FABIAN OFFERT

I am Assistant Professor for the History and Theory of the Digital Humanities and Director of the Center for the Humanities and Machine Learning at the University of California, Santa Barbara. My research and teaching focuses on the epistemology, aesthetics, and politics of artificial intelligence: I study how machine learning models represent culture and what is at stake when they do. You can find a list of my publications here, or you can email me to get in touch.

My work is situated at the intersection of critical artificial intelligence studies, the digital humanities, media studies, and the history of technology. It is supported by the Volkswagen Foundation through the AI Forensics project and by the UC Humanities Research Institute through the Critical Machine Learning initiative. My technical work includes the imgs.ai project, hosted at Deutsches Dokumentationszentrum für Kunstgeschichte. Before joining the faculty at UC Santa Barbara, I worked for a number of German cultural institutions, including ZKM Karlsruhe and Goethe-Institut New York. I have published and lectured widely on questions of the digital, including 25+ first author papers and 50+ lectures worldwide. My current book project, Vector Media, writes a new historical epistemology of artificial intelligence, tracing the thought systems immanent in deep neural networks. Other research interests include the history, theory, exhibition, and preservation of digital art.