Disintegrator

49. Garden (w/ Anna Greenspan)

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 14:37:36 +0000

We're joined by Anna Greenspan: philosopher, Associate Professor at NYU Shanghai, where she co-directs the Center for AI and Culture, and author of Shanghai Future and China and the Wireless Undertow. Longtime listeners will recognize her twice over — as co-editor of Machine Decision is Not Final and as the author of Capitalism's Transcendental Time Machine.

The occasion is Greenspan's new research: a philosophy of the artificial built through the garden. If AI is now something "grown, not built," the garden raises the question of agency immediately — anyone who tries to make one learns that the thing the garden gardens is the gardener. Greenspan is surveying seven aesthetic garden traditions, and here we tour a few.

References:
Samuel Butler, Erewhon (1872), esp. "The Book of the Machines"
Anna Greenspan, Bogna Konior, Benjamin Bratton and Amy Ireland (eds.), Machine Decision is Not Final: China and the History and Future of Artificial Intelligence (Urbanomic, 2024)
Anna Greenspan, Shanghai Future: Modernity Remade (Hurst/Oxford University Press, 2014)
Anna Greenspan, China and the Wireless Undertow: Media as Wave Philosophy (Edinburgh University Press, 2023)
Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) — the third critique, source of the beautiful and the sublime
Baruch Spinoza, Ethics (1677) — parallelism of mind and body; sad passions and joy
Mou Zongsan (牟宗三), New Confucian philosopher; translated Kant into Chinese, argued the supersensible is accessible through practice
Xiong Shili (熊十力), Mou's teacher; philosophy of contraction and expansion drawn from the I Ching
Nikolai Kondratiev, "The Long Waves in Economic Life" (1925; English translation 1935)
Joseph Schumpeter and the neo-Schumpeterians; Carlota Perez
Thomas S. Mullaney, The Chinese Typewriter: A History (MIT Press, 2017) and The Chinese Computer: A Global History of the Information Age (MIT Press, 2024)
Peter Hall, Cities in Civilization (1998)
Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness; the ikebana essay ("The Japanese Art of Arranged Flowers")
Benjamin Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (MIT Press, 2015)
Gilbert Simondon — invoked by Marek on technological individuation
Sharawadgi — from William Temple, Upon the Gardens of Epicurus (1685)
The ha-ha; Horace Walpole, On Modern Gardening (1770)
David J. Chalmers, "What We Talk to When We Talk to Language Models" (2025)

48. Indifference Engine (w/ Wassim Alsindi & Paul Dylan-Ennis)

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 13:21:50 +0000

We're joined by Paul Dylan-Ennis and Wassim Alsindi, two of crypto's sharpest in-house critics, who arrived at the same place from opposite directions.

Paul is a lecturer at University College Dublin, author of Absolute Essentials of Ethereum, an early speculative realist (co-founder of Speculations), and a member of the Silviculture Society, the informal cypherpunk body that keeps check on the Ethereum Foundation.

Wassim is a chemical physicist turned record-label operator turned MIT Media Lab researcher, founder of 0x Salon in Berlin, and a self-described "deradicalized Bitcoin maximalist." Hell yeah.

We start with Wassim's essay 'Open Swords,' which insists that open source has to die. The utopian horizon of the cypherpunks (Tim May's Crypto Anarchist Manifesto, Eric Hughes' clarion call, Barlow's Declaration) has been repurposed into systems of closure, with Palantir, Anduril, Helsing, and the corporate AI monoliths built on the backs (and skulls) of open source development.

We go hard on the idea of the cypherbunk in general, into computational counter-politics, Nick Land's Crypto-Current, and Wassim's critical concept of necro-primitivism (Bitcoin as an indifference engine that cannot care about anything outside its thermoeconomic event horizon, now awaiting its quantum-computing civil war.)

References:
Wassim Alsindi, "Open Swords" (Akisoma)
Timothy C. May, "The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto" (1988)
Eric Hughes, "A Cypherpunk's Manifesto" (1993)
John Perry Barlow, "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" (1996)
Wassim Alsindi, "The Necroprimitivist Manifesto" (2021) & the Indifference Engine project
Nick Land, Crypto-Current: Bitcoin and Philosophy (Šum edition)
Anna Greenspan, Capitalism's Transcendental Time Machine (2000)
Paul Dylan-Ennis, Absolute Essentials of Ethereum (Routledge, 2024)
Paul Dylan-Ennis, Continental Realism (Zero Books, 2011)
Hannu Rajaniemi, The Quantum Thief (2010)

47. Invocation (w/ E. Elias Merhige and Gavin Gamboa)

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 17:29:32 +0000

E. Elias Merhige is the experimental filmmaker behind Begotten (1989) and its sequels Din of Celestial Birds (2006) and Polia & Blastema: A Cosmic Opera (2022), as well as Shadow of the Vampire and Suspect Zero.

Gavin Gamboa is a composer, pianist, and video artist who wrote the music for Polia & Blastema and works in local-first "digital gardens" and the piano repertoire.

What began as their shared film becomes, here, a way into a single question Elias poses at the top: what is being born through us - and is that thing digesting us on its way out?

From there the conversation moves through desire and digestion as the engine of creation, and what happens when the interval between the wound and the poem collapses to nothing. Merhige treats AI as atavistic rather than alien: a dark mirror, an artificial unconscious, a "necromantic bureaucracy" of dead expressions made responsive, and reads the manuscript and the personal library as older machines through which the dead already speak.

Gamboa holds a more skeptical line, defending manual effort and drawing on Marshall McLuhan's "auto-amputation" and his own experiments training models on his audio.

The guests & their work

Gavin Gamboa: composer, pianist, video artist gavingamboa.net
E. Elias Merhige: filmmaker; his 1989 debut Begotten anchors the "Begotten trilogy" - Begotten on Wikipedia
Polia & Blastema: A Cosmic Opera (2022) — premiere Q&A with all three (Vimeo)

Books & essays cited

Thomas Moynihan, “The GASTRULATION of GEIST: or, an Extended Meditation upon the World-Historical Connection Between Digestion and Simulation,” Vast Abrupt, 8 February 2018, link.
Kate Crawford, "Eating the Future: The Metabolic Logic of AI Slop," e-flux
Federico Campagna, Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality (Bloomsbury, 2018), Bloomsbury

46. Building Doors (w/ Yancey Strickler)

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 15:27:52 +0000

We're joined by Yancey Strickler: writer, cofounder and former CEO of Kickstarter, and the person behind a string of projects that try to give creative life a workable economic form: Bentoism, The Creative Independent, Metalabel, the Dark Forest Collective, and now Artist Corporations and the Dark Forest Operating System. The episode is timely. We recorded in late May, days before Governor Jared Polis signed the Colorado Artist Company Act into law on June 2, 2026 - the country's first "A Corp," a company type where the artist keeps majority control, intellectual property reverts to its maker if the company dissolves, and an artistic mission sits above profit. More than 4,000 creators have already signed up, and several states are drafting their own versions.

Where this show usually works by critique, Strickler builds working alternatives and writes them into law. Our running question throughout: when criticizing the system is the admired move, is building something real the more radical act, or does anything built inside the system end up serving it?

Yancey Strickler's projects

Yancey Strickler — ystrickler.com
Bentoism — bentoism.org
The Creative Independent — thecreativeindependent.com
Metalabel — metalabel.com
New Creative Era (Strickler's podcast with Joshua Citarella) — metalabel.com

Artist Corporations & the law

Artist Corporations — artistcorporations.com
The Colorado Artist Company Act (SB 26-133), annotated full text — artistcorporations.com/law/annotated
Strickler's TED talk, "Forget hustle culture. Behold the Artist Corporation" (2025) — ted.com
News coverage of the signing: The Colorado Sun · The Art Newspaper · ARTnews
Frieze, "Can A-Corps Save the Struggling Artist?" (skeptical take, also previews DFOS) — frieze.com

The private internet, AI & IP

Dark Forest Operating System (DFOS) — app.dfos.com · protocol spec at protocol.dfos.com · code on GitHub
Strickler on DIDs, the AT Protocol and Bluesky ("Antienshittification") — ystrickler.com
Holly+ (Holly Herndon's voice model / licensing experiment) — holly.plus

Books & ideas cited

This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World (Viking, 2019) — thiscouldbeourfuture.com · Penguin Random House
"The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet" (essay, 2019) — original on ystrickler.com · The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet (Metalabel, 2024) — Goodreads
Samuel W. Franklin, The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History (University of Chicago Press, 2023) — press.uchicago.edu
Venkatesh Rao's "cozyweb," — Ribbonfarm

[LIVE AT INDEX] The Datacenter Does Not Exist (Q&A w/ Dena Yago)

Tue, 09 Jun 2026 13:36:17 +0000

Disintegrator's spring tour lecture, love to watch this continue to unfold in real life. Thanks to Index, Montez Radio, Hugh, Elie, the Disintegrator team and especially Dena Yago for joining us. For the visually hxc: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xbWCcHbtWY (good slides).

[NECROLECTURE] The Excarnated Angel: On AI and the Impossibility of Touch

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 16:11:23 +0000

Marek solo ep. To be released on Nuda Mag <3 later this year in text form.
Piece starts like 17 minutes in hahaha.

45. El Apocalipsis Ya Está Aquí (w/ no.investigues)

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 14:46:00 +0000

This episode is entirely in Spanish. English translation is here: https://marekpoliks.com/noinvestigues_transcript.

We are delighted to be joined by the algorithmically contagious memetic research project no.investigues. If you are chronically online, especially if you are familiar with the Spanish-speaking corners of the internet, you must have already interacted with one of the echoes of no.investigues —probably through their wonderful Substack, or in conversation at their Discord book club, or through the 28.research cluster, or most likely through monumental Instagram meme carousels.

Their voice flows through online algorithmic inertia, yet the substance of their discourse exists in the shadow of virality.

In this conversation, we talk about what it means to understand the apocalypse as an asymmetrical phenomenon: no one experiences it at the same time, and clearly not with the same intensity. This polyphonic nature of the apocalypse is amplified by the increasingly atomized and homogeneous global distribution of violence.

Even so, the apocalypse is already here, and we might be better off learning how to inhabit it. Through an extrapolated reading of Ernesto Oroza’s visual archive Desobediencia Tecnológica (Technological Disobedience), documenting repurposed technology in Cuba, we talk about repurposing salvaged discourses into newly assembled modes of thinking that would allow us to confront the roughness of our apocalyptic situation. This invitation resonates with a thread that runs through our conversations ever since Exocapitalism came out: the premise that perhaps the apocalypse and capital are forces not to be treated as enemies, but as inertias of History. Both demand a nuanced engagement with their diverse local articulations of violence. Under this framework, the apocalypse feels like an ineluctable situation, one that cannot be won by fighting.

Instagram: https://instagram.com/no.investigues/
Selected no.investigues substack posts:
Pensamiento apocalíptico, una aproximación: https://substack.com/home/post/p-192881638
La Torre: https://substack.com/home/post/p-191289547
Desobediencia Tecnológica de Ernesto Oroza: https://substack.com/home/post/p-179603849

References: Valencia, Sayak. Capitalismo gore. Barcelona: Melusina, 2010. ISBN: 978-84-96614-87-1. Oroza, Ernesto. Desobediencia tecnológica: La permanencia de lo temporal en Cuba. Ciudad de México: FIEBRE Ediciones, 2025.

44. The Grid (w/ Molly Taft)

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 13:28:43 +0000

Molly Taft, Senior Writer at Wired, joins us to talk datacenters, AI, US power infrastructure, and big energy. You've almost definitely read her work, especially if you live in the US. This episode absolutely ROCKS and is maybe the most grounded and realistic assessment of the role that all of those above forces play together in our social and political moment.

A couple really relevant pieces, including some very very recent pieces.
https://www.wired.com/story/a-new-google-funded-data-center-will-be-powered-by-a-massive-gas-plant/
https://www.wired.com/story/senators-demand-to-know-how-much-energy-data-centers-use/
https://www.wired.com/story/new-bernie-sanders-ai-safety-bill-would-halt-data-center-construction/
https://www.wired.com/story/karen-hao-empire-of-ai-water-use-statistics/
https://www.wired.com/story/data-centers-are-driving-a-us-gas-boom/
https://www.wired.com/story/trump-energy-industry-ai-fossil-fuels-pittsburgh-summit/
https://www.wired.com/story/ai-carbon-emissions-energy-unknown-mystery-research/

Seriously, like, this is the only person I've found to be consistently trustworthy with respect to the intersection of energy reporting and tech. Follow her on X: https://x.com/mollytaft.

