I am a researcher and trained architect. Since 2023, I am an Assistant Professor for Protohistory of Artificial Intelligence and Machines in the Arts at the University of Amsterdam. After a PhD at EPFL and an SNSF-funded postdoc at ATTP, TU Vienna, I worked at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design Basel, where I was the Head of the Make/Sense PhD programme. I edited three books (Radio Explorations, forthcoming, Ghosts of Transparency, 2019 and Unpleasant Design, 2013) and I research and write about computational modelling, feminist hacking, and posthuman networks in the context of art, design and architecture. My research interests animate a practice at the intersection of computational processes and posthumanist and postcolonial critique of technology. My current research addresses data and measurement, offering a generative perspective on the interrelations between technicity for making and circulating art.

Research

My research into the technical, socio-political and environmental aspects of artificial intelligence is based on data materialism: paying attention to materialist concerns for ways in which technology automates performance and creativity, while historicizing and contextualizing methods for measurement through which data is obtained. Data materialism is also a way to refuse a ‘data idealism’. I understand the ‘proto’ in protohistory as a gesture of making a precedent in the way AI is studied. It suggests observing that which precedes AI, but also challenges causalities that can be established between automation and creativity.

I propose a protohistory of AI inspired by generative genealogy as a materialist geophilosophical practice that is critical and creative. The generative view enfolds, on the one hand, the concern for machine-based automated creation (as in generative art) while, on the other, offering a genealogical approach to material history of AI: one which traces nonlinear generation of digital artificial intelligence techniques of automation and mechanization, and provides a window into the surprising futures, to take up the words of Iris van der Tuin and Rossi Braidotti. Protohistory of AI will not aspire to an indefinite linear teleology, or a metahistorical locus of its ‘origin’, but instead proceed by a methodology of jumping generations and challenging of the linear cutting up of time into successive fragments, inspired by feminist new materialism and an interdisciplinary approach to digital humanities.