Incredible Machines 4

Thank you. All right, well, I haven't prepared anything because I intuited and I think fairly correctly

that this conference would unfold very nicely as much through accident, error, glitch, and various forms of spontaneity as through Mo Salami's superhuman, very ambitious planning effort. So here we are. I also didn't prepare anything because I suspected, again I think accurately, that the topic of this conference would be shifting by the hour. And indeed it has. We're sort of tracing the petit object of the past two days. So it seemed to me from last night's and this morning's sessions, namely Alexander Galloway's, Mackenzie Wark's

and Clint Burnham's papers, that we were really making headway in tracing the limits of computation. So Alex Galloway traced the history of a crisis in representation, in mimetic representation that undergirds computation to the economic crisis that we could date to 1973, although Alex mentioned 1975 and we talked about that a bit. And he then drew on the recent work of Francois Laruel, who postulates that representation not only fails to describe, but is no longer mediating the relationship between a sentient subject and

the field of the real and the information that that field generates. Clint Burnham's paper talked about the intimacy at the level of touch between mediation and everyday life. So there was the description of all of the scrolling, the touching, the pinching, the relationship. I won't, I've been corrected that I am not to use the term phenomenology any longer, the experience of the human sensorium in relationship to the screen. And he used a really, I thought, wonderful phrase, which is that in this intimate and indeed erotic and violent mediation

between human and machine, we're seeing something that we might describe as the dictatorship of the objectified, which was a really lovely phrase, and I hope we get to talk about it. And Mackenzie Wark brought up Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto today, which is a way of both actualizing the interstice between the human and the machine, but also critiquing computationalism from within. Then, today's papers seem to suggest that we're once again looking at ways of thinking, the fact that there is no outside to computation.

So Nick Cernicek brought up DSG models which structure macroeconomics, determine the fates of corporations, nation states, peoples, all of it of course predicated on the disavowal of the law of the tendency of profit to drop or the immiseration thesis. and let's see, there was Sohail Malik's paper focused on the price index that moves across the art world, the financial sector, and everyday life and then as though it didn't appear that the problem set of the conference had shifted drastically we then had Reza Negaristani's

paper which suggests a whole other vector to the meaning of computationalism, which is that while the computer doesn't describe or modelize the world, it does serve to suggest the future of the human in which the function, the human as a function of functions, for lack of a better way to put it, could be disarticulated from substance, constitution, identity, essence, any of the remaining vestigial mysticisms that continue to inform our notion of the human, which seems to be a whole other set of inquiries.

So I'm hoping that in this conversation I can try and sort of herd these various vectors to see where these three themes either connect or fail to connect. But I think what we really need to talk about is the role of metaphor, which briefly came up in an all-too-brief confrontation between Galloway and Negar Astani, a friendly confrontation, a happy exchange, briefly yesterday evening. and I really think that's what needs to be dilated here. It seems that we're really trying to talk about the limits of simulation, correspondence, and contingency.

That's really the only kind of common space I can find among these three themes about the meaning, the role, and the assignation of computationalism now. So it's limits, the limits to those limits, and it as a structure that will help us think about the future of our species past the current limitations of the human that we've inherited from the Enlightenment, which structures a wedge between ourselves and our own proper Enlightenment. So that's 48 hours in a nutshell.

It should also be mentioned in the future. Oh, how much can I? Okay, and we have many other presentations yet to come. Great internal questions, too much. Yeah, we're dealing with excess and lack, as always. What's new? But I think that this problem of metaphor might help move us forward, and we try and figure out among the seven of us or so who are seated up here what the points of intersection among us even are. Yes.

Yes. Yeah, I'm not sure what, I'm not sure if I have anything more to say about metaphor, but maybe, well maybe, I don't know, but I want to hear more about, I want to hear from other people more about sort of like why metaphor just is an issue and how we should tackle that. I mean, I like what you said about this notion of there is no outside to computation and how that was a theme, particularly in some of the later talks. And actually, I'm not even sure I would disagree with that. But I think it hinges on the difference between what we could call a kind of ecstatic structure,

or a standing outside of, versus a structure of imminence. So an ecstatic structure relies on an X structure or an as structure, whereas imminence relies on an in structure. and so I think that you can simultaneously say there is no outside to computation and say that there is also a kind of, if you will, a parallel methodological you know, a parallel method that could remain within computation but not actually be computationalist, if that makes any sense the one thing I'll add about metaphor is that I mean, we were joking about this, you know, that for anyone who's interested in a kind of materialism or theory of imminence,

metaphor poses something of a problem, right? Because, you know, like in Deleuze, right, the horizon is not a metaphor. The horizon is a real structure. And I was reminded by a colleague recently that meta actually is, like the T in meta from the Greek actually modifies into a D in the Latin. And so it's actually connected to the idea of media, mediation, the notion of being amidst. I think there's a misperception that meta is sort of about beyond or above or this kind of cosmological quasi-theological layer or something but it is actually about a milieu or a sense of being a midst

so I don't know if that helps or hinders the conversation I think it helps tremendously but we need to circumscribe what we are in the midst of and along those lines you had said something very helpful yesterday that you were quoting Jameson and you said something along the lines that where utopia ends or fails as a narrative it's sort of reborn as a method and that's I think somewhere where you might elaborate a little bit this idea that the meta doesn't entail an interval of distance

or being above or on top of, but it's about being enfolded in this field of the real, for lack of a better term, that we're in a condition where we are faced and confronted with new forms of mediation that we don't yet have description or language for. So I guess that's what I sensed emerging from the interval between your work and especially Rizona Garastani's work. You had accused Alex Galloway of the use of metaphor, And I thought that was very useful as a point of tension. OK, sure. Well, basically, I think it's important to really start with this.

I mean, OK, I want to first kind of like talk about this metaphor and metaphorization, but also kind of highlight basically the main objection that I made, which wasn't really the metaphor. I think basically, what are metaphors, really? Metaphors are, as you say, allow for transversality between different domains that allow mediation, bringing bridge. But there is two functions to the metaphor. One, a metaphor basically carries a semantic load across different domains. And also, it's a constructive vector. Now, metaphor can only be used, I would say, to a certain extent.

Once you really build an argument from metaphor, it becomes like this. We have one basically, it has kind of an axiomatic almost function, that we are getting the semantic load of the metaphor. And the semantic, what really makes a metaphor is the semantic load that is retained across different domain, as we are taking it from a math metaphor, deploying it into philosophy, and then it becomes politics, and then so on and so forth. Now, what this evenly distribution of the semantic load over different domains, whose semantic, they have their own semantic specificity,

and that's why they have their own demands and obligations, creates a lesion and explanatory conflation. Once we have explanatory conflation, we have descriptive impoverishment. Once we have descriptive impoverishment, we have prescriptive inconsequentiality. Now, but also there is this part to metaphor that Chatelet talks about and actually used quite extensively by every discipline. I mean, metaphors shouldn't be vilified because of this restriction. Shatlet talks about metaphor as being like this Trojan horse that deploys formal resources of one territory in another territory. Once it mobilizes the formal resources in the new territory,

it creates tensions. Basically, instigates a dynasty of problems. It creates a chain reaction. And then you have to resolve these problems that were otherwise impossible to even imagine or envisage from the perspective of your immediate local resources, conceptual local resources. Now, these are the two things. And I think, well, I would say that... Can I jump in? Sure. For a second, Reza? Because you've used this metaphors, perhaps, of the semantic load and conflation and so on the past couple of days, so I've been very privileged to be able to hear you speak four times since Wednesday.

And so I just want to poke a bit at this notion, because I think this notion of language and this kind of metaphor phobia, for example, I think it might be actually a fundamental error in terms of an understanding of how language functions, that language always, there's always an impoverishment. There never is a perfect kind of point at which language or the semantic load, the semantic cloud as they say in the digital humanities and so on, that that will actually do that kind of work, that kind of metaphor and the transporting Greek sort of sense of what the term metaphor itself is. And so I think the notion that one can't move from one linguistic or one contextual domain to another, and that when we move a term or a metaphor from one to another,

that there's some kind of travesty to the original use of the term and so on. Well, I respect that within a technical language of philosophy, of certain branches of philosophy, it would be very useful to try to have this kind of linguistic policing going on. I think that fundamentally what it does is it closes off the use of language and it keeps the creative use of language itself, on the one hand, bounded, but it also misrecognizes the way in which language itself is always, in that kind of structural sense, is always missing, is always not to the point, is always suffering under some kind of a semantic load. So it never does the work one wants it to do, but we have to sort of accept that sort of lack as inherent to how language itself functions.