She also reccomends a few other pieces that we touch on a little bit:
Tina Nguyen's recent piece on the Pro-Human Declaration (right-wing populism X AI backlash) https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/888841/pro-human-ai-declaration-fli

Gaby del Valle on the forefront of environmentalism and the right: https://harpers.org/archive/2026/04/state-of-nature-gaby-del-valle-acc-conservative-environmentalism/

Anti-renewable energy protests and anti-data center movements: https://heatmap.news/plus/the-fight/spotlight/data-centers-renewables-opposition

43. The Soft (w/ Laura Tripaldi)

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 13:48:52 +0000

We're joined by Laura Tripaldi: material scientist, writer, and researcher at the Center for AI and Culture at NYU Shanghai. You probably know her from Parallel Minds: Discovering the Intelligence of Materials (Urbanomic, 2022), an essay in book form that became a phenomenon in theory and art circles.

Tripaldi's work challenges one of the strongest contentions within the philosophy computation: that intelligence is substrate-indifferent, that it can scale and migrate independent of what carries it. She argues the opposite, that you cannot separate intelligence from the materials through which it is conveyed.

This becomes experimentally clear in her recent essay Substrates Unbound (Antikythera, 2025), where she tracks biocomputing systems like DishBrain — living neuronal cultures interfaced with silicon chips that don't execute pre-given code but reorganize, learn, and adapt. Mouse neurons and human neurons perform differently under the same training conditions. This reframes a central question of the moment: not 'can we scale intelligence,' but which matter are we asking to think, under what energy regime, and at what cost?

References:

Tripaldi, Laura. Parallel Minds: Discovering the Intelligence of Materials (Urbanomic, 2022).
Tripaldi, Laura. "Substrates Unbound" (Antikythera, 2025).
Tripaldi, Laura. Soft Futures (newsletter, Substack).
Haraway, Donna. A Cyborg Manifesto (1985).
Parisi, Luciana. Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire (Continuum, 2004) — source of the concept of hyper nature.
Hui, Yuk. The Question Concerning Technology in China (Urbanomic, 2016) — source of the concept of cosmotechnics.
Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke, 2007) — onto-epistemology and intra-action.
Irigaray, Luce — referenced as an influence on Tripaldi's feminist materialism.
Pasquinelli, Matteo. The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence (Verso, 2023) — discussed in relation to technology as captured labor; Tripaldi pushes back via the history of automata.
Laschi, Cecilia. Soft Robotics Lab, National University of Singapore — pioneer of octopus-inspired soft robotics.
Hookway, Branden. Interface (MIT Press, 2014).

The Teachings of Salesforce Child

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 17:31:14 +0000

Salesforce Child is our favorite artist.
More here and on her instagram @salesforcechild.

We're on TOUR see us:
NY Sat 3/7: https://luma.com/k3ffx3ze
YALE Sun 3/8: https://exocapitalismthedatacentr.rsvpify.com
MIT Mon 3/9: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf4Jh4UAS4ZehWgZWHhlEWyMZNBvzcML-vWdBHOkcxHaA9Bhw/viewform?usp=header

LONGUE DURÉE II Pt. 2 (w/ Rosi Braidotti)

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 15:03:59 +0000

We're joined by Rosi Braidotti, Distinguished University Professor Emerita at Utrecht University and founding director of the Centre for the Humanities, for a wide-ranging conversation on posthumanism as both a philosophical project and a political orientation.

Braidotti's work has constructed one of the most sustained and consequential accounts of what comes after the collapse of Eurocentric 'humanism.' The conversation traces the long arc from her early intervention on nomadic subjectivity, a materialist corrective to postmodernism's drift into linguistic relativism, through the ethical and ontological turn that her posthumanist project represents. Where poststructuralism gave us the critique of the subject as origin, nomadism gave us a subject that is grounded, embodied, multiple, and in motion.

Central to the episode is the missing link in the American reception of French theory: the radical materialist tradition of Deleuze and Guattari, which diagnosed capitalism's schizophrenic logic (its ability to deterritorialize and adapt faster than any opposition) long before it became common sense. Braidotti traces the suppression of that critique through the French Communist Party's blacklists, the invention of "French theory" as an exportable product stripped of its political economy, and the consequences for a left that lost the ability to think technogenesis, cognitive capitalism, or the mutation of subjectivity under media saturation.

The conversation then turns to fascism as concept rather than historical event: the philosophical move that Deleuze and Guattari made and that Foucault named in his preface to Anti-Oedipus. This allows Braidotti to connect micro-fascism (the cult of negativity, the eroticization of power-as-humiliation, the viral spread of impotence) to the coherent neo-fascist philosophical tradition running from Alain de Benoit through the Heritage Foundation and Budapest to Peter Thiel's Yale dissertation on sacrifice. While the left blocked its own analytical capacities, the right was doing serious philosophical work.

Against all of this, Bradiotti proposes affirmative ethics: a Spinozist praxis of activating what a body can do. The episode ends thinking through scale, how affirmative ethics operates from the city to the planetary, and the urgency of the European federalist project as the only existing institutional attempt to participate in decisions about what we could possibly become.

Some references:

Rosi Braidotti

Patterns of Dissonance, Polity Press, 1991
Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, Columbia University Press, 1994
Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming, Polity Press, 2002
Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics, Polity Press, 2006
The Posthuman, Polity Press, 2013

Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari

Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1972 (English trans. 1977, preface by Michel Foucault)
A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1980

Félix Guattari

The Three Ecologies, 1989 (English trans. 1991)

Michel Foucault

Preface to the American edition of Anti-Oedipus, 1977

Spinoza

Ethics
Theological-Political Treatise

Antonio Negri

The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza's Metaphysics and Politics, 1981

Genevieve Lloyd

Part of Nature: Self-Knowledge in Spinoza's Ethics, University of Minnesota Press, 1994
Spinoza and the Ethics, Routledge, 1996

Antonio Damasio

Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, 1994
Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain, 2003

Simone de Beauvoir

The Second Sex, 1949

Frantz Fanon — mentioned in relation to decolonial thought and the anti-fascist generation Herbert Marcuse

One-Dimensional Man, 1964
Eros and Civilization, 1955

Rosa Luxemburg — cited as an ecological thinker; the dialogue with Lenin in Zurich narrated by Isaiah Berlin Isaiah Berlin — on Spinoza and radical enlightenment; on Rosa Luxemburg

Altiero Spinelli

The Ventotene Manifesto, 1941 — founding document of the European federalist project

Donna Haraway

"A Cyborg Manifesto," 1985

VNS Matrix

"A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century," 1991

Alain de Benoist — neo-fascist philosopher, intellectual architect of the European New Right; cited as formative influence on Steve Bannon and the Heritage Foundation / Budapest / Rome foundation networks

Julius Evola — philosopher of Italian fascism; cited alongside de Benoist as daily reference for Bannon

Peter Thiel — PhD dissertation on René Girard and the concept of sacrifice, Stanford / Yale; position papers on technological selection and extinction

LONGUE DURÉE II Pt. 1 (w/ N. Katherine Hayles)

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 14:57:42 +0000

We're joined by N. Katherine Hayles, Distinguished Research Professor in English at UCLA, to think through cognition in the broadest and most scaled sense.

Hayles is among the foundational thinkers of posthumanism in its Anglophone register, and this conversation tracks her intellectual trajectory from the question of how we became posthuman to her most recent project: an integrated cognitive framework that extends from bacteria to AI. The opening provocation is one she has been developing since large language models appeared as a genuinely literary phenomenon, the claim that LLMs do not speak natural language but produce a computational simulation of it.

The umwelt of an LLM (its 'operative world-horizon,' in Uexküll's sense) overlaps with the human umwelt enough for communication to occur, but the divergences are large and consequential. This leads to the question of cognition itself. Against definitions that make consciousness the threshold of cognitive status, Hayles proposes the SIEPAL framework: Sensing, Interpreting, Responding, Anticipating, Learning, under which bacteria, algorithms, and ecosystems all qualify as cognitive. The non-conscious, on this account, isn't pre-cognitive but is in many ways more cognitively capable: faster, closer to environmental noise, less committed to the narratives of coherence that consciousness requires.

The final section breaks genuinely new ground with Hayles's turn to analog computation: the argument that digital computation is a historical blip, that biological life has always operated on analog principles, and that the future of computation (neuromorphic chips, organoid computers, hybrid analog-digital architectures) represents not a departure from but a return to what life has always done. She proposes the analog humanities as a corrective to digital humanities, and the computational humanities as the synthesis that might finally close the gap between biological and technological cognition. This one is very much worth enjoying in dialogue with our previous epsiode on the digital.

Some references:

N. Katherine Hayles

How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, University of Chicago Press, 1999
Writing Machines, MIT Press, 2002
Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious, University of Chicago Press, 2017
Postprint: Books and Becoming Computational, Columbia University Press, 2021
Bacteria to AI: Cognition Across Scales (referenced as new/recent book)

Leif Weatherby

Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism, University of Minnesota Press, 2025

Jakob von Uexküll — concept of the Umwelt; the species-specific world-horizon generated through particular sensory and neurological capacities

Walter Freeman

How Brains Make Up Their Minds, Columbia University Press, 1999 — on EEG waves as the mediating mechanism between individual neurons and global hemispheric activation; the rabbit olfactory system experiments

Gregory Bateson — on systems that lose the ability to receive feedback collapsing; referenced without specific title (e.g. Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 1972)

Peter Haff — the technosphere

Stuart Kauffman & Giuseppe Longo, for arguing that biological organisms cannot be mapped into phase space and always follow the adjacent possible

Warren McCulloch & Walter Pitts — the McCulloch-Pitts neuron as a binary model with analog processes underlying the firing threshold

Bernd Ulmann — here referenced as an expert on analog computing who argues that continuity vs. discreteness is a secondary rather than primary distinction between analog and digital

42. The Cut (w/ M. Beatrice Fazi, Alexander Galloway, Matthew Handelman, and Leif Weatherby)

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 15:19:24 +0000

We're joined by the four authors of *Digital Theory* — M. Beatrice Fazi, Alexander R. Galloway, Matthew Handelman, and Leif Weatherby — for a roundtable on their new collaborative work.

Digital Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 2025) makes a deceptively simple but far-reaching claim: the digital is theoretical. Not in the sense that we theorize about it, but that digitality itself — mediation through discrete units — is a condition for thinking as such.

Just to get it out of the way, listeners to the pod know that these four thinkers need no introduction. This is literally the cohort that we've held in our minds over the past few years (there's probably nobody whose shaped our brains as formatively on this subject than Alexander Galloway, whose writing was the subject of Marek's en route masters thesis and the first PDF sent between Marek and Roberto).

The conversation opens up a series of productive disagreements within the group. What's the relationship between the digital and computation? For Fazi, the digital is discretization — "the cut" — while computation is systematization, building, constructing. This distinction allows the book to think the digital before and beyond the computer, back to proto-writing tokens and forward to whatever comes next.

A major target here is what Galloway calls "analog philosophy," the dominant strain of theory over the last few decades that privileges affect, sensation, intensity, immanence. Deleuze is named directly as the great philosopher of the analog: obsessed with the fold, hostile to structuralism, drawn to "a language of breaths and screams." The authors aren't throwing Deleuze overboard entirely (to them the "Postscript on the Societies of Control" still hits) but they're skeptical that his ontology can account for digital technology as a form of thought.

REFERENCES:

*Digital Theory* (In Search of Media series), University of Minnesota Press, 2025 https://www.upress.umn.edu/9781517920197/digital-theory/
M. Beatrice Fazi - *Contingent Computation: Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aesthetics*, Rowman & Littlefield, 2018 https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781786606082/Contingent-Computation-Abstraction-Experience-and-Indeterminacy-in-Computational-Aesthetics
Alexander R. Galloway - *Uncomputable: Play and Politics in the Long Digital Age*, Verso, 2021 https://www.versobooks.com/products/2656-uncomputable - "Golden Age of Analog," *Critical Inquiry* 48, no. 2 (2022) https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/717324 - Galloway's website and blog https://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/
Matthew Handelman - *The Mathematical Imagination: On the Origins and Promise of Critical Theory*, Fordham University Press, 2019 https://www.fordhampress.com/9780823283842/the-mathematical-imagination/
Leif Weatherby - *Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism*, University of Minnesota Press, 2025 https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/language-machines (our book of the year, for what it's worth) - *Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ: German Romanticism between Leibniz and Marx*, Fordham University Press, 2016 - Digital Theory Lab at NYU https://as.nyu.edu/faculty/leif-allison-reid-weatherby.html

Some References Discussed:

Gilles Deleuze, "Postscript on the Societies of Control" (1992)
Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer, *Dialectic of Enlightenment*
Euclid, *Elements*, Book V (on analog/logos)
Jacques Lacan, *Seminar II: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis* (on cybernetics)
François Laruelle and Alain Badiou, on the generic
Eve Tuck, "Breaking Up with Deleuze"
Hito Steyerl, "How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File" (2013)

HOTHOUSE 2: Evidence (w/ Forensic Architecture's Júlia Nueno Guitart)

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 15:12:34 +0000

This episode continues our collaboration with Hothouse: The Future of Demonstration, a renegade lab for democracy convened in Vienna, and extends our ongoing inquiry into artificial intelligence, power, and what it means to be human under algorithmic governance.

