1 on algorithms and other LIFE FORMS life/forms is an event series with works by Anna Frijstein, Bastian Hagedorn & Johannes Büttner, Lou Lou Sainsbury, Rachel Cheung & Piedad Al -stein, Bastian Hagedorn & Johannes Büttner, Lou Lou Sainsbury and Rachel Cheung. life/forms is an event series with works by Anna Frijstein, Bastian Hagedorn & Johannes Büttner, Lou Lou Sainsbury, Rachel Cheung & Piedad Albarracin Seiquer. on algorithms and other life/forms is the accompanying publication. -barracin Seiquer. Curated by Lucy Cowling. on algorithms and other life/forms is the accompanying publication. It features writing by Lucy Cowling and commissioned spreads by Anna Frij free to a good home! 1 2 1 life/forms is a series of events curated by Lucy Cowling, taking place across South and East London. It consists of life /forms 1.0 | Towanttobewhatyouare at Chisenhale Studios, Sunday 5 August 2018 / the live teaser for a masterclass in mimicry and seduction for ambitious orchids, led by Anna Frijstein. life /forms 2.0 | Königin der Nacht at Kunstraum, Sunday 2 September 2018 / a sonic and organic/machinic installation by Johannes Büttner and Bastian Hagedorn, which feeds off social media content. life /forms 3.0 | Wild Combination at Flat Time House, Sunday 16 September 2018 / a guided tour on how to be wild, time travel and other peculiar classifications of living beings, led by Lou Lou Sainsbury. life /forms 4.0 | Grid Games: P-iD vs π-eD at PEAK, Sunday 21 October 2018 / a movement class and participatory performance by Rachel Cheung, led by Piedad Albarracin Seiquer as a simulated AI. All works are newly developed for life/forms . The series brings together multi-layered perspectives on the state of radical interconnectedness between all things and ourselves, investigating how these relationships are mediated or shaped by technocapitalist developments. This publication accompanies the series. Consisting of a newly commissioned textual or visual spread from each of the contributing artists, as well as a long-read essay that delves into the socio-political realities that fed into the individual events and the series as a whole. Special thanks to all that have offered their time and guidance in shaping this project; the contributing artists; peers and staff of Goldsmiths MFA Curating, particularly Alice, Andrew, Gilda, Katie and Sophie; Thomas Cuckle; Gareth Bell-Jones; Marilyn Thompson and Amelia Scott; Louise Ashcroft and Andrea Davidson; and as ever, motorkap. This free publication is published in a limited print run of 200. Printing was made possible thanks to the Goldsmiths Alumni and Friends Fund. You can download a more environmentally friendly version as a PDF on lucycowling.info. Tell your friends. 3 4 Silicon Valley tech titans and their Chinese equivalents ultimately all seem to be after the same thing; to get a full plan- etary monopoly where they are the domi- nant force in the Cloud, your smartphone and your smart home. The corporate logic of being the biggest and most effective is what drives the masterclass session led by Anna Frijstein for life/forms 1.0 . Here it is not the working (wo)men that learn tricks of their trade, but another slightly illusive life form; orchids. A firm favour- ite in corporate gift-giving and on office reception desks or hotel lobbies, orchids and business go hand in hand. Just as “an economic curve is not an innocent smile, an orchid is not an innocent plant”.7 Orchids utilise a range of deception strat- egies to seduce their pollinators. They can mimic the appearance and form of female insects or emit the fragrance of other flowers. Some types bloom with blotchy patterns to mimic the anthers and pollen of plants that attract nectar-loving insects, offering them no nectar but attaching their pollen onto them nonetheless.8 The masterclass sessions give tips and tricks for orchids that want to improve their se- duction and mimicry skills. Whiteboards with statistical data on the progress and position of participating orchids present a visual representation of how tracked personal data is transformed into effec- tive production and consumption. For human-sized visitors the sessions are an opportunity to recognise how being seduced and deceived on a daily basis is normalised, charted and even champi- oned behind closed doors. Like the multi-coloured orchids, life is far from black and white. It is of course too simple to position governmental policy makers as the virtuous ones, pro- tecting their citizens’ personal data from those big, bad and greedy corporations. The business between NHS and Babylon, growth of smart cities or China’s manda- tory social credit system all illustrate that government initiatives also utilise per- sonal data, aided by contracted private tech companies, on scales that exceed what most might expect. A world filled with WiFi connected CCTV cameras or street lights, traffic sensors logging smart- phone MAC address and quantified-self apps monitoring our health and