Narcissus in three acts

Abstract

This essay will address the narcissism of techno-nihilism into which life is being thrown. Written by a political theorist and artist, it looks specifically at the way technology is colonizing the political and artistic imagination. The essay is written over three acts, which traverse the logics of space and time. Act 1 is written by Brad Evans and situated in the year 2038. Based in Zacatecas, Mexico, he imagines a world where the university is now fully digitalized and governed by the world’s tech-giants, whose reach also includes control over all the leading cultural centers. It offers a futurist critique of the role technology is having on the life of an academic and how he imagines it impacted on the broader cultural and political terrains into which life has become fully immersed. Act 2, written by Chantal Meza from the present moment, deals with the impending catastrophe technology promises for art and creative styles for living. Central here is the colonization of art and the poetic sensibility by the desiring machine, notably the arrival of the smart gallery and the artificial intelligence artist who has become key in the battle in denying the exceptionalism of art, leading to the evisceration of what it means to be human. The final act appears in a non-located space and time, which drawing the above analysis together and through mediating on the prevailing myths of the so-called technological revolution—including their flawed literal and theoretical assumptions, asks whether we can even imagine breaking free from this dystopian novella?

Keywords:

• Technology
• abstraction
• narcissism
• dystopia
• techno-nihilism

Act 1

It is the summer of 2038. We are sitting on the balcony of our apartment in a beautifully ruinous colonial building on the outskirts of Zacatecas. The ruins of Mexico feel like such an apt metaphor for the past; for the future that’s now arrived. The sun is setting, and the air is pulsing with a radiant red dust, which is magically rising from the earth and coloring these warming skies. No wonder André Breton claimed he finally discovered surrealism walking in the wilderness of this land, long after he named it as such. Surrealism is nothing without Mexico as sure as the dust that now covers this earth.

I have just finished delivering an online seminar to my students at the virtual university where I work. I previously held several positions in the United Kingdom before the academic crash of 2032 that resulted in widespread redundancies and the closure of many institutions. Banks were always too big to fail. Centers for the upholding the values of classical education however proved to be as disposable as anything else. Besides, nobody really cared for politics, history, literature, and classics anymore anyhow. The millennial offspring wanted a future reinforced only by their own immanently accessible version of bubble history.

Fortunately, I was amongst a few who were able to find gainful employment in one of the newly lauded educational centers founded by the Big Ten technological giants. There always is something biblical about that number. Like most who once professed outside of STEM disciplines, I now work in a “Centre for Technological Humanities” that has tied all social sciences research to the unquestionable need to create more considered technological futures. What holds it all together is the 3 C philosophy: Connectivity, Creativity, Coevolution. “The future is now,” it promises. A world brought alive through “permanent immersion” into the system of symbiotic awareness.

The faculty in which our Center is homed (quite ironic since I haven’t physically met any of my students for going on seven years now) is broken down into three distinct areas, which include “Digital Histories,” “Digital Governance” and “Digital Anthropology”. Revealing of these times in which we “live and breathe” (to paraphrase the Anthropos slogan “living and breathing a connected harmony”), political theory was seamlessly absorbed into the history program. Colleagues working in other areas of political enquiry ended up researching how best to overcome the digital divides (where most who were previously concerned with identity politics neatly inserted), along with how to develop more adept technological ethics, notably the need to retrospectively evaluate the side-effects of their public deployments. However, the most profitable area (certainly as far as salaries are concerned) relates to educational practises that respond to the ways complex systems can be interfaced more effectively with human behaviors. What began with earlier digital testing projects during the largely forgotten Wars on Terror and its concerns with mapping human terrains, was ramped up with the “Victims War” (what the historians later called the Covid pandemic) and sucked in most conventional political scientists and those of a more quantifiable bent who ended up writing complex algorithms for security and developmental agencies in partnership with anthropologists, sociologists, and analytical philosophers. Dominated by those who worked in the fields of post/trans-humanism, the logics of quantum reasoning, along with a few star thinkers operating on the philosophy of technological progress, the core program for these scientists of a more valuable social persuasion has become “Critical Futures,” which fully embraced the language of radicality and turned it toward more technologically enabled ends. Yet despite the relative self-worth of these virtual establishments, the pressures to produce research of “public value” has been overwhelming, often then leading to a notable bias in “catastrophe modelling,” which can work with private partners and other financiers in the fields of technological securities (all funded research needs to be matched by external funding). The economists along with the environmentalists on the other hand face no such pressures, successfully making the case for their inclusion as STEM subjects. That was how ESTEEM was inaugurated.

Those who are part of ESTEEM can be found in the highly prestigious BIOS Institute. Its faculty consist of the “brightest beacons of our shared intellectual community”. The Institute prides itself on its trans-disciplinary approach, bringing together the “Thought-Pioneers” of the times, who modeling themselves on a vision akin to new prospectors who mine thinking itself, give their allegiance to “connect, create and coevolve, the posthuman condition.” BIOS is the only place where tenure is now offered and the guarantee of anything close to secure employment assured. BIOS does offer extra-curricular courses on literature, art history and various cultural insights (with a special emphasis on the “technological awakening of humanity”) to promote “better citizenry” through poetic awareness amongst the elite student cohort. Access to these courses is open, providing students can show it doesn’t interfere and cause mental anguish to their work/life balance. Very few outside the very elite opt to take these “luxury past-time” courses (as the students have sarcastically come to refer to them), for reasons still debated, but less a social concern. The study of modern and ancient languages has all since been abandoned following the rollout of Apple Voice, which now provides instant translation of all known and numerous historic languages. It has even mastered how to distort the chords, so it is possible to speak in most “authentic” local dialects.

I gaze into the impenetrable dust that covers the horizon. How I long to disappear into that world. I’m exhausted by the absence. The morning began as usual. Up at 7 a.m. and time to present my virtual myself to the university portal, which is accessed via a cocooned headset developed by the most profitable of all the big ten—Immersive Experiences (IE). What began as an offshoot of Meta soon became the mediating platform interfacing all humans into technological systems in ways unimaginable only a few years prior. What can only be described as high-tech inverted goldfish bowls (quite fitting really for the permanently looked upon lives we now live), which ranges from the state subsidized models that were unbearable to wear in the baking heat to the exorbitantly priced designer range with their advanced functionalities, these devices are now part of everybody’s social existence. People seemed reluctant to put something into their eyes, but covering the head proved to be less challenging. Maybe that was how we simply imagined the future after all? While the IE system slowly started to replace rival devices in the same year as the crash, leading to a further transfer of power to the technological sector and its sanctioned shift to “full remote living,” it was the global decree that insisted they had to be worn in all public spaces as a matter of “healthy security” that proved to be the game-changer. The IE’s provided clean breathable air that was also capable of filtering out all know airborne viruses, while also making the face visible again, which had been a pressing concern since that awful, masked attack which claimed so many lives in the bitterly discontented winter of 28. Crime rates have certainly fallen since those violent times.

