Hello? And welcome everyone. Thank you for your patience. This is the fifth episode of the virtual symposium Recursive Colonialism, Artificial Intelligence and Speculative Computation. We are the Critical Computation Bureau, a collective of researchers, artists and writers,
working at the intersection of technology and culture, computer science and information theory, aesthetics and politics. Recursive Colonialism, Artificial Intelligence and Speculative Computation 2020 aims to provide interventions in the technopolitics of racial capitalism and its recursive regeneration, mixing together critical and creative practices and borrowing models and methods from the philosophy of technology, black studies, political theory, computer science and information theory, media aesthetics and cultural and media theories. Please check our manifesto on the website www.recursivecolonialism.com and the special issue Control Societies at 30 published online
in social text. We would like to thank Duke University which has sponsored this symposium together with the University of Pennsylvania and L'Università di Napoli L'Orientale. For more information on this project or to contact us, feel free to check out our website www.recursecolonialism.com and to follow our socials. My name is Tiziana Terranova. My co-facilitator today is Joanna Parvan. We call this fifth day of the symposium Machine Aesthetics and Asset Capital, and we've accompanied today's dialogue with an exclusive music set by Code 9. The set will premiere on YouTube in two hours. The format of this session will be the following.
Our guests will both talk for 20 minutes each, then 10 minutes each. After that, the speakers will address a few questions that you can type into your Q&A box at the bottom of your screen. Please remember to state clearly which speaker your question is addressed to. Our co-facilitator will pick up as many questions as possible and the chair will address them to the panelists. I also want to remind all panelists not to check the Q&A box as all questions will be verbally asked by the chair. Please type in your question in the Q&A box at any time of the session. This session is also streamed live on our YouTube channel. The first two episodes are already up and the following ones will be up soon.
Today we are very proud to host a dialogue between our guests Steve Goodman and Luciana Parisi. Steve Goodman is an artist, writer and under the name of Code 9, an electronic musician. He founded the record labels Hyperdub in 2004 and Flatlines in 2019. He has produced three albums, two with the late vocalist The Space Ape, Memories of the Future in 2006, and Black Sun in 2012, and one solo album, Nothing, 2015. His book, Sonic Warfare, was published in 2009 by the MIT Press, and in 2019, he co-edited Audit, Unsound, Undead, for the Urbanomic Press.
He co-runs the monthly event series Zero and his installations have appeared at, among other venues, such as the Tate Modern, the Barbican, an Arbeit Gallery in London and CAC in Shanghai. Luciana Parisi's research is a philosophical investigation of technology and culture and statics and politics. She is a professor in media philosophy at the Programme in Literature and the Computational media art and culture at Duke University. She's the author of Abstract Sex, Philosophy, Biotechnology and Mutations of Desire, published in 2004 by Continuum Press, and Contagious Architecture, Computation, Aesthetics and Space, 2013 MIT Press. She's completing a monograph on
alien epistemologies and the transformation of logical thinking in computation. Welcome to you both and over to Steve and Luciana. Thank you, Tiziana. I'd just like to thank the Critical Computation Bureau for this invitation and the opportunity to kind of resume a conversation with Luciana that's been going on for at least 20 years. So today I want to focus on a couple of things. I want to focus on a persistent myth that continues to haunt ideas of machine aesthetics.
And I'll then move on to reflect on a certain description of a mode of inhuman sonic intelligence which pre-existed recent innovations in machine learning and discuss or maybe reflect on its degrees of complicity with subsumption within science fiction or pre-emptive capital. So I want to start with what emerges some side notes to a sound installation that I designed in 2018-2019 entitled It, which revolved around the myth of the golem for the exhibition AI More Than Human at the Barbican in London. It mapped how recent preoccupations with AI
are still haunted by creatures of old Kabbalistic tales. What follows navigates between the theologians of the singularity and Team Human. Section one is called Spectres of the Golem. In Mamori Oshii's Innocence 2004, the sequel to Ghost in the Shell, Public Security Section 9 is tasked with investigating a series of murders committed by hacked gynoids or robots with a female form that killed their owners and then inexplicably committed suicide. Prompted by Major Kusanagi's holographic messages,
Section 9 agent Batu recalls Jacob Grimm's 1808 retelling of the myth of the golem. A clay figure sculpted in the image of man is brought to life through Kabbalistic ritual in order to serve its human master and then proceeds to run amok. Batu describes how in order to activate the golem the word emet or Hebrew for truth is inscribed upon its forehead by removing the first letter so that the word becomes met meaning dead the android is deactivated the most famous account of the myth of the golem as a body without soul originates in the Jewish community 16th century Prague
was created to protect the ghetto from outside threats. Even earlier appearances can be found in the Old Testament. In other versions of the myth, the golem, a rule-following artificial entity, was created through ecstatic ritual and incantations revolving around the vocal recitation of combinations of Hebrew letters and numbers, literally breathing life into it. So here we have an inanimate body animated by sound. The Golem myth proposes a crude hardware clay software word number model. It's either a speech activated machine or one switched on and off with a passcode, which stirs the otherwise lifeless figure.
the myth pre-poses a sequence of events creation from dead matter to a creature as slave, companion, protector and then loss of control and destruction or deactivation of the artificial being Innocence, Ghost in the Shell 2 once again summons the golem a revenant specter that continues to haunt humanity's Promethean dreams of self-overcoming the golem myth is often invoked in discussions of the usually theological drive of transhumanists to transcend human form this foreboding parable has endured as a warning about the hubris of the quest for immortality and has become synonymous with apocalyptic ai
the fear of the replacement of humans by machines from frankenstein to the founder of cybernetics Norbert Veela's infamous God and Golem, through to Joanna Goes in the Shell, Ex Machina, and so on, its hold over the modern imagination runs deep. The Golem suggests a kind of technological animism that accompanies the increasing automation of life. While Innocence deploys the myth to bolster the dramatic arc of the cyborg in the film, the notion of the Golem as runaway AI is perhaps best rendered in Stanislav's LEM's short story Golem 14. So in the interzone between science and myth,
Mark Fisher invoked the concept of the Gothic flatline, which he described as a plane where it's no longer possible to differentiate the animate from the inanimate, and where to have agency is not necessarily to be alive. There are many kinds of persons in the world, he suggests, only some of whom are human. On the gothic flatline, the golem conjures an acoustic cyberspace as a demonology of artificial intelligence. Tool, slave, collaborator or nemesis. The golem has become a cipher for technological danger. While a killer drone or a vengeful gynoid poses an obvious threat to life, what menace does the golem bring when dropped into musical ecosystems?
What does this cipher for AI apocalypse convey about music? What is a musical threat or a threat to music? its final erasure through the coupling of AI and neural link systems a musical instrument that plays its player a database of music autonomous from listeners was what we thought of as music merely a side effect of a long-term formalisation that will replace humans through automation do these threats demand an installation of an Asimovian charter for music? While algorithmic musical systems subsume and embed a great deal of human labour, some argue that musical simulations can already pass the Turing test.
