https://mediated.space Zachary Kaiser Thu, 22 Oct 2026 00:04:29 +0000 https://mediated.space en https://mediated.space/Professional-Design-Work-1 Tue, 24 Dec 2024 02:36:42 +0000 Zachary Kaiser https://mediated.space/Professional-Design-Work-1 /PROFESSIONAL DESIGN WORK https://mediated.space/Teaching-5 Mon, 23 Dec 2024 21:03:58 +0000 Zachary Kaiser https://mediated.space/Teaching-5 /TEACHING https://mediated.space/Research-Creative-Practice Mon, 23 Dec 2024 20:24:29 +0000 Zachary Kaiser https://mediated.space/Research-Creative-Practice /RESEARCH &amp; CREATIVE PRACTICE https://mediated.space/Information Mon, 23 Dec 2024 20:13:14 +0000 Zachary Kaiser https://mediated.space/Information We design the world and the world designs us back. —Arturo Escobar ︎︎︎ My book—Interfaces and Us ︎︎︎&nbsp;Tech Won’t Save Us Feature ︎︎︎&nbsp;Madison Museum of Contemporary Art Artist Lecture︎︎︎ Soundcloud Zachary Kaiser (he/him) is an educator, writer, designer, artist, union organizer, DJ, and music producer. He is currently Associate Professor of Graphic Design and Experience Architecture in the Department of Art, Art History, and Design at Michigan State University. He is also a member of the Organizing Committee for the MSU Union of Tenure System Faculty and has been working on the union effort since 2020. Zach’s research and creative practice address the politics of technology as enacted through the interfaces to digital products and services. He is the author of Interfaces and Us: User Experience Design and the Making of the Computable Subject (Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2023), an interdisciplinary artist-scholar monograph that examines the role of UX design in legitimizing and circulating the dangerous idea of humans as computers. He also regularly exhibits his creative practice nationally and internationally, including, most recently, a commissioned work about Artificial Intelligence, titled Blessed is The Machine, for the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (Madison, WI). Zach is also the former Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of Art, Art History, and Design’s interdisciplinary MFA program. He also is the former chair of the CAA Committee on Design, and the former secretary of the Design Studies Forum. https://mediated.space/University-Infrastructure-and-as-Fiction Thu, 22 Oct 2026 00:04:29 +0000 Zachary Kaiser https://mediated.space/University-Infrastructure-and-as-Fiction “University Infrastructure and/as Fiction: The Fairy Tale of Generative AI in Higher Education and the Stories that Can Haunt Its Dominance” Journal article(2026, forthcoming) - and -“Fairy Tales and Ghost Stories: Higher Education, Artificial Intelligence, and Alternative Sociotechnical Configurations”&nbsp; Presentation delivered at the Institute of Philosophy at the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague (July 2025) <img width="4000" height="2250" width_o="4000" height_o="2250" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/fdffe20d1f40646c9f25a1cee965edc5ff68ef7fb4589c2b6a41d8a1a6a408fc/fuck-your-use-case-2.jpg" data-mid="253576185" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/fdffe20d1f40646c9f25a1cee965edc5ff68ef7fb4589c2b6a41d8a1a6a408fc/fuck-your-use-case-2.jpg" /> In the summer of 2025, I had the tremendous opportunity to deliver a seminar at the Institute of Philosophy at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. It was an honor and recognition of the work I’ve done at the intersection of Science and Technology Studies, Political Economy, and Critical University Studies. Below, you can watch a recording of the talk with which I began the seminar, titled “Fairy Tales and Ghost Stories: Higher Education, Artificial Intelligence, and Alternative Sociotechnical Configurations.”&nbsp;&nbsp; This talk also served as the springboard for a forthcoming (as of Oct. 2026) journal article, titled, “University Infrastructure and/as Fiction: The Fairy Tale of Generative AI in Higher Education and the Stories that Can Haunt Its Dominance” (pre-print available here). The abstract is as follows:&nbsp;Just as the technologies deployed within a university constitute modes of governance, the method by which a university is governed is also a technology. Technologies under capitalism—both techniques of governance as well as tools used by the governed—serve to augment surplus value for the capitalist class, and any benefit to the working class is part of the engineering of consent for their domination. But capitalist hegemony also exerts its force