This essay elaborates the nature and consequences of compression and noise, understood as interdependent phenomena determining current aesthetic regimes and modes of perception in the “cognitive co...

Generative design is the artistic practice where an artist uses external systems (rules, algorithms, organic processes) to complete an artwork. Commonly utilized in video game design, generative design suggests an aesthetics of human-machine interaction, as machine decision-making partially shapes the experience of the player. In generative games, then, the relationship between designer, system, and audience dynamically shapes the conception, production, and reception of the game as a text.The interaction between designer, system, and audience unfolds in three ways. Firstly, by applying (...) generative methods, the designer is explicitly de-centered, instead creating an environment in which systems somewhat-autonomously interact with entities. Secondly, generative games frame players as both entities within the game-world and agents from outside of it. Thirdly, generative games produce unexpected or emergent outcomes. Emergence is a product of the tension between decisions made by designer, system, and player(s). In essence, generative games produce novel worlds into which players are thrown, forcing them to learn to dwell within them. As Gianni Vattimo argues in Art’s Claim to Truth, in such artworks where “the hermeneutic circle is conceived in more existentialist terms, the act of interpretation is dramatized” (85).Further analysis of the interpretive drama found in games which utilize generative methods, especially as these texts continue to pervade popular culture and daily life, can unpack theories of intentionality, presence, and creativity in modern digital contexts. To elaborate these theories, I examine generative methods found in Hello Games’s No Man’s Sky. In this game the relationship between designer, text, and player produces emergent narratives with each subjective experience of the text, suggesting that human-machine interaction is inherently processual and relational. (shrink)

The task of negotiating present ecological breakdowns is entangled crucially with the logistics of managing a globally distributed observing infrastructure. Composed of sensors aboard orbiting sate...

1. Artificial Intelligence is an ambiguous umbrella term. Until today there is no uniform definition of AI and the term carries several meanings. As exemplary, I will give two definitions of AI tha...

While the notions of creativity and agency have each received considerable attention in the literature on computational systems, the connections between these two concepts have rarely been addressed. In this paper, I contribute to this debate by discussing the results of an online questionnaire aimed at testing the interactions between the attribution of agency and creativity to human and artificial subjects. Findings of the study indicate that the ascription of agentive capabilities to a subject is positively correlated to the level (...) of creativity attributed to the process they perform. This result supports the claim that a better understanding of the steps needed in order to achieve agency can help also shed light on the development of creativity in computational systems. I conclude the paper by suggesting that the technological revolution of the last decades is compelling us to re-think concepts such as authorship, ownership, agency, and creativity that, so far, have been typically attributed to humans only, and to consider how these notions are being transformed in dynamics of interaction between humans and machines. (shrink)

In machine learning literature, the concept of expression is seldom addressed as a general term in relation to information construction and data. The term more often carries a narrower meaning and refers to human bodily, emotional, or artistic dimensions that are recorded to train a model. However, this paper discusses a view in which expression is understood as any human sensory realm that can bring incidents explicit through the act of “pressing out,” as the early etymology of expression indicates. Also, (...) all the sensory data that are used to train a machine learning model and the data the trained model gives as an output are considered meaningful through their expressive mediality—a form that is actively produced and can therefore be subjected to critical phenomenological analysis. This paper contrasts nonverbal expressions with categorical or linguistic expressions and asks, “What do eye movements express when they are used in training a machine learning model? What kind of expression arises in linguistic models? What could be considered aesthetic data (and what would it express)?”For philosopher John Dewey, instinctive reactions in human behavior that for example exhibit mere discharge of an emotion should be separated from purposeful expressions. However, in machine learning, the two Deweyan positions (instinctive and intentional) collapse, as artificial expressions are purely simulations of learned logic. Therefore, the phenomenological question of this paper is traced back to the original stimulus and its human annotators. In this paper, philosopher Don Ihde’s experimental phenomenology explains how appearances can be attended to without subsuming them under any assumptions, whereas art theory—arising especially from philosopher Dieter Mersch’s thinking—provides an understanding of the mediality of expression. This paper introduces examples from machine learning that are not generally considered expressive but are used for regular tasks, such as object detection, and provides an alternative approach from aesthetics and artistic research that understands these modalities as expressive. If data are understood as expressive, it can be critically assessed how current machine learning models constitute knowledge. (shrink)

