Inevitably Posthuman? – The Weekly Standard

There are, broadly speaking, two kinds of futurology, the utopian and the apocalyptic. In Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari, like the Book of Revelation, offers a bit of both. And why not? The function of imaginary futures is to deliver us from banality. The present, like the past, may be a disappointing muddle, but the future had better be very good or very bad, or it wont sell.

Harari, an Oxford-educated Israeli historian who teaches in Jerusalem, is the author of Sapiens (2015), a provocative, panoramic view of human evolution and history upward from apedom. It became an international bestseller, recommended by the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Barack Obama. Hararis style is breezy and accessible, sprinkled with allusions to pop culture and everyday life, but his perspective is coolly detached and almost Machiavellian in its unflinching realism about power, the role of elites, and the absence of justice in history. He is an unapologetic oracle of Darwin and data. And he is clearly a religious skeptic, but he practices a form of Buddhist meditation, and among the best things in his new book, like his previous one, are his observations on the varieties of religious experience.

Harari begins by assuring us that humanity is on a winning streak. Famine and plague, two historical scourges, are disappearing, and a third, war, is no longer routine statecraft. For the first time in history, more people die of eating too much than eating too little. More people succumb to ailments related to old age than to infectious diseases. Victims of all kinds of violence are, as percentages of the population, at historical lows in most places. The next stop, presumably, is Utopia.

But if its the best of times, its also the worst of timesat least for other species. In the present era, which Harari follows other writers in calling the Anthropocene epoch, a dominant, overbreeding humanity is playing the role of the dinosaur-dooming asteroid 65 million years ago. Were transforming the planet. Many species of larger wild animals are reaching the vanishing point, while the now far more numerous domesticated animals raised for food have been bred into miserable, bloated, immobilized travesties of their wild ancestors. We live in an age of mass extinctions. The question Harari raises is whether we are going to be the next victims of our own success.

In a few decades, we might have a new caste society that, in Hararis account, looks something like the Egypt of the pharaohs. Most of humanity, made redundant by artificial intelligence and robots, will be ushered into subservience or virtual-reality obliviousness. But there will be a rich elite whose technical mastery will bring them something approaching omniscience. They will periodically arrange complete biochemical makeovers, giving themselves perpetual youth, and they will have assorted injections and brain prosthetics to bestow unflagging confidence and intelligence and bliss. They will be beings apart, experiencing mental states unknown to all previous merely human beings. It will make them, in effect, a new species, Homo deusjust as the cognitive revolution 70,000 years ago gave rise to our own human species, Homo sapiens, with unheard-of powers of abstraction and imagination, thereby turning an insignificant African ape into the ruler of the world.

On the other hand, this god-incubating project might just be a mad-scientist experiment that blows up in our genetically enhanced faces. Harari concedes that revamping the human mind is an extremely complex and dangerous undertaking since we dont really understand the mind. He would seem to agree with critics who think that any such transhumanist or posthumanist enterprise should proceed with caution and be carefully considered and debated in advance. His book is only meant, he says, to enable us to think in far more imaginative ways about the future, and it is a historical prediction, not a political manifesto. But he isnt optimistic about halting the project of redesigning humanity and merging it with machines, even if it turns out to be a big mistake. After all, history is full of big mistakes. Given our past record and our current values, we are likely to reach out for bliss, divinity and immortalityeven if it kills us.

As for the other, more conventionally apocalyptic ways of killing us, Hararis book is remarkable for tiptoeing past the usual suspects, like climate catastrophe and nuclear war. He does bring up something he calls the logic bombembedded malicious software that could be activated during a geopolitical crisis, producing power blackouts, plane and train crashes, and the obliteration of financial records (in other words, all the money you thought you had squirreled away in a safe place).

Harari has nothing to say about how todays technology seems to be aiding and abetting our descent into an increasingly crude, inarticulate, and barbaric societyonline bullying and abuse, livestreamed suicides and rapes and murders, terrorist recruitment and incitement, and so onand thus fails to project those trends into the future. In fact, he downplays terrorism as a desperate measure adopted by historys losers.

So much for the good news. Harari describes several other current technological fads and intellectual trends that might remake the world. The Quantified Self movement involves monitoring and measuring human activities; for many people, using a Fitbit can bring about improvements in physical health. But what Harari describes is more like an obsession or an ideology, reducing the self to nothing but mathematical patterns. Then there is Dataism, which he rightly calls a current scientific dogma. It holds that all life is basically just hardware and software: Organisms are algorithms and giraffes, tomatoes and human beings are just different methods for processing data. Harari seems to suggest that if these ideas prevail, humanity may drown in a biblical-caliber flood of numbers, with no ark of autonomy in sight.

In 1888, Edward Bellamy, an American socialist, published his immensely popular novel Looking Backward, which envisioned a happy future in the year 2000: We would have no wars, no banks, no money to put in them, no poverty, no wealth, no prisons, no politicians to put in them, no advertisements, no professional sports, no bad manners, and (now comes the good part) no lawyersjust a rather genteel Industrial Army receiving equal rations of modest middle-class amenities. No mention of computers and the Internet, nor even radios, but there would be telephone connections in every home to a symphony orchestra playing live music.

In the quarter-century after Bellamy, more than 200 futurist tracts and novels appeared in English, almost all optimistic, though a few grim futures began raining on the utopian paradethe first drops of the later dystopian deluge that included Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Some were memorable; all were wrong.

Except for a few remarks about Marxist mistakes, Harari doesnt deal with the picturesque ruins of the bright futures of the past. And he confesses, reassuringly, that he does not know what the future will be like. Nobody does. He is, he claims, only sketching a few indistinct possibilities and not endorsing any of them. But like Bellamy and other past futurologists, he is extrapolating current technological and social tendencies and cutting and pasting them onto the blank slate of the future, and his chances of being right are not any greater than theirs were. What makes his book readablehis sweeping, high-altitude style of analysisalso makes it somewhat facile.

Harari does acknowledge a few cracks in his own tentative utopian faade. Weve managed to achieve unprecedented levels of prosperity, comfort, safety, and choice, but these things do not always translate into true happiness or full human flourishing. Indeed, we find ourselves living distracted, disconnected lives. We have more choice than ever before, Harari writes, but we have lost the ability to really pay attention to whatever we choose. Rates of depression, drug use, and suicide are, Harari notes, higher in some affluent, high-tech societies than in some indigent but tradition-rich places.

Modernity, he says, came to us as a deal in which humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power. Until recently, most cultures believed that humans play a part in some great cosmic plan that gave meaning and purpose to their lives but also limited their power, since ultimate power always resided with the gods or the natural order. Human hubris of the Tower of Babel or Greek tragedy varieties earned quick retribution. But modern humanity has developed powers of its own that match the awe-inspiring powers once attributed to the godsmiracle-working medicines, instant global communication, nuclear bombs, and so forth. Power, however, tends not only to corrupt, it makes the absence of meaning more glaring. On the practical level, Harari writes, modern life consists of a constant pursuit of power within a universe devoid of meaning.

Its not that modernity completely gave up on meaning. It just withdrew it from the cosmos and reinvested it in humanity, creating humanism, which is, Harari says, the real religion of the modern world. Liberal humanism, allied with democracy and consumerist capitalism, has prevailed over its totalitarian rivals by anchoring meaning to the autonomous individual self. Since Rousseau, weve been looking inward and consulting our feelings to find meaning and purpose in life. Life thus becomes, as far as possible, a series of freely chosen, emotionally gratifying, significant experiences; whole industries, like the travel industry, have sprung up to provide them.

Trying to build a humanist church on the shifting sands of feeling has had some unintended consequencesa sentimental, subjective morality; politics in a feel-good or touchy, outrage-driven key; and a self-absorbed therapeutic culture in which everyone is healing and no one is well. Harari gives almost no attention to these. But he demonstrates throughout the book that history has always been a record of unintended consequences, and he offers no reasons for thinking that will change.

The one thing we can be reasonably sure of about the future is that the best-laid plans of mice and men and computerized societies will, as is the custom, go awry. Amid his Homo deus conjectures, Harari remarks that by achieving immunity to disease and aging, the new technocratic elite will be potentially immortal, but they would still be vulnerable to death by accident (or assassination, I would add). In other words, the supergeeks of tomorrow may have godlike aspirations, but they will be extremely nervous little gods. They may never get out of the house.

In Dostoyevskys Notes from Underground, his ranting antihero predicts that people will sabotage the precisely calculated, number-ruled technological utopias of the future by doing self-destructive things and committing random acts of violence just to assert their freedom. You might argue that this is already happening.

Maybe computers will take over the world. But, as Harari admits, scientists have so far failed to come up with an explanation for human consciousness and subjectivity, let alone replicate them in computers. Computers lack not only consciousness but the self-doubt, inner ambivalence and conflict, and sheer self-loathing that are its faithful companions and the source of all our trouble and creativity. Harari says that they may not need consciousness, doubt, and creativity to replace us. But I suppose if they begin saying, like St. Paul, I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate, or, like Montaigne, what we believe we do not believe, and we cannot disengage ourselves from what we condemn, we should start to worry.

Subverting the prospective techno-apotheosis Harari describes may not require drastic Dostoyevskian measuresmaybe just imagination, which, for Harari, echoing a famous remark by Napoleon, is what rules human life. Lives of artificial bliss handed to us on a platter of biochemical and neuroelectronic manipulation may well turn out to be stifling, unchallenging lives, and the human imagination, if it is not stunted and stupefied by virtual reality and other illusions, is likely to find unpredictable ways to subvert them. We will have found out that gods are never happy.

Lawrence Klepp is a writer in New York.

