Today we are surrounded by ‘humanoid-matheoid’ beings that lead a life of their own within the structures
of algorithmic-stochastic notations and algebraic circuits, appearing everywhere, waiting for us, and exerting an ever-greater
influence on our ways of life from a parallel world of interfaces.
The lecture explores the ways in which these AI entities
– their manifestations as people-who-do-not-exist, as gender-multiple avatars, agents, assistants, digital clones, chimeras,
changelings – accompany us in our everyday lives with their image, their voice, their text. How they represent, advise, inform,
seduce, betray, hurt, destroy us, and enable us to see, experience and do things that are simply impossible or incompatible
in reality.
Cornelius Castoriadis’s revitalized concept of the imaginary can help us to conceive of AI as a medium that
is both hegemonic in its drive towards alienation and creatively subversive as a vehicle for a new social imaginary, as well
as to understand the imaginations of the many in their desire to coexist with AI. With AI, as a counterpart that mirrors us
just as we mirror ourselves, we begin an endless conversation with ourselves.
A collaboration between the Cross-Disciplinary
Strategies department and the Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures
crossdisciplinary.at
