Tag: technology

Graduate Course Proposal — Artificial Intelligence: Histories, Media, Imaginaries

Roger WhitsonLeave a comment


This course focuses on the media materialities, social histories, and literary imaginaries informing the rise of artificial intelligence. AI has been implicated in the fall of the University, the destruction of the humanities, the rise of technofascism, and the extinction of the human being. Yet, we’ll see that not only are the arguments surrounding AI not new, but they are also central in the history and discourse of the humanities. This course will sketch a dialectic between human agency and its articulation in a wide variety of posthuman conditions. Karl Marx saw human labor reduced by industrial machinery to being “mere linkages” between technical systems. Mary Shelley asks us what we owe the artificial lives we create. Gilbert Simondon displaces the human entirely in the construction of technology, suggesting an ongoing cybernetic entanglement he called technogenesis. We will look not only at these historical sources, but also contemporary attempts to address AI in the University and its relationship to teaching and politics. Assignments include a significant culminating written or multimodal project or annotated syllabus/lesson plan, leading class two times during the semester, and ongoing participation.

Potential readings taken from the following:

  • Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
  • Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, The Future Eve
  • Nalo Hopkinson, Midnight Robber
  • Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun
  • Issac Asimov, I, Robot
  • Peter Watts, Blindsight
  • Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, End Time Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World
  • Karl Marx, “Fragment on Machines”
  • Megan Ward, Seeming Human: Artificial Intelligence and Victorian Realist Character
  • Tamara Ketabgian, The Lives of the Machines: The Industrial Imaginary in Victorian Literature & Culture
  • Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”
  • Friedrich Kittler, “There is No Software” and “Protective Mode”
  • Jussi Parikka, Operational Images
  • Trevor Paglen, How to See Like a Machine
  • Adrian MacKenzie, Machine Learners: Archaeology of a Data Practice
  • Wolfgang Ernst, “From Media History to Zeitkritik,” “Cultural Archive vs. Technomathematical Storage,” Technologos in Being
  • Leaf Weatherby, Language Machines
  • Günther Anders, The Obsolescence of the Human
  • Gilbert Simondon, On the Existence of Technical Objects
  • Yuk Hui, Kant Machine: Critical Philosophy After AI
  • Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, Code: From Information Theory to French Theory
  • MLA-CCCC Joint Task Force on Writing and AI
  • N. Katherine Hayles, Bacteria to AI: Human Futures with Our Non-Human Symbionts
  • Safiya Noble, Algorithms of Oppression
  • “Where We Are: AI and Writing” (Special Forum), Composition Studies.
  • Matthew Kirschenbaum and Rita Raley, “AI and the University as a Service.”

Proposal for ASAP ’15: Media are Time Machines

Roger WhitsonLeave a comment

In his history of the time-travel genre as a “narratological laboratory,” David Wittenberg curiously argues that H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine articulates time by referencing the cinema: “the mere press of a lever accomplishes the task of advancing, reversing, or modulating temporal movement, as it would, for instance, in a kinetoscope, a protocinematic device with which Wells was very familiar” (86). The parallel between media and time machine is invoked in the field of media archaeology; in particular, Wolfgang Ernst description of time as “a complex layering of presence and past(s), rich forms of temporal articulation [that] can be identified in a chrono-tonal sense,” as a useful alternative to question of whether time is subjective or objective. This presentation will show how Wells’s book develops a machinic form of time travel as a literary device to delineate and juxtapose three different scales of temporality developed in the nineteenth century: the rapid temporality of the film projector, the prescise of the industrial clock, and the longue durée of natural selection. While Wittenberg sees the time-travel genre as hinging on the development of the time paradox, I suggest that the development of time-critical processes in the nineteenth century reveals Wells’s developing sense of temporal mediation as a fundamental topic for science fiction.

For Ernst time-criticality is the delineation and processing of time by media operations. One of his best examples is mechanical escapement in pendulum clocks. While the sundial measures time by the shadow cast from the sun, forming an indexical relation between time and the sun, mechanical escapement processes time as a series of standardized units operating through a mechanical oscillation that does not have an indexical reference other than its own measurement. I suggest that Wells’s book develops time travel as a mechanism to throw into relief the difference between the cultural artifact as enveloped in a history and the operative mechanism processing time. While this dramatization is particularly present in the artifacts the traveler uses to prove that he traveled to the future, a not-so-subtle reference to the surplus value extracted from colonial holdings, it can also be seen in the mechanism itself as engaging in the act of disciplining organisms from vastly different moments in history through a radical form of time synchronization. For me, Wittenberg’s focus on narratology should be supplemented with an account of how media construct various experimental possibilities for narrative. The machinic modulations of time in Wells’s novel provides a powerful example of the entangled relationship between time, media, and narrative. While the extraction, synchronization, and modulation of time alongside their relationship to capitalist extraction will form the central focus of the presentation; it will also show how Wells’s novel anticipates more recent time travel books that are also interested in time-critical mediation, such as William Gibson’s The Peripheral.