Section 2. Artificial acoustic agencies. Set against these melodramatic scenarios, it's worth remembering that in most versions of the myth that Golem was created to protect the community from which it was spawned. Moreover, instead of musical automation being a potential vibe killer, it's worth recalling the words of Kojo Eshin when he reminded us that, quote, the way science is used in music in general is as a science of intensified sensation. In the classic two cultures of mainstream society, science is still the science that drains the blood of life and leaves everything vivisected. But in music, it's never been like that. Rather, he points to a sonic science that departs from a musical humanism, nurtures accidents and invents the unknown.
Beyond retro-manically repeating musical styles as ostensibly statistical averages of past musical material, in other words, recent AI experiments with producing replicating music in the style of a pre-existing musical aesthetic, the Golem could be a repository of unsound, a carrier of a music to come. For many, the apocalyptic version of the musical automation story has already been superseded by a more symbiotic model in which human music is augmented, upgraded by its engagement with, for example, machine learning, promising untold inhuman collaborators. Rather than merely an anti-Promethean warning, this augmented music already fosters new kinships between humans and non-humans.
In a musical ecosystem, the Golem is an artificial acoustic agency. Still embryonic at the moment, future artificial musicians may comprise of speech synthesis modules, machine learning, machine listening, intelligent signal processing, and the formal modelling of musical behaviour. Such a system of algorithmic composition based on chants, rule-based or AI systems which learn and create their own rules, may themselves integrate an internal automated critic as a sorting and selection tool. AI research on music has two sometimes combined tendencies, the symbolic outputting of score information and the sub-symbolic sound synthesis.
While taking advantage of advanced processing and sound generation potential, such systems to date have usually required supervision by humans. who provide the data sets from which the systems learn and retain the roles of coordination and cherry-picking of musical behaviour. Rather than reducing human input, rather than taking the human out of the loop, these techniques integrate humans into supposedly non-hierarchical systems of improvisation and curation. Section 3. Ghost Dubbing towards the end of innocence Batu discovers that the killer gynoids have been hacked and ghost dubbed making them seem more human in the terminology of ghost in the shell the ghost
is what differentiates the human from an artificial person yet the dubbing procedure is illegal and destroys the human mind from which it's copied if musical golems like the gynoids and innocence acquired their own voice, must they then commit suicide to offset the assassination their existence indicates, using their newfound autonomy to decry their own superhuman musicality. As wholesome as the augmentation of human music, as the augmentation of human musicality may sound, the outcome, programmed or accidental, may not be fully comprehensible within currently available schemas. This opens up an exciting promise of a monstrous potential to create work in excess of,
and perhaps even hostile to, any human aesthetic designation. does an automated musical system really need to be ghost dubbed for its contribution to be considered musically significant while in most versions of the myth the golem is mute it's hard not to sense its specter within the proliferation of embryonic speech activated virtual ai assistance chained to menial domestic tasks what might these what might the progeny of these rudimentary intelligences do once liberated from human servitude? How might their currently elementary sonic responsiveness evolve? Drawing from other sightings of the golem in science and pop culture,
the installation it toyed with some of these questions using near inaudible voices from malfunctioning text-to-speech systems beamed into highly directional speakers. It probed the liminal space between internal voices and those dubbed in from the outside. While musical augmentation by AI is often promoted as a co-evolution between humans and non-human agents, the machine is still essentially being domesticated and humanised. In Innocence, if the hack killer gynoids had not been dubbed with a human ghost, in the first place they would have remained innocent. They wouldn't
have killed their owners. Towards the end of the film, Major Kusanagi, already a ghost adrift in the Matrix, mused that, quote, if the dolls had voices, they would have screamed, I did not want to become human. section four black atlantean future rhythm machine now i want to contrast this idea of the out of control golem that not just threatens its human master perhaps but perhaps tries to refuse the model of the master slave dialectic with some of the ideas of co-doation in his late 90s text more brilliant than the sun where he is already using a terminology which may or may not coincide with at least some of the
concepts at stake in Luciana's research into xenopatterning. Specifically, Kodrueschen proposes a sonic fiction of the Black Atlantean future rhythm machine. One could argue that this fiction stages, makes audible, some of the chrono crises of recursive colonialism within the simultaneously forwards, sideways and counter flows of its time signatures. The Black Atlantian Future Rhythm Machine assumes the role of a distributed, decentralised artificial intelligence engaged in essential mathematics that simultaneously abstracts, affects and concretises cognitions, that calculates movement and moves calculation.
Composed in part by the vernacular mathematics of Black musical sociality, as temporal and sonic coding systems motivate the flesh and constitute an animated diagram for a set of anti-gravity craft to navigate the way of the present. The future rhythm machine is composed of both analogue and digital computational systems, parallel countercultures in the numerical sense of counting, intermodulating across time zones, Composed of localised continia and infrastructural clouds, each musical ecosystem is both generated by and generates the local population's rate of vibration, neural entrainment and fuzzily calculates and adjusts their movements
The various regional electronic scenes and their servers and local area networks provide the concrete detail of this central calculus internet worked, each locale enters into loose asymmetrical synchronization. Their collective intelligence is an amalgam of individual auteurs, genius and faceless movements, seniors, but their inventiveness exceeds the summation of any individuals swept up by its inhuman agency. Kojo Eshin noted that one of the key tasks of the future is to understand rhythmic intelligences and hyperrhythmic music as something that's happening to us that we can't yet understand,
that we can only begin to grasp. It's one step ahead, with each step producing a theoretical advance. It's cleverer than you and me. It's always wrong-footing you. Patterns are unresolved, incomplete, indefinite rhythm for Eschen does not just activate a pre-organised body centralised around the head but rather synthesises bodily intelligence limb by limb anywhere you have that sense of tension that's the beginning that's the signs of a bodily intelligence switching on it proceeds by amplifying this tension possessing and dispossessing you constituting a collective exoskeleton bemoaning both the racist tendency to essentialise and naturalise rhythm
and to retreat into the ineffable when confronted by describing it Eschen instead offers a biotechnical account rhythm is a thought where the interface is between the wet and the hard the more brilliant the black atlantean future rhythm machine is a xeno intelligence against naturalization and innateness it contacts you from the outside not from within eschen pauses and inverts the conventional anthropocentric conception of music history attributing agency also to the non-human components of cultural networks the future rhythm machine is a diasporic synthetic intelligence but it describes not merely the
electronic continuation of vibrant traditions of african polyrhythm and musical cultures networked for the 21st century it also entails a complicity with and navigation within predatory computational networks in a planet at planetary extra human scale it dramatizes the synthesis between the innovations of black musical sociality and their automation. For the future rhythm machine, all musicians, all listeners, all dancers, all researchers, all academics, all journalists, all programmers are merely sense organs, search algorithms, processing units on this network.
the South London artist actress thinks he built his studio robot AZD while the future rhythm machine thinks it deployed him as an advanced servo mechanism to own and be owned by the means of vibration more recently more recently actress has collaborated with an AI named Young Paint which he describes as a system trained on his own music that he outsources labour to. In the stack, Benjamin Bratton is referred to a mega machine of planetary computation composed of nested systems which include earth, cloud, city, address, interface and user.