The answer to this would be yes, and I said again, I specifically said that we shouldn't vilify metaphors. But metaphor is a specific form of transversality. And in order to make these kinds of arguments, we shouldn't basically deploy all of our energy or all of our basically things on metaphorization. Basically, evolution of modern science started by undermining this smooth flow of metaphorization from one domain to another, in which basically you can create a conceptual tunnel vision that you can basically talk about the universe as just a truncated man.

Now, science turns metaphor to, and really like mathematics, physics, chemistry, to the concept of the operator. Basically forms of semantic regulations that they can make this bridge, but they don't really have this completely like allow you to basically metaphorize between different domains, and by metaphorizing, you are generalizing the faraway situation from your local niche phenomena, from your local specificities. Metaphorize end up to be instruments of generalization if they are excessively used. But as I said, and Schatler says that metaphorization is a creative vector because of that creating that tension is faced.

So it's an essential function of the language because what are really metaphors? Metaphors are really what . basically they allow for the intersection of two semantic domains that allows this kind of transition, like back and forth. Once you really make a deductive chain, also metaphorization, you end up generalizing. Okay, that's, yes, that much I understood and agree with within the parameters of your trying to get out of the ontology of the concept, as you put it. I don't understand, I guess, how function, the term function, is going to rescue you from that.

You're trying to deduce that which renders the human autonomous from mysticism, nature, forms of determination, capitalism, from the history of the human itself. How the human is a function of functions is going to get you out of that. But I'm not saying that I want to belabor that over much for the rest of this. The concept of function here happens actually on three levels. It's coming usually associated with philosophy of mind, but it has basically quite metaphysical implications.

One function at the normative level, the difference between semantic and physical information, and the semantic retains some sort of autonomy over the physical information. Function at the level of causality, which happens at the level of mechanisms, and function at the level of physical systems, which happens at the level of patterns and processes. So this is a completely, I think, an open question, this whole idea of function, how much should we buy into the understanding of functional autonomy. Functional autonomy is different from the autonomy of human because human is distinguished by certain functions that it does. And those functions have the capacity to be autonomized,

not that human is autonomous. And this is entirely, yes, open questions, open to debate. And, yes. Can I follow up with that with another question? And this might actually even be a way to bring in Benjamin Bratton's talk from, I don't know if that was the first one from the other day, but, you know, so then, my question then is, you're talking about layers, and so the question is, do you, is that a metaphor? Layers. And if it's not a metaphor, where does it come from, right? Because I think if Bratton was here, he might say, well, you know, you know, that's this kind of layer thinking, right, is not that different from this sort of stack thinking, right?

And certainly in the history of computer networking, there's a very strong, I don't know if it's a metaphor, that it is a model. It is a model for organizing network communication and how these things are designed and implemented. And it is a layer model. So if it's not a metaphor, then are you getting it from the mode of production? No, you see, okay, I just want to say, rather than coming back to the metaphorization point, that when I'm talking about layers, these levels, again, I did not unpack this fully. The levels are usually, they're like, I would say that there are different forms of levels

in a physical phenomenon or any phenomenon, explanatory levels, which are basically can be ramified into different forms of explanation, causal explanation, that basically this table, this is what Clint and Jollet have already heard this thing, that for example, the steel beam has different causal fabrics, different, and these causal fabrics have different explanatory layers or hierarchies in the sense that, for example, an engineer applies a stress field, presses a steel beam, and it bends, okay? Now, engineer, if you are having that kind

of flat understanding of explanatory level. That's basically this, what I did, and how it behaved under this condition can be applied all the way down, as if it does not have an explanatory level. Explanatory level are parts of the causal order, but can be also functional level, a normative level, so on and so forth. But the thing is that in the steel beam, once you really zoom in, you see that behind the microscopic level of the domain of the ordinary language that you said that if I do this, it will bend like this. You see the level of patches of the crystal. Behind the patches of the crystal, inhomogeneity of the crystal, and then atomic scale. And the behavior that you thought is going to be universally applied all the way down

breaks apart because causation is usually nonlinear in this phenomenon. it requires for different levels of explanation. Can I say something? Sure. Actually, you know what I was going to say? I just want to introduce to people the waiting patient guests, because we should have done this earlier, but I just want to do that out of fairness to them, because we have a group of equally significant and important people up there. So let's just get them going, Like, not get them going in terms of maybe like beginning, but sort of like introduce them and sort of like tell everyone that they will get a chance to speak each.

And then maybe actually we can even do that. But it's according to Jale and Ami. I just want to read their names, because I do have the list, and maybe Jale doesn't have them in front of her. Do you have the list? OK, so that's why I'm just aiding you in reading your names. So up in the sort of like I'm going to go from like my Right, to my left, we have Peter Welfendell, philosopher based in London, England. And the epistemology police, we call him. Then we have Nick, no, second person, we have Nick Land. He's the infamous Nick Land. At some level there was this thing of like Moe's inviting like 12 men to talk.

And I was like, OK, if this is my 12, then Nick is my Judas. So there's the Judas. And then next to Nick Lang, we've got Mathia Pasquilini. He's a writer and researcher whose work crosses directly. And if I had connected with him earlier, he would have probably be one of the presenters. Next to Mathia, we have Kate Steinman. Kate holds a PhD, and she's an art historian. And she actually got her doctor from UBC, and that's how we made each other. She's also one of the editors of Philip Magazine. After Kate, we have Judith Udenbeck.

Judith is also an art historian. Actually, Judith will be in Vancouver this coming Friday to be the keynote speaker for the UBC grad student art history symposium. Next to him, we got the team of Joshua and everybody else who are not even supposed to be in the room, but I guess there's an extra seat, so they just join. Next to that, we got the invisible Jason from Grand Rapids. And next to Jason, we got Christina McPhee, artist. And next to Christina, we got Amanda Beach, also an artist. So here we go. That's the group that's up there. are listening impatiently waiting for Jolly's decision

to when to go to them. Should I go ahead and say the comment? Yeah, it just strikes me. I feel compelled maybe to make a conceptual distinction between two senses in which we can speak maybe of metaphor at a very general level. One sense I would call the bad metaphor, perhaps, kind of playing on the Hegelian bad infinity, good infinity. But the bad metaphor would be the use of language, or the use of a concept or word or whatever, or a phrase, in which its function is to obfuscate semantic content. So for example, and this just jumps to mind, but for example, if we're talking about generalization,

right, like yesterday I brought up how under the rubric of generalization, if we speak of generalization so that it will conflate the distinction between generosity, on the one hand, as an operation that's very peculiar to its domain of application, as in Bidou's work or something like that, and generalization as something else, then in fact, what we mean when we say that this is a metaphoric use of the term that is pejoratively judged to be, we mean that we're basically avoiding specificity when there should be and it's possible to have it. But I think also, and perhaps this speaks to your rejoinder, I think that at least in the 20th century, we've had relatively different theories of metaphor,

which do not ascribe primordially a reproductive function to metaphor, but a productive function. For example, to take the perhaps canonical example, Heidegger. Heidegger speaks, and a very famous quote from him, He says, the poet always speaks as if the being was said for the first time. And I think what is behind this idea is that, I mean, this is something that I believe is very close to our experience with poetry. When somebody has a very good metaphor, in a certain sense, paradoxically perhaps, it is more literal than a literal description itself. It touches on the matter with extraordinary precision. And in this sense, it heightens our semantic potential depth and understanding rather than

obfuscates it. So that's what I would call the good metaphor, perhaps. Maybe we shouldn't call metaphor these two different things. Maybe there's a better way to make this distinction. But nevertheless, I think it's a useful conceptual distinction. And just one more point. I think that perhaps the bad use of metaphor is in the realm of common sense language. of an equivalent or an illogical operation to what Ressa describes formally as a conflationary approach. In other words, where different strata or levels of explanation are elided and when a particular level of explanation is transferred to different hierarchies or levels. And that is perhaps the pejorative sense that we should avoid, but of course there's a productive good sense to it.

impassioned defense of literature. I endorse it. Should we make some reference? Sure. But there's also, like, there's also, I think it would be good if people can, like, wait on this, because this, another thing, and I'm not sure if you addressed it or not, because I was making communication, so you may have actually highlighted that as one of the things that came up, is this tension between universal and particular, which also is kind of like how metaphor works, particularly in a conversation between Sohail and Martha. So Sohail's sort of like general and very universal idea

of the function of contemporary art and how contemporary art actually functions, versus how Martha problematized that by talking about particularities of how actual exhibitions, actual artworks, actual artists function, and how these two sometimes are incompatible. And it just reminded me of what Reza sometimes says in defense of his own critique of the art world. He goes like the art world always put the artist and the art in front of itself like, what is the word you use? like a human shield. So it's like the art system, to both camouflage itself and make a victim of itself. So it puts the artist in the front.

