Collaborative filtering, the idea that we can collectively select meaningful content from an ever-growing stream of data, was central to early net cultures in the 1990s. Three decades later, automated recommendation systems have taken over. In this talk, I will take a look at the forgotten history of collaborative filtering and discuss its implications for today's networked society.
Chair: Stefanie Bräuer
(in partnership with Critical Media Lab)
Biography
Clemens Apprich is a professor of media theory and history at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. He is the head of the Department of Media Theory as well as the Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures, and acts as Vice-President for Research and Digitality. His current research concerns digital media and computational cultures, with a particular focus on filter algorithms and their deployment in data analysis, as well as machine learning methods. He is the author of Technotopia: A Media Genealogy of Net Cultures (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2017) and co-author Pattern Discrimination (University of Minnesota Press/meson press, 2019). He is currently working on a new book project entitled Errant Intelligence (Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming).
Chair
Stefanie Bräuer is an art historian and media studies scholar. She studied in Jena, Berlin, Basel, and Siena. After contributing as a research assistant to a project on ultrashort audiovisual forms in Basel and Luzern (2014–17), she was a guest researcher at the German Center for Art History in Paris (2017–18). Her doctoral thesis explored the implementation of oscilloscopic imagery in early 1950s experimental film (Schüren, 2024). Currently, she is PostDoc at the Critical Media Lab of HGK Basel where she works on a historical network analysis of 1980s and 1990s video practice and net activism in Basel. At Hochschule Luzern, she teaches courses on the history of audiovisuality, on the theory and culture of digital media, as well as a media aesthetics of experimental practices in the arts, science and technology.