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Inevitably Posthuman? - The Weekly Standard

Pulitzer Prize Winner Jorie Graham’s Collection of Poetry, ‘Fast’, Will Haunt You, Beautifully – PopMatters

Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard poet Jorie Graham opens her new collection, Fast with an epigraph by Robert Browning: Then the good minute goes./ Already how am I so far/ Out of that minute? The quotation is fitting: Fast concerns itself with many things but most prominent among them is the fleeting nature of our existence in time and the manner in which that good minute continually slips our grasp and recedes into an inaccessible but vaunted past. Quite in opposition to Goethes Faust, we do not find ourselves bereft of moments we would bid Stay! but rather discover that we are immersed in them. And as they withdraw farther from us, we feel their absence all the more acutely. We are haunted by the ghosts of experiences we barely registered while they were occurring and haunted even more by those we always recognized were important.

In Fast Graham explores and articulates experiences that are both harrowingly personal (the deaths of her parents, her cancer treatments) and ostensibly impersonal (deep sea trawling, interacting with conversation bots, the vicissitudes of plankton and algae blooms). The sleight of hand that she manages in the best of these poems is to suggest that what appears to be impersonal and simply the state of our seemingly posthuman existence surges through the landscape of our emotional lives while those moments that we so desperately need to be utterly personal, to be ours alone, have within them an uncanny objectivity and recede so rapidly from the present that we fail, despite our desperation, to maintain their affective presence.

Even the orthography employed in these poems involves a thinking through and confrontation with time. Graham employs a striking mark throughout the collection: the Times New Roman arrow. This is essentially an em-dash with an arrow head to the right, thus pointing to the following word or phrase. Now, of course, in most English-language writing (except perhaps in the most concrete of concrete poetry) we move from left to right. The em-dash by itself (and the em-dash is still used in these poems, as well) does not thwart or inhibit forward motion exactly but it does imply a sense of equipoise, a sense that the preceding and the following are on somewhat equal footing (even if one progresses toward the other). Indeed, a very typical use of the em-dash is to denote appositionthe grammatically parallel, side-by-side balance of two or more clauses. Another typical usage is to designate the clause within the em-dashes as subordinate to the surrounding clausesthat is, the clause set out by the em-dashes is understood as a parenthetical remark or exempli gratia.

The arrow negates any such sense of apposition or subordination. The arrow demands forward motion; it does not merely assume it or take it for granted. The arrow impels the reader forward. In these passages, one feels swept up in the onrush of the poetic undercurrent, rushed out into the depths of a tumultuous thought, an image that crests and crashes down upon the reader inexorably, ineluctably. And yet, part of me as a reader resists this onrush of motion. In its efforts to push me forward, the arrows sometimes inspire my readerly resistance to pull back, to question the relentless impulsion of time, to endeavor (as these poems often seem to endeavor) to hold on to the fleeting moment, to cry out in Faustian despair, Stay, though art so beautiful!

The pastness of our lives inflects our present, which stands both as an accumulation of past experience and a negation (a registered loss) of that experience. In We, Graham suggests: we are way/ past/ intimation friendthe pastness ofyou can only think about itit wont/ be there for youyou can talk about itthey are gone who came before. The past is something we discuss and think about but can no longer hold in our grip. Our intimate moments are always in the past and thus we are sorrowfully, longingly past them.

Bound up with our being in time is our being involved with a body: being a body, losing our bodily presence in death, the proximity and distance of bodies in relation, networks of bodies in families and forests, the seeming dematerialization of the body in our interactions on the internet, the occlusive nature of the ailing body as it blocks our (what our without the body?) progress in life. Our bodies experience the ravages of time, are dependent upon time for their meaning, and register times passage by displaying its inscriptions as carved into our wrinkles, our frailties, our inevitable decline.

Perhaps my favorite device that Graham employs with respect to the body is her particular care with the preposition in and verbs such as to enter. The body in these poems wants to be inside, with loved ones, connected to a community (whether the nuclear family, a sea of algae, decaying flora, or the subterranean matrix of roots and fungi that sustains the life of a forest amidst individual death). And yet the body continually breaks down, betrays and is betrayed, fails (even at the height of its power, which is all too rare in these poems of extremity and sorrow). The body loses itself in the midst of its yearning to return; it continually slips toward the outside, away from the circumference of companionate comfort, away from the bittersweet familiarity of home.

Graham divides her book into four large sections; each section is rather loosely organized around a theme: 1. an examination lifes enmeshment with death writ largethe manner in which death serves to nurture new life, the possibility of global death, our lifelike interactions with nonliving things such as bots on the internet; 2. ruminations on the death of the poets fatherthe loving interaction of the still-living with the recently dead; 3. thoughts on the human bodythe sick body, the underappreciated body, the body engaged with the machine; and 4. another foray into the deaths of loved onesthe father again but now also the mother.

Despite this overall division, however, the poems are not laid out in a schematic fashion. The various themes interpenetrate, and each poem, at times bordering on free association, encompasses a plethora of referents and allusions, unforeseen connections, and abrupt shifts in register and voice. But throughout, the collection is pervaded by images of time as it relates to and conditions life, death, and the body.

The brief opening poem, Ashes, provides a fine example of the vertiginous manner in which Graham spins out her ideas and images and indeed presents in a brilliantly telescoped manner the concerns and devices explored in the collection as a whole. The narrating voice seeks some kind of ontological foundation, some solidity of being. She asks the plants to give me my small identity. No, the planets. Notice the swift turn from the terrestrial to the heavenly, from the biology of decay (the loam waits to make of us what it can) to the Platonic conception of the microcosms relation to the macrocosm of the celestial spheres (Grahams disenchanted postmodern Platonism reducing the planetary motions to a groove traversed where a god dies).

The dizzying alternation between the small and the large impacts the understanding of time here as well. The narrators lifetime gives way to a wish to become glass and then assonantly shifts toward the glacial; the human lifespan echoes with the prehistoric frozen mothers caress. Maturation and senescence are not merely human attributes. Our growth and death are accompanied by an untold wealth of beings that come and go, all encompassed by a system (the universe) that itself came into existence and is fading out of it. Hence the dialectic of micro/macrocosm plays out on the temporal stage; considering the vicissitudes of human birth and death leads to the realization (hardly profound and yet shattering all the same) that a universe can die.

In the midst of all of this are bodies: bodies of plants that in their fecundity transmute absorbed death into incipient life; bodies of fish and insects and birds that are victims of the life cycle; the Platonic, emergent body dragged down through shaft into being; and, most immediately, the living human body that anticipates, fears, and attempts to justify death, the body trammeled with entry and thinning but almost still here in spirit. This is the body that wastes away and experiences that decline as the meaning-granting essence of that bodys existence, that knows death but does not understand it.

These poems are not all on an equal footing. Graham is at her best in free verse pushed forth by free association. Her gift for connection is what typically prevents her sometimes (often?) banal observations from crossing the threshold into being trite. There is nothing particularly revealing about the connection between our personal death and its contribution to the moldering richness of the soil giving rise to new life. What makes this image work in a poem like Ashes is the agility with which that biological image vaunts over into the Platonic, the cosmological, the ecological, the theological, and the corporeal. Some poems, like Dementia, appear less sure-footed in their peregrinations through concepts and categories of thought.

Others, such as from The Enmeshments, clearly the weakest poem in the collection, attempt to infuse the free verse with some allusions to meter through rhyme but only manage to create a stilted rhythmic effect (But what if I only want to subtract. Its too abstract. I have no contract. Cannot enact impact/ interact) that detracts from the rigor and charm of her usual poetic design, devolving into the clumsy and the mundane.

Certain of these poems, however, will and should assimilate themselves to your consciousness, insinuate themselves into your way of thinking. Poems such as Fast, Reading to my Father, and The Post Human are replete with thoughts and images that haunt me, that shake the tendrils of my nervous system, and appear to me in unbidden moments. The Post Human, in particular is enchanting and horrifying at once. The narrative I finds herself in the room of her just-deceased father, standing next to his body, which is no longer his, no longer someones body but just a body, a bit of detritus, but beloved detritus. She is holding his hand as it stiffens with rigor mortis: The aluminum shines on your bedrail where the sun hits. It touches it./ The sun and the bedraildo they touch each other more than you and I now./ Now. Is that a place now. Do you have a now.

Time, the body, life, and deathall hold together in a beguiling, evocative tension. Sunlight, a bringer of life and vitality, shines upon the deathbed, touches it, drawing a connection between the innerving, immaterial warmth of light and the cold, steely indifference of the aluminum. The daughter holds the hand of her departed father, but, of course, he is no longer holding her hand, cannot do so. There is no one there to do so. The father has vacated the Now and no longer is while the daughter continues to reach out, to attempt to touch that which has fled into pastness. And yet, this is not an image of futility, some quixotic endeavor to overcome the unsurpassable finality of death. She manages, in some small but crucial way, to touch her father and he touches herbeyond a place, beyond a now, beyond the materiality of bodies and the irrevocable isolation of the present. The bodies that we are will always seek and somehow impossibly find a way back in.