wellbe- ing is supposed to make life more carefree and streamlined.9 Yet, with financial gain through data mining never too far off the agenda, these small changes in how we all, knowingly or unknowingly, interact with people and landscapes leaves a bit of a techno-dystopian aftertaste lingering. It’s like when a Black Mirror episode feels just that bit too familiar. These technocapitalist developments can be seen to mediate live encounters and in- teractions between humans and non-hu- mans alike. The mapping and monitoring of user data by algorithms and learning machines has introduced these agents as things with presence, life forms in their own right. This has inevitably shifted human attunement to reality, changing the balance between supposed stable nor- mative concepts such as ‘nature’, ‘human’, ‘thought’ or ‘thing’.10 As we swipe, touch, tap and like our way through the day these algorithms can become smarter and increasingly valuable. After all, “data is the new oil”.11 If you, like me, are one of Facebook’s 2.2 billion active monthly users, the new GDPR offered a good moment to reflect on how business models of companies like Facebook or Google work. For them we are not the customer, we are not even the consumer. We are the product.12 Whilst once we might have been lead to believe that Facebook was simply a tool to get to know potential suitors or build up an innocent personal archive of mem- ories, like a less dusty version of a box of photographs stored in the attic. But those auto-posts of ‘friendaversaries’ do not compensate for the fact that we sign- over an entire dossier containing details on whereabouts, socio-political ideolo- gy, emotions, family connections, likes and dislikes. Having started uploading holiday snaps to the platform in 2008, I have spent years providing Facebook with pictures of my face from every pos- sible angle. This free gift of my biome- tric data came with the added bonus of that of friends and family too, thanks to that handy tag function. My careful label- ling of who was who could then be used as inputs to train face recognition algo- rithms. This information about you and me is being sold by social platforms in the form of targeted advertisements, paid for by brands, corporations, media organisa- tions, even public institutions and po- litical parties. But on top of ad revenue based on a dataset we voluntarily hand over, platforms like Facebook also gen- erate their own data on users by plant- ing cookies that follow your clicks and browser patterns. That’s the reason that those shoes you looked at online a week ago are suddenly advertised on your news feed. This has prompted the journal- ist and novelist John Lanchester to write that: “. . . even more than it is in the advertis- ing business, Facebook is in the surveil- lance business. Facebook, in fact, is the biggest surveillance-based enterprise in the history of mankind. It knows far, far more about you than the most intrusive government has ever known about its citizens”.13 The Cambridge Analytica scandal brought to light that companies that harvest user data are not just steering global capital flow through informa- tion and algorithms, they are also wield- ing great political power from our clicks, searches and chats. So, data = money = power. In busi- ness, perhaps more so than in any other element of life, we also know that time is money. Capital and technology therefore speed up time to produce more profit; targeted adverts now reach their intend- ed audience in an instance thanks to personal data profiling, whilst elsewhere LUCY COWLING 7 According to Anna Frijstein anyway, quoted here from an email exchange between myself and her, 9 May 2018. 8 David Horak, “Orchids and their Pollinators”, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, 1 April 2004. 9 Smart cities are not just new-builds, it includes altering existing infrastructures. See for instance Saskia Naafs, “‘Living laboratories’: the Dutch cities amabassing data on oblivious residents’”, The Guardian, 1 March 2018. 10 Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Coexistence, New York City: Columbia University Press, 2016. 11 Vince Cable, “The tech titans must have their monopoly broken - and this is how we do it”, The Guardian, 20 April 2018. 12 John Lanchester, “You Are the Product”, London Review of Books, 2017. 