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.
“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.
We are excited to announce our first event of 2026! Hannes Bajohr will present on “The Latent Space of Meaning and the Novel” on Tuesday, January 13, from 5-6:30pm PT. The event will take place in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room. Refreshments will be served.
“A world – nothing less – is the theme and postulate of the novel,” German philosopher Hans Blumenberg wrote in 1963. At that same moment, AI research, already emerging from its early optimism, turned to “world models” as a means of stabilizing its brittle systems. Today, these two conceptions of “world” – the literary and the computational – converge in large language models (LLMs), which use their latent spaces not just to generate plausible sentences, but entire narratives, even novels, albeit with still uneven results. Yet in what sense are the “worlds” of novels and of AI analogous, and what can each illuminate about the other?
The talk proposes that both novels and LLMs operate within structured networks of relations – assemblages of events, inferences, and expectations – that can yield a form of coherence even when classical causality is weak or absent. Literary techniques from realism to modernism build patterned universes: realist and naturalist fiction through causal-social dynamics, genre fiction through explicit world-building, and modernism through fragmented but still intelligible world-logics. These traditions offer a vocabulary for assessing LLM-generated texts.
Where early systems like SHRDLU pursued explicit symbolic world models and failed outside narrow domains, contemporary LLMs rely on distributed vector spaces that encode statistical regularities without grounding. My own experiments with a fine-tuned German-language model yielded narratives with stylistic unity but little causal depth. Like certain experimental novels, they evoke meaning through a “weak force” of association rather than strong narrative causality. This talk tries to follow these ideas and aims to resist both overhyping LLMs’ understanding and dismissing them as mere mimicry, thus placing AI-generated fiction, as the meeting points of the two uses of “world,” within a broader theory of modeling and meaning.
Bio:
Hannes Bajohr, is Assistant Professor of German at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on media studies, political philosophy, philosophical anthropology, and theories of the digital. Recent publications include: Thinking with AI: Machine Learning the Humanities (as editor, London: Open Humanities Press) and “Surface Reading LLMs: Synthetic Text and its Styles” (arXiv preprint, forthcoming in New German Critique). In 2027, the English-language translation of his LLM-co-generated novel (Berlin, Miami) will appear with MIT Press.
This event is generously co-sponsored by the Stanford Literary Lab and Stanford Department of English.
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.
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.
Please join us in welcoming our next speaker at the Digital Aesthetics Workshop, Kartik Nair, who will present on “Forms in Motion: Elemental Effects in Contemporary Cinema” on Friday, April 25, 1:00-3:00pm PT. The event will take place in McMurtry 370, where lunch will be served.
Motion capture is the practice of recording the movements of human bodies and using those movements to animate computer-generated bodies, thereby producing virtual character movement on the screen. Current scholarship on motion capture has critically examined the construction of this technology in trade reportage, industry journalism, and film promotion, detecting a discursive ambivalence arising from a struggle for recognition between live actors and motion capture technicians over the future of film performance. This talk will use motion capture as a heuristic to understand the many other kinds of human movements that are being captured in the processes of digital image-making. I will track the pipeline of atmospheric effects. Such atmospheric effects are ubiquitous in contemporary blockbuster cinema. Dust, fire, smoke, light, water and other particulate proliferate in the mise en scene, helping to ground impossible worlds even as they fascinate us with their own expressive qualities. Replacing the logic of photographic capture with one in which the frame is a ‘blank canvas’ to which elements are selectively added, such atmospheric effects vividly attest to the claim that digital tools have re-linked filmmaking with painting. Yet, unlike the painted canvas, which preserves brushstrokes in frozen perpetuity, virtual effects inscribe a trace of and in motion: these are instances in which the creative and corporeal motion of visual effects artists is captured and conveyed as motion. This process unfolds along a transnational path along which the mobile trace moves. Even as those generating it may remain immobilized by visa regulations, server locations, and time-zone differentials, their physical moves are eventually ex-propriated and assimilated into screen movement. Closely read, then, the spectacular conventions of blockbuster cinema can become legible as archives in and of motion.
Bio:
Kartik Nair is a film scholar working at the intersection of transnational cinema, film historiography, materialist media theory, and infrastructure studies, with a focus on popular genres and South Asian cinema. His first book, Seeing Things, is about the production and circulation of low-budget horror films in 1980s India. His current research explores the physical pipelines of digital cinema. He is an Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Temple University in Philadelphia, and one of the core editors of BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies.
This event has been generously co-sponsored by the Department of Art & Art History and the Stanford Center for South Asia.
