In Conversation: Jean Ma and Tung-Hui Hu at Digital Aesthetics Workshop (December 2)

Poster by Hank Gerba

Please join us for the Digital Aesthetics Workshop’s next event, “In Conversation: Jean Ma & Tung-Hui Hu.” The two authors will discuss their recently released books—Jean Ma’s At the Edges of Sleep: Moving Images and Somnolent Spectators and Tung-Hui Hu’s Digital Lethargy—before moving into a more synthetic conversationA version of this event was originally scheduled in 2020 as a discussion of work in Jean Ma’s book-to-be, but was cancelled due to the pandemic. We are *thrilled* to bring the event back as, in part, a celebration of the book’s launch : ) 

The meeting will be held December 2nd, 10am-12, in McMurtry 370. Breakfast will be provided !

Zoom registration if unable to attend in-person: tinyurl.com/3nujuzkr

Jean Ma is the Victoria and Roger Sant Professor in Art in Stanford’s Department of Art & Art History. She has published books on the temporal poetics of Chinese cinema (Melancholy Drift: Marking Time in Chinese Cinema), singing women on film (Sounding the Modern Woman: The Songstress in Chinese Cinema), and the relationship of cinema and photography (Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography). She is the coeditor of “Music, Sound, and Media,” a book series at the University of California Press. Her writing has appeared in Camera Obscura, Criticism, Film Quarterly, Grey Room, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, and October. Her new book At the Edges of Sleep: Moving Images and Somnolent Spectators is the recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writer Book Grant. To access the open-source digital edition, please visit: luminosoa.org/site/books/m/10.1525/luminos.132/

Tung-Hui Hu is a poet and scholar of digital media. The winner of a Rome Prize and a NEA fellowship for literature, Hu has also received an American Academy in Berlin Prize for his research. He is the author of A Prehistory of the Cloud (MIT Press, 2015), described by The New Yorker as “mesmerizing… absorbing [in] its playful speculations”. His research has been featured on CBS News, BBC Radio 4, Boston Globe, New Scientist, Art in America, and Rhizome.org, among other venues. His brand-new book, an exploration of burnout, isolation, and disempowerment in the digital underclass, is Digital Lethargy (MIT Press, October 2022).

“At the Edges of Sleep” — Jean Ma at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, March 9, 2020

We are excited to announce our next event of the Digital Aesthetics Workshop, a late-breaking addition to our calendar, a week from today with Jean Ma. We’ll meet on Monday, March 9th, from 5 to 7 PM in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room.

Professor Ma teaches in the Film and Media Studies Program of Stanford’s Department of Art and Art History. On Monday, we’ll discuss some of her recent research on sleep in film and moving image art. 

More information on the talk is below. There will be snacks and wine, and there is no pre-circulated reading for this workshop. Please feel free to circulate widely!

At the Edges of Sleep

This talk introduces my current research on sleep in film and moving image art, as both a subject matter to explore and a state to induce in the audience. An example of the recent turn to sleep is Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s SLEEPCINEMAHOTEL (2018), a work addressed to viewers presumed to be unconscious for the better part of its duration. The proposition made by SLEEPCINEMAHOTEL – that sleep can be more than a negative reflection on the work that arouses it – flies in the face of standard ideas about reception. I relate the provocation of sleepy spectatorship to a larger set of shifting conceptions of sleep, in disciplines of knowledge as well as popular discourse. As sleep emerges from the shadows into a newfound visibility, it undergoes a reevaluation. On the one hand, changing notions of the relationship between sleep and waking life reflect a new stage of the reign of instrumental reason, marked by nascent (bio)technological capacities to convert life processes into units of productivity. But on the other hand, as the boundaries between sleep and wake are displaced and reinscribed, we are also presented with an opportunity. What is the value of sleep? What can be preserved by carving out a space for sleep?