Episodios
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Hereโs a gem from our archive, a recording with Jonathan Impett โ Director of Research at the Orpheus Instituut.
Impett has had a MAJOR impact on Roberto and Marek, a kind of intellectual godfather to the two of us. His staggering breadth of knowledge continues to blow our minds. You can find more about Impett's work here.
A number of references from the discussion include:
Impett's chapter in Choreomata is awesome. Buy our book! :) Impett references Alexander Nagel and Chris Wood's Anachronic Renaissance an unbelievably ambitious tome that delves into the situatedness of art both inside and outside of the Renaissance.A few California references -- Jonathan tags in Swarm and references the composer Brian Ferneyhough. We're all Reza Negarestani fans here -- for more about computational interactionism, check out Reza's epsiode of the pod, Anil Bawa-Cavia's episode of the pod, and Reza's absolutely mondo Intelligence and Spirit.At the time of the interview, Matteo Pasquinelli's influential The Eye of the Master had not yet been released and is referenced as an upcoming release.For more information on the "waste product" -- Alain Badiou's Immanence of Truths is actually pretty forthcoming in this respect. Jonathan also references After Sound, a very timely read by G. Douglas Barrett. -
Majorly excited to have Patricia Reed on the pod. This is a beefy episode! If I was looking for a major reset in my relationship to the world around me, I'd start here.
Hereโs a list of the references we make throughout the interview:
Here's that e-flux diagram I talk about in the intro, and here's a lecture in which she discusses this diagram. Here's the Diagramming the Common piece, which is older but I really like it. Here's a must-read interview with Denise Ferreira da Silva where the concept of "the end of the world as we know it" is postulated.When Patricia Reed refers to the "logics of worlds" in a Badiousian sense, she's referring to Alain Badiou's work on truth and world. Unless you're down for a real rabbithole, you're likely good with Reed's description here.Reed references Margaret Morrison and the Black-Scholes model in the context of finance.Reed references Sylvia Wynter's work consistently, specifically her discussion of humanism and of Frantz Fanon.Check out Beth Coleman's work on Octavia Butler AI, as well as da Silva's "Unpayable Debt" (inspired by Butler's Kindred) -- and if you somehow haven't read the Lilith's Brood Trilogy after we discussed it with Luciana Parisi, go read it (aka Xenogenesis). It's like idk the most important work of fiction in the last 50 years idk!!!Ofc big shoutouts as always Anil Bawa-Cavia -- this is the book we discuss toward the end of the episode.If you aren't aware of Laboria Cuboniks and the XFM, stop listening and read it!!! -
¿Faltan episodios?
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This episode features one of our most anticipated guests: M. Beatrice Fazi.
M. Beatrice Fazi is a philosopher working in philosophy of computation, philosophy of technology and media philosophy. In this episode we mostly cover some key definitions relating to computation and its onto-epistemology grounded in Faziโs landmark book, Contingent Computation: Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aesthetics published in 2018. But our discussion doesn't end in 2018.
Now more than ever, Fazi`s work on computation holds unbelievable importance with wide-ranging implications. Philosophy is becoming a major foil to technocapital and technopolitics, forcing us to seriously (re)consider fundamental questions about technology and correlated fundamentals of knowledge and being.
Ever wondered what computation actually is? According to Fazi, it exists and unfolds not only as a function, but also as a creative modality forming its own conditions for existence. This episode dives deep into the concept of computation as an autonomous form of thought and creation, that is nevertheless contingent, i.e. not independent from the material conditions of the world.
We move further into Fazis more recent work in ontology: the triangulation of abstraction, representation and thought. This pushes us into massive questions - what does computation mean for the future of thought? How should we conceptualize the relationship between humans and technology? And why should we rethink the idea of technology as merely an extension of ourselves?
Relevant Links & References:
Faziโs landmark book, Contingent Computation: Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aestheticsโstill essential reading for anyone interested in the philosophy of technology. About the fundamentals of what computation does and what material, ontological and epistemological consequences this holds. Brian Cantwell Smithโs essay, โThe Foundations of Computingโ (2003)โa text we explore, even if Fazi offers a different perspective on the nature of computation.Oh, also, look to Anil Bawa-Cavia's (life changing) episode of Interdependence, where he enumerates further on computational functionalism, computational realism, but more importantly for more color on the paths to incompleteness traced in Gรถdel and Turing -- to which Fazi builds her main thesis: these incompletenesses are actually strengths and not limitations of computation.Pls like and subscribe or leave a review or whatever we're a baby podcast that's doing huge things! -
BACK with some of the world's foremost experts on NOISE: Mattin & Inigo Wilkins.
