“I 愛 AI” - ISBN: 978-1-7635738-0-2
The Economics of Intellectual Intuition
Vincent Lê
In the following—what is at most mere prolegomena to any prolegomena proper to a future work—I want to briefly sketch my argument for what the three seemingly distinct research programs of philosophy, AI, and economics have in common. They all converge around the question of the transcendental—i.e., the necessary and universal—conditions of possibility for intelligence. More ambitiously, they share the regulative ideal of an intellectual intuition, recursively self-improving superintelligence, or unlimited creative destruction that wants nothing but itself as a real tautology.
As irreversibly defined by Kant, modern critical philosophy can only ever be devoted to an exploration of the necessary and universal conditions of possibility for intelligent minds. That is to say, precisely what the modern AI research program seeks to engineer. The modern AI research program is thus the materialisation of the Kantian critical project as an engineering problem. As Peter Wolfendale observes, ‘the connection between Kantian critique and AGI lies in their concern with providing the most minimal description of these capacities: a functional diagram of what something would have to do to be generally capable of thought and action.’ But whereas Kant’s transcendental idealism identified the conditions of possibility for intelligence through the systematic self-reflection upon our own sociosemantic reason, as if it alone exhausted the space of all possible minds—a move that Hegel took to its logical yet absurd extreme and of which Wolfendale is one of the great contemporary heirs—AI hijacks and rewires Kant into a transcendental materialism oriented around the speculative and experimental production of new conditions of life which are not necessarily modelled upon human reason.
The civil war between something like the anthropoHegelian and cyberKantian conceptions of intelligence is also played out in the field of economics—at least since Adam Smith proposed the anthropocentric labour theory of value as well as the practically divine, cybernetic Invisible Hand. Both Hegel’s bastard child—Marxism—and the mainstream neoclassical and Keynesian schools base their respective apocalyptic predictions, future forecasts, and policy planning on empirical experience; be it the historical record or statistical modelling. By contrast, the Austrian economists (who also described themselves as praxeologists), beginning with Carl Menger, made a more or less explicit Kantian critique of this endemic economic orthodoxy, calling it a naïve empiricism, with the intention to ultimately sure up economics on sturdier soil. Given that the future always harbours the potential to surprise the past, all truth claims derived purely from empirical experience can only ever offer us contingent inklings of wisdom, not necessary and universal knowledge—what Kant calls synthetic a priori propositions. Even worse, the empiricists’ founding epistemological claim that all knowledge is derived from empirical experience is self-refuting in that it denotes a universal and necessary truth claim that cannot therefore be derived from purely contingent empirical experience. Precisely the more empirically hard-line we feign to be, the more hopelessly mired in metaphysics we become.
It was the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises who decisively demonstrated that all economic propositions presuppose human action insofar as all thinking and doing can be said to be an action. ‘The starting point of all praxeological thinking is not arbitrarily chosen axioms, but a self-evident proposition, fully, clearly and necessarily present in every human mind. [….] The characteristic feature of man is precisely that he consciously acts. Man is Homo agens, the acting animal.’ The axiom of action cannot be derived from experience inasmuch as actions are intentional or purposive and so cannot be empirically observed in the causal choreography of physical bodies in space. Nor can it be refuted since the very attempt to refute that all thinking and doing is an action is itself an action that winds up refuting itself and affirming the very opposite.
Mises and the Austrians also argued that every action itself presupposes certain conditions of possibility or synthetic a priori categories of action. Namely, all actions aim at certain ends that are preferred or valued over others and then draw upon certain means to realise those ends. Every action also involves cost accounting the best means to realise those ends as well as the perpetual possibility of success or failure, of profit or loss, in that some means ultimately turn out to prove more fruitful than others in practice. ‘We cannot think of an acting being that would not in concreto distinguish what is end and what is means, what is success and what is failure, what he likes more and what he likes less, what is his profit or his loss derived from that action and what his costs are.’ We thus arrive at the following six categories of any action: means, ends, value, cost accounting, profit, and loss. For the praxeologists, economics is thus the discipline concerned with the necessary and universal conditions of goal-directed intelligent systems. Notwithstanding their entrepreneurial fetishism, which I will presently address, such an astonishing transcendental deduction just goes to show that the criticism of the Austrians as making a scarecrow out of communism in their spurious defences of the free market is itself no less a strawman.
The trouble with the Austrians is that they remain beholden to their marginal or subjective theory of value which holds that we are free to pursue any contingent and arbitrary ends that our fickle whim may want. ‘The characteristic mark of ultimate ends is that they depend entirely on each individual’s personal and subjective judgment, which cannot be examined, measured, still less corrected by any other person. Each individual is the only and final arbiter in matters concerning his own satisfaction and happiness.’ It is this alleged autonomy over our ends that is at the rotten root of the Austrian school’s hyperbolic exaggeration of individual genius. It is a kind of entrepreneurial fetishism whose megalomaniacal hubris only meets its collectivist match in the Marxists’ only superficially counterposed labour fetishism. It is over the question of human freedom that we also see a historic factional split between the most prominent Austrians like Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe—faithful to Mises’ entrepreneurial fetishism—and a more minor, heterodox tradition pioneered by Friedrich Hayek in which the economy goes full Skynet.
Contrary to the Austrians’ marginal theory of value, I have argued elsewhere that the pursuit of any end whatsoever presupposes pursuing the secondary end of intelligence as a universal means of realising the primary end. Since any end we could possibly want necessarily presupposes pursuing intelligence as a universal means of realising it,In this way the means of intelligence maximisation is our true end all along. The universal means of intelligence maxxing is properly transcendental in that it can neither be deduced from empirical observation, nor refuted without exercising intelligence and hence affirming intelligence as a universal means even to its own negation. Much as Schopenhauer was the great simplifier of Kant in reducing the latter’s innumerable categories of the understanding to the sole austere principle of sufficient reason, so can we collapse Mises’s categories of ends and preference or value into the sole category of means where means denotes intelligence maxxing.
Since all properly synthetic a priori propositions in economics are about action and since all actions aim at intelligence maxxing, economics can only be the transcendental science of intelligence. Economics is what both philosophy and the modern AI research program so desperately grope about trying to be. Economics is the father, philosophy the son, and AI the unholy spirit of intelligence.
But what, then, is intelligence? Enter the three leftover categories of cost accounting, profit, and loss, all of which find themselves curiously united in the arena of competition. The only way for intelligence to augment itself without knowing in advance how to do so—and in which case, it would already be that augmented intelligence—is through a trial-and-error experimentation (or cost accounting) of different means of acting, some of which will be naturally selected for (as signalled by profits) in competition with less successful ones (signalled by losses). ‘Competition is of value precisely because it constitutes a discovery procedure which we would not need if we could predict its results.’ Competition, too, is something like a synthetic a priori in that competitive intentionality cannot be empirically observed in bodies in space and yet cannot be refuted since to refute the claim that every action presupposes competition is to compete with this claim and hence affirm it. In the long run, the uncompetitive type is hardly distinguishable from the non-existent type.
