“Adam and Will are joined by Professor Steven Shaviro to discuss his work on the philosophy of science fiction, developing on themes from recent texts such as Extreme Fabulations and 2016’s Discognition out on Repeater Books. We asked Steven about the various techniques that writers such as Frank Herbert, Adrian Tchaikovsky, and China Mieville to unearth possible futures in the present; and how they extrapolate from, speculate upon, and generate fables about dominant tendencies of our political and technological situation. We also touched upon philosophies of time and narrative such as Bergson, Deleuze, Whitehead, Foucault, Marshall McLuhan, and Darko Suvin.”
“The story of what the fossil fuel industry knew about climate change more than four decades ago.
Scientists who worked for the biggest oil company in the world, Exxon, reveal the warnings they sounded in the 1970s and early 1980s about how fossil fuels would cause climate change – with potentially catastrophic effects. Drawing on thousands of newly discovered documents, the film goes on to chart in revelatory and forensic detail how the oil industry went on to mount a campaign to sow doubt about the science of climate change, the consequences of which we are living through today.
In our capitalist world, it is clear that the ‘green transition’ has had its skeptics, but it is hard to minimize the role of extractive fossil industries in supporting such skeptics or employing them in spreading lies, mistrust, or zooming in on the ‘uncertainty’ aspect. Once scientific predictions were at hand – it is almost as if there was a concerted effort to build up a counter-narrative of denialism spending countless billions to deny the runaway greenhouse effect.
‘Climate denialism’ would not exist today in this form if it had not been intentionally and systematically sponsored with big money by the oil industry majors. Such miseducation and complacency about fossil fuels are the direct results of investments in combatting scientific results and climatologist’s consensus over this matter.
Once such denialism became untenable, oil majors started promising newer, so-called ‘greener’ ways to phase out like gas (like fracking – which because of the methane leaks has been bringing us ever near to the edge of no return). It is not a bunch of cooks or just a few petrostate autocrats but decades-long campaigns of disinformation, subterfuge, and propaganda by the most powerful energy companies on earth – “oil majors” (till the recent rise of national state oil companies =NOCs and so-called independents like diversified international conglomerates responsible for upstream activities such as Mitsubishi Corp).
Why do people sport “Save Diesel” stickers on their cars? Well for one, these are not your petroleum Mad Max fools. Their belief and dependence on fossil fuels was heavily subsidized till recently. Everyone, from the farmers to the truck drivers has become addicted to such cheaply provided fuels (cheaply if you included the worldwide imperial network of 800 strong US military bases and supporting authoritarian regimes abroad) and this documentary shows how these changes were indefinitely postponed, and how the green movement was constantly watered-down or how we got fucked over big time. Information about climate modeling and scientific research was always available, obtained at the behest of the companies themselves but has been constantly downplayed by “oil majors” (Big Oil). It’s also one of the biggest stories of US environmental policy failure that probably brought us to were we are in a world of rising temperature, rising sea levels, extreme weather and countless other ripple down effects.
This BBC documentary will dispel any doubt about how disastrous and effective financing such disinformation campaign was. Extractivism is not just technical capacity and drilling or pumping out, it involves acquiescence on a large scale and governmental compliance with fossil fuel special interests. It is imho a top documentary in clarifying the step-by-step (forensic almost) historical way of how we got to the current climate emergency (possibly the biggest challenge that has faced humanity in its recent past). It is also a documentary that interviews the journalists, engineers, plus the “merchants of doubt” that have been employed over the years by the Oil industry to devise new methods of extraction, or have spread disinformation and manufactured consent and kept the biggest polluters polluting. To their credit -many, though not all deeply regret their involvement. Who are the footmen of oil industries? Although many of its political protagonists (and many if not almost all are men) express their ignorance, naivete, or lack of information at the time (or having been given false or biased information) – this is completely at odds with the fact that they have been instrumental to US’s Empire and its infinite thirst for fossil fuel energy supplies. Fossil fuel was and is still the blood of the empire. This story of how imperial histories have shaped such carbon ideologies is also not explored (a continuum btw British and American empire, one on coal and partially petroleum and the other on petroleum and now gas).
Another aspect (not discussed in this BBC mini-series) is that in the West (notably Europe and US) we still consider the energy industry as consisting of the “oil major” – with big corporations like Exxon being at the center of this investigation. But that is an outdated picture – since today such companies – 7 global oil majors – “hold less than 13% of global oil and gas production and reserves.”(a point made by Adam Tooze quoting the recent International Energy Agency’s latest report on the global oil and gas industry in the energy transition). As such today 7 global oil majors “hold less than 13% of global oil and gas production and reserves. National oil Companies (NOCs) account for more than half of global production and close to 60% of the world’s oil and gas reserves.”
[Photograph: Supran, et al., 2023, “Assessing ExxonMobil’s global warming projections” from the late 70s early 80s]
Full automation – has somehow entered our vocabulary recently, but what were the 1960s expectations on a TV show. In many ways, such predictions were both over-inflated and too optimistic, at the same time they have a retro-future air that is so typical for such mid-century modernity that is mostly white, suburban and manly. That being said we cannot confront the promises, fears and expectations of today’s AI revolution and robotics without actually looking back about how these things got presented, marketed, and forgotten. We should also see this embrace of robotics and naive computing in contrast with the 1970s pessimism and incipient techno-criticism that was also mirrored in some of the best SF of that era such as Shockwave Rider by John Brunner, a blueprint for the future 1980s generation of cyberpunk authors.
spacetime coordinates: 12,067 E.I. (Era Imperial) – 12,102 E.I. Trantor, capital of the Galactic Empire / Periphery world of Terminus / 12,240 E.I. Synnax
Foundation premiered on September 24, 2021. In October 2021, the series was renewed for a second season, which is set to premiere in mid-2023.
update (…) The second season received more positive reviews from critics, with many agreeing that it was an improvement over its first season, emphasizing the more accessible pacing, better plot, improved interpersonal characterizations and overall satisfaction with the season’s payoff. (wiki)
1. Do you think that imagining the future could be the first step to contribute in manifesting it?
First, let’s not limit the power of imagination, this “capacity” to imagine to just our common use of it as only pertaining to humans, a unique human faculty or a particular ability. Just a capacity of the capacious. A fantabulous happy extension of an evolved cognition, the marked and significant difference of lionized primates, such as humans used to feel as their branch diverged from other related species.
Let’s imagine that imagination is certainly more widely found and more basic than expected – a precondition to all the other “higher” faculties regarded by many as superior or distinctive.
For me and for others it feels more and more important to be able to accept and speak for example about bacteria or non-sapient blue-green algae in these nearly frivolous, imaginative terms. There is a comics from 1979 based on ideas by Dr Timothy Leary, a Neurocomics that treats the primordial soup as an irreverent cocktail of excitable ingredients, utterly promiscuous, and imaginatively spilling over (pls check the digital version here https://timespacewarps.wordpress.com/2021/01/27/1760/ ).
Let us see how we can question our own favorite evolutionary just-so stories, stories that get constantly remade. What about a story that shows how our particular transformation was achieved historically from distantly related, non-neuronal, brainless beginnings? Let us understand, with our current brains the way of being in the world of organisms that enjoy their lives without a central nervous system.
What do you do with this “imagination” that presupposes a complete lack of imagination around itself?
It would be worthwhile investigating how we can recognize or include the manifestation of an imagination that is clearly phylogenetically and epigenetically overflowing, one that complicates the arbitrary borderlines of a standard neuro- intelligence model. A more gradual and universal one. One that would put to shame our supposed neurotypical preferences. And even as this model gets more and more untenable, it tends to slide, captivated and kidnapped, lured by the supposedly lower ‘concrescent’ reality of the world.
With this background of unequal distribution hovering around us – a (preposterous) scarcity of imagination in the history of biological life that became the main tale told by the life sciences, we have arrived at a moment of crossroads. I considered my contact with STS (Science and Technology Studies) and history of science important because it made me question the very restricted and canonical histories told by the life sciences about themselves or as transmitted by generations and generations of biology manuals.
Otherwise, we keep risking remaining conceptually blocked in our physio-chemical understanding, blindfolded by the dominance of one domain, resisting all those ideas arising out of various domains of the evolving life sciences, losing our chance to keep up with all the new discoveries being made all the time.
Some call it a “Crisis of the Imagination”. I do not know if it is a crisis or not, but it would be a mistake to attribute it by default to the human, or Germaine to the fine arts, therefore entirely and exclusively human or humanistic. A crisis is only one if it keeps mired in just coffee talk about quantum physics and string theory while forgetting about various levels of symbiosis levels, of the role played by extremophile Archeobacterial lifeforms living in impossible (for us) conditions, or about the iconic role played by Tardigrades, seen everywhere online and offline, seemingly the perfect pre-adapted for life in outer space and pop SF series such as Star Trek.
It is important to see how we get socially constrained and so strict when and if we imagine a future, a common future imagined not just by some bipedal apes. Imagination is somewhere else then, especially if it does not help us imagine another world. Imagination is an agential and tangentially unpredictable mode, actively and reactively involved in emanating, speculating, fabulating, emitting “other kinds” of worlds.
If we refer strictly to the patriarchal and systemically racist capitalism we currently participate in, one that has subjugated and exploited billions and billions of species on this planet crushing this world in its grasp, it feels more impossible or unachievable than ever to exercise our imagination. It becomes very easy to imagine why we live materially in our very own flesh and bodies the closing in of a creaking opportunity window without being able to do something about it.
Our current worldview, where other worlds have been condemned to stand on the losing side of the equation, prefers the word “unfit” – a term that puts all in the same box as maladaptive, improbable, wasteful or impossible. This strictly Adaptationist worldview is more and more maladaptive itself, and I mean here that is presupposes this fitting in as essential and unavoidable. To fit is to have to practically accept all injustices. This view justifies and rationalizes all economic and energophage inequalities, and is more and more evident and obscene by the day.
