Johanna Drucker

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Personal Statement

As a young person, I was immersed in the study of the natural sciences of biology, genetics, microbiology, and astrophysics with the intention of pursuing a research career. I was fascinated by scientific illustration and learned to draw the specimens my mother and I collected, particularly shells and fish we caught for our salt water aquarium. My life took a turn and I went to art school instead and became involved in a lifetime of studying natural forms and processes alongside other pursuits. I became an academic, focused on the relations between visuality and epistemology, an approach that complemented my work as a visual poet working in typographic modes. My scholarly publications include Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production (Harvard University Press), The Visible Word (University of Chicago Press), Figuring the Word (Granary Books), What Is? Nine Essays in Epistemology (Cuneiform Press), The Alphabetic Labyrinth (Thames and Hudson) and many other titles. My artist’s books are represented in library and museum collections throughout the United States and Europe.

research

research expositions

  • Designing Agency (2023) author(s): Johanna Drucker published in: HUB - Journal of Research in Art, Design and Society
    As AI systems proliferate, questions about their emergent capacities focus on intelligence, sentience, and control. But the issue of agency, the capacity for action with consequences, brings other design issues into play. Agency takes many forms including mechanical, incidental, probabilistic, and intentional, but is largely assessed on the basis of behaviors. The challenge of designing agency can be met by considering what must be programmed into a system to provide it with the capacity for action, but the distinction between the appearance of agency (simulacral) and actual agency (intentional) is difficult to test. This paper discusses some of the connections between agency and debates in physics about determinism and probability as they relate to the question of human capacities for intentional action and concludes with a discussion of the difficulties of conceptualizing agency without falling into Romantic models of disruptive behavior. No easy answers arise in regard to the problem of designing intentional agency in a way that can be either tested or constrained.
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