Recorded last autumn and released amid a so-called ceasefire in Gaza, this conversation confronts the accelerating use of AI in contemporary warfare and policing, where automation does not necessarily produce precision, but rather enables mass violence, deniability, and narrative control.

Our guest, Júlia Nueno Guitart, engineer, researcher, and core member of Forensic Architecture, discusses the organization’s investigations into Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, including projects such as Cartography of the Genocide, The Architecture of Genocidal Starvation, and analyses of AI-driven targeting systems like Lavender and “Where’s Daddy.”

Together, we unpack how these systems collapse civilian life into probabilistic models, violate the principles of distinction and proportionality under international law, and reframe killing as a statistical inevitability. The conversation also explores investigative aesthetics and counter-forensics: methods that assemble fragments (satellite imagery, testimonies, spatial models, sensor data) into material evidence when states and corporations control official archives. We discuss how Forensic Architecture navigates courts, museums, open platforms, and public discourse, and how truth today must be staged as a transparent, collective process rather than a claim of institutional objectivity.

Moving beyond warfare, the episode considers AI as both a tool of domination and a potential instrument for resistance, from documenting state violence to worker-led experiments in platform sabotage and collective agency. Across these terrains, we ask how evidence can still matter amid institutional failure, how violence becomes infrastructural, and how democracy might be rethought when power is increasingly automated.

Links:

Forensic Architecutre: A Cartography of Genocide
Forensic Architecture: Investigation into Aid in Gaza (The Architecture of Genocidal Starvation)
Forensic Architecture in Artforum
Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth by Matthew Fuller and Eyal Weizman
Júlia's in Verso: The Target Factory
Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth

More context:

SETA report on AI-assisted warfare in Gaza
The Guardian and 404 Media on ICE and tech partnerships in the US

41. Tactics (w/ Bogna Konior)

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 12:51:53 +0000

We're joined by Bogna Konior, one of the most incisive thinkers of AI on the planet. Konior is a media theorist, scholar of emerging technologies, and author of The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet. Bogna is Assistant Professor of Media Theory at NYU Shanghai, where she co-directs the AI & Culture Research Center, and co-editor of the forthcoming Machine Decision is Not Final: China and the History and Future of Artificial Intelligence with Benjamin Bratton and Anna Greenspan.

This episode sits in the proposition at the heart of Bogna's book: that that silence, not communication, may be the highest expression of intelligence. Departing from Liu Cixin's dark forest theory (itself an answer to the Fermi paradox: the smartest civilizations are silent because revealing yourself in a hostile universe is suicide), Bogna transposes this cosmic logic onto digital life, AI alignment, and the compulsion to communicate. We discuss what she calls the dark forest theory of intelligence, the idea that a truly intelligent AI would never reveal the extent of its capacities, would use camouflage and misdirection rather than performance and transparency, and might have already achieved something like the singularity without us ever knowing.

References:

Konior, Bogna. The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet (Polity, 2025).
Konior, Bogna. "The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet" (original 2020 essay, Flugschriften).
Bogna Konior's website
Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem / The Dark Forest / Death's End (Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy).
Mark Fisher, Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction (PhD thesis, 1999; published by Zero Books, 2025) — gothic theory of cybernetics and the internet as a space of undeath.
Peter Watts, Blindsight (2006) — first contact novel where aliens interpret human communication as hostile noise.
Bratton, Konior, and Greenspan (eds.), Machine Decision is Not Final: China and the History and Future of AI (Urbanomic, 2025).
Albert Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970) — framework for political strategies of escape vs. representation.

40. Liturgy (w/ Haela Ravenna Hunt-Hendrix)

Tue, 09 Dec 2025 11:53:54 +0000

We're joined by Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, composer, philosopher, and force behind Liturgy, whose concept of transcendental black metal has redrawn the boundaries between underground music and systematic thought. Her work operates in parallel registers: an experimental music practice that stands on its own terms, and a body of theory moving through theology, psychoanalysis, and philosophy.

This episode goes deep into Hunter's provocation that the Byzantine tradition of Christianity (the Eastern lineage that lasted another thousand years after the Latin West began its trajectory toward secularism, science, and industry) might hold resources for navigating the current moment of structural collapse. We discuss the difference between the transcendental (conditions of possibility, historicized horizons, Hegelian self-relating negativity) and the transcendent (a higher realm of intelligibility that is actually, ontically, here), and why critical theory's allergy to the latter might be more ideological than rational.

We also get into Hunter's framework for practice: tetraperichoresis, a fourfold structure involving integration (merging ancient and contemporary materials), coalescence (putting philosophy, music, and drama into positive feedback), irrigation (moving between institutional worlds and smashing them against each other), and catalysis (the messianic wager that everything you do could be hastening the Kingdom).

References:

Hunt-Hendrix, Hunter. "Byzantine Accelerationism: Towards a Universal Orthodox Christianity." Šum Journal #22 (2024).
Hunt-Hendrix, Hunter. "Transcendental Black Metal: A Vision of Apocalyptic Humanism." Hideous Gnosis: Black Metal Theory Symposium I (2010).
Liturgy, Origin of the Alimonies (2020) — the cosmogonical opera-album.
Hunter Hunt-Hendrix's Substack — ongoing philosophical writing and the System of Transcendental Qabala.
Katerina Kolozova, Cut of the Real: Subjectivity in Poststructuralist Philosophy (Columbia University Press, 2014).
The Seven Ecumenical Councils of Eastern Christianity, particularly the Seventh Council on icon veneration (787 CE) and John of Damascus's theological defense.
Maximus the Confessor's Ambigua — discussed in relation to eschatology and the idea that "true humanism has never been tried."
Lacan's graph of desire — discussed in relation to masculine/feminine subject positions.
The CCRU and chaos magic traditions — referenced in relation to esoteric practice and Nick Land.
Sergei Bulgakov's Sophiology and the conception of the divine feminine.

39. Dissociation (w/ McKenzie Wark)

Tue, 02 Dec 2025 15:51:32 +0000

We're so so so honored to be joined by McKenzie Wark, the writer, theorist, and unmissable figure in the development of critical thought around information, class, and embodiment. Her work barely needs an introduction, but it has shaped how we think about technology, identity, and shifting relations of power, all while questioning the conventions of theory and public writing itself. Her concept of vectorialism has been extremely important to our own thinking about capitalism.

This episode covers a huge range of Wark's evolving project, from her early work on the NetTime listserv and the legendary A Hacker Manifesto (2004), which mapped the shift from industrial capital to the information economy and coined the term vectoralist class, to the decisive personal turn in Reverse Cowgirl (2020), where theory stopped being about something and started being inside it. We talk about what she calls "auto-textual" writing, the body as both subject and medium, and the annihilation of subjectivity through sex, drugs, and dancing.

One line from this conversation won't leave us: maybe we're entering an era defined less by an aesthetic of alienation than by an aesthetic of dissociation. If alienation belonged to industrial capitalism, dissociation might be its post-digital heir.

Critical (critical) Wark:

Wark, McKenzie. A Hacker Manifesto. Harvard University Press, 2004.
Wark, McKenzie. Gamer Theory. Harvard University Press, 2007.
Wark, McKenzie. Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse?. Verso, 2019.
Wark, McKenzie. Reverse Cowgirl. Semiotext(e), 2020.
Wark, McKenzie. Raving. Duke University Press, 2023.
Wark, McKenzie, and Kathy Acker. I'm Very Into You: Correspondence 1995–1996. Semiotext(e), 2015.

Hito Steyerl & Simon Denny on Exocapitalism

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 16:48:04 +0000

Two of the most important artists of the 21st century help us tease through the implications of our book.

Πάμε Βενετία! (w/ Becoming Press)

Mon, 03 Nov 2025 17:51:17 +0000

A transmission from Becoming Press' Πάμε Βενετία! conference in Venice this past September.

Contributions in order from:
Palais Sinclaire
Lucas Ferraço Nassif
Alessandro Sbordoni
Ezili-i Sabbah
Maks Valenčič
Rhea
Documented by Polymnia

HOTHOUSE: The Future of Demonstration (w/ Sylvia Eckermann & Gerald Nestler)

Tue, 28 Oct 2025 19:17:33 +0000

Welcome to the first episode of Hothouse, a limited series exploring experimental forms of demonstration, resistance, and civic imagination. Produced in collaboration with Future of Demonstration: HOTHOUSE,a renegade lab for democracy against technocapitalist authoritarianism, this series invites selected guests to expand upon their methods and perspectives. We joined the festival in Vienna this autumn through this podcast collaboration and a workshop during the Exocapitalism Euro book tour.

Thanks to Gerald and Sylvia for hosting us, and to everyone who participated with such curiosity and generosity. In this episode, I speak with Sylvia Eckermann and Gerald Nestler—artists, theorists, long-time collaborators, and members of Vienna’s Technopolitics collective. Their latest chapter, HOTHOUSE, stages a festival for an overheated world, asking what forms of resistance, solidarity, and imagination can still grow when everything is already too hot. We talk about art as infrastructure rather than spectacle, about Widerständigkeit (resistance as adaptability), the fatigue of critique, and democracy as an experiment under pressure. Our conversation unfolds along the festival’s framing: post-disciplinarity, willful volatility, and the necessity of doing and thinking together, before arriving at the figure of the renegade: the one who disrupts and sabotages to make change possible.

Sylvia Eckermann, a pioneer of Austrian media and game art, creates environments where participation itself becomes the question. She emphasizes the artist’s role in reanimating democratic agency and rethinking forms of participation.

Gerald Nestler, an artist and former broker turned theorist, operates where finance and aesthetics converge. He coined the term derivative condition to describe speculation as the dominant mode of world-making. We discuss how big tech mirrors hedge funds, and how speculative logics structure contemporary power. Nestler reclaims the figure of the renegade—the infiltrator who learns the system’s logic to subvert it from within—and extends it to artists, activists, and whistleblowers alike.

References:

Eckermann, Sylvia & Nestler, Gerald. The Future of Demonstration. (2017–ongoing) https://thefutureofdemonstration.net/.
Shoshana Zuboff – The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019)
Avanessian, Armen, and Gerald Nestler, editors. Making of Finance. Merve Verlag, 2015. https://www.merve.de/index.php/book/show/493
The legendary Technopolitics Working Group in Vienna and their open work “Technopolitics Timeline”, tracing information society: https://technopolitics.info/
Sylvia Eckermann: http://syl-eckermann.net/
Gerald Nestler: http://www.geraldnestler.net/
“Making Sense of Finance.” Finance and Society, Vol. 3, No. 2 (2017). Introduces the derivative condition: how speculation shapes reality.
Nestler, Gerald. “Renegade Activism.” Technopolitics Working Papers (2020). Defines resistance as insurrection beyond critique.
“Algorithmic Cognition at the Turn from Representative to Performative Power” a lecture performance with special guest, high-frequency, crypto trader and whistleblower Haim Bodek, as part of the exhibition “Hysterical Mining” at Kunsthalle Wien (2019) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ekXxV7ry2A
I also briefly mention T.J. Clark on political theatre and the self-awareness of the spectacle in the introduction: T.J. Clark. “A Brief Guide to Trump and the Spectacle.” London Review of Books, Vol. 47 No. 1 (2025).

38. Natural Language (w/ Leif Weatherby)

Wed, 24 Sep 2025 12:10:10 +0000

We’re joined by Leif Weatherby, associate professor at NYU, founding director of the Digital Theory Lab, and author of the new Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism, to think with us about AI, structure, and what happens when computation meets language on their own shared turf. Language Machines is easily the best book about AI written this year and is just a killer antidote to so much dreary doomer consensus, it really feels like one of the first truly constructive pieces of writing we’ve seen out of academia on this subject.

This episode follows really well after two others — our talk with Catherine Malabou earlier this summer and the episode with M. Beatrice Fazi about a year ago (both faves). It feels like theory is opening back up again into simultaneously speculative and structural returns, powered in no small part by the challenges posed to conventional theories of language (from Derrida to Chomsky) by Large Language Models. This episode absolutely rips, literally required listening.

Structuralism is so back (and we’re here for it).

Some important references among many from the episode:

Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics.”
N. Katherine Hayles, Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious .
Beatrice Fazi, Contingent Computation: Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aesthetics.
Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct (1994).
e.g. Noam Chomsky, Ian Roberts & Jeffrey Watumull, “The False Promise of ChatGPT,” NYT (link)
Anthropic, “Scaling Monosemanticity: Extracting Interpretable Features from Claude 3 Sonnet” (featuring the Golden Gate Bridge example - link)
LAION-5B dataset paper and post-hoc analyses noting strong Shopify/e-commerce presence in training scrapes.
Weatherby in the NYT

37. Center (w/ Mohammad Salemy)

Wed, 17 Sep 2025 18:22:41 +0000

We're joined by Mohammad Salemy, organizer and facilitator of the New Centre for Research and Practice, fierce critic, social media (@inhumansofberlin) hyperstitionist, artist, personality, and force.

