media theory – medieninitiative

CFP: Stanford-Leuphana Summer Academy on Humanities and Media 2026: Periodization

After a one-year hiatus, the Stanford-Leuphana Summer Academy on Humanities and Media is back! The theme for 2026 is Periodization, and we’ll meet for the week of June 22-26 in Berlin.

How, why, and with what epistemic implications is history divided into temporal segments? Periodizations—whether in the form of epochs, ages, turning points, or more heroic “eras”—belong to the most fundamental and at the same time most frequently contested historiographical operations in literary, art, and media studies. Although they “have no witnesses” (Blumenberg), they constitute a persistent schematism that has proven extremely productive since the so‑called »saddle time« (Koselleck). Periodizations structure time and allow for “significant” markers, enable narrative schemes, stabilize institutions and epistemologies, and in this way also shape concepts of the future and of expected caesuras. They operate as lasting calls to recognize patterns which, when new ones are discovered, may dissolve or remain resilient and continue to have an effect. In recent years, a renewed problematization has emerged—in the name of re‑periodizations (“Anthropocene”), de‑periodizations (“broad present”), or comparative and global perspectives and other temporalities (“multiple modernities”). Yet these approaches do not escape the legacy of periodization; rather, they are often blind to its recursive and pattern‑forming operations.

The Stanford–Leuphana Summer Academy 2026: Periodization will address the following core areas: theories and models of periodization (e.g. epochal thresholds, longue durée, kairos, tipping points); epistemological foundations and implications of the division of time; critique of traditional concepts of epochs; media and disciplinary histories of periodization in different fields (history, literature, philosophy, art, theology, etc.); global perspectives on periodization (asynchronicity, but also cyclical, genealogical, or cosmological temporal orders); and the media and materialities of periodization (calendars, chronicles, exhibitions, textbooks, AI, forensics).

Core Faculty

1. Adrian Daub (Comparative Literature, Stanford)

2. Shane Denson (Film & Media Studies, Stanford)

3. Ute Holl (Media Studies, Basel)

4. Gertrud Koch (Film Studies, Leuphana)

5. Sybille Krämer (Philosophy, Leuphana)

6. Lea Pao (German Studies, Stanford)

7. Claus Pias (History and Epistemology of Media, Leuphana)

8. Aileen Robinson (Theater & Performance Studies, Stanford)

Special Guests

Timon Beyes (Sociology of Organization and Culture, Leuphana)

Wolfgang Ernst (Media Theory, Humboldt University Berlin)

further guests to be announced…

Application

All applications from advanced doctoral candidates must be submitted electronically in PDF format. Please submit your CV (1-2 pages) along with a 500-word abstract of your topic and a short letter of intent explaining why you would like to attend this Summer Academy.

Please use the following naming convention for your application files: Lastname_CV.pdf,

Lastname_Abstract.pdf, Lastname_Letter_of_Intent.pdf. Please email your applications by March 13, 2026 to stanleu@leuphana.de.

The working language of the Summer Academy will be English. The organizers will cover travel (economy) and accommodation costs for the time of the summer school. No additional fees will be charged.

General information

The Stanford-Leuphana Summer Academy on Humanities and Media addresses the intersection between individual humanities disciplines and studies of media and technology from a variety of historical, systematic, and methodological perspectives. As we live in a time when new technologies are emerging at an increasingly rapid pace, the Academy seeks to address vital questions about how different media can drive political and social change, but it also inquires into the assumptions and values that produce technological artifacts. Media studies and media theory intersect with various disciplines in the humanities and social sciences that treat the transmission of information, the formation of social networks, and the embodiment of knowledge in technological artifacts. Therefore, the Academy will bring together faculty and students from various branches of the humanities and social sciences to think about how »mediality« permeates these disciplines in distinct ways; we will approach these issues not only from a robustly interdisciplinary vantage but also by way of comparative cultural and historical perspectives. In this way, the Academy will contribute to our understanding of the fundamental ways that forms of media and technological mediation inform disciplinary knowledge across the humanities, as well as the ways that these disciplinary knowledge formations are an essential precondition to any serious thinking about mediality.

Click the image above to read the full CFP!

“AI as Existential(ist) Risk and Aesthetic Opportunity” — Keynote at Media Theory Conference 2025 in Toronto, Nov. 7-8

I’m excited to be giving one of the keynotes at the Media Theory Conference 2025 at the Centre for Culture and Technology in Toronto. On Nov. 8, I’ll give a talk titled “AI as Existential(ist) Risk and Aesthetic Opportunity.” Here is the abstract:

Contemporary debates around artificial intelligence often frame the technology in terms of “existential risk.” Yet such framings rarely pause to consider what existential might mean in the existentialist sense. In this talk I return to Heidegger’s account of the “worldhood of the world” and Sartre’s concept of “hodological space” to argue that the risk posed by AI is not confined to catastrophic scenarios of planetary survival, but lies more immediately in the reconfiguration of subjectivity itself. AI systems bypass conscious perception, modulating aesthesis—the sensory, affective, and preconscious conditions of experience—and in doing so recalibrate the orientations that make ethical deliberation possible in the first place.