In considering future imaginings of art and Artificial Intelligence (AI), we point out two key premises to our approach: the human-machine relation without opposition between the two terms; and the implications of artificial intelligence within practice-led art practices. According to Gilbert Simondon, there is a biological and technological evolution that does not separate nature and technics or culture and technics, since what is defined by human nature is already part of a technological system. Yuk Hui criticizes the idea of technological (...) singularity supported by strong artificial intelligence which converges on itself. However, there is also the possibility of multiple bifurcations emerging from technodiverse practices and aesthetics. On algorithmic art, Lev Manovich points out that AI is increasingly culturally influencing our imagination, choices, and behaviours and that it has built its own imagery and cognitive patterns in society. Joanna Zylinska connects the dots between AI, creativity and innovation, which by bringing AI to research into practice-led art practices, opens the problematization of AI to the possibilities of reprogramming the human sensory-cognitive apparatus. In this paper, we extend these approaches to examine whether these computer systems that enable the processing of big data can or cannot program our imagination, desires, likes, sensations, perceptions and attitudes. Finally, in order to think the worlds built through these emerging AI technologies, we ask what kind of society we want to live in, and what roles we will allow ubiquitous computational technologies, such as AI, to play in our daily lives. (shrink)

The present paper purports to question the status of machine translation as a technique, or even as a technology. The use of new technologies, and more particularly neural machine translation is problematic, because the operating mode of machine translation software is a machinic language processing that relies on the harvesting of potentially infinite databases to feed an artificial intelligence. Such a recursive loop only reinforces the sphere of the same without ever taking into account the risk of radical otherness in (...) all its singularity. This is the spawn of our collective intelligence fed back to us by a network of interconnected algorithms in an endless feedback loop. I contend that translation allows us to overcome the dichotomy between techne and poiesis by opening the space for the emergence of otherness in the translating language that welcomes it. Even though the automaticity of the machine is antinomic with any poetic event, (how) can we, as Derrida puts it, “think together the machine and the event, a machinelike repetition and that which happens/arrives”11. Derrida, “Typewriter Ribbon,” 136. through (machine) translation? (shrink)

Modern and contemporary transhumanism has seen a recent rise in academic and popular relevance; specific naïve metaphysical ideas, such as immortality, have returned with this rise. This article refrains from any ethical or political assessment of transhumanism. Still, it critiques the exact metaphysical or idealistic nature of transhumanism and its pursuit of digital immortality: the idea that, through technological advancements, precisely in Artificial General Intelligence, an immortal virtual “self” will become possible. The article follows the form of Immanuel Kant’s “Paralogisms” (...) from the Critique of Pure Reason, where Kant is concerned with the substantial, immortal nature of the soul and its experiential impossibility. The article will offer theoretical and practical paralogisms (false logical inferences), arguing that the transhumanist claim that digital immortality is possible fundamentally stems from two incorrect major premises. The first concerns the substantial nature of information, which informs the theoretical paralogisms; the second concerns infinite transformation (pure plasticity), which informs the practical paralogisms. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is establish the difference between aesthetics and the philosophy of art. Part of the argument is that only a philosophy of art can give an adequate philosophical account of works of art. The argument is advanced drawing on the writings of Immanuel Kant and Gunter Figal.

