Masked Media by Gary Hall - new open access book from Open Humanities Press

Announcing the latest title in Open Humanities Press MEDIA : ART : WRITE : NOW series:

Masked Media: What It Means to Be Human in the Age of Artificial Creative Intelligence by Gary Hall

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/masked-media/

If we want a socially and environmentally just future, do we need a radical new theory of change – or to radically change theory? It’s this question Gary Hall and his collaborators have been addressing for over twenty years with experimental publishing projects such as Open Humanities Press, Liquid and Living Books, and the Culture-Led Re-Commoning of Cities. Unsettling received ideas of the author and the book, originality and copyright, real and artificial intelligence, these uncommon communities of theorist-mediums are testing the ‘non-modernist-liberal’ modes of creating and sharing knowledge enabled by various media technologies, from writing and print, through photography and video, to computers and GenAI. By thinking outside the masked black box that renders Euro-Western knowledge-making practices invisible – keeping the human ontologically separate from the nonhuman, be it animals, the planet or algorithmic machines – they show there’s no such thing as the human, the nonhuman already being in(the)human.

Masked Media is one such experimental project. It is not a ‘human-authored’ work. Instead, the thinking within it has been generated by a radically relational assemblage that includes AI and more. Although the book appears under a real name – ‘Gary Hall’ – which, like Banksy and Karen Eliot, acts as a mask, it is not the intellectual property of a singular human individual, and is published under a Collective Conditions for Re-Use licence to reflect this. Masked Media shows how such norm-critical experimentation is of vital importance to our understanding of everything, from identity politics and the decolonialisation of knowledge, through epistemologies of the Global South and the possibilities of open city infrastructure, to extractive capitalism, planetary destruction and the Anthropocene. It thus constitutes a call to radically redesign theory for a time of multiple crises.

In Masked Media, a follow-up to A Stubborn Fury, Hall proceeds to show how our ways of writing and working can be reinvented to produce a more socially just future after the years of austerity and the coronavirus pandemic.

Like all Open Humanities Press books, Masked Media is available open access (and can be downloaded for free):

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/masked-media/

Masked Media is a media experiment as much as it is a work of deft media philosophy. Moving beyond well-worn practices of book authorship, Masked Media yields something far more substantial: a collaborative media praxeology for the twenty-first century and beyond. More than a book, then, the pages assembled here represent an all-too-rare achievement that makes good on the posthumanist promise to collaborate with nonhuman materials and challenge deeply rooted notions of human sovereignty pervading academe. This is an experiment in performative media theory that is sure to inspire a new generation of theorist-practitioners across a wide range disciplines and practices. .

Adam Nocek, Director of the Center for Philosophical Technologies, Arizona State University

Before reading Gary Hall’s new book, you might think it was just another quantifiable volume by an established media theorist about the relationship between academic conventions, the development of new digital technologies and their embedding in an inescapable economic system. As you read it, however, the masks fall and you have to ask yourself who actually wrote this book – and is it a book at all? The positions discussed, critical as they are of liberalism and individual authorship, provide indispensable material for training new AI models in order to enable them to become equally self-reflexive and authorship-critical media, themselves performing authorial agency.

Cornelia Sollfrank, artist and researcher

A crucial volume for understanding the profound transformations in the perception, notion and political value of sharing information and related infrastructures, reflecting a few decades of practice. It deeply challenges the whole concept of authorship with a new radical approach, where the ‘author’ has a collective and multiple dimension, in which human and nonhuman authors are seemingly integrated.

Alessandro Ludovico, Winchester School of Art, editor of Neural magazine