Digitality as a Triad: From the Love Letter to Emotion AI – Anna Tuschling (Bochum)

Abstract:

The lecture presents various historical and contemporary concepts of digitality that highlight the three characteristics of digital systems: discreteness, arbitrariness, and systematicity. In short, digitality is often understood as a triad that applies not only to modern electronic computers but also to analog sign and writing systems. The lecture examines this form of digital complexity in terms of its epistemic and ontological status on the one hand, and in relation to historical changes in the coding of qualities such as affectivity and emotionality on the other. Although digitality as a triad allows us to draw a line from love letters to emotional AI as historically varying forms of coding, it by no means precludes a critique of AI. Rather, systematically focusing on digital complexity helps us understand how emotions are to be made computable and enables us in the humanities to define more clearly what “emotion” and “affect” mean in the approaches of affective computing and emotion AI.

This event is part of our winter term 2025/26 Lecture Series Digital Complexity: Beyond Human Understanding.

If you would like to attend, please register with events@khk.rwth-aachen.de.