Thanks to Raphael Arar’s suggestion, I recently read Luke Munn and Liam Magee’s “Other Worlds: Using AI to Revisit Cybersyn and Rethink Economic Futures” paper (see it here). Their approach is certainly innovative and interesting. However, I couldn’t help but think of two alternative paths that could be derived from their paper. On the one […]
Also at the Semiotic Machines conference a few weeks ago, the US scholar Lisa Gitelman made a very interesting connection between early type specimens – the booklets published by type foundries both to advertise and demonstrate how to compose text with their typefaces (see Reynolds 2022) – and contemporary Large Language Models (LLMs). According to […]
Last week I attended the Semiotic Machines conference here in Berlin. At the opening panel on the first day, the philosopher Beatrice Fazi said something that intrigued me and has kept me thinking ever since. She said – I’m paraphrasing from memory here – that in order to address the challenges that AI systems pose […]
Last week I installed and ran an LLaMA 2 model on my wife Barbara’s Raspberry Pi 5. I conducted this small experiment to present a more concrete discussion of Wolfgang Ernst’s notion of technológos in an article I was writing – more on that below. My aim was to explain and problematize the relation between […]
Our book Frictions: Inquiries into Cybernetic Thinking and Its Attempts towards Mate[real]ization has recently been published by meson press. The open access PDF version is free, and I invite you all to download it. Similarly, print copies can be purchased online from the vendors listed on meson’s website. Please consider recommending our book to your […]
A couple of weeks ago I got an email from Google saying that my Location History data would be erased soon since I haven’t used their tracking service for a while. In fact, I now think that the only reason why I stopped using that feature – which probably I never turned on myself but […]
As a continuation of an earlier post, this entry aims to explain in a little more detail my work around the notion of techno-diagrammatics and Beer’s Cybernetic Model of Contemporary Capitalism. As I expected, I discussed elements of this work in two meetings. In April, I participated in project Antikythera’s Synthetic Catallaxy workshop in Mexico […]
[This post is, for now, only available in Spanish] El año 2020 escribí un ensayo que me hizo pasar un mal rato. Lo escribí para un Call for Papers con el que un journal chileno invitaba a abordar la relación entre historia del diseño y tecnología. Titulado “Qué historia, qué tecnología, qué diseño”, el texto […]
For some time now, I have been working with what I call techno-diagrammatics. This notion is the product of my study of an old, unpublished manuscript that Stafford Beer developed during his last visit to Chile in June-July 1973; a document in which he attempted to model the dynamics of contemporary capitalism, and which I […]
This is a short of excerpt of a theory-fiction essay written in early 2021 by the Bucles collective – Joaquín Zerené, Dusan Cotoras and myself. It was originally thought as a warm-up for our participation at the transmediale workshop on Research Refusal, and thus for the series of essays and articles we developed there. However, […]
I have just finished reading Benjamin Bratton’s last book, The Revenge of the Real: Politics for a Post-pandemic World, and, given the urgency and relevance of this project, I think that an open, broad, and collaborative reflection is needed – one that, I hope, will unfold from multiple sources and actors. Thus, aiming to contribute, […]
[This is a bilingual note. See English version below.] Hace un par de semanas, en el contexto de la conferencia Constituir lo común organizada por el núcleo de investigación chileno en arte, performatividad y activismo, NMAPA, tuve la suerte de dirigir un taller sobre interfaces – como me pidieron –, que sin embargo terminé llamando […]
After a long process of informal interaction and collaboration, Dusan Cotoras, Joaquin Zerené, and I have finally decided to consolidate our efforts in a joint platform of research. We have called this project Bucles, which is the Spanish word for loops. Through this project we are hoping to achieve two goals: on the one hand, […]
Going from November 2019 to February 2020, and taking place both in Humboldt University of Berlin and the Einstein Center Digital Future, the Applied Cybernetics lectures series was a project I coordinated and curated, aiming to develop an open discussion on the frictions that may have emerged when cybernetic thinking and its conceptual frameworks were […]
[This note is a bilingual one —English and Spanish—, even though the referred content is only available in Spanish] [EN] A few months ago, the Anilla unit at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Santiago, Chile, invited me to take part of their podcast, Irrupciones en el MAC [Irruptions at the MAC]. Eventually, that became […]
[This is, for now, a Spanish only note. English translation will come soon.] En el taller sobre Cibernética, Información y Algoritmos celebrado justamente ayer lunes 28 de septiembre en ese lugar múltiple que se va construyendo desde y con plataformas de teleconectividad como Zoom, y que convocó principalmente a investigadores y académicos de Argentina, Chile […]
[This is a bilingual note. Español más abajo.] [EN] Last June 8th, I had the joy and privilege of opening the Forum on Current States of the Technological Automation organized by the Chilean publishing house, Qual Quelle. More concretely, it was an initiative put together by the philosopher Zeto Bórquez, who was not only able […]
During this summer semester 2020 (April to July/August-September), I will be teaching a seminar class for Master students at the Institute of Musicology and Media Sciences of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. The class will be connected to some of the developments coming from my doctoral research on project Cybersyn, and hence it will tackle the concept […]
Why is that us, humans, want to get close/er to the machines? Last Wednesday we had the first lecture of our series on Applied Cybernetics. There, Dr. Stefan Höltgen gave a talk on the Actualization of Cybernetic Learning, through which he presented the work he and his team did restoring the MORE computer; a device […]
[This is a bilingual note. Español más abajo.] [EN] The notion of the archive has been particularly important for our countries —I think of you, oh, South-America!—. Fields in the humanities such as art history and visual studies, and somehow cultural studies too, have pointed out the central role of this notion when it comes to […]