Centre for Digital Inquiry
Leviathan’s Ear: Hybrid Livestream (Online and FAB 1.16) + Workshop
7 July 2026, 10:00am-12:00pm
The voice is personal, embodied and continually changing. Human listening involves the interpretation of many contextual signals, including register, accent, cadence, spatial position and the semantic information encoded in speech. Speech-to-text processes, by contrast, transform features of the vocal signal into text, often treating this wider context as noise in the pursuit of optimized outputs. These processes have increasingly become ambient infrastructures, delivered as platform services and mobilized as extractive data streams for machine-learning models.
In conversation with Sean Dockray, James Parker and Joel Stern from machinelistening.exposed, we discuss the technics of machine listening, including its transformative effects on labour, everyday life, aesthetics and the politics of listening.
The livestream is part of a day-long workshop at Warwick exploring machine-listening systems, visit here for more information and to register.
CDI-TV: Now in Book Form!
Do you prefer reading pages to watching playback? Catch up on CDI-TV without having to stream 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 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.
The Politics & Pedagogies of Vibe-Coding: Hybrid Livestream Online and FAB 1.16
14 May 2026, 11:00-12:00
Programming is changing. AI-assisted coding at once lowers some barriers to software development, yet significantly raises others: tiered access models, opaque training systems, tacit and unstable knowledge around prompting, and new enclosures on technical knowledge.
This livestream, part of a day-long workshop, critically takes on the vibe coding hype, examining what AI-assisted programming opens up and forecloses for computational culture. Taking a cue from Ivan Illich's notion of convivial tools, it asks what a politics of convivial code might actually look like today, and what's emerging through this new programming culture with its Big Tech dependencies and extractivist logics.
Featuring keynote provocation from David Berry (University of Sussex), respondents Janna Joceli Omena (King's College London) & Michael Castelle (University of Warwick).
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).
Latest on Bluesky
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.