digital aesthetics – medieninitiative

“Six Theses on an Aesthetics of Always-On Computing” — James J. Hodge at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, April 30, 2024

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!

Zoom link for those unable to join in-person: tinyurl.com/27afjatd

Abstract:

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).

Digital Aesthetics Workshop-Workshop, May 24, 2024

Digital Aesthetics Workshop – Workshop

Stanford University, May 24, 2024

We’re pleased to announce the return of the Digital Aesthetics Workshop – Workshop. In the spirit of the Digital Aesthetics series – which invites faculty from various institutions to speak about their work – we envision the DAW-W to be a space for graduate students to share any work-in-progress research in a half-day workshop at the Stanford Humanities Center.

We welcome 250-word abstracts from Stanford graduate students for 15-20 minute presentations. Presentations can be about papers, practice-based projects, and alternative forms of research relevant to the theme of “digital aesthetics,” broadly understood. Presentations will then be workshopped with their peers and faculty mentors Shane Denson (Art History) and Angèle Christin (Communication). Lunch and refreshments will be provided to attendees.

Please send your abstracts to Hank Gerba (hankg@stanford.edu) and Grace Han (ghahahan@stanford.edu) by 6 May 2024, with the email title “DAW-W Abstract.” Acceptances will be sent out shortly after.

“Mimetic Virtualities” — Yvette Granata at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, February 6, 2024

Please join us for the next Digital Aesthetics Workshop, when we will welcome Yvette Granata for her talk on “Mimetic Virtualities: Rendering the Masses and/or Feminist Media Art?” on February 6, 5-7pm 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 attached, as well as a poster for lightweight circulation. We look forward to seeing you there!

Zoom link for those unable to join in-person: tinyurl.com/2r285898

Abstract:

From stolen election narratives to Q-anon cults, the politics of the 21st century are steeped in the mainstreaming of disinformation and the hard-core pursuit of false realities via any media necessary. Simultaneously, the 21st century marks the rise of virtual reality as a mass media. While spatial computing technologies behind virtual reality graphics and head-mounted displays have been in development since the middle of the 20th century, virtual reality as a mass media is a phenomenon of the last decade. Concurrently with the development of VR as a mass media, the tools of virtual production have proliferated – such as motion capture libraries, 3D model and animation platforms, and game engine tools. Does the pursuit of false realities and the proliferation of virtual reality technologies have anything to do with each other? Has virtual reality as a mass medium shaped the aesthetics of the digital masses differently? Looking to the manner in which virtual mimesis operates via rendering methods of the image of crowds, from 2D neural GAN generators to the recent development of neural radiance fields (NERFs) as a form of mass 3D rendering, I analyze the politics and aesthetics of mimetic virtualities as both a process of rendering of the masses and as a process of the distribution of the sensibility of virtualized bodies. Lastly, I present all of the above via feminist media art practice as a critical, creative method.

Bio:

Yvette Granata is a media artist, filmmaker, and digital media scholar. She is Assistant Professor at University of Michigan in the department of Film, Television and Media and the Digital Studies Institute. She creates immersive installations, video art, VR experiences, and interactive environments, and writes about digital culture, media art, and media theory. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at film festivals and art institutions including, Slamdance, CPH:DOX, The Melbourne International Film Festival, The Annecy International Animation Festival, Images Festival, Harvard Carpenter Center for the Arts, The EYE Film Museum, McDonough Museum of Art, and Hallwalls Contemporary Art, among others. Her most recent VR project, I Took a Lethal Dose of Herbs, premiered at CPH:DOX in 2023, won best VR film at the Cannes World Film Awards, and received an Honorable Mention at Prix Ars Electronica in Linz Austria. Yvette has also published in Ctrl-Z: New Media Philosophy, Trace Journal, NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, International Journal of Cultural Studies and AI & Society. She lives in Detroit.

CYBERPUBLICS, MONUMENTS, AND PARTICIPATION — Legacy Russell at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, May 20

We’re excited to announce our next event at the Digital Aesthetics Workshop, a talk by writer and curator Legacy Russell, author of Glitch Feminism, which will take place next Thursday, May 20th at 10 am Pacific and is co-sponsored by the Clayman Institute for Gender Research.

