Paul Feigelfeld teaches the seminar “Machine Learning” in the Summer Semester

Filling in for Clemens Apprich, Paul Feigelfeld will be teaching the Machine Learning seminar during the summer term. His class explores the paradigms, politics, prophecies, prognoses, permutations, predictions, productions, paranoias, patterns, performances, and punks of Machine Learning and its emo child, Artificial Intelligence.

The aim of the seminar is to develop a thorough understanding of the technological constellations of the field of Machine Learning, its historical developments, and political, social, ecological, and cultural implications.

Every other week, participants can take a practical course in Python coding basics for ML fundamentals, led by Andrea Klaura, which can be found here Hands on Machine Learning. While it is not a formal requirement to also attend this other course, we highly recommend to jointly attend both of those two courses.

During the opening session, the course will disassemble and anatomize a computer, reassemble it into an open machine and make it the non-human companion for the rest of the term.

Each block consists of an introductory lecture and the reading and discussion of a scientific/technical text on AI/ML and a critical/discursive text.

On three occasions, artists working with Machine Learning will hold online guest lectures:

On April 8, Tega Brain will open the series. Tega Brain is an Australian-born artist and environmental engineer exploring issues of ecology, data, automation, and infrastructure. Brain is also assistant professor for Integrated Digital Media at New York University (NYU). She has created digital networks that are controlled by environmental phenomena, schemes for obfuscating personal data, and a wildly popular, online smell-based dating service. Through these provisional systems she investigates how technologies orchestrate and reorchestrate agency.

On April 15, Jenna Sutela will give some insights into her work. Jenna Sutela is a Finnish artist based in Berlin. She and her studio work with biological and computational systems, including the human microbiome and artificial neural networks to create sculptures, images and music. Drawing on cutting-edge scientific research and its philosophical implications, Sutela’s work is often processual in nature. In her projects, wetware – a term used to consider organic matter through the lens of computing – hardware and software, are used to explore the world beyond human perception.

On May 27, Constant Dullaart – artist and professor for Networked Materiality at AdBK Nürnberg – will reflect on the broad cultural and social effects of communication and image processing technologies, from performatively distributing artificial social capital and poems on social media to completing a staff-pick Kickstarter campaign or setting up a new social media company.

His work includes online performances, custom routers, startups, armies, redestributed found images. Frequently juxtaposing or consolidating technically dichotomized presentation realms.