M. Beatrice Fazi and Anna Longo in Conversation, Soundperformance by Dario Sanfilippo
Organized by Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures (part of M. Beatrice Fazi’s fellowship and the Weibel Lectures series) in cooperation with the AIL
When machines process and produce language, what philosophical frameworks help us understand their operations?
Philosophers M. Beatrice Fazi and Anna Longo bring contemporary philosophical perspectives to AI, interrogating how computational systems construct meaning beyond human categories. This dialogue explores whether large language models constitute new semiotic agents, challenging anthropocentric assumptions about thinking and linguistic possibility.
Program
18.00 - 19:30
Presentations and conversation:
M. Beatrice Fazi & Anna Longo
20.00 - 20:30
Sound performance: Dario Sanfilippo
M. Beatrice Fazi is a philosopher working on computation, technology, and media. Her research focuses on the ontologies and epistemologies produced by contemporary technoscience. She has published extensively on the limits and potentialities of the computational method, on digital aesthetics, and on the automation of thought. She is Associate Professor at the University of Sussex (United Kingdom), the author of Contingent Computation: Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aesthetics (2018), and co-author of Digital Theory (2025).
Anna Longo is a philosopher affiliated to the University of Paris. Her research crosses the philosophy of technology, French post-structuralism and aesthetics. She is author of two books: The Game of Induction: Automatisation of Knowledge and Philosophical Reflection (Mimesis 2022) and Deleuze, A Philosophy of Multiplicity (Ellipses 2024).
Dario Sanfilippo is a composer, performer, audio programmer, and researcher specialised in musical complex adaptive systems. He has a PhD in Creative Music Practice from the University of Edinburgh and his artistic research focuses on the exploration of new music through artificial intelligence (in the broadest sense) and artificial life implemented via adaptive audio feedback networks. His work combines principles of agency, autopoiesis, evolvability, and radical constructivism to design systems that are deployed in live performance for human-machine interaction or autonomous music.