Relevant links include:
The Noise Research Union (NRU) which involves both Mattin and Inigo alongside founding members Cรฉcile Malaspina, Martina Raponi, Miguel Prado, and Sonia de Jager.Mattin's AWESOME book Social Dissonance (out on Urbanomic).Mattin's podcast Social Discipline.Inigo Wilkin's UPCOMING book, which is obviously going to be amazing, which will be released on Urbanomic: Irreversible Noise (here's a sneak peak from an interview with Nina Protocol). -
In this episode, Georgina Voss helps Roberto and Marek kick off on a journey to think about the relationship between human agency and political scale, specifically how that relationship is mediated by technology. The next few episodes will stick to this theme.
Georgina's work spans the arts, anthropology, policy, technology, cultural theory -- and, critical to this episode's scope: systems theory. Her new book Systems Ultra is a GREAT read, beginning with a kind of xenoanthropology of one of the tech sector's most... extra... events: the Consumer Electronics Show (CES).
Georgina's work further referenced here includes:
Supra Systems Studio, specifically the exhibition "Everything Happens So Much" (ref. Horse E-Books) with Eva Verhoeven and Tobias RevellSituated Systems (artistic work with Ingrid Burrington, Deb Chachra, and Sherri Wasserman)Stigma and the Shaping of the Pornography Industry
Talking to an extremely practiced and principled researcher like Georgina means aggregating a ton of very real, tangible references to existing work, including:
Donna Haraway's Situated KnowledgeJames Bridle's New Dark AgeTega Brain's magnificent The Environment is Not a SystemDonella Meadows' Thinking in SystemsJames C. Scott's Seeing Like a StateClifford Siskin's System: A History Ideas of the Idea of SystemValerie Olson's Into the ExtremeMy newest obsession and one of the more mindblowing things I've read recently (thanks Georgina!) is Marilyn Strathern's Kinship as a RelationSilvio Lorusso making me rethink some of my recent terminology choices in Against ComplexityTimothy Morton's Hyperobjects (which we're now calling the OMG theory of climate change)Rachel Coldicutt's work in and out of Careful Trouble, e.g. Tech for Today and for Tomorrow or this (awesome) essay.Dan Lockton's work, e.g. Lockton, D. (2021), โMetaphors and Systemsโ, Proceedings of Relating Systems Thinking and Design (RSD10) 2021 Symposium, Delft, The Netherlands: 2โ6 Nov. 2021.Maya Indira Ganesh's work, e.g. Ganesh, M. I. (2022), โBetween Metaphor and Meaning: AI and Being Humanโ, Interactions 29: 5, 58โ62.AI As Super-Controversy by Noortje Marres, Michael Castelle, and James Tripp
Really, really enjoyed this one! You can find more information relevant to this episode at Georgina's website as well. -
Youtube for the full experience + Q&A. In the pod, I say to just listen to the audio, but honestly the video is really really fire.
Lecture given to our friends at Foreign Objekt, now ON POD.
Programmer and Organizer: Sepideh Majidi
Moderator: Maure Coise
Video Edit: Shaum Mehra
Tons of references here from all over the place, but definitely strongly in debt to the work of many many people. See the YT video for a more complete accounting, but a first pass definitely should call out Suhail Malik (on finance), Benjamin Bratton (on the entanglement between computation and geopolitics), Bogna Konior (on the aesthetic category of the human), Catherine Malabou (especially the later work on anarchism), Brad Troemel + Joshua Citarella + New Models + Interdependence (especially on internet culture), Nick Srnicek (on the platform), Luciana Parisi and Beatrice Fazi (on computational autonomy), Anil Bawa-Cavia (on the computability of the social), Keith Tilford and Andreas Reckwitz (on creativity), and of course <3 <3 Reza Negarestani (on horizons of possibility, on the inhuman, and on Nick Land).