Chadwick lives in New York City and teaches Music History and Theory at The City College of New York. He earned his doctorate in Musicology at Columbia University. He has given papers on topics ranging from 12th Century lament to Duke Ellington and early radio to the use of Wagner's music in Bugs Bunny cartoons. He has published in scholarly journals on the music of John Cage, Richard Strauss, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. He has taught courses on music history, the history of rock, and the history of jazz at the University of Maryland, College Park, and Columbia University

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Pulitzer Prize Winner Jorie Graham's Collection of Poetry, 'Fast', Will Haunt You, Beautifully - PopMatters

An Interview With Rick Rosner on Women and the Future (Part 4) – The Good Men Project (blog)

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Ethics exists beyond issues of the sexes. Issues of global concern. Ongoing problems needing comprehensive solutions such as differing ethnic, ideological, linguistic, national, and religious groups converging on common goals for viable and long-term human relations in a globalized world scarce in resources without any land-based frontiers for further expansionand exploitation, UNinternational diplomatic resolutions for common initiatives such as humanitarian initiatives through General Assembly Third Committee (Social, Humanitarian and Cultural), Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), United Childrens Fund (UNICEF), United Nations Develop Programme (UNDP), World Food Programme (WFP), Food And Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO), United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), United Nations Human Populations Settlement Programme (UN-HABITAT), Interagency Standing Committee (IASC), and issues of UN humanitarian thematic import such as demining, early warning and disaster detection, the merger of theories of the grandest magnitude (e.g., general and special relativity) and the most minute (e.g., quantum mechanics), medical issues such as Malaria, Cancer, and new outbreaks of Ebola, nuclear wasteand fossil fuel emissions, severe practices of infibulation, clitoridectomy, or excision among the varied, creative means of female and male genital mutilation based in socio-cultural and religious practices,stabilization of human population growthprior to exceeding the planets present and future supportive capacity for humans, reduction of religious and national extremism, continuous efforts of conservation of cultural and biological diversity, energy production, distribution, and sustainability, economic sustainability, provision of basic necessities of clean water, food, and shelter,IAEAand other organizations work for reduction and eventual elimination of nuclear armaments, culture wars over certainty in ethics on no evidence (faith-based ethics)and lack of certainty in morality because of too much data while lacking a coherent framework for action (aforementioned bland multiculturalism transformed into prescription of cultural/ethical relativism), acidification of the oceans, problems of corruption, continued annexation of land, issues of international justice handled by such organs as the International Court of Justice, introduction of rapid acceleration of technological capabilities while adapting to the upheavals following in its wake, issues of drug and human trafficking, other serious problems of children and armed conflict including child soldiers, terrorist activity, education of new generations linked to new technological and informational access, smooth integration of national economies into a global economy for increased trade and prosperity, and the list appears endless and growing.

If collated, they form one question:How best to solve problems in civil society?

Main issue, all subordinate queries and comprehensive, coherent solutions require sacrifice. You might ask, Cui bono?(Who benefits?) Answer: all in sum. Problem: few feel the need to sacrifice past the superficial. Some Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram protestations to represent themselves as just people while not behaving in the real world as just people. Hashtags and celebrity speeches help in outreach and advertisement, but we need long-term, pragmatic solutions to coincide with them more. Nothing hyperbolic to disturb healthy human societies, but reasonable and relatively rapid transitions into sustainable solutions.You have stated positive trajectories by thinking about the future. You talked of some, but not all. What about these collection of problems and the growing list?

Rick Rosner: I believe the best instrument of change is information. Informed people more readily disbelieve stupid shit. Widespread ignorance and distrust of well-substantiated facts are usually signs of somebody getting away with something.

We know society is trending in an egalitarian direction. Trends towards equality are in a race with technology remaking society. For me, the question becomes, How many lives and generations will be spent in misery before social and tech trends make things better and/or weird?

The happy possible eventual situation is that tech creates a utopia in which all people get what they want. The unhappy possible eventuality is that tech debunks the importance or centrality of humanity, and humans are afterthoughts the stepchildren of the future being taken care of but not really having their concerns addressed because their level of existence isnt taken seriously by posthumans. (And of course theres the possibility that AI gets out of hand, eats everything and craps out robots. Lets try to avoid that.)

Tech will solve some huge problems. One of the biggest is the steadily growing population. People who have a shot at technical, earthly immortality (50 to 80 years from now) will reproduce less. When transferrable consciousness becomes commonplace (120 to 150 years from now), posthuman people may not reproduce at all (though traditional human enclaves will still spit out a steady stream of kids). The uncoupling of individual consciousness from the body it was born into solves a bunch of, perhaps most, current problems and anticipated problems crowding, food, pollution, global warming by allowing people to live in ways that leave less of a footprint. (Not that their choices will be made for purely ecological concerns. People will always follow their own interests, and posthuman people will choose a variety of non-fleshy containers (200 years from now) because virtual or semi-robotic containers will be cheaper, more convenient, more versatile and exciting.)

But our current problems will be largely replaced by fantastically weird problems. Virtual people will be subject to virtual attacks and virtual disease. Agglomerations of consciousness may become bad actors. People may sic nanotech swarms on each other. You can find all this stuff in good near-future science fiction. William Gibsons new novel,The Peripheral, which takes place about 20 years and 90 years from now, can serve as a good, fun intro to the future. In it, some impossible stuff happens, but its the possible stuff thats interesting and scary. There are websites devoted to the future in a very non-la-de-dah way. Look athttp://io9.com/andhttp://boingboing.net/ theyre entertaining and informative.

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An Interview With Rick Rosner on Women and the Future (Part 4) - The Good Men Project (blog)

Nam June Paik Art Center – E-Flux

International Symposium Gift of Nam June Paik 9 Coevolution: Cybernetics to Posthuman Saturdays, July 8, 15, 22, 29, 2017, 15pm

Nam June Paik Art Center 10 Paiknamjune-ro, Giheung-gu Yongin-si, Gyeonggi-do 17068 Korea Hours: TuesdaySunday 10am6pm

press@njpartcenter.kr

njpac-en.ggcf.kr Facebook / Instagram / Twitter

Hosted and organized by Nam June Paik Art Center, Gyeonggi Cultural Foundation

Nam June Paik defined cybernetics as various relationships between humans and machines, art and machines, art and technologies, humans and art and even among diverse arts (artists). He understood that it would generate varying combinations out of these relationships. Nam June Paik put his ideas about cybernetics into artistic practices: he performed Robot Opera with robots he himself had made and manipulated, expressing simply and playfully the complicated relationship between humans and machines.

Cybernetics as a discipline was first introduced by Norbert Wiener, as he attempted to explain the regulative relationship between humans and machines. When a number of scholars gathered and discussed on the theme at Macy Conference, however, cybernetics dynamically developed into a emerging epistemological concept. Nam June Paiks theoretical ideas and artistic practices correspond to (or lead ahead) the few steps of the radical development of cybernetics achieved throughout history: the first wave cybernetics, which was at the level of mechanic feedback, and the second wave cybernetics, which characterizes as reflexity and self-generation and the third wave cybernetics, at the center of which is emergence, are all relevant. These steps express a posthuman evolutional point of view on how the boundary between humans and machines is deconstructed.

Our symposium looks into a contemporary approach to the phased developmental history of "cybernetics"and at the same time analyzes Nam June Paiks works on machines and art. We expect it will develop into a dynamic and contemporary discursive space where presenters from diverse background freely discuss in small spaces. We hope that each participant exists as a subjective observer and there will be sensitive and exciting reactions within that space.

Program

July 8 12:30pm "Sudden Unintended Accelerationas a Psychosis of Machine" Youngjun Lee(Machine Critic, Professor ofKaywon Universityof Art & Design)

2:304pm "Cybernetics and Later,The History of the Integration and Simulation for Processing Human Elements in Circuits" Kyuheun Ko(Adjunct Professorof Sung Kyun Kwan University)

45pm Discussion

July 15 12:30pm "Cybernetics and Cyborg: Some Philosophical Questions" Jinkyoung Lee(Professor of Seoul National University of Science and Technology)

2:304pm "Cognitive Ecological Outline of the Strategy for Social Solidarity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence" Kwanghyun Sim(Professor of School of Visual Arts,Korea National University of Art)

45pm Discussion

July 22 12:30pm "Cybernetic Lyricism: Gregory Bateson,Nam June Paik, and the Mind as Conjunctive" Seongeun Kim(DPhil, Leeum,Samsung Museum of Art)

2:304pm Artist Talk: Taeyeun Kim,pela Petri

45pm Discussion

July 29 12:30pm "Transductive Ensemble of Nature, Human, and Technical Objects: The TechnoAesthetics ofNam June Paik and Posthuman" Jaehee Kim (Professor of the Ewha Institute for the Humanities (EIH),Ewha Womans University)

2:304pm "Inside Out, Outside In: Technical Media as Exteriorizations of Cognition and the Art Installationsof Nam June Paik" N. Katherine Hayles(Professor of Literature at Duke University)

45pm Discussion

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Nam June Paik Art Center - E-Flux

Inaugural Issues of the Journal of Posthuman Studies Now Available! – Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies

Now, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2017 of the newly established Journal of Posthuman Studies (Penn State University Press) is available via jstor: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jpoststud.1.1.issue-1 It is a ground-breaking issue with amazing contributors! It is already possible to submit your work for consideration for future issues by accessing this link: http://www.psupress.org/Journals/jnls_JPHS.html The new journal is being edited by IEET Fellow Stefan Lorenz Sorgner and the Executive Director of the IEET James J. Hughes. The Editorial Board includes further members of the IEET as well as many other distinguished thinkers and artists: http://www.psupress.org/Journals/jnls_JPHS.html

The launch of this new journal as well as this new area of studies will officially be celebrated during the 9th Beyond Humanism Conference (Topic: Posthuman Studies) which will take place at John Cabot University in Rome from the 19th until the 22nd of July 2017: http://beyondhumanism.org/ The tentative conference program is already available: http://beyondhumanism.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Preliminary-schedule-5.pdf It will be a massive event with more than 100 speakers and participants and many thought leaders from a great variety of traditions and disciplines!!!!

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Inaugural Issues of the Journal of Posthuman Studies Now Available! - Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies

Why We’re Probably Living in a Computer Simulation – Inverse

Philosopher Nick Bostrom published a rather convincing argument in 2003 that insisted that were probably living in a computer simulation. Read it and youll understand why Elon Musk says the odds that were living in base reality is one in billions.

In short the argument goes like this:

A lot of people think were on the brink of creating super-powerful computers and A.I.

If we are, then well soon have the ability to create vast simulations of reality, populated with simulated people who are conscious yet dont know they are simulated.

If we can create real-world simulations, we probably will.

Scientists might run simulations of history with different variations to see how things play out. Gamers might do the same. Wealthy people might create fantasy worlds for themselves. If its cheap enough, many people might do it. Who knows; conscious machines might do it to distract the humans whose bodies they are using to generate power. Whoever creates these simulations, its fair to assume they might create very many.

