Mashinka Firunts Hakopian imagines artists and artist-activists as heroic alternatives to mad scientists. The ones who teach best what we know about ourselves as learning machines.
“Artists, and artist-activists, have introduced new ways of knowing — ways of apprehending how learning machines learn, and what they do with what they know,” writes Hakopian. “In the process, they’ve…initiated learning machines into new ways of doing. They’ve explored the interiors of erstwhile black boxes and rendered them transparent. They’ve visualized algorithmic operations as glass boxes, exhibited in white cubes and public squares. They’ve engaged algorithms as co-creators, and carved pathways for collective authorship of unanticipated texts. Most saliently, artists have shown how we might visualize what is not yet here” (The Institute for Other Intelligences, p. 90).
This is what blooms here in my library: “blueprints and schemata of a forward-dawning futurity” (90).
Trance-Scripts 