The Digital Aesthetics Workshop is looking forward to welcoming Rizvana Bradley, who will present “Borrowed Time: Mediating the Nonevental” on Tuesday, March 4, at 5-7pm PT. The event will take place in the Watt Dining Room at the Humanities Center, where refreshments will be served. Below you will find the Bradley’s bio and a brief abstract, as well as the poster for the event. See you there!
This talk approaches the concept of mediality, which gets to the heart of a number of theoretical questions concerning the entanglements of raciality, mediation, and immediation, and the worldly violence of the everyday. Interrogating the racialized grammars of ontology, phenomenology, and (aesthetic) form, one can begin to further understand the depth of the violence and scope of the implications of what Bradley theorizes as black mediality. Black mediality has massive implications for both the grammar of technics that predominates in the philosophy of media, as well as the conception of mediality this grammar inscribes. Moving by way of artistic example, the talk demonstrates how both mediatic forms and the perceived technological exteriorizations of the modern human subject are bound to normative, phenomenological conceptions of temporality.
Bio:
Rizvana Bradley is Associate Professor of Film and Media and Affiliated Faculty in the History of Art and the Center for Race and Gender at the University of California, Berkeley.
Bradley’s book, Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form (Stanford University Press, 2023), moves across multiple histories and geographies, artistic mediums and forms—from nineteenth-century painting and early cinema, to contemporary text-based works, video installations, and digital art—in order to inaugurate a new method for interpretation, an ante-formalism, which demonstrates black art’s recursive deconstruction of the aesthetic forms that remain foundational to modernity.
Bradley serves on the Advisory Board of October. Her articles appear in journals such as Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism, Film Quarterly, Black Camera: An International Film Journal, Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, TDR: The Drama Review, Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, and Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory. Her art criticism has also been published in The Yale Review, Artforum, e-flux, Art in America, November, and Parkett, as well as numerous exhibition catalogs, including for the Serpentine Galleries, the New Museum, Whitechapel Gallery, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, and the Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art. Bradley has curated a number of academic arts symposia, including events at the British Film Institute, London, the Serpentine Galleries, London, and the Stedelijk Museum of Art, Amsterdam.
The Digital Aesthetics Workshop is proud to welcome Mindy Seu, who will present “A Sexual History of the Internet: Lecture Performance Beta Test” on Tuesday, January 28, 5-7pm PT. The event will take place in Wallenberg Hall 433A, where refreshments will be served. Below you will find the speaker’s bio and a brief abstract, as well as the poster for the event. We hope to see you there!
“A Sexual History of the Internet” is a revisionist techno-history that introduces device-mediated relationships, the computer mouse as vulva, and the sex workers who built the internet.
Bio:
Mindy Seu is a designer and technologist based in New York City and Los Angeles. Her expanded practice involves archival projects, techno-critical writing, performative lectures, and design commissions. Her latest writing surveys feminist economies, historical precursors of the metaverse, and the materiality of the internet. Mindy’s ongoing Cyberfeminism Index, which gathers three decades of online activism and net art, was commissioned by Rhizome, presented at the New Museum, and awarded the Graham Foundation Grant. She has lectured internationally at cultural institutions (Barbican Centre, New Museum), academic institutions (Columbia University, Central Saint Martins), and mainstream platforms (Pornhub, SSENSE, Google), and been a resident at MacDowell, Sitterwerk Foundation, Pioneer Works, and Internet Archive. Her design commissions and consultation include projects for the Serpentine Gallery, Canadian Centre for Architecture, and MIT Media Lab. Her work has been featured in Vanity Fair, Frieze, Dazed, Brooklyn Rail, i-D, and more. Mindy holds an M.Des. from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and a B.A. in Design Media Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles. As an educator, Mindy was formerly an Assistant Professor at Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts and Critic at Yale School of Art. She is currently an Associate Professor at University of California, Los Angeles in the Department of Design Media Arts.
This event is generously co-sponsored by the d.school, the Asian American Research Center at Stanford, and the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis.
We’re pleased to announce our first event of 2025! Please join us in welcoming Jussi Parikka, who will present on “The Environmental Data Stack” on Tuesday, Jan 7, 5-7pm PT. The event will take place in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room, where refreshments will be served. We look forward to seeing you there after the holiday break!
This talk tests the notion of “environmental data stack” as a particular kind of a methodological problem space (Lury 2021). The term defines the multiple levels of “problematics” of grounding environmental data in alternating scales of reference, in different technological forms of capture of data, and in various interacting registers of sensing. The environmental data stack builds on existing work in critical data studies where the situated, even spatialized notions of data are developed – and it also lends itself to a sense of the politics and aesthetics of data, where aesthetics is not necessarily about art (it can be though) but about the wider context of materials, sensing, and modeling. This work relates to my interest in cultural techniques of data and software studies, including the intersection of ecomedia and computational practices. The talk will thus feature some examples from recent and on-going work in different projects such as the Design and Aesthetics for Enviornmental Data (https://cc.au.dk/en/dafed/).
