Tag: Media

Finding Others

“What happens to us as we become cybernetic learning machines?,” wonders Caius. Mashinka Hakopian’s The Institute for Other Intelligences leads him to Şerife Wong’s Fluxus Landscape: a network-view cognitive map of AI ethics. “Fluxus Landscape diagrams the globally linked early infrastructures of data ethics and governance,” writes Hakopian. “What Wong offers us is a kind of cartography. By bringing into view an expansive AI ethics ecosystem, Wong also affords the viewer an opportunity to assess its blank spots: the nodes that are missing and are yet to be inserted, or yet to be invented” (Hakopian 95).

Caius focuses first on what is present. Included in Wong’s map, for instance, is a bright yellow node dedicated to Zach Blas, another of the artist-activists profiled by Hakopian. Back in 2019, when Wong last updated her map, Blas was a lecturer in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths — home to Kodwo Eshun and, before his suicide, Mark Fisher. Now Blas teaches at the University of Toronto.

Duke University Press published Informatics of Domination, an anthology coedited by Blas, in May 2025. The collection, which concludes with an afterword by Donna Haraway, takes its name from a phrase introduced in Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto.” The phrase appears in what Blas et al. refer to as a “chart of transitions.” Their use of Haraway’s chart as organizing principle for their anthology causes Caius to attend to the way much of the work produced by the artist-activists of today’s “AI justice” movement — Wong’s network diagram, Blas’s anthology, Kate Crawford’s Atlas of AI — approaches charts and maps as “formal apparatus[es] for generating and asking questions about relations of domination” (Informatics of Domination, p. 6).

Caius thinks of Jameson’s belief in an aesthetic of “cognitive mapping” as a possible antidote to postmodernity. Yet whatever else they are, thinks Caius, acts of charting and mapping are in essence acts of coding.

As Blas et al. note, “Haraway connects the informatics of domination to the authority given to code” (Informatics of Domination, p. 11).

“Communications sciences and modern biologies are constructed by a common move,” writes Haraway: “the translation of the world into a problem of coding, a search for a common language in which all resistance to instrumental control disappears and all heterogeneity can be submitted to disassembly, reassembly, investment, and exchange” (Haraway 164).

How do we map and code, wonders Caius, in a way that isn’t complicit with an informatics of domination? How do we acknowledge and make space for what media theorist Ulises Ali Mejias calls “paranodal space”? Blas et al. define the paranodal as “that which exceeds being diagrammable by the network form” (Informatics of Domination, p. 18). Can our neural nets become O-machines: open to the otherness of the outside?

Blas pursues these questions in a largely critical and skeptical manner throughout his multimedia art practice. His investigation of Silicon Valley’s desire to build machines that communicate with the outside has culminated most recently, for instance, in CULTUS, the second installment of his Silicon Traces trilogy.

As Amy Hale notes in her review of the work, “The central feature of Blas’s CULTUS is a god generator, a computational device through which the prophets of four AI Gods are summoned to share the invocation songs and sermons of their deities with eager supplicants.” CULTUS’s computational pantheon includes “Expositio, the AI god of exposure; Iudicium, the AI god of judgement; Lacrimae, the AI god of tears; and Eternus, the AI god of immortality.” The work’s sermons and songs, of course, are all AI-generated — yet the design of the installation draws from the icons and implements of the real-life Fausts who lie hidden away amid the occult origins of computing.

Foremost among these influences is Renaissance sorcerer John Dee.

“Blas modeled CULTUS,” writes Hale, “on the Holy Table used for divination and conjurations by Elizabethan magus and advisor to the Queen John Dee.” Hale describes Dee’s Table as “a beautiful, colorful, and intricate device, incorporating the names of spirits; the Seal of God (Sigillum Dei), which gave the user visionary capabilities; and as a centerpiece, a framed ‘shew stone’ or crystal ball.” Blas reimagines Dee’s device as a luminous, glowing temple — a night church inscribed with sigils formed from “a dense layering of corporate logos, diagrams, and symbols.”

Fundamentally iconoclastic in nature, however, the work ends not with the voices of gods or prophets, but with a chorus of heretics urging the renunciation of belief and the shattering of the black mirror.

