The Parallel Form, or the Logic of the Graphic

Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal, Professor of Digital Humanities, University of Basel

Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal holds the professorship in Digital Humanities, with a focus on Artificial Intelligence and Media Studies in the department of Arts, Media, and Philosophy at the University of Basel, where he also directs the Digital Humanities Laboratory. He was previously the Ruth and Paul Idzik Collegiate Chair in Digital Scholarship, English, and Film, Television, and Theater at the University of Notre Dame. He is the co-author (with Théo Lepage-Richer and Lucy Suchman) of Neural Networks (University of Minnesota Press and meson press, 2024), and his award-winning writing—situated between media theory, literary studies, computer science, critical design, and STS—can be found in Critical Inquiry, Configurations, Diacritics, Social Text, American Literature, Design Issues, and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, among other scholarly and popular venues. He is an incoming president of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA).

Per canonical studies of media, seriality emerged as a prominent cultural form sometime in the nineteenth century. Over the next 150-odd years, it managed to extend its formal features, epistemological attributes, and social functions across several political, cultural, technological, and economic domains from novels to films and TV to videogames. However, seriality is now being challenged for dominance by a relatively new cultural form that permeates contemporary technology; this talk treats parallelism as a possible starting point for understanding our medial present.

Graphic cards today, and computer generated images (CGI) which are rendered by them, are sites of parallel, rather than serial, processing; each part of the image is created simultaneously, instead of one after another. Looking at the recent history of the infrastructures, political economies, and forms of operation-in-parallel, I describe why and how these techniques reached their current level of indispensability. This then becomes a springboard for my examination of the cultural and epistemological effects of this kind of processing, which is essential today not just for the rendering of images but also for big data analysis, crypto mining, and contemporary artificial intelligence hardwares. Studying this computation as graphical rendering, I tell the story of how our computers came to calculate through, not just for, image generation. I thus argue that we need to comprehend our current age of parallelism as a correlate of a new kind of logic of the graphic, constantly drawing and re-drawing images across scales, even when nothing needs to be visualized.

Events are free and open to all unless otherwise stated. Following the event, there will be a reception in the Atrium of the Alison Richard Building.

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CDH website event listing: https://www.cdh.cam.ac.uk/events/41390

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