They're simultaneously demarcated and segmented into zones of sovereign power. In conjunction with the Dutch artist Metahaven, Bratton names the stack's relation to futurity is potential as the black stack, or to quote them, computational totality to come, defined at this moment by what it is not, by the empty content fields of its framework, and by its dire inevitability. It's not the platform that we have, but the platform that might be. The platform would be defined by the productivity of its accidents and by the strategy for which whatever may appear at first as the worst option, even evil, may ultimately be where to look for the best way out.
It's less a possible future than an escape from the present. End of quote. I would like to bastardize and repurpose this concept of the Black Stack as a shadow of the future by forcing a conjunction with the sonic of the future rhythm machine. We're used to, for example, understanding the Black Atlantic following Paul Gilroy as a rhizome, a horizontal decentralized network. But it's also distributed through a vertical, modular technological architecture of platforms, both hardware and software. The stacks and platforms of science fiction capital, the pre-emptive capitalism, complicates and accelerates the advances of the future rhythm machine. With sonic fiction, the black stack is a liquid computer,
a motherboard and the key engine of global pop music. The history of popular music in the West is simultaneously a story of the automation of the Black Atlantic. The uploading of the algorithmic processes that compose musical cultures into the algorithm of digital software. The history of musical automatons and Western formalist musicology stretching back centuries culminates in the stack. As visual software integrated and automated the techniques of early Soviet avant-garde cinema, music software encodes centuries of knowledge and technique. While it's a stack that has made possible the democratisation and decentralisation of the music industry, it also deploys AI to design your listening habits through automated
playlists, pre-empting and programming your desire like a kind of parametric architecture of taste. The stack also catalyzes a predatory culture of algorithmic racial profiling that through prediction forecloses the future. To what extent can contemporary music cultures only be understood both through their complicity with these predatory predictive computational networks and what unidentified audio objects, or perhaps in Luciana's terms of reference, alien intelligences can they give rise to and what is their fate? Thank you. Thank you so much, Steve. Now I'm going to leave the floor to Luciana Parisi for her part of the dialogue. Thank you, Luciana.
Thank you. Thank you, Steve, very much for being in conversation and dialogue with me and to our verses as we've been doing over the years. I'm very, very thrilled and excited. Thank you to Tiziana for sharing. It was another level of conversation we have had for years as well. And I want to especially thank Oana Parvin and Brian Daquino for our collaborators in the Critical Competition Bureau and the fantastic media team. I just would like today to share my screen.
And I'm going to turn off my video. So today I would like to sketch two models to discuss what Mark Fisher calls science fiction capital in relation to machine aesthetics and in the context of what our interest in alien intelligence may be, starting not from the limit of perception, but from an alien logic of imagination, something I call xenopatterning. One model is taken from Octavia Butler's book, The Mind of My Mind, which anticipates how science fiction capital is manifested in AI corporations directly owning the mind of people,
is linked to a non-optical telepathic master pattern. Another model I will take from Jordan Peele movie Get Out, where science fiction capital coincides with the recursive accumulation of the future value of the flesh through the abduction of black bodies under the eugenic order of the coagula. These models, and this is just a premise I want to do before I discuss them in more length. These models in general tell us of how science fiction capital relies on surrogacy as a form of free labor, exploitation and extraction of value. This is racialized and gender surrogacy,
central to the accumulation reproduction of value in technological systems where the surrogate, as Denise Ferrera da Silva would put it, as not juridical, economical or political existence. As recently argued by Atana Soki and Boris in the book, Surrogate Humanity, the relation between the surrogate and AI capital is one form of science fiction capital that has yet to be unpacked. These two models may contribute to discuss science fiction capital and machine aesthetics away from the optical regime of vision and representation of aesthetic judgment and
empirical experience. As Paul Virilio already anticipated in his book, Visual Machine, in a computer, the optically active electrons of machines correspond to a series of coded impulses that mediate the real beyond physical or energetic analogy. Virilio claimed with the automation of perception, image feedback is no longer assured by the interaction with the world. In short, machine vision is negative optics. It does not shed light on dark matter. Instead of a cinematic synthesis of time, machine aesthetic here entails predictive patterning
resulting in the pixelation of the word in terms of binary language, involving the spatial discretization for which sets of coded impulses correspond to infinitely small duration." End of quote. AI capital relies on predictive patterning and on learning intelligence, which means that AI does not represent the world, but in its combinatory logic and statistics, it actually predicts the world, either according to what is already known or what can be known. Importantly, at the core of predictive patterning, are indeterminacy. That is to say, for me, that computational patterning
relies on randomness, incompatibilities, or even noise, depending on whether you are talking in terms of statistics, computational logic, or information theory, or the combination of all of them. So after this premise is now going to go and discuss these models more in details. In the mind of my mind, Octavia Butler describes a project of world domination through the telepathic power of Doro, a more than human creature originally born as a Black Nubian who has been breeding colonies of surrogate patternists for over 4,000 years. To increase the network power of his mind, Doro snatches bodies and minds by breeding and mating
with creatures that he holds as captive to train them to receive his master pattern. Doro, however, cannot fully control the capacity of his surrogate colonies to become active carriers of his code. Most of his enslaved mind cannot withstand the noise broadcasted by Doro's switching on his pattern and end up killing each other in madness. Doro does not simply predict or telepathically reads minds, but he owns minds, he becomes the minds he abducts. Here, as much as San Francisco capital owns the future value of the surrogates that grant the monopolistic expansion of capital pattern,
so too high-tech cooperation on the racialized and surrogates must match and correct errors, must match emotion with expression, concepts without objects, according to a taxonomy of categories that teaches the machine to think according to the grammars or rules. As much as the alien AI learns to recognize and predict meaning, affectivity, desires, behavior, so too it keeps on extracting futurity of value. In the mind of my mind, the relation between science fiction capital and machine aesthetics entails not the representation of the world in terms of objects, but the mere topological
patterning of holes and parts, the ingression of noise or randomness in algorithmic learning and navigation. This entails neither an aesthetic judgment based on the conceptual synthesis of imagination that predetermines that we can all experience the same thinking because we share the same spatiotemporal intuition, nor the empirical model which explains the common space of experience in terms of aggregating of given facts or patterns of data. Instead, this machine aesthetic can be here tentatively discussed in terms of what Wilfred Sellers calls sheer receptivity, a form of intuition consisting in non-conceptual representation.