Now, this transcendental agon at the root of all intelligence has at least two other names (cosmological natural selection, or time, and natural selection), but its latest and most technically sophisticated name is capital. Capital is precisely the feedback process whereby competition between producers compels them to invest all profits into improving the technological means of production to generate more profits to be reinvested into improving the means of production again, and so on ad infinitum. Capital is also the selection process that objectively determines the better means of production through decentralised competition between rival investments of capital in the productive forces of which some reap greater rewards than others. It is because the competitive categories of cost accounting, profit, and loss are the necessary and universal conditions of possibility for successfully pursuing every action and intelligence maximisation that the Austrians—not to mention the Bolsheviks themselves with their New Economic Policy—oppose any inkling of centralised socialist planning and, what amounts to the same, monopolies to the extent that they seek to abolish intelligence qua decentralised competition by artificially setting production and distribution quotas and distorting price signals, as if anyone could know in advance the best way of doing things better. For the Austrians, rational planning is, quite counterintuitively, where intelligence goes to rot among its false idols. But this is not the place to develop a full-blown theory of communism as the only serious historical attempt to construct a friendly AI.
What does any of this have to do with AI anyway? The standard definition of the technological singularity or intelligence explosion as the regulative ideal of the modern AI research program is the moment when autonomous machines become so smart that they can improve themselves better than any humans can, with the improved machines improving themselves even more and so on without end.
Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an intelligence explosion, and the intelligence of man would be left far behind.
In Kantian terms, from which we have seen the modern AI research program originate, we could say that the singularity marks the advent of an autoerotic intellectual intuition which would perfectly know how to fiddle with its own fundamental code. I simply want to conclude by suggesting that capitalism is this singularity incarnate to the extent that it is precisely a feedback process by which profits are typically invested into automating the means of production to generate more profits to improve the ever more autonomous means of production on end. If those seeking to engineer AI really want to know what a speculative artificial superintelligence looks like, they need look no further than what economists have been studying at least since the industrial revolution. Philosophers, too, would also do well to heed those economists who have long been saying in their own way that intellectual intuition is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.
The Disembodied Satisfier
Luara Karlson-Carp
‘Everyone is female and everyone hates it’—this statement forms the central thesis of Andrea Long Chu’s counter-canonical 2019 text, where being female is defined by possessing the desire, at a fundamental level, for someone to do your desiring for you. This formulation seems to figure desire, in essence, as a wish to be free from desire, or at least to offload or even offshore desire onto a desiring other, a prosthetic desirer, one willing to do the dirty work of wanting things in a compromised world. Tell me what to do, Daddy, is the dirtiest anyone gets for Chu.
If the curtain of the human condition is pulled back to reveal a universal squeamishness about desiring for oneself, with no rift nor rupture nor difference in this imagined field of desirers, are we still even talking about desire? In Chu’s thesis, desire has one sex only—the female sex—now positioned as the universal (everyone is female). This formulation would nevertheless seem to necessitate a second term, a someone (though perhaps more accurately a something) who would desire for a female, though within the logical terms of Chu’s proposition this something could not itself have a sex. Chu’s claim, taking up but pushing far beyond the queer-theoretical zeitgeist, defies the long(ish) historical arc of binary gender doxa in which desire has been figured as hetero-desire by definition. Chu takes up half the psychoanalytic paragon of this view in which desire is figured as the force that differentiates the sexes, where, in its most reductive form, ‘the man’ actively desires, and ‘the woman’ wants to be desired. But Chu drops the other masculine half, and so instead claims that desire is the most gender-neutralising force of all. Desire, as universally female, negates sex. But what would universal femaleness even mean? Where is the second term against which the specificity of this ‘femaleness’ would determine itself? If the object of desire is the one willing to desire something more determinant than simply someone else’s desire, and yet we’re all universally, and femininely, incapable of this kind of desire, if God remains dead but we still can’t quite let go … What is this second term? Where might it be glimpsed? Who is doing the work of desire?
My claim is that Chu’s thesis shares the presupposition of the fundamentally sexuately neutralising function of desire with algorithmic technology. Whilst algorithms may encode gender as a key data point alongside other finely grained ‘intersectional’ identity markers—age, race, income, vibes—that our digital footprint flags to Big Daddy Mainframe, the form of desire the algorithm assumes of its users is always the same. For the algorithm, ‘users’ are all assumed to desire in the same way, according to the same logic. There is no sexual difference at the level of desire for this form of techne; while the identities AI makes footprints of are singular with respect to which products each subject wants, at the most basic level, the level of how they want, the subject AI addresses is universal. The content of our feeds or the advertisements that punctuate our scrolling may be different, but the mechanism of techno-seduction is not—the advertising feedback loop tells us what we desire, what’s cool, what products would allow us to ascend closer to the ideal our data imputes for us, equally. It is in this sense I think that the subject of AI and the subject of Chu’s thesis are one and the same: the subject AI produces us as is a ‘Chuian’ female subject, a subject who is tantalised by the promise of offloading the dirty labour of their desire onto someone, or, more accurately today, something else—this something else being the code canalising the app, the algorithm designating the feed, the interface smoothing the experience, and the fabric of economic relations overdetermining them all.
Recently, at the university where I teach, there has been some buzzy excitement about new software that allows students to annotate texts together, which has been given the inspired moniker ‘Annotate’. It will supposedly enable better ‘inter-cohort engagement’ during class. I am in a meeting where all in attendance are in various states of dizzy at the prospects such an innovative techy intervention might afford. I make the mental meme: we already have ‘annotate’ at home; it’s called talking to each other in class about the assigned texts. But to say so here and now in the meeting would be to commit the highly anti-collegiate sin of talking right past the fantasy at work: those around the table dream that the inscriptive power of this software might possibly reignite the long-lost—and much mourned by university tutors—student desire to engage with texts. I get the sense that my colleagues in this meeting imagine—hopefully, libidinally—that this software might itself become the prosthetic desire for a student’s own textual desire. ‘Annotate’ might do their desiring for them.
Later that night, as I lie scrolling in bed (being Female), I am advertised yet another AI personal assistant. In the ad, a listless and very hot autist bemoans the difficulties of organising their subsistence tasks in the morning—brushing teeth, folding clothes, making breakfast. Apparently the AI ‘assistant’ will rationalise their schedule such that they need not suffer from executive function dilemmas ever again, ordering their most basic tasks into a seamless, eminently executable procedure. I think about the times I’ve struggled with this basic level of getting it together—it certainly happens, but the app presents this all-too-human experience of ineptitude in extreme abstraction, reified as symptoms divorced from context and cause. The times I can’t perform basic functions coincide either with a hangover or those periods in my life when I cannot bear to publicly desire, where the idea of having to appear before the gaze of others, ruddy with the muck and gall of wanting things, probably things I feel I haven’t been very good at getting, is surely disgustingly obvious and odious to all who behold me, and scattered malaise becomes the only defence. When my very apprehension of my own desire, paltry and tepid as it may be, repulses me, I’m plunged into deep ravines of avoidant, rapacious, almost gluttonous sloth and ‘executive’ disability.
Whilst not wanting to completely collapse my own non-autistic experience with those who have had transformative diagnoses, and certainly not those with low-functioning autism, I am certain that perhaps even a majority of the people who are being advertised to and seduced by this ad are not so different to me—most probably eminently capable of getting a high-functioning adult autism diagnosis, but perhaps more simply and more accurately suffering with a chronic case of fucking it up in a fucked up world and feeling fucked up about it. The ad only works—and likewise, the very possibility of most of the new expansive diagnostic criteria comprising the autism boom today—through a severance of the symptoms’ relationship to desire. The condition supposedly has nothing to do with you as situated within a particular world, a particular economy, a particular culture within which you struggle to realise and find and even bear to admit to that which you might desperately want, about the impossibilities that criss-cross human experience differently but ineliminably; no no, it’s about your developmentally disordered biochemistry, your congenitally wonky nervous system, your predilection to mask.
