Science Facts/Fictions (SFF): Science Fiction, Robotics Engineering and Policy
DIAS Seminar Room - SDU. November 15, 2024
SFF invites discussion on the interchange between AI, robot science, and science fiction.
SFF will investigate the practicality of speculative science fiction as thought experiments of potential futures and future technologies, but also of the way in which engineering is influenced by science fiction, consciously or unconsciously. In this, SFF also asks: to what extent is there a need to proactively influence legislation based on imagined technology instead of reactively addressing legal problems connected to new technology that has already been introduced?
Deadline for registration: November 8. Please register here: https://event.sdu.dk/sff
Event is sponsored by Odense Robotics, DIAS and the Center for Culture and Technology at SDU.
Program - November 15, 2024
9.15 – 9.20: Welcome – Simon Møberg Torp, Dean of Humanities and Sten Rynning, Director of the Danish Institute of Advanced Study
9.20 – 9.30: Introduction. Rune Graulund and Erik Granly (Department of Culture and Language), Norbert Krüger (SDU Robotics)
9.30 - 10.30: Keynote 1 - Professor Adam Roberts, Royal Holloway, University of London: "Robots, Slaves and Orphans"
10.30 – 11.00: Coffee Break
11.00 – 12.00: Science Fiction Inspiring Technical Development
- Anna Nadibaidze (SDU) “Visual portrayals of weaponised AI: How popular is Western pop culture?"
- Kasper Opstrup (KU): “Inner Paths to Outer Space”
- Erik Granly Jensen (SDU): “In the Zone. H.G. Wells on Time and Technology”
12.00 – 12.45: Lunch
12.45 – 1.45: Science and Technology Inspiring Science Fiction
- Jonas Jørgensen (SDU): “Soft Robot Aesthetics – Sensuous Speculations on Future Human-Robot Engagements”
- Robert Ladig (SDU): “From Alternative Post-Apocalypse to Dystopian Cyberpunk Fantasy: Aerial Manipulation in Games Media”
- Christian Schlette (SDU): “Large Structure Production: Its current status and future”
1.45 – 2.45: Keynote 2 – Niels Jul Jacobsen, CEO Capra Robotics: “How a space opera spawned a generation of roboticists”
2.45 – 3.45: Panel – Industry Visions for the Near and Far Future
- Thor Ellegaard Hansen (Odense Kommune): "Odense: The City of the Future, The City of Robots. A talk on City Development in the Space Between Reality, Ambition and Science Fiction."
- Ole Georg Andersen (Odense Robotics): Emerging robot technologies
- Representative from Universal robot (to be confirmed)
Background
The first employee of Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin was the science fiction writer Neal Stephenson, just as the musician and artist Laurie Anderson was invited to be the first artist in residence at NASA. Similarly, Elon Musk has confirmed that the direct inspiration for SpaceX and the ultimate goal of colonizing Mars has been directly inspired by science fiction and Tesla’s Cybertruck has been marketed as a car “that looks like the future”, and has the distinct look (and name) of 1980ies cyberpunk cinema. In this, science fiction becomes fact, if not yet in human colonization of Mars, then at least in Space 2.0. as the manner in which the tech industry envisions and designs the way in which we communicate and interact, shop and drive.
Keynotes
Professor Adam Roberts is an Arthur C. Clark Award nominee, the author of a range of science fiction novels and a range of academic monographs, including Science Fiction (2005) and The History of Science Fiction (2016).
Niels Jul Jacobsen is the CEO of Capra Robotics. He has worked in industrial robotics and automation for more than 30 years. He is the founding father of Mobile Industrial Robots (MIR) and was on the board of Universal Robots from 2008-2015.
CANCELLED: Workshop on Representation in/of AI with Fabian Offert
Thursday, November 14, 2024, 19.00-20.30 on Zoom
The Center for Culture and Technology, University of Southern Denmark and the research cluster “The Aesthetics of Biomachines and the Question of Life” (The Velux Foundations) invite you to join this exciting talk!
