Concepts

Deloylo deloylo deloylo, oh my slender Sheikh.
It is spring, and I climbed to the heights of Sulaymaniyah, to a battlefield.
The beautiful sky has sounds of airplanes, machine guns,
of bombs and automobiles.
Oh brothers, call the guardsmen.”

— Boyraz

#violence

In 1770, Wolfgang von Kempelen constructed the infamous Mechanical Turk. This automaton was supposed to play chess and even be able to complete the Knight's problem. Like the Digesting Duck, the Mechanical Turk amazed the audiences. However the machine turned out to be fake. Inside, a human operator was hidden.…

— RYBN

#automation

Maven’s promise supports the wider DoD initiative named Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2). In a press conference announcing that program, Secretary of the Air Force for Public Affairs Charles Pope promises that “As envisioned, JADC2 will allow U.S. forces from all services … to sense, make sense and…

— Suchman

#data

This aspiration becomes technically realisable with the technologies of concern for this essay. It is a vision which implicitly categorises humans as objects of suspicion. A terrifying vision which seems all too-plausible in the present moment: “real-time actionable intelligence” at speed and scale – such is the aspiration for AI…

— Schwarz

#targeting

Viewed in this way, contemporary art served as a bellwether of neoliberal globalization. Now, rather than arriving at the “end of history”, as Francis Fukuyama suggested, we must speculate about what comes next.

— Citarella

#art

One of the substantial attempts to map the infrastructures of AI is the work Anatomy of an AI System by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler.

— Stalder

#AI

This short commentary offers a simple corrective. I chronicle how the embrace of automated warfare go hand in hand with the steady rise of hard-core political conservatism and nationalism, in Israel and Palestine and worldwide. Orienting towards these political conditions expands understandings of AI as sociotechnical systems, enunciated through people…

— Goodfriend

#data war

Second Variety is a science novel by American writer Philip K. Dick set in a world where war between the Soviet Union and the United Nations has reduced most of the world to a bare wasteland. The plot evolves from discovery by the few remaining soldiers that the self-replicating Claws-robots originally built to…

— Danylyuk

#armed drone

During a residency in Pact Zollverein, Essen, while working on the project ‘Human Computers’, RYBN subscribed to the Amazon MTurk platform and recorded the movement of the keyboard and the mouse of several tasks, visualizing them using a method inspired by Gilbreth’s chronocyclegraph.

— RYBN

#division of labor

Practical applications of generative archival practice might include:

— Lee

#archive

Generative methods build on patterns that have been extracted from an existing data set (training data), for images that are assumed to be relevant, such as those with the label ‘pope’. And this data set is likely to contain also images of a female pope.

— Stalder

#generative

And these are only a few examples among many. This is not fraudulent systems set by small startups trying to make a name, but by the GAFAM themselves: Amazon, Facebook, Google, etc. Looking behind the curtain of automation – of contemporary computing, of algorithms and AI – one can see…

— RYBN

#amazon

Let’s remember the microphone in the silence cabin of Victoria Vickers and whisper these questions to it: Could this same microphone delivering the verbal bombs, be used by Kawîs Axa to record the songs of the rebellion? Can the machine take sides, can it be forced to betray itself? And…

— Boyraz

#dead media

“Friend-shoring” describes the withdrawal of certain forms of production from geopolitical competitors (particularly silicon chips and green energy) and their relocation to allied or vassal states. Losing access to these essential goods now poses a steep risk to national security. As a result, tariffs and military alliances will now divide…

— Citarella

#economics

For us from an artistic perspective, using the body as a recording medium was the most interesting part. Fatigue and repetition inscribed directly the experience onto the body of the participants. The never-ending duration taken by a single operation of classification, made it even more memorable. Like the naming of…

— RYBN

#human computers

The software described above, published as HalluciGen, is not alone in its approach. Notable examples for in-place text scrambling programs include Quixotic by Marcus Butler, for static site generators (2024, running in Rust), and Poison the WeLLMs by Mike Coats, acting as a reverse proxy (2024, running…

— Planitzer

#adversarial

Neo-liberal theory posited the possibility that markets themselves possess reason or some sort of sovereignty; a reason built from networking human actions into a larger collective without planning, and theoretically, politics. The market can thus be understood as a sort of decision making machine; returning us to Milton Friedman’s original…

— Halpern

#statistical model

— RYBN

#Fake

One of the substantial attempts to map the infrastructures of AI is the work Anatomy of an AI System by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler.

— Stalder

#infrastructure

On September 11, 2011 we launched our home-made low frequency kamikaze trading bot as an extra-disciplinary performance that involved buying and selling stock at the stock market. Our algorithm ADM8[2] was built over a multilayer Perceptron, based on Frank Rosenblatt's implementation (1958) of McCulloch and Pitts' model (1943),…

— RYBN

#neuron

In response to Hamas’ bloody attack, Israeli politicians promised to exact vengeance. The Air Force attacked 1,500 targets in Gaza in the first 48 hours of war. However Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu demanded more. According to the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth, Netanyahu erupted in anger in a closed cabinet meeting…

— Goodfriend

#algorithmic intensification

Neoliberalism is a political and philosophical project whose origins extend back to Europe in the 1940s. Since that time, neoliberals have envisioned a global and borderless society linked by free markets.

