Anna-Kaisa's committee seminar

On June 1, 15-17, two out of the three committee members will give a seminar the day before Anna's defence in 1440 (no zoom).

Nick Seaver: How to Not Pay Attention

Abstract: How do you know if someone is paying attention? In settings like the driver's seat of a "self-driving" car, the work-from-home office, the streaming music service, or the lecture hall, attention is known and managed through technical mediations that are inevitably vulnerable to manipulation. This talk examines techniques for not paying attention—from steering wheel weights to mouse jigglers—as a way to understand how attention is constructed today. These deceptive interventions into the technicity of attention help to clarify the array of social and technical relations from which attention emerges and raise new questions about the functioning of the attention economy more generally.

Nick Seaver is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University, where he also directs the program in Science, Technology & Society. He is co-editor of Towards an Anthropology of Data (2021) and the author of Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation (2022), an ethnographic study of music recommender system developers. He is a faculty affiliate with Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and a fellow with the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research’s Future Flourishing Program. Seaver is currently writing a book on the meaning and measurement of attention and developing a project on the anthropology of contraptions.

Sarah Cook: Curating art and AI

Abstract: Curating (interactive) exhibitions of art and AI necessarily includes considering the supply chain of artists' materials, the algorithmic or generative process taking place in public, and the strong opinions of audience members. Using the cases of two exhibitions at Bildmuseet in Umeå/Upmeje - Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg - Machine Auguries, and AI and the Paradox of Agency - affords the possibility to compare changes over time on both fronts. As awareness of the impact of the use of AI becomes more widespread in society, so does the attention on so-called AI art scale up (or does it?). Questions about best way of documenting the curatorial process of realising the exhibitions and the public reactions to them are up for discussion.

Sarah Cook is a curator, writer and researcher based in Scotland. She is Professor of Museum Studies in Information Studies at the University of Glasgow. From 2023 she has been a guest professor in Art and AI with UmArts at University of Umeå as part of the WASP-HS programme.
She is editor of 24/7: A Wake-up Call For Our Non-stop World (Somerset House, 2019) and INFORMATION (Documents of Contemporary Art, Whitechapel and MIT Press, 2016) and co-author (with Beryl Graham) of Rethinking Curating: Art After New Media (MIT Press, 2010; Chinese edition 2016). Sarah has curated and co-curated over 50 international exhibitions of contemporary art, new media art and digital art for museums, galleries and festivals worldwide.