On December 9 (12:00 - 13:00) we have the pleasure to welcome Mette-Marie Zacher Sørensen in our CENSUS Brown Bag Seminar series. 

Mette-Marie Zacher Sørensen is assistant professor in the department of Aesthetics and Culture at Aarhus University. Since 2014 she has been working on the project Technologies of the Face in Contemporary Art funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research. She has arranged two international seminars gathering scholars and artists within the field of new media art: Shy Faces - Digital Subjects and Acts of Disappearing and Facial Machines and Obfuscation in an Age of Biometrics and Neural Networks. She has published the articles  “Quantified Faces : On Surveillance Technologies, Identification and Statistics in Three Contemporary Art Projects ”in Digital Culture and Society 2 (2) Transcript Verlag, 2016 and with Thomas Bjørnsten “Uncertainties of facial emotion recognition technologies and the automation of emotional labour” in Digital Creativity. 28(4), 2017/The Uncertain Image, Routledge, 2019

Here is the abstract of her talk on 'The Shy Digital Subject'

I have been working on a project with a speculative figure/ conceptual persona: The Shy Digital Subject. Shyness is not only blushing, lack of eye-contact, striking self-consciousness and unintentional unwillingness to contribute in a conversation. In this project I transfer the concept of shyness into an understanding of a conceptual digital subject (a user) with high sensibility towards social networks, interaction and surveillance. This theoretical transfer is inspired and informed by Olga Gurinovas work on the “lurker” as figure in digital culture, as well as Wendy Chuns analysis of the “You” in contemporary digital networks. My shy digital subject is speculative fiction fed with inspiration from different sources; Sociology, Philosophy, Literature, Cultural Theory etc. So far I have used this speculative figure as a way of analyzing some of Facebooks features, as well as analyzed the potential reactions to a future smart city with ubiquitous surveillance. How might this affect shy citizens?  

Join us in room 120 (Wiener) on December 9!