1,032 research outputs found

    The Machine Starts: Computers as Collaborators in Writing

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    The penetration of digital technologies into the process of creating and disseminating narratives is no longer a new phenomenon, but perhaps what does still seem strange and far-fetched is the suggestion that machines are collaborators and authors in their own right. This paper examines an example of a computer-mediated narrative and suggests that not only does the machine exert its own agency in the process of writing, but this process has a long provenance from the ancient world, through the 20th century avant garde, and into contemporary technological futurism

    The Inhuman Overhang: On Differential Heterogenesis and Multi-Scalar Modeling

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    As a philosophical paradigm, differential heterogenesis offers us a novel descriptive vantage with which to inscribe Deleuzeā€™s virtuality within the terrain of ā€œdifferential becoming,ā€ conjugating ā€œpure saliencesā€ so as to parse economies, microhistories, insurgencies, and epistemological evolutionary processes that can be conceived of independently from their representational form. Unlike Gestalt theoryā€™s oppositional constructions, the advantage of this aperture is that it posits a dynamic context to both media and its analysis, rendering them functionally tractable and set in relation to other objects, rather than as sedentary identities. Surveying the genealogy of differential heterogenesis with particular interest in the legacy of Lautmanā€™s dialectic, I make the case for a reading of the Deleuzean virtual that departs from an event-oriented approach, galvanizing Sarti and Cittiā€™s dynamic a priori vis-Ć -vis Deleuzeā€™s philosophy of difference. Specifically, I posit differential heterogenesis as frame with which to examine our contemporaneous epistemic shift as it relates to multi-scalar computational modeling while paying particular attention to neuro-inferential modes of inductive learning and homologous cognitive architecture. Carving a bricolage between Mark Wilsonā€™s work on the ā€œgreediness of scalesā€ and Deleuzeā€™s ā€œscales of realityā€, this project threads between static ecologies and active externalism vis-Ć -vis endocentric frames of reference and syntactical scaffolding

    Before and Beyond the Bachelor Machine

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    This paper will examine the importance of Marcel Duchampā€™s La Machine CĆ©libataire (The Bachelor) on Art and Technology in the 20th and 21st centurie

    The narrative manipulation of human subjectivity : a machinic exploration of psyche as artificial ready-made

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    Avec lā€™acceĢleĢration de la production narrative au vingt-et-unieĢ€me sieĢ€cle, ainsi que les tentatives dā€™appropriation des moyens de production et des mythes collectifs par le marcheĢ, il y a lieu de questionner lā€™effet des nouveaux mythes sur la psycheĢ humaine. Lā€™ingestion persistante et soutenue de reĢcits infuseĢs de symboles capitalistes produit une mutation de la subjectiviteĢ humaine, dans un mouvement vers une certaine homogeĢneĢiteĢ. Par une relecture de la PoeĢtique dā€™Aristote, la premieĢ€re section de cette theĢ€se propose une vision politique de la catharsis, qui theĢorise le reĢcepteur de toute narration comme programmable et pouvant eĢ‚tre guideĢ vers des attitudes et des postures. Cette conception meĢ€ne directement aĢ€ une deĢfinition machinique du reĢcit et la notion dā€™asservissement machinique, qui concĢ§oit la subjectiviteĢ humaine comme engageĢe dans des processus de connectiviteĢ ouĢ€ elle perd certains fragments de son uniciteĢ. La troisieĢ€me fouleĢe de cette theĢ€se theĢorise la socieĢteĢ de controĢ‚le de Deleuze et ses heĢritiers conceptuels, le capitalisme de surveillance et lā€™ectosubjectiviteĢ. Ces deux notions tentent de percevoir le reĢgime de pouvoir du vingt-et-unieĢ€me sieĢ€cle, fondeĢ sur les donneĢes personnelles et la standardisation de la psycheĢ humaine. Finalement, le quatrieĢ€me et dernier chapitre de cette recherche se penche sur la notion de veĢriteĢ telle que deĢcrite par Michel Foucault dans Le Courage de la VeĢriteĢ. Dans la notion Grecque, et particulieĢ€rement son deĢveloppement platonicien, de parrheĢ„sia, Foucault identifie lā€™homogeĢneĢiteĢ dā€™une veĢriteĢ baseĢe sur une hieĢrarchie eĢthique, et son renversement par les Cyniques en animaliteĢ assumeĢe qui ouvre de nouveaux territoires dā€™existence et de veĢriteĢ. En somme, ce renversement nous permet de concevoir ce que serait une existence libre, hors dā€™un reĢgime de veĢriteĢ qui deĢsubjective et rend homogeĢ€ne.With the acceleration of narrative production in the twenty-first century, as well as the attempted appropriation of means of production and collective myths by market economy, there is an increasing need to question the effect of these new myths on the human psyche. The persistent and sustained ingestion of narratives infused with capitalist symbols produces a transformation of subjectivity, which mutates from unicity to increased standardization. Through a rereading of Aristotleā€™s Poetics, the first section of this thesis offers a political conception of catharsis that theorizes the receiver of narratives as programmable and guidable towards attitudes and postures. This conception leads directly to a machinic definition of the narrative and the concept of machinic enslavement. These concepts conceive of human subjectivity as engaged in processes of networking where it loses fragments of its unicity. The third chapter of this thesis theorizes Deleuze's society of control and its conceptual successors, surveillance capitalism and ectosubjectivity. Both these concepts attempt to theorize the reigning regime of power of the twenty-first century, based on personal data and the standardization of the human psyche. Finally, the fourth and final chapter of this research analyzes the notion of truth as described by Michel Foucault in The Courage of Truth. In the Greek notion of parrheĢ„sia, and especially in its platonic development, Foucault identifies the homogeneity of a truth system based on a hierarchization of ethics. The reversal of this system by the Cynics into an assumed bestiality is crucial to this thesis as it opens new territories of existence and truth. In sum, the Cynic reversal permits us to conceive of a free existence, outside of a regime of truth that desubjectivates and homogenizes

