(Flusser voice) Into the Universe of Vaguely AI-Generated Conference Presentations

The gap between adding a language to a model and including the community that speaks it in governance is not a technical limitation, writes Sofia Magdalena Olofsson. It is a political choice, she says. www.techpolicy.press/the-multilin...

The Multilingual AI Gap Is Not Closing. It Is Being Rebranded.

The gap between adding a language to a model and including the community that speaks it in governance is a political choice, writes Sofia Magdalena Olofsson.

techpolicy.press

Giving a talk on my new research at @harvardusjapan.bsky.social this coming Monday at noon, in person and streaming! Zoom registration at us-japan.wcfia.harvard.edu/event/japane...

Giving a talk on my new research at @harvardusjapan.bsky.social this coming Monday at noon, in person and streaming! Zoom registration at us-japan.wcfia.harvard.edu/event/japane...

I have a brief essay on karaoke enclosures in the new Lee Bul catalogue, part of a retrospective currently on at M+ (Hong Kong)

Exciting this is out -- lost count of how many times I've recommended people read the original dissertation

keep your electric eye on me@ubisurv.net · 5mo ago

A very early contender for #surveillance book of the year: Colonial Surveillance, by Midori Ogasawara... www.sup.org/books/asian-...

Glasses promising to lower your cognitive load that depend on you being too cognitively overloaded to realize you shouldn't be wearing them

Ben Ewen-Campen@benforward3.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Facebook plans to put facial recognition in its glasses and they think we’re too stupid to fight back. Their internal memo: “We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns.”

If you're in the neighborhood this weekend, I'll be presenting the Saturday keynote at this Harvard conference. Part of my project on Japanese CGI beyond simulation. Really just here to share the slick poster design though

Wednesday night at the Global Mediations Lab: Paul North (co-editor of the new edition of Capital) joins us to talk mediation in Marx

That article makes me realize I don’t really care if students can recite the plot. It’s not about enforcing one particular form of attention. I do still dream of in-person screenings, because there are some things you just can’t perceive at all without a bigger screen, or a bigger group

J.D. Connor@jdconnor.bsky.social · 6mo ago

To be clear: I don't believe the "can't watch" account is true, but I don't trust the anecdata (mine or anyone else's). I do know the author does not care about the complexities or histories of motion picture viewing and attention. This is all feeding into a grand narrative of "attention crisis"

11am/8pm (Boston time) tomorrow!

Paul Roquet@inqualia.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Join us for a follow-up conference to Cultural Politics of the Computational Image, this time online. Friday, January 23, day/night. Register for the zooms at: globalmediations.mit.edu/cpci-workshop/

11am/8pm (Boston time) tomorrow!

Paul Roquet@inqualia.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Join us for a follow-up conference to Cultural Politics of the Computational Image, this time online. Friday, January 23, day/night. Register for the zooms at: globalmediations.mit.edu/cpci-workshop/

Great topic (and I appreciate this long list of related vocab)

Join us for a follow-up conference to Cultural Politics of the Computational Image, this time online. Friday, January 23, day/night. Register for the zooms at: globalmediations.mit.edu/cpci-workshop/

Given ambient audio capture is now mainly being used in medical contexts to record interactions with patients, it's helpful to think of Meta et al.'s 'always recording' strategy as basically turning all of life into one endless doctor's appointment

TIL about the tradition of satirical computer vision papers that propose using computer vision to automate the recognition of 'good' computer vision papers

“In the rare cases when the bot makes a mistake, they strap on a VR headset and use joysticks to manually control grasp and place the drink back on the shelf […] In a typical eight-hour shift, they take over the robot about 50 times, and it takes up to five minutes each time to resolve the error.”

Japanese convenience stores are hiring robots run by workers in the Philippines

Filipino tele-operators remotely control Japan’s convenience store robots and train AI, benefiting from an uptick in automation-related jobs.

restofworld.org

Someone at Kodansha keeps inviting art animators to make VR films and it's great (newest one is a Wada Atsushi critique of mental health care in Japan/defense of imaginary cats)

Venice Immersive 2025 - If You See A Cat

YouTube video by BiennaleChannel

youtu.be

Tokyo Metro doing an escape room tie-in for Exit 8 is a little on the nose, but why not I guess

The real 2.5D

MIT tool visualizes and edits “physically impossible” objects

The “Meschers” tool from MIT CSAIL represents “physically impossible” objects commonly found in M.C. Escher’s illustrations by converting both images and 3D models in 2.5-dimensional objects. The tool...

news.mit.edu

A movie made of dust and mold (complimentary)

I wonder if one legacy of the VR/metaverse etc. hype cycle is companies have given up hoping people will *voluntarily* adopt new tech (excerpt from @bcmerchant.bsky.social newsletter)

Cindi Textor's wonderful _Intersectional Incoherence: Zainichi Literature and the Ethics of Illegibility_ is available for free download. With chapters on Yi Kwangsu, Kim Saryang, Kim Sokpong, Yi Yangji, Yu Miri and others.

Building on the great papers from our Global Mediations workshop this past April, we're launching a CFP for additional contributions to an anthology on the global contestation of computational imaging. Details below; proposals due 9/13

Building on the great papers from our Global Mediations workshop this past April, we're launching a CFP for additional contributions to an anthology on the global contestation of computational imaging. Details below; proposals due 9/13

An open letter of resignation from myself and many other book series editors at Amsterdam University Press, following its recent acquisition by the notoriously exploitative academic publishing conglomerate Taylor & Francis.

Vinzenz Hediger@vinzenzhediger.bsky.social · last yr.

The time has come to reinvent academic publishing. Over the last years conglomerates have bought up once respectable publishers and turned them into rent extraction machines, generating obscene profits from tax-payer funded research and unremunerated academic labor./ mediastudies.hypotheses.org/6850

My sense is GPS *does* have something to do with AI, but in the sense of training people to do what a computer tells them to do rather than trust what they see in front of them. Technologies against situational awareness

This is a laundry list of rhetorical strategies to defend the adoption of a given technology for the purposes of advancing an ideology & economic regime: inevitability, unquestioning praise of “innovation,” buy-in from concerned stakeholders, assurances that partnership is not capitulation. 1/n

Randi Weingarten 🖇️📚✊🇺🇸@rweingarten.bsky.social · last yr.

Today we launched the National Academy for AI Instruction with UFT, Microsoft, OpenAI & Anthropic to offer free, high-quality AI training to educators. Some of you have expressed legitimate reservations about AI and tech companies. I want to speak to you directly. 🧵

Finished @lizpelly.bsky.social’s fantastic MOOD MACHINE. The part on the re-muzakification of ambient really tracks with frustrations I’ve heard from musicians lately. If you only go online, it’s as if the history of ambient music has been rewritten to foreground more background-friendly styles

Will be circling the incomprehensible rotaries with newfound respect now that I know they can keep out self-driving cars