Location: Deutsches Museum, Auditorium
Time: Monday, 2 March 2026, 17:00-19:00
The symposium will be held in English!
Artificial Intelligence is currently surrounded by a narrative of unprecedented revolution—but how much of AI is its hype? And is this ‘hype’ truly a new phenomenon? What can we learn from the way AI has been branded before?
The symposium investigates the historical and current cultural mechanisms behind the branding of AI and the idea of technological hypes and trends. By tracing the trajectory of AI marketing and public perception from its early mythical stages to the current era of Large Language Models, the event questions the cyclical nature of technological promise and disillusionment.
Bringing together experts from the history of computing, digital art, and cultural anthropology, the panel will explore how Artificial Intelligence has been packaged as a brand to serve political, economic, and social agendas—but most importantly to sell itself and automated computing. Are we experiencing yet another ‘AI summer,’ or have we entered a fundamentally new era of technological imaginaries?
The event will be streamed on the Deutsches Museum's YouTube channel. Follow this link for the livestream. (external link, opens in a new window)
Moderator:
- Thomas Nyckel (Regensburg U)
Panelists:
- Thomas Haigh (Chair of History, U Wisconsin-Milwaukee, author of the forthcoming „The Brand That Wouldn’t Die: A History of Artificial Intelligence“)
- Tamiko Thiel: (Product designer of the CM-1/CM-2 AI supercomputers and acclaimed pioneering media artist in VR/AR)
- Manuel Trummer (Chair of Empirical Cultural Studies and European Ethnology at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, renowned scholar working on the cultural theory of popular culture and hypes)
Organizers:
- Laura Niebling (Regensburg U)
- Dinah Pfau (Deutsches Museum)
- Rudolf Seising (Deutsches Museum)
- Tamar Novick (TUM)