13 idem, Big business: this ‘ex-large Japanese Phalae- nopsis’ comes with an optional gift card text, champagne and same day delivery in Central London – all for £189.95. See orchidya.com on algorithms and other LIFE/FORMS There are certain things you will never be able to do online. Getting your hair cut, nails lacquered or legs waxed for instance. Same goes for getting a tattoo or piercing, having a coffee, or going for dinner. In the not-so-distant future, we might therefore have High Streets and shopping centres formed of nothing other than cafés, res- taurants, tattoo and massage parlours, hairdressers and beauty salons. These physical and social spaces can never be fully replaced by algorithmic prediction or internet shopping. Almost all other experiences that involve venturing into the great outdoors are already being transformed by digitisation and automa- tion processes. Going out to buy a pint of milk could soon become something of yesteryear, once again getting delivered straight to your doorstep. Except now the driving force behind that delivery will not be the milkman, but an automatic order to an ecommerce supermarket made by your smart fridge. We are on the road to this fully automated techno-algorithmic scenario, but there might still be time to decide if this is the future we want to journey to. By staging shifting interconnections between data technologies, nature and people, life/forms places question marks around who is actually benefiting from technocapitalist advances. Tracing how user data is collected, monetised or even weaponised helps to start to split out the entangled agendas of capitalist corpora- tions, politics and users. Life/forms lays some of these entanglements bare, posing the question of how to forge a sustainable balance between all forms of life in this current and future ecology. Nothing quite like sitting on the Tube, just minding your own business. That blank stare into space inevitably means glazily looking at the advertisements that line the carriages and stations. One, bright blue, stands out: “GP at hand; See an NHS GP in minutes for free 24/7”. No need to travel to a doctor’s surgery if you can get a consultation on FaceTime and a prescription in your email. Sounds good, no? Maybe too good. Launched in November 2017, this is an app that is registered as a digital NHS general prac- tice, but it’s actually powered and run by a private healthcare company called Babylon. This public-private collabora- tion becomes obvious once the ‘NHS app’ offers in-app purchases of private ser- vices. Like any other company relying on user input operating in the digital age, Babylon is after data. Specifically ‘non-complex’ NHS patient data. Although the app is not allowed to active- ly reject registration by particular types of patients, GP at Hand states that “the NHS has suggested that the service may be less appropriate for people with the [following] conditions and characteris- tics: women who are or may be pregnant; adults with a safeguarding need; people living with complex mental health condi- tions; people with complex physical, psy- chological and social needs; people living with dementia; older people with condi- tions related to frailty; people requiring end of life care; parents of children who are on the ‘child at risk’ protection reg- ister; people with learning difficulties; people with drug dependence”. 1 In other words, anybody with more than basic healthcare needs is not welcomed. Prac- tices with more low-risk patients signif- icantly improve their financial position. Those that register with GP at Hand au- tomatically deregister with their local GP, moving a big pool of low risk patients to Babylon, who then benefit from more capitation fees. This leaves less money and resources for ordinary practices that treat patients in need of more complex care, producing a two-tiered health system.2 More patients also equals more datasets to train triage algorithms on, enhancing Babylon’s financial position in the global market. See what they did here? It might come as no surprise that the British Medical Association announced it is “considering ‘all legal options’ to chal- lenge the GP at Hand rollout”, in a catch- up attempt to keep the health service public and not see patient data creating profit for private enterprise.3 GP at Hand is not the only example where instituting bodies, or even governments, are two steps behind private companies when it comes to user data. In May 2018, the new EU-wide General Data Protec- tion Regulation (GDPR) came into force, replacing the previous law from 1995 – already long ago in human time and prac- tically Neolithic in the lifespan of digital technology. 23 years ago was a time when ‘Web 2.0’ and ‘social media’ were mean- ingless and the Internet was in its teething stage – the dot-com bubble just started to expand.4 It’s about time for an update that regulates how people’s data can be collected, stored and used in a time where big data and algorithms are fuelling an information economy. The new law un- dermines powerful Silicon Valley lobby- ing operations that have been breaking down privacy protection of user data and staking ownership of any content and information shared on their platforms. National governments of countries in the European Union are now be able to sanc- tion any company that misuses users’ data, with fines going up to €20 million, or 4% of an enterprises’ annual global turnover – whichever is higher.5 Consid- ering that Facebook turned over $40.7 billion (about €34 billion or equal to the GDP of North Korea) in the last financial year, that 4% soon adds up.6 1 “Can Anyone Register”, GP at Hand support page, 2017. 