Media Aesthetics V || Rhetoric, Media, & Publics Summer Institute 2023

This July, I am excited to be one of the faculty at the Media Aesthetics Summer Institute at Northwestern University, along with Nico Baumbach, Dahye Kim, Hannah Zeavin, and Chenshu Zhou. Please consider applying if this intensive, interdisciplinary workshop could benefit your work. The call for applications and further info are below:

Call for Applications

2023 Summer Institute in Rhetoric, Media, and Publics

Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208 
In Person, July 17–21, 2023 
The deadline for applications is Tuesday June 6, 2023 

Media Aesthetics V
The annual Rhetoric, Media, and Publics Summer Institute at Northwestern University is scheduled to be held on July 17-21, 2023 (with arrival July 16 and departure July 22). 

Institute conveners are Dilip Gaonkar (Rhetoric, Media, and Publics, Northwestern University) and James J. Hodge (English, Northwestern University).

The theorization of media often begins with a story about the history of the senses and the sensorium and how that history might be understood in terms of the ways new technologies transform our individual and collective abilities to see, hear, and communicate. The 21st-century computational saturation of culture by mediated forms as the infrastructure of ordinary life poses new challenges to this project. While many projects emphasize the algorithmic and technical dimensions of the internet age, the media aesthetics project (now in its 5th year) is devoted to exploring ordinary experience. How, for instance, does the rise of internet culture into culture as such bring into being new forms of social belonging, personhood, and collective desire? What aesthetic forms — new or old — grant the most critical traction on grasping our historical present? What critical/interpretive languages do we need to devise to respond constructively to the politically vexed and culturally fragmented ethos of the present? In this project, we hope to explore and interrogate the mediated experience of the present as it mutates, propelled by the rapidly shifting dynamics of capitalist modernity, and while mutating both discloses and conceals the possibilities and perils before us.

Institute Format and Application Process 

The institute will consist of five days of presentations and discussions led by visiting scholars and Northwestern faculty. This year’s visiting scholars include: Nico Baumbach (Columbia University), Shane Denson (Stanford University), Hannah Zeavin (Indiana University), and Chenshu Zhou (University of Pennsylvania). This year’s contributing Northwestern University faculty includes Dahye Kim (Asian Languages and Cultures).

The institute is sponsored by the Center for Global Culture and Communication (CGCC), an interdisciplinary initiative of Northwestern University’s School of Communication. The CGCC will subsidize transportation (up to $250), lodging (double-occupancy), and some meals (breakfast and lunch every day and two group dinners) for admitted students. Applicants should send a brief letter of nomination from their academic advisor, along with a one-page statement explaining their interest in participating in this year’s institute, to the summer institute coordinator Bipin Sebastian (bipinsebastian@u.northwestern.eduWe will adopt a policy of rolling admissions. Priority will therefore be granted to strong applications that are submitted in a timely fashion, preferably by June 6, 2023. All inquiries should be directed to Bipin Sebastian. 

Summer Institute Schedule (tentative):

Monday 7/17

 Welcome and Introductions (am): Dilip Gaonkar & James J. Hodge

 Shane Denson talk (pm): “Of Algorithms, Aesthetics, and Embodied Existences” 

Tuesday 7/18 

 Denson workshop (am) 

 Chenshu Zhou talk (pm): “The Boredom and Excitement of Live Streaming”  

 Dahye Kim talk (pm): “Korean Writing in the Age of Multilingual Word Processing: Reterritorialization of Scripts and the Cultural Technique of Writing” 

Wednesday 7/19 

 Zhou workshop (am) 

 Nico Baumbach talk (pm): “Conspiracy as Theory, Theory as Conspiracy” 

Thursday 7/20

 Baumbach workshop (am) 

 Hannah Zeavin talk (pm): ” Screening Mother, Coding Baby: Attachment, Deprivation, and the American Prison”

Friday 7/21 

 Zeavin workshop (am)

Faculty Bios:

Nico Baumbach Nico Baumbach is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Columbia University. His research and teaching focus on critical theory, film and media theory, documentary, and the intersection of aesthetic and political philosophy. He is the author of Cinema/Politics/Philosophy (Columbia University Press, 2019) and The Anonymous Image: Cinema Against Control (Columbia University Press, Forthcoming)He is currently working on a book on the relationship between critical theory and conspiracy theory.

Shane Denson is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies and, by Courtesy, of German Studies and of Communication at Stanford University, where he also serves as Director of the PhD Program in Modern Thought & Literature. His research interests span a variety of media and historical periods, including phenomenological and media-philosophical approaches to film, digital media, and serialized popular forms. He is the author of Post-Cinematic Bodies (2023), Discorrelated Images (2020), and Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface (2014). See shanedenson.com for more information.

