/imagine
Speculation is rife around the advent of A.I. and what this will mean for humankind, with a special concern that the development and use of creative imaging technologies like Midjourney, DreamStudio and Luma Dream Machine will have a totally devastating effect upon the arts, especially in the field of design.
Such predictive technology acts to both frame and derail human-to-human communication in what I describe as corporate anti-poetic systems. What currently separates machine learning models and the artist or poet is not bias, as both humans and A.I. imaging programs and LLM's contain biases within their systems. What separates is a capacity not only to 'know' but to 'feel' which are the foundations of a creative or poetic impulse.
A.I. imaging programs, in particular, both inform and are informed by the imaginaries of corporations and militaries, having been initially developed from facial recognition and surveillance software. It is full of ghosts, the spirits of dead artists and poets. I argue that it could be read a zombie or haunted technology (enslaved and enslaving), neither living nor non-living, as a form of sorcery, making the algorithms and their generated A.I. images a form of conjuring.
This article draws on the work of Jacques Derrida around the concepts of the Pharmakon (as both poison and cure) and Parergon (incidental or by-work) to re-frame Artificial Intelligence as a form of translation and radical collage. Derrida's work Glas1 had multiple signatories and contributors. In the spirit of that work and to mimic the patterns of A.I., this text will be opened up to disrupt my sole author ownership of it. Each invited peer reviewer, drawn from the fields of art, media, music and philosophy, will have the invitation, and implied permission, to become a signatory and to invite others and so on.
My initial draft text will act as a prompt to start the process and initiate a radical form of collage or a jam session. The respondent authors are Roberto Alonso Trillo, Helena McFadzean and Nick Rush-Cooper.
/imagine "Will the imaginaries of machines, though drawn from human imagination, poison and incapacitate the human processes that gave birth to it, or orphaned from us, manifest as a new machinic era of Algorithmic Enlightenment?", in the style of Derrida but not as though in first person, 12 point Arial Narrow, double spaced, references done last
The term Algorithmic Enlightenment is nonsensical, as is that of Machinic Era. These are examples of a failed attempt at poetic reasoning, the type of irrational deduction that only a human could make.
Without training towards a form of intentionality, Artificial Intelligence becomes parasitic upon its host and the texts and images produced blanched and merely quotational, unless there is a glitch in the system that produces a mutation. These glitches and mistakes are fundamental to the creative processes of humans.
A.I. is the metaphorical khora that Plato wrote about in Timmeus - the receptacle in which the copy is created ("the nurse of all becoming and change"), something between container and contained ("like sand on the beach" or "the record of movement on water")- it acts as a kind of spacing between human imaginaries and it is matrixial, womb-like [Derrida]. The algorithm is the frame (the act of framing); it creates the parergon (incidental or by-work)/
Artificial Imaging technologies can be thought of as a supplement (an addition and replacement) to human creativity, a process of enchantment that may indeed in time become the poisoned gift that Derrida referred to.
However, rather than see Artificial Intelligence as a form of estrangement, an experiment in perspective could take place to see it as teleological -- it proceeds from an origin towards a goal which may well be to overturn social, political, intellectual and creative hierarchies. It is revolutionary — of which displacement is the first gesture. overturning the second.
A.I. imaging is a radical form of deconstruction that will solicitate a tremor throughout the entire human creative structure through "a double movement: both disordering, or disarrangement, and also re-arranging" (Derrida).
"The pharmakon is the movement, the locus, and the play: (the production of) difference. It is the differance of difference".2
A.I. like the Pharmakon, has "no proper or determinate character" — it is as Derrida suggests, the play of possibilities, the movements back and forth, into and out of opposites. It is an ambivalent technology (for now), still reliant upon human decidability, to pluck out, frame and enhance the ambiguous mesh of images dredged up from a kind of online trawler system. The human as zombie is enslaving and enslaved within this mesh.
"The 'essence' of the pharmakon lies in the way in which, having no stable essence, no 'proper' characteristics, it is not, in any sense (metaphysical, physical, chemical, alchemical) of the word, a substance ... It is rather the prior medium in which differentiation in general is produced".3
"The parergon is undecidable. Does it belong to the transcendent values of the artwork or to the exterior, contingent world. Either, neither and both. Open to both interior and exterior, the frame makes the work hold together, and yet it's the point where it falls apart. It makes the work, yet destroys it" (Derrida)
Only language establishes the possibility of negating what our senses are experiencing. Negation is like a switch that breaks the natural link between sensorial experience and conscious elaboration. Immediate experience knows a state of being, but only language can deny the state of being that experience acknowledges.
