Hello All,

I know it is a busy week of campus visits for AIMS folks, but on
Wednesday CMS candidate Ayhan Ayteş will be giving a talk that I think
will interest a lot of you (see below). Ayteş has done a lot of cool
work in the field of digital media and has expressed a strong interest
in the AIMS program. If you can make the talk, that would be fabulous!
Ayhan is also scheduled to meet with Artie from 1:15-2:00pm on
Wednesday, and I bet he wouldn't mind if other folks attended that
meeting.

Have a great week & hope to see some of you at the talk!
Braxton

Dr. Ayhan Ayteş, University of San Diego
Mechanical Turk: "Oriental" Automata and the Mechanization of the Mind
Wednesday, January 30
3:45-4:45 pm
217 McGuffey Hall
The idea of a machine that can play chess has been one of the driving
concepts throughout the modern process of the mechanization of the
mind. In many implementations of the chess playing machine as a
conceptual apparatus — from the essays of Edgar Alan Poe to Claude
Shannon’s computer models—there are direct references to its
archetype, the 18th century Automaton Chess Player designed by
Austrian engineer Wolfgang von Kempelen. The human-machine artifice
designed into the Automaton Chess Player has sustained its relevance
and become crucial in explaining many forms of human-machine symbiosis
up until the current post-industrial era. By tracing the material and
discursive forces in this particular history, Dr. Aytes demonstrates
the roles performed by the Automaton Chess Player as a conceptual
apparatus throughout the history of the mechanization of the mind in
relation to its physical embodiment of the irreconcilable
contradictions of the Enlightenment’s ideological presumptions.

Bio:
Ayteş received his Ph.D. degree in Communication and Cognitive Science
from the University of California, San Diego in 2012. His research
interests include cultural history of Artificial Intelligence and
Cognitive Labor in relation to subjectivity, body, autonomy,
temporality, religion, and race. His dissertation, The ‘Other’ in the
Machine: Oriental Automata and the Mechanization of the Mind, is an
inquiry into a long-term cultural relationship between intelligent
automata and Orientalism. His digital media works have been exhibited
in various venues including Istanbul Museum of the History of Science
and Technology in Islam, and Aksanat Culture and Arts Center. Website:
http://ayhanaytes.wordpress.com/