Beyond Classification: The Machinic Sublime

Beyond Classification: The Machinic Sublime (BCMC) emulated an academic roundtable discussion with the authors and 3 machinic/more-than-human guests. Part performance, part intervention within the context of an academic conference, BCMC introduces a novel and explicitly visible strategy of co-dependency for an array of diverse intelligences through a connected loop of human, machine, and animal agencies. The meteoric rise of AI in the last years can be seen as a part of a larger tendency towards deeper, more opaque data collection and analysis techniques that form the dense substratum beneath the proliferation of human-computer interfaces today. As a human developer, the most striking qualities of generative AI are its vastness, non-determinism, and infinitude— explicit themes and qualities of a machinic ‘sublime’. How can a human artist/programmer sensibly navigate this multi-dimensional space of latent meaning?

This intervention is an experimental roundtable discussion/performance via web conferencing, a new kind of Turing Test where success in the testing is not found in the plausible simulation of human consciousness through speech, but rather in expressing diverse intelligences through new forms of language. In this multi-agent exchange, human interlocutors and non-human partners argue the possibility of a machinic sublime. Together, these interlinked discussions become an emergent system. In this roundtable format, audience interventions are welcome.

Content

Author and article information

Contributors

Joel Ong

Robert Twomey

Eunsu Kang

Kangsan Joshua Jin

Conference

Publication date: September 2021

Publication date (Print): September 2021

Pages: 373-379

Affiliations

[0001]York University

Toronto, Canada

[0002]University of

Nebraska-Lincoln

Nebraska, USA

[0003]Carnegie Mellon

University

Pennsylvania, USA

[0004]Pittsford Sutherland

High School

New York, USA

Article

DOI: 10.14236/ewic/POM2021.50

SO-VID: 2e81499e-61fe-4683-a3a5-834588b33417

License:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Conference name: Proceedings of Politics of the Machines - Rogue Research 2021

Conference acronym: POM 2021

Conference number: 3

Conference location: Berlin, Germany

Conference date: September 14-17, 2021

Conference sponsor: Electronic Workshops in Computing (eWiC)

Conference theme: debate and devise concepts and practices that seek to critically question and unravel novel modes of science

History

Product

1477-9358 BCS Learning & Development

Self URI (article page): https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14236/ewic/POM2021.50

Self URI (journal page): https://ewic.bcs.org/

REFERENCES

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C Donahue (2019) WaveGan (V2). http://github.com/chrisdonahue/wavegan (October 10, 2021).
Gabrys, Jennifer. 2016. “Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet”. University of Minnesota Press.
N Hansen, Y Akimoto, and P Baudis (2019). CMA-ES/pycma on Github. http://github.com/CMA-ES/pycma (October 10, 2021).
Hakim, Jamie, Chatzidakis, Andreas, Littler, Jo, Rottenberg, Catherine and Segal, Lynne (2020) The Care Manifesto. Verso Books. ISBN 978–1839760969.
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Comments

Comment on this article

[1] C.U Anderson, & S.B Pold (2018). The Metainterface: The Art of Platforms, Cities, and Clouds. MIT Press.

[2] A Breton 1896–1966. (1972). Manifestoes of surrealism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

[3] A Brock, J Donahue, & K Simonyan (2018). Large scale GAN training for high fidelity natural image synthesis. arXiv preprint arXiv:1809.11096.

[4] Crawford, K (2021). Atlas of AI: Power, Politics and the Planetary Cost of Artificial Intelligence. Yale University Press.

[5] C Donahue (2019) WaveGan (V2). http://github.com/chrisdonahue/wavegan (October 10, 2021).

[6] Gabrys, Jennifer. 2016. “Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet”. University of Minnesota Press.

[7] N Hansen, Y Akimoto, and P Baudis (2019). CMA-ES/pycma on Github. http://github.com/CMA-ES/pycma (October 10, 2021).

[8] Hakim, Jamie, Chatzidakis, Andreas, Littler, Jo, Rottenberg, Catherine and Segal, Lynne (2020) The Care Manifesto. Verso Books. ISBN 978–1839760969.

[9] E Kirksey (2014). The Multispecies Salon. Durham: Duke University Press.

[10] S Liang (2016) Otter.ai. http://otter.ai (October 10, 2021).

[11] J McCartney (1996) SuperCollider. http://supercollider.github.io (October 10, 2021).

[12] OpenAI API Beta Documentation (2021) http://beta.openai.com/docs/engines/instruct-series-beta (October 10, 2021).

[13] A Radford, et. al (2021). Learning transferable visual models from natural language supervision. arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.0002

[14] E Thacker (2004). Biomedia. University of Minnesota Press.

[15] Tronto, J (1993). Moral Boundaries: a Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York, London: Routledge.

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