So to attack the art system, you have to either shoot the artist, or those situation in the water, you have to physically remove the artist in order to attack what you want to attack. Because otherwise, you're going to kill the artist and to be able to get to the art system. So perhaps, Moe, to follow that analogy, don't we have the liberals who go and be human shields, right, to Israel or whatever. So actually, let's not just defend artists here. No, for sure. I mean, the artists want to be the human shields, right? They want to say, poor us, you know, please pay attention to my practice and so on. So, yeah, so I think maybe we should go up there and maybe, like, the right order to start maybe just be, like, just randomness of the fact that, like, people are lined up that way. So, Peter, do you want to, like, take over and have a few words you got?

like you asked for like 10 minutes or like something so like you can go ahead and like sort of like do your bit. Hello I'm Peter Wolfendale and due to some technical difficulties during my original presentation at the Incredible Machines conference I've been given the chance to re-record what I was saying there. Given this I'm hoping I can make it make more sense the first time around so what I'd like to do here is draw some connections between the themes explored in Dan Sassolotto and Resonagro Stani's talks about functionalism and the political themes

of Nick Cernick's talk and Benedict Singleton's talk on platforms so taking Dan and Reza's functionalism first the core idea there is essentially Kantian one, that what it is to be capable of thought and action is to have a certain functional structure and this functional structure can be described independently of the material it's instantiated in very much as is the case with computation, you can make a Turing machine out of whatever you want, be it silicon be it biological, be it an elaborate system of cats, mice and cheese or whatever. Similarly, the idea is you can make a rational edge out of whatever you like.

What's important is the functional relationships between its parts and the capacities that emerge out of this. I'll basically take what Dan was saying about that as read. now to connect this to more political issues it's interesting to see how Hegel develops this Kantian idea what Hegel realises is that if you can make a rational agent out of anything there's no reason you can't make rational agents out of other rational agents so there's no reason you can't structure a group of rational agents in such a way that it itself has some kind of emergent rational agency And this is the essence of Hegel's concept of spirit.

Now, using this as a sort of starting point, you can reframe the problem of politics or the political problem as how to constitute ourselves as a group into a collective agent capable of maximizing our individual freedoms by way of the agent's collective freedom this problem of how to come together to enhance our freedoms as a group is really just the problem of justice and in fact actually it has a a lot of similarity to the way Plato thinks of justice in the republic

where he talks about justice as the mental health of the state. There's an analogy between the mind of the individual and the structure of the state as a whole. Even if we disagree with Plato's tripartite conception of the mind and everything else that comes out of that, there's still a fairly platonic idea here. For artists, I'd just like to say the other way of thinking about this idea of justice is how to make ourselves as a state into a work of art. Now, what's interesting about thinking of politics in this way is that the functional structure of a collective agent like this

has to have certain features. Particularly, it demands a differentiation of social roles. or a division of labour. Now, importantly, this includes a differentiation of cognitive labour. There can be no effective system of collective decision-making, no collective agency, that doesn't involve both systems of technical specialisation and administrative specialisation, or roles for experts. And what constitutes these expert rules is a certain special

authority, but this authority is only granted or warranted on the basis of a corresponding responsibility which is assessed in terms of particular epistemic or practical capacities. This basic idea that there's no particular privileges associated with a specialised role without corresponding responsibilities is what I call the idea of normative parity. You get differentiation of roles, but this differentiation requires a certain mechanism of justification. And in the case of roles that involve expertise, the authority that's granted the special privileges only

comes from the abilities that are supposed to be codified within that expert role. Now, given this basic framing, I want to discuss the intersection of two different political ideals that place constraints upon potential answers to the political problem, like how you differentiate these roles so as to structure the state as a collective religion. one is the idea of technocracy and the other is the idea of classless society now I'm particularly interested in bringing up this notion of technocracy because one of the things which is hung over this whole event is the accelerationist manifesto written by

Nick Cernick and Alex Williams and something which kind of commonly comes out as a criticism is that it's technocratic. And I'd like to kind of try and nuance that notion to some extent. So the idea of technocracy and the idea of classless society are usually taken to be incompatible. insofar as technocracy is often interpreted as ruled by a class of experts and thus is opposed in principle both to democracy proper and to the dissolution of class. Now, I would argue that not only are they compatible, but they are in fact mutually supportive

because technocracy shouldn't be interpreted as opposed to democracy, but rather as opposed to meritocracy, which is a form of division of labour that is functionally indifferent to class even if it isn't founded upon class necessarily moreover I want to suggest that continuing developments in information technology will enable us to approach both of these ideals so that's the sense in which what I'm going to explore here connects up with the overarching theme of the conference technology as it's developing gives us the means to start to approach both of these ideals that I'm seeing are compatible or importantly in the light right, so I've already said something about Kant and Hegel

and I'm going to bring in somebody else, namely Heidegger see I think Heidegger has this very important insight about action which is that most of what we do isn't the result of practical reasoning principally, and this isn't exactly what he says but principally because of cognitive constraints we simply can't take apart the details of absolutely everything we do and engage in practical syllogisms to work out optimal solutions to practical problems in every case generally what we do is just deploy practical heuristics for coping with our environment that we've either sort of habitually developed

or learned more or less implicitly from others or you know these are kind of behavioral niches that structure the patterns of action and interaction that are constitutive of the culture we find ourselves in so to sum that up again we compensate for limited cognitive resources by solving practical problems through distributed social cognition producing shared solutions to common practical problems now bringing another name I think what Foucault does to this Heideggerian idea is to show that this sort of social cognition that Heidegger points out is actually itself socially differentiated.

Heidegger talks about it in two monolithic terms. He simply talks about a single reservoir of practical heuristics, which he calls the world. But it's clear that there can be different overlapping worlds belonging to social groups individuated by their slightly differing practices or lifestyles. Now, given this idea of a sort of differentiating space of social recognition, I think we can treat classes as socio-cognitive systems. I should say they're systems that distributively solve practical problems that are common to or jointly shared by groups whose economic proximity is sufficient to

establish information channels between them through which patterns of behavior can be propagated, incrementally adjusted, either implicitly or explicitly. To say that a little bit slower, the idea is that you can have a lot of different people coexisting within the same space, but it's the proximity of their lifestyles, the extent to which they're confronted with the same practical problems that establishes information channels between them through which they can offer one another options for action people who live the same kind of lives

can solve problems from each other simply by doing things by displaying the solution and so out of these sort of informational links between a lot of different people, what you get is the production of solutions to common problems that get propagated and evolve throughout that network. But that network is constituted out of economic proximity, similarity of lifestyles and similarity of practical problems you're confronted with. Now, one of the effects of this distributed process is the production

of default solutions for various problems and importantly a variety of stable lifestyle niches or implicit social roles so it's not just small tasks like how to feed your family on a certain amount of money per week that we commonly produce and generate as a class but it's also larger practical solutions particularly to the overarching problem of how to make a living, how to occupy yourself and these constitute implicit social roles