    Post-structuralism, Complexity and Poetics.

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    Post-structuralism and complexity are plural and diverse modes of thought that share a common subscription to the Ć¢ļæ½ļæ½anteriority of radical relationalityĆ¢ļæ½ļæ½. They nonetheless subscribe to a different ethic of life because they address the anteriority of radical relationality in different ways. Complexity remains strategic in its bid to become a power-knowledge of the laws of becoming. It derives that strategic ethic from its scientific interest in the implicate order of non-linearity that is said to subvert Newtonian science. Post-structuralism is poetic. It derives its poetic ethic from Heidegger and from the re-working of orphic and tragic sensibilities to radical relationality with the radically non-relational. Observing that all poetry is complexity avant la lettre, the paper illustrates these points with the Odyssey and concludes that while complexity is ultimately concerned with fitness, post-structuralism is pre-occupied with justice

    An Evolving Apparatus

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    Lacan\u27s Cybernetics

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    This project explores the synchronicity of psychoanalytic and cybernetic practices from the mid-to-late nineteenth century by recovery and analysis of a shared material media culture. This project takes as a starting point the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who observed the affinity between cybernetics and psychoanalysis, ā€œtwo roughly contemporaneous techniques,ā€ related to the emergence of the two distinct types of sciences: exact and ā€œconjectural.ā€ I investigate their shared patterns of figuration in the two fields, before they developed significant, and even irreconcilable, differences. This project demonstrates that what Lacan discussed explicitly in the 1950s, particularly, in his ā€œcyberneticā€ Seminar II, was an expression of a more implicit connection between cybernetics and psychoanalysis ab initio. It offers a media-archaeological account of the pre-history of psychoanalysis (or proto-psychoanalytic practices) that considers the development of the psychoanalytic technique both through and against the technological mediation. The final part of this dissertation switches from the subject of the architectural and institutional panopticon of the nineteenth century to the ā€œinterpassiveā€ user-subject of the perverse panopticon of the social media network. My discussion resonates with the current concerns expressed both within academia and in the Lacanian clinic about the degree of mediation, the limits of surveillance, the capacity of the network to exploit the subject, the automation of the gadgets that manage our lives, and the symptoms produced by all these aspects of the human-machine assemblages or even the erasure thereof in the capitalist discourse of global economy

    The biosocial subject: sensor technologies and worldly sensibility

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    Sensor technologies are increasingly part of everyday life, embedded in buildings (movement, sound, temperature) and worn on persons (heart rate, electro-dermal activity, eye tracking). This paper presents a theoretical framework for research on computational sensor data. My approach moves away from theories of agent-centered perceptual synthesis (on behalf of aĀ perceiving organism) and towards a more expansive understanding of the biosocial learning environment. The focus is on sensor technologies that track sensation below the bandwidth of human consciousness. I argue that there is an urgent need to reclaim this kind of biodata as part of an unequally distributed worldly sensibility, and to thereby undermine more narrow reductive readings of such data. The paper explores the biopolitical implications of recasting biodata in terms of trans-individual inhuman forces, while continuing to track the distinctive power of humans

    The Machinic Imaginary: A Post-Phenomenological Examination of Computational Society

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    The central claim of this thesis is the postulation of a machinic dimension of the social imaginaryā€”a more-than-human process of creative expression of the social world. With the development of machine learning and the sociality of interactive media, computational logics have a creative capacity to produce meaning of a radically machinic order. Through an analysis of computational functions and infrastructures ranging from artificial neural networks to large-scale machine ecologies, the institution of computational logics into the social imaginary is nothing less than a reordering of the conditions of social-historical creation. Responding to dominant technopolitical propositions concerning digital culture, this thesis proposes a critical development of Cornelius Castoriadisā€™ philosophy of the social imaginary. To do so, a post phenomenological framework is constructed by tracing a trajectory from Maurice Merleau-Pontyā€™s late ontological turn, through to the process-relational philosophies of Gilbert Simondon and Castoriadis. Introducing the concept of the machinic imaginary, the thesis maps the extent to which the dynamic, interactive paradigm of twenty-first century computation is changing how meaning is socially instituted in ways incomprehensible to human sense. As social imaginary significations are increasingly created and carried by machines, the articulation of the social diverges into human and non-human worlds. This inaccessibility of the machinic imaginary is a core problematic raised by this thesis, indicating a fragmentation of the social imaginary and a novel form of existential alienation. Any political theorisation of the contemporary social condition must therefore work within this alienation and engage with the transsubjective character of social-historical creation
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