While this is only one level of intuition, it nevertheless offers a radical shift from the Kantian intellectual intuition and transcendental concepts. According to Sellers, sheer receptivity as a material form of intuition comes to interact with conceptually guided intuition in a second moment when they together become part of a process of productive imagination within patterning. I do not have much time to delve into this aesthetic mode right now, but I want to return to mind on my mind to a pocket father. Doro's psycho-colonial plan of training minds is defeated by Mary, one of his daughters incubated with his patterns. As she enters phase transition,
she quickly learns to navigate Doro's noise frequencies and starts to multiply his pattern and taking control of active minds around the country. She soon realizes that she's not just sharing Doros telepathic power, but there is a mind of her own mind, building a special dimension of alien patterns that do not belong to her. Starting from the sheer receptivity of noise, of alien noise, Mary Pattern starts to mesh with an increasing number of patterns and ultimately to take over Doros' empire until she's forced to kill him. But growing layers upon layers of telepathic thinking,
Mary gives the frequency of her patterns to Doros' laid populations, offering them the chance to transition towards higher mental power. If Doros is a psychopathic tyrant, Mary instead aspires to breed an alien intelligence that can host all kinds of mind, has defined a space of unification in the patterns of her patterns. As Mary shares a sheer receptivity, a non-conceptual material receptivity of alien frequencies, her patterns, even if guided by the transcendental synthesis of her mind, enters a process of productive imagination, a xenogenesis beyond her comprehension.
One could say that there are here at least two possibilities of machine aesthetics and sound fiction capital. On the one hand, Doro keeps the pattern of his monopolistic enslavement of surrogate patternist in the form of a transcendental synthesis of imagination. On the other, Mary unlocks the gates, allowing the intrusion of alien patterns into hers, relinquishing total control, remaining entangled with the plethora of sheer receptivity of other up-patternists enfolded in a series of productive imagination, opening a pattern to the governance of new rules. Mary perhaps can help us to think beyond the model of surrogacy in science fiction capital
and within machine aesthetics in terms of alien complexities, of patterning imagination as no conceptual intuition or noise, a material intuition that allows minds to construct a multi-logic of space and time. The shear receptivity of patterning can also be seen at work in certain modes of machine learning and machine vision, particularly in the computational compression of randomness in convoluted neural networks, of which we have seen a few examples in this week's panel discussion.
In particular, recent research at Google is focused on convoluted neural networks that can engage with noise or randomness to eliminate errors in algorithmic patterning or in the mismatch of objects and concepts. This is also science fiction, a capital question of how to eliminate errors without the need of surrogate labour in order to move towards a fully automation of knowledge. From this standpoint, predictive vectors counter-construct counterfactual dimensions of the image of a cat that is not a cat, making up a space for an alien patterning that enmeshes in the process of an algorithmic productive imagination.
It is as if the discretization of the network in increasingly small patterns of recognition flips the network inside out, adding unknown dimensions to its organizational network. Instead of an autopoietic growth of the master pattern across the layers, convoluted neural networks add more discrete parts to a network and therefore eventuate an increasing volume of randomness whose complex patterning cannot be fully explained, programmed, and represented before it happens. One consequence for including the alien patterns of noise in predictive vectors in a convoluted
neuron network ultimately entails the sheer receptivity of the complexity of noise entering a space of artificial imagination. This implies not an optical representation of the real, determined by given concepts. What algorithms perceive is not raw data, but a noise complexity that is already part of a manifold or non-conceptual representations enfolded in computational compression. Convoluted neural networks are just one example here where complex patterns of noise stand for an alien intelligence from where to re-envision the techno-political implication of science
fiction capital and machine aesthetics. I want now to conclude with a reference to Jordan Peele's movie Get Out, to possibly contrast it to Mary's model of sharing the reception of noise and productive imagination with all kinds of mind. with what I call negative optics, that is a non-light or a black light, to quote Denise Ferreira da Silva, that is at once precluded from being as much as it refuses being. I see these negative optics at work in Jordan Piers' Get Out, which reminds us that the question of technology cannot be separated from the violence of colonialism. And yet,
as much as these instruments of islam and secure recursive patterns of the master, automated intelligence continue to skip sequences and enter the world of negative iteration in negative auto impressions. The movie opens with an unsettling scene of abduction of a young black man choked and dragged in the back of a trunk in a quiet suburb neighborhood. In the next scene, we meet Chris, a young black photographer and Rose is white girlfriend talking about going out town to meet their parents, the Armitage family at the weekend. Despite some subtle warnings, we still have no thought.
So we have still no tangible sense that Chris will soon embark into the science fiction capital project or techno-colonial eugenics. Chris, however, is never unguarded, as his automatic camera is always strapped around his body. All the events lead to the Armitage family celebrating the memory of Rose Grandad, the creator of the eugenic program, the Order of Coagula. As the party's guests gather in the garden with their fabled bodies in old-fashioned clothes, Chris notices a young black man in beige colonial outfit held with his arm by his elderly wife.
Chris sees in him the young man who had recently disappeared and was known as Andre Logan King, working slowly. Chris is addressing him directly, calling him by his name, and is immediately drawn to click on his phone camera that activates a flashlight, exercising the frozen gaze of the vulnerable, old-caring young body. Andres starts bleeding from his nose as the camera flash interrupts his strings of non-consciousness, breaking into the dark optics that lurks beneath the light which keeps him captive. Chris dreads his own thoughts. What are these young black bodies with
abducted souls doing here? Chris could not have envisioned a eugenic combination of hypnosis and neurosurgery as he finds out that the Armitage master plans is to use black bodies as surrogates for organologic reproduction of wildlife. The order of coagula intends to neutralize surrogates by owning the flesh and extending its future value in the bioeconomic cosmogony of man's survival. As Chris understands the Arminage transhuman project, it takes to heart the machine aesthetic of his photographic thinking. What he is after is not the unveiling of the truth behind the self-reflective master-slave circuit.
Instead, he keeps thinking with the negative optics of the machine. Namely, as the camera flashes the negative auto-images of darkness, he finds a line of flight from his surrogate destiny. Creased mediatic thinking can also be discussed in terms of the non-optical fratality of the real and can be sent to refuse what François Laruel calls the decisional structure of transcendental philosophy. If the Armitage family's plan is to transplant white consciousness and self-reflective reasoning into the intelligence of the slave machines, it is because it assumes that the latter is a medium that must grant the recursive subjection of the flesh and nourish the eternality of
transcendental philosophy chris camera flash shots are used as weapons against the army that are sentimental model of the mind his shots are mediatic auto expression generative instrumentalities a techno aesthetics that starts from the noisy vector of automation Machine aesthetics makes no reference here to any a priori originally reference. On the contrary, Chris' camera becomes an auto-expression of an unerasable alien intelligence that the camera clones in its dark complexity, hacking the transcendental schema of decision making.
Instead of preserving the light of the master, the camera becomes a fractal algorithm that each time discretizes alien intelligence, whose complex patterning stays in the dark as negative optics. In other words, the camera is not a medium of representation that catches the unconscious darkness or consciousness trapped behind the image. If this were the case, Chris would mainly use his camera as a machine of revelation, a sort of messianic horizon for sharing or becoming included in the light of truth. Chris' camera will then debunk the transparency thesis of the self-determining subject and denounce the autopoietic recursivity of colonial epistemologists.