so just to you know occupations are generally the best example you know retail work small business ownership of various different kinds industrial labour but anyway I'll talk about examples a bit later to sort of bring in another Foucauldian term these sort of lifestyle niches are essentially systems of subjectivation through which certain sorts of expertise is transmitted

and concerned so the idea is thus that classes are an integral if implicit part of the process through which labour is divided up. Though the parameters they work within are set by relations between classes constitutive of the society as a whole. This is to say that they enable the generation of more differentiated roles, for instance shop owner, factory worker, doctor, etc. within the broader economic niches they occupy. For example, white collar work, blue collar work, professional worker etc. as well as enabling the subjectivation of the individuals who

fill these roles so it's both about constituting the niches and filling them now in contrast to this we can also identify explicit aspects of the processor of labour and division and most obviously centralised political and legal legal frameworks, formalizing implicit rules. So certain rules take on particular legal standing, the authorities and responsibilities that come with them become formalized parts of the political system. You can think of examples, police, soldiers, even doctors and similar things. this actually moves into

the existence of professional, pedagogical and research institutions that engender and assess various forms of expertise, for example licensing bodies schools and universities, now although it's obvious that these sorts of institutions are often integral parts of the class system, so for instance Oxbridge in the UK or the Ivy League university system in the US and thus reproduce the stratified privileges associated with that system we have to recognise that it's only through explicitness that these sorts of irrationalities within the process of labour division can be overcome this is what brings us to the idea of technocracy

rather than thinking of technocracy as preserving a privileged place for a pre-constituted class of technicians, we should think of it as prescribing a sort of maximal explicitness, not only in the process of dividing labour amongst pre-constituted individuals, so individuals who've already gone through the process of subjectivation and acquired their skills and whatnot, but also in the process of subjectivation through which these individuals are constituted, as able to occupy those roles. now this latter clause is what sets technocracy apart from meritocracy which only concerns the optimal division of labour amongst subjects whose capacities are already constituted

and this is what makes it blind to the structural inefficiencies that the class system injects into the political process if we view technocracy as sort of superseding this then we can see that in fact it coincides with the idea of classlessness insofar as it aims to overcome all implicit systems of social differentiation that impede the rationalization of the functional structure of society so we're not saying that technocracy aims to completely eradicate implicit systems of social differentiation, but it aims to rationalize them, and that means requiring the possibility that these systems can be made

explicit and re-engineered, and that means that essentially class can be decomposed now, the final question of course is, what does this have to do with the mechanization of knowledge production well the loose hypothesis I want to propose is that the increasing penetration of information technology into everyday life offers us the opportunity to break down the informational barriers that make classes in a more or less closed socio-cognitive economy so what I've said is that what kind of individuates classes is socioeconomic proximity but it individuates it insofar as it's that proximity that constitutes the information channels through which practical information can be spread.

Information technology and its development promises or provides us with the promise of breaking down these barriers by providing alternative information practitioners. this is to say that it gives us the resources to move from implicit to explicit forms of social cognition in which our ability to offer one another options for action increases exponentially this is something we already see in the proliferation of open source software and creative commons media but it must ideally be extended to the whole of human practical endeavor so that rather than reducing the variation in occupations that are permissible within an egalitarian society we remove cognitive hurdles that make these occupations

inaccessible to those of differing socio-economic backgrounds so to tie this back into Ben Singleton's talk what I'm really arguing for is the creation of socio-cognitive platforms which enable sort of unitary or less differentiate social cognition which is as accessible which provides practical possibilities to people as widely as possible so breaking down the limit the cognitive limitations imposed by belonging to and growing up and being subjectivated within a given class.

Yes, that's my basic idea. Maybe I'll talk about it more in the future. Thank you very much. Yeah, yeah, I totally agree with that. I think that's exactly right, and that's what I was trying to reference in the first half of the talk. with this, you know, because Jonathan Stern talks about that too, right? About how, you know, audio compression systems are explicitly designed around a quote-unquote ideal listener, right? Which I think is maybe what you're getting at. So that's what I was trying to talk about under this, the heading of the kind of, the heading of abstract compression. Yeah. So I agree with that characterization.

Right, right. So the proposal is that there are sort of two pathways for compression. There's the pathway of abstract compression, which is about, it requires a transcendental or metaphysical structure, right? But then the path of generic compression doesn't. It is about an insufficiency or a principle of impoverishment, right, where you delete data but not in the service of kind of sketching out in Solilet some sort of ideal shape of some kind. At least that's the proposal. Yeah.

Something in the kind of Alex's idea of digitality and the kind of compression that it makes. It's in fact, yes, I understand that data loss doesn't really entail, doesn't really distort the process of, for example, representation. But the kind of data loss that happens in digitalization, and that's what Alex was attempting to unravel, is that basically digitalization, which a number corresponds to, for example, a finite state of the machine or evolution of a

physical system. Now, the thing is that with physical dynamic systems, They are deterministic chaos, meaning that the evolution, even if you have the initial and boundary condition of a system, as it evolves, it's going to be catastrophic. You do not know how it's going to evolve because the smallest perturbations count. And these smaller perturbations are usually represented by those smaller decimals in a number system. And once you really get rid of them, and this is really the kind of metaphysics of digitalization, Once you really get them off, you round a number to a digit. You basically have assumed that it's not going to really distort the kind of representation that you are making.

But it's, in fact, it's not really that a lot. It's actually changing the causal regime to a new causal regime, to a fundamentally deterministic one, which doesn't correspond with the deterministic chaos, for example, of a physical system. So I think, let's go back to the compression issue, and maybe tie it back to metaphor a bit. It seems that the, I'm going to share the same concerns about whether compression is the right term. The thing that's common between the transcendental operation conceptualization, let's say, or the descriptive account, but also through data is reduction. There are different things that are being reduced in each case.

So the issue is whether compression becomes a sort of a meta-ordering metaphor for other types of reduction in other fields. That seems to be the issue that Razor was bringing up, I thought. But I think what seemed to me to come up frequently in the discussions was the issue of modeling. I mean, it's the most explicit with Nick's presentation this morning. But I think all of us were somehow speaking about how to model and what a good model might be, and what can be lost by a model to still be adequate to what it claims to be modeling, which I think is the point that you were just making, because there can also be catastrophic consequences in terms of continuing to be a good model. But in terms of the initial question on metaphor,

it strikes me that understanding models as reductions of systems which they are nonetheless adequate to as models, we might be obliged to think about models as precisely not metaphoric, but simply as reductions, and therefore adequate. And I think I'm wondering about this, simply because I think the operation of the metaphor to use Ray's formulation as carrying semantic load seems to be very different to the model as a recursion, as a kind of lossy recursion. Yeah, it's a recursion of the system it's describing, but it loses the texture and the detail of that model.

And that seems to be a non-metaphorical relationship. And also, I think that might allow us to start to, I mean, I think as people have been trying to do, to intervene upon a conceptualization of computation now in ways that are more open than the standard reduction to the digital and opening up to the humanities. But then along those lines, how would we qualify how we talk about something like function if we agree that we don't want to get into a territory where we're dealing with the reductions and losses that come from modelization? then what, how can you qualify the function that you're uncoupling from constitution in affirmative terms,

or in terms that are other than subtraction? So you had your three tiers of understanding computation, that it's its own logic, then it's the layer that would be the algorithm, and then it would be the layer that is its implementation. And you want, this is for Reza, you want to argue that the quality of the function that you're talking about is not at the level of the algorithm, which gets into the problem of modelization and reduction, nor is it implementation, because you're not getting into this kind of instrumental rationality logic. You seem to want to hold off or sort of hold out a space for the function as operating as something other than what we all in this room might associate with it in our laity, so to speak.