— Citarella

#neoliberal

AI-assisted targeting systems may have allowed the military to target and kill at an unprecedented scale, as international media outlets have reported. However attention to developments on the ground evidences how all the violence was the result of concerted decisions: a prime minister ordering a campaign of destruction and a…

— Goodfriend

#politics

— Halpern

#market

For a broader approach, it is also possible to extend adversarial techniques to images. For Carrier-Bag.net we decided to refrain from this technique in order to minimise the resource footprint and just replace images with alternative images containing visual noise. Adversarial image techniques include the generation of garbage data as…

— Planitzer

#algorithm

Working between physics, machine learning, and cybernetics, Scholes and Black recognized that the insights of reasonable traders might matter less in pricing assets then would measuring the volatility of a stock (that is, the dynamics of upward and downward movement of price over time). Considering the context, and Black’s close…

— Halpern

#derivative

— Boyraz

#colonialism

As John Cheney-Lippold explains, “to be intelligible to a statistical model is […] to be transcoded into a framework of objectification” (ibid. 524). In this process, any individual becomes defined and cross-calculated as a computationally ascertained, actionable object. The human target object is reworked as a “discrete, modular and thus…

— Schwarz

#agency

“Noise in the sense of a large number of small events is often a causal factor much more powerful than a small number of large events can be. Noise makes trading in financial markets possible, and thus allows us to observe prices for financial assets… We are forced to act…

— Halpern

#noise

— RYBN

#google

Somewhere in Germany there is a securitized data server that holds one of the world’s most comprehensive archives of propaganda videos produced by the so-called Islamic State (ISIS), an extremist jihadist militant group that gained international notoriety in the mid-2010s for its sensationalist use of media violence to spread its…

— Lee

#ISIS

The conditions of authorisation, routinisation and dehumanisation are latent within the AI-targeting environment. The technology acts as authority, the environment abounds with distributed routinised tasks as part of the wider targeting process and, as detailed above, de-humanisation through objectification is always implicit in such AI targeting contexts. Rather than facilitate…

— Schwarz

#autonomous weapons

That’s why, in addition to the already existing names to call the fraudulent systems based on human labor – Human-in-the-loop, AAI, Pseudo-AI, Faux-AI, Potemkine-AI etc. – we propose a new term, Laborious Computing, set to reconnect computing with its manufacture origins, and to designate every computational processes that requires human…

— RYBN

#computing

This contradiction led me to devise my own tactics to allow for a distant mode of analysis. I began to imagine myself as a machine that could process disturbing content through a dispassionate, formalist lens. First, I scanned through the film as quickly as possible to identify its overall narrative…

— Lee

#dispassion

Foreseeably, governments around the world are increasingly looking to recruit young people with gaming experience to join their fights. In recruitment, the military typically looks for operators who can quickly learn and adapt to the constantly changing battlefield environments, including gamers. However, these similarities end on a real battlefield where…

— Danylyuk

#gamification

Abstraction leads to uncertainty about which image (re)presents the world or, rather, the infinite ‘multiple realities’ that encompass all human experience. In current circumstances, the original or ‘authentic’ experience is marginalised and almost non-existent when compared to the media production of war, which is not only limited to mediation but…

— Danylyuk

#image theory

Human beings, Hayek believed, were subjective, incapable of reason, and fundamentally limited in their attention and cognitive capacities. At the heart of Hayek’s conception of a market was the idea that no single subject, mind, or central authority can fully represent and understand the world. He argued that “The ‘data’…

— Halpern

#Friedrich A. Hayek

We seem to be at the end of globalization. With seismic political shifts, a certain era of contemporary art has also come to a close. In previous decades, contemporary art sought to unify a world society whose aesthetics, markets, and institutions would slowly converge upon a shared set of values.…

— Citarella

#globalization

While many of the participants, including Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, Warren McCulloch, Ross Ashby, and Claude Shannon, focused on symbolic and linguistic processes, one model focused on the neuron. A psychologist, Frank Rosenblatt proposed that learning, whether in non-human animals, humans, or computers, could be modeled on artificial, cognitive devices…

— Halpern

#perception

The leading justification for these systems has always been the promise of precision and accuracy in targeting, in the name of adherence to International Humanitarian Law and the Geneva Conventions. In a public plenary in February of 2021 Robert Work, then co-chair with Eric Schmidt of the National Security Commission…

— Suchman

#classification

Instead of a global convergence upon a shared set of values, these developments indicate that there are growing forms of value that have become non-transferable between blocs. The aesthetic, financial, and philosophical values expressed within the institutions of each sphere are becoming more distinct and separate.

— Citarella

#universalism

This all matters because classification is at the foundation of International Humanitarian Law, where what differentiates murder from the legitimate taking of life turns on the Principle of Distinction between those who are in combat and pose an imminent threat, and those identified as civilians – a principle that remains…

— Suchman

#civilians

The design of such guard rails is inevitably a political process. Which characteristics in the existing data sets should be corrected and in what form this correction should be made cannot be answered in a value-free manner. Again, aesthetic-normative rather than analytical-empirical questions arise. It is less about what an…

— Stalder

#AI guard rails

There is a long-standing web standard to inform crawlers which parts of a given website they may access, and which are restricted. This simple robots.txt file is the implicitly agreed upon reference and may lay out rules for individual crawlers and subpages. It is good practice to use this robots.txt…

— Planitzer

#bot

With the Industrial Revolution, technique became the almost exclusive interface for understanding and studying the world, with an asymmetrical distinction between an ‘observing subject’ on the one hand, and an ‘observed object’ on the other. According to Hannah Arendt, modernity starts with the distancing from the world observed through the…

— RYBN

#Hannah Arendt

The argument Neil Renic and I put forward is that a systematise mode of killing facilitates a moral devaluation of humans in two ways. One is the rendering of those targeted as data objects, often depicted only crudely on the computational interface as red or orange squares – this is…

— Schwarz

#de-humanisation

Ground truths and the datasets from which they are built and that they reproduce require, and largely presuppose, operations of datafication; that is, the rendering of worlds of interest as numbers.