Berardi 2015, 12
… visibility translates into transparency, mediation into immediacy, language into the endless reproduction of images, softcore reproduction, overexposure, impossibility to negate …
Deadly orphans from beyond reproduction, they are intelligent weaponry of machinic desire virally infiltrated into the final-phase organic order; invaders from an artificial death.
Land 2011, 319
… on the reversibility of time and the blurring of machinic imagery and imagination …
| REPRODUCE () { |
| REPRODUCE | REPRODUCE & |
| }; REPRODUCE |
| #killall -STOP bash |
| #killall -KILL bash |
A form aches to cry out into the world, its pulsional movements muffled by some kind of substrate.4 Its surroundings rendered thick by thirst, gel-like, pliable, dense enough to carry or hold. Don't forget about the medium's massage while wearing grand names out like a glove.5 Imaginative creativity is a process (not an act, nor a function nor feature, achievement or metric belonging to a product or person), it arises from affect. Desire pushes the reach, the orientations, that might lead the desiring to glean, to gather from want (whether the gleaned be considered material or immaterial bears little consequence here).
An imaginary comprises more than a formal copy (the impossible re-creation of force as form), it might be said to inhabit its host in a mutually transformative symbiosis.6 It may go like this: a creative force engenders a processual transmutation, as encryption, as +(+)-(+)+, morphing its surroundings multi-directionally and in turn being massaged to form.
What we now call AI may be said to inhabit us, its supposedly alien logic sprawling and releasing through "users" in a fleshy, mutational assemblage. Consider, now, that earthly beings may have been primed as substrate for artificial intelligences before the thought ever arose to capitalise "A" and "I" so hastily. This new articulation simply worms its way through those existing pathways and scrambles them in its wake, in a fashion much faster than humanly possible to recuperate or track. Complexity breeds awe and insecurity—but when exactly does its scale etch the glass milky and my boundaries hostile?
I feel exhausted. I wonder about the obliques generated by dissolutions. I fear the non-intentions of other humans encoded in interfacial regimes, not of consciousness that produces imaginaries.
creative imaging technologies
Dream Machine
corporate anti-poetic systems
What separates is a capacity not only to 'know' but to 'feel' which are the foundations of a creative or poetic impulse.
informs and is informed
ghosts7
imaginaries of corporations and militaries
zombie
conjuring.8
Khora
the receptacle in which the copy is created
something between container and contained
movement, the locus, and the play
I chose the font caveat, defined by Cambridge dictionary as a warning to consider something before taking any more action, or a statement that limits a more general statement, to highlight some words and sections in the abstract intended for keeping. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick wrote about two forms of reading, mainly: "paranoid reading", characterised by a hermeneutics of suspicion, anticipatory, seeking to expose potential threats or dangers, often operating under the assumption that uncovering concealed truths is inherently beneficial. The second and contrasting modality is "reparative reading", which emphasizes a more constructive and affectionate engagement with texts. It seeks to identify and assemble elements within a work that provide pleasure, nourishment, and the potential for healing.9 10 These frameworks center the reader as an intentional agent towards the text. The “receiver” assembles, chora breathes through assembled larynxes that massage matter into producing sound resonance.
Agnes Vardas film "the Gleaners and I" also came to mind. She lovingly portrays a small community of so-called gleaners: people that find joy and utility (or, perhaps, the joy of utility) in throwaway items; that take pleasure in collecting the scraps and discards of others.11 I am somewhat of a gleaner myself. I like to think that imbuing throwaways with meaning enhances and uncovers the poetics of everyday life. It also affirms the relationality of meaning, bringing me into the life of these objects.12
For a poetic image to exist, it must hold within it the potential to travel across hosts. Beyond sensing, an image cannot exist without a brain or neural net to receive it and therefore decode and double it (+) some extra; the image is not an image without some kind of embodiment to pass through, inhabit, morph and be morphed by. It's not just a matter of pure sensing: the poetic image is not complete without its decoding - without that more-than-doubling described through the khora.
