FABIAN OFFERT

I am Assistant Professor for the History and Theory of the Digital Humanities 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. At UCSB, I co-direct the newly established Center for the Humanities and Machine Learning, and I am affiliated with the Department of German, the Media Arts and Technology program, the Comparative Literature program, the Mellichamp Initiative in Mind & Machine Intelligence, and the Center for Responsible Machine Learning. 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 focuses on "Machine Visual Culture" in the age of foundation models. Other research interests include the history, theory, exhibition, and preservation of digital art.