The GIA collective is organising a reading group in May and June 2024.
LLMs represent a major advancement of the ‘computational turn’ in mediality, but remain rather isolated as an object of investigation or critique. This is partly due to marketing hype surrounding them (which becomes the secondary object of critique) or their ambivalent corporate origin, but also a lack of ambitious theoretical considerations.
In order to attempt a more wide ranging view we invite you to join GIA’s activities the mur.at worklab and together we will consider questions like:
How do LLMs remediate old dreams (and nightmares) of universal languages, encyclopedists, archivists and all kinds of information management projects to which LLMs are peculiarly related?
How is the question of remediation related to abstraction and what kind of vistas do LLMs open for us (new dreams and new nightmares)?
In what sense can we understand LLMs as the first true AI cultural interfaces? What does the future hold in an era of ubiquitous LLMs?
What kinds of social and self-relations will be afforded by LLMs?
We will address these and similar questions in our activities. These include Wednesday reading groups (22.5. 29.5. 5.6. // 16.00 - 18.00) in the mur.at project room (Leitnergasse 7) and a traditional worklab in June (19. -23. 6.) at KIG.
More information about the coming reading seminars:
June 5, 2024: starting 16.00 at mur.at project room AND online on BBB
May 29, 2024:
May 22, 2024:
Operative ekphrasis: The collapse of the text/image distinction in multimodal AI
Buckland, M. The expansion of bibliography: Dog-stone, antelope, and evidence
Optional: Non-Human Words: On GPT-3 as a Philosophical Laboratory
Optional: The Model is The Message
If you would like to join or if you have any questions, please contact us at gia@kompot.si
See you around!
GIA team
Photo credits: GIA