So what is that function that would sort of emancipate the human from this kind of narcissistic ontology of the concept, But without then delivering us to the system's rationality, that would be part of the same problem. See, I'm going in a circle, and I'm wondering how you would qualify the function. I briefly talked about this, that when we are talking about function, function is basically has also different connotation. Is it the difference of a functional autonomy of, For example, is it at the level of the normative, meaning the semantic versus physical information, processes,

and patterns, or patterns and processes, or mechanisms as different from the entire causal fabric of a physical phenomenon. Now, I did not, I think, because no, I'm sure that I did not say it. I did not relate function that tried to basically locate function in the computational level of that three-tier level. Basically, I started only to say that Turing's revolution is a functionalist thesis. Now, Turing's understanding of function is extremely limited because he tries, again, by way of modeling, which are basically

the kind of models available at a mathematical level But at his time, the kind of function that he realizes this, the function that he extracts, only appears at the level of appearances. And it's supported by certain mathematical equations and mathematical models that only support basically those flat universes, those explanatory flat universes. It does not allow for these mechanisms to build up, these explanatory levels. And this is why Turing's basically project has, you know, fraught with shortcomings. Now, but that does not really derail his basic gesticulation, namely the functional realizability of human.

So now I think this, as I said, is a completely open question, open to debate. But take side, for example, with Brandon, and I would like Peter to talk about this. For Brandon, human, as I said, is basically understood by the set of activities performing of which is tantamount to be human. So he formulated at this level, what in order to say something, what ought we do,

and in order to specify that doing exactly, again, what activities should we perform. So it's a kind of a pragmatist functionalism that exactly what activities or what odds or what performances I can't hear anybody else. You know, the sapient from the sentience. And then he concludes... So it's basically... And this is so Brandon, I would say that probably Brandon does not, view is not really that compatible on the surface with Turing. It's exactly what Turing also tries to do.

He tries to get the mind and decompose it to a set of practices, which count as to be human. And these are, what are these basically? These practices are implicit, for example, in social practices, in robot social practices, in basically deployment of a vocabulary. I can talk if you want. Epistemology, please come. So I'm just going to make a few remarks on San's image of myself. I think I want to start by saying this is way outside my territory, pissing territory. So these remarks will come probably from slightly left field.

But a couple of things that struck me over the course of the last few days, last two days, are certain key terms that pull out for me and then key idea clusters. I'm an art historian. I work on art of the 50s and 60s, mainly the transition from what you might think of as built objects into what, for better or worse, is called performance. So that's where I'm coming from. One of the key questions for me, and I think this discussion of metaphor for those of us who actually deal with art, is so far removed from the kinds of materials that we actually

work with, think about, play with intellectually. I like to think of art as a thought form, whether it's material or immaterial. So one key question for me that arises from the very interesting discussion of platforms that Ben Dick Singleton presented was what kind of platform is art? And that's something that I'm not really feeling in the room yet. What kind of platform is art? It's the platform that's enabled the particular conversation that you guys are having there in Vancouver and the sort of odd side conversations that we're having on various different sites

and in various different formats. So what is the platform that is art? The second thing is that in terms of this discussion of metaphor, it strikes me that computation itself has become an overriding metaphor in the conversation here. And it was Suhail who brought up Bateson's difference that makes a difference. Bateson is a cybernetician, but he's not a cybernetician engaged with computation straightforwardly. He's a guy looking at human behavior, not even language, sort of non-linguistic systems and human behaviors. And he's understanding those in relation to a systems thinking.

So, for me, this sort of computational metaphor, which is what it is, is one that sort of clouds over, or let's say that has compressed out of it something about behavior and about what I think it was Joshua brought up as affect, the affective. So I'd like to put those in the room for you to work with. You might even say that this computational metaphor has resulted in a kind of generative entrenchment of computation that has cut away, paired away, other types of practice, other types of difference.

The last thing I wanted to toss in there had to do with universal education. And I appreciated very much the response to the presentation on universal education. Because one of the questions that comes before you even begin to think about universal education and some universalizing is, what is learning itself? This is not a trivial question. What is it to learn? In fact, that very notion of the difference that makes a difference is about learning, a learning and change. So I want to put those things in the room. It's been a sort of frustrating back end evening here. And I'm leaving this image up in place of a selfie, as it were,

just as a reminder that what we're talking about really is matter, material. And that all of these kinds of practices, that all of these systems, all of these forms and formats depend upon a kind of material. And I'm sure most of you know, probably in far greater detail than I do, that these cables that run under our oceans are continually being cut by one state agent or another state agent and replaced. There's a continual process of physical intervention in this ethereal medium that we're playing with. It's just a reminder that when we're using this metaphor of the computational,

it's dependent upon an array of material artifacts, an array of practices, as well as the compression that takes out, strips out, something that might be the thought experiment that is art-making. And as they say on the radio in New York, I'll take my answers offline. Thanks. I'm supposed to be talking now, can I? Yes, please. Well, to be honest, I think the remarks I've got probably seem extremely crude and not exactly left field but coming from the sidelines.

There's only really been one question, to be honest, that's guarded everything I've been interested in for the last 20 years, which is the teleological identity of capitalism and artificial intelligence. I've sort of tried arguing that out in very different spaces spaces with very different people, it obviously produces a lot of stimulating friction, wherever you are here, but it's a sort of fundamental thesis that can more and more persuade you The most recent situation that came up with was discussing the whole friendly AI phenomenon,

which is very specifically institutionalised project by people who switched, interestingly, Interestingly, from being engaged in action of production of artificial intelligence, people who started to assume that artificial intelligence was going to happen, and that the fundamental question was whether various structures of security can be put in place to protect people from what it was going to be like. And the way that this kind of development tracks the equivalent on the side of political economy is extremely striking for me. That in both cases, one has an increasingly persuasive set of models that are very, very

stubborn in the system. They come up generation after generation in slightly different vocabulary but extremely recognizable once you start looking for them. Based on, and you can choose our vocabulary with great freedom, but I'll start with a very traditional one. Spontaneous order, spontaneous organization, self-organization, in the American, auto-catacters, catalyzing, and all that. Everyone knows this stuff. It's occasionally critiqued precisely because of its continuity. We saw in the early 90s, where I first started really picking up on this type of thing, that there was an evoked

ideological teeth of what was at that time called the Californian ideology. Now, I'm probably going back into people's interests at this point, so I'll tell you just about it, but this was really provoked by certain things, I would say a very key individualist case was Kevin Kelly, who was a thought that was, I think, quite influential people out of control. Well, he was drawing very explicitly a set of analogies across a whole bunch of fields. He was inspired by research conducted at the Santa Fe Institute which is still doing very interesting work on contact systems today. But certainly included

market companies, very explicitly on one end, and problems in practical computational research research at the other end. I think examples of things like Stuart Kaufman and his abilities of generate or nothing totally randomness circuits. And the robot, which comes from just building together a bunch of very very simple robot components and actually getting complicated emerging behaviour as that. So, just to say for at least two decades, and I think that that's the most certainly grandest in the day, there is a constant tendency for there to be a regeneration of a certain

type of discourse that has powerful resonances both on the side of people in technical research, intelligence machines, to summarize, and on the other side, they engage very strongly with highly charged political discussion about the degree to which social processes are most effectively evolved by completely decontroled social processes. And everyone recognizes That's exactly what the critique of the California ideology was all about. Of course, at that point, it's the kind of world boost phase of Silicon Valley as we now know it,

associated with a resurgence of what I think lots of people in this field are calling neoliberal ideas to do with deregulation, privatisation, a ban, it's not a ban, it's about down-housing government, that everyone knows what that cocktail of ideas is about. And I think everyone recognises that those two discourses are extremely interconnected. So I'm not going to go on about this much longer, I'm just going to say And interesting whether people think that the two sides of this phenomenon really are usefully separated.

