Vector Media writes a new historical epistemology of artificial intelligence, asking how machine learning models represent culture and what is at stake when they do. Analyzing the core techniques underpinning large multimodal artificial intelligence models, Leonardo Impett and Fabian Offert offer the concept of ‘neural exchange value’: the value cultural artifacts acquire not through meaning or context, but through their capacity to function as vectors, ultimately leading to the collapse of all media. Impett and Offert show that under the vector media regime, bias is not just a question of what is represented, at stake is the logic of representation itself. Drawing on Phil Agre’s notion of a ‘critical technical practice’, Vector Media reveals how artificial intelligence systems embed new epistemologies of media beneath the surface of their architectures.
 
Leonardo Impett is Research Group Leader at the Bibliotheca Hertziana and Associate Professor in Digital Humanities at the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge.
 
Fabian Offert is Associate Professor for the History and Theory of the Digital Humanities and Director of the Center for the Humanities and Machine Learning (HUML) at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
 


Speaker : Leonardo Impett, Fabian Offert
Date : Oct 23 (FRI) 12pm (CET), 6am(EST) via Zoom
Format : This event will be held on Zoom. Registration is required via the QR code.