Creative AI Lab – ‘Aesthetics of New AI’ panel discussion for Frieze Week 2020

What new aspects does the technical framework of machine learning bring to art-making? And conversely, what can artworks that use AI point to in AI research and development? These questions formed the basis for discussion during an online panel event, convened by the Creative AI Lab in collaboration with the NYU Digital Theory H-Lab for Frieze Week 2020, with Leif Weatherby, Nora Khan, Joanna Zylinska and Murad Khan. The full event can be viewed as a video here.

The Creative AI Lab is a collaboration between the R&D Platform at Serpentine Galleries and King’s College London’s Department of Digital Humanities. It follows the premise that collectively, we are at the early stages of understanding the aesthetics of ‘AI’: locating a new poetics, investigating what it means to work with systems that are able to calculate meaning, and practicing art-making in the so-called ‘black box’ of machine learning. This panel formed part of an ongoing and collaborative investigation into AI aesthetics, one of multiple lines of inquiry explored by the Lab. The event was hosted by the Lab’s principal investigators Dr Mercedes Bunz, Senior Lecturer in Digital Society, KCL, and Eva Jäger, Assistant Curator of Arts Technologies, Serpentine. A reader of the panellists’ work accompanied the event –– it can be downloaded from the Serpentine’s website. As Eva Jäger outlined, ‘the Lab holds space for this work, convening diverse conversations, like this one, and compiling a database of tools and resources. The lab also produces knowledge and approaches to digesting and communicating this media through experimental research projects’.

‘It’s not just a black box, It’s at least grey. When you open that up you start to see things that have either aesthetic value, critical value, or both’. This initial provocation from Leif Weatherby (NYU Digital Theory H-Lab) aligned with the impetus for such practices outlined by Mercedes Bunz: that ‘we need to reflect on the societal impact of this technology critically, but also on its creative capacity – art is offering a space for the creative and playful exploration of this technology’.

The panel responded to these considerations alongside a tele-present audience through presentation and discussion. A range of divergent approaches emerged for understanding the reciprocal relationship between AI and artistic research, encompassing philosophical, art historical and conceptual-technological approaches. In particular, two often overlapping modes of practice: working with machine learning to develop a distinctive machinic aesthetics through the generation and display of ‘front-end’ imagery, and works which foreground conceptual exploration, revealing ‘back-end’ processes and mechanisms.

Joanna Zylinska, Professor of New Media and Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London focused on the possibility that a shift in trajectory is required in AI art research, away from the binary view of humanity and technology. Critically questioning the motivations behind AI art production and its market, which in her view often reproduces persistent and ‘seductive’ human notions of creativity, she posited the possibility that contemporary machine learning practices should in fact tend towards a different “AI” – art for ‘another intelligence’, exemplified by Katja Novitskova’s work Pattern of Activation (2020).

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Job: AEP Lecturer in Humanistic and Social Computing

The Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London is looking for one AEP Lecturer in Humanistic and Social Computing to help us grow our teaching expertise in critical HCI, user centered research and sustainable design from a humanities and social sciences perspective.

The ideal candidate will have a PhD in a relevant discipline, an excellent understanding of HCI, user research and critical design from a humanistic perspective, the ability to teach existing modules in this area and develop new ones, at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

A developing track record of research and publications in the area of humanistic and social computing will be particularly welcome. This is a FTE position.

You can find more details and apply (by 6th December 2020) here.

Fulbright scholarship awarded to Digital Humanities PhD student

Stephanie Grimes will be joining the Department of Digital Humanities as part of the flagship international exchange programme to advance research into technology and cultural heritage.

Congratulations to Stephanie Grimes, a PhD student who recently joined the Department of Digital Humanities, and has been awarded the prestigious Fulbright Scholarship to further her research into technology and its influence on public reception to ancient Roman art.

The Fulbright Scholarship is awarded to American and British students to deepen public knowledge, promote civic engagement, and develop leaders through education exchange programmes between students of the US and UK.

Stephanie will be supervised by Dr Stuart Dunn, Head of the Department of Digital Humanities, and will be using her time at King’s to take an interdisciplinary approach to her research. She will use art history, museum studies, archaeology, and technology methods to gain a comprehensive understanding about how innovations shape the way people relate to the past.