Aesthetics and social cognition are two disciplines rarely merged, despite the penetration of artworks into social, moral, and political concerns. In particular, participatory artworks involve direct social interaction and perception, and are more often than not motivated by, and aim towards, ethico-political ends. In the following, I fuse considerations aesthetic with considerations intersubjective, arguing that participatory artworks engage and exploit empathy’s biased character towards a recalibration of our social relationships, namely inclusion and exclusion. Although critics of empathy suggest that its (...) biased, manipulable, and narrow characteristics are detrimental to its moral promise, I argue that participatory artworks are successful intervention methods just insofar as they use these characteristics for their ethico-political gain. This is stimulated by their facilitation of affective, primary intersubjectivity, something I argue is unique to participatory art. After detailing these operations, I suggest that works that seek to address exclusion, rather than those that facilitate inclusion, have a greater potency in addressing and recalibrating empathy, in part owing to their provocation of empathy-related emotions and forms of fellow-feeling such as shame and compassion. (shrink)

Sleep is soothing, silent, and serene, until it is not. Sleep is often troubled, disturbed, or even “disordered” as the medical literature describes it. This paper begins from an extreme form of such disturbance—terrified sleep. Night terrors (pavor nocturnus), in which sleep is violently interrupted, offer important insights into sleep and the methods by which it is studied. The sanitising nature of the medical classification of night terrors as part of a continuum with sleepwalking and yet strikingly distinct from nightmares, (...) leads us into the arms of a more traditional, first-person, phenomenological investigation of night terrors. Without denying the power of both approaches, this paper offers a deconstructive alternative reading of this troubling of sleep through Jean-Luc Nancy’s rethinking of the body, its suffering and materiality. Nancy, and Derrida, help us tarry with the body terrified and trembling in night terrors. First the paper explores the medical incisions within sleep that carve out night terrors, as a delimited phenomenon. This is followed by a consideration of what phenomenology can, and crucially cannot, add to our understanding of night terrors. Next a deconstructive critique of the phenomenological concepts of Leib and Körper is utilised to return to the material body gripped by the night terror. This in turn leads to an alternative account of this parasomnia through a post-Nancean phenomenology of terror as distinct from fear and Angst. The paper closes by drawing out several conclusions about the body, sleep, and phenomenology’s limits when approaching the somnolent. (shrink)

As I sat down to sketch this review of Richard Kearney’s new book on touch, I happened to have received just then in the post a record I had ordered some time ago. It was an album by the French gro...

This article looks closely at one of Paul Cézanne’s portraits of Vallier painted the last year of his life to examine how his (“fugitive”) vision works through his use of colors. The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who in his phenomenology views the body as the primary locus of having and therefore knowing the world, emphasizes the vital role of the body of the artist that must be offered to the world in order to truly manifest the world in painting. It (...) is no wonder that Cézanne’s artwork and thought are stitched into the structure of Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetics in his essay “Eye and Mind,” for Cézanne’s painting bears witness to his own account of aesthetic experience. Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the lived vision that seeks the depth of Being, the lived qualities of the visible world, takes Cézanne’s vision manifested in his portrait of Vallier further to see where the painting as well as Cézanne himself stand in relation to the visible world. (shrink)

The release of Emmanuel Levinas’s Prison Notebooks (Carnets de captivité) as a part of the first tome of his collected works has further illuminated the extent of the philosopher’s preoccupation with art, especially literature. Levinas’s own literary efforts have been well documented, but less attention has been paid to the relationship between the Prison Notebooks and Levinas’s early philosophy of art. In this article, I suggest that much of what Levinas has to say apropos art in his early philosophy can (...) be traced back to meditations undertaken in captivity. I will unearth the influence of the Prison Notebooks in three articles from the 1940ʹs “L’autre dans Proust,” “La réalité et son ombre,” and “La transcendance des mots.” I argue that in Levinas’s early philosophy of art follows two distinct “paths”: the path of eros and the path of sensation. On one hand, Levinas questions how and if literature can do justice to the question of alterity, whereas on the other he seeks to make sense of the relationship between art and sensibility. I argue that in his notebooks Levinas offers an account of the meaning of sensations that forms the basis of his early aesthetics. Thus, the study of the Prison Notebooks is important as it allows us to see how Levinas’s early philosophy of art, including his seminal “La réalité et son ombre,” functions as a continuation of a philosophical project already begun during his time in captivity. (shrink)