through the circulation of fictions—fairy tales that inspire awe and wonder—about technological progress and economic growth. These fictions structure material reality, reifying today’s neoliberal-authoritarian governmentality, circumscribing the parameters of political possibility, and denying to the working class that things could be otherwise. The university is just as much subject to these conditions as any other industry. Indeed, the utility of generative artificial intelligence for universities under capitalism appears as the result of such fairy tales. The fairy tale of genAI’s utility for higher education—as evidenced through press releases and policy documents—is deeply pernicious and ignores the evidence of the deleterious nature of genAI for people and planet alike. To delegitimize this fairy tale and its material impacts, I tell what I call “ghost stories,” which haunt the fairy tales of economic expansion and technological progress that hold our collective imagination hostage. These ghost stories—of lost futures and small instances of autonomous communal self-determination and technological conviviality—range from the development of a student information platform at a major research university in the 1990s to democratic technological innovation in Rojava. Such stories, when taken together, can both destabilize capital’s structuring fictions and their role in higher education while producing new structuring narratives, allowing us to begin to, as J.K. Gibson-Graham write, “excavate the possible.” https://mediated.space/LORETA Wed, 21 Oct 2026 23:25:31 +0000 Zachary Kaiser https://mediated.space/LORETA LORETA (2019, 2026 + ongoing) Collaboration with Marisa Brandt Commissioned film and workshop with the MSU Museum and the MSU Museum CoLaB Studio (Oct., 2026) <img width="1921" height="1080" width_o="1921" height_o="1080" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/abd4eea3497e078751922644c1106914b0dc82aa86bc97b745e5b2b6f76cd46f/Artboard-1-copy-2.png" data-mid="253574983" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/abd4eea3497e078751922644c1106914b0dc82aa86bc97b745e5b2b6f76cd46f/Artboard-1-copy-2.png" /> A collaborative speculative fiction about the future of the university, LORETA—which stands for Learning Operational Restructuring in Education Technology Administrator—tells the story of a university department beleaguered by austerity measures, budget cuts, and massive administrative bloat.The primary vector of dissemination for this fiction is a short film that is what we call a “desktop fiction,” meaning that the entirty of the film takes place in the destkop environments of individuals working in the aforementioned fictional university department. In the film, the faculty in this department are introduced to a computational system that is ostensibly intended to help them make their course scheduling more efficient, but, instead, the system, couched in the language of the latest “AI”, actually facilitates democratic deliberation and collective decision-making, eventually leading the faculty to understand the power of democratic communal self-determination. LORETA is inspired by worker occupations of factories and self-managed cooperatives, as well as other strongly democratic social movements like the Zapatistas. It also draws on contemporary research in critical university studies that has demonstrated the parasitic nature of university executive management. LORETA’s “AI” doesn’t seek to replace faculty or TA positions with slopified facsimiles. Rather, it seeks to help faculty and staff take over the entire university, abolishing administration and allowing those who know the university best to run it. But the film ends before such action takes place—it merely alludes to the possibility that the “AI” is a “trojan horse” of sorts. It requires the viewer to imagine what transpires after the interactions featured in the film. When we present LORETA to audiences, my collaborator, Marisa Brandt, and I screen a short film about LORETA, a film which takes place entirely in the desktop environments of the faculty in a fictional university department. And after the screening, we run a workshop to help people try to reconsider what they believe the future of higher education is. We try to help them examine why they might be told the future of higher education is one thing, when, in fact, it could be something entirely different, but the antidemoractic nature of university governance paired with the authoritarian nature of technological innovation makes it so difficult to see more