AI Media - Institutional partners
AI Media - Institutional partners
AIIM, Centre for Aesthetics of AI Images
AIIM is based at Aarhus University and focuses on the intersection between three key concepts:
- Aesthetics constitutes the centre’s fundamental theoretical and analytical approach to exploring AI images. By ‘aesthetics’ we understand a wide variety of theoretical approaches, such as (but not limited to) the work by, Jacques Ranciére, Sianne Ngai, Yves Citton, Gilbert Simondon, and Olga Gourinova. Hence, the centre is solidly founded in the humanities and focuses specifically on the potentials of aesthetic theory to explore and comprehend AI image practices.
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an overall lay cultural term covering a range of machine learning practices that train computer models to extract dominating features from big data sets. The centre is particularly focused on AI that relate to ‘visuality’ (e.g.: pixel-resolution, vector-graphics, camera-settings), image analysis (e.g.: object detection, heatmaps) and image generation (e.g.: diffusion models).
- Images as cultural phenomena are at the very core of the centre’s focus. Whereas the centre’s theoretical approach is confined to aesthetics, potential objects of research cover all images and image practices that are somehow related to AI (e.g.: Renaissance paintings feed into a training data set, deepfake porn videos, faces automatically popping up on screens in surveillance systems, synthetic stock photo, AI art, cluster visualizations).
RHET AI - Center for Rhetorical Science Communication Research on Artificial Intelligence, University of Tübingen, Germany
Under the direction of Prof. Olaf Kramer of the University of Tübingen’s Rhetoric Department, The Center for Rhetorical Science Communication Research on Artificial Intelligence (RHET AI) investigates the structure of discourses and debates on the topic of AI from a rhetorical, linguistic, and media-related perspective within five research units: Which narratives and frames play a role in these contexts? Which topical arguments and emotional reactions prevail? The RHET AI Center is funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. Involved are the Rhetoric Department and the Institute of Media Studies at the University of Tübingen, the Chair of Science Communication with a focus on Linguistics (Department of Science Communication) at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, researchers from the Excellence Cluster Machine Learning and Cyber Valley, as well as the practice partner Wissenschaft im Dialog in Berlin.
AG Interfaces - a working group of the German Society for Media Studies (GfM)
The working group Interfaces of the German Society for Media Studies (GfM) provides a forum for the exchange and networking of media studies scholars who are concerned with the history and theory of interfaces. It aims at opening up the concept and the phenomena of the interface from a media historical and media theoretical perspective. In addition to reflecting on the history of the term and the further development of a theorization of interfaces, the group wants to deal in particular with the history of different interface formations. While user interfaces in computer history form a starting point for this, it is followed by questions about the effects of other interface levels that enable and intensify forms of human/machine relationships. Annual workshops on theoretical and methodological issues are the central medium of cooperation, complemented by a mailing list, a blog, and publications in journals. Current spokespersons are Alice Soiné and Daniel Stoecker.