Ben Vickers

K Allado-McDowell

Kenric McDowell

What do the divinatory practices of Ancient Greece’s Oracle of Delphi, the Incan knotted quipu counting device, the I Ching, the nine billion names of God and Elizabethan mathematician John Dee have to do with artificial intelligence? The Atlas of Anomalous AI is a compelling and surprising map of our complex relationship to intelligence, from ancient to emerging systems of knowledge. A wildly associative constellation of ideas, stories, artworks and historical materials, the Atlas draws on art historian Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas — an image map of the “afterlife of antiquity” — to approach the defining concepts of AI from an imaginative, artistic and revitalising perspective. The Atlas presents a hyperdimensional view of the world, through a broad range of perspectives that explore the question of what AI has been and what it is becoming. Key texts on modelling, prediction and automation are brought together with stories of science fiction, dreams and human knowledge, set among visionary and surreal images by Emma Kunz, Pablo Amaringo, Carl Jung, Hilma af Klint, William Blake.The Atlas expands our common understanding of AI and raises new questions beyond a illusory fixation on linear progression, towards a new horizon of infinite play in the construction of artificial intelligence today.

Atlas of Anomalous AI

How can humans and non-humans come together to save the planet in an age of climate crisis? In recent years, we have seen a rise in the popular understanding of non-human intelligence, from octopi to mushrooms to AI. At the same time, man-made systems are under increasing pressure on a warming planet. What must be done to remake our future?
In Air Age Blueprint, K Allado-McDowell – a pioneering thinker at the intersection of ecology, and technology – with their writing partner GPT-3, tells the hopeful story of a future where artists, shamans and AI researchers collaborate to preserve the ecosystem. Weaving together fiction, memoir, theory and travelogue, Air Age Blueprint grapples with the legacies of colonialism, centuries of ecological destruction and rapacious techno-capitalism, to present a blueprint for surviving the 21st century, drawing lessons from Indigenous knowledges, neuroscience, art, psychedelic research and other-than-human intelligence.

Air Age Blueprint

The first book to be co-written with the language AI GPT-3, exploring selfhood, ecology and technology. During the first summer of the coronavirus pandemic, a diary entry by K Allado-McDowell initiates an experimental conversation with the AI language model GPT-3. Over the course of a fortnight, their exchange rapidly unfolds into a labyrinthine exploration of memory, language and cosmology. The first book to be co-created with the emergent AI, Pharmako-AI takes a hallucinatory journey into selfhood, ecology and intelligence via cyberpunk, ancestry and biosemiotics. Through a writing process akin to musical improvisation, Allado-McDowell and GPT-3 together offer a fractal poetics of AI and a glimpse into the future of literature. Pharmako-AI reimagines cybernetics for a world facing multiple crises, with profound implications for how we see ourselves, nature and technology in the 21st century.

K Allado-McDowell

Books

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