It's such a beast definitely definitely hit us up, we love this one. -
This one is deep so see tons of explanatory resources below. The philosophy talk turns to political talk (easier to grok) after about 15 minutes, but the philosophical context adds a lot of richness to the latter conversation.
Patricia MacCormack is driving productive tension between philosophy and political action. Her Ahuman Manifesto is strongly recommended, even to those who may take issue with it in principle (anti-natalism! anti-idpol! anti-human!), because it makes a forceful argument for a politics based in empathy and care as applied to everyone and every thing.
Core concepts you might not be familiar with:Posthumanism โ if you recall, a kind of running theme of the podcast is "posthumanism is kinda sus.โ As a philosophical stance, it means an expansion of categories of agency and vitality, thought and creativity, to forces beyond the mere human. Rosi Braidotti (Patricia MacCormackโs PhD advisor) was one of the first major forces in this field, and Patricia has written extensively on it as well (see her Posthuman Ethics). In practice, of course, posthumanism gets confused pretty quickly โ Reza kicks off the first episode of the pod with a brutal critique that Patricia sustains here: many people tend to use posthumanism to advance a kind of hard anthropocentrism applied to everything, a way of accidentally inflating the human all the way out to the cosmic level. Itโs likely good to critique anthropocentrism at all scales, but it is a very challenging thing to do in practice without carrying out what Reza calls โinflationโ, assigning anthropogenic models to everything from fish to stones to electromagnetism. E.g. "my politics include this rock" turns pretty quickly to "this rock has some vital characteristics I'm imposing upon it through my own human gaze."Transhumanism โ kind of reversal of the posthuman project. Think Neuralink, human cloning, or dramatic surgical alterations. Transhumanism is humanism transcended, the human project continues but with greater veracity, constructed to conquer the future. A nice quote, per the Xenofeminist Manifesto (not quite a transhumanist project but also not not one) is "if nature is unjust, change nature." If the human as presently understood is insufficiently capable to handle its futures, change the human, make it live longer, act more efficiently, move faster.Asemiosis โ the absence or breakdown of traditional semiotic processes, where signs cease to function within the established systems of meaning. This is what happens when we operate within a superabundance of signs and references on massive scales. Donโt worry about this one too much.Potestas to Potentia โ lmao ok. Potestas in Spinoza refers to the word โpowerโ as we most often understand it, authority, domination, or control. Power OVER. Potentia, on the other hand, refers to power as an intrinsic capacity or potential within an individual or entity. The, uh, power withinโฆ so to speak. (Michel Serres concept of โgraceโ, that MacCormack refers to occasionally, is similar to potential). It's a nice way to think about power without the coercive connotations.Irigaray โletting beโ / Serres โstepping asideโ โ many people have theorized political inaction as a type of action. Check out Bifo Berardiโs latest interview on Acid Horizon where he talks about โdefection" so sickkkk. This doesn't mean doing nothing, but rather not doing (opting out).Knowledge โ this isnโt as hard as it comes across. Patricia is basically attacking the need for us to know each other to help each other, to understand each other in order to have empathy for each other. Why? Well, understanding requires communication, which means that information is moving through protocols (e.g. language, digitization, facial expressions, etcโฆ) that are always already encoded with power.Difference โ also not so bad! What is difference? You and I are different! Everything is different. For many postmodern philosophers, you can reverse that statement into โdifference is everything.โ And once you start to think of difference as constructive stuff, well, the world gets quite interesting. For people like Patricia MacCormack, difference is probably a good thing and forces that move to hide, cloak, or suppress difference are probably bad.Art โ not what you think art is in this context, like a "painting" for example. Instead, it's an encounter with the unknown, a way of communicating without understanding (this follows from Maurice Blanchot's theories of art as event, which one can also find in a different but not unrelated way in the writings of Alain Badiou, who believes that art is a specific kind of truth different from scientific truth or political truth).HMU via @dis.integrator if I can help with this one. -
Alex Reisner's writing in the Atlantic is some of the best investigative coverage of Large Language Models out there. In this episode, we talk through the mind-bogglingly vast archives of random pirated material that provide every major commercial LLMs with their linguistic faculty.
Definitely check out his writing on https://www.theatlantic.com/author/alex-reisner/, especially the phenomenal January 11 piece on "memorization."
