Transmission in Motion

Seminar Blogs

Afrofuturism and Imaginative Technological Design – Pauline Munnich

    As Dan Hassler-Forest exposed in the seminar “Janelle Monáe’s Black Utopias and the Afrofuturist Imagination”, science fiction and thinking about the human future has predominantly been a Eurocentric practice. In the seminar through specifically focusing on Jane Monáe, Hassler-Forest illustrates how Afrofuturism focusses not just on the future but also the past and…

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Monáe’d Again – Jakob Henselmans

    Suddenly, everyone around me is thinking about Janelle Monáe. A new co-worker wrote his thesis about her a few years ago; a good friend of mine just recommended me her second album (and happened to have caught her drummer’s drum stick two times in a row); my partner shared “I Like That” with…

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Afrofuturism, Racial Capitalism and Asian Americans – Jingzhe Zhang

    The most interesting part for me in Dr. Dan Hassler-Forest’s lecture is the concept of Afrofuturism and racial capitalism. The term Afrofuturism is often used to talk about speculative fictions that express the experience and concern of African diaspora. But Afrofuturism, according to Dan, also exists as an important conceptual framework that challenges…

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AI; Ambivalent Inspections – Jakob Henselmans

    Something strange happens to the work of writing blog-style about AI, when it is now easier to do so by just going to www.chat.openai.com, commanding “a blog-style text about AI,” and finding an essay before you, faster than you can wink – literally. My partner, also an academic, now uses it to quickly…

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Ethics of AI-art: A Case Study of Lensa – Rupsa Nag

    The seminar on ‘Social Imaginaries of Ethics and AI’ made us think through how Artificial Intelligence is imagined by its makers, its social implications and ethics. Through discussions on various aspects of AI, one that came up was the use of AI in art. This was a very interesting discussion considering the recent…

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Positions towards ChatGPT – Jingzhe Zhang

  In this seminar, Sonja Rebecca Rattay proposes a way to categorize positions towards Artificial Intelligence (AI) using two axes: utopian-dystopian and pragmatic-speculative. The utopian-dystopian axis measures the judgement of AI: is it more focused on opportunities or harms? The pragmatic-speculative axis measures the foresight in thinking about AI: is it more focused on existent…

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AI and the Accessibility Tool – Pauline Munnich

    In the seminar “Social Imaginaries of Ethics and AI” we discussed and explored the ethics around AI, focusing on four positions that tend to be taken when it comes to imagining future possibilities for AI. The four positions were constructed around two axes: the axis of dystopian-utopian and the axis of pragmatic and…

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The Ethics of Ambiguous AI – Dominique Ubbels

    Two weeks before TIM’s fourth session “Social imaginaries of ethics and AI”, my friends and I started to obsess over The Chat GPT, a chatbot recently launched by OpenAI. Our discussions tended towards the “dystopian-speculative” view that was one of the common attitudes towards AI discussed by the speakers Sonja Rebecca Rattay, Irina…

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