Renée Ridgway, Digital Cultures Fellow

Renée Ridgway is a researcher based in Amsterdam, NL and Copenhagen, DK. She studied at the Rhode Island School of Design (BFA)/Brown University and Piet Zwart Institute/ Plymouth University (MA) and Copenhagen Business School in their Management, Philosophy and Politics department (PhD). During her PhD she was also a research associate at Leuphana University’s Digital Cultures Research Lab (DCRL) (2014-2017) and a fellow at CAIS (Center for Advanced Internet Studies) in Bochum, DE (2018, 2019). Inputs to academic publications include a PhD monograph, Re:search – the Personalised Subject vs. the Anonymous User (2021), a chapter Search engines as a mediating technology of organization in the Oxford Handbook: Media, Technology and Organization Studies (2019), an entry on Search Engines in SAGE: Encyclopedia of the Internet (2018) and Against a Personalisation of the Self in Ephemera, Vol.17 #2 (2017), an article that compares two methods of searching online (Google vs. Tor).

Project at KU CAS:
Conversational agents as the future of search: exploring dialogical care through the digital

Situated at the interstices of critical digital methods, media theory and Feminist STS studies, What is the Art in Artificial Intelligence? Exploring dialogical care through chatbots and users will investigate chatbots that apply artificial intelligence (AI) on mobile devices in order to supply answers. The research will examine exchanges between chatbots and users through a feminist lens of care in order to discover how these interpellative technologies affect human behaviour when searching for information and as algorithmic responses. How do conversational agents ‘learn’? Which AI training models are used? In which ways can these entangled interactions be visualised and understood? What is the Art in Artificial Intelligence?

An auto-ethnography will explore various text-based chatbots as interlocutors that provide therapy, capturing data by screenshotting the results. Registering the inputs/outputs (I/O) and monitoring ‘intra-actions’ (Barad 2007) as ‘situated knowledge’ (Haraway 1988), this self-designed methodology will enable understanding of how chatbots interact and learn, along with some of their effects.. Along with studying the complex usages of conversational agents, from chatbot assistive tasking to answering queries as search engines, this interdisciplinary methodology will contribute to advancing ‘dialogical cultures’ within the entanglement of posthumanist agencies (Hayles 1999) and computational machines.