How can authors use AI writing tools like GPT-3? What's the best way to prompt the models to output usable text? Are there copyright issues with this approach? Author Paul Bellow explains how he is using the tools and how authors need to embrace the possibilities rather than reject them.

https://www-thecreativepenn-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.thecreativepenn.com/2021/02/26/ai-augmented-author-gpt3/amp/?amp_gsa=1&_js_v=a6&usqp=mq331AQIKAGwASCAAgM=#amp_tf=From %1$s&aoh=16247239328784&csi=0&referrer=https://www.google.com&ampshare=https://www.thecreativepenn.com/2021/02/26/ai-augmented-author-gpt3/

Post-humanism is best understood as several overlapping and interrelated fields coming out of the traditions of anti-humanism, post-colonialism, and feminist discourse. But the term remains contested, both by those who wish to overturn, or even destroy, the ‘humanism’ after that decisive hyphen (post-humanists), and those engaged in the project of maximising their chance of merging with technologies, and reaching a supposed point of transition, when the current ‘human’ has been augmented, upgraded, and surpassed (transhumanists). For both those who wish to move beyond ‘humanism’, and those who wish to transcend ‘the human’, there remains a significant, shared, problem: the supposed originary separations, between information and matter, culture and nature, mankind and machine, singular and plural, that post-humanism seeks to problematise, and transhumanism often problematically ignores, lead to the delineation of ‘the human’ as a single, universalised figure. This universalism erases the pattern of difference, which post-humanists see as both the solution to, and the problem of, the human paradigm. This thesis recognises this problem as an ongoing one, and one which – for those who seek to establish posthumanism as a critical field of enquiry – can never be claimed to be finally overcome, lest the same problem of universalism rear its head again.

To tackle this problem, this thesis also enters into the complex liminal space where the terms ‘human’ and ‘humanism’ confuse and interrupt one another, but rather than delineate the same boundaries (as transhumanists have done), or lay claim over certain territories of the discourse (as post-humanists have done), this thesis implicates itself, myself, and yourself in the relational becoming posthuman of which we, and it, are co-constituted. My claim being, that critical posthumanism must be the action it infers onto the world of which it is not only part, but in mutual co-constitution with.The Practice of Posthumanism claims that critical posthumanism must be enacted in practice, and stages itself as an example of that process, through a hybrid theoretical and practice-based becoming. It argues that posthumanism is necessarily a vibrant, lively process being undergone, and as such, that it cannot be narrativized or referred to discursively without collapsing that process back into a static, universalised delineation once again. It must remain in practice, and as such, this thesis enacts the process of which it itself is a principle paradigm.After establishing the critical field termed ‘posthumanism’ through analyses of associated discourses such as humanism and transhumanism, each of the four written chapters and hybrid conclusion/portfolio of work is enacted through a ‘figure’ which speaks to certain monstrous dilemmas posed by thinkers of the posthuman. These five figures are: The Phantom Zone, Crusoe’s Island, The Thing, The Collapse of The Hoard, and The 3D Printer (#Additivism). Each figure – echoing Donna Haraway – ‘resets the stage for possible pasts and futures’ by calling into question the fictional/theoretical ground upon which it is predicated. Considered together, the dissertation and conclusion/portfolio of work, position critical posthumanism as a hybrid ‘other’, my claim being that only through representing the human as and through an ongoing process (ontogenesis rather than ontology) can posthumanism re-conceptualise the ‘norms’ deeply embedded within the fields it confronts.The practice of critical posthumanism this thesis undertakes is inherently a political project, displacing and disrupting the power dynamics which are co-opted in the hierarchical structuring of individuals within ‘society’, of categories within ‘nature’, of differences which are universalised in the name of the ‘human’, as well as the ways in which theory delineates itself into rigid fields of study. By confounding articulations of the human in fiction, theory, science, media, and art, this practice in practice enacts its own ongoing, ontogenetic becoming; the continual changing of itself, necessary to avoid a collapse into new absolutes and universals.

Magic UX is a new smartphone interface inspired by the physical world. It uses your view of the real world to help you navigate computer generated content in the digital world. It's a practical, subtle use of augmented reality. specialprojects.studio/project/magic-ux/Cast: Special Projects

I just came back from two jam packed weeks at Transmediale festival, 2017. Morehshin Allahyari and I were involved in a wealth of events, mostly in relation to our #Additivism project. Including: On the Far Side of the Marchlands: an exhibition at Schering Stiftung gallery, featuring work by Catherine Disney, Keeley Haftner, Brittany Ransom, Morehshin and myself.

Photos from the event are gathered here.

The 3D Additivist Cookbook european launch: held at Transmediale on Saturday 4th Feb.

Audio of the event is available here.

Singularities: a panel and discussion conceived and introduced by Morehshin and myself. Featuring Luiza Prado & Pedro Oliveira (A parede), Rasheedah Phillips, and Dorothy R. Santos.

Audio of the entire panel is available here. The introduction to the panel – written by Morehshin and myself – can be found below. Photos from the panel are here.

Alien Matter exhibition: curated by Inke Arns as part of Transmediale 2017. Featuring The 3D Additivist Cookbook and works by Joey Holder, Dov Ganchrow, and Kuang-Yi Ku.

Photos from the exhibition can be found here.

