Paolo CAFFONI

Paolo Caffoni is a postdoctoral researcher in the ERC project AIMODELS at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. His research examines the political economy of language technologies, with a particular focus on linguistic labor, machine translation, multilingual AI, and the material conditions through which language is transformed into a computational resource. His work brings together critical AI studies, philosophy of language, media theory, translation studies, and history of science and technology.

He studied Literature, Semiotics, and Curatorial Studies in Milan and completed his PhD at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe with a dissertation entitled Machine Translation as a Technology of Bordering. The dissertation develops a theoretical framework for analyzing machine translation as a technology of bordering rather than as a neutral instrument of linguistic mediation. Against dominant interpretations that define it as the automated transfer between equivalent meanings, it reconceptualizes machine translation as an epistemic and political process that produces boundaries, hierarchies, and different regimes of value. Contemporary language automation – from statistical machine translation to large language models – is situated within longer histories of measurement, abstraction, and the organization of labor.

Before joining AIMODELS, Caffoni was a faculty member at NABA Milan and worked as an editor-at-large at the Berlin-based publishing house Archive Books (2009–2021), where he also co-directed the exhibition and public programme of Archive Kabinett. He was a member of the curatorial team of the 2018 Yinchuan Biennale. His writing has appeared in AI & Society, MicroMega, Arts of the Working Class, Civic Sociology, and other journals and edited volumes.