"This Is Your Brain on ImageNet": Embedding and Visual Epistemology – Fabian Offert (UCSB)
"Embedding" is one of the most important techniques in the machine learning toolbox. Polemically, in natural language processing and computer vision, any useful knowledge is embedded knowledge. While the technique itself is hardly more than an advanced form of compression, it is the universality of embeddings that renders them interesting from an epistemological perspective: universal faculties – such as "seeing" in the case of computer vision, which I will focus on in this talk – are extrapolated from particular datasets and represented in an exclusively relational manner. Exactly because of their universality, embeddings live on, sometimes way beyond the lifespan of the datasets that they represent. "Historical" deep convolutional neural network features, for instance, still inform the training of newer generative models by ways of perceptual distance metrics that determine the realism of generated images. By becoming just another part of the training pipeline, however, they cease to appear as distinctive epistemic structures. More importantly, this "historical opacity" of embeddings obfuscates what I propose to understand as a major epistemic shift: scientific knowledge, at least if it relates to the visual, is often generated with the help of cultural data. Embeddings, then, can be seen as a cultural technique, and as a trading zone that spans, surprisingly, not only branches of the natural sciences, but the sciences and the humanities.
Fabian Offert is Assistant Professor for the History and Theory of the Digital Humanities at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and principal investigator of the international research project "AI Forensics", funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. His research and teaching focuses on the question how machine learning models represent culture and what is at stake – aesthetically and politically – when they do. His current book project investigates "Machine Visual Culture" in the age of foundation models. https://zentralwerkstatt.org.
Registration is not necessary.
Please contact: Naja Grundtmann for additional info.
September 13, 2024 13:00-16:00
Workshop organized by the Center for Culture and Technology at SDU: Submarine Cables: Technology and Geopolitics
When: September 13, 2024 13:00-16:00
Where: SDU Odense (Room: Comenius)
No registration necessary. Just bring yourself and your students!
Please contact: Erik Granly Jensen erikgranly@sdu.dk or Kathrin Maurer kamau@sdu.dk for info.
Description:
Even though the accelerated development in digital communication technologies in recent decades has been accompanied by abstract images about data in the cloud, the global communication infrastructure is primarily material and consists of huge cable networks laid out on the seabed of the world's oceans (Peters, 2015). 99% of all Internet communications run through fiber-optic submarine cables. These networks have a decisive geopolitical, economic and cultural-industrial significance in the development of contemporary societies, just as they draw decisive technological-historical and geopolitical traces back to the first telegraphic submarine cables from the 1860s (Bridle, 2018). It is the analysis of the contemporary cable networks, its materiality and contexts (geopolitical, economic and cultural-industrial) and its various historical implications that will be addressed in this workshop.
Program:
13:15-13:30: Introduction: Kathrin Maurer & Erik Granly Jensen
13:30-14:00: Mette Simonsen Abildgaard (AAU), “Rethinking the breakdown – Greenland, Denmark and their shared digital infrastructure”
14:00-14:30: Johan Lau Munksholm: “Geopolitics and the Unfurling Politics of Digital Infrastructures”
14:30-15:00: Coffee Break
15:00-15:30: Ane Grum-Schwensen (SDU), “The Great Sea Serpent (1871). H.C. Andersen on telegraphy, oceanography, and the ambivalence of information technology”
15:30-16:00: Erik Granly Jensen (SDU), “Materialities. Submarine cables, Gutta-percha rubber and Geopolitics around 1870”
See Abstracts here.
CANCELLED: September 3, 2024
Research seminar with Amanda Lagerkvist
Existential Media: Probing Relational Technologies of Life, Death, Extinction and Everything In-between
CANCELLED: WHEN: September 3, 2024, 14:00 – 16:00, followed by a reception event
WHERE: University of Southern Denmark, Odense campus (DIAS seminar room, V24-411-0)
In this seminar, Amanda Lagerkvist will introduce her empirical and conceptual work on the existentiality of (media) technology within the young field of ‘existential media studies.’ The presentation will span examples from death online research to biometric AI, from the AI apocalypse to the relations between selfhood, technology and disability. The talk will ponder these as existential media; that is media that speak to and about our human vulnerability and deep relationality. Hence, as ‘relational technologies’ they not only bring a sense of ‘life’ to the fore, but also invoke horizons of death and extinction. But even when reconceived as media of limits, within (digital) limit situations, the presentation will stress that existential media can in truth be generative and open out to the unforeseen (Jaspers 1932/1970; Lagerkvist 2022).
