Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Medienwissenschaft

Peli Grietzer : Ambient Meaning (Vortrag)

  • Wann 12.12.2018 von 18:00 bis 20:00
  • Wo Medientheater (EG, Raum 0.01)
  • iCal
‘This talk presents a mathematically informed interpretation of a classically romantic literary-theoretic thesis: that a work of art can aesthetically communicate an ineffably complex holistic understanding of the real world, which we might call the work’s ‘aesthetic meaning.’ Drawing on a generalization of ‘deep learning’ (“artificial intuition”) systems and on elementary algorithmic information theory, we describe a kind or aspect of aesthetic meaning—‘ambient meaning’—that may have a special resonance with Modernist and avant-garde approaches to aesthetic meaning, as well as with the concepts of aesthetically sophisticated cultural-materialist thought of the kind that theorists like Sianne Ngai, Jacques Rancière, or Raymond Williams practice.
 
‘Ambient Meaning,’ as I'll call it, is the sensible (‘sensate’) representation of a virtual, diffused, immanent structure – the representation, by a work of art, of some systemic real-world structure akin to a mood (Heidegger), cultural logic (Jameson), sensorium (Rancière) or even ideology (Althusser/Ngai). I draw a close formal analogy between 'ambient meaning' and the logic of an information-theoretic process known as latent variable generative modelling, and propose a way of thinking through some of the ontological and epistemological tangles of ambient meaning by thinking about the geometry of latent variable generative modelling.'