Off Center

Off Center, a Podcast from the Center For Digital Narrative

Off Center is a podcast series from the Center for Digital Narrative, a Norwegian Center of Research Excellence at the University of Bergen, Norway. In each episode, host Scott Rettberg and a guest delve into a topic revolving around digital storytelling and its effect on contemporary culture. The series covers academic research on digital narratives in electronic literature, computer games, social media, computational narrative systems, AI, XR and more in an enjoyable and understandable way.

  1. 2d ago

    Episode 47: Minor Tech - Alternative AI Platforms with Christian Ulrik Andersen

    Host Scott Rettberg speaks with Aarhus University Associate Professor Christian Ulrik Andersen about autonomous AI imaging and his co-authored book, Objects of Interest and Necessity. They examine how fringe user communities, micro-models, and platforms like Civitai, AI Horde, and Hugging Face challenge big-tech dominance in generative AI. The conversation also delves into "minor tech" strategies, alternative infrastructures, and the role of digital art in rethinking our political and cultural relationship to technology. References Andersen, C. U., & Cox, G. (2017). The Metainterface: The Art ofPlatforms Cities and Clouds. MIT Press. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262038133/the-metainterface/ Andersen,C. U., Milev, N., & Velasco, P. (2024). Objects of Interest and Necessity:A Tour Guide to Autonomous AI Imaging. Digital Aesthetics Research Center /Centre for Advanced Visualization and Interaction (CAVI). https://darc.au.dk/publications/darc-books Deleuze,G., & Guattari, F. (1986). Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (D. Polan, Trans.).University of Minnesota Press. https://www.upress.umn.edu/9780816615155/kafka/ LAION(Large-scale AI Open Network). (2021). Open-Source Datasets and MachineLearning Infrastructure. LAION. https://laion.ai/ Marx,L. U.(2020). The Small File Media Festival. Simon Fraser University Schoolfor the Contemporary Arts. https://smallfile.ca/ Pamuk,O. (2012). TheMuseum of Innocence. Vintage Books. https://www.orhanpamuk.net/book.aspx?id=96&lng=eng Rombach, R., Blattmann, A., Lorenz, D., Esser, P.,& Ommer, B. (2022). High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models. Proceedings of the IEEE/CVFConference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 10684–10695. https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.10752

    Episode 47: Minor Tech - Alternative AI Platforms with Christian Ulrik Andersen

  2. Aug 3

    ALGOpod #9: Alexandra Deem

    ALGOpod is back, and in episode 9 Gabriele de Seta welcomes Alexandra Deem, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ca' Foscari University of Venice, to discuss her ethnography of tradwives and other platformed gender roles, as well as her ongoing research on AI influencers and post-authentic storytelling.

    ALGOpod #9: Alexandra Deem

  3. Jul 27

    Episode 46: Humans Imitating AI Imitating Humans with Malthe Stavning Erslev

    Scott sits down with Aarhus University researcher Malthe Stavning Erslev to explore the aesthetics of generative AI, electronic literature, and "bot mimicry." They discuss how humans imitate algorithms, trace the evolution of neural networks from RNNs to BERT and GPT models, and examine how creative interactions can push back against the homogenization of modern language models.  References Devlin, J., Chang, M. W., Lee, K., & Toutanova, K. (2018). BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding. https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04805 Erslev, M. S. (2023). Bot Mimicry & Literary AI: On the Aesthetics of Human-Algorithmic Interactions. https://darc.au.dk/blog/nyhed/artikel/new-book-bot-mimicry-in-digital-literary-culture McCarthy, J., Minsky, M. L., Rochester, N., & Shannon, C. E. (1955). A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence. http://jmc.stanford.edu/articles/dartmouth/dartmouth.pdf Patti, K. (2018). I forced a bot to watch over 1000 hours of Olive Garden commercials and then asked it to write an Olive Garden commercial of its own. https://x.com/KeatonPatti/status/1006961202998726665?lang=en  Pold, S. B., Veel, K., Erslev, M. S., & Ørum, K. (2025–2028). Human-AI Collaboration: Imaginaries, Interventions, Interfaces (HAIC-III) https://darc.au.dk/projects/human-ai-collaboration-haic-iii Reddit Community. (2015–present). r/TotallyNotRobots: A Subreddit for Totally Normal Human Encounters. https://www.reddit.com/r/totallynotrobots/ Vaswani, A., Shazeer, N., Parmar, N., Uszkoreit, J., Jones, L., Gomez, A. N., Kaiser, Ł., & Polosukhin, I. (2017). Attention Is All You Need. https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762

