Centre for Digital Inquiry
CDI-TV: Now in Book Form!
Prefer pages to playback? Catch up on CDI-TV without having to watch it (and without having to look at us!). Hybrid Encounters is a downloadable PDF of edited transcripts from our first year of livestreamed sessions (July 2024-June 2025), including a short intro by the CDI team.
A portable archive of low-budget, high-intensity studio presence and content rich conversation covering topics from tactical media to the politics of AI, from vaporware/backrooms/weirdcore to the neo-plebeian condition, from algorithmic management to digital disconnection.
Artificial Intimacies
This latest episode of CDI-TV explores the shift from 'artificial' to 'synthetic' intimacy, discussing how we co-construct relationships with machines that offer a risk-free space for vulnerability and reassurance. From the nostalgic re-embodiment of digital characters through the professional cosplay industry to the use of ChatGPT as a hermeneutic agent to interpret dating app messages, the episode examines whether AI is a solution to our modern anxieties or a sanitization of the messy nature of human love. Are we turning to machines because they provide a perfect, non-judgmental mirror that human partners, and even our own friends, cannot always offer?
Guests:
- Francesco Barchiesi (University of Birmingham)
- Erinne Paisley (University of Copenhaghen)
Streamed at: 04.02.26, 4:30pm GMT from Warwick Media Lab. Live Worldwide.
StreamArtNetwork (SAN) Archipelago @ Transmediale
CDI joins SAN Archipelago: a dispersed studio-chain spanning Krakow, Kyiv, Budapest, Warwick, Leeds, Munich and Vilnius, linked by converging streams and shared currents. This pop-up collaboration will operate as a low-budget, high-intensity carrier-net for collective presence across borders, territories and time-zones throughout Transmediale Festival 2026.
Thinking with archipelago-drift, SAN leans into highly distributed, translocal communication: many shores, no centre; relation without consolidation. Over several days, the network will appear as a chill-ready, shaded locality, where visitors can drift in and out of live-streamed interviews, discussions and performances. We don’t scale, we connect. We are not hybrid enough.
Location: Silent Green, Berlin
Livestream and Schedule: https://san-archipelago.super.site/
Dates: 28.01-01.02
Warwick's hub for critical digital research.
The CDI brings together researchers across humanities, social sciences and sciences to think with and through our digital condition.
We use and develop digital research techniques and associated tools to advance knowledge about culture and society ('thinking with' the digital), while also taking up the digital as a substantive critical topic ('thinking through' the digital).
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Projects
Discover the research projects we have supported and hosted, covering themes such as data infrastructures, platform governance, app studies, digital intimacy and AI. Our work engages with critical questions around digital infrastructures, cultural shifts and the politics of technological change.
Get Involved
The CDI interdisciplinary research network at Warwick brings together researchers, practitioners and organisations to critically examine digital technologies and pursue experimental alternatives. Find out how to join and contribute to our future research projects.