Tag: Stanford

Artist Panel: EXTRA/PHENOMENALITIES — Feb. 23, 2026

Join us for an artist panel featuring participants from EXTRA/PHENOMENALITIES, on view at Stanford Art Gallery from January 22-March 13, 2026. Bringing together artists whose work explores the limits of experience, this program offers a special opportunity to hear directly from those behind the exhibition.

Each participating artist will give a brief talk reflecting on their work in the exhibition, followed by a moderated conversation and audience Q&A. 

Participating artists include Morehshin Allahyari, Mark Amerika, Will Luers, & Chad Mossholder, Brett Amory, Rebecca Baron + Douglas Goodwin, Jon Bernson, Daniel Brickman, Paul DeMarinis, Karin + Shane Denson, Ebti, Frank Floyd, Gabriel Harrison, DJ Meisner, Joshua Moreno, Carlo Nasisse, Miguel Novelo, Andy Rappaport, William Tremblay, Camille Utterback, and Kristen Wong.

The exhibition is curated by Brett Amory, Karin Denson, and Shane Denson.

Moderator to be announced.

VISITOR INFORMATION: Oshman Hall is located within the McMurtry Building on Stanford campus at 355 Roth Way. Visitor parking is available in designated areas and is free after 4pm on weekdays. Alternatively, take the Caltrain to Palo Alto Transit Center and hop on the free Stanford Marguerite Shuttle. If you need a disability-related accommodation or wheelchair access information, please contact Julianne White at jgwhite@stanford.edu. This event is open to Stanford affiliates and the general public. Admission is free.

More info here: https://events.stanford.edu/event/artist-panel-extraphenomenalities

Methods Cafe: “Race, Repetition, and Seriality in Games and Contemporary Media” — Austin Anderson and Shane Denson in Conversation, Feb. 11, 2026

 “Race, Repetition, and Seriality in Games and Contemporary Media.”

Videogames and race have intermingled since the earliest days of the medium, yet game studies has yet to develop a sustained methodology to contend with the racial logics and aesthetic practices embedded within game texts. How do videogames function as racial projects? Does race function as a structuring force within game design? How do the structures of repetition inherent to games hold and transmit racial meaning?

Please join us for a conversation around these questions and more between Austin Anderson (Provostial Fellow and Lecturer in English) on his in-progress book Racial Recursivity: A Methodology for Critical Race Game Studies and Shane Denson (Professor of Film & Media Studies) on his ongoing work in seriality across media forms. 

More info here.

InterPlay Salon at Cantor Arts Center, Feb 5, 2026

On Feb 5, 2026 (5:00-6:30pm), I’ll be participating in the InterPlay Salon alongside Michele Elam and Charlotte McCurdy at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford. We’ll be presenting short PechaKucha-style talks. Mine will focus on my recent art and curatorial efforts with the non/phenomenal collective, including our current show EXTRA/PHENOMENALITES at the Stanford Art Gallery.

More info and registration here.

Norms in the Age of Intelligent Machines: Bodies, Knowledge, Governmentality — Dec. 4 & 5 at Stanford

Norms in the Age of Intelligent Machines — a two-day conference organized by Shane Denson, Armen Khatchatourov, and Johan Fredrikzon and sponsored by the France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, Villa Albertine, and the Stanford Department of Art & Art History — will take place at Stanford on December 4-5, 2025.

Speakers
Morehshin Allahyari (Stanford)
Hannes Bajohr (UC Berkeley)
David Bates (UC Berkeley)
Bilel Benbouzid (University Gustave Eiffel, Paris)
Shane Denson (Stanford)
Jean-Pierre Dupuy (Stanford)
Noel Fitzpatrick (TU Dublin)
Johan Fredrikzon (KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm)
Julia Irwin (Stanford)
Armen Khatchatourov (DICEN / University Gustave Eiffel, Paris)
Helen Nissenbaum (Cornell Tech)
Warren Sack (UC Santa Cruz)
Antonio Somaini (University Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3)
Fred Turner (Stanford)

The prospect of intelligent machines challenges our societal norms. Matters of debate over the past half century concerning digital networks – e.g. access, privacy, subjectivity, participation – must be reconsidered in the age of machine learning. More specifically, the proliferation of AI-based systems leads to new ways of understanding what normativity is. Social norms don’t change overnight; however, the mechanisms and processes that drive these changes are increasingly influenced by AI-based infrastructures, characterized by a heightened level of automation, while being opaque, inscrutable, and anthropomorphic.

Faced with such conditions, we have to ask, first, what it means to instill or break a norm and, second, what norms even mean or represent. This landscape presents both profound challenges to maintain just and stable means of interaction and, at the same time, novel and creative opportunities for alternative modes of being.

