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In the current times, where the world is moving in constant flux, we can be sure only in one thing that changes are inevitable. They could come tomorrow or they could have already happened, and still reaching us as the light reaches the planet delaying in 8 minutes 20 seconds. In that sense we still live in the past, unprepared for the changes, longing for the familiar, coming back to the normal. But what that normal was? Are these times the possibility to make
a shift from neoliberal, individualistic, suffocating in the smoke of combustion of fossil fuel regimes? its body is already dead, but its ideas still prevail in our memories, there is still an effort to bring it back to life.
But what are the other options we have? That’s the question that the most relevant for me right now. The history could teach us a lot to foresee the future, and not create just an evolved version of an old machine, working for the same people but excluding the others, which usually comes under the beautiful promises.
These thoughts were a starting point for my research. I started to look closely into the history of neoliberalism, how it formed itself in the 1970s, and came after capitalistic embedded liberalism, that was widespread in western countries on one hand and communism on the other hand. Neoliberalism as a political and economic structure of governance was invented by leading American economists after the great depression when they came up with an idea of market free from the regulation of the government, privatization, individualism, and competitiveness as a driving force for increasing productivity. The ideology spread across the globe, most of the times with military interventions.

I started to look for post-capitalist propositions of the future that were “laying around”, as Naomi Klein argued that it would be the ideas that laying around which will have a higher chance to force themselves into action at the current uncertain times. I came across the documentary “The 3rd industrial revolution” where Jeremy Rifkin, known as economic and social theorist shares his vision of the post-capitalist world, which is “smart”, based on the sharing economy model, abandoned fossil fuel combustion in favor for alternative sources of energy, internet of things, etc. It was all laid out pretty convincingly, but still raised a lot of questions. although, the idea of raising a biosphere consciousness it is really very important to nurture.

questions were mainly about his view of technology as a quick and efficient fix, the solution to everything. Curiously enough, I found an article from 2001 about his persona and opposite accusations, how he was hated by scientist circles because of his Luddite inclinations and public speeches as an activist, which usually were concerned with introducing new technologies without a proper understanding of it and its social consequences. He is also known for his environmental discourses and concerns.
The main critique of his proposition of alternative energy sources is that in order to produce such amounts of solar panels you need a vast amount of rare earth materials, which are finite and toxic, both during excavation and after its life ends. Which creates another spiral of environmental and social issues. They last on average 25-30 years, which means they should be replaced by that time. Recycling of it is also another issue, so far most of the toxic e-waste ends up on the land fields, or if you "recycle", it ships to African countries or South Asia and being damped there.
Humans created such complex systems and trapped themselves in it, that all the solutions seem only replacing one problem to another.
I was always drawn to technology, and particularly, computers. Maybe it has to do with the cultural aesthetic of the romanticized image of hacktivists, and them going against the big capitalistic corporations and financial systems, using only their knowledge of how the system works and breaking it. Maybe it has to do with electronic music and Kraftwerk. Or the belief from my childhood that objects also have consciousness or essence, and so do computers. Or maybe I was sold the idea that technology brings us freedom and choice of how to survive without manual labor. Either way, I am really interested in exploring these connections and relations.
Ilse has recommended me to read #Accelerationist manifesto, and I have based my essay around this theme. Maybe because I am Libra by sign, I enjoy weighing two opposite opinions (it's also very hard for me to choose one position), so I choose to juxtapose it with Berardi's philosophy, which I found thanks to Falke. And really enjoyed reading his book "Breathing", where I found a lot of things that were subconsciously speaking to me before and got the voice and some confidence after this reading. I also believe that a lot of our knowledge and wisdom come from the body as if you would let it speak, it would create a different dimension in which the brain operates differently and could reveal the answers which I believe already out there. For some time I believed people of the future would be so sensitive, they would be able to read each other's minds without talking or sense something in a distance. We don't invent anything, we just uncover.
That is also why I don't really believe in authorship and the position of "creating" something unique. I try to find some stories or use already existing material to reassemble it, put in a different setting.
Anyway, I set out on a quest to explore what is up with technology nowadays. "Surveillance capitalism" leads me to think about how advanced technology being used and develops mainly to feed capitalism and was basically enslaved by it. How our behavior more and more dictated by algorithms and predicted by it, how we ourselves become robots, repeating all the commands over and over again. How physically we have been placed in boxes, both at home and at work offices, how every pixel of our online presence has been constantly sold to the algorithms, to train them to predict our future behavior, to later recognize our presence and confidently frame our faces and bodies with a colorful rectangular shape. Today AI can learn to track your gaze, your emotions, and to count your breath, and conclude your confidence. those algorithms have been used to sort video interviews for job positions in big companies. To keep such a large amount of data in the cloud, more and more data centers are being built, consuming a huge amount of power, and the cycle continues. Although it is necessary to understand those things, it brings nothing but exhaustion.
I went back to the idea of sensibility and post-politics, proposed by Berardi. I like the idea of creating something dysfunctional in a capitalist system, that would turn our heads in a different direction and send vibrations, as we are in fact interconnected. The question from the workshop of an artist Valentina (if I'm not wrong) kept coming to me, "what if we assumed that our bodies were interconnected?" and no matter if no one saw your performance or heard about it, you could change something just by doing something.
I tried to connect everything I 've been thinking.
For Domeniek assignment, I tried to generate AI text based on Documenta artist profiles, I thought maybe there is something like average Documenta artist profile. It was mostly for fun and not really serious, it didn't work out as well as I thought, but it generated quite interesting stories, which I thought were poetic. I put one of them on the website - it is about Dia and her silent death.
This small experiment inspired me to try out to generate more texts, based on the poems that I was choosing, both mine and from the poets I liked. I created not very vast, but some dataset and put is as an input file, I asked my friend to do that of course, as I am not that technical despite the aesthetic I prefer (he complains that I don't mention his efforts enough, so here is his name - Aleksandr Narinian).
The results of these experiments were quite interesting to me. It created some sparks of imagination and was as poetic in the form as the input files, sometimes were very far from the original.
I spent days editing it and choosing the ones that spoke to me somehow.
With this gesture, I imagined AI doing something except surveillance and marketing, outside of the capitalistic system, and creating some other meaning with the poetry. I tried to create an imginary possibility that technology/nature/spirituality could co-exist together, one not replacing the other but in a interwoven space