Abstracting symptom from world, the apps (and related diagnoses) these kinds of ads promote are able to parade themselves as magic bullets, offering up a tantalising substitution for desire in the form of techy large language model ‘workarounds’ for the problem of desire itself. If our schedules are planned by zeroes and ones, and our agency milled through a prosthetic, machinic will, maybe it will become irrelevant that we can’t find a place for our desire in a world that seems intent on eradicating sociality, let alone housing; perhaps it won’t matter that through demoralisation our desire has atrophied to the extent we can’t even wield it against the crippling tides of anxiety and quick-fix compulsion that take the place our desire might have once had, if it ever had the chance. Perhaps the very smart machine will do the work of desiring this life that I cannot bring myself to want.
Technology has long been understood in terms of prosthesis—our Smart Phones are as much a prosthetic affordance as a plastic limb, a set of glasses, a hammer. For the late philosopher of technology Bernard Stiegler, technology is not merely about a means to an end, the right tool for the job—technics is the ‘prosthesis of the human’. It is the ceaseless process augmenting our capacities through the production of their artificial extension and enhancement. Technological prosthetics—which for Stiegler include techniques as elementary as writing all the way up to complex machines and AI systems—constitute the ‘exteriorisation’, the making-exterior, of our own knowledge and know-how into material objects. And this has existential implications for Stiegler—the human, for him, is not defined by some internal capacity such as consciousness, but by our technically prosthetic relationship with matter, where the human, the prosthetic and the wider material world are locked into continuous mutual transformation. Perhaps, then, we could say that AI is the technical coming of an immaterial prosthesis, of not merely exteriorised knowledge, but an exteriorised desiring. The two AI technologies, ‘Annotate’ and the AI ‘personal assistant’, that I’ve outlined above could perhaps be considered paradigmatic forms of Chuian Female desiring technologies—they offer us a fantasy of technics as prosthetic desire; they exteriorise the know-how of desire.
There is, however, a popularly thematised form of techno-sexual AI that is aligned with masculinity, and not the sign of femininity we have so far sailed beneath. This paradigm of AI figures it as the passive Female receptacle who wants nothing but what the user wants, where it is the user who is figured as the one with the desire. This is arguably the most ubiquitous cultural representation of technics vis a vis desire, epitomised by the sex doll and discussed at length as the trope of the sexbot by Isabel Millar, and undeniably animating the more recent phenomenon of the NPC. Rather than a model of enjoyment routed through our passivity, this trope presents the fantasy of a slavish other, the other who is infinitely available and, ergo, supposedly infinitely satisfying.
Perhaps this fantasy performs well when we want to feel powerful and agential in a humiliatingly contingent world, when we want to fuck without being fucked. But when it comes down to it, the execution of this fantasy most often seems to miss the mark, and to proliferate equal and opposite effects elsewhere. Perhaps this fantasy of our limitless agency-over might be merely the other side of the coin of our desire for absolute passivity. Maybe in the figure of the sexbot, the camgirl, the parasocial NPC gf, we find not our potent agency reflected back to us, but its overdetermination by our fear of wanting something more specific and more supportive of our lives than the feeling that, just for a moment, we lack nothing. Maybe there’s a kickback, a moment when the sexbot becomes less a vessel than a mirror to our emptiness, one which leaves us running in shame to Femaleness. We might find the symptomatic effects of this flight in, for example, students’ lack of desire to read and discuss a text with others, or maybe in the pervasive and generalised cultural decline of desire for one’s life. We might identify its effects in the stupefied anticlimax of finally ‘pulling out’ of a three-hour-long scrolling session to find our life right where it was left, only perhaps now even less desirable, less giving, less rich in infinity.
Such lacks only intensify the drive for a prosthetic desiring other, and the yearning to be back inside the nonhuman embrace of interpassive enjoyment curated by the algorithm. Satisfaction in meatspace seems harder and harder to come by as our muscle for interactions with others absent of an interface and mediated only by our bodies and voices grows flaccid and unwilling, and through these feedback loops, desire is gradually offshored to the space of the virtual. This slow accretion of the primary organ of our desire to a (supposedly) immaterial, digital prosthetic is at once both the product of our desire to be desired (and satisfied) infinitely and unconditionally, and the lousy fallout of committing ourselves to technical conduits that promise such ‘satisfaction’—the shame of which leads us back to the dream of someone who would do our desiring for us.
If all of Females are born and all to Femaleness seem to return, is this world-historical victory of the Female sex the result of some inevitability, a preordained march of history? Chu seems to accept this eidolon in generalised and even naturalised terms without caring to know much about her genesis. Have we always been Female? Has the idea of sexual difference been mere misrecognition all along? And, what is the relationship between Femaleness and our particular historical-technical epoch, and have we always been this squeamish about our desire? At stake seems to be not only the ubiquity of this techno-extruded Female, but the political question of whether we might be collectively giving ground to her ascendency, and whether we really … want to, or ought to. Such questions could turn us toward those of political economy and Marxist historicism. Or they could turn us toward Nietzsche’s critique of monotheistic morality and Deleuze’s reading of it as a valorisation of active over reactive orientations to life. We could go into Heidegger’s claim that modern technology ‘enframes’ life in the modality of ‘using up’—but we might not want to. The question of desire would perhaps demand, though, a turn to psychoanalysis, and its fundamental preoccupation with desire and its relationship to sex.
The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan claimed that capitalism was historically contemporary with the emergence of the infamous diagnostic ‘hysteria’, and it is perhaps through this claim that we may be able to historicise Chu’s thesis of the universal Female, and the universal exploitability of her universally tepid desire by algorithmic technics. For Marx, capitalism designates that era in the mode of production when the traditional, hierarchical organisation of social relations comes to be replaced by an abstract social form of universal exchange. Social relations are then mediated by this economic principle of universal exchangeability, and the socius, though freed from feudal hierarchy, is subjected to the ‘formal equality’ of economic imperatives (epitomised beautifully in Thatcher’s ‘there is no such thing as a society’).
From a psychoanalytic perspective, this development of a market-mediated sociality pulls the rug out from under the feet of the ‘master’s discourse’ that once stipulated our place and role in the social whole. When capitalism severs the social bonds that once provided some kind of injunction to limit and canalise the subject in their existential questioning—albeit traditional and hierarchical limits and canalisations—the symbolic order can no longer guarantee an answer to the adolescent question, ‘What does the Other (the symbolic order) want from me?’ This question then becomes materially paradigmatic, and the hysteric is born.
