Join us Tuesday, 22 September 16.30h to discuss the recently published ‘Vector Media’, which looks at image generation and multimodal models, and reads them inspired by Marx as capital morphing towards 'neural exchange value'. On this day, the authors of ‘Vector Media’ are in town, Fabian Offert and Leonardo Impett, so our very own Creative AI Lab has organised a book launch. The authors will be joined on the panel by Joanna Zylinska, Daniel Chavez Heras, and Mercedes Bunz. We would love to see you there too. Register here if you think you can make it.

The book 'Vector Media', with an introduction by Johanna Drucker, writes a new historical epistemology of artificial intelligence, asking how machine learning models represent culture and what is at stake when they do.

Analysing the techniques underpinning large multimodal artificial intelligence models like DALL-E, Midjourney, Flux, or Stable Diffusion, Impett and Offert offer the concept of 'neural exchange value': the value cultural artifacts acquire not through meaning or context, but through their capacity to function as vectors. What happens to culture when sensory data is turned into abstracted forms of meaning?

Impett and Offert show that under the vector media regime, bias is not just a question of what is represented, at stake is the logic of representation itself. Drawing on Phil Agre's notion of a 'critical technical practice', Vector Media reveals how artificial intelligence systems embed new epistemologies of media beneath the surface of their architectures.

Speakers:

Leonardo Impett is Research Group Leader at the Bibliotheca Hertziana and Associate Professor in Digital Humanities at the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge. He was previously an Assistant Professor in Computer Science. His research looks at AI as both a method and an object of study in the history of art and visual studies; his research group, Machine Visual Culture, takes a highly interdisciplinary and collaborative approach to crossing the two fields. His own work concentrates on the image-theories and ideologies beneath contemporary AI systems.

Fabian Offert is Associate Professor for the History and Theory of the Digital Humanities and Director of the Center for the Humanities and Machine Learning (HUML) at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research focuses on the epistemology, aesthetics, and politics of artificial intelligence, with recent publications appearing in AI & Society, Visual Resources, the Journal of Digital Social Research, American Literature, and Media + Environment, among others