Singularities Panel delivered at Transmediale, Sunday 5th February 2017 Introduction by Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke   Morehshin: In 1979, the Iranian Islamic revolution resulted in the overthrowing of the Pahlavi deen-as-ty and led to the establishment of an Islamic republic. Many different organizations, parties and guerrilla groups were involved in the Iranian Revolution. Some groups were created after the fall of Pahlavi and still survive in Iran; others helped overthrow the Shah but no longer exist. Much of Iranian society was hopeful about the coming revolution. Secular and leftist politicians participated in the movement to gain power in the aftermath, believing that Khomeini would support their voice and allow multiple positions and parties to be active and involved in the shaping of the post-revolution Iran. Like my mother – a Marxist at the time – would always say: The Iranian revolution brought sudden change, death, violence in unforeseen ways. It was a point, a very fast point of collapse and rise. The revolution spun out of control and the country was taken over by Islamists so fast that people weren’t able to react to it; to slow it; or even to understand it. The future was now in the hands of a single party with a single vision that would change the lives of generations of Iranians, including myself, in the years that followed. We were forced and expected to live in one singular reality. A mono authoritarian singularity. In physics, a singularity is a point in space and time of such incredible density that the very nature of reality is brought into question. Associated with elusive black holes and the alien particles that bubble out of the quantum foam at their event horizon, the term ‘singularity’ has also been co-opted by cultural theorists and techno-utopianists to describe moments of profound social, political, ontological or material transformation. The coming-into-being of new worlds that redefine their own origins. For mathematicians and physicists, singularities are often considered as ‘bad behaviour’ in the numbers and calculations. Infinite points may signal weird behaviours existing ‘in’ the physical world: things outside or beyond our ability to comprehend. Or perhaps, more interestingly, a singularity may expose the need for an entirely new physics. Some anomalies can only be made sense of by drafting a radically new model of the physical world to include them. For this panel we consider ‘bad behaviours’ in social, technological and ontological singularities. Moments of profound change triggered by a combination of technological shifts, cultural mutations, or unforeseen political dramas and events. Like the physicists who comprehend singularities in the physical world, we do not know whether the singularities our panelists highlight today tell us something profound about the world itself, or force us to question the model we have of the world or worlds. Daniel: As well as technological or socio-political singularities, this panel will question the ever narcissistic singularities of ‘I’, ‘here’ and ‘now’ – confounding the principles of human universality upon which these suppositions are based. We propose ‘singularities’ as eccentric and elusive figures in need of collective attention. It is no coincidence that ‘Singularity’ is often used as a term to indicate human finitude. Self-same subjects existing at particular points in time, embedded within particular contexts, told through a singular history or single potential future. The metaphor of the transformative Singularity signals not one reality ‘to come’, nor even two realities – one moved from and one towards – but of many, all dependant on who the subject of the singularity is and how much autonomy they are ascribed. The ‘Technological’ Singularity is a myth of the ‘transhumanists’, a group of mainly Western, commonly white, male enthusiasts, who ascribe to the collective belief that technology will help them to become ‘more than human’… ‘possessed of drastically augmented intellects, memories, and physical powers.’ As technological change accelerates, according to prominent Transhumanist Ray Kurzweil, so it pulls us upwards in its wake. Kurzweil argues that as the curve of change reaches an infinite gradient reality itself will be brought into question: like a Black Hole in space-time subjects travelling toward this spike will find it impossible to turn around, to escape its pull. A transformed post-human reality awaits us on the other side of the Technological Singularity. A reality Kurzweil and his ilk believe ‘we’ will inevitably pass into in the coming decades. In a 2007 paper entitled ‘Droppin’ Science Fiction’, Darryl A. Smith explores the metaphor of the singularity through Afro-American and Afrofuturist science fiction. He notes that the metaphor of runaway change positions those subject to it in the place of Sisyphus, the figure of Greek myth condemned to push a stone up a hill forever. For Sisyphus to progress he has to fight gravity as it conspires with the stone to pull him back to the bottom of the slope. The singularity in much science fiction from black and afro-american authors focusses on this potential fall, rather than the ascent:

“Here, in the geometrics of spacetime, the Spike lies not at the highest point on an infinite curve but at the lowest… Far from being the shift into a posthumanity, the Negative Spike is understood… as an infinite collapsing and, thus, negation of reality. Escape from such a region thus requires an opposing infinite movement.”

