Machine Patterning and Alien Imagination: Guest Lecture and Workshop with Dr. Luciana Parisi

Dr. Luciana Parisi (Goldsmiths, University of London) holds a workshop and presents a lecture on the topic of machinic thinking and imagination as part of the lecture series New Developments in Theory.

Guest Lecture: Machine Patterning and Alien Imagination

6–8 pm, Grosser Hörsaal, Department of English, Nadelberg 6, Basel

If the image of the future has already been colonized by the inevitability of a planetary automation or by the Singularity, is it at all possible to re-introduce alienness in the current figuration of a master pattern that knows it all? As neural nets experiment with predictive learning, they also evolve machine percepts and concepts. These are not of an optical nature, but are exclusively algorithmic. The growth of the network, however, is never given, but is conditioned by the indeterminacy of trial and error in the effort to predict what has not yet been programmed – known or thought – from within the system. This dynamic mode of machine learning algorithms can be taken as a starting point to defy the transcendental schema of neural networks. The neural schema of machine vision algorithms can be  re-articulated in terms of a transcendental imagination that challenges from within the cybernetic model of a servo-mechanic, mindless system of decision making. The talk will address the consequences of machine imagination for a re-theorization of the instrumental vision of technology. 

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Workshop: Machine Imagination

9.30 am–1pm, 4–6 pm, Room 13, Department of English, Nadelberg 6, Basel

The first part of this workshop led by Dr. Parisi serves as a forum to discuss her recent interventions in the philosophy and theory of computation, with a particular emphasis on the challenges to and mutations of epistemology in relation to machine thinking. In order to facilitate discussion, participants will read a recent and a forthcoming article on the topic prior to the meeting.
The second part of the workshop is dedicated to the participants’ research projects: participants will have the opportunity briefly to introduce their current research project in order to receive feedback from both Dr. Parisi and their peers.

To register for this workshop, please send an e-mail to ridvan.askin@clutterunibas.ch. Places will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.  

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Luciana Parisi researches the philosophical consequences of technology in culture, aesthetics and politics. She is a Reader in Critical and Cultural Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London and co-director of the Digital Culture Unit. She is the author of Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire (2004, Continuum Press) and Contagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics and Space (2013, MIT Press). Currently, she is writing on the history of automated reason and the transformation of logical thinking in machines. 

Visit the web page of the New Developments in Theory lecture series.

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