Given that one base reality (the reality that developed this technology) would lead to countless simulated realities (populated, again, with conscious beings), then odds would be that we currently live one of the simulated realities.

There are some ways around this conclusion, but they range from unnerving to unsatisfying.

On one hand, we might be overestimating the likelihood of mankind reaching that super-computer-powered posthuman state.

If we are probably not on the brink of a computing breakthrough either because the technology is unexpectedly complicated or because weve underestimated the existential risks facing mankind then the odds shift back in favor of us living in base reality. A naive, overoptimistic, and possibly doomed base reality.

Another argument against us living in a simulation is that, even if a posthuman state is likely, posthumans wont have much interest in simulating reality.

Futurist and Age of Em author Robin Hanson made this case in a recent exchange with Inverse. We are not actually very eager to simulate our past, except for the few parts of the past that have the most cultural resonance to us, Hanson wrote. Pick a person in the past, and we do almost nothing like simulating their world. Not in novels, in plays, in video games, nothing.

But, uh, count us among the people who would eagerly create simulated realities to play around with and if there are many people like us, and this technology is realistic, then yeah, were back to probably living in a video game.

So what if we do live in a simulation? It might actually be a moot point, Bostrom argues. After all, the reality we live in appears to follow predictable rules, and our way of living and understanding of the universe is built around those rules.

Properly understood, therefore, the truth should have no tendency to make us go crazy or to prevent us from going about our business and making plans and predictions for tomorrow, Bostrom writes.

Dont Miss: Experts Predict When A.I. Will Beat Humans in Everything

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Why We're Probably Living in a Computer Simulation - Inverse

Our Posthuman Future – Wikipedia

Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution is a 2002 book by Francis Fukuyama. In it, he discusses the potential threat to liberal democracy that use of new and emerging biotechnologies for transhumanist ends poses.

From the back cover of the paperback edition:

A decade after his now-famous pronouncement of "the end of history", Francis Fukuyama argues that as a result of biomedical advances, we are facing the possibility of a future in which our humanity itself will be altered beyond recognition. Fukuyama sketches a brief history of man's changing understanding of human nature: from Plato and Aristotle's belief that humans had "natural ends" to the ideals of utopians and dictators of the modern age who sought to remake mankind for ideological ends. Fukuyama argues that the ability to manipulate the DNA of all of one person's descendants will have profound, and potentially terrible, consequences for our political order, even if undertaken with the best of intentions.

Publication history

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Our Posthuman Future - Wikipedia

Milano Arch Week – E-Flux

Milano Arch Week The week dedicated to architecture June 1218, 2017

Triennale di Milano Viale Alemagna, 6 20121 Milan Italy

http://www.milanoarchweek.eu Facebook

Click here to download the full program

Milano Arch Week, sevendays in which Milano will host events dedicated to the future of architecture and of cities, with Stefano Boeri as curator and promoted by the City of Milan, the Politecnico di Milano and the Triennale.

The events start on Monday,June 12 with a pre-opening party at Fondazione Catella. From that moment on the Milano Arch Week will be hosted at the Patio of the Architecture School of the Politecnico di Milano on Tuesday, June13with the attendance of Chancellor Ferruccio Resta and the Triennales Vicepresident Clarice Pecori Girardiand from Wednesday, June14to Saturday, June 17will occupy both the garden and the internal spaces of the Triennale di Milano located in viale Alemagna.

Milano Arch Week will be characterized by the participation of many leading actors in the international architectural scene, such as the Catalan RCR, Pritzker Award winners of 2017, and the North American Master Peter Eisenman. The list of attendees continues with Elizabeth Diller, designer of the renowned New York City High Line and Francis Kr, the Burkina Faso architect designer of the future Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in London. The events will host also many other well-known international architects like Winy Maas (MVRDV), Giancarlo Mazzanti, Philippe Rahm, Sam Jacob, Martin Videgrd, Petra Blaisse (designer of Milans new Porta Nuova Park), and the Chinese urbanist Lee Xianing.

Many worldwide known Italian architects will be involved in the initiative as well: Alessandro Mendini, Cino Zucchi, Michele De Lucchi, Benedetta Tagliabue, Italo Rota, Carlo Ratti, Patricia Urquiola, Mario Bellini, as well as Archea, TAM associati, AouMM, Baukuh, Piuarch, 5+1 aa, OBR, Metrogramma, Startt, LAN, Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli from OMA and many more.

A section of Milano Arch Week is dedicated to emerging Italian architecture groups, including Parasite 2.0, Raumplan, Small, Fosbury Architecture and Waiting Posthuman Studio, that will take place inside the Triennale garden.

The week will be characterized also by times of reflection dedicated to great Masters of Italian architecture and culture, such as Aldo Rossi (commemorating 20 years from his passing with a reading session of Giovanni Testori texts) and Ettore Sottsass (as an anticipation to the planned autumn exhibition at the Triennale). An exhibition will be dedicated to the Florentine architect Vittorio Giorgini, precursor of zoomorphic architecture, curated by Emilia Giorgi, will be exhibited at the Quadreria.

On Friday, June 16, at 6:30pm, the Triennales Salone dOnore will house a great party, a tribute to Gillo Dorfles, 107 years old, and attended by Milanos mayor Giuseppe Sala.

Milano Arch Week will then end on Sunday morning with a preview visit to the new swimming pools building within the bounds of Franco Parentis Theatre. Many additional events related to architecture will be held in other city locations for the entire week, such as walks, VespArch scooter excursions, guided visits to Milans architecture by architects, open studios, and more.

Particular attention will be given to the relationship between architecture and other arts, such as cinema, through the contributions of Amos Gitai, Paolo Vari and Davide Rapp with Giorgio Zangrandi; ohotography, with the participation of Oliviero Toscani, Paolo Rosselli and Antonio Ottomanelli; art, through the involvement of artists such as Adrian Paci; and theatre, with a special event dedicated to Luca Ronconi, at Teatro dellArte, directed by Margherita Palli and Giovanni Agosti, and an unique show schedule directed by Umberto Angelini.

Many themes will be discussed and examined during Milano Arch Week, such as the periphery of contemporary cities, social differences, urban transformations and the great challenge of the Central Italian reconstruction (attended by, among others, Commissioner Vasco Errani). Other themes that will be analyzed and include international conflicts (through the participation of the Israeli architect Eyal Weizman) and the relationship between Architecture and Geopolitics in the development of African cities.

In the evenings the Triennales garden will light up and house reflective moments interlaced with shows and entertainment.

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Milano Arch Week - E-Flux

Why We Are Not In A Computer Simulation Run By Posthumans – NPR – NPR

Last week, Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker published a satirical essay, in which he wondered whether the strange reality we live in could be some kind of computer game played by an advanced intelligence (us in the future or alien).

His point was that if it is, the "programmers" are messing up, given the absurdity of current events: the incredible faux-pas at the Oscars, where the wrong best picture was announced; Donald Trump, the most outsider president ever elected in U.S. history; the strange comeback by the New England Patriots at the Super Bowl. These events, claims Gopnik, are not just weird; they point to a glitch in the "Matrix," the program that runs us all.

For most people trying to make a living, pay bills or fighting an illness, to spend time considering that our reality is not the "real thing" but actually a highly-sophisticated simulation sounds ridiculous. Someone close to me said, "I wish smart people would focus on real world problems and not on this nonsense." I confess that despite being a scientist that uses simulations in my research, I tend to sympathize with this. To blame the current mess on powers beyond us sounds like a major cop out. It's like the older brother framing the younger one for the broken window. "He threw the ball!" Not our fault, not our responsibility, "they" are doing this to us.

Of course, philosophers consider such questions because they are interesting and raise points about the nature of reality and our perception of it. The Are We Living in a Simulation? question comes from a 2003 paper by Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, who reasoned, compellingly, that given our own proficiency with computers and virtual reality, one of the following propositions must be true:

In other words, either we disappear, or our successors do or don't run simulations, including the one we are part of today. Bostrom's point is that if our species moves on to a new, posthuman phase, our "new us" will have unimaginable computation powers, and running realistic simulations will be a given. If this is the case, we would be like characters in a super-advanced Sims game, believing we have autonomy when, in fact, we are puppets in the hands of the game-players.

This sounds like a very Calvinist kind of situation, with God substituted by super-advanced game players. Or maybe we can call them Super Advanced Gaming Entities (S.A.G.E.)? Our fates are in the hands of "posthuman" entities with powers beyond our control. The key difference between God and a simulation (at least in this narrow context) is that God is presumably infallible, while simulations have glitches, or can have glitches.

The one glitch in the simulation argument is that there is nothing to stop the simulation at one super-advanced posthuman (alien) species. It could very well be that our simulators are, for their part, simulated by even more advanced simulators, and those by even more advanced ones, ad infinitum. Who is the first simulator? This reminds me of the "turtles all the way down" concept of Anavastha in Indian philosophy, where the world rests on an elephant that rests on a turtle that rests on a turtle that... In the West, it may be interpreted as infinite regression or the problem of the First Cause. (For a history of the "turtles all the way down" concept and its many occurrences and variations see here.)

This offers at least some sort of comfort, given that we all seem to be enslaved in an endless nested web of simulators. Only the first simulator is truly free. Familiar?

For Bostrom's argument to work, the key assumption is that advanced intelligences will have an interest in simulating their ancestors (in this case, us). Why would they, exactly? Would they expect to gain some new information about their reality by looking at their evolutionary past?

It seems to me that being so advanced they would have collected enough knowledge about their past to have little interest in this kind of simulation. Forward-looking may be much more interesting to them. They may have virtual-reality museums, where they could go and experience the lives and tribulations of their ancestors. But a full-fledged, resource-consuming simulation of an entire universe? Sounds like a colossal waste of time.