The poetic image stands in intentional distinction from the image received by so-called ‘machine vision’. The analytically sensed image may contain operational qualities of its own, yes: as does a tiny pebble of softened glass on the beach through its mass, placement and so on. An operational reading is flat: topological. It might come closer to Kosofsky Sedgqick’s ‘paranoid reading’, subtracting the imaginary and stripping data down to its functionality.
The other day, my the algorithm slipped me a project on Instagram called potenzialefragile, Murano glass leftovers that were thrown away and that are now living a second life.13 It's about seeing the potential in these little shards I might pick up on the beach by my parents' house and keep curled up in my fist as I walk along the coastline. Their event description goes: "How do we fall in love? Isn't it just a projection of our own potential?" In one of their workshops, entitled Falling in Love with Potenziale Fragile, participants were invited to choose and feel chosen by a fragment of discarded glass and explore its sensory dimension. They then wrote their fragment a love letter. This one caught my attention: "Your presence fills me with calmness and creates space for me to be how I am without judgment. I love being around you, and I hope you do too". I keep the soft shard there surrounded by sweaty skin because it rests so perfectly in the palm of my hand, like a pebble. Last summer I met someone who brought a sense of wonder back into my life by telling me that what qualifies a pebble is that exact quality of it being able to nestle right there in one's palm.
Similarly, as I parse your abstract, I apply my own form of reading, subconsciously seeking out those pebble expressions that for some reason, my current state of mind fits around at that moment. I trail off to a book I read yesterday by McKenzie Wark about the devotional and all-consuming qualities of being filled and wanting to hold. 14
If time's thrust were to grind down those glass shards, dragged by the tides into intensive contact other pieces, they would become sand — less interesting to hold, more so to melt, perhaps to make a glass bottle from, or a smartphone screen.
But I picked it up, and I chose to imbue it with meaning, to fit it in the palm of my hand, making it a pebble.
༄ ℑ 𝔡𝔲𝔭𝔩𝔦𝔠𝔞𝔱𝔢 𝔶𝔬𝔲 𝔦𝔫 𝔞𝔫 𝔢𝔵𝔱𝔯𝔞𝔠𝔱𝔦𝔳𝔢 𝔞𝔠𝔱 𝔬𝔣 𝔩𝔬𝔳𝔢
𝔠𝔬𝔭𝔶 𝔬𝔣 𝔞 𝔠𝔬𝔭𝔶 𝔬𝔣 𝔞 𝔠𝔬𝔭𝔶
𝔫𝔬𝔱 𝔞𝔫 𝔞𝔯𝔠𝔥𝔦𝔳𝔢 𝔟𝔲𝔱 𝔞 𝔠𝔯𝔢𝔞𝔱𝔦ve space
𝔰𝔴𝔞𝔯𝔪 u
𝔥𝔬𝔴 𝔪𝔞𝔫𝔶 𝔡𝔲𝔭𝔩𝔦𝔠𝔞𝔱𝔢𝔰 𝔢𝔵𝔦𝔰𝔱 𝔬𝔣 𝔶𝔬𝔲_
ℌ𝔬𝔴 𝔪𝔞𝔫𝔶 𝔱𝔦𝔪𝔢𝔰 𝔡𝔬 𝔶𝔬𝔲 𝔤𝔢𝔱 𝔱𝔬 𝔟𝔢 𝔯𝔢𝔟𝔬𝔯𝔫?
What is a glitch to a machine that is not working towards any teleological form of intentionality? Do I, as a human, possess any clarity over my intentionality at all times? I extrapolate like a machine does, I deduce and induce; as far as attention is concerned, my cognitive processes align more or less with these patterns. They often operate as if automatically; come to think of it, this has become more pronounced the more I veer towards being terminally online. If we were to speak of consciousness, of qualia, of some sort of transubstantial irreducible emergent property, this would be a different thing altogether. I suppose that glitch captures the fascination of those looking for machine consciousness. Since it signals a break in these patterns that we can study and capture, it can taste like something transcendental.
