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 ...

PlaguePod Live: Cope Edition. What’s going on? It’s been over a month in lockdown, the epistemological conundrum of coronavirus has been solved (no one knows anything) and we are bored, deranged, chronically anxious, and have no idea what to talk about. But there is fresh junglism, there is CoronaQuest, and there are guests: Enrico Monacelli and Laura Tripaldi report back from Italy, Shaun Lewin continues the search for rare jaffa cakes and COVID/corvid crossovers, and Edinburgh’s finest Proc Fiskal brings some tunes and lockdown updates from the Heart of Lothian.

In this live podcast, socially-distanced Urbanomic-adjacent guests from across the planet join us from their respective lockdown cells to share personal and speculative views on the Coronavirus era. With Matt Colquhoun (Xenogothic), Amy Ireland, Nyx Land, Shaun Lewin, Robin Mackay, Mattin, Enrico Monacelli, Thomas Moynihan, Reza Negarestani, Katherine Pickard, Miguel Prado, Laura Tripaldi. CONTENT WARNING: FOUL LANGUAGE, DEGENERATE PHILOSOPHERS, COGNITIVE TURPITUDE, ACCELERATIONISM

In this action-packed PlaguePod we present a series of readings from Audint—Unsound:Undead, plus some extra special additions from the Audint Crew and from Kode9, we invite listeners to call in to our brand new feature, the challenging dystopian adventure game CoronaQuest, and with guests Thomas Moynihan and Shaun Lewin we talk existential risk, Hydroplutonic Kernow, spinal catastrophism and, most crucially, lockdown snacking—tackling some fundamental questions: Which snacks are optimal for lockdown conditions? And is it possible to develop a definitive speculative ontological schema capable of encompassing the dynamism of the entire mouthfeel continuum? Lewin teams up with DJK Huysmans to ...

Drawing on cryptic intimations in the work of J.G. Ballard, Georges Bataille, William Burroughs, André Leroi-Gourhan, Elaine Morgan, and Friedrich Nietzsche, in the late twentieth century Dr. Daniel Barker formulated the axioms of Spinal Catastrophism: If human morphology, upright posture, and the possibility of language are the ramified accidents of natural history, then psychic ailments are ultimately afflictions of the spine, which itself is a scale model of biogenetic trauma, a portable map of the catastrophic events that shaped that atrocity exhibition of evolutionary traumata, the sick orthograde talking mammal. Tracing its provenance through the biological notions of phylogeny and ‘organic ...

In this epic osteogeographical podcast recorded entirely on location, we go back to the future and take a tour around Cornwall with author Thomas Moynihan to discuss his book Spinal Catastrophism. In the last section Shaun Lewin joins us at Plymouth station to talk railway spines. 00:00:00 Introduction 00:06:34 Pencallenick Obelisk 00:12:00 The Creepy Recurrency of a Peculiar Idea 00:14:30 German Idealism and Trauma 00:16:15 Copernicanism, Deep Time, Organic and Inorganic 00:18:55 Unconscious as Indigestion of the Idea 00:20:52 Wakefulness as Retrograde Amnesia 00:22:04 Wrongmindedness, Methodology, and Theory-Fiction 00:23:23 Desiring-Theory and Metaphorology 00:25:50 A Cave, Trevaunance Cove 00:26:44 Into Eternity, the Mines of Falun, Slowtime 00:30:15 Xenocommunication 00:31:54 Depth as Memory, Nicholas Steno 00:34:13 ...

From global pandemics to prophecies of evil AI superintelligences to the impending perils of genome editing, our species is increasingly concerned with the prospects of its own extinction. With humanity’s future on this planet seeming more insecure by the day, the twenty-first century has seen ‘existential risk’ become the object of a growing field of serious scientific inquiry. But this preoccupation is not exclusive to the post-atomic age of global warming and synthetic biology. Our growing concern with human extinction itself has a history—one that is important for our understanding of what it means to be human in the first place. Retracing ...