And interesting whether people think that there is an explicit historical momentum to make these converges between these two things, starker and starker, and therefore to actually raise a question about what kind of convergence point is actually being historically constructed rejected by this . And then I guess I just think it's an opportunity to have a really heated antagonistic discussion. But that's what we're not going to do. The best thing's happening now. So thanks for that. So if you want to go by order, I think Kate will be next, and I hope your microphone is

a little bit better quality, Kate. So you can jump in. Can you hear me? Yes. Okay, it sounds fine? Yes. If you can just mute Nick's mic. Okay, I think you did. Go ahead, Kate. Okay. Yeah, so I'm Kate Steinman. I'm a PhD student in art history at UBC. I'm working on a dissertation on biopolitics in contemporary video art. And at the moment, I'm focusing on a chapter on the work of Melanie Gilligan and Hito Steyerl. I'm also one of the editors at Phillip Magazine, and I'm an editor also at Yishu, another contemporary

art magazine based in Vancouver. And I'd like to thank Merle for inviting me to respond. It's a huge honor to be here, and I've enjoyed everyone's contributions. But as several other people have said, this is way out of my area. So I do have a few thoughts, though, that I'd like to offer that the conference provoked for me. So I'm going to go back to the beginning of the day today when Mackenzie Wark opened the conference with a fascinating talk in which he argued that the concept of metabolic rift is one of the most important liberation fronts of our time. So metabolic rift refers to Marx's observation that an irreparable rift occurs in the interdependent processes of social metabolism under capitalism

and that a rupture inevitably occurs in the metabolic interaction between humanity and ecology as a result of capitalist production, between humanity and the planetary environment, as a nod to the name of this session. So it refers to the growing rift between technology and nature. And as Warke pointed out, in our era, alongside the liberation of women or the liberation of the working classes, we are also witnessing the liberation of carbon, whereas once carbon was in the ground, now it's in the air. Marx's molecular rift for today's era is carbon, it's phosphorus, it's nitrogen. These are natural elements, but they're in the wrong place.

Instead of participating in feedback loops, they're acting as runaway elements endangering the climate. So it's around this, around climatology, more than around political economy, Warwick seems to be arguing that we must rethink matters today. but whereas Warwick invokes Bogdanov and Haraway to explore this paradox in which the 20th century witnessed both an astonishing improvement in the capacity to create information systems and, on the other hand, a vast devastation of the underlying thermodynamic systems its metabolic processes on the molecular level I was immediately reminded

of a prescient short science fiction story written in 1909 called The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster, and I'm sure many of you know it. So the protagonist in Forster's story is, excuse me, is a woman named Vashti who lives in a tiny sealed pod. And I'd like to read a very, very short passage from the story in which Vashti is using a kind of Skype-like interface to have a conversation with her son who lives far away in another pod. And this quote, or this little passage, seems especially appropriate for the technologically challenged conversations we've been having during this conference. Okay, so I'm going to read.

It says, The machine did not transmit nuances of expression. It only gave a general idea of people, an idea that was good enough for all practical purposes, Vashti thought. The imponderable bloom, declared by a discredited philosophy to be the actual essence of intercourse, was rightly ignored by the machine, just as the imponderable bloom of the grape was ignored by the manufacturers of artificial fruit. Something good enough had long since been accepted by our race. The clumsy system of public gatherings had long since been abandoned. Neither Vashti nor her audience stirred from their rooms. seated in her armchair she spoke and while they in their armchairs heard her fairly well

and saw her fairly well that's the end of the quote so in the in the futuristic information oriented society in Forster's story and again this was written in 1909 the environment has been so destroyed that the surface of the planet is considered uninhabitable and each citizen lives alone in one of these tiny pod-like rooms in a vast grid of underground cities spread all across the globe. And that reminds me of what Judith was saying about speaking of cables under the ocean. So the physical necessities of food, of clothing, and shelter are all taken care of by this sort of global entity called the machine, like this sort of a quasi-religious entity.

and the inhabitants of the pod spend most of their time having one-to-one chats or group electronic chats in real time with voice, with pictures, with video, kind of like Google Hangout style. So for me, the paradox that Mackenzie Wark talked about this morning, this paradox in which the improvements in our capacity to create information systems are matched only by a massive degradation of those systems underlying thermodynamics, really invoke the devastating contrast of this story. But for me, the story also, which I knew about before, it also really invokes, in the work I've been reading, for example, Franco Bifo-Berardi's work

on biopolitics and connective mutation. Bifo writes that, you know, I've got a quote from him, the combined effect of the so-called emancipation of women, which in reality has been the subjection of women to the circuit of capitalist production, and the diffusion of the televisual socializer, has something to do with the contemporary psychopolitical catastrophe, end quote. So for BIFO, digital interfaces and digital networks, like information, are reducers of complexity. And along with other reducers of complexity, like money or stereotypes, they simplify the relationship with the other. So Bifo says, quote, when the other appears in flesh and blood,

we cannot tolerate its presence because it hurts our insensibility. The video electronic generation does not tolerate armpit or pubic hair. One needs perfect compatibility in order to interface corporeal surfaces in connection, smooth generation, end quote. and so Ja Le too spoke at the beginning of this session of the violent relationship between the human and the machine that has been invoked by the topic of this conference but so Forrester's story for me is less a warning against technology than it is a call to use it differently and for this reason I think it relates nicely to the concerns that have been raised by the speakers here today and yesterday of course so to conclude

I wanted to turn just very quickly to something I'm sure you're familiar with the Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics which was written last year by Alex Williams and Nick Cernicek and they argue, and I'll quote again that the left must take advantage of every technological and scientific advance made possible by capitalist society we declare that quantification is not an evil to be eliminated but a tool to be used in the most effective manner possible Economic modeling is, simply put, a necessity for making intelligible a complex world. The 2008 financial crisis reveals the risks of blindly accepting mathematical models on faith, yet this is a problem of illegitimate authority and not of mathematics itself.

The tools to be found in social network analysis, agent-based modeling, big data analytics, and non-equilibrium economic models are necessary cognitive mediators for understanding complex systems like the modern economy. The accelerationist left must become literate in these technical fields. And responding to this manifesto in the current issue of E-Flex Journal, Michael Hart identifies that passage as one of the most crucial in the manifesto. And Michael Hart says, production, or productive quantification, economic modeling, big data analysis, and the most abstract cognitive models are all appropriated by worker subjects through education and science. The use of mathematical

models and algorithms by capital does not make them a feature of capital. It is not a problem of mathematics. It is a problem of power. So for this reason, I'm very excited to have been part this today to explore ways to appropriate digitality for our own purposes. So that's all. Thanks very much. Okay. Okay, so I don't think we really came to a conclusion about who's next, but we have two people left. So So who would like to go next? Either Amanda or Mateo? It sounds like Mateo's...

You want to go? Why don't we just have Amanda go? Is that okay? Is that okay with you, Amanda? Let me turn on the mic. Go ahead. Oh, hold on a second. Yeah, there we go. Is that working? It is, yes. I don't mind if Mateo goes if he's really tired. No, go ahead. That's okay, go ahead. Okay. All right, Will, as long as you can hear me. I just wanted to try and address something that you wrote in your introduction to the conference mode, and that was this question of the effect of the digital in terms of how artists look at the world and perceive world. I wanted to try and get back to a question of specificity.

Am I still connected? Yes, you are. Okay, thank you. I wanted to ask about specificity and these questions of difference that have come up over the day and yesterday. I also wanted to think about the figure of the digital and how the figure of the digital in contemporary art practice has often been used as a kind of referent to questions of the production of democracy, the production of equality, but at the same time, equality is purchased through these ideas of the proliferation of individual identities. So it's a very kind of liberalist understanding of equality vis-a-vis the digital as this kind of figure of sensory experience in a lot of art practices.

