How the Machine Learned to Think
June 30 | 19:00
From Workshop to Library
A Lecture by Taguhi Torosyan
Letters and Numbers
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  • Taguhi Torosyan
    Taguhi Torosyan is a curator, artist, and researcher based in Yerevan, and Founder and Artistic Director of Ars Techne. Her work spans installations, photography, and community-driven research, engaging with infrastructures, memory, and collective care, and has been presented internationally across exhibitions, publications, and research platforms.
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From Workshop to Library: How the Machine Learned to Think
A Lecture by Taguhi Torosyan
Long before silicon, one question was already being rehearsed in workshops, libraries, and novels: can a made thing think, feel, answer — even appear alive?

This lecture treats that question as the long prehistory of both media art and artificial intelligence, moving from the medieval legends of speaking brass heads attributed to Albertus Magnus and Roger Bacon, through Vaucanson's Digesting Duck and the punched cards of the Jacquard loom, into the literary machines of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's Tomorrow's Eve — the novel that gave us the word android — and finally to Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine.

Read together, these episodes show that media art did not begin with the computer but grew out of a much older imagination in which automata, artificial bodies, and speculative machines were instruments for thinking about cognition, gender, labor, and language — making media art a long-standing form of knowledge production that has always used machines, real and imagined, to ask what it means to think, to speak, and to be alive.
18:30 — Doors open

19:00 — Event starts

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Location: Letters and Numbers
Date: June 30
Language: Armenian

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Participation: free with registration
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