Join us for a special event celebrating the launch of two important new books by two leading Australian theorists of computational culture—Professor Adrian Mackenzie (ANU) and Professor Anna Munster (UNSW).

The event kicks off with an in-conversation between the authors as they discuss the politics, aesthetics and infrastructures of contemporary digital life—from platform economies to machine learning systems.

The conversation will be followed by drinks in the RSSS Foyer.

This event will also be live-streamed on Zoom. Please register for online attendance and we will send out zoom details closer to the date.

Organised by the Computational Culture Lab + School of Sociology at the ANU.

About the books

1000 Platforms
by Adrian Mackenzie (ANU)

In today’s digital world, platforms are everywhere, shaping our social and cultural landscapes. This groundbreaking book shows how platforms are not just technical systems, but complex networks involving diverse people, practices and values. It explores a wide range of digital platforms, using insights from science and technology studies, anthropology, sociology and cultural theories to offer fresh perspectives on how platforms, media and devices function and evolve.

Blending ethnographic work with technical analysis, this is essential reading for anyone wanting a deeper understanding of the digital age.

DeepAesthetics: Computational Experience in a Time of Machine Learning
by Anna Munster (UNSW)
Computation has now been reconfigured by machine learning: those technical processes and operations that yoke together statistics and computer science to create artificial intelligence (AI) by furnishing vast datasets to learn tasks and predict outcomes. In DeepAesthetics, Anna Munster examines the range of more-than-human experiences this transformation has engendered and considers how those experiences can be qualitative as well as quantitative. Drawing on process philosophy, Munster approaches computational experience through its relations and operations. She combines deep learning—the subfield of machine learning that uses neural network architectures—and aesthetics to offer a way to understand the insensible and frequently imperceptible forms of nonlinear and continuously modulating statistical function. Attending to the domains and operations of image production, statistical racialization, AI conversational agents, and critical AI art, Munster analyzes how machine learning is operationally entangled with racialized, neurotypical, and cognitivist modes of producing knowledge and experience. She approaches machine learning as events through which a different sensibility registers, one in which AI is populated by oddness, disjunctions, and surprises, and where artful engagement with machine learning fosters indeterminate futures.

About the authors

Adrian Mackenzie is Professor of Sociology at the Australian National University. He is a leading scholar of science and technology studies, media and cultural studies, and social and cultural theory. His current interests focus on network and computational media, digital sociology and innovation in data-related methods. He is the author of Machine Learners: Archaeology of a Data Practice (MIT Press, 2017), Wirelessness: Radical Empiricism in Network Cultures (MIT Press, 2010), Cutting Code: Software and Sociology (Peter Lang, 2006) and Transductions: Bodies and Machines at Speed (Continuum, 2002).

Anna Munster is Professor in the School of Art and Design at the University of New South Wales and author of An Aesthesia of Networks: Conjunctive Experience in Art and Technology and Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics.