Till Rückwart will be a visiting scholar at Digital Cultures and Arts from April 15 to May 13 through a Una Europa research fellowship. During his stay, he will actively participate in research and teaching activities at the Bridge Professorship. Concurrently, he will be working on a subproject of his dissertation, which examines the relationship between bugs, platforms, and AI systems from the perspectives of artistic research and media and cultural studies.
In his project, he advocates for a radical rethinking of the concept of the computer bug. Starting from a genealogy of the term “bug” and its application in technologies, he analyzes, among other things, current developments on digital platforms as well as practices in the training process of machine learning systems. Building on this, he develops a methodological perspective conceiving of bugs not solely as errors to be fixed, but as an opening for critical and subversive practices. Instead of traditional bug fixing, he proposes “bug attunement”as an anti-institutional practice through which users can respond to implicitly harmful and discriminatory platform operations. In the context of his subproject, he experiments with alternative methods designed to protect video content from delegitimization strategies and unauthorized recontextualization on platforms.
Till Rückwart is a research associate at the Division of Culture and Media Management of the Institute for Theater Studies at Freie Universität Berlin and a member of metaLAB (at) Berlin.