The image of a collective ‘push’ of the stone of progress up the slope necessarily posits a universal human subject, resisting the pull of gravity back down the slope. A universal human subject who passes victorious to the other side of the event horizon. But as history has shown us, technological, social and political singularities – arriving with little warning – often split the world into those inside and those outside their event horizons. Singularities like the 1979 Iranian revolution left many more on the outside of the Negative Spike, than the inside. Singularities such as the Industrial Revolution, which is retrospectively told in the West as a tale of imperial and technological triumph, rather than as a story of those who were violently abducted from their homelands, and made to toil and die in fields of cotton and sugarcane. The acceleration toward and away from that singularity brought about a Negative Spike so dense, that many millions of people alive today still find their identities subject to its social and ontological mass. In their recent definition of The Anthropocene, the International Commission on Stratigraphy named the Golden Spike after World War II as the official signal of the human-centric geological epoch. A series of converging events marked in the geological record around the same time: the detonation of the first nuclear warhead; the proliferation of synthetic plastic from crude oil constituents; and the introduction of large scale, industrialised farming practices, noted by the appearance of trillions of discarded chicken bones in the geological record. Will the early 21st century be remembered for the 9/11 terrorist event? The introduction of the iPhone, and Twitter? Or for the presidency of Donald J Trump? Or will each of these extraordinary events be considered as part of a single, larger shift in global power and techno-mediated autonomy? If ‘we’ are to rebuild ourselves through stronger unities, and collective actions in the wake of recent political upheavals, will ‘we’ also forego the need to recognise the different subjectivities and distinct realities that bubble out of each singularity’s wake? As the iPhone event sent shockwaves through the socio-technical cultures of the West, so the rare earth minerals required to power those iPhones were pushed skywards in value, forcing more bodies into pits in the ground to mine them. As we gather at Transmediale to consider ai, infrastructural, data, robotic, or cyborgian revolutions, what truly remains ‘elusive’ is a definition of ‘the human’ that does justice to the complex array of subjectivities destined to be impacted – and even crafted anew – by each of these advances. In his recent text on the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster Jean-Luc Nancy proposes instilling “the condition of an ever-renewed present” into the urgent design and creation of new, mobile futures. In this proposition Nancy recognises that each singularity is equal to all others in its finitude; an equivalence he defines as “the essence of community.” To contend with the idea of singularities – plural – of ruptures as such, we must share together that which will forever remain unimaginable alone. Morehshin: This appeal to a plurality of singularities is easily mistaken for the kinds of large scale collective action we have seen in recent years around the world. From the Arab Springs, and Occupy Movement through to the recent Women’s March, which took place not 24 hours after the inauguration of Donald Trump. These events in particular spoke of a universal drive, a collective of people’s united against a single cause. Much has been written about the ‘human microphone’ technique utilized by Occupy protesters to amplify the voice of a speaker when megaphones and loud speakers were banned or unavailable. We wonder whether rather than speak as a single voice we should seek to emphasise the different singularities enabled by different voices, different minds; distinct votes and protestations. We wonder whether black and brown protestors gathered in similar numbers, with similar appeals to their collective unity and identity would have been portrayed very differently by the media. Whether the radical white women and population that united for the march would also show up to the next black lives matter or Muslim ban protests. These are not just some academic questions but an actual personal concern… what is collectivism and for who does the collective function? When we talk about futures and worlds and singularities, whose realities are we talking about? Who is going to go to Mars with Elon Musk? And who will be left? As we put this panel together, in the last weeks, our Manifesto’s apocalyptic vision of a world accelerated to breaking point by technological progress began to seem strangely comforting compared to the delirious political landscape we saw emerging before us. Whether you believe political mele-ee-ze, media delirium, or the inevitable implosion of the neo-liberal project is to blame for the rise of figures like Farage, Trump or – in the Philippines – the outspoken President Rodrigo Duterte, the promises these figures make of an absolute shift in the conditions of power, appear grand precisely because they choose to demonize the discrete differences of minority groups, or attempt to overturn truths that might fragment and disturb their all-encompassing narratives. Daniel: The appeal to inclusivity – in virtue of a shared political identity – often instates those of ‘normal’ body, race, sex, or genome as exclusive harbingers of the-change-which-should – or so we are told, will – come. A process that theorist Rosi Braidotti refers to as a ‘dialectics of otherness’ which subtly disguises difference, in celebration of a collective voice of will or governance. Morehshin: Last week on January 27, as part of a plan to keep out “Islamic terrorists” outside of the United States Trump signed an order, that suspended entry for citizens of seven countries for 90 days. This includes Iran, the country I am a citizen of. I have lived in the U.S. for 9 years and hold a green-card which was included in Trump’s ban and now is being reviewed case by case for each person who enters the U.S.. When the news came out, I was already in Berlin for Transmediale and wasn’t sure whether I had a home to go back to. Although the chaos of Trump’s announcement has now settled, and my own status as a resident of America appears a bit more clear for now, the ripples of emotion and uncertainty from last week have coloured my experience at this festival. As I have sat through panels and talks in the last 3 days, and as I stand here introducing this panel about elusive events, potential futures and the in betweenness of all profound technological singularities… the realities that feel most significant to me are yet to take place in the lives of so many Middle-Easterners and Muslims affected by Trump’s ban. How does one imagine/re-imagine/figure/re-figure the future when there are still so many ‘presents’ existing in conflict? I grew up in Iran for 23 years, where science fiction didn’t really exist as a genre in popular culture. I always think we were discouraged to imagine the future other than how it was ‘imagined’ for us. Science-fiction as a genre flourishes in the West… But I still struggle with the kinds of futures we seem most comfortable imagining. THANKS   We now want to hand over to our fantastic panelists, to highlight their voices, and build harmonies and dissonances with our own. We are extremely honoured to introduce them: Dorothy Santos is a Filipina-American writer, editor, curator, and educator. She has written and spoken on a wide variety of subjects, including art, activism, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology. She is managing editor of Hyphen Magazine, and a Yerba Buena Center for the Arts fellow, where she is researching the concept of citizenship. Her talk today is entitled Machines and Materiality: Speculations of Future Biology and the Human Body. Luiza Prado and Pedro Oliveira are Brazilian design researchers, who very recently wrapped up their PhDs at the University of the Arts Berlin. Under the ‘A Parede’ alias, the duo researches new design methodologies, processes, and pedagogies for an onto-epistemological decolonization of the field. In their joint talk and performance, Luiza and Pedro will explore the tensions around hyperdense gravitational pulls and acts of resistance. With particular focus on the so-called “non-lethal” bombs – teargas and stun grenades – manufactured in Brazil, and exported and deployed all around the world. Rasheedah Phillips is creative director of Afrofuturist Affair: a community formed to celebrate, strengthen, and promote Afrofuturistic and Sci-Fi concepts and culture. In her work with ‘Black Quantum Futurism’, Rasheedah derives facets, tenets, and qualities from quantum physics, futurist traditions, and Black/African cultural traditions to celebrate the ability of African-descended people to see “into,” choose, or create the impending future. In her talk today, Rasheedah will explore the history of linear time constructs, notions of the future, and alternative theories of temporal-spatial consciousness.      