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Data Stories Symposium, 26-27th November 2020

The Department of Digital Humanities is pleased to be involved in co-organising the DataStories Symposium 2020 which will explore how people engage with data to create stories.

Data is represented in different ways to allow us to understand and make use of it: in numbers, in text, in visualisations, in interactive stories and other forms. Data stories are relevant to many areas of our life – they are part of the news, of how we engage with science and research, they inform our decisions and they help us explain the world.

We are getting more and more aware that data should excite as well as inform and be engaging as well as educating. Data should be presented in a manner that allows different perspectives and supports us in understanding the uncertainties attached to it.

The DataStories Symposium 2020 will bring together experts from academia, industry and the third sector to discuss, generate ideas and inspire future interdisciplinary collaborations aiming to explore Human Data Interaction in relation to storytelling with data.

Contributors and guests include: researchers, data journalists, data artists, computer scientists, curators, game designers, amongst others.

We will have three exciting keynote speakers, interactive sessions and lightning talks to showcase ongoing work and to discuss current challenges around datastories. Topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Experiencing data through storytelling, art and games
  • Narrative practices for data stories
  • Data representations: narrative visualisations and other forms
  • Human Data Interaction
  • Making sense of data and uncertainty
  • Transparent reporting in data journalism

Currently confirmed speakers include: Anna Feigenbaum (Bournemouth University), Andrew Tatem (University of Southampton, Director of WorldPop and Flowminder), Benjamin Bach (University of Edinburgh), David Caswell (BBC News Labs), Phil Harvey (Microsoft), Caelainn Barr (The Guardian), Michele Mauri (DENSITYDESIGN LAB), Kathleen Gregory (DANS), Tom Blount (University of Southampton), Nick Holliman (Newcastle University), Marc Streit (Johannes Kepler University Linz), Stefanie Posavec.

We will have three keynote speakers, interactive workshops, live sketching, and a number of lightning talks to showcase ongoing work and to discuss current challenges around data stories. 

You can find out more at datastories.co.uk/symposium/  and register for free here.

New Book: “Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access” (MIT Press, 2020)

MIT Press have recently published a new book on Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access edited by Martin Eve and myself.

The book aims to provide a “critical inquiry into the politics, practices, and infrastructures of open access and the reconfiguration of scholarly communication in digital societies”.

My chapter, “Infrastructural Experiments and the Politics of Open Access” examines how scholarly communication infrastructures may be taken as both an object of research and a site of experimentation to explore questions of who has access, what counts, what matters, and how relations are organised.

The chapters in the book are also available as a set of open access PDFs to coincide with Open Access Week. The whole book is available as a single PDF here. Following is an overview of the table of contents with links to full texts of corresponding chapters.

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Black History Month at DDH

Update: Video for all three events is now available at the following links:

We’re delighted to announce a series of three events for Black History Month in the Department of Digital Humanities. Please note that separate registration is required for each event.

Black British Digital Studies

Join us for a conversation between Dr. Francesca Sobande, Rianna Walcott, and Keisha Bruce about their research in Black British Digital Humanities, Francesca’s latest book, the Digital Lives of Black Women in Britain, and their experiences as Black British scholars.

When: Tuesday, 27th October 2020, 5:00-6:30 pm GMT

Register: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/black-british-digital-studies

Dr. Francesca Sobande is a lecturer in digital media studies at the School of Journalism, Media and Culture at Cardiff University. She is Course Director of the BA Media, Journalism and Culture programme and is an affiliate of the Data Justice Lab. Francesca’s work focuses on digital culture, Black diaspora, feminism, creative work, and the experiences of Black women. She is author of The Digital Lives of Black Women in Britain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and is co-editor with Professor Akwugo Emejulu of To Exist is To Resist: Black Feminism in Europe (Pluto Press, 2019). Francesca tweets at @chess_ess and more about her work can be found at francescasobande.com.

Rianna Walcott (she/her) is an LAHP-funded PhD candidate at Kings College London researching Black women’s identity formation in digital spaces, and a graduate twiceover from the University of Edinburgh. She co-founded projectmyopia.com , a website that promotes inclusivity in academia and a decolonised curriculum. She frequently writes about feminism, mental health, race and literature for publications including The Wellcome Collection, The Metro, The Guardian, The BBC, Vice, and Dazed . Rianna is co-editor of an anthology about BAME mental health – The Colour of Madness , and in the time left over she moonlights as a professional jazz singer. Rianna tweets at @rianna_walcott and more about her work can be found at riannawalcott.com.