Amanda’s talk will be followed by responses from:
• Bjarki Valtýsson, Associate Professor, Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen
• Susana Tosca, Professor, Department of Design, Media and Educational Science, University of Southern Denmark
• Johan Lau Munkholm, Postdoc, Department of Culture and Languages, University of Southern Denmark
All attendees are then invited to participate with questions and discussion. After the seminar there will be a reception event.
Amanda Lagerkvist
Amanda Lagerkvist is Professor of Media and Communication Studies in the Department of Informatics and Media at Uppsala University. She is the principal investigator of the Uppsala Informatics and Media Hub for Digital Existence. As Wallenberg Academy Fellow (2014-2018), she founded the field of existential media studies. Her work has explored digital memories, death online, and lived experiences of automation.
Date and location
Tuesday 3rd September 2024
14:00 – 16:00, followed by a reception event
University of Southern Denmark, Odense campus (DIAS seminar room, V24-411-0)
Organisers
The seminar is organised by the following research groups at the University of Southern Denmark and Copenhagen University: ‘Bio-machines and the Question of Life’ (The Velux Foundations) research cluster based within the Centre for Culture and Technology (SDU); The media research group (SDU); The digital culture research group (KU).
The event is sponsored by the The Velux Foundations and the Center for Culture and Technology (SDU) and Media Studies (SDU).
Registration
The event is free, but it is necessary to register by 27th August in order to attend. To register, or for more information, please contact Emily Cousins: ecou@sdu.dk
November 29, 2023
Lecture by Dominique Routhier, postdoc in the Department of Language and Culture and DIAS affiliated
WHEN: Wednesday 29th of November 11.15-12.15
WHERE: The DIAS seminar room, Fioniavej 34, Odense campus
All are welcome, no registration is needed.
DIAS Senior Fellow Kathrin Maurer will present the lecture.
Art and Automation: Cybernetics, Modernism and the Avantgarde
Abstract: In a 2022 New York Times article, an artist who won a local art competition with an AI-generated artwork dramatically declared: ‘Art is dead, dude. It's over. AI won. Humans lost.’ This statement exemplifies a broader sense of anxiety about AI and automation, extending beyond concerns about jobs and livelihoods to encompass fundamental aspects of the human condition: our ability to think, reason, communicate, and express ourselves artistically. In a DIAS lecture presenting his new book, With and Against: the Situationist International in the Age of Automation, Dominique Routhier historicizes the automation-debate by returning to its ‘cybernetic’ origins in the 1950s. The lecture thus focuses on the centrality of cybernetics—a largely forgotten interdisciplinary ‘science of communication and control’—to the postwar moment in art, and, by way of examples from mid-century modernism and the avantgarde, argues that the history of automation and the history of art are deeply intertwined.
About: Dominique Routhier is a postdoc in the Department of Language and Culture at the University of Southern Denmark, an affiliate at DIAS (Danish Institute for Advanced Studies), and part of the research project ‘Drone Imaginaries and Communities’ (Independent Research Fund Denmark, 2020-2024). His research focuses on the cultural history of automation, with a particular interest in the intersection of art, technology, and political economy. Dominique is currently at work on a scholarly handbook, The Aesthetics of Machine Vision: Critical Terms and Ideas (in review, MIT Press). His writings have appeared in numerous Scandinavian and international journals, including K&K, Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, Rethinking Marxism, Boundary 2, Historical Materialism, and LARB, among other places. Author of With and Against: the Situationist International in the Age of Automation (Verso Books, 2023).
November 16, 2023
Invitation to Book Launch!
The Center of Technology would like you to invite the launch of Kathrin Maurer’s new book The Sensorium of the Drone and Communities (MIT Press).
The book delivers a discussion of how civilian drones sense the world and how they build the aesthetic imaginaries of our communities. For more info, see info on MIT Press website The Sensorium of the Drone and Communities. Please note that MIT made this book open access! Just click here Direct to Open Model.
Program: After short intro by Kathrin Maurer, Svea Braeunert (Visiting Professor at the Film University Babelsberg/physical) and Jussi Parikka (Professor in Digital Aesthetics and Culture at Aarhus University/on zoom) will share some comments about the book. There will be a small reception afterwards.