What do stromatolites dream of? What do stromatolites imagine while belching gases, not as individual cells, but as planet-wide biomass, on a grand scale collectively, contributing to a world of tomorrow under oxygenation/oxidation just a few billions of years away?
Can you identify in these bubbles of inklings of an imagination floating during a period almost impossible to imagine in human cortical terms, that made possible our ‘humaness’ that is still narrowly defined as western and whose understanding limits itself to a rusty technoscientific imaginary.
A lack of imagination that can barely communicate the vastness and scaling necessary to assess the cumulative effects of millions of exhausts pipes and changes that do not take place during millions but decades (our own lifetimes)?
Technoscience stimulated by imagination for profit is making itself responsible for the unfair mass extermination of countless species. On the other hand, it is a science that has offered as an unprecedented and vertiginous look into “deep time” and has tried to familiarize us with the hidden contribution of unknown ones. Of course, there is countless other non-modern of pre-modern examples from non-Eurocentric societies from all around the world that cherished and acknowledged this overwhelming contribution by other creatures, beings, entities, spirits.
Science is only now finally recognizing the collective work of inhuman, non- more than human (more than fungus, more than plant etc) ones, a work that produced this outer protective layer calle atmosphere. A layer where we started walking and became conscientious of late, without therefore asking ourselves who made this protecting shield that has protected us and other creatures from most of the cosmic rays or UV radiation during millions of years.
This atmospheric or climatic imagination implies the apparition of a future where free-floating cells dividing continuously got stuck to each other, never alone anymore and only sporadically and dangerously autonomous inside their larger organismic units (see for ex our current understanding of the evolution of cancer cells).
These cells, meanwhile, started showing behaviors of a vaguely coordinated organized kind, a quorum-sensing that took life to another level than mere individualities, making waving coordination into a “ciliary collective walk”.
The very first levels of organization that enabled early movements appear as a disequilibrium of hundreds of microscopic ciliated cells in a gradient field – as the movements made today by multicelullar model organism Trichoplax adhaerens, considered one of the most basal metazoans.
Our extremely complicated brains are now unable to grasp why there is no need for brains to obtain the first cellular coordination of millions of cells, yet today we definitely struggle to obtain large scale coordination in a Ministry for the Future (as per Kim Stanley Robinson), so that we can preempt a nearly inevitable situation: the climate crisis. Difficult to perceive, to conceive and start imagine this very basic advancement of tissues or differentiated cellular lines as they search their spatial-temporal momentum…
2. Does a critical-analytical perspective of the past have a constructive role in modeling the future in your view?
I am agreeing with those that say we should try to circumscribe the finitude of such a total future – a totalizing future such as the one promoted by a series like Star Trek let’s say (even if I continue watching and enjoying it!). The series was bold enough to include gigantic tardigrade-like extraterrestrial beings navigating a mycelial network that holds the galaxies together, or a character called Stamets based on actual mycologist and mushroom enthusiast Paul Stamets. On the other hand, one should embrace the possibility that one is always partial, in the sense of being part and partial whenever exploring such present possibilities and future impossibilities.
Let us keep a big warning about a future that imposes one single unchanging version of the future upon all other species and the rest of humanity.
Let say a unique future based on just such a “warp drive” invention, i.e. the impact of one invention that pushes inevitably everything into the Faster Than Light era. Yes, it is an imaginary invention, but one that directs exclusively towards a total future. This is something if not entirely problematic, then full of lacunae that are not immediately noticeable, especially when that totalization is made around a technologically privileged group or one single invention.
Maybe a philosopher would say that such an analytic or critical perspective is a direct follow-up to the post-Kantian heritage that has divided western philosophy into suburbia of the mind with separated continental traditions and analytical ones.
I am not a philosopher so I will not go into detail. I will ask those interested to ask themselves in what why does any type of future depend on something more humble than what we have taken into account, even given our lofty evolutionary position, a minor something that does not even get mentioned in those version of a totalizing future.
Here is this simple observation by Charles Mudede, writing on the Seatle Slog, about the absence of green plants on the spaceships of the United Federation of Planets (the main supranational stellar union mentioned in the ST universe). Plants, as the primary providers of energy on the planet, or at least on this planet, are completely circumvented, ignored, overlooked, etc.
One of the most symptomatic under-currents of SF was cyberpunk sub genre that gets crystallized in the 1980s during the ballistic missile race btw the East and West blocks and during the first massive wave of neoliberal restructuring. As a genre it appears at a precise place – the city of Vancouver, Canada. It is a future placed in a city where the past is not perceived as surpassed, unreachable, deleted and where layers of time coexist, where you have to make use and make do with what has existed or will exist, old or new, low tech or high tech (here taking my cues from C. Mudede).
At the same time we are now in a better position to see why the Silicon Valley Californian future is not at all somber and opaque, oppressively corporate-like in the classical cyberpunk narratives, but more like a transparently corporate habitat, inexhaustible exhausting wellness and profoundly libertarian and anti-syndicalist mood more akin to The Circle movie from 2017.
Nevertheless, the cyberpunk inheritance makes it clear why we are not just neighbors to our actual neighbors or our actual flights of imagination, but neighbors to all the crazy rich and all the business park dreams on the whole planet.
It is important to understand that this cyberpunk, initially Canadian, does not repudiate temporal layering and temporal intermingling. It does permit the persistence of a constantly perishing present, temporal complicity towards futuralism, especially when PKD’s obsolescent androids and exclusive premium robotic sheep coexist.
3 How do you see the role of contemporary culture in relation with the future?
I think I partially answered this above.
Contemporary culture is too much “culture” and this search for the eco-critical dimensions that includes laboratory cultures (as in tissue cultures or yogurt cultures) comes with very meager offerings and maybe overly defined by Danone possibilities and lack of funds for blue-sky research, with a preponderance of big tech lobbies.
From Raymond Williams we have learned how difficult it is to define culture, risking to leave out somebody, abusing and emptying this word while at the same time diminishing conflicts or inherent transformations.
It is important to see how – the future is totally decoupled from the new or the truly new, in total divergence from that future promised in genre movies, in the sense that every new thing ‘is more of the same’. This monetized future is already portioned, auctioned, packaged and sold using cryptocurrencies and complex financial instruments (the so-called fintech), some of which are actually called futures. Crypto currencies belie their underlying materiality and so manage to escape our attention because we tend to forget that they run on physical infrastructure, on computers that are sometimes fueled by leftover fossil fuel somewhere at the Polar or Arctic North like in one Canadian advert trying to attract new investments.
Even if we feel placed at the bottom end of financialization, we can take this recent campaign by the BRD bank “You are the Future” and see in what way the pressures of contemporary culture (represented by financial institutions) amplify the surrounding climatic and ecological pressures on individuals, on personal payment plans, etc. and especially on this recurrent YOU – as unitary, ethnopolitical, indebted or having to pay rate till forever.
Everything is still sadly transposed in terms of you or him, or her.
It remains to be seen how much is this going against a situation that is in no way easy to isolate, locally or individually, or how slow and after how much struggle some populations and expressions, ecologies, bodies, genders, multiplicities etc. will carve themselves a space in contemporary consciousness and attention.
I think that SF in the sense of speculating and fabulating, or as speculative fiction, fantastic or scientific speculation has this role of culturally translating for both interlocutors, exactly like a device from the SF movies that can deliver meanings almost involuntarily from one extraterrestrial language into another. No unadulterated transmission, but a transmission with twists and modifications – creatively and imperfectly translating realities that necessarily surpass the individual level, the human limits of perception, especially if dealing with social, scientific and technical transformations that are impossible to calibrate.
4. Do you think that the study of the future will have a constructive impact if it would get included in the educational curriculum?
I would definitely prefer to alternate this impeding hype, the pressing and oppressing futurological drive with other things.
Maybe it is high time to include in the school curriculum something about speculative fiction instead, going back to your first question.
Embracing futurology has to be nuanced, especially if one refers to a type of future forecasting typical of the banking sector, or the start-up kind. We should have the utmost care and reservations here, taking into account the fact that everything that has to do with prognosis and forecasting from is completely engaged in ensuring the impossibility of a common future.
Futurology as packaged by tech pundits and tech gurus is easy to find, because the world seems to be full of quite myopic visionaries, even dangerous ones, in the sense that uncertainties are nowadays packaged as manageable risks and externalized on others. We do not need more singularity salesmen, or agents of a more or less conscious optimization that touches upon everything but does not change anything fundamentally.
We should always be wary and vigilant about this futurology frustrated by the borders of this world and in search of tax evasions, off-shore futurology of neglect that has become a sort of scourge, an exercise in externalizing risks on the backs of others, offering cheap predictions on demand (*or expensive one if one takes into account the habitats and lives lost in exchange): a simple business deal dressed up as a very rudimentary SF.
First, education itself is left without a future.
All those with a degree end up without a viable future, jobless, without any pension plans and ready to fall trough the gaps of a system that prepares highly qualified people for bullshit jobs. I refer directly to those jobs discussed by the late David Graeber in his book and familiar to most of us today. Even if I don’t have such a job at the moment, the clock is ticking, and I will sure join in, because there is nothing else for me.
You do not have a future, because this is the future of work, of the learned skills turned worthless in today’s terms, of careers based on educational systems have become all a subject of speculative investments and divestment. Today at the stock exchange one can bet on the lack of future of certain careers and what one is learning and hoping to graduate in. All the unprofitable lessons, the obsolete school manuals they are based on, the slowness of re-qualification or costliness of retraining get correlated by algorithms to academic disciplines and careers with loosing odds.
