The Industrialisation of Patterns

Workshop

  • Public event without registration
  • Datum: 22.05.2026
  • Uhrzeit: 11:00 - 16:30
  • Vortragende(r): Workshop
  • Ort: Villino Stroganoff, Via Gregoriana 22, 00187 Rome and online
  • Kontakt: katja.hackstein@biblhertz.it
The Industrialisation of Patterns
How might the nineteenth-century textile industry – its concrete organisations, and formal combinations, its mechanical engagements, and material explorations – give us clues, to trace a critique of the AI industry?

With the advent of deep learning, over the last fifteen years, images have been massively collected, and organised into datasets, to train artificial intelligence algorithms. Decomposed through chains of mathematical filters, they are treated as visual patterns, to optimise analytical and generative models.
Echoing the visual economy at the heart of the digital industry, this workshop invites us to look back at the production, and circulation of patterns in the nineteenth-century textile industry. What could such an archaeology teach us? What nodes of tension – of convergence, and divergence – should be followed, to sharpen a critique of the computational regime we live in?

SPEAKERS
Philip Sykas (Manchester Metropolitan University), Ellen Harlizius-Klück (Research Institute for the History of Technology and Science -Deutsches Museum), Birgit Schneider (Universität Potsdam + Fachhochschule Potsdam)Jesse Lockard (University of Oxford), Sophie Cras (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne), Tristan Dot (University of Cambridge), Meekyung MacMurdie (University of Utah)

Please follow the event also online through our VIMEO CHANNEL: the links will be soon published HERE.

Scientific Organization: Tristan Dot (University of Cambridge), Sophie Cras (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Leonardo Impett (Bibliotheca Hertziana)

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