And I think this goes back to maybe something Suhail mentioned about the aesthetics of destabilization and the concept of instability that art reifies. And I think often this has been connected to kind of the vista of the digital that can give access to this space of real instability. And this kind of ethic of indeterminacy that artwork has kind of enjoyed very much. And I wanted to maybe think about this as what Reza talks about is the fantasy of the ineffable, which is located in a digital aesthetic that is particularly managed as a kind of weak ideology in contemporary art. And I think that these empirical mirrors of the digital are actually inconsequential politically

because they misunderstand what the digital machine is and is not. So this manifestation of egalitarian, differentiated and horizontal dreams ends up as a private theatre that regresses critique to the level of parody. So I wanted to reflect on this and rather than ask how we might produce the experience of the digital as equivalent or adequate to the real, we must instead ask how the space of decision, the system of regulative mediation, information and communication demands that we reshape and rethink the methods of our critique and operations of knowledge without cause or linear cause. But also I think the digital in this formulation, it's more rationalist, say, formulation or computational formulation,

instructs us to move past the ideas that have supported the critique, the name and the condition of art. And it kind of makes myths of these things and regulates them to this weak ideology, as I've said. But it's a weak ideology that still convinces artists, and artists still claim. And often these artists call themselves activists, which I'm not sure about at all. So through the demand of the digital, we see this emergence of two types of language re-emerging that are often oversimplified as being A, the networked operation of power where scientific reason produces knowledge space and B, a flaky, interpretive, ambiguous, ambiguous, ambivalent, aporetic abstraction of the image that gives poetic expression

to these systems. And I think that this is where we get this idea that the image is weak, but ideologically dangerous in this kind of traditional formulation of the evil demon of images like we see in Baudrillard, where, you know, we see this ambiguity that's easily rationalized and simplified. So I want you to think about how some of the people have responded to this idea of the image in the conference already, where we've seen one person, and I can't remember their name, talking about their practice as dysfunctional in this kind of Kantian ideal of where the image is irrational, and therefore it presupposes a political orientation through that irrationality.

And we also see this idea that Martha talked about in response to Suhail, where we cannot think about a paradigm of art because art addresses us always in the moment of utter specificity. But I think both of those responses are totally incorrect because it's really clear to me that art's laboured its political charge in a world that's aligned itself with a liberal mantra of human freedom. Often artworks tend to melt into each other in proliferate experiments with more stuff that basically puts forward the idea that the artwork can emancipate us and to do so it must be engaged in the vista of free interpretations. So to understand the artwork here it offers us freedom

and it must be taken as discreetly individual and different. It must be just like us and And I think that's where Martha kind of comes from. But I want to ask about the computational languages that we've addressed and the operations of reason that have been put forward today. The supposed non-ideological language of science as well. And to talk about the scientific image that might surpass the conditions of a natural science and the experimental discourses of the humanities that love interpretation. But I want to ask the politics of this science, and I want to think about how the same ideology of freedom is reclaimed in the mastery of the neutral. We experience this problem directly and perennially in our practice, where we are told that perceiving

the existing conditions of the artwork differently through the lens of the digital is enough work to do if we want to recondition our existing reality. So it goes, it's enough to read the world differently in order to reproduce and engage the world differently. So what I'm thinking about is how these theories of a universal science and often employing the digital to do so within arts is a kind of logic of interpretation that the thought of the digital elicits. And it risks the notion that it does not matter that artworks or culture should take on a radical rethinking of method, nor must they operate differently in any empirical, perceptual or experiential sense. So is the digital in these terms an alibi for the proliferation

of more stuff tied to a fateful acceptance expressed in the idiom, what happens, happens? And I'm also thinking here of Alex's reference to Terrell and Larawell, where the adequation of the scientifically oriented real to the image resides within the aesthetic genre of mysticism, nature and spirit. And I can't help think of Terrell's work in this case as a fake universal, rather the private looks art experience. Art as an expression recovers the problem of interpretation then. So basically I wanted to get to the problem of knowledge and information that Suhail brings up, as well as implicate Nick's positive account of the model. And in addition, I think the question of mediation is something that a non-representational art

just imagines that it could get over. This is a fantasy. And too often the claims to non-representationalism in art naively imagine that they are no longer dealing with language. So just to get over this, I want to think about our problem of designating an account of the digital as an organisational structure of informational economies to art. The aim without irony towards production means that we must think that the digital, without using this as metaphor or as an interpretive model that would simply look at existing art differently. So I don't want to kind of think of the problem of semantics here. I want to think about a practically producing artwork that can be thought of as political and not ethical.

And I think it's because these interpretive models that we've valorised are not enough to dismantle the fundamental myths that are habituated to the art world. So moreover, this interpretive method, employed as a means to embed the digital as a pre-political reality of culture, underscores these traditions of advanced capitalism ever more naively. So what if we were not to oppose science to the image and instead were to understand the rational power and non-contradictory logic of the image and its operations? What would it mean to undertake this reconceptualization of the world as a practical undertaking that considers the force of images as part of that world. So I want to think of how we can think the artwork as a specific case, since the image

that is the artwork, if it is spoken of at all, is often referred to by philosophy and theory in general terms, and often artworks, if they are referred to at all, serve as replaceable examples of wider causes. So does it matter, in the context of the digital, in the thrill of information, what artists do? Is this a question of analysing the informational capacity of artwork specifically rather than claiming some essential property to the image? Or just like the ethos of capitalistic accumulation massively enhanced and complexified by the digital, does art also require a new ethos, a new name under which to labour?

But if we are to think specifically to the condition of art as scientific method, as a model producing entity, can this be done without normatively valorizing the different, as we heard in Martha's response to Suho, and Suho, if art through the digital in this case is a refusal for correlative abstractions, does it demand a new form of specificity? So to raise that as well, can the physically descriptive be understood without producing the formal hierarchy of these levels of rationalising, let's say, if so, does this return us to the question of spatiotemporal context-based accounts of art, events and objects? So I guess what I'm wondering about is the qualitative particularity and its place within

these systems and as these systems, without reconditioning these accounts themselves to a renewed form of critical idealism. Finished. Thank you very much. So, just to lay out the rest of this, Martha has some clarification to make based on the foot I put in my mouth. So that's going to happen. And then there's Matteo, and then there's... So why don't we get Matteo first because he's been waiting a long time and we got two in and then after Matteo We get you to clarify and then we get Christina and that's it. I'm so glad Christina came back. So go ahead Matteo Yes, we can just be as brief as you can because we don't really have that much time

I will be super brief and thanks Mohammed for inviting me and Yeah, it's pretty late here, and I don't know how to try to respond or sum up this incredibly rich conference. So, having a few minutes, I would like just to mention one concept to sum up everything. This is precisely, it will take two minutes. This concept is the concept of code surplus value or machinic surplus value, as the Lesingatari expressed in a chapter of Antidepus that has been quite important recently because it's the same chapter of of the locus classic of accelerationism.

So, I... I don't think you have the last final voice. Sorry, I hear other noise, especially from...Katherine, sorry. So, I tried to sum up the book conference, or try to respond to some of the speakers, around one concept only, because it's the only thing I can do right now. So, this concept is the concept of code surplus value. And this surplus value of code is the way for me to condense different problems, at least tonight, too. Before going to sleep, I would like to mention two problems. The first problem is the problem of surplus value within the relation of machines,

and especially information machines and only machines. This is the crisis of Marx's labor theory of value, specifically, as we said, in the relation of cybernetic machine and cybernetic labor. This was mentioned also by Nick Lamb in his comment to the Axel Newarkens Manifesto recently. Curiously, Dresden and Gattari in this chapter, in the footnote, they mention and they comment also the fragment of machine from the Grundrisse, where Marx refers to the general intellect incarnate into machine, something that my friends from Italian Apostol Peres, we started to discuss only 20 years after that comment. And so this idea of the surplus value of code incarnate is something that has been important

in political economy recently. I mean, we debated that acceleration. Second, this idea of surplus value of code tonight can be referred also to some kind of failures of the Lisingatari anthology. The Lisingatari elaborating the trauma with structuralism and Lacan, a big stress machine only in the size of production, kind of endless productive flow that appeared in a sort of liquid nature. In this sense, I understand Reza, a project, as an attempt to bring final recognition back into the political project of the machine, in what can be defined as an alliance with

augmented intelligence, with artificial intelligence in a broader sense, in what he called the next machine in the article, Navigate with Extreme Prejudice. Or, as said with McKenzie work tonight, today's order, the human and non-human partners in thought. Or, better said by Daniel Sacilotto in his overview across organic and inorganic intelligence. Anyhow, probably discussing all this issue about pan-computationalism, the listening Atari sounds no longer very useful. Tonight, talking about the ethics of revision, that I guess Reza has been the only one who has been the only one who has been.

I still wonder what is the relation between error and normativity, pathology and normativity, psychopathology and normativity in Reza's system. It's a new problem. It was an old problem for both Lessing and Foucault. It is reasons machines, mothering machines, kids and machines. There will be a third point that is connected to the proper issue of surplus, but probably it's too late for me to address that. So I bring my greetings to you all over there. So Martha, do you want to take that foot out of my mouth?

