Tag: media art

Re-Figuring | Digital Gravity — Morehshin Allahyari and Miguel Novelo at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, May 19, 2026

The Digital Aesthetics Workshop is pleased to announce our next event, featuring presentations from Morehshin Allahyari and Miguel Novelo, on May 19 from 5-6:30PM PT in the Board Room at the Humanities Center.

For those unable to join in person, we invite you to join on Zoom. Registration is at this link.

Morehshin Allahyari | Re-figuring

In this presentation, Morehshin Allahyari speaks to the significance of re-figuration in her work: the act of re-reading the past, in order to reimagine decolonial futures. Drawing upon key projects She Who Sees the Unknown and Speculations on Capture, alongside her current film-in-progress, Morehshin centers circular time as a de- and anti-colonial methodology. She explores how embracing multiple, or plural futures is a tool for challenging the Western vision and use of technologies, to continue systemic violences. She invites us to consider the meaning of making work about the future, in a current moment when, for many, the notion of a future hangs in the balance.

Morehshin Allahyari (Persian: موره‌شین اللهیاری‎), is a Bay Area based Iranian-Kurdish artist and assistant professor of Digital Media Art at Stanford University, using 3D simulation, video, sculpture, and digital fabrication as tools to re-figure myth and history. Through archival practices and storytelling, her work weaves together complex counternarratives in opposition to the lasting influence of Western technological colonialism in the context of MENA (Middle East and North Africa). Morehshin has been part of numerous exhibitions, festivals, and workshops around the world including Venice Biennale di Architettura, New Museum, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Pompidou Center, MoMa, Victoria and Albert Museum, Queens Museum, and Museum of Modern Art, Taipei. She has been an artist in residence at Carnegie Mellon University’s STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, Autodesk Pier9 Workshop in San Francisco, the Vilém Flusser Residency Program for Artistic Research in association with Transmediale, Berlin, Eyebeam’s one year Research Residency, Pioneer Works, and Harvest Works. She has been featured in Art21, The New York Times, BBC, Huffington Post, Wired, National Public Radio, Parkett Art Magazine, and Al Jazeera, among others. Morehshin’s work has been the subject of critical analysis across books, academic articles, and dissertation chapters of over 100 publications.

Miguel Novelo | Digital Gravity

Digital art is a dense, physical matter. Novelo’s recent work connects contemporary computing to a long arc of indigenous tools, situating data within the weight of the geological and the ancestral. Using photogrammetry and computer vision, Novelo translates the rhythms of bodies in motion into “computing rocks”—vessels that store and process information. During his residency at Recology, Novelo focused on the haunted CPU, exposing the tension between the digital desire for levitation and the physical anchor of the body. Light is not weightless; it is an extension of the earth’s resources. Through interaction, the viewer’s body activates the gravity of the work, grounding the ghostly smears of the screen into a tactile experience. This talk examines how the digital body is realized through its relationship to physical matter, resource costs, and the ritual of motion.

Miguel Novelo (he/him/el) is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and researcher who focuses on emerging media and community organizing—currently working on algorithmic movies, technoshammanic installations, thermodynamic hypnotism, and friendly computer viruses. Novelo earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts  from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2018, followed by a Master of Fine Arts from Stanford University in 2022. His work has been exhibited at various institutions, including the de Young Museum, the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) in Mexico City, and numerous international film festivals. Novelo is a lecturer at Stanford Art and Art History Department and San Jose State University.

This event is generously co-sponsored by the Department of Art & Art History, the Middle Eastern Studies Forum, and the Program in Global Studies.

NON/PHENOMENALITIES — July 26 – Aug 30, 2025 at Gallery 120710 in Berkeley

NON/PHENOMENALITIES — a show that I am co-curating with artist Brett Amory at Gallery 120710 in Berkeley — opens July 26 with an amazing lineup of artists.

The title of this exhibition plays on the multiple senses of the “phenomenal.” On the one hand, the phenomenal is equated with spectacle and the spectacular, the exceptional appearance that dazzles its audience, like a pop phenomenon. On the other hand, phenomenality refers to the way anything whatsoever appears to our embodied senses; this less extravagant sense of the word “phenomenon” is at the heart of phenomenology and Kantian philosophy (where it is opposed to the noumenal, which can never appear to sensation).

Both senses of the phenomenal are contested and reconfigured in the contemporary networks of computational media and machine-learning algorithms. For example, AI produces a steady stream of spectacles, each more spectacular than the last, but the underlying operations are immune to human perception. In this interplay, not only the objects of perception but also the very conditions of experience are up for grabs. The phenomenal itself is conditioned by a new realm of nonphenomenality, which poses a special challenge for artists working with these new technologies.

As a way of approaching this new situation, we look to works that stage multiple aesthetic inversions of the phenomenal, ranging from the subtle or understated to the invisible. What comes to the fore when vision encounters computation’s resistance to consciousness, its “discorrelation” from the phenomenology of embodied experience? How can we perceive what artist Trevor Paglen has dubbed the “invisible images” that populate our world? And how can these inversions connect with or be illuminated by other traditions of the non/ phenomenal—for example Buddhist ideas of appearance as illusion, the Lacanian notion of the unperceived Real, or neuroscientific theories of consciousness as a nonsubstantial epiphenomenon?

