Vortrag von Dr. Özgün Eylül İşcen: The Black Boxed Allegories of Artificial Intelligence and its Contested Futures

Abstract: Machine learning algorithms harbor discrimination on many levels, not only through biases in data but also how they reproduce these historical inequalities within and beyond machines, often under the guise of value-neutrality, i.e., in black boxes that conceal their own functioning and historicity. In return, this talk addresses the black box allegories of AI systems by tracing the historical connections between cybernetics and logistical capitalism – where their differential impacts are strongly felt and negotiated. Indeed, the black box cannot be unveiled since what lies beneath it are the colonial histories and social disparities the global supply chain operates through, but not without frictions. Working through the complex visuality that the cybernetic black box animates, this talk examines the changing politics of image and futurity via artistic interventions that contest the totalizing impacts of today’s emergent technologies.

Dr. Özgün Eylül İşcen is a postdoctoral researcher at the Schaufler Lab at TU Dresden. She has been a research fellow at the ICI Berlin and taught at HU and UdK Berlin. Eylül earned her PhD in Computational Media, Arts and Cultures at Duke University in 2020. Her research examines the geopolitical aesthetic of computational media in the context of the Middle East. Eylül is also part of the multidisciplinary research project Against Catastrophe, led by Prof. Orit Halpern, and is also collaborating with Prof. Shintaro Miyazaki for the Counter-N, a web-based publication on alternative modes and futures of computing. 

Registration  for the livestream:  Jana Wodicka. Guests are welcome.

Photocredit: Still from 'cyb0rg tentacle manifest0' project, Aslı Dinç, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.