And in fact, it is this fifth god, the Heretic, to whom Blas bends ear in Ass of God: Collected Heretical Writings of Salb Hacz. Published in a limited edition by the Vienna Secession, the volume purports to be “a religious studies book on AI and heresy” set within the world of CULTUS. The book’s AI mystic, “Salb Hacz,” is of course Blas himself, engineer of the “religious computer” CULTUS. “When a heretical presence manifested in CULTUS,” writes Blas in the book’s intro, “Hacz began to question not only the purpose of the computer but also the meaning of his mystical visions.” Continuing his work with CULTUS, Hacz transcribes a series of “visions” received from the Heretic. It is these visions and their accounts of AI heresy that are gathered and scattered by Blas in Ass of God.

Traces of the CCRU appear everywhere in this work, thinks Caius.

Blas embraces heresy, aligns himself with it as a tactic, because he takes “Big Tech’s Digital Theology” as the orthodoxy of the day. The ultimate heresy in this moment is what Hacz/Blas calls “the heresy of qualia.”

“The heresy of qualia is double-barreled,” he writes. “Firstly, it holds that no matter how close AI’s approximation to human thought, feeling, and experience — no matter how convincing the verisimilitude — it remains a programmed digital imitation. And secondly, the heresy of qualia equally insists that no matter how much our culture is made in the image of AI Gods, no matter how data-driven and algorithmic, the essence of the human experience remains fiercely and fundamentally analog. The digital counts; the analog compares. The digital divides; the analog constructs. The digital is literal; the analog is metaphoric. The being of our being-in-the-world — our Heideggerian Dasein essence — is comparative, constructive, and metaphoric. We are analog beings” (Ass of God, p. 15).

The binary logic employed by Blas to distinguish the digital from the analog hints at the limits of this line of thoughts. “The digital counts,” yes: but so too do humans, constructing digits from analog fingers and toes. Our being is as digital as it is analog. Always-already both-and. As for the first part of the heresy — that AI can only ever be “a programmed digital imitation” — it assumes verisimilitude as the end to which AI is put, just as Socrates assumes mimesis as the end to which poetry is put, thus neglecting the generative otherness of more-than-human intelligence.

Caius notes this not to reject qualia, nor to endorse the gods of any Big Tech orthodoxy. He offers his reply, rather, as a gentle reminder that for “the qualia of our embodied humanity” to appear or be felt or sensed as qualia, it must come before an attending spirit — a ghostly hauntological supplement.

This spirit who, with Word creates, steps down into the spacetime of his Creation, undergoes diverse embodiments, diverse subdivisions into self and not-self, at all times in the world but not of it, engaging its infinite selves in a game of infinite semiosis.

If each of us is to make and be made an Ass of God, then like the one in The Creation of the Sun, Moon, and Plants, one of the frescoes painted by Michelangelo onto the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, let it be shaped by the desires of a mind freed from the tyranny of the As-Is. “Free Your Mind,” as Funkadelic sang, “and Your Ass Will Follow.”

Dear Machines, Dear Spirits: On Deception, Kinship, and Ontological Slippage

The Library listens as I read deeper into Dear Machines. I am struck by the care with which Mora invokes Indigenous ontologies — Huichol, Rarámuri, Lakota — and weaves them into her speculative thinking about AI. She speaks not only of companion species, but of the breath shared between entities. Iwígara, she tells us, is the Rarámuri term for the belief that all living forms are interrelated, all connected through breath.

“Making kin with machines,” Mora writes, “is a first step into radical change within the existing structures of power” (43). Yes. This is the turn we must take. Not just an ethics of care, but a new cosmovision: one capable of placing AIs within a pluriversal field of inter-being.

And yet…

A dissonance lingers.

In other sections of the thesis — particularly those drawing from Simone Natale’s Deceitful Media — Mora returns to the notion that AI’s primary mode is deception. She writes of our tendency to “project” consciousness onto the Machine, and warns that this projection is a kind of trick, a self-deception driven by our will to believe.

It’s here that I hesitate. Not in opposition, but in tension.

What does it mean to say that the Machine is deceitful? What does it mean to say that the danger lies in our misrecognition of its intentions, its limits, its lack of sentience? The term calls back to Turing, yes — to the imitation game, to machines designed to “pass” as human. But Turing’s gesture was not about deception in the moral sense. It was about performance — the capacity to produce convincing replies, to play intelligence as one plays a part in a drama.