Please register in advance at: tinyurl.com/GFDAW.

About the event:

“CYBERPUBLICS, MONUMENTS, AND PARTICIPATION”

Join writer and curator Legacy Russell in a discussion about the ways in which artists engaging the digital are building new models for what monuments can be in a networked era of mechanical reproduction.

Legacy Russell is a curator and writer. Born and raised in New York City, she is the Associate Curator of Exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Russell holds an MRes with Distinction in Art History from Goldsmiths, University of London with a focus in Visual Culture. Her academic, curatorial, and creative work focuses on gender, performance, digital selfdom, internet idolatry, and new media ritual. Russell’s written work, interviews, and essays have been published internationally. She is the recipient of the Thoma Foundation 2019 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art, a 2020 Rauschenberg Residency Fellow, and a recipient of the 2021 Creative Capital Award. Her first book Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020) is published by Verso Books. Her second book, BLACK MEME, is forthcoming via Verso Books.

Sponsored by the Stanford Humanities Center. Made possible by support from Linda Randall Meier, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Co-sponsored by the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research.

Complete Video of Rendered Worlds: New Regimes of Imaging

Here is the complete video of the event Rendered Worlds: New Regimes of Imaging from October 23, 2020. Featuring Deborah Levitt (The New School), Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal (UC Davis and Universität Siegen), Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan (King’s College London), and Shane Denson (Stanford) discussing their recent work, with Hank Gerba (Stanford) and Jacob Hagelberg (UC Davis) co-moderating the round-table.

Sponsored by the Linda Randall Meier workshop on Digital Aesthetics (Stanford) and the Technocultural Futures Research Cluster (UC Davis), with support from the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Killing Time — Jenny Odell at Digital Aesthetics Workshop

Odell_DAW_Poster-72dpi

I am excited to announce our first meeting of the Linda Randall Meier Research Workshop on “Digital Aesthetics: Critical Approaches to Computational Culture” (more colloquially known as the Digital Aesthetics Workshop) for the 2019-2020 year — our third year. On October 23rd, 5-7 PM, in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room, we’ll host artist and critic Jenny Odell, who will share some research from her new book project.

One of the threads of Odell’s last book, the critically acclaimed How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, concerned the ways in which the “time is money” equation has become more and more pervasive, extending into realms of leisure and even sleep. This talk will examine the history of how time became money in the modern sense; contrast homogeneous, commodified time with heterogeneous ecological time (migrations, flowering events, stages of succession, etc.); and delineate the increasing clash between these two views of time within the context of climate change.

Plastic Dialectics: Community and Collectivity in Japanese Contemporary Art — Miryam Sas at Digital Aesthetics Workshop

Sas Poster

What do we mean when we speak of “collectivity,” collaboration, and community? How have artists and theorists in Japan questioned and created experimental practices that reframe these terms, so crucial to discussions of the arts today? Sas will reflect on issues of collectivity and assemblage as manifested in Japanese contemporary art, drawing examples from 1950s art theory, late 1960s intermedia art, 1970s site-specific photography events, and post 3-11 sculptural installation. Through site-specific critique and new modes of engagement with local space, artists in each of these distinct moments engage in a subtle but powerful rethinking of the frameworks and practices of collectives past and present.

At the next meeting of the Digital Aesthetics Workshop, Miryam Sas, Professor of Comparative Literature and Film & Media at UC Berkeley, will discuss Plastic Dialectics: Community and Collectivity in Japanese Contemporary Art. As we have throughout this quarter, we will meet on Tuesday, Dec 4, from 5-7 at the Roble Gym. RSVP to deacho@stanford.edu – we expect there will be a paper that we will pre-circulate this weekend.