Seen from this angle, the hazard of AI is not external to us but infrastructural, shaping our movements, postures, and affective attunements. At the same time, this hazard can be taken up as an opportunity: artworks that use machine learning to stage glitches, detours, or dissonances do not merely represent technological change but provide laboratories for inhabiting it, exposing how bodies and worlds are being rewritten. If AI marks an existentialist risk, it also opens an occasion to engage aesthetically with the reorganization of perception and orientation, and to confront the stakes of ethics where they begin—in the aesthetic, in the felt conditions of living and acting in a changing world.

Out Now: Technics, eds. Nicholas Baer and Annie van den Oever

Just out in print and open access: Technics (edited by Nicholas Baer and Annie van den Oever) is a wide-ranging and in-depth exploration of contemporary technologies, techniques, and technics more broadly.

I am happy to have made a small contribution to the volume, one of “Ten Statements on Technics,” by André Brock, Dominique Chateau, Beth Coleman, Shane Denson, Amanda Egbe, Yuriko Furuhata, Tom Gunning, Jeffrey West Kirkwood, Laura Mulvey, and Jean-Christoph Plantin.

Take a look at the whole volume — there’s a lot of good stuff in there!

“The Ends of Perfection: On a Limit Concept in Global Film and Media Theory” — Nicholas Baer at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, April 5, 2024

I am pleased to announce our first event for spring quarter! Please join us in welcoming Nicholas Baer next week, who will present a talk titled “The Ends of Perfection: On a Limit Concept in Global Film and Media Theory” on Friday, April 5, 2:30-4:30pm 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: https://tinyurl.com/4ry559an

Abstract:

This talk examines the concept of aesthetic perfection against the backdrop of today’s digital mediascape, where the latest screen technologies promise sharp, pristine images with lossless compression and a lifelike appearance. While, in Hito Steyerl’s account, the circulation of “poor” or “imperfect” images can disrupt hegemonic media logics, I demonstrate that the very ideal of perfection is an engine of semantic instability in the modern age. Intervening in contemporary debates about “rich” and “poor” images, and “high” and “low” definition, my lecture offers a differentiated and historically dynamic understanding of perfection as a limit concept in global film and media theory. I argue that moving images played a crucial role in the redefinition of perfection, as classical conceptions of the term gradually and unevenly gave way to perfectionism, perfectibility, and an aesthetics of imperfection. Integrating Reinhart Koselleck’s method of conceptual history into the study of moving images, my talk reconceives the history of global film and media theory as one of semantic persistence, change, and radical novelty of meaning.

Bio:

Nicholas Baer is Assistant Professor of German at the University of California, Berkeley, with affiliations in Film & Media, Critical Theory, and Jewish Studies. He is author of Historical Turns: Weimar Cinema and the Crisis of Historicism (University of California Press, 2024) and co-editor of three volumes: The Promise of Cinema: German Film Theory, 1907–1933 (University of California Press, 2016), Unwatchable (Rutgers University Press, 2019), and Technics: Media in the Digital Age (Amsterdam University Press, 2024).

This event is generously co-sponsored by the Stanford Europe Center.

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]

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.

Temporal Mediations in Digital Capitalism — Feb. 11, 2023 at UPenn

I am excited to be participating in the 2023 Wolf Conference on “Temporal Mediations in Digital Capitalism” on February 11 at the University of Pennsylvania. I am grateful to Chenshu Zhou for the invitation.

My talk is titled “On the Temporal Technics of Metabolic Capitalism”:

In this presentation, I hope to uncover the temporal dynamics of an emerging system of metabolic capitalism. This system takes aim at embodied and environmental exchanges, including organic processes such as heart rate, brainwave activity, and eye movement, targeting the body as both a resource to be mined and an object to be shaped. Wearables such as the Apple Watch, smart exercise machines like the Peloton or Mirror workout systems, and consumer-grade EEG devices marketed to help improve attention or to assist with mindfulness or meditation—all of these institute a system of “training” that aims to discipline the user’s bodymind and make it more productive. Unlike earlier disciplinary regimes, however, this newer one situates screens and other interfaces as the site of interactive real-time feedback between metabolic processes and subjective and social efforts to transform them. Accordingly, these apparatuses operationalize a temporality that undercuts the threshold of subjective perception, intervening directly in the prepersonal time of embodiment itself, thus enlisting users in an experiment with metabolic and phenomenological time that has far-reaching consequences for our embodied and social existences. (It goes without saying that corporations will extract value from the experiment regardless of its success or failure, however such outcomes might be defined.)

