This event features two keynotes by Professor Julia Velkova (Linköping University, Sweden) and Dr Sy Taffel (Massey University, New Zealand), who will discuss how to regenerate the materiality of the digital technologies, and more concretely of AI, in the Anthropocene.
Repairing the Sustainable Cloud, Prof Julia Velkova, Linköping University
Abundance, the Anthropocene, and AI, Dr Sy Taffel, Massey University
Over the past decade, the visibility of data infrastructure triggered by its global expansion has raised awareness of the infrastructural complex that underpins digitalised societies. As AI scales up, both in tangible and intangible forms, it becomes ever more urgent to discuss how to govern the socio-environmental consequences of its materiality. Within this context, Professor Velkova’s keynote, Repairing the Sustainable Cloud, will guide us through innovative ways to interrogate media infrastructures and their interconnections with time, energy, and the environment. Dr Taffel will deliver a keynote titled Abundance, the Anthropocene, and AI, examining the ecological, material, cultural, and political affordances of digital technologies. The session will be chaired by Dr Valdivia (Oxford Internet Institute), whose transdisciplinary expertise combines computational and ethnographic methods to investigate how the materiality of AI contributes to the Anthropocene.
Speaker biographies
Julia Velkova is professor of media and culture at Linköping University and Profutura Scientia fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. Her research examines media infrastructures and their relation to time, energy and environment.
Sy Taffel is a Senior Lecturer in Media Studies and co-director of the Political Ecology Research Centre at Massey University, Aotearoa-New Zealand. His research focuses upon the ecological, material, cultural, and political affordances of digital technologies.
Professor of media and culture, Linköping University
Julia is a Profutura Scientia fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. Her research examines media infrastructures and their relation to time, energy and environment.
Senior Lecturer in Media Studies and co-director of the Political Ecology Research Centre, Massey University
Sy's research focuses upon the ecological, material, cultural, and political affordances of digital technologies.