Lecture: „Visual Culture and Artificial Intelligence“

This lecture is part of the lecture series "Practice of Digital Humanities". It takes place as part of the Master's "Digital Humanities". However, it is open to all interested parties and will be designed as a video conference with a lecture and discussion option.

Deep artificial neural networks have radically altered the way in which computers process the visual world. In this talk, I will investigate some of the implications of this shift for the digital humanities/digital art history. Specifically, I will demonstrate imgs.ai, a visual search engine that facilitates the intuitive exploration of large image corpora. I will show how imgs.ai uses deep learning to draw connections between images, but also where it fails to account for the radical difference between human and machine vision. Finally, I will discuss why machine learning and computer vision should be considered "natural" domains of humanist inquiry, and why we thus need a new transdisciplinary field of Critical AI Studies.