How media interfaces including written technologies, Large Language Models, voice recognition, and translation compose and constrain transmissions.

Language is one of the earliest human tools, and its facility and flexibility transmitted through written text in various formats as well as speech, sound, and voice. With the advent of ChatGPT, language is no longer exclusively the provenance of human beings, introducing an existential shift in human communication while enabling new possibilities of translation and communication between a vast array of beings and things. Narrative Machines investigates the historical imaginaries and research, interfaces, and communication dynamics of a world in which narrative machines are presumed and commonplace. It explores how language gets more and less complex within these systems and the niches in which it is developed and transmitted. It derives new theories of narrative based on the progeny of narrative embedded in non-human agents, explores the semiotics of deep time as embedded in environments, and in other cases discovers the ways that machinic processes of narrative have always been embedded in non-verbal forms. Narrative Machines speculates on futures where second-order memory in AI systems form wholly new ways externalise memory, cognition, and being. 

How the multisensory aesthetics, logics, and dynamics of environmental representations.

Most AI research and technologies focuses on agent-based modelling, in which programming the needs and wishes of individual agents is understood as the core dynamic shaping behaviour and outcomes. Environment-based modelling starts from the other direction, exploring at how environments and contexts constrain, enable and shape agents and the various forces, dynamics, and logics that shape environments in and of themselves. Environments from ideological milieus to infrastructural forms, political and social environments, climate and ecology must be captured and rendered. Environment-based modelling shapes a dynamic and recursive understanding of environments and the ways that they are alive and shape life within them.

How interfaces, infrastructures, and ideologies encode the urban, intimate, and planetary spaces in which automation underpins social, machine, and biochemical operations.

Automation is a process of encoding and delegating decisions into structures so that they do not need to be decided at every instance. This shifts the requirements of labour and attention for human operators, and opens opportunities for activities to occur. Pervasive automation investigates the genealogies and impacts of of automation and considers the opportunities and consequences for an increasingly automated future. It reviews biological, technological, and social automation as forms of governance. It explores scenarios for a society in which many functions which currently rely on rote work or exhaustive processes are decided by encoded into environments or artefacts. How will pervasive automation shape the infrastructures, interfaces and ideologies of urban, intimate and planetary space? How will it transform production and consumption, and shift the cities from mute landscapes to ones that speak and communicate? A new understanding of the possibilities and pathologies of this automated future, and its impacts on cognition, communication, and intelligent constructions must be formed.

How various forms of intelligences emerge, evolve, and embed across human, animal, plant, and machine/AI typologies and ecologies.

Artificial Intelligence tends to be understood as in which machines become intelligent by imitating human beings. Hybrid intelligence begins with the idea that intelligences are plural, enacted in various ways and performed by various actors, human and non-human alike. The real impact of artificial intelligences is helping humans rethink what intelligence is in the first place, the forms it takes, how it differs or overlaps with wisdom, intuition, and its various composites. Hybrid intelligence investigates how various forms of intelligence begin to merge, become co-dependent, and inform one another.  It considers intelligence from the perspective of cognitive or behavioural acuity, and as the ability to apply insight, reason, or knowledge from one situation to another by synthesizing multiple perspectives and accounting for situational factors. Hybrid intelligence in this context also refers to the military definition of “intelligence” as information concerning enemy manoeuvres. Hybridizing intelligence means that intelligence in the form of data, information and higher level insights must be able to be recognized, retrieved, and synthesised at key moments.

How the reorganisation of interaction, production, and experience enable effective organisation of society, culture, and communication.

During Covid, Boris Johnson awkwardly confirmed that “There is such a thing as society” overturning Margaret Thatchers famous statement that led to the neoliberal era. The past decades have seen the actual and ideological reduction and removal of more expansive projects to provision and enable society at large in the domains of transport, housing, health, care, and innovation. The grand experiments of socialism were deemed a failure, but many thinkers have continued to argue that this would be the ideal model. Suspicion of states has led to a focus on small-scale cultural projects to the benefit of large-scale private actors, encouraging the further demise of more expanded schemes to provision basic needs and enable the distribution of resources to society at large. At the same time, the core architectural organisation of places for human thriving in cities has been static or uninvented. Social Infrastructure investigates new forms for social developments across scales, catalyzing the reinvention and resurgence of cities as places for conviviality, exchange, and resource sharing, as well as the planetary composition of social institutions. Social Infrastructure develops propositions for the transformation and reinvention of social institutions, organisations, and sites that will determine the future of social forces and relations.

How new forms of organisation, experience, and resource-use based on mass distribution, access, and flourishing.

Shifts in technological capacity mean profound shifts in human purpose and experience if leveraged in the right way. In the past decade, a slew of proposals have come out positing a new role for human rights that proposes provisioning basic resources as UBx (Universal Basic Income, Universal Basic Services, Universal Basic Health, etc.) as a means for redistributing the proceeds of aggregated wealth. Many technologies start as luxuries only accessible to the few, and then with changes in production and economy, find ways to distribute their capacities to general populations. Universal Basic Luxury investigates the meaning and provision of luxury to the masses in buildings, clothing, and the arrangement of shared services, and is attached to a political philosophy of sharing rather than ownership. This necessitates a profound redefinition from luxury as scarcity to luxury as surplus, the right to repair, but it also means understanding surplus not as consumable goods but as time, but luxury as the provisioning of long-term environments for restoration. As Earth resources like water, air, light, energy, and hospitable temperatures become scarce, a new definition of luxury is emerging, one that cherishes that elegance and glory of everyday and extraordinary materials and experiences with deep impact. Universal Basic Luxury explores ways to reorganise resources and systems to enable luxury for all. 

How the logics and dynamics of remote and intimate spaces converge information, performance, experience, and observation.

The typology of operating theatres as controlled spaces for observation, invention, and intervention can be traced from the first surgical theatres through to the mission control rooms that have long been ground zero sites for research and decision. These spaces require high degrees of technical specificity that changes with technological innovations, and they also necessitate performance, understood both in its sense of embodied fictioning as well as in its sense of behaviours in realising a task or function. They are also increasingly spaces in which incision, maintenance, and intervention operate through remote operations. Operating Theatres investigates this typology and its reorganisations of performance through the emergent forms of feedback, observation, and display that characterise these spaces, and the forms of enactment and re-enactment generated by remote and invasive technologies.