At the same time, the educational systems have dealt only very late with the neurodivergent, the non-neurotypical, with minds that do not obey or coincide with what was considered standard everywhere in the past. Also, very, very late we are finally starting to see jobs that take into account the autism spectrum disorders or an educational curriculum that is more inclusive in this sense.
The way our studies are being sponsored and financed always in regard to a certain future income, of either being coupled with future “liquidity” or not, gets everyone reduced to constant payment status or the incapacity to be such a source of regular payments. It gets tied down to the incapacity to reimburse in time the debt accrued during your education years.
Not only is risk calculated so that investors or shareholders would be repaid – only then you are ‘worth it’, or incentivized, only then you become part of the “meritocratic” scheme, only and only if your future career can be monetized so that you can enjoy today a scholarship or be worth all those tuition borrowings.
Betting is not just the usual corner shop betting joint, that one is just a small picturesque neighborhood get-together. We have a much more insidious betting on the potential lack of future of a large majority of school students or of students whose education was devalued from the start, or that becomes just a reason for upping the bets.
It is easier and easier to bet on the certainty of educational failure, on the loosership of certain disciplines or the obsolescence of pedagogic systems that have spent money and time to train us humans in the past and the present. Let’s just think about such classical domains as the natural sciences, or the dwindling number of field scientists, the disenfranchised humanist or liberal arts, as well as all the vocational schools of the socialist times.
We also have today this creative sector – already the main betting horse of the new economy, on one side completely fragilized and highly dependent on applications and all manner of extra financial supplements and on the other – the poster independent sector of new, so-called smart cities. All these shrinking and polluted cities that need to reinvent themselves constantly in order to attract investors and clean their image (what happens in Timisoara “and soon in the whole country!” to rhyme in with the Revolution 1989 slogan).
Sometimes the students who can afford the costs of high theory of highly-rated teachers and interesting courses – are already from the privileged classes, those that come from rich milieus from the very start (I am saying this because of acquaintances that do this kind of teaching in Germany, so it is not just an Eastern European thing).
On the other hand, there is so much educational material online, so many videos, tutorials, fabulous YT channels – be it philosophy, transgender studies, dialectics, history of science, technology, political economy etc cultural studies, biohacking etc.
Yet it is true that one gets to them when already exhausted, bored and disillusioned.
If you do not represent an investment, a vested interest, you are suffering all sorts of consequences, mental and bodily ones.
On the other side the paradox is that nobody dictates your curriculum any longer, you can choose what and how to built up your ‘looser’ educative kit, for the very fact that such courses do not represent an investment, no winning bet, and you can maybe use this false freedom to combine the most unwieldy materials and contradictory things. For example let us imagine a course based on SF speculations about education from the future and immediate examples about educational betting or critical theory and afro pessimist thinkers.
I can tell you I am working on something that I hope will never end.
Because you specifically called it project – I will pick up on this complete mess of a word, on the fact that we already describe this way our work or this type of structure where we find ourselves no matter what.
When you say ‘project based’ you are employing the neoliberal newspeak – trying to dissimulate this type of nomadism from project to project for what it is – a complete disaster, a way to embellish and make it sound cool, while it is actually a common disease and a currently incurable one.
And I want to include here that blind tech-nomadism, of carrying your workspace, working from a distant beach, no matter if you work for NATO, for humanitarian purposes, or for the election campaign in another country, using your skills no matter what the requirements, exactly the way Cambridge Analytica did it (just one infamous case among many I guess).
Why are these things valued in this way on the job market? Why are such beach remote working positions made possible etc promoted in adverts with the promise of a fat paycheck that helps you jump planes like a DJ from country to country? Well, this is sure one of the most toxic and polluting things existing on the planet today.
I am also migrating from Bucharest to Berlin and back and have tried to keep this come n go at a minimum. Very few can afford a fixed place. Very few are employable in anything but on a project base, where and when the project season is on. These projects are a euphemism for free-lancing, a reality that hides a cynical mercenary lifestyle without illusions and without much future talk. You are good for everything and good for nothing.
This sez a lot about the type of obsolescence that these projects imposed because whenever finished or evaluated, they get sent away and behind there is not much left. Eventually, just online crumbs that you can barely match or explain or replicate.
It is a research literature that is cherishing a variety of ideas and authors, a SF that has become truly global (what did we know about Indian, Arab, Korean, pan-African SF 50 odd years ago, or even about a wider understanding of Easter European SF?).
Partly vaccinated in this way we can dive into deeper waters, catch hold of mutations, frog leaps and qualitative jumps and acknowledge their relevance for now as well as for the future.
In its short version, I spontaneously caught it on TV, during one of the Minderiads (mineriade in RO) from Bucharest in the 1990s. From the streets we received our daily screen portions of televised audio-visual TV realism. On one of those Mineriads that remain in the collective memory as brutal and violent, from a group of miners brought from the Vale Jiului coal mining towns, one turns around towards the camera and is asked by the TV crew what are his demands.
I kid you not! I want to take this minor anecdote and make into something quite serious and fundamental. In my regard – this TV fragment does not just reflect the cheesy, dunk humor and naivete of those years.
For me this quite provocative response from a young miner arriving in the Romanian capital city from the mining towns that would soon be ruined and shut down, give us a first tectonic sign that something is massively changing behind the scenes – that behind these televised events there is the transition from one industry to the next.
How does a miner from Valea Jiului, from the core fossil fuel extractive industries, from the soon to be dis-empowered miner syndicates – become a fan?
How does the fan get born from the settled soot of the working class? A fan, let us not forget, that is engrossed by a US-Canadian series about biodroids, immortalist bosses, digitization, experiments gone rogue, abandoned cities, lots of rusty iron, intelligent machines and the first decent 3D effects meant to give body to a vision of dystopic dimensions of a specific nature. A no-future, post-industrial landscape for people that had to deal not only with the post-human but also with a world of post-work. Where does the factory move, how does one consume, relax and gets fascinated by the history of one’s own disintegration, of “restructuring” and its own crumbling representation?
More importantly maybe, what does it mean to loose a world? What does it mean to live trough the disappearance of your world, and what does it mean to not find a place any longer in it?
From a working-class hero he becomes on TV a villain while watching it live on premium hour. We notice this shift, from a representative of those fundamental means of production, from a worker from a glorified industrialism branded almost overnight as polluting and unwanted but which gave him a collective bargaining power when confronting the dehumanizing mechanisms and pressures of capital, a shift that places him not in the back seat – but in front seat of an unwanted future.
How does this fan almost instantly become jobless, media literate and tele-visually integrated at the same time entangled in a cinematic or computational mode of production (to use the Jonathan Beller’s terms). He transforms and is transformed in his own main opponent, in the class enemy of the newly green-washed electronic industries that evangelize their zero emission goals.
At the same time, he is becoming a prosumer fan with a Netflix subscription plan, a fanatic of online streamed series. He is ready to binge-watch, netflix & chill and eager to influence the production of his favorite series and shape his favorite titles, ready to feel entitled, even ready to start planning and organizing the next Comicon together with Kaufland in Bucharest. This puzzle I feel I am involved in since a few years, if not from the moment I have seen this fragment on TV during the 90s immediately after the Revolution, a fragment one should revisit and think with even now.
6. How do you see your profession/your projects in the future?
I think we can regroup all these together with the above question.
As mentioned I suffer from a constant de-professionalization, I forget what I use to do or am supposed to do, and have gotten to the situation where it is very hard to explain or to justify myself in front of those that ask me what are you working on actually, how much is your salary, where do you get your income? What did you work on? What do you want to do now, or want to do in the future?
I get the feeling that I refused or allowed myself to refuse too many jobs whenever I was offered them during the heyday of easy offerings, refusing this enviable possibility to settle in a particular institution. This has eloped me, so I cannot pretend I have an overview on my own doings and goings.
Most of the people I know already have their .com or .ro or have built more or less assiduously a career, a trajectory, a fixed base, more or less engaged in the management of the self-image. What I see with me is a cemetery of projects, shipwrecked blogs etc.
One important thing is when your friends drag on you, and I start to appreciate this more and more, even as you did it now with this interview. I think this has been one of your favorite methodologies all along, even if not systematically pursued. I appreciate it when somebody tries to involve, question me without a particular end-result, because I’ve become more and more skeptical about all these self-evaluations. I am talking about the flighty untimely moment when somebody comes and tells you to come and join in, let’s meet, let’s think about it together. Even when ghostwriting, mind you, or pretending to be an AI!
This while each is streamlining and bulldozing his yellow brick road towards solitude. If everyone tries to actualize – in the current default talk, you completely start feeling incapable of ever doing something together with others, and I also include myself in this bizarre situation.
I had the luck and joy to collaborate interuptedly with you, with Sebastian Big, with Declan Clarke, with Bogdan Otaku Gorganeanu, Alexandra Croitoru, Vasile Leac, Milos Jovanovic, the early trio Nanca/Cosm/Gontz as I knew them once, Mimi Salajean, Mihai Lukasz, Sara Lehn, Nita Mocanu, Candidatura la Presedentie, Lucas Cantori, Ovek Finn, Dyslex, Philou from Come N Go (or this is his core band for me), Mabento Makunouchi, Claudiu Cobilanschi, Anca Benera, Biroul Melodramatic, Valentina Desideri, Bezna, Kavdanska & Dilmana, Manuel & Brynjar, Mircea Nicolae & Victor Plastic (as I met them), Nicu Ilfoveanu, with Alt Art, Protocol Cluj, Tamtam, ODD, Mes 56, with Mort “braindead” la Creier, Ion Dumitrescu, Alienocen Outernational, Würtembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, Nae Timotei Drob, Nicolae Comanescu, Clubul Convivialis, Cristian Darstar, Utopiana, Szilard Miklos, Florentin Tudor from Rusu & Flore, Fundatia Tranzit Sibiu si Bucuresti, Colectia Energii Regenerabile de la Fractalia and much more in what reads like some bizarre automatic writing… many more that should have probably get mentioned here.