— Suchman

#ground truth

— RYBN

#artificial artifical intelligence

As suggested by the media, consumer drones are democratising warfare by providing militaries with new ways to conduct reconnaissance, gather intelligence, and deliver weapons. Evidently, with the development of consumer devices, people have means to participate in war in ways that have never previously been available. One example is the…

— Danylyuk

#consumer drones

Despite its early setbacks, Project Maven is alive and well and now a DoD ‘program of record.’ In 2022 the Pentagon handed the Maven program to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, responsible for processing the US’s vast intake of aerial surveillance. In an interview with the defense media outlet Breaking Defense,…

— Suchman

#project maven

In 2015, on the invitation of PACT Zollverein we proposed the workshop “Human Perceptron”,[65] aiming at this very purpose. We took a primitive form of neural network, a Perceptron, in this case a single layer one. It resembled the one we used for our 2011 trading bot artwork,…

— RYBN

#perceptron

Over the last few years, I have been researching the militarized Kurdish landscape through a triangle of affinities linking the machine, the animal and the human. The interaction between the militaristic, the natural and the cultural unfolds as a sonic battle on the colonized landscape. Sonic booms, bird calls and…

— Boyraz

#military

The first genealogy stretches from Gaspard de Prony's calculation manufacture in 1793, to Amazon’s algorithmic management in the 2010’s.[6]

— RYBN

#Gaspard de Prony

The aircraft used in the RAF (Royal Air Force) campaign, a Vickers Victoria MARK IV, was originally a bomber and transporter, modified with speakers and amplification gear for these purposes in 1932. After the success of the “sky-shouting” modifications, the newer Vickers model ‘Valentina’ were also modified and subsequently deployed…

— Boyraz

#media

Systematic killing – as a signifier – is associated with some of the darkest historical periods of mass violence and widespread death and destruction. It is a term laden with moral abhorrence, and to raise such a term within the contemporary discussion of lethal autonomous weapon systems, and AI targeting,…

— Schwarz

#Günther Anders

AI has played a pivotal role in Israel’s war in the Gaza strip since October 7^th 2023, when Hamas militants massacred 1,200 Israeli civilians and soldiers and took more than 250 hostage (CNN 2025). Reporting by Israeli and international news outlets have detailed how large language models and predictive analytics…

— Goodfriend

#prediction

The term we propose, on our side, Laborious Computing, aims to achieve a similar goal, name things with more precision, but from an opposite angle. It aims to re-anthropomorphize, re-incarnate, re-embody, and underline the human component at the heart of the operational modalities of this particular technology, and shed light…

— RYBN

#discourse

Instead of a visual depiction of the places and the events, Kawîs Axa chooses to focus on the soundscape. Skies filled with the sounds of the airplanes, machine guns, bombs, and automobiles signify a sonic invasion. The empire is loud.

— Boyraz

#sonic

If I had access to an automated analytical tool back then, how differently would my investigative path had been? Perhaps not much, because I would have been left with the same abundance of metadata that I had generated manually. It was a pile of words that I tried to sort…

— Lee

#patterns

Human Computers is a media archaeology research that aims to unravel the intricate entanglement between computing and capitalism through the prism of labor. It is an attempt to analyze the historical bonds that tie together labor division with mechanized computing, and, by extent, with what is nowadays called “Artificial Intelligence”.

…

— RYBN

#labor

These two artifacts represent starkly opposed perspectives: one from the imperial machinery of control, and the other from the vernacular traditions of resistance. By looking at them together, I explore how sound functions as both a weapon of domination and as a medium of resilience. How can artistic gestures activate…

— Boyraz

#resistance

None of the state-of-the-art systems managed to alert IDF troops of Hamas’ attack on October 7^th and prevent the atrocities of that morning from unfolding. Some ex-security officials lamented a military so blinded by the hype emanating from Silicon Valley, they abandoned tried and true intelligence tactics. Others critiqued an…

— Goodfriend

#Intelligence

These two genealogies, the one of manufacturing computation and the one of labor matrix, mix as one in the rise of a new type of management, at the beginning of the 21^stcentury: algorithmic management.

— RYBN

#management

Participation in the networks of contemporary art also implicitly signaled a region’s openness to international finance. In this environment, foreign investors could pursue their economic goals without fear of expropriation. While it's not written into the bylaws of any museum, no country with a respected biennial is going to nationalize…

— Citarella

#finance

I found it ironic that in 2023 Getty sued the generative AI company Stability AI for allegedly using millions of images from the open-source collection LAION 5-B for training its AI model Stable Diffusion (Schuhmann et al. 2022). While diffusion models determine how data is processed, it is ultimately the…

— Lee

#scraping

— Halpern

#Frank Rosenblatt

Ultimately, there is no effective way to differentiate human from automated visitors – as anyone will agree, who was thoroughly annoyed by the surge of captcha forms in the 2010s only to realise they’re not as commonplace anymore. In this light, one can only hope that at least the large…

— Planitzer

#human-as-object

In his initial paper that emerged from the Dartmouth program detailing the idea of a “perceptron,” Rosenblatt distances himself from his peers. These scientists, he claimed, had been “chiefly concerned with the question of how such functions as perception and recall might be achieved by a deterministic system of any…

— Halpern

#Donald O. Hebb

— Goodfriend

#nationalism

My starting point in engaging with these developments is the claim for the greater precision and accuracy of data-driven warfighting, a contention that has been shown to be tragically false in Israel’s bombardment of Gaza following the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023. To understand the fallacy of the claim…

— Suchman

#precision

I first read Butler’s text years before the preponderance of AI in the 2020s; what strikes me now is her application of the ‘operative’ for how one relates to human senses. Harun Farocki and Trevor Paglen used this word to describe how images are used within machine processes such as…

— Lee

#operative image

When compared to 20th century Cold War divisions, today’s ideological differences appear rather small. We no longer see a clash of grand narratives and political-economic models. Instead, we see a growing convergence; powerful executive authority invested in an individual leader who rules over a large territory of specialized economic zones…

— Citarella

#history

Generative archival practice also interrogates the temporality of digital memory. Unlike traditional archives that preserve historical artifacts in relatively stable forms, generative/statistical/probabilistic archives are constantly evolving as training datasets change, safety parameters are adjusted, and user interactions reshape system behaviors. Yesterday's generative results may be impossible to reproduce tomorrow as…