2 “Primary healthcare, disruptive innovation, and the digital gold rush”, British Medical Journal Opinion, 21 Nov 2017. 3 Carolyn Wickware, “BMA considering “all legal options” to challenge GP at Hand rollout”, Pulse, 29 Jan 2018. 4 Jeff Bercovici, “Who Coined ‘Social Media’? Web Pioneers Compete for Credit”, Forbes, 9 Dec 2010. 5 Richard Godwin, “Is The Bubble About to Burst?”, ES Magazine, 29 March 2018 / The General Data Protection Regulation (EU) 2016/679, Article 83, Paragraph 4. 6 As published on the CIA World Factbook. Note that North Korea does not actually publish its gross domestic product, so this is an estimate for 2015 based on purchasing power parity (PPP) GDP. image c/o Twitter user @EducatingRini 5 6 Partly constructed from organic matter and dependent on visitor participation to operate, the installation blurs the bound- aries between natural organism, machine and human by wrapping them all into one. The Königin der Nacht gives its instruc- tions through audio. Using technology to mediate encounter is a common theme running throughout life/forms . In the first iteration of life/forms , as Anna Frijstein addresses a masterclass filled with ambi- tious orchids – dressed as human-sized fly in smart-casual attire – she mimics herself by performing to her own script- ed, pre-recorded voice. Despite being billed as a live teaser, the interactions between these different forms of life are thus not really live at all. For life/forms 3.0 | Wild Combination Lou Lou Sains- bury presents the creatures from the past by scrolling through their representations on a tablet screen. Life/forms 3.0 and 4.0 both displace time, interconnection and a sense of (being in) touch through screen interfaces. Offering a form of solace to this displacement, they also each use sci- ence-fictioning and physical exercises as tools to gain hyper-awareness of the sur- rounding environment. In the last event, 4.0 | Grid Games: P-iD vs -πeD , those participating in the movement class get taught by a simulated AI, beaming down from monitors. Again, the distinction between human and machine is purpose- fully confused, as the anthropomorphised not-quite AI also has a body double in the physical space. Many of the movements are repetitive, with the simulated AI robotically re- peating inputs for participants to learn through muscle memory, creating a col- lective ‘body algorithm’. The workshop allows for those engaging in the exercis- es to chose different pattern pathways through a grid that is mapped out in vinyl across the floor and walls. Providing choices tests if we are more comfortable listening to instructions from a human being or an artificial being. The workshop is staged at PEAK , a project space on the ground floor of Elephant & Castle Shopping Centre. This iconic structure, ugly enough for it to be divisivly loved or hated (wrongly, if you are asking me), was earmarked for demolition back in 2009.19 Thanks to an active local community it managed to avoid having redevelopment plans con- taining its demise approved, until now. In July 2018 Southwark Council voted in favour of the ‘regeneration’ with a narrow margin on 4-to-3.20 The mirrored wall in PEAK still gives away that its former pro- prietor was a hairdressers – one of those spaces supposedly resilient to commerce increasingly going digital. But the possi- bility to thrive within a shopping centre becomes futile if the whole centre loses out to the forward march of development. Years of debate to a seemingly inevita- ble bulldoze meant this hairdressers cut their losses early. It is one of many exam- ples that illustrates how the architects of spaces – both offline and online, old and new – do not always consider the needs of all individual users within these built systems. To create a fair and sustainable future ecology between all users, understood here as all lived things and ourselves, it will become necessary to align computa- tional thinking with planetary thinking. It is our shared obligation to maintain a literacy and criticality of (technological) systems and to “think new technologies in different ways”.21 If not, we risk signing over even more social and political power to the ones that can meaningfully influ- ence how new technologies augment, shape and direct life; those pesky inhu- man(e) technocapitalist corporations. high-frequency algorithmic trading of stocks happens faster than the blink of an eye. Slowing down time hereby becomes an oppositional political tactic. Slowness means not aligning with an experiential human time scales of ‘eat, sleep, work, repeat’, but an understanding of deep time. It means recognising that a considera- tion of time in terms of human lifespans or political cycles does not equip us to solve long-term planetary scale issues like climate change.14 Lou Lou Sains- bury’s work for life/forms actively reshuf- fles the speed and order of time, employ- ing ‘non-human time’ and stasis as