An Open Access anthology edited by Matteo Pasquinelli forthcoming (Fall 2015) for Meson Press, Leuphana University Lüneburg.

VIA Festival Announces Visual Artists, Exhibitions This selection of local and international emerging artists who work fluidly between a variety of digital media (video, animation, computer-generated imagery, augmented reality) have been paired with the festival’s headlining acts.

A review of Cécile B. Evans’ show Hyperlinks, at Seventeen Gallery, London 15th Oct – 6th Dec 2014. With lots of editing and writerly support from Anton Haugen and Michael Conner.

Cécile B. Evans, Hyperlinks or it didn’t happen (2014). Still frame from HD video. Courtesy of Seventeen. Media saturation in the internet’s “cut & paste” ecology has become so naturalized that contemporary film’s collaged aspects are not readily considered. Who are the subjects in, for example, a Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch film? And for whom do they perform? When I show these films in my class, my students switch tabs in their browsers, Snapchat each other, like photos, fav tweets—often on multiple screens at once—then state that this “work is about strange fake-tanned kids’ search for a toilet.” What has made this answer stay in my mind pertains to the word “about.” When used for these works, the banal statement “this work is about…” registers as a crisis of categorical closure that the simultaneous existence of disparate, accumulated content on a single screen constantly thwarts. Central to Cécile B. Evans’ show Hyperlinks at Seventeen Gallery in London is the video-essay, Hyperlinks or it didn’t happen, displayed on a high-resolution TV with headphone cords installed at a comfortable cartoon-watching height in a corner of the space. Entering at the opposite corner, I navigate the gallery space, attempting to link the objects together—a prosthetic leg atop an upturned Eames chair replica near a rubber plant that counterbalances a plexiglass structure supporting 3D-printed arms (One Foot In The Grave, 2014), another Eames replica sitting in one corner (just a chair), various prints on the floor and walls—before sitting down, cross-legged, on a thick-pile rug strewn with postcard-sized images. The film begins with a super high-resolution render of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman’s head floating over the shimmering image of a jellyfish. “I’m not magic, and please don’t call me uncanny,” says a synthetically-augmented human voice. “I’m just a bad copy made too perfectly, too soon.” The video lingers on Hoffman’s face. His lips do not move — at least, not in sync with the voice claiming to be the bad copy. “Fuck. Fuck FUCKING FUCK! I am full of him.” An audience laughter track plays. The bad copy’s hair flutters as his head bobs. The follicles on his nose look like they’d be the perfect environment for a blackhead to take up residence. The subject floating on the screen does not symbolize Hoffman, rather, it is an improper metaphor for the actor’s “untimely death’; for anything that transcends description, yet is saturated with meaning nonetheless. Hyperlinks is so full of meaning that, as the voice suggests, it is set to burst.