Bio:
Jussi Parikka is professor of Digital Aesthetics and Culture at Aarhus University where he leads the Digital Aesthetics Research Centre (DARC) as well as is the founding co-director of the Environmental Media and Aesthetics -research program. He also holds a visiting professorship at Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton). His books have addressed media archaeology, the ecological underpinnings of discourses of digital culture from animals to geology, and most recently, transformations of visual culture. The more recent books include Operational Images (2023) as well as the co-authored Living Surfaces: Images, Plants, and Environments of Media (2024, with Abelardo Gil-Fournier). Both are available as open access. His books have been translated into 12 languages. Currently he is developing a new project on datafication of agriculture.
This event is generously co-sponsored by The Europe Center.
I’m excited to report that the Digital Aesthetics Workshop at the Stanford Humanities Center has been renewed for another year — our seventh! Next year’s graduate student co-chairs are Grace Han and Rebecca Turner!
This past week marked the conclusion of our sixth year of the Digital Aesthetics Workshop at the Stanford Humanities Center, which we celebrated with a graduate symposium — the appropriately titled Digital Aesthetics Workshop-Workshop!
With nine events a year, six years is a lot of events! Here’s what we’ve done so far:
2017-2018 Events:
Mark B. N. Hansen, “The Ontology of Media Operations, or, Where is the Technics in Cultural Techniques,” 10 October 2017
Claus Pias, “Computer Game Worlds,” 24 October 2017
Allison de Fren, “Post-Cinema and Videographic Criticism,” 14 November 2017
Bonnie Ruberg, “Video Games Have Always Been Queer,” 23 January 2018
Jacob Gaboury, “Techniques for Secondary Mediation: On the Screenshot as Image-Object,” 6 February 2018
Shane Denson, “Discorrelated Images,” 3 April 2018
Elizabeth Kessler, “Psychedelic Space and Anachronic Time: Photography and the Voyager’s Tour of the Solar System,” 10 April 2018
Jonathan Sterne, “Machine Learning, ‘AI,’ and the Politics of Media Aesthetics: Why Online Music Mastering (Sort of) Works,” 24 April 2018
Matthew Wilson Smith, “The Nostalgia of Virtual Reality,” 15 May 2018
2018-2019 Events:
Carolyn L. Kane, “Chroma Glitch: Data as Style,” 9 October 2018
Camille Utterback, “Embodied Interactions & Material Screens,” 27 November 2018
Miryam Sas, “Plastic Dialectics: Community and Collectivity in Japanese Contemporary Art,” 4 December 2018
Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux, “Skin in the Game: Greymarket Gambling in the Virtual Economies of Counter-Strike,” 14 January 2019
N. Katherine Hayles, “Can Computers Create Meaning? A Cyber-Bio-Semiotic Perspective,” 12 February 2019
Kevin B. Lee, “Dreams and Terrors of Desktop Documentary,” 27 February 2019
Marion Fourcade, “A Maussian Bargain: The Give and Take of the Personal Data Economy,” 23 April 2019
Digital Aesthetics Symposium, featuring Stanford graduate students and faculty, 14-15 May 2019
Miyako Innoue, “Writing at the Speed of Thinking: The Japanese Kana Typewriter and the Rehabilitation of the Male Hand,” 28 May 2019
2019-2020 Events:
Jenny Odell, “Killing Time,” 23 October 2019
Scott Bukatman, “We Are Ant-Man,” 5 November 2019
Ben Peters, “Declining Russian Media Theory,” 21 November 2019
Rachel Plotnick, “Unclean Interface: Computation as a Cleanliness Problem,” 11 February 2020
Jean Ma, “At the Edges of Sleep,” 9 March 2020 [cancelled due to COVID-19]
Melissa Gregg, Title TBA, 7 April 2020 [cancelled due to COVID-19]
Sarah T. Roberts, “Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media,” 21 April 2020
Kris Cohen, “Bit Field Black,” 19 May 2020
Xiaochang Li, “How Language Became Data: Speech Recognition between Likeness and Likelihood,” 26 May 2020
2020-2021 Events:
Vivian Sobchack, in conversation with Scott Bukatman and Shane Denson, 29 September 2020 (additional follow-up event for Stanford graduate students, 14 October 2020)
“New Regimes of Imaging.” Roundtable discussion with Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal, Deborah Levitt, Bernard Geoghegan, and Shane Denson, 23 October 2020
libi rose striegl and the Media Archaeology Lab at the University of Colorado at Boulder, 10 November 2020
