Recommendation algorithms play an important role in our reception of digital media products. Whet... more Recommendation algorithms play an important role in our reception of digital media products. Whether we listen, watch, or read online, the content we receive is often pre-filtered based on calculated relevance or on the similar taste of others. As such, our reading of a thriller or watching of the newest romantic comedy contributes to a network of previous experiences supplying media producers with valuable data for an even more optimized future product. Engaging the aesthetics of networked media, this trend is important to consider, as it plays a vital role in the communication situation. From the spatiotemporal and sensorial affordances of Spotify’s musical advice to the complex semiotic modalities of the Popular Highlights in the Kindle interface, the recommended experience of online media content calls for an intermedial vocabulary to be adequately described and understood. This chapter offers a general discussion of the concepts of intermediality and multimodality focusing on their relevance for engaging with networked media experience. The chapter is divided into two parts: the first part presents a broader introduction to existing intermedial scholarship as it relates to networked media, while the second part exemplifies ways to approach this topic through two illustrative analyses of the interfaces of Spotify and Kindle.
Machine learning (ML) systems have shown great potential for performing or supporting inferential... more Machine learning (ML) systems have shown great potential for performing or supporting inferential reasoning through analyzing large data sets, thereby potentially facilitating more informed decision-making. However, a hindrance to such use of ML systems is that the predictive models created through ML are often complex, opaque, and poorly understood, even if the programs “learning” the models are simple, transparent, and well understood. ML models become difficult to trust, since lay-people, specialists, and even researchers have difficulties gauging the reasonableness, correctness, and reliability of the inferences performed. In this article, we argue that bridging this gap in the understanding of ML models and their reasonableness requires a focus on developing an improved methodology for their creation. This process has been likened to “alchemy” and criticized for involving a large degree of “black art,” owing to its reliance on poorly understood “best practices”. We soften this critique and argue that the seeming arbitrariness often is the result of a lack of explicit hypothesizing stemming from an empiricist and myopic focus on optimizing for predictive performance rather than from an occult or mystical process. We present some of the problems resulting from the excessive focus on optimizing generalization performance at the cost of hypothesizing about the selection of data and biases. We suggest embedding ML in a general logic of scientific discovery similar to the one presented by Charles Sanders Peirce, and present a recontextualized version of Peirce’s scientific hypothesis adjusted to ML.
The relatively new Big Data systems, which operate at different levels, such as modes ofmonitorin... more The relatively new Big Data systems, which operate at different levels, such as modes ofmonitoring, bulk analysis or techniques for data mining, are increasingly used by corporationsand agencies to make sense of massive collections of data, as they promise access to anincreasingly traceable and more predictable population. Although these systems have beenobjects of interest in scientific, economic and socio-political research for some time, they alsoplay a more and more noticeable role in recent aesthetic and cultural discussions. This articleargues that, as decisive modes of representation of knowledge production, algorithmicsorting and categorisation are relatively underexplored but important territory for scholarsin the diverse field of the philosophy of aesthetics. This article presents the concept of thedigital objectas a way to comprehend the different modes of functioning inherent in the logicof algorithmic sorting, as they are“translated”into visual manifestations in the artworks ofRossella Biscotti, as the point of departure for analysing the 19thcentury punched cardtechnologies built into the operation of automated looms and later electromechanicaltabulating machines.
This article examines the work of the Japanese mathematician and photographer Shigeru Onishi (192... more This article examines the work of the Japanese mathematician and photographer Shigeru Onishi (1928--1994) and his topologically inspired photographic experiments. It asks how his painterly play with emulsion and coloration is a visual exploration of questions of process and continuous transformation, and how these experiments can be understood in relation to more general discussions of mathematical and artistic “ways of knowing”. Building on ideas introduced by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his work on the late Cézanne, the article introduces the concept of topological vision to describe and account for a particular way of seeing that considers the continually coming-into-being of a photographic motif.
Review of UNCERTAIN ARCHIVES: CRITICAL KEYWORDS FOR BIG DATA EDITED BY NANNA BONDE THYLSTRUP, DAN... more Review of UNCERTAIN ARCHIVES: CRITICAL KEYWORDS FOR BIG DATA EDITED BY NANNA BONDE THYLSTRUP, DANIELA AGOSTINHO, ANNIE RING, CATHERINE D’IGNAZIO AND KRISTIN VEEL CAMBRIDGE: THE MIT PRESS, 2021. 640 PAGES ISBN: 9780262539883
Tid er en af de mest kostbare ressourcer, vi har i dag, og de faerreste foler, de har nok af den.... more Tid er en af de mest kostbare ressourcer, vi har i dag, og de faerreste foler, de har nok af den. Hver dag bestraeber vi os pa at folge med tiden i en stadig kamp for at na opgaver, deadlines eller sociale aktiviteter. Vores dognrytme forstyrres af et blat skaer, nar endnu en e-mail, nyhedsoverskrift eller opdatering kalder pa vores opmaerksomhed. Teoretikere som Jonathan Crary og Hartmut Rosa har ligefrem karakteriseret vores senmoderne samfund som henholdsvis 24/7- og hojhastighedssamfundet (Crary, 2014; Rosa, 2010).