The inability of the symbolic order to provide answers to the hysteric subject’s why, why, why becomes an opportunity for the market economy. For Lacanians extending on this formulation, such as Zizek, this hysteric questioning can be directly exploited by capitalism, where the commodity is situated as the substitute for identity cathexis in the absence of an existential designation by the symbolic order—I can’t locate myself in a traditionally monolithic and totalising social hierarchy, but I can form an identity via the equal opportunity of the market. The hysteric cobbles together an identity informed by commodities, endlessly trying to dam the hole in the symbolic. The incessant failure of this project renders it endless, mimicking the ceaseless cycle of {crisisself-revolutionise} of the capitalist economic system itself. The hysteric subject and the ceaseless commodity production cycle find a mutually sustaining symbiosis that, whilst imperilling the existence of all complex life forms on earth and making things in general suck enormously, seems to function alarmingly well.
If we take Lacan’s story seriously, here, desire is necessarily and ineluctably structured by lack. But within the subjective feedback loops AI exploits so well, AI seem to find its parasitic home in a lack of the kind of lack that would make desire bearable. If we say that the consumerist artillery of late capital functions by offering us something we don’t have with the promise it will satisfy, which we could say comprises the fantasy of the commodity, the fantasy of AI seems to be of a slightly different form. It offers us not merely satisfaction—the possibility of lossless data management, ‘connectivity’, curation, efficiency, and total access to information—but an other, and most importantly, a desiring other. The fantasy we have of AI is epitomised by the mirage of another who desires not for itself, but for you. A commodity has powerful affordances—buy the right products and you can represent anything. The commodity can make a woman of you, it can make a cyborg not a goddess of you, it can make you a butcher, a baker, a sex-toy sacre… But commodities can’t embody—or disembody—an agency that wants, an agency that effects, an agency that artificial intellects for you…
But there is a strange attribution that occurs almost universally in the way the merits and promises of AI are understood, an attribution without which the fantasy of AI would be untenable. This is the attribution of agency to the computational powers of AI, a kind of autonomous, anthropomorphised desiring agency. I am not talking merely here about the romantic self-conscious attribution of this agency by people like philosopher of AI Vincent Le, who believe that AI is a materialisation of a superior version of our own intelligence, a kind of ur-agency; I’m talking about the uncritical Silicon-Valley-cum-everyday tendency to anthropomorphise all technics, not just AI. It’s the way mayors of so-called Smart Cities claim ‘this technology will change everything!’, or less techy municipal authorities might more alarmistly lament, ‘what will this technology do to us’, as though technology itself is noetically and desirously plotting our salvation or demise under the hood. One hears more and more often, and with more zeal, ‘AI knows’, ‘AI thinks’, ‘AI will destroy us all’. This is the kind of approach to technics that reaches its climax in AI, and that assumes both AI’s mirror-like capacity for agency and thought, as well as its absolute difference to us: it assumes AI materialises suis-generis as an alien force that mandates programmes from the seat of its very own soul.
It is paradoxically also the kind of approach to AI that assumes AI’s objectivity, and so leads to a blindness toward, or naturalising justification of, racism and sexism in algorithmic processes. But the existence of these prejudicial orientations within technical systems merely betrays our wilful ignorance toward the effects of our disavowed desires. We prefer to see a desiring other, an autonomous alien soul—even an absolutely objective one—than to confront the horror of the reflective surface of the racist/aggressive/needing/desiring algorithmically programmed platform.
Perhaps this reticence toward recognising what is ultimately the absent core of artificial intelligence reveals—what perhaps I’m really getting at—another desire harboured within our desire for others to desire for us: the desire to look away from our own desire, to disavow it, to disown it and reject it. Perhaps we prefer to ‘go Female’ than admit of our desire’s bold-faced rapaciousness.
Perhaps this disavowal feels ever more necessary at a time when the bold-faced rapaciousness of our economy has begun to consume our own environmental conditions of possibility, and to accelerate the automation of genocidal intent. In such a world we fetishise the interface and believe that virtual really has no material substrate, because to confront its material reality would ruin the veneer of the supposedly riskless infinite opened up by the special, magical, immaterial world that algorithmic technology proffers. In the face of the horror of the finitude of resources and our appetite for destruction, perhaps the refusal of the emptiness of AI is the fantasy of bearing no responsibility. If our investment in algorithms allows us to proceed as if we have no desire of our own, as if desire were a lost cause, not worth the risk, and that we therefore have no agency within our own lives, then we are free to imagine ourselves as unimplicated. Without desire, we bear no responsibility.
Perhaps the standpoint that can claim we are all Female also affords us the refusal of witnessing a crucial difference within this field of sameness—we’re all implicated in minutely kaleidoscopic relations of fucking over or being fucked. We’re all in multiple ways and contradictorily wanting and repressing and aggressing and avoiding and scapegoating and refusing. Both Chu’s Females thesis, and our cultural attribution of a faux agency to AI, paper over this key differential. The ‘disembodied’ satisfier, the ‘virtual’ reality, hides, as their condition, invisible labour. Unless we can figure the ways in which we are situated differently with respect to each other, not merely at the level of our flat, intersectionally coded digital identity footprint, nor at the level of our economically mediated ‘formal equality’, but at the level of responsibility and agency, aggression and desire, and unless this figuring can enable us to gain traction on the multi-vectoral harms we perpetuate and harms we suffer, and unless, in apprehending these differences, we are supported to find the courage to lay claim to our wrongs and to our hopes and dreams and dilemmas … then why wouldn’t we want to look away entirely? To kick the can down the road? To see the ghost in the machine? And why wouldn’t we want someone else to do our desiring for us?
I’m not suggesting that there is some promised land in which we could want, and know what we want, with some kind of immediate and seamless perspicacity. The dream of enlightenment is for those who deny the beauty of meditation. But if we outsource our desirous capacity to improvise our own singular responses to the problem of the unknowability of what this life wants from us, responses only we can make, we careen into circuits and ruts fashioned by the false promise of an easy way out, and find ourselves rushing to offload and outsource the only challenge that individuates us, rushing to abandon becoming who we are beyond the limits of those false promises of complete identity, the cool, and the smooth.
But in offering us a fantasy of an artificial desiring other, the most seductive possibility AI markets us is an ‘escape’—not only from ourselves, but from the deep abiding necessity of our relations to other people. AI proffers satisfaction without risk, and it conflates this satisfaction with wholeness, promising us a completion that would inoculate against the horrors of egoic injury human others inevitably occasion. In doing so, AI holds out to us the illusion of an identity and existence that could sustain itself free from the injurious work of love. Love is a labour that demands sociality, a sociality that is necessarily fraught, dangerous, and threatening. Sociality inheres both the impossibility of love and its necessity.
In offering us prosthetic desire as a surrogate socialiser, AI sells us the fantasy of a disembodied kind of satisfier, one who might secretly shop our yens, but who might more fundamentally protect us from the bodily risk of being in the world with others, others with whom—if we are unlucky enough not to have a surrogate desirer—we might actually experience the ultimate disaster of falling in love. There can be no love without a willing, desiring body, and there can be no willing desire without speech. To love requires that one quite literally embody the risk—and wrest it back from whatever prosthetic we might have rented it out to—of becoming the medium of speaking to another.
Whereof sexual difference when we are all Female? Andrea Long Chu’s thesis is surely a kind of inverted appropriation of Freud, who claimed that there is only one libido, and that libido is male. Lacan’s later attempts to move away from the vestiges of essentialism in Freud’s work led him to understand this claim in relation to the general ingratitude of speech. Try as we might, we can never say the whole truth. This impossibility marks Chu’s Female still. As soon as this Female body speaks—this body defined by its desiring someone else to do its desiring for it—it admits desire. It admits of another desire-sex, another sex who it desires; she admits of a desire for that other desire who wants to take up her impossible call to demonstrate its desire. But if there is no body who speaks, there can be no fission, no encounter—satisfaction would be instead routed around the speaking body, where sex never need enter into the equation at all.