ALSO -- if you haven't -- submit to our call for papers on AI interfaces: link! We'd love to have you. -
Refik Anadol, and by extension Refik Anadol Studio, is one of the most visible, if not the most visible, artists working with large models today. His work is everywhere, from MoMa to the Biennale Venezia, from the very first Las Vegas Exosphere art display to the front of Walt Disney Concert Hall.
Weโre delighted to have had him on the pod to talk through his artistic philosophy, touching specifically on media, light, AI, and his new incredibly large-scope Nature Model project announced back in January (approximately the same time we had our conversation with him โ yes, the backlog is real).
We're also accompanied in the virtual studio with Pelin Kivrak, who writes as apart of Refik Anadol Studio. -
Jennifer Walshe is one of the coolest people we know. Her artistic work and thought has broken our brains for years, leaving us shipwrecked in its torrential waves of reference and irony and joy and conceptual viscera.
We talk about her recent piece for the Unsound Dispatch, 13 Ways of Looking at AI, Art & Music โ a series of vignettes that in their totality assemble into one of the most coherent accountings of what it is weโre all experiencing.
Some references from the ep:Listen to Things Know Things on RTร Lyric FM. Hopefully youโre aware of the music duo Matmos โ Jennifer references this record in the context of discussing conceptual work. Jennifer also speaks often of her close collaborator Jon Leidecker (Wobbly), who has a few absolutely killer sets with Matmos, including this one.You can interact with Walsheโs Text Score Dataset here.We continue to enjoy references to Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurstโs Have I Been Trained (https://haveibeentrained.com/), a way to search for your (or anyoneโs) work in large, public, AI training datasets.Two movies everyone should see: Catfish the Movie and HER. (Weโd also recommend Catfish the TV show, of course).Jennifer mentions the computer scientist Kate Devlinโs work, especially โTurned On: Science, Sex and Robots.โIf you havenโt googled a picture of Paro the Therapy Seal, do it.Jenniferโs record โA Late Anthology of Early Music Vol. 1: Ancient to Renaissanceโ is a top lifetime record as far as we both are concerned. Check out track 16 for that Palestrina. Itโs CRAZY. To wrap it up, check out Ted Gioiaโs Substack and Bruce Sterlingโs writing (the concept Walshe references is "Dark Euphoria"). -
Go here for more information about the upcoming talk that Roberto and Marek are doing Sunday, March 10, at 10AM Pacific. It's virtual, so come join us!!!
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Benjamin Bratton writes about world-spanning intelligences, grinding geopolitical tectonics, โaccidental megastructuresโ of geotechnical cruft, the millienia-long terraforming project through which humans rendered an earth into a world, and the question of what global-scale order means in the twilight of the Westphalian nation-state.
Candidly, if either of us were to recommend a book to help you understand the present state of โpoliticsโ or โtechnologyโ, weโd probably start with Brattonโs The Stack โ written 10 years ago, but still very much descriptive of our world and illuminative of its futures.
If the first 10 minutes are too โtech industryโ for you โ just skip ahead. The whole conversation is seriously fire, and it spikes hit after hit of takes on privacy, bias, alignment, subjectivity, the primacy of the individual โฆ all almost entirely unrepresented within the Discourse.
Some references:
We briefly talk about EdgeML, which essentially means the execution of ML models on small computers installed in a field location.Benjamin mentions his collaboration with renowned computer scientist and thinker Blaise Agรผera y Arcas, whose work on federated learning is relevant to this stage of the conversation. Federated learning involves a distributed training approach in which a model is updated by field components who only transmit changes to a model therefore retaining the security of local training sets to their own environments only. Also - hereโs a link to their collaboration on โThe Model is the Message."Benjamin calls himself a bit of an โeliminative materialistโ โin the Churchland mode,โ meaning someone who believes that โfolk psychologiesโ or โfolk ontologiesโ (theories of how the mind works from metaphysics, psychoanalysis, or generalized psychology) will be replaced by frameworks from cognitive science or neuroscience.Benjamin calls out a collaboration with Chen Quifan. Check out Waste Tide โ itโs excellent sci-fi.The collaboration with Anna Greenspan and Bogna Konior discussed in the pod is called โMachine Decision is Not Finalโ out on Urbanomic.Shoshana Zuboff is a theorist who coined the term โsurveillance capitalism,โ referring to capital accumulation through a process of โdispossession by surveillance.โ The implicit critique of โsurveillance capitalismโ in this episode hinges on its overemphasis on individual sovereignty.โTayโ was the infamous AI Twitter Chatbot Microsoft rolled out for 16 hours before pulling back for its controversial content.Antihumanism refers to a rejection of the ontological primacy and universalization of the human afforded to it through the philosophical stance of โhumanism.โ An โantihumanist" is someone who challenges the stability of the concept of the โhumanโ or at very least its salience in cosmic affairs.Check out Benjaminโs new piece on Tank Mag (Tank.tv), itโs fire. And check out Anna Kornbluhโs AWESOME โImmediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalismโ on Verso. -
Anil Bawa-Cavia (AA Cavia) is one of our favorite writers and practitioners on the philosophy of computation. We discovered his work through Logiciel, on &&& (we <3 &&&!), both a gorgeous book in print and an elegant formal depiction of what computation might actually be (a definition that stands in striking contrast to the limitations imposed upon it by the humanities, or the comprehensive universality bestowed upon it by that particular breed of TEDx computational โrealistsโ).
