
Grace Han
Grace Han is a PhD candidate in the Film and Media Studies program in Art History, where she thinks about animation aesthetics. Prior to coming to Stanford, she received the SAS Maureen Furniss Award for Best Student Paper on Animated Media (2019) for an essay on anime melodrama. Currently, her dissertation is tentatively titled, "Encounters with the Generative Archive."
Project Description
AI-generated images, sound, and video have triggered an epistemological crisis in the West, inspiring questions about origins (is this made by a human or not?), memory (did this actually happen?), and consequence (what is at stake if this were real?). I address these questions via a phenomenological reading of a range of media objects in my project. Here, I examine a constellation of computer-generated (CG) and artificial intelligence (AI) moving image media grappling with the “archival turn,” such as those made by contemporary artists Heesoo Kwon, Jon Rafman, Rashaad Newsome, and more. I point out that this collection of artworks, films, and performances are indicative of what I call the “generative archive.” This term highlights the departure from the photographic archive, which centers the camera’s recording capability to chemically capture a “trace” of the profilmic world before it. The generative archive, on the other hand, emphasizes the processuality of generating documents as a means of knowledge, as is seen in these CG/AI artworks. In sum, this dissertation answers the fundamental question of our time: How do computer-generated (CG) media shape, cut, and fit into what we know?