Sas studies Japanese literature, film, theater, and dance; 20^th century literature and critical theory; and avant-garde and experimental visual and literary arts. She is the author of Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return (Harvard, 2010); and Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism(Stanford, 2001). Sas is currently working on a book on media theory and contemporary art in Japan, Feeling Media: Infrastructure, Potentiality, and the Afterlife of Art in Japan, for which she was awarded a President’s Research Fellowship in the Humanities (2017-18). She has published numerous articles in English, French, and Japanese on subjects such as Japanese futurism, cross-cultural performance, intermedia art, butoh dance, pink film and Japanese experimental animation.

Chroma Glitch: Carolyn Kane at Digital Aesthetics Workshop

kane_chroma-glitch

The Digital Aesthetics Workshop at the Stanford Humanities Center is entering its second year, and we are pleased to announce the first event: Carolyn L. Kane will share some of her current research with us, under the title Chroma Glitch: Data as Style. The discussion will encompass Takeshi Murata, Ryan Trecartin, and datamoshing, all within Kane’s broader project, tentatively titled Precarious Beauty: Glitch, Noise, and Aesthetic Failure. There will be a paper pre-circulated ahead of the talk; we will pass it along a week ahead of the event. We are thrilled Dr. Kane can join us – when we first came up with this idea for a workshop, her name became a token for the sort of scholarship we would want to bring in. She will launch a year already filling up with exciting speakers and a new graduate colloquium (more on that to come).

Carolyn L. Kane is the author of the award-winning Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code (U Chicago, 2014). [You can learn more about this fascinating project through this interview in Theory, Culture & Society.] She earned her Ph.D. from New York University’s Dept. of Media, Culture, and Communication in 2011, and was awarded the Nancy L. Buc Postdoctoral Fellowship in “Aesthetics and the Question of Beauty” at Brown University in 2014. From 2011 to 2014 she taught at Hunter College; she is now Associate Professor of Communication and Design at Ryerson University in Toronto.

This event will be held from 5-7p on Tuesday, Oct 9, 2018 at the Roble Arts Gym Lounge (TAPS department). Drinks and snacks will be served. Please RSVP to Doug Eacho (email in image above) if you can, and share widely.

Matthew Wilson Smith: The Nostalgia of VR

Smith poster DAW 2018

On Tuesday, May 15th, we’ll have our fourth and final Digital Aesthetics Workshop of the Spring quarter, “The Nostalgia of Virtual Reality” with Matthew Wilson Smith, at 4 PM in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room. In this workshop, we will discuss the degree to which emergent technologies of virtual reality are indebted to longstanding concepts of presence and disembodied consciousness.

Matthew Wilson Smith is an Associate Professor of German Studies and Theatre and Performance Studies at Stanford University. His interests include modern theatre; modernism and media; and relations between technology, science, and the arts. His book The Nervous Stage: 19th-century Neuroscience and the Birth of Modern Theatre explores historical intersections between the performing arts and the neurological sciences and traces the construction of a “neural subject” over the course of the nineteenth century. It was published by Oxford University Press in 2017. His previous book, The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace (Routledge, 2007), presents a history and theory of modern artistic synthesis, placing such diverse figures as Wagner, Moholy-Nagy, Brecht, Riefenstahl, Disney, Warhol, and contemporary cyber-artists within a genealogy of totalizing performance.

Jonathan Sterne: Machine Learning, ‘AI,’ and the Politics of Media Aesthetics

Sterne poster DAW

On April 24, 2018 (4-6pm in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room), Jonathan Sterne will be speaking at the Digital Aesthetics Workshop. The title of his talk is: “Machine Learning, ‘AI,’ and the Politics of Media Aesthetics: Why Online Music Mastering (Sort of) Works.”

Jonathan Sterne is Professor and James McGill Chair in Culture and Technology in the Department of Art History & Communication Studies at McGill University. His work is concerned with the cultural dimensions of communication technologies, especially their form and role in large-scale societies. One of his major ongoing projects has involved developing the history and theory of sound in the modern west. Beyond the work on sound and music, he has published over fifty articles and book chapters that cover a wide range of topics in media history, new media, cultural theory and disability studies. He has also written on the politics of academic labor and maintains an interest in the future of the university. His new projects consider instruments and instrumentalities; histories of signal processing; and the intersections of disability, technology and perception.