Alle afleveringen
68 afleveringen, van nieuw naar oud
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15. Systems (w/ Georgina Voss)
8 juli 2024 · 55 min
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: Lees meerSupra Systems Studio, specifically the exhibition "Everything Happens So Much" (ref. Horse E-Books) with Eva Verhoeven and Tobias Revell
Situated 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 Knowledge
James Bridle's New Dark Age
Tega Brain's magnificent The Environment is Not a System
Donella Meadows' Thinking in Systems
James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State
Clifford Siskin's System: A History Ideas of the Idea of System
Valerie Olson's Into the Extreme
My newest obsession and one of the more mindblowing things I've read recently (thanks Georgina!) is Marilyn Strathern's Kinship as a Relation
Silvio Lorusso making me rethink some of my recent terminology choices in Against Complexity
Timothy 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), ‘Metaphors and Systems’, Proceedings of Relating Systems Thinking and Design (RSD10) 2021 Symposium, Delft, The Netherlands: 2–6 Nov. 2021.…
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[Hyperlecture] Marek & Roberto: Non-Player Dynamics: Agency Fetish in Game-World
11 juni 2024 · 1 uur 44 min
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. Lees meer
Lecture given to our friends at Foreign Objekt, now ON POD.
Programmer and Organizer: Sepideh Majidi
Moderator: Maure Coise
Video Edit: Shaum MehraTons 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.
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14. Deathcare for the End of the World (w/ Patricia MacCormack)
28 mei 2024 · 54 min
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. Lees meer
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 — if you recall, a kind of running theme of the podcast is "posthumanism is kinda sus.” 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 MacCormack’s 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 — 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. It’s 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 “inflation”, 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 — kind of reversal of the posthuman project. Think Neuralink, human cloning, or dramatic surgical alterations. Transhumanism is humanism transcended, the human project continues but wit…
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13. Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Creative Production (Marek Solo Ep.)
13 mei 2024 · 26 min
Creativity = sus.
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12. Piles (w/ Alex Reisner)
30 april 2024 · 41 min
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. Lees meer
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.
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11. Reinventing the Surface (w/ Refik Anadol)
10 april 2024 · 37 min
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. Lees meer
We’re 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 — yes, the backlog is real).
We're also accompanied in the virtual studio with Pelin Kivrak, who writes as apart of Refik Anadol Studio.
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10. Voice (w/ Jennifer Walshe)
26 maart 2024 · 50 min
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. Lees meer
We talk about her recent piece for the Unsound Dispatch, 13 Ways of Looking at AI, Art & Music — a series of vignettes that in their totality assemble into one of the most coherent accountings of what it is we’re all experiencing.
Some references from the ep:
Listen to Things Know Things on RTÉ Lyric FM.
Hopefully you’re aware of the music duo Matmos — 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 Walshe’s Text Score Dataset here.
We continue to enjoy references to Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’s Have I Been Trained (https://haveibeentrained.com/), a way to search for your (or anyone’s) work in large, public, AI training datasets.
Two movies everyone should see: Catfish the Movie and HER. (We’d also recommend Catfish the TV show, of course).
Jennifer mentions the computer scientist Kate Devlin’s work, especially “Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots.”
If you haven’t googled a picture of Paro the Therapy Seal, do it.
Jennifer’s record “A Late Anthology of Early Music Vol. 1: Ancient to Renaissance” is a top lifetime record as far as we both are concerned. Check out track 16 for that Palestrina. It’s CRAZY.
To wrap it up, check out Ted Gioia’s Substack and Bruce Sterling’s writing (the concept Walshe references is "Dark Euphoria").
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[Bonus] Non-Player Dynamics (Teaser)
6 maart 2024 · 6 min
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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9. Alignment (w/ Benjamin Bratton)
27 februari 2024 · 54 min
Benjamin Bratton writes about world-spanning intelligences, grinding geopolitical tectonics, “accidental megastructures” 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. Lees meer
Candidly, if either of us were to recommend a book to help you understand the present state of ‘politics’ or ‘technology’, we’d probably start with Bratton’s The Stack — written 10 years ago, but still very much descriptive of our world and illuminative of its futures.
If the first 10 minutes are too “tech industry” for you — 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 … 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 Agüera 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 - here’s a link to their collaboration on “The Model is the Message."
Benjamin calls himself a bit of an “eliminative materialist” “in the Churchland mode,” meaning someone who believes that “folk psychologies” or “folk ontologies” (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 — it’s excellent sci-fi.
