Office: Phelps Hall 6214
Email: vagt@gss.ucsb.edu
Other Departmental Affiliations: Comparative Literature, Film and Media Studies
Teaching and Academic Specialization
Research and Teaching
My research interests lie at the intersections of German and French philosophy and the history and theory of science, with a particular focus on media theories and cultural techniques. I have published on Kant, Nietzsche, Freud, Bergson, Heidegger, Simondon, and Lacan, as well as on media technologies and physics, such as computer simulations in biomaterial sciences, or AI and neurocognitive science.
I have been a visiting professor at Humboldt University, Berlin and at Bauhaus University in Weimar and a Principal Investigator of the research group Self-moving Materials at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces. I have been a senior fellow at the MECS Institute for Advanced Studies of Computer Simulations at Leuphana University, Lüneburg (Germany); the NOMIS research project "The New Real: Past, Present, and Future of Computation" at Bauhaus University, Weimar (Germany), and at the College of Social Sciences and Humanities at Ruhr Alliance, North Rhine-Westphalia.
I am currently running a graduate student seminar on Environmental & Postcolonial Media Theories at UCSB (INT-594MT). My undergraduate courses include Creative Chaos (C-LIT 148), Bauhaus Praxis (GER 117), Heidegger (GER 164H), Comparative Media (GER/C-LIT 37), and Continental Philosophy of Science and Technology (C-LIT/GER 185).
Recent Publications
- "Catastrophic Forgetting" (in: Thinking with AI, forthcoming)
- "Nietzsche, Ashby und die logische Fiktion künstlicher Intelligenz", 2023 (in: Nietzsche, die Medien und die Künste)
- Impossible-Possible Machines, 2022 (communication +1) (https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cpo/vol9/iss1/7/)
- Modeling the Pacific Ocean, 2021 (https://mediaenviron.org/article/21997-introduction-modeling-the-pacific-oceanMedia and Environment, 2021)
- Action at A Distance, 2020 (https://meson.press/books/action-at-a-distance/)