Benjamin Bratton - The Deep: Learning, Time, Fake, State, Ecology

Goldsmiths College Department of Art MFA Lectures 2017-18

Benjamin Bratton - 3rd May, 2018
The Deep: Learning, Time, Fake, State, Ecology

In this lecture and discussion, Benjamin H. Bratton will consider the role/limits of aesthetics in modeling complex systems operating at scales that confound normal human intuition. Such models may include limited and conditional feats of abstraction (cognitive, technical, formal, figurative, gestural).

Bratton will draw together deep time, deep learning, deep ecology and deep states of various kinds: the emergence of intelligence from material complexity, post-Turing Test models of human-AI interaction, synthetic sensing at urban scale, inorganic semiotics, the inscrutability of artificial neural networks, multipolar hemispherical stacks, designing planetary governance and gradient citizenships, and the coupling/decoupling of past, present, and future as foundations and alibis.

A Copernican turn in design (and media theory) might be based on how intelligence is imbued in accumulating layers of material technologies (grammar, the grave, the GPU, etc.) allowing successive generations to build on/against them and to automate processes for escaping intuitive biases, not reinforcing chauvinisms.

If Anthropogeny is the study of how ancient species became human, then Anthropolysis may be the study of how the human becomes something else. In between is a sort of “humanities” based less on celebrating the expressive experience of interiority than on getting outside our own skins to know what we are (and indeed where and when we are) and what to do next.

The world is a model open to design and designation, not by self-reflective human mastery over its sovereign domain, but because our planet uses humans to know itself and remake itself. We are the medium, not the message.

Benjamin H. Bratton's work spans Philosophy, Design and Computer Science. He is Professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego. He is Program Director of the Strelka Institute of Media, Architecture and Design in Moscow, a Professor of Digital Design at The European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, and Distinguished Visiting Faculty at SCI_Arc in Los Angeles.

Presented by the Department of Art and the Department of Visual Culture, Goldsmiths.

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