critical making – medieninitiative

Introducing the film|minutes video|graphic workstation

I made a piece of software! It’s called the film|minutes video|graphic workstation. It’s pretty niche but cool if you want to take notes or do very close readings of films/videos.

It’s a combination video player and text editor designed for close analysis of moving image media in scholarly research and academic writing, including student writing about film and video. The app plays videos on loop, one minute at a time, while the user enters notes or commentary on that segment. Timestamped notes are saved as txt files that can be reloaded and revised at a later time. Accordingly, the app serves either as a writing tool (as an informal notebook, for example, or for composing more complex and detailed close readings of films) or as a platform for reading previously compiled texts. The app was designed to facilitate the type of writing featured in Lever Press’s film|minutes book series, from which the workstation takes its name. Each book in the series takes a minute-by-minute approach to an individual film and conducts a close analysis on this basis. I am also the author of the first book in the series, on the 1935 film Bride of Frankenstein. A demo featuring the video and corresponding text of the first ten minutes of the book/film are included in the app.

In addition to its use as a tool for writing, the app promotes reflection on the relation of text and image in an age of digital media, where conventional scholarly writing now competes with “videographic criticism” (or video essays). Instituting what might be called a videographic method, though not necessarily producing a strictly videographic product, the film|minutes video|graphic workstation invites users to reflect on the status of the seen (video) and the written (graphic) more generally.

Accordingly, the app continues a series of videographic and critical making projects aimed at probing the edges of what is possible in video as a self-reflexive medium for theory — not just a vehicle or container medium for theorization but a platform that potentially creates new modes of looking and seeing. My video essay “Sight and Sound Conspire: Monstrous Audio-Vision in James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931)” is an intertext in more ways than one; while it is more or less technically conventional, in that it is a linear video with beginning, middle, and end, its formal structure of repetition and variation on a single scene anticipates the kind of close looking that the film|minutes workstation (and the film|minutes book series) promotes. (More obviously, the focus on Frankenstein films is of course another point of conversation.) My interactive video essay “Don’t Look Now: Paradoxes of Suture” subsequently challenged the linear form and experimented with spatializing and looping structures to foster close looking; the film|minutes video|graphic workstation inherits from it the focus on interactivity and the loop. My critical making project “The Algorithmic Nickelodeon” went even further outside the bounds of linear video, using data from an EEG headset to influence playback in realtime and thus to open the focusing and capture of attention to scrutiny. While the film|minutes video|graphic workstation does not stage quite so radical a disruption of the video source, perhaps it opens similarly self-reflexive questions around the way, as Nietzsche put it, “our writing utensils work alongside us in the formation of our thoughts.” That is, the medium in and through which we write and think — whether that is pen and paper, word processor, or nonlinear digital editing platform — is not neutral with respect to the things we conceive and express. It is my hope that the film|minutes video|graphic workstation will help us to think through the transformation of writing about moving-image media in conjunction with ubiquitous digital video.

The app is open access (CC-BY-NC-SA) and available for Windows and Mac. You can download it here: https://doi.org/10.25740/xq320wq3449.

“where do old sounds go to die?” and “murnau model” — Critical Making Collaborative, May 16, 2025

The Critical Making Collaborative at Stanford invites you to our Spring event — an evening of sharing and discussion with two recipients of the Critical Making Award, Lemon Guo and J. Makary, who will present their ongoing work in music and performance on Friday, May 16 (6PM) at the CCRMA Stage (3rd floor).

Lemon Guo — where do old sounds go to die?

Since 2017, I have been visiting the Kam villages in Guizhou, China to work with the elder women singers. In my recent trips, I noticed that a sound that used to pulse through the village in all waking hours had disappeared. To make textile for clothing, many women used to spend months at a time hammering cotton outdoors. I made several field recordings of this practice, when it seemed commonplace and quotidian. As cultural tourism transformed the village soundscape, I started to listen to these files in my hard drive. In this piece, the performers were only allowed to listen to these recordings in the first rehearsal. They were not told that the field recordings would be taken away from them. This performance is made from what they can remember.

