Disintegrator

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:Probably Marek’s favorite piece of theory: Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of DesireA 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 SpaceThe essay: The Alien Subject of AI.Some references from the conversation that are likely interesting to any listener:If you haven’t read Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis (renamed Lilith’s Brood), we strongly recommend these amazing pieces of science fiction.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.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).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?”).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.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).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:Anil Bawa-Cavia’s Logiciel brings a sledgehammer to contemporary computation, illuminating the ideological presuppositions and logical incoherencies at its core.Nick Land’s Machinic Desire inspires the piece, with its provocation that capitalism is an AI sent from the future.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.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.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!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.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.On the economic side, Suhail Malik’s Ontology of Finance is a must-read, as is Bifo Berardi’s “After the Economy”.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: 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.Jon references Anthony O’Hear’s “Art and Technology” as a foundational work establishing the parasitic tendencies of AI back in the 90s.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.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: Free Labor: Producing Culture of the Digital EconomyNetwork Culture: Politics for the Information AgeAfter the Internet: Digital Networks between Capital and the CommonWe further recommend some background information about some of the theorists Tiziana references, including: 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.Since we speak about Marx’s Grundrisse, David Harvey has quite a good primer on this important but unusual text here.Something that informed Marek’s thoughts in this conversation was an excellent recent episode of Aufhebunga Bunga (number 362 with Cory Doctorow).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.Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Toward a Global Idea of Race comes up in the context of racialized capitalism.Peter Galison’s War Against the Center is highly recommended as we speak about centralization.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?

Reza Negarestani has put together one of the strongest philosophical conceptions of Artificial General Intelligence. In this episode, Reza, Marek, and Roberto hit virtually every limit of AI theory -- from the outer banks of the "human", the boundaries of creativity and imagination, the borderlands of contemporary computation, and the social and political and aesthetic implications of all of the above. This episode is a great companion piece to not just Reza's chapter in Choreomata (Galatea Reloaded: Imagination Inside-Out Imagine) but his absolutely mindblowing work Intelligence and Spirit. We reference a few texts in the interview:Intelligence and Spirit (in our opinion, one of the most important treatises on AGI)Reza's work on the "inhuman" in The Labor of the Inhuman and Drafting the InhumanHis collaboration with the brilliant visual artist and theorist Keith Tilford, who also has a significant piece in Choreomata, but who most famously collaborated with Reza on ChronosisReza's conversation with one of our favorite political theorists, Nick Srnicek, via the awesome Impossible Object BooksWhile this episode is quite technical, we are confident that repeat listens are rewarding. Reza will uproot everything you believe about Artificial Intelligence in this incredible interview.