With many more I did not collaborate directly but had the pleasure to meet, contact and enjoy their company. I cherish the rare moments I tried to curate something in the past.
I enjoyed when Mihaela Dragan invited me to talk about the Romacene and SF. I was glad that the Arhiva de Sunet came over in Drumul Taberei hood to talk about sounds from Timisoara. I enjoyed talking with students about indie horror movies, starting from the Bodrog the movie experience. I regret not organizing a cozzzmonautica at the Cuca Festival (which I still hope I will). I truly enjoyed writing about the composer Octavian Nemescu for muzica imaginara, just before he departed this world.
I felt very good being invited by Gabi P.N.E.A. to contribute to his blog Timespacewarps as a place of churning and collating and trying out ideas, sounds, perceptual trajectories & apperceptual notions, all these un-hoped for splashes in growing data pools.
More and more difficult as this conviviality becomes – this communal labor is quite improbable, as an occasion to socialize outside the social platforms towards a common task as per Feodorov dwindle down. I really enjoy this co-opting, and try not to count them or to do any rankings – always glad to return the favor, whenever I get the nerve to involve others in return.
7. What is your relation with Artificial Intelligence, or with robots?
I think I just wrote something towards this end on the blog I am contributing to with Gabi. It is a discussion starting from the recent movie by the French video clip director Seth Ickerman, a sort of age-restricted musical video clip, mostly a retro SF biopunk full of sex magick and synthwave sounds by Carpenter Brut https://timespacewarps.wordpress.com/2021/08/24/1930-blood-machines-mini-series-2019
I even have a few quite amateurish recordings uploaded on a soundclound account, a sort of plunderphonics using some linux audio software from years back https://soundcloud.com/earth-evacuation-plan/data-recovery-foundation-tapes-i-choam-corporationplanet-kaitain I think that you can hear there how my relation with what we call today AIs or robots or entities has developed, since it takes into account not only the cinematic or gaming industry examples but all the imaginary spillover all around us.
We have somehow these retrograde AIs, stuck in their virtual asistant roles that hear you, peeping on you whenever you least expect it, although under surveillance capitalism you should expect it all the time. We worry about who or what is influencing us, but we never seem to worry how we influence AIs instead, in regard of the fact that they carry a lot more agency and decisive power nowadays, deciding over the chances of many other humans, because they integrate human cultural biases almost without regulation or filtering etc. although things started changing.
For those interested, I urge them to listen these recordings on earphones and try to imagine them as part of a memory implant, residual coaching of future employees from various fictional inter-planetary corporations. More than 6 years have passed since I made this sound collage with the track name – CHOAM Combine Honnete Ober Advancer Mercantiles – exactly the corporation from Frank Herbert’s Dune that takes care of mining the spice.
So you see I am interested more about these secondary aspects, those that fall off the main equation, the way in which the very attention and buzz around “Intelligence Explosion” or the “Super Intelligence X-Risk” tends to monopolize informal meetings at the Davos conferences from Switzerland (a few years ago). I am interested in the way a paradox or mere speculation about AIs feeds into the fears of certain high-ranking, ultra rational communities characterized by efficiency and singularity search. How curious that their attention is being disturbed, grabbed or invaded by a future AI hyperstition like Rocco the Basilisk?!
You said how do you relate – I am interested in the relational at in its most fragile and remote, this delicate relationality, easy to break, the way these feeble connections are sometimes the most important ones, not the stronger and stable ones.
In the theory of networks – these wispy links would be the most important ones, NOT the verified and tested ones, those links for example that bind members of a conspirative group, members of clan, a family, of a mafia, of a political class, of a clique etc but those that can literally hang almost on one single strand of hair.
Another weak strong inter-relation that suddenly came to the foreground is the non-intelligent nature, a non-intelligence, a non- smartness that is very basic and gets upcycled by capitalism and especially by this growing traveling jet set.
I refer to the simple fact that COVID virus reached out so much of the planet using previous cheap flight networks, touristic routes, carried and pulled in this race that is extremely lopsided and with differing speeds of vaccination and mutation that gave rise to resistant strains that you could never call intelligent.
8. How do you see the relation between technology and nature in the future?
I think I got a problem with this relation that gets chocked by a tunnel vision of one single technology – let say lets say the choke-hold on our imagination that some historical technologies have got on our explanatory power.
The way our descriptions have helped in mistreating or exploiting the various sub-divisions of life, or the way such technologies have been used as misguided metaphors or as outdated models that got reified and retained with quite damaging material results.
There is this insidious feeling that I can let myself being carried along by a certain easiness or frivolity following in the steps of the ex-mathematician A N Whitehead and the many that have taken his hints in various directions – such as Isabelle Stengers or Steven Shaviro among others – maybe I can even call my friend Ion Dumitrescu one of those. Of Whitehead’s lack of contempt towards the role of feelings and generosity towards the new, inherent in his thinking. I am not carried by his very elaborate “scheme”, but taken on board by his very encouraging tone that tries to think against the grain, or in spite of all the dead weight of all those philosophical orthodoxies.
There is a new appetite, towards a certain new kind of realism – a realism that is measured and balanced by debates about the world in all its aspects. It is a new courage of being part of a tangible reality not completely dissociated from the absolutely intangible and bizarre universe described by the physical sciences.
Maybe this is one of the few available ways of avoiding the strictures of replication or testability typical for scientific positivism as well as a way to get ahead of the game that has chained theoretical physics to biases and aesthetic presuppositions (like those highlighted by Sabine Hossenfelder in her provocative Lost in Math: How Beautry Leads Phyisics Astray 2018).
As an example SF should not be regarded just as a metaphor, or just exclusively a literary genre, but something direct, inevitably shared all around us, with utmost concreteness. At the same time SF offers a insistent yet vague affective palette, a literal sensor or a tool kit that can help us learn and unlearn to live with technologies, in order to multiply the experiences of another cosmotechnology.
An example would be Jeff Vandermeer (Southern Reach trilogy, or the Borne cycle). Vandermeer, just to take this well-knowns example, a relative fresh one at that – that somehow mediates and stimulates the need for an environmental posthumanism, one that has not nostalgia towards anthropocentrism, free of the residues of human exceptionalism. And this, importantly, without being misanthropic or an adorer of Gaia theory that risks falling prey to green-brown eco-fascisms as many do indeed.
His proposal – if I can call it that is to be completely immersed, co-dependent and transformational, but not in the sense of current workplace flexploitation, and at the opposite pole of domineering suprematist transhumanism that is somehow ultra-humanist and exclusivist.
I see in Vandermeer’s offer a certain critical posthumanism, pessimist and mature at the same time, but also with a lot of trust in utopian promiscuity, enriched by ambiental transhumanism and multi-species perspectives that once theorized feel more sterile and sparse than what he and others manage in their books.
Borne is for example a living weapon – biotechnology that went rogue, a feral experiment conceived as a very complex weapon that starts growing and blooming, and that seems to have a very imprecise teleology or final purpose.
Nobody knows how it got here, or nobody can trace all the necessary gene manipulations that made it possible or those pathways that stimulated its evo-development. Even its metabolism is unclear. All that does not matter because you can never take back things, at a moment when you have to learn to share the world with so many orphaned creatures, so many orphaned biotechnologies, so many banished organisms. Banished by their supposed creators or patent owners, that have long since expired and disappeared or become extinct and unrecognizable.
We have to welcome and learn to accept new refugee ecologies – that have been weaned from the measurements and quantification of the human or their initial laboratory tests (even if there they had their petri dish cradle phase), because the lab itself does not exist any longer or has fused with the entire world.
The world of Jeff Vandermeer from Borne is a world full of beings that have sprung out of the Linnean taxonomy or have left the Natural History museum behind. They are unclassified beasts of an unnatural world, exuberantly dangerous, killing you softly, tearing you to pieces gently, forlorn artificial entities. They are in search for a den wherever they can. Borne is such a found bud, one that is incredibly and attractively full of hidden fangs, a budding poisonous something that is morphing and shapeshifting when you do not look at it.
It is important to understand that it can be incredibly dangerous and at the same time very friendly and cuddly in a terrible, very unfriendly world. Arriving with tendencies and desires in tow that cannot be confused with those of the people around it, no matter how much they wish to see themselves as adoptive parents.
It is an unrecognizable world, where we cannot impose our old pastoral values of forest brotherhood as in the Romanian saying and untouched wilderness sold as România Neîmblânzită (title of a recent Romanian documentary about the supposed wilderness of Romania). Borne is the exact opposite, a preparation for an overly domesticated world that is unbound and that is transforming us almost as quick as we transform it.
We have to let go of the Greek myth that tells us about the damaging things that escaped from Pandora’s Box, because it is senseless to let ourselves be oriented by recurrent mythopoetics and vintage cosmotechnics. We should maybe follow in the lead of what Yuk Hui mentioned in his extended essay, because it is high time to cultivate and learn new things, even from the Chinese technological accounts that seem strange and unusual to many.
We have to understand what to do with such inherited myths of Western progress. What is going on with all these escaped things, with all these unfruitful things, the denied, the disavowed ones, those that left us and got dispersed around the world.
Here I refer to inventions that were never fully ours or technologies invented by others, things that where never owned even by their inventors, brought far from their point of origin, inventions that became so universal and generalized that they entered some vast general intelligence or public domain of unknown and innumerable applications. Like the Chinese magnetic compass, this magnetism is at the core of magnetic resonance visualization technologies or part of the maglev (magnetic levitation) trains such as the Shanghai Transrapid, currently the oldest such commercial maglev tech still in operation.