Evans wants us to feel uncomfortable at the absence of an uncanny feeling, and by referring to this lack directly in the monologue of the simulated voice, she sets up a relation the viewer and this, a highly stylized, digital avatar. Hoffman, the image-thing, is not really a metaphor, nor is he really a copy, a simulation, or even a simulacrum of a more-real body. Hoffman, the image-thing, is literal and actual, perhaps more so to the viewer than Phillip Seymour Hoffman, the flesh-and-blood human or his “untimely death” was/will/could ever be. In her 2010 essay A Thing Like You and Me, Hito Steyerl defines the image as a thing whose “immortality… originates… from its ability to be xeroxed, recycled, and reincarnated.” [1] Like the postcards strewn throughout Hyperlinks, the floating, self-referential Hoffman points out a literal truth: Hoffman’s head is an “improper metaphor” [2] for the image that it actually is. Catachresis, a term we can employ for such “improper metaphors,” is a forced extension of meaning employed when “when no proper, or literal, term is available.” [3] According to Vivian Sobchack, “catachresis is differentiated from proper metaphor insofar as it forces us to confront” [4] the deficiency and failure of language. In linking across the gap between figural and literal meaning, catachresis marks the precise moment “where living expression states living existence.” [5] The image-things of Evans’ film are similarly analogically hyperlinked to the metaphors they supposedly express. In several sequences, an invisible, green-screened woman wanders a beach with a man who we are told is her partner: the nameless protagonist of Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel, The Invisible Man. For a few seconds, we are confronted with Marlon Brando’s floating head, isolated from scenes deleted from Superman II (1980) to be digitally repurposed for the 2006 film Superman Returns, so the actor could reprise his role as Superman’s father two years after his death. The vocaloid pop-star Hatsune Miku serenades us with the song “Forever Young,” referencing her own immortality in the server banks and USB sticks that confer her identity. We then see, rolling onto a stage in Canada, Edward Snowden gives a TED talk on taking back the web, through a “Telepresence Robot” (an object that looks like a flat-panel screen attached to a Segway). As in a collage, the film splices and dices contiguous space and time, producing a unique configuration of catachretic associations, rather than a continuous narrative about something. Fictions are interwoven with facts, gestures with statements, figures with subjects. Moving about the gallery, the viewer hovers about the strewn postcard-sized images of a counterfeit Kermit the Frog, the render of Philip Seymour Hoffman, and the “hologram” of Michael Jackson. The image-things in Evans’ work seem to exist beyond subject/object distinctions, outside of sense, above their own measure of themselves —selves that they, nonetheless, frequently seem to be measuring and re-measuring. The exhibition comes with its own printed glossary of terms listing references the video makes. The first term in the glossary is “Hyperlink”: A reference to external data that a reader can open either by clicking or by hovering over a point of origin. From Greek hyper (prep. And adv.) “over, beyond, overmuch, above measure.” Here again the figural and literal are called into question. In relation to what can one say the “external” or “beyond” of a hyperlink resides? Why is the etymology for “link” not also given? Though at first, the glossary seems to map the associations, the links, of the disparate imagery presented in the show, it is suggestive of the total-work, presenting an almost anarchistic circulation of imagery as a coherent system. The glossary’s reification of associations gestures towards also the internet’s systemic interpellation of our networked subjecthood; as well as in the film title’s reference to the phrase “Pics, or it didn’t happen,” the show’s contrast between a body’s lifespan and a circulating digital image seems to also echo of our status as “poor copies” of our digital semblances. The image-things in “Hyperlinks” serve – to hijack the words of Scott Bukatman – “as the partial and fragmented representations that they are.” [6] . Through the works’ superfluity of associations and meanings, I found myself considering the impossibility of categorical closure. If totalization means incorporating all disparate things, an ultimate difference erupts: a moment that also signals the deficiency and failure of systemization itself. What makes Evans work successful is this endless calling up of the specter of the beyond, the outside, the everything else, from within the perceived totality of the internet. With the glossary, the totality of the show almost feels performative, gesturing towards the systemic totalizing we confer onto art objects in a gallery space before, after, and, especially, during their imaging. But image-things are considerably more liberated than either objects or subjects. They are more real, precisely because we recognize them as images.

[1] Hito Steyerl, “A Thing Like You and Me,” in The Wretched of the Screen, e-flux Journal (Sternberg Press, 2012), 46–59.

[2] Vivian Carol Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 81.

[3] Richard Shiff, “Cezanne’s Physicality: The Politics of Touch,” in The Language of Art History, ed. Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell (Cambridge University Press, 1991), 150.

[4] Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, 81.

[5] Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language (Routledge, 2004), 72.

[6] Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 40.

Cécile B. Evans, Hyperlinks or it didn't happen (2014). Still frame from HD video. Courtesy of Seventeen. Media saturation in the internet's "cut & paste" ecology has become so naturalized that contemporary film's collaged aspects are not readily considered. Who are the subjects in, for example, a Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch film? And for whom do they perform? When I show these films in my class, my students switch tabs in their browsers, Snapchat each other, like photos, fav tweets—often on multiple screens at once—then state that this "work is about strange fake-tanned kids' search for a toilet." What has made this answer stay in my mind pertains to the word "about." When used for these works, the banal statement "this work is about…" registers as a crisis of categorical closure that the simultaneous existence of disparate, accumulated content on a single screen constantly thwarts. Central to Cécile B. Evans' show Hyperlinks at Seventeen Gallery in London is the video-essay, Hyperlinks or it didn't happen, displayed on a high-resolution TV with headphone cords installed at a comfortable cartoon-watching height in a corner of the space. Entering at the opposite corner, I navigate the gallery space, attempting to link the objects together—a prosthetic leg atop an upturned Eames chair replica near a rubber plant that counterbalances a plexiglass structure supporting 3D-printed arms (One Foot In The Grave, 2014), another Eames replica sitting in one corner (just a chair), various prints on the floor and walls—before sitting down, cross-legged, on a thick-pile rug strewn with postcard-sized images.  