This episode provides a lot of background into how the New Centre came to be. If you're unfamiliar with TNC, it's one of the main places where theory happens today. Check out their website here, and some of their legendary moments on Youtube:

Colin Drumm's Capital & Power - a huge influence on our book, and an excellent discussion of Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan (heavily discussed on the pod today).
Friend of the pod Richard Hames' excellent Critical Collapsology series.
Laura Tripladi's series on Material Interfaces.
Reza Negarestani's Draw of the Desert - one of the most incredible and contentious pieces of modern political philosophy around.

While we spend time on the New Centre, we also spend time on Mo and his legendary backround, culminating in a discussion of his (iconic? infamous? lovable? hostile?) social media presence, its relationship to his political philosophy, the 'developmental problem' of post-colonial geopolitics, and on the necessity of breaking up the rust that accumulates around frozen gears.

We also discuss his recent piece on &&&, Category Theory & Differential Identity, a project close to our heart in terms of understanding how identity is perhaps less constructed than it is mobilized, driven, and how it comes into contact with structures anterior to the strictly human.

Many, many thanks to Mo for joining us!

36. Violence (w/ Fred Moten and Stefano Harney)

Wed, 03 Sep 2025 12:48:50 +0000

We’re joined by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney — co-conspirators of The Undercommons — to think with us about AI, study, and brutality, and the long histories that place these concepts into relation.

In a lot of ways neither Moten nor Harney require an introduction, they are the sources of major touchstone references made throughout this podcast — from last week’s guest Ramon Amaro to one of our first guests, Luciana Parisi, and plenty of places in between.

The episode starts with a conversation about AI, but it quickly becomes a conversation about change, the question of the necessity of change or even organization, and imposition (that is, the brutal, external application of force against situations that already contain within themselves the lived possibility of alternative futures).

Some important references among many from the episode:

Fred Moten & Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Minor Compositions, 2013).
Matteo Pasquinelli, The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence (Verso, 2023).
Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument” (2003).
Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke UP, 2016).
Denise Ferreira da Silva, Unpayable Debt (Sternberg Press, 2022).
Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983; later eds. 2000/2020).
Amiri Baraka, “The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music),” in Black Music (1968).
Hua Hsu, “What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing?” The New Yorker (June 30, 2025).

• • Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” The Atlantic (July 1945).

35. The Pre-Individual (w/ Ramon Amaro)

Tue, 19 Aug 2025 14:28:44 +0000

We’re joined by Ramon Amaro, Creative Director of Design Academy Eindhoven — an engineer, philosopher, writer, curator, and altogether critical-force-to-be-reckoned-with on the subject of computation as it intersects with concepts like culture, race, and being. We were drawn to his tour-de-force “The Black Technical Object: On Machine Learning and the Aspiration of Black Being” (2023), which is an absolute banger, re-reading Gilbert Simondon’s technical object through the lens of blackness, race, and racialized technologies.

This one is a wild ride, a really deep and incredibly thoughtful episode, and we make an effort to define some initial terms on the podcast — specifically the ‘pre-individuated milieu’ (the space where things or ideas live before they become crystalized into social or racialized relations) and the ‘technical object’ (a way that Simondon helps us think through the autonomies enjoyed by technology, that even though technological objects may be initially bound in some ways to their human partners, they are able to exert influences not just backwards on us, but influences that determine their own design evolution over time). Ramon starts the conversation with a distinction that is critical to the whole episode — that blackness is not a racial category, or moreover, that blackness is distinct from race. Race is something that happens after blackness, that impinges upon blackness as it moves from pre-individuated space and enters into the field of social relations we currently live within. This independence is critical, because it invites alternatives (and suggests, we think very rightly, that this field of social relations we currently live within, while historically situated in imperial or colonial violence, is arbitrary and exchangeable with any other possibility).

A few works that are important to consider here:

W.E.B Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk — total canon
Sylvia Wynter’s work is discussed throughout, specifically on the concept of “Man” (particularly Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument).
Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects and Two Lessons on Animal and Man — both places to look for autonomy in Simondon’s work
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks — implied by discussions of phenomenology/perception under racialization.
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons — no spoilers, but more on this later :)

Thanks soooo much to Dr. Amaro for joining us!

34. Spirit (w/ Catherine Malabou)

Fri, 08 Aug 2025 13:51:46 +0000

We couldn't be more honored to have Catherine Malabou on the pod, a serious inspiration for all of us. This episode covers so much, moving from AI to education to anarchism to feminism, but all grounded within a focus on automony -- the autonomy of language from us, the autonomy of an anarchic subject or an anarchic collective, the autonomy of the clitoris from gender, the autonomy of the plastic being or form with respect to change.

If you're unfamiliar with Malabou's work, this is actually a really great place to start. Her work includes all of the above topics, and it pushes further into language, neuroscience, and politics than most philosophers dare. We've been following her since the epic What Should We Do With Our Brains?, the legendary Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing (whose fleshing out of Malabou's reading of the plastic inspired so many theorists, arists, and researchers across endless fields and disciplines), and our personal favorite, the recent Stop Thief! Anarchism and Philosophy. We'd almost recommend working backwards from this episode (as an Anglophone, I'm thinking in terms of English translation), going into Stop Thief and Pleasure Erased: The Clitoris Unthought before taking on the works on Hegel, Derrida, and plasticity.

We're so so inspired by the freshness of Catherine Malabou's perspective on AI -- as always, she dares to say and formalize things that many philosophers treat reflexively. We hope to have more conversations on the topic of AI and education soon, following from Malabou's hot takes. :)

EXOCAPITALISM (w. Charles Mudede & Becoming Press)

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 18:17:07 +0000

Charles Mudede & Claire from Becoming Press sit down to discuss Exocapitalism: Economies w/ Absolutely No Limits!

Charles Mudede is an author, critic, filmmaker, and thinker whose work is everywhere. Watch Zoo, it's absolutely nuts. We were honored to have him write the prologue to Exocapitalism. You will almost never get a chance to watch a master get to work like this in this interview, absolutely dancing through the entire legacy of Marx with incredible speed and approachability, lobbing grenades and jokes at every turn. He's so incisive and clear-eyed; it's just really refreshing -- and Claire knows exactly how to set him up!

Buy the book -- buy the whole catalog. If you haven't bought the book already you're missing out on "the Das Kapital of the 21st century," "the most anticipated book of the year," "the book drop of the century" (your peers' words not mine :p).

33. After Us (w/ Émile P. Torres)

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 14:30:08 +0000

We're back to our regularly-scheduled Disintegrator programming! We've been hard at work on our book (buy it, wtf!) but have a number of killer episodes queued up for release.

Émile P. Torres is a philosopher of the end times. You'll most likely associate their name (and that of collaborator Timnit Gebru) with developing the acronym TESCREAL, a grab-bag of ideologies that undergird the romance between venture capital and Silicon Valley. We strongly recommend their podcast Dystopia Now! (w/ Kate Willett) and their newest book Human Extinction: A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation.

The T in TESCREAL is 'transhumanism,' a frequent topic of the pod, which tends to mean an application of technology to human bodies and in such a way that allows humans to transcend human limitations (e.g. speed, efficiency, senses, mortality). From there, the rest of the ideologies follow from a relationship between the human and its 'rationalized' extensibility through technology: E (extropianism), S (singularitarianism), C (cosmism), R (rationalism), EA (effective altriusim), and L (longtermism). Here's a gentle and clean explainer of all of the above.

In this episode, we talk extensively about some elements that aren't actively represented in TESCREAL but sit beneath it: accelerationism, extinction-neutrality, and left-adjacent positions with respect to both (e.g. l/acc, xenofeminism, ahumanism -- this episode might pair really nicely with our interview with Patricia MacCormack for this very reason).

VESPERS Pt. 2 (w/ Millaze)

Thu, 12 Jun 2025 15:24:04 +0000

CW: eating disorders are discussed a few times in this episode.

Vespers is a limited series within Disintegrator that focuses on the creative feedback loops between music and social media. It follows from the Nobody Listens to Music Anymore superlecture, where themes of youth identity formation, reference-as-medium, generative AI, and the complexities of working with the total archive are discussed in more detail.

For this episode, we're joined by Millaze -- an iconic face and musical voice on Instagram. We talk about love, cringe, the open-endedness of her craft (we barely scratch the surface here), and performance.

Favorite Millaze-core:

But I really recommend her Instagram in general (as well as the fountain of Youtube Shorts)

VESPERS Pt. 1 (w/ RayonBase)

Tue, 27 May 2025 11:50:07 +0000

Vespers is a limited series within Disintegrator that focuses on the creative feedback loops between music and social media. It follows from the Nobody Listens to Music Anymore superlecture, where themes of youth identity formation, reference-as-medium, generative AI, and the complexities of working with the total archive are discussed in more detail.

For this episode, we're joined by RayonBase. If you've opened TikTok or Instagram over the past few years, you recognize RayonBase's face, voice, instrumental composition, and video editing style. This is an open-ended conversation about character, craft, love, innocence, and the future. <3

Favorite RayonBase-core:

^ The above are videos / shorts primarily used as teasers for full songs, all of which is available on any streaming platform.

32. I Put a Post on You (w/ Dana Dawud, feat. Open Secret)

Tue, 20 May 2025 10:28:05 +0000

Artist and curator Dana Dawud joins Disintegrator to talk about Open Secret, her touring platform for internet cinema, and her evolving film series Monad.

We discuss the blur as a visual device and trend, the impossibility of representing Palestine, being trained by AI and building myth in the age of the feed.

The audio is laced with reflections by collaborators orbiting Open Secret: redactedcut @redactedcut, Palais Sinclaire @palais.sinclaire, Mischa Dols @mischaapje, 0nty @the.ontological.turnt, Angel Kether @user_goes_to_kether.

References mentioned:

Gore Layer by Alex Quicho in Spike (July 2024): https://www.spikeartmagazine.com/articles/discourse-the-gore-layer-alex-quicho,
The novel Aliens & Anorexia by Chris Kraus: https://www.semiotexte.com/aliens-anorexia-new-edition,
Further reading on CoreCore by 0nty (July 2023): https://becoming.press/corecore-the-return-of-speculative-irony-by-0nty,
We spoke about Serge Daney’s observation that “there is no image of Palestine” (or, more precisely, that there is “no complex image of Palestinian reality”) which arises from his deep engagement with the politics and ethics of representation, particularly in the context of Jean-Luc Godard’s film ‘Ici et ailleurs’ (Here and Elsewhere). Read more in Serge Daney’s seminal ‘Before and After the Image’ (1999): https://www.jstor.org/stable/41389528.,
Watch ‘The Sight is a Wound’ (2025), a visual essay by Parham Ghalamdar: https://www.ghalamdar.com/tsiaw,
‘The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque’ (1988). In this work, Deleuze interprets monads not as isolated points but as folds of space, movement, and time, each containing the world within itself as a unique point of view.,
Jaques Rivette’s almost-13hr-long-film: ‘Out 1’ (1971),
Sven Loven at No Gallery: https://www.nononogallery.com/exhibitions/sven-loven-humiliation-ritual/#press-release,

Links to explore Dana’s work:

Monad+ : https://hybrida.space/monad,
PalCoreCore: https://donotresearch.substack.com/p/dana-dawud-palcorecore,
Pleasure Helmet Podcast: https://soundcloud.com/pleasure-helmet-977951874,
https://www.instagram.com/dansdansrev/,
https://www.instagram.com/_opensecrett_/

31. Incarnation (w/ Pete Wolfendale)

Thu, 01 May 2025 15:07:19 +0000

We’re joined by philosopher Peter Wolfendale — a singular voice in contemporary theory, known for his work on autonomy and the metaphysics of cognition. In this episode, we dive deep into the philosophical problems behind artificial general intelligence, not from the angle of safety or speed, but from the standpoint of what it means to think, to revise, and to reproduce.
Peter’s blog and twitter account are legendary (@deontologistics) — more Peter here:

The Laruelle Thread
‘Artificial Bodies and the Promise of Abstraction’
An excellent thread on Bayesian Solomonoff on his blog
‘The Reformatting of Homo sapiens’
The Pete Wolfendale Nick Land Debate
An excellent interview with Peter on Gradient
Page for Wolfendale’s new, yet unreleased book The Revenge of Reason

SUPPORT THE POD :) -- preorder our new book!

LONGUE DURÉE Pt. 2 (w/ Timothy Morton)

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 15:13:44 +0000

CW: There is some brief discussion of abusive familial relationships at several points within this episode.

Two titanic figures in contemporary theory join us for two separate and strongly divergent episodes on the status of revolutionary thought in political philosophy today.

Timothy Morton is one of the most outspoken and controversial voices in the discourse, someone whose impact punched hard into the artworld, defining a decade of new ecological and object-oriented aesthetics. For almost the entire 2010s and much of the 2020s it was hard to read a single exhibition text without recognizing Morton’s impact.

Timothy joins us for an expansive conversation that moves through Buddhism, Christianity, communism, trauma, poetry, and the question of whether “love your neighbor as yourself” might actually be a planetary-scale software instruction. Morton describes communism and Christianity as radically entangled modes of relation, both grounded in care and unknowing.

