Critical Making Collaborative

“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?

Sunset with a Sky Background — Screening and discussion on AI Aesthetics with filmmaker J. Makary and respondent Caitlin Chan

On May 7, 2024 (4:30pm in McMurtry 115), the Critical Making Collaborative at Stanford is proud to present a screening of Sunset with a Sky Background, followed by a discussion on AI aesthetics with filmmaker J. Makary and respondent Caitlin Chan.

J. Louise Makary is a filmmaker and Ph.D. candidate in art history specializing in film studies and lens-based art practices. She is interested in using methodologies foundational to the study of cinema, such as psychoanalysis and semiotics, to interpret emergent visual forms of A.I. with film in mind. Her works have been exhibited at ICA Philadelphia, Bauhaus University, the Slought Foundation, Mana Contemporary (Jersey City and Chicago), Human Resources LA, Moore College, SPACES Cleveland, and the Spring/Break Art Show.

Caitlin Chan is a second year Ph.D. student in art history. She is currently working on a project that historicizes the aesthetics and phenomenology of A.I.-generated images by tracing a genealogy to early 19th-century photographic practices of making and viewership.

“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.

Game Changer Lab at Critical Making Collaborative, Jan. 26, 2023

I am happy to announce the inaugural event of the Critical Making Collaborative at Stanford — a new initiative that my colleagues Jean Ma (Film & Media Studies), Matthew Wilson Smith (Theater and Performance Studies/German), and myself established to probe the intersections of theory and practice:

Please join the Critical Making Collaborative at Stanford University in the Clark Center Auditorium at Bio-X (318 Campus Drive) on Thursday, January 26th, from noon to 1:30 pm for a presentation by collaborators Melissa L. Gilliam and Patrick Jagoda. The Clark Center Auditorium is located below the Clark Center Courtyard, accessible by the courtyard staircase or by the elevators in the east wing lobby.

In this talk, Dr. Gilliam and Dr. Jagoda will present the Center for Interdisciplinary Inquiry and Innovation in Sexual and Reproductive Health (Ci3), with a particular emphasis on the Game Changer Chicago (GCC) Design Lab, which they co-founded at the University of Chicago. This interdisciplinary collaboration brings together high school youth from the South Side of Chicago, graduate and undergraduate students, and full-time game design staff. Together, they create digital stories and games about health and social justice issues to improve young people’s health and well-being.

Projects include a suite of board games that tackle health issues in Chicago (Hexacago), a game-based narrative about sexual violence (Bystander), a mobile game about HIV testing among men who have sex with men (The Test), a roleplaying video game to encourage youth underrepresented in STEM to explore this area (Caduceus Quest), a multimedia intervention based in India (Kissa Kahani), and a birth control counseling tool (Tangible Tool). These research projects raise questions about intersections among the humanities, arts, and sciences, digital media and learning, emerging cultural and narrative genres, and the social and emotional health of youth.

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford, as well as the Digital Aesthetics Workshop and the Medical Humanities Workshop, both of which are sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center.