On digital intelligence

Description

Speakers

Mercedes Bunz

Description

This talk will introduce my current research: I am interested in what way the haunted concept of writing – its production of meaning, the form of subjectivity it created, its model of political power and our resistance to that power – is being outpaced and transformed, shifted on its side through artificial intelligence as a tool that can ‘calculate meaning’ through ‘digital intelligence’. The talk will analyse artificial intelligence (in particular machine learning) as a new technical ability; an ability that adds to storage of memory and to the transmission of meaning now also the process of calculating data, which is read here as a calculation of meaning. (Kittler would be excited.) My overall interest is to explore in which way this new ‘ability’ of calculating meaning is changing the scene of the human artifice (Arendt), in particular the way in which older power mechanisms are being transformed by it.

About the speaker

Mercedes Bunz is Professor in Digital Culture and Society at the Department of Digital Humanities, 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’ – Mercedes Bunz co-leads the Creative AI Lab, a collaboration with the Serpentine Gallery, London. Her last publications are ‘How Not to Be Governed Like That by Our Digital Technologies’, in: The Ends of Critique: Methods, Institutions, Politics, edited by K. Thiele, B. Kaiser, T. O’Leary (Rowman & Littlefield) and with Claudia Aradau ‘Dismantling the apparatus of domination? Left critiques of AI’, in: Radical Philosophy.

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