just, equitable, and egalitarian alternatives. <img width="1264" height="760" width_o="1264" height_o="760" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/fc368d01b627405367089e2fee6c2e7b10f4e9591920f4b3dedd01aa5d30956b/loreta-screencap-1-copy.jpg" data-mid="253575487" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/fc368d01b627405367089e2fee6c2e7b10f4e9591920f4b3dedd01aa5d30956b/loreta-screencap-1-copy.jpg" /> <img width="2880" height="1800" width_o="2880" height_o="1800" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/97b230051164b0066a2c8aa09741b29b5a9333e1eeaf6685be58acc3b1480c14/Screenshot-2026-09-10-at-9.44.03AM.png" data-mid="253574986" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/97b230051164b0066a2c8aa09741b29b5a9333e1eeaf6685be58acc3b1480c14/Screenshot-2026-09-10-at-9.44.03AM.png" /> <img width="4000" height="2250" width_o="4000" height_o="2250" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3dd8cc2ea9fdb909734d2099028a20f4d1918c22960efdd4daab497fa15c1a60/other-images-32.jpg" data-mid="253574988" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3dd8cc2ea9fdb909734d2099028a20f4d1918c22960efdd4daab497fa15c1a60/other-images-32.jpg" /> https://mediated.space/Interfaces-and-Us Thu, 02 Jan 2025 17:29:47 +0000 Zachary Kaiser https://mediated.space/Interfaces-and-Us /RESEARCH &amp; CREATIVE PRACTICE Interfaces and Us: User Experience Design and the Making of the Computable Subject (2023) Hybrid Artist-Scholar Monograph Published by Bloomsbury Visual Arts (purchase at the link above) <img width="2400" height="2000" width_o="2400" height_o="2000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/da59cf62d6309685f009a50022732da087ea1ca3446c63d4f69c03665a991960/IMG_1389-copy.jpg" data-mid="224285459" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/da59cf62d6309685f009a50022732da087ea1ca3446c63d4f69c03665a991960/IMG_1389-copy.jpg" /> I am extremely grateful to the folks at Bloomsbury for taking a chance on this book. And I am very proud of how it turned out. This book began in 2017, when I attended the Design Incubation Writing Fellowship in New York. Nearly four years after that, I finally got a contract, and, eventually, in February of 2023, it was published. In glorious full-color no less (thanks to a grant from my institution and to Bloomsbury’s Design publisher and team for making it happen). I think the book is a good read and will remain relevant at least for a little while longer. Go get yourself a copy.&nbsp; About the book, Tim Maughan, writer, tech critic, and author of Infinite Detail along with many other brilliant stories, writes: “Interfaces and Us dares to peel back the plastic film protecting interface design to reveal how it is both shapes and is shaped by everything from convenience and consumerism to market forces and economic inequality. While finally putting to rest the idea that design is inherently neutral, it's an indispensable guide to the politics of how we interface not just with the digital systems around us, but with late capitalism itself.” Here’s the back cover text and the Table of Contents, which, together, I think to do a decent job of capturing the vibe:&nbsp; We’re all familiar with smart TVs making suggestions on our future watching, real-world exercise data being transferred to our workout apps, and turning up our home heating before we start our commute, but how does this world of technological interfaces affect our actions and perceptions of self? When society relies on computer models and their interfaces to explain and predict everything from love to geopolitical conflicts, our own behavior and choices are artificially changed... In this book, Zachary Kaiser describes and details the role of user-experience design in the adoption of the “computable subjectivity,” where an individual believes that they are both computing—where they process information like a computer—and computable, meaning that they can be entirely understood by computers. He explores the characteristics that underpin the development and proliferation of this particular subjectivity, including the ideological commitment to the equivalence of “data” and “world,” and the aspiration to both be legible to, and predictable by, computers. He also explores the harmful social consequences of this subjectivity and outlines how design practice and education can respond. Table of Contents AcknowledgementsIntroduction1. Historical and Conceptual Roots of the Computable SubjectivityIntroduction: Disrupting the Insurance Industry-“Convenience” and “Freedom”Producing