Critical Topics: AI Images is an undergraduate class delivered for Bradley University in Spring 2023. It is meant to provide an overview of the context of AI art making tools and connects media studies, new media art, and data ethics with current events and debates in AI and generative art.

We need to acknowledge both the politics and the physical impact that AI has on the planet, says scholar Kate Crawford in her new book. At the turn of the 20th century, a German horse took Europe by storm.

This seminar course is an introduction to the concepts, questions, and components that encompass interactive media as it relates to creative expression and critical engagement. Students will learn to analyze interactive media’s constituent parts, engage in readings that critically examine both the impact that interactive media and technology have on culture and societies as well as the ways in which social contexts shape the development and application of these technologies, and apply these concepts in a series of creative exercises. The contexts become apparent by examining interactive media and interactivity through the lenses of relevant critical perspectives including politics, economics, ethics, race, gender, psychology, and the environment. Throughout the semester students will learn and apply critical texts to analyze interactive media and build a vocabulary for making sense of our increasingly mediated world. The course thus serves to introduce a conceptual foundation for students to inform and direct their own creative practice by establishing a lexicon of basic operating definitions and reinforcing a culture of makers capable of critical reflection and awareness. Readings, discussions, research, creative exercises and writing constitute the body of this course.

Around the world, two billion people eat insects regularly. In the US and Europe? Not so much. But, some entrepreneurs think it’s time. We take a tour of the startup cricket farms trying to kickstart a new industry, and sample some insect snacks ourselves.

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Irina Raicu is the director of the Internet Ethics program at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. Views are her own.

Good books about food and ethics?

I am teaching a class this summer called "Digital Futures." It is going to be a seminar-style class where I'm making students read a lot of books about "the future" and then talk about technology, ethics, their relation to the world, and all of that fun stuff.

So if you have any favorite books (fiction, nonfiction, theoretical), games, or films about "the future" please post them in the dang comments.

Philosopher Rosi Braidotti of Utrecht University in the Netherlands delivered the 2017 Tanner Lectures on Human Values this spring at the Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center.  Her talks are jointly titled “Posthuman, All Too Human.” The first, “Memoirs of a Posthumanist,” took place on Wednesday, March 1; the second, “Aspirations of a Posthumanist,” on Thursday, March 2. Professor Braidotti was joined by Professors Joanna Radin (History of Medicine, History) and Rüdiger Campe (German, Comparative Literature) for further discussion on Friday, March 3.   Rosi Braidotti is Distinguished University Professor and founding director of the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht University. Her published works include Patterns of Dissonance: An Essay on Women in Contemporary French Philosophy (1991); Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (1994; 2d ed. 2011); Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (2002); Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (2006); La philosophie, lá où on ne l’attend pas (2009); Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti (2011); and The Posthuman (2013). In 2016 she coedited Conflicting Humanities with Paul Gilroy.     Professor Braidotti has been an elected board member of the Consortium of Humanities Centres and Institutes since 2009. She is also an honorary fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and a member of the Academia Europaea. She has been awarded honorary degrees by the University of Helsinki and the University of Linkoping. In 2005, she was knighted into the Order of the Netherlands by Queen Beatrix.

SONIC ACTS ACADEMY #Additivism: An Encounter with The Fluid Outside 28 February 2016 - De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, the Netherlands --- A talk and Q&A session by Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke about The 3D Additivist Manifesto + The 3D Additivist Cookbook and the artist’s own research and practice in relationship to #Additivism, activism, and critical/poetic approaches to 3D printing. #Additivism is a collaboration between artist and activist Morehshin Allahyari and writer/artist/academic Daniel Rourke. In March 2015 they released The 3D Additivist Manifesto: a call to push additive manufacturing technologies to their absolute limits and beyond, into the realm of the speculative, the provocative and the weird. They then issued a call for submissions for a radical ‘Cookbook‘ of blueprints, designs, 3D print templates, and essays on the topics raised by their Manifesto including text and projects on environmental ethics, objects in movements for social and political change, the renewed contemporary significance of the artist manifesto by the likes of the Accelerationist and Xenofeminist movements, and the potential of radical intervention in contemporary technocapitalism.Cast: Sonic Acts

In a famous scene from the original Jurassic Park, Ian Malcolm (played by Jeff Goldblum), is lunching with John Hammond. They are discussing the ethics of building a theme park of dinosaurs and Goldblum's character says:

Sarah Perry is a guest blogger who blogs at Carcinisation and is the author of Every Cradle is a Grave: Rethinking the Ethics of Birth and Suicide.

