Univ.-Prof. MMag. Dr. Clemens Apprich
Clemens Apprich is head of the Department of Media Theory as well as the Peter Weibel Research Institute for Digital Cultures at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, where he holds the Professorship for Media Theory and History since 2021. He studied philosophy, political science, cultural history and theory in Berlin, Bordeaux, and Vienna. In 2011 he became research associate at the Centre for Digital Cultures at Leuphana University of Lüneburg, where he was also guest professor from 2017 to 2018. From 2018 to 2019 he was a visiting research fellow at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, Concordia University in Montréal, and from 2020 to 2021 assistant professor in media studies at the University of Groningen. Apprich is still guest researcher at the Centre for Digital Culture, as well as an affiliated member of the Digital Democracies Institute at Simon Fraser University and of the Global Emergent Media Lab at Concordia University. His current research deals with filter algorithms and their application in data analysis as well as machine learning methods. Apprich is the author of Technotopia: A Media Genealogy of Net Cultures (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017), and, together with Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Hito Steyerl, and Florian Cramer, co-authored Pattern Discrimination (University of Minnesota Press/meson press, 2019). Currently, he is working on a new book about Animated Intelligence (Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming).
Contact
Office Hours: by Appointment
Phone: +43-1-71133-3550
Email: apprich[at]uni-ak.ac.at
Showroom: Clemens Apprich
- title
- Secret Agents: A Psychoanalytic Critique of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
- type
- Article in Journal With Citation Index (Peer Reviewed)
- keywords
- Media and communication studies, Digital media
- texts
- Abstract
- “Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Intelligence” (GOFAI), which was based on a symbolic information-processing model of the mind, has been superseded by neural-network models to describe and create intelligence. Rather than a symbolic representation of the world, the idea is to mimic the structure of the brain in electronic form, whereby artificial neurons draw their own connections during a self-learning process. Critiquing such a brain physiological model, the following article takes up the idea of a “psychoanalysis of things” and applies it to artificial intelligence and machine learning. This approach may help to reveal some of the hidden layers within the current A. I. debate and hints towards a central mechanism in the psycho-economy of our socio-technological world: The question of “Who speaks?”, central for the analysis of paranoia, becomes paramount at a time, when algorithms, in the form of artificial neural networks, operate more and more as secret agents.
- authors
- Clemens Apprich
- publishers
- De Gruyter
- date
- 2018
- ISBN/ISSN/ISMN
- 2364-2114
- DOI
- 10.14361/dcs-2018-0104
- URL
- https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.14361/dcs-2018-0104/html
- published in
- title
- Digital Culture & Society
- volume/issue
- 4 (1)
- pages
- 29–44
- language
- English