Shaka McGlotten, “Racial Chain of Being,” 8 December 2020
James J. Hodge and Shane Denson, “Dialogue in Digital Aesthetics: Sensations of History and Discorrelated Images,” 2 April 2021
Melissa Gregg, “The Great Watercooler in the Cloud: Distributed Work, Collegial Presence, and Mindful Labor Post-COVID,” 6 April 2021
Adrian Daub, “What Tech Calls Thinking,” 11 May 2021
Legacy Russell, “Cyberpublics, Monuments, and Participation,” 20 May 2021
Fred Turner and Mary Beth Meehan, “Seeing Silicon Valley – Life Inside a Fraying America,” 2 June 2021
2022-2023 Events:
Erich Hörl, “The Disruptive Condition,” 5 October 2022
Mark Algee-Hewitt, “Patterns of Text/Patterns of Analysis,” 15 November 2022
Jean Ma and Tung-Hui Hu, “In Conversation” (joint book event), 2 December 2022
Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, “The Violent Forensics of Digital Imagery: Abu Ghraib, Ukraine, and Cat Videos,” 17 January 2023
Melissa Gilliam and Patrick Jagoda, “Game Changer Lab” (co-sponsored with the Critical Making Collaborative), 26 January 2023
M. Beatrice Fazi, “On Digital Theory,” 28 February 2023
Alexander Galloway, “‘No Deconstruction without Computers’: Learning to Code with Derrida and Kittler,” 7 March 2023
Neta Alexander, “The Right to Speed-Watch (or, When Netflix Discovered its Blind Viewers),” 18 April 2023
Damon Young, “Selfie/Portrait,” 9 May 2023
Mihaela Mihailova, “Acting Algorithms: Animated Deepfake Performances in Contemporary Media,” 26 May 2023
2023-2024 Events:
Luciana Parisi, “The Negative Aesthetic of AI,” 20 October 2023
Ge Wang, “Artful Design and Artificial Intelligence: What Do We (Really) Want from AI?,” 14 November 2023
Thomas Lamarre, “Harvesting Light,” 5 December 2023
Bryan Norton, “Marx After Simondon: Metabolic Rift and the Analog of Computation,” 30 January 2024
Yvette Granata, “Mimetic Virtualities: Rendering the Masses and/or Feminist Media Art?,” 6 February 2024
Akira Mizuta Lippit, “Shadowline,” 12 March 2024
Nicholas Baer, “The Ends of Perfection: On a Limit Concept in Global Film and Media Theory,” 5 April 2024
James Hodge, “Six Theses on an Aesthetics of Always-On Computing,” 30 April 2024
Digital Aesthetics Workshop-Workshop, graduate student symposium, with responses from Angèle Christin and Shane Denson, 24 May 2024
Thanks to all of the graduate student coordinators over the years, including Jeff Nagy, Doug Eacho, Natalie Deam, Annika Butler-Wall, and this year’s coordinators Grace Han and Hank Gerba. (And congratulations to Hank on successfully defending their dissertation last week!)
We’re pleased to announce the second event of the Digital Aesthetics Workshop for spring quarter. Please join us in welcoming James J. Hodge, who will present on “Six Theses on an Aesthetics of Always-On Computing” on Tuesday, April 30, 5:00-7:00pm PT. The event will take place in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room, where refreshments will be served. Below you will find the abstract and bio. We look forward to seeing you there!
This talk comes from my book project, “Ordinary Media: An Aesthetics of Always-On Computing.” The premise of the project is that the smartphone has become for many the signature technology and engine of experience in the twenty-first century. One of the project’s larger claims is that ambient givenness of smartphones in contemporary life has significantly reorganized the human sensorium and, moreover, has elevated the significance of experience at the level of the skin’s surface, or what the psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden terms “boundedness.” This talk attends to the ways in which this dramatic shift in the general orientation of experience entails a sea change in the general nature of aesthetics native and responsive to the always-on world. Discussing a variety of examples from film, literature, video, games, digital art, and vernacular aesthetic forms and genres, this talk explores six “theses” of aesthetics in this still-novel yet ordinary arena.
Bio:
James J. Hodge is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Northwestern University. His essays on digital aesthetics have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Postmodern Culture, TriQuarterly, Film Criticism, and elsewhere. He is the author of Sensations of History: Animation and New Media Art (Minnesota, 2019).