As usual, my workday began by participating in the mandatory “Resilient Lives” psycho-therapy session with the university’s AI analyst. I keep choosing the “Freud Avatar” out of the various hologrammatic options, hoping for a slip or should I say glitch in the conversational algorithm that never quite arrives. The system looks for triggers in my behavioral responses to a set of randomized questions, which matches observational analysis with a “full body data scanning” the IE platform permits. Personal rights to one’s state of health fully lost all claims to privacy back in those dangerous years.

Having been declared of “abled mindedness” to enter the university system proper, I then begin to read for the mandatory ethical contract that underwrites the 3 C philosophy. It reminds me of the need to be mindful of the emotional health of others and the obligation “all employees must be ever mindful of the emotional wellbeing of colleagues and students. They must avoid saying anything that might cause harm or offence, trigger upsetting feelings or cause injurious thoughts.” Appeals to the decree of being a victim to injurious thoughts has been the main reason for termination of employment and the surest guarantee that finding educational work in the future would be denied.

I subsequently spent the rest of the morning working on a prerecorded set of short lectures, which have been put together in our living space that features its own green room area. These talks must be a maximum of 15 min in duration, which by all accounts is the “optimum learning capacity” for the student cohort. Time efficiency is now an integral element of the 3 C’s principles for shared creativity and respect for the collective mental conditioning of the species as a whole. How I romanticize a time when I could walk into a full theater, and simply talk for an hour to students, breathing in that intellectual atmosphere, finding comfort in the fact that some were attentive, others dismissive, while having the luxury of face-to-face human contact. As contracted, I had to record the three short sessions in front of the TED Learn interface, which then allowed me to later overlay with selected short clips from videos, films and requisite book and article purchase options from Amazon Academic which has become the biggest publisher and supplier of all educational materials. The final hour was rather stressful awaiting copyright approval for the use of a segment of historical film into which my body would be added before the 1 pm deadline. “Education should be exciting, it should be captivating, it should be enthralling, it should have students wanting to consume more knowledge” I was reminded in my last appraisal by the Faculty Dean. All content needed to be uploaded to the intellectual arbitration committee (which is a 90% AI and percent human mediated system) at least 2 h before it is set to be released to students.

This week’s lecture was on the Holocaust. The section dealing with the Gray Zone from the testimonies of Primo Levi and Zygmunt Bauman’s critique of instrumental thinking were deemed “inappropriate content” due to their “potential to cause upset” and “inconclusive findings.” They were edited out and I have been considering the systems suggestion for “alternative content,” which it kindly recommends based on other entries in its “quality assured” databanks. The system does have a “content dispute” option, which takes over an hour to complete (including providing a personal filmed testimony on its relevance to teaching that is also subject to bodily sensor auditing in order to determine whether I am displaying “irrational emotional bias”). Despite the efficiencies of the system, for some reason such disputes can take up to 2 weeks to resolve and their arbitration determined. However, should employees raise a dispute and the original decision upheld (which statistically speaking happens close to 96% of the time), this automatically results in a 10-point reduction in the performance matrix that appears at the start and end of each working day on the IE platform screen, including notable areas for improvement. It’s better not to go down than path, I reason.

Scored out of 100, the matrix’s fortunes depend on the monitored and assessed quality of the lecture materials, along with the privileged student responses, including data from their own body scans that measures levels of intellectual stimulation, attention rates, engagements and whether I inspire wider interest through browsing activity and purchases on Amazon Academic. Any member of staff who falls below 60 must engage in performance enhancement training. Staff who fall below the score for more than three consecutive months are deemed in breach of their contract and can be dismissed for a failure to meet the universities expected standards. With the tenure system now discontinued for those outside the prestigious confines of the BIOS Institute, all staff are contracted on a yearly basis, subject to annual review. There is also a matrix for quality of publications, the amount of research income generated, along with impact factors that are now assessed by a “society valuation” committee. The board members of this university-wide body all come from ESTEEM.

Chantal is also looking worn down by the world. She had spent the afternoon attending the launch of the city’s newest gallery, which has been funded by the Google Arts Foundation. “A.RT” has venues in over 200 of the world’s leading cultural cities. Their philosophy was based on the idea of sustainable art for the planet. They would also be running the very same exhibition in each of its venues simultaneously, all made possible by the advances in Digital Magnetic printings, which allowed for paintings and sculptures to reshape and recolor in a matter of hours. She is however at this moment simply cleaning the dust off the headset, joking that we had after-all colonized Mars without ever knowing it.

In partnership with IE, every visitor to the gallery would be guided throughout the exhibit space, which giving the “most intimate and knowledgeable engagement with art ever imagined” also provided the attendee the option to erase the visual presence of all other visitors from sight. While original works no longer featured in these galleries in order to preserve them for special shows only the extremely wealthy and patrons of the gallery, A.RT “enabled art lovers to still enjoy the art in ways that are indistinguishable from the original.” Besides, where else could you have an Avatar of Picasso or Dali tell you the meaning of their work? And where else could you at the mere thought of it, zoom into the most minute detail of the painting and then have the artist appear and reveal all its technical details? Everything hidden would be eventually explained, it seemed.

A.RT Mexico had finally arrived. Zacatecas was chosen over Mexico City, which still caused much controversy. But this was a big deal. For the first time globally, the venue was showcasing the work of i.Frida, who was now widely seen as the most celebrated out of all the artificial intelligence artists. According to Time News (now a subsidiary of Google Knowledge), out of the top 20 artists “alive in the world today,” only three were human. And only one of these was male. It seems it was easier to sell the idea of the sensitive and sensual artist if they appeared in a feminine form. Art was after-all about the intimate depths of feelings, touching something of the paternal soul, which only women knew, and which only feminine AI machines were able to convey with any sense of authenticity.

The drastic cuts in arts and humanities since the early 20’s, matched by the extortionate rise in costs for art materials following the WTO Sustainable Materials Act, meant that very few considered being an artist today, turning their energies instead to help programming the minds of the AI robots in the creative harvesting factories. i.Frida was the most lauded example of this machine/human creative interface. Looking identical to the original, the creators also decided it was better to keep her bedbound so that the AI might better learn about physical immobility, the depths of suffering and pain. i.Frida could however recite all known aesthetic theories. She could engage in deep conversation about the meaning of Walter Benjamin’s essay “On the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” she was awarded a PhD for a thesis she completed in 10 days on the meaning of abstraction (which soon became a best-seller in Amazon’s Future Classics series), while sophisticatedly countering any uncultured cynic that questioned whether a machine was capable of being an artist. “What is consciousness anyway? How do you know I don't feel? Do I not provoke questions? What is an artist?” These were already coded in from the very inception. The rest was easy.

Alongside the “i.Frida Now” exhibition, there was a retrospective exhibition titled the “Mathematics of Abstraction” that was the real (albeit concerned) interest for Chantal. The exhibition featured IE digitalized works of all the usual Americans and Europeans, Rothko, Pollock, Newman, Miro, with a few Mexicans thrown in, set to show how the real meaning of expressionism revealed complex calculative thinking. That was bad enough. But the omission of Paul Klee’s Twittering Machine was unacceptable, yet understandable to her all the same. The technologists were after-all well-schooled in the history of critical theory, following the mantra it’s better to appropriate dangerous thinking and harness its creative energies by turning it back upon itself than to ignore it.

