2 and 3 July 2025, the AI Forensics team held a public symposium:

Interpreting intelligent machines?

What does it mean to interpret machines? What is language to a computer? What is the epistemology determining artificial intelligence? Is there an act of interpretation common to traditional hermeneutics and the nascent attempts to reverse engineer neural algorithms? According to which historical trajectories do social relations, processes of abstraction, definitions of intelligence, and predictive models configure one another? What epistemic horizons thereby impose themselves on us, and what modes of knowing could we mobilise in renewal?

Logistical information

The symposium took place over two days—Wed., 2 July & Thu., 3 July—at Trust in Berlin. It featured a mix of lectures, panel discussions, as well as more participatory formats.

  • The symposium was livestreamed.
  • Selected recordings & materials to be made available.
  • Scheduling changes: the programme on the current page reflects the final running order.
  • You can request reminders and updates per email through this form. Personal data deleted.
  • Add the symposium to your calendar: Day 1 Day 2
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Event poster, 16:9
Project symposium

Interpreting intelligent machines pt. 1

Trust, Kluckstraße 25, 10785 Berlin

project retrospective / transformers—models of? / cartography / labour / knowledges and practices of interpretability

  • Arrival
    10:00
    Break
  • Introduction
    10:20
    What is AI Forensics? A retrospective introduction

    Lead PI Matteo Pasquinelli (HfG Karlsruhe/U Venice) opens the symposium: Why forensics?—The search for a methodology commensurate to the societal transformations wrought by AI. Exploding (the view of the) AI production pipeline. Characterising the project.

    Discussion
    talk, roundtable
  • Cartography of transformer hegemony
    11:15

    Revisiting milestones in the transformers’ ascent, these contributions offer critical reappraisals that complicate the eponymous catchphrase of attention being all you need. They put forth pieces of an ‘alternative chronology’ of these models.

    The Cost of Language. Tokenization as a Metric of Labour.

    Paolo Caffoni (HfG Karlsruhe) investigates machine translation, the birthplace of the transformer’s ascent

    Discussion
    Feminist methods for XAI and cartography as method

    Goda Klumbytė (U Kassel) introduces cartography as a method Cartography—language models, labour, and the social

    Discussion
    Panel
  • Lunch
    13:15
    Break
  • Vector epistemology
    15:00

    The techniques and mechanisms underlying the shape of AI—and their form(s) of interpretation.

    Models of vision or visual culture?

    Leonardo Impett (U Cambridge/B Hertziana) presents work on OpenAI’s multimodal CLIP and previews Vector Media (forthcoming 2026, meson press), coauthored with Fabian Offert (UCSB)

    Beyond SAEs for Mechanistic Interpretability

    Patrick Leask (Durham U) contextualises the sparse autoencoder approach within the wider frame of mechanistic interpretability, discussing also the significance recent findings (2025)

    Discussion

    What kinds of knowledge and practice is interpreting AI?

    Panel
  • Informal
    17:00
    Break
Project symposium

Interpreting intelligent machines? pt. 2

Trust, Kluckstraße 25, 10785 Berlin

historical epistemology / statistics / pedagogy / arts

  • Arrival
    11:00
    Break
  • Statistical normativities
    11:15
    Calculating health

    Giulia Gandolfi (HfG Karlsruhe) on the historical epistemology of correlational knowledge in medicine

    AI interpretability and accountability in the humanitarian sector

    Arif Kornweitz (HfG Karlsruhe) presents his PhD project—from the inception of prediction in political philosophy to the “hard problem of conflict prediction”

    Discussion
    panel
  • Lunch
    13:15
    Break
  • Learning otherwise
    15:00
    Worlding beyond benchmarking

    Eleanor Dare (U Cambridge) discusses worlding and arts-based research in the context of a series of pedagogical workshops on AI held in Cambridge, England

    Affective & embodied knowledge in/for XAI

    Goda Klumbytė (U Kassel) on the need for new modes of knowing, and reporting from the Beyond Explainability workshop

    Discussion
    panel
  • Announcements: Outputs (forthcoming)
    16:45
    Two books, a workshop, and an anthology of boundary concepts—what the remainder of the project has in store
    predictions

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