Machine Intelligences, new edition of Culture Machine – available open access

Culture Machine 20 (2021): Machine Intelligences, guest-edited by Peter Jakobsson, Anne Kaun and Fredrik Stiernstedt

https://culturemachine.net/vol-20-machine-intelligences/

Culture Machine is part of Open Humanities Press and the Radical Open Access Collective

Vol 20: Machine Intelligences, guest-edited by Peter Jakobsson, Anne Kaun and Fredrik Stiernstedt

From the editors’ introduction

The aim of this special issue is to advance new critical perspectives on machine intelligence. Although the current hype surrounding artificial intelligence has been countered by several critical interventions, there is still a long way to go in order to produce a shift in the mainstream discourse concerning these technologies. The AI-hype has support from resourceful and well-connected actors within industry and politics. Within the art world and popular culture, AI appears to be a more ambiguous phenomena, associated with both blessings and grave dangers. Nevertheless, its development is all too often portrayed as though it is inevitable and that the path it will take is already set. The impulse behind this special issue is to deepen and diversify the interrogation of this seemingly inevitable development and to get a look behind the shiny surfaces of these supposedly new technologies. This special issue thus offers historical perspectives, conceptual re-thinking and situated analyses of the technical realities and the social and cultural implications of machine intelligence, in its many different forms and manifestations, with the hope that this will provide opportunities to intervene in and change the course of our technological futures….

Contents 

Machine Intelligences – An Introduction – The Editors

The Mountain in the Machine: Optimization and the Landscapes of Machine Learning – Sam P. Kellogg

Generative Adversarial Copy Machines –Martin Zeilinger

Optimal Brain Damage: Theorizing the Nervous Present – Johannes Bruder & Orit Halpern

In Other Words: Smart Compose and the Consequences of Writing in the Age of AI – Crystal Chokshi

What Personalisation Can Do for You! or, How to Do Racial Discrimination Without ‘Race’ – Thao Phan & Scott Wark

Intelligent Borders? Securitizing Smartphones in the European Border Regime – Michelle Pfeifer

‘A Game That is Not a Game’: The Sublime Limit of Human Intelligence and AI Through Go – Kwasu Tembo

Whose Singularity? Artificial Intelligence as a Mechanism of Corporate Sovereignty
– Andrew Davis

Theseus in the Epistemic Labyrinth: Critical Histories of Data and the Apparent Weight of Color
– Evan Donahue

Artificially Shared Kinesthetic Intelligence – Lisa Müller-Trede

We Have Always Been Artificially Intelligent: An Interview with Joanna Zylinska
– Claudio Celis and Pablo Ortuzar Kunstmann

 Playful Machine Learning: An Interaction Designer’s Journey into Neural Networks – Andreas Refsgaard

Filosofía pirata y trabajo editorial / Pirate Philosophy and Editorial Work

An e-book of essays on pirate philosophy, edited by Gabriela Méndez Cota in Mexico, has just come out:

Filosofía pirata y trabajo editorial (Pirate Phiosophy and Editorial Work)

It's partly influenced by, and engaging with, my work on Pirate Philosophy, and a lecture I gave for Gabriela at her institution in Mexico city, Universidad Iberoamericana, in September 2019: 'Liberalism Must Be Defeated: On the Obsolescence of Bourgeois Theory in the Anthropocene'. (A Spanish translation of my lecture is available here.)

But - as is indicated by the 'related posts' section at the bottom of the page - Filosofía pirata y trabajo editorial/ Pirate Philosophy and Editorial Work is also influenced by the work of my Centre for Postdigital Cultures colleagues Janneke Adema and Rebekka Kiesewetter on radical open access, feminism and piracy. 

The Postdigital City for Post-Pandemic Times - free online conference

Registration is now open for next week’s The Postdigital City for Post-Pandemic Times conference.

Attendance is free and all are welcome, but please register here: 

https://www.coventry.ac.uk/research/about-us/research-events/2021/the-postdigital-city/

The conference webpage is here:

https://www.coventry.ac.uk/research/areas-of-research/postdigital-cultures/cpc-2021-conference/

'La modernidad fue un "blip" en el sistema'

This interview with me, '"La modernidad fue un "blip" en el sistema": sobre teorías y disrupciones con Gary Hall' ['"Modernity was a "blip" in the system": on theories and disruptions with Gary Hall'] has just appeared in the Colombian weekly magazine Semana. It was conducted by Alejandro Pérez Echeverry when I visitied Bogotá to give a keynote at Dispositivos institucionales, universitarios, editoriales, 17, Instituto de Estudios Críticos, Centro Cultural Gabriel García Márquez, late January, early February, 2020. 

