I am a philosopher of media and technology, focusing on the intersections of body, politics, and technology. Currently an Acting Professor at the Ruhr Universität Bochum at the Department of Media Studies, I am also an associate researcher at KWI (Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut, Essen, Germany) and SFB Virtuelle Lebenswelten (Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany).

My current research examines the ways in which contemporary algorithmic rationality shapes knowledge, subjectivity, and sociality. Whereas earlier forms of algorithmic rationality sought to eliminate human judgment by reducing interpretation and decision to computation and by presenting machine outputs as neutral, model training in the age of generative AI functions as a normativizing process. I analyze how generative AI, as a socio-technical system, produces new forms of power and subjectivity and regulates machine and human behavior through implicit and explicit norms. By unilaterally deciding on seemingly self-evident values and bypassing democratic deliberation, I contend that Big Tech claims “interpretative sovereignty” (Deutungshoheit) and authority over knowledge and normativity.

My work has appeared in AI & Society, Philosophy & Technology, Social Text, Big Data & Society, Appareil, and Revue des sciences humaines.

My first book, Theorie des graphischen Feldes, was published by Diaphanes in 2020. My second book project, Toward a Hauntology of Touch, takes as a starting point what Jean-Luc Nancy calls the “Law of Touch” as the law of sociality. Toward a Hauntology of Touch analyzes touch as a set of culture-technical operations that shape the space between bodies; operations by which bodies become subjects for one another, form communities, and enter into the political realm. By critically discussing a selection of concepts fundamental to modern and contemporary Western political philosophy in terms of touching operations, the book casts a new light on issues pertaining to appropriation, (self-)possession, self-determination, affectability, dispossession, and exclusion. It advances haunting as a form of touch that, invisibly yet significantly, shifts boundaries and borders. A haunting touch toward which the book is oriented designates a form of ethics and politics that would acknowledge the necessity for self-determination while simultaneously unsettling identity and self-possession.