Graziele Lautenschlaeger
Graziele Lautenschlaeger is a Brazilian media artist, researcher, and professor of Media Technologies at the University of Applied Sciences St. Pölten (AT). With her atelier hosted at the Schlot Kulturverein, she is based in Linz since 2022, when she moved for a postdoctoral research fellowship at the VALIE EXPORT Center Linz/Kunstuniversität Linz (2022-2024). She holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (2014-2018) and is interested in practices at the intersections between art and science, exploring the poetic and symbolic layers of technological artifacts, grounded mainly on theoretical references such as cybernetics, relational aesthetics, media archaeology, and new materialism. She graduated in Media Design/Image and Sound from the Universidade Federal de São Carlos (2005) and holds a Master’s degree in Architecture and Urbanism from the Universidade de São Paulo (2010), with a research stay in the Interface Culture Department at the Kunstuniversität Linz (AT, 2008). Between 2011 and 2013, she worked as a culture commissioner at SESC in São Paulo, curating and producing programmes in media art, digital culture, and dance. She is a member of the American Society for Cybernetics (ASC), of the Österreichische Gesellschaft für Geschlechterforschung(ÖGGF) and of the Institut für Medienarchäologie (IMA).
Articles of Graziele Lautenschlaeger
In Dialog With the Black Box: Poetic Resistance to AI’s Algorithmic Homogenization Through Translation
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is here to stay. Some scholars believe that it is a speculative bubble that will soon burst, but the consequences of this period will remain. This paper analyzes this phenomenon through the lenses of Vilém Flusser’s work, in the search for a better understanding of these consequences in our processes of signifying and experiencing the world. Framing AI algorithms as agents of technological contamination over human semiosis, we analyse how the Machine Learning (ML) technique reduce linguistic and perceptual reality to vector embeddings in latent space, enacting a violent abstraction that flattens experience and accelerates cognitive overload. The chain of mathematical and statistical operations needed to train and operate ML algorithms echoes Flusser's reflections on how language and translations work, enabling us to create a dialectical bridge between both visions of the critique of technology. Once the bridge is built, the essay traces parallels between Flusser's theory of translation as ontological impossibility across linguistic cosmoses and algorithmic "similarity" mappings (embeddings) in multimodal generation, highlighting standardization and an impoverished experience, as anticipated by Franco Berardi and Arlindo Machado. Examining AI slop, model collapse, and programmed totalitarianism, we aim to build a reflection about the exclusion of human agency in signification processes of reality, where apparatuses predetermine responses and functionaries become excluded. In this context, Flusser’s practice of translation—where meaning jumps from one cosmos to the other, forcing the intellect to surpass the boundaries of language—is considered an act of creation. The essay brings elements of Flusser’s attention to the aesthetical experience of this practice, which puts it in constant friction with the apparatus of Language to resist uncritical automation. This practice shows us a pragmatic but propositive methodology of counterattacking from inside the apparatus against machinic stereotyping to reclaim dialogical semiosis from computational domination through aesthetic experience.