J. Makary — murnau model

For murnau model, I used a machine learning model trained on still frames from F. W. Murnau’s 1924 silent film The Last Laugh/Der letzte Mann to generate new hypothetical images that emerge from its lengthy dream sequence. After subsequent interventions to guide image generation and alter their evolution, the images were “married” back to the film through photographic capture of individual frames of the physical filmstrip. By embedding these digital apparitions into the material substrate of celluloid, I intended to create a dialogue between analog and digital dreams, from film to data and back again. The resulting work becomes a reflection on cinema’s dual nature as both technological process and dream machine.

“Unit Operations” and “Alloy Resonator 0.2” — Critical Making Collaborative, March 10, 2025

The Critical Making Collaborative at Stanford invites you to an evening of sharing and discussion with two recipients of the Critical Making Award, Daniel Jackson and Kimia Koochakzadeh-Yazdi, who will present their ongoing work in music and performance—Monday, March 10 (4PM) at the CCRMA Stage (3rd floor).

Alloy Resonator 0.2 – Kimia Koochakzadeh-Yazdi (Music Composition)

Alloy Resonator, a hybrid wearable instrument, embraces the fragility and rigidity of the body as an expressive medium for playing electronic music. It experiments with physical thresholds and explores ways to position the performer’s body at the center of the performance. The goal is to have every movement, whether subtle or exaggerated, become an amplified sonic gesture.

The Unit Operations Here Are Highly Specific – Daniel Jackson (Theater and Performance Studies)

The Unit Operations Here Are Highly Specific is a devised, movement-based work exploring the relationship between text, performance, and reception by allowing each audience member to choose from and switch between soundtracks while they watch a choreographed performance. The work playfully confronts the limits of personalization in the context of collective experience while interrogating how meaning is generated and where meaning resides in complex performance-media environments.

“Democratizing Vibrations” and “Opera Machine” — Critical Making Collaborative, Nov. 22, 2024

The Critical Making Collaborative at Stanford invites you to an evening of sharing and discussion with two recipients of the Critical Making Award, West Montgomery and Lloyd May, who will present their ongoing work in opera and haptic art—Friday, Nov. 22 (5PM) at the CCRMA Stage (3rd floor).

Democratizing Vibrations – Lloyd May (Music Technology)

What would it mean to put vibration and touch at the center of a musical experience? What should devices used to create and experience vibration-based art (haptic instruments) look and feel like? These questions are at the core of the Musical Haptics project that aims to co-design haptic instruments and artworks with D/deaf and hard-of-hearing artists.

Opera Machine – Westley Montgomery (TAPS)

Opera Machine is a work-in-process exploring music, measurement, and the sedimentation of culture in the bodies of performers. How does the cultural legacy of opera reverberate in the present day? How have the histories of voice-science, race “science,” and the gendering of the body co-produced pedagogies and styles of opera performance? What might it look like (sound like) to resist these histories?

“Dancing Technologies: Integrated Movement, Drones, and Posthuman Blackness” — Raissa Simpson, Marc Chappelle, and John Eric Henry at Critical Making Collaborative, April 26, 2024

The Critical Making Collaborative is proud to present Raissa Simpson, John Eric Henry, and Marc Cunanan Chappelle, who will be discussing their work with AI and drones on Friday, April 26 at 4:30pm in Roble 139.

“Weaving as Coding: Complexity and Nostalgia” — Hideo Mabuchi at Critical Making Collaborative, March 4, 2024

The Critical Making Collaborative at Stanford proudly presents Hideo Mabuchi, Professor of Applied Physics and Denning Family Director of the Stanford Arts Institute, for a presentation titled “Weaving as Coding: Complexity and Nostalgia.” The presentation will take place on Monday, March 4 (12:30-2:00pm in the McMurtry Building, room 370). All are welcome!

