Bruno Latour and Artificial Intelligence

Venturini, T. (2023). Bruno Latour and Artificial Intelligence. TECNOSCIENZA, 14(2).

In this paper I reflect on the rise of generative artificial intelligence and AI chatbots trying to imagine what Bruno Latour might have thought of these technologies.

Read the paper in Tecnoscienza

Political Anthropological Research on International Social Sciences (PARISS)

I’ve recently be asked to be part of the editorial board of the newly founded journal “Political, Anthropological Research on International Social Sciences” (P.A.R.I.S.S.).

The journal aims to encourage scholars to write across disciplines, academic cultures and writing styles in order to open up orthodox conventions based on assumptions about what proper scholarship should do. Similar to questions of nature that cannot be neatly separated into categories of chemistry, biology or physics, we believe that the social sciences require transversal sites for thought and practice. P.A.R.I.S.S. is such a site. Our journal constitutes a step towards transversality and de-disciplinarization, bringing together multiple disciplines in an effort to transcend them.

See the homepage of the journal

The Web and its Publics

In the talk, I discuss the social and political consequences of the organization of digital media. I consider the limits of a simplistic reading of the power-law distribution of online visibility and the hopes raised by the thematic clustering and the dynamism of the Web.

I also touch on the risks that these dynamics entail exploring five series of causes (in economy, media, technology, culture and politics ) which encourage the recent proliferation of ‘junk news’ (see the post “From Fake to Junk News, the Data Politics of Online Virality” for a text detailing these causes).

Download the slides of the presentation

DMI Summer School 2016

dancingtogether

Dancing Together: the Fluidification of the Modern Mind

The keynote presentation that I gave at the 2016 edition of the Amsterdam Digital Methods Initiative Summer School. The talk address the question of social modelling and proposed to replace the current ‘spatial approach’ (based on the divide in micro and macro levels) with a natively temporal approach.

See the slides of my presentation

Medusa at the Hairdresser

medusa

The conference I gave at the SPRU Freeman Friday Seminars at the University of Sussex on March 27 2015 (stirring quite a bit of controversy…).

In the last few years, our societies have been confronted to a new kind of problems. Our planet – once so vast and unexplored – seems to have shrunk around us constraining our actions with its multiple ecological and economical fragilities. Welcome to the Anthropocene! After centuries spent in trying to rule the world, we suddenly realize how tiny is our kingdom and, as the air fill with CO2, how suffocating is its atmosphere. What’s worse, we find ourselves utterly unprepared to deal with the situation we have created. The more we strive to force the knots we tied, the more they seem to tighten around us. The knots that hold us cannot be slashed, but (and it’s our only hope) they might be untied. The fabric of our natural and social interdependencies is complex, but not impenetrable. And this is where social sciences may help, by hijacking one of the strongest forces of modernization (the proliferation of digital inscriptions) and turning it into a source of understanding. Turning inscriptions into traces, and following them as threads through the maze of collective life, we can try to unfold the complexity of our small world and learn to live with it.

See the slides of the conference

Politiques de la Terre – Politics of the Earth

PolitiquesDeLaTerre

Since the industrial revolution, the Earth may have entered the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch in which humans would be the main actors of the planet changes.  The term Anthropocene indicates a new phase in relations between a planet governed by physical and biological laws – the Earth system – and a set of human societies engaged in conflicting relations of domination governed by economic, social or political laws – the World system. But as this transformation requires rethinking the scales and the dynamics of collective action, it imposes rethink jointly the World and the Earth. Such is the general objective of the “Politics of the Earth” interdisciplinary program.

See the project website

Il nostro pane quotidiano

eataly

Post-doc research on the sociology of modernization. The project was co-hosted by the Communication Studies Department of the University of Bologna and the Università di Scienze Gastronomiche di Slow Food.

The research analyzed the case of Eataly, an Italian supermarket chain that tries to apply the most modern marketing and distribution techniques to the most traditional food production. Can the distinction between modernity and tradition be overcome?

Download the research report (warning: 8mb file)

Les trous noirs de la Révolution Verte

GreenRevolution

Venturini, T. (2007). Les trous noirs de la Réevolution Verte. Décroissance & technique, 3.

This article describes the controversies stirred by the process of agricultural modernization in the so-called ‘green-revolution’

Download the preprint (in French)

Opera Aperta: Wikipedia e l’oralità secondaria

oralitasecondaria

 

Venturini, T. (2006). Opera Aperta: Wikipedia e l’oralità secondaria. Magma, 4, 35–45.

In questo articolo si discuterà di Wikipedia, se ne analizzerà il modello comunicativo e si mostrerà come esso getti nuova luce sulla distinzione oralità/scrittura. Riflettendo sui processi e sui prodotti della mediazione comunicativa, illustreremo quindi come Wikipedia abbia dato vita a una forma di comunicazione davvero nuova. Un modello comunicativo caratterizzato da un’apertura radicale e totale che non può essere assimilata né all’oralità, né alla scrittura.

Download the preprint (in Italian)

Il mago e l’imprenditore magico

magic

Venturini, T. (2005). Il mago e l’imprenditore magico. Cassazione Penale, 45(3).

Drawing on the legal case of an italian magician, this article discuss the difference between tradition and modern magic

Download the preprint (in Italian)

Seminare Vento

SeminareVento

PhD research on the sociology of modernization at the University of Milano Bicocca.

The research investigates the tensions connected to the modernization of agriculture by analyzing a series of controversy on biopiracy and the patenting of agro-biodiversity.

Download the research report