Maja Bak Herrie

Maja Bak Herrie is postdoc at School of Communication and Culture at Aarhus University (AU). She received her PhD from the Faculty of Arts at AU in 2019 for her dissertation on the aesthetics and culture of modern data processing and digital knowledge production.

Her research is situated at the intersection of aesthetics, media theory, and the philosophy of science, focusing on computational vision technologies, scientific imaging, photography, and artistic research.

Her monograph Thinking Through Data: How Outliers, Aggregates, and Patterns Shape Perception was published by at Stanford University Press in March 2025. Her work—both individual and collaborative—has appeared in journals such as AI & Society, Contemporary Aesthetics, Leonardo, Big Data & Society, MAST: The Journal of Media Art Study and Theory, and Journal of Aesthetics and Culture.

She is co-editor (with Tobias Dias) of The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, as well as associate editor of Journal of Aesthetics and Culture.

Currently, she is engaged in the research project NEW VISIONS: Image cultures in the era of AI with Lotte Philipsen (PI) and Lea Laura N. Michelsen (funded by Aarhus University Research Foundation). Many of the project’s activities are also linked to the Centre for Aesthetics of AI Images, which she co-founded.

Moreover, Herrie is member of the research programmes Arts, Aesthetics and Communities and Cultures and Practices of Digital Technologies at Aarhus University. In a nordic context, she is a member of the societies Nordic Society of Aesthetics and Nordic Network of Women in Aesthetics.