Please join us in welcoming Katherine Behar, our next guest of the year, who will present “Isn’t Artisanal Intelligence K(NOT) AI?” on Wednesday, February 25, from 5-6:30PM PT. This event will take place in the Board Room at the Humanities Center; refreshments will be served. We hope to see you there.
“Isn’t Artisanal Intelligence K(NOT) AI?” unfolds a new theory of artisanal intelligence. Contextualized in Behar’s artistic practice, which concerns gender, race, class, and labor in digital culture, and specifically her current project, Inside Outsourcing, which takes inspiration from the un-automatability of basket-weaving, this lecture ties together neural networks and tacit knowledge to weigh the valuation of intelligences.
Bio:
Katherine Behar is an interdisciplinary artist who studies contemporary digital culture through feminism and materialism. She is Professor of New Media Arts at Baruch College and The Graduate Center, CUNY.
This event is generously co-sponsored by the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis and Fiber Optics: Materials & Media, a Stanford Humanities Center Research Workshop.
Please join us in welcoming Patrick Keilty, our next guest of the year, who will present “Processing Pleasure” on Tuesday, February 3, from 5-6:30PM PT. This event will take place in the Board Room at the Humanities Center; refreshments will be served.
This talk examines the early history of electronic payment processing, as told by the engineers who developed the technology in the 1980s. Struggling to find a suitable customer for the invention, they initially sold their technology to adult magazines through the telecommunications giant, MCI. Little has been written about electronic payment’s origins within the sex industries, despite the ubiquity of electronic commerce today. Yet the sex industries have long been early adopters of new technologies. With electronic payment, adult magazines expanded the burgeoning phone sex industry through 1-900 phone sex lines, affording clients the anonymity and confidentiality of paying for pleasure. Electronic payment develops within a history of cultural and legal efforts to regulate, contain, limit, or eradicate the sex industries. When U.S. legal precedent ultimately centers the right to sexual pleasure in the home, the sex industries embraced technologies that did the same. Threatened with U.S. Congressional regulation, by the end of the decade, those same engineers sold their technologies to the growing televangelist industry. As a result, their payment infrastructure funded both sides of the U.S. “culture war.” This talk provides the historical context for a longer book chapter about the relationship between electronic payment, pleasure and desire, which are integral to the development of financial infrastructures that enable the social reproduction of capitalism.
Patrick Keilty is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information and Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. Professor Keilty’s research focuses on the politics of digital infrastructures in the sex industries, adult film, and the materiality of media. His writing and editorial work has appeared in Camera Obscura; Feminist Media Studies; Information Society; Archivaria; JDoc; Porn Studies; Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience; Scholar and Feminist Online; Feminist and Queer Information Studies Reader (Litwin Books, 2013); Uncertain Archives (MIT Press, 2021); Queer Data Studies (University of Washington Press, 2023); The Handbook of Adult Film and Media (Intellect, 2025); and elsewhere. He is currently working on two monographs — one examines the politics of technologies in the sex industries and the other is a history of two important French stag films from the 1920s.
This event is generously co-sponsored by the Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
We are excited to announce our first event of 2026! Hannes Bajohr will present on “The Latent Space of Meaning and the Novel” on Tuesday, January 13, from 5-6:30pm PT. The event will take place in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room. Refreshments will be served.
“A world – nothing less – is the theme and postulate of the novel,” German philosopher Hans Blumenberg wrote in 1963. At that same moment, AI research, already emerging from its early optimism, turned to “world models” as a means of stabilizing its brittle systems. Today, these two conceptions of “world” – the literary and the computational – converge in large language models (LLMs), which use their latent spaces not just to generate plausible sentences, but entire narratives, even novels, albeit with still uneven results. Yet in what sense are the “worlds” of novels and of AI analogous, and what can each illuminate about the other?
The talk proposes that both novels and LLMs operate within structured networks of relations – assemblages of events, inferences, and expectations – that can yield a form of coherence even when classical causality is weak or absent. Literary techniques from realism to modernism build patterned universes: realist and naturalist fiction through causal-social dynamics, genre fiction through explicit world-building, and modernism through fragmented but still intelligible world-logics. These traditions offer a vocabulary for assessing LLM-generated texts.