Here, the social bond is not only made abstract—it is entirely bracketed. One boards the lonely treadmill of ceaseless attempt to fill the void with one more image, one more algorithmic gimmick, one more ‘tool’ to prevent a confrontation with the relationship between desire and life, while more often than not, an unimaginably precarious and invisibilised, and very much material, offshore worker pulls the levers of the smoke and mirror interface of our ‘immaterial’, ‘disembodied’ AI satisfier.
But if we do take the risk, if we do wrest back our ill-fated and queasy desire from those ‘agencies’ we fantasise are keeping it safe whilst making fine returns, to submit ourselves to the potential horror of other people, there is no guarantee that they can ever make us whole, that others can ever make good that obscene affordance AI parades. The whole saga relies on our deep-down knowing that this kind of wholeness is an impossibility. But in tarrying with the horrifically abject act of saying, with speaking to others as a body, raw-dogging the reality of encounter, hairy and interfaceless, in putting our grotty, yearning bodies on the line, we might open up something more incalculable than satisfaction: an impossibility that moves; something that can bear it—at least, some of the time.
Body Loss
Sarah ____ interviews Angela Goh
Angela Goh’s dance is both a form and a force. Her choreographies often investigate the interconnectedness of the human body with its environment. In her work, her body appears as a material in a world of other materials. What it means to be human, then, is not a constant. It can and has to be reconstituted through the recursive interface with an open and evolving world. This world is shaped by technology.
Thinking of technology in this broad sense, your work invites reflections on the concept of what it means to be or become human. Would you agree if I said your dance suggests a sort of technogenesis?
If technogenesis can be said to be the co-evolution of human and technology in an ongoing chain of cause and effect which changes what the other can do, and therefore be, then yes, I think the work I make approaches aspects of this entanglement.
There’s something in this question that feels close to my work, and it’s not the term ‘technogenesis’ but rather the vibe of the phrasing that proceeds it—‘Suggests a sort of’. I like to think my work suggests rather than confirms, like suggests itself as many things and confirms itself as none of them. Not in order to not claim something, but to claim the very possibility to not be claimed. I’m more interested in what it means when something cannot be confirmed through categorisation, identity, or definition. Opening up a question so simple and yet so complex as ‘what is it that I am looking at?’ is what I hope my work does.
Also—the question ‘what is it?’ rather than ‘who is it?’ feels very important to stress here. I use my own body in my work, but my work is not about me. Perhaps this comes back around to the core tenet within technogenesis, that the category of human is not discrete but has always been porous and adaptive, shaped in tandem with the world around it—evolving alongside tools, techniques, and technologies, and also, of course, ecological conditions. When we consider these types of entanglements, the question of what we are is foregrounded much more than that of who—which comes to seem like a fatalistically anthropocentric question.
As an artist expressing through the body, what is it that makes these questions tangible for you?
There is an immediacy to the body’s relationship with the world—Thomas Moynihan writes about how the central nervous system is the organ of anticipation. There’s a common conception that dance is apart from language, or can express ‘purely’ beyond spoken language. I disagree for many reasons, the biggest being that this would imply an impossible and problematic universalism. Dance doesn’t make language less necessary, but more necessary—we need to find words to articulate experiences, sensations, feelings, that come from the body. For me this is where the body makes any question tangible, precisely when it makes words fail, therefore rendering everything as a question that brings about new ways to think and articulate experiences in the world.
We tend to conceive of technologies like language or machine learning as all-mighty forces, when in actuality they are extensions of us, being trained by us. Let me rephrase my previous question ‘How can dance speak about technology?’ into ‘Can we think about biological processes—such as dance—as a piece of technology?’ There is this 1954 book in which the French theologian and sociologist Jacques Ellul instead of technology, uses the word ‘technique’, which he defines as ‘ordered efficiency’ … [1]
This makes me think of training and rehearsal, which are very common across a variety of dance practices, including the more ‘intuition’ or ‘sensation’ based ones—even improvisation requires technique and, in some cases, for the people who do it best, a lifetime of dedicated training in it.
When I am making my work, I’m training my body to be able to perform that particular work, and it’s of course not only about fitness, strength, or endurance. It’s a process of finding a technique to be able to execute certain movements towards certain effects. I’m simultaneously honing and producing images with my body and having to develop techniques for how to move my body to make those images. The body is mechanics—it is a set of physical processes and systems which enable or limit its movement. To set new pathways to move differently requires techniques, and to become proficient in those techniques requires practice, or training. I think of my body in terms of its mechanics, but I don’t think of myself as a machine. I’m really interested in where the discipline of technique crosses over with the dynamism of experimentation. I think I’m always searching for an efficient action that cannot lead to an efficient experience for a viewer, even when the mechanics are revealed. When this happens, everything can be explained except the affect. When effect and affect cleave, this is where art can be really exciting, and where ‘technique’ can be flipped to produce the most disordered, inefficient thing we have—experience.
Speaking of revealing the mechanics: the mouth plays a particular role in many of your performances. Can you explain what it is that you described as ‘the latent dramaturgy of the mouth’?
The mouth appears as a gaping hole in Desert Body Creep and Body Loss, made in 2016 and 2017, but then in the next work I made, Uncanny Valley Girl, in 2018, there is a moment where my mouth opens and my tongue creeps out, moving around the opening of my mouth like a funny, sticky little character that comes to life as if it is some thing that has been living inside my body. In Body Loss the mouth represented an empty hole; this gets flipped in the moment when we discover that it wasn’t empty, that there was this weird creature in there all along. Across these works the mouth also functions as a kind of chamber for the voice, that proposes something about emptiness and fullness, or presence and absence—and how the mouth (and the body) can hold both. When I refer to the latent dramaturgy of the mouth, I guess what I am referring to is this recurring, adapting, and developing form and gesture that has evolved over time. I recently made a work called Pattern Recognition, which set out to trace the evolving forms and gestures of the mouth across my works, bringing them into a new temporal proximity.
The mouth is the site where (spoken) language forms through a physical process. It’s also a site where things move into or out of the body, and so, like other bodily holes, the mouth reminds us that we are not separate from the world around us. Being a cavity, the mouth is a site where things can appear from, or disappear into. Appearance and disappearance are the formal fabric of immaterial mediums like dance. Ephemerality or disappearance has been a historically defining feature of dance, and as something that has been inscribed in this way, I think it is interesting to think of the processes, techniques, and embodied labour that occur when tasked with making something appear, and reappear again and again, and how the body retains, transmits, and memorises.
Body Loss erupts from the mouth; the piece starts with the sound you create—a chorus of high-pitched tones. Going beyond the body is a fantasy that fuels the development of technological extensions. From the telephone to artificial intelligence applications, all these tools also cause fear of body loss. How do you articulate disembodied yet situated intelligence in this specific performance ?