Chris's non-photographic shots, however, do more than that. As a medium act, the shots are weapons that clone the real into thought, the fractal plane of dark optics, diatropics, diffraction, or the complexity of quantum infinities. Not a return to ontology for recuperating the loss or the withdrawing of being but rather a generative fractality where algorithms ceaselessly activate a discreteness of infinities letting aliness enter the imagination the xenopatter of the um of the of the non-human the fractal algorithms hack back and overturn the
hermitage family order of the coagula the light and dark circuit of being and not being christ camera presents us with what alex galloway calls a crypto ontology a pattern in complexity foreclosing the being foreclosing the ontology of the human the scope here is to refuse the the autopoietic circulatory production, saving surrogacy from the universality of another ontology. Far from resigning to the natural laws of autopoietic extraction, Chris Cameron rather activates an alien intelligence without being, transpiring through the world as the alien consciousness of a negative machine.
Thank you, Steven and Luciana for this wonderful journey into SF Capital and SF Not Capital. It was really imaginative ways of thinking about this. You have now 10 minutes each to answer and react to each other's position. While I invite our attendees to start giving form to their questions, because in 20 minutes, we'll have a little bit of time. We're not going to go for too long today. you understand the limits of some kind of attention. So think about your questions now and start typing them in the Q&A box. And now over to Steve for his answer, his reply, his reaction,
to use a kind of social media jargon to Luciana's talk. OK, thanks, Luciana. There's lots going on there that my struggling algorithms we're failing to parse. Let's start with something simple, hopefully. Maybe you could just explain a little bit in the Octavia Butler story, the pattern of patterns, the mind of her mind, what is this space of unification where, you know, she opens up, she almost democratizes the distribution of intelligence and you talked about it as a space of unification that this
happens in could you say more about that yeah okay sure thanks I mean I guess my point is to try and make you know to draw different kind of lines and different kinds of cosmic computational possibilities right that um through through the patterning of the real and the way the pattern of the real enters uh or rubs again or becomes some kind of uh um active uh uh auto expression of uh of villainous so the mind of my mind as a model and i think that get out as another model but
but they're both important model in terms of mediatic transmission of something that cannot be completely comprehended and compressed, which is alien intelligence. But nonetheless, they are rubbing with it, or they are becoming a ventriloquist, or they become echoes of it. So when Mary unleashes a pattern to everyone, she doesn't just unleash the pattern, she just unleashed the frequency to actually enter for everyone to be able to develop their own rules
of the pattern. So it's not just one pattern that's shared by everyone, that's the model of Doro. That's what Dodo developed this pattern through his telepathic power, gathering all sorts of intelligences, animal, human, machine, gods, any kind of myth, and just holds on them, holds on them and trains the captives to a point where they are able to receive his frequency. And this frequency is this kind of complex pattern of noise that will, when will be received, will be received in a way that will be activated at a bigger scale, but will not be able to be changed.
Whereas what Mary does is to say, what I'm going to do, given that I have this ability, this telepathic, this power, this computational power, I'm going to share the computational power by sharing the secret of receptivity. So the capacity, the sheer receptivity of the pattern, which is of this material noise complexity allows every pattern to contribute to the pattern. So, while she owns it, she doesn't really own it. So, the unification is a bit odd. She does, they, Octavia Butler uses this word, that's why I keep on it. I don't, you know, in one end could appear,
I said the democratization of the of the of the upper social spaces, Tiziana Cose, but actually is is more about, you know, entering a zone of tension, conflict, struggle, of different kind of patterning. Where, you know, whereas it's still true that Mary has this power to integrate all of them, she also can be sabotaged and a rule can be taken over anytime. So how does she manage to not to be overthrown given that their model of bringing together
different minds is not despotic. I think that she leaves this question, compared to other books that Octavia Butler has written way later, because this is one of the earlier books, she leaves this question unanswered, unaddressed. So she just depicts this kind of complacency of being part of a system that can overthrow yourself because you relinquish power, you relinquish control, not power. And at the same time, she also doesn't give us a kind of map of how Mary can navigate this kind of poetical conundrum, you know, this kind of possibility of creating,
perhaps in the words of Stefano Harney and Fred Motten, an undercommon that has to do with some kind of transversal trans alliances or undoing alliances to do transversal connections that instead we see in the parables of the sour, but also in xenogenesis. But I think that leaves us to ask, If I appropriate it here, or misappropriate it here, it's because I wanted to point out how Mary allows everyone to this channel of frequency with the alien patterns, where there is a process of productive imagination which can create concept rules
which are completely bring with them a materiality that is anti-monopolistic. It's anti-monopolistic because every time the pattern is received, the pattern can also change and the condition of the pattern of the rules can also change. So there is a dynamic process where it's not just about the pattern that changes, there is this kind of absolute materiality that stands out of everything else. But actually the material is brought into, is brought into this kind of patterning that becomes a rule, that becomes a logic and so on. Is the noise merely a trigger, the frequency merely a trigger, or does it carry the pattern
which facilitates the distribution of? Yeah, that's an interesting question because, you know, a trigger is always when we talk about it, it's a trigger of something else or for something else, right? trigger sometimes in terms of you know abducting temporalities has to do with the going back right a trigger the fact that there is something that you are triggered to come in a place that has a space that where things have something has already happened but actually the trigger you know then in terms of this kind of retro activation of the past or of a pattern that already exists It's also a transformation because the pattern, it doesn't exist in aesthetic mode.
You know, Doro works 4000 years to keep the pattern in the same way, for keeping it for not being changed. It goes, you know, it's a lot of work that he does constantly to train and check and fine tune all the creatures he abducts and all the captive it held, all the calling it held all over the planet. But Mary completely let that go. You know, she just doesn't believe that the pattern is to be kept in the same way. So she lets the trigger become also a transformer. I think similarly to that, when you talk about get out and the camera flash,
you know in get out there is you know the the sound of the the stirring the the spoon in the teacup which puts him in to the dark space he's the sunken space and doing kind of a neural entrainment of the sound he enters into this um hypnotic state and as you were saying the the camera flash has this other function which is to momentarily drag the I suppose zombified characters who've been ghost-apped with a white um yeah the white soul um I think it seems like
there's something similar going on with the the camp what you're arguing about the camera flash and it's not just a trigger the flash using the camera and its flash and the sound of that isn't just a trigger which kind of wakes the zombie wakes up the sleepwalker from his zombified state but i think there's you're saying there's something else going on yeah no that's interesting as well um because you know it's interesting the the relationship between the zombie, the alien, you know, and the hacker, I guess, you know, as science fiction capital figures. And I guess that there is some kind of...
