Friday, 12 June 2026, 09:30–14.00
Center for Digital Narrative, LG1 lounge (Langes gate 1-3), University of Bergen
Welcome to a half-day seminar discussing new practices and phenomena emerging from the study of algorithms and artificial intelligence in culture and society.
The seminar will include talks from two visiting scholars doing research on cutting-edge phenomena in digital culture – algomaxxing and AI influencers – followed by a lunch discussion in which participants can receive and offer feedback on their own development of concepts and methods for the study of similar topics.
Lunch is free for anyone who signs up to the seminar, please accept this calendar invitation or contact one of the organizers to be included in the lunch order.
PROGRAMME:
09:30: Welcome & Introduction from KIME
09:45: Talk by Idil Galip (external link): Algomaxxing: Notes on cultural production after the algorithm
10:45: Coffee break
11:00: Talk by Alexandra Deem (external link): Automating authenticity: The rise of AI influencers
12:00: Lunch & discussion with the speakers: “Developing concepts and methods for the study of AI cultures”
Idil Galip – Algomaxxing: Notes on cultural production after the algorithm
Increasingly, cultural producers — across new media, music, film, art, literature, and fashion — forge anticipatory and recursive (Beer 2022) relations with social media algorithms. “Influencer creep” (Bishop 2025) has made its way into most kinds of creative work, where optimising algorithmic discoverability is now also part of the job. In digital folklore, “The Algorithm” appears as a sentient entity (Lupinacci 2024), a kind of techno-cultural gatekeeping deity (Galip 2023) that, with the right inputs, can be prompted, appeased (Glatt 2022), or managed (Bishop 2019). Everyday cultural production thus becomes oriented toward algorithmic optimisation — algomaxxing — an algorithmically mediated set of value relations that manifests as both a cynical disposition and a distinctive aesthetic register of (too) late capitalism (Kornbluh 2024). From clipfarming and memecoins to AI slop and ragebait, algomaxxing saturates everyday digital culture. In this talk, I turn to three research cases from the Anglophone web to show how.
İdil Galip is a writer and researcher whose work investigates the meme as the foundational infrastructure of contemporary culture and politics. She examines how memetic media form new publics, dictate the rhythms of attention, and act as an ideological battleground. Her writing, spanning academic journals, arts publications, and experimental zines, operates within and against traditional knowledge economies. She founded the Meme Studies Research Network in 2020 and currently lectures at the University of Amsterdam. She has a PhD in sociology from the University of Edinburgh.
Alexandra Deem – Automating authenticity: The rise of AI influencers
The proliferation of AI influencers on social media unsettles one of the core organizing logics of the Web 2.0 era: authenticity. Since the early 2000s, authenticity has been a key currency of the creator economy whereby the affective labor, self-expression, and visibility of content creators and influencers is leveraged in service of brand campaigns and digital marketing. Encompassing AI-generated doubles of human creators, entirely fictional avatars, and various shades of gray in between, AI influencers both deepen and refigure the extractive function of authenticity discourse on social media platforms, which have increasingly been oriented less around sociality and more around the consumption of content at scale. The MSCA project AI INFLUENCE investigates the implications of these shifts through ethnographic research among those creating and deploying AI influencers, primarily on Instagram and TikTok. This presentation shares findings from the ongoing research and positions AI influencers as outcomes of “post-authentic storytelling,” forms of hybrid human-AI narrative production in which the perception of authenticity is still paramount but is tied less to facticity or autobiographical referentiality than affective plausibility, vibe, and resonance. It emphasizes the gendered implications of such storytelling, from the performance of feminized labor and entrenchment of dominant beauty norms to distinctly gendered monetization strategies.
Alexandra Deem is a Marie-Sklodowska Curie postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. She works between the fields of digital anthropology and feminist cultural studies. Her current project investigates the impact of generative AI on the creator economy through ethnographic research among those creating and deploying AI influencers on social media. She recently published a book with Routledge titled The Tradwife Revolution: An Ethnography of Trad Futurism on Social Media.
Lunch discussion (12:00-14:00): “Developing concepts and methods for the study of AI cultures”
After the two talks, registered participants are invited to stay for lunch and tasked to bring one single concept or method they are interested in exploring for the study of AI, algorithms or digital culture, which we will discuss over a round of short discussions with the two speakers and other participants.
The seminar is hosted by the ALGOFOLK (Algorithmic folklore: The mutual shaping of vernacular creativity and automation) project at the Center for Digital Narrative, and the Imagine (Citizen perceptions of AI in everyday media life) project at the Department of Information Science and Media Studies. Our collaboration is funded by a grant from UiB’s strategy for the humanities, on the topic of authenticity and digital media in an age of AI (KIME – Kunstig intelligens og autentisk medieinnhold).