The simulation argument messes with our self-esteem, since it assumes that we have no free will, that we are just deluded puppets thinking we are free to make choices. To believe this is to give up our sense of autonomy: after all, if it's all a big game that we can't control, why bother? This is the danger with this kind of philosophical argument, to actually make us into what it's claiming we are, so that we end up abdicating our right to fight for what we believe in.

Let us make sure that we don't confuse philosophical arguments with our very real socio-political reality, especially not now. We need all the autonomy that we can muster to protect our freedom of choice.

Marcelo Gleiser is a theoretical physicist and writer and a professor of natural philosophy, physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College. He is currently teaching a Massive Online Open Course titled Question Reality! that goes much deeper into these questions. His latest book is The Simple Beauty of the Unexpected: A Natural Philosopher's Quest for Trout and the Meaning of Everything. You can keep up with Marcelo on Facebook and Twitter: @mgleiser

Link:

Why We Are Not In A Computer Simulation Run By Posthumans - NPR - NPR

Why Reality Is Not A Video Game And Why It Matters – New Hampshire Public Radio

Last week, Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker published a satirical essay, in which he wondered whether the strange reality we live in could be some kind of computer game played by an advanced intelligence (us in the future or alien).

His point was that if it is, the "programmers" are messing up, given the absurdity of current events: the incredible faux-pas at the Oscars, where the wrong best picture was announced; Donald Trump, the most outsider president ever elected in U.S. history; the strange comeback by the New England Patriots at the Super Bowl. These events, claims Gopnik, are not just weird; they point to a glitch in the "Matrix," the program that runs us all.

For most people trying to make a living, pay bills or fighting an illness, to spend time considering that our reality is not the "real thing" but actually a highly-sophisticated simulation sounds ridiculous. Someone close to me said, "I wish smart people would focus on real world problems and not on this nonsense." I confess that despite being a scientist that uses simulations in my research, I tend to sympathize with this. To blame the current mess on powers beyond us sounds like a major cop out. It's like the older brother framing the younger one for the broken window. "He threw the ball!" Not our fault, not our responsibility, "they" are doing this to us.

Of course, philosophers consider such questions because they are interesting and raise points about the nature of reality and our perception of it. The Are We Living in a Simulation? question comes from a 2003 paper by Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, who reasoned, compellingly, that given our own proficiency with computers and virtual reality, one of the following propositions must be true:

In other words, either we disappear, or our successors do or don't run simulations, including the one we are part of today. Bostrom's point is that if our species moves on to a new, posthuman phase, our "new us" will have unimaginable computation powers, and running realistic simulations will be a given. If this is the case, we would be like characters in a super-advanced Sims game, believing we have autonomy when, in fact, we are puppets in the hands of the game-players.

This sounds like a very Calvinist kind of situation, with God substituted by super-advanced game players. Or maybe we can call them Super Advanced Gaming Entities (S.A.G.E.)? Our fates are in the hands of "posthuman" entities with powers beyond our control. The key difference between God and a simulation (at least in this narrow context) is that God is presumably infallible, while simulations have glitches, or can have glitches.

The one glitch in the simulation argument is that there is nothing to stop the simulation at one super-advanced posthuman (alien) species. It could very well be that our simulators are, for their part, simulated by even more advanced simulators, and those by even more advanced ones, ad infinitum. Who is the first simulator? This reminds me of the "turtles all the way down" concept of Anavastha in Indian philosophy, where the world rests on an elephant that rests on a turtle that rests on a turtle that... In the West, it may be interpreted as infinite regression or the problem of the First Cause. (For a history of the "turtles all the way down" concept and its many occurrences and variations see here.)

This offers at least some sort of comfort, given that we all seem to be enslaved in an endless nested web of simulators. Only the first simulator is truly free. Familiar?

For Bostrom's argument to work, the key assumption is that advanced intelligences will have an interest in simulating their ancestors (in this case, us). Why would they, exactly? Would they expect to gain some new information about their reality by looking at their evolutionary past?

It seems to me that being so advanced they would have collected enough knowledge about their past to have little interest in this kind of simulation. Forward-looking may be much more interesting to them. They may have virtual-reality museums, where they could go and experience the lives and tribulations of their ancestors. But a full-fledged, resource-consuming simulation of an entire universe? Sounds like a colossal waste of time.

The simulation argument messes with our self-esteem, since it assumes that we have no free will, that we are just deluded puppets thinking we are free to make choices. To believe this is to give up our sense of autonomy: after all, if it's all a big game that we can't control, why bother? This is the danger with this kind of philosophical argument, to actually make us into what it's claiming we are, so that we end up abdicating our right to fight for what we believe in.

Let us make sure that we don't confuse philosophical arguments with our very real socio-political reality, especially not now. We need all the autonomy that we can muster to protect our freedom of choice.

Marcelo Gleiser is a theoretical physicist and writer and a professor of natural philosophy, physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College. He is currently teaching a Massive Online Open Course titled Question Reality! that goes much deeper into these questions. His latest book is The Simple Beauty of the Unexpected: A Natural Philosopher's Quest for Trout and the Meaning of Everything. You can keep up with Marcelo on Facebook and Twitter: @mgleiser

More:

Why Reality Is Not A Video Game And Why It Matters - New Hampshire Public Radio

Musk and Bostrom’s computer simulation theory isn’t as crazy as it first sounds – The Plaid Zebra (blog)

Musk and Bostroms computer simulation theory isnt as crazy as it first sounds

BY: DUSTIN BATTY

As augmented reality and virtual reality technology continues to improve, concerns have arisen that in the future, we wont be able to tell what is real and what is computer-generated. According to some peopleincluding well-known innovator, inventor, and entrepreneur Elon Muskthere is a very good chance that we are all living in a computer simulation.

I know, I know; it sounds crazy. Weve all seen The Matrix, and most of us are aware that its just science fiction. But this theory isnt just senseless balderdash. Musk and the others who hold this theory, such as philosopher Nick Bostrom, make fairly compelling points to corroborate their arguments.

At Code Conference 2016, Musk points out the fact that video games have advanced from Pong to 3-dimensional near-realistic graphics in just over 40 years. It follows that in a few more decades, if we continue at our current rate of technological advancementor in a few millennia, if our advancement slows by a factor of a thousand, but eventuallywe will reach the level of technology necessary to create a fully realistic-seeming virtual reality.

One of the strongest counter-arguments to the computer simulation theory, as posited in an IFLScience article, is that running a truly lifelike simulation of a city, with all its trillions of interactions, would require a city-sized computer. In other words, the amount of computing power that would be required in order to process all of the human minds that are currently aliveas well as the environment in which we all exist and the visible universe that we can detectwould be impossible to develop.

After a lengthy build up in the paper he wrote on the subject, Bostrom claims that developing the computing power required to allow for the lives of 100 billion people, as well as the surrounding environment, is not actually impossible. It would, however, require a computer with the mass of a large planet, which is obviously something that were not even close to building. He says that the technology will become available eventually, if we are able to survive as a species long enough to become what he calls posthuman.

He describes the posthuman as those who are alive when humankind has acquired most of the technological capabilities that one can currently show to be consistent with physical laws and with material and energy constraints. It will probably take us thousands of years to reach a posthuman state, but Bostrom and Musk both point out that the time-frame doesnt matter. As long as the possibility of realistic simulations exists, then we are most likely in one.

The reason for this is simple logic. A simulation this advanced contains sentient beings that can create their own simulation; like in the movie Inception, there would be simulations within simulations within simulations. The chances that we are in the base reality rather than in one of the Inception layers is unlikely because there is only one base reality, but many simulated realities. And there would be no possible way to tell the difference.

So what does this mean for us? How do we move forward, knowing that theres a decent chance that we are in a computer simulation rather than in base reality? Well, we just keep on as if nothings changed. Because, if you think about it, nothing has changed. The world is just as real as it always was, and our reasons for living our lives the way we do are still true. We have simply been given a possible answer to the question about life, the universe, and everything. And I, for one, think its fascinating.

Tagged: computer simulation, elon musk, Nick Bostrom, posthuman, technology, Virtual Reality

Link:

Musk and Bostrom's computer simulation theory isn't as crazy as it first sounds - The Plaid Zebra (blog)

BAK, basis voor actuele kunst – E-Flux

Former West: Art and the Contemporary After 1989 Edited by Maria Hlavajova and Simon Sheikh

formerwest.org mitpress.mit.edu bakonline.org Facebook

BAK, basis voor actuele kunst is pleased to announce the release of Former West: Art and the Contemporary After 1989. This publication includes over 70 texts, visual essays, and conversations by artists, thinkers, and cultural practitioners worldwide, and marks the culmination of an eight-year artistic and curatorial research experiment, FORMER WEST.

The volume explores with and through art the social, cultural, politico-economic, technological, and ecological repercussions of the end of the Cold War on the contemporary. In a nod to a supposed counterpart, the former east, the book proposes to former the west as a way of resisting the wests continued coloniality, and appeals to arts critical potential for thinking and living through alternatives.

Asking how to envision such alternative trajectories, the contributions probe the distinctions established within the post-1989 geopolitical order, specifically those of a global north and global south, and seek to align the post-communist condition with the postcolonial constellation. They consider in parallel the cultural, political, and environmental upheavals that structure the present moment with the post-ideological, posthuman, and posthistorical formations that have emerged in intellectual and artistic response. The book queries not only history and historicization in their western guise, current conditions defined by wars, creeping normalizations of contemporary fascisms, post-truth, and algorithmic cultures, but also solidarities in the context of global class recomposition and migration, unfolding in chilling relevance to the political atmosphere of today.