and Looping, or, Biopolitics and BiopowerThe Value of ConvenienceFreedom and Countercultural TechnocracyThe Selfish System: Cybernetics and Rational Choice TheoryMarkets as Information Processors: Cybernetics and EconomicsThe Neoliberal GovernmentalityConclusion: Foundations and Ramifications2. Data=WorldIntroduction: Can You “See” Your Dream Data?Data and World: An Origin StoryComputational Instrumentation: Templates and TranslationsHow Computational Instruments DisappearConclusion: The Great Inversion, or, Operationalism's Legacy3. Prediction and the Stabilization of IdentityIntroduction: Whisper and the Scrambling of Algorithmic AnticipationThe Digital Production of Fragmentation and AlienationOntological Insecurity: One Consequence of Fragmentation and AlienationThe Digital Mirror Self: Soothing Ontological Insecurity with ComputationThe Role of UX in Producing, then Soothing, Ontological InsecurityConsequences: Soft Biopower and the Proscription of PotentialConclusion: Becoming Cyborgs4. The Moral Imperative of Normality through Computational OptimizationIntroduction: The Optimized Professor and the Pressures of OptimizationMeasurement, Normativity, and Morality: Two Origin StoriesThe Moral Imperative of Self-Optimizing Technologies: The Case of the Amazon HaloConsequences: Anxiety, Superfluity, and the Instrumentalization of Interpersonal InteractionConclusion: Fighting for Servitude as if it Were Salvation5. The Questions of Political Economy and the Role of Design EducationIntroductionQuestion 1: The Issue of Political Economy and Chile's Socialist CyberneticsQuestion 2: The Role of Design Education in Resisting the “Reality” of the Computable Subjectivity and the Reformist ApproachConclusion: Returning to Political Economy and the Limits of the Reformist Approach to Design EducationConclusion: Towards a Luddite Design EducationThe Politics of UX and the Computable Subject as the Ideal Political SubjectThe Lingering Problem: The Computable Subjectivity and Political EconomyThe Revolutionary Approach: Luddite Design EducationA Provisional Program of Luddite Design EducationA Luddite Design Education, Now <img width="2400" height="2000" width_o="2400" height_o="2000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6e8443b13cbc6e3549520f34b2440dc4cf3585857310ea569a79f53cf5de70f8/IMG_1388-copy.jpg" data-mid="224285457" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6e8443b13cbc6e3549520f34b2440dc4cf3585857310ea569a79f53cf5de70f8/IMG_1388-copy.jpg" /> https://mediated.space/Blessed-is-the-Machine Tue, 31 Dec 2024 23:13:51 +0000 Zachary Kaiser https://mediated.space/Blessed-is-the-Machine /RESEARCH &amp; CREATIVE PRACTICE Blessed is the Machine (2023-2024) Collaboration with Gabi Schaffzin as Culture Industry [dot] Club Commissioned Installation for the imaginary i exhibition at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Madison, WI <img width="3811" height="2541" width_o="3811" height_o="2541" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6217fbb313af1cdeebe9c39c5332387f0e03c23db6ee37769e54c9ce56a5ffc6/DSC07948.jpg" data-mid="224001210" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6217fbb313af1cdeebe9c39c5332387f0e03c23db6ee37769e54c9ce56a5ffc6/DSC07948.jpg" /> Blessed Is The Machine is our (myself and Gabi Schaffzin) first major museum commission. To capture the scope, detail, and historical research for the project, we created a site specifically for the piece, so please do visit that if you are curious to learn more. The wall text, written in collaboration with the inimitable Chrstina Brungardt, who was the curator of the exhibition and director of the Museum at the time, does a good job of briefly explaining the gist of the project (I do encourage you to visit the project’s website to learn more, though—I promise it’ll be fun):In 1909, E.M. Forster, the famed British author, wrote the only piece of science-fiction he would ever write—a novella titled The Machine Stops. Forster’s story anticipated most of the technological underpinnings of our society today—the Internet, telepresence (e.g., Zoom or FaceTime), virtual reality, augmented reality, and streaming music and video. But far from a technological utopia, Forster’s story was a warning. Citizens of this new state see themselves as members of a technologically advanced society; instead, they are living in a dystopian world. Blessed is the Machine by Culture Industry [dot] Club is an interactive installation that examines our relationship to artificial intelligence. Within the gallery, visitors are presented with