    Episode 46: Humans Imitating AI Imitating Humans with Malthe Stavning Erslev

  4. Jun 2

    The AI Update XXIII - The Pope / Chatting with Claude

    On this episode, Jhave and Scott tackle the intersection of artificial intelligence, theology, and human dignity, sparked by Pope Leo XIV's landmark AI encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. From philosophical debates over the "TESCREAL" ideology and Isomorphic Labs' massive $2.1 billion funding and how to navigate mundane office politics using AI ethics, which Scott tires himself with a real time conversation with Claude. References Davies, H., McKernan, B., & Sabbagh, D. (2024, April 3). ‘The machine did it coldly’: Israel used AI to identify 37,000 Hamas targets. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai-database-lavender Future of Life Institute. (2023, March 22). Pause giant AI experiments: An open letter. https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/ Gebru, T., & Torres, É. P. (2024). The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence. First Monday, 29(4). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v29i4.13636 Isomorphic Labs. (2026, May 13). Isomorphic Labs announces $2.1 Billion in Series B funding. https://www.isomorphiclabs.com/articles/isomorphic-labs-announces-series-b-investment-round Kurzweil, R. (1999). The age of spiritual machines: When computers exceed human intelligence. Viking Press. Pope Leo XIV. (2026, May 25). Magnifica humanitas [Encyclical letter]. The Holy See. https://www.vatican.va

    The AI Update XXIII - The Pope / Chatting with Claude

  5. May 11

    The AI Update XXII - Controversy Part 2

    Scott and Jhave are back to talk even more AI controversy. Is it okay for AI to kill up to 100 people? Is there a dark money campaign to spread Anti-China-AI fear? Are "deep fakes" out and "shallow fakes" so in right now? That, and so much more. References https://x.com/_NathanCalvin/status/2051454585420521501  .A Dark-Money Campaign Is Paying Influencers to Frame Chinese AI as a Threat | WIRED Elon Musk’s Lawyers Ask OpenAI’s President Why He Is Worth $30 Billion - The New York TimesElon Musk Wanted OpenAI to Go Commercial, Greg Brockman Testifies - The New York Times ‘Think before sharing,’ Giorgia Meloni says as AI-made lingerie image of her goes viral Google and Pentagon reportedly agree on deal for ‘any lawful’ use of AI (the Verge) Google DeepMind workers in UK vote to unionize amid deal with US military | US news | The Guardian  4TB of voice samples stolen from 40,000 AI contractors -- how to verify if yours is being weaponized | ORAVYS The Era of Eka: New Startup Unveils Vision-Force-Action Model to Crack Dexterity | Humanoids Daily Eka Robotics: The Era of Superhuman Robotics

