Tag: Stanford Humanities Center

The Great Watercooler in the Cloud — Melissa Gregg at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, April 6

The Digital Aesthetics Workshop is happy to announce a long-awaited, COVID-postponed event with Melissa Gregg next week on Tuesday, April 6th 5-7 pm Pacific,”The Great Watercooler in the Cloud: Distributed work, collegial presence and mindful labor post-COVID.”

Please see below for details and register at tinyurl.com/DAW2021.

“The Great Watercooler in the Cloud: Distributed work, collegial presence and mindful labor post-COVID”

The immediate shift to so-called “remote work” in the pandemic created an extraordinary instance of corporate reckoning: hierarchies seemingly so solid and impenetrable evaporated within weeks as workers rapidly adjusted to doing their job in slippers. Previously commonsense notions of the day’s rhythms – the obligatory performance of a 9 to 5 persona – faced critical contaminants in the form of children, spouses and pets. Meanwhile the surprisingly social elements of office life became apparent in their obvious absence. Zoom fatigue replaced team-building drinks as the dominant affective mode. As the work world prepares for a return to something other than normal, this talk draws on multiple studies of technology users in lockdown and previous research on productivity to understand the condition of professional intimacy post-COVID. In doing so, it reflects on the psychological, physical and environmental burdens embedded in the idea of “work from anywhere.”   

Melissa Gregg is Intel’s chief social scientist and thought leader for user experience (UX). With a PhD in gender and cultural studies, she is an international expert on the future of work and a specialist in applied ethnography. Her over 60 peer-reviewed publications and books have anticipated key shifts in the experience of connected work and home life, from Work’s Intimacy (Polity 2011) to Counterproductive (Duke 2018), The Affect Theory Reader (Duke 2010) to the new collection, Media and Management (Meson Press 2021).

Following an academic career in Australia, Melissa led Intel’s first university investment in social computing before building user research to a position of strategic impact in the PC business. Her team now guides the roadmap for product development and architecture across consumer and commercial segments, including the EVO brand. As Chief Technologist for Sustainability in the Client Computing Group, Melissa inspires technologists, colleagues, consumers and customers to accelerate the transition to carbon neutral computing. This requires a fundamental reckoning with business as usual for the PC industry, to ensure the finite resources providing connectivity today can continue in to the future.

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

Complete Video: Vivian Sobchack in Conversation with Scott Bukatman and Shane Denson

Here is the complete video of the Digital Aesthetics Workshop event from September 29, 2020: Vivian Sobchack in conversation with Scott Bukatman and myself. This was a lively and far-ranging discussion, which we were honored to host. Please enjoy!

Vivian Sobchack in Conversation — Digital Aesthetics Workshop, Sept. 29, 2020

Poster by Hank Gerba

I am pleased to announce the Digital Aesthetics Workshop’s first event of the 2020-2021 academic year, taking place on September 29 (5-7pm PT via Zoom) with Vivian Sobchack, who will be in conversation with Stanford professors Scott Bukatman and Shane Denson. Please email Annika Butler-Wall (annikabw@stanford.edu) for the Zoom link.

Vivian Sobchack, a pioneer in the phenomenological study of visual media and a leading theorist of science fiction cinema, has long been a central voice in discussions of technology’s relation to experience and culture. Indeed, her work articulates questions that are at the very heart of the Digital Aesthetics Workshop. What is the relation of the body to the technologically mediated image? How does this relation change with the shift from cinematic to digital media? How does the materiality of the medium shape our perception of it and of ourselves? Is there such a thing as an aesthetic of the digital, or is “digital aesthetics” itself an oxymoron? In this conversation with Scott Bukatman and Shane Denson (both professors in Stanford’s Film & Media Studies program in the Department of Art & Art History), we hope to explore these and other questions and to reflect on the significance of Professor Sobchack’s groundbreaking work for the study of digital cultures.

Vivian Sobchack is Professor Emerita in the Department of Film, Television and Digital Media at UCLA. She was the first woman elected President of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and served on the Board of Directors of the American Film Institute. Her essays have appeared in journals such as Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Film Comment, camera obscura, Film Quarterly, and Representations. Her books include Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film; The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience; and Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, and she has edited two anthologies: Meta-Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick-Change; and The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event.

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)

Poster by Hank Gerba

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)

Poster by Hank Gerba

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

“Behind the Screen” — Sarah T. Roberts at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, April 21, 2020 (via Zoom)

Poster by Hank Gerba

We’re excited to announce a last-minute workshop with Sarah T. Roberts, next Tuesday, April 21st, from 5 to 7 PM. The workshop will take place via Zoom; please email Jeff Nagy (jsnagy at stanford dot edu) for the link.

