The Critical AI Seminar series continues in 2025 and 2026 with another four lectures that critically address Artificial Intelligence (AI) from various perspectives – across different contexts of application and through different lenses of critique. With these lectures we hope to once again bring together scholars from around the world in engaging discussions and further contribute to Critical AI Studies as a continuing ‘field in formation’ (Raley and Rhee, 2023).

The seminars are online, open to everyone. For each seminar, one or two prominent invited speaker(s) are invited to give a talk that engages theoretically or empirically with AI.

January 13, 5:30-7 PM (CEST): Invited talk by Fabian Offert on ‘Vector Media‘

Registration here

This talk presents a new history and theory of the vector space in contemporary artificial intelligence systems. I will argue that the inevitable bias of such systems lies not only in what they represent, but in the logic of representation itself. Their internal ideologies are often not directly visible in their generated outputs or even their training data, the focus of almost all existing work. Instead, they emerge from how the model organizes and transforms information within itself. While previous media technologies created new formats or imitated existing ones, deep neural networks instead seek to dissolve prior media into a universal space of commensurability: the vector space. Cultural objects, once specific to a medium, are rendered fungible; commodities in a new neural economy, expressed only in terms of their neural exchange value.

Fabian Offert is Assistant Professor for the History and Theory of the Digital Humanities and Director of the Center for the Humanities and Machine Learning (HUML) at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research focuses on the epistemology, aesthetics, and politics of artificial intelligence. His most recent book project, Vector Media (Meson Press/University of Minnesota Press) writes a new historical epistemology of artificial intelligence, asking how machine learning models represent culture and what is at stake when they do. Before joining the faculty at UCSB, Fabian was Postdoctoral Researcher in the German Research Foundation’s Priority Program ‘The Digital Image’ and Assistant Curator at ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe.