Seminar Blogs

I Don’t Want to Know: On Hauntologial Resistance and Black Posthumanist Utopias – Olga Efremov
My writing of this blog post is overshadowed by a tragic anniversary: one year from the start of Russian invasion in Ukraine. The past twelve months have been a trying emotional journey through the mediated theatre of the largest European military conflict of the 21st century that had inadvertently became a prism for…
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Life, Universe, and Karen Barad: The Stage of Death by A Thousand Agential Cuts – Olga Efremov
When it comes to thinking about the future, I am a self-confessed techno-optimist, or to be more academically precise, a strong believer in what Jennifer Gildley (2017) called “integral futures” the incorporate “mixed methods, transcisciplinarity, complex bricolage” (95). As the seminar presenters Sonja Rebecca Rattay and Irina Shklovski noted when speaking about the…
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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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