May 28, 2025
Tobias Revell in conversation with Niklas Egberts: Design and the Social Construction of AI.
Schaufler Kolleg@TU Dresden has developed an innovative videocast format that brings the project focus Data Worlds to life in a new way. In exciting discussions, our doctoral students meet artists and scientists and explore the interfaces between art, research, and digital society. The format opens up diverse perspectives on how we deal with data in our time—critically, creatively, and interdisciplinarily.
In his presentation at Schaufler Lab, London-based designer, artist and researcher Tobias Revell shared insights from his PhD research on the role of design in the construction of AI. Among the strategies that Revell discussed are the construction of technological futures, the invention of use, the spectacle of progress, and technological normativity. Underlying these explorations is a constructivist approach that does not disregard the materiality of technology per se, but approaches AI through the sociocultural practices, scenes and events in which it is constituted as a discursive object. In the discussion, we touched on the conceptual history of enchantment and disenchantment in relation to technology and its implications for contemporary discussions about data-worlds.