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Dr. S. (Selena) Savić

Assistan Professor
Faculty of Humanities
Algemene Cultuurwetenschappen

Visiting address
  • Turfdraagsterpad 15
  • Room number: 1.04
Postal address
Contact details
  • About

    I am an Assistant Professor for Proto-history 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 was a senior researcher and the Head of the Make/Sense PhD programme at the Basel Academy of Art and Design. My recent publications include two edited volumes, Radio Explorations, and Teaching Artistic Strategies, 2024, transcript Verlag. I research, teach and write about digital archives, computational modelling, feminist materialism 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.

  • Teaching

    I teach in the new BA programme Global Arts, Culture and Politics where I also co-coordinate the major The Human and Artificial Intelligence. I also give a course in the Research MA Art and Performance Research Studies.

    List of courses in 2024-25: https://studiegids.uva.nl/xmlpages/page/2024-2025-en/search-lecturer/lecturer/13017

  • Publications

    2024

    2023

    2022

    • Savić, S. (2022). Articulating Nomadic Identities of Radio Signals. Matter Journal of New Materialist Research, 3(1), 56-81. https://doi.org/10.1344/jnmr.v3i1.38959
    • Savić, S. (2022). Pixels and Bandwidth: On Imaginaries of Travel in Data. In ON THE INTERPLAY OF IMAGES: Imaginaries and Imagination in Science Communication (SCIENTIA atque USUS. Scientia ed., Vol. 3, pp. 111-121). Olschki.
    • Savić, S., & Grant, S. (2022). Slime Mold and Network Imaginaries: An Experimental Approach to Communication. Leonardo, 55(5), 462-467. https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02248

    2021

    • Savić, S., & Miyazaki, S. (2021). Modulating Matters of Computation, Modelling and Hyper-Separations. In Proceedings of Polititcs of the machines - Rogue Research 2021: Berlin, Germany (pp. 63-68). (Electronic Workshops in Computing). BCS Learning and Development. https://doi.org/10.14236/ewic/POM2021.8

    Talk / presentation

    • Savić, S. (speaker) (8-5-2024). Generative Pasts of AI, Art Meets Radical Openness 2024, Linz.

    Others

    • Savić, S. (participant) (17-7-2024). EASST/4S Conference, Amsterdam, Amsterdam. The (im)possible Bodies of Data. Fictioning Generative Embodiment in Large Language ModelsThis research explores the formation of 'knowledge bodies' (…) (participating in a conference, workshop, ...).
    • Savić, S. (chair) (16-7-2024). EASST/4S Conference, Amsterdam, Amsterdam. Decolonizing Digital Archives was a Continuing Education programme offered by Flavia Claviezel, Lucie Kolb, Karolina Sobecka, Bernhard Garnicnig, (…) (participating in a conference, workshop, ...).
    This list of publications is extracted from the UvA-Current Research Information System. Questions? Ask the library or the Pure staff of your faculty / institute. Log in to Pure to edit your publications. Log in to Personal Page Publication Selection tool to manage the visibility of your publications on this list.
  • Ancillary activities
    No ancillary activities