Digital selves articulate a performance of ‘personality’ able to navigate the precarious conditions of ‘volatile’ markets through the adoption of ready-made personas. Through three events, performances, a publication and an exhibition, this interdisciplinary project interrogates the impact of an asset-based economy on digital personhood using our insights to ‘map’ the infrastructural and choreographic relationships between finance and performance and demonstrate how interactions between personas and platforms condition the subjectivities considered valuable in digital public space.
Jan Løhmann Stephensen, Phd, Associate Professor in Aesthetics & Culture at Aarhus University. Questions such as What could participation also look like? and Who, or what, matters as proper participants in political democratic and/or cultural creative processes? have been central to his research and publications. In addition, from perspectives of political economy and sociology of both work and art/culture, he has focused on the increased ‘creativization’ of our (working) lives, in later years with a special interest in the interplay between human actors on the one hand; and on the other: artificial intelligence and related computational technologies of automation.
FORMER FELLOWSHIP
AIAS-SHAPE Fellow
Fellowship period: 1 Sep 2024 - 30 Jun 2025
Project title: Chat Democracy: AI, Democratic Talk, and a New Shared Language
In democracy, language is essential. With the ongoing integration of Large Language Model-based technologies like ChatGPT into a host of digital platforms, AI-technologies will soon be integral to the processes of cultural meaning-making, civic deliberation, and community-building in the democratic public sphere. Hence, this project asks, what kinds of publics and communities will emerge when discussions on political issues become entangled with and assisted by AI-driven ‘info-discursive auxiliaries’? Who gets to talk? In whose language? What kind of citizens will, and could, we become?
Project title: Machine-Characters: The Choreographed Subjectivity of Platform Media Performance
Area of research: Aesthetics and culture
Fellowship period: 1 Sep 2025 - 30 Jun 2026
Fellowship type: Artist-in-Residence Tandem Fellow
Contact: jloehmanns@aias.au.dk
This fellowship has received funding from The Aarhus University Research Foundation (AUFF)
