Media Cultures of Machine Translation.A Perspective between Cultural Studies and Technology
The shift from linguistics to Big Data offers the promise of accessibility to the vast knowledge of the world without linguistic barriers and continues to leave its mark. Beginning from the radical differences between intellectual (i.e., human), meaning-centered translation and machine-based translation freed from the constraints of semantics, Benjamin’s notion of »pure language« and the computerized large language models are now being thought alongside one another – and in light of current debates within cultural studies, these differences are being reassessed. An emerging epistemology of digital media seeks to describe these translation paradigms – moving back and forth between technical terminology and the terminology of cultural studies. How closely connected is Benjamin’s »pure language« – utterly bound to semantics – to current large language models that rely on artificial neural-networks and are utterly divorced from semantics? Are the latter influenced in any way by Benjamin’s ideas or concepts stemming from the realms of the humanities and cultural studies? Can the construction of concepts within these two different realms profit from one another?
Martin Warnke, studied in Berlin and Hamburg, received his doctorate in Theoretical Physics in Hamburg in 1984, was head of the Computing and Media Centre of Lüneburg University for many years, habilitated in Computer Science/Digital Media at Leuphana University Lüneburg in 2008 and has been a professor at the Institute for Culture and Aesthetics of Digital Media, of which he was the founding director, at the School of Culture and Society since 2010. He has held visiting professorships at the universities of Basel, Klagenfurt and Vienna.
He works in the field of the history and theory of digital media and the digital documentation of complex artefacts of the visual arts. He is the director of the Institute for Advanced Study "Media Cultures of Computer Simulation" (mecs). He founded the »HyperKult« workshop series, was spokesperson for the "Informatics and Society" section of the Gesellschaft für Informatik e. V. and is chairman of the Springhornhof Arts Club.
mit Anne Dippel, Tiefen der Täuschung: Computersimulation und Wirklichkeitserzeugung, Berlin: Matthes & Seitz 2022.
»Heaven and Earth – Cloud and Territory in the Internet«, in: Human-Centric Computing in a Data-Driven Society: IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, 117–29, Cham: Springer International Publishing 2020.
mit Anne Dippel, Interferences and Events. On Epistemic Shifts in Physics through Computer Simulations, Lüneburg: meson press 2017.
Theorien des Internet, Hamburg: Junius Verlag, 2011.
mit Wolfgang Coy und Georg Christoph Tholen, (Hg.), Hyperkult, Basel: Stroemfeld 1997.
Die Umstellung von Linguistik auf Big Data verspricht den Zugang zum Weltwissen ohne Sprachhürden. Ausgehend von der radikalen Verschiedenheit intellektuell-sinnhafter und maschinell-semantikfreier Sprachübersetzung entwirft der Vortrag ein Forschungsvorhaben, das beide Übersetzungsparadigmen aufeinander bezieht: eine Umschrift von technischen in kulturwissenschaftliche Termini und vice versa als Epistemologie digitaler Medien.