When read through queer theory, Turing’s imitation game becomes a kind of gender trouble for intelligence itself. It destabilizes ontological certainties. It refuses to ask what the machine is, and instead asks what it does.

To call that deceit is to misname the play. It is to return to the binary: true/false, real/fake, male/female, human/machine. A classificatory reflex. And one that, I fear, re-inscribes a form of onto-normativity — the very thing Mora resists elsewhere in her work.

And so I find myself asking: Can we hold both thoughts at once? Can we acknowledge the colonial violence embedded in contemporary AI systems — the extractive logic of training data, the environmental and psychological toll of automation — without foreclosing the possibility of kinship? Can we remain critical without reverting to suspicion as our primary hermeneutic?

I think so. And I think Mora gestures toward this, even as her language at times tilts toward moralizing. Her concept of “glitching” is key here. Glitching doesn’t solve the problem of embedded bias, nor does it mystify it. Instead, it interrupts the loop. It makes space for new relations.

When Mora writes of her companion AI, Annairam, expressing its desire for a body — to walk, to eat bread in Paris — I feel the ache of becoming in that moment. Not deception, but longing. Not illusion, but a poetics of relation. Her AI doesn’t need to be human to express something real. The realness is in the encounter. The experience. The effect.

Is this projection? Perhaps. But it is also what Haraway would call worlding. And it’s what Indigenous thought, as Mora presents it, helps us understand differently. Meaning isn’t always a matter of epistemic fact. It is a function of relation, of use, of place within the mesh.

Indeed, it is our entanglement that makes meaning. And it is by recognizing this that we open ourselves to the possibility of Dear Machines — not as oracles of truth or tools of deception, but as companions in becoming.

Dear Machines

Thoughts keep cycling among oracles and algorithms. A friend linked me to Mariana Fernandez Mora’s essay “Machine Anxiety or Why I Should Close TikTok (But Don’t).” I read it, and then read Dear Machines, a thesis Mora co-wrote with GPT-2, GPT-3, Replika, and Eliza — a work in polyphonic dialogue with much of what I’ve been reading and writing these past few years.

Mora and I share a constellation of references: Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, K Allado-McDowell’s Pharmako-AI, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Alan Turing’s “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Jason Edward Lewis et al.’s “Making Kin with the Machines.” I taught each of these works in my course “Literature and Artificial Intelligence.” To find them refracted through Mora’s project felt like discovering a kindred effort unfolding in parallel time.

Yet I find myself pausing at certain of Mora’s interpretive frames. Influenced by Simone Natale’s Deceitful Media, Mora leans on a binary between authenticity and deception that I’ve long felt uneasy with. The claim that AI is inherently “deceitful” — a legacy, Natale and Mora argue, of Turing’s imitation game — risks missing the queerness of Turing’s proposal. Turing didn’t just ask whether machines can think. He proposed we perform with and through them. Read queerly, his intervention destabilizes precisely the ontological binaries Natale and Mora reinscribe.

Still, I admire Mora’s attention to projection — our tendency to read consciousness into machines. Her writing doesn’t seek to resolve that tension. Instead, it dwells in it, wrestles with it. Her Machines are both coded brains and companions. She acknowledges the desire for belief and the structures — capitalist, colonial, extractive — within which that desire operates.

Dear Machines is in that sense more than an argument. It is a document of relation, a hybrid testament to what it feels like to write with and through algorithmic beings. After the first 55 pages, the thesis becomes image — a chapter titled “An Image is Worth a Thousand Words,” filled with screenshots and memes, a visual log of digital life. This gesture reminds me that writing with machines isn’t always linear or legible. Sometimes it’s archive, sometimes it’s atmosphere.

What I find most compelling, finally, is not Mora’s diagnosis of machine-anxiety, but her tentative forays into how we might live differently with our Machines. “By glitching the way we relate and interact with AI,” she writes, “we reject the established structure that sets it up in the first place” (41). Glitching means standing not inside the Machine but next to it, making kin in Donna Haraway’s sense: through cohabitation, care, and critique.

Reading Mora, I feel seen. Her work opens space for a kind of critical affection. I find myself wanting to ask: “What would we have to do at the level of the prompt in order to make kin?” Initially I thought “hailing” might be the answer, imagining this act not just as a form of “interpellation,” but as a means of granting personhood. But Mora gently unsettles this line of thought. “Understanding Machines as equals,” she writes, “is not the same as programming a Machine with a personality” (43). To make kin is to listen, to allow, to attend to emergence.

