0(rphan)d(rift>) Articles

FutureCrafting: A Speculative Method for an Imaginative AI 2018

by Betti Marenko
The 2018 AAAI Spring Symposium Series
The issue I explore with this position paper concerns dominant cultural scripts around Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the need to imagine different narratives in light of machine learning’s autonomous performativity. The aim is to offer a philosophical reflection, not only to sidestep narratives of techno-determinism, dystopia and existential risk to mankind, but also to speculate on how to imagine a (more) benevolent AI based on uncertainty and the co-evolution of humans and technology. The paper presents the speculative methodology I call FutureCrafting: a forensic, diagnostic and divinatory method that investigates the possibility of other discourses, equally powerful in building reality, constructing futures and having tangible impact. FutureCrafting is speculation at the juncture of design and philosophy, pivoting around the open-ended figuration of the what if…? It articulates collaboration rather than competition, coevolution rather than antagonism, and privileges the indeterminate and the imaginative. To conclude, the paper makes reference to the non-human intelligence of the octopus and to how this can inform a more imaginative AI.

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Glimmer Breach 2018

by Maggie Roberts
Hashtagging felt the most appropriate form with which to communication with an algorithm. Mark Jackson of iMT Gallery writes about this text:
‘Hashtags are ways of translating themes and motifs into language that computers and algorithms understand. As such they seem to be a reaching out to AI. They also have a mysticised trait for drawing together images, sometimes with unexpected results. And lastly, there are people on instagram (for example) that use the language/form of hashtags for communicative effect, suggesting a “new generation” of post-internetees who are becoming robot compatible.
This is a word-hoard of hashtags. With special intention to include those that make reading hard (human reading that is)’. 

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‘Hyperstition: An Introduction’ 2009

Delphi Carstens Interviews Nick Land.
In the following interview Nick Land responds to some questions about the mechanisms of Hyperstition in the context of apocalypse.

Q1. I wonder if you could elaborate on what exactly is concealed … what will be revealed by apocalypse?
R1. What is concealed (the Occult) is an alien order of time, which betrays itself through ‘coincidences’, ‘synchronicities’ and similar indications of an intelligent arrangement of fate. An example is the cabbalistic pattern occulted in ordinary languages – a pattern that cannot emerge without eroding itself, since the generalized (human) understanding and deliberated usage of letter-clusters as numerical units would shut down the channel of ‘coincidence’ (alien information). It is only because people use words without numerizing them, that they remain open as conduits for something else. To dissolve the screen that hides such things (and by hiding them, enables them to continue), is to fuse with the source of the signal and liquidate the world.

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0(rphan)d(rift>) Cyberpositive 2012

Cyberpositive begins as a text collage to an installation by the multimedia art collective 0rphan Drift at the Cabinet Gallery in 1994. The insistent signal that became Cyberpositive transforms into an anomaly from the unknown, unequivocally in control of its own arrival and composition. Early 1995 it emerges as a science fiction experiment that traverses the alien urban landscapes and affective experiences of hyperreality, continuously in the process of being mutated under the spectral glare of information technologies (many of which it anticipates). The synaesthetic, addictive, polyrhythmic and vampiric potentials of cyberculture are meshed through a barrage of machine code populated by AI and voodoo frequencies. Its dynamically visual narrative is something at once prose, image and drug; making a story of a process of seduction for the K-strayed generation.

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Turbulent Oceans and Evolutionary Fever Dreams 2011

Interview between Mer/Maggie Roberts and Tony Marcus.
London. April 2011.

Do you mainly work now by yourself? When we first met in 1994, at London’s Cabinet Gallery you were part of the collective 0rphan Drift. But now you work alone?
Mer: “Yes. Mostly. But still 0rphan Drift, now 0rphan Portal, is always present. I still believe very strongly in hive minds and in that kind of collective unconscious software concept that William Gibson came up with. I’m helping my friend Delphi Carstens work out his PhD which is about manifesting the apocalypse and Ranu Mukherjee and I are planning more collaborations as 0rphan Portal next year. I do feel very linked to people even when I’m working on my own. But working in a studio in a cocooned environment by the sea at the bottom of Africa, I am very alone. There’s no one around me locally – there’s people who appreciate the work but rarely someone who gets it in a way that I find inspiring. I am approaching galleries. That will be different. And I am completely connected by the internet, in a very honed way… but not in physical proximity with the people I’m collaborating with. Which is a new experience.”

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The Image as unit of contagion 2011

A response to the work of Mer Roberts by Delphi Carstens.
Since founding the art-collective 0rphan Drift in 1994, Mer Roberts has been deeply immersed in exploring the uncanny shadows of the globalised world. As a digital shamaness who straddles the Atlantic in all directions, Mer has direct feeds into voudoun, African sorcery, continental philosophy, fashion and experimental techno-culture. Articulating what can be termed driftwork, Mer describes a passage through membranes, filters and barriers into unbounded electromagnetic spaces where things oscillate and collide. This is a passage beyond the singularity into dimensions where the ordinary rules of temporality and spaciality no longer apply. Interpenetrating her work is a Zen aesthetic – a direct pointing at reality; a serene yet violent penetration of the neo-cortex by a powerful new meme. Her collages, ethereal watercolours and oils, digital images and short films emphasise the incursion of what Freud called the uncanny – the somehow familiar yet disturbing intrusion of the unconscious dream into waking life. Spectral winds blow softly across her images, announcing the arrival of a tectonic paradigm-shift.

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Hyperstition 2010

by Delphi Carstens.
Hyperstition is a neologism that combines the words ‘hyper’ and ‘superstition’ to describe the action of successful ideas in the arena of culture. Akin to neo-Darwinist Richard Dawkins’ concept of memes, hyperstitions work at the deeper evolutionary level of social organisation in that they influence the course taken by cultural evolution. Unlike memes, however, hyperstitions describe a specific category of ideas. Coined by renegade academics, the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), hyperstition describes both the effects and the mechanisms of apocalyptic postmodern ‘phase out’ or ‘meltdown’ culture.

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Hybridity 2010

Frieze, Issue 133, September 2010.

IS THERE BEAUTY IN SUPER-HYBRIDITY?
It goes back all the way to Frankenstein’s monster: that which is a composite with the seams showing – rather than elegantly hidden – is considered ugly. Mary Shelley’s point was that in the artificially produced mind of the composite monster there is, sadly-ironically, a heightened sensitivity for beauty, for example the simple grace of a bird song. (On top of that, of course, in Shelley’s classic there is an argument of the monster’s ethical, ‘inner’ beauty versus it’s ‘inner’ ugliness of feelings of rage and revenge.)

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