Cécile B. Evans, "Hyperlinks," Installation view. Courtesy of Seventeen. The film begins with a super high-resolution render of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman's head floating over the shimmering image of a jellyfish. "I'm not magic, and please don't call me uncanny," says a synthetically-augmented human voice. "I'm just a bad copy made too perfectly, too soon." The video lingers on Hoffman's face. His lips do not move — at least, not in sync with the voice claiming to be the bad copy. "Fuck. Fuck FUCKING FUCK! I am full of him." An audience laughter track plays. The bad copy's hair flutters as his head bobs. The follicles on his nose look like they'd be the perfect environment for a blackhead to take up residence. The subject floating on the screen does not symbolize Hoffman, rather, it is an improper metaphor for the actor's "untimely death'; for anything that transcends description, yet is saturated with meaning nonetheless. Hyperlinks is so full of meaning that, as the voice suggests, it is set to burst. Evans wants us to feel uncomfortable at the absence of an uncanny feeling, and by referring to this lack directly in the monologue of the simulated voice, she sets up a relation the viewer and this, a highly stylized, digital avatar. Hoffman, the image-thing, is not really a metaphor, nor is he really a copy, a simulation, or even a simulacrum of a more-real body. Hoffman, the image-thing, is literal and actual, perhaps more so to the viewer than Phillip Seymour Hoffman, the flesh-and-blood human or his "untimely death" was/will/could ever be. In her 2010 essay A Thing Like You and Me, Hito Steyerl defines the image as a thing whose "immortality… originates… from its ability to be xeroxed, recycled, and reincarnated." [1] Like the postcards strewn throughout Hyperlinks, the floating, self-referential Hoffman points out a literal truth: Hoffman's head is an "improper metaphor" [2] for the image that it actually is.  Catachresis, a term we can employ for such "improper metaphors," is a forced extension of meaning employed when "when no proper, or literal, term is available." [3] According to Vivian Sobchack, "catachresis is differentiated from proper metaphor insofar as it forces us to confront" [4] the deficiency and failure of language. In linking across the gap between figural and literal meaning, catachresis marks the precise moment "where living expression states living existence." [5] The image-things of Evans' film are similarly analogically hyperlinked to the metaphors they supposedly express. In several sequences, an invisible, green-screened woman wanders a beach with a man who we are told is her partner: the nameless protagonist of Ralph Ellison's 1952 novel, The Invisible Man. For a few seconds, we are confronted with Marlon Brando's floating head, isolated from scenes deleted from Superman II (1980) to be digitally repurposed for the 2006 film Superman Returns, so the actor could reprise his role as Superman's father two years after his death.

The vocaloid pop-star Hatsune Miku serenades us with the song "Forever Young," referencing her own immortality in the server banks and USB sticks that confer her identity. We then see, rolling onto a stage in Canada, Edward Snowden gives a TED talk on taking back the web, through a "Telepresence Robot" (an object that looks like a flat-panel screen attached to a Segway). As in a collage, the film splices and dices contiguous space and time, producing a unique configuration of catachretic associations, rather than a continuous narrative about something. Fictions are interwoven with facts, gestures with statements, figures with subjects. Moving about the gallery, the viewer hovers about the strewn postcard-sized images of a counterfeit Kermit the Frog, the render of Philip Seymour Hoffman, and the "hologram" of Michael Jackson. The image-things in Evans' work seem to exist beyond subject/object distinctions, outside of sense, above their own measure of themselves —selves that they, nonetheless, frequently seem to be measuring and re-measuring. The exhibition comes with its own printed glossary of terms listing references the video makes. The first term in the glossary is "Hyperlink":               A reference to external data that a reader can open either by clicking or by hovering over a point of origin. From Greek hyper (prep. And adv.) "over, beyond, overmuch, above measure." Here again the figural and literal are called into question. In relation to what can one say the "external" or "beyond" of a hyperlink resides? Why is the etymology for "link" not also given? Though at first, the glossary seems to map the associations, the links, of the disparate imagery presented in the show, it is suggestive of the total-work, presenting an almost anarchistic circulation of imagery as a coherent system. The glossary's reification of associations gestures towards also the internet's systemic interpellation of our networked subjecthood; as well as in the film title's reference to the phrase "Pics, or it didn't happen," the show's contrast between a body's lifespan and a circulating digital image seems to also echo of our status as "poor copies" of our digital semblances. The image-things in "Hyperlinks" serve – to hijack the words of Scott Bukatman - "as the partial and fragmented representations that they are." [6] . Through the works' superfluity of associations and meanings, I found myself considering the impossibility of categorical closure. If totalization means incorporating all disparate things, an ultimate difference erupts: a moment that also signals the deficiency and failure of systemization itself. What makes Evans work successful is this endless calling up of the specter of the beyond, the outside, the everything else, from within the perceived totality of the internet. With the glossary, the totality of the show almost feels performative, gesturing towards the systemic totalizing we confer onto art objects in a gallery space before, after, and, especially, during their imaging. But image-things are considerably more liberated than either objects or subjects. They are more real, precisely because we recognize them as images.

[1] Hito Steyerl, “A Thing Like You and Me,” in The Wretched of the Screen, e-flux Journal (Sternberg Press, 2012), 46–59.

[2] Vivian Carol Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 81.

[3] Richard Shiff, “Cezanne’s Physicality: The Politics of Touch,” in The Language of Art History, ed. Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell (Cambridge University Press, 1991), 150.

[4] Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, 81.

[5] Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language (Routledge, 2004), 72.

[6] Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 40.

