Tag: Art

Animating Sites of Becoming — Poyen Wang and Heesoo Kwon at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, April 28, 2026

We are pleased to announce our first event of spring quarter! Poyen Wang and Heesoo Kwon will join us for a joint talk on Tuesday, April 28, from 5-6:30pm PT. The event, titled, “Animating Sites of Becoming,” 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/mrx4ndz2

Poyen Wang | Cultvating Chora: CGI, Interiority, and Queer Presence

Through recent practice, Wang situates CGI world-building within the discursive terrains of psychoanalysis and queer theory, proposing a parallel mode of thinking in which digital environments function as both mental architectures and sites of becoming. Wang approaches CGI not simply as a representational tool but as a method of inquiry—one that constructs, destabilizes, and reconfigures interior worlds. Drawing on the concept of Chora as an ambiguous, unnamable, and unstable spatial condition, Wang treats CGI image-making as a form of writing through which narrative emerges not as a linear structure but as emotional accumulation, positioning queerness not as identity but as a condition of continual becoming. The work asks: how might digital image-making rearticulate interiority, and what forms of presence emerge when it is staged as a performative, psychological scene? 

Bio:

Poyen Wang is an artist and filmmaker born and raised in Taiwan, currently based in New York City. His work approaches the moving image as a theatrical, performative medium, staging psychologically charged scenes that explore intimacy, vulnerability, and power. Through cinematic tropes, spoken word, and atmospheric composition, he constructs a poetics of queer presence—fleeting, fractured, and unresolved—while interrogating the power dynamics of image-making. In his work, viewing becomes a charged exchange where gaze and presence interweave, dissolving the boundaries between spectator and subject.

Wang’s work has recently been included in Greater New York 2026 at the MoMA PS1. He has presented work at institutions and venues including Asia Art Archive in America; 99 Canal, New York; Essex Flowers, New York; Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn; Kasseler Kunstverein and Kasseler Dokfest, Kassel; Wassaic Project, New York; the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; Taipei Digital Art Center, Taipei; and 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica, among others. He teaches in the Department of Film and Media at Hunter College in New York City.

Heesoo Kwon | Between Body and Code 

Heesoo Kwon’s practice unfolds through Leymusoom, an ongoing autobiographical feminist religion she initiated in 2017. Her work brings together personal life, family histories, Korean mythology, and ritual practices to explore how memory, identity, and relationships evolve over time. Working across video, installation, photography, and digital media, Kwon uses CGI and AI to build interconnected worlds. Through projects such as Leymusoom Firefly and Premolt, she creates an evolving archive linking personal and ancestral memory, often reimagining her female ancestors as digital bodies. Her work reconsiders family, lineage, and time, exploring how digital and spiritual frameworks can reshape memory, the body, and collective experience.

Bio:

Heesoo Kwon is a Korean multimedia artist whose  work engages in ritualistic, autoethnographic, and archival practices. Employing 3D animation, modeling and artificial intelligence technologies as procreant tools to forge and traverse realms, Kwon engages in the rewriting of mythic matrilineal histories, the queering of familial relations, and the envisioning of decentralized communities and memoryscapes, notably through the self-referential, feminist religion Leymusoom, and the Firefly series which takes as its genesis AI-augmented family photographs from the artist’s childhood. In Kwon’s heterotopic hyperspaces, she abstracts concepts of time and memory, transcending the legacies of sacrifice, trauma and patriarchal violence to offer instead transformative modes of existence, liberation and community. 

Kwon received a Master of Fine Arts at the University of California, Berkeley, and is currently an Assistant Professor in the Animation department at the California College of the Arts. Her work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, Stanford; Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa; Buk Seoul Museum of Arts, Seoul; Huis Marseille, Amsterdam; V&A Museum, London; Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam; West Den Haag, The Hague; Centre Wallonie Bruxelles, Paris; M+, Hong Kong; and WMA Space, Hong Kong. Kwon is the recipient of the 2025 New & Experimental Works (NEW) Program Grant from the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, the 2025 Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation, the 2024 Trellis Art Fund Stepping Stone Grant, the 2023 Artadia Award, and the 2022 Hewlett 50 Arts Commission. Her work is in the permanent collections of KADIST, Cantor Arts Center, and Huis Marseille.

This event is generously co-sponsored by the Asian American Research Center at Stanford and Asian American Art Initiative. 

EXTRA/PHENOMENALITIES in Review

Photo: Shaun Roberts

EXTRA/PHENOMENALITIES came to a close this past week, following a very successful run at Stanford Art Gallery. Curated by the non/phenomenal collective (Brett Amory, Karin Denson, and Shane Denson), and featuring 20 artists and collaboratives, the exhibition opened on January 22 and closed on March 13.

