Concepts

The title given to the first presentation in 1931, Exhibition of International Collection of Modern Art of the „a.r.” group emphasised internationalism and the present. Strzemiński saw it as an instrument in a process of emancipation that is based on visual consciousness: the eyes, as part of the brain are…

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…

It is precisely at this point that the artistic impulse to rebuild or re-specify AI becomes theoretically instructive rather than merely artisanal. The re-training of small models, the isolation of datasets, the refusal of general-purpose systems: these gestures enact a shift from totality to partial object, from system to instance.…

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…

The first path consists in a radical deconstruction of identity as the foundation of social organization. This approach does not consist in substituting new identity categories for old ones, but in questioning the very principle of stable and univocal identity that underlies all vectorization. Identity is no longer conceived as…

Here, however, the metaphor of totality demands a more careful handling. If AI is grasped by its proponents as a planetary system—an abstract intelligence hovering above social relations, institutions, and practices—it becomes too easily available for both technocratic celebration and dystopian denunciation. Totality, in this sense, risks functioning as an…

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…

This consciousness does not automatically produce solidarity—history shows abundantly that awareness of common danger can just as easily produce every-person-for-themselves and murderous competition. But it opens a possibility: that of recognizing in the other, beyond all differences vectorially assigned, a fellow mortal, someone who shares the same fundamental precariousness. This…

As some kind of participant in an NFT-centered art world for the last few years, I pay attention to some of it’s visual and technical trends. For whatever reason, the goings on in this discourse seldom reach other art worlds with much scale, beyond the artists Beeple and Rafik Anadol. This…

It’s worth noting that this synchronization has been both total and global (Gao et al. 2024). The UAE trains transformers on NVIDIA GPUs (AWS Machine Learning Blog 2024). India trains transformers on NVIDIA GPUs (NVIDIA Blog 2025, Kallappa et al. 2025). China trains transformers on NVIDIA GPUs (South China Morning…

This is not propaganda in the traditional sense (directed toward a mass 'people') but a form of algorithmic clientelism: each voter segment receives a customized version of the leader's persona and messaging, calculated to produce maximal affective resonance for that specific vector. The manifestly constructed, artificial, even ridiculous character of…

The second path consists in the elaboration of a logos structurally troubled by doubt—that is, of an alternative rationality that integrates doubt not as a provisional insufficiency to be overcome, but as a constitutive and productive dimension of thought. This alternative logos recognizes its own situated and partial character and…

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…

But it is a gesture that, beside itself, continued beyond its scope to make its own axiomatic claims about the real. There is no universal syntactical structure, only grammars inflected by power. There is no concept of reason apart from local rationalities embedded in specific experiences of life. Time is…

Closer to the present is the Gulf Crisis TV Project, which adapted the technique of what was then called narrowcasting — broadcasting to a small target viewership, often an immigrant diaspora — and rethinking it for more overtly political purposes. During the First Gulf War, with the usual outbreak of…

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…

Within the extremely sophisticated, vast and complex system of the division of labor, art represents that small, yet vital ‘counter-system’ which, as the last refuge of freedom of speech, keeps the responsiveness of the big system fresh. Art uses the peaceful tools of lateral thinking and continuously shapes public opinion…

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).

In a relatively recent essay, Argentinian novelist Cesar Aira (2018), focused on different types of anachronisms characteristic to the notion of contemporary art. Primarily this genre is timeless: it replaced all the other movements with the persistence of an eternal present. The illusion of the existence of a single line…

Ways of Seeing responds directly to the problem described earlier: the circulation of images within contemporary digital infrastructures accelerates perception to the point where interpretation becomes secondary to affective reaction. In reaction, the spatial and temporal composition of the exhibition interrupts the automatic conversion of images into emotional signals. The…

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…

At the political level, it requires building coalitions capable of transcending the epistemic divisions systematically produced by algorithmic systems. This is perhaps the most difficult challenge: how to create solidarity between people who no longer inhabit the same informational universe, who no longer share the same criteria of truth, who…

The meme, this singular form of collective creativity that has structured the internet for two decades, operates according to a logic that Derrida would have recognized: that of différance, this simultaneous movement of differentiation and temporization. Each meme differs (distinguishes itself) while deferring (postponing) meaning in a chain of infinite…