9. What project are you dreaming about?
Common let us try and avoid the “project” dream – because of them we cannot dream any longer, they do drag on us. Let us rather search for new modes of conviviality – new ways of living co-dependently and not dependent, traveling around ourselves with our attention ecology widening, one gracious step to be able to parse time and space together, with modes of thinking and feeling, shared passions and also a shared disappearance.
Do not overshare – but try to join with unknown friends (or well-known ones) an unknown dusk, not a well-known rising of the sun. I am reading for a few years Dhalgren by Samuel R Delaney. It is a fabulous way to get lost in the thickets of that book, providing dense vertigo, stylistically flawless, written in 1975 one year before I was born. A shelter of a book for difficult and demanding times, an amorphous bloom that is nearly impossible to keep hold on to and that nevertheless offers numerous stepping stones towards a misaligned friendship and a living in between the cracks of this world.
Sorry for the long post – PNEA just pointed out that the majority of our readers is non-Romanian speaking. Well, below there is an introduction – the exhibition statement in English, maybe a bit abstract but I think it sets the mood for the show. The show itself is has various elements including and Out Of Place artefact discovered in Romania during the 1970s that I got enamored during my youth. It is the so-called Robot Foot from Aiud and was initially dated as being 300.000 yr old being due to the way it was found next to some wooly rhino fossil bones. It was sent to be dated at both the Atomic Energy Institute in Magurele Romania and somewhere in Switzerland and the analysis came as being mostly aluminum. Well, this is one of the those anachronic object that can disturb the smooth succession of the time-space continuum, so we took it as the centerpiece for the show and the logo. We also had a special alien script font developed by Alexandru Pisica Patrata Ciubatariu. We also included a lot of SF zines, we did an entire collage of them with the whole panorama of various publications, DIY zines, SF comics, all produced during the Socialist era and after 1989. We wanted to highlight the diversity and the richness of expression to be found in the SF fandom in Romania in particular, but for the whole East bloc in general. We had a famous documentary by Andrei Ujica included in the show about the last citizen of the Soviet Union, left in space during the days of the collapse of the CCCP. There is much to be talked about – hopefully we will have soon an article by Paula Erizeanu in Calvert Journal in EN about the show. For now here is the statement:
New Temporealities: The Xenogeneses of SF
The objective of „The Xenogeneses of SF” exhibition is to explore novel non-linear temporalities by proposing an imagination exercise in time about time. It is an open invitation to traverse various timelines of newly imagined histories, brimming with speculative worlds. We can imagine and explore together the modalities and material conditions that allowed such worlds to thrive, multiply, support each other, become permanent and eventually get ruined.
We will partially try and follow such aspirations, consequences, deviations, specific to the Sci-Fi phenomenon, while highlighting accumulated side-effects that tend to spill over well beyond such speculative world building sites.
We will invite you to have a deeper look at the role of Sci-Fi, outside of its solely anticipatory or predictive function, as a method of un-predicting, of dis-anticipating and non-actualizing. At the limit, SF takes as a given the fact that exteriority permeates the now and the here.
This exhibition probes something else as well, acknowledging that the known is never fully known, ordinary or matter-of-fact, if we start question the very inevitability of our current world via a specific pop inflected situational SF. It argues that the most banal reality is already an extraterrestrial one, arrived from elsewhere, distorted and ready to be revisited by a SF intensely animated by varieties of never-ever, of nowhere and not yet. We intend to open up a portal or several portals that mediate these two aspects of SF.
The improbability of these worlds may be only improbable and unimaginable under the current circumstance or from the perspective of current scientific consensus, or it can take this state of things as a starting point and push it towards its outermost consequences.
We want to gather such speculative worlds that are made impossible under current economic, technological and social conditions. A techno-scientific worldview that is largely dissociated from the common good and severely hampered by economic and political imperatives as well as having to face unprecedented planetary, climacteric and ecological challenges. A worldview that has been always been co-dependent and constrained in its scope and vision.
The exhibition presents various dynamics and trajectories that have started from the initial SF core communities, from a primary SF fandom, but never remained there, becoming a common concern to us all.
The SF fandom is most probably the oldest organized fandom in Romania and other East European countries, and should be understood as a polymorphic encounter of common interests and transformative passions, clusters of fans, amateurs, artists, engineers,cenaclu club members, game designers, VFX artists, all spread out in time, all speculatively engaged in a imaginative effort and multifarious group-play. Involved in exchanging collective worlds that have well since crossed over beyond their initial place of origin and elaboration.
We start from the idea that wherever you are, even in the most isolated imaginable place, the very extremity of today’s contemporary world will carry you straight into SF, with third kind encounters at every step. We consider that our current reality is closely innervated by these vectors of SF, especially if we just consider those very ways in which SF might help us think and solve unsolvable contradictions, while living and inhabiting in the churn of irreversible mutations that were never tailor-made for us.
Below is a recent interview we gave as a joint curatorial crew to the IQadds online mag.
Practic am luat copypaste de pe site-ul IQads. Dacă se sesizează dăm jos, însă pe de alta parte nu am semnat cu ei nici un contract si aproape toata informatia furnizată aici, în afara strict de intrebarile trimise initial e de la noi, furnizată de mine si Vasile Leac si legată de expoziţia Timpuri Noi. Afland ca miscarea lor e sa fie free câteva zile, dupa care intra dupa paywall, m-am gandit sa salvez aci si sa ramana accesibil mai mult timp. Plus erau nevoie si de niste hyperlinks.
E cumva tipic pentru zilele astea – tu faci research, tu strangi informatii, trimiti raspunsul si la sfârsit ajungi sa platesti pentru propria ta informatie pentru ca e detinuta de platformele altora :)) care au backup juridic etc intorc pe degete legea drepturilor intelectuale etc. Poate gresesc, poate nu, chiar aş vrea să greşesc… Dar Aaron Swartz saracu stia mai bine lucrurile astea.
În acel moment s-a coagulat, în momentul în care unele scriitoare de SF au remarcat că nimic din filmele SF nu ne-au pregătit pentru ce se întâmplă și că de fapt nu era nevoie de bărbăţi brutali mînjiţi cu motorină, ci mai curând de îngrijitori, îngrijitoare transpiraţi și disperaţi, o forţă de muncă supra solicitată şi lipsită de mijloace, povestesc ei.
Este o expoziţie despre timp, care necesită timp. Cum a luat ea formă explică mai bine în rândurile de mai jos Ștefan Tiron și Vasile Leac. Cei doi vorbesc despre viitorul amanetat, speranțe colective, cum spune SF-ul istoria din România, dar și despre Alien și Dune, Colectia Romanelor SF scoasă de Univers sau amintiri cu oseminte imaginare de giganți din anii 80.
Prima întâlnire cu SF-ul
E greu cu primele – tind să zic că e vorba de lucruri transmise, mediate de altcineva și de altceva. Un punct important – notat ca atare în expozitie, când am folosit SF în titlul ei, am păstrat ambiguitatea dintre termenii ficţiune speculativa (speculative fiction) și science fiction (ambele prescurtate ca SF) care e doar un subset am putea zice din prima.
Una din cele mai pregnante amintiri este filmulAlien de Ridley Scott (1979) povestit înainte să fie văzut de către tatăl unui prieten care fusese în SUA și văzuse acolo filmul în perioada când nu era accesibil la noi. Trebuia să-ți imaginezi totul fără imagini, fără referinţe, exact ca în piesa radiofonicăExpediţie în Crocobauritania (1984), inclusă în expoziţia asta.
Deci tot, inclusiv mediul de pe navă, inclusiv fiinţa aia care îţi ieşea din piept afară şi avea acid în loc de sânge. Apoi importante au fost desigur ecranizărările astea după Lem și Fraţii Strugatski de Tarkovski pe muzică de Eduard Artemiev (chiar dacă autorul Stanislav Lem nu prea era mulţumit), important e de reţinut că e vorba de un SF est-vestic, includ aici și Futureworld (1976), văzut la Favorit și Soylent Green tot din același an, vizionat în anii 1980.
Unul dintre noi a descoperit SF-ul în complet alt context, săpând împreună cu fratele său într-un deal prin anii 85, încercând să dezgroape oseminte de giganţi, cum se zvonea pe atunci, mai în glumă mai în serios, că stau îngropate într-un tumulus din apropierea satului unde a copilărit.
Timpuri Noi: Xenogeze ale SF-ului, postere proiect Laika se intoarce. Fotografie de Claudiu Popescu
Referințe personale și riscul unui joc plicticos
Aș răspunde cumva în raport cu expoziţia curatoriată, căci este foarte uşor să alunecăm pe panta personalului, şi am încercat cât putem să ne ferim de o perspectivă din asta personală, chiar dacă e imposibil să eviţi parcursul individual poţi să încerci asta. Importante au fost în acest sens şi texte teoretice şi critice începând cu Darko Suvin, Florin Manolescu şi Frederic Jameson, şi continuând cuSeo-Young J. Chu, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Mircea Opriţă,Steven ShavirosauSherryl Vint.
Înscriindu-ne într-o largă zonă de studii SF am mers mai mult pe trans-personal și colectiv, căci SF-ul ca fenomen nu credem că poate fi detaşat de aceste legături, sinteze, medii și relaţii sociale uneori aiurizante. Punct important e ultimul an de liceu 1994, petrecut în Alaska la Steller High School când un coleg a organizat o seară de anime unde au rulat Gundam și Akira.
Cred că e mult prea ușor să arunci cu referinţe în dreapta şi în stânga, impunând o referenţialitate geek arogantă de insider, care buclează și nu face decât să confirme lucruri deja aparent para-ştiute și canonizate. Totul riscă astfel să devină joc plicticos de băieţei și rachetuţele lor (şi poate asta și e).