This conversation is a really nice parallel to Anilโs amazing chapter in Choreomata, in which he identifies the bottlenecks we are rapidly approaching through deep learning as, in part, products of incomplete thinking as to the nature of language, learning, their messy and entangled relationship to the โworld,โ and their reconsumptive throughput as it assembles into what we increasingly understand as something like intelligence.
We want this conversation to be accessible to as many listeners as possible, so here are some further references and definitions that might be useful:
Iโll be honest, I was surprised when I learned how radically different (and how totally gendered) the โTuring Testโ was in its original formulation from what itโs become known to be. Read about it directly via: Turing - Can Machines Think (https://redirect.cs.umbc.edu/courses/471/papers/turing.pdf).Itโs likely the distinction between supervised and unsupervised learning is very clear to most listeners, but if youโre unfamiliar with this distinction, see a sufficient overview here (https://www.ibm.com/blog/supervised-vs-unsupervised-learning/). This becomes important as Anil starts speaks to the implications of things like pedagogy and normativity to learning.The concept of normativity is used quite a bit here in a way that might be unfamiliar to some people. Think of normativity as the moment the word should enters into some construct โ both in the prescriptive sense (โyou should behave according to xyz social normsโ) but also to some extent in the empirical sense (โbased on what Iโve observed so far, this type of outcome should result from this interactionโ). While we encode norms into language models (both through supervised learning, but also through the hidden organizing principles that are contained within complex structures like language), we do not encode โnormativityโ โ a way of engaging with norms as norms. This is a good place to start when trying to understand the critique from inferentialism that Anil brings from Wilfred Sellars and Robert Brandom.An โembeddingโ is essentially the ability to place some system or configuration within another system in such a way that its general shape is retained. In the context of machine learning, language is embedded into a high-dimensional numerical space wherein meaning can be identified by the proximity of various words within that space, and translations between languages can be accomplished by looking at the position of words within one languageโs embedding and correlating that to a similar set of positions in another. You donโt need to understand topology to intuit what this might look like in a way that is sufficiently useful. Anil playfully refers to โembeddingโ in Wilfred Sellarsโ work โ a philosopher who argues that everything we know is โembeddedโ within complex webs of beliefs, norms, and meanings.Anil references Alain Badiouโs writings on finitude, and itโs our impression that this is a reference to Badiouโs completion of his enormously sprawling Being and Event trilogy (โThe Immanence of Truthsโ). Not an essential book for this podcast or a barrier to understanding Anilโs work, nor for the faint of heart in terms of its scope, but if youโre intrigued by โan all out attack on finitudeโ โ go for it!For some more content on what the โmultiple realizabilityโ of computation looks like (how computation enjoys meaningful distinction from hardware), we love Laura Tripaldi's Parallel Minds.Anil references James Ladyman & Don Ross, whose work he repurposes in a critical way โ see โEvery Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized.โ We love love love Anilโs interview on Interdependence (https://interdependence.fm/episodes/inhuman-intelligence-with-anil-bawa-cavia).