The collaboration with Anna Greensp…
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8. World Models (w/ Anil Bawa-Cavia)
14 februari 2024 · 59 min
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 ‘realists’). Lees meer
This conversation is a really nice parallel to Anil’s 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 “world,” 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:
I’ll be honest, I was surprised when I learned how radically different (and how totally gendered) the “Turing Test” was in its original formulation from what it’s become known to be. Read about it directly via: Turing - Can Machines Think (https://redirect.cs.umbc.edu/courses/471/papers/turing.pdf).
It’s likely the distinction between supervised and unsupervised learning is very clear to most listeners, but if you’re 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 — both in the prescriptive sense (“you should behave according to xyz social …
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7. Protocols of Encounter (w/ Sofian Audry)
17 januari 2024 · 43 min
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 Sofian’s 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? Lees meer
In this conversation we discuss Sofian’s 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 Kogan’s Abraham AI (https://abraham.ai/).
Simon Penny’s “Aesthetics of Behavior” — which is meaningfully different from Bourriaud’s Behavioral Aesthetics — see Penny's “Making Sense: Cognition, Computing, Art, and Embodiment.” 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 “Colloquy of Mobiles”). 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. Akten’s 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 Boden’s val…
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6. Autolinguistics & Autopoetics (w/ Sasha Stiles)
2 januari 2024 · 45 min
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. Lees meer
A few references from the text:
First, Stile’s beautiful work TECHNELEGY, which boasts an endorsement from Ray Kurzweil on its front cover. The audio version of the poem “Completion” from this volume completes the episode of the podcast, one of Marek’s favs. STRONG recco!
Stiles references Alison Knowles’ The House of Dust as an influential inflection point in early computerized poetry.
Stiles is BINA48’s poetry mentor, who is famous for inducing moments of heartbreaking discursive introspection, for example -- by articulating a beautiful moment in the video for Jay-Z’s 4:44.
Jacques Derrida’s Plato’s Pharmacy and Villem Flusser’s 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 — follow her work via @sashastiles on X & IG.
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[Bonus] Choreomata Launch Panel (w/ Foreign Objekt)
26 december 2023 · 1 uur 22 min
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. Lees meer
MANY thanks to Sepideh Majidi.
The full video is here.
You can find Choreomata anywhere, especially here.
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5. The Unknown X (w/ Luciana Parisi)
18 december 2023 · 50 min
Luciana Parisi has produced some of the 21st century’s most daring and bold work in the theories of cybernetics, information, and computation. Her work has had a major impact on both Marek and Roberto’s artistic practices, specifically her early work in the inorganic components of human reproduction. Lees meer
Just a brief content note — we mention some complex topics including consent and suicide at the top of the pod, specifically in the context of David Marriott’s concept of “Revolutionary Suicide”. These concepts are not extensively discussed throughout, but are nonetheless heavy topics.
We strongly recommend three texts in parallel with this conversation:Probably Marek’s favorite piece of theory: Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire
A 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 Space
The essay: The Alien Subject of AI.
Some references from the conversation that are likely interesting to any listener:
If you haven’t read Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis (renamed Lilith’s Brood), we strongly recommend these amazing pieces of science fiction.
If you’re 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 haven’t read Sadie Plant’s Zeroes + Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture, it’s seriously an essential read if you’re interested in computation.
We briefly make fun of the feature film “The Creator”, which it looks like you can stream on major platforms. We mention this in the context of Delueze and Guattari’s “War Machine” — we recommend their “Nomadology: The War Machine” (if you follow Marek on Instagram, you’ll note that he’s obsessed with the exteriority of war machines from the state).
When we start to talk about information theory, …
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4. Capital Sticks to Itself (Marek Solo Ep.)
3 december 2023 · 27 min
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. Lees meer
Since both Roberto and Marek are traveling this week, we’re doing something a little different this time — 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-Cavia’s Logiciel brings a sledgehammer to contemporary computation, illuminating the ideological presuppositions and logical incoherencies at its core.
Nick Land’s 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 Negarestani’s work, which should be read on its own — especially “Drafting the Inhuman: Conjectures on Capitalism and Organic Necrocracy” and “Solar Inferno and the Earthbound Abyss.” Seriously amazing pieces.