Contributors include: Nancy Adajania, Edit Andrs, Athena Athanasiou, Zygmunt Bauman, Dave Beech, Brett Bloom, Rosi Braidotti, Susan Buck-Morss, Campus in Camps, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Chto Delat?/What is to be done?, Jodi Dean, Angela Dimitrakaki, Dilar Dirik, Marlene Dumas, Keller Easterling, Okwui Enwezor, Charles Esche, Silvia Federici, Mark Fisher, Federica Giardini and Anna Simone, Boris Groys, Gulf Labor Coalition, Stefano Harney, Sharon Hayes, Brian Holmes, Tung-Hui Hu, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Sami Khatib, Delaine Le Bas, Boaz Levin and Vera Tollmann, Isabell Lorey, Jlius Koller, Sven Ltticken, Ewa Majewska, Artemy Magun, Suhail Malik, Teresa Margolles, Achille Mbembe, Laura McLean, Cuauhtmoc Medina, Sandro Mezzadra, Walter D. Mignolo, Aernout Mik, Angela Mitropoulos, Rastko Monik, Nstio Mosquito, Rabih Mrou, Pedro Neves Marques, Peter Osborne, Matteo Pasquinelli, Andrea Phillips, Nina Power, Vijay Prashad, Gerald Raunig, Irit Rogoff, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Naoki Sakai, Rasha Salti, Francesco Salvini, Christoph Schlingensief, Georg Schllhammer, Susan Schuppli, Andreas Siekmann, Jonas Staal, Hito Steyerl, Mladen Stilinovi, Paulo Tavares, Trnh T. Minh-H, Mona Vtmanu and Florin Tudor, Marina Vishmidt, Marion von Osten, McKenzie Wark, and Eyal Weizman.

Former West: Art and the Contemporary After 1989 is edited by Maria Hlavajova and Simon Sheikh. Visual introductions to book chapters are curated by Maria Hlavajova and Kathrin Rhomberg.

Former West: Art and the Contemporary After 1989 has been published in the context of the curatorial and artistic research experiment FORMER WEST (200816), developed by BAK and realized through manifold partnerships with artists, theorists, activists, as well as art and educational institutions transnationally. Leading up to this publication, a series of public editorial meetings has been held in Utrecht (2014), London (2015), Budapest (2015), and Warsaw (2015), in which themes, contributions, and propositions for this publication have been considered in dialogue with the public.

Published by BAK, basis voor actuele kunst and MIT Press, 2016 | Design by Mevis & Van Deursen, Amsterdam | English language | 748 pages | Paperback | ISBN: 9780262533836

The publication is out now and can be ordered via MIT Press.

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BAK, basis voor actuele kunst - E-Flux

At the Spencer, surprises from new Asian artists – Pitch Weekly

Jiayuan Mountain by Du Kun

In the West, the phrase Asian art typically evokes delicate rice-paper prints, robed women in minimal interiors, and sublime waves of Japanese landscapes: museum pieces. Its no surprise that imaginative contemporary works are being made in the East. But whats on view in Temporal Turn, at the University of Kansas recently renovated Spencer Museum of Art, nevertheless startles. The exhibition gathers arresting art that addresses the unstoppable march of time and the spiritual link between humanity and nature.

The show, divided into five categories, spreads out across the two-story gallery. The names of these rubrics Pulse, The Edge of Infinity, Mythopoeia, Human/Posthuman/Inhuman, Anthropocene risk shading the viewers impressions of the art gathered therein. But the verbal indulgence doesnt have to inhibit your intuition, and the visuals consistently stimulate.

New meaning is given to the expression rock god in Du Kuns Jiayuan Mountain, part of his portrait series of Chinese music stars imagined as colossal temples settled in mountain landscapes. Each in this run is breathtaking in its rich detail and luscious color palettes. Here, the musicians features, built from elements of Buddhist and Confucian architecture, conflate traditional and modern modes of identity; shoulder muscles are articulated by jagged vertical mountains dusted by a snowy fog, and the hair is rendered like a bank of sculpted clouds. A bird on the left edge, near the eyes, gives the viewer a sense of scale. The closer you are to the piece, the more details reveal themselves. The bridge of the nose, for instance, is an emperor in formal garb strumming an instrument. Du Kuns obsession with musicians has reached worship status, but his homage is rooted in traditional Chinese culture and deep history.

I wish there were a way to experience Konoike Tomokos Donning Animal Skins and Braided Grass in a different setting. The six-legged wolf is mirror-tiled, like a walking disco ball, and is the most attractive piece on the first floor. But its position in the gallery, beside a window, limits the full glittering effect on a sunny afternoon.

The sculpture coincides with an 11-minute black-and-white animation of wolf and a liminal creature called a mimio think sentient emoticon on a quest through the woods. The narrative emerges from a kind of dream logic, with bits of mythological ephemera strung across a loop that seems to have no beginning and no end. Wolves are extinct in Konoikes native Japan, where at one time indigenous Ainu people believed themselves born of a goddess and a creature that resembled a wolf. Donning Animal Skins alters and elevates the animal in a way that demands consideration of the myth and the reality as a single history: Reverent lore couldnt save the Hokkaido wolf from extermination.

As you make your way through the first floor, maniacal clicking periodically breaks your focus and lures you into the darkness of a side room. It comes from an old adding machine, stuck banging out the same command on a strip of thermal paper, which has become tangled and ineffective from the unyielding abuse. The installation Kansas Bokaisen Project, by Park Jaeyoung, is set up like a cluttered research lab, with an animal being pumped with air in a plastic bubble. The creature is a Japanese urban legend, called a bokaisen; under the steamy incubator in the middle of the lab, it resembles a possum. Paging through the notebooks on the table provides more information about an expedition to a land where the new animal was discovered, native to the fictitious world that unfolds as you paw through the interactive materials on the desk. A simulacrum of taut empirical research mingles with the scribbles of a mad scientist.

For images you didnt ask to see and will probably try to forget, move upstairs and sit in the curtained-off room in which Lu Yangs Uterus Man runs. In this surreal animation set to loud, jarring EDM the reproductive process mutates into a militarized nightmare. You will see weaponry and biology merged. You will see a baby roaring on the end of an umbilical-cord leash and a go-kart made of human bones, its elongated spine whipping around the back like the tail of a scorpion.

Told you.

The central character of the animation is a gender-ambiguous futuristic superhero wearing a suit that makes the human body transparent. Uterus Man procreates, graphically, and uses the child as a tool for destruction. Sexuality and gender are explored through an assault of violent images (Lus collaborator on the project is a Japanese artist who had his genitals removed and served as a meal to paying guests. Really), and even when physical violence is absent from the screen, the intensity of the music and animation leaves you no less unsettled. Uterus Man hammers home the Human/Posthuman/Inhuman subcategory name, hammers it right into your skull. Lu Yangs work challenges sexual and cultural conventions with an exhaustive rigor that borders on the murderous.

That said, Yangs anti-narrative storytelling implores you to consider time as a tangled line. And if there is a single theme in Temporal Turn, this is it. The film succeeds in intensifying the entire show by being its least contemplative, its least beautiful. This is art with the power to free artists who follow its wildly unpaved path.

Still, theres more to see in Temporal Turn. Walking through it, you understand that artists in Seoul, New Delhi, Tokyo and Beijing are producing imaginative work at a pace that mirrors the rapidity of the regions overall growth. Its an absorbing collection, one that even seems to be in conversation with the permanent collection just as the artists on view consider the timeline that connects their new with the unforgettable old.

Temporal Turn: Art and Speculation in Contemporary Asia

Through March 12 at the Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence

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At the Spencer, surprises from new Asian artists - Pitch Weekly

The Ninja Tune forum has shut down after 19 years – FACT Magazine – FACT

Dont worry, itll live on in another form.

London label Ninja Tune isnt just known for its great releases, the labels online forum has been a tight knit community and music resource since 1998. This week, after 19 years, the Ninja Tune forum will shut down.

A gathering place for music fans, amateur producers, DJs and established artists, the forums were marked with in-depth discussions, production competitions, DJ trades and IRL meet-ups. In addition to many Ninja Tune signees such as DJ Food, artists who posted include Posthuman and Mark Bell of LFO. Many FACT writers such as John Twells, Laurent Fintoni and Tony Poland have memories of posting on the forum during its long run.

The closure has less to do with the forum than it does with internet forums in general theyre growing out-of-date. Over email, the label explained that the increasing tech issues with the forum and the decreasing amount of posts made them decide to set up a page on Reddit which will be run and regularly updated by forum members.

The label shared the news last week on the forum in a note which we have republished below.

Were sad to close the Ninja Tune Forum. Created way back in 1998, it quickly became a lively community of people with thoughts to share and a common love of music of Ninja Tune. For a while back then it was the perfect Ninja Tune community. Some highlights have been the forum marriages and relationships, the huge King Geedorah lyric threads and posts being quoted in The Guardian. Over the years there have been over 45,000 registered users! The old forum technology issues mixed with the decreasing amount of posts in this new age of internet communication means it makes more sense to set up a page on Reddit whose technology is better designed and regularly updated (run by forum members Invisible A, Kid Vector & Techdef) where the spirit can live on.

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The Ninja Tune forum has shut down after 19 years - FACT Magazine - FACT

Things Are Super Weird Right Now, but It’s Not a Glitch in the Matrix, Says Harvard Physicist – ScienceAlert

If the past 12 months have you feeling like you're stuck in the beta version of some giant, buggy simulation, we're right there with you, what with the World Series, the Super Bowl, the Oscars, and depending on which side of the fence you sit, the US and UK elections.

But despite what Elon Musk says, the barrage of weirdness we've been experiencing lately is just the way of the Universe, says Harvard theoretical physicist Lisa Randall, who once described the probability that we're living in a giant video game of the future as "effectively zero".

If you're unfamiliar with the simulation hypothesis, it's based in a 2003 paper by Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom from the University of Oxford, who argued that at least one of the following propositions must be true:

That 'posthuman' stage Bostrom is talking about refers to the probability that at some point in the future, our technology would be so advanced, a single computer could simulate the entire mental history of humankind, using less than one-millionth of its processing power for 1 second.

Now imagine that a posthuman civilisation in the distant future manages to build a massive network of these 'ancestor-simulations', into which we could upload replicas of the minds of our ancestors to play out their lives in a giant computer program.