Anmeldelse af Nanna Bonde Thylstrup: The Politics of Mass Digitization.Cambridge: The MIT Press, ... more Anmeldelse af Nanna Bonde Thylstrup: The Politics of Mass Digitization.Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2019.
In this article I discuss the themes of movement and restriction inherent in digital technologies... more In this article I discuss the themes of movement and restriction inherent in digital technologies in two very different artistic projects, both of which offer aesthetic material for debating the politics of data. I approach this discussion through the term gravity as used by philosopher Levi R. Bryant (The Gravity of Things; Onto-Cartography). Through an analogy to Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, Bryant suggests the term gravity to denote how both semiotic and material entities influence the becoming and movement of subjects and collectives in time and space (Bryant, The Gravity of Things 10). I use this as a point of departure to investigate the shared space between physical and virtual borders, and the streams of data that are formed by, and also form, the space they traverse. The term gravity is used to elucidate the contours of the digital space that determines the paths between sender and receiver, as well as draws and erases borders, restricts and enables movement.
Passage - Tidsskrift for litteratur og kritik, 2017
Maja Bak Herrie: “The Art of Withdrawal – Hermetic Objects and Deixis without Context in Gertrude... more Maja Bak Herrie: “The Art of Withdrawal – Hermetic Objects and Deixis without Context in Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons”The last decade has seen an increased attention toward things and objects in the aesthetic disciplines. This article explores the analytical potentials of the quadruple object model from Graham Harman’s object-oriented philosophy in a literary context, namely Gertrude Stein’s 1914 book Tender Buttons: objects, food, rooms. With the assistance of the quadruple object model and the linguistic term deixis, paradoxically concrete but non-contextualised, literary objects in the form of everyday items and foods are conceptualised as being in a process of withdrawal and emergence.
Recommendation algorithms play an important role in our reception of digital media products. Whet... more Recommendation algorithms play an important role in our reception of digital media products. Whether we listen, watch, or read online, the content we receive is often pre-filtered based on calculated relevance or on the similar taste of others. As such, our reading of a thriller or watching of the newest romantic comedy contributes to a network of previous experiences supplying media producers with valuable data for an even more optimized future product. Engaging the aesthetics of networked media, this trend is important to consider, as it plays a vital role in the communication situation. From the spatiotemporal and sensorial affordances of Spotify’s musical advice to the complex semiotic modalities of the Popular Highlights in the Kindle interface, the recommended experience of online media content calls for an intermedial vocabulary to be adequately described and understood. This chapter offers a general discussion of the concepts of intermediality and multimodality focusing on their relevance for engaging with networked media experience. The chapter is divided into two parts: the first part presents a broader introduction to existing intermedial scholarship as it relates to networked media, while the second part exemplifies ways to approach this topic through two illustrative analyses of the interfaces of Spotify and Kindle.
Machine learning (ML) systems have shown great potential for performing or supporting inferential... more Machine learning (ML) systems have shown great potential for performing or supporting inferential reasoning through analyzing large data sets, thereby potentially facilitating more informed decision-making. However, a hindrance to such use of ML systems is that the predictive models created through ML are often complex, opaque, and poorly understood, even if the programs “learning” the models are simple, transparent, and well understood. ML models become difficult to trust, since lay-people, specialists, and even researchers have difficulties gauging the reasonableness, correctness, and reliability of the inferences performed. In this article, we argue that bridging this gap in the understanding of ML models and their reasonableness requires a focus on developing an improved methodology for their creation. This process has been likened to “alchemy” and criticized for involving a large degree of “black art,” owing to its reliance on poorly understood “best practices”. We soften this critique and argue that the seeming arbitrariness often is the result of a lack of explicit hypothesizing stemming from an empiricist and myopic focus on optimizing for predictive performance rather than from an occult or mystical process. We present some of the problems resulting from the excessive focus on optimizing generalization performance at the cost of hypothesizing about the selection of data and biases. We suggest embedding ML in a general logic of scientific discovery similar to the one presented by Charles Sanders Peirce, and present a recontextualized version of Peirce’s scientific hypothesis adjusted to ML.