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'At the end of 2020, before the covid-19 and misery led us to awaken as a society to the point of dignity and resistance, Gary Hall passed through Colombia. He did it within the framework of the seminar 'Cátedra 9 Viento - Critical Imagination'. Before his lecture “Contemporary Editorial Devices”, Hall spoke with us.

As he makes clear in this interview, it is many things, he prefers it that way. He avoids the title of "expert" that many avidly seek and is not afraid to say that he plays something else, that he does not seek to be a "brand." For this reason, even though a photo was taken for this article, he does not include one or in his own biography.

In this talk, Hall talks about devices of disruption in universities, in the publishing field and in the media, also of finding hope in community movements and in their crusade to regain their self-determination over the interests of multinationals. Hall exposes the hypocrisies of the media system and also hits hard on the educational system of his country and an elite that believes they know what the public "needs" to know. He reviews Shakespeare and the impacts of Gutenberg's invention, talks about Michel Foucault, the impact of photography on art, Napster, Spotify, Netflix and Facebook....'

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The full interview is available in Spanish here. (Put the following url into Google Chrome and it'll provide an English translation for you: https://www.semana.com/cultura/articulo/la-modernidad-fue-un-blip-en-el-sistema-sobre-teorias-y-disrupciones-con-gary-hall/202105/) 

hyposubjects: on becoming human, by Timothy Morton and Dominic Boyer - new book from Open Humanities Press

Announcing the publication of hyposubjects: on becoming human, by Timothy Morton and Dominic Boyer.

Like all Open Humanities Press books, hyposubjects is available for free:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/hyposubjects/

The time of hypersubjects is ending. Their desert-apocalypse-fire-and-death cults aren’t going to save them this time. Meanwhile the time of hyposubjects is just beginning. This text is an exercise in chaotic and flimsy thinking that will possibly waste your time. But it is the sincere effort of two reform-minded hypersubjects to decenter themselves and to help nurture hyposubjective humanity. Here are some of the things we say in this book: 1) Hyposubjects are the native species of the Anthropocene and are only just now beginning to discover what they might be and become. 2) Like their hyperobjective environment, hyposubjects are also multiphasic and plural: not-yet, neither here nor there, less than the sum of their parts. They are, in other words, subscendent (moving toward relations) rather than transcendent (rising above relations). They do not pursue or pretend to absolute knowledge or language, let alone power. Instead they play; they care; they adapt; they hurt; they laugh. 3) Hyposubjects are necessarily feminist, colorful, queer, ecological, transhuman, and intrahuman. They do not recognize the rule of androleukoheteropetromodernity and the apex species behavior it epitomizes and reinforces. But they also hold the bliss-horror of extinction fantasies at bay, because hyposubjects’ befores, nows, and afters are many. 4) Hyposubjects are squatters and bricoleuses. They inhabit the cracks and hollows. They turn things inside out and work miracles with scraps and remains. They unplug from carbon gridlife; they hack and redistribute its stored energies for their own purposes. 5) Hyposubjects make revolutions where technomodern radars can’t glimpse them. They patiently ignore expert advice that they do not or cannot exist. They are skeptical of efforts to summarize them, including everything we have just said.

hyposubjects is published in our Critical Climate Chaos: Irreversibility series, which is edited by Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook:

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/ccc2-irreversibility/

Author Bios

Dominic Boyer is a writer, media maker and anthropologist. He currently teaches at Rice University where he also served as Founding Director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences (2013-2019). His most recent book is Energopolitics (Duke UP, 2019), which is part of a collaborative duograph, “Wind and Power in the Anthropocene,” with Cymene Howe, which studies the politics of wind power development in Southern Mexico. With Howe, he also helped make a documentary film about Iceland’s first major glacier (Okjökull) lost to climate change, Not Ok: a little movie about a small glacier at the end of the world (2018). In August 2019, together with Icelandic collaborators, Boyer installed a memorial to Okjökull’s passing, an event that attracted media attention from around the world. He is pursuing anthropological research with floodies in Houston, Texas, and on electric futures across the world. And he is developing a TV series, Petropolis, about relations and reckonings in Houston TX.

Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. They have collaborated with Björk, Laurie Anderson, Jennifer Walshe, Hrafnhildur Arnadottir, Sabrina Scott, Adam McKay, Jeff Bridges, Justin Guariglia, Olafur Eliasson, and Pharrell Williams. Morton co-wrote and appears in Living in the Future’s Past, a 2018 film about global warming with Jeff Bridges. They are the author of the libretto for the opera Time Time Time by Jennifer Walshe. They are the author of Being Ecological (Penguin, 2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), eight other books and 250 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food. Morton’s work has been translated into 10 languages. In 2014, Morton gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory. They blog regularly at Ecology Without Nature.