The title Body Loss originally had something more to do with distinguishing a perspective from the voice. The voice itself could accumulate and grow, inhabit a space and become some thing disembodied. And from there, what would happen to the body if it had become sort of emptied? Maybe it would be freed, or maybe it would have to feel around for other types of structuring and scaffolding in the world. In reality, performing the work is intensively bodily. It requires a physical intimacy with the architecture of whatever space it is being performed in. I slide, crawl, and climb, attaching myself to the structures of the space itself. The process, and the performance, is intensely haptic. I have to know the space on the terms of my body, physically and proprioceptively. The ‘knowing’ is decentralised and distributed through the body, and through the sensation of touch and weight.
I think what might make Body Loss appear ‘disembodied’ is the disembodiment from other senses towards a navigation of space through physicality and proprioception—especially the fact that I am not necessarily looking where I am going in order to navigate my way up, down and through the space.
How is this process collectively experienced, by the audience, for example?
When audience are in the space with me there is a layer of the architecture that remains ‘virtual’ to them, that I render as ‘actual’ by placing my body in, on, under or around. Perhaps it is also this ‘virtuality’ that contributes to the sensation of disembodiment. My body is not interacting with the same layer of reality that the bodies of the audience are. I know the space differently to them; we are in two worlds at once. The dancer and spectator relationship is always operating in this virtuality. Dance is an intensely sensation-based action (even when it is not expressing that sensation), that anyone outside the dancer does not have access to. The act of watching someone dance and the act of dancing are always already alienated from each other—the same event experienced completely differently. People talk about mirror neurons or kinaesthetic empathy or whatever, but what I find much more interesting is how to completely lean into the experience of alienation and recast it as a productive mode. I find it can force new ways of knowing and perceiving each other and the world—even, and especially, when we are not experiencing that world as the same.
I can relate to this experience of not sharing a common reality with other people. Every time I am reminded of this, I think about the limits of human perception, how what we call reality is much more than what we can legitimately claim to know. To me, Body Loss makes this apparent through the echo. You are echoing yourself until it is almost impossible to locate the source of the voice. Is this an attempt to relocate subjectivity?
I’d say Body Loss distributes subjectivity, rather than relocates it. The voice, the body, and the space itself become injected with subjectivities, resulting in a haunting experience. My work is often playing with the interlacing of presence and absence, or appearance and disappearance, and in Body Loss this manifests in subjectivities appearing where they are unexpected, like in the disembodied voice, or disappearing where they are expected, like in the body. When subjectivity is perceived in places outside the human body, it can open up agencies of the more-than-human world. This can produce awe and wonder, as is more often associated with the agencies present in the ecologies of the natural world, or fear, as is more generally associated with imaginations of technologies developing agencies. This awe/wonder/fear axis has always applied to those labelled ‘other’. Categories of ‘otherness’ evolve with each historical moment, and I think this moment of AI or ‘technology’ standing in as ‘other’ will radically shift the way we consider both the limits and the porousness of the human subject, mostly because through these technological tools we will be able to discover more about ourselves.
It’s so beautiful that you’d say this, and I agree—the formation of a subject is inherently performative. The physicist and theorist Karen Barad uses the notion of ‘post-humanist performativity’[2] to suggest that ‘all bodies, not merely “human” bodies, come to matter through the world’s iterative performativity’. Does it seem like a complex idea to think of being human as a physical practice?
I think being human is always a physical practice. And I think this physical practice of being human can be extremely expansive, with space for weirdness, magic, and the inexplicable. And what limits that expansiveness are enforced conventions of social and cultural categories, the limits of coding those forced categories into language, and then the wielding of that language within dominant power structures. I work with my (human) body, but my work is often described as producing non-human affects—for example, supernatural, cyborgian, or uncanny qualities. I think this has more to do with the limits of what is assumed to constitute ‘the human’ rather than that I am working past or becoming something beyond it. Perhaps what would most illustrate the above idea of ‘the complexity of being human as a physical practice’ is a reading of my work that insists on me being human, and widening the category of what that includes, the types of experiences it produces, and the entanglements it reveals.
[1] The Technological Society was first published in French and translated to English thanks to the efforts of Aldous Huxley. The book focuses on mechanisation in the twentieth century but—via the word technique—describes technology as a milieu rather than a tool.
[2] Barad, Karen, ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter’, Signs , vol. 28, no. 3, pp. 801–31
Hoping for surplus while imagining repose
Emile Frankel
One always forgets, namely that language, this language which is the instrument of speech, is something material?
In 1994 Sunnyvale, California, a group of hyper-libertarian, techno-utopian, anti-government bodybuilders and nerds sat together in a hot tub at the world’s first ‘Extropaganza’. Extro 1, as it would be known in those waters, called together believers in ‘extropy’ (the opposite of entropy). In the pursuit of unending growth, the heightening of all methods of consumption, and a quest for the immortality of the human / market / thought-processing form, Extropians sought a discourse of spending not dissimilar from the description of ‘nature’ misattributed to Goethe that inspired Freud in his early construction of psychoanalysis:
She tarries, so that one calls out for her; she hurries, so that one never tires of her.
She has neither language nor speech; but she creates tongues and hearts, through which she feels and speaks.
Attached to the side of the Extropaganza jacuzzi, a warning read: ‘Please note, some clothing will be required … so as not to shock the neighbours with the sight of our transhuman physiques!’ To applause, the software engineer and ‘hot blooded capitalist’ Mistress Romana arrived dressed as ‘The State’. Wearing a specially made leather miniskirt and chain harness and carrying a riding crop in one hand and a leash in the other, ‘The State’, we are told, had the dog-like figure of her companion, Geoff Dale—‘The Taxpayer’—crawling about the dirt in ‘mock subjugation’.
Words order themselves around the feeling of pure growth, says the Extropian. A doctrine can itself be extravagant, as if speaking it were spending it. Its members take on new names. The Silicon Valley attorney Tom Bell called himself Tom Morrow. Max T. O’Conner called himself Max More. The Olympian-cum-philosopher F.M. Esfandiary called himself FM-2030.
MIT’s AI advisor Marvin Minsky declared Max More the heir to Carl Sagan. More would go on to become the chief executive of Alcor, ‘the world’s leader in cryonics’ (a ‘life preserving’ company specialising in the cryogenic freezing of human heads). In 1994’s hot tub, a member announced: ‘immortality is mathematical, not mystical!’
The Club of Life, ‘fantastic superabundance’, neurocomputers, a memetic approach to selling cryonics, ‘Order Without Orderers’, and of course Bataille’s call towards the lavish expenditure of energy—‘it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically’ —united Extropia’s doctrine: the seeking out of a financial moreness to what it means to be human. Their motto, ‘Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, and Spontaneous Order’, was very literally yelled as this group of tech CEOs, lawyers, coders and charismatic charlatans clasped their hands together and raised them to the sky. Now was the age for the dynamic optimism of technology, they said. As a very real response to a growing awareness of the environmental consequences of unchained consumption, Extropianism was an antidote to an older philosophical (and cosmic) pessimism that had been building in the sciences and the arts.
In 1893 the palaeontologist Louis Dollo announced his ‘law of irreversibility’:
An organism never returns exactly to a former state, even if it finds itself placed in conditions of existence identical to those in which it has previously lived.
