Abstract

This seminar will present Machine-Personalities, a collaborative project by Anneke Kampman and Jan Løhmann Stephensen investigating how digital platforms choreograph online subjectivity. We focus on performance as a form of infrastructural critique: by inhabiting and amplifying the gestures, metrics, and rhythms that platforms use to evaluate and monetise personas, performers make visible the social, technical, and financial systems shaping attention, affect, and value. Drawing on YouTube case studies and artistic practice, we explore how platformed personalities operate as both products and producers of algorithmic logics, revealing the precarious, co-constructed, and programmable nature of contemporary subjectivity. The seminar reflects on how performance—from musical gestures to moving-image interventions—can intervene from within, exposing the invisible infrastructures that govern digital life while opening possibilities for critical engagement and resistance.

Short Bios

Anneke Kampman is an award-nominated musician, artist and academic researcher whose work engages the political economy of the cultural industries from a transnational and transdisciplinary perspective. By mobilising pop cultural artefacts as ‘texts’ which mediate relationships between individuals, states and markets, her works open these apparently smooth or spectacular systems up to public scrutiny.

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.

What is an AIAS Seminar?

The AIAS Seminar Series is a session of seminars held by the AIAS fellows, AIAS Visiting or Tandem Fellows or by other speakers proposed by the fellows. In each seminar, a fellow will present and discuss her/his current research and work-in-progress to an interdisciplinary audience for 30 minutes, closing off with 30 minutes for questions, comments and discussion.

All seminars are in-person and held in English. To attend online, please contact Cecilie Horshauge at cecilie@aias.au.dk by 9:00am on the day of the semimar as the latest to request a link.