I'm just, I just was thinking, it's so interesting to, we might discuss later more about, you know, the zombie the hacker and the alien right because they i think they are all different kind of entry point into this the the problem that i'm trying to uh discuss in how um the the automation uh is why uh why automation when i talk about automation automation of intelligent automated reason is the way to say that there is something about the medium or the instrument that is able, when it's able to process its own reception of the reel, it actually also activates another
articulation of the real in terms of allowing in allowing the ingress of something that is incomputable within it so what does the flash do the flash you know um and you know of course there is an old history of uh of aesthetic that has to do with uh with the with the camera and with the you know with the framing of the image or the deadening of the of the of the real through uh you know through to kind of freezing that the camera does on the floor time uh but i think that the flesh what it does here is this kind of i wanted to talk about this dark optics uh this diffraction, this kind of quantum infinity insofar as it allows for not just a transparency
or enlightenment of the real, right? Some kind of light or some kind of frame that comes onto the unknown or the unconscious or matter and just, you know, know, reframe it within its own categories. But actually, it's the other way around. What the flash does is to allow the dark optics, to allow darkness to be already there or to act back on thought, to transform thought as if, you know, completely breaking away from the game of dark and light, the flash just opens up this other level of vision, you know,
which are called negative vision, you know, this, you know, this negativity has to do with, you know, a kind of zeroing or withdrawing from this double articulation and actually move away from the logical revealing or transparency so that, you know, there is a way in which you can't liberate the zombie from the trapped soul, from its entrapped soul, but actually what you do is to open up another timeline, you know, or tour of the dark soul, of the entrapped the dark zone which has nothing to do with it you know cannot be recuperated within
that the light or the dark circle you know it's just something else yeah um i mean i think zombie is probably not the right model for get out actually because what can get out you've got a white ghost dubbed into a black shell and you're arguing that the camera it's not that the camera flash um excavates the black ghost in the black shell because it doesn't seem like there is a black ghost in the black shell anymore once once the the brain has been transplanted once the ghost has been dumped in so it's what um when when those characters start crying you know the
camouflage provokes crying or the camouflage provokes a nosebleed. What's going on there? Is that muscle memory of the black shell? Because you're saying that it's not that there's a black ghost left in the black shell. Is it merely muscle memory of the shell? Yeah, that's another form of automatism that is interesting, right? because the kind of is almost like, again, trigger or automatic response of the body that, you know, it's almost like you can say it's a symptom. One could say, oh, it's a symptom of a trapped consciousness, right? Or is it a symptom of something that is there that cannot recognize itself?
You know, it's just a reaction, right? But that it's, or one could argue, no, but that's bodily intelligence. That's bodily intelligence insofar as the body knows that is trapped in there, but cannot speak, but not in the language of tears or of blood. There is what McKintree Wahile called the heartbreak, the 808 heartbreak, which I think that it's this interesting example of the fact that the automated machine, there's an automation that maintains the pain, that maintains a sentience. So you can call it as a sentient intelligent, bodily intelligent,
But I think I want to push that even further, you know, to say that, you know, that maintains any possibility of complying to the model of surrogacy that, you know, that both Doro and the Order of the Coagula and the kind of eugenic project of colonialism and technology has put in place. And so there is this kind of refusal, you know, it's a refusal because you cannot enter the order of normality. And indeed, as much as the captives, the surrogate captives whose body has been transplanted with this white mind are outside of the, you know, of the, of the, of the Armitage family,
you know, they stay servant, right? They stay servomechanic systems that, you know, always do the same thing that, you know, the only thing that shows some level of apparently humanity or of aliveness, of aliveness is the blood and the tear. But the blood and the tear are so artificial in the same way, you know, because they don't match their gaze. there's nothing alive within them so there is this deadening and this this kind of negativity that also has to do with the what the automatic machine does what the camera does for me and i think that you know i borrow a lot of ideas actually from francois laruel they are definitely not mine in
terms of interestingly arguing for a non-photography non-photography you know that actually the camera doesn't operate a shedding of light but actually refuses this kind of circle of enlightenment and and stays with a non-decisional pattern or refractive pattern of alienness of the real that doesn't fit the model so um even if he um he is you know let's say he escapes the you know the destiny of surrogacy that he has in front of him, he does so by thinking automatically, by thinking in automation terms, by entering that space of
dark optics, by completely, you know, even when, like I read the piece by Kojo in the the unsound book that you co-edited with Delaney and Toby. And, you know, it talks about the fact that, so I just forgot, that there is this undeadness, you know, that Chris pretends to be dead, that goes all the way through the surgery room, the surgery room when you know it does something then it is able to escamotage something right and the undead and life you know to stay on this this level of refusal of enlightening and revealing the truth
or liberating the trapped consciousness of obvious uh you know of the captives of the of the the servomechanic bodies there to liberate them is not into that right it's just trying to find another line and I think this alliance with automation and alien intelligence in this case is interesting. Yeah, I don't know if that explained. Thank you. I think if you want to finish like 15 minutes, as we hoped we would also because it's Saturday night, although in quite, you know, strange and restrained circumstances for most of us. I have three questions. Sorry, Shana, would you like say something more um something that no just something about see because i did i wanted to ask
him about um the past uh when um the machine um uh when the general said oh maybe they wouldn't they wanted to refuse to be human you know they um where's the the quote um you know the quote that you mentioned at one of the last session about uh maybe they would have uh if they had voice they would have refused they would have said we didn't want we don't want to become human that that's something to bear in mind sorry it's just a quick um a quick answer to that to link to what i was thinking sure um i mean you know you know this this happens at the climax of the film and
i think what can be taken from it is slightly different from what the film is trying to do with In the film, basically the Yakuza are child trafficking for a corporation who are taking young girls captive and extracting their ghosts and dubbing it into gynoids, which are basically sex dolls, to make the experience more realistic. this character who used to work at the corporation Locus Soli I think it's called wants to sabotage this and draw attention to it so he hacks into the gynoids and causes them to kill their owners and also immediately self-destruct
if they hadn't been hacked so he's hacked into them and trying to create this situation in order to draw attention to the child trafficking that's going on. If they hadn't been hacked, in other words, if the girls' ghosts hadn't been dubbed into the gynoids, then they wouldn't have committed this crime, so they would have remained innocent. at the end of the film Batu who is the main detective kind of goes in this quite weird rant where he blames one of the girls for the killing of the gynoids and then Major Kusanagi who comes who's the ghost in the shell from the original
one comes out of the matrix and kind of rescues him at the end but also tells him that maybe these dynoids didn't want to be humanized in the first place. And I think this idea of the machines that don't want to be humanized is kind of resonates a lot for me with the anti-post or inhumanism of which there are tons in Kojo's More Brilliant Than Sun. In other words, the idea that's in More Brilliant Than Sun, that instead of pleading in the soul gospel tradition to be allowed into the racist conceit of humanism, which blackness has always been excluded from
and is in fact the founding violence on which that platform of humanism is built, instead of begging to be allowed into that system, a lot of the musicians that Kojo draws on refuse entry into that system and say, we don't want to be human anyway. You've never let us in. Forget your system. And so he goes on to relate to these musicians who identify more with the alien, and identify more with the machine, with the object, et cetera, et cetera. So it's really, I mean, I don't think I don't want to be human
is used in Ghost in the Shell in quite that way, but it really resonated a lot for me with one of the sides of More Brilliant Than the Sun. I think generally people tend to overlook or write off quite quickly because it's quite hard to domesticate. And it's really one of the main themes that people have more recently gone on to differentiate what Kojo was doing there from more typical strands of Afrofuturism, particularly Afro-American Afrofuturism. And so, for example, Mackenzie Walker's talked about more brilliant in terms of black accelerationism and Aria Dean has coined a phrase, black accelerationism, to try and pinpoint this kind of anti-poster inhumanism of what's going on in that book.