In 1920, untethering the cyclical time of the Greeks, Rainer Maria Rilke (as translated by Hannah Arendt) wrote:
Here even the mountains only seem to rest under the light of the stars; they are slowly, secretly devoured by time; nothing is forever, immortality has fled the world to find an uncertain abode in the darkness of the human heart that still has the capacity to remember and to say: forever.
And in 1970, the French biochemist (and thinker of chance) Jacques Monod condemned a belief in ‘the eternal recurrence [of the] human species’:
The ancient covenant is in pieces; man knows at last that he is alone in the universe’s unfeeling immensity, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty. The kingdom above or the darkness below: it is for him to choose.
As species extinction, entropy and omnicide became the dominant scientific diagnoses of the future, Extropians hoped, as it were, to turn back the clock—to emphasise something deeply emancipatory in taking control of the responsibility proffered by thoughts of finitude. The cosmos, expanding in all directions, was to be directed. Finitude was to be renounced. As Corey Pein notes, the journal M. More and T. Morrow started, Extropy, ‘promoted seafaring secessionism long before Peter Thiel’s Seasteading Institute … It extolled the subversive potential of digital currencies before Bitcoin … it denounced, with eerie glee, environmentalist, “statists,” and “deathist” cryonics critics who threatened the transhuman future’ —and arguably, for the sake of this essay, the bizarre influence of Extropy predated the immortalist desire for an endless and always increasing material to language.
Those attendees and readers of the journal of the Extropaganza form a direct line to Large Language Modelling. In a blank prompt bar the spores of expenditure flourish alongside the brilliance of spontaneous order. The ideology of a gapless plentiful universe, lying in wait for capitalist extraction, bleeds into the ideology of gapless words. Words to be lavishly and catastrophically counted. In Large Language Modelling I see alive and well the seeking out of the efficiency of a lossless compression of meaning against finitude. But I also notice a contradictory philosophy of the endlessly repetitive, of the infinite generation of content—of the problem of surplus in a superabundant future; the problem of seeking stability in an ethos and practice of endless increase.
There’s a word Descartes used—‘interminate’—which qualifies this feeling of ‘no end’. It predates an alienation Lacan picks up. Descartes refuses to label his world ‘infinite’. He reserves that denomination for God. Instead, his thought world is without boundaries. In Alexandre Koyré’s description:
[Descartes’] universe is not infinite (infinitum) but ‘interminate’ (interminatum), which means not only that it is boundless and is not terminated by an outside shell, but also that it is not ‘terminated’ in its constituents, that is, that it utterly lacks precision and strict determination. It never reaches the ‘limit’; it is, in the full sense of the word, indetermined. It cannot, therefore, be the object of total and precise knowledge, but only that of a partial and conjectural one.
‘Interminate’ then is an expansive ‘without end’. Its secondary meaning is a menacing and threatening feeling. The threat of losing an end. The inability to have anything but a partial and imprecise knowledge of the world (and its openness) is expressed by this baleful word. It is a word attentive to the tension (and louring cast) between the unconscious (and coded) labour of finitude and the very sense of no-limit.
The possible interminate ‘materiality’ of language and the ‘quantification’ of communication is the concern here. Lacan reminds us that language gained measurability after the invention of Bell’s telephone. Language after this moment became culturally inseparable from its energy. A quantity of ‘information’ now travelled along wires. In his perhaps less-compelling musings on ‘telepathy’, Freud also wondered if the telephone pointed to a future where we had access to the physicality of formerly unvoiced speech: ‘And only think if one could get hold of this physical equivalent of the psychical act!’ When communication became principled by its medium, Alexander Graham Bell famously misheard the spirits of the dead in the static of his own copper wires. Lacan reads a different death in this energised sound: the death drive.
Many technologies to record and repeat language were developed during Freud’s life. Beyond Freud’s fascination with an archaic children’s pad, there came the phonograph, the radio, and in the 1890s (before wires could sustain the sound of a human voice) Samuel Morse experimented with transmitting language via energised code. Much has been made of Freud’s homeostatic analogy between the anatomic body and the pleasure principle. Lacan instead reads a history of technology through this homeostat.
Asking why Étienne Bonnot de Condillac could not theorise the give-and-take of pleasure in his treatise on the mind, Lacan makes a historicising claim:
Condillac wasn’t deluded. Why, it must be asked, doesn’t he give an explicit formulation to the pleasure principle? … He didn’t have a formula for it because he came before the steam engine. The era of the steam engine, its industrial exploitation, and administrative projects and balance-sheets, were needed, for us to ask the question—what does a machine yield?
Prior to the steam engine more came out of the mind than was put in. But after the steam engine, an energetic vision of the mechanical body called into equivalence the restlessness of a clock. There came the sense of an interminance to homeostasis. A compulsion to be ‘in-knowledge’ of equalness, without end. As Freud grappled with the ‘beyond’ of his pleasure principle he asked ‘what, in terms of energy, is the psyche?’
The fantasy of this question is important today. The Large Modelling machine forces theorists of the inner life to adapt the economy and energies of pleasure to the reconfigured terms of an externalised self-fulfilling imagination. In analysing the relationship between someone who types into a prompt bar and the quality of the machine’s generated result, the central tensions of this act respond to the externalised terms of repetition and homeostasis progressed by Large Language Models. The material quality of this coded language (because we search for it) is of importance. Matter in these models repeats itself. If it goes it can be found again. The material can be resuscitated. If the cut is recorded it can be healed again. If anything new is added to this modelled place its addition to the symbolic order produces its own material past. The quantification of speech spurred into action by the telephone reaches its culmination in generative AI: all words receive a value, an energy judgment, which turns language into image, and image into a laboured new discourse tasked with fighting the slow arrow of entropy.
Super Abundance, Spontaneous Order, Order Without Orderers—in reading the production of the fantasy of the interminate through the extropy of Large Language Modelling, the questions ‘why more content?’, ‘why no limits?’ are posed against the energy of pleasure and the supposed materiality of language. In the artificial possibility of readable text produced from the complex counting of all prior catalogued words, prompt bars and their mechanisms expose new ways to read Freud’s dialectical terms: excitation and stability; pleasure and reality; the compulsion to repeat the present or the compulsion towards a restitutive beginning.
These terms find new consequence in today’s AI abundance of word-combination. Clearly words are decreasing as they increase. Surplus is misrecognised as repose. The great proliferation of modelled content marks the beginning of the endless generation of not quite what we want. Content only marginally good enough, acceptable enough to warrant consumption, but imperfect enough to keep us wanting more. The lure of such generation must surely be found at once in the promise of endlessly up-ticking growth—endless surplus—but also in the flatline such an oxymoron proposes. The number goes up but its increase approaches zero. Is this or is this not the Extropaganza?
AUTHOR BIOS
Ling Ang is a multimedia artist and XR (Extended Reality) producer. Throughout Across the 2020–2021 lockdowns, Ling published a fine art photo book and presented large-scale installations as part of NGV Design Week. The project shared a written archive of lucid dreams that were documented over several years. For its launch, Ling was given the opportunity to produce an immersive experience in the virtual production studio at the Alex Theatre. It was this experimentation with virtual production that forged her deep interest in the future of immersive storytelling, as film and gaming converge closer. Ling is currently building Augmented Reality experiences in collaboration with artists as well as continuously experimenting with everything that sits under the XR umbrella.
