Human Entities Podcast

Human Entities 2024: culture in the age of artificial intelligence
Eighth edition, 15 May 2024

Plant consciousness
Monica Gagliano
Evolutionary ecologist, Research Associate Professor (Adjunct) at Southern Cross University, Australia

Monica Gagliano PhD is an internationally award-winning research scientist, selected by Biohabitats as one of the 24 most Inspiring Women of Ecology, together with Jane Goodall, Rachel Carson, Sylvia Earl, and Terry Tempest Williams. She has been an invited lecturer at the most prestigious universities, including UC Berkeley, Stanford, Harvard, Dartmouth and Georgetown. Monica’s pioneering work has been widely featured by prominent media, such as The New York Times, Forbes, The New Yorker, The Guardian, National Geographic, and many others. Monica is Research Associate Professor (Adjunct) of evolutionary ecology based in Australia. She is currently Chief Scientist at Kaiāulu|Coherence Lab in Hawaii, and Research Associate at the Takiwasi Centre in Perú.

Monica has pioneered the brand-new research field of plant bioacoustics, which for the first time, experimentally demonstrates that plants emit voices and detect and respond to the sounds of their environments. Her work has extended the concept of cognition in plants. By demonstrating experimentally that learning and memory are not the exclusive province of animals, Monica has reignited the discourse of plant subjectivity, as well as ethical and legal standing. Inspired by encounters with nature and indigenous elders from around the world, Monica applies an innovative and holistic approach to science, one that is comfortable engaging at the interface between areas as diverse as ecology, physics, law, anthropology, philosophy, literature, music, the arts, and spirituality. By re-kindling a sense of wonder for the beautiful place we call home, she is helping to create a new ecology of mind that inspires the emergence of revolutionary solutions toward human interactions with the world we co-inhabit.

Monica’s studies have led her to author numerous ground-breaking scientific articles and books, including Thus Spoke the Plant (2018) and The Mind of Plants (2021).

https://www.monicagagliano.com
https://www.instagram.com/_monicagagliano_
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monica_Gagliano
https://researchportal.scu.edu.au/esploro/profile/monica_gagliano/overview

Credits
Organised by CADA in partnership with Lisbon Architecture Triennale and Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon

Programmed by Jared Hawkey/Sofia Oliveira with guest programmers: Andrea Pavoni, Justin Jaeckle, Lavínia Pereira and Olivia Bina.

Funded by: República Portuguesa – Cultura / Direção-Geral das ArtesSupport: Câmara Municipal de Lisboa; Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia – NOVA LINCS; Instituto Ciências Sociais, Urban Transitions Hub, Universidade de Lisboa; DINAMIA’CET (ISCTE-IUL) and Faculdade Belas Artes, Universidade de Lisboa, Departamentos de Design de Comunicação e Arte Multimédia
Design: Pedro Loureiro
Photography: Joana Linda
Sound: Diogo Melo

Human Entities 2024: culture in the age of artificial intelligence
Eighth edition, 5 June 2024

Solarpunk means dreaming green
Jay Springett
Strategist and writer

Solarpunk is a movement in speculative fiction, art, fashion, and activism that seeks to answer and embody the question “what does a sustainable civilization look like, and how can we get there?”

In our current age of popular dystopia, climate grief, and biosphere collapse, Solarpunk has become a ‘creative container‘ for more fertile futures. Not one future singular, but many. Solarpunk encourages everyone to re-imagine what life might be like en-route to a better world. Our collective future will not be imposed upon us from above, but instead created bottom up by individuals in polyphony. A texture consisting of multiple simultaneous lines of independent melody.

The future never passively arrives fully formed, instead, it must be dreamed. Solarpunk is one such dream. In this talk Jay will cover the story of how solarpunk came to be and its attempts at inspiring people to ‘remake our present and future history’.

Jay Springett
Jay Springett is a strategist and writer from London.

He is known as a leading voice in the speculative genre of Solarpunk, which described in 2019 as a ‘memetic engine’ – a tool to power the ‘refuturing’ of our collective imagination. In 2020 his Solarpunk short story ‘In The Storm, A Fire’ was long listed for the BSFA Award for Short Fiction.  Jay is a Fellow of Royal Society of Arts in London and was selected as one of WeAreEurope’s 64 Faces of Europe in 2019. He is currently an instructor at The New Centre and speaks regularly about the future, technology and culture at events around the world. He currently hosts two podcasts: PermanentlyMoved.Online, a 301 second long personal journal and Experience.Computer, an interview show about aphantasia, creativity, and the imagination.

