[Air-L] Adrian Mackenzie and Anna Munster Book Launch Event (Online and In-person)

[Thao Phan]

*ANU Event: Adrian Mackenzie and Anna Munster Book Launch Event (Online and
In-person)*

🗓️ Thursday 30 October, 4 - 5:30pm
📍(in-person) Auditorium, RSSS Building, 146 Ellery Cres, Acton ACT 2601
💻 (online) Register to receive Zoom link to livestream
🔗 Register here:
https://events.humanitix.com/1000platforms-deepaesthetics-booklaunch
<https://events.humanitix.com/1000platforms-deepaesthetics-booklaunch>

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.

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.