Looking beyond the spectacles of contemporary technology, Non/phenomenalities asks us to imagine an aesthetics of the subtle, the muted, the “barely perceptible difference,” maybe even the boring.

“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.

Correlative Counter-Capture in Contemporary Art @ ASAP/14

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, “Pulse Index”, 2010. “Recorders”, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2011. Photo by: Antimodular Research

On Saturday, September 30, at 9am Pacific Time, I’ll be giving the following talk at ASAP/14 (online):

Correlative Counter-Capture in Contemporary Art

Computational processing takes place at speeds and scales that are categorically outside human perception, but such invisible processing nevertheless exerts significant effects on the sensory and aesthetic—as well as political—qualities of artworks that employ digital and/or algorithmic media. To account for this apparent paradox, it is necessary to rethink aesthetics itself in the light of two evidently opposing tendencies of computation: on the one hand, the invisibility of processing means that computation is phenomenologically discorrelated (in that it breaks with what Husserl calls the “the fundamental correlation between noesis and noema”); on the other hand, however, when directed toward the production of sensory contents, computation relies centrally on statistical correlations that reproduce normative constructs (including those of gender, race, and dis/ability). As discorrelative, computation exceeds the perceptual bond between subject and object, intervening directly in the prepersonal flesh; as correlative, computation not only expresses “algorithmic biases” but is capable of implanting them directly in the flesh. Through this double movement, a correlative capture of the body and its metabolism is made possible: a statistical norming of subjectivity and collectivity prior to perception and representation. Political structures are thus seeded in the realm of affect and aesthesis, but because the intervention takes place in the discorrelated matter of prepersonal embodiment, a margin of indeterminacy remains from which aesthetic and political resistance might be mounted (with no guarantee of success). In this presentation, I turn to contemporary artworks combining the algorithmic (including AI, VR, or robotics) with the metabolic (including heartrate sensors, ECGs, and EEGs) in order to imagine a practice of dis/correlative counter-capture. Works by the likes of Rashaad Newsome, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Hito Steyerl, or Teoma Naccarato and John MacCallum point to an aesthetic practice of counter-capture that does not elude but re-engineers mechanisms of control for potentially, but only ever locally, liberatory purposes.

Notes toward a Phenomenology of AI Art

Jon Rafman Counterfeit Poast, 2022 4K stereo video 23:39 min MSPM JRA 49270 film still

Today I have a short piece in Outland on AI art and its embodied processing, as part of a larger suite of articles curated by Mark Amerika.

The essay offers a first taste of something I’m developing at the moment on the phenomenology of AI and the role of aesthetics as first philosophy in the contemporary world — or, AI aesthetics as the necessary foundation of AI ethics.

BOOK LAUNCH UPDATE: New Date (July 3) and Location! In conversation with Mark B. N. Hansen

Please note: Due to factors outside of my control, the book launch event for Post-Cinematic Bodies, originally scheduled for this Thursday June 29, has been postponed to next Monday, July 3 at 7pm.

I am happy to announce that I will be in conversation with Mark B. N. Hansen!

Please also note the change of venue, to the Kurfürstenstraße location of Hopscotch Reading Room!

BOOK LAUNCH! June 29, 2023: Hopscotch Reading Room, Berlin

[UPDATE: POSTPONED TO JULY 3 — MORE INFO HERE]

On Thursday, June 29, Hopscotch Reading Room (Gerichtstraße 43 in the Wedding district of Berlin) will be hosting a book launch event for my new book Post-Cinematic Bodies — which will be out both in print and open-access digital formats from meson press. There will be paperbacks available for purchase at the launch, and they’ll be more widely available soon afterwards. If you’re in town, come out around 7pm for a short reading, discussion, and drinks!

[UPDATE: POSTPONED TO JULY 3 — MORE INFO HERE]

Getty Graduate Symposium 2023 Videos

I had the good fortune to attend the Getty Graduate Symposium, featuring graduate students from all of the PhD-granting Art History programs in California, this February at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Videos of all the talks are now online here.

Above, I am just posting the final session, the final talk of which features an excellent talk by my advisee Grace Han, who spoke about “re-animating Lost Time through remixed time: Jacolby Satterwhite, Jon Rafman, and the Generative Archive” (starting around 45 min. in).

On Display: Immemory, Soft Cinema, After Video

About two years ago, the exhibition On Display: Immemory, Soft Cinema, After Video at Bilkent University in Ankara brought together projects by Chris Marker, Lev Manovich, and the contributors to the “video book” after.video — including the collaborative AR piece “Scannable Images” that Karin Denson and I made. Recently, Oliver Lerone Schultz (one of the editors of after.video) brought to my attention this “critical tour” of the exhibition, which takes the form of a discussion between Ersan Ocak and Andreas Treske. It is audio only, and you might need to turn up the volume a bit, but it’s an interesting discussion of video and media art.

(See here for more on after.video. Also, I should note that the AR on “Scannable Images” is currently not working due to the ephemeral business models of AR platforms these days, but I hope to port it over to a new platform and get it up and running again soon!)