Vortrag von jessie beier: Artificial Intimacies: Figuring Care in the Age of AI 

What happens when machines are trained to care? From wellness platforms that track mood and behaviour, to therapeutic chatbots, classroom emotion-recognition software, and the AI girlfriend/boyfriend experience, today’s algorithmic tools increasingly promise intimacy, attentiveness, and support—while simultaneously reorganizing perception, flattening sensation, and quietly hardwiring normative models of emotion, embodiment, and subjectivity. As these systems rush to patch the widening holes in precarious care infrastructures, they do so by running on hidden circuits of energy and data, tied to ever-intensifying regimes of planetary extraction and the spectre of human labour that props up so-called artificially intelligent systems. To figure care in the age of AI is thus to ask how today’s “feeling machines” sense and standardize intimacy, how affective labour is black-boxed into protocols of learning, and how work, energy, and desire are recoded to naturalize some forms of care as authentic, others as artificial. Drawing on recent research-creation projects, the talk weaves theoretical inquiry, artistic experimentation, and pedagogical reflection to investigate care as a site of tension and ambivalence—where intimacy meets infrastructure, tenderness becomes protocol, and collective resistance might be reworked with and beyond the machine..

jessie beier is an artist, philosopher, and conjurer of weird pedagogies for unthought futures. Her research brings educational theory into dialogue with media theory, feminist science and technology studies, energy humanities, machine learning, and extinction studies to speculate otherwise on pedagogical possibility in an era of ecological catastrophe. Her artistic practice—often deploying sound, video, digital/analogue technologies—stages speculative scenarios that center pedagogies aimed at collective practices of refusal and fabulation. She is Assistant Professor of Art Education at Concordia University (Montreal) and author of Pedagogy at the End of the World: Weird Pedagogies for Unthought Educational Futures (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023).

This lecture takes place within the framework of the Care Research Fellowship, a working format of the Care Research Lab (CRL). Jointly run by the University of Cologne and the University of Education Karlsruhe, the CRL invites international experts to address specific questions and case studies in the field of care. More information: https://kunst.uni-koeln.de/careresearchlab/care-research-fellows/

Der Vortrag findet im Rahmen der Kooperation mit der Universität zu Köln als Teil der Ringvorlesung Intermedia in Karlsruhe in Raum 3.312 (Etage 3, Gebäude 3, Pädagogische Hochschule Karlsruhe, Campus Bismarckstraße 10, 76133 Karlsruhe) statt und wird in Zoom übertragen (Anmeldung zum Livestream vorab bei Annalina Scheiba. Gäste sind herzlich willkommen. Hinweis: Der Vortrag findet in englischer Sprache statt.

In der Ringvorlesung Intermedia werden Fragen der Medienkultur, Mediengestaltung und Medienbildung aus interdisziplinären Forschungsperspektiven in den Blick genommen. Weitere Informationen und (Online-) Termine.

Einige der Vorträge werden im Nachhinein online veröffentlicht.

Photo Credits: Live from the Black Box! Residency at Concordia University, photographed by Lisa Graves (February, 2025).