Keisha Bruce is a Midlands4Cities-funded PhD researcher in Black Studies at the University of Nottingham. Her research interests include Black popular culture, diasporic visual cultures, and digital media representations. Her PhD thesis explores Black women’s digital visual cultures on social media with a particular focus on how identity is mediated, and diasporic community is fostered online through processes of visuality and affect. Outside of her thesis she is currently undergoing an archiving project on Black girlhood in Britain. You can find her on Twitter at @keishastweets.

Black Joy on Black Twitter: An In-Conversation with André Brock

As we continue to endure the privations forced upon us by the pandemic and various government responses thereto, it is important to locate sources of joy. Writing about Black cyberculture often revolves around oppression, resistance, labor, or consumption. Brock, however, argues that Black digital practice’s deviation from technocultural practice and desire can be understood as a feature, not a bug. He proposes that Black Twitter, in particular, offers a space for Black joy to originate, participate, and conversate, leading to surplus libidinal, communal, and political energies powering movements such as Black Lives Matter. Rianna Walcott will discuss how she uses Brock’s perspectives in her research on Black British digital cultures.

When: Wednesday, 28th October 2020, 5:00-6:30 pm GMT

Register: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/blackjoy

André L. Brock is an Associate Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. He is an interdisciplinary scholar with an M.A. in English and Rhetoric from Carnegie Mellon University and a Ph.D. in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His scholarship includes published articles on racial representations in videogames, black women and weblogs, whiteness, blackness, and digital technoculture, as well as groundbreaking research on Black Twitter. His article “From the Blackhand Side: Twitter as a Cultural Conversation” challenged social science and communication research to confront the ways in which the field preserved “a color-blind perspective on online endeavors by normalizing Whiteness and othering everyone else” and sparked a conversation that continues, as Twitter, in particular, continues to evolve. His most recent book is Distributed Blackness: African American Technocultures, published by NYU Press. You can find him on Twitter at @DocDre.

Black Speculative Fiction

Like many parts of our lives, the cultural artifacts that shape our imaginations – films, books, and so on – are shaped by relationships of race. Join us for a free-wheeling conversation between Black speculative fiction authors, Hamza Mohamed and Ayize Jama-Everett, for an exploration of the role and importance of Black voices in shaping our collective imaginations of the present, and possible futures.

When: Saturday, 31st October 2020, 5:30-6:30 pm GMT

Register: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/blackspeculativefiction

Hamza Mohamed launched his own publishing imprint, Wings of Crows in the beginning of 2020 with his debut novel Abeed: Dreams of a Lost Nation, the first of a trilogy. His work weaves stories from East Africa and it’s diasporas. With Wing of Crows, Hamza hopes to build a platform for Black writers as well put an emphasis on Black protagonists in fiction. You can find him on Twitter @HajimeNoHamza.

Ayize Jama-Everett was born in 1974 in Harlem New York. He holds three Master’s degrees (Divinity, Psychology, and creative writing), and has worked as a bookseller, professor, and therapist. He desires to create stories that people want to read, and he believes the narratives of our times dictate future realities. Three of his books have been published by Small Beer Press – The Liminal series – with another on the way.  He’s published a  graphic novel with noted artist John Jennings, entitled The Box of Bones, and a graphic novel adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo is forthcoming from Abrams Press. Shorter works can be found in The Believer, LA review of books, and Racebaitr. You can find him on Twitter @AyizeJamaEveret.

Department of Digital Humanities contributes to world-leading research on data/AI as part of new UKRI National Research Centre on Privacy, Harm Reduction and Adversarial Influence Online

The Department of Digital Humanities is bringing its world-leading research on the social and political dimensions of data and AI to a newly established national Research Centre on Privacy, Harm Reduction and Adversarial Influence Online (REPHRAIN).

The centre brings together more than 50 leading academics with industry, non-profit, government, law, regulation and international research centre partners. The aim is to identify and reduce the threat of harm from loss of privacy, insecurity, inaccurate information and other issues that have emerged as the digital economy has grown.