Jay has been writing online at http://www.thejaymo.net since 2010.

Credits
Organised by ⁠CADA⁠ in partnership with ⁠Lisbon Architecture Triennale ⁠and ⁠Faculty of Fine Arts⁠, University of Lisbon

Programmed by Jared Hawkey/Sofia Oliveira with guest

Funded by: República Portuguesa – Cultura / ⁠Direção-Geral das Artes⁠
Support: ⁠Câmara Municipal de Lisboa⁠; Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia – ⁠NOVA LINCS⁠; Instituto Ciências Sociais, ⁠Urban Transitions Hub⁠, Universidade de Lisboa; ⁠DINAMIA’CET⁠ (ISCTE-IUL) and ⁠Faculdade Belas Artes⁠, Universidade de Lisboa, Departamentos de Design de Comunicação e Arte Multimédia
Design: ⁠Pedro Loureiro⁠
Photography: ⁠Joana Linda⁠
Sound: ⁠Diogo Melo⁠

Human Entities 2024: culture in the age of artificial intelligence
Eighth edition, 29 May 2024

Artificial Intelligence Design and the Logic of Social Cooperation
Matteo Pasquinelli
Associate Professor in Philosophy of Science, Ca’ Foscari University, Venice

A conversation around the book “The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence” with the author Matteo Pasquinelli.

What is AI? A dominant view describes it as the quest “to solve intelligence” – a solution supposedly to be found in the secret logic of the mind or in the deep physiology of the brain, such as in its complex neural networks. Pasquinelli’s book The Eye of the Master argues, to the contrary, that the inner code of AI is shaped not by the imitation of biological intelligence, but the intelligence of labour and social relations, as it is found in Babbage’s “calculating engines” of the industrial age as well as in the recent Large Language Models such as ChatGPT.

Matteo Pasquinelli
Associate Professor in Philosophy of Science at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage of Ca’ Foscari University in Venice where he is coordinating the ERC project AI MODELS.

http://matteopasquinelli.com
https://pric.unive.it/projects/ai-models/home
https://www.versobooks.com/products/735-the-eye-of-the-master

Credits
Organised by ⁠CADA⁠ in partnership with ⁠Lisbon Architecture Triennale ⁠and ⁠Faculty of Fine Arts⁠, University of Lisbon

Programmed by Jared Hawkey/Sofia Oliveira with guest

Funded by: República Portuguesa – Cultura / ⁠Direção-Geral das Artes⁠

Human Entities 2024: culture in the age of artificial intelligence
Eighth edition, 22 May 2024

Pluralizing psychedelic experiences
Giorgio Gristina
PhD candidate, DANT (ICS-ULisboa), Systems Neuroscience Lab (Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown)

Potential groundbreaking therapeutic applications are fuelling a resurgence of scientific and clinical interest towards psychedelic compounds. Growing media coverage is popularizing concepts such as “mystical experience” and “ego-dissolution”. Such terms are used in most scientific studies to describe the complex subjective experiences elicited by these substances, possibly playing a role in their therapeutic outcomes. But what’s the history behind these categories? And are there other ways of interpreting the peculiar effects of these substances?

The mystical framework has been dominant in western scientific approaches to altered states of consciousness, and was thus adopted by psychedelic research since its inception. However, I argue that it is not the only possible interpretation of psychedelics’ effects. Ethnographic data and anecdotal evidence show that other communities have approached psychedelics through other epistemologies, and that their effects vary considerably across different settings. To widen our understanding of these substances’ effects and their therapeutic applications, scientific approaches to psychedelics should attempt to include a broader diversity of experiences, contexts and methods.

Giorgio Gristina
Giorgio Gristina holds a BA in Intercultural Communication and a MA in Social and Cultural Anthropology, both from the University of Torino (Italy). He also got a diploma in Sound Engineering from the school APM (Italy), having collaborated to numerous artistic / audiovisual projects along the years. He is currently PhD candidate in Medical Anthropology at the Institute of Social Sciences (ULisboa), with a research project co-hosted by the System Neuroscience Laboratory (Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown). His PhD investigation employs qualitative methods to unravel the historical and cultural frameworks underlying contemporary scientific research and clinical practice with psychedelic drugs, with focus on the Portuguese scenario and its role in the context of the “psychedelic renaissance”. His work explores the socialities emerging around the use and circulation of drugs, and the way scientific discourses shape western conceptions of self, mind and mental health. He has conducted fieldwork in Israel and in different sites in Europe.