The two conferences (December 4-5, 2025 at Stanford, April or May in Paris) aim to investigate how norms of embodiment, forms of knowledge, and techniques of governmentality operate in the age of AI, and to address the imbrication of two movements: how the evolution of social norms is reflected in new algorithmic practices, and how these algorithms influence social norms in various domains. It will bring together the humanities, social sciences, and law to address issues of crucial contemporary importance.

Sponsored by France – Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, Villa Albertine, and Stanford Department of Art & Art History

Image: Brett Amory, Archive Drift ⧑⧗⧖⧔. Photo: Shaun Roberts

More info here

View the full conference program with agenda, abstracts, and speaker bios

Registration

“Unit Operations” and “Alloy Resonator 0.2” — Critical Making Collaborative, March 10, 2025

The Critical Making Collaborative at Stanford invites you to an evening of sharing and discussion with two recipients of the Critical Making Award, Daniel Jackson and Kimia Koochakzadeh-Yazdi, who will present their ongoing work in music and performance—Monday, March 10 (4PM) at the CCRMA Stage (3rd floor). 

Alloy Resonator 0.2 – Kimia Koochakzadeh-Yazdi (Music Composition) 

Alloy Resonator, a hybrid wearable instrument, embraces the fragility and rigidity of the body as an expressive medium for playing electronic music. It experiments with physical thresholds and explores ways to position the performer’s body at the center of the performance. The goal is to have every movement, whether subtle or exaggerated, become an amplified sonic gesture.

The Unit Operations Here Are Highly Specific – Daniel Jackson (Theater and Performance Studies)

The Unit Operations Here Are Highly Specific is a devised, movement-based work exploring the relationship between text, performance, and reception by allowing each audience member to choose from and switch between soundtracks while they watch a choreographed performance. The work playfully confronts the limits of personalization in the context of collective experience while interrogating how meaning is generated and where meaning resides in complex performance-media environments.

“Digital Orreries: Meditations on Material and Media Cosmologies” — Aileen Robinson at Digital Aesthetics Workshop, Dec. 3, 2024

We’re pleased to announce our next event of the year. Please join us in welcoming Aileen Robinson, who will present on “Digital Orreries: Meditations on Material and Media Cosmologies” on Tuesday, Dec 3, 6:30-8:30pm PT. The event will take place in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room, where refreshments (and dinner!) will be served.

Zoom link for those unable to join in-person: tinyurl.com/4mnk7wmn

Bio:

Aileen Robinson is a historian of performance and technology with specializations in 18th and 19th century technological performance and Black cultural performances. Working across the history of science, technology, and theatre, Robinson explores how systems of knowledge, connected to the body and the object, overlapped to produce practices of research, dissemination, and valuation.  Robinson’s current book manuscript, Instruments of Illusion, explores intersections between technological, scientific, and theatrical knowledge in early nineteenth-century interactive science museums. She teaches across the history of science and performance, magic and technology, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century stagecraft, and 19th and 20th-century Black artistic production.

This event has been generously co-sponsored by Stanford TAPS: Department of Theater and Performance Studies.

“Democratizing Vibrations” and “Opera Machine” — Critical Making Collaborative, Nov. 22, 2024

The Critical Making Collaborative at Stanford invites you to an evening of sharing and discussion with two recipients of the Critical Making Award, West Montgomery and Lloyd May, who will present their ongoing work in opera and haptic art—Friday, Nov. 22 (5PM) at the CCRMA Stage (3rd floor). 

Democratizing Vibrations – Lloyd May (Music Technology)

What would it mean to put vibration and touch at the center of a musical experience? What should devices used to create and experience vibration-based art (haptic instruments) look and feel like? These questions are at the core of the Musical Haptics project that aims to co-design haptic instruments and artworks with D/deaf and hard-of-hearing artists. 

Opera Machine – Westley Montgomery (TAPS)

Opera Machine is a work-in-process exploring music, measurement, and the sedimentation of culture in the bodies of performers. How does the cultural legacy of opera reverberate in the present day? How have the histories of voice-science, race “science,” and the gendering of the body co-produced pedagogies and styles of opera performance? What might it look like (sound like) to resist these histories? 

Congratulations, Dr. Hank Gerba!

On Sunday, June 16, it was my honor to “hood” Hank Gerba, who earned their doctoral degree in Art History with a concentration in Film & Media Studies, and to make the following remarks at our departmental commencement ceremony:

Hank Gerba’s dissertation, “Digital Disruptions: Moiré, Aliasing, and the Stroboscopic Effect,” is exceptional in a number of ways. While it is a work primarily in media theory, or even media philosophy (itself an exceptional or eccentric subfield within film and media studies), the dissertation stages its argument by way of close engagement with a number of digital processes and devices, but also a number of analog artworks. Accordingly, it is exceptionally well suited for an interdisciplinary graduate program like ours, where students like Hank graduate with a PhD in Art History but are able to specialize also in Film & Media Studies, and where all of our students are expected to gain some acquaintance with both fields. 

