On May 20, 2025, the Digital Aesthetics Workshop will hold our final event for the year: a roundtable on AI and Media featuring Sun-ha Hong (UNC-Chapel Hill), Johan Fredrikzon (KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm), Julia Irwin (Stanford University), and Hank Gerba (University of Southern California).
The event will take place from 5:00-7:00pm PT in the Stanford Humanities Center Board Room. Zoom link for those unable to join in-person: tinyurl.com/5n8mdpbb
Schedule :
5:00-5:15: Sun-ha Hong | Ruins of the Technofuture
5:15-5:30: Johan Fredrikzon | Prompting the Dead: Technological Spiritualism in the Age of Machine Learning
5:30-5:45: Julia Irwin | William James’s Neural Network, Fringe Consciousness, and Historical Time
5:45-6:00: Hank Gerba | The Generative Image
6:00-7:00: Q&A
Sun-ha Hong | Ruins of the Technofuture
Where are the ruins of artificial intelligence and the data-driven future, and what do they have to tell us? While abandoned data centres, electronics waste landfills, and vast mineral mining operations already cover large swathes of the planet in material destruction, we must also think of technofutures’ gleaming monuments as ruin: the litany of prototypes never to be built, the construction lots of AI-fuelled smart cities and utopian colonies (Neom), the loudly announced then quietly shriveled infrastructure projects (Stargate).
I will suggest three distinct genres of ruin, and the different theories of technological futures they prescribe: (1) the disavowed ruin, and contemporary AI futures’ total denial of decay and historicity, exemplified by the Bezos-funded 10,000 Year Clock; (2) the manufactured ruin, theorised by Albert Speer, the chief architect of the Third Reich; (3) the redemptory ruin in which, Walter Benjamin tells us, ruins provide a progressive alternative for articulating future visions.
Sun-ha Hong examines forms of uncertainty, doubt, speculation and (dis)belief around surveillance, smart machines & AI. He is Associate Professor in Data Science and Communication at UNC-Chapel Hill, and previous haunts include Stanford, Simon Fraser University, MIT and Penn. Sun-ha once wrote Technologies of Speculation (2020), and will one day complete Predictions Without Futures.
Johan Fredrikzon | Prompting the Dead: Technological Spiritualism in the Age of Machine Learning
Technical media of recording and playback have, since the 19th century at least, been employed in attempts to contact the spirits of the dead. In these histories of technological spiritualism, humans themselves have often played the role of “media.” In this talk, I compare the mid 20th century phenomenon of Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) where tape recorders allegedly picked up messages from “the other side” with so called deadbots: machine learning systems trained to simulate deceased people. In particular, the talk will note the significance of error and labor in these practices and how they distribute the effort of interpretation between user and machine.
Johan Fredrikzon is a researcher at the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. He is currently a visiting scholar at Stanford University. In 2022–2024 he was a visiting postdoc fellow at The University of California, Berkeley. Fredrikzon holds a Master of Computer Science from Stockholm University where he also received his Ph.D. in the History of Ideas in 2021. In his research, Fredrikzon has been interested in problems of erasure, disappearance, waste, and decay as conditioned by processes of data management, office work, and archival practices. During 2018–19 he was a research affiliate at Yale University. Fredrikzon’s current research project is a three-year study of the history of artificial intelligence (AI) from the perspective of errors and mistakes in humans and machines respectively, funded by the Swedish Research Council.
Julia Irwin | William James’s Neural Network, Fringe Consciousness, and Historical Time
This talk situates philosopher-psychologist William James as an originator of the neural network concept. I recover his ideas about the human mind and brain’s “fringe” qualities, which I argue are a precedent condition for human reason and creativity. Fringe consciousness is an ambiguous sensation—like the contents of one’s peripheral vision—that opens up the habituating nervous system to the possibility of novelty. It is also the very element within the mind and brain that cyberneticians overlooked; indeed, the electromechanical replication of the nervous system was possible because of the elision of fringe consciousness.
Contemporary discourse on AI either takes the position that statistically driven AI can merely rearrange past phenomena in the dataset or that deep-learning systems’ capacity to re-write their own objectives will bring about unprecedented calamity. History is either frozen or marked by an imminent radical break. Yet neither stance helps us understand what it means to be an agent of history in the age of artificial intelligence. In re-animating James’s concept, I articulate a new path for thinking with and against today’s intelligent machines, one that pushes us beyond replacement vs. augmentation narratives.
Julia Irwin is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Art and Art History and the Institute for Human-Centered AI at Stanford University. She researches the history and philosophy of artificial intelligence, with a focus on the relationship between theories of intelligence and automation. Her writing has appeared in Grey Room, Film History, and Ki (Qui Parle). She holds a PhD in Film & Media from UC Berkeley.
Hank Gerba | The Generative Image
What does artificial intelligence signal about the nature of images? This talk investigates the way in which AI externalizes and operationalizes the imaginative capacities which influence the genetic process of image-formation.
Hank Gerba holds a Ph.D from Stanford’s Film & Media Program within the Art & Art History Department. Their work focuses on media aesthetics and AI. Currently, Hank is a researcher at the University of Southern California, combining narrative theory with generative AI.
