Goethe Annual Lecture 2022
Mercedes Bunz: The Culture of Artificial Intelligence
We are delighted to have art historian, philosopher and journalist Mercedes Bunz as one of this year’s speakers of our Goethe Annual Lecture series at the Goethe-Institut London. Her talk explores the particular power of AI systems using work from contemporary artists to reveal the human misunderstanding regarding AI.
The talk will be moderated by Eva Jäger, curator of Arts Technologies at Serpentine.
As part of the Goethe-Institut London's 60th anniversary celebrations, we are inviting you to three Goethe Annual Lectures this year featuring author Mithu Sanyal, academic Mercedes Bunz and musician Matthew Herbert.
In her talk, Mercedes Bunz will dig into the ways contemporary AI systems ‘calculate meaning’ - a field traditionally assigned to culture. She will explore ways in which AI systems analyse our world, and could transform our culture by assisting us with their intelligence – albeit not human intelligence.
Using work from contemporary artists and researchers such as Memo Atken, Rafik Anadol, Stephanie Dinkins, Adam Harvey, and Allison Parrish, the talk will discuss not only how artists can help us in understanding the particular power of AI systems, but also how AI systems make sense of our world and symbols. At the same time, these playful, curious, and sometimes critical artistic approaches toward AI point to something else according to Mercedes Bunz: a profound human misunderstanding of the culture of AI.
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At the moment, that is Artificial Intelligence and ‘machine learning’. Delving into the topics of AI and ‘machine learning’, Bunz co-leads the Creative AI Lab, a collaboration with the Serpentine Gallery, London. Her latest publications are 'How Not to Be Governed Like That by Our Digital Technologies' in The Ends of Critique: Methods, Institutions, Politics, edited by K. Thiele, B. Kaiser, T. O’Leary (Rowman & Littlefield) and with Claudia Aradau 'Dismantling the apparatus of domination? Left critiques of AI' in Radical Philosophy.
Past speakers of our Annual Lecture include Dan Hicks (2021), Sharon Dodua Otoo (2020), John Kampfner (2019), Brendan Simms (2018), Anne McElvoy (2017), Neil MacGregor (2016), Christopher Clark (2014), David Chipperfield (2012), Norman Rosenthal (2010), Tacita Dean (2006), Peter Jonas (2005), Ian Kershaw (2003), Richard Wentworth (2002) and AS Byatt (2001).
Here you can find videos of previous lectures.
Learn more about our 60th anniversary on our website.
Details
Goethe-Institut London
50 Princes Gate
Exhibition Road
SW7 2PH London
Price: Free (incl. post-lecture reception), Online-Livestream: Free
The lecture will take place at the Goethe-Institut London as well as being streamed live online. The lecture will be followed by a Q&A and, for those attending in person, a reception in the Goethe-Institut Library.