Where? University of Southern Denmark, Odense, DIAS SEMINAR ROOM
When? November 16, 2023 at 14:00-16:00 (Danish Time, CET)
How? This is a hybrid event. If you would like to follow the event on zoom, please click use this link: https://syddanskuni.zoom.us/j/66581849894?from=addon. If you like to attend physically, just show up in the DIAS Seminar room.
Registration: If you like to attend physically, please register by writing to Kathrin Maurer kamau@sdu.dk no later than Nov 14, 2023.
Download the flyer here.
I am so much looking forward to seeing you in one form or the other! Kathrin
October 26, 2023
Workshop on Robots in Science and Fiction
When: October 26, 2023; 14:00-16:00 (Denmark me, CEST)
Where: HYBRID EVENT
Physical: University of Southern Denmark, Campusvej 55, 5230 Odense; DIAS Seminar room
ZOOM: htps://syddanskuni.zoom.us/j/67518128424?from=addon
No need to register. Just come by or join the zoom link on day of event.
For more information including full programme click here.
October 2nd, 2023
Book launch
Dylan Cawthorne from SDU TEK invites you to a book launch for The Ethics of Drone Design: How value sensitive Design can create better Technologies.
Hosted by SDU Drone Center at TEK SDU and the Center for Culture and Technology at HUM SDU.
Monday October 2nd from 13:00-15:00 (might be shorter, but this is just to be safe)
Physical event at SDU TEK in the Ellehammer seminar room, TEK-28-600-3
The book presents a holistic approach to the development of drones and demonstrates the connection between human values and technological capabilities. The book includes four case studies of prototype drones designed and built by the author: the healthcare drone, the search and rescue drone, the educational drone, and the spiritual drone. Methods from the fields of engineering, ethics, and art, are utilized in the case studies, with the aim to create better technologies that benefit society.
Find the book here.
August 23, 2023
3pm - 5 pm (CEST)
The Center for Culture and Technology invites to this hybrid event about monuments and virtually reality:
Antimonument Expanded
During the recent years, we are confronted with more and more images of protestors undoing monuments that express a colonial or imperialist worldview. These acts of deconstructing monuments became a universally understood symbol of uprising and discontent against the publicly inscribed history. The idea for “Antimonument Extended” - Virtual Reality program aims to create a discussion about the status of such monuments in German speaking societies without physically destroying them. By means of VGA technology users can intervene directly on the scanned version of the controversial monuments.
The project is focused on three public monuments in Düsseldorf made by artists formerly on the list of “Gottbegnadeten” (god-gifted) by the National socialist regime. These artists, even after the war, continued to receive large public monument commissions, and they are still in our public spaces. Pop-up workshops will take place in front of these sculptures where visitors can try out the Virtual Reality program. In parallel, artists living in Germany and Austria with immigration background are invited to intervene on these monuments with 3D projection mapping and performance. The concluding exhibition will take place in a gallery where the documentation of these pop-up workshops can be seen, while giving a platform to further discuss the meaning of the project in current context.
In this virtual/hybrid conference, the invited artists and organizers will discuss the results of the workshops and reflect on each process.
Read more about the event including Zoom link here
May 24, 2023
Introduction to the Center for Culture and Technology on May 24, 2023 from 12-13
The Center for Culture and Technology would like to introduce itself to the new merged departments in the humanities at the University of Southern Denmark. As we encourage interdisciplinary research across the humanities, social sciences, and engineering, we are curious to explore new collaborations and find new associates.
If you are interested, join us for a brown bag lunch in O 96 at SDU (Campusvej 55) on May 24, 2023 from 12-13, right after the department meeting. Brown bag means you bring your own lunch. There will be a few short presentations by the leader group of the center and plenty of networking.
No need to register. Just stop by! It is a physical meeting.
See our website https://www.sdu.dk/en/cult-tech and follow us on Facebook or LinkedIn!
If you have any questions, please contact Kathrin Maurer (Professor mso of Humanities and Technology and Leader of the Center for Culture and Technology).
Email: kamau@sdu.dk
We are looking forward to seeing you!
Kathrin Maurer, Dylan Cawthorne, Stig Børsen Hansen, Casper Sylvest, Bo Kampmann Walther