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…

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…

In 1917 Viktor Shklovsky called the artist's activity ‘ostranenie’, which translates to ‘estrangement’ or ‘defamiliarization’ (Shkovsky 2017). And during reception – in proportion to the degree of estrangement – we can experience the instructive process that leads from non-understanding, through misunderstandings, to understanding; and then, later, in a critical situation…

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…

Generative and predictive AI, the latest technological tool we are using prevalently and investing billions in but barely comprehend, is likely to become a means of ensuring future discourse is even more engineered. In the Middle East, the use of AI and advanced analytics in PR is — Devi

From a different direction, there was the piece by the Japanese computer artist Masao Kohmura with the title Whole Character Catalogue, a riff on Stewart Brand’s highly influential Whole Earth Catalog of the late 1960s and 1970s. Set up in the center of the gallery space was a computer with…

My upcoming book Twilight of the Magicians (Muzyczuk 2026) focuses on artistic practices in Poland and Russia from the late Cold War period through the decades following 1989. It examines how artists engaged with reenchantment as a method for destabilising the rational and bureaucratic frameworks that structured modern life. In…

The trial for pessimism transforms ecological consciousness into psychological pathology rather than ontological access. When one attempts to confront the irremediable—extinction without-remainder, the closure of all future testimony—this confrontation is often reframed as personal despair. This psychologization participates in the repression of destruction phenomena: artworks engaged with extinction are not…

This is a different version of the term ‘singularity’ from the popular narrative of an AI apotheosis which projects a hypothetical future point where artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence with utopian or catastrophic consequences. Characteristically for Jameson, the concept of singularity for the purposes of cultural analysis is developed as…

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. 

Paradoxically, the merry mix of opacity, shameless leadership, unregulated experimentation, and PR spin thrives best in countries with stringent controls on expression, ensuring that wealthy CEOs and their private companies remain unquestioned since strategic optimism is the lingua franca. Ironically, or maybe not, this very same…

The irony is striking: at the moment when critics of cultural globalization were calling for more diversity and horizontality in international exchanges, alignment produces a system infinitely more repressive than the old Western hegemony. Where neoliberal globalization left interstices, margins, possibilities of diversion, territorial alignment produces hermetically closed cultural spaces,…

The message was one that reverberated through contemporary art discourse in the early 1990s: old horizons of popular liberation represented by the 1960s anti-colonial nationalism had proven not only a failure in the sense of being crushed from outside, but also a failure on their own terms. They had always…

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…

Surprisingly, but alarmingly, the same symbolic structures that once served emancipatory purposes within artistic countercultures proved capable of being rearticulated within emerging right-wing political imaginaries. Ritual began to operate as powerful technology of political mobilisation. The transition occurred through a shift in the affective orientation of these practices. Techniques developed…

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…

At the moment when the finitude of one alone will be that of all, then perhaps we will finally be human. This proposition suggests that humanity does not yet exist as an accomplished reality but as a possibility to come, and that this possibility will perhaps actualize itself only at…

Black swans are lining up, everything is being said, and claims such as the 'last century of civilization' (Rees 2003), or in a milder but equally realistic tone, that we are living at the 'end of the century of democracy' (Mounk and Foa 2018) and something else will come, can…

The monad does not negate the whole; it internalises it. Each instance, each model, each prompt–output relation contains a distorted but determinate image of the world that produced it. The universal does not stand above the particular as an abstract law, nor does the particular merely exemplify the universal; rather,…

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…

Two things followed from Bourdieu’s insight. First, cultural producers should not be ashamed of fighting for the privileges of their own class — that is, fighting for the university, museum, or cultural institutions themselves, rather than simply seeing them as part of a larger complex of ideological production. Agitating for…

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…

So: on one hand, a world-spanning thing. But on the other hand, at the same time, the collapsing monopole of cosmopolitan globalism and Western internet monoculture, the last-ditch clutchings of hegemonic American (‘Western,’ ‘Northern’) military and financial influence, the diffraction of humanism into posthumanism (Braidotti 2013), the erosion of the…

To approach AI as a structure of feeling is to shift attention away from technological novelty and toward the texture of the present it produces. In this register, artificial intelligence does not primarily appear as a technical problem to be solved, nor as the harbinger of an imminent industrial revolution.…

With the weakening of the critical counter-system built on modernist autonomy, the problem-solving capacity of the entire system weakens. 

