A visual culture studies perspective on the possibilities and limitations of artificial intelligence.
Dr Margarete Pratschke,
Humboldt University of Berlin
Computer vision is a field of digital visual culture that, as part of artificial-intelligence research (AI research), is currently advancing at incredible speed. The speaker, Dr Margarete Pratschke, reports on these developments within her current research project on the new “digital amateurism” inherent to AI as a defining visual perspective and tool for working with digital image archives.
Against the backdrop of the growing prevalence of AI-based processes, you can learn about the challenges faced by cultural and memory institutions, in particular, when cataloguing and analysing their digital image archives.
Using current examples, including from the Image Archive of ETH Zurich, this lecture critically engages with the possibilities and limitations of computer vision. There is a particular focus on the extent to which conservative methods and commercial interests pretend to be progressive. The aim of this lecture is therefore also to establish ethical guidelines in the use of AI for cultural and memory institutions.
Dr Margarete Pratschke is an art and image historian at the Humboldt University of Berlin.
- Staff member of “The Technical Image” department of the Humboldt University of Berlin’s Hermann von Helmholtz Centre for Cultural Techniques; received her doctorate for her thesis “Windows als Tableau. Zur Bildgeschichte grafischer Benutzeroberflächen” (“Windows as a tableau. On the visual history of graphic user interfaces”); also works at the Hasso Plattner Institute at the University of Potsdam.
- 2010–2017: Postdoc at ETH Zurich’s Chair for Science Studies. Since then, she has served as interim director of the research unit “The Technical Image” and as interim professor of History and Theory of Form as well as professor of Modern Art and Visual History at the Humboldt University’s Institute of Art and Visual History.
- Since 2019: Research project “Digitale Dilettanten – Computer Vision als Kennerschaft” (“Digital amateurs – computer vision as connoisseurship”), funded by the Volkswagen Foundation’s funding line “Original – isn’t it?” at the Humboldt University.
- Winter semester 2020/2021: Visiting professor of History and Theory at the Weißensee Academy of Art Berlin.
- In 2016, Dr Margarete Pratschke received the Caroline von Humboldt Prize for her research, including her monograph on the Psychological Institute at the Berlin Palace, which she wrote at ETH Zurich.