Sensing AI. Engaging Machine Learning Affectively through Process Philosophy and Art

Many routinely performed operations of data preparation and optimisation in machine learning (ML)-driven AI seem to be solely quantitative. Yet their execution simultaneously organises data relations according to vectors of similarity and difference. At the very moment data is quantitively operated upon by the statistical methods of ML, it is also re-spatialised and re-configured with ‘hidden’ or latent potential for pattern and relation. How can we come to ‘sense’ the qualitative potentials and register the processuality of contemporary machine learning-driven AI?

In this talk and seminar, I will propose that AI’s operativity lends itself to being thought via concepts from process philosophy, especially Gilbert Simondon’s ‘alagmatics’, with its knowing of technical systems via their dynamic operations. Taken together with techniques honed through critical AI art, I suggest that we can come to register AI’s affectivity as a sensibility that is open and indeterminate and at odds with the ‘predictive’ society. I will focus on viewings and discussion of a range of artists who engage not just in a critique of AI and prediction but who help to register the different affectivities of AI. Artists and cultural producers include: Anna Ridler, Philipp Schmitt, Monica Monin, Tega Brain, Fabian Offert and others.

Moderation: Birgit Schneider (University of Potsdam)

For participation in presence we kindly ask for prior registration at mail@zem-brandenburg.de, online participation is also possible without registration.

Anna Munster is a Professor of Art and Design at the University of New South Wales, Australia and co-director of its newly formed Autonomous Media Lab. Her research currently focuses on new ways to theorise machine learning experience with emphasis on critical artistic interventions into AI. She has written: An Aesthesia of Networks (2013, MIT) and Materialising New Media (2006, Dartmouth University); articles on media assemblages, networks and platforms, media art and process philosophy in Theory, Culture and Event, Journal of Cultural Analytics, Inflexions; contributed to Affects, Interfaces Events (Imbricate, 2021) and has co-authored with Adrian MacKenzie for the anthology Distributed Perception (Routledge, 2021). Anna is writing a new book Deepaesthetics. On Computational Experience in a Time of Machine Learning. She is a practicing artist working across sound, video, data, and autonomous systems.