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Making language: re-writing and control in algorithmic poetics
Considering the effects of machine learning in aesthetic practices, the aim of this presentation is to discuss strategies for authorial inscription and the autonomy of literary writers in relation to programmable writing tools.
In a first moment I will apply David Nickel's notion of "proxy writer" (2013) to algorithmic writing agents in order to characterize these agents in what concerns their relative autonomy and place within human writing practices, and argue that digital writing environments and tools have been gradually becoming more alienated from the writer's control. Vilém Flusser's notion of "functionary" will be applied to computational writing practices in order to situate these in the broader context of writing media.
In a second moment I will discuss the writing strategies present in Jhave's ReRites (2017-18) in order to assess how such strategies cope with the high level of autonomy of neural-networks in text-generation, and how they function as a necessary precondition for literary inscription on a highly mediated writing space.
Cecilie Klingenberg - 24.02.2021 - 16:07
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The metainterface spectacle
With ‘interface criticism’ (Andersen and Pold) as an outset, we will address how the interface is in a transition from a closed system of interaction, to a dispersed network. More specifically, we are interested in how to relate aesthetically to this transition as a new mode of organization of the ‘masses’ (or ‘users’) that takes place in a cultural industry around metainterfaces. Following a path of critique from Benjamin, Kracauer, Crary, Hayles and others, we intend to discuss it as a new form of media spectacle: a ‘metainterface spectacle’ that simultaneously organizes the users, and offers a way of perceiving their reality as ‘cognitive assemblages’.
Cecilie Klingenberg - 24.02.2021 - 16:18
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Seeking Pleasure in the Confusion of Boundaries: Reading Posthumanism in Children’s Literature
Literature and art forms contribute significantly to the discussion of epistemological concerns of posthumanism. Which is to say that, literature and art imagine, interrogate and nurture the subjective and embodied attributes of the nonhuman experience. It is through such exploration of the experiential aspects that sensitivity and other similar personal engagements can occur, which can augment our comprehension of nonhuman beings and entities, that in turn can lead to conspicuous epistemological and ethical consequences.
To consider critical posthumanism as established only within critical theory and philosophy, wherein the idea of the human has been the moot point, is to neglect the significant role of popular culture and literature in the revaluation of the concept of the human.
Cecilie Klingenberg - 24.02.2021 - 16:24
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Contemporary Posterity
What does it mean to be post? In a time of countless movements of post-[x], the value of the prefix itself becomes of interest: what does it do to a concept to reposition it by turning it into a ‘posterity’?
I will unpack this question through an inquiry into the concept of ‘post-digital’, scrutinizing and seeking to overcome the problems of rigid periodization that the prefix ‘post’ might imply. Such an inquiry is arguably also central to the ongoing exploration of posthumanist tendencies in literary and aesthetic fields. Indeed, posthumanism and the (post-)digital are – historically and continuously – closely connected (cf. Haraway; cf. Hayles). As Laura Shackelford argues, the post-digital’s “practice-based experimentation continues to pursue … posthumanist inquiries and immanent engagements with technicity” (349).
Cecilie Klingenberg - 24.02.2021 - 16:40
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Reading Through-the-Earth. Towards the Posthuman Aesthet(h)ics
We are living-with our embodied and embedded lives now-here. Our entities are entangled not only with other (human and non-human) entities but also in the present time and local space, which are never only present and local. They should be rather considered as the assemblage of past-present-future with various forms of the glocality.
Merging Timothy Morton's notion of hiperobjects with Karen Barad's onto-epistemology turns us towards the posthuman aesthet(h)ics. According to our living-with now-here, I argue that we cannot differentiate ethics and aesthetics. We rather need to re-lecture Jacques Ranciére's concept of the distribution of the sensible in a posthuman manner.