Still, it is rare for a dissertation to be so agnostic about traditional disciplinary divisions and to speak across boundaries in a way that goes straight to their root: in this case, straight to the root of aesthetic and technical processes or forms. The division between technology or the technical, and art or the aesthetic, is a fairly recent invention, just a little over 200 years old. It is only in the wake of this split that we can speak of the supposedly disparate fields of art history and media studies. Exceptionally, Hank’s dissertation challenges that split, along with a number of other more or less conventional categorizations. And it does so by foregrounding a number of exceptional phenomena: the shimmer of moiré silk, pixely appearances on computer screens, and stroboscopic flickers of film—digital disruptions, according to the title of Hank’s dissertation, when digital and analog logics come into conflict with one another, when blocky grids clash with smooth contours or a film’s discrete frames line up with the movement of wagon wheels or helicopter blades to make it seem as though they were standing still. 

In framing the project this way, however, Hank not only challenges disciplinary boundaries but significantly relocates the digital/analog divide. The digital is not just about computers but applies also to the clashing grids of watered silk, which give rise to the analog shimmer that we see in the fabric and in artworks made with it. Digital and analog come to name not particular types of technologies or media, but fundamental modes of organizing aesthetic experience itself. This is an important media-philosophical argument, and it lays important groundwork for thinking about the ways that contemporary media, such as AI, are actively transforming our visual and aesthetic worlds.

I’ll just mention, finally, that Hank is the first student for whom I served as primary advisor, and the first PhD student whose progress I have accompanied from admission to the program to all the way to defending their dissertation. So it kind of feels like I’m graduating today as well. But it’s Hank who did the work and in many respects surpassed their mentor. I am grateful to have learned from Hank, both through their scholarship and through their work across the university, including at the Digital Aesthetics Workshop at the Stanford Humanities Center, where we have collaborated for several years. Hank is graduating with the Christopher Meyer Prize, one of the highest honors that we can bestow on graduating PhD students, in recognition not only of excellent scholarship but also outstanding service to the departmental and university community. 

Please join me in congratulating Hank Gerba.

Six years of Digital Aesthetics Workshop

This past week marked the conclusion of our sixth year of the Digital Aesthetics Workshop at the Stanford Humanities Center, which we celebrated with a graduate symposium — the appropriately titled Digital Aesthetics Workshop-Workshop!

With nine events a year, six years is a lot of events! Here’s what we’ve done so far:

2017-2018 Events: 

    • Mark B. N. Hansen, “The Ontology of Media Operations, or, Where is the Technics in Cultural Techniques,” 10 October 2017
    • Claus Pias, “Computer Game Worlds,” 24 October 2017
    • Allison de Fren, “Post-Cinema and Videographic Criticism,” 14 November 2017
    • Bonnie Ruberg, “Video Games Have Always Been Queer,” 23 January 2018
    • Jacob Gaboury, “Techniques for Secondary Mediation: On the Screenshot as Image-Object,” 6 February 2018
    • Shane Denson, “Discorrelated Images,” 3 April 2018
    • Elizabeth Kessler, “Psychedelic Space and Anachronic Time: Photography and the Voyager’s Tour of the Solar System,” 10 April 2018
    • Jonathan Sterne, “Machine Learning, ‘AI,’ and the Politics of Media Aesthetics: Why Online Music Mastering (Sort of) Works,” 24 April 2018
    • Matthew Wilson Smith, “The Nostalgia of Virtual Reality,” 15 May 2018

2018-2019 Events: 

    • Carolyn L. Kane, “Chroma Glitch: Data as Style,” 9 October 2018
    • Camille Utterback, “Embodied Interactions & Material Screens,” 27 November 2018
    • Miryam Sas, “Plastic Dialectics: Community and Collectivity in Japanese Contemporary Art,” 4 December 2018
    • Stephanie Boluk and Patrick LeMieux, “Skin in the Game: Greymarket Gambling in the Virtual Economies of Counter-Strike,” 14 January 2019
    • N. Katherine Hayles, “Can Computers Create Meaning? A Cyber-Bio-Semiotic Perspective,” 12 February 2019
    • Kevin B. Lee, “Dreams and Terrors of Desktop Documentary,” 27 February 2019
    • Marion Fourcade, “A Maussian Bargain: The Give and Take of the Personal Data Economy,” 23 April 2019
    • Digital Aesthetics Symposium, featuring Stanford graduate students and faculty, 14-15 May 2019
    • Miyako Innoue, “Writing at the Speed of Thinking: The Japanese Kana Typewriter and the Rehabilitation of the Male Hand,” 28 May 2019