    The AI Update XXII - Controversy Part 2

  6. Apr 27

    The AI Update XXI - Controversy Part 1

    Join Scott and Jhave for a candid, slightly cynical deep dive into the ethical quagmires currently reshaping the tech landscape on The AI Update. This episode tackles everything from the military entanglements of Anthropic and Palantir to the unsettling rise of AI-driven bioweapons and global cyber warfare. Amidst a flurry of deepfakes and "supervillain" corporate maneuvers, the duo questions whether humanity is truly prepared for the automated future it is so aggressively building. References AI Safety Institute (AISI). (2026). Our evaluation of Claude Mythos Preview’s cyber capabilities. AISI Work. [https://www.aisi.gov.uk/blog/our-evaluation-of-claude-mythos-previews-cyber-capabilities] Amodei, D. (2026). Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War. Anthropic. [https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war] Anthropic [@AnthropicAI]. (2026). New research: When open-source models are fine-tuned on seemingly benign chemical synthesis information generated by frontier models... [Post]. X. [https://x.com/AnthropicAI/status/2015870963792142563] Anthropic PBC v. U.S. Department of War, No. 26-cv-01996-RFL (N.D. Cal. 2026). (Order Granting Motion for Preliminary Injunction) [https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.465515/gov.uscourts.cand.465515.134.0.pdf] Claude hits No. 1 on App Store as ChatGPT users defect in show of support for Anthropic's Pentagon stance. (2026). [https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-claude-hits-number-one-app-store-openai-chatgpt-2026-2] Mozilla. (2026). Mozilla used Anthropic’s Mythos to find and fix 271 bugs in Firefox. Mozilla Blog. [https://www.wired.com/story/mozilla-used-anthropics-mythos-to-find-271-bugs-in-firefox/] OpenAI. (2026a). GPT-5.5 Bio Bug Bounty. OpenAI. [https://openai.com/index/gpt-5-5-bio-bug-bounty/] OpenAI. (2026b). Our agreement with the Department of War. OpenAI Blog. [https://openai.com/index/our-agreement-with-the-department-of-war/] Palantir manifesto described as ‘ramblings of a supervillain’ amid UK contract fears. (2026). The Guardian. [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/21/palantir-manifesto-uk-contract-fears-mps] Project Glasswing: Securing critical software for the AI era. (2026) [https://www.anthropic.com/glasswing] Trump deletes post with AI image of himself as Jesus-like figure after outcry. (2026). The Guardian. [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/13/trump-ai-image-christ-like-figure-backlash] Turner, S. D. (2026). AI can design and run thousands of lab experiments without human hands. Humanity isn’t ready for the new risks this brings to biology. The Conversation. [https://theconversation.com/ai-can-design-and-run-thousands-of-lab-experiments-without-human-hands-humanity-isnt-ready-for-the-new-risks-this-brings-to-biology-279191] Walsh, Joe  (2026) Hegseth declares Anthropic a supply chain risk, restricting military contractors from doing business with AI giant. [https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hegseth-declares-anthropic-supply-chain-risk/] The watchers: How OpenAI, the US government, and Persona built an identity surveillance machine that files reports on you to the feds. (2026) [https://vmfunc.re/blog/persona/]

    The AI Update XXI - Controversy Part 1

  7. Apr 20

    ALGOpod #8: Craig Ryder

    In episode eight of ALGOpod, Gabriele de Seta chats with Craig Ryder, postdoctoral researcher with the ERC-funded project SMALLPLATFORMS at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, about his ethnographic journey from Sri Lankan digital activism towards platformed extreme speech.

    ALGOpod #8: Craig Ryder

  8. Apr 14

    Episode 46: "The Wrong Body; Diverse Bodies and Digital Narratives" Live Panel with Hannah Ackermans, Ella Holi and Sérgio Galvão Roxo

    In this episode we present a live recording of "The Wrong Body; Diverse Bodies and Digital Narratives" panel that took place at the CDN Equinox event on 20th March 2026, with Hannah Ackermans, Ella Holi and Sérgio Galvão Roxo.

    Episode 46: "The Wrong Body; Diverse Bodies and Digital Narratives" Live Panel with Hannah Ackermans, Ella Holi and Sérgio Galvão Roxo
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Ratings & Reviews

4.8
out of 5
5 Ratings

About

Off Center is a podcast series from the Center for Digital Narrative, a Norwegian Center of Research Excellence at the University of Bergen, Norway. In each episode, host Scott Rettberg and a guest delve into a topic revolving around digital storytelling and its effect on contemporary culture. The series covers academic research on digital narratives in electronic literature, computer games, social media, computational narrative systems, AI, XR and more in an enjoyable and understandable way.

Information

  • Creator
    Off Center, a Podcast from the Center For Digital Narrative
  • Years Active
    2023 - 2026
  • Episodes
    82
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Off Center, a Podcast from the Center For Digital Narrative
  • Show Website
    Off Center

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