A volume on artificial intelligence, which attempts to disassemble and reformulate what one might understand as AI by taking apart both notions of ‘artificiality’ and ‘intelligence’ and seeing what new meaning they produce when recombined. We summon the trickster of the natural order, chimera, both a mythical creature and a genetic phenomenon. Drawing upon chimerism allows us to broaden ‘artificial intelligence’ into ‘synthetic cognition’⁠—an approach that highlights the duality of ‘artificial’ and ‘authentic’, amplifies non-human methods of cognition and anticipates modes of symbiosis. With this aim, the editors, Ilan Manouach and Anna Engelhardt, assembled an inventory in which one can find contributions ...

When M. Beatrice Fazi claims that “computation is computation,” we know this is so precisely because computation is never simply contained within the skin of computers, but is instead singularly generative. That generativity—in the fullest sense of the term, and perhaps even a little more than that—is the premise of this book, and thinking with Fazi opens onto more-thans precisely because her analyses are so self-contained. Indeed, the thinkers in this collection demonstrate that because “computation is computation,” attendant concepts of media, race, intelligence, digitality, aesthetics, and compression are troped in new ways, yielding novel trajectories.