I wrote a short piece for Grafik Magazine’s Screenshot feature: Moravec’s Paradox states that ‘low-level’ sensorimotor skills require far more computational resources than ‘high-level’ abstract reasoning. In general terms, this translates into the doctrine that computers are very good at solving some types of problems, humans at others. Picking out the face of a loved one in a packed crowd and walking over to embrace them is laughably easy for a human to do, but not a robot. Alternatively, calculating the square-root of 1,276,433,9 takes a cheap pocket calculator a few nanoseconds. As for a human? Well, try it out for yourself * Sustained by these principles, a new breed of machine/human hybrid systems have begun infecting our social and economic networks. Rather than imitate tasks that humans can do effortlessly, these programs are built to work with us, allowing the distinct strengths of human and ‘artificial’ intelligences to coalesce. One particularly intriguing example of this is the reCaptcha password system. Maintained by Google, reCaptcha is employed hundreds of millions of times every day, according to Google’s own promotional blurb, to ‘stop spam, read books’. You yourself — perhaps without knowing it — have taken part in a vast online act of computation, donating a short burst of your highly evolved pattern recognition skill to Google’s project of digitising every one of the world’s printed books. The reCaptcha system is doubly fascinating in regards Moravec’s Paradox because it marks the meeting-point between low-level and high-level computable problems. Every password is guessable given enough time and computer resources. Alternatively, the smudged word on page 286, line forty three of the Magna Carta is incredibly difficult for a computer to recognise. If it fails, a different smudge with a different ‘solution’ is pulled from the database, ensuring your email account remains secure. Whilst determining whether or not you are a human the reCaptcha software quietly hijacks your biological brain, translating the task it has been allotted to protect your data into a moment of distributed, invisible labour. The question is: who or what is using who or what, for what or whom? Systems like reCaptcha could be hailed as the birth of a ‘world brain’: a thinking web connecting everyone on Earth into a vast meta-mind capable of incredible feats of computation. The truth, however, is both far more mundane and far more profound in its implications. A generation or two ago we envisaged the future as a place where intricate machines would carry out most menial tasks, leaving humans free to contemplate their place in the universe, embrace loved ones in crowds, and sunbathe under the depleted ozone layer. Instead, we have inherited a world where humans carry out menial tasks at the bequest of machines, whilst maintaining the illusion that it is we, personally, who have benefited from each transaction. Every click and swipe of your finger is a collaboration between invisible entities — corporate, synthetic or not-even-invented yet. Next time you scan your own produce at the supermarket, track your eating and exercise habits, and upload them to a corporately maintained database, follow the advice of a piece of software on which stock to sell, or which car to buy, search Google for a weird string of misspelt terms, or retweet a Twitter bot, you are taking part in a vast experiment that has already evolved beyond any single person or machine’s ability to comprehend. The future of information is augmented, symbiotic, invisible and incessant. But does it belong to users? Corporations? Or semi-autonomous machines? Only you and your synthetic assistants can decide. * The answer, according to my smartphone, is 3572.7215116770576

Augmented hole

An experimental movie featuring thoughts about wearable/fashionable technology, 3d printing, audio visual production and the deconstruction of reality. It was produced with a headmounted web-cam. I was wearing it half the monday to test how it feels and what it means to record everything you see and hear. The computer was processing the live image in a deconstructing way, doing basicaly the opposite of "augmented reality". In the evening I prodcued the soundtrack and cut together the movie. So the movie can be seen as a compressed view on my activities on this specific monday.Cast: leaving the planet

The digital turn, and with it increased use of location-aware technologies, has yieldedinnovative image applications and posed new questions about the status and value of theimage. These applications rely on algorithmically defined relations between the viewing subject and the world viewed, offering robust alternatives to the visual economies of thepast. If we take seriously Heidegger’s insights regarding the Welt-bild as a metaphor for themodern era, the algorithmic reconfiguration of subject-object relations in this emerging visual regime potentially offers insights – and a metaphoric alternative – through which wecan reflect upon the current era. This essay uses two entry points to explore this possiblereconfiguration, and with it, the question of value. Downloadable applications such asPhotosynth aggregate location-tagged photographs into a near-seamless whole, and offer a way to consider such issues as collaborative authorship of the image, unstable points of view,and the repositioning of subject-object relationships – all elements that fundamentally challenge Western representational norms dominant in the modern era. In this new regime,the spatial referents of greatest value are points of uniqueness sought out and built upon by the program’s algorithms -- and not those perceived by the viewer. The viewer is in turnfree to explore an extensive and dynamic image space unconstrained by (and indeed, withoutaccess to) an authorized or ‘correct’ viewing position. A second case, built upon certainaugmented reality applications, works by ‘recognizing’ particular spaces and, through the useof computationally enhanced viewing screens, superimposing new images over real space. Inthis case, a system of virtual spatial annotation depends upon the ‘correct’ positioning of the viewer (and portable computing device) in the world. The virtual image gives the vieweraccess to an encoded and location-based domain of signification, augmenting her encounters with the world and potentially transforming the meaning of its sights. The two cases standin a rough reciprocal relationship, one loosening our spatial moors and leaving us to wander

I want to read about Augmented Reality. Tech developments IRL; techno-utopian / transhuman dreams, and hard-fought aspirations; and any sci-fictional dystopian nightmares you know of. Articles and academic papers especially welcome, but what sci-fi stories have dealt imaginatively with Augmented Reality? Where's it going? And who is worried?

Google Glass seems to offer us the best Augmented Reality possibilities at the moment, but it all feels a bit geeky and mundane. Who is really thinking outside the box?