Timpuri Noi: Xenogeze ale SF-ului. Planuri si patente OSIM de obiecte zburatoare,OZN din comuna Perişor (Dolj). Fotografie de Claudiu Popescu
Asta fiind zise, pe lângă turnanta publicaţiilor Nemira din anii 1990, importantă a fost lumea eminamente vizuală a comics-urilor, pe partea de bandă desenată cu subiecte SF, mai ales metamorfoza Image Comics de după 2012, dacă nu greşesc, cu Prophet no 21, apoi mai vechi, binenţeles Incal de la Metal Hurlant, iar pe partea japoneză tot ce a făcut Masamune Shirow, Katsuhiro Otomo (inclusiv chestii mai puțin cunoscute precum Domu, The Legend of Mother Sarah etc) și mai ales Tsutomu Nihei cu Blame!, Biomega etc. în jurul lui 2000.
Nu mai menționez aici diferite anime și filme pt că nu ne ajunge interviul ăsta. Înainte de 1989, tind să menționez numerele revistei ORION, publicată la Craiova în format mare cu benzi desenate pe ultima pagină de neîntrecutul Victor Pîrligras (Mutanţii se chemă parcă și era o bandă desenată serializată), în două culori (negru, roşu, parcă) care îl cumpăram de la chioşcul de ziare și căruia i-am oferit un loc special în expoziţie.
Timpuri Noi: Xenogeze ale SF-ului. Print dupa desen original de Walter Riess coperta la Almanah Anticipatia. Fotografie de Claudiu Popescu
Dacă viitorul poate fi amanetat
Importantă în acestă expoziţie considerăm că este și a doua funcție – cea propriu zis speculativă a SF-ului, una care nu e neapărat viitorologică, de predicţie, cât cea de anti-predicţie, cea care nu lasă cele mai negre predicţii, deja operative, deja parte din strategiile militare și privat-corporate să fie singura variantă de posibil. Deci vedem toate mecanismele de anticipare azi ca fiind extrem de problematice, în măsura în care însăşi viitorul educativ așa cum e el jalonat de Venture Capital (în viitoarea ta carieră, să zicem) aproape că buclează şi activează ceea ce prezice.
Astea fiind spuse, merită repetat din când în când – că noul în capitalismul global este mai multe feluri de la fel. Dacă viitorul poate fi amanetat ca risc calculabil, el este eminamente vandabil şi profitabil, când nu nu, chiar şi în măsura în care aproape toate generaţiile ulterioare (cu Greta în frunte și o bună parte din populaţia planetei) și-au dat seama că au fost excluşi din propriul lor viitor. Fie ei sunt înhămaţi la datorii şi rate de plată care nici în milioane (de ani?) și generaţii întregi viitoare nu vor putea fi plătite. Fie tot ei, generaţia asta doomer-ilor, au realizat că generaţia precedentă, cea cinică a părinţilor, care este şi generaţia celor care deţin mijloacele de producţie de pe Terra și conturi neimpozabile, nu vor face nimic ca să preîntâmpine catastrofa climaterică care va afecta viitorul celor mai mulţi dintre urmaşii noştri. Pentru asta a curs destulă cerneală deja în romane și antologii de climate-fiction recente care nici nu mai sună a SF pentru că deja vedem cu ochii noştrii ce se întâmplă.
Timpuri Noi: Xenogeze ale SF-ului. Synth si tape loops de Mitos Micleusean. Fotografie de Claudiu Popescu
Ce spune SF-ul românesc despre istoria românească
O foarte bună întrebare, şi aș vrea să răspund la întrebarea asta cu o imagine foarte importantă de pe coperta 4 a revistei ORION nr 3 din 1989, cu un desen făcut de Victor Pîrligras semnat ca fiind din 1983, aflat în studioul SFTV din expoziţie.
issue of the ORION SF zine first published at the end of the 1980s in Craiova by the local Theatre. It was one of the most important and lavish Romanian SF zines offering comics, SF studies criticism, both translations and original works of science fiction literature all in one.
Las pe cele și cei interesaţi să caute să răspundă şi să discute acest desen. Pot da aici un spoiler și spune că este un desen extrem de puternic, ca o gravură alb negru, cu un personaj imobil care cerşeşte. E vroba de un cyborg sau un robot umanoid care stă la marginea străzii cu capul picat, deşurubat din umeri. Este un robot omul străzii, un clochard robotic, sărăcit și aparent abandonat de sistemul social şi sistemul de producţie care l-a creat.
Nu vreau să dăm prea multe hint-uri în acest sens, important e că el arată spre social și spre societate sau lipsa de social în post 1989, şi într-un fel constuie una din cele mai puternice și vizionare, chiar dacă stranii și neliniştitoare mărturii ale SF-ului și societăţii romanâneşti postdecembriste. Ba chiar am putea adăuga globale, sub spectrul unei post-automatizări inegale care nu îndeplineşte promisiunile post-muncii și unde orele de muncă cresc și salariile scad. Un loc unde majoritatea joburilor sunt parte dintr-un gig economy, unde ajungi să dai la pedală fără nici un fel de drepturi şi unde majoritatea nu își mai permit asigurări de sănătate (depanare!) și unde atât roboţii cât și oamenii sunt tratataţi ca fiind obsolescenţi.
Timpuri Noi: Xenogeze ale SF-ului. Fotografie de Claudiu Popescu
Povestea expoziției
Procesul ei a fost visare, și apoi muncă și iarăşi muncă.
Ea a început poate în copilărie dar s-a conturat acum 2 ani, înainte de pandemie, în momentul în care toată lumea în plină pandemie începea să zică, trăim vremuri SF, totul e SF. Deci în acel moment s-a coagulat ea, în momentul în care unele scriitoare de SF au remarcat că nimic din filmele SF nu ne-au pregătit pentru ce se întâmplă și că de fapt nu era nevoie de bărbăţi brutali mînjiţi cu motorină ci mai curând de îngrijitori, îngrijitoare transpiraţi și disperaţi, o forţă de muncă supra solicitată şi lipsită de mijloace. E vorba de SF-ul aşa ziselor servicii esenţiale, de cele mai periclictate joburi invizibile, ale oamenilor de sacrificiu de pe altarul economiei.
Timpuri Noi: Xenogeze ale SF-ului. SFTV #1 -show cu Irina Gheorghe
Pregătirea a constat în multe intâlniri și contacte directe sau la distanţă cu participanţi, susţinătoare şi susţinatori. Nici nu ştim de unde să începem. Că e vorba de vizită de lucru la Muzeul Henri Coandă la localitatea Perişor (Dolj) la OZN-ul montat în faţă de ing. Nicolae Stăncioiu în 2015 şi până la contactul cu cinemateca germană și RBB pentru obţinerea drepturilor de difuzare a documentarului Utopie în Babelsberg despre SF-ul est german cu ajutorul Institutului Goethe. Întâlnirea de la Avanpost în Bucureşti, studio de efecte speciale de sunet, cu sound designer-ul Marius Lefterache care a lucrat la SF-ul Blood Machines.
Timpuri Noi: Xenogeze ale SF-ului. Fotografie de Claudiu Popescu
Am putea spune că ăsta e un alt SF de azi, munca asta de colaborare și susţinere din toate părţile care a devenit imposibilă și greu de conceput.
Inclusiv subtitrat și tradus aceste materiale cu ajutor de unde s-a putut. Am avut sugestii de parcurs cum a fost Out of the Present despre ultimul cetăţean al Uniunii Sovietice rămas în spaţiu abandonat de cei de la sol, documentar de Andrei Ujica, pe care l-am inclus la sugestia Andreianei Mihail. Apoi contactarea grupului de aeronautică prezent în expozitie cu macheta care o vor lansa cât de curând în spăţiu, în Portugalia. Nu mai menționez munca la infografice cu filogeneza și taxonomia meme-lor cu extratereştri, aceasta din urmă realizată de cei de la Trepantsii sau de harta migraţiilor X aliene făcută de Alin Răuţoiu, sau de harta incompletă a cenaclurilor SF facută de Suzana Dan la indicaţiile noastre şi de cronologia (vădit şi ea incompletă) a contactelor extraterestre din Ţarile Române făcută cu ajutorul istoricului Cătălin Ghercioiu.
Timpuri Noi: Xenogeze ale SF-ului. Fotografie de Claudiu Popescu
S-au putem vorbi despre video eseul Ad Astra Per Aspera făcut de Cristian Drăgan comisionat special pentru acest show, o primă trecere în revistă a istoriei filmului de SF românesc. Sau poate arhivele de reviste şi fanzine sau poveștile de cenaclu SF ale lui Alexandru Ciubotariu, munca de selecţie și xeroxare a acestor materiale.
Sau poate cărţile donate de Ambasada Chinei despre robotica chineză sau Istoria ştiinţei și tehnologiei din China, din trecut până în prezent, misiuni spaţiale chinezeşti şi contactul fructuos avut cu ei în acest sens şi în scopul evidenţierii unei explorări pacifice și non militariste a spaţiului cosmic.
Timpuri Noi: Xenogeze ale SF-ului. Fotografie de Claudiu Popescu
Premisele
Două lucruri care nu cred că decurg din textele aferente expoziţiei şi ar merita menţionate, anume faptul că asociaţia Ephemair – conţine termenul de air, aer, văzduh și că la origini, din câte ştim era visul unui festival dedicat aerului, dedicat baloanelor și diferitelor modalităţi de a pluti și explora văzduhul. Poate nici ei nu ştiu asta, dar asta a fost un posibil punct de decolare, pt ca să nu uităm că primele pioniere și pionieri ai vazduhului, înainte de avioane și de nave au fost cei care au mers în dirijabile, baloane, deci astronautica și explorarea cosmosului este anticipată de etapa baloanelor plutitoare umplute cu aer.