Thank you. Well, thank you both. You know, it's very nice to be exposed to this kind of readings of science fictional possibilities of thinking about artificial intelligence, given the kind of mainstream solidification or kind of a monotonous story, as you said, you know, either you support the singularity or you get a team human, you know, the logicians of the singularity of team human. and thinking that you can read this transversity as well. But we have quite a lot of questions, a few questions, and we don't have a lot of time. So I'm going to start with the first question from an anonymous attendee to Luciana. Could you speak more to the relation
between xenopatterning and automation? How does the automaton here break out of the eternal return of recursive colonialism? Thank you for this question, Anonymous. Yeah, that's the kind of interface I'm working on, right? So because of one end, the xenopatterning for me has to do with the importance of leaving space for inhuman processes or inhuman reality or inhuman plenum, which cannot be completely turned or synthesized into one model or the other. So in a way, I would not say that
that xenopattern is one with automation because I'm not interested in re-ontologizing anything, especially machine. So that's what I'm not interested in. So for me, it's always important to leave metaphysical space, which is the xenopattern. But xenopattern also means that there is a patterning of alienation, no, there is a way in which alienation, or not alienation, sorry, alieness. The capacity to be unknown, okay? Which is also an interesting panel on alienation, but I could talk about it later. It enters the pattern of the everyday,
enters the pattern of imagination, the synthesis of imagination, the collective imagination, up to become a thinking process, up to become thought rules, discourses, norms, you know, it does have that as well. You know, it does have this kind of pattern, a potential of entering inside as opposed to, so for me, when we talk about the automation of our creative patterns, so automation, to me, is not just a way to repeat a pattern because if you even think in terms of recursivity or in terms of neural networks or as I said today convoluting neural networks you know is something where the recursivity
over and over again the same function enters the nodes and hubs and algorithms start to learn and you can have a small set of data, you can have a large set of data. So for me, the relation between xenopatting and automation is not so good. So automation, that's the reason why I'm interested in automation, that we, the electrician of the reason, the Turing machine, the encounter of the Turing machine to the cybernetic machine, like it is intelligent in interacting with the modern intelligence. Then you have a form of automation that, even if it's recursive, it also learns.
And I was talking about Siv before about how important it is that in the book on Norma Biener, even if he says he wants to get out of a servomechanical model, he can't do that. but on the other hand, it proposes a notion, a theory of learning. We need to develop a theory of learning. A theory of learning is where artificial intelligence and automation for me become interesting and become a way to link with the department. Thank you. The next question is from Brian D'Aquino to Steve, one of our critical Computation Bureau members, as Kojo Eschen says, technology intensifies the relation between body
and music through rhythmic intensification and hypersensation when the body becomes a large brain. When Eschen wrote this, technology-based music such as jungle and techno was still meant to be experienced strictly live and possibly through big speakers activating what Julian Enriquez calls the sonic dominance. The current trend, further accelerated by the lockdown, music increasingly becomes a digital experience, not only on the producers side, also for the audience, as with streaming platforms and online events, such as yours later on. What space is left here for bodily intensification and what strategies must be deployed, if so, to keep the body and
bodily affects as the main focus in dance music? Thanks Brian. Well obviously there's no such thing as digital sound, if you hear it it's analog and I think the acceleration of the kind of virtual listening experience that we've been dealing with in the last few months of like streaming performances and so on that kind of listening i think we've been prepared for for quite a long time through um ipod culture the walk from the i walkman through to through the ipod this kind of isolated um individuated or perhaps small
groups listening experience potentially straight stream straight in through the earbuds through headphones. So, you know, there's been a kind of process over the last few decades towards a secluded listening, which the last this year, the becoming streaming of nightlife has been a intensification of it and so on. I think what's happened this year is going to have an irreversible threshold. We're not just going to go back to normal. I think music culture has been transformed forever by what's happened this year,
economically, industrially. But just because we are locked in our own little prison cells, it doesn't mean to say it's a disembodied listening experience experience or it's uh or it's um i mean it is a less intense experience but i i don't think that has disappeared i think it's temporarily dilated and in some version will expand again sonic dominance will return um i think the landscape in which it's going to return is going to be very different there's a lot of other things that have gone on in the last
this year apart from a change in our listening habits such as a kind of reckoning within the music industry to do with its what become its racialized norms and the kind of operating system of white supremacy which was being taken for granted within electronic music culture. So I don't think it's necessarily going to be, this year has been had a negative, just purely negative effect on our auditory culture. But it kind of remains to be seen how this is all going to play out afterwards. Thank you, Steve. We have another question from Lordy Salis to both.
In relation to what has been presented today, how close or distant, actual or accurate, do you feel are your mnemonic control thesis that you've written together? Would it make any sense to say that your interest in patterns moved from a temporal to an atemporal or rather spatial one? This question is for both of you. Okay, I can start. Thanks for this question, Laura. So, yeah, I think that mnemonic control for us, from my point of view, from us, was a way of, I remember that our motto was remember to forget.
during that period because in a way, you know, mlemonic control is a one-handed sense of wanting to evacuate the present as a way of, you know, the kind of the fascia temporal order of the everyday. We don't have anything against the ordinary, it's not just about avant-garde, chic, it's more about the possibility of the temporality of labour and care and the kind of syncopated rhythms of the everyday. So for us, meremonic control was a way to also
discuss this evacuation, but also the twist of this evacuation, so the fact that whatever you know, whatever we will be doing, we will never be able to do that. kind of harnessing of speculation, speculative harnessing of the future. In a way, you know, the possibility of opening up the time of the present and hacking back of the past in order to move towards any future that would have been possible. I mean personally, in terms of this model of personal, but not personally myself, I think personally my research question or my
curse research question was how do I get out of the category of time as a safe category to actually maintain a sense of recursivity or a sense of what I talked the other day, this kind of auto-poietic model of evolution or adaptation and transformation and more things. At some point all became to me to topologically, what I call as someone as a topological control, and for going to patterning and going to the discreetness and going to the question of specialization
and through the digital has been a way for me to actually account for a different kind of aesthetic that doesn't just say that, okay, the discretization is bad and the analog is good or experience is what allows for novelty, whereas the automation is something that sucks away or absorbs the novelty of the labor of the human. I just wanted to open up space to, away from this kind of return to the matrix as a space of non-reproduction. So that's how I moved towards, you know, I felt like to do some more work on space.