Jameson’s account of the aesthetics of singularity carries echoes of Theodor Adorno’s influential definition of the artwork as a ‘windowless monad’—a self-enclosed entity that paradoxically manifests the empirical world by being separate from it. Adorno borrows the concept of the monad from Leibniz who used it to describe the harmony…

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…

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,…

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.”

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…

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…

Firstly, the behind-the-scenes machinations and labour that go into sustaining abovementioned ambitions, opacity, and hype in most art capitals tend to border on the pathological, given increasing social disconnect worldwide. From the US to the UAE, creative labour is in crisis, partly due to a weakening labour market and partly…

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…

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…

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…

This strategy functions like algorithmic deplatforming: channels are not eliminated but vectorially constrained, creating graduated exclusions. Unlike the hierarchical repression of historical fascism, vectorial alignment operates through modulation: institutions are not closed but reconfigured through calculated coercion. Culture gradually aligns toward the objectives of power, producing the appearance of freedom…

GenAI thus abolishes the meme’s deferred temporality, replacing collective maturation with instantaneous probabilistic calculation. What appears as technical acceleration masks an infrastructure of cultural seizure—vectorial extraction of the entire visual commons into proprietary latent spaces. LAION-5B, one of the main datasets used to train the generative AI model Stable Diffusion,…

Raymond Williams famously described cultural processes as structured by a dynamic relation between ‘the dominant’, ‘the residual’, and ‘the emergent’. The dominant names those meanings and practices that are institutionally stabilized; the residual refers to elements formed in the past that remain active in the present; and the emergent designates…

Whether or not advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) are closing in on “the gap towards Artificial General Intelligence” (Guo et al. 2025), they are nevertheless closing in on something. Be it Artificial General Intelligence or be it techno-capital singularity, be it a topological map of the structural invariances in…

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…

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…

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…

Taking species finitude into account from the perspective of individual finitude could provoke a more intense sense of passibilité in the manner of a wound. This term designates the fundamental state of exposure to affects prior to any symbolic representation. In Lyotard, passibilité is intimately linked to childhood—a state where…

Jameson’s account of the aesthetics of singularity carries echoes of Theodor Adorno’s influential definition of the artwork as a ‘windowless monad’—a self-enclosed entity that paradoxically manifests the empirical world by being separate from it. Adorno borrows the concept of the monad from Leibniz who used it to describe the harmony…

For Hui, the history of Western technology (here read through Heidegger) can be interpreted as a history through which nature is subordinated to man. In Western cosmotechnics, nature is given to man as a resource through technology – and it’s precisely through the ‘neutral’ or ‘objective’ position of technology within…

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…

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,…

According to the Financial Times, survey findings across US, UK, and Europe in January 2025, revealed a substantial “decline in young people’s wellbeing” largely because of a “marked shift away from in-person socialising.” Needless to say, technology is a major factor in engendering social disconnect and…

Algorithms do not merely filter information; they create epistemic bubbles, closed informational environments that generate their own internal coherence. Each community develops not only its own opinions, but its own criteria of truth, its own factual evidences, its own modes of reasoning. The QAnon movement perfectly illustrates this dynamic: it…

The analysis developed throughout this text leads to a fundamental question: what form can emancipatory politics take in an era when power operates in latent spaces inaccessible to direct representation, when truth itself is dissolved in probabilistic distributions, when collective action is systematically undermined by the algorithmic production of epistemic…

Two things followed from Bourdieu’s insight. First, cultural producers should not be ashamed of fighting for the privileges of their own class — that is, fighting for the university, museum, or cultural institutions themselves, rather than simply seeing them as part of a larger complex of ideological production. Agitating for…

Museums cannot be taken as an alternative to these ever-present images. There could be no balance between them. Yet we still dream of museums that are politically and socially relevant in a reality that is operating on a different pace. But the museum’s purpose is grounded in another relation to…

