M. Beatrice Fazi

M. Beatrice Fazi (born 1981) is a philosopher known for her work in the philosophy of computation, the philosophy of technology and media philosophy. Her research focuses on the ontologies and epistemologies produced by contemporary technoscience, particularly in relation to issues in artificial intelligence and computation and to their impact on culture and society. She has published extensively on the limits and potentialities of the computational method, on digital aesthetics and on the automation of thought. She is Associate Professor in Digital Humanities in the Faculty of Media, Arts and Humanities at the University of Sussex, where she is currently also the Head of the Department of Media and Cultural Studies.

Her philosophical work addresses the abstract character of computational systems and the ways in which the computational method might produce new forms of intelligibility while also challenging present and past accounts of sensibility. She theorises the relation between the rational and the empirical, the ideal and the material, the logical and the aesthetic in digital culture. These issues are channelled into a philosophical approach to digital technologies that aims to comprehend the nature and role of abstraction and thought in the twenty-first century alongside the onto-epistemological specificity of computational procedures.

Her monograph Contingent Computation: Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aesthetics was published by Rowman & Littlefield International in 2018. The book investigates formal reasoning in relation to computational aesthetics. It does so by proposing a re-conceptualisation of contingency within formal axiomatic systems vis-à-vis technoscientific notions of incompleteness and incomputability.

Her writing on philosophy and technology appears in prominent academic journals and edited collections. Her latest work is concerned with theorising what she terms “algorithmic thought”. Recently, she has written on explainability in deep learning, on the epistemic implications of algorithmic decision-making, on the incommensurability between humans and machines and on the notion of synthesis in generative artificial intelligence. She is currently working on a book conceptualising representation in computational systems and on a project on the meaning and scope of digital theory.

She has given over one hundred talks to audiences across North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. She is a member of the Sussex Digital Humanities Lab, the Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science and Sussex AI at the University of Sussex, and a member of the Digital Theory Lab at New York University. She sits on the boards of the academic journals Computational Culture and Media Theory; from 2019 to 2024 she co-edited the book series Media Philosophy (Rowman & Littlefield). She has been a Visiting Scholar at New York University and a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Advanced Internet Studies in Germany. She is an Affiliate Researcher at Antikythera, a think tank on the speculative philosophy of computation at the Berggruen Institute (USA). Her investigation of indeterminacy in computation was awarded a British Academy/Leverhulme grant for the project “Digital Culture and the Limits of Computation” (2017-2018).

She holds a PhD and an MA from the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths (University of London), and a Laurea in Philosophy from Università degli Studi di Macerata (Italy). She completed a PGCert HE (Goldsmiths, University of London) and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.