In a recent short story/essay, Anarchic Artificial Intelligence, Louis Chude-Sokei considers the role of memory and history in formulating conceptions of futurity. Through the lens of emerging artificial intelligence (AI), Chude-Sokei illustrates how representations of potential futures remain tethered to our interactions with the past, retaining the power to reproduce and reinforce existing inequalities and power structures. In previous work, Chude-Sokei has drawn on depictions of robots and automata in cultural works to illustrate the gendered and racialized understandings of artificial life within Western conceptions of modernity. Using Caribbean sound cultures as a central reference, he charts the complex inter-relationship between machinic innovation and human power relations, illuminating porous borders between the human and non/in-human. Cultural production, and more specifically the production of sound, is centred as a vital (but not exclusive) sign of both humanity and intelligence. “They communicated in codes so powerful that their masters heard something like intelligence in the music they made” (Chude-Sokei n.pag.).
View More Archived Futures: Digging In The Crates Of AlwaysAuthor: Gary Charles
Gary Charles is an interdisciplinary researcher and artist, working across sound, moving image, installation, and conceptual practice. Gary also releases music under a number of monikers, including releases on High Strung Young and Flash Recordings as The Static Hand, and improvised electronics as part of improvisation collective, The Cosmic Asunder. His current research looks at the emergence of Artificial Intelligence approaches in cultural production, particularly in relation to creativity within contemporary art and music cultures. Through both research and practice, his focus is on uncovering the assumptions, misdirections and biases embedded in the models, as well as the protocols that underpin them. Gary is currently a PhD candidate at University of Birmingham, and teaches Synthesis, Audio and Cultural Theory at the British and Irish Modern Music Institute (BIMM).