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)…

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…

Karp ends his book with a claim that resonates with Slobodian’s interpretation. In a chapter called ‘An Aesthetic Point of View’ Karp argues that we can’t be wishy-washy and tolerant any more of anything-goes cultural policy – we need to decide on a cultural position, keep it and defend it…

GenAI thus abolishes the meme’s deferred temporality, replacing collective maturation with instantaneous probabilistic calculation. What appears as technical acceleration masks an infrastructure of cultural seizure—vectorial extraction of the entire visual commons into proprietary latent spaces. LAION-5B, one of the main datasets used to train the generative AI model Stable Diffusion,…

If one were to map the dominant, residual, and emergent categories according to the computer vision lab, the art school, and Brecht's old apartment in Akademiestraße, then we might get a different kind of a cognitive map than the all-encompassing diagrammatic project of Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler. On the…

So: on one hand, a world-spanning thing. But on the other hand, at the same time, the collapsing monopole of cosmopolitan globalism and Western internet monoculture, the last-ditch clutchings of hegemonic American (‘Western,’ ‘Northern’) military and financial influence, the diffraction of humanism into posthumanism (Braidotti 2013), the erosion of the…

Artworks often register changes at the level of affect and embodied experience before these signs become legible within political or institutional frameworks. This understanding of artistic practice aligns closely with Richard Demarco’s long-standing view of art as a form of cultural sensorium. Since mid-1960s Demarco, a Scottish curator, made attempts…

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…

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…

We know that we are going to die (absolute certainty) but we generally know neither the moment nor the conditions of this event (radical uncertainty). This aporia of one’s own death is multiplied at the scale of the species: we know that the human species will eventually disappear, but we…

This is a different version of the term ‘singularity’ from the popular narrative of an AI apotheosis which projects a hypothetical future point where artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence with utopian or catastrophic consequences. Characteristically for Jameson, the concept of singularity for the purposes of cultural analysis is developed as…

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…

According to the Financial Times, survey findings across US, UK, and Europe in January 2025, revealed a substantial “decline in young people’s wellbeing” largely because of a “marked shift away from in-person socialising.” Needless to say, technology is a major factor in engendering social disconnect and…

Here, then, we find ourselves with a theory of the role of the artist that supports Citarella’s point — but the mechanism through which they were doing it is important not to overlook. That is, the intellectual work of speaking on behalf of the universal that Bourdieu describes was not…

Museums create situations in which seeing becomes a form of work rather than a passive reception. This shift from representation to practice is crucial. It consolidates the rift caused by the object-practice collision. The period of time between creation and viewing opens a spatial composition that allows objects from different…

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…

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…

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…

There was an amazing art group known in the Net.Art circles of the ‘toyland’ web 1.0 era: Etoy.[4] They made incredible networked performances starting in the 1990s, in the form of a ‘toywar’ with the company etoys.com – Karp’s exemplar of frivolous weakness. Etoy, the art corporation, organised a kind of…

Generative AI inaugurates a post-memetic regime. It reconfigures the structural conditions that made memetic culture possible: the discreteness of images, the deferred temporality, the significant temporal short-circuits. But perhaps it is appropriate to think of this transformation not as an external threat to the human, but as the culmination of…

Black swans are lining up, everything is being said, and claims such as the 'last century of civilization' (Rees 2003), or in a milder but equally realistic tone, that we are living at the 'end of the century of democracy' (Mounk and Foa 2018) and something else will come, can…

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…

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”…

I exhibited some of these works for the first time in June 2025 in Berlin – in a conference room inside a hotel room near Potsdammer Platz on Stauffenbergstraße, which faces across the street the German Ministry of Defense headquarters - known as the Bendlerblock. The street that the hotel…

We know that we are going to die (absolute certainty) but we generally know neither the moment nor the conditions of this event (radical uncertainty). This aporia of one’s own death is multiplied at the scale of the species: we know that the human species will eventually disappear, but we…

Ezekiel Dixon-Román and Luciana Parisi suggest an even harder (Dixon-Román and Parisi 2020 & 2025) cosmotechnics, critiquing Hui’s imperative toward technodiversity as a kind of loose globalist-liberal multiculturalism. For Dixon-Román and Parisi, Hui's proposition for technodiversity remains caught within a cosmopolitical frame that can recognize cultural difference but cannot account…