the avatar of an always-listening artificial intelligence. By conversing with the AI, it infers the content, emotion, and expression of the visitor before sending this new data through a product recommendation algorithm. The process is visualized in the space through an instantaneous display of shifting information. The real-time data harvesting is manifested in a cacophony of screens flashing code, flip boards rattling out information, and printers spitting out a record into a growing pile of paper. Meanwhile, the avatar talks to the viewer about the social and political system that produces a reliance on—and the strange consequences that accompany—the seeming convenience of AI-powered services. Visitors can, nonetheless, take home a receipt that includes a personalized product recommendation, complete with a convenient QR code. Our artist lecture (February 2024), titled, “Art, Computing, and AI: How the Proverbial Sausage Is Made and Why You Should Worry about the Proverbial Sausage Making Process,” was an honor and a blast to deliver. In watching it, you’ll get a flavor for what our installation was like, as well as the underlying ideas behind the project. As a bonus, you’ll also get to hear me rant about the difference between socialism and state capitalism.&nbsp; <img width="3854" height="2480" width_o="3854" height_o="2480" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/29a7e069881c0e28da33ec6e3c22056bd4d877f65209349fa69ea336592d52a9/DSC07958.jpg" data-mid="224001221" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/29a7e069881c0e28da33ec6e3c22056bd4d877f65209349fa69ea336592d52a9/DSC07958.jpg" /> <img width="3840" height="2160" width_o="3840" height_o="2160" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b7c1862d281ff3065715731f05dfceee26dd48b076fe8274b936308fd614e143/blessed-image-top-level-01.jpg" data-mid="224001222" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b7c1862d281ff3065715731f05dfceee26dd48b076fe8274b936308fd614e143/blessed-image-top-level-01.jpg" /> https://mediated.space/DJ-Set-for-Science-Gallery-Detroit Fri, 27 Dec 2024 13:49:59 +0000 Zachary Kaiser https://mediated.space/DJ-Set-for-Science-Gallery-Detroit /RESEARCH &amp; CREATIVE PRACTICE In the Spring of 2021, as the COVID pandemic ravaged the world and the capitalist class remained hellbent on never letting a good crisis go to waste, I was invited by Science Gallery Detroit to take part in their “virtual performance” series—a set of musical performances and DJ sets that were recorded and streamed for Science Gallery’s audiences who would have otherwise attend their programs in person (the recordings were done safely with plenty of social distancing). This invitation was one of my happiest professional honors, because the other performers in this series were Shigeto and members of Underground Resistance, the founders of Detroit Techno. Below is the video of my performance. Enjoy.&nbsp; https://mediated.space/Design-Within-and-For-Post-Scarcity Wed, 15 Dec 2021 17:28:34 +0000 Zachary Kaiser https://mediated.space/Design-Within-and-For-Post-Scarcity /RESEARCH &amp; CREATIVE PRACTICE Design within and for “post-scarcity”: opening lecture for MOTYF 2021 workshop, April 2021. Read the whole lecture here. Below is the abstract: The Covid-19 pandemic and accelerating climate change have laid bare the horrifying nature of global capitalism. We have no choice but to imagine different socio-political-technical configurations — a massively complex endeavour. Many theorists who imagine a post-scarcity future rely on a false idea about the power of automation, the prominence of which belies other economic shifts. If “abundance is not a technological threshold to be crossed,” however, but instead a “social relationship,” what does a post-scarcity society actually look like? This workshop — a theory-driven seminar-studio hybrid — asks what a post-capitalist, post-scarcity society might look like, and how design is done in such a society. It will critically engage with ideas about automation and ask what design means when basic human needs are met, economic growth is no longer an imperative, and necessary labor is shared and not relegated to certain classes of society. <img width="1920" height="1080" width_o="1920" height_o="1080" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c646801f035c3ff2d845ecdbf36dbc17919f446a7fee1edfc67399777b564da5/medium_image.jpg" data-mid="127488631" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c646801f035c3ff2d845ecdbf36dbc17919f446a7fee1edfc67399777b564da5/medium_image.jpg" />