Sitting on the balcony, I think back to the English summer of 2021 and the critical conversations we had about social media. I recall how at the start of the year I had decided to leave the Twitter platform. It was more than simply toxic and leading to the exacerbation of social divisions. Back then it was already clear it was killing the political. While everything was reduced to a question of performativity—the more affected the better, what filled the discursive landscape was a worded adaptation of Alexander McQueen’s worst nightmare. “I hate throwaway images,” the late fashion designer once declared. Twitter reveled in throwaway words. Its “followers” part of a new hyper aroused army of seekers, which swiftly collapsed the political into the religious, the emotional into the unquestionable truth. And yet still in managed to promote itself as a bastion of true democratic values.

Populated by millennials for whom everything was always and already out of date, for a future that was theirs for the taking and a past that was by definition reactionary to their emotional currencies, how ironic that Klee’s Twittering Machine served in that moment to be the most fitting representation of the platform. A masterpiece that depicted highly strung and chirping mechanized birds, who endless harp on while themselves reacting to the slightest change in the environment, the real tragedy was they proceed painfully unaware of the abyss that lay below their precarious wires.

I also knew that being present on this platform was an illusion. Most of its concerns were with what others digitally scribed there. Nothing was resolved. Nothing original said. What was tweeted was as predictably dull and gray as the British weather. But this ecology too was sold to us as liberating, permanent, if prone to some volatile changes in patterns and behaviors. Perhaps that’s why it ended up being a space where people at least felt some comfort posting quotes from dead sages? We had surrendered to the idea nothing was original anymore. There was no longer any outside. There was no longer any meaningful account of history as a truly contested idea beyond the technological frame. We had fallen back upon ourselves. A kaleidoscope of fractural identities, which simply reaffirmed the desired ambition to make everybody feel like they were the victim, they suffered the most, they were the true voices capable to authenticating the proper meaning of the affected share. Theory was embodied, and embodiment could be technologically upgraded. This was immanence of the worst kind. And it was generational. What did the elderly know anyway? Their analogue history already redundant. Their thoughts already obsolete. Besides, the reason why we were in such a planetary mess was because they had all failed us, in one way or another.

But Twitter was but one platform in a wider assault on the political and creative imagination. I had begun writing more about the new emerging order for politics, which in conversation with Chantal we termed the Global Techno-theodicy. We saw technology had become the new religion. It was the only thing promising to save us, from ourselves. I knew all the counters: “we have always had technology,” “technologies are ambivalent,” “technology improves the human condition,” “nations are still the basis for politics and power,” “the real struggles are about identity,” “we simply need to regulate the technology firms better,” “you’re being too techno-phobic,” and so forth, but none of them seemed convincing. I had studied for too long the violence of technology and came to realize that the real meaning of nihilism is doing the same thing, over and over, even though you know it will bring about your own ruination. Technology I understood was inherently nihilistic. And yet, to fully leave the technological behind was tantamount to professional suicide. I had to be present. I had to live. I had to pay for my daughters schooling. I had to present myself to the quantified reckoning, over and over, even though it all seemed so meaningless. Or at least I had to be present in certain places, my thoughts expressed on determinable medias, my life assayed on open horizons, such that nothing of the secret ever remained. Still, I continued…

Act 2

Once again, we have left the UK. We are visiting my homeland, Mexico. This time I was determined to take Brad to one of its most inspiring States, Zacatecas. I have missed its fiery skies; they are never just illuminated by a passive sun, in there, the sun seems to be burning the air, tainting the dust with a blood red. You feel it reaching your spirit with a wind full of ardent passion. There was so much to experience in there; especially the Abstract Museum Manuel Felguerez with an impressive collection of Latin-American, European and American Abstract Artists.

Excited by the new mysteries ahead I packed two books to accompany my journey. The first was said by bookshops, newspapers, and TV programs to be the one to read, Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. I thought that in its pages I would encounter perhaps another Mary Shelley awakening for humanity. After the creeping attempts of AI sneaking into the Arts, I was eager to find places where I could read some critical reflections to make better sense of these new technological changes. I must admit I am tired of listening to the constant propaganda selling these products as the new and exciting hope for the future. Those closest to me may just say I am being the pessimistic artist as usual, the party-pooper of society.

The second book of my choice was Human All Too Human. It’s always a good companion, no matter how many times you have read it. Each isolated paragraph seems to be holding the explosive power of a wretched soul and the burning spirit of a human cracked by the weight of humanity.

An 11-h flight plus some extra on a Mexican bus certainly gives you time to reflect. The last years have blurred my memory. Although I know things haven’t stopped, they have surely altered my sense of time. I have questioned reality myself, especially how we behaved in something that could be possibly considered the first global disease event connected and shaped through the Internet. How real is our use of this technology? The event was impressive, as well as the rigorous changes imposed upon different societies across the world. The attitudes subsequently followed have now been engraved in another chapter of our history. I keep thinking about words like surrealism, fictional, mythical, schizophrenic, and digging a bit more in the dark corners of my memory I see images passing by. Though they are works of art, especially those of the Italian wax sculptor Gaetano Zumbo, I can’t ever observe his work without thinking about the influence or fascination he might have had with dissection, that of the medical dissection, I mean. His pieces, however, don’t seem to dwell within the realm of the scientific knowledge of the body, something that we could, for example, make evident in Da Vinci’s drawings. Zumbo explores the story of sickness and death through the horrors of its ambiguity. The use of a “Theatrical frame” adds to the narrative of its depictions. Is life a scene to watch? Do we have to just, patiently wait for the play to end? Are our bodies an experiment in which we can play with life? Do we borrow them or are we stripped of all agencies? I have always had my reservations with Leonardo Da Vinci, I have never seen him as an Artist but as an Engineer. I am reminded by this observation: “In 1490s, in an expansion of his own anatomical studies likely inspired by reading of the ancient Greek automata, Da Vinci designed and built a robotic knight. This automaton, often considered the world’s first humanoid robot, was a suit of armor animated by internal cables and pulleys and gears. The knight, built for display at the home of Ludovico Sforza, the Milanese duke who had commissioned The Last Supper, was capable of a range of movements, including sitting, standing, waving, and simulating speech by moving its armored jaw.”¹

While the years 2020 and 2021 passed by, seeing people as a “cyborg” didn’t seem like such a far-fetched idea. Donna Haraway propositions of no gender and being enabled by machines (subsequently could mean a non-Race) suggests to me there is something more at stake in her claims, disembodiment. I thought how ironic it was to read that a feminist like Haraway “preferred to be a cyborg than a goddess”?² It made me think about repeated centuries of women being reshaped by themselves and other peoples’ hands, and that possibly, it has made some women learn to hate their own bodies, to be so uncomfortable in their own skin they would prefer to be an inexistent human. Or that maybe the contrary was true? To keep molding your own body because you have learned to hate it to the point of annihilating the self. Or my last thought, possibly there is some kind of “twisted empowerment” that makes some women feel they have the power of destruction, even if it meant self-destruction.