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…

These principles may seem abstract, but they translate into concrete practices: participatory governance systems that give voice to those usually excluded, protocols for intercommunity dialogue that do not presuppose prior agreement on fundamentals, technologies designed to facilitate understanding across differences rather than maximize engagement within echo chambers. Certainly, the left…

In short, Citarella is right that we may be moving on from an era of a push toward a world society under the sign of “western-style liberalism.” But to understand why that project was able to attract so much talent and creativity for the thirty-five years that it was underway,…

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…

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…

There was an amazing art group known in the Net.Art circles of the ‘toyland’ web 1.0 era: Etoy.[4] They made incredible networked performances starting in the 1990s, in the form of a ‘toywar’ with the company etoys.com – Karp’s exemplar of frivolous weakness. Etoy, the art corporation, organised a kind of…

We are at the end of a multitude of exponential processes, and such curves usually end with dramatic changes, a collapse during which – among other things, of course – a huge loss of knowledge occurs, which, at least according to history so far, is usually followed by several hundred…

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…

Jameson’s evaluation of the art of singularity as ‘nominalistic’ would seem to close off all prospects of relating it with the proposition of AI as a Gesamtkunstwerk. However, the doctrine of nominalism does not necessarily deny the universal; rather, it holds the abstract universals to be subsequent to particular things.…

But we should be precise about what is actually being claimed when computation is said to be constitutively entangled with colonial violence. The core operation of the transformer is attention: computing relevance between tokens via learned matrix operations in the service of statistical pattern-finding. If the claim is that statistical…

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…

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…

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…

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…

By the end of the 1990s, multiculturalism was almost exclusively invoked in the negative. Yet while some critics and artists mourned the transgressive quality of the avant-garde and resented the impression that art was being crudely instrumentalized, others welcomed it. “The notion that a culture is built like a mosaic,” Mesquita…

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…

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…

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…

The emergence of a new fascist aesthetics in the current technological context differs radically from historical manifestations. If totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century had privileged a monumental classicism, contemporary fascist tendencies adopt an aesthetic orientation characterized by the grotesque, kitsch, and a particular appropriation of pop culture. Generative artificial…

Even if we manage to stop the ‚great acceleration‘ of our own endeavor – that could be the optimistic scenario – it would also mean the end of growth; but this is also the engine of what produced everything we naively want to remain the same. Growth that sustains welfare…

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…

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,…

We have entered the post-alphabetic era announced by Vilém Flusser. Apparatuses now program us as much as we program them. In this techno-imaginal universe where all our faculties are traversed by technologies, the question of fascism arises differently. Vectofascism designates this contemporary political form that adapts the fundamental mechanisms of…

There were no art museums in the town where I grew up in the 1990s. Our aesthetic was scratched together from skate videos, album art, and the zines sold at punk shows. Mannerisms were lifted from rented VHS tapes. The outfits of out-of-town bands were observed with the precision of…

The latter argument brings us to soft cosmotechnics. The question of where cosmotechnics happens has been given a contemporary response in the form of Benjamin Bratton’s stack-separability. Bratton's Stack model (Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, User - see Bratton 2016) borrows from network protocol architecture a principle of modularity: anything…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Another crucial factor of concern is that in cities across Asia and the Middle East, long overlooked culturally by an imperial eye only cognizant of resources to tap and geopolitics to manoeuvre, building a dynamic art scene always involves intense bias for the west. This happens despite decades of visible…

Closer to the present is the Gulf Crisis TV Project, which adapted the technique of what was then called narrowcasting — broadcasting to a small target viewership, often an immigrant diaspora — and rethinking it for more overtly political purposes. During the First Gulf War, with the usual outbreak of…

Polentransport became then another attempt at a renewal of that potential fifty years after the first act. Beuys treated it as a bridge towards redemption, a donation to a country where some of the most atrocious moments of WWII took place. This was a gesture towards the past. But there…

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.