King’s will be jointly leading two strands of the work, on minimising harms while maximising benefits from a sharing-driven digital economy; and balancing individual agency and social good.

Dr Mark Coté, Senior Lecturer in Data Culture and Society at the Department of Digital Humanities and a PI for the new centre comments:

REPHRAIN will allow us to continue our world-leading cross disciplinary research on the social dimensions of data and AI. The Departments of Digital Humanities and Informatics look forward to collaborating with leading researchers across the UK to make our digital lives not only more safe, but empowered.”
Further details can be found in announcements here (KCL) and here (UKRI).

Job: Lecturer in Digital Culture and Media Education

The Department of Digital Humanities is seeking to appoint a permanent Lecturer (Academic Education Pathway) to contribute to our teaching in the area of digital culture and society. The post-holder will have a sound knowledge of the theories, key concepts, and methods providing expertise in areas within this domain, and will be expected to develop it. As a non-exhaustive list of examples, we are interested in all aspects of digital culture and media, and especially in expertise regarding platform and app studies, algorithm studies, smart cities, digital health, ethnography, anthropology, and digital methods, data analysis, dataveillance, digital inclusion and exclusion, as well as in online teaching.

We are looking for a range of expertise to support our fast expanding five postgraduate programmes – in particular on the MA Digital Culture and Society – and on the BA Digital Culture. Candidates will be expected to provide high quality teaching across all levels, including undergraduate, Masters, and PhD, to supervise undergraduate and graduate student dissertations, and to keep abreast of the latest scholarship in their field. Candidates will be striving to become scholars of national and international standing.

The post holder will complement existing teaching in the Department and offer students new opportunities in their studies of digital society and culture. She/he will support student specialisation in their own area. The successful applicant will also be expected, within reason, to teach outside their own immediate area of expertise.

The successful candidate will also undertake pastoral duties including personal tutoring and administrative duties linked to Departmental, Faculty and University administration.

Candidates will contribute to the life and reputation of the Department, the Faculty, and the College through taking on an appropriate administrative role, contributing to internal networks and collaborations, taking part in external national and international activities, and undertaking industry and public engagement where appropriate.

This role is based at King’s Strand Campus in London, and the post holder will be expected to offer a blended package of learning, both online and face to face.

Interviews are expected to be held in the week commencing 2 November 2020.

Full-time – 35 hours per week

Contract – indefinite

Full details and application link can be found here.

Joint Statement on Humanist

In early August a post commenting on an essay by the writer Khalid Warsame, was circulated to the recipients of the Humanist email list. This post referred to Warsame’s alleged beliefs about British colonial guilt and made direct reference to ‘casual anti-white racism’. Several members of the list responded to condemn the use of this term, including a researcher and colleague in DDH. We understand that the forum editor and moderator chose not to publish two of these responses, a decision which is not in line with the behaviours and guiding principles we in the Department of Digital Humanities (DDH) and King’s Digital Lab (KDL) expect. We are therefore disappointed that these standards and values were not maintained on this occasion. We will ensure this is not repeated. The moderator has since posted an apology on Humanist, admitting that the decision to censor the responses was “mistaken” and subsequently released a number of the responses.

As a community, we are committed to freedom of academic expression, and, most importantly, to the principle of empowering individuals of all backgrounds and levels of seniority to have their voices heard. We are acutely aware of the central role that the study of race and inequality, and the decolonization agenda, play as core parts of the contemporary Digital Humanities, and we are proud to have some of the world’s leading researchers in these areas among our community. We fully support the recent statement of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) – of which Humanist is an allied publication – on Black Lives Matter, Structural Racism and Establishment Violence, and the associated nine action points. We recognize there is inequality and racism around us and our community; and that some of this racism has been normalized and perpetuated in academic practice. As a university dedicated to academic, educational and research excellence, addressing issues of race and fighting racism, racialisms, and racial inequality are central to the university’s mission of ensuring our students receive the highest quality education, and that they, our staff and partners are supported to thrive while serving society and making the world a better place.

We will continue to take steps in the longer-term discussion about decolonizing the Digital Humanities and acknowledging the persistence of structural racism. As we reflect on this, we hope that we can all collectively learn how to be better practitioners and allies in the fight against racism and support our BAME students and colleagues.