Altă sursă importantă ascunsă o consider ideea lui Miklos Szilard care a și curatoriat împreună cu Mircea Nicolae un show la Rezidenta BRD Scena 9 despre Matthis-Teutsch, la rândul lui o punte interesantă dintre avangarda clasică și viitorologie de tip realism constructiv (cum o numea Teutsch). Szilard zicea mai în glumă mai în serios că dacă nu ar fi făcut expo cu Teutsch ar fi făcut un call pentru o navă spaţială construită de free lanceri ca să le trezească conştiinţa de clasă.
Timpuri Noi: Xenogeze ale SF-ului. Fotografie de Claudiu Popescu
O expoziție despre timp care are nevoie de timp
Repet, cel mai important este să o vadă şi să îsi lase timp pentru ea, căci este o expoziţie şi despre timp… care necesită timp. Tangenţial este și despre schimbarea percepţiei referitoare la timp, la timpul rămas dacă a mai rămas, şi despre o temporalitate nouă, specifică banilor și lichidităţii capitalului, am putea zice, cum precizează un text important semnat de Bogdan Popaîn ziarul expoziţiei de Centrul Dialectic și alăturat lucrării lor Bani Gheaţă, instalată în camera 5.
Altfel putem ruga publicul să nu se aștepte la o expoziţie care arhivează sau face o arheologie a fenomenului SF, ci una care se vrea speculativă ca atare, care lucrează chestionând cu mijloacele specifice SF-ului, starea de fapt actuală. Nu are sens să predicăm sau să pretindem o expertiză în acest sens, ci mai curând să oferim publicului și neiniţiatilor o cale de acces, îndemnându-i să îsi compună și construiască împreună o expertiză într-un domeniu vast, cu milioane de publicaţii și expresii.
Timpuri Noi: Xenogeze ale SF-ului. Fotografie de Claudiu Popescu
Trebuie să fim critici dar nu condescendenţi faţă de modul în care alţii îşi imaginau viitorul, şi mai important e să vedem care sunt constrângerile azi, de ce nu ne mai putem azi imagina anumite lucruri.
În cuvintele lui Quentin Skinner, nu e cazul să căutăm superioritatea imaginarului actual faţă de ce și-a imaginat umanitatea în timp şi față de aşa zisele naivităţi de altă dată, ci mai curând să vedem „ce constrângeri invizibile și nerecunoscute plasează societatea noastră asupra capacităţii noastre de a imagina” o altfel de lume am adăuga noi.
E nevoie de pozitivism pesimist
Haideţi să trecem rapid peste ultimele doua produse mari și somptuoase ale acestui an, Dune de Villeneuve, și Fundaţia produsă de Apple+. NU sunt pe lista de favorite, şi de aceea vrem şi noi să vedem alte lucruri decât clasici de acum 60 de ani, pentru că există o puzderie de romane SF fenomenale, la care nu mai ajungem din cauza marilor epopei din trecut care culeg toată atenţia şi bugetele. Mă refer aici la revoluția genului SF de operă spaţială – că e vorba de Elizabeth Bear, Iain M Banks, Peter Watts, Cixin Liu, Benjanun Sriduangkaew, Kamerun Hurley, Tade Thompson, Nicky Drayden etc.
Aș putea spune că invariabil astăzi e nevoie de un anume pozitivism pesimist, adică pesimism în gândire, optimism în acţiune, un pic altceva decât pozitivismul logic, filozofia care s-a dorit hegemonică în ce priveşte ştiinţa. Atunci când avem de-a face cu ceva implicabil, ştiind ce ne aşteaptă în următoarul secol, SF-ul ne trafichează cu generozitate instrumente care ne situează în inima unor procese care par că ne depăşesc capacitatea de acţiune, gândire și simţire, făncându-ne părtăşi la o lume mai mare, şi participanţi în tot ce se întâmplă, până şi în felul sau tipul de SF pe care vom decide să îl actualizăm în comun.
Predicţia o situez tot ca o anti-predicţie pentru 2071, aș vrea să avem un Minister Întru Viitor cum sună titlul cărţii lui Kim Stanley Robinson, însă fără 30 de milioane de morți datorate unui val de căldură din ce ce în ce mai puternic situat în viitorul apropiat, asta dacă se poate.
“When MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini discovers that facial recognition does not see dark-skinned faces accurately, she embarks on a journey to push for the first-ever U.S. legislation against bias in algorithms that impact us all.”
This is probably one of the most important documentaries to address many issues that are not any longer strictly the domain of SF. Cod Bias is definitely within the bounds of any socially inflected SF worlds u can think of. Maybe it used to be just the figment of dystopian – Cold War tinged imagination, but now it is very much part of ours. Made me actually mentally revisit theat primordial Silicon Valley 1984 promo – the ad for Apple Macintosh PC released in December 1983. Feels puzzling how this new televised technological muscle was part of a much wider and concerted Reaganite response to the -(still) Socialist East. ‘Free World’ computing as easily turned and facing off the eponymous Orwellian 1984 villain, a drab, grey, docile citizenry of the standardized monolithic solid-state, the ideological ‘other’ where a repressive & monstrous surveillance apparatus – (be it Securitate/Stasi) enforced obedience & ‘rightminding’. Only that, in retrospect, the newly competitive Silicon Valley product was a launch-pad for a much wider privacy Dragnet and much more insidious scope and certainly fancier in looks & design. Buying into a system of personal, automated & generalized consumer surveillance that also brought the pretense of neutral, un-biased coding.
Coded Bias documentary is the strongest advocacy of algorithmic justice i have seen, watched or heard of. A critical introduction to the current algo-capitalistic trends & as well as some of the ways needed to counter act AI-supported disparities & disenfranchisement. It is no mystery that you actually need people from across the board, including industry ppl (call them what u want, ex- Quants/former flash trading brokers, tech renegades, whistle-blowers, technological deserters, industry watchdogs, etc). Yes, not only EFF members, STEMs, geeks and blerds, but also people from the social housing blocks, the hood, the street corner youngsters and those with migrant-background – those that are primary targets and have been already mis-measured, data stripped and data mined and whose bodies and faces are literally the training grounds of computational modernity. Most of them, are the unwilling informants and unpaid trainers of emerging tech deployments that under-girds surveillance capitalism.
One of the most important takes from this documentary – was for me the counter-intuitive demonstration that goes against old cyberpunk sayings (paraphrasing: ‘the future is already here but it is just unequally distributed’). In the 21st c we learn time and time again, that the 1%, or 10% or the rich, powerful and wealthy are not the future’s bleeding knife- since they have mostly lived live of unfettered privacy and non data retention. They are not a tested minority, and clearly not the ones who get first unwanted access beforehand and do not suffer the effects of those things that will get distributed later one a vast scale. In fact (as one of the participants of Coded Bias points out) – the post-apocalyptic poor, the unprotected, those with previous histories of discrimination, enslavement, incarceration, abusive family background, profiling etc those already under some state of surveillance, registration and control (ID checked mostly in terms of constituting some form of risk), are the ones who suffer the blunt of these new technologies.
They are the un-glamorized testers of unequal futures, and not the privileged rich beta testers that mostly seem to opt-out of their own companies technological wonders. Accordingly, technological transformation is so important that it should not be defined just in terms of access – or left at the whim of company board members, Big Tech, Innovation hubs or ‘smart’ city planners & cheerleaders. It is not just a question of ‘users’ – since it is about the ‘used’ more than the users nowadays. It is – without nostalgia or pre-technological naivity in tow, that in spite – of these tremendous and complex planetary changes, legislation and lobbying for digital rights & accountability seems to lag behind, since both public attention and consciousnesses gets bypassed. Direct oversight and regulation or consciousness itself seems so trivial, and yet it is constantly remade into a threshold to be bypassed by the free markets & mantras hailing for ‘disruptive’ transgressions. Nonetheless, there is this incredible alliance and (as seen below) a lot of initiatives have sprung up, that espouse not just a neo-Luddite conviction, but one of tekk-savvyness, informed by the above ‘renegades’and industry insiders and/or burnouts as well, by previous historical black liberation examples as by the new empowering SF alternate histories (i see some clear signs of Wakanda there) having been written (thinking about Solomon Rivers,Nalo Hopkins and Nisi Shawl & others here) or waiting to be written in collaboration with automated text generators or not.
There is emerging calls from both government and by popular demand to at least be able to opt-out of these technologies in the US and EU (face recognition being just the most obvious case), altough I’m not sure about the vast majority of the world (which is clearly not from the Global North) or even the accelerating use & deployment of drone wars & DARPA abroad in the wake of protracted but inevitable US retreat from Afghanistan. There of course the possibility to learn how optical governance works or is put to use/abused in other parts of the world, since the West does not hold the monopoly over AI. China, in particular is an interesting divergence, since machine vision has been widely rolled out by the CCP via its social credit score, as well as being repurposed from below during the Pandemic response. SF has been historically very wary with attempts to modulate or influence behaviors such as behaviourism, to tuning or pegging controls or strong emotional responses towards a common good (Just think of swath of movies from Equilibrium 2002 to Brave New World 2020 or the new Voyagers 2021). ‘Brainwashed’, ‘the Manchurian Candidate’ etc are just a few of the inherited standard fear responses churned by both Cold War warriors, strategists, Pentagon brass and the run of the mill Hollywood movie output whenever they tried to depict or describe actual, imagined or suspected ideological traitors and US army deserters. ‘Brainwashing’ especially was made up into a sort of explain-all – to cover a whole range of ‘enemy'(past & present) responses, as the only possible logical explanation for the divergent behavior of former US troops (many of them black) who decided to opt-out of the racist US capitalist system after living as POW (during Korean War). When former army personnel decided to question, defect & live outside their bounds they must have been ‘brainwashed’, especially if they happened to be choosing Mao’s China for a while (a forgotten history detailed with tremendous wit in Julia Lowell’s fascinating book: Maoism: A Global History 2020) instead of racism back home or in the army. Change of mind and qualms about incoming orders also equals treason as we know from the case of Chelsea Elizabeth Manning or Edward Snowden.
