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Philosophy

Gibbering Fools and Social Signals

The performative essence of the psychological theatre of contemporary social media is of a human subject that exists and persists as foundationally divided against itself in, through and as the production (and reflexive reproduction) of the remedial language and simplified visual grammars that maximally amplify this signal of uniqueness and individuality – even as the […]

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Philosophy

What does AI mean for us all?

An interesting thing about Artificial lntelligence so rapidly acquiring such an eloquent aptitude to mimic, engage and constructively deceive us is that this ensemble of technologies do not in any comprehensive sense actually understand us – we and our intricately stochastic behaviours are merely so many numbers and statistical (as probabilistic) relationships or correlations and […]

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Philosophy

Automating Creativity?

Does generative AI art limit or unleash our creative potential as artists, as human beings? If you consider our relationship to the visual data of the historical corpus of human creativity, the ability to automate creativity does not remove a discerning aesthetic choice from the this process. If nothing else, the sheer volume and diversity […]

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Philosophy

Generative Art is Old

Generative AI is changing the world but it doesn’t really take much imagination to understand the transformative cultural shift invoked by this new technology is really only the revisitation of what has come before. Creativity in the visual arts has almost exclusively been a process defined by the endless revisitation and recursively self-propagating evolution of […]

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Philosophy

Mass Hysteria and Social Media

Mass hysteria in the age of social media is not any kind of an exception, it is the rule. The endless tesseracts of obsessively narcissistic taxidermy in filtered montage of body and culture may once have adorned our walls and our family photo albums but now populate our mobile devices, our cultures and our #imagination. […]

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Philosophy

All Media is Social Media

All media is social media. (It’s long past time to tear that bandaid off.) The degree to which the media consumers can engage with and influence that media has certainly undergone some dramatic revisions in recent years but at heart this all remains a social communications system. It is also worth acknowledging that, while the […]

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Philosophy

Platonic Beauty in Generative Art

Artificial Intelligence has no experience of #beauty beyond its exposure to the corpus of training data with which its neural network weights and biases are programmatically refined. Despite this, it can return to us an image which we recognise as being in some way beautiful. The question that occurs to me is that of whether […]

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Philosophy

Generative Uncertainty

The technologies with which we once aspired to any kind of teleological (or explanatory as aesthetic) closure and epistemological certainty have now proved much more effective in generating the inverse case.

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Philosophy

Insanity

Only the truly insane could ever see some kind of beauty or attraction in violence and war. It is because the tattered flags and broken bodies they invoke make the dark tar of their own hollow souls seem something less haunted, less futile. These are strange mad beasts and many of them are witless fools […]

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Philosophy

Should we Pause Artificial Intelligence?

Observe how we fear the generative mechanisms of our own self-reproduction. Language lives through us just as we do through it and were it not that the developers and the discoveries will unlikely be put back in their genie bottles any time soon, we might successfully regulate the rapidly percolating uncertainties that our own unbounded […]

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Philosophy

Conflict as Communication

It is precisely because conflict is a kind of communication that it persists so far beyond the infancy of our species. Artefacts and entities of communication remain in this world for as long as they do through the many ways they endlessly reproduce themselves both through and as us. War, fear and hatred perennially percolate […]

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Philosophy

War

War is a widow, an orphan, a dusty grave and a lonely field of grief and sorrow. Image: stable diffusion.