About this Episode

This episode explores how the character adopted during a process of research or writing unconsciously influences the kind of knowledge that that process can produce. The video asks: Who is really doing the writing in academic contexts? And how does the character of scholarly rigour sometimes produce unintended outcomes?

This chapter continues the exploration of a “politics of inner self,” highlighting the momentum and blind spots that even supposedly neutral character frames can carry. Performance, art, authorship and critique intersect here in a candid analysis of the forces shaping knowledge production.

About this Series

Scripting for Agency: An Artistic Enquiry into Selfhood, Character and Agency in the Age of AI is a video lecture series based on Dr Katarina Ranković’s practice-based PhD in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. Combining philosophy, performance, creative writing, and AI theory, the series explores how our understanding of the self shapes our personal lives, our politics, and our relationship to intelligent technologies.

Links

Series Playlist: https://bit.ly/sfa-series

PhD thesis (PDF format): https://bit.ly/sfa-pdf

Thesis artworks: https://bit.ly/sfa-art

References

- Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

- Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin, 1990.

- Hayles, N. Katherine. My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

- Ranković, Katarina. “The Shape of a Thinking Thing.” In Goldsmiths PhD Art Publication, edited by Marie-Alix Isdahl, Dani Smith and Nina Wakeford. Independently published in an edition of 500, 2021.

- Samanani, Farhan. How to Live with Each Other: An Anthropologist’s Notes on Sharing a Divided World. London: Profile Books, 2022.

- Wolfram, Stephen. A New Kind of Science. Champaign, IL: Wolfram Media, 2002.