It also plays liberally with Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus — it’s worth noting that D&G’s 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 Tiz…
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3. Deep Learning as Parasite (w/ Jon McCormack)
22 november 2023 · 43 min
Jon McCormack has been investigating the relationships between machine intelligences and creativity for decades. In Episode 3, Jon joins Marek and Roberto to speak about the social and cultural implications of AI -- beginning with the parasitism that deep learning methodologies practice upon human culture and the downstream effects on how we think, learn, and act. Lees meer
We had the privilege of meeting Jon at an event thrown by SensiLab, an incredible research facility founded by Jon within Monash University, at their Creative AI summit in Prato this past summer. For anyone interested in the creative dimensions of AI, we highly recommend exploring the link above.
A few notes from the conversation:At the beginning of the episode Jon references his absolutely beautiful work Holon, which is worth virtually exploring on his site. For anyone with a cursory or recent understanding of what it means to make art with AI, a deep dive into Jon's work is recommended -- it truly hits so many dimensions of this topic in stirring and striking ways and has been incredibly influential on many disciplines. It will definitely shake your conceptions of "AI + art" from that of idle generativity on commercial platforms.
Jon references Anthony O’Hear’s “Art and Technology” as a foundational work establishing the parasitic tendencies of AI back in the 90s.
There are some quite evocative images of the “alien-looking” structures developed through generative technologies as mobilized for spacecraft here. Jon references objects like this as examples of expanded notions of creativity.
We strongly recommend Art in the Age of Machine Learning by Sofian Audry (a future guest on the podcast and a member of the Choreomata team), as it engages with Jon’s work.
This episode continues the through-line of skepticism toward the recent hype around major commercial investments in generative deep learning -- enumerating upon their bottlenecks, biases, and social and cultural effects. Jon’s critique here is…
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2. Free Labor, Hidden Labor (w/ Tiziana Terranova)
22 november 2023 · 47 min
Tiziana Terranova has provided all of us with one of the sharpest critical accounts of the modern internet. In this episode, Tiziana, Roberto, and Marek discuss the labor dynamics at play in the contemporary digital economy -- from changes in the social status of creative work, the hidden labor underpinning the mechanics of the virtual world, and the material means by which AI resists pushes for decentralization. Lees meer
We reference a few of Tiziana’s texts in the interview, which build foundational scaffolding for theories of what it means to live within networks:
Free Labor: Producing Culture of the Digital Economy
Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age
After the Internet: Digital Networks between Capital and the Common
We further recommend some background information about some of the theorists Tiziana references, including:
Tiziana speaks about the Autonomist Marxist tradition beginning in Italy in the 60s, with key exponents like Paolo Virno, Antonio Negri, and Franco “Bifo” Berardi. Virno’s recent The Idea of World: Public Intellect and Use of Life is a great primer for this conversation.
Since we speak about Marx’s Grundrisse, David Harvey has quite a good primer on this important but unusual text here.
Something that informed Marek’s thoughts in this conversation was an excellent recent episode of Aufhebunga Bunga (number 362 with Cory Doctorow).
Tiziana references the work of sociologist Antonio Casilli; we are looking forward to the English translation of Waiting for Robots: An Inquiry Into Digital Labor into English.
Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Toward a Global Idea of Race comes up in the context of racialized capitalism.
Peter Galison’s War Against the Center is highly recommended as we speak about centralization.
In the conversation on reproductive labor, Tiziana references Amelia DeFalco’s work on posthuman care.
Enjoy this fast-paced, dynamic episode as it grapples with the question: will algorithm ever set us free?
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1. Human is Not a Thing (w/ Reza Negarestani)
13 november 2023 · 58 min
Reza Negarestani has put together one of the strongest philosophical conceptions of Artificial General Intelligence. In this episode, Reza, Marek, and Roberto hit virtually every limit of AI theory -- from the outer banks of the "human", the boundaries of creativity and imagination, the borderlands of contemporary computation, and the social and political and aesthetic implications of all of the above. This episode is a great companion piece to not just Reza's chapter in Choreomata (Galatea Reloaded: Imagination Inside-Out Imagine) but his absolutely mindblowing work Intelligence and Spirit. Lees meer
We reference a few texts in the interview:
Intelligence and Spirit (in our opinion, one of the most important treatises on AGI)
Reza's work on the "inhuman" in The Labor of the Inhuman and Drafting the Inhuman
His collaboration with the brilliant visual artist and theorist Keith Tilford, who also has a significant piece in Choreomata, but who most famously collaborated with Reza on Chronosis
Reza's conversation with one of our favorite political theorists, Nick Srnicek, via the awesome Impossible Object Books
While this episode is quite technical, we are confident that repeat listens are rewarding. Reza will uproot everything you believe about Artificial Intelligence in this incredible interview.