— Lee

#generic pastness

— Lee

#Judith Butler

— RYBN

#facebook

The Turk toured around the world, and played chess games against celebrities of the time, like Napoleon Bonaparte, and Charles Babbage. It was depicted by Edgar Allan Poe in his 1874 novel Von Kempelen And His Discovery, in which the author attempts to deduce its fraudulent modus operandi. Charles Babbage…

— RYBN

#Charles Babbage

Over many years as a film critic I produced hundreds of short video essays revealing the inner workings of cinema. When ISIS videos were grabbing headlines in the mid-2010s, there was one in particular named Flames of War, an hour-long video which the Western news media was quick to dub…

— Lee

#video essay

On the level of networked computing infrastructure, the circumstance/the point that Generative AI is a continuation of a long-standing trend of centralization and concentration of power is best illustrated by the fact that the five big tech companies came to dominate the second phase of the development: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple,…

— Stalder

#data center

What happens when the underground world of DIY drone building, and drone racing is co-opted by the military? The main shift occurred in the grounds of perception to a post-human transformation of vision and war. The aesthetic of drone vision became a common place for marketing videos and film footages,…

— Danylyuk

#drone aesthetic

The boom of generative AI, which started with the maturing of generative Large Language Models (LLMs) around 2020, can be seen as the next step in this process of centralization. This now not only takes place on the level of the infrastructure, but also regarding communication patterns. Users of chatbots…

— Stalder

#LLM

To summarize: Under the algorithmic regime, humans remain cheaper than robots.[35] Humans are deemed as small cogs of a larger algorithmic engine, where the algorithms direct and command humans. Algorithmic decisions are not to be discussed or criticized by humans. Algorithmic routes and paths are inhumanly designed and…

— RYBN

#Norbert Wiener

— Planitzer

#crawling

— Lee

#Stable Diffusion

The concentration of power is not only the effect of the economies of scales, which favor data-centric incumbents, but also by the black-box character of the technology itself. Indeed, one could say, that the fusing of the two, the cloud and the black box, creates a new entity, the black…

— Stalder

#obfuscation

— Planitzer

#refusal

However, Al Badri goes beyond these questions, which are at the center of many restitution debates. For she also poses the question of the interpretation of the past, not so much in the sense of historical source work, but as a resource for the future. Here, too, the element of…

— Stalder

— Suchman

— Lee

— Schwarz

In hindsight, participation in the global system of contemporary art, as defined by its markets, institutions and reputable publications, signaled a city or nation’s arrival to the advanced world. During this period, a broad discursive network of biennials and museums of contemporary art cropped up in regions that had achieved…

— Citarella

#exhibition

The work of making that distinction is conceptualized in military doctrine as the result of a process named ‘the kill chain,’ the procedures through which persons become targets for the use of lethal force. The canonical OODA loop – Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act – is now updated to place sensor…

— Suchman

#kill chain

Illusionism tricks were not reserved to the automaton folklore of the 19^th century, they were also at the heart of the pioneering research on Artificial Intelligence. Let's think for example of the Imitation Game, a test proposed by Alan Turing in his 1950 article On Computing machinery and intelligence.

— RYBN

#chat bot

Neoliberal economics often theorizes the world as a self-organizing adaptive system to counter the idea of planned and perfectly controllable political (and potentially totalitarian) orders. Within this ideology the market takes on an almost divine, or perhaps biologically determinist, capacity for chance and emergence, but never through consciousness or planning…

— Halpern

#planning

While these are its latest instantiations, the data-driven targeting imaginary has a longer history dating back at least to US operations in Southeast Asia, articulated in 1969 by General William Westmoreland, then Chief of Staff of the US Army, who offered these thoughts over lunch: “On the battlefield of the…

— Suchman

#weapon

— Boyraz

#poetry

As Benjamin famously noted, the area of visual knowledge became one of the artefacts and cultural products of mechanical reproduction. Jenks notes that all forms of understanding generate a partial view of the world: “however hard they may strive through systems theory, subcultural theory, phenomenologies or neo-Marxism, such perspectives cannot…

— Danylyuk

#vision

— Stalder

#microsoft

The desire for data surveillance and categorisation as actionable knowledge to eliminate all possible risk – real or perceived – has always been, as Arendt notes, the “utopian goal of the totalitarian secret police”. The dream that “one look at the gigantic map on the office wall should suffice at…

— Schwarz

#surveillance

And even dynamics that centralize infrastructures into the hyper-scale, with the associate political, social and ecological dynamics, are not following some inert law, but strategic decisions. And questionable ones at that. The appearance of the Chinese DeepSeek application caused a tremendous shock in Western circles. Not only because China is…

— Stalder

#scale

— RYBN

#cybernetics

We’ll illustrate this point focusing on the lungs, the heart, the metabolism, and muscles. To measure lungs and breathing capacities, Edward Kentish's Pulmometer (1813) was followed by a long series of Spirometers, including that of English physician John Hutchinson (1846). Labor physiologist Jules Amar later used it to calculate the…

— RYBN

#measuring

If we understand AI as the next phase in the built-out of the networked computing infrastructure, we can divide this history into, broadly speaking, three phases. The first phase started in the early 1980s, when the first group of major Internet standards consolidated, turning networked computing from an experimental playground…

— Stalder

#internet

As these models continue to evolve, their outputs increasingly reflect the aesthetic conventions of their dominant data sources: promotional images, entertainment media, and commercial photography. This prevailing visual style – what I earlier referred to as a “soup” of stock photos, Hollywood movies, video games, and influencer content – functions…

— Lee

#style

The belief that all geopolitical conflicts can be approached as engineering problems has a uniquely modern genealogy. It spans a century’s worth of industrial scale military engineering, from nuclear armaments and radars to digital surveillance and drone strikes. Hype around big data, algorithmic processing, and an AI arms race has…

— Goodfriend

#engineering

The relabeling of images creates an alternative layer of metadata for understanding them, collectively forming a new frame for understanding the significance of extremist violence within an encompassing framework of systemic violence upon the Middle East. In this context, Allahyari has researched how the same techniques of 3D modeling and…

