Conversational Technologies: Talk with Hannes Bajohr

The rapid development of generative AI has stimulated debates about the role of technology in creative practices, challenging our understanding of human-machine interaction and how the two inform each other. As a school of design, film and art, we need to consider the impact of these technologies on modes of cultural production. Which new skills and knowledge will be required in the creative professions? How is the process of making changing in the various disciplines?
 
In this series of talks, organized by the Creativity and Digitality Hub in collaboration with different degree programs, we invite you to discuss these questions with experts from various fields, exploring both individual practices and broader infrastructures in the age of AI.

Hannes Bajohr is a literary scholar and digital author. He has published extensively on the impact of digital writing technologies on language and literature, the German philosophical tradition in the 20th century – especially the connection between phenomenology and anthropology – as well as liberal and republican political theory.
 
Besides of his scholarly work, he also pursues a literary practice that explores forms of co-authorship between human and computers. He has published numerous generative works as a part of writers’ collective 0x0a, including the volume Halbzeug (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2018). In 2023, he published (Berlin, Miami), a novel co-written with a self-trained large language model.
 
After postdoctoral positions and fellowships at Berlin's Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research, the University of Basel, and the Collegium Helveticum in Zurich, he recently joined the Department of German at the University of California, Berkeley as Assistant Professor. In 2024, he received the N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature by the Electronic Literature Organization.