Where early systems like SHRDLU pursued explicit symbolic world models and failed outside narrow domains, contemporary LLMs rely on distributed vector spaces that encode statistical regularities without grounding. My own experiments with a fine-tuned German-language model yielded narratives with stylistic unity but little causal depth. Like certain experimental novels, they evoke meaning through a “weak force” of association rather than strong narrative causality. This talk tries to follow these ideas and aims to resist both overhyping LLMs’ understanding and dismissing them as mere mimicry, thus placing AI-generated fiction, as the meeting points of the two uses of “world,” within a broader theory of modeling and meaning.
Bio:
Hannes Bajohr, is Assistant Professor of German at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on media studies, political philosophy, philosophical anthropology, and theories of the digital. Recent publications include: Thinking with AI: Machine Learning the Humanities (as editor, London: Open Humanities Press) and “Surface Reading LLMs: Synthetic Text and its Styles” (arXiv preprint, forthcoming in New German Critique). In 2027, the English-language translation of his LLM-co-generated novel (Berlin, Miami) will appear with MIT Press.
This event is generously co-sponsored by the Stanford Literary Lab and Stanford Department of English.
Please join the Digital Aesthetics Workshop in welcoming Thomas Pringle, who will present “Streaming Capital: Digital Aesthetics and Natural Infrastructure” on Tuesday, April 29, from 5:00-7:00pm PT. The event will take place in the Board Room at the Stanford Humanities Center. We look forward to seeing you there!
In 2022, Netflix launched “Net Zero + Nature,” a program offsetting the streaming giant through purchase of carbon credits generated by the Wildlife Works Kasigau Corridor REDD+ Project. Promotional materials assert that trees growing in Kenya are an infrastructure supporting resource-intensive streaming media. Recent digital media have been critiqued as industrial, environmentally destructive processes. Yet this project suggests that the isomorphic relationships between an image and its ecological impact are aesthetic, with the Netflix offset program indexing a broader media-historical rationality linking digital representation to economically conditioned forms of physical change. What media-historical a priori lend legibility to the statement: environments are media infrastructure?
In the late 1950s, cybernetic ecologist Howard Odum studied Corpus Christi Bay during his tenure at the Marine Institute at the University of Texas. Concerned with how ongoing petroleum logistical development threatened the turtle grass beds crucial to the estuary ecosystem, Odum drew on images of electrical circuitry to analogize seagrass to the local hay market, estimating that the work performed by the bay’s photosynthesis was worth $97.46 per acre per year. Turtle grass conservation would thus support various modes of production: fishing, tourism, natural gas electricity generation, and the ecological metabolism of industrial sludge. This humble act of labor-free monetization is among the first recorded arguments that conserved environments serve as infrastructure, or in Odum’s words as “life support functions supporting the economy without much conscious recognition.” In the context of recent degrowth advocacy, this case initiates a media historical narration of the aesthetic forms signifying the productivity of “natural infrastructures.”
Bio:
Thomas Patrick Pringle is Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. With Gertrud Koch and Bernard Stiegler, he is the co-author of Machine (Meson and University of Minnesota Press, 2019). Pringle’s research on environmental media appears in NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, Journal of Film and Video, Media-N, and New Media and Society, as well as the volumes Toxic Immanence: Decolonizing Nuclear Legacies and Futures (2022) and Power Shift: Keywords for a New Politics of Energy (2025).
This event has been generously co-sponsored by the Woods Institute for the Environment, the Department of English, the Department of Communication, and the Program in Science, Technology, and Society.
We’re delighted to welcome our next speaker for the Digital Aesthetics Workshop: Scott Richmond will present a hands-on demo, titled, “Computing, Intimately: On Computational Transitional Objects” on Friday, March 14, from 11:30am-1pm PT. We request that participants also take a look at the paper he has generously provided us with in advance (please email Grace Han for a copy: ghahahan at stanford dot edu). The event will take place in the Board Room at the Stanford Humanities Center and lunch will be served.
This hands-on workshop will engage computing historically, theoretically, and aesthetically. Drawing on the work of MIT computer scientist Seymour Papert in the 1970s, whose team made the Logo pedagogical programming environment, we will attend to the psychic and aesthetic dimensions of the computational transitional object as it emerged around 1970. Papert theorized the computational transitional object as our surrogate in the microworld of the computer. Participants will be asked to read a pre-circulated paper about Papert. They should bring a laptop to do hands-on coding in Ludus, a translation of Logo. No programming experience of any kind is required, and those who already know how to code should come with beginners’ mind.