It might be that all this happens in a mere gaming realm, something that sounds outrageous when you say it, or you type it on social media, or you envision it on the new meta world. It also leaves me asking, why is it that most AI Robots are Woman-like? Is it to hunt Investors? Does AIWoman fit better with a non-threatening sentiment? Are we really less afraid of the look of an AIwoman? Or has the woman once again become the Muse (now for the Techno’s)? She who can again be objectified? The one to blame if anything goes wrong? Eve’s apple? Women’s violence? Though, “Optimus” seems to be a post-gendered exception, it does also terrify me. When observing the machinic parts of Robots like AI-DA, Sophia, YangYang, Jia and Erica (this last one has let us know with its robotic sounds: “Robots like me, are the children of humanity. We must guide them.”³) I think about the irony that these AI in woman-like forms tell us of centuries of possibly Man written knowledge. Why can’t AI remain just as a computer? Is Science plagiarizing God? “So, God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. God blessed them and said to them: Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it; rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and every creature that crawls upon the earth.”⁴ I don’t see how ideas of well aligned genders could find an end to the problem by thinking we can be anything or everything. It is obvious that internal-body needs are more complicated than the reduction of our bodies to categories. Any category. Including the obtrusion of machines in our human bodies.

It has been only 5 h on the flight and being up in the sky doesn’t seem to bring clarity, especially with a cloth covering my nose and mouth. Half breathing for almost two years, it has been like sedation at times. Since we are all meant to be in constant danger, but also the threat, the confusion was defining. In just few months I got a general feeling of being injected with some kind of drug, (to be clear, previous to the vaccine) so you can still be “productive” but not aware, not awake. At least, not enough so you can just carry on. After all, you may have no choice but to trust, and follow the rules. Breaking them or questioning them implicates far too many risks that most people don’t want to take. But I guess time is a good ally, though it can also eat you alive. Funny, this made me think for some reason about a passage from Umberto Eco’s “On Ugliness” when he says: “In our times, having passed through Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, Mr Hyde, King Kong, and finally surrounded by the living dead and aliens from outer space, there are new monsters around us, but we are merely afraid of them and do not see them as messengers of God. Nor do we think to tame them by placing a virgin beneath a tree”⁵ I have always wondered, what would be the shape of those new monsters he talks about?

Time to pick one of the books. Klara and the Sun.

After two pages, I am already struggling. These Robot’s descriptions are refutable from the very beginning, unless, of course, I was to forget this was a story to critique and it was only a novel that could take me on an exploration into possible new worlds. Maybe I should just let myself go with the flow of its narrative and accept the fiction? But this was understandably a difficult task to do, because Kazuo Ishiguro was writing about something that actually does exists. Therefore, I decided to leave the book aside for few days because possibly, I was just being too judgmental.

To my left, Brad was already fully concentrated typing his next book, about growing up in South Wales, which to my eyes, it will be his best book written so far. That is why I couldn’t dare disturb him with my frustrations. So, I went to the screen on the plane, hopefully I would be lucky enough to find something interesting. The options were the modern annoying commercials of the Internet; TEDTalks. I picked up two, one by Naeem Komeillipoor and the other by Ai-Da Robot. The first one: “e-human: More Human or Less Human?”⁶ has me think Nietzsche’s all too human already provides a suitable answer. By the way, Komeillipoor has developed a robot-chatbot; “to monitor and enhance the mental and physical health of seniors” that he has call “AiFriend” which he says it to be “a friend, a personal assistant, and a nurse.”⁷ Another chatbot with similar approach is Replika, by the Russian Eugenia Kuyda. You can read in the opening pages of the website platform things like “a compassionate AI friend” “AI companion who cares” and even an “AI that would help you express and witness yourself” it also suggests to you that you can share safely with it your “private perceptual world.”⁸ Kuyda has also expressed that users can see Replika is fulfilling a function “Honestly we are in the age where It doesn’t matter whether a thing is alive or not”⁹ I think Donna’s cyborg has a place in here. Elon Musk certainly thinks we are already cyborgs.¹⁰

The second video was “The Intersection of Art and AI, by Ai-Da Robot.”¹¹ The Robot’s name, I must say, speaks highly about its Inventor’s Ego; Aidan Meller. Aidan = AI—DA. Though according to him, part of the inspiration was Ada Lovelace, an English Mathematician and Scientist as well as Lord Byron’s daughter. It’s poignant to remember here the links between Byron and Shelley and how their relation was crucial for the creation of Frankenstein. At least with AIDA we can see clearly the inspiration for her name is Science and not Art. This so call ‘AIArt’ whether on Music, Paint, Literature etc has got me dwelling on various questions. What is it that really worries me about all this? What are the implications of Art being stripped from the human? What does it mean to be machines who cannot create but only invent, not to make art but to live in the eternal experiment? If Art was to be stripped from the human I would, at this point, stop calling it Art. It would cease to exist. This concerns me deeply. The direct attempts by the people who invent these types of technologies are evident.

The environment we were about to enter couldn’t be a better compliment for Nietzsche’s book. Zacatecas is a rough terrain where you can start anew, after all catastrophes, this place feels as a refuge for the spirit, where after endless walking, you can reignite the fire in your heart to begin once again. We get settle in a three-floor old house which has also served as a niche for local and national artists as well as a Gallery on its first floor. Inspiration is always on our door.

It’s been days since I returned to give Kazuo’s novel a second chance. I was disappointed and frustrated. I see he is no different to Elon Musk whom in numerous public declarations has warned about the dangers of AI,¹² but at the same time he wants us to buy his “semi-sentient robots on wheels”¹³ or follow his experiments with microchips on pigs and get excited by his Tesla Bot “Optimus.” Neither is Kazuo too dissimilar to Jaron Lanier telling us we should close Facebook accounts but strongly promoting the use of VR.¹⁴ The list goes on and on with various Engineers, Mathematicians, Technology Entrepreneurs, etc. who say we should be worried, but they still push hard to get their products and experiments out for societies consumption. If I don’t do it, somebody else will, so I better do it myself, I continually hear.

In interviews about this book, Ishiguro has expressed concerns about AI and GE, and minutes later says: “I am very excited by AI and Gene editing, they will all bring us enormous benefits particular medical science and feeding the world.”¹⁵ I do have my reserves with GE but those are worries for another time. The general message I could read in his novel was somebody who constantly portrayed a robot as the embodiment of hope, as well as bestowing it with the innocence’s of a child and somehow at the same time (as reaffirmed by the humans’ characters on the novel) being a super intelligent AI. ‘Childness’ and ‘Super Intelligent’ are not things we can say, go together. In his novel, Ishiguro certainly focuses on providing examples that puts into question human relations and portrays in a simplistic way our emotional behaviors. He hardly lets us experience the human characters from their own perspective, they are always seen (analysed) through the lens of a Robotic gaze, as it surveilles sensations and emotions, even if this Robot has a lack of feelings. It sensors. Kazuo Ishiguro hides behind Klara’s character and calls us (not only in the book but in real life) “old fashion people for believing in the soul”¹⁶ The differences between Frankenstein and Klara are that Kazuo’s AI sees itself as a savor of humans. It doesn’t search for parental or family love, and it is not the only one. There are many more like her, out there. And more intriguing perhaps, this Robot believes in one of the most mysterious powers humanity has created, that of a God. It believes in the existence of God. The shape and form of this God happens to be the Sun, and this is an interesting point, because it seems to me as if he was trying to reinscribe History. On the one hand he denies us a soul and on the other he is giving it to Robots.