Cecilie Klingenberg - 24.02.2021 - 16:46
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Transgression, transcendence and posthumanism in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian
What makes us human? Descartes believes it is the cogito – the rational mind, or the soul. “Reason,” he writes in the Discourse on the Method, “[is] the only thing that makes us men and distinguishes us from the beasts.” This categorical distinction between the human species and all other living things is embedded in the western philosophical tradition which has held, since antiquity and even before, that man has a privileged position in the natural world. Human life is endowed with intrinsic value, while other entities, such as animals, plants or minerals, are resources that may justifiably be exploited for the benefit of humankind.
Cecilie Klingenberg - 24.02.2021 - 16:50
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Wordlyphagic Literature: For biopoetry to microbiological A.I
I have frequently spoken of word and image as viruses or as acting as viruses, and this is not an allegorical comparison.
William S. Burroughs, Electronic Revolution
As with bacteriophages – viruses that parasitize a bacterium by infecting it and reproducing inside it –, literature is permeated by a series of centripetal and centrifugal movements of rarefaction, in which a sequence of virulent “wordlyphagic” language processes chew, devour, swallow, digest, and regurgitate words (just to swallow them again). Moving away from the printed page, or being even more deeply impregnated in its textures, these viral processes can either offer a truly literal meaning to Burroughs' often-quoted words, “Language is a virus”, or simply emphasize its metaphoric sense, just as they can be simultaneously analyzed in vivo by means of laboratorial practices and/or scrutinized by digital algorithms.
Cecilie Klingenberg - 26.02.2021 - 11:23
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Textual entanglements & entangled texts: On relationality and narrative
The notion of entanglement is central to critical posthumanist thought. It might be said to have replaced the ubiquitous network metaphor or even the paradigm of the global in a number of contexts; at the very least, it stands in a tense relationship to them. While the figure of the globe is undeniably linked to human(ist) construction practices and the European colonial project, and a network-like connectedness implies links between objects that are ultimately thought of as separate, the topos of entanglement entails a fundamentally different, relational form of (intra)connectedness with other ethical implications. When fctional texts generate connectivity, e.g. by linking storylines that are separated in terms of their geographies, literary studies often habitually refer to these texts as "global novels" or "network narratives".
The implications of these tropes of connectivity themselves - as briefy outlined above - are rarely given much thought; and as labels, they cannot account for more complex and meshwork-like formations. In this talk, I will be thinking about the poetics and aesthetics of entanglement.
Cecilie Klingenberg - 26.02.2021 - 12:21
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Habit: posthuman aesthetics from prehuman physiology
Late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century advances in physiology – in particular the discovery and characterisation of the autonomic nervous system, an adaptive physiological mechanism that carries out life-sustaining functions entirely automatically – led to growing awareness of the central role of automaticity in human survival.
Reflecting this growing awareness, French physiologist Claude Bernard observed that, despite appearing 'free and independent', humans largely rely on automatic processes for their survival, just like their evolutionarily more ancient precursors. Further emphasising Bernard's idea, at the turn of the century American philosopher and psychologist William James estimated that ‘nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of [human] activity is purely automatic and habitual'. These and similar observations suggested that, whilst intuitively appearing defined by individual agency and free deliberate choice, humans are, to a large extent, dependent upon evolutionarily ancient automatic physiological mechanisms.
Cecilie Klingenberg - 26.02.2021 - 12:28
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From the AI Imaginary to Artificial Communication in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora
The AI imaginary as unfolded over half a century of posthuman machine beings foregrounds how scientific modernity has entangled the matter of intelligence with the mediation of technology. AI exhibits this condition explicitly as engineered intelligence instantiated in machines.
Classical versions of the AI imaginary typically bring artificial intelligence forward as higher intelligence, beyond organic contingencies, cosmic rather than terrestrial. In the thrust and escape velocity of such cosmological narratives, the AI imaginary beams outward and away from Earth along expansionist and monolithic lines of evolutionary progressions toward cosmic heights ever receding from its human origins.
Cecilie Klingenberg - 26.02.2021 - 12:41