Photo: Shaun Roberts

The show was extremely well attended throughout the 7+ week duration, with visitors spending a good deal of time in the gallery. Despite the conceptual complexity of the show, visitors from a wide variety of backgrounds reported that they found it engaging and accessible.

Photo: Shaun Roberts

Last week, there was a nice review of the show by Audrey Chang in the Stanford Daily:

And before that, there was a write-up by Olivia Peterkin for Stanford Arts:

EXTRA/PHENOMENALITIES may be over, but the non/phenomenal collective has a lot more in store, so stay tuned!

Photo: Shaun Roberts

EXTRA/PHENOMENALITIES — Drone Footage Video

We’re coming up on the final week of EXTRA/PHENOMENALITIES, with 20 amazing artists and collaboratives approaching the conditions of appearance and nonappearance from a wide variety of angles and mediums. The exhibition, curated by the non/phenomenal collective (Brett Amory, Karin Denson, and Shane Denson) is open Monday through Friday, 12-5pm, through March 13.

The video above, featuring drone footage shot by Shaun Roberts and edited by Shane Denson, provides an overview (literally) of the show.

Check it out before it closes!

“Isn’t Artisanal Intelligence K(NOT) AI?” — Katherine Behar at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, Feb. 25, 2026

Please join us in welcoming Katherine Behar, our next guest of the year, who will present “Isn’t Artisanal Intelligence K(NOT) AI?” on Wednesday, February 25, from 5-6:30PM PT. This event will take place in the Board Room at the Humanities Center; refreshments will be served. We hope to see you there. 

Zoom link for those unable to join in person: https://tinyurl.com/4rfhj2cs

Abstract:

“Isn’t Artisanal Intelligence K(NOT) AI?” unfolds a new theory of artisanal intelligence. Contextualized in Behar’s artistic practice, which concerns gender, race, class, and labor in digital culture, and specifically her current project, Inside Outsourcing, which takes inspiration from the un-automatability of basket-weaving, this lecture ties together neural networks and tacit knowledge to weigh the valuation of intelligences.

Bio:

Katherine Behar is an interdisciplinary artist who studies contemporary digital culture through feminism and materialism. She is Professor of New Media Arts at Baruch College and The Graduate Center, CUNY.

This event is generously co-sponsored by the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis and Fiber Optics: Materials & Media, a Stanford Humanities Center Research Workshop. 

Artist Panel: EXTRA/PHENOMENALITIES — Feb. 23, 2026

Join us for an artist panel featuring participants from EXTRA/PHENOMENALITIES, on view at Stanford Art Gallery from January 22-March 13, 2026. Bringing together artists whose work explores the limits of experience, this program offers a special opportunity to hear directly from those behind the exhibition.

Each participating artist will give a brief talk reflecting on their work in the exhibition, followed by a moderated conversation and audience Q&A. 

Participating artists include 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.

The exhibition is curated by Brett Amory, Karin Denson, and Shane Denson.

Moderator to be announced.

VISITOR INFORMATION: Oshman Hall is located within the McMurtry Building on Stanford campus at 355 Roth Way. Visitor parking is available in designated areas and is free after 4pm on weekdays. Alternatively, take the Caltrain to Palo Alto Transit Center and hop on the free Stanford Marguerite Shuttle. If you need a disability-related accommodation or wheelchair access information, please contact Julianne White at jgwhite@stanford.edu. This event is open to Stanford affiliates and the general public. Admission is free.

More info here: https://events.stanford.edu/event/artist-panel-extraphenomenalities

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

“AI as Existential(ist) Risk and Aesthetic Opportunity” — Keynote at Media Theory Conference 2025 in Toronto, Nov. 7-8

I’m excited to be giving one of the keynotes at the Media Theory Conference 2025 at the Centre for Culture and Technology in Toronto. On Nov. 8, I’ll give a talk titled “AI as Existential(ist) Risk and Aesthetic Opportunity.” Here is the abstract:

Contemporary debates around artificial intelligence often frame the technology in terms of “existential risk.” Yet such framings rarely pause to consider what existential might mean in the existentialist sense. In this talk I return to Heidegger’s account of the “worldhood of the world” and Sartre’s concept of “hodological space” to argue that the risk posed by AI is not confined to catastrophic scenarios of planetary survival, but lies more immediately in the reconfiguration of subjectivity itself. AI systems bypass conscious perception, modulating aesthesis—the sensory, affective, and preconscious conditions of experience—and in doing so recalibrate the orientations that make ethical deliberation possible in the first place.

