c:o/re Junior Fellow 11/24 – 04/25
Daniela Wentz is a media scholar focusing predominantly on the history and theory of digital media and media aesthetics. Her current project examines the interrelation of media and autism from a media-historical and epistemological perspective, taking digital and smart technologies for the diagnosis and therapy of autistic people as a starting point. Prior to her time at the KHK, she was a research associate at Ruhr University Bochum, at the Center for Digital Cultures of Leuphana University Lüneburg, and held different positions at Bauhaus University Weimar, where she also studied and obtained her PhD.
The Apparatus of Autism: A Media Cultural History of Emotional AI and Social Robots
This project explores the intersection of emotional artificial intelligence (AI), social robots, and autism. It investigates the historical development and current applications of technologies designed for diagnosing and treating neurodivergent individuals, particularly those diagnosed with autism. The research traces the genealogy of these technologies and examines their theoretical implications, epistemic conditions, and consequences. This work is situated at the intersection of media history and critical autism studies. It challenges the established practices and cultures surrounding the technologies in question, examining how autism-related knowledge has informed emotional AI development and how these technologies, in turn, have shaped the dominant understanding of autism. During my time at the KHK, I focus on two main hypotheses: 1. The claimed lifelikeness of social robots is related to the assumed machine-likeness of autistic individuals. This parallel between autistic persons and robots appears in both the history of autism and social robotics histories. 2. Social robots for autism are rooted in behaviorism. The project aims to explore the overlooked history connecting these technologies to the behavioral sciences and clinical psychiatry.
By analyzing the entanglement of emotional AI and autism, this research aims to provide insights into the broader field of affect detection technologies and their implications for neurodivergent individuals and society at large.
Publications (selection)
Wentz, Daniela and Laura Hille (Eds.) (2023): Kritik postdigital. Lüneburg: meson.
Wentz, Daniela (2023). “Through the Autism Glass. Behaviourist Interfaces and the (Inter)action Order”. In: Interface Critique 4. DOI: 10.11588/IC.2023.4.93412
Wentz, Daniela (2022). “Tales from the Loop. Autismustechnologien und Subjektivierung.“ In: Feministische Studien 2, issue “Subjektivierungsweisen des Digitalen“, pp. 260-275, DOI: 10.1515/fs-2022-0038
Wentz, Daniela (2021). “Nudged to normal. Images, Behaviour and the Autism Surveillance Complex.” In: Digital Culture and Society 02, issue “Networked Images in Surveillance Capitalism”, pp. 265-286, DOI: 10.14361/dcs-2021-070213