There's no foot in your mouth, Moe. No, in fact, I was about to get off the computer and then I just heard myself becoming, you know, like the humanist for Art is Liberation and I sort of sat up. And I think the one part of that quote was the fact of the kind of specificity. And this is something I just, I think what's interesting about a conference like this is, you know, in art, I don't want to say art world, because as I said before, I think there are many art worlds. I think there are many areas when we say contemporary art, we're talking about a lot of different things. I think one thing that a number of us might see when you go, if you look at the Facebook

conversation, that people are very excited when Judith said, you know, you have actual wires and they are being cut. This is sort of like, you know, what we talk about in art in terms of the fact, well, let me just put it in the media sense real quickly, someone like Wendy Chun who says, you can't you can't talk about, you know, communication or technology as completely immaterial. It's just not, you know, we're all sitting in front of computers. Similarly, my point about the art, you know, saying contemporary art, that for me is a very dangerous place to go because, first of all, you know, if we were to say technology, there's a good part of the world that, you know, doesn't have technology. And so if you look at the wires, again, that go under the sea,

there are only a couple that go to Australia and even less that go to Africa, and their internet connection can, you know, disappear for a couple of days on end. If we're going to think about technology as a model for art, not just as some sort of idea of new media, I am always curious about, you know, what philosophers, etc., are doing, but there is a way in which there's a certain amount of abstraction that we can use, and then in other places where it does, you know, get connected or not. For instance, one of the things that I find really interesting is that Roncier's latest book is basically an art history. At some point, if you're doing philosophy and you're involving art, you know, he's gotten to the point where it is an art history.

So that's all I was trying to do, is say that there was a sort of level of abstraction there that in terms of someone like me, who's on the ground dealing with a lot of different kinds of art, I would never say, as a sort of monolithic category, contemporary art. Similarly, some art may be liberatory, you know, in the sense a lot of people that I know would actually describe that as creative activism rather than art per se. So right there, we're already expanding categories of art. At any rate, thanks a lot for this opportunity to be involved in this conference. I found it really interesting. I will admit there are certain areas. You know, I sat through the entire accelerationist thing at eFlux as well.

It's interesting, I think, to see where it touches down and where those of us who do very specifically with art, you know, as it's called, and to see where it overlaps. So thanks a lot. Thank you, Martha. Okay, so, Christina, are you ready? I think so. It's wonderful, actually, that it's ending with your background in media arts and how long you've been involved with all this and how you left it and started painting. And this is it. The conference is going to end with your remarks. So thank you for being patient and for coming back, because I thought I lost you. Thanks. Can you, am I hearable? We're hearing perfectly.

Oh, good. That's great. Well, I first want to say, this is like, I think there was someone who made a rather tragic comment amongst the panel. Since the panel's gone, I will say this. And someone said, well, you know, these whiny artists who feel that they must share their practice. Well, I thought maybe I would throw up on the screen, I've just been drawing all day, so you won't be able to see it very well, but there's lots of strange creatures moving along in this fairly large drawing, which I hope serves as kind of a weird choreographic, linguistic record of what happened

from a completely subjective point of view. Are you still able to see me and hear me? Is this good? You're fine? Hello? Yes, Tony, it is. Go ahead. We're all like mismanaged. All right. Well, so I guess you referred to my history. Well, I was trained in painting and drawing, but starting in about the late 90s, I got very interested in starting to work with what was then called, optimistically called, New Media. And in fact, the journey began with a study of the, I was doing drawings of pre-Cambrian 500 million year old fossils

at the Burgess Shale in Yoho National Park as part of a Banff Media and Visual Arts residency that I did in 1999. And at that time I was hooked up with an artist who was doing a project that involved the then new GPS concept of like, you would move along the Burgess Shale and memories would be triggered through this massive laptop that was in your backpack. He was carrying this huge backpack to sort of get the GPS and then there would be this triggered memory of a poem or something like this. So it was this interesting, the project was called Tracers by Terry Reed, who's I think a professor at RISD today.

So I think that this led me to work in media for a long time, and I still do, And I wanted to, mainly I want to talk a little bit about my impression of the topologies of media and painting. And only in very, very brief forms. First of all, I want to say that I think on a technical level, just a technical comment, But compression in video is not necessarily a concept of losing information or degradation. But it's rather the MPEG protocols are designed so that the artificial intelligence

actually finds associative resonances of forms. So it's actually a kind of, I hate to use this term, but metaphoric thinking on a kind of, or at least, okay, it's probably not metaphor, it's simile. That there's actually a way in which MPEG-4 compression manages to deliver what we call a lossless interface. So a video of mine that might be, you know, six gigabytes can deliver to you for, you know, 200 megabytes on a screen in a theater where if it was the six megabytes, it would crash the stupid projector.

Okay, so this is, in a way, I think we need to be kind of careful about, you know, there's more than one way to think about compression, and compression can also refer to associative logics and even visual semiotics, and I don't think that was ever really touched on, and I think it's actually kind of a cool thing to think about in terms of computational semiotics. On a broader level, I'd like to comment that I have served a formal observation and a philosophical position. A philosophical position is that I actually, like Mackenzie Wark, I'm actually far more worried about the carbon load than anything else.

And I think that this issue of defining what is human seems kind of a little bit extraneous to the main problem at hand, that in fact, you know, I think the earth is not going to die and we are not going to save the earth. Gaia is going to continue and in fact the biodiversity scientists, the scientific community that works on biological systems basically adopts the Gaia, the Reveille's philosophy, that everything about the Earth is a giant... Well, it's a type of system, but it's a material system. So, I guess I'm going to say that I basically take the view that we're putting ourselves out of business, as well as all of the animals and the biome that is associated with us.

So this is the crisis. It's not the crisis of, like, the Earth versus humans or anything. It's that the earth is going to continue, and we're actually not going to continue. So this makes a problem of end sort of a problem of ultimate meaning, which I realize that many people would love to eliminate. They would love to eliminate mortality, and they would love to eliminate the problem of transcendence, and all these other things. But unfortunately, the situation we are now finding ourselves in is one in which we are facing our imminent demise, probably. And so all of our structures of thought

are unable to cope with this situation, including those of art. The final thing I would like to just comment on is a formal comment from an art historical perspective, which is that one of the things that I really, really love is thinking about the Baroque period and Baroque aesthetics. And I think one of the great things about the Baroque period was twofold. You had, on the one hand, a tremendous interest in giant recursive forms. When you think about Bach and architectonics of recursions into fugue states that would create these huge architectures. And the architecture of the period is characterized by similar kinds of searches for iteration,

endless iteration. And at the same time, there's a tremendous interest in science as a possible venue for thought to sort of explore possible worlds. So the Atenasius Kirchner is really the great example of an early scientist who's looking in the growth period, who's looking at this notion of multiple layers and multiple levels of life forms that could all fit into an amazing Noah's Ark, which would be... So it was sort of a, again, it was a figure of end times. So I think we are in that situation again now.

I'm not the first to say this. this is actually a fairly common discourse about the idea of the Baroque. And the other comment is that Baroque is a... the word means broke, broken, but it also has this possibly unintentional resonance to the idea of the Baraka, or shed, or container. So it's, in a way, a broken container. And on that note, I will say that simply what perhaps a way to make a figure of the sorts of things I make is that that's what I make, are broken figures.

And really, that's all I have to say. And thank you so much for this wonderful time. So I guess we're done with the program. Thank you all for staying until the last minute of it, whoever's left here. And it was a wonderful experiment. And I think we made some kind of a little history about what we did, what we tried to do. So at least I can claim that. One note I want to say is that the videos all have better sound and better presence because I tried it last night and we've tried it morning recording so for the parts that you couldn't make sense of here in the room

there's really good recordings out there that you can go and listen to if you want to and again, thanks to all the participants, all the guests and all the presenters and everyone and yeah hopefully we'll hopefully we'll do it in a few years with much better technology and less glitches but actually I kind of like all the glitches and all that because it kind of like made a point and acted as sort of like a link between sort of like the universal in particular thanks again goodbye