In 2011, a loose group of “grumpy futurists” wrote up an extensive list of “Alternatives to the Singularity” in a collaborative Google Document. “The Singularity”, in popular culture and para-religious belief, refers to the point where machine intelligence leaves humans behind.

“Language is easy to capture but difficult to read”, in the words of the poet and media researcher John Cayley.1 Cayley wrote this sentence merely as a footnote to an essay on his “terms of reference”, yet it sums up the whole dilemma of so-called “big data” processing.

Four decades after the book was published, Limit to Growth’s forecasts have been vindicated by new Australian research. Expect the early stages of global collapse to start appearing soon

This talk was delivered as the plenary paper for The 11th Interdisciplinary Social Sciences Conference, Imperial College, London, 2nd August 2016. You can find the full content of the talk beneath the slides in the comments section, or click the gear icon below and select ‘Open speaker notes’ It is presented here under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence – please use as you wish, but always reference and refer back to this post or the slide show.

“Any sufficiently advanced civilisation is indistinguishable from its garbage.” – Bruce Sterling

with: Jean-Marie Boyer, Ewen Chardronnet, Nicolas Maigret, Daniel Rourke, Erin Sexton; moderated by Ryan Bishop

Disnovation Research is a project inquiring into the mechanics and rhetoric of innovation. Considering the "propaganda of innovation" as one of the ideological driving forces of our era, it aims to explore the notions of technological fetishism and solutionism through speculations and diversions by artists and thinkers.

The performance Drone-2000 presents a bestiary of autonomous flying systems powered by dysfunctional algorithms. Here, trusting the autonomy of the machine is not only a discursive concept but a real-life experience shared with the audience, triggering visceral and psychological reactions.

The Disnovation panel highlighted a few outstanding projects on this issue, with Daniel Rourke introducing the #Additivism speculative research project – a collaboration with artist and activist Morehshin Allahyari – followed by Ewen Chardronnet presenting the fifth issue of the Laboratory Planet newspaper.

Haus der Kulturen der Welt Thursday, 4 February 2016

Additivism / #Kipple / #SonicActs