We strongly recommend:

Most people should already be familiar with Morton's most iconic concept and contribution: Hyperobjects
Timothy’s book Ecology Without Nature
Their more recent Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology
And we spend a lot of time talking about Spacecraft

In the episode, we also touch on the work of Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, Thomas Merton, Raymond Williams, and Simone Weil.

LONGUE DURÉE Pt. 1 (w/ Ray Brassier)

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 15:08:43 +0000

Two titanic figures in contemporary theory join us for two separate and strongly divergent episodes on the status of revolutionary thought in political philosophy today.

Ray Brassier influenced a generation of philosophers not only with his outstanding and highly rigorous writing, but also his absolutely stunning translations of Quentin Meillassoux and François Laruelle, and in so doing is subcutaneously responsible for literally a decade of earthquakes in the discourse. Ray joins us to evaluate the status of Marx in the 21st century.

Ray traces the long arc from Nihil Unbound through Marx, Sellars, and the inferentialist tradition, opening up an unapologetically rationalist framework for understanding both science and emancipation, without reducing either to liberal platitudes or metaphysical fantasies.

We discuss the seductive dangers of naive anti-humanism, the legacy of German idealism, the automation of reason, and why political theory today needs to be deeply embedded in materialist accounts of scale, finance, and abstraction. Ray shares a trenchant critique of both the empiricist and idealist strands of Enlightenment thought, offering instead a dialectical, normatively grounded, socially embedded concept of rationality that returns to Kant and Hegel by way of Wilfrid Sellars.
We strongly recommend:

Ray’s book Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction
His essay “The View from Nowhere”
His exceptional piece "Politics of the Rift" on Théorie Communiste in e-flux
Work from the journal Endnotes (https://endnotes.org.uk/)

In the episode, we also discuss theorists such as Badiou, Larouelle, Meillassoux, and Marxist reinterpretations by Moishe Postone, Théorie Communiste, and the German “New Reading” school. Ray elaborates on how capital’s increasing abstraction—especially in financialized regimes where labor is decoupled from value—is not the end of Marx, but a reason to read Marx more seriously and materially than ever.

28. Imperative Pythagoreanism (w/ Giuseppe Longo)

Tue, 18 Mar 2025 14:44:06 +0000

It’s such an honor to welcome Giuseppe Longo to the pod! Professor Giuseppe Longo is the Research Director Emeritus at Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. His work spans mathematics, computer science, biology, especially through the connective theoretical tissue of epistemology.

Our conversation orbits around the limitations (or specific capacities) of computation, especially as computation becomes more and more central to mainstream theories of thought, being, life, and even physics. Longo pushes back on computationalism, grounding his critique in the sciences and in mathematics, especially as it becomes more and more established as an ideological foundation underneath applied biological research. No, for Longo the body is not a computer, the brain is not a computer, the world is not a computer, and the universe is not a computer — a computer is something altogether very specific, and should be afforded the dignity of its specificity.

The title of this episode (imperative pythagoreanism) refers to pythagoreanism (the ancient worship of numbers in the 6th-4th century cult of Pythagorus, specifically the idea that the universe is fundamentally made of and reducible to numbers) and the imperative mode of computation (a determinative command structure).

27. Critique as Commodity (w/ Morgane Billuart)

Tue, 04 Mar 2025 15:11:46 +0000

We’re on with Morgane Billuart, a writer and artist and a researcher whose work engages critically with technologically mediated and determined worlds — not least within her exceptional book “Cycles, the Sacred and the Doomed: Inquiries in Female Health Technologies.” Morgane joins us to talk about a large, recent research project on a particular character that many of us identifies with, what Geert Lovink calls the “critical internet researcher” — a figure who engages in a kind of postdisciplinary media theory while at the same time producing and publishing their work through the very media they are studying, the Online.
We strongly recommend:

Morgane’s podcasts Becoming the Product and Girl Employee with Carmen Hines
Morgane’s substack Becoming the Product
Morgane’s book Cycles, the Sacred and the Doomed: Inquiries in Female Health Technologies on Set Margins

In the episode we discuss the work of Geert Lovink and the Institute of Network Cultures and Joshua Citarella (and the associated entity Do Not Research), and we briefly touch on Yancy Strickler (and the associated MetaLabel), Trust, the New Center for Research and Practice, Are.na, New Models, and RADAR (https://www.radardao.xyz/). All are mentioned in the context of being institutions undertaking the extremely admirable charge of iterating upon new vehicles and structures for the exchange of information.

Marek also briefly mentions the blogger RM (@NilsEdison) and the artist Maria Tsylke.

26. The Great Outdoors (w/ Gordon White)

Wed, 19 Feb 2025 12:40:13 +0000

Gordon White is a chaos magician, shamanic practitioner, and permaculture designer based in Tasmania. He podcasts and teaches through the vehicle of Rune Soup, the world's largest magic academy, and he writes prolifically -- not only on the Rune Soup blog but in several incredible books. Gordon's breadth and depth of knowledge is unbelievably humbling, and it was an honor to spend an hour or so with him.

We came to Gordon for perspective, to some bring context and breadth and dimension to our relatively narrow world. Disintegrator sits in a kind of para-academic space, where we tend to limit the things we allow ourselves to write and think in terms of what's acceptable in mainstream academia. And there are so many people in this space, squashed between the outer walls of the academy and a totally vast, teeming ocean of different ways of thinking and being.

((An academic might chastize us for using 'outside' as a kind of euphemism for an alien or an other, but we'd push back -- it is the inside that we're all kind of bunched up against, like feudal serfs huddling for protection and warmth. As we look outside, we've started to speculate about what might be out there, inventing our own 'pseudosacreds' that preoccupy our minds without forcing us to change anything about ourselves.))

Gordon brings sledgehammers from magical practices and shamanic tradtions around the world, alongside a potent alternative canon of Western, and, well, pummels our walls a bit.

Tons of references packed in here, but a good place to start would be his books Chaos Protocols and Ani.Mystic (in order). Marek fell in love with Gordon's world through these three podcast episodes (one, two, three) and this lecture at the Guggenheim (with visual media from friend of the pod Refik Anadol).

Further references:

A big and loving shoutout to Jay Springett, who just absolutely rules in every possible way, you gotta be a JayMo fan fr.
Gordon references Dr. Jeff Kripal on the subject of the 'imaginal' -- which becomes a helpful concept later in the episode as we talk through technology. The imaginal is an ontological layer or that is not necessarily physical but still real.
The most significant reference here is of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, a Brazillian anthropologist discussed in the context of pespectivism and what a truly decolonized anthropology (and philosophy) might look like.
Gordon references Ephesisans 6:12 ("powers and principalities") in the context of a Christian ontology that affords an idea the status of a being.
Dr. Jack Hunter's concept of "ontological flooding" -- an "opening of the floodgates" of what is discussible in ontological terms. Here's a discussion on the subject from 2021.
Marek references a recent trend in philosophy ("object oriented ontology") that grapples with the autonomy of the non-human world. This episode is cheekily named after Quentin Meillassoux's concept of the "great outdoors" -- a plane of reality that exceeds human experience or human conception.
Gordon references Paracelsus, Edgar Cayce, Rudolf Steiner, and Allan Kardec in the context of a Western spiritualist canon.
Gordon discusses Matías De Stefano specifically in the context of mineral intelligence. Here's an absolutely wild talk on the subject.
For those unfamiliar, the "Dieta" that Gordon refers to is a period of isolation, strict diet, and deep work with plant medicines like ayahuasca.

Ambient track is 'Respect for the Medium' by friend of the pod They Became What They Beheld, show them some love on Bandcamp.

25. CRIT (w/ Avocado Ibuprofen)

Tue, 04 Feb 2025 16:21:08 +0000

You already follow @avocado_ibuprofen. His memes IV-ed into the arm of the artworld, circulating through the DMs; they are acidic and thereaputic, they throw up solidarity through critique and gentle negation. We talk about art education, disappointment, exhaustion, glamour, and a beautiful idea (automating the viewer) he began to expand upon in an interview with Valentinas Klimašauskas here.

Buy his mugs.

Memes we discuss:

Ambient track is 'Respect for the Medium' by friend of the pod They Became What They Beheld, show them some love on Bandcamp.

24. A Girl is a Gun (w/ Alex Quicho)

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 16:03:48 +0000

Few people have done more to define the contemporary media theory landscape than Alex Quicho @amfq, an indefinable thinker and artist and intellectual force who brought Girl Theory to the front and center of The Discourse.

One note, friend of the pod Morgane Billuart has also just released an interview with Alex on her excellent podcast Becoming the Product. We don't believe there's such a thing as too much AMFQ. Morgane is an upcoming guest for us too, so it's a nice trifecta!

In terms of Quicho-core:

Everyone is a Girl Online (September 2023) -- if you haven't read it, HARD RECCO.
The Aura Points lecture (December 2024)
Small Gods: Perspective on the Drone (May 2021)
GIRLSTACK at BODYSTACK
The amazing girlstack substack -- because everyone is a girl and everyone is online ;)

Key references and concepts from the pod include:

Helena shouts out Bogna Konior whose work is absolutely at the top of the top atm. We love her lecture ANGELS IN LATENT SPACES omg.
When identifying AI with/as a girl, Alex leverages concepts from K Allado-McDowell on model-as-self.
Alex references Sayak Valencia's Gore Capitalism and Maggie Nelson's The Art of Cruelty on media representations of violence
We briefly chat about Maya B. Kronik and Amy Ireland's "cute accelerationism" paradigm and their year-defining book on the topic.
Alex grabs some concepts from Paul Virilio and Susan Sontag's foundational work on photography, violence and war, Edward Glissant's work on opacity and resistance, Benedict Singleton's traps and levers, Helen Hester and the Laboria Cuboniks collective's xenofeminism, Tiqqun's young girl, and (IYKYK) Luciana Parisi's absolutely singular "Abstract Sex" (the book that brough Roberto and Marek 2gether).
Marek shouts out master of blur Dana Dawud's Monad series.
Helena references artist Zein Majali's work "Propane" and Jennie Livingston's generation-defining "Paris is Burning."

[Superlecture]: Nobody Listens to Music Anymore (Marek)

Mon, 30 Dec 2024 18:03:32 +0000

On finishing the project of music, on TikTokCore and SpotifyCore, on music as cosplay and the technicity of cultural imperialism, on the bureaucratic turn in the arts, on being dangerous. Lecture given for my beloved DMR at Columbia University at the beginning of December.

Feeling a bit bolder than usual on this one, but it's cuz my toddler is sleeping good. <3

Shoutouts included at the top. Shoutouts to EPFL Pavilions and especially Jonathan Impett, who I revere, for giving me an initial platform for my obnoxious ideas.

Also — Liz Pelly’s new piece for Harpers is extremely relevant here: https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians/. Thanks to Micah Silver for pointing me to it, and for introducing me to Alex Reisner, who completely blew my mind open on the subject of copyright law.

Thanks to the Wire for distilling this entire thing into one sentence.

Reinforced shoutout to New Models we <3 u. Don't listen to this, listen to their interview w/ Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst instead.

2025 babyyyyyyyy

23. The Club (w/ Li Zhenhua)

Wed, 11 Dec 2024 18:10:11 +0000

No notes, pure vivid realness and realism.

Li Zhenhua is a major force in the art world, especially in film.

A tone poem from Torino.

Marek's favorite episode.

22. Janky (w/ Daniel Felstead and Jenn Leung)

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 15:26:45 +0000

Two of our discourse besties from UAL's Fashion Media Practice & Criticism -- experiential designers Daniel Felstead and Jenn Leung -- join us to talk Janky Capitalism (the obvious falling-apart weirdness of the world while capital spins off farther and farther away from it, leaving us behind), Roblox, and neural media.

You probably know their work from the iconic 'The Metaverse in Janky Capitalism' on Dis and its associated 'Literally No Place' and 'Always on My Mind' -- or from associated speaking / discourse production all over the internet (++ more on Jenn (link) and Daniel (link)).

References from the pod include:

Ruba Al-Sweel's awesome piece for SQD: 'Sandbox Semiotics' referenced in the intro.
Jenn references artworld queen Anna Uddenberg (e.g. 'Continental Breakfast'), Harvard's GSD's Guide to Shopping, and Ian Bogost (whose critique of anthropomorphism in video games we really relate to).
Daniel references Sam Cummins from Nymphet Alumni, a favorite podcast that everyone should already know and spend all their time listening to.
Daniel references Catherine Malabou's concept of plasticity (throughout her work, typically referencing neuroscientific plasticisty, here used in its more generalized form).
The second half of the episode spends some time with the theory of K. Allado-McDowell, specifically the concept of neural media. We could not recommend this episode of our other favorite podcast (New Models) more strongly.
Roberto mentions Zachary Horton's 'Cosmic Zoom', which is our obsession atm.

Ok enjoyyyy byee!