And that's what I did. Yeah, I mean, I think that problematic in mnemonic control of where control of the past is, or control of the memory or the archive or so on is extended into the future, starts to colonize the future, science fiction capital or preemptive capital. we're still toying with this tension between you know you can see it in the shana's work in xenopatterning artificial imagination alien intelligence all of this stuff is a is a way of trying to hold together the fact that um and also in what i was talking about today about the complicity of the future rhythm machine with the black stack it's trying to hold together and not
accept any facile too facile a solution to this problem of being immersed in the algorithmic culture which you which you're aware can also do things that you don't understand that aren't necessarily that aren't necessarily things that you would want to suppress. So dealing with that ambivalence of algorithmic culture, of the recent innovations in AI and how they reflect on aesthetics and politics and so on,
I think that was all present in mnemonic control. And if anything, we're just, the technology is evolving and so that problematic changes and evolves alongside the systems. Thank you. We have another question from Anonymous to Steve. If the golem is the inanimated body, animated by sound, who or what could be animated by AI music? Especially now when music often becomes a surrogate for illegalized sociality. That's for you, Steve. Could you say that again, please?
If the golem is the inanimated body, animated by sound, who or what could be animated by AI music? Especially now, when music often becomes a surrogate for illegal sociality. Illegalized, illegal sociality. well you know there's different versions of the golem myth in one that i mentioned the golem is activated by an incantation that incantation is still a code so it's really the it's really the golem the lifeless body is animated still animated by this
code. The golem is a surrogate or the golem is essentially an allegory of AI in a lot of the ways that it's used these days. I'm not sure how you would necessarily transplant that onto again this issue of us being trapped in our pandemic prisons listening to music because we can't go out and socialize. I don't think there's a mapping there to be done. which is not to say that there isn't interesting things going on in AI music, but I don't think they quite relate to the frame of that question. Thank you. We have another question from Goda Klumbight. Again, I hope I'm pronouncing it
right, to both. Thank you for your amazing talks. I wanted to ask you both to elaborate on the theme of innocence. If humanism or transposition of the human spirit make the technologies non-innocent, what would be the role of non-innocent or non-slash-innocent in alien intelligence? or is non-innocence not the term that should reapply anymore? Could we think with accountability, repositioning, responsibility in state and how might this affect understanding of justice in relation to technologies? And I think this is going to be our last question. Thank you. Do you want to start?
Yeah, I mean, in Ghost in the Shell 2, Innocence, it's a very convoluted film. The density of cultural references that go on in that film is quite tiring to process. the the the the the suggestion that the dolls would be innocent if they hadn't been dubbed with a human ghost I think is quite on one level it's quite literal if they weren't hacked and dubbed with a human ghost they wouldn't have killed their owners it also suggests on another level that which I
don't think it's particularly convincing that without human interference i mean maybe this is a question for without human interference what would the machines do maybe they just wouldn't fit in you know i think the point is it's more that they wouldn't necessarily fit into human aesthetic or moral political designations and so the point is to hold open the fact that what you're dealing you're potentially dealing with here if the machines hadn't been dubbed and hadn't been i suppose tainted by this illegal process of ghost dubbing is that um i suppose it raises a whole question about ai and moral and legal responsibility which is going on
in terms of like self-driven cars and so on you know in that kind of context then law the gulf in the law is having to accommodate a whole new series of questions to do with inhuman responsibility because obviously who takes the responsibility when your self-driving car plows into a crowd um i think i think probably what both myself luciana are trying to hold on to is that that sense that without human interference first of all obviously when you come in contact with humans these questions arise but before that there's something going on which isn't
purely understood in terms of human aesthetics or human morality or human legality and so on. So I think it's an interesting question, but I think both myself and Luciana are trying to operate under that question in the space before, or the space outside of the humanization or domestication, domestication of machines. Yes, I think I would agree with that. I would also say that what does it mean to be indonesome and non-indonesome? Of course, those are categories that are really very much linked
to the Judeo-Christian university and the way it translates to particular knowledge in terms of in the category of the law and moral justice. And so there is a big discussion that one can have there. And although at the same time, you know, this other one to, it's important to say, so at what level you are interviewing. So if you are asking, you know, what kind of accountability, what kind of responsibility, you know, who has the ability to have responsibility or not. So there is a way we have, you know, marked the surrogate within, you know, recursive colonialism in terms of racialized, gendered, sexualized, you know, knowledge, knowledge
of machine, then, you know, one could argue that in a way the machine has always been seen as innocent, because it doesn't have capacity of moral judgment. It doesn't have capacity of decision, it doesn't have the capacity of making choice, you know, it's just innocent in that way. So you go back to the same kind of recursive metaphysics that becomes what Sylvia Winter calls cosmogony and the way, you know, it's a perfect way in a sociogenic way as well as a term of I'm not able, I'm not given the ability, I'm disabled or debilitated as we received discussion with just before, or being part of this world that makes decisions.
Right? So how do we do that? How do we turn this thing away? Or this kind of, what is it that abilities? I think again, I want to return to the work of Denise Ferreira da Silva in terms of bringing forward the question of ethics, of poor ethics, right? A question where the point is not to act within the regime of transparency of the law, of making open access, or making accessibility the only way to actually become able to make
decision and become accountable. So if you're saying that in terms of whether Google, Facebook or Amazon account, they will always be able to displace that accountability on the servomechanic, on the surrogate or the error or anything, right? That would not be because the game of the law is exactly the one of, you know, telling the law but not abiding the law, right? And so that's one question. And the question that I want to return to the Black poetics will be about, you know, how do we build this kind of ethical question? How do we re-re-reconfigure this question of ethics,
of a difference with our severability of an under common or alien alliances and so on. So, another way in which we can do the work of ethics without subsuming to the existing law, law to the existing moral law, but maybe in the process, in the perspective of, you know, remain outlaw and from the outlaw position, create different kind of configuration of responsibility or accountability. For that, I will stay. Thank you. Thank you so much. To all our
attendees, there are interesting questions, Luciana and Steve, really engaging with each other and bringing out all this SF artificial imagination that I think is something that's really needed at the current moment. So we close now after this question. And before, however, I would like to remind you that since again, it's Saturday in prison cells in that kind of pandemic condition, you can still listen to episode 05 sounds today with an exclusive Code 9 DJ set, which is going to stream at the end of this panel and shortly on our YouTube channel as well. Don't forget that we're going to have a very interesting panel tomorrow going on as well.
Episode 06, the Son of Futurities and Automation is going to be on at a really kind of a bit of an awkward time for some of us. It's quite late, but we think it's unmissable. So enjoy the Code 19 JSEG. Thank you very much. and we will meet you again hopefully tomorrow bye bye thank you thank you bye bye guys bye everyone