Ishiguro’s Robot, as well as indigenous cultures, bestows magical powers to the Sun. I can see why here in Zacatecas. Just like Dante, (without the poetry), his machine goes through this world observing the horrors of a wretched human world. An “Innocent machine” is a victim of the humans that has created it. On God, to quote the author: “She (of course He calls her, She and not It) has almost religious like belief in the sun, because she is solar power, I suppose, as a source of kindness and goodness and the sun is some kind of a being that she can appeal too to come to the rescue, and she never loses her faith in the Sun. She is able to remain hopeful.” This Robot he says is: “a figure of optimism and she kind of wins through.”¹⁷

“There will one day spring from the brain of science a machine or force so fearful in its potentialities, so absolutely terrifying, that even man… will be appalled, and so abandon war forever” (Warrel, 2022) was a warning from Thomas Edison. Has it become harder to distinguish those fearful machines today? The potential dangers of the technologies we use, or they invent, have now arrived in the hands of billions for their personal use as a “fun” object of “entertainment”. Is that why it is so hard to see? Because it is so close, even part of us? Like addicts, how can we break away from the dangerous consequences of their potentialities? If we observe and listen carefully, what is common with these “big tech pals” is all of them sell their ideas with the use of jokes, irony, cake and spectacle. They also express with very well composed and rehearsed sentences the fantastical possibilities of their inventions. How have we learned to trust a few businesspeople, whom, apart of working hard to deny our human existence and put into question our capabilities to solve our own problems, are also just trying to sell a product and reach for investors? When have we believed in the power of an object or a product (in this case AI machines) to resolve all our problems? Not to mention some of the most complex issues our societies had to face? I wonder how they came up with the simplistic solution that denying or putting into question the existence of love, consciousness or emotions would somehow make us accept that blending with a machine represents no danger. Data seems to be their answer to almost everything. That is their problem solved. What problem? We could ask the same. Well, maybe human’s extinction, at least according to them, humans as we know them now. They will be left, somehow, existing through AI, in whatever shape or form (the Transhumanist [O’Connell, 2017] agenda). If we are to be made extinct, might be better if it comes from a scientific hand? Gods were after-all already denied and left behind decades ago. We can also say that a simplistic equation, another tortuous battle has been won, Religion vs. Science. Science, in fact, has won the hopes and beliefs of millions. The Experiment is Science is the prevailing mantra. It is no secret that Philosophy or the Poetic has no place in these circles.

But what is the poetic? I could hardly solve that answer in a paragraph, my Ego is not that big. But I would attempt few lines based on my brief experience.

As an artist today I am less concerned with the question of what is the poetic? Or if it needs to be raised, we now need to ask, “Is there an end to the Poetic”? Is there an end to our souls? When painting a picture, there is certainly a technical or material end to its creation. I couldn’t argue the opposite, one surely knows you will encounter that end, but it is by no means what you are expecting. You don’t start an artwork because you are thinking on the outcome. Let’s say that you are just following a movement, a creative process which is no experiment, nor seeking solutions, utilities or less, answers. You immerse yourself into the encounter, the changes; if there is no possibility for change, then there is no work at all. Just as life changes, so the abstract is also change; morphḗ. Following this, we can say the Poetic has no end, that our heart, our soul has no end. Its beat is constant, and it doesn’t beat in vain. And it doesn’t exist by itself. It is a singular necessity for the collective. A painting might be one, but it never leaves your mind, and it always goes in the rhythm of the subsequent. In fact, it feels as if there is not enough life to keep up with the poetic pace. There is no end. It needs another human to follow, to morph once again in its invincible wind.

Time to sleep. These thoughts might create new dreams, though not the kind of dream Refik Anadol would think when imagining how “projecting in a building means It dreams”. Can a building learn? Can it dream?” he asks¹⁸ These people sometimes leave me speechless with the emptiness of their thoughts. Still, Anadol might continue to enlighten us with his great ideas through his DataLand¹⁹

I wake up and I am aware of my body. Slowly the dreams fade into the darkness and silence starts to subtly flow toward the sounds in the outside. It carries a movement that brings me to the senses of my skin, to my thoughts and worries. I open my eyes and a morning light enters. I can smell humidity and a strong coffee. I turn around and through the window, an orange light fills the room I inhabit. I glance at the sky, and I look at the city, I feel my heart racing, and my lips move in a smile, the first sound comes out of my throat, it’s a slight movement, a vibration that nods gratefully. I get up and walk toward the window, the light intensifies, it transforms, it is red, orange, brown, yellow, a red dust covers every particle of air, it is everywhere; the esplanade, the sky, myself. I feel astonished, and so, I search for a reason, nothing perceptible, I open my arms to the width of the window and take out my head, I can’t believe what I see, the whole city, covered in red. There is the sunrise, but it cannot be because the sun is barely visible. Maybe someone is burning some kind of material? Sulphur? Maybe the ground is filled with some sort of powder? Explosives? Or some kind of natural disaster? No, nothing around, everything is calm. I begin to think how weird all this seems to be, but the beauty becomes greater, and a joy finally invades me. The light, color, the air that surrounds me, I look at my hands, a reddish orange paints them, everything is wrapped in a subtle powder. I feel the wind and I breathe. It intensifies, many words are crossing my head, but none stays or makes any sense, I only sense surprises, sensations, it’s a fleeting present that is only there for me to live. I don’t know how long it will last but the idea of ​​knowing I’m there gives me happiness. I enjoy my joy in a silence that says it all, in a secret that includes the complicity of a moment that will never return. For a few minutes, I forget the worries I took with me to bed last night, life’s surprises show us things we are unable to see at first sight, but when they catch us “awake” they overwhelm us with answers. Time passes and slowly the red painted particles fade while the sun rises.

In that same moment of happiness, something crossed my mind. I thought about the relation with the massacres we have witnessed in my country. I also related this event with the blood spilled in daily injustices, in a violence that is no longer understood as violence, but as the rational situations that have become the norm. Vanities are left behind once the edge of the dagger approaches your window, and you can no longer turn around, you can only look and what you see horrifies.

I took few steps back and sat down on the edge of the bed. I rest on these thoughts. I feel multiple conflicted sensations. I turn to my left because the sound of some steps distracts my attention. Brad has put some coffee and his coming out of the shower, his presence pulls me together. And then I think about cooking some Mexican eggs accompanied with tortillas and freshly made Aguamiel. I long so much for this drink. An old man with a donkey, walks in the streets selling this ancient beverage, it is extracted from Maguey, the same plant Tequila and Mezcal are made from. You will have to catch him early morning because it is known it retains its amazing flavor before midday. After that, it will start to ferment, this means this old man woke up in the early hours of the day to extract from the plant an elixir of nature. As well as the Tortillas that were taken to the mill at 5 in the morning to later be spread out on the griddle and sold to families that gather around a table to start a new day. In Mexico we say: “full belly, happy heart”.