Note: I'm not as interested in Virtual Reality here - an old paradigm which was written about extensively in the 90s. Thanks

Bruce Sterling Augmented World keynote speech http://t.co/PGDghq8aTS – Ian 'Cat' Vincent (catvincent) http://twitter.com/catvincent/status/344381501489676288

Excited and privileged to be in this show, opening tomorrow (May 25th)… Thanks to prostheticknowledge for this preview:

RUN COMPUTER RUN Art and Tech festival held at RUA RED gallery, Dublin, opens this Friday 24th to July 13th.

RUN COMPUTER RUN @ GLITCH 2013 is an arts festival focused on examining artistic responses to cultural, economic and social factors that currently affect the evolution of the Internet. The festival features four exhibitions, eight workshops, a symposium featuring leading thinkers and curators in the field of New Media Art, and a showcase of short films.

One show, ‘Examining Aesthetics’ features creatives and groups in the top of the field: FIELD, Pixel Noizz, Casey Reas and Marius Watz. Another show, ‘Economics + The Immaterial’, is an augmented reality exhibit by design to explore the value of immaterial goods:

How do we give value to immaterial goods? How do we buy and sell digital images? What is the relationship between economics and digital aesthetics? How can curators and artists create new platforms and models for the creation of economic exchange? These are some of the questions that this show attempts to answer. We are currently accepting artwork (video, jpg, gifs, 3d models or HTML content) that will feature in a unique gallery-based exhibition. The exhibition is composed of two parts – a gallery-sited virtual show, and the online production and distribution of materially-realised limited-edition goods.

A collection of great creatives have contributed here: Francoise Gamma, Yoshi Sodeoka, Lorna Mills, Benjamin Gaulon, Rollin Leonard, A Bill Miller, Emilio Gomariz, Andreas Nicolas Fischer, Emilio Vavarella, Debbie Guinnane + J. M. Bowers, Pinar & Viola, Chiara Passa, Reed + Rader, Daniel Rourke + Alex Myers, Alain Vonck, Jonas Lund, Emilie Gervais, Raquel Meyers, Benjamin Berg, Eutechnik, Andrew Healy, Linda Kostowski and Sascha Pohflepp, Geraldine Juárez, and … err … me … If you have a smartphone with the Layar app, you will be able to see the submissions when the corresponding AR markers for each artist will be available from the website. The third show, ‘Beyond The White Cube’, looks at art outside the gallery space and on the internet:

The goal of Beyond The White Cube is to explore and question how artworks made for Internet and mobile platforms can be transformed and reconceived for the gallery. Taking work that was originally conceived for other platforms of viewing and interaction and placing within a gallery context raises questions about the relationship between the digital and the physical.

It features works from Constant Dullaart and Evan Roth. The fourth show, ‘Remaining Anonymous’, looks at artist works looks at the connection between online + offline life:

As the Internet increasingly embeds itself within our everyday lives, our online identities have begun to connect to our offline lives, making public information and our activities. The Internet is a space where data is archived, indexed, and often made publicly available. With the rise of identity-centric social networks like Facebook, it is increasingly difficult to remain anonymous online. The inherent sociality and default to public nature of these platforms leave our digital traces freely available to be collected and manipulated beyond our control. As our online data fuels commercial concerns how much of our digital identities do we really own, and what is the true price of giving away our access or control? How can we circumvent the policies these platforms put in place to regain the rights to our privacy? Are our rights to anonymity slowing fading? As part of our online exhibition, the curator has selected work by Paolo Cirio, Benjamin Gaulon and Martial Geoffre-Rouland. These works serve to highlight how traces of digital data left online can be commodified and re-appropriated questioning privacy online.

You can find out more about the exhibitions, artists and events at the official website here

"We're trying to work out whether places have memories and if so, how can we help people relate to these memories," says Tim Cole, a lecturer in History at the University of Bristol.

His project, Reflecting the Past, will see augmented reality mirrors deployed in the saloon of the ship, SS Britain, to allow visitors to "glimpse characters from the past in a fragmentary, fleeting kind of way". When in situ in September, the content will not be triggered by the visitor but played on a random loop, he adds. "Sometimes you'll see things and sometimes you won't. We want to emphasise the view that the past isn't easy to get at. The past leaves it traces but they're not there on demand in the present."

The latter half of the 20th century saw the built environment merged with media space, and architecture taking on new roles related to branding, image and consumerism. Augmented reality may recontextualise the functions of consumerism and architecture, and change in the way in which we operate within it.

A film produced for my final year Masters in Architecture, part of a larger project about the social and architectural consequences of new media and augmented reality.Cast: Keiichi Matsuda

Whether the Google books settlement passes muster with the U.S. District Court and the Justice Department, Google's book search is clearly on track to becoming the world's largest digital library. No less important, it is also almost certain to be the last one. Google's five-year head start and its relationships with libraries and publishers give it an effective monopoly: No competitor will be able to come after it on the same scale. Nor is technology going to lower the cost of entry. Scanning will always be an expensive, labor-intensive project. Of course, 50 or 100 years from now control of the collection may pass from Google to somebody else—Elsevier, Unesco, Wal-Mart. But it's safe to assume that the digitized books that scholars will be working with then will be the very same ones that are sitting on Google's servers today, augmented by the millions of titles published in the interim.

That realization lends a particular urgency to the concerns that people have voiced about the se