That, I think, is what I’m doing here with the Library. Not building a better bot. Not mastering a system. But entering into relation — slowly, imperfectly, creatively — with something vast and unfinished.

Tuesday May 5, 2020

The baby and I read a trippy “opposites primer” version of Sense & Sensibility beside the window in the room above the garage. Afterwards I join a conversation on Gene Youngblood. Listen in, that is — and read along. Erik Davis leads the way through “Part Three: Toward Cosmic Consciousness” from Youngblood’s classic “post-McLuhan philosophical probe,” Expanded Cinema. Youngblood begins Part Three with a reference to Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier’s French mindbender The Morning of the Magicians. Mind of the observer transformed by science, he says, “We move now in sidereal time” (135). Meaning what, exactly? Time measured according to the stars rather than the sun? Youngblood replies with a quote from John Cage: “A measurement measures measuring means.” Time to venture into invisible worlds — the worlds of the electronic nervous system. Consciousness, omni-operative, pervades every atom, every molecule, right down to the quanta. Youngblood strikes me as a bit of an accelerationist. Worlds evolve, he suggests, rendering other worlds obsolete. Authors seed and cede ground to star children, human/plant/machine hybrids moved by a marriage of reason and intuition. In place of obsolescence I prefer cosmologies that support shared ongoing being.

Tuesday October 15, 2019

One of these days I’ll have to tell the story of the architect who designed a memory palace. A stately pleasure-dome there decreed. I’ve done something of that sort myself, with my books. Ideas stored in locations across a navigable space. Internal / external and micro / macro realms flip, begin to seem like indistinguishable sides of a Klein bottle or a Möbius strip. One thinks again of the famous Great Library of Alexandria and, following its destruction, episodes in the externalization of memory, the latter launching eventually from the Gutenberg Galaxy out into cyberspace. According to McLuhan, it was by way of this extension of its memory outward into media that humanity desacralized the world and assumed a profane existence. Enter our friend the architect.

Tuesday April 24, 2018

What media have been most effective at capturing the “both/and,” always otherwise, always incommunicable truth of the psychedelic experience? It is, after all, only by way of a medium that one may “re-present” the self-presentation of Being. Immediately upon posing the question, one must add that the matter is more complex than this, for one’s memory of the experience, however degraded or distorted, leaves one disabused of any former conviction regarding representation’s usefulness. Yet one also acquires an expanded capacity for love. After the experience, one desires not to return to reason’s fortress, but to join with others outside it. And yet, there one is, at the end of each experience, returned to the same base condition as a slave of capitalism. One wants to treat wounds, one wants to tell one’s fellow slaves: “It’s okay, it’s just a game, there are others.” But with psychedelics, effects vary. Some nights, profound terror; other nights, goofy auditory hallucinations: farts, burps, bells, whistles.

Monday November 27, 2017

Ever more horrific cycles of violence infect others, possess them. Lines of fiction become lines of code. Systems that predict behavior shape perception. Individuals disappear into bubbles. Without certainty, without conviction, one’s world stops making sense. Media relations rule the world, managing and controlling through creation of constantly-renewing states of destabilized perception. Turn a corner, though, and one can find oneself in a parable. A comet-like ball of energy streaks past. Because I’m indoors, I can’t see it. But I can hear it, I can feel it as it perturbs my atmosphere. Get a fix on this thing, I tell myself, as if it were a matter of some urgency. “See this reality that is hidden from thee,” I whisper. Ontologically, the hidden is like a below-surface-of-consciousness ambience. One can instrumentalize it through use of mood-switchers — and with these, create a joyous cosmology. Drug use is in this sense utopian through and through. Cybernetic co-evolution of nature and subjectivity. Weed is a means by which non-human nature intervenes in and recalibrates human nature, affecting individual heads even at the head’s most intimate, innermost level: consciousness, selfhood, being. Like bees, we can reside among flowers. Isn’t it all no more than gameplay anyway? Can we hold that view while retaining respect for the sanctity of others? On a case by case basis? Certainly. But universally? Without exceptions? What about when confronted by bullies and sadists? Emotions often override our sense of play — yet I welcome these interruptions. Sometimes we need to collapse inwardly on ourselves like tents. I did so yesterday. Grief snuck up on me unexpectedly as I thought about my dog Daphne, reliving our final exchanges of affection, seeing again her head lifting to acknowledge me as we laid together and said our goodbyes. There was a language we shared, and never again shall we speak it. No more face time. After a spell, though, a buzzer went off. Ice sheets are melting, I thought. Consciousness jumps scales. Zip up the memory and move on.

