Book Launch: Air Age Blueprint + The Institute for Other Intelligences
The New Museum Theater, 235 Bowery, New York, NY 10002
On March 30, 6:30pm in the New Museum Theater, Rhizome will host the book launch for two new books, Institute for Other Intelligences by Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, and Air Age Blueprint by K Allado-McDowell. The event will feature performative readings followed by a moderated talk and Q&A with the authors and writer Elvia Wilk.
While current AI discourse remains preoccupied with the idea that AI will, in the future, take human jobs and replace human creativity, both authors suggest that AI is less a direct competitor than a complex companion, reshaping our abilities and our self-image even in the present.
Weaving together fiction, memoir, theory and travelogue, K Allado-McDowell’s Air Age Blueprint, published by Ignota Press, was written with an AI writing partner, GPT-3, and human editorial input. The book offers a novelistic narrative in which a young filmmaker’s life is disrupted by a fated encounter with a Peruvian healer. In the Pacific Northwest they meet K, a double agent working between art and technology, who invites them to test a secret program called Shaman.AI. This human-machine experiment, rooted in magic, produces a key to rewriting reality – a manifesto describing how entangled human and non-human intelligence will remake our technologies, identities and deepest beliefs.
In The Institute for Other Intelligences (published by X Artists’ Books, eds. Ana Iwataki and Anuradha Vikram, design by Becca Lofchie, illustrations by Fernando Diaz), Mashinka Firunts Hakopian brings speculative fiction and media studies to bear on an imagined future where machine intelligences convene annually for curriculum on algorithmic equity. The book presents a transcript from one of these conferences in which a community of “AI agents” gather to deliver lectures on the human biases and omissions encoded in their training data. Drawing on feminist, queer, and critical media scholarship, the book offers a speculative vision of how the operations of future generations of intelligent machines might be optimized toward just outcomes. Hakopian uses these speculative exchanges to invite the reader to consider how critical approaches to nonhuman intelligence might reroute our current path toward destructive technofutures and allow us to conceive of another way forward.
Mashinka Firunts Hakopian is an Armenian writer, artist, and researcher born in Yerevan and residing in Glendale, CA. She is an Associate Professor in Technology and Social Justice at ArtCenter College of Design, and holds a PhD in the History of Art from the University of Pennsylvania. With Avi Alpert and Danny Snelson, she makes up one-third of the collective, Research Service. Her writing and commentary appear in Performance Research Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, Meghan Markle’s Archetypes, and elsewhere. Her current book project considers the role of ancestral intelligence and diasporic worldmaking in emerging technologies.
K Allado-McDowell is a writer, speaker, and musician. They are the author, with GPT-3, of the books Pharmako-AI, Amor Cringe, and Air Age Blueprint. Their sound healing neuroscience opera, Song of the Ambassadors, premiered at Lincoln Center in 2022. They record and release music under the name Qenric.
Allado-McDowell established the Artists + Machine Intelligence program at Google AI. They are a conference speaker, educator and consultant to think-tanks and institutions seeking to align their work with deeper traditions of human understanding.