From a media-theoretical perspective, the new interventions mark a significant update from the past-oriented or memorial functions of recording technologies like the cinema as well as the “ontology of liveness” or presence attaching to television; in their place, post-cinematic technologies such as those discussed here are future-oriented or protentional, and they therefore participate in a potential pre-formatting of subjectivity and embodiment. In political economic terms, these technologies therefore also mark an important update in the organization of social materiality itself; that is, they shift from what Sartre in his late, Marxist work identified as the “practico-inert” (in light of the way that commodities and other forms of “worked matter” store past human praxis while condensing it into inert objective form), to a futural technics of what I call the “practico-alert”—where proactively surveillant technologies intervene more directly in subjectivation processes and put us, like the new machines, in a constant state of alert. Finally, whereas Sartre’s practico-inert organized social structures around itself (Sartre’s class-oriented formation of the “seriality,” for example, which Iris Marion Young takes as the basis for thinking gender as a socially enforced typification process), these new futural technologies must be interrogated also in terms of their social agencies as important vectors of typification (racialization, gendering, and dis/abling, among others) and futural or preemptive interpellation.

Further info about the conference, including the complete line-up of speakers and abstracts can be found here.

CFP: 2023 Stanford-Leuphana Academy for Media Studies — “Media and Cultural Change”

I am happy to announce the call for papers for the 4th annual Stanford-Leuphana Academy for Media Studies, which will again take place in Berlin (June 25-30, 2023)!

The topic this year is “Media and Cultural Change”

Our core faculty this year are:

Timon Beyes (Sociology of Organisation and Culture, Leuphana)
Shane Denson (Film and Media Studies, Stanford)
Marisa Galvez (French, Italian, and German Studies, Stanford)
Karla Oeler (Film and Media Studies, Stanford)
Claus Pias (History and Epistemology of Media, Leuphana)
Fred Turner (Communication, Stanford)
Sybille Krämer (Philosophy, Leuphana)
Ruth Mayer (American Studies, Hannover)
Bernhard Siegert (History and Epistemology of Cultural Techniques, Weimar)

Special Guests:

Simon Denny (University of Fine Arts Hamburg)
Wolfgang Ernst (Media Studies, Humboldt University Berlin) — to be confirmed

As in previous years, travel and accommodation costs will be covered for graduate students accepted to the Academy, and there will be no additional fees for participation. So please consider applying and spread the word to qualified graduate students!

“Code” — Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan at Digital Aesthetics Workshop (Jan. 17, 2023)

Please join us on Tuesday, January 17th @ 5-7pm, in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room, for a very special event with Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan. Bernard’s new book, Code: From Information Theory to French Theory, releases just 3 days later on January 20th (https://www.dukeupress.edu/code) ! At Digital Aesthetics he will be discussing the book as well as his future project, Screenscapes: How Formats Render Territories.

Zoom registration, if you can’t make it IRL: https://tinyurl.com/4dhyjuna.

Bio:
Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan is a Reader in the History and Theory of Digital Media (loosely equivalent to associate or w2 professorship). An overarching theme of his research is how “cultural” sciences shape—and are shaped by—digital media. This concern spans his writing on the mutual constitution of cybernetics and the human sciences, ethnicity and AI, and the role of mid-twentieth century military vigilance in the development of interactive, multimedia computing. His attention to cultural factors in technical systems also figured in his work as a curator, notably for the Anthropocene and Technosphere projects at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt.

Bernard’s book Code: From Information Theory to French Theory examines how liberal technocratic projects, with roots in colonialism, mental health, and industrial capitalism, shaped early conceptions of digital media and cybernetics. It offers a revisionist history of “French Theory” as an effort to come to terms with technical ideas of communications and as a predecessor to the digital humanities. N. Katherine Hayles wrote of this book that it “upends standard intellectual histories” and Lev Manovich that “after reading this original and fascinating book, you will never look at key thinkers of the twentieth century in the same way.” Early drafts of the book’s argument appeared in journals including Grey Room and Critical Inquiry.

Bernard’s current book project, Screenscapes: How Formats Render Territories, draws on infrastructure studies and format studies to offer a radical account of how digital screens produce global space. It considers the digital interface in terms of articulation, i.e., in its technoscientific formatting of territories, temporalities, and practices as “ecologies of operations.” Excerpts appear in Representations (An Ecology of Operations) and MLN (The Bitmap is the Territory).