— Lee

#Morehshin Allahyari

As an historical category, contemporary art begins in the mid-1970s with the emergence of new media art. In its broad philosophy, contemporary art follows the teleological arc of new communications technologies; steady progress towards an increasingly interconnected and open model of society. This historical period coincides with the political order…

— Citarella

#liberalism

— Goodfriend

#Big Data

In 1913, Frederick Winslow Taylor published his Principles of Scientific Management. Task timing and the Chronometer were at the heart of his method. One year later, Jules Amar suggested to divide individuals according to “their degree of intelligence and their personal characteristics, and to distinguish those who are good at…

— RYBN

#Taylorism

By training with selected data, the work creates its own latent space, which can open up futures that are less dominated by colonial legacies and commercial optimization. Other images can be generated in this space. New speaker positions become possible. The absent is helped to become present. The explicitly…

— Stalder

#latent space

But the blackness made even blacker, reaching the near total light-absorbing qualities of Vantablack used by the artist Anish Kapoor, through additional layers of organizational, legal, and architectural means. Organizationally, by relying on a poorly documented, global division of labor, that makes it nearly impossible to fully understand the…

— Stalder

#openai

But if there is no technological determinism at work, this means that entirely different worlds could be generated. Such an interest pervades the work of the German-Iraqi artist Nora Al Badri, for example.

— Stalder

#artist

While we enter the age of killer robots, there is an urgent need for humanitarians, governments, media, policymakers, and drone-makers to deal with the specific issues around consumer drones in conflict. The complete terror from above threatens to wipe up the possibility of humanity, especially in the case of human…

— Danylyuk

#ethics

— Citarella

#Cold War

Which brings us to this image, introduced by the Israeli defense team at the International Court of Justice in the Hague, in response to the charge of genocide brought to the court by South Africa (Forensic Architecture 2024a).

— Suchman

#Forensic Architecture

— Danylyuk

#Walter Benjamin

Black and his colleague Scholes introduced the Black-Scholes Option pricing model in 1973 in order to provide a new way of relating options prices to the future.⁵ What made this model unique in the history of finance was that it completely detached the price of an…

— Halpern

#volatility

In military discourses and media reports derived from them, ‘data’ are consistently naturalised, treated as objectively given signals emitted by the world. This glosses over a myriad of questions, including what is detectable through technologies of surveillance and what is not, and how machine-readable signals get translated into what the…

— Suchman

#actionable intelligence

Examining the use of flying machines in sonic warfare and propaganda, this essay focuses on a 1932 British military campaign in Kurdistan, occurring during the British mandate in Iraq. Two key historical documents serve as the foundation for this analysis: an article from The Illustrated London News, detailing the use…

— Boyraz

#sound

The second story, published in April of 2024, describes the system named ‘Lavender’ dedicated to the targeting of individuals designated as suspected ‘low level’ Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad militants. In the Occupied Territories surveillance includes massive amounts of aerial imagery (from satellites to drones), cell phone signals taken as…

— Suchman

#lavender

At the same time, class has once again returned as a valid and acceptable way of understanding the world—but with significant limitations to its universal scope. Today, we see few discussions about an international proletariat and much more talk about competition between American and Chinese workers. Under multipolarity, class divisions…

— Citarella

#multipolar

Additionally, we can observe hard laws and soft rules that set the parameters of acceptable expression within each zone; legally enshrined decency laws in Russia, explicit state censorship in China and private divestment in the United States, each represent a local limit to artistic freedom.

— Citarella

#civil rights

There is also a deeply repressed history of geopolitics behind these innovations in finance. The derivative pricing equation emerged with the end of Bretton woods, decolonization, post-Fordism, and the OPEC oil crisis, to name a few of the transformations at the time then, as a way to tame or circumvent…

— Halpern

#post-fordism

Through this analysis I interpreted the structure as matching a Hollywood action film, save for the shock finale which followed the established tactic of publicizing executions to grab media attention. Somehow these findings left me unsatisfied: identifying and describing forms and patterns was not leading to insights for how to…

— Lee

#keywords

As our perception was irreversibly altered by technology, so was the notion of performance. John McKenzie extends the idea of performance by arguing about the intersections between different types of cultural, organisational and technological performances. He traces military research in the USA during the Cold War, which redefined American science.…

— Danylyuk

#high performance

Published in The Illustrated London News on April 8^th, 1933, this report details the novel psychological war tactics used by British empire. The cutaway drawing reveals the guts of the giant flying machine called Vickers Victoria. This state-of-the-art machine is depicted in utmost detail, with labels for the power amplifier,…

— Boyraz

#voice

— Citarella

#capitalism

Efforts to produce digital computing and machine learning had long been related to economics and psychology. Whether in markets, machines, or human minds particularly in the post-war period many human, social, and natural sciences came to rely on models of communication and information related to computing. Models of the world…

— Halpern

#machine learning

— Suchman

#training data

Antoine Bousquet supports this view in his discussion of the “scopic regime” of cultural theory, which requires the inclusion of “martial gaze” (Pong & Richardson 2024, 21). While the scopic regime is mainly concerned with the politics of image, the controversy surrounding targeted killing with drones leads to the discussion…

— Danylyuk

#scopic regime

Human metrics was first designed in the laboratories of physiologists and ergographers. At the turn of the 20^th century, it makes its way into factories and becomes the vanguard of the scientific organization of work. From the industry, metrics then spreads to the whole society: war, school, professional orientation, before…

— RYBN

#metrics

It was not least this intervention that many, particularly on the political right, objected to. For them, it was an example of the ‘woke thought police’. They are not entirely wrong about that. After all, who authorized the managers and engineers at Google to make these decisions? What are their…

— Stalder

#right-wing

The visual analysis of the Amazon Echo infrastructure traces the device's life cycle from the extraction of raw materials (birth), its operation through physical and cognitive layers (life), to its eventual disposal (death). It all begins and ends with geology: from the mines, which take minerals that were created over…

