Performative lecture @ Any / One Day the Future Has Died. Impossible Possibilities of Artificial Intelligence

"In the age of Artificial Intelligence, on any given day, at some point most definitely, the Future has died.

The Future, with capital F, seems to be perfectly synchronized, in line and aligned with the global mode of technological production. In this kind of Future in a hyper networked and digitized society, we witness new modes of extraction, monopolizations, surveillance; new types of environmental harm and damages as well as new codes of discriminations and exclusions which bring more climate change-induced provincialization, more competition and individualism. Not only does this model of Future not provide enough space for the many(-folded), its pretension lies in the misreading of the concept itself. Because in contrast to its usual connotation, the Future does not necessarily and always indicate a tomorrow or far away. But, as Michelle M. Wright and Rasheedah Phillips brilliantly show in their works, it is about a radical re-thinking of time and experiencing of temporalities that gives way to a broader and better understanding of stories, past and present, of todays, of tomorrows, of in-betweens (Fred Moten).

futures – without capital F and in their plural form – always also happen now.

With the Impossible Possibilities we think AI with Kara Keeling. We are concerned with the presence of AI, with what goes beyond its expression and produces a surplus that cannot be seen or understood, but is nevertheless present: "Whatever escapes recognition, whatever escapes meaning and valuation, exists as an impossible possibility within our shared reality, however one describes that reality, and therefore threatens to unsettle, if not destroy, the common sense on which that reality relies for its coherence." (2019: 83). What is impossible to recognize is the possibility of AI. For what defies re-cognition exists in a world that is real but not fed into the normative discourse of AI as predictive computation. With this conference, we turn our attention to paradox as a condition of existence that has the potential to shake the common sense of AI.

Impossible Possibilities does not stand for exposing the binary in the conundrum but stands for an invitation for exploring such a  paradox productively."

Full programme and info: https://www.hgb-leipzig.de/hochschule/kalender/1518

Preliminary program (Register: any_one@hgb-leipzig.de).

Please keep Crashing (Workshop Documentation)

With students of Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig
Organized by the Academy for Transcultural Exchange (AtA), facilitated by Anja Kaiser and Melina Weissenborn

[our panel:]

Sedimented Temporalities of Geodigital Landscapes (Panel)
With The Underground Division (Jara Rocha and Femke Snelting) and Orit Halpern
Moderation: Katrin Köppert