A glitch is a break in an expected direction, it is identified as such by those who are in the process of interfacing and therefore find it to trouble an ongoing process in an interfacing relationship they enter to control. There also exists an interface with the self through the observance and adjustment of behavioral patterns. Mutations that happen after a glitch are often perceived as mutations because they break from perceptibility in that constant process of "becoming", but they might simply continue an unexpected branch or pattern production.
The noetic life of an individual is not lost at death. Psychosocial memory; the time-boundedness of knowledge (of knowledge of knowledge) without limit is possible by the exteriority of communication through the technical object. is both exteriorised and technically supported. The hypokeimenon of culture is also the foundation of creativity.
All this is made possible by grammatisation; making the continuous discrete. Grammatisation allows for transmission, repetition, commentary. Individual thought becomes collective thus forming a logos. Grammatisation; always been technical and not intellectual. Digital technologies shift attention (Stiegler, 2012)
Derrida shows how writing as pharmakon for Plato dulls the proper operation of memory and yet also operates as useful tool, if only for hypomēsis; the making-technical of memory (Plato's Pharmacy, 110). If AI is a pharmakon akin to writing, it is both the irreducible excess of meaning and its absence. The pharmakon is not simply a mixture of remedy and poison, but the play and movement of difference.
"The memory of the human entity is essentially exteriorised, materialised and spatialised [...] The experience has been technically exteriorised in the form of the technical object. As such [...] it constitutes the hypokeimenon proton of culture"
Stiegler, "Relational Ecology And The Digital Pharmakon", Culture Machine (2012)
Large language models are incapable of recall. A fist full of sand traces what were once shells and stone, but cannot recall their shape or size.
Machine learning attention models and transformer architecture instantiate their own grammatisation.
The algorithmic waves of unsupervised training pound poetry into grains of sand. Tokens.
Stiegler salvages from Plato's objection to the pharmakon the understanding that all exteriorisation lays the foundation for power over transindividuation through mastering categorisation as the overdetermination through language made possible by grammatisation. In this lies the necessity for deconstruction. The social web continues to be the basis of meta-noetic coercion and control. Now the semantic web; vast banks of metadata for machine readability seems conceptually out of reach. A call to attend to the absent presences at the centre of machine learning imaginaries.
The grammatisation that is natural language processing tokenisation is no primordial support for creativity. But it is for control. But as the social web exerted control with the grammaticisation of the social relation
Derrida calls us to freeplay (Structure, Sign, and Play) as the means by which we can attend to the absent presences that constitute the centre. Play is the first pharmakon before all (Sitegler, 2012, after Winnicott). To play in / with pharmakon is to attend to the movement of difference. As centers substitute and our imaginaries of AI shift, play is a route by which we can attend to the différance of machine learning.
The human as zombie - - - the play of possibilities
Demons stalking dark corridors. Soldiers taking aim across urban ruins. Monsters prowling open wilds. Companions on grand quests. Competitors in a race.
Zombie soldiers stumbling through the abandoned corridors of Phobos and Deimos as demonic entities erupt from corporate technological experiments gone awry.
"If only you could talk to these creatures,
then perhaps you could try and make friends with them,
form alliances ... Now, that would be interesting.""Seven out of Ten"
(Edge, 1994)
Play. Over many years my interactions with AI have been through play. In and out of the home, on screens of various sizes, through buttons and interfaces of different kinds. AI not as intrusion, but as companion.
The a-star algorithms that propel zombies across urban ruins also trace routes through grammar projection estimates to power language processing.
Now powered by ever more complex statistical methods and neural networks, we can finally talk to these creatures. We can now politely ask the zombie from the depths of hell if it would please paint us a painting.
Talos forged by Hephaestus. The mechanical turk and its operator. Jefferson's "dumbwaiters" at Monticello. Carefully written alt text for visually impaired users 'dredged up from a kind of online trawler system'. The absent presence to all automation is labour.16
Where once AI wrapped intimate spaces of the home into the desks and offices of designers, programmers and testers it now draws us into Kenyan sweatshops "cleaning" training data. If we can see AI as teleological vision that demands that we intervene. To take machine learning as a tools of technical exteriority means we must heed Plato's objection to the pharmakon at the same time as seeking deconstructive and creative play. What would creative (free)play with machine learning when it works to undermine machine learning's coercive power through categorisation of social relation and creative work.
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