Assuming these minds had a 'consciousness' - something that scientists have been considering recently - they would realistically demand something akin to human rights so they weren't some kind of robotic slave race. But that's starting to sound a whole lot like us...

In a nutshell,Bostrom proposedthat humans will either almost certainly die out before any of this even happens (thanks, climate change); no advanced civilisations in the history of the Universe contained individuals with the means to build ancestor-simulations; or we almost certainly live in a simulation.

Last year, Elon Musk revealed that he's a big believer in the simulation hypothesises, arguing that "the odds that we're in base reality is one in billions".

And hell, it makes sense when you're going through weird times like these that something other than "base reality" is at play:

But Lisa Randall is here to ruin all our fun, because when Corinne Purtill from Quartz asked her if the recent Oscars mix-up has her rethinking her anti-simulation stance, the answer is not even a little bit.

"At this point, we cannot prove that we do or don't live in a simulation. More to the point, there is no reason to believe that we do," she said.

"However, we can pretty much be sure that people will do amazing things and they will also mess up in spectacular ways."

At a public debate last yearmoderated by Neil deGrasse Tyson, Randall seized on Musk's probability argument as one of the biggest reasons for why the simulation hypotheses doesn't make sense.

"Part of the problem is that probabilities have to have a well-defined meaning, or are only useful when they have a well-defined meaning. So, among all possible scenarios we can actually say which one is more or less likely," she said.

"When we run into infinities ... it stops making sense. I mean, I could say really by probability I'm very likely to be Chinese, because there's a lot more Chinese than Americans. But I'm clearly not Chinese. So, probabilities are tricky, and you have to be careful what you mean when you're saying them."

Randall added that it's incredibly egotistical for us to assume that some highly advanced civilisation would build simulations that look just like us, and the probability argument only works if countless alien civilisations saw the human species as something worth simulating.

"It's just not based on well-defined probabilities. The argument says you'd have lots of things that want to simulate us. I actually have a problem with that," she said.

"We mostly are interested in ourselves. I don't know why this higher species would want to simulate us."

Case closed? Randall thinks so, but there are still some in the simulation corner, including cosmologist Max Tegmark from MIT,who argued, "If I were a character in a computer game, I would also discover eventually that the rules seemed completely rigid and mathematical."

And that sounds an awful lot like laws of physics, asJames Gates, a theoretical physicist at the University of Maryland, pointed out:

"In my research I found this very strange thing.I was driven to error-correcting codes - they're what make browsers work. So why were they in the equations I was studying about quarks and electrons and supersymmetry? This brought me to the stark realisation that I could no longer say people like Max are crazy."

It would be nice to blame all of the recent weirdness on a glitchy simulation, but Randall sayswe're better off coming up with more realistic explanations for the mysteries of the world, rather than blaming it all on a giant computer program.

And that sounds a whole lot more scientific to us.

You can watch the whole debate below, and read the transcript here:

Excerpt from:

Things Are Super Weird Right Now, but It's Not a Glitch in the Matrix, Says Harvard Physicist - ScienceAlert

’10 Years of I Love Acid’ compilation comes on a 303-shaped USB … – Mixmag

I Love Acid is celebrating 10 years by announcing a compilation released as a custom designed USB stick shaped like a Roland TB-303.

Originally launched as an event in April 2007, with Luke Vibert, Posthuman and more at Corsica Studios in London, I Love Acid has since grown into a reputable record label supplying the scene with all forms of acid. Theyve hosted over 100 events since inception and now are commemorating the legacy with a collection of acid-tinged tunes.

10 Years of I Love Acid features 20 tracks from acid-loving producers like XXXY, Mike Dunn, Luke Vibert, Mystic Bill, Cardopusher, Posthuman, Chevron and more.

As the label focuses on showing love to the sound of the Roland TB-303, a tool commonly used in producing acid tracks, 10 Years of I Love Acid will be released on a 8G USB stick resembling the TB-303, crafted to fit and work with CDJs.

10 Years of I Love Acid will be released on March 31.

View the tracklist below.

10 Years of I Love Acid tracklist:

01. Neville Watson Sweatbox 02. Posthuman Brand Loyalty 03. Mike Dunn No Chaser 04. XXXY Blup Blup 05. TB Arthur TB1 B1 06. Mystic Bill Revenge Of The Preacherman 07. Cardopusher Out On A Limb 08. Hardfloor 36 Chambers Of Kikumoto 09. dyLab Let Us Rise 10. Kerrie Eerie Acid 11. Jared Wilson Tracking 12. Hannah Holland Tweak feat. Josh Caffe 13. B12 Wobble Boarding 14. Mark Forshaw Hes Not There 15. Jozef K & Wintersun Hyggeacid 16. John Heckle Days Of Atlantis 17. Chevron CYPUPB~B 18. Luke Vibert Jeepers H Christ 19. Transparent Sound Dancing Eyelids 20. Pye Corner Audio Dead Ends

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'10 Years of I Love Acid' compilation comes on a 303-shaped USB ... - Mixmag

I Love Acid’s 10th anniversary compilation comes on a 303-shaped USB stick – FACT

Luke Vibert, Posthuman, John Heckle and more contribute to the 20-track compilation.

Londons I Love Acid party will celebrate 10 years in the game with a 20-track acid compilation, released on a 303-shaped USB stick.

As RA reports, the compilation features tracks made byacid-loving producers from across the globe, including Luke Vibert, Neville Watson, Jared Wilson, Hannah Holland, Mark Forshaw and John Heckle.

Pye Corner Audio, XXXY, TB Arthur and Posthuman also contribute to the compilation, which will be released in time for the partys 10th anniversary parties in April.

Launched in 2007 by Luke Vibert and Posthuman, I Love Acids first party was held at Londons Corsica Studios and has been a fixture at the club and expanded with parties in different countries.

Its 10th anniversary parties take place at Manchesters Hidden on April 1, Corsica Studios on April 7 and Barcelonas Moog on May 5. Tickets for those can be found here.

10 Years of I Love Acid will be available to pre-order from the Balkan Vinyl Bandcamp page on March 5.

Tracklist:

01. Neville Watson Sweatbox 02. Posthuman Brand Loyalty 03. Mike Dunn No Chaser 04. XXXY Blup Blup 05. TB Arthur TB1 B1 06. Mystic Bill Revenge Of The Preacherman 07. Cardopusher Out On A Limb 08. Hardfloor 36 Chambers Of Kikumoto 09. dyLab Let Us Rise 10. Kerrie Eerie Acid 11. Jared Wilson Tracking 12. Hannah Holland Tweak feat. Josh Caffe 13. B12 Wobble Boarding 14. Mark Forshaw Hes Not There 15. Jozef K & Wintersun Hyggeacid 16. John Heckle Days Of Atlantis 17. Chevron CYPUPB~B 18. Luke Vibert Jeepers H Christ 19. Transparent Sound Dancing Eyelids 20. Pye Corner Audio Dead Ends

Read next: The 20 best acid house records ever made

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I Love Acid's 10th anniversary compilation comes on a 303-shaped USB stick - FACT

Btonsalon Center for Art and Research – E-Flux

Emmanuelle Lain Incremental Self: Transparent Bodies March 8July 1, 2017

Opening : March 7, 69pm

Btonsalon Center for Art and Research 9 Esplanade Pierre Vidal-Naquet Rez-de-Chausse de la Halle aux Farines F-75013 Paris France

T +33 1 45 84 17 56 info@betonsalon.net

http://www.betonsalon.net Twitter / Facebook / Instagram

Btonsalon - Center for Art and Research is proud to present a solo exhibition by Emmanuelle Lain to re-open its newly refurbished spaces.

Our lives are all but fragile and precarious. Yet they are multiple, collective, and uncontrollable. This is what artist Emmanuelle Lain manifests in her exhibitionIncremental Self: Transparent Bodies.The bodies we observe in her filmic installationstudents, retired artists, workersare in transitional places where different sorts of exchanges are taking place. They are evolving in spaces of negotiation where successive layers of identity are being performed in interaction with given economic, sensible, and even symbolic facts and objects.What should we do with of all these stories, anecdotes, and memories told by each and every one of us? How to make these narratives biting? To exhibit oneself is to demonstrate a form of resistance, while reconnecting with ones own fragility. WithIncremental Self: Transparent Bodies, we are inclined to explore the following question raised by philosopher Rosi Braidotti: How[do we] find adequate theoretical and imaginary representations for our lived conditions and how [do we] experiment together with alternative forms of posthuman subjectivity?(1)Emmanuelle Lains exhibition is a demonstration of ones taking shape, where humans and objects influence each other, assembling, overlapping, and mixing indiscernibly.Each permeates the other until conscience arises in their trembling selves, thus becoming transparent. Emmanuelle Lains transparent bodies materialize our shifting, off-center, fragmented, and multiple identities. Even more, transparent bodies are contagious, contaminating each other.

(1)Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman, Cambridge: Polity Press,2013, p.187

Emmanuelle Lain (born in Paris in 1973) lives and works in Marseille. She graduated from the cole Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Paris. Elaborating on the specifics of each exhibition venue, Emmanuelle Lain uses the furniture and architectural features of her host institutions to provide a methodology of places connecting the spaces, the artworks and the audience. Her practice consists of monumental in-situ installations that blur the distinctions between the different media she uses. This process allows her to create a complex cognitive space where several temporalities coexist and only make sense to the spectator, who is considered to be the key player of the exhibition.

She recently exhibited her works at the Palais de Tokyo (2017, 2014) and at Villa Vassilieff (2016) in Paris, at the Lyon Biennale (2015), at the GLstrand, (Copenhagen, 2015), at the Stereo Gallery (Warsaw, 2015), at the ICA Singapore (2015), at the Swiss Cultural Institute (Rome, 2014) and at La Loge Bruxelles (2013). Her works were also shown in personal exhibitions hosted by the Villa Arson (2016), the Galerie Motinternational (Bruxelles, 2015), IFAL (Mexico, 2015), the foundation Ricard (2014) and C-o-m-p-o-s-i-t-e (Brussels, 2014).