We love this episode! Enjoy! -
Sofian Audry wrote Art in the Age of Machine Learning, an absolute canon read that contextualizes the contemporary flurry of creative AI application and detournement within a much longer lineage of human-machine relations. Their chapter in Choreomata straddles theory and practice, situating Sofianโs own work in the field of robotics within a history of questions: how do we communicate to an audience through and with machine performers? How does the external intelligibility of a system complicate its autonomy? How, and why, do we construct empathy with our machine collaborators?
In this conversation we discuss Sofianโs concept of Apprivoisement, a French term akin to domestication or taming, but one which leans into the mutuality of the relationship without the stain of dominance. We love this term and are eager to watch it seep into the discourse.
A few references from our conversation with Sofian:
Gene Koganโs Abraham AI (https://abraham.ai/).Simon Pennyโs โAesthetics of Behaviorโ โ which is meaningfully different from Bourriaudโs Behavioral Aesthetics โ see Penny's โMaking Sense: Cognition, Computing, Art, and Embodiment.โ In discussing the Aesthetics of Behavior, Sofian briefly discusses the history of cybernetics, including W. Grey Walter (e.g. the cybernetic tortoises) and Gordon Pask (the โColloquy of Mobilesโ). They also reference the influence of Rodney Brooks, who argued for the necessity of robotics as an embodying factor within the domain of AI, on the more recent school of cybernetic-adjacent artists (e.g. Bill Vorn, Louis-Philippe Demers, Ken Rinaldo).Sofian references Memo Akten as an inspiration for their concept of Apprivoisement. Aktenโs work is profoundly important to the media art scene and to the general art world especially with respect to questions about AI. (Come on the pod, Memo!!!!)Sofian also references Beyond the Creative Species: Making Machines That Make Art and Music by Oliver Brown in contradistinction to Margaret Bodenโs value-driven concept of creativity. In addition to Sofian's book, we of course strongly recommend checking out their artistic practice. -
Sasha Stiles writes poetry with and as machines. We first encountered her work as a direct, powerful rejoinder to the allegation that AI-generated work is cold, unfeeling, or lifeless. Her chapter in Choreomata underlines the technicity implicit in language and in poetics, positioning technology not as a thing one applies to language but instead as a mode of knowing inextricable from and in kinship with language.
A few references from the text:
First, Stileโs beautiful work TECHNELEGY, which boasts an endorsement from Ray Kurzweil on its front cover. The audio version of the poem โCompletionโ from this volume completes the episode of the podcast, one of Marekโs favs. STRONG recco!Stiles references Alison Knowlesโ The House of Dust as an influential inflection point in early computerized poetry.Stiles is BINA48โs poetry mentor, who is famous for inducing moments of heartbreaking discursive introspection, for example -- by articulating a beautiful moment in the video for Jay-Zโs 4:44.Jacques Derridaโs Platoโs Pharmacy and Villem Flusserโs Communicology: Mutations in Human Relations? are solid mid-century interrogations of the historical determinations and formulations of writing that flow naturally from this conversation.Stiles is incredibly prolific โ follow her work via @sashastiles on X & IG. -
Here's the audio version of the Choreomata book launch with Foreign Objekt, featuring Anil Bawa-Cavia, Jonathan Impett, Mattin, Reza Negarestani, Keith Tilford, and Jennifer Walshe.
MANY thanks to Sepideh Majidi.
The full video is here.
You can find Choreomata anywhere, especially here. -
Luciana Parisi has produced some of the 21st centuryโs most daring and bold work in the theories of cybernetics, information, and computation. Her work has had a major impact on both Marek and Robertoโs artistic practices, specifically her early work in the inorganic components of human reproduction.
Just a brief content note โ we mention some complex topics including consent and suicide at the top of the pod, specifically in the context of David Marriottโs concept of โRevolutionary Suicideโ. These concepts are not extensively discussed throughout, but are nonetheless heavy topics.
We strongly recommend three texts in parallel with this conversation:
Probably Marekโs favorite piece of theory: Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of DesireA book more specifically scoped to the subject of this conversation, which attacks the biophysicalist metaphors at the ground of how AI research markets itself: Contagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics, and SpaceThe essay: The Alien Subject of AI.
