A familiar cautionary tale about AI is the paper clip maximizer, where an AI destroys the world in pursuit of its seemingly banal task of making paper clips efficiently. The story imagines an AI with general, even superhuman, intelligence and agency. The debates continue about whether or not AGI will ever be achieved. But what […]
Author: Alex Reid
Professor of Media Study at the University at Buffalo
On Friday night I attended an intermedia performance of faculty and students. It was an impressive array of concepts, techniques, and expertise varying from dancers performing music with wearable computing devices to the sonification of data about sunsets and much more. There was (what I’d call) a posthuman DJ experience going on, where the interfaces […]
The University at Buffalo has been in the news (and social media) over an upcoming event involving a controversial speaker invited by a conservative student group on campus. I’m not here to discuss the particulars of this case or how to respond to it. I’m sure Google can help you learn more. My interest is […]
Writing a post analyzing the moral panic surrounding the latest digital media technology is nearly as boring as participating in the moral panic itself. Let’s not worry too much about ChatGPT. In a decade it will probably seem as quaint as Clippy. So I’ve got a tangent here and this Harry Potter-esque post title. I’ll […]
Categories
the volumetric capture of agency
The FIFA World Cup has had a recent habit of introducing new media technologies into the sporting world. That’s not surprising given its status as a global spectacle. Given the many controversial aspects of this year’s event in Qatar, the introduction of the “semi-automated video assistant referee” is relatively mild. However, it’s an excellent example […]
There are a number of ways to understand the term “computational rhetoric.” In no particular order, the first might be something like critical code studies in that one studies the rhetoric practices of coding. A second would be akin to machine reading in the digital humanities, doing rhetorical analysis of a large textual corpus, or […]
I imagine it comes as no surprise to academics across these fields that instrumentalism is typically a dirty word. It is epithet applied liberally including the rejection of coursework that is overly practical or focused on “how-to” (e.g. teaching writing), of degree programs deemed to be too focused on preparing students for specific careers, and […]
This is a kind of inside-baseball question, I think. For the typical English speaker, theory means something like speculation. In more academic/research contexts, theories are the conceptual basis for the work we do: e.g., a theory of evolution. The OED provides this helpful definition that is closer to what I had in mind as a […]
There’s a 2004 video interview of Katherine Hayles conducted by Arthur Kroker for C-Theory, where she discusses How We Became Posthuman, Writing Machines, and My Mother was a Computer. Her 1999 book traces the posthuman back to the beginnings of computers and cybernetics. Considered differently though, posthuman theory as we encounter it gets some start […]
The familiar posthuman natureculture of Haraway and others suggests, in its most basic form, that there is a material history for all things, even the most seemingly fundamental dimensions of space and time. It strikes me as a weird idea to try to grasp. I suppose on the one hand there is the Big Bang […]
Alex Reid 