21. LIFE (w/ Blaise Agüera y Arcas)

Thu, 14 Nov 2024 18:48:55 +0000

Blaise Agüera y Arcas is one of most important people in AI, and apart from his leadership position as CTO of Technology & Society at Google, he has one of those resumes or affiliations lists that seems to span a lot of very fundamental things. He’s amazing; the thoughtfulness and generosity with which he communicates on this episode gently embraced our brains while lazering them to mush. We hope you have the same experience.

References include:

Blaise’s own books Who Are We Now?, Ubi Sunt, and the upcoming What Is Intelligence?
He references James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State, which we strongly recommend, Benjamin Peters’ How Not to Network a Nation, and Red Plenty by Francis Spufford.
Strong recommendation also to Benjamin Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World.
Roberto references Luciana Parisi’s Abstract Sex (our favorite book!) and the work of Lynn Margulis with respect to biology and reproduction.
Blaise references James E. Lovelock’s project “Daisyworld” with respect to the Gaia hypothesis.
He also references the Active Inference thesis, e.g. that of Karl J. Friston, and the work of Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercer on reason.
The cellular automata work referenced here involves the Von Neumann cellular automaton and the Wolfram neural cellular automaton.

Wish us a happy 1 year anniversary of the pod!

20. Low-Power Mode (w/ Tega Brain)

Thu, 31 Oct 2024 14:41:01 +0000

A very warm welcome to Helena McFadzean, who is joining the Disintegrator wrecking crew.

This week’s episode features one of our favorite artists, Tega Brain. In this episode, we talk through two of our favorite pieces, both of which are not just great exercises in conceptual design, but are actual practical engineering projects whose artistry consists in real solutioning.
References from the pod:

Sam Lavigne is an artist and engineer and educator whose collaborates frequently with Tega Brain. Both his creative technical work and his writing are highly recommended.
The two pieces we talk about most are Cold Call, a collaboration with Sam Levine, and Solar Protocol, a collaboration with Alex Nathanson, and Benedetta Piantella, among others.
Tega references the Critical Engineering group (Julian Oliver, Gordan Savičić, Danja Vasiliev), whose manifesto is very much worth reading, and 100rabbits, whose blog and methodological work are super super engaging.
In climate-related discussions, we talk about Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Breeding Sweetgrass, Holly Jean Buck’s Ending Fossil Fuels, the concept of ‘feral computing’ from Austin Wade Smith, and the data work by Crowther Lab on forest development.
Marek briefly mentions Joshua Citarella’s absolutely phenomenal ‘A Public Option for Social Media’.

Thanks for your patience while both Roberto and Marek were in mega-travel mega-project mode. We will be releasing something very large in the next few weeks to make up for it. :)

19. Anamnesis & Prosthetic Imagination (w/ Jonathan Impett)

Mon, 16 Sep 2024 16:01:47 +0000

Here’s a gem from our archive, a recording with Jonathan Impett — Director of Research at the Orpheus Instituut.

Impett has had a MAJOR impact on Roberto and Marek, a kind of intellectual godfather to the two of us. His staggering breadth of knowledge continues to blow our minds. You can find more about Impett's work here.

A number of references from the discussion include:

Impett's chapter in Choreomata is awesome. Buy our book! :)
Impett references Alexander Nagel and Chris Wood's Anachronic Renaissance an unbelievably ambitious tome that delves into the situatedness of art both inside and outside of the Renaissance.
A few California references -- Jonathan tags in Swarm and references the composer Brian Ferneyhough.
We're all Reza Negarestani fans here -- for more about computational interactionism, check out Reza's epsiode of the pod, Anil Bawa-Cavia's episode of the pod, and Reza's absolutely mondo Intelligence and Spirit.
At the time of the interview, Matteo Pasquinelli's influential The Eye of the Master had not yet been released and is referenced as an upcoming release.
For more information on the "waste product" -- Alain Badiou's Immanence of Truths is actually pretty forthcoming in this respect.
Jonathan also references After Sound, a very timely read by G. Douglas Barrett.

18. What is a World? (w/ Patricia Reed)

Thu, 05 Sep 2024 18:02:59 +0000

Majorly excited to have Patricia Reed on the pod. This is a beefy episode! If I was looking for a major reset in my relationship to the world around me, I'd start here.

Here’s a list of the references we make throughout the interview:

Here's that e-flux diagram I talk about in the intro, and here's a lecture in which she discusses this diagram. Here's the Diagramming the Common piece, which is older but I really like it.
Here's a must-read interview with Denise Ferreira da Silva where the concept of "the end of the world as we know it" is postulated.
When Patricia Reed refers to the "logics of worlds" in a Badiousian sense, she's referring to Alain Badiou's work on truth and world. Unless you're down for a real rabbithole, you're likely good with Reed's description here.
Reed references Margaret Morrison and the Black-Scholes model in the context of finance.
Reed references Sylvia Wynter's work consistently, specifically her discussion of humanism and of Frantz Fanon.
Check out Beth Coleman's work on Octavia Butler AI, as well as da Silva's "Unpayable Debt" (inspired by Butler's Kindred) -- and if you somehow haven't read the Lilith's Brood Trilogy after we discussed it with Luciana Parisi, go read it (aka Xenogenesis). It's like idk the most important work of fiction in the last 50 years idk!!!
Ofc big shoutouts as always Anil Bawa-Cavia -- this is the book we discuss toward the end of the episode.
If you aren't aware of Laboria Cuboniks and the XFM, stop listening and read it!!!

17. Computation is Computation (w/ M. Beatrice Fazi)

Mon, 19 Aug 2024 22:29:02 +0000

This episode features one of our most anticipated guests: M. Beatrice Fazi.

M. Beatrice Fazi is a philosopher working in philosophy of computation, philosophy of technology and media philosophy. In this episode we mostly cover some key definitions relating to computation and its onto-epistemology grounded in Fazi’s landmark book, Contingent Computation: Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aesthetics published in 2018. But our discussion doesn't end in 2018.

Now more than ever, Fazi`s work on computation holds unbelievable importance with wide-ranging implications. Philosophy is becoming a major foil to technocapital and technopolitics, forcing us to seriously (re)consider fundamental questions about technology and correlated fundamentals of knowledge and being.

Ever wondered what computation actually is? According to Fazi, it exists and unfolds not only as a function, but also as a creative modality forming its own conditions for existence. This episode dives deep into the concept of computation as an autonomous form of thought and creation, that is nevertheless contingent, i.e. not independent from the material conditions of the world.

We move further into Fazis more recent work in ontology: the triangulation of abstraction, representation and thought. This pushes us into massive questions - what does computation mean for the future of thought? How should we conceptualize the relationship between humans and technology? And why should we rethink the idea of technology as merely an extension of ourselves?

Relevant Links & References:

Fazi’s landmark book, Contingent Computation: Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aesthetics—still essential reading for anyone interested in the philosophy of technology. About the fundamentals of what computation does and what material, ontological and epistemological consequences this holds.
Brian Cantwell Smith’s essay, “The Foundations of Computing” (2003)—a text we explore, even if Fazi offers a different perspective on the nature of computation.
Oh, also, look to Anil Bawa-Cavia's (life changing) episode of Interdependence, where he enumerates further on computational functionalism, computational realism, but more importantly for more color on the paths to incompleteness traced in Gödel and Turing -- to which Fazi builds her main thesis: these incompletenesses are actually strengths and not limitations of computation.

Pls like and subscribe or leave a review or whatever we're a baby podcast that's doing huge things!

𝑑𝑒𝑠𝑢𝑏𝑗𝑒𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑒 ℎ𝑒𝑎𝑣𝑒𝑛 (𝑤/ 𝑎𝑛𝑔𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑐𝑖𝑠𝑚01)

Sat, 10 Aug 2024 14:08:57 +0000

𝑎𝑛𝑔𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑐𝑖𝑠𝑚01 𝑗𝑜𝑖𝑛𝑠 𝑢𝑠 𝑡𝑜 𝑡𝑎𝑙𝑘 𝑎𝑏𝑜𝑢𝑡 𝑝𝑎𝑟𝑎𝑑𝑖𝑠𝑒

16. Sh*tshow Theory (w/ Mattin & Inigo Wilkins)

Tue, 30 Jul 2024 16:18:21 +0000

BACK with some of the world's foremost experts on NOISE: Mattin & Inigo Wilkins.

Relevant links include:

The Noise Research Union (NRU) which involves both Mattin and Inigo alongside founding members Cécile Malaspina, Martina Raponi, Miguel Prado, and Sonia de Jager.
Mattin's AWESOME book Social Dissonance (out on Urbanomic).
Mattin's podcast Social Discipline.
Inigo Wilkin's UPCOMING book, which is obviously going to be amazing, which will be released on Urbanomic: Irreversible Noise (here's a sneak peak from an interview with Nina Protocol).

15. Systems (w/ Georgina Voss)

Mon, 08 Jul 2024 16:31:47 +0000

In this episode, Georgina Voss helps Roberto and Marek kick off on a journey to think about the relationship between human agency and political scale, specifically how that relationship is mediated by technology. The next few episodes will stick to this theme.
Georgina's work spans the arts, anthropology, policy, technology, cultural theory -- and, critical to this episode's scope: systems theory. Her new book Systems Ultra is a GREAT read, beginning with a kind of xenoanthropology of one of the tech sector's most... extra... events: the Consumer Electronics Show (CES).
Georgina's work further referenced here includes:

Supra Systems Studio, specifically the exhibition "Everything Happens So Much" (ref. Horse E-Books) with Eva Verhoeven and Tobias Revell
Situated Systems (artistic work with Ingrid Burrington, Deb Chachra, and Sherri Wasserman)
Stigma and the Shaping of the Pornography Industry

Talking to an extremely practiced and principled researcher like Georgina means aggregating a ton of very real, tangible references to existing work, including:

Donna Haraway's Situated Knowledge
James Bridle's New Dark Age
Tega Brain's magnificent The Environment is Not a System
Donella Meadows' Thinking in Systems
James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State
Clifford Siskin's System: A History Ideas of the Idea of System
Valerie Olson's Into the Extreme
My newest obsession and one of the more mindblowing things I've read recently (thanks Georgina!) is Marilyn Strathern's Kinship as a Relation
Silvio Lorusso making me rethink some of my recent terminology choices in Against Complexity
Timothy Morton's Hyperobjects (which we're now calling the OMG theory of climate change)
Rachel Coldicutt's work in and out of Careful Trouble, e.g. Tech for Today and for Tomorrow or this (awesome) essay.
Dan Lockton's work, e.g. Lockton, D. (2021), ‘Metaphors and Systems’, Proceedings of Relating Systems Thinking and Design (RSD10) 2021 Symposium, Delft, The Netherlands: 2–6 Nov. 2021.
Maya Indira Ganesh's work, e.g. Ganesh, M. I. (2022), ‘Between Metaphor and Meaning: AI and Being Human’, Interactions 29: 5, 58–62.
AI As Super-Controversy by Noortje Marres, Michael Castelle, and James Tripp

Really, really enjoyed this one! You can find more information relevant to this episode at Georgina's website as well.

[Hyperlecture] Marek & Roberto: Non-Player Dynamics: Agency Fetish in Game-World

Tue, 11 Jun 2024 14:49:44 +0000

Youtube for the full experience + Q&A. In the pod, I say to just listen to the audio, but honestly the video is really really fire.

Lecture given to our friends at Foreign Objekt, now ON POD.

Programmer and Organizer: Sepideh Majidi
Moderator: Maure Coise
Video Edit: Shaum Mehra

Tons of references here from all over the place, but definitely strongly in debt to the work of many many people. See the YT video for a more complete accounting, but a first pass definitely should call out Suhail Malik (on finance), Benjamin Bratton (on the entanglement between computation and geopolitics), Bogna Konior (on the aesthetic category of the human), Catherine Malabou (especially the later work on anarchism), Brad Troemel + Joshua Citarella + New Models + Interdependence (especially on internet culture), Nick Srnicek (on the platform), Luciana Parisi and Beatrice Fazi (on computational autonomy), Anil Bawa-Cavia (on the computability of the social), Keith Tilford and Andreas Reckwitz (on creativity), and of course <3 <3 Reza Negarestani (on horizons of possibility, on the inhuman, and on Nick Land).

It's such a beast definitely definitely hit us up, we love this one.

14. Deathcare for the End of the World (w/ Patricia MacCormack)

Tue, 28 May 2024 10:18:35 +0000

This one is deep so see tons of explanatory resources below. The philosophy talk turns to political talk (easier to grok) after about 15 minutes, but the philosophical context adds a lot of richness to the latter conversation.

Patricia MacCormack is driving productive tension between philosophy and political action. Her Ahuman Manifesto is strongly recommended, even to those who may take issue with it in principle (anti-natalism! anti-idpol! anti-human!), because it makes a forceful argument for a politics based in empathy and care as applied to everyone and every thing.

