Sound, especially voice, and the vibrations that carry it are linked to electronic surveillance. Today’s dominant AI systems encode a worldview where culture is tractable as text, and the so-called “vibe” becomes a glossy proxy for the materiality of creative practice. This talk traces how the ‘vibe check’ has been operationalized tech companies and governments and how the words we use to describe cultural production are treated as data from which intentions, emotions, risk and deviance can be inferred.
Moderator: Kris Paulsen, Associate Professor of History of Art (Ohio State)
This lecture is part of the Global Arts + Humanities' Society of Fellows 2025-26 event series, "Artificial Intelligence: Propositions from the Arts + Humanities" — a series of lectures by artists and scholars whose work foregrounds the ethical obligations arising from the simulation of human intelligence and increased surveillance.