The relatively new Big Data systems, which operate at different levels, such as modes ofmonitorin... more The relatively new Big Data systems, which operate at different levels, such as modes ofmonitoring, bulk analysis or techniques for data mining, are increasingly used by corporationsand agencies to make sense of massive collections of data, as they promise access to anincreasingly traceable and more predictable population. Although these systems have beenobjects of interest in scientific, economic and socio-political research for some time, they alsoplay a more and more noticeable role in recent aesthetic and cultural discussions. This articleargues that, as decisive modes of representation of knowledge production, algorithmicsorting and categorisation are relatively underexplored but important territory for scholarsin the diverse field of the philosophy of aesthetics. This article presents the concept of thedigital objectas a way to comprehend the different modes of functioning inherent in the logicof algorithmic sorting, as they are“translated”into visual manifestations in the artworks ofRossella Biscotti, as the point of departure for analysing the 19thcentury punched cardtechnologies built into the operation of automated looms and later electromechanicaltabulating machines.
This article examines the work of the Japanese mathematician and photographer Shigeru Onishi (192... more This article examines the work of the Japanese mathematician and photographer Shigeru Onishi (1928--1994) and his topologically inspired photographic experiments. It asks how his painterly play with emulsion and coloration is a visual exploration of questions of process and continuous transformation, and how these experiments can be understood in relation to more general discussions of mathematical and artistic “ways of knowing”. Building on ideas introduced by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his work on the late Cézanne, the article introduces the concept of topological vision to describe and account for a particular way of seeing that considers the continually coming-into-being of a photographic motif.
Review of UNCERTAIN ARCHIVES: CRITICAL KEYWORDS FOR BIG DATA EDITED BY NANNA BONDE THYLSTRUP, DAN... more Review of UNCERTAIN ARCHIVES: CRITICAL KEYWORDS FOR BIG DATA EDITED BY NANNA BONDE THYLSTRUP, DANIELA AGOSTINHO, ANNIE RING, CATHERINE D’IGNAZIO AND KRISTIN VEEL CAMBRIDGE: THE MIT PRESS, 2021. 640 PAGES ISBN: 9780262539883
Tid er en af de mest kostbare ressourcer, vi har i dag, og de faerreste foler, de har nok af den.... more Tid er en af de mest kostbare ressourcer, vi har i dag, og de faerreste foler, de har nok af den. Hver dag bestraeber vi os pa at folge med tiden i en stadig kamp for at na opgaver, deadlines eller sociale aktiviteter. Vores dognrytme forstyrres af et blat skaer, nar endnu en e-mail, nyhedsoverskrift eller opdatering kalder pa vores opmaerksomhed. Teoretikere som Jonathan Crary og Hartmut Rosa har ligefrem karakteriseret vores senmoderne samfund som henholdsvis 24/7- og hojhastighedssamfundet (Crary, 2014; Rosa, 2010).
Anmeldelse af Nanna Bonde Thylstrup: The Politics of Mass Digitization.Cambridge: The MIT Press, ... more Anmeldelse af Nanna Bonde Thylstrup: The Politics of Mass Digitization.Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2019.
In this article I discuss the themes of movement and restriction inherent in digital technologies... more In this article I discuss the themes of movement and restriction inherent in digital technologies in two very different artistic projects, both of which offer aesthetic material for debating the politics of data. I approach this discussion through the term gravity as used by philosopher Levi R. Bryant (The Gravity of Things; Onto-Cartography). Through an analogy to Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, Bryant suggests the term gravity to denote how both semiotic and material entities influence the becoming and movement of subjects and collectives in time and space (Bryant, The Gravity of Things 10). I use this as a point of departure to investigate the shared space between physical and virtual borders, and the streams of data that are formed by, and also form, the space they traverse. The term gravity is used to elucidate the contours of the digital space that determines the paths between sender and receiver, as well as draws and erases borders, restricts and enables movement.
Passage - Tidsskrift for litteratur og kritik, 2017
Maja Bak Herrie: “The Art of Withdrawal – Hermetic Objects and Deixis without Context in Gertrude... more Maja Bak Herrie: “The Art of Withdrawal – Hermetic Objects and Deixis without Context in Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons”The last decade has seen an increased attention toward things and objects in the aesthetic disciplines. This article explores the analytical potentials of the quadruple object model from Graham Harman’s object-oriented philosophy in a literary context, namely Gertrude Stein’s 1914 book Tender Buttons: objects, food, rooms. With the assistance of the quadruple object model and the linguistic term deixis, paradoxically concrete but non-contextualised, literary objects in the form of everyday items and foods are conceptualised as being in a process of withdrawal and emergence.
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