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Btonsalon Center for Art and Research - E-Flux

Prairie Pop: NPR’s Codrescu breaks down Dadaism’s ongoing influence – Little Village

From Tristan Tzaras Vingt-Cinq Poemes. Etching by Hans Arp. From the collection of the International Dada Archive, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries Andrei Codrescu: Documenting Dada/Disseminating Dada

Shambaugh Auditorium Saturday, Feb. 18 at 7 p.m.

Dada was a volatile artistic, social and political movement that exploded in 1916 from the Zrich club Cabaret Voltaire, creating reverberations that can still be felt today. Its fuse was lit by refugees from World War One who decamped to Switzerland, a neutral country that became a magnet for artists, bohemians and other radicals.

As poet and NPR contributor Andrei Codrescu observed, The Dadaists had the bad luck to live during a World War yet unmatched for stupidity (though he was quick to add, Not that there are any smart wars). We are living in a similar world, but it is still only 1913, he told me, drawing parallels between the dawning days of the Trump administration and the lead-up to WWIs bloodbath. So, in a scientifically more advanced time, we are in the same position the Dadaists were: The only answer to the insanity of our war-hungry leaders is a resolute NO.

The Dadaists were contrarians; they were artists who wanted to abolish art, and were serious about their jokes. We destroyed, we insulted, we despised and we laughed, reminisced early Dadaist Hans Richter in his book, Dada: Art and Anti-Art. We laughed at everything. We laughed at ourselves just as we laughed at Emperor, King and Country, fat bellies and baby-pacifiers Pandemonium, destruction, anarchy, anti-everything, why should we hold it in check? What of the pandemonium, destruction, anarchy, anti-everything, of the World War?

Dadaists said their NO by mocking all Western art and philosophy, echoed Codrescu. They saw that only the creation of new forms of art, thinking, living and creative resistance would demonstrate the absurdity of war. As the author of The Posthuman Dada Guide, he will speak in Shambaugh Auditorium at 7 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 18 as part of the University of Iowa Main Library Gallery exhibition, Documenting Dada/Disseminating Dada.

I discovered Dada in high school, in my birthplace, Romania, which was a communist country, Codrescu recalled. Coming to Dada through the poetry of Tristan Tzara, it opened the door for him, making it possible to use his imagination to survive Romanias police state. Im familiar with dictatorship and its silencing of dissent, Codrescu added. We are now on our way to authoritarian rule in the U.S.

The Posthuman Dada Guides subtitle Tzara and Lenin Play Chess serves as the books framing device: a hypothetical chess game that pitted Tzara against Russian communist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin. Tzara played chess on the side of art, anarchy, freedom, the unexpected and the end of war. Lenin played for ideology, class war and an orderly police state. For a while in the 20th century it looked like Lenin won the war. In the 21st, it looks like Tzara did. We will see. The game still goes on.

Codrescu hopes Dada tactics can help win a game whose stakes have been raised by sadistic chess masters like Donald Trump. Spontaneous action is the only activity that the police dont understand. They understand ideologies like communism, fascism, etc., but they have trouble with poetry. First thought, best thought, Allen Ginsberg said. Organizations understand organizations, but no one expects spontaneous dance, song or a sudden seizure by a pagan god. Dada is a constructive destruction party that lets the future in.

When asked about his favorite historical moment in this constructive destruction party, Codrescu mused, The first night at Cabaret Voltaire must have been something: Poets invented simultaneous readings, there were dances invented on the spot, fantastic masks by Marcel Janco, Tristan Tzaras antics, Hugo Balls nonsense poems, several languages in performance. There was a drunken audience of heartbroken, wounded soldiers, deserters and spies. It was the start of modern art in the 20th century. One evening that changed everything.

Dadaists mocked and molested bourgeois society with prankish acts that attempted to dismantle the museums and turn the streets into galleries. The first shot fired from Dadas anti-art machine gun was Marcel Duchamps first ready-made, Bicycle Wheel, in 1913. According to Duchamp, a ready-made is just an everyday object that can be turned into art by someone audacious enough to call it that. As early as 1913, Duchamp deadpanned, I had the happy idea to fasten a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool and watch it turn.

With Fountain, his most notorious ready-made, Duchamp bought a mass-produced urinal, signed the name R. Mutt on its white porcelain surface and then placed it in a gallery. On another occasion, he drew a mustache and goatee on a store-bought reproduction of Da Vincis Mona Lisa, naming it LHOOQ. When the letters in Duchamps title are read aloud in French Elle a chaud au cul its a pun on a phrase that translates colloquially as she is hot in the ass.

For a group that embraced irreverence and chaos, its no surprise that Dadaism quickly imploded by the early-1920s. But its anarchic legacy lives on and continues to serve as an antidote to todays post-truth era that is swimming in alternative facts. Reflecting on this, Codrescu said, The non-facts of people in power are dangerous lies. The disorder of distracters is not Dada: its brainwashing propaganda based on salesmanship and deliberate confusion. Dada undoes those with an overt sense of the absurd that puts the spotlight squarely on the contradictions of power.

Dada is flexible, he concludes, when the power lies, it reacts with an absurd but true transparent gesture. When power pretends to be of the people, Dada proclaims its aristocracy. Dada is a perpetual NO to whatever is being proposed by the manipulators in power.

Kembrew McLeod marches to the beat of his own Dada drummer. This article was originally published in Little Village issue 215.

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Prairie Pop: NPR's Codrescu breaks down Dadaism's ongoing influence - Little Village

Will we control innovation or will it control us? – The Daily Courier (subscription)

Most experts say we are not ready for the massive job losses that will happen because of automation.

In most instances, we think we are interested in innovation, but we are mostly interested in incremental innovation, such as changing the proverbial flavour of the ice cream, adding a blade to a razor, or buying a welding robot.

A bigger step is social innovation, the changing of mindset, attitude, and culture. As Edgar Shein (1985) said, culture determines and limits strategy.

Many have figured out that if we dont learn to think differently, we will not solve our big problems.

A better toothbrush may be important, but it has little to do with finding ways to address complex issues such as racism, terrorism, violence, let alone the inability for rich nations to get people working, feed impoverished children, or address mental health issues.

The key to social innovation is deep listening, according to thinker Pauline Oliveros, the kind of dialogue that builds understanding, acceptance, and partnership.

It wasnt long ago, when people with differences women and minorities of all kinds endured violence and state-level oppression. Canadas residential schools are a clear example of state-sponsored and legalized violence.?

But social innovation processes allowed the world to change, for equity to evolve, and eventually, in many cases, become the rule of law.

But letting go of old ways is challenging. The process may require a long period of healing and an active phase of reconciliation.

The work done in South Africa, for example, under their Truth and Reconciliation agenda is not so much about boosting poverty rates directly, but empowering and healing so that oppressed people can address generations of collective trauma.

Social innovation may help us come together, but of all the kinds of innovation, I consider quantum innovation as the most misunderstood.

A quantum social innovation is the leap from one state of social consciousness to another.

Some think that quantum innovation is impossible because it requires a system to evolve in ways that are posthuman.

What is posthuman? It means getting beyond a limiting anthropocentric perspective where humans are the centre of everything something Indigenous people all over the world have known for millennia.

Those who study consciousness, neuroscience, computation, biological evolution, and creativity point to studies in evolutionary adaptation, quantum physics, and photosynthesis to identify non-linear change where a system, species, or structure evolves far beyond the rational addition of its components.

What we have discovered is that quantum change is all around us. The sub atomic level reveals evidence that not only is time not linear, but that one particle can be in two places at one time.

This is the kernel of what is known as quantum computing.

The biological perspective reveals many examples of quantum change, such as how cells or photons do more than regenerate, but evolve to create new forms.

Neuroscience tells us that consciousness extends beyond our brains to our bodies and perhaps even beyond.

In my view, artificial intelligence (AI) offers us potentially new ways of addressing our human limitations and offers a chance to refocus our energy on ethics.

New automobiles with assisted technologies are a clear example of the ways in which machines are assisting human beings.

We have already created new interfaces with machines that may give us a peek into a future where machines help us in unexpected ways.

The question that many ask in the field of artificial intelligence is what will we do when robots put 60 per cent of human beings out of work.

Many commentators see a global depression coming because soon robots will eliminate millions of jobs.

Before this happens, we must think about these challenges to human productivity and the human economy.

Might robots make us enough money so that we dont have to work? It depends on who owns them or programs them doesnt it?

Did you know that the current economy could not function without robots?

Artificially intelligent agents make the stock markets fairer by taking the human element out, so that trades can be conducted ethically and so that catastrophic events can be mitigated.

Just as artificially intelligent umpires will make our sports, like tennis, fairer, the same will happen to arenas where there is human error or emotion.

Ethics is the key discipline when addressing artificially intelligence and automation.

Soldiers who work with sentient machines (i.e. bomb disposal robots) consider their machine partners as persons and give them human levels of loyalty and respect.

Is this loyalty to the inanimate ethics?Can sentient machines help us make better ethical judgements and eventually help us be better, more compassionate humans?

Can robots assist us to create jobs? Can they identify and predict where we will face not just say weather and traffic issues, but where violence and conflict might emerge?

Can they lead us into useful court/medical/negotiation simulations where win-win outcomes will help us avoid conflict, ecological exploitation and war? Or will they simply steal our jobs, put our global economy into a tail spin, and deliver us into self-extinction?

In my view, machines can help us if we focus on evolving ethical ways for human beings to advance our mutual well-being with the planet.

What will we do? Instead of just asking how machines can help us be more innovative, let us ask machines to assist us in becoming more ethical and humane.

Stan Chung, PhD is the author of I Held My Breath for a Year available at stanchung.ca.

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Will we control innovation or will it control us? - The Daily Courier (subscription)