Seen from this angle, the hazard of AI is not external to us but infrastructural, shaping our movements, postures, and affective attunements. At the same time, this hazard can be taken up as an opportunity: artworks that use machine learning to stage glitches, detours, or dissonances do not merely represent technological change but provide laboratories for inhabiting it, exposing how bodies and worlds are being rewritten. If AI marks an existentialist risk, it also opens an occasion to engage aesthetically with the reorganization of perception and orientation, and to confront the stakes of ethics where they begin—in the aesthetic, in the felt conditions of living and acting in a changing world.

“Making Politics: Commemoration, Resistance, and Play” — Joseph DeLappe at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, Oct. 22, 2025

With apologies for the late announcement, the Digital Aesthetics Workshop is delighted to welcome our first speaker of the 2025-26 academic year! Joseph DeLappe will present on “Making Politics: Commemoration, Resistance, and Play” on Wednesday, October 22, from 5-6:30pm PT. The event will take place in Wallenberg 433A, at the Stanford Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA). Dinner will be served.

Zoom link for those unable to join in-person: tinyurl.com/5cjwfmej

Below you will find the Joseph DeLappe’s bio and abstract. We look forward to seeing you there!

Abstract: 

Can art be a catalyst for change in times of war and conflict? What role can creative acts of counter-memorialization, interventionist practices, play, and participatory art take to change how we perceive and act upon issues of contemporary and historical violence and in the broader politics of memory? Media artist and activist Joseph DeLappe will share documentation from a diversity of creative projects and actions developed over the past several decades that utilize digital and analogue processes to creatively address such questions. A lineage of works, including video games, public actions (online and IRL), participatory making, performance, play, protest and memorialization will illuminate upon his critical and interrogative strategies engaging the intersections of art, technology, and social engagement.

Bio: 

Joseph DeLappe, born San Francisco 1963, is an artist, activist and educator, he relocated to Scotland in 2017 after 23 years directing the Digital Media program at the University of Nevada, Reno. Working with electronic and digital media since 1983, projects in online gaming performance, sculpture and electromechanical installation have been shown throughout the world. In 2006 he began the project dead‐in‐iraq, to type consecutively, all names of America’s military casualties from the war in Iraq into the America’s Army first person shooter online recruiting game. More recently he developed the concept behind Killbox (funded in part by a Creative Scotland), an interactive computer game about drone warfare created with the Biome Collective in Scotland. Killbox was nominated for a BAFTA Scotland (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) as “Best Computer Game”. His works have been featured in the New York Times, The Australian Morning Herald, Art in America, The Guardian and the BBC. He has authored several book chapters, including “Me and My Predator(s): Tactical Remembrance and Critical Atonement, Drone Aesthetics: War, Culture, Ecology, Open Humanties Press, 2022 and “Making Politics: Engaged Social Tactics, A conversation between Joseph DeLappe and Laura Leuzzi”, Art as Social Practice: Technologies for Change, Routledge, 2022. DeLappe was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Fine Arts in 2017.

This event is co-sponsored by the Silicon Valley Archives and the Patrick Suppes Center for History & Philosophy of Science. 

NON/PHENOMENALITIES — July 26 – Aug 30, 2025 at Gallery 120710 in Berkeley

NON/PHENOMENALITIES — a show that I am co-curating with artist Brett Amory at Gallery 120710 in Berkeley — opens July 26 with an amazing lineup of artists.

The title of this exhibition plays on the multiple senses of the “phenomenal.” On the one hand, the phenomenal is equated with spectacle and the spectacular, the exceptional appearance that dazzles its audience, like a pop phenomenon. On the other hand, phenomenality refers to the way anything whatsoever appears to our embodied senses; this less extravagant sense of the word “phenomenon” is at the heart of phenomenology and Kantian philosophy (where it is opposed to the noumenal, which can never appear to sensation).

Both senses of the phenomenal are contested and reconfigured in the contemporary networks of computational media and machine-learning algorithms. For example, AI produces a steady stream of spectacles, each more spectacular than the last, but the underlying operations are immune to human perception. In this interplay, not only the objects of perception but also the very conditions of experience are up for grabs. The phenomenal itself is conditioned by a new realm of nonphenomenality, which poses a special challenge for artists working with these new technologies.

As a way of approaching this new situation, we look to works that stage multiple aesthetic inversions of the phenomenal, ranging from the subtle or understated to the invisible. What comes to the fore when vision encounters computation’s resistance to consciousness, its “discorrelation” from the phenomenology of embodied experience? How can we perceive what artist Trevor Paglen has dubbed the “invisible images” that populate our world? And how can these inversions connect with or be illuminated by other traditions of the non/ phenomenal—for example Buddhist ideas of appearance as illusion, the Lacanian notion of the unperceived Real, or neuroscientific theories of consciousness as a nonsubstantial epiphenomenon?

Looking beyond the spectacles of contemporary technology, Non/phenomenalities asks us to imagine an aesthetics of the subtle, the muted, the “barely perceptible difference,” maybe even the boring.