Brett Zehner is a media theorist and artist writing on technologies of resistance. Brett's dissertation project, Machines of Subjection, explores the ubiquitous emergence of predictive media in the form of machine learning. This research aims to conceptualize a new form of political power where individual decision-making is being replaced by the ubiquity of predictive computation. For instance, theories of identity formation and language acquisition must be updated with the emergence of so-called natural language processing and a wide range of real-time perceptive technologies that correspond to statistical aggregation in machine learning.
As a digital language artist Brett is also interested in new aesthetic-political formations that are emerging through artist explorations of artificial intelligence. Over the past five years Brett has troubled the boundaries of collaborative literary practice, conceptual and computational art forms as well as social practices informed by academic and community based research. This experimentation has taken the form of various intermedia projects that test the limits of technological platforms and their relation to economies of personal expression. Brett has shared his research and creative work internationally. He is currently Ph.D. candidate at Brown University in Performance Studies and Computational Media and he holds an MFA from UC San Diego.