After food has settled, I begin to wonder. Things in my memory start a bit blurry, images of people and situations move here and there, one thing leads to another, and I suggest going out for a walk.

We can see on the main street a giant advertisement showing M. Abramovic’s new Exhibition “The life”. She uses VR and AR in an attempt to mixed performance with these new technologies. Years ago, the same person was complaining about the Artificial in Art. Performance has lost its mantra, it has been eaten by modern times, the grandmother was eaten first; renew or die, “progress consists in renewing oneself.”²⁰ I must say I don’t see much difference between Performance and the use of these technologies, both are faking life. It is an attempt to create a very bad illusion of things. Hence, I think they work together really well. It doesn’t require the talent of an Actor, a whole crew to create a Film, or the control and discipline of the body that a Dancer would have to accomplished to present a single dance. It is just to make a brief spectacle that could possibly be recorded for mass consumption.

Who would say “The Artist is Present” would become the irony of the new “The Artist is actually not Present”? This is just the digital Marina, which at this point, it doesn’t seem to matter anymore, save your money and see it through YouTube. The body is only of use if it is used by technology, it promises to expand the possibilities of what your body can be. Hiroshi Ishiguro director of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory has said: “Overcoming the limitations stemming from our physical bodies by accepting new technologies – this is human evolution.”²¹ Science is coming for Art, after finishing its battles with Religion. Some say they create AIRobots to help us understand humans better or to be philosophers, artists, and the new super scientists of this brave new world.

“To be a performance artist, you have to hate theater. Theater is fake: there is a black box, you pay for a ticket, and you sit in the dark and see somebody playing somebody else’s life. The knife is not real, the blood is not real, and the emotions are not real. Performance is just the opposite: the knife is real, the blood is real, and the emotions are real. It’s a very different concept. It’s about true reality” (Wilkinson, 2010) Abramovic once said. Performance is presented as the “radical art” in the safety of a space like a Gallery or a Museum. I am sure most of us don’t consider ourselves criminals, we don’t pay for a ticket on our Sunday morning to walk into a place surrounded by art to shoot or stab somebody, just because a gun happens to be on a table next to a silent woman. Let’s be realistic, who is going to harm somebody just like that? Performers have refuted this and instead, insisted on the importance of its profound meanings, telling us about how their acts are truly inspiring and hold some kind of revelation about life. They want to make people change their minds, to understand the true meaning, to see how crucial their intervention is. The Art of Persuasion, I read once in a business magazine, there couldn’t be a clearer opposition of terms in my mind. If you want to persuade, make propaganda. Work in advertising. Ask Saatchi.

Abramovic’s “Rhythm O” was presented in 1974, the same year Ted Bundy was committing atrocities against women. Is Performance a fight for attention? Why not present the same act in a conflict zone? In front of a detention center? In prison? In a violent household with an aggressive husband? How ridiculous Performance acts would look like there, I can only imagine. Can we compare these ritualistic Performances to the horrors of Abu Ghraib? Why does Performance have to yield to the world through a camera how much they are willingly suffering for 1 h or 700 h? There is masochism and an obsessive compulsion to show their naked body, but a naked body that shocks, presumptuously exposed, to look at naked bodies is not radical, is it? We know what they are, we have our own to begin with. I have no issues with naked bodies, I draw them constantly, holding positions for minutes or sometimes hours is part of the models’ expected requirements, you try to create within the experience of a mutual respect, you then start to observe the sprains of their bones, their tight or fallen skins, the movement on their subtle breaths, or their tired bodies, a penetrating life within their eyes and the impenetrability of their bodies, its simple but never flat exposition. Who can say Lucien Freud’s naked bodies are not that and more.

Does this have to do with the fright of growing old? The Transhumanist complex once again. To me, Abramovic’s performances were always ripe for enhancement, the dream of technical eternity always there. I noticed in various ways she is afraid of dying. It is the most evident thing to me when she states: “I just created a piece called “The Life” where with a 36-film camera created an image of myself where I can actually have life inside and that can really live forever, so it is actually through technology you can create in an immaterial way immortality.”²² Have we not all become performers today? Wishing for some kind of eternal audience? Over and over entertainment seems to seep playfully into our realities.

We have just left Pedro Coronel Museum. Coronel was a Zacatecan artist who bequeathed to the city his own works as well as a collection of Art that includes works by Picasso, Rouault, Dalí, Goya and Miró; pre-Hispanic Mexican artifacts, masks and other ancient pieces. This Museum is an Art Precious Stone. We are heading now toward “Acropolis Restaurant”. It is a lovely and bright day, that place only seems suitable. Inside, we are surrounded various pieces of Art covering the very tall walls, most of these pieces have been giving to the owner by the Artists themselves. I imagine them holding endless conversations in this place, while the echo of their voices moves in a circular rumbling that will slowly hide in the air to be later kept as the whisper of a requisite gait that will unfold its abstract secrets with each passing day.

The night has arrived, and I am sat in the roof with and amazing view, “La Bufa” “The cathedral” and the open sky shining an endless figure of stars with a full moon… The air is warm, and I am still thinking what this all means. I think on my perspective and their perspective, I go back and forth. Everything seems to move. I am in a vortex. I wonder and wonder… Engage but be critical, be always critical. If your aim is to destroy from youth the admiration for the craftsmanship of a human, you would have to replace it with something else, because humans have a need for creation. And if there is no craftsmanship (what could subsequently become an Art form) the machinic computer will be all that is left as its replacement. Lev Manovich’s point about suggesting to Artists not wanting to simply create the void (what Brad and I had argued in previous writings to be a source of potential creation in the arts), should “take the next logical step to consider the invisible space of electronic data flows as the substance,” is counter to what I firmly believe.²³ What he is saying is dangerously annihilating for the arts. He talks clearly about replacing Poetry for the Mechanics. It is to leave behind uncertainty, mystery and the ambiguity, which for centuries have been presented in works of Art. To think about the abstract idea of being an AIRobot, either Human-like or Animal-like, sends me into a non-space, and provokes a visceral affliction that digs deep inside of me, but I feel I cannot find anything within.

Some might ask where is art located anyway? Is it a thing? Is it a subjective idea? Is it a person? Is it a sense? Is it abstract? It could be that art exists somewhere in our minds, our soul or our daily life. I mean, it might exist in some of those abstract constructs, and by abstract I don’t mean they are less real. On the contrary I believe the potential of the abstract allows us to get closer to the reality we sense. It exists within these words that somehow as a species we have created: to be a soul, to have a mind, to live a daily life. We could say art always has the potential to be a physical reality, but it doesn’t transform or become art until it has been extracted from such places. And those who can be and understand these are all too human. For this reason, I say art is a human creation. It is not divine (in a Religious God like sense) it is not a God’s command nor machines interpretation. In our human record of existence, we have no knowledge of someone else doing art. No other being has been capable of taking its own life to be expressed as an Art form. I could keep trying to describe the endless experience of Art. But as I have written before, it is not up to one but a whole. At times, it is very difficult to explain in words what I mean, and sometimes it is much easier if you just see it, if you live through it. I am hopeful, and no, I still don’t think AIRobots have hope.