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…

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…

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…

The emergence of a new fascist aesthetics in the current technological context differs radically from historical manifestations. If totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century had privileged a monumental classicism, contemporary fascist tendencies adopt an aesthetic orientation characterized by the grotesque, kitsch, and a particular appropriation of pop culture. Generative artificial…

These claims demand more theoretical grounding because of the abundant precedents of this structure in the history of modern and postmodern art. In response to Gregory Chatonsky’s conference paper on Vectofascism, one audience member remarked that the whole problem with AI is that the world is trying…

Even if we manage to stop the ‚great acceleration‘ of our own endeavor – that could be the optimistic scenario – it would also mean the end of growth; but this is also the engine of what produced everything we naively want to remain the same. Growth that sustains welfare…

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…

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,…

Still, she maintains the possibility of a critique external to the relations she analyzes; she can identify the vectoralist class because she presupposes a viewpoint that escapes it. This class according to Wark, “appropriates free information and transforms it into private property,” thus creating an objective antagonism with the “hacker…

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…

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…

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.…

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…

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…

The example of the video on Gaza, initially conceived as a ‘critical joke’ then reposted and diverted by Donald Trump, perfectly illustrates the dynamic of reversibility that characterizes this aesthetic regime. In this environment, no critical intention remains stable; all content can be reappropriated, diverted, inverted. Contents become ‘bifid’ or…

At scale, however, a new series of communicational standards has been quickly emerging and consolidating. Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol standardized the natural language interface for AI agents to interact with contexts that aren’t humans (e.g. a website, a database, a calendar). Within 6 months of its inception in November 2024,…

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…

This seems plausible but are they describing the kingdom of Ocampo’s phantasmagoria? Is the world baby at home in the world society of which Citarella speaks? Andrea Fraser observed in her 2024 text The Field of Contemporary Art: A Diagram that the art world only staged its triumphal march because it…

Power laws are formally agnostic; they appear in any mathematical attempt to generalize against structured data. Power laws imply that the constraint of generalization itself has a specific geometry and that this geometry is approached through the application of scale, in terms of the density of the generalizing machine. In…

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.…

Akademiestraße, Munich, is touched by generative AI in more ways than most streets. Within a few metres, three addresses articulate distinct yet entangled regimes of world-making. At number 2, the Academy of Fine Arts increasingly debates digital technologies and their aesthetic and political implications. Across from it, at street number…

Closer to the present is the Gulf Crisis TV Project, which adapted the technique of what was then called narrowcasting — broadcasting to a small target viewership, often an immigrant diaspora — and rethinking it for more overtly political purposes. During the First Gulf War, with the usual outbreak of…

The museum as the container of these challenging objects is a space for the experiment in forming new conditions for seeing. The weak signals are early percepts of those phenomena that take on the shape of a prototype. Autonomy in this sense guarantees conditions of thought rather than specific outcomes.…

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…

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…

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…

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”.

‘The Way of Code – The Timeless Art of Vibe Coding’ has a kind of mystification poetics at its core. Typical of the language are phrases like “the model is the mystery, the gateway to all understanding” (ibid.). To me, it reads as a kind of contemporary futurist poetry, poeticizing code…

The example of the video on Gaza, initially conceived as a ‘critical joke’ then reposted and diverted by Donald Trump, perfectly illustrates the dynamic of reversibility that characterizes this aesthetic regime. In this environment, no critical intention remains stable; all content can be reappropriated, diverted, inverted. Contents become ‘bifid’ or…

In the late work of Fredric Jameson, the analysis of contemporary art is further developed in relation to the absolute-yet-singular structures: “that conceptual centaur known as the universal singular” (Jameson 2015, 101-132). He draws attention to art which produces singular events, one-offs that do not invent a form which can…

It is always important to hold space for the material, here meant both ways in terms of physical mechanics and also in terms of commercial incentives. But the material is always a tricky position to hold with respect to something like computation (Fazi 2018), which is only actualized within the…

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…

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…

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…

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…

1.) The cult of the vectorial leader

In the universe of technical images, the leader is no longer a subject carrying a historical will but a function in a feedback system. The cult of the vectofascist leader is no longer a cult of the person but a cult of the interface,…

