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Fall 2024 Speaker Series

Fall 2024 Schedule:

Art and Artificial Intelligence: A Philosophical Investigation with Alice Barale, University of Milan

Monday October 28 at 1pm PST

Talk co-sponsored by The Humanities Institute with Humanities in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

It has been several years since the first artwork created with artificial intelligence was sold at the renowned auction house Christie's in 2018. In the meantime, new types of artificial intelligence have emerged, enabling artists to conduct different experiments. However, the presence of AI in the artistic process continues to raise significant questions. How should its role be understood? And, more importantly, what new chances does it offer within the artistic field and beyond?

Alice Barale is a scholar of Aesthetics and Assistant Professor at the Department of Cultural and Environmental Heritage at the University of Milan. She has extensively researched Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin, authors to whom she has dedicated several essays and two monographs ("La malinconia dell’immagine," FUP, 2009, and "La prima impresa: Shakespeare in Warburg e Benjamin," Jaca Book, 2021). For Benjamin, she has edited and translated a new Italian version of "Origin of the German Trauerspiel" (Carocci, 2018). Among her most recent research interests are the philosophy of color ("Il giallo del colore," Jaca Book, 2020) and the relationship between art and artificial intelligence. She has curated the collected volume "Arte e intelligenza artificiale. Be my GAN" (Jaca Book, 2020) and has just completed a new book on the subject, which will be published in November 2024.

Higher Ed and the Algorithmic Gaze with Lindsay Weinberg, Purdue University

Monday November 18 at 1pm PST

Register to attend virtually here

Higher Ed and the Algorithmic Gaze

Higher education increasingly relies on digital surveillance in the United States. By digitally monitoring and managing campus life, institutions can supposedly run their services more efficiently, strengthen the quality of higher education, and better prepare students for future roles in the digital economy. Yet in practice, these initiatives often perpetuate austerity, structural racism, and privatization at public universities under the guise of solving higher education's most intractable problems. In this talk, I’ll argue that these more recent transformations are best understood as part of a longer history of universities supporting the development of technologies that reproduce racial and economic injustice on their campuses and in their communities. I’ll close with a discussion of the implications of increased automation and AI in higher ed, particularly for faculty and student labor.

Dr. Lindsay Weinberg is a clinical associate professor in the John Martinson Honors College at Purdue University, and the Director of the Tech Justice Lab. Her research and teaching are at the intersection of science and technology studies, media studies, and feminist studies, with an emphasis on the social and ethical impacts of digital technology. Her recent book, Smart University: Student Surveillance in the Digital Age (John Hopkins UP, 2024), examines the proliferation of digital tools for higher education governance, and their impacts on marginalized people within and beyond the university’s walls.