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CONFERENCE ABSTRACTS

-DESIGNING THE PROBLEM, MODELING THE SOLUTION


Ross McElwain & Jay Springett
Decentralized Autonomous Organisations were originally imagined by cybernetics and later realized on the blockchain. An alegal organizational model ideal for coordinating both large and small groups across territorial borders, DAOs have become a design space explored notably by gamers, artists, and activists, especially in the field of governance. We foresee DAOs playing a crucial role in the passage between what might be termed hybrid realities, both on and offline. This is a natural consequence of internet-native generations’ sharp awareness of living inside political, fictional and other models, and will constitute a powerful form of critique from within.

Mi You
My contribution focuses on Chinese scientist Qian Xuesen and the recent retro-futuristic sci-fi Qian Xuesen and the Yangtze River Computer (2021) by artist Shi Qing. Qian Xuesen was the scientist behind China’s missile and space program since the 1950s, and no less importantly, he ventured into more speculative realms of somatic sciences in the 80s. His inquiry into technologies that integrate with the human remains understudied today, a point to which Shi Qing pays tribute through the fictive Yangtze River Computer based on the mobilization of the masses. The talk brings together both alternative histories of computation and tech imaginaries, and highlights their idiosyncrasies against the backdrop of current (artist and speculative) accelerationist tech imaginaries on the left. With this, I ask what it means to reclaim computation technology from a non-West and left perspective today.

Zenobio Almeida
One of the great difficulties in designing with formal models is concretizing them in the objective world as functional tools or techniques. Inspired by Fuchs-Kittowski, a pioneer in the theory and methodology in regards to designing information systems, I will question the field of tensions between formal models and the nonformal world. If the model is the message, what is between the message and the world? Which messages are we throwing to our worlds, and through which models are we not just perceiving our always mediated cognitions but also creating and recreating the new worlds? Which systems of interaction between artifacts, users, and environments can enhance cognition, recursively improving the systems?

Benjamin Bratton
At what point does the performance of reason become a kind of reason? As Large Language Models, such as LaMDA, come to animate cognitive infrastructures, the questions of when a functional understanding of the effects of “language”— including semantic discrimination and contextual association with physical world referents — constitute legitimate understanding, and what are necessary and sufficient conditions for recognizing that legitimacy, are no longer just a philosophical thought experiment. Now, these are practical problems with significant social, economic and political consequences. One deceptively profound lesson, applicable to many different domains and purposes for such technologies, may simply be (several generations after McLuhan): the model is the message.

Ed Keller
Where does thinking take place, and what is the relationship between symbolic or metasymbolic systems and levels of sapience? How does current work in VQGAN/Clip* and Diffusion**, connect to a deeper ecosystemic thinking or an architectural/urban thinking about systems intelligence? This talk, in the context of AI/ML generated imagery produced using tools such as NightCafe, will touch on subjects including the overview effect, ubiquitous cognition, metalinguistics, latent space, the geopolitics of the multiverse, and ultraconserved gestures as a partial response to some of the mechanisms of cognitive capture. *VQGAN (Vector Quantized Generative Adversarial Network): VQGAN is a GAN architecture which can be used to learn and generate novel images based on previously seen data. **The diffusion model works by adding Gaussian noise to the training data and then learning to recover it.

Patricia Reed
In this presentation, we'll examine the interplay between two distinct pictures of models: the model as epistemological mediator (Margaret Morrison), and the model as performative driver (Donald MacKenzie). In combining these two model picturings, we can come to understand the function of models as a form of cognitive interference, that is, as an enabling thought-prosthetic mingling the activities of discovery and manipulation. This framework allows us to better understand Alain Badiou’s premise that models induce 'participation', where participation is understood as a mixture of the sensible and the intelligible.

Valentin Golev
The most impressive technologies we’ve been facing recently go beyond achieving particular technical goals and objectives, expressing vague but important notions that would hitherto fall under the purview of philosophy: truth and meaning (formal logical systems), fairness and honesty (blockchains), intelligence or creativity (machine learning). Recognition of a familiar structure behind technology can help us critically understand its mythological functioning without losing the perspective of its metaphysical ambitions that influence and mirror the social consequence of technology. We have to learn to read technologies as modern myths to avoid mistaking their posits for the truth.

Daniel Young
My presentation proposes the systems-based photography with which I have experimented in the past few years in my projects. I will be speculating on the limits to these strategies and the presisting need for problematic cognitive shortcuts of heuristics, and the narrative functions of the descriptions of systems.