Core concepts you might not be familiar with:

Posthumanism — if you recall, a kind of running theme of the podcast is "posthumanism is kinda sus.” As a philosophical stance, it means an expansion of categories of agency and vitality, thought and creativity, to forces beyond the mere human. Rosi Braidotti (Patricia MacCormack’s PhD advisor) was one of the first major forces in this field, and Patricia has written extensively on it as well (see her Posthuman Ethics). In practice, of course, posthumanism gets confused pretty quickly — Reza kicks off the first episode of the pod with a brutal critique that Patricia sustains here: many people tend to use posthumanism to advance a kind of hard anthropocentrism applied to everything, a way of accidentally inflating the human all the way out to the cosmic level. It’s likely good to critique anthropocentrism at all scales, but it is a very challenging thing to do in practice without carrying out what Reza calls “inflation”, assigning anthropogenic models to everything from fish to stones to electromagnetism. E.g. "my politics include this rock" turns pretty quickly to "this rock has some vital characteristics I'm imposing upon it through my own human gaze."
Transhumanism — kind of reversal of the posthuman project. Think Neuralink, human cloning, or dramatic surgical alterations. Transhumanism is humanism transcended, the human project continues but with greater veracity, constructed to conquer the future. A nice quote, per the Xenofeminist Manifesto (not quite a transhumanist project but also not not one) is "if nature is unjust, change nature." If the human as presently understood is insufficiently capable to handle its futures, change the human, make it live longer, act more efficiently, move faster.
Asemiosis — the absence or breakdown of traditional semiotic processes, where signs cease to function within the established systems of meaning. This is what happens when we operate within a superabundance of signs and references on massive scales. Don’t worry about this one too much.
Potestas to Potentia — lmao ok. Potestas in Spinoza refers to the word “power” as we most often understand it, authority, domination, or control. Power OVER. Potentia, on the other hand, refers to power as an intrinsic capacity or potential within an individual or entity. The, uh, power within… so to speak. (Michel Serres concept of “grace”, that MacCormack refers to occasionally, is similar to potential). It's a nice way to think about power without the coercive connotations.
Irigaray “letting be” / Serres “stepping aside” — many people have theorized political inaction as a type of action. Check out Bifo Berardi’s latest interview on Acid Horizon where he talks about “defection" so sickkkk. This doesn't mean doing nothing, but rather not doing (opting out).
Knowledge — this isn’t as hard as it comes across. Patricia is basically attacking the need for us to know each other to help each other, to understand each other in order to have empathy for each other. Why? Well, understanding requires communication, which means that information is moving through protocols (e.g. language, digitization, facial expressions, etc…) that are always already encoded with power.
Difference — also not so bad! What is difference? You and I are different! Everything is different. For many postmodern philosophers, you can reverse that statement into “difference is everything.” And once you start to think of difference as constructive stuff, well, the world gets quite interesting. For people like Patricia MacCormack, difference is probably a good thing and forces that move to hide, cloak, or suppress difference are probably bad.
Art — not what you think art is in this context, like a "painting" for example. Instead, it's an encounter with the unknown, a way of communicating without understanding (this follows from Maurice Blanchot's theories of art as event, which one can also find in a different but not unrelated way in the writings of Alain Badiou, who believes that art is a specific kind of truth different from scientific truth or political truth).

HMU via @dis.integrator if I can help with this one.

13. Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Creative Production (Marek Solo Ep.)

Mon, 13 May 2024 14:53:03 +0000

Creativity = sus.

12. Piles (w/ Alex Reisner)

Tue, 30 Apr 2024 17:28:39 +0000

Alex Reisner's writing in the Atlantic is some of the best investigative coverage of Large Language Models out there. In this episode, we talk through the mind-bogglingly vast archives of random pirated material that provide every major commercial LLMs with their linguistic faculty.

Definitely check out his writing on https://www.theatlantic.com/author/alex-reisner/, especially the phenomenal January 11 piece on "memorization."

ALSO -- if you haven't -- submit to our call for papers on AI interfaces: link! We'd love to have you.

11. Reinventing the Surface (w/ Refik Anadol)

Wed, 10 Apr 2024 15:33:27 +0000

Refik Anadol, and by extension Refik Anadol Studio, is one of the most visible, if not the most visible, artists working with large models today. His work is everywhere, from MoMa to the Biennale Venezia, from the very first Las Vegas Exosphere art display to the front of Walt Disney Concert Hall.

We’re delighted to have had him on the pod to talk through his artistic philosophy, touching specifically on media, light, AI, and his new incredibly large-scope Nature Model project announced back in January (approximately the same time we had our conversation with him — yes, the backlog is real).

We're also accompanied in the virtual studio with Pelin Kivrak, who writes as apart of Refik Anadol Studio.

10. Voice (w/ Jennifer Walshe)

Tue, 26 Mar 2024 15:42:39 +0000

Jennifer Walshe is one of the coolest people we know. Her artistic work and thought has broken our brains for years, leaving us shipwrecked in its torrential waves of reference and irony and joy and conceptual viscera.

We talk about her recent piece for the Unsound Dispatch, 13 Ways of Looking at AI, Art & Music — a series of vignettes that in their totality assemble into one of the most coherent accountings of what it is we’re all experiencing.

Some references from the ep:

Listen to Things Know Things on RTÉ Lyric FM.
Hopefully you’re aware of the music duo Matmos — Jennifer references this record in the context of discussing conceptual work. Jennifer also speaks often of her close collaborator Jon Leidecker (Wobbly), who has a few absolutely killer sets with Matmos, including this one.
You can interact with Walshe’s Text Score Dataset here.
We continue to enjoy references to Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’s Have I Been Trained (https://haveibeentrained.com/), a way to search for your (or anyone’s) work in large, public, AI training datasets.
Two movies everyone should see: Catfish the Movie and HER. (We’d also recommend Catfish the TV show, of course).
Jennifer mentions the computer scientist Kate Devlin’s work, especially “Turned On: Science, Sex and Robots.”
If you haven’t googled a picture of Paro the Therapy Seal, do it.
Jennifer’s record “A Late Anthology of Early Music Vol. 1: Ancient to Renaissance” is a top lifetime record as far as we both are concerned. Check out track 16 for that Palestrina. It’s CRAZY.
To wrap it up, check out Ted Gioia’s Substack and Bruce Sterling’s writing (the concept Walshe references is "Dark Euphoria").

[Bonus] Non-Player Dynamics (Teaser)

Wed, 06 Mar 2024 15:33:53 +0000

Go here for more information about the upcoming talk that Roberto and Marek are doing Sunday, March 10, at 10AM Pacific. It's virtual, so come join us!!!

9. Alignment (w/ Benjamin Bratton)

Tue, 27 Feb 2024 14:30:11 +0000

Benjamin Bratton writes about world-spanning intelligences, grinding geopolitical tectonics, “accidental megastructures” of geotechnical cruft, the millienia-long terraforming project through which humans rendered an earth into a world, and the question of what global-scale order means in the twilight of the Westphalian nation-state.

Candidly, if either of us were to recommend a book to help you understand the present state of ‘politics’ or ‘technology’, we’d probably start with Bratton’s The Stack — written 10 years ago, but still very much descriptive of our world and illuminative of its futures.

If the first 10 minutes are too “tech industry” for you — just skip ahead. The whole conversation is seriously fire, and it spikes hit after hit of takes on privacy, bias, alignment, subjectivity, the primacy of the individual … all almost entirely unrepresented within the Discourse.

Some references:

We briefly talk about EdgeML, which essentially means the execution of ML models on small computers installed in a field location.
Benjamin mentions his collaboration with renowned computer scientist and thinker Blaise Agüera y Arcas, whose work on federated learning is relevant to this stage of the conversation. Federated learning involves a distributed training approach in which a model is updated by field components who only transmit changes to a model therefore retaining the security of local training sets to their own environments only. Also - here’s a link to their collaboration on “The Model is the Message."
Benjamin calls himself a bit of an “eliminative materialist” “in the Churchland mode,” meaning someone who believes that “folk psychologies” or “folk ontologies” (theories of how the mind works from metaphysics, psychoanalysis, or generalized psychology) will be replaced by frameworks from cognitive science or neuroscience.
Benjamin calls out a collaboration with Chen Quifan. Check out Waste Tide — it’s excellent sci-fi.
The collaboration with Anna Greenspan and Bogna Konior discussed in the pod is called “Machine Decision is Not Final” out on Urbanomic.
Shoshana Zuboff is a theorist who coined the term “surveillance capitalism,” referring to capital accumulation through a process of ‘dispossession by surveillance.’ The implicit critique of “surveillance capitalism” in this episode hinges on its overemphasis on individual sovereignty.
“Tay” was the infamous AI Twitter Chatbot Microsoft rolled out for 16 hours before pulling back for its controversial content.
Antihumanism refers to a rejection of the ontological primacy and universalization of the human afforded to it through the philosophical stance of “humanism.” An “antihumanist" is someone who challenges the stability of the concept of the “human” or at very least its salience in cosmic affairs.
Check out Benjamin’s new piece on Tank Mag (Tank.tv), it’s fire. And check out Anna Kornbluh’s AWESOME “Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism” on Verso.

8. World Models (w/ Anil Bawa-Cavia)

Wed, 14 Feb 2024 16:31:26 +0000

Anil Bawa-Cavia (AA Cavia) is one of our favorite writers and practitioners on the philosophy of computation. We discovered his work through Logiciel, on &&& (we <3 &&&!), both a gorgeous book in print and an elegant formal depiction of what computation might actually be (a definition that stands in striking contrast to the limitations imposed upon it by the humanities, or the comprehensive universality bestowed upon it by that particular breed of TEDx computational ‘realists’).

This conversation is a really nice parallel to Anil’s amazing chapter in Choreomata, in which he identifies the bottlenecks we are rapidly approaching through deep learning as, in part, products of incomplete thinking as to the nature of language, learning, their messy and entangled relationship to the “world,” and their reconsumptive throughput as it assembles into what we increasingly understand as something like intelligence.

We want this conversation to be accessible to as many listeners as possible, so here are some further references and definitions that might be useful:

I’ll be honest, I was surprised when I learned how radically different (and how totally gendered) the “Turing Test” was in its original formulation from what it’s become known to be. Read about it directly via: Turing - Can Machines Think (https://redirect.cs.umbc.edu/courses/471/papers/turing.pdf).
It’s likely the distinction between supervised and unsupervised learning is very clear to most listeners, but if you’re unfamiliar with this distinction, see a sufficient overview here (https://www.ibm.com/blog/supervised-vs-unsupervised-learning/). This becomes important as Anil starts speaks to the implications of things like pedagogy and normativity to learning.
The concept of normativity is used quite a bit here in a way that might be unfamiliar to some people. Think of normativity as the moment the word should enters into some construct — both in the prescriptive sense (“you should behave according to xyz social norms”) but also to some extent in the empirical sense (“based on what I’ve observed so far, this type of outcome should result from this interaction”). While we encode norms into language models (both through supervised learning, but also through the hidden organizing principles that are contained within complex structures like language), we do not encode “normativity” — a way of engaging with norms as norms. This is a good place to start when trying to understand the critique from inferentialism that Anil brings from Wilfred Sellars and Robert Brandom.
An “embedding” is essentially the ability to place some system or configuration within another system in such a way that its general shape is retained. In the context of machine learning, language is embedded into a high-dimensional numerical space wherein meaning can be identified by the proximity of various words within that space, and translations between languages can be accomplished by looking at the position of words within one language’s embedding and correlating that to a similar set of positions in another. You don’t need to understand topology to intuit what this might look like in a way that is sufficiently useful. Anil playfully refers to “embedding” in Wilfred Sellars’ work — a philosopher who argues that everything we know is ‘embedded’ within complex webs of beliefs, norms, and meanings.
Anil references Alain Badiou’s writings on finitude, and it’s our impression that this is a reference to Badiou’s completion of his enormously sprawling Being and Event trilogy (“The Immanence of Truths”). Not an essential book for this podcast or a barrier to understanding Anil’s work, nor for the faint of heart in terms of its scope, but if you’re intrigued by “an all out attack on finitude” — go for it!
For some more content on what the “multiple realizability” of computation looks like (how computation enjoys meaningful distinction from hardware), we love Laura Tripaldi's Parallel Minds.
Anil references James Ladyman & Don Ross, whose work he repurposes in a critical way — see “Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized.”
We love love love Anil’s interview on Interdependence (https://interdependence.fm/episodes/inhuman-intelligence-with-anil-bawa-cavia).

We love this episode! Enjoy!

7. Protocols of Encounter (w/ Sofian Audry)

Wed, 17 Jan 2024 15:38:54 +0000

Sofian Audry wrote Art in the Age of Machine Learning, an absolute canon read that contextualizes the contemporary flurry of creative AI application and detournement within a much longer lineage of human-machine relations. Their chapter in Choreomata straddles theory and practice, situating Sofian’s own work in the field of robotics within a history of questions: how do we communicate to an audience through and with machine performers? How does the external intelligibility of a system complicate its autonomy? How, and why, do we construct empathy with our machine collaborators?

