On March 13, 2025, the Department of German at UC Berkeley hosted the inaugural Sunrise Lecture on Media and Technology. The series, designed to foster cross-disciplinary discussions on the shifting dynamics of technological mediation and their broader cultural and intellectual implications, opened with a talk by Dr. Fabian Offert, Assistant Professor of the History and Theory of Digital Humanities at UC Santa Barbara.
In his lecture, Vector Media, Offert examined the ideological foundations of neural networks and their capacity to generate texts and images by learning from vast datasets. He argued that contemporary AI systems operate within a paradigm of geometric interpolation, collapsing media specificity into a universal vector space. This framework enables AI to translate and manipulate different forms of media but also raises questions about bias, representation, and the commodification of cultural objects within AI infrastructures. The talk set a high standard for future installments of the Sunrise Lecture Series.