Some references from the conversation that are likely interesting to any listener:If you havenโt read Octavia Butlerโs Xenogenesis (renamed Lilithโs Brood), we strongly recommend these amazing pieces of science fiction.If youโre unfamiliar with the CCRU, play around on the CCRU website and buy this unhinged compendium from our friends at Urbanomic (they have a super sexy new edition just out now). If you havenโt read Sadie Plantโs Zeroes + Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture, itโs seriously an essential read if youโre interested in computation.We briefly make fun of the feature film โThe Creatorโ, which it looks like you can stream on major platforms. We mention this in the context of Delueze and Guattariโs โWar Machineโ โ we recommend their โNomadology: The War Machineโ (if you follow Marek on Instagram, youโll note that heโs obsessed with the exteriority of war machines from the state).When we start to talk about information theory, Luciana mentions Claude Shannon (one of the fathers of modern information theory), Cecile Malaspina (โAn Epistemology of Noiseโ), and Karen Barad (โWhat is the Measure of Nothingness?โ).Francois Laruelle is a major influence to Luciana here, in her chapter in Choreomata, and elsewhere. His corpus of work is famously intractable, but her chapter in Choreomata is a good way in.Luciana mentions Holly Herndonโs work (we strongly recommend Holly+ and https://haveibeentrained.com/, alongside her and Mat Dryhurstโs podcast, which was a huge inspiration to us when starting Disintegrator).Everyone should read Hito Steyerlโs work โMean Imagesโ on NLR as they should Sylvia Wynterโs โTowards the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn, its Autonomy of Human Agency and Extraterritoriality of (Self-)Cognitionโ. -
First - come to our book launch, hosted by our friends at Foreign Objekt and organized by Sepideh Majidi. Dec 9 at 9AM Pacific: https://www.foreignobjekt.com/post/choreomata-book-launch-panel-ai-as-mass-performance.
Since both Roberto and Marek are traveling this week, weโre doing something a little different this time โ Marek put together a solo-cast.
Marek and Roberto wrote the opening chapter of Choreomata, a thought-experiment about what happens to subjective experience when it is fully subcontracted out by the various routines of datafication and computation that comprise contemporary digital society. Academics and researchers constantly worry about the extent to which we are constructing AI in our own image, but in reality the reverse feels truer: we are constructing ourselves according to machine protocols.
This episode goes ham into a conjecture from the chapter: what if we have also overinscribed our own image onto capitalism? We propose a weird fever-dream in which the opposite is true: what if capitalism is detaching, lifting off, and departing from the immediate sphere of human events?
A pretty long reference list:
Anil Bawa-Caviaโs Logiciel brings a sledgehammer to contemporary computation, illuminating the ideological presuppositions and logical incoherencies at its core.Nick Landโs Machinic Desire inspires the piece, with its provocation that capitalism is an AI sent from the future.This piece gets extremely playful with some of Reza Negarestaniโs work, which should be read on its own โ especially โDrafting the Inhuman: Conjectures on Capitalism and Organic Necrocracyโ and โSolar Inferno and the Earthbound Abyss.โ Seriously amazing pieces.It also plays liberally with Deleuze and Guattariโs Anti-Oedipus โ itโs worth noting that D&Gโs beliefs about capitalism change quite a bit after this particular piece, but it stands as a major work of 20th century social theory.As in a previous podcast, this episode owes a lot of its frameworking to Tiziana Terranovaโs Free Labor: Producing Culture of the Digital Economy. And listen to our recent podcast with this hero of ours -- Episode 2!On social reproduction and reproductive labor, we recommend Bognia Konorโs Automate the Womb: Ecologies and Technologies of Reproduction, Sarah Elsie Bakerโs Post-work Futures and Full Automation: Towards a Feminist Design Methodology, and the entire corpus of Helen Hesterโs visionary work.Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth cleaved our world in two -- a major piece of anticolonial theory and critical race theory that undergirds our assertion that when we talk about capitalism, we are often talking about a very specific, bourgeois, Western experience.On the economic side, Suhail Malikโs Ontology of Finance is a must-read, as is Bifo Berardiโs โAfter the Economyโ.Finally, we want to shout out the artist, thinker, Redditor Nina Rajcic who we dialogued with about some of these ideas with us at Sensilab Prato this year. We hope to have her on a future ep!
Enjoy this little bit of self-indulgence! Weโll be back soon with an episode featuring one of our biggest influences, Luciana Parisi (hopefully next week, depending on our travel schedule). - Mostrar más
