Seminar Blogs
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…
Read moreEthics 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…
Read morePositions 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…
Read moreAI 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…
Read moreThe 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…
Read moreFear of the Artificial Other: A Dystopian-Speculative Approach to AI – Chris van der Vegt
In the fourth Transmission in Motion seminar on ethics and artificial intelligence (AI), we were asked to pick a one out of four positions on AI governance, divided over two axis: utopian-dystopian and dragmatic-speculative. Based on the way we positioned ourselves on the grid, we were sorted into groups to discuss our perspectives….
Read moreThe Potential to Die: “Do Performing Robots Dream of Sinterklaas?” A Child’s Play – Olga Efremov
The third session of TiM was a fascinating combination of three presentations united by a common desire to unravel both performative and technological aspects of robot actors and robot-like acting, and live theatrical performances that put the theory to practice. Both Simple Machines by Ugo Dehaes and NAO: Re-wired by Ulrike Quade Company…
Read moreRobotic Ritual – Job Santé
The third session of the Transmission in Motion seminar was centred around the topic of “robotic imaginaries”. During the presentations that took part in the session, one project stood out for me, namely the NAO: Re-wired project by the Ulrike Quade Company.[1] Within this project, a so-called NAO robot was deconstructed and rewired…
Read moreThe Unbecoming of my Broken Laptop – Pauline Munnich
What does it mean to design and perform as a robot? In the seminar “Robotic Imaginaries” several speakers discussed how theatre and robots informed each other and how by bringing robots to the theatre it opened up new ways of designing robots and new imaginaries of what robots can be. Where before I…
Read more“Failing at Human: Kinship Between Humanoid Robots and Autistics” – Chris van der Vegt
The third session of Transmission in Motion on the topic of robots in art and performance was opened with a short introduction by professor Maaike Bleeker wherein she noted that, for a long time, it was the goal of developers to make robots resemble human movement, speech and behaviour as closely as possible….
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