Speaking at the Visions Forum at MCA Sydney

Last week I gave a talk at the Visions Forum at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Australia. Joined by artists and researchers that included Trevor Paglen and Kate Crawford, Visions “proposes a new way of looking at looking … bring[ing] together a group of experts to share their thoughts on the art, science and politics of vision. How do scientists and engineers understand vision today? What is its history? And what utopian or dystopian visual futures lie ahead?” For my part, I focused on how platforms see us and how their designs intentionally change the way we see the world and ourselves.

A recording of my talk will go up online shortly; when it does, I’ll post it here. In the meantime, you can see the full program here.

As part of my work as a guest researcher with the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen in Norway, I gave a new talk about the endless engagement aesthetics of AI platforms like ChatGPT. Titled “Your perspective is quite insightful: Deconstructing the Endless Engagement Aesthetics of AI Platforms,” I walk through methods and reasoning for separating LLM models from the corporate interfaces that surround them, and use what I find to discuss the tactics companies like OpenAI are using to induce users into deep thinking and sharing, conversational flow, and increased engagement.

AI and Digital Media Aesthetics at the Center for Digital Narrative, University of Bergen, Norway

Next week I’ll give a talk at the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen titled “Your perspective is quite insightful”: Deconstructing the Endless Engagement Aesthetics of AI Platforms. I’ll be sharing some in-progress work I’m looking at AI feed patterns on TikTok and affective affirming speech patterns in ChatGPT, examining both for the ways they induce platform engagement, and more broadly how they contribute to a wider aesthetics of endless growth.

The session includes many other talks. Here’s a full description of the session.

While in residence as a guest professor at Aarhus University last fall, I gave a talk that (re)frames my art practice and artworks as establishing and enacting an aesthetics of degrowth. Titled From Forever More to Degrowth Aesthetics: Tactics of Bounding in the Digital Infinite, I examine the growth aesthetics embedded in today’s big tech platforms, showing how their designs reshape our conceptions of life as limitless in order to convert our time and attention into endless profit. Then I walk through a series of projects that counter, subvert, and reimagine this digital landscape, discussing how net art makes possible a “tactics of bounding” that helps us recover a sense of finitude in the face of the digital infinite.

Here’s the original abstract:

From Forever More to Degrowth Aesthetics: Tactics of Bounding in the Digital Infinite

17 November 2023
Peter Bøgh Andersen Auditorium
Aarhus University, Denmark

Despite their lofty mission statements, today’s leading social media platforms primarily emphasize one singular concept: more . These capitalist software machines are designed to stoke an insatiable cycle of production and consumption in order to maximize corporate growth and profit. To achieve this, they leverage data and scale to produce signals and interface patterns that keep users engaged, promising connection and joy in exchange for growing shares of our time and attention. This talk presents a series of art projects that resist these accumulative logics, works that employ an aesthetics of degrowth that reconfigures and/or reimagines the social apps that aim to trap us in endless loops—until there’s no more time left to give.

Many thanks to my amazing colleagues in Aarhus University’s Department of Digital Design and Information Studies and the Digital Aesthetics Research Center (DARC) for their support of my visit. My time with you all continues to reverberate in my work and beyond.