https://doutoramento.antropologia.ulisboa.pt/estudantes/giorgio-gristina

Credits

Programmed by Jared Hawkey/Sofia Oliveira with guest

Funded by: República Portuguesa – Cultura / ⁠Direção-Geral das Artes⁠

Support: ⁠Câmara Municipal de Lisboa⁠; Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia – ⁠NOVA LINCS⁠; Instituto Ciências Sociais, ⁠Urban

Design: ⁠Pedro Loureiro⁠

Photography: ⁠Joana Linda⁠

Sound: ⁠Diogo Melo⁠

Human Entities 2023: culture in the age of artificial intelligence
Seventh edition, Wednesday 17 May 2023

How much of our individual human experience can we absorb into machine models when we use machine learning and a huge amount of data? Will AI become sentient? Sovereign? Ambitious? How will living with AI change our daily experience? This talk reflects natural, social, and computing sciences, describing both human and artificial intelligence, then governance, justice, and creativity. What we do matters, and we are obliged to ourselves and our planet to create and maintain good governance of all artefacts of our species.

Joanna Bryson
Joanna J Bryson, Professor of Ethics and Technology at Hertie School, is an academic recognised for broad expertise on intelligence, its nature, and its consequences. She advises governments, transnational agencies, and NGOs globally, particularly in AI policy. She holds two degrees each in psychology and AI (BA Chicago, MSc & MPhil Edinburgh, PhD MIT). Her work has appeared in venues ranging from reddit to the journal Science. She continues to research both the systems engineering of AI and the cognitive science of intelligence, with present focuses on the impact of technology on human cooperation, and new models of governance for AI and ICT.

https://www.joannajbryson.org
https://joanna-bryson.blogspot.com
https://twitter.com/j2bryson

Human Entities 2023: culture in the age of artificial intelligence
Seventh edition, Wednesday 3 May 2023

Smart Power
Orit Halpern
Full Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures and Societal Change at Technische Universität Dresden

Today, growing concerns with climate change, energy scarcity, security, and economic volatility have turned the focus of urban planners, investors, scientists, and governments towards computational technologies as sites of potential salvation from a world consistently defined by catastrophes and ‘crisis’. From large scale computer simulations of the weather, to smart cities and infrastructures, to geo-engineering projects, to cryptocurrencies and blockchains, we have arguably transformed the planet into a test-bed and experiment for computational technologies. The penetration of almost every part of life by digital technologies has transformed how we understand nature, culture, and time. But what futures are we imagining, or foreclosing through these planetary ‘experiments’? How have we come to see human survival as fundamentally dependent on computational networks? This talk maps the rise of this ‘smartness mandate’. Tracing genealogies from artificial intelligence, finance, architecture, and art I will develop an account of how ubiquitous computing has become one of the dominant governing logics of our present (and possibly our future) and to what effects.

Orit Halpern
Orit Halpern is Full Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures and Societal Change at Technische Universität Dresden. Her work bridges the histories of science, computing, and cybernetics with design. She completed her Ph.D. at Harvard. She has held numerous visiting scholar positions including at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, IKKM Weimar, and at Duke University. She is currently working on two projects. The first is a history of intelligence and evolution; the second project examines extreme infrastructures and the history of experimentation at planetary scales in design, science, and engineering. She has also published widely in many venues including Critical Inquiry, Grey Room, Journal of Visual Culture, and E-Flux. Her first book Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason (Duke UP 2015) investigates histories of big data, design, and governmentality. Her latest book with Robert Mitchell (MIT Press January 2023) The Smartness Mandate, is a theory and history of the concept of ‘smartness’, that interrogates the relationship between computation, population, economy, and governmentality.

https://orithalpern.net

https://governingthrough.design

https://againstcatastrophe.net

Human Entities 2023: culture in the age of artificial intelligence
Seventh edition, Wednesday 26 April 2023

Rebooting democracy
Manuel Arriaga + Pedro Magalhães
Manuel Arriaga is a university professor and one of the founders of the Fórum dos Cidadãos; Pedro Magalhães is a researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon

Democracy is a technology of collective decision-making that aggregates intentions and defines a course of action. However, according to the diagnosis of many, it’s a technology ‘in crisis’. An important part of the contemporary experience of ‘democratic frustration’ seems to result from the contrast between the stagnation of ways of doing politics and the rapid evolution of digital technology. As consumers, we have long learned to expect – and demand – innovation. Yet, as citizens, we regularly confront ourselves with the immutability of mechanisms of governance.

In representative democracy, who is effectively represented? How, and to what extent, are the interests and preferences of people – and different people – converted into policies? With regard to the issue of the environment and climate change, in every election cycle there seems to be a kind of myopia, or short-sightedness, which exclusively focuses on the articulation and resolution of (some) short-term problems.