-WHEN TO MODEL, HOW TO KNOW


Elie Ayache
Recent propositions in derivative pricing and stochastic volatility modeling suggest that truth exists below the surface of derivative and asset prices, truth as seen from God's point of view. Technically, it is the 'rough volatility model'. They call it ‘God’s model’. By contrast, the ‘Market models’ approach finds no place for such underlying truth, or indeed an underlying stochastic process, and believes only in surface models, where derivatives are themselves the underliers and their price is the only fact, produced solely by the machinic, automatic, autonomous and anonymous logic of the market.

Anna Longo
On the one hand, economic growth is fueled by the innovations and advances in the sector of information technology, on the other hand, the expansion of platforms has been favorizing the spread of the so called “gig economy”. Will the Platform Economy, the reorganization of markets, enterprises, and social organization it portends, catalyze economic growth and a surge in productivity driven by a new generation of entrepreneurs? Or will the reorganization concentrate gains in the hands of those who generate the platforms and possibly even stifle future entrepreneurs? Will it spark a wave of entrepreneurial possibilities, or an avalanche of dispossessed workers trying to make their way with gigs and temporary contracts?

Franziska Aigner
My contribution deals with how models and other practical forms are capable of addressing planetary-scale transformations caused by technological change, through asking about the underlying, technical conditions of possibility of models, practical forms, and ultimately schemata. The route of questioning will take its starting point from Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of the culture industry, and specifically Hollywood cinema, in their 1944 Dialectic of Enlightenment, which hinges on the claim that its “prime service to the customer is to do his schematizing for him [sic].” Hollywood cinema is here said to have finally deciphered and gained control over what, according to Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason was essentially characterized as a “hidden art in the depth of the human soul.” How, then, is it possible for the culture industry to ‘schematize’ for us, and what are the consequences (political, social, moral, epistemological, ontological) of an externalized and industrialized schematization?

Katerina Kolozova
I will revisit the notion of technē in Aristotle's Poetics and seek for correspondences between the understanding of art, technology and mechanics in the European history of ideas that draws on the Aristotelian tradition or could be related to it indirectly, namely via the materialist, empiricist and other approaches. They do not necessarily need to be relegated to the materialist as opposed to the idealist philosophical and scientific legacies but do occupy such niches even within the opposing traditions of thought. In Aristotle, the creation of the work of art is no different than any other form of cognition: consider the notion of mimesis rendering art, technology and philosophy closely interlocked.

Jean-Pierre Caron
In the Atlas of Experimental Politics, The Subset of Theoretical Practice Collective offered a toolkit for navigating the social worlds of concrete political practice. In this presentation, I flesh out one of the ideas proposed in the Atlas, namely, how political organizations can yield information about the worlds we inhabit, which we can call the epistemic mediation aspect of an organization. By trying to quickly reconstruct the mediations through which a cognitive function can be assigned to political organizing I will perform a critique of the way “worldmaking” has been used in connection to political matters recently.

AA Cavia
The 'frame problem' was first articulated by Patrick Hayes & John McCarthy in 1969, in the context of artificial intelligence for situated robotics at Stanford University. This talk examines both the epistemological and computational aspects of the problem through the lens of topology. I will discuss two notions of frame, the first from model theory, and the second from constructive mathematics, proceeding from the theory of locales.

Reza Negarestani
A precursor to the philosophy of modeling, Hans Vaihinger is often credited for foreseeing a systematic inquiry into the nature of models as artifices (Kunstgriffe) which express the fictive (phantasizing) activity of the mind. Composed as a series of annotations on text-to-image generation algorithms, this presentation attempts to look at such machine learning models through a synthesis between the model as a fictive activity and fictive activity as a function of what Edmund Husserl has called phantasy and its affiliates, memory and image-consciousness. This synthesis allows us to look at the interaction with models as itself a rich territory largely unexplored—a territory where the function of phantasy or imagination (in the Husserlian sense) is exteriorized or turned inside out. Such an exteriorization marks the beginning of the lengthy process of unimagining imagination, an unlearning necessary for re-imagining imagination stripped from centuries of grime accumulated around it in the name of the human impression of human creativity.

Cássia Siqueira
My presentation deals with the sex class system as a constitutive - though contingent - feature of culture, and points to a project in which it is designed as a trap. Following Shulamith Firestone's analysis of the aesthetic/technological dialectics of cultural history and Helen Hester's xenofeminist reading of her work, conjoined with an infrastructural treatment of grammar as embedded in the logical-material concept of forms of life, I approach gender abolition and the end of culture as we know as a neorationalist project, aligned with a throughgoing critique of the human's transcendental structures.