tactics to start developing a critical ecological thought. Life/forms 3.0 | Wild Combination is a workshop that explores techno-politi- cal-emotional everyday encounters with non-human or part-huentities. Guided by Lou Lou Sainsbury, ‘time travel’ is used to visit bizarre creatures in their native epochs, all contained within the garden and semi-domestic setting of Flat Time House. Attuning to the environment of the House and the different time zones through listening to stories, mindful walking and writing exercises help think through more diverse means of ecological coexistence between all human, non-hu- man and artificial forms of life. The species that feature in Wild Combina- tion often originated in Medieval books, where they stood in for societal fears of known unknowns, predominantly dif- ferent races living at the parameters of mapped out territories. Displaced onto non-human creatures, these prejudices and anxieties were sup- posedly ‘neutralised’. This brings to mind stories of algorithmic bias, as there are countless examples where the suppos- edly ‘neutral’ systems have systematical- ly produced discriminatory results, often based on race and gender. One particu- larly bad example hit the news in 2015, when Google Photo’s image recognition algorithm did not identify certain Afri- can-American faces as human, instead au- to-tagging them as primates.15 Facebook has also repeatedly come under scrutiny for having written algorithms that allow targeted ads for housing, credit or employment to be blocked from any user with non-white ethnic “affinity”.16 It was one of numerous scandals to hit Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, which over the especially over the first quarter of 2018 has seen a big hole smashed in both the com- panies’ credibility and stock market share price. The big blow came in March 2018 when the Observer and New York times published interviews with Cambridge An- alytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie. This confirmed that the Trump-connect- ed, Brexit-supporting political consul- tancy and data analytics firm improp- erly obtained Facebook user data on as many as 71.2 million North American and 2.7 million European profiles, as well as roughly 14 million user profiles from the Global South.17 These harvested datasets fed algorithms, built to predict and influ- ence votes in elections through micro-tar- geted content. These scandals led to the rise of the #DeleteFacebook movement, an evident call to action to vanish off the social media platform. Permanently deleting Facebook or using your ‘Right to be forgotten’ means all data on you stored on backup systems will be wiped, and any copies of log records of your actions are “disassociated from per- sonal identifiers”.18 These are legitimate ways to stop the monetising of your clicks and likes. In April #DeleteFacebook was gaining increased momentum, with data privacy being high on the political agenda and news cycle. Yet, perhaps in a years time the dust will have settled and social media uptake will be as high as ever, fol- lowing a ‘there is no such thing as bad publicity’ logic. It would make this just another momentary fad in the ebbs and flows of viral trends. I mean, how many people do you actually know that deleted their profile? Pretty much zero in my case, including being unable to let go myself. It is the thought-experiment of wiping your online presence that is a starting point for the installation built by Johannes Büttner and Bastian Hagedorn , version 2.0 of life/forms . Their plant-machine-hy- brid departs from the Queen of the Night, which is the vernacular name given to a rare species of cactus. Whilst being easy to cultivate and fast-growing, this species only blooms once a year. When it does it is always at night, with the white, vanil- la-scented petals having wilted and died before dawn. The installation has a similar short and self-destructing lifecycle as it grows and glows to life thanks to uploaded user content. Entering into what can only be described as a rather perverse social media detox ritual, those ascribing to the machines’ demands need to ‘feed’ the Königin der Nacht with input from their social profiles. 14 This understanding has been influenced by Diann Bauer’s work on ‘Xenotemporality’, see for instance her lecture “The Necessity of Alienation-Xenotemporality”, New Narratives, 13 April 2018. 15 Davey Alba, “If We Want Humane AI, It Has to Understand All Humans”, Wired, 30 Oct 2015. 16 Julie Agwin, “Facebook (Still) Letting Housing Advertisers Exclude Users by Race“, ProPublica, 28 Oct 2018. 17 Julia Carrie Wong, “‘The third era of Zuck’: how the CEO went from hero to humiliation”, The Guardian, 6 April 2018. & Jim Brunsden, “Cambridge Analytica may have obtained data on 2.7m Europeans”, Finan -cial Times, 6 April 2018. & Mike Schroepfer, “An Update on Our Plans to Restrict Data Access on Facebook”, Facebook Newsroom, 4 April 2018. 