— Stalder

#mapping

— Halpern

#injustice

I began cutting the film into shots, creating a timeline that isolated individual sequences for closer examination. Today this process looks archaic. Contemporary video editing software like Adobe Premiere or DaVinci Resolve can automatically detect cuts in existing footage and separate shots in a timeline. Again, had I done this…

— Lee

#editing

— RYBN

#Alan Turing

In the past few years, I’ve seen more than a few artists voluntarily self-censor or choose to withdraw their artworks from problematic contexts or from exhibitions that take place under governments with whom they personally disagree. I worry that these principled gestures might belie a deeper lack of confidence in…

— Citarella

#institutions

Before focusing on the specific dimensions of generativity, it’s useful to distinguish between analytical and generative AI. Technically, there is no fundamental difference. In each case, it is a matter of recognizing and evaluating patterns in data. The difference lies in the application. In the first case, the aim…

— Stalder

#analytical AI

— Stalder

#apple

Models of minds and machines took a dramatic turn in 1956, when a series of computer scientists, psychologists, and other scientists embarked on a project to develop machine forms of learning. In a proposal for a workshop at Dartmouth College in 1955, John McCarthy labelled this new concept “artificial intelligence.”

…

— Halpern

#John McCarthy

While we need to pay attention in the current moment to the enormous expansion of signal generating infrastructures we also, I am arguing, need to attend to that which escapes capture by datafication. The aim is to destabilise the premises through which technomilitarism perpetuates its logics of rational and controllable…

— Suchman

#social justice

— Danylyuk

#martial gaze

In that all computer systems are programmed, and therefore planned, we are also forced to contend with the intentional and therefore changeable nature of how we both think and perceive our world. The failed efforts to model markets makes us recognize the historically situated and socially specific nature of both…

— Halpern

#cognition

The regular presence of small, unidentifiable drones over conflict causes confusion, fear and disgust. Civilians and soldiers on the ground cannot know who’s watching them, and for what purpose. In reality the drone war is a catastrophe for people on the ground, both sides repeatedly strike blows on the enemy…

— Danylyuk

#commercial drone

A more malicious defense approach is to overwhelm the crawler’s computational and memory capacity by force-feeding it more data than it can swallow. The infamous zip bomb, which has been in use to fight off attackers for a long time, can also be applied to scrapers. The arguably most cited…

— Planitzer

#compression

There are, of course, limits to what alternative image generation approaches can do, not simply because of their scale, but because the generative aspects of generative AI are not limited to the screen. Indeed, they extend far beyond the screen. To approach this other dimension of generativity, it is useful…

— Stalder

#Geoffrey Bowker

I consulted the website Have I Been Trained, a platform launched by digital artists Holly Herndon and Matt Dryhurst that partially mirrors LAION 5-B to help artists detect if their work has been used without their consent for generating new content (Herndon and Dryhurst 2022). I used the website to…

— Lee

#Matt Dryhurst

Two years later, a post on Twitter's engineering blog caught our attention. Improving Twitter Search with Real-Time Human Computation[3] explained how Twitter engineers were trying to correlate the users' searches and commercial results with the help of workers hired on MTurk, the infamous crowdsourcing platform launched by Amazon…

— RYBN

#crowdsourcing

In my opinion, these synthesized pope images are some of the most interesting that have been generated to date. They were created using Google Gemini, which was released at the beginning of 2024. The technical quality is impressive, quasi photo-realistic, and very rich in detail. However, the images went viral…

— Stalder

#discrimination

— Stalder

#meta

— RYBN

#Modernity

To recruit the workers, the GAFAM do not hire them directly, but through the proxy of various platforms of crowdsourcing,[54] the most famous being Amazon MTurk. But multiple other platforms exist, each with its own specialty, its own work conditions. The most notable are: FigureEight (now called Appen)…

— RYBN

#scaleai

With the proliferation of consumer-grade generative AI services, the ethics of data sourcing and usage has been called into question time and time again. Glaring issues of misrepresented information, downright slop, unintended leaks, copyright infringement, and power hunger have not yet been satisfactorily addressed. While it’s business as usual on…

— Planitzer

#copyright

— Lee

#Holly Herndon

Human Computers is constructed upon multiple genealogies. We borrow the term genealogy from Michel Foucault who suggested moving behind the views of established institutions “to discover in a wider and more overall perspective what we can broadly call a technology of power.” He suggested to replace “a genetic analysis through…

— RYBN

#Michel Foucault

The measuring of human-motor thermodynamics began, so to speak, with the physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz, who transposed the principle of conservation of energy to humans at work. The mechanistic, thermodynamic conception of the human body became the norm, punctuated by the invention of all kinds of instruments and devices to…

— RYBN

#thermodynamics

— Schwarz

#totalitarism

For the data and computer sciences, which see themselves as technical disciplines, this is a fundamental dilemma that cannot be solved analytically. Not even by rejecting guard rails entirely. Taking historical data as an unproblematic representation of reality (‘ground truth’) is highly problematic. Every historian knows these problems with archival…

— Stalder

#objectivity

In an age of meme driven speculation, NFT’s, and democratized options trading, such a statement might seem common sense. Even natural. Does anyone, after all, really think a crypto currency named as a joke for a small dog, or an almost bankrupt mall-based game retailer are intrinsically worth anything? Much…

— Halpern

#crypto currency

— Planitzer

#consumer rights

While certain generative platforms such as Chat GPT add keyword-specific guard rails and block the term ‘ISIS’ from generating images, as of this writing the term works on the Stable Diffusion XL model via the website Stable Diffusion Online (Black Technology LTD, n.d.). My searches in 2024 produced ISIS militants…

— Lee

#GPT

The army met their demands. In 2019 Aviv Kochavi became chief of staff of the IDF. In his entry speech, he pledged to make the army into a “lethal, innovative and efficient fighting force”, appealing to a fractured Israeli populace (Levy 2021). For the center left, the words “innovative and efficient”…