To what extent can forms of ‘democratic innovation’, especially those that serve to create greater opportunities for political participation, serve to address long-term problems, in particular the climate crisis? What is the potential of other forms of political organisation as a complement, or even alternative, to representative democracy?

This discussion will be moderated by Catherine Moury, Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the PhD programme, Political Studies Department, NOVA University of Lisbon.

Manuel Arriaga
Manuel Arriaga is a university professor, author of Rebooting Democracy: A Citizen’s Guide to Reinventing Politics one of the founders of the Fórum dos Cidadãos and, more recently, one of the driving forces behind the political party (still non-existent) FUTURO.

https://www.rebootdemocracy.org
https://www.forumdoscidadaos.pt
https://www.futurodemocratico.pt

Pedro Magalhães
Pedro Magalhães is a researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon, where he develops research in the area of public opinion and political attitudes, in particular attitudes towards democracy.

https://www.pedro-magalhaes.org/
https://twitter.com/PCMagalhaes

Human Entities 2023: culture in the age of artificial intelligence
Seventh edition, Wednesday 19 April 2023

Mark Leckey is one of the most influential artists working today. Since the late 1990s, his work has looked at the relationship between popular culture and technology as well as exploring the subjects of youth, class and nostalgia. He works with sculpture, film, sound and performance⁠ – and sometimes all four at once. In particular, he is known for Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999) and Industrial Light and Magic (2008), for which he won the Turner Prize.

His work has been widely exhibited internationally, including solo exhibitions at Tate Britain, in 2019, Serpentine Gallery, in 2011, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, in 2008 and at Le Consortium, Dijon, in 2007. His performances have been presented in New York City at the Museum of Modern Art, Abrons Arts Center; at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, both in 2009; and at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City, in 2008. His works are held in the collections of the Tate and the Centre Pompidou.

https://markleckey.com
https://www.cabinet.uk.com/mark-leckey
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/mark-leckey-6877/introducing-mark-leckey
https://www.youtube.com/@MrLeckey
https://www.instagram.com/mark.leckey
https://twitter.com/MarkLeckey
https://www.nts.live/shows/mark-leckey

Organized in partnership with  the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon, Communication Design and of Multimedia Arts departments

Discriminating Data, a conversation with Wendy Hui Kyong Chun

In Discriminating Data [2021], Wendy Hui Kyong Chun reveals how polarization is a goal—not an error—within big data and machine learning. These methods, she argues, encode segregation, eugenics, and identity politics through their default assumptions and conditions. Correlation, which grounds big data’s predictive potential, stems from twentieth-century eugenic attempts to “breed” a better future. Recommender systems foster angry clusters of sameness through homophily. Users are “trained” to become authentically predictable via a politics and technology of recognition. Machine learning and data analytics thus seek to disrupt the future by making disruption impossible.

In this conversation, Chun will discuss the themes of her book with Andrea Pavoni, assistant research professor at DINAMIA’CET and then take questions from the audience.

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun

https://www.sfu.ca/communication/team/faculty/wendy-chun.html

Human Entities is a public programme of talks organised by CADA.

Artist Talk

Somewhat similar to what it is commonly said about migrants, autonomous machines are taken to be a potential threat to some human labour. In military environments, these systems and their efficiency can, in fact, be more lethal than those controlled by people. This idea allows us to roll back to the core definition of intelligence which, since the Industrial Revolution has been deeply linked with efficiency-as-productivity, and subsequent avoidance of errors. This definition which is the heir of a type of rationality, with origins in the Enlightenment, is placed at the top of a hierarchy above all other human thought systems. Problems linked to managing the natural environment, where other later ‘non-rational’ human cultures are encountered, have been solved through domination and even annihilation. We can now see that some AI systems continue this legacy.

In this context, AIELSON [a machine learning model Torres trained to generate spoken-word poetry] reflects upon the zeitgeist, incorporating a complex critique where the system is seen to be connected to humanity (as a reflection) since imperfections are not discarded but embraced. Consequently this contradicts the notion of intelligence as the epitome of flawless efficiency and perfection. Hence, Torres proposes that we should now discuss machine creativity, and how creativity informs human imagination. Her work asks the question: Can we envision another future of possible cooperation between humans and machines, where the natural world is no longer seen as a territory to conquer?

Bio

Her performances and her artworks, which are also part of the collections of Malmo Art Museum and the Public Art Agency of Sweden, have been presented in several countries of the Americas, Central Europe, and Scandinavia, where she is currently based.

https://autodios.github.io