I distinguish the ethics of transhumanism from a related metaphysical position which I refer to as “speculative posthumanism.” Speculative posthumanism holds that posthumans might be radically non-human and thus unintelligible in human terms.

Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom began thinking of a future full of human enhancement, nanotechnology and cloning long before they became mainstream concerns. Bostrom approaches both the inevitable and the speculative using the tools of philosophy, bioethics and probability.

Nick is Professor in the Faculty of Philosophy at Oxford University and founding Director of the Future of Humanity Institute and of the Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology within the Oxford Martin School. He's also the co-founder and chair of both the World Transhumanist Association, which advocates the use of technology to extend human capabilities and lifespans, and the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.

TEDxOxford is organised by University of Oxford students, aiming to bring together the young minds of tomorrow's world with the movers and shakers of today. TEDxOxford is kindly sponsored by Neptune Investment Management - http://www.neptunefunds.com

In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations)

Huddled within one of the most influential theories of human desire and the destiny of democracy is an image of history and its future. This image is of a horizon. In lectures delivered at the École Pratique des Hautes Études from 1933 to 1939, Alexandre Kojève argued that the horizon of universal human recognition (“democracy”) was already in the nature of human desire but, paradoxically, had to be achieved through concrete struggles that intensified political life. These struggles were dependent on and waged against the background of human finitude. Yet, at the end of these battles, when the horizon had been breached, the world and the humans within it would be a form of the undead.

What was the future of this image? And what is its future now? Is it “huddled within,” or is it the architectural framework on which affective and institutional futures were built and now face us? What other imagistic architecture of human being and politics might have made an alternative history and fut

Monsters demonstrate, monsters alert us: whether or not the etymologies relating the word to both “monstro” (I show) and “moneo” (I warn), are correct, monsters act as a moral compass. The physical prodigy becomes a test of ethics and, in the move between literal and figurative, displays the crucial role fictions play in the establishment of value and the common sense. Or, one might say in the era when the Humanities are under such stress, thinking with monsters shows how an understanding of Nature, and of medicine, law and custom is impossible without cultural expression.

Information ethics has become a scholarly growth industry in recent years, especially through the work of Rafael Capurro, the  founder of the International Center forInformation Ethics (ICIE). The maturity of the debate is reflected in the leading question of the International ICIE Symposium 2004 in Karlsruhe, Germany: how isembodied human life possible within local cultural traditions and the horizon of a global digital environment? The Symposium  explores ethical ramifications of thisquestion by encouraging research and reflection on effects of the Internet and postInternet developments of digital networks on a wide range of phenomena, includingcommunity, democracy, customs, language, media, economic development, and cultural memory. These are valuable projects, and much can be learned from themabout the causal relations in which digital networks in their current form are implicated. 

The concept of openness is often employed as part of a radical critique of the closed-off worlds of what might be called ‘traditional media’. It is variously used to urge for the right to transparency, the ethics of sharing, the value of re-use and the benefits of connecting.

This series of research seminars will explore various aspects of openness. Special attention will be given to the benefits and drawbacks of openness, and to the many possibilities openness offers for the future of media production, use and critique.

FRIDAY NOVEMBER 12, 2010

“Content for all, revenues for some.” For this session we explore the theory behind terms and terminologies. What do the terms ‘free’ and ‘open’ mean in their current contexts? How are they used and in what new political condition do they gain resonance? What is open, how open is it, and for whom? Can anything be learned by reconsidering the work of the grand master of openness as a political concept, Karl Popper? Or are there historical examples of open societies and the commons we can draw from to answer these questions? How do we situate unpaid, crowd-sourced content made profitable by companies such as Google in relation to freedom and openness? We should nuance the definition of data or information, asking whether it comes from open archives versus audiovisual material from emerging artists, established reporters or other cultural producers. Is a resource still open if a user’s attention to it is then sold to advertisers? Indeed, is openness an absolute (either/or) concept, is does it make sense to think of openness as a scale? Alternatively, is it possible to develop an ethics of closure? There is no way back to the old intellectual property rights regimes. But how then are cultural producers going to make a living? How can we create sustainable sources of income for the ‘digital natives’? How can we reconcile the now diverging interests of professionals and amateurs?