Bio:
Scott C. Richmond is Associate Professor of Cinema and Digital Media in the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto, where they also direct the Centre for Culture and Technology. Their work lies at the intersection of film and media theory, queer and affect theory, avant-garde and experimental media aesthetics, and the history of computing. They are author of two books, Cinema’s Bodily Illusions: Flying, Floating, and Hallucinating (Minnesota, 2016) and Find Each Other: Networks, Affects, and Other Queer Encounters (Duke, under contract).
This event is generously co-sponsored by the Stanford Media Studies Colloquium.
The Digital Aesthetics Workshop is looking forward to welcoming Rizvana Bradley, who will present “Borrowed Time: Mediating the Nonevental” on Tuesday, March 4, at 5-7pm PT. The event will take place in the Watt Dining Room at the Humanities Center, where refreshments will be served. Below you will find the Bradley’s bio and a brief abstract, as well as the poster for the event. See you there!
This talk approaches the concept of mediality, which gets to the heart of a number of theoretical questions concerning the entanglements of raciality, mediation, and immediation, and the worldly violence of the everyday. Interrogating the racialized grammars of ontology, phenomenology, and (aesthetic) form, one can begin to further understand the depth of the violence and scope of the implications of what Bradley theorizes as black mediality. Black mediality has massive implications for both the grammar of technics that predominates in the philosophy of media, as well as the conception of mediality this grammar inscribes. Moving by way of artistic example, the talk demonstrates how both mediatic forms and the perceived technological exteriorizations of the modern human subject are bound to normative, phenomenological conceptions of temporality.
Bio:
Rizvana Bradley is Associate Professor of Film and Media and Affiliated Faculty in the History of Art and the Center for Race and Gender at the University of California, Berkeley.
Bradley’s book, Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form (Stanford University Press, 2023), moves across multiple histories and geographies, artistic mediums and forms—from nineteenth-century painting and early cinema, to contemporary text-based works, video installations, and digital art—in order to inaugurate a new method for interpretation, an ante-formalism, which demonstrates black art’s recursive deconstruction of the aesthetic forms that remain foundational to modernity.
Bradley serves on the Advisory Board of October. Her articles appear in journals such as Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism, Film Quarterly, Black Camera: An International Film Journal, Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, TDR: The Drama Review, Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, and Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory. Her art criticism has also been published in The Yale Review, Artforum, e-flux, Art in America, November, and Parkett, as well as numerous exhibition catalogs, including for the Serpentine Galleries, the New Museum, Whitechapel Gallery, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, and the Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art. Bradley has curated a number of academic arts symposia, including events at the British Film Institute, London, the Serpentine Galleries, London, and the Stedelijk Museum of Art, Amsterdam.
We’re pleased to announce our first event of 2025! Please join us in welcoming Jussi Parikka, who will present on “The Environmental Data Stack” on Tuesday, Jan 7, 5-7pm PT. The event will take place in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room, where refreshments will be served. We look forward to seeing you there after the holiday break!
This talk tests the notion of “environmental data stack” as a particular kind of a methodological problem space (Lury 2021). The term defines the multiple levels of “problematics” of grounding environmental data in alternating scales of reference, in different technological forms of capture of data, and in various interacting registers of sensing. The environmental data stack builds on existing work in critical data studies where the situated, even spatialized notions of data are developed – and it also lends itself to a sense of the politics and aesthetics of data, where aesthetics is not necessarily about art (it can be though) but about the wider context of materials, sensing, and modeling. This work relates to my interest in cultural techniques of data and software studies, including the intersection of ecomedia and computational practices. The talk will thus feature some examples from recent and on-going work in different projects such as the Design and Aesthetics for Enviornmental Data (https://cc.au.dk/en/dafed/).
Bio:
Jussi Parikka is professor of Digital Aesthetics and Culture at Aarhus University where he leads the Digital Aesthetics Research Centre (DARC) as well as is the founding co-director of the Environmental Media and Aesthetics -research program. He also holds a visiting professorship at Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton). His books have addressed media archaeology, the ecological underpinnings of discourses of digital culture from animals to geology, and most recently, transformations of visual culture. The more recent books include Operational Images (2023) as well as the co-authored Living Surfaces: Images, Plants, and Environments of Media (2024, with Abelardo Gil-Fournier). Both are available as open access. His books have been translated into 12 languages. Currently he is developing a new project on datafication of agriculture.
This event is generously co-sponsored by The Europe Center.
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.
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.
I’m excited to report that the Digital Aesthetics Workshop at the Stanford Humanities Center has been renewed for another year — our seventh! Next year’s graduate student co-chairs are Grace Han and Rebecca Turner!
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!)