In Hideo’s words:

Weaving as Coding: Complexity and Nostalgia

Textiles are cultural objects that organically support nested layers of coding. In this talk I’ll first illustrate what I mean by this with brief examples borrowed from papers in anthropology and media studies, and then discuss a small textile piece I recently wove on an eight-shaft table loom. My piece employs a traditional block draft (Bronson spot lace) and weft-faced weaving to mimic the appearance of a seven-segment numeral display, as can be found in common LED alarm clocks, and spells out the “calculator word” h-E-L-L-0 as the upside-down view of the digit string 07734. To complete the arc of the story I’ll offer a semantic mash-up of Boymian reflective nostalgia with the information-theoretic concept of algorithmic complexity, and argue on this basis that hand-weaving offers a rich paradigm for critical making that undermines framings of generative AI as a tool that augments human creativity.

As a quantum physicist devoted to the traditional crafts of ceramics and weaving, I live a kind of spiral between abstraction and materiality that keeps me dithering over what it means to know something. I profess this equivocation in my teaching, which increasingly looks to the humanities for help in relativizing rigorous thought and embodied understanding. The project I’ll discuss grew out of class prep for teaching APPPHYS100B “The Questions of Cloth: Weaving, Pattern Complexity, and Structures of Fabrics”, but I’ve only picked up on its critical making aspect as a result of things I learned while co-teaching ARTHIST284/484 “Material Metonymy: Ceramics and Asian America” with Marci Kwon.

Two Events on AI and Critical Making

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).

RESCHEDULED: Alexander R. Galloway at Critical Making Collaborative (via Zoom), April 25, 2023

Please join the Critical Making Collaborative at Stanford for a presentation titled “Crystals, Genes, and Wool: Three Case Studies in Algorithmic Re-enactment” by Alexander R. Galloway, Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. This free event will take on Zoom on Tuesday, April 25th, from 5:00 pm to 7:00 pm PDT.

An algebraic textile pattern from 1947, a cellular automata simulation from 1953, a tabletop game from 1977 – in this online workshop, we will explore three lost or otherwise overlooked pieces of code from the deep history of computational culture. Using an experimental method dubbed “algorithmic re-enactment,” we will study these artifacts in their own historical context, while also bringing them to life again using current tools.

Alexander R. Galloway is a writer and computer programmer. He is the author of several books on digital media and critical theory, including most recently Uncomputable: Play and Politics in the Long Digital Age (Verso, 2021). Since 2001 he has worked with the Radical Software Group on Carnivore, Kriegspiel, and other software projects.

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford. Please RSVP here to receive a Zoom link by email.

“Crystals, Genes, and Wool: Three Case Studies in Algorithmic Re-enactment” — Alexander R. Galloway at Critical Making Collaborative, March 8, 2023

Please join the Critical Making Collaborative at Stanford for a presentation titled “Crystals, Genes, and Wool: Three Case Studies in Algorithmic Re-enactment” by Alexander R. Galloway, Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. This free event will take place in Room 115 at the McMurtry Building (355 Roth Way, Stanford, CA 94305) on Wednesday, March 8th, from 3:00 pm to 5:00 pm.

An algebraic textile pattern from 1947, a cellular automata simulation from 1953, a tabletop game from 1977 – in this workshop, we will explore three lost or otherwise overlooked pieces of code from the deep history of computational culture. Using an experimental method dubbed “algorithmic re-enactment,” we will study these artifacts in their own historical context, while also bringing them to life again using current tools.

Alexander R. Galloway is a writer and computer programmer. He is author of several books on digital media and critical theory, including most recently Uncomputable: Play and Politics in the Long Digital Age (Verso, 2021). Since 2001 he has worked with the Radical Software Group on Carnivore, Kriegspiel, and other software projects.

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford.

CPU Workshop on “Self-Organized Criticality”

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