— Goodfriend

#innovation

— Stalder

#cloud

— Lee

#propaganda

Yet, every image is the result of a highly situated production. In the case of generated images, this situatedness is characterized by the historical and political nature of the data, as well as by the values and interests of those who create models from it. As a result, the boundary…

— Stalder

#future

— Lee

#Harun Farocki

This may all sound like an incredibly democratic vision of war where transparency and knowledge imply that states and participants can be identified from digital information flows and, as a result, held to account. Smart devices, apps, archives, and algorithms remove the bystander from war, collapsing the distinctions between witnessing…

— Danylyuk

#witnessing

But, let’s start from a concrete example. Let’s have a look at the TED Talks, the Silicon Valley’s nexus of tech’s newspeak.[62] In TED conferences, you have seventeen minutes to convince the audience – or, to put it bluntly, seventeen minutes for a scientist or a researcher to…

— RYBN

#TED Talk

The primary developer of the newly named Maven Smart Systems is Palantir, led by self-satisfied master of war Alex Karp, earlier this year securing a $480 million dollar contract with the US Army. Command and control in the moment of Generative AI is built on top of Palantir’s AI Platform,…

— Suchman

#palantir

Prony’s calculation manufacture stresses out the influence of Adam Smith's Division of labor over computation and offers an interesting matrix to understand computer's origins and effects.[7] In 1791, under the French revolution, Gaspard de Prony was appointed the direction of Bureau du Cadastre to establish a national cadaster…

— RYBN

#Adam Smith

Although many people complained that these images were wrong, the nature of the images makes such a claim meaningless. These images may look photo-realistic, they have nothing to do with photography. The criteria of photographic theory, such as representation, indexicality, or framing, do not help us here. If we were…

— Stalder

#indexicality

After some weeks involving hundreds of hours watching these videos, the researcher began to experience anxiety, nightmares and thoughts of self-harm. Through therapy he devised different tactics to continue his work. One was to don a white lab coat to inhabit the persona of a scientific researcher in order to…

— Lee

#laboratory

According to military tactics, if the target can be seen it can be destroyed. The advertising slogan for Comanche helicopter: “Whatever threat Comanche detects is history” is particular noteworthy at this respect (cited in Bishop & Phillips 2010, 63). This example reflects the thinking of Paul Virilio about the relation…

— Danylyuk

#Paul Virilio

In 1850, Helmholtz succeeded in measuring the speed of nerve impulses, which he called physiological time. In the same vein, Franciscus Donders, a Dutch ophthalmologist, developed the Noematachograph in 1865 – a derivative of the famous Phonautograph by Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. With this apparatus, Donders was able to measure…

— RYBN

#neuroscience

Far from illuminating our thinking, or our actions, an overly technologically mediated environment obscures human relations with the world and with each other. It is a structural condition in which the minutiae of the process inhibit the ability to imagine the magnitude of the effects as a whole. Complexity is…

— Schwarz

#complexity

— Stalder

#situatedness

Fischer Black, who not incidentally was the student of Marvin Minsky and spent a lot of time thinking about intelligence, artificial or otherwise, was one of the inventors of the world’s preeminent trading instruments, the Black Scholes Options Pricing Model. For Black, “irrationality” was not an exception, but rather a…

— Halpern

#Fischer Black

Another strategy to channel the narrative and lock the imaginary can be found in GAFAM patents. We have mentioned earlier some of Amazon’s mind-boggling patents, famous for their extravagant promises [Figure 14]. Like the spectacular Method and System for Anticipatory Package Shipping (US8615473B2, 2013), which states, in a dystopian minority…

— RYBN

#science-fiction

— Stalder

#protocol

Hayek’s idea of environmental intelligence was inherited directly from the work of Canadian psychologist Donald O. Hebb, who is known as the inventor of the neural network model and the theory that “cells [neurons] that wire together fire together.” In 1949, Hebb published the Organization of Behavior, a text that…

— Halpern

#neuroplasticity

What emerged was not direct violence – no blood, no beheadings – but a different kind of violence: a violence against a system of understanding that determines what an image represents and how one interprets it. A violence against images as they have been known my whole life. To me,…

— Lee

#images

Like all historical propaganda narratives, their gaze is not directed backwards, but forwards. They are an anticipation, a premonition of the future. These images show something virtual in the classical sense of Gilles Deleuze, something that is possible, that already affects the real, but is not fully actualized. What…

— Stalder

#the real

— Stalder

#invisibilization

These two modes of interacting with an image – detached analysis and active transformation – resonate with two modes of artificial intelligence technologies in contemporary visual culture. As described by researcher Antonio Somaini, there is analytic AI in which images are situated within datasets for analysis, and generative AI that…

— Lee

#Antonio Somaini

In seeking to establish the underlying currents of contemporary perceptions, Bishop and Philips observed that the development of contemporary military technology coincides with an era of active experiments in art. Even though theatres of war and museums of modern art coexist as separate entities, there is an overlooked connection between…

— Danylyuk

#techno-science

— Schwarz

#organization

— Stalder

#Nora Al Badri

While seemingly the territory of the few and the select in finance, quite on the contrary, such statements reflect an attitude that is ubiquitous today and integrated into our smartphone trading apps and social networks. Mainly, the idea that we are all networked together to make collective decisions within frameworks…

— Halpern

#network

Moreover, the evacuation of wounded soldiers from the battlefield became impossible due to immediate drone attacks, which left them suffering for days or even weeks at times. Perhaps autonomous lethal weapons disgust us the most from an ethical point of view. The current discussions point out that autonomous weapons are…

— Danylyuk

#drone vision

Toward these global ends, neoliberals sought to erect an international legal framework that upheld individual private property rights above the sovereign authority of states. In the grand designs of these theorists, the slow extension of property rights was seen as a way to incrementally link a world society that guaranteed…