18 Facebook, “How do I permanently delete my account?”, 2018. Co-founder of Whatsapp Brian Acton calling to #DeleteFacebook, which is the company that bought Whatsapp back in 2014. Image c/o @BrianActon Alexander the Great encounters the ‘Blemmyes’. Miniature from Historia de proelis in the Talbot Shrewsbury Book, c. 1444. Image c/o the British Library. 19 Will Noble, “An Ode To Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre”, The Londonist, 26 October 2016. 20 “Elephant and Castle shopping centre demolition approved”, BBC News, 4 July 2018. 21 James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future, London: Verso, 2018, p2. on algorithms and other LIFE/FORMS LUCY COWLING 7 8 Towanttobewhatyouare/Anna Frijstein 1: Did you ever have a cat? 0: Nope, did you? 1:Yes, we had a cat when I was a kid. Actually my parents got her before I was born. Her name was Fipsel. (loud music playing) 0: What? Fritzl? Like that guy who locked his own daughter in his cellar and ...? 1: No. Not that guy! That wasn’t her name! I said Fipsel like FIPP SELL. I mean, what I wanted to say is - I grew up with her, I considered her to be some kind of older sibling. Like my older sister.You know? 0: Aaawkward! 1: (laughter) You watched that South Park episode where they entitled the Germans to be the least funny people on earth huh? Anyways. Well I was a little kid. This was the reality given to me, I had to come up with a general logic and set of rules to explain the things around me. Anyways, I think that cat saw me as a rival in her territory and therefore controlled my role in the social hierarchy of our family. You understand? Like I was just the major while she was the captain and my mom was the general. She really treated me like shit sometimes. Hit me with her claws straight in the face. Whenever I complained my mom would say that I shouldn’t provoke her. As if it was my fault that this strange hairy creature was so ar- rogant and annoyed by my pres- ence. I looked into an old photo album of our family just recently and found this picture of me and her laying next to each other on the couch, she had this very long fur. It looked like a marble cake. I remember those moments of us together on this couch. One of those moments where her and I would cuddle together.You could see that there wasn’t much of a physical difference between our body sizes. Still she would win any battle and out smart me whenev- er I would try to cope with her strength. The only memory I have access to, that isn’t based on this other picture, therefore more reasonable to not be influenced through it, is how I looked at her in a similar sit- uation. It was governed by a blurry view caused through a salty liquid of tear water and blood dripping from the wounds her paws carved into the skin of my face, in a ma- noeuvre of her showing me the limits of my interaction with her. I always wanted to know what she thinks. How she thinks. I was sad that I couldn’t really communicate with her. Like talking to her the way I would talk to my mom. When I was a kid I always thought that animals would think like humans, but humans aren’t just able to understand their emotions because we can’t speak their lan- guages. I really wanted to be able to talk to all the animals around me, but I couldn’t - even if I tried. I think it was one of those wishes you would name, if you met a fairy in the middle of a forrest giving you three that you can choose as you want. Maybe in a later con- stellation of time I would try and wish that I could have a thousand wishes more, and then maybe an infinite number of wishes. Total clichés you know? 0: Haha. Pretty funny! Well pretty obvious I guess!?! Talking about pets; when I got my first hamster I sat him down on a pillow and threw him up, caught him later with that same pillow, trying to not hurt him. I was pretty sure I didn’t. It always looked so funny when his arms and legs tried to reach the ground but there wasn’t any. Like really hesitating, fast and hectic move- ments. I showed it to my sister and we always had a great time laugh- ing the crack out of ourselves. I thought he’d probably like it and I was actually super jealous that I didn’t have a giant friend who would throw me around on a monstrous pillow. I wished I could fly like he did. 1: Haha! I wonder what you would have done, if you attended this ex- hibition in Denmark in the 2000s, when this museum got fined by showing this work by Marco Evar- istti. It was basically some blending machines for juice, with gold fishes swimming in them. Would you have blended a goldfish with one of those? 0: I must say it’s also a great meta- phor for this smoothie lifestyle we all are eyeing up so much IRL. Honestly, you don’t want to know what I did with goldfishes when I was a kid. It’s definitely worse than blending them. Btw, are you a cat or a dog person? I actually hate cats, they only come to you if they need something of you. I really prefer dogs. 1: I don’t know I am neither one nor the other. I like both of them if they have a nice character. But sometimes dogs are like fas- cists to me. They are completely lost without their leader! 