-CONTEMPORARY ART MODELING NOVELTY, FORMING KNOWLEDGE


Jason Mohaghegh
There are a growing number of theories that revolve around the machine's relation to the unconscious thus opening doors to discourses on the psychoanalysis of virtual worlds, multiverses, algorithms, and artificial intelligence itself. However, one often forgets the hidden lineage of the psyche that resides within hypnosis. This obscure paranormal domain of inquiry -which consists of experiments with ideas of positive and negative hallucinations, magnetism, mesmeric seizures, suggestion, telepathy, telekinesis, intuition, identity-switching, ideomotor reflexes, and "communities of sensation"- is also strangely the resurrected yet hidden promise behind many technologies of the future. Nevertheless, my presentation will explore the lost component of this connection between hypnotic methodologies and machinic devices: namely, a unique relation to "the black" (i.e. to darkness, silence, and the nothing), like that of the sensory deprivation chamber, which always formed such atmospheres of persuasion and entrancement in the past. The question therefore arises: Can the machine master black thought/space in order to summon extraordinary powers found only in blindness?

Judy Radul
Reflecting on a few of my artworks structured by questions of listening and speech, this event provokes me to speculatively question the effect of AI listening as a model of reception. If listening is not only, and perhaps not primarily, about interpretation, but a receptive feedback system profoundly conditioning the very possibilities of speech, how does the listening of chatbots, AI Therapists, surveillance systems and virtual assistants enable/disable and upload/download subjectivities. “Reception” as a sort of indexical passivity, does not correspond to this model of listening. My interest is to interrogate a cultural orientation toward conceptualizing discourse as self-generating and to consider what is opened/closed in new computational forms of reception.

Rodolfo Sousa Ortega
In this presentation, I will work with the idea of transformational inventions dealing with physical erosion to mesoamerican religious sculptures caused by archeological and architectural policies in the Gulf of Mexico. I will be focusing specifically on a case study of Zapotal, a shrine that has been part of my research since 2019. The aim of my presentation is to rethink and reshape the archeological devices with new models enhanced by digital tools on one side and advancements resulting from the material and ecological turns, instead of the anthropocentric modern melancholy prevailing the heritage policies around the world.

Cécile Malaspina
My contribution to thinking about the model as the message will be to return to a moment in the history of thought when some of the most basic aspects of today’s modeling of intelligence were far from self-evident. What I want to show is that the conceptual solutions that have imposed themselves, as a result of impassioned and sophisticated debates, are not the result of indelible progress, but only one among other possible outcomes. In turn, the consequences of such modeling decisions truly become the message when they are naturalized and begin to determine what intelligence can be.

Erica Love & Joao Enxuto
It has been ten years since Alix Rule and David Levine published International Art English (IAE), an essay that produced an explanatory model for the language of contemporary art. Rule and Levine’s findings were derived from an analysis of press releases served up by e-flux and were much debated in its aftermath. It is not our aim to revive specific, periodized arguments but rather to consider which features of IAE persist today. Are the misapplications of intellectual forebears such as French poststructuralism and the Frankfurt School still at the root of IAE? Or has the IAE framework been comprehensively overwritten by discourses which have dominated the past decade, such as: affect theory, decolonization, care, contagion, cryptocurrency, and climate change?

Romulo Moraes
This presentation will cover the idea of portable listening devices as virtual reality devices, exploring how auditory technologies produced an opaque psychoacoustic space that enveloped its users decades before VR goggles came into existence. The sonic atmosphere enforced by portable listening devices, when paired with the visual movements of reality, seems to create a cinematographic effect. The user then gets the impression of "being inside a film". The lecture will try to understand the history of listening-as-cinema and how it can be a model for future aesthetic experiences.

Stephanie Wakefield
This presentation will discuss resilience ecology's concept of the back loop, both its uses and limits, as a means for understanding the current historical moment of the Anthropocene. It will also examine emergent models for responding to the Anthropocene back loop within art and urban design while asking whether these domains remain trapped in the Holocene and what models adequate to the Anthropocene might look like.

Xenia Benivolski
In the 1960s, radicals practicing the Workers’ Inquiry built on Marx's “Fragment on Machines" offered to workers and intellectuals an ant’s-eye view of capitalism, revealing workers’ power. This method portrays the worker as futurist project: (Haiven, Webb, Benivolski) Amazon contains all the elements of a sci-fi story: merciless subordination, frivolous space travel, an evil-villain out of touch with reality, and an unforgiving world increasingly consumed by class struggles. What narratives could the workers themselves propose? With workers, the project (Haiven, Webb and Benivolski) explores what radical hope and praxis might be found in science fiction texts.

IMAGE: Modulating Ramp, Justin Lincoln, 2022