In a rare and courageous move – The White Space (Machine/Ancestral Night duology) space opera universe of Elizabeth Bear avoids the usual ‘brainwashing’ suspicion of previous SF dystopian conventions by offering exactly what so much canonic SF eschews. It opens the possibility of a wide, non-coercive future galactic union where every human (altough the union is made by many non-sapient but sentient syster species) has the option to decide how much it alters, allows or wants to dial-down or fine-tune (what amounts to certain AI assisted ‘mindfulness’) a central nervous system evolved to automatize responses to emotional distress. Changing developmental patterns etc including universal non-coercive(!) access (called “bumping” in the novel) to what amounts to puberty blockers is not automatically a bad thing or a monstrous unnatural hybristic act(altough there’s libertarian privateers who think so in that universe like in ours)!
White Space opens up a way to modulate, discuss and deal in other ways with trauma, isolation, addiction, puberty, dysphoria, sex or gender assignment by birth etc bypassing automatic, hormonal or non-cognitive ‘habitual’ responses, being able to imaginatively limit violent behaviors at a minimum. Curbing willingly so much of what is anti-social behavior was apparently frowned upon even in that far future, but there’s room for so much more. It’s of course always important to pay attention to who decides what and when one misbehaves or when disobedience becomes accepted & when not. Of course there is a thin line, and there are those who want to skip and actively propagate opting out of the opting out. Body (non modification) extremists surely exist in that future that deem it sacrilegious to intervene or to dabble with ‘natural’ responses, while acting (on whole) quite egoistically and self-centered. In this galactic union – new forms of piratical freeports keep offshoring resources and escaping the central taxing authority, thus harboring non-mindfulness terrorism arising in response to a largely benefic mental & emotional tuning widely available. Even if coding bias into hardware based on white wetware bias is the main focus of Coded Bias, it ultimately supports a malleable wetware-hardware continuum that allows for modulation and even requires it.
Black-boxing of the operative logics of machine vision or acknowledging that machinic cognition or decisionality is essentially collaborative, not isolated, nor impervious to questioning, thus, cannot just settle for the human/nonhuman or creator/created, nonhuman/posthuman binaries. It feels very wrong, since it closes down our own sensitivity either to the same old repackaged as new, or to a newer wider & largely collaborative nonhuman ‘worldy sensiblity’ that is always risks being tipped towards whiteness and reactive toxicity if left unattended. Microsoft’s Tay 2016 chatbot that developed 24h a proclivity for hate speech is a test in case. It’s not just the simple powerful logic of trash in trash out, but of how easily this tipping point might be achieved today under trolling & targeted attacks. At the same time, one should never loose sight of other machinic bridges &conceptually as well as emotionally more progressive examples that developed as part of writing practices & modernist techniques such as automatic writing or Alan Turing’s automated Loveletter generator.
One cannot unbox anything in a straightforward way, since Shalini Kantayya’s diverse cast of protagonists and invited guests make clear that not even programmers or makers do not understand how the AI does what it does. One more thing cannot be remedied with just more data, simply more information. Even acknowledging that we can fully understand those internal processes, we can still feel trh results, see the hard facts and harsh reality whenever these AIs tend to ignore black and brown or female faces. AIs do need some deep unlearning in order to ‘re-educate'(not such a bad word) themselves and make sure they will not act out just the mathematical sums of the worst of the worst and select by default for the chosen few while deselecting everybody else.
Pushing the logic of this documentary, it is time to find out more about how decisions, ‘chance’, contingency may still be directed so as to redistribute luck on a more equal way in an increasingly unequal world economy. Economy is itself futurism served frozen & pre-cooked, and different debt ridden lives and widely different futures are being handed down, bent along pre-selected trajectories, trajectories that are being doctored (who cares if knowingly or unknowingly, intentionality is always ulterior anyway) actively make impossible the lives of a majority. A ‘pan-selectivity’ needs yo be developed that refuses yo be ‘gamed’ easily and influenced only by the influent few armed with predictive algorithms – at the tip of a capitalistic drive that actualizes every potential out there, no matter how horrific and brutal as long as it pays dividends.
Like probably any ideological formation – bias is not just invisible, it probably maybe impossible to completely eliminate, but this should not stop us trying to change it and actively imagine what’s to be done. Bias seems to work and act by being unspecified, invisibilized, left out of the loop. Again, like ideology, it is the missing mass that bends everything according to its set of preemptive expectations, almost like a constant enactment of a single, unilateral inner experience, making itself ubiquitous. Bias is not simply an apparently whimsical conceit, it is not just a pre-programmed part of the system, but something that needs to be enforced, hard-coded and programmed at every level of future decision making, at ever threshold of resistance.
Bias is made seemingly non-existent each time output and prediction is put at a premium. If if blaring, it feels like an itch you cannot scratch, because it starts to seem so intrinsic & para-systemic. Technology or AI is not neutral nor is inherently bad it gas been often said, and it is getting as bad or worse or as good as the whole context/environment allows it, or the drift promoting it keeps on pushing it, or as long as the coded ideals and values are what they are. Remember even if everything is being turned into ‘driver-less’-everything, it’s not less of driven- market economy.
We can not see it and measure it because its effects are measured on those who are made to matter less and less, on those ‘others’ that even the states, law or constitution does not seem to ‘notice’ or care for any longer. It is easier to wave bias aside, to bring undigested misconstructions on board and heap them on top of those being distributed the loosing lots, the bad seats(if any), and even if those stories just give you bad dreams, goosebumps, depression or severe need to disconnect from another’s catastrophic or already dystopian reality. So this necessitates different, collective and directed research approaches & coordinated effort to ‘black boxing’ so many current decisional processes. There’s also a different venue (not tackled in Coded Bias) – a sort of related QWERTY bias, of path dependencies whenever we have historically & incrementally built conventional (man-made) computational infrastructures. This ‘convention’ not only only stands in the way of more evolutionary – developmentally inclusive, unconventional approaches to computation & computing, but might leave out or blind us to other venues or other modes of problem solving existing or evolved (as those investigated by Andrew Adamatsky studying maze-solving slime molds). While most computation & research nowadays follows old & certainly well-tested arhitectures, it only builds upon existing & specific constraints – all too human ones we might add, moreover a very restrictive & biased account of what counts as ‘human’ (amply documented throughout Coded Bias), one that both engineering and coding seems to take as granted. ‘Worth’ – in a constantly devalorizing environment becomes constantly threatened, at the same time we should welcome the erosion of old, gendered biased and individualistic notions of singular genius(unmoved mover?) and farcical ‘great men’ through our plural AI – human interactions.
Coded Bias gets the highest marks in advocating for an A.I.X -research, attempting to build an explainable artificial intelligence, a research that should be aware of ‘artificial unintelligence'(Meredith Broussard), as well as to demands that humans hone their response-ability (Haraway), both allowing for aesthetic, epistemologic and ethical responsiveness whenever technological 21st upgrades and optimizations start pouring in.
You do not need to be a tech expert to advocate for algorithmic justice. These basic terms are a good foundation to inform your advocacy. For a more detailed breakdown of how facial recognition works, see the guide titled Facial Recognition Technologies: A Primer from the AJL. For more on surveillance, see the Community Control Over Police Surveillance: Technology 101 guide from the ACLU.
Algorithmic justice. Exposing the bias and harms from technical systems in order to safeguard the most marginalized and develop equitable, accountable, and just artificial intelligence.
Benchmark. Data set used to measure accuracy of an algorithm before it is released.
Bias. Implicit or explicit prejudices in favor of or against a person or groups of people.
Artificial intelligence (AI). The quest to give computers the ability to perform tasks that have, in the past, required human intelligence like decision making, visual perception, speech recognition, language translation, and more.
Big data. The mass collection of information about individuals who use personal technology, such as smartphones.
Biometric technology. Uses automated processes to recognize an individual through unique physical characteristics or behaviors
Black box. A system that can be viewed only through its inputs and outputs, not its internal process.
CCTV. Closed-circuit television cameras are used by institutions to record activity on and around their premises for security purposes.
Civil rights. A broad set of protections designed to prevent unfair treatment or discrimination in areas such as education, employment, housing, and more.
Code. The technical language used to write algorithms and other computer programs.
Data rights. Referring to the human right to privacy, confidentiality, and ethical use of personal information collected by governments or corporations through technology
Data set. The collection of data used to train an algorithm to make predictions.
Due process. The right not to be deprived of life, liberty, or property without proper legal proceedings, protected by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the US Constitution.
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). A data rights law in the European Union that requires technology users consent to how their data is collected and prohibits the sale of personal data.
Facial recognition. Technologies – a catchall phrase to describe a set of technologies that process imaging data to perform a range of tasks on human faces, including detecting a face, identifying a unique individual, and assessing demographic attributes like age and gender.
Machine learning. An approach to AI that provides systems the ability to learn patterns from data without being explicitly programmed.
Racism. The systematic discrimination of people of color based on their social classification of race, which disproportionately disadvantages Black and Indigenous people of color.
Recidivism risk assessment – Automated decision making system used in sentencing and probation to predict an individual’s risk of future criminal behavior based on a series of data inputs, such as zip code and past offenses.
Sexism. The systematic discrimination of women and girls based on their social categorization of sex, which intersects with racism for women and girls of color.
Social credit score. An AI system designed by the Communist Party of China that tracks and analyzes an individual’s data to assess their trustworthiness.
Surveillance. The invasive act of monitoring a population to influence its behavior, done by a government for law and order purposes or by corporations for commercial interests.
Value-added assessments. Algorithms used most commonly to evaluate teachers by measuring student performance data.
Voice recognition. An application of AI technology that interprets and carries out spoken commands and/or aims to identify an individual based on their speech patterns.
TimeSpace Warps 