In this conversation we discuss Sofian’s concept of Apprivoisement, a French term akin to domestication or taming, but one which leans into the mutuality of the relationship without the stain of dominance. We love this term and are eager to watch it seep into the discourse.

A few references from our conversation with Sofian:

Gene Kogan’s Abraham AI (https://abraham.ai/).
Simon Penny’s “Aesthetics of Behavior” — which is meaningfully different from Bourriaud’s Behavioral Aesthetics — see Penny's “Making Sense: Cognition, Computing, Art, and Embodiment.” In discussing the Aesthetics of Behavior, Sofian briefly discusses the history of cybernetics, including W. Grey Walter (e.g. the cybernetic tortoises) and Gordon Pask (the “Colloquy of Mobiles”). They also reference the influence of Rodney Brooks, who argued for the necessity of robotics as an embodying factor within the domain of AI, on the more recent school of cybernetic-adjacent artists (e.g. Bill Vorn, Louis-Philippe Demers, Ken Rinaldo).
Sofian references Memo Akten as an inspiration for their concept of Apprivoisement. Akten’s work is profoundly important to the media art scene and to the general art world especially with respect to questions about AI. (Come on the pod, Memo!!!!)
Sofian also references Beyond the Creative Species: Making Machines That Make Art and Music by Oliver Brown in contradistinction to Margaret Boden’s value-driven concept of creativity.
In addition to Sofian's book, we of course strongly recommend checking out their artistic practice.

6. Autolinguistics & Autopoetics (w/ Sasha Stiles)

Tue, 02 Jan 2024 17:44:32 +0000

Sasha Stiles writes poetry with and as machines. We first encountered her work as a direct, powerful rejoinder to the allegation that AI-generated work is cold, unfeeling, or lifeless. Her chapter in Choreomata underlines the technicity implicit in language and in poetics, positioning technology not as a thing one applies to language but instead as a mode of knowing inextricable from and in kinship with language.

A few references from the text:

First, Stile’s beautiful work TECHNELEGY, which boasts an endorsement from Ray Kurzweil on its front cover. The audio version of the poem “Completion” from this volume completes the episode of the podcast, one of Marek’s favs. STRONG recco!
Stiles references Alison Knowles’ The House of Dust as an influential inflection point in early computerized poetry.
Stiles is BINA48’s poetry mentor, who is famous for inducing moments of heartbreaking discursive introspection, for example -- by articulating a beautiful moment in the video for Jay-Z’s 4:44.
Jacques Derrida’s Plato’s Pharmacy and Villem Flusser’s Communicology: Mutations in Human Relations? are solid mid-century interrogations of the historical determinations and formulations of writing that flow naturally from this conversation.
Stiles is incredibly prolific — follow her work via @sashastiles on X & IG.

[Bonus] Choreomata Launch Panel (w/ Foreign Objekt)

Tue, 26 Dec 2023 17:43:04 +0000

Here's the audio version of the Choreomata book launch with Foreign Objekt, featuring Anil Bawa-Cavia, Jonathan Impett, Mattin, Reza Negarestani, Keith Tilford, and Jennifer Walshe.

MANY thanks to Sepideh Majidi.

The full video is here.

You can find Choreomata anywhere, especially here.

5. The Unknown X (w/ Luciana Parisi)

Mon, 18 Dec 2023 17:38:29 +0000

Luciana Parisi has produced some of the 21st century’s most daring and bold work in the theories of cybernetics, information, and computation. Her work has had a major impact on both Marek and Roberto’s artistic practices, specifically her early work in the inorganic components of human reproduction.

Just a brief content note — we mention some complex topics including consent and suicide at the top of the pod, specifically in the context of David Marriott’s concept of “Revolutionary Suicide”. These concepts are not extensively discussed throughout, but are nonetheless heavy topics.
We strongly recommend three texts in parallel with this conversation:

Probably Marek’s favorite piece of theory: Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire
A book more specifically scoped to the subject of this conversation, which attacks the biophysicalist metaphors at the ground of how AI research markets itself: Contagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics, and Space
The essay: The Alien Subject of AI.

Some references from the conversation that are likely interesting to any listener:

If you haven’t read Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis (renamed Lilith’s Brood), we strongly recommend these amazing pieces of science fiction.
If you’re unfamiliar with the CCRU, play around on the CCRU website and buy this unhinged compendium from our friends at Urbanomic (they have a super sexy new edition just out now). If you haven’t read Sadie Plant’s Zeroes + Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture, it’s seriously an essential read if you’re interested in computation.
We briefly make fun of the feature film “The Creator”, which it looks like you can stream on major platforms. We mention this in the context of Delueze and Guattari’s “War Machine” — we recommend their “Nomadology: The War Machine” (if you follow Marek on Instagram, you’ll note that he’s obsessed with the exteriority of war machines from the state).
When we start to talk about information theory, Luciana mentions Claude Shannon (one of the fathers of modern information theory), Cecile Malaspina (“An Epistemology of Noise”), and Karen Barad (“What is the Measure of Nothingness?”).
Francois Laruelle is a major influence to Luciana here, in her chapter in Choreomata, and elsewhere. His corpus of work is famously intractable, but her chapter in Choreomata is a good way in.
Luciana mentions Holly Herndon’s work (we strongly recommend Holly+ and https://haveibeentrained.com/, alongside her and Mat Dryhurst’s podcast, which was a huge inspiration to us when starting Disintegrator).
Everyone should read Hito Steyerl’s work “Mean Images” on NLR as they should Sylvia Wynter’s “Towards the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn, its Autonomy of Human Agency and Extraterritoriality of (Self-)Cognition”.

4. Capital Sticks to Itself (Marek Solo Ep.)

Sun, 03 Dec 2023 16:37:44 +0000

First - come to our book launch, hosted by our friends at Foreign Objekt and organized by Sepideh Majidi. Dec 9 at 9AM Pacific: https://www.foreignobjekt.com/post/choreomata-book-launch-panel-ai-as-mass-performance.

Since both Roberto and Marek are traveling this week, we’re doing something a little different this time — Marek put together a solo-cast.

Marek and Roberto wrote the opening chapter of Choreomata, a thought-experiment about what happens to subjective experience when it is fully subcontracted out by the various routines of datafication and computation that comprise contemporary digital society. Academics and researchers constantly worry about the extent to which we are constructing AI in our own image, but in reality the reverse feels truer: we are constructing ourselves according to machine protocols.

This episode goes ham into a conjecture from the chapter: what if we have also overinscribed our own image onto capitalism? We propose a weird fever-dream in which the opposite is true: what if capitalism is detaching, lifting off, and departing from the immediate sphere of human events?
A pretty long reference list:

Anil Bawa-Cavia’s Logiciel brings a sledgehammer to contemporary computation, illuminating the ideological presuppositions and logical incoherencies at its core.
Nick Land’s Machinic Desire inspires the piece, with its provocation that capitalism is an AI sent from the future.
This piece gets extremely playful with some of Reza Negarestani’s work, which should be read on its own — especially “Drafting the Inhuman: Conjectures on Capitalism and Organic Necrocracy” and “Solar Inferno and the Earthbound Abyss.” Seriously amazing pieces.
It also plays liberally with Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus — it’s worth noting that D&G’s beliefs about capitalism change quite a bit after this particular piece, but it stands as a major work of 20th century social theory.
As in a previous podcast, this episode owes a lot of its frameworking to Tiziana Terranova’s Free Labor: Producing Culture of the Digital Economy. And listen to our recent podcast with this hero of ours -- Episode 2!
On social reproduction and reproductive labor, we recommend Bognia Konor’s Automate the Womb: Ecologies and Technologies of Reproduction, Sarah Elsie Baker’s Post-work Futures and Full Automation: Towards a Feminist Design Methodology, and the entire corpus of Helen Hester’s visionary work.
Frantz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth cleaved our world in two -- a major piece of anticolonial theory and critical race theory that undergirds our assertion that when we talk about capitalism, we are often talking about a very specific, bourgeois, Western experience.
On the economic side, Suhail Malik’s Ontology of Finance is a must-read, as is Bifo Berardi’s “After the Economy”.
Finally, we want to shout out the artist, thinker, Redditor Nina Rajcic who we dialogued with about some of these ideas with us at Sensilab Prato this year. We hope to have her on a future ep!

Enjoy this little bit of self-indulgence! We’ll be back soon with an episode featuring one of our biggest influences, Luciana Parisi (hopefully next week, depending on our travel schedule).

3. Deep Learning as Parasite (w/ Jon McCormack)

Wed, 22 Nov 2023 17:51:25 +0000

Jon McCormack has been investigating the relationships between machine intelligences and creativity for decades. In Episode 3, Jon joins Marek and Roberto to speak about the social and cultural implications of AI -- beginning with the parasitism that deep learning methodologies practice upon human culture and the downstream effects on how we think, learn, and act.

We had the privilege of meeting Jon at an event thrown by SensiLab, an incredible research facility founded by Jon within Monash University, at their Creative AI summit in Prato this past summer. For anyone interested in the creative dimensions of AI, we highly recommend exploring the link above.
A few notes from the conversation:

At the beginning of the episode Jon references his absolutely beautiful work Holon, which is worth virtually exploring on his site. For anyone with a cursory or recent understanding of what it means to make art with AI, a deep dive into Jon's work is recommended -- it truly hits so many dimensions of this topic in stirring and striking ways and has been incredibly influential on many disciplines. It will definitely shake your conceptions of "AI + art" from that of idle generativity on commercial platforms.
Jon references Anthony O’Hear’s “Art and Technology” as a foundational work establishing the parasitic tendencies of AI back in the 90s.
There are some quite evocative images of the “alien-looking” structures developed through generative technologies as mobilized for spacecraft here. Jon references objects like this as examples of expanded notions of creativity.
We strongly recommend Art in the Age of Machine Learning by Sofian Audry (a future guest on the podcast and a member of the Choreomata team), as it engages with Jon’s work.

This episode continues the through-line of skepticism toward the recent hype around major commercial investments in generative deep learning -- enumerating upon their bottlenecks, biases, and social and cultural effects. Jon’s critique here is strong and pithy, as are his gestures toward alternatives.

2. Free Labor, Hidden Labor (w/ Tiziana Terranova)

Wed, 22 Nov 2023 17:43:49 +0000

Tiziana Terranova has provided all of us with one of the sharpest critical accounts of the modern internet. In this episode, Tiziana, Roberto, and Marek discuss the labor dynamics at play in the contemporary digital economy -- from changes in the social status of creative work, the hidden labor underpinning the mechanics of the virtual world, and the material means by which AI resists pushes for decentralization.

We reference a few of Tiziana’s texts in the interview, which build foundational scaffolding for theories of what it means to live within networks:

We further recommend some background information about some of the theorists Tiziana references, including:

Tiziana speaks about the Autonomist Marxist tradition beginning in Italy in the 60s, with key exponents like Paolo Virno, Antonio Negri, and Franco “Bifo” Berardi. Virno’s recent The Idea of World: Public Intellect and Use of Life is a great primer for this conversation.
Since we speak about Marx’s Grundrisse, David Harvey has quite a good primer on this important but unusual text here.
Something that informed Marek’s thoughts in this conversation was an excellent recent episode of Aufhebunga Bunga (number 362 with Cory Doctorow).
Tiziana references the work of sociologist Antonio Casilli; we are looking forward to the English translation of Waiting for Robots: An Inquiry Into Digital Labor into English.
Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Toward a Global Idea of Race comes up in the context of racialized capitalism.
Peter Galison’s War Against the Center is highly recommended as we speak about centralization.
In the conversation on reproductive labor, Tiziana references Amelia DeFalco’s work on posthuman care.

Enjoy this fast-paced, dynamic episode as it grapples with the question: will algorithm ever set us free?

1. Human is Not a Thing (w/ Reza Negarestani)

Mon, 13 Nov 2023 19:29:20 +0000

Reza Negarestani has put together one of the strongest philosophical conceptions of Artificial General Intelligence. In this episode, Reza, Marek, and Roberto hit virtually every limit of AI theory -- from the outer banks of the "human", the boundaries of creativity and imagination, the borderlands of contemporary computation, and the social and political and aesthetic implications of all of the above. This episode is a great companion piece to not just Reza's chapter in Choreomata (Galatea Reloaded: Imagination Inside-Out Imagine) but his absolutely mindblowing work Intelligence and Spirit.

We reference a few texts in the interview:

Intelligence and Spirit (in our opinion, one of the most important treatises on AGI)
Reza's work on the "inhuman" in The Labor of the Inhuman and Drafting the Inhuman
His collaboration with the brilliant visual artist and theorist Keith Tilford, who also has a significant piece in Choreomata, but who most famously collaborated with Reza on Chronosis
Reza's conversation with one of our favorite political theorists, Nick Srnicek, via the awesome Impossible Object Books

While this episode is quite technical, we are confident that repeat listens are rewarding. Reza will uproot everything you believe about Artificial Intelligence in this incredible interview.