The GC Digital Initiatives recently announced their Fall 2015 Speaker Series, and all of us Fellows will surely be coming to a lot of those events, and we think you should join us for them. Read more about them and RSVP via the links below.

• “TBD:” A Talk by Wendy Chun
  Wednesday, November 18th, 6:30-8:30pm. The Skylight Room. The Graduate Center.

  Increasingly, it would seem, the future is already known, determined by algorithms that analyze, predict and pre-empt actions. Privacy is dead, and so is consent, because regardless of our own actions, we are betrayed by people “like us.” To what extent, though, does this situation offer new possibilities for action and modes of identification? This talk explores what it means “to be determined,” by framing users as characters in a universe of dramas putatively called Big Data.

  Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Professor of Modern Culture and Media, Professor of History of Art and Architecture, and Chair of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University.

• “Digging Deep: Ecosystems, Institutions, and Processes for Critical Making”
  December 1st, 12:30-2:30pm; 3-5:30pm. ARC Seminar Room 5318.05, The Graduate Center.
  Advanced registration required for each session.

  Join Patrik Svensson, Matt Ratto, and Anne Balsamo for a highly anticipated day of sessions that explore the field of critical making in its institutional context. Sponsored by the Advanced Research Collaborative, with co-sponsorship from GC Digital Initiatives and Umeå University, the program includes two parts. The first session foregrounds institutional perspectives on critical making and materiality, and the second engages situated practices and processes of critical making in its varied sites.

• “The Art of Seeing: Aesthetics at the Intersection of Art and Science”
  December 10th, 4:15-5:30pm. Science Center, Room 4102, The Graduate Center.

  In this two-part presentation, art historian Emily L. Spratt and computer scientist Ahmed Elgammal explore the uses of vision technology for the analysis of art and its philosophical implications for both aesthetic theory and artificial intelligence. Through an investigation of the most fundamental questions computer scientists are confronted with in giving a machine the capacity to see, we demonstrate the value in utilizing methodologies from art history as the field of computer vision has already, in fact, predicted certain categories of interpretation that aid in the analysis of art. Returning to the aesthetic debates inspired by Kant and renewing focus to the art historical theories of iconography and iconology that were prominent in the first half of the twentieth century, basic issues of object classification are examined in relation to vision technology. In this presentation, we hope to demonstrate the merit of bridging the fields of art history and computer science, and to underscore the new challenges aesthetics, in the age of artificial intelligence, face.

  This event is hosted by the Computer Science Colloquium, and co-sponsored by GC Digital Initiatives.