Disintegrator – Détails, épisodes et analyse

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!!!

Refik Anadol, and by extension Refik Anadol Studio, is one of the most visible, if not the most visible, artists working with large models today. His work is everywhere, from MoMa to the Biennale Venezia, from the very first Las Vegas Exosphere art display to the front of Walt Disney Concert Hall.

We’re delighted to have had him on the pod to talk through his artistic philosophy, touching specifically on media, light, AI, and his new incredibly large-scope Nature Model project announced back in January (approximately the same time we had our conversation with him — yes, the backlog is real).

We're also accompanied in the virtual studio with Pelin Kivrak, who writes as apart of Refik Anadol Studio.

Jennifer Walshe is one of the coolest people we know. Her artistic work and thought has broken our brains for years, leaving us shipwrecked in its torrential waves of reference and irony and joy and conceptual viscera.

We talk about her recent piece for the Unsound Dispatch, 13 Ways of Looking at AI, Art & Music — a series of vignettes that in their totality assemble into one of the most coherent accountings of what it is we’re all experiencing.

Some references from the ep:

• Listen to Things Know Things on RTÉ Lyric FM. 
• Hopefully you’re aware of the music duo Matmos — Jennifer references this record in the context of discussing conceptual work. Jennifer also speaks often of her close collaborator Jon Leidecker (Wobbly), who has a few absolutely killer sets with Matmos, including this one.
• You can interact with Walshe’s Text Score Dataset here.
• We continue to enjoy references to Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’s Have I Been Trained (https://haveibeentrained.com/), a way to search for your (or anyone’s) work in large, public, AI training datasets.
• Two movies everyone should see: Catfish the Movie and HER. (We’d also recommend Catfish the TV show, of course).
• Jennifer mentions the computer scientist Kate Devlin’s work, especially “Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots.”
• If you haven’t googled a picture of Paro the Therapy Seal, do it.
• Jennifer’s record “A Late Anthology of Early Music Vol. 1: Ancient to Renaissance” is a top lifetime record as far as we both are concerned. Check out track 16 for that Palestrina. It’s CRAZY. 
• To wrap it up, check out Ted Gioia’s Substack and Bruce Sterling’s writing (the concept Walshe references is "Dark Euphoria").

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.