I recorded some of it with the computer-generated voice, which I questioned doing, but I decided to try anyway. I guess I liked imagining it as a human, therefore taking it to talk to nature, I recorded small videos of it hiding in the grass, which later I realized was quite an anthropocentric view. It didn't feel right. I felt lost in my thoughts and ended up splitting the webpage into two. First, there was a claim I am not a robot, then after working for days with the texts and trying something out, I thought maybe I am a robot after all, so I had to put it out there. I was just left out with a senseless technology, which only highlighted the loneliness and added to the confusion.
now I think it also reflects the binary system we are living in, the bits of digital computation which is either 1 or 0. I heard about quantum computers which operates in qbits, and can create infinitely many possible states.
with this experience, I will try to reformulate my questions and the approach again, I feel the need to keep 2 contradicting things together until I figure it out. but so far this is the point where I am, made a full loop.

*this doc is not finished

another additional update: presenting the project:
I ve been interested in non-human life forms, not only living, but synthetic as well. And during quarantine and crisis there has been a lot of frustration and struggle with the machines we had to embrace, in most cases it replaced our bodily communication to the technologically mediated forms.
While I can understand and relate to that frustration and awereness that humans are not machines, and we as humans connect through our bodies and that was taken away from us. Experiences of materiality were taken away (living bodies of not only humans, but bodies of nature, and spaces)
I’ve become interested in my relations with technology and machines in particular, where do I stand?
Researching the question of the role of technology in today’s world, I found there are mostly two kind of opposite directions – one that suggesting that technology is the only answer to all our problems, and another that we should produce and use less technology, turn back to body . There are a lot of political, social, environmental consequences to both views, but I don’t really believe in binary systems of oppositions, there is always something more. And one not necessarily means replacing the other.
Today artificial intelligence and neural networks are mostly being used fulfilling the market demands and control purposes – it is surveillance, identification, market prediction, finance operations, data collection for selling more stuff to more people.
There are less known uses of AI beyond their use-value, I started to think and imagining about it existence beyond the capitalistic system. Later I was inspired by book of Bifo Berardi “Breathing” where he mentions poetry being a cosmic rhythm, going beyond the functionality of things and languages, and creating a different kind of dimension of relations. I decided to try machine poetry.
As I am not very technical myself, I asked my friend to help me out and we started with a simple uses of AI, like text generation, using GPT-2 (its an open source text generator) as an input file I fed to it a set of poems which I collected from different authors, and also included text written by me, and it generated huge amounts of poems and text, through which I picked some, which resonated with me.

I also doubt that means, because it seems to suggest the idea of autonomous machine and kind of "machine conciousness" and its "humanization". does it? but that is not my interest - im seeing it as a collaborative creative machine, one that could give much more possibilities for the artists and not only. but still it is a machine that reflects only what you put into it, its not objective

But the text alone doesn’t do justice to the idea I have, I ve been thinking of the way of installing it, so it has some materiality to it, as well as nature elements, as I believe we can create different kind of technology that nurtures our connections to nature at the same time, and spirituality that comes with it - I noticed that most indigenous cultures have strong connections with nature, spirits, interconnection of the all elements in the world, which give them another perspective on things and different understanding of relations to each other and non-human environment. I also like the idea of machines being entangled with magical thinking, not to suggest that technology is magic, but to imagine different possibilities of technological advancement, for example, as in the project "Grow your own cloud" , which you could find in artistic practices section

"Steven Connor - dream machines" :
"Machines are imaginary, not just because we have no choice but to imagine their operation and uses, but also because we invest so strongly in them. When we imagine machines, we are doing more than just representing them to ourselves, for imagining is representation coloured and contoured by feeling. What we feel about machines is thrown into sharp relief by the fact that machines themselves seemingly by definition do not feel. This means that we are in a relation of reciprocal surrogacy with machines. Machines do things on our behalf, without needing to have any feelings about it. If machines do not feel, then we do, and our feelings may well be feelings about that disjuncture. Machines do the doing we cannot, we feel the feeling they cannot. Machines give us ways of feeling about ourselves, just because, we are almost sure, they do not themselves have ways of feeling about themselves. We feel for them, and perhaps also through them. What we feel for and about and through them confirms us by recoil in our way of existing ourselves as non-mechanical."