. Below you will find the abstract and bio attached, as well as a poster for lightweight circulation. We look forward to seeing you there!
Does AI have an aesthetic form? Perhaps one can argue that this form may entail a thinking without self-reflectivity and yet one may still hang on a function of imagination for artificial thinking. But one cannot neglect that self-reflectivity precisely defines the procedure by which reason is supplemented by imagination – a generative function that grants the system not to fall into its dogmatic premises. From this standpoint, the function of imagination seems to collide with the role of noise and randomness in generative AI. The scope here however is not to establish a direct correlation between imagination and noise or even to argue for a machine aesthetics that carries through the project of aesthetic judgment in the moment of the sublime, namely the encounter with the incalculable and the unmeasurable. Instead of a prosthetic extension of aesthetic judgement, this talk discusses the negative function of imagination in Generative AI as an instance of a negation of aesthetics: a socio-techno-genic insurgence of radical alienness from where the recursive iteration of the sublime fails its task of rebooting the system.
Bio:
Luciana Parisi’s research lays at the intersection of continental philosophy, information sciences, digital media, computational technologies. Her writings investigate technology in terms of ontological and epistemological possibilities of transformation in culture, aesthetics and politics. Her publications address the techno-capitalist investment in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, nanotechnology to explore challenges to conceptions of gender, race and class. She has also written extensively within the fields of media philosophy and computational design in order to investigate metaphysical possibilities of instrumentality.
She was a member of the CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit) and currently a co-founding member of CCB (Critical Computation Bureau) through which she co-ideated the Symposium Recursive Colonialism, Artificial Intelligence and Speculative Computation (Dec 2020) https://recursivecolonialism.com/home/
In 2004, she published Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire, which investigates capitalist experimentations in molecular strata of nature together with non-linear theories of endosymbiosis to argue against biocentric models of sexual reproduction and conceptions of sex and gender in terms of biodigital replications and non-filiative bacterial sex. Her book Contagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics and Space (2013) explores algorithms in architecture and interaction design as a symptom of global cultural transformation, where algorithmic computation represents a mode of thought that challenges dominant models of human cognition. Her current project, Automating Philosophy (forthcoming) explores the possibilities of a radical thought and critique which starts with inhuman intelligence and cosmocomputations. Part of this research has been published in recent articles “Media Ontology and Transcendental Instrumentality” (2019) and “Xenopatterning: Predictive Intuition and Automated Imagination” (2019).
I am happy to announce this year’s first two events of the Critical Making Collaborative at Stanford. Both events focus on critical and self-reflexive uses of AI at the intersection of theory and practice.
The first event, on Friday, October 13 (12-2pm in the McMurtry Building, room 360), includes a screening of Carlo Nasisse’s short film “Uncanny Earth.” In this film — which is equally about technology, ecology, human and nonhuman agency — an AI attempts to tell a story about the earth and its inhabitants. Following the screening, we will discuss the film and the many issues it raises for working and thinking critically with AI with the filmmaker.
Carlo Nasisse is a director and cinematographer. His work has been featured in the New Yorker, PBS, SXSW, Slamdance, and the New Orleans Film Festival. His most recent short film, “Direcciones”, won the Golden Gate Award for Best Documentary Short at the San Francisco Film Festival. He is currently completing his MFA at Stanford University.
RSVPs to shane.denson@stanford.edu are appreciated, though not required, so I have a rough headcount for refreshments.
The second event, on Friday, November 3 (4:30pm, location TBA), will feature Prof. Matt Smith and his wonderfully weird graphic novel remix of Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lies in an Nonmoral Sense” composed in awkward and agonistic collaboration with the AI graphics engine Midjourney — it may be humanity’s last artwork!
Matthew Wilson Smith is Professor of German Studies and of Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford. His interests include modern theatre and relations between science, technology, and the arts. His book The Nervous Stage: 19th-century Neuroscience and the Birth of Modern Theatre (Oxford, 2017) explores historical intersections between theatre and neurology and traces the construction of a “neural subject” over the course of the nineteenth century. It was a finalist for the George Freedley Memorial Award of the Theater Library Association. His previous book, The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace (Routledge, 2007), presents a history and theory of attempts to unify the arts; the book places such diverse figures as Wagner, Moholy-Nagy, Brecht, Riefenstahl, Disney, Warhol, and contemporary cyber-artists within a coherent genealogy of multimedia performance. He is the editor of Georg Büchner: The Major Works, which appeared as a Norton Critical Edition in 2011, and the co-editor of Modernism and Opera (Johns Hopkins, 2016), which was shortlisted for an MSA Book Prize. His essays on theater, opera, film, and virtual reality have appeared widely, and his work as a playwright has appeared at the Eugene O’Neill Musical Theater Conference, Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater, and other stages. He previously held professorships at Cornell University and Boston University as well as visiting positions at Columbia University and Johannes Gutenberg-Universität (Mainz).