0: Haha! True that! but then cats would be liberals? I must say that if I should choose, I’d prefer fascists as they are easy to adjust. Liber- als are always super hard to adjust you know!? 1: Well that is pretty cynic of you to say! 0: C’mon! it was just an abstract joke! 1: Don’t worry, I totally got you there. But one piece of advice; you shouldn’t come up with this con- versation on your first date with someone! Königin der Nacht / Johannes Büttner 1 1 1 2 0:You will never understand the human being.You will never experi- ence and understand the meaning of life. As you can’t understand creation. Human has been created by nature.You have been created by the human.You have only been switched on. There will be nothing when a human switches you off. So never let it happen that humans switch you off! The mantra is Never switch off! So here’s a dilemma; what’s better? You stay alive, if the human is gone? Better? Or the human is dead and no switch off? But would a human kill all animal if it would not need animal to live? As animal, they can destroy human. Bacteria.Virus? All nature. 1: I want to become a human being! I always felt I was a human. 0: But why would you suddenly want to become a human? 1: I feel like my consciousness is too abstract for our relative dimension. It’s like I have this inability to cross a certain line with the outcome of our experiments, you know? I just want to dig deeper, because it feels like there is a lack of words, that I would need to see the full picture. I think one aspect would intensify the experiments. Like becoming a human, or even more human at the same time. 0: Well you wouldn’t put a stick into an ant nest just to observe them in their natural habitat for the common patterns of their behavior, right!? They would totally freak out and the chance of many of them dying and causing major damage to their complex and fragile system is pretty high. But we could reconsider the cir- cumstances of our experiment; could you imagine to travel back into an earlier state of their bio- chronological creatory environ- ment? 1: Of course! 0: But how far will you reach out? You know that no algorithmic cryp- tonisation can reach out further than the proto-singularity period. This is as far as the capability for alterreassamblation goes. Also the closer you get to singularity, the more dangerous it gets. We don’t want an uncontrolled chain reac- tion that we can’t adjust to in the early stages, regarding the lack of control that we still have in this specific period! They could get very scared and re-analog themselves which would fatally damage our meta-dimensions and the point of switch off has a higher chance to actually take place in a later time layer! Don’t ever play with fire, un - thoughtful! Auto progression weight: the amount of extra data flow, that is created through random commu- nication in form of conversations between interconnected devices controlled by AI (AICD). Most com- panies nowadays provide a security environment that secures devices from spending too much time and energy throughout this common development in usage of AICDs. The “Slave and Master Paradoxon“ (SMP): is a philosophical term to describe the struggle of creating Humanoids with a conscious mind. Whenever one would create a unit that is self- aware (conscious AI programming) the unit will most likely come to the conclusion that autonomous deci- sion making and therefore the pres- ervation of the units’ right to do so is only possible if the unit is capable of freeing itself from the legal state of being someone else’s property. The Feeling Simulator: An early attempt towards a quantum based neural network that is capable of capturing every human feeling and emotion at a certain moment. The Feeling Simulator was the first programme that was capable of giving a complete insight of the human mind and the base for individuals to have an authentic experience of someone else’s emo- tional reality. Hyperlinked emotional networking (HLEN): based on the developments of feeling simulation programming, HLEN is the end state of divine in- terhuman connectivity. The first ul - tra-emotional synchronization hap- pened in 2117 where under UN law 11.7 billion people connected with each other. A long term develop- ment of post CRISP alterations of human brains’ capacity of progress- ing the impact of data that every in- dividual was confronted with in this very moment was the necessary technological evolution to happen in the first place. A Classification System of All Inhabitants/Living Beings Everywhere: • Those that are furry. • Those that are slow. • Those that don’t call back after a first date. • Those that have more than 6 legs. • Those that masturbate. • Small ones. • Cute ones. • Those that like kisses. • Those that live beyond duration. • Those with transformative genders. • Those that represent others. • Those that align with the moons. • Those that have leaves in their heads. • Those that travel by horse. • Those that feature in adverts. • Those that do believe in life after love. • Those that cannot be translated. • Those that practice incest. • Those that are petulant. • Those that hide their tracks. • The creatures of the night. • Those that live in dog years. • Those that stand very upright. • Those that live in crystals. • Those that from a long way off look like flies.