Job Offer from February 06, 2026
Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History, Villino Stroganoff, Via Gregoriana 22, 00187 Rome, and online (Zoom), 4th and 5th June 2026
Deadline: 16th March 2026
In machine learning and information theory, noise is typically defined as an unwanted intrusion into a signal—an error to be minimized, filtered, or regularized. Yet recent advances in large language and diffusion models place noise at the center of their operation: from randomized probabilities in token prediction to noise seeds in image, sound, and video generation. Philosophical and aesthetic perspectives have also long recognized noise as a force of disruption and invention—one that opens systems to unpredictability, difference, and transformation. Noise, in other words, is not only what obscures meaning, but also what enables new meanings to emerge.
This tension raises fundamental questions. Who determines what counts as “signal” and what is discarded as “noise”? What happens when noise is no longer conceptualized as merely impeding communication in the Shannon–Weaver sense, but becomes a constitutive part of both the channel and the model’s behavior? Such conditions call for sharper critique and theorization of what this workshop reframes as “noisy systems”. Noisy Systems: Aesthetics, Epistemology, and Computation thus proposes to examine noise as a position of reference across technical, social, and cultural domains, bringing together insights from machine learning, critical AI studies, media theory and archaeology, art history, philosophy, and practice-based research.
We welcome papers addressing noise from a range of intersecting angles, including (but not limited to):
- Noise in generative systems (LLMs, diffusion models, audio/video synthesis, etc.)
- Signal/noise distinctions across communication channels and neural networks
- Experimental practices engaging randomness, error, glitch, or indeterminacy
- Historical perspectives on noise in art, design, science, and technology
- AI slop, degradation, and synthetic abundance
- Ideological, epistemological, or aesthetic conceptions of noise
- Noise as a site of resistance against deterministic or anthropocentric paradigms
- Infrastructural dimensions of noise in AI systems (crowdwork, data pipelines, etc.)
Papers will be 20 minutes in length. Please submit an abstract of the proposed paper (max. 500 words) and a short CV (max. 300 words, first author only if multiple) via the following web form:
https://forms.gle/YB4Kf8RwyzUcDX2D9
Scientific organization: Violaine Boutet de Monvel, Eryk Salvaggio, Amira Moeding
Fee: No registration fee. Funding will be made available to assist travel and accommodation for speakers without other funding, with priority for early career scholars.
Organized by the Machine Visual Culture research group.