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 ...

The exhibition House of Mirrors: Artificial Intelligence as Phantasm takes the common clichés about AI as an opportunity to talk about issues such as hidden human labor, algorithmic bias/discrimination, the problem of categorization and classification, and our fantasies about AI. It asks whether (and how) it is possible for us to reclaim agency in this context. Featuring more than 20 artistic works by international artists, the exhibition is divided into seven thematic chapters. The scenography of the exhibition is reminiscent of a giant house of mirrors.

3D computation has historically co-evolved with Modern technosciences, and aligned with the regimes of optimisation, normalisation and hegemonic world order. The legacies and projections of industrial development leave traces of that imaginary and tell the stories of a lively tension between “the probable” and “the possible”. Defined as the techniques for measuring volumes, volumetrics all too easily (re)produce and accentuate the probable, and this process is intensified within the technocratic realm of contemporary hyper-computation. The ubiquity of efficient operations is deeply damaging in the way it gradually depletes the world of all possibility for engagement, interporousness and lively potential. Volumetric ...