Professor Roberts is the leading authority on commercial content moderation, the mostly invisible, increasingly globalized labor that keeps digital platforms free(-ish) of hate speech, pornography, and other kinds of unwanted material. Her research has become even more crucial over the last few months, as we increasingly spend the bulk of our professional and social lives online, and we hope you’ll join us to discuss it.

Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media

Faced with mounting pressures and repeated, very public crises, social media firms have taken a new tack since 2017: to respond to criticism of all kinds and from numerous quarters (regulators, civil society advocates, journalists, academics and others) by acknowledging their long-obfuscated human gatekeeping workforce of commercial content moderators. Additionally, these acknowledgments have often come alongside announcements of plans for exponential increases to that workforce, which now represents a global network of laborers – in distinct geographic, cultural, political, economic, labor and industrial circumstances – conservatively estimated in the several tens of thousands and likely many times that. Yet the phenomenon of content moderation in social media firms has been shrouded in mystery when acknowledged at all. In this talk, Sarah T. Roberts will discuss the fruits of her decade-long study the commercial content moderation industry, and its concomitant people, practices and politics. Based on interviews with workers from Silicon Valley to the Philippines, at boutique firms and at major social media companies, she will offer context, history and analysis of this hidden industry, with particular attention to the emotional toll it takes on its workers. The talk will offer insights about potential futures for the commercial internet and a discussion of the future of globalized labor in the digital age.

Sarah T. Roberts is an assistant professor of Information Studies at the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies, specializing in Internet culture, social media, and the intersection of media, technology and society. She is founding co-director, along with Dr. Safiya Noble, of the forthcoming UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry. Her book, Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media, was released in June 2019 (Yale University Press).

“Declining Russian Media Theory” — Ben Peters at Digital Aesthetic Workshop

DAW_Peters_Poster

Next week, on Thursday, November 21, the Digital Aesthetics Workshop will host Ben Peters for our third workshop of the 2019-2020 season, for a talk entitled “Declining Russian Media Theory.” We’ll meet in the Humanities Center Board Room at 5 PM.

More info:

A first step toward a larger project, Peters test runs ways to decline, in both senses, the problem of Russian media theory. It is a curious fact that nowhere does there exist today, despite the ample intellectual materials, anything that might be called “Russian media theory.” Other scholars have identified various schools of media thought as distinctively German, Canadian, American, French, and British and yet, while the lumber and ruins are ample, no single school of media thought stands today that is recognizably Russian or otherwise discernibly Slavic. Why not? Peters argues not that some kind of Russian media theory should exist (in fact, he offers several reasons why it should not). Rather it is simply to speculate beyond the curious observation that, given the sustained interest in the subject, no distinctively Russian theoretical approach to media has emerged to date. This brief, in turn modest and immodest, and necessarily speculative essay aims not to articulate such a theory, nor to lament its nonexistence, nor even to call for further commentary in that direction. Instead this talk aims to take a step backwards to reflect on the causes of that curious fact, to navigate some obstacles standing in the way of its articulation, to sound out and explore the declensions of such a media theoretic grammar, and to excavate the pre-dispositional grounds of possibility for a Russian—or perhaps Slavic—media theoretic tradition.

Benjamin Peters is a media scholar interested in plumbing uncharted media histories and theories, particularly in the Soviet century. He is also author of How Not to Network a Nation (MIT Press 2016), editor of Digital Keywords (Princeton UP 2016), the Hazel Rogers Associate Professor and Chair of Media Studies at the University of Tulsa, and an affiliated fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School.

LIT+ Conference at Stanford

LIT+

I am very honored to be speaking alongside some very distinguished thinkers this December at the LIT+ Conference on the State of the Interdisciplines, sponsored by Stanford’s Program in Modern Thought and Literature (MTL), Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (FemGen), the Stanford Law School, and the Stanford Humanities Center. Watch this space for more info soon!

Killing Time — Jenny Odell at Digital Aesthetics Workshop

Odell_DAW_Poster-72dpi

I am excited to announce our first meeting of the Linda Randall Meier Research Workshop on “Digital Aesthetics: Critical Approaches to Computational Culture” (more colloquially known as the Digital Aesthetics Workshop) for the 2019-2020 year — our third year. On October 23rd, 5-7 PM, in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room, we’ll host artist and critic Jenny Odell, who will share some research from her new book project.

One of the threads of Odell’s last book, the critically acclaimed How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, concerned the ways in which the “time is money” equation has become more and more pervasive, extending into realms of leisure and even sleep. This talk will examine the history of how time became money in the modern sense; contrast homogeneous, commodified time with heterogeneous ecological time (migrations, flowering events, stages of succession, etc.); and delineate the increasing clash between these two views of time within the context of climate change.