2019-2020 Events:

    • Jenny Odell, “Killing Time,” 23 October 2019
    • Scott Bukatman, “We Are Ant-Man,” 5 November 2019
    • Ben Peters, “Declining Russian Media Theory,” 21 November 2019
    • Rachel Plotnick, “Unclean Interface: Computation as a Cleanliness Problem,” 11 February 2020
    • Jean Ma, “At the Edges of Sleep,” 9 March 2020 [cancelled due to COVID-19]
    • Melissa Gregg, Title TBA, 7 April 2020 [cancelled due to COVID-19]
    • Sarah T. Roberts, “Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media,” 21 April 2020
    • Kris Cohen, “Bit Field Black,” 19 May 2020
    • Xiaochang Li, “How Language Became Data: Speech Recognition between Likeness and Likelihood,” 26 May 2020

2020-2021 Events:

    • Vivian Sobchack, in conversation with Scott Bukatman and Shane Denson, 29 September 2020 (additional follow-up event for Stanford graduate students, 14 October 2020)
    • “New Regimes of Imaging.” Roundtable discussion with Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal, Deborah Levitt, Bernard Geoghegan, and Shane Denson, 23 October 2020
    • libi rose striegl and the Media Archaeology Lab at the University of Colorado at Boulder, 10 November 2020
    • Shaka McGlotten, “Racial Chain of Being,” 8 December 2020
    • James J. Hodge and Shane Denson, “Dialogue in Digital Aesthetics: Sensations of History and Discorrelated Images,” 2 April 2021
    • Melissa Gregg, “The Great Watercooler in the Cloud: Distributed Work, Collegial Presence, and Mindful Labor Post-COVID,” 6 April 2021
    • Adrian Daub, “What Tech Calls Thinking,” 11 May 2021
    • Legacy Russell, “Cyberpublics, Monuments, and Participation,” 20 May 2021
    • Fred Turner and Mary Beth Meehan, “Seeing Silicon Valley – Life Inside a Fraying America,” 2 June 2021

2022-2023 Events:

    • Erich Hörl, “The Disruptive Condition,” 5 October 2022
    • Mark Algee-Hewitt, “Patterns of Text/Patterns of Analysis,” 15 November 2022
    • Jean Ma and Tung-Hui Hu, “In Conversation” (joint book event), 2 December 2022
    • Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, “The Violent Forensics of Digital Imagery: Abu Ghraib, Ukraine, and Cat Videos,” 17 January 2023
    • Melissa Gilliam and Patrick Jagoda, “Game Changer Lab” (co-sponsored with the Critical Making Collaborative), 26 January 2023
    • M. Beatrice Fazi, “On Digital Theory,” 28 February 2023
    • Alexander Galloway, “‘No Deconstruction without Computers’: Learning to Code with Derrida and Kittler,” 7 March 2023
    • Neta Alexander, “The Right to Speed-Watch (or, When Netflix Discovered its Blind Viewers),” 18 April 2023
    • Damon Young, “Selfie/Portrait,” 9 May 2023
    • Mihaela Mihailova, “Acting Algorithms: Animated Deepfake Performances in Contemporary Media,” 26 May 2023

2023-2024 Events:

    • Luciana Parisi, “The Negative Aesthetic of AI,” 20 October 2023
    • Ge Wang, “Artful Design and Artificial Intelligence: What Do We (Really) Want from AI?,” 14 November 2023
    • Thomas Lamarre, “Harvesting Light,” 5 December 2023
    • Bryan Norton, “Marx After Simondon: Metabolic Rift and the Analog of Computation,” 30 January 2024
    • Yvette Granata, “Mimetic Virtualities: Rendering the Masses and/or Feminist Media Art?,” 6 February 2024
    • Akira Mizuta Lippit, “Shadowline,” 12 March 2024
    • Nicholas Baer, “The Ends of Perfection: On a Limit Concept in Global Film and Media Theory,” 5 April 2024
    • James Hodge, “Six Theses on an Aesthetics of Always-On Computing,” 30 April 2024
    • Digital Aesthetics Workshop-Workshop, graduate student symposium, with responses from Angèle Christin and Shane Denson, 24 May 2024

Thanks to all of the graduate student coordinators over the years, including Jeff Nagy, Doug Eacho, Natalie Deam, Annika Butler-Wall, and this year’s coordinators Grace Han and Hank Gerba. (And congratulations to Hank on successfully defending their dissertation last week!)

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.