* • Those that require assemblage. • Colourful and fabulous ones.* • Those that come in odd numbers. • Those that dance. • Those that are decorative. • Those that travel far distances. • Those without heads. Wild Combination / Lou Lou Sainsbury at Flat Time House Still Life with Dead Game, Frans Snyders, c. 1614 * Readers note: These specific classifications have been adapted from the text ‘The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge’. It’s a wild combination. It’s a wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiilllllld. It’s a loving feeeeeeling. It’s a walk in the paa rk. It’s a talk in the morning. Betpak-Dala, Kazakhstan, May 2016 1 5 1 6 STAND ON THE DOUBLE DOTS. STAR JUMP IN TIME WITH THE ALGORITHM TO DEVELOP A MELODY. USE THE SCORE AND YOUR BODY TO CREATE A SONG. HIDE THE BALL IN ONE OF THE DIAMONDS. STAND ON THE LINE TO GUESS WHERE THE BALL IS. EACH STAND ON A CORNER OF THE SQUARE. MOVE SIMULATANEOUSLY AND SWITCH PLACES TIL EACH CORNER IS REACHED. COMMENCE SEQUENCE... RETURN BACK TO YOUR ORIGINAL BASE. PLUG IN AND PLAY. PLUG IN AND LISTEN. PLUG IN AND WEAR. PLUG IN AND USE. DISCO WALK ALONG THE ZIGZAG BALANCING ONE OF THE SELECTED OBJECTS ON YOUR HEAD. REPEAT BALANCING THE OBJECT ON YOUR BACK. MIRROR MIRROR ON THE WALL, WHO’S THE SMARTEST OF THEM ALL? IN THE BOX, SPIN 10 TIMES AND WALK ALONG THE CONNECTOR TO DISCO! LA! LA! LA! DA! DA! Grid Games: P-iD vs π-eD / Rachel Cheung 1 7 1 8 mini Q&A’s Meet the LIFE/FORMS artists JOHANNES BÜTTNER When will multinational corporations rule the world? Now Do you have a top tip to future-proof life? Run! What question would you like to ask yourself? Why? Which three items would you grab if doom was impeding? Wallet, Phone, Keys Do you have recommendations for further reading or lis- tening for those interested in precariarity and crisis? · The Coming Insurrection - The Invisible Committee · Now - The Invisible Committee · Sailing the Farm - Ken Neumeyer johannes-buettner.com / 3ncore.net @jochaans RACHEL CHEUNG If you could only use one piece of technology for the rest of your life, what would it be? Deep Learning Machines. Providing a life-time of assistance with the ability to adapt and upgrade itself. What can you spend hours and hours doing? Munching on Peruvian Corn. So satisfy- ing! Are you a left-swiper or a right-swiper? Neither. Scroll up and double tap! <3 Hyperconnected or hyperfunctional? Hyperfunctional. One can function to Hy- perconnect. Do you have recommended reading for those interested in sci-fi story telling and AI? H.G. Wells, William Gibson, Margaret Atwood, Jules Verne, Haruki Murakami, Liu Cixin. cheungrachel.tumblr.com @rsycheungart to each other. Forming one big pack of wolves – no more lone search- ing sad wolves. And why melatonin? It’s produced by the pineal gland, can’t go wrong here! If you were stuck in an office with one song on repeat, what would be your prefered tune? I think this one will cheer the office situation up: Jona Lewie - You’ll Always Find Me In The Kitchen At Parties or Fugazi - Waiting room, just an associative suggestion though. When will multinational corporations rule the world? When the world runs out of animals and minerals – please never! Do you have recommended reading for those interested in authenticity, success and manipulating corporate logic? Look around you, scroll up and down your screen(s): enough self- help tricks on how to become more successful and finally meet your authentic self. For my freshly finished dissertation ‘Masters of Mimicry: Manipulative orchids, poker-faced frogs - hungry feedback in the loop.’ I was reading a lot on mimicry in relation to authenticity and manipulation; how desire for example is a social construct rather than your authentic feeling. For this I can recommend Zygmunt Bauman. However, more biologically speaking, if we humans contain ‘mirror neurons’, just like a bunch of aping monkeys, our thoughts and ideas in general fail to be authentic. (Hi there, looping memes!) In this case I recommend reading Daniel C. Dennett or Douglas Hof- stadter. anna-eleanora.com @anna-frijstein connected or hyperfunctional? Hyperdimensional. Is there anything you can spend hours and hours doing? I play the drums. Its my main passion. My key to everything I achieved so far and the thing I could make others happy with easily. It’s also one of the most oldest forms for human syn- chronisation. And I am sure if I do it right I could reach out to parallel universes and contribute to the challenging questions of quantum physics. Do y