Forms and Formats of Machine Experience

Sebastian Rozenberg, M.A.

The project investigates how aesthetic judgements are embedded in specific conditions of possibility, constraints of description and experience, that are in turn anchored in technology as well as concepts of art, both for models and humans. The question is how automated and modelled aesthetic ratings and predictions challenge human centred concepts of aesthetics and vision, and equally how human judgement formats the operations and outputs of the models, making this a central question for the present time of quantitative aesthetics, memes as politics and AI slop.
My PhD is a media aesthetic and media philosophical project, investigating the way computational media formats experience, through the articulation of a phenomenology of media formats. The project looks for affordances and possibilities of understanding computation as formatting experience and perception on phenomenological registers, while human sensory experience and perception simultaneously format the computational processes and catagories. This is particularly pressing in relation to understandings of human phenomenal experience of computational media and technologies as foreclosed, undercut, or wholly inaccessible.