Disintegrator

Blaise Agüera y Arcas is one of most important people in AI, and apart from his leadership position as CTO of Technology & Society at Google, he has one of those resumes or affiliations lists that seems to span a lot of very fundamental things. He’s amazing; the thoughtfulness and generosity with which he communicates on this episode gently embraced our brains while lazering them to mush. We hope you have the same experience.
 
References include:

• Blaise’s own books Who Are We Now?, Ubi Sunt, and the upcoming What Is Intelligence?
• He references James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State, which we strongly recommend, Benjamin Peters’ How Not to Network a Nation, and Red Plenty by Francis Spufford.
• Strong recommendation also to Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World.
• Roberto references Luciana Parisi’s Abstract Sex (our favorite book!) and the work of Lynn Margulis with respect to biology and reproduction.
• Blaise references James E. Lovelock’s project “Daisyworld” with respect to the Gaia hypothesis.
• He also references the Active Inference thesis, e.g. that of Karl J. Friston, and the work of Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercer on reason.
• The cellular automata work referenced here involves the Von Neumann cellular automaton and the Wolfram neural cellular automaton.

Wish us a happy 1 year anniversary of the pod!

A very warm welcome to Helena McFadzean, who is joining the Disintegrator wrecking crew.
 
This week’s episode features one of our favorite artists, Tega Brain. In this episode, we talk through two of our favorite pieces, both of which are not just great exercises in conceptual design, but are actual practical engineering projects whose artistry consists in real solutioning.
References from the pod:

• Sam Lavigne is an artist and engineer and educator whose collaborates frequently with Tega Brain. Both his creative technical work and his writing are highly recommended.
• The two pieces we talk about most are Cold Call, a collaboration with Sam Levine, and Solar Protocol, a collaboration with Alex Nathanson, and Benedetta Piantella, among others.
• Tega references the Critical Engineering group (Julian Oliver, Gordan Savičić, Danja Vasiliev), whose manifesto is very much worth reading, and 100rabbits, whose blog and methodological work are super super engaging.
• In climate-related discussions, we talk about Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Breeding Sweetgrass, Holly Jean Buck’s Ending Fossil Fuels, the concept of ‘feral computing’ from Austin Wade Smith, and the data work by Crowther Lab on forest development.
• Marek briefly mentions Joshua Citarella’s absolutely phenomenal ‘A Public Option for Social Media’.

Thanks for your patience while both Roberto and Marek were in mega-travel mega-project mode. We will be releasing something very large in the next few weeks to make up for it. :)

Here’s a gem from our archive, a recording with Jonathan Impett — 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: 

1. Impett's chapter in Choreomata is awesome. Buy our book! :) 
2. 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.
3. A few California references -- Jonathan tags in Swarm and references the composer Brian Ferneyhough. 
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. For more information on the "waste product" -- Alain Badiou's Immanence of Truths is actually pretty forthcoming in this respect. 
7. 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.

Here’s a list of the references we make throughout the interview:

1. 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. 
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Reed references Margaret Morrison and the Black-Scholes model in the context of finance.
5. Reed references Sylvia Wynter's work consistently, specifically her discussion of humanism and of Frantz Fanon.
6. 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!!!
7. Ofc big shoutouts as always Anil Bawa-Cavia -- this is the book we discuss toward the end of the episode.
8. If you aren't aware of Laboria Cuboniks and the XFM, stop listening and read it!!!

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 Fazi’s 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:

• Fazi’s landmark book, Contingent Computation: Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aesthetics—still 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 Smith’s essay, “The Foundations of Computing” (2003)—a 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 Gödel 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!

𝑎𝑛𝑔𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑐𝑖𝑠𝑚01 𝑗𝑜𝑖𝑛𝑠 𝑢𝑠 𝑡𝑜 𝑡𝑎𝑙𝑘 𝑎𝑏𝑜𝑢𝑡 𝑝𝑎𝑟𝑎𝑑𝑖𝑠𝑒

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 Cécile 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 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.
• Maya Indira Ganesh's work, e.g. Ganesh, M. I. (2022), ‘Between Metaphor and Meaning: AI and Being Human’, Interactions 29: 5, 58–62.
• 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 — 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 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 — 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. Don’t worry about this one too much.
• Potestas to Potentia — lmao ok. Potestas in Spinoza refers to the word “power” 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 within… so to speak. (Michel Serres concept of “grace”, that MacCormack refers to occasionally, is similar to potential). It's a nice way to think about power without the coercive connotations.
• Irigaray “letting be” / Serres “stepping aside” — many people have theorized political inaction as a type of action. Check out Bifo Berardi’s latest interview on Acid Horizon where he talks about “defection" so sickkkk. This doesn't mean doing nothing, but rather not doing (opting out).
• Knowledge — this isn’t 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, etc…) that are always already encoded with power.
• Difference — 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 “difference is everything.” 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 — 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.