- E-mailgabriele.seta@uib.no
- Visitor AddressSydnesplassen 7HF-bygget5007 Bergen
- Postal AddressPostboks 78055020 Bergen
Gabriele de Seta is, technically, a sociologist. He holds a PhD from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica in Taipei. Gabriele is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher with the ERC-funded project “Machine Vision in Everyday Life”, and was awarded the 2021 Prize for Young Researchers from the Faculty of Humanities. His research work, grounded on ethnographic engagement across multiple sites, focuses on digital media practices, sociotechnical entanglements and vernacular creativity in the Chinese-speaking world. He is also interested in experimental music, new media art, and collaborative intersections between research and creative practice.
I have designed the "Machine Vision" module for the Digital Culture BA course Critical Approaches to Technology and Society (Fall 2020), and taught the MA course Key Theories in Digital Culture (fall 2021). I regularly give guest lectures and lead workshops at international institutions. I am currently co-supervising PhD candidate Marianne Gunderson and digital culture MA student Marie Reike.
My publications are listed on Google Scholar, and most of them are accessible through links on my website.
I have recently written about deepfakes on Chinese social media platforms, the visual aesthetics of China's machine vision industry, and the sociotechnical history of the QR code.
- (2023). QR code: The global making of an infrastructural gateway. Global Media and China (GMAC). 362-380.
- (2023). Machine vision situations: Tracing distributed agency. Open Research Europe.
- (2023). Imagining machine vision: Four visual registers from the Chinese AI industry. AI & Society: The Journal of Human-Centred Systems and Machine Intelligence. 18 pages.
- (2023). Digital Depth: A Volumetric Speculation. magazén: International Journal for Digital and Public Humanities. 245-270.
- (2022). Representations of Machine Vision Technologies in Artworks, Games and Narratives: Documentation of a Dataset. Data in Brief.
- (2021). Tres mentiras de la etnografía digital. Revista SOMEPSO. 110-132.
- (2021). Sinofuturism(s). Verge: Studies in Global Asias. 74-99.
- (2021). Scaling the scene: Experimental music in Taiwan. Cultural Studies. 162-182.
- (2021). Introduction: ASIA.LIVE: Inaugurating livestream studies in Asia. Asiascape: Digital Asia. 5-14.
- (2021). Huanlian, or changing faces: Deepfakes on Chinese digital media platforms. Convergence. The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies.
- (2021). Gateways, sieves and domes: On the infrastructural topology of the Chinese stack. International Journal of Communication. 2669-2692.
- (2020). Three lies of digital ethnography. Journal of Digital Social Research (JDSR). 77-97.
- (2020). Sociality, circulation, transaction: WeChat's infrastructural affordances . Verge: Studies in Global Asias. 65-82.
- (2020). Private messages from the field: Confessions on digital ethnography and its discomforts. Journal of Digital Social Research (JDSR). 1-19.
- (2020). Must Zhongzheng fall? Varied responses to memorial statues of Taiwan’s former dictator. City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action. 627-641.
- (2023). Lies of digital ethnography.
- (2023). Automating conspiracy: Opaque intersections of artificial intelligence and China.
- (2022). Sociotechnical imaginaries of artifice & intelligence.
- (2022). On infrastructural abstraction: Models, parameters, algorithms.
- (2022). Imaginaries of artificial intelligence and machine vision in China.
- (2022). Imagi(ni)ng machine vision: An industry walkthrough.
- (2024). Thousand-mile eyes & ten thousand images: Machine vision in Chinese everyday life.
- (2024). Popular culture in the digital age: Qualitative methods for the study of digital folklore.
- (2024). From ASCII greetings to synthetic livestreams: Three decades of Chinese digital folklore.
- (2024). Beyond hallucinations & dreams: Experimental approaches to generative AI models.
- (2024). An algorithmic folklore: Vernacular creativity in the age of everyday automation.
