Digital Aesthetics

From IBM punch cards to digital census forms, from ASCII art to Oculus Rift, how do we think and feel on screens and online, on disk or in the cloud, at the keyboard or off-the-grid? How do digital objects and code blur boundaries between text, image, and performative act? How do they trouble our understanding of the distinctions between a medium and its content, and how do new media create new subjects, objects, and worlds? Digital objects are simultaneously technological and aesthetic, algorithmic and political, informatic and material. An exploration of the cultures they create and the publics they structure must necessarily draw on the strengths of a number of humanities traditions, from art history to cultural studies, to political philosophy. This workshop hosts conversations about digital technology and culture beyond traditional disciplinary lenses, incorporating approaches from material culture studies, performance theory, technology history, aesthetics, and elsewhere. We encourage approaches that cross borders between engineering and the humanities, bringing technological objects into critical humanities research, and introducing critical new vocabularies into ongoing discussions of the design and production of our digital present and future.