Nick Seaver is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and director of the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Tufts University in Medford, MA. His ethnographic research on the developers of algorithmic music recommendation has appeared in Cultural Anthropology, Cultural Studies, and Big Data & Society. He is co-editor of Towards an Anthropology of Data (2021) and author of Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation (2022). His current research explores the rise of attention as a value and virtue in machine learning worlds.
Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan is Reader in the history and theory of digital media at King’s College London. An overarching theme of his research is how “cultural” sciences shape—and are shaped by—digital technologies. This concern spans his writing on the mutual constitution of cybernetics and the human sciences, ethnicity and AI, and the role of mid-twentieth century military vigilance in the development of interactive, multimedia computing. His attention to cultural factors in technical systems also figured in his work as a curator, notably for the Anthropocene and Technosphere projects at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt.
Life in Pixels hosts an ongoing series of transdisciplinary conversations thinking about how we can make sense of, and live with, our computational social condition today. Considering sociocultural, aesthetic, politicoeconomic, environmental, racial, and historical registers of technology together, the series will bring together people who think and do technology beyond disciplinary boundaries. The events are all designed as an ongoing series of conversations between scholars and practitioners in Media Studies, Science and Technology Studies, History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, Critical Digital Studies, and Literary Cultural Studies.
Life in Pixels is generously sponsored by the Ruth and Paul Idzik College Chair in Digital Scholarship, the Program in History and Philosophy of Science, the Lucy Family Institute for Data and Society, the Navari Family Center for Digital Scholarship, the Department of English, the Minor in Data Science, and the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame.
Originally published at lucyinstitute.nd.edu.