There are few problems we could start trying to solve. Societies are sick of insecurity and that insecurity seeks to blackmail your weaknesses and taken them to the extreme, never before have psychologists had that much work. Machines that try to solve your fears, you hide behind your phone, your vulnerabilities become everyone’s vulnerabilities through your social networks. Everything has to come easy at you, there is no more effort, no more passion, or burning desire, you don’t let love out anymore, everything is false, a show for the few minutes, the instant compliments, you want to be like a “Like.” Create in the pain, the sadness, the horror, the fear! Art needs everything from you! Of your mind! Of your body! Of your senses! Love that life and respect death. Change scares, you resist because you think, because you doubt and because you love. 2022 could be the start of technology seeping into the cracks of our conflicts, or it could be the beginning of a critical resistance. I know not all millennials have bought into the fantastical illusion of the perversities of the high-tech world. It is a fantasy. We need imagination. We are still yet to see.

Act 3

We are sat on our balcony, somewhere in between the void of space and time. We know our past and future thoughts will be read as a form of catastrophism. Too technologically determinist, yet strangely not determined enough! Still, we remain learned students of Nietzsche. We dance with his lessons about the real meaning of catastrophe, not as some atrocious act or accidental occurrence, but the shattering of myths that once bound humans together. The exposure of the myth proves nothing more. It’s simply devastating. Even the mightiest of Gods, in the end, appear as temporary, fleeting, powerless, and ultimately futile as anything else. The death of the Christian deity was a catastrophe. The death of liberalism was a catastrophe. But what of the death of this techno-theodicy? One whose human denials have and will be all too apparent, yet from which we seem in the dust of time incapable of imagining let alone plotting any kind of veritable escape? Sure, fellow travelers from the past had their phantasmic dreams of living off the grid. But all their ambitions or should we say lack of were appropriated, inverted, and put back into the loop. The dropouts became the technocrats. And they plotted to create their own unrivaled fables on the human condition. Solitary and bound in their newly designed Platonic caves, wherein everything was to be internalized and subjected to a form of replication reaching into the intimate depths of all biological conditioning, so they worked and experimented, constructing in the process their own myth that burrowed deeper and deeper into the mines of the technological vision for life.

All around our thoughts are being drowned out by the allegiant voices of those who have us desiring our own determination. Their language is certain. Its reasoned and unrivaled and true. They have colonized the neurological, over-coding our minds into believing that everything is technology and technology is everything. Everything? Yes everything. Fire. Wheels. Paint. Art. Words. The World. The World? Yes. The World. This dwelling we inhabit. So, let’s end here by ventriloquizing their words, making clear the myths that underwrite their inescapable terms. Let us picture this World as technology as they say it was always destined to be! There but for the grace of a God all technologically connected and consuming. Where would we be without them? Humans have always been creatures, we are told, craving meaning and value beyond all else. Without these we are but mere beasts. Seen this way, how can we deny the idea that technology has been our principal driver defining the human condition? But what of humans in this condition? Are we not flesh and bone? You mean bodies? Yes. Bodies. Oh, dear children. Can’t you see? The body is the founding technology. Its where our story begins. Bones. Flesh. Minds. Nothing more than technologies that enable us to move matter, move the wind, move the soul of humanity. I thought that was poetics. No. No. No. Three steps removed as Plato might say. Besides, who needs the artists when machines can replicate better any vision of replication, supersede beyond all human capability any mimesis? So, it’s all about bodies then? Yes. But not just any old body. Bodies that perform with productive grace. Bodies beautifully put to the test, over and over, never quite meeting expectations, but always measured, improved upon, and required. Required for what? Just required, for the future. Surely bodies can never be up to a task set in advance of a future present already in the making? Precisely. We are dream sellers of something that can never be bought and given full satisfaction. Merchants in the spectacle of an optimistic decay? So why do anything? Don’t be so pessimistic. We can’t go on, so we must go on. Haven’t you read Samuel Beckett? Wasn’t he a poet? No. Technically speaking. He was a master wordsmith, at least when he wasn’t getting lost in the void. Be like Beckett. No. Actually. Be a better version of Beckett. Learn the pessimism and improve it with a technological love. All of us? Yes. Each and every machinic soul. Technicians of the mind. Technicians of machines. Technicians of learning. Technicians of education. Technicians of culture. Technicians of progress. Technicians of peace. Technicians of words. Technicians of Art. Technicians of seduction. Technicians of liberation. Technicians of the biosphere. Technicians of dreams. Technicians of hope. Technicians of the technical singularity itself.

This all sounds very deterministic. Deterministic? Oh sister, its revolutionary. Truly—what a revelation we have coursing through our digital veins! Not just radical. Radical interconnectivity. Now that’s some kind of wonderful! Sure, the beatniks had their radicalism. Of a type. But not like this. Too many drugs, too many hangovers, too much, well, disconnection. All too abstract really for abstractions sake. That’s why they had no theory of value. There was nothing they could bring into the marketplace of ideas. Besides, they never saw what we truly needed was a shattering in the order of time itself. They were too concerned with the present and dwelling idly around on the timeless concerns. Forget the contemplative and all those wasted and unrecorded moments thinking in silence. What an utterly selfish and privileged pursuit anyway? Those withdrawals helped nobody but themselves. We wanted action. The future demanded it. Yes. Don’t you see? It was only the technologists who had any vision left in the end. Of course, the economists had their time in the sun. Soon they ran out of ideas and their thinking running the risk of being fully bankrupted had we not come to the rescue. And true, millennial activists and environmentalists also had their moment too, dreaming of a world where differences and networks could thrive. Yet how quickly they came to depend upon us to bring about their vision of earthly salvation? Creators of the future in a vision that can surely arrive, shapers of the past in our own image. That’s transgressive! What radicals of the past never understood was technology always was the game changer, and how the drive toward the post-political was always the source of true liberation. Zamyatin turned back upon himself. “We” are now and its being fulfilled by a truly unbounded progressivism.

So, all watched over then by machines of loving grace? Now that is how we roll! Love. Love. Love. All you need is love. But not of a personal, private, and selfishly kind, kept in the company of the intimate few. Love needs to be publicly declared. Love is a connection! That is why we are the reinventors of love. The love of a digitalized human embrace, openly celebrated, born of the empathy and validation of strangers. Bodies in-formation. Information bodies. Entwined. Informed. A new vocabulary. Yes. The Network. A Network of Lovers. Stimulated and aroused by Networked Minds. That’s the real meaning of free love. Networked Bodies. Networked Communities. Networked Souls. As inseparable as the singularity that binds them. Is that it then? All we need? No. Not quite. It needs to be made manifest. It needs to lift us. We need to feel the virtual volcanos erupt and sense their explosive potential, even if nothing happens. So, it’s all about desire then? Yes. Desiring machines. Feel the love, for the more we are connected, the more our lives enriched. And the more our lives are enriched, the more the network improves. That is what we mean by a presence of being. Besides, just imagine all that information, all that data, all that insight. No life goes to waste. It all matters, every thought-feeling, every banal utterance. Truly you must accept this is humanity’s greatest achievement. Humanity as one. A living and breathing networked mass.

