IN3’s Communication Networks & Social Change (CNSC) research group is pleased to invite you to the Seminar: «From the body to the cloud: rethinking our relationship with AI», given by Alejandra López Gabrielidis, philosopher and researcher specialising in art and digital technologies.
The seminar will be held, in hybrid format, on Wednesday, November 20 at 10:00 am in Room C1.19 of the Interdisciplinary R&I Hub (Building C).
Venue
Interdisciplinary R&I Hub (Building C - C1.19)
Rambla del Poblenou, 154
08018 Barcelona
Espanya
When
20/11/2024 10.00h
Organized by
Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, IN3's Communication Networks & Social Change (CNSC) research group
Program
Abstract
In this seminar we will explore the relationships that are knitted between our bodies, as producers and generators of data, and artificial intelligence systems. The aim will be to take a journey that starts from the ‘body’, exploring at this level bodies as producers and generators of data and data as a material reality that is part of our forms of perception, agency and cognition, postulating the concept of the ‘data body’. In the second axis, we will critique the anthropocentric notion of intelligence in favour of the broader concept of ‘distributed cognition’ (involving human and non-human agents, such as technical systems) and analyse how our bodies of data participate in forms of artificial cognition and what are some of the current applications of AI in various domains of society. Finally, under the umbrella of the ‘cloud’, we will address the privatisation of data and its cognitive potential that is sustained by an exclusively ‘productivist’ interpretation of data, and we will oppose this conception with an interpretation of data that puts its reproductive dimension first, using some of the postulates of the feminism of social reproduction as a basis for thinking about ways of democratising artificial intelligence.
Alejandra López Gabrielidis
Philosopher and researcher specialising in art and digital technologies. Her research focuses on the new modalities of corporeality that emerge in relation to the phenomenon of datafication, exploring the interaction between data and the body from an approach of distributed agentiality and cognition. She currently works as coordinator of the Doctoral Unit at BAU, University Centre of Arts and Design in Barcelona, and as a lecturer in Aesthetics and Theory of the Arts in the degrees of Design and Fine Arts at the same university. She has worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Technopolitics unit of the CNSC (Communication Networks and Social Change) group at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3) of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), and as co-coordinator of the Sociotechnical Conceptualization Vector. In addition to her academic work, she has translated works by authors such as Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi and Katherine Hayles and has published numerous articles and essays in various journals and specialised media.