Grey Room invites you to a free, hour-long webinar on infrastructure as a site of political sovereignty and media-technical force, Tuesday, April 21st, 10:00 (PT) / 13:00 (ET) / 19:00 (CET) feat. Lisa Parks, Erhard Schüttpelz, Julia Velkova and Rosalind Morris. Signup at bit.ly/GreyRoomInfr...
Just published open access, a playful exercise I developed and ran with students: "The Cringe Test: student evaluations of intelligence with LLMs in a Turing Test adapted for classroom use" www.frontiersin.org/journals/edu...
My kid’s school ensuring none of its students become humanities PhDs
There may be an English translation forthcoming from Yale press? I remember hearing it had been planned into the publication schedule early on in the German production. I’m not sure though.
I read Siegert’s book on these and am putting together a roundtable review for a journal. Reach out if anyone’s interested!
A student asked GPT if its summaries of a class text were distorted. It replied “If distortion is inevitable in communication, then maybe my “blurriness” isn’t just a flaw—it’s a mirror held up to how humans process and reshape information every day.”
Now in Portuguese translation, and open access, an essay Francesco Casetti and I wrote on "Screens": periodicoscientificos.ufmt.br/territoriose...
"In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes." --Theodor Adorno
why do I have to acknowledge if I used an LLM in preparing the text but my colleagues don't have to note when their spouses and research assistants helped with research and writing ?
And, likewise, mechanic, automated, inhuman, derivative.
Andy Warhol Campbell's soup can sticker sheet, MoMA design store
The concept of "slop" is going to fit neatly into the space that "mass culture" occupied in 20c theory. It expresses a fear that culture has become liquid, abject, homogenous, replicating and spreading itself like a slime mold.
When I try to make sense of the kind of language produced by large language models (LLMs) I think of Saussure's passing remark that language is a "a machine that will always run no matter the damages that may be inflicted upon it."
HOTTE LOCAL SINGLES NEAR UNTO THEE ARE YNTERESTID YN VERNACULAR REWRITINGES OF THE TROY LEGEND, HENDECASYLLABIQUE VERSE, LIGHT FALCONRY, HERBALISM. JOYNE *COURTR* THE BEST APP FOR COURTLYE LOVE.
Love this review, and glad to see it also bring in @bernarddionysius.bsky.social, whose _Code_ deeply shaped my thinking about the history of cultural theory.
If you put these two books together, I think it makes a very coherent story about where theory came from and why we need it right now.
I love this thread. In a similar vein, Hans-Georg Gadamer: "When you take a word in your mouth you must realize that you have not taken a tool that can be thrown aside if it will not do the job, but you are fixed in a direction of thought that comes from afar and stretches beyond you."
Thanks for this generous reading, Robin!
My review of the excellent Code: From Information Theory to French Theory by @bernarddionysius.bsky.social is out now in the new and very exciting @histsocialscience.bsky.social! Available open access here~~
muse.jhu.edu/article/952248
The new OpenAI model announced today is quite wild. It is essentially Google's Deep Research idea with multistep reasoning, web search, *and* the o3 model underneath (as far as I know). It sometimes takes a half hour to answer. Let me show you an example. 1/x
is this genre theory? I think it might be!
A while back I did a performance of my 'Drift as a planetary phenomenon' for the excellent Panel on Planetary Thinking at the University of Gießen (www.uni-giessen.de/en/faculties...). They've now released the video (40 mins).
www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YWo...
I was filling out a social security form in Swedish. I had to check one of two boxes. Google Translate renders the two options as
(a) I am a decent
(b) I am a cretin
I haven't gotten much out of this website. Is there something I should do to make it more interesting?
I like this line by Bob Dylan from the Rolling Thunder Revue movie: “When somebody’s wearing a mask, he’s gonna tell you the truth. When he’s not wearing a mask, it’s highly unlikely.”
‘I’ is a linguistic convention to facilitate communication and should not be interpreted as a sign of self-awareness or consciousness. --ChatGPT
spilling bong water on the rug is definitely a violation of the entire system of binaries that make dorm life with a roommate barely manageable
the structuralism? yeah, it's def a gateway theory