Let me show you how art and culture drive technological development.
Let me show you how art and culture drive technological development.
I’ve been quite amused at comments from students and colleagues who enjoyed my recent Bridget Jones version of department head blogging, but who have totally missed the intertextual reference. I mean, come on, it’s blatant copy-catting!
Surely I’m not the only new media scholar to have read Bridget Jones? Both volumes? And let’s be frank, I really enjoyed them. They’re hilarious.
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When I studied literature we mostly read the classics. Great literature, the canon. But that’s not necessarily what most people actually read. What if instead of comparing AI-generated literature to the literary canon, we tried comparing it to super popular and commercial forms of literature instead? Like the folkebøker that […]
Synthetic media is a current popular term for AI-generated videos, texts and images. I think the first use was only a few years ago in 2018, but I couldn’t find an overview of its use so thought I’d cobble one together here, mostly because I like Elena Pilipets and her […]
OpenAI plans to charge $20,000 (USD) a month for an AI agent that can do “PhD level research”. Maybe all the PhDs and postdocs recently fired by DOGE should band together and sell their services as “AI agents” – apparently some people will pay more for robots than people. At […]
This is my original Norwegian draft of an essay published in the Danish foreign policy magazine Udenrigs today as part of a special issue on AI and foreign policy. I argue that AI is influencing the way we tell stories, and more seriously, that there is a risk of this […]
In 2022 I learned about FAIR data, the movement to make research data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reproducible. One of UiB’s brilliant research librarians, Jenny Ostrup, patiently helped me make the dataset from the Machine Vision project FAIR in 2022 – I wrote a little bit about that in my […]
Thanks to everyone who came to the triple book talk of three recent books on machine vision by James Dobson, Jussi Parikka and me, and thanks for excellent questions. Several people have emailed to asked if we recorded it, and yes we did! Here you go! James and Jussi’s books […]
noah
Perhaps those of us who got the intertextual reference thought, like you, that it was so obvious as to not require comment? If memory serves, they even work this type of thing into the movie. Now, when do we get to see Adrian Mole, department head?
tom
You’re not alone. Although I remember reading the original column in the Independent before it went all book-ish. Bridget is the example I usually use on students when trying to explain interactive adaptation for the first time (cigarettes, off-licences, map of london etc).
Jill
Oh god. I loved the Adrian Mole books as a teenager, but I haven’t been able to bear the thought of his pathetic self as an adult. Maybe I should venture into the adult books after all…
LiL
I’m a film scholar and I read them. Also saw movies. Liked all.
Eirik
You definitely should give some of the later Adrian Moles a try, Jill. The latest one, “The weapons of mass destruction”, is totally on the level with the first two, IMHO. While I also enjoyed Fieldings’ books, Sue Townsend is more than just funny. There’s a social and political conscience, and a sense of contemporary Britain, that is totally lacking in “Bridget Jones”.