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!!!

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.

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 Greenspan and Bogna Konior discussed in the pod is called “Machine Decision is Not Final” out on Urbanomic.
• Shoshana Zuboff is a theorist who coined the term “surveillance capitalism,” referring to capital accumulation through a process of ‘dispossession by surveillance.’ The implicit critique of “surveillance capitalism” in this episode hinges on its overemphasis on individual sovereignty.
• “Tay” 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 “humanism.” An “antihumanist" is someone who challenges the stability of the concept of the “human” or at very least its salience in cosmic affairs.
• Check out Benjamin’s new piece on Tank Mag (Tank.tv), it’s fire. And check out Anna Kornbluh’s AWESOME “Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism” 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 ‘realists’).

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:

1. 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).
2. 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.
3. 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 norms”) but also to some extent in the empirical sense (“based on what I’ve observed so far, this type of outcome should result from this interaction”). 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 “normativity” — 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.
4. An “embedding” 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 language’s embedding and correlating that to a similar set of positions in another. You don’t need to understand topology to intuit what this might look like in a way that is sufficiently useful. Anil playfully refers to “embedding” in Wilfred Sellars’ work — a philosopher who argues that everything we know is ‘embedded’ within complex webs of beliefs, norms, and meanings.
5. Anil references Alain Badiou’s writings on finitude, and it’s our impression that this is a reference to Badiou’s completion of his enormously sprawling Being and Event trilogy (“The Immanence of Truths”). Not an essential book for this podcast or a barrier to understanding Anil’s work, nor for the faint of heart in terms of its scope, but if you’re intrigued by “an all out attack on finitude” — go for it!
6. For some more content on what the “multiple realizability” of computation looks like (how computation enjoys meaningful distinction from hardware), we love Laura Tripaldi's Parallel Minds.
7. Anil references James Ladyman & Don Ross, whose work he repurposes in a critical way — see “Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized.”
8. We love love love Anil’s 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 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?

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 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:

1. 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!
2. Stiles references Alison Knowles’ The House of Dust as an influential inflection point in early computerized poetry.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. Stiles is incredibly prolific — 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 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.

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:

1. Probably Marek’s favorite piece of theory: Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire
2. 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
3. The essay: The Alien Subject of AI.

Some references from the conversation that are likely interesting to any listener:

1. If you haven’t read Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis (renamed Lilith’s Brood), we strongly recommend these amazing pieces of science fiction.
2. 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.
3. 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).
4. When we start to talk about information theory, Luciana mentions Claude Shannon (one of the fathers of modern information theory), Cecile Malaspina (“An Epistemology of Noise”), and Karen Barad (“What is the Measure of Nothingness?”).
5. 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.
6. Luciana mentions Holly Herndon’s work (we strongly recommend Holly+ and https://haveibeentrained.com/, alongside her and Mat Dryhurst’s podcast, which was a huge inspiration to us when starting Disintegrator).
7. Everyone should read Hito Steyerl’s work “Mean Images” on NLR as they should Sylvia Wynter’s “Towards the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn, its Autonomy of Human Agency and Extraterritoriality of (Self-)Cognition”.

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, 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:

1. Anil Bawa-Cavia’s Logiciel brings a sledgehammer to contemporary computation, illuminating the ideological presuppositions and logical incoherencies at its core.
2. Nick Land’s Machinic Desire inspires the piece, with its provocation that capitalism is an AI sent from the future.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. As in a previous podcast, this episode owes a lot of its frameworking to Tiziana Terranova’s Free Labor: Producing Culture of the Digital Economy. And listen to our recent podcast with this hero of ours -- Episode 2!
6. On social reproduction and reproductive labor, we recommend Bognia Konor’s Automate the Womb: Ecologies and Technologies of Reproduction, Sarah Elsie Baker’s Post-work Futures and Full Automation: Towards a Feminist Design Methodology, and the entire corpus of Helen Hester’s visionary work.
7. 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.
8. On the economic side, Suhail Malik’s Ontology of Finance is a must-read, as is Bifo Berardi’s “After the Economy”.
9. 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! We’ll be back soon with an episode featuring one of our biggest influences, Luciana Parisi (hopefully next week, depending on our travel schedule).

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.

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:

1. 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.
2. Jon references Anthony O’Hear’s “Art and Technology” as a foundational work establishing the parasitic tendencies of AI back in the 90s.
3. 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.
4. 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 strong and pithy, as are his gestures toward alternatives.

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.

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:

1. Free Labor: Producing Culture of the Digital Economy
2. Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age
3. After the Internet: Digital Networks between Capital and the Common

We further recommend some background information about some of the theorists Tiziana references, including:

1. 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.
2. Since we speak about Marx’s Grundrisse, David Harvey has quite a good primer on this important but unusual text here.
3. Something that informed Marek’s thoughts in this conversation was an excellent recent episode of Aufhebunga Bunga (number 362 with Cory Doctorow).
4. 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.
5. Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Toward a Global Idea of Race comes up in the context of racialized capitalism.
6. Peter Galison’s War Against the Center is highly recommended as we speak about centralization.
7. 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?