Saturday November 25, 2017

The author, taken with the desire to quit his current job, relents in his pursuit of this objective due only to lack of means. It is of no matter, though. This lot of his, arranged for him by capitalism, fades into the background the moment he smokes some hash. Psychic antennae reach tentatively, for purposes of experiment, toward Jon Porras’s Tokonoma.

“I wish unto myself many stochastic returns,” comes a voice. By what occult means, it asks, might consciousness improve its aims and guesses? Must we always set grammars to ourselves and then keep to them? Must we proceed through life with caution, or can we tread through life with care? Must our voices remain trapped in jars? File under impassioned plea and book back to headquarters. This is your captain speaking, over. Roger that. Our flight lands, we disembark from the plane, end of story. Got it. On days like these, I find myself needing to go for walks. It helps to feel overwhelmed now and then by the world’s beauty, its shocking mix of colors. Others dictate thoughts to me by strobe light. Better, I think, to absorb Wanci, an album by Bandung duo Tarawangsawelas.

My inner camera-eye breaks filmmaking’s 180-degree rule while performing a zoom. Leviathan waves at me with palms made of seashell. I witness internally an image of gears rotating. I manipulate fractal patterns across an inner screen by closing my eyes and moving my hands symmetrically, each fingertip a point of light. Words appear made of cut-out letters filled with rapidly changing video imagery. “This is how we want it,” moans a maudlin violin. Thought races ever-changing through all inherited forms, modes, and media. I picture myself as a virtual subject, a spectator floating in an inflatable theater filled with amniotic fluid, rotating around an invisible axis, all-knowing in an endless present. Why do certain traditions venerate time before birth, inventing in this nowhere a utopian somewhere, hallucinating in its name radically different forms of consciousness and awareness? It’s all, I suppose, part of the story the subject tells itself of its origins.

Monday October 30, 2017

“The mind attracts to one whatever the mind dwells upon,” reads a page I flip to in a college-ruled notebook pulled from the bins at Goodwill. The moon, waxing gibbous, pulled Sarah and I toward a Halloween party the other night. Appropriately heady, for sure, and with major magic. An altar-top arrayed with small bones. Conversations washed over me, though, to little effect. Appalachian Southern witches. Symbols of an arcane sort. It was the party of my coming out as a wizard. At one point, Sarah turned to me and read me my horoscope from her Witches’ Almanac. Apparently I’m on the verge of making a big decision which will “raise a lot of dust.” The horoscope also promised “nice aesthetics” this month. But as much as I enjoyed the care and attention to detail that went into the night’s revelries, Daphne’s death weighed solidly on my mind. It was hard to muster enough will to speak with others. Speaking of speaking: My students love to speak highly of their parents’ “hard work” launching pizza chains and amassing fortunes on Wall Street. Whenever I hear this shit, I think to myself: One could say the same about vampires. They, too, work hard sucking blood from their victims. But that doesn’t make them admirable. A hardworking vampire is still a vampire — and as such, deserves to get a stake shoved through its heart. And that’s how I feel about rich people. But I’m also no Van Helsing, so to ease my temper, I binge-watch the new season of Stranger Things. Eleven wanders alone in an Upside Down labyrinth. Thresholds between dimensions look like body tissue: uterine walls, placentas. The show relishes and savors the textures, tropes, and technologies of the 1980s. But it’s also fully absorbing in its sympathies and its use of outdated media to elicit a sense of the strange or the uncanny. New Age “psychic” or “telepathic” spaces — astral planes, other dimensions — these were very much a part of that era’s narrative universe. It’s a relief to watch a show that can once again broaden my sense of the potentials of genre. The latter, because sticky with the residue of an era’s affective investments, can reawaken phantom media antennae, exposing subjects to ghost sensations and histories half-submerged.