Digital platforms have become vast global infrastructures that constantly listen to the everyday murmurs, moods, and habits of users. Ever more intricate deep learning systems allow platforms like TikTok to constantly recalibrate their atmospheric media environments. Streaming services like Spotify have become veritable ‘mood machines’, feeding back aggregate listening habits through fine-tuned playlists. They vectorize audio-visual data in unintelligibly complex ways to construct never-ending streams of similar content optimized for repetitive scrolling and swiping. It is claimed we now live in the age of ‘cosine capital’ where embeddings of all imaginable things restructure commodities and cultural exchange. Whether in the form of Italian brainrot, Pinterest subcultures, or intricately crafted SORA videos, ‘vernacular creativity’ is now thoroughly entwined with deep learning. However, culture is affected on a potentially deeper level than merely the use of AI as new production tools, also influencing the mode of circulation and collective understanding of culture. Instead of clear links between profiles and webpages as shaped into discrete network topologies and associated with Web 2.0 (Lury et al. 2012), online culture is increasingly mediated by the fuzzy and emergent characteristics of current machine-learning systems; or what some would call vibes.

How does it happen that the ‘vibe’ of Internet culture shifts with the introduction of new AI technologies? Why is it that certain aesthetics emerge over others? How do we look at subcultural forms, how does AI look at it, and how does it subsequently affect our own ways of seeing? How can we empirically trace the myriad entanglements between vectors and vibes? The first four sessions of the reading group we will engage with these questions by reading key texts in the emerging field of critical AI studies. They will revolve around the themes of vibes, statistics, biopolitics, and platform capitalism.

To sign up for this reading group, please email Sal Hagen (s.h.hagen@uva.nl) or Daniël de Zeeuw (d.dezeeuw@uva.nl)

Dates (15:00-17:00):

• 20 February
• 13 March
• 10 April
• 8 May