— Citarella

#capital

To recover those lives requires us to turn to the question of truths on the ground. Close analyses of US operations by investigative journalists make clear that the problem of civilian death in military operations is not a matter of inadequate sensor networks, or access to information, but of the…

— Suchman

#errors

In resisting these dominant tropes, generative archival practice does not aim to circumvent ethical restrictions on violent imagery or to reproduce harmful content. Instead, it examines the boundaries of permissibility within AI systems as sites of cultural negotiation, asking what these boundaries reveal about our relationship to difficult material. When…

— Lee

#critical practice

The third dimension Kelman raises is the one we are already familiar with, ‘dehumanisation’. This dimension of dehumanisation stretches for Kelman in both directions: “to the extent that victims are dehumanised, principles of morality no longer apply to them and moral restraints against killing are more readily overcome” (Kelman 1970,…

— Schwarz

#dehumanisation

— Halpern

#stock

Take the case of the Bell helicopter, which is designed for all weather conditions, day or night, allowing four fields of view: wide, medium, narrow, and narrow zoom for long-distance precision targeting, moreover, targeting and firing can be controlled remotely, overcoming the pilot’s limited point of view. What would be…

— Danylyuk

#helicopter

Frank Gilbreth, an American engineer, embraced the idea of scientific management, and the idea of optimizing industrial work by dividing up and simplifying the worker's movements. In 1913, Frank & Lilian Gilbreth developed the Chronocyclegraph, applying Marey's graphic method and Chronophotography to study and optimize workers' movements in the factory.…

— RYBN

#Frank & Lilian Gilbreth

To say that ours are darkening times is to acknowledge, that the present moment – the year is 2025 – is increasingly characterised by familiar modes of authoritarian oppression, of right-wing political cruelty and of inevitably rising geopolitical tensions in the context of which nuclear Armageddon and the necessity for…

— Schwarz

#international law

— Halpern

#self-organizing system

Furthermore, this practice acknowledges the technically distributed nature of algorithmic memory. Instead of being housed in traditional archives with clear institutional boundaries, it exists across numerous platforms, datasets, and systems. This apparent distribution belies the underlying concentration of power and infrastructure required to operate generative AI systems. Large-scale models are typically developed…

— Lee

#access

The second process Kelman highlights in the path toward an erosion of moral restraint for mass violence is ‘routinisation’. Where authorisation overrides otherwise existing moral concerns, processes of routinisation limit the procedural points at which such moral concerns can, and will emerge. It reflects a configuration in which humans are…

— Schwarz

#process

— RYBN

#assembly line

One of her works is Babylonian Vision (2020). For this, she trained a neural network, a so-called Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), a precursor to current image-generating processes, with 10,000 images from the five museums with the largest collections of Mesopotamian, Neo-Sumerian and Assyrian artifacts. From these, further new artifacts…

— Stalder

#GAN

These financial models are, to use Donna Haraway’s terms, “god-tricks”. They perform omniscience and control over uncertain, complex, and massive markets. They are also embodiments of ideology—mainly that markets can neither be regulated or planned. These instruments naturalize and enact an imaginary that markets make the best decisions about allocation…

— Halpern

#Donna Haraway

Laying claim to an image by reframing it: this mechanism for digital colonialism came to mind as I was searching for traces of Flames of War, the ISIS video I analyzed, which had been removed from the internet. My searches led me to Getty Images, one of the world's largest…

— Lee

#Getty Images

…

— RYBN

#media archeology

Similarly, we are beginning to see a divergence in hemispherical art markets. Chinese collectors are now purchasing less American art than in years previous. The invasion of Ukraine has raised significant barriers to moving capital between Russia and the United States. Tariffs have re-shored the fabrication of artworks back to…

— Citarella

#art market

Hayek thus reconceptualized human agency and choice neither as informed technocratic guidance nor as the freedom to exercise reasoned decision making long linked to concepts of sovereignty. Rather, he reformulated agency as the freedom to become part of the market or network. He was very specific this point; theories of…

— Halpern

#freedom

— Lee

#ownership

The need for more calculation continued to spread in the scientific world with the emergence of statistics at the end of the 19^th century, following the works of Francis Galton and Karl Pearsons – two notorious eugenicists[17] – and, for instance, the installment of the Department of Applied…

— RYBN

#eugenics

— Schwarz

#routinisation

This emerging political economy is about to supplant the previous mode of “surveillance capitalism" as Shoshanna Zuboff analyzed it. Its main lever of operation is no longer the modification of behavior, but rather, the modification of life chances. The emblematic tool of the surveillance capitalism was the consumer profile, based…

— Stalder

#surveillance capitalism

Stocks, they reasoned, behaved more like the random motions of particles in water (thermodynamics) then proxies or representations of some underlying economic reality. And agents (humans) behaved more like machines, or perhaps blindfolded individuals. The market is full of noise (as understood as unpredictable or not fully knowable signals), and…

— Halpern

#information theory

introduction – initial conflict – immersion in daily duties – mid-narrative battle – inspirational speech – climactic battle – on-screen execution of enemies.

— Lee

#film

When boundaries between the military and the domestic disintegrate, we might ask what makes current politics visible and possible. The performative level questions who addresses whom, how the power works and to what effect. It is worth remembering that we do not simply become freer with increased technological capabilities; rather,…

— Danylyuk

#performativity

The idea that human judgement is flawed (or corrupt) and that markets could neither be regulated nor fully predicted and planned has long been central to the automation and computerization of financial exchanges. Throughout the middle of the twentieth century, increased trading volumes forced clerks to fall behind on transaction…

— Halpern

— Stalder

— Suchman

— Danylyuk

The first of these elements is ‘authorisation’. Authorisation is in place when a person is embedded in a structure within which they become “involved in an action without considering the consequences, … and without really making a decision” (ibid. 38). In other words, these are configurations in which the human…

— Schwarz

#authorisation

Carrier Bag

News

About

Concepts