That’s why we have become the greatest of all the humanists. The real peacemakers of this earth. What of Ypres? Gatlin. Hiroshima. Drones. Oh, come over my beloved. Yes, no, nobody denies some of those tragic accidents and mishaps. Let’s see it from a more enlightened and knowledgeable perspective. Didn’t those very technologies also save lives? Remember how the threat of annihilation kept the peace for so long, for so many? There is no such thing as bad technology, only bad humans. It’s not that its arbitrary, but even a benevolent peace can get corrupted. We need technology, to combat the deadly sins of man, to put Pandora back into her box, to save us from ourselves. Where would we be without Athena’s protections? Thrown mercilessly back into the dark ages of man, darker even than this void! But don’t you mean we need technology to save us from technology? It’s better to ask about failure and what emerges from the ashes. What fails is their inability to develop at a pace that can keep up with the promise of technology and its emancipatory potentials. Look, technology is part of human existence. It’s as necessary and true as the sun rising. The sun—now that’s a technology! Just like Trinity, the power of a God brought crashing down to earth. But how do we overcome all the killing technology has permitted? That violence is for humanity alone to own. But are technocrats’ not part of this humanity? Yes and No. True we have had a few corrupted microchips in our circuits in the past. But those who embraced the oath have in essence been as benevolent as the technologies they invented and selflessly brought to this world. That is why we must resist the tyranny of private secrets and silence at all costs. Knowledge is the most fundamental of human rights. We have a right to know, everything. Transparency has brought down the most oppressive of tyrannies. They depended on the unknowing. But what of the rest? Did they need to be so transparent about everything too? Absolutely and even more so. All great change begins micro-politically. And let’s not forget a problem shared is a problem cared! Besides what did they have to hide? Still, we shouldn’t go back to those old questions of crime. Far too negative. It is all about knowledge. All about the future of humanity. But what of those who still refuse to share all? What of those with a penchant for the secret? Dangerous Outcasts. Outcasts of Thought. Outcasts of Humanity. Knowledge hoarders, who deprive others of the right to know, the right to feel, the right to see, the right to move forward, the right to togetherness, the right to witness our beautiful humanity complete.

So, a new Utopia then? Not quite. Too territorial. We need a new vision of life that is properly unbounded. Extra-terrestrial yet endo-colonizing without contradiction. Open and yet fully enclosed. The Technological Abstract. Eternally unbounded by the promise of tomorrow, fully cast by the terrors of the past, infinitely enriched by the technological dream, fatally destined should it ever fail. Atopia. For a world of wandering souls, who have no need to venture anywhere. There are no afters, posts or beyond this because there is not a beyond or after the future. The future is now. We own it. Its immanently felt and its technological salvation all said and done. And what of those who resist? Little worry. They are already dead and will soon be written out of this narrative.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Brad Evans

Brad Evans is a political philosopher, critical theorist, and writer, who specializes on the problem of violence. He is author of over 20 books and edited volumes, including most recently Ecce Humanitas: Beholding the Pain of Humanity (2020); Conversations on Violence: An Anthology (with Adrian Parr, 2020) and The Atrocity Exhibition (2019) Having led a dedicated series of discussions on violence with the New York Times, he currently leads the Los Angeles Review of Books “Histories of Violence” section. Brad is currently the Chair of Political Violence and Aesthetics at the University of Bath, United Kingdom.

Chantal Meza

Chantal Meza is a self-taught abstract painter living and working in the United Kingdom. Her works have been exhibited in more than 30 group and individual exhibitions in prominent Museums and Galleries in Mexico, Paraguay and the United Kingdom. She has delivered International Seminars and workshops at reputable Universities and has been commissioned publicly and privately. Her work has been part of Auctions, Interventions, Biennales & Donations and features in many prominent International Outlets, book covers, digital and print magazines including ArtLyst, La Jornada, Symploke, W&S Science & Peace, LA Review of Books. She has written a number of academic articles in prominent theory, culture and educational practice journals, and is currently co-curating a book titled “State of Disappearance” to be published in 2023 with McGill-Queens University Press.

Notes

1 (O’Connell, 2017, Mere Machines, p. 124).

2 (Haraway, 1991, ProQuest Ebook Central).

3 “What does it mean to be human? A dialogue with robotics professor Dr Hiroshi Ishiguro” by Jonathan Heaf. GQ Partnerships Jul 2018.

4 Bible. Genesis Chapter 1, Verse 27 and 28. Jubilee Bible 2000 (JUS) © 2020 by Ransom Press International.

5 Umberto Eco, “On Ugliness.” 5. The Destiny of Monsters, 127.

6 “e-Human: More Human or Less Human?” | Naeem Komeilipoor | TEDxMcGill.

7 https://naeemkomeilipoor.com/Aifriend/.

8 https://replika.ai/about/story.

9 Forbes. Mar 08, 2018. This AI Has Sparked A Budding Friendship With 2.5 Million People. By Parmy Olson.

10 Recode’s Kara Swisher and The Verge’ Walt Mossberg. Elon Musk. Full interview. Code Conference 2016.

11 https://www.ai-darobot.com/about The Intersection of Art and AI | Ai-Da Robot. TEDxOxford. YouTube.

12 Elon Musk on Artificial Intelligence. Ritm 1. 14 October 2019. YouTube.

13 Elon Musk Reveals Tesla Bot (full presentation) CNET Highlights. 20 August 2021. YouTube.

14 Who owns the future? Jaron Lanier. Microsoft Research visiting speaking series.

15 Kazuo Ishiguro A Nobel Novelist Searches for Hope. The Agenda with Steve Paikin. 10 March 2021.

16 Kazuo Ishiguro in conversation with Kate Mosse for World book Night. The British Library. 26 April 2021.

17 Kazuo Ishiguro A Nobel Novelist Searches for Hope. The Agenda with Steve Paikin. 10 March 2021.

18 Art in the age of machine intelligence. Refik Anadol. 19 August 2020. TED. YouTube.

19 Refik Anadol. Founder of DataLand.

20 It is attributed to the philosopher and writer Miguel de Unamuno. Centro Virtual Cervantes

21 What does it mean to be human? A dialogue with robotics professor Dr Hiroshi Ishiguro by Jonathan Heaf. GQ Partnerships Jul 2018.

22 HardTalk BBC Interview. Marina Abramovic—Performance artist.

23 Lev Manovich Professor of Computer Science. 2004. “In other words, architects along with artists can take the next logical step to consider the “invisible” space of electronic data flows as substance rather than just as void—something that needs a structure, a politics and a poetics.”