This essay explores the redistribution of expressive agency across human artists and non-human entities that inevitably occurs when artificial intelligence (AI) becomes involved in creative processes.
Judging by the language that machine learning practitioners use to describe how today’s most advanced neural networks are themselves produced, or ‘trained,’ the mountain landscape remains as compelling and potent an emblem as ever.
This special issue thus offers historical perspectives, conceptual re-thinking and situated analyses of the technical realities and the social and cultural implications of machine intelligence, in its many different forms and manifestations, with the hope that this will provide opportunities to intervene in and change the course of our technological futures.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcJPRW-kH00 PDF In this article, interaction designer and artist Andreas Refsgaard describes how machine learning has become an integrated part of his practice. While still relying on coding for most…
PDF This volume of essays—especially the framing introductory essay—draws its interpretive motivation and energy from distinguishing between “populist media” and “media populism” in terms of their respective assumptions and trajectories.…
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Those with access to digital media are often aware of their access as a privilege not available to all; the drive to quantify is a willed use of media capacities to highlight the part that does not have access. Because affiliation bonds with the surplus and recognizes it as such, recognizes it cannot be fully counted, the relationship is necessarily beyond the personal: the part of the part will always remain unknowable, anonymous. Whether or not social media users disclose their identity what they disclose about the part that they seek to make visible is that it is fundamentally different.
If our approach in this framing essay emphasizes the import of media infrastructures and techno-human processes for understanding populism, and political life more broadly—what we frame as a shift from populist media to media populism—this is not to diminish the critical need for accounts of political subjectivity, aesthetics, discourse, and the like. But it is to observe that such processes have been basically transformed by our computational habitus.
PDF On May 10, 2018, after three years of negotiations and delays, the Apple corporation announced that it would no longer be proceeding with a planned €850 million data center…
The willingness of publics to believe in obvious fakes is an enduring phenomenon because, for them, shoddy performances are an expression not of fakery, but of realness, a realness that makes room for anyone to become anything they want. This possibilism, ripening in states of precarity, supersedes political ideology, is a crucial source of the cynical political power that nurtures it.