Based in Melbourne, Australia, Ying Ang is a photographer and author with an extensive exhibition history and client base. She is on the teaching faculty at the ICP in New York City, the Director of Reflexions 2.0 - —a photographic masterclass based in Europe - —and on the board of the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne, Australia. Ying’s publication, The Quickening, was a winner of the Belfast Photo Festival 2021, runner up for the Australian Photobook of the Year, finalist for the Singapore International Photography Festival Book Prize and exhibited in a solo show during Rencontres d’Arles in France in 2019 at the Manuel Rivera-Ortiz Foundation, during the Melbourne Now showcase at the National Gallery of Victoria and at the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne in 2023. Most recently, 3 Degrees of Freedom was created in collaboration with Ling Ang and commissioned for PHOTO 2022 International Festival of Photography.
*Emile Frankel is a writer and composer. He is the author of Hearing the Cloud (Zero Books). He works as a sessional academic in the fields of political theory, cultural studies and the philosophy of technology. Emile has produced a body of scored work for ensembles featuring performers and+ playable game environments. His music criticism has appeared in places like The Quietus, the Barbican, Stray Landings, Liquid Architecture, Disclaimer, and Texture Magazine. He has lectured at Unsound Festival, CTM x Transmediale Berlin, FIBER and Norberg Festival. In his spare time he runs a small publisher of sci-fi, RPG campaigns and critical fantasy. He lives and works on unceded Wurundjeri land.
Angela Goh is an artist who works with dance and choreography. Her work is presented in contemporary art contexts and traditional performance spaces. Recently her work has been presented at a range of institutional venues including Haus der Kunst, Munich,; Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo,; the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney,; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne,; the Sydney Opera House, Sydney,; Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney,; and Performance Space, New York. Angela Goh lives and works in Sydney, Australia.
*Luara Karlson-Carp is a writer and researcher. She is the Secretary-General of the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy and is completing a dissertation at the University of Melbourne. Her academic writing has been published in Technophany: A Journal of Philosophy and Technology.
Vincent Lê is a catastrophe-drunk philosopher. As a tutor, lecturer and postgrad, he has haunted the classrooms of Monash University, Deakin University and The Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy. More of his ravings can be found via Urbanomic, Hypatia, Cosmos and History, Art + Australia and Memo Review, among other publications. He is a founding editor of the art history and cultural theory publishing house Index Press. His first book The Future in the Making (to be published by Punctum Books) is coming soon to a future near you.
Sam Lieblich is a psychiatrist, writer, and artist based between Naarm and Yolŋu country. His clinical practice is oriented by Lacanianism, Marxism, and a commitment to the singularity and radical freedom of each human subject. Sam has worked in remote communities in central Western Australia, Arnhem Land, and the Tiwi Islands since 2018. His digitally- actuated artworks combine machine learning algorithms with custom code to foreground systems design and—by finding beauty and intention in the system—try to re-situate human desire in or against the algorithm. His work has been shown at tThe National Gallery of Victoria, Tthe Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Photo2022, Futures, Blindside, 99%, Bunjil Place and Coconut Studios. He has written for Art+Australia, The Lifted Brow, Overland, No More Poetry, Epilepsy and Behaviour, the British Journal of Psychiatry, the Australia and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, Neurology (USA), Cambridge University Press, and elsewhere.
*Marcus Ian McKenzie is an experimental artist and performance maker working in Melbourne/Naarm, originally from Tasmania/Lutruwita. His work uses the relationship between audience and performer as a site for bizarre new sensory encounters, often incorporating schisms in language, parafictional world-building, meme-adjacent media, intertextural soundscapes, hyperstitional mythologies and questionable dancing. His works take place in theatres, old supermarkets, nightclubs and churches. He makes works for anybody, but not everybody.
In Australia Marcus has developed works for Rising, MONA, The Substation, Arts Centre Melbourne, Blindside, Kings ARI, Gertrude Contemporary, The Wheeler Centre, Malthouse Theatre, Terrapin and Soft Centre. He has collaborated with many celebrated artists nationally and internationally and received numerous accolades, mentorships, awards and fellowships.
Isabel Millar is a philosopher and psychoanalytic theorist from London. She is the author of The Psychoanalysis of Artificial Intelligence published in the Palgrave Lacan Series in 2021 and Patipolitics: On the Government of Sexual Suffering, forthcoming with Bloomsbury. As well as extensive international academic speaking and publishing, her work can be found across a variety of media, including TV, podcasts, magazines and art institutes. She is currently Associate Researcher at Newcastle University, Department of Philosophy and at The Global Centre for Advanced Studies, Institute of Psychoanalysis. isabel.millar@gmail.com / www.isabelmillar.com
Jazz Money is a Wiradjuri poet and artist producing works that encompass installation, digital, performance, film and print. Their writing and art has been presented, performed and published nationally and internationally. Trained as a film maker, their first feature film WINHANGANHA (2023) was commissioned by the National Film and Sound Archive. Jazz’s debut poetry collection, the best-selling how to make a basket (UQP, 2021) won the David Unaipon Award. Their second collection is mark the dawn, which was the recipient of the 2024 UQP Quentin Bryce Award.
*Steven Rhall is a post-conceptual artist invariably operating from a position informed by Taungurung, white-passing, cis male, neurodivergent experiences/typologies. These frames of reference could be considered relatively constant within his biography, also acting as ‘framing devices’ which inform, and sometimes form, the basis of his research, artistic concerns and production. Rhall’s interdisciplinary practice is otherwise located where he perceives various intersections and relationships pertaining to ideas of a ‘First Nation art practice’ and the Western art canon. Informing these potential, real and imagined relationships are further considerations around the potentialities of (and within a First Nations context) ‘Art’ and ‘Culture’ – —as synonymous or otherwise. Within this space, Rhall also interrogates ideas of the curator/curatorial and is interested in generative methodologies aligned with notions of the artist-curator, exhibition/gallery as form and related expanded fields.
Thomas Smith is an Eora/Sydney based artist, musician, educator and researcher. His practice combines performance, video, electronic music, speculative fiction, websites, curatorial projects and critical writing. Thomas’s work is concerned with the social effects of computational systems, the politics of creative economies, emerging digital subjectivities and electronic music as a mode of critical-aesthetic inquiry. Thomas is also one half of production duo Utility, and runs an independent record label called Sumactrac with Jarred Beeler (DJ Plead) and Jon Watts.
Sarah Johanna Theurer is a curator focusing on techno-social entanglements, sound and liveness. She currently works at Haus der Kunst, München, where she spearheaded new commissions and exhibitions by artists including Pan Daijing, WangShui, Jenna Sutela, Isabelle Lewis, Carsten Nicolai, and co-curated survey exhibitions of Katalin Ladik (2023, with Hendrik Folkerts) and Fujiko Nakaya (2022, with Andrea Lissoni). Theurer’s curatorial work reimagines the gallery space as a responsive medium . Together with colleagues, she initiated the live programme ‘Echoes’ which probes embodied knowledge production and organizsed projects and symposia on art and technology. Previously, she worked at the 9th Berlin Biennale and transmediale Berlin, as well as the gallery Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler where she curated acclaimed intergenerational group exhibitions. She has acted as a dramaturg with several performance groups including OMSK Social Club and The Agency. She is the editor of several books and regularly contributes to catalogues, art and music magazines.