Speakers Yann Moulier Boutang, University of Technology of Compiègne, editor of Quarterly French Review MULTITUDES Sustainablility of Free and Open: from Terra Nullius to the new Commons A comparison can be made between the former commons before the application of the terra nullius principle of european colonization and enclosures of primitive accumulation in Western countries and the new commons of the digital era. Like the public sector, the open source and free movement are yielding for free positive externalities to market economy without the ressources granted by state. Unless you tackle with the revenu issue, like the copyleft movement or the Creatives commons licences, the model has to be highly funded through private sponsorship or public subvention with all the disadvantages in terms of freedom. Economic sustainability of the new commons is a crucial political issue.

Dymitri Kleiner, author of Telekommunist Manifesto telekommunisten.net/​ The Telekommunist Manifesto The Telekommunist Manifesto is an exploration of class conflict and property, born in the realization of the primacy of economic capacity in social struggles. Emphasis is placed on the distribution of productive assets and their output. The interpretation here is always tethered to the understanding that wealth and power are intrinsically linked, and only through the former can the later be achieved. As a collective of intellectual workers, the work of Telekommunisten is very much rooted in the free software and free culture communities. However, a central premise of this Manifesto is that engaging in software development and the production of immaterial cultural works is not enough. The communization of immaterial property alone cannot change the distribution of material productive assets, and therefore cannot eliminate exploitation, only workers self-organization of production can.

Simona Levi is a multidisciplinary artist born in Italy and established in Barcelona since 1990. She is the Director of Conservas, a cultural activity centre. Since 2000, she has directed the arts festival INn MOTION which takes place at the Centre of Contemporary Culture of the city of Barcelona. She is an outstanding activist in European social movements in the area of free circulation of knowledge and the right to housing. She is also involved in several artistic and activist platforms. She is co-founder of EXGAE, a civil organization that defends from the abuses of the cultural industry trade groups. fcforum.net/​

Nate Tkacz, Melbourne University Death Knell for Open Politics Openness has become the master category of politics in network cultures. Whereas recent instantiations of the open cannot be understood without reference to 80s software cultures, the idea of openness extends beyond this specific context: Openness has a history. Most famously, it was mobilised by Karl Popper as a critique of totalitarian knowledge and to justify market organisation and the related (neo)liberal disposition. In this presentation I make some critical observations regarding the function of openness both in contemporary network cultures and in the writings of Popper. By placing these distinct but related iterations in dialogue, I hope to point out that there is much more at stake in the battle for openness than its mere realisation. nathanieltkacz.net/​

Moderator: Geert Lovink, founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures, is a Dutch-Australian media theorist and critic. He holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne and in 2003 was at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Queensland. In 2004 Lovink was appointed as Research Professor at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam and Associate Professor at University of Amsterdam. He is the founder of Internet projects such as nettime and fibreculture. His recent book titles are Dark Fiber (2002), Uncanny Networks (2002) and My First Recession (2003). In 2005-06 he was a fellow at the WissenschaftskollegBerlin Institute for Advanced Study where he finished his third volume on critical Internet culture, Zero Comments (2007). networkcultures.org/​Cast: network cultures

In the past year, I've written roughly 5,000 pages of scholarly literature, most on very tight deadlines. But you won't find my name on a single paper.

I've written toward a master's degree in cognitive psychology, a Ph.D. in sociology, and a handful of postgraduate credits in international diplomacy. I've worked on bachelor's degrees in hospitality, business administration, and accounting. I've written for courses in history, cinema, labor relations, pharmacology, theology, sports management, maritime security, airline services, sustainability, municipal budgeting, marketing, philosophy, ethics, Eastern religion, postmodern architecture, anthropology, literature, and public administration. I've attended three dozen online universities. I've completed 12 graduate theses of 50 pages or more. All for someone else.

You've never heard of me, but there's a good chance that you've read some of my work. I'm a hired gun, a doctor of everything, an academic mercenary. My customers

Trolleyology encapsulates the deepest tensions in our moral outlook. To tease out our moral intuitions, philosophers have come up with ever more ingenious scenarios. The trolley is usually racing towards five unfortunates and the reader is presented with various means to rescue them at the cost of another life, involving props such as obese gentlemen, footbridges, trapdoors and lazy Susans. Some of the examples are so complex that, in the words of one exasperated philosopher, this branch of ethics “makes the Talmud look like Cliffs Notes [a US brand of study guides].” But at its root the trolley problem is a philosophical detective story, attracting some of the smartest minds in moral philosophy.

One of them is Jeff McMahan of Rutgers University. McMahan is a good liberal, open to debate on any topic—except tea. Green tea is sent to him every two months from the Indian estate where it is grown. His cup of tea has to be brewed in a certain way: steeped for precisely six minutes in dist