I’m a researcher in digital humanities and visual artificial intelligence.

Hi, I’m Fabian.

About

I am Assistant Professor in History and Theory of Digital Humanities at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I am also principal investigator of the international research project “AI Forensics” (2022-25), funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. My research and teaching focuses on the digital/computational humanities, with a special interest in the epistemology and aesthetics of computer vision and artificial intelligence.

Before joining the faculty at UCSB, I was affiliated with the DFG SPP “The Digital Image”, and the Critical Artificial Intelligence Group (KIM) at Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design. Previously, I worked for a number of German cultural institutions like ZKM Karlsruhe, Ruhrtriennale Festival of the Arts, and Goethe-Institut New York.

The picture above is “a painting of a quantum computer by Albert Bierstadt”, generated by a machine learning system (Midjourney).

News

Check out this interview with my colleague Rita Raley and I where we argue that, in the age of highly idiosyncratic “snapshots”, we need to re-align our methodology with the material reality of machine learning. In another interview with the UCSB Current I speak about the limits of large language models. I am also quoted in this Time / Bloomberg piece on the recent Google Gemini situation.