The postwar universalism that sustained decades of ‘globalist order’ was always a particular in disguise. And that disguise wasn’t especially resilient. Throughout postcolonial critique, feminist critique, and Marxist critique, there was already a visible consensus that what presented itself as universal was in fact Western, male, white, colonial, a specific…

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…

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

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,…

Generative AI radically transforms this visual economy. In the latent space of a generative model, there are no longer discrete images. A ‘white Persian cat’ could be represented by a vector over thousands of dimensions. A ‘Bengal tiger’ would be a few coordinates away. Between these points exists an infinite…

The movement from street to planet captures a tension that continues to shape contemporary thinking about AI. Systems developed within particular laboratories or training sets are readily framed as infrastructures of global reach, capable of reorganising image production, language, and knowledge at scale. Yet their expansion does not erase the…

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…

A more sophisticated take rooted in software economics would point to an incentive structure that is based less in discrete profit (or even revenue) in favor of speculation. It’s not that AI needs to locally deliver a promise – ultimately, lowered labor and tooling opex – it’s rather that AI…

Following the development of the socio-political field that shaped the secular concept of art, an environment emerged that, through its activity, legitimized even those works whose understandability, receptibility, or let's say, usefulness, was not clear to the present, and therefore required mediators, supporters, explainers; that is, a loyal environment of…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

3.) The designation of algorithmic scapegoats

Where historical fascism designated universal enemies of the nation, vectofascism calculates personalized enemies for each node of the network. It is customized hatred, algorithmically optimized to maximize the affective engagement of each population segment. The system does not propose a single scapegoat but an entire…

The vehicles through which humans articulate themselves as such – the social, the political, the cultural – are duly implicated in this incoming universalism. The first compromise is with the technical medium of these articulations, which is revealing itself to be resistant (if not immune) to the effects of its…

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…

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…

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.…

Ten years ago, I made an exhibition for the New Zealand pavilion at the Venice Biennale which tried to reframe images ripped from restricted government documents leaked by Edward Snowden as artworks (Denny 2015a). Part of my monumentalizing of these motifs implied that they might be authored by an underacknowledged…

GenAI thus abolishes the meme’s deferred temporality, replacing collective maturation with instantaneous probabilistic calculation. What appears as technical acceleration masks an infrastructure of cultural seizure—vectorial extraction of the entire visual commons into proprietary latent spaces. LAION-5B, one of the main datasets used to train the generative AI model Stable Diffusion,…

While the Whole Character Catalogue broke the rules of the empire of difference by rendering particularity down to monochromatic code, another set of works overstepped the bounds in a different way — by pushing the protocol into the human body. The works were by the Japanese art collective, Technocrat, which…

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,…

This incredible exhibition was one of many during the mid-century showcasing art by artists that were technology-literate and excited to make work using computational processes. Arguably, you could also say that the work featured in this and other exhibitions like it poeticized and even mystified what was going on at…

In the late work of Fredric Jameson, the analysis of contemporary art is further developed in relation to the absolute-yet-singular structures: “that conceptual centaur known as the universal singular” (Jameson 2015, 101-132). He draws attention to art which produces singular events, one-offs that do not invent a form which can…

Unfortunately, the timing is wrong. Transformers displaced the rest of the field while OpenAI had about 50 employees, well before the speculative frenzy, and the displacement was justified on benchmarks that substantially predate the Generative AI moment. And from there, the pattern is sort of the converse of what you…

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…

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…

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…

Vectofascism operates through the industrialization of the differend: a mechanism by which algorithms systematically produce situations where parties in conflict can no longer agree on the very terms of debate. Vectofascism does not need to censor the opposition; it suffices to ensure that discursive universes are sufficiently distinct that even…

At the epistemological level, it requires developing critical literacies capable of making visible the invisible mechanisms of algorithmic modulation. This does not mean simply denouncing ‘fake news’ or ‘filter bubbles,’ but understanding in depth how vector spaces structure perception and cognition in the digital age.

This is where the figure of an enemy of contemporary art is being produced. Its rise is driven by the inability to align these two modes and to see that the material structure which is presented to the eyes is a product of usually hidden methodologies, which became the focus…

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…

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…

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…

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.