Talk: Art, Art History, and Artificial Intelligence

Computation and the Humanities is a series of events at the GCLR investigating the impact of computation on literary and visual research. Guests include researchers, artists, and practitioners working within and beyond the digital humanities. On March 20th, we welcome Dr. Leonardo Impett, who is a University Assistant Professor in Digital Humanities and convenor of the MPhil in Digital Humanities at Cambridge University.

In this talk, Impett will introduce his current project, a new history of machine visuality. The stakes are multiple. In the spirit of histories of visuality, computer vision might tell us something about the dominant modes of thinking about vision over the last century. We might also want to learn something about the scopic regimes of machine vision systems because of their use in surveillance, automation, scientific research and so on. More broadly, Impett will argue that discourses and practices of visuality (and thus a set of only partially explicit theories about seeing) have been central to the invention and development of neural networks, and thus to contemporary AI more broadly, from chat-bots to audio systems.

Zoom attendance link here

Please visit the GCLR website for full information.

Sponsored by the Graduate Center for Literary Research (GCLR)