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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
CFP Post-Cinema: Practices … by medieninitiative on Scribd
I am happy to share the CFP for a special issue of Images Secondes on the topic of “Post-Cinema: Practices of Research and Creation,” edited by Chloé Galibert-Lainé and Gala Hernández López.
The special issue, for which I am serving on the comité scientifique (which sounds a lot cooler than “review board”), will collect traditional scholarly articles as well as contributions in other media (such as videographic criticism and experimental digital forms). Proposals are due April 20, 2020, with final submissions due September 30.
Please spread the word to anyone who might be interested in contributing to what is sure to be an exciting publication!
CPU, the Critical Practices Unit, is bifurcating. In addition to hosting events, such as last quarter’s exploration of robotics and performativity, CPU is inaugurating a media/arts workshop.
This will be a space, organized around periodic themes, in which we will plan, discuss, and create projects which disturb the unhappily inherited oppositions of theory/practice, life/art, art/science, and scholarship/the rest. Writers, artists, coders, musicians, everybody (anybody), with a desire to explore alternate ways of making-alongside-theory is welcome. We are looking for critical making, art, manifestos, noise, digital humanities, novel forms of publication, works in progress, and more. There will be no imposed limitation to the scale, medium, or temporality of these projects—only a dotted timeline of informal get-togethers (with snacks) in which we can provide feedback, support, and a shared (if distributed) space for one another. If you’re already working on something (or know someone who is (please forward widely !)), or want to start something, let us know !
CPU’s first workshop theme will be SELF-ORGANIZED CRITICALITY.
Plucked from complexity sciences, SoC is a speculative mechanism which describes how “natural systems,” such as life, might form out of chaos. The term prompts, among many potential questions: How do we(?) position criticality (historically, socially, ontologically) ? Is there any pleasure in critique ? How to navigate porosities or closures between the humanities and sciences (physis/nomos, physis/techne) ? What does it mean for material to gather ? Can material be maternal, or sex abstract ? Who is the ‘self’ which organizes, and how is it oriented (toward/against futures, origins, vortices, decay) ? What does it mean to do all this at Stanford ? Word-play is encouraged—no association is too loose.
We’ll be organizing a first get-together soon.
Again, if interested, please reach out to Hank Gerba: hankg@stanford.edu
I am happy to report that my deformative, EEG-driven interactive video project, The Algorithmic Nickelodeon, which was screened last month at the ACUD-Kino in Berlin, has been selected for screening at the Besides the Screen Festival taking place in Vitória and São Paulo, Brazil this September. My understanding is that it will be among the works shown in Vitória from September 9-12.
Works from the course “Let’s Make a Monster: Critical Making,” which I co-taught this quarter with my art practice colleague Paul DeMarinis, are currently on display in the Shriram Center for Bioengineering and Chemical Engineering at Stanford University. The show, which officially opened today, is up through Friday, June 8.
We are particularly excited to take this work across campus and show it in the context of a space devoted to cutting-edge engineering work, where we hope that it provokes thought and discussion about the transformations of technology, experience, and life itself taking place in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. Thanks especially to Prof. Drew Endy for his help in facilitating and making this show possible.
Here are just a few glimpses of the work on display.
Nora Wheat, Decode (2018)
Hieu Minh Pham, The Knot (2018)
Raphael Palefsky-Smith, Brick (2018) — more info here
David Zimmerman, Eigenromans I-III (2018)
Jennifer Xilo, Mirror for Our Upturned Palms (2018)
Jackie Langelier, Creepers (2018)