About

Structuralism and AI: These pages are were designed to publish the ‘live’ unfolding research process of a project led by Professor Sunil Manghani as part of his Turing Fellowship 2021-23, and in connection to editing a special section, ‘Notes on Structuralism‘ for Theory, Culture & Society.

The project began by tracing aspects of the history of structuralism with a view to consider its significance for our current handling and advancement of AI, data and natural language processing. A reading group → provided the initial means to explore structuralism vis-a-vis AI. At the same time, Manghani committed to an ‘open research’ process, whereby not has there been an attempt to keep all research openly available, this site provides the means to make public the research as a ‘live’, unfolding process. See: index cards → and Projects & Publications →

Key to the project is a re-reading of the influential anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, along with the noted cultural theorist Roland Barthes. Both thinkers, when turning to questions of culture, developed persuasive accounts for identifying specific ‘units of analysis’, which included sophisticated approaches to classification models, systems of thinking and cultural meaning. Currently, when we consider what data is being tracked and how it is being used it is often not particularly rewarding and is rarely accessible and meaningful to the individual’s associated with the data. There remains a space for more careful consideration and cross-disciplinary dialogue.

The key pages of this site comprise of :

An introduction to the project appears in ‘The Art of Artificial Intelligence’, Reaction [print version] (Research & Enterprise Magazine of University of Southampton, Issue 24, Summer 2023).

Prof. Sunil Manghani is Professor of Theory, Practice and Critique at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton (UK), and one of the organisers of the Alan Turing AI & Arts Interest Group. He is Managing Editor of Theory, Culture & Society, and Co-Editor of Journal of Visual Art Practice. His work brings together various aspects of critical theory, visual arts and image studies. His books include Image Studies (2013), Zero Degree Seeing (2019); India’s Biennale Effect (2016) and Farewell to Visual Studies (2015). He curated Barthes/Burgin at the John Hansard Gallery (2016), as well as Building an Art Biennale (2018) and Itinerant Objects (2019) at Tate Exchange, Tate Modern.