The 10ᵗʰ STS Italia Conference, titled Technoscience for Good: Designing, Caring and Reconfiguring, was held at the Politecnico di Milano’s Bovisa Design campus from 11 to 13 June 2025. One of the MEMPOP members, Robert Bobnič, contributed a presentation about the epistemology of technoscience of cultural taste.

The conference hosted two plenaries (with Ruha Benjamin and Shannon Vallor) and a dense programme of more than eighty parallel panels. The contributions covered themes such as artificial intelligence, algorithmic governance, decolonising STS, and many other pressing issues in contemporary technoscience. The detailed programme is available here.

Robert Bobnič, a MEMPOP member, contributed his presentation, “Technoscience of Cultural Taste,” to a panel on human–AI feedback loops in platformized consumption. Tracing recommender systems from 1990s collaborative filtering to contemporary deep-learning architectures, he argued that these computational systems no longer simply re-mediate cultural taste but actively produce and classify it, functioning as epistemogenic agents. By calling for analytical attention to the encoding principles in the recommender’s algorithmic design, Bobnič extended Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of taste into the algorithmic era. He concluded with a question: Does a machine have a taste on its own?