Monday Night Seminar: Mathew Iantorno
Schedule
Mon Mar 09 2026 at 06:00 pm to 08:00 pm
UTC-04:00Location
The Centre for Culture and Technology - University of Toronto | Toronto, ON
About this Event
Please join us at the Centre's Coach House for a Monday Night Seminar led by CCT Graduate Fellow Mathew Iantorno:
This Monday Night Seminar will peer into the aisle of the supermarket to discuss how algorithmic systems have been deployed to optimize the in-store labour performed by customers. Self-service has a long history in the United States and Canada, from the rolling out of the first grocery carts in the 1930s to early experiments with self-checkouts in the 1990s. Today, in pursuit of completely de-staffing stores, major retailers such as Amazon and Starbucks have turned to the power of the algorithm. Smartphone apps, digital sensors, and AI-powered platforms have been increasingly used to thwart theft and enforce in-store labour—with some stores going as far as forcing visitors to sign an online terms of service agreement before entering. This presentation interrogates this transposition of platform logics onto in-person shopping experiences, drawing from extensive onsite documentation of recent self-service experiments in Toronto, Canada.
About the speaker:
Mathew Iantorno is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. His research explores how retail automation transforms labour practices, consumer responsibility, and public space. Throughout, he explores the long history of artificial intelligence, connecting modern digital platforms with vending machines, automats, and self-service stores. By doing so, he locates persistent imaginaries and driving business imperatives that have accompanied the century-spanning ambition to automate and replace workers. Outside of his dissertational research, Mathew has engaged in pedagogy development projects focused on improving digital literary within the Faculty of Information; Institute of Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology; and the Critical Digital Humanities Initiative.
About the Centre for Culture and Technology:
The Centre for Culture & Technology is dedicated to theoretical, aesthetic, and critical inquiry into the impacts of contemporary media on our interconnected world. This project is informed by the Centre’s location in the Coach House, a multi-use heritage building that was once Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s office and salon on the University of Toronto campus. The Centre draws inspiration from McLuhan’s humanistic intellectual and institutional legacy, continuing his stated goal of “investigation into the psychic and social consequences of technologies”.
The Centre promotes the study of media aesthetics in an expanded sense, examining the ways technological media shape contemporary experience by elaborating its histories, its problems, its infrastructures, and its politics. Offering both a setting and a framework, the Centre provides space and programming for scholars working in humanistic media studies across the three campuses of the University of Toronto and in the GTA. The Centre also supports the production of and conversation about contemporary media art, fostering aesthetic experimentation as a mode of inquiry.
Centre for Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto
39A Queens Park Crescent East
Toronto, ON M5S 2C3
www.cultureandtech.utoronto.ca
[email protected]
Instagram @uoftculturetech
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Where is it happening?
The Centre for Culture and Technology - University of Toronto, 39A Queen's Park Crescent East, Toronto, CanadaEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
CAD 0.00