- (2023). Synthetic ethnography: Field devices for the qualitative study of generative models.
- (2023). Spiritual pollution: A decade of Chinese digital folklore.
- (2023). QR codes: The global making of an infrastructural gateway.
- (2023). Latent China: An experiment in synthetic ethnography.
- (2023). From thousand-mile lenses to super VR invincible infrared X-ray glasses: A century of machine vision in Chinese science fiction.
- (2022). “Since I can’t go to China”: A digital ethnography primer.
- (2022). Imagining machine vision: Aesthetics of computational sensing from the Chinese AI industry.
- (2022). From 'thousand-mile lenses' to 'super VR invincible infrared X-ray glasses': Machine vision in Chinese science fiction.
- (2022). Deepfaking myself as a digital ethnographic method.
- (2022). China’s machine vision vernaculars.
- (2022). A ‘next-generation internet’: How Chinese tech companies imagine the metaverse.
- (2021). Wisdom + ability: on Chinese discourses around artificial intelligence, algorithms, and "smart" technologies.
- (2021). Vernacular obfuscation.
- (2021). The circulation and governance of deepfakes in China.
- (2021). Situating sinofuturism: Techno-orientalist fantasies, digital arms races, and chronopolitical othering.
- (2021). Matrix barcodes, swapped faces and thousand-mile eyes: Machine vision in Chinese everyday life.
- (2021). Machine vision in Chinese everyday life.
- (2021). Ethnography, postdigital: Platforms, algorithms, and automation.
- (2021). Ethnographic approaches to digital folklore.
- (2021). Ethnographic approaches to digital folklore.
- (2021). Apertures #5: Alexa Hagerty, Shazeda Ahmed & Vidushi Marda.
- (2021). Apertures #2: Paola Voci & Yiyi Yin.
- (2021). Apertures #1: Ari Larissa Heinrich & Dino Ge Zhang.
- (2020). Situating data cultures and infrastructures: André Brock, Gabriele de Seta and Jill Walker Rettberg.
- (2020). Gateways, sieves, and domes: On the infrastructural topology of the Chinese stack.
- (2023). Into the megadungeon: An introduction. magazén: International Journal for Digital and Public Humanities. 183-190.
- (2023). China’s digital infrastructure: Networks, systems, standards. Global Media and China (GMAC).
- (2021). Blockchain chicken farm: And other stories of tech in China’s countryside, by Xiaowei Wang (Book review). Asiascape: Digital Asia. 265-269.
- (2020). Zoning China: Online Video, Popular Culture, and the State, by Luzhou Li. Asiascape: Digital Asia. 235-238.
- (2020). Information fantasies: Precarious mediation in postsocialist China, by Xiao Liu. Asiascape: Digital Asia. 145-148.
- (2020). Digital China’s informal circuits: Platforms, labour and governance, by Elaine Jing Zhao. China Information. 294-295.
- (2020). Ambient media: Japanese atmospheres of self, by Paul Roquet (Book review). International Journal of Communication. 1753-1755.
- (2021). APAIC Report on the Holocode Crisis. Surveillance & Society. 474-479.
- (2020). Sinofuturism as inverse orientalism: China’s future and the denial of coevalness. SFRA Review. 86-94.
- (2020). Optical governance: The roles of machine vision in China’s epidemic response. Strelka Magazine.
- (2021). Maskinsyn: føler du deg overvåket?
- (2024). Ethnographic approaches to digital folklore.
- (2023). Let a hundred sinofuturisms bloom.
- (2021). The politics of muhei: Ethnic humor and Islamophobia on Chinese social media. 14 pages.
- (2021). The Bloomsbury handbook of the anthropology of sound. 11 pages.
- (2021). A “no-venue underground”: Making experimental music around Hong Kong’s lack of performance spaces. 11 pages.
- (2021). Maskinsyn: Ditt digitale liv - Smart eller overvåket?
More information in national current research information system (CRIStin)