Friday, Nov 6, 2020
15:00-17:00
Virtual Event (zoom link will be sent out)
Please register to the event via this link: https://syddanskuni.zoom.us/meeting/register/u5wpdOGgpj4rGNCs0lMDLMHKJona4-6I-svI
Fill in your name, family name and email. Then you will receive the link to the event which will be held in zoom.
If you have any questions, you are welcome to send a mail to Line Gren: lineg@sdu.dk
Program (click the link to get a pdf file):
15:00-15:30
Welcome and Intro
Kathrin Maurer, Prof MSO for Humanities and Technology, Department for the Study of Culture
Stig Børsen Hansen, Associated Professor, Institute for Design and Communications
15:30-17:00
Lecture: On the Misunderstandings of AI
Mercedes Bunz, Deputy Head of the Department of Digital Humanities and Senior Lecturer in Digital Society at King's College London
A wide range of different AI systems based on the promising technology of machine learning are rapidly being integrated into everyday life, variously supplanting and delivering institutional decisions. The emerging ubiquity of these systems alternately provokes consternation and enthusiastic acceptance.
Taking inspiration from French technology theorist Gilbert Simondon, this lecture considers the boundaries between the meaning-making capacities of technical objects, such as AI systems, and aesthetic objects. It asks what it means that AI systems are ‘integrated’ into the world, and whether this integration could be understood differently. Might existing responses to integration be based on a misunderstanding?
Dr Mercedes Bunz is Deputy Head of the Department of Digital Humanities and Senior Lecturer in Digital Society at King's College London. She studied Philosophy, Art History and Media Studies at the FU Berlin and the Bauhaus University Weimar and wrote her thesis on the history of the internet driven by a deep curiosity about digital technology. Until today, she has not been disappointed by the transforming field that is digital technology, which provides her reliably with new aspects to think constantly about. At the moment, that is Artificial Intelligence and ‘machine learning’. As part of this, Mercedes Bunz is heading a
research project into ‘Creative AI’ with an AHRC grant and co-leads the Creative AI Lab, a collaboration with the Serpentine Gallery, London. Her last publication is ‘The Internet of Things’ with Graham Meikle and ‘The calculation of meaning: on the misunderstanding of new artificial intelligence as culture’ published in the journal Culture, Theory and Critique.