Dahye Kim is an Assistant Professor of Asian Languages and Cultures at Northwestern University. Her research and teaching focus on modern Korean literature and culture, critical approaches to media history, and the cultural dimensions of communication technologies in East Asia. Dahye is particularly interested in exploring the evolving significance and signification of literature and literacy in the digital age. Her current project, tentatively titled “Techno-fiction: Science Fictional Dreams of Linguistic Metamorphosis and the Informatization of Korean Writing,” delves into the radical transformation of writing and literature in the new technological environment of the 1980s and 1990s South Korea.

Hannah Zeavin is a scholar, writer, and editor. She is an Assistant Professor of the History of Science at the University of California at Berkeley (Department of History & The Berkeley Center for New Media). Zeavin is the author of The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (2021) and Mother’s Little Helpers; Technology in the American Family (forthcoming), both from MIT Press. She is the Founding Editor of Parapraxis.

Chenshu Zhou (she/her) is Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies in the History of Art Department and the Cinema and Media Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her PhD from Stanford University. Zhou’s research explores a variety of questions related to the moving images, in particular spectatorship, exhibition, and temporality. She is the author of Cinema Off Screen: Moviegoing in Socialist China (University of California Press, 2021), which received the 2022 Best First Book Award from the Society of Cinema and Media Studies. Her second ongoing book project investigates the relationship between work and screen media consumption against China’s transition from socialism to neoliberal authoritarianism.

Intermediations: Patrick Jagoda, “Metagames and Media Aesthetics” (January 27, 2023)

Recently, I announced an upcoming event featuring the Game Changer Lab Chicago, founded by Melissa Gilliam and Patrick Jagoda, as part of the new Critical Making Collaborative at Stanford. I am pleased now to announce another event featuring Patrick Jagoda, the following day, as part of my other new initiative this year at Stanford: the Intermediations series, which is dedicated to exploring the intersections of intermediality and interdisciplinarity.

On January 27, at 12pm in the Terrace Room of Margaret Jacks Hall, Professor Jagoda of the University of Chicago will be presenting on “Metagames and Media Aesthetics.” Please see below for an abstract and bio, and hope to see some of you there!

“Metagames and Media Aesthetics”

Broadly circulating humanistic terms such as “metafiction” (William H. Gass), “metapictures” (WJT Mitchell), and “metacomics” (M. Thomas Inge) point to heightened self-reflexivity within a medium or form. Particularly since the 2010s, we have seen an increased volume of “metagames” or games about games that include prominent independent game examples such as The Stanley Parable (2013),Doki Doki Literature Club! (2017), and There is No Game (2020). This presentation explores different theories and categories of metagames en route to the question of why metagames are so important to understanding our contemporary media ecology in 2023. Video games in general, and metagames in particular, call for an expanded sense of media aesthetics that exceed Roland Barthes’s earlier triumvirate of image, music, and text. This talk theorizes the videogame sensorium and its broader implications for media studies.

Bio:

Patrick Jagoda is the William Rainey Harper Professor of Cinema & Media Studies, English, and Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Chicago. He is Executive Editor of Critical Inquiry and director of the Weston Game Lab, as well as co-founder of the Game Changer Chicago Design Lab and Transmedia Story Lab. Patrick’s books include Network Aesthetics (2016), The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer (2016 with Michael Maizels), Experimental Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification (2020), and Transmedia Stories: Narrative Methods for Public Health and Social Justice (2022 with Ireashia Bennett and Ashlyn Sparrow). He has also co-edited five special issues or edited volumes, and published over fifty essays and interviews. Patrick designs transmedia, digital and analog games, including the climate change alternate reality game Terrarium (2019), which received the 2020 IndieCade award for the best Location Based and Live Play Design. He is a recipient of a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship.

Video: Sensations of History and Discorrelated Images: James Hodge and Shane Denson in Conversation

Above, the complete video from the conversation on April 2, 2021 between James Hodge and myself about our new books, Sensations of History and Discorrelated Images. Co-sponsored by the Center for Global Culture and Communication at Northwestern University and the Linda Randall Meier Research Workshop on Digital Aesthetics at Stanford University.

Sensing Media: New Book Series at Stanford University Press

I have been sitting on this news for a while now, and I am excited that I can finally share it: Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and I are editing a new book series at Stanford University Press called “Sensing Media” that is devoted to the aesthetics, philosophies, and cultures of media.

We are especially interested in contributions that rethink media aesthetics, understood broadly to include both artistic uses of media and their sensory dimensions; that conceive media as the site where art and technology converge; and that expand the scope of media-philosophical discussions to include global and heretofore marginalized perspectives. We are excited to explore the connections between sensory forms and their infrastructures, between media technologies and aesthetic sensibilities, and more generally between media and the many possible worlds they disclose.

Please spread the word about the new series, and consider submitting your manuscripts. If you have questions, you can direct them to me, Wendy Chun, or Executive Editor Erica Wetter, with whom we are thrilled to be working on this series. We look forward to learning about your work!

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.