"I don't write about AI"--I find myself saying this to friends and colleagues with some frequency. And yet the topic is difficult to avoid these days. Below are some notes on one of the fundamental problems in AI: Is is possible for a discrete machine to model continuous phenomena? Instead of trying to solve the [ ]
During my explorations into the digital and analog, I often encounter a series of frequently asked questions. I will address three of them here... Question: does it have to be either/or? Must one decide between the digital and the analog? What about digital-analog mixtures? What about ambiguity? No, it is not necessary to decide. Both/and is [ ]
Several common mistakes should be avoided when trying to define the digital. (1) The first mistake is to assume that the digital is bound by the field of consumer electronics. Focusing on consumer electronics tends to confine digitality within a relatively narrow band of history (industrial societies roughly since World War II) and a relatively [ ]
In the past I've written about the importance of cuts within digitality. A cut indicates difference, difference of whatever kind. But a cut is not enough for a full-fledged digital system. Cuts will not spontaneously assemble into a regular series, and cuts will not calculate or compute, at least not if they remain in the [ ]
Join me for an event at NYU with Martha Schwendener about her new book The Society of the Screen: Vilém Flusser’s Radical Prescience. We will talk about Flusser, art and art making, screens, technical images, cybernetics, and many other things. April 9, 6:30pm Einstein Auditorium 34 Stuyvesant Street NYC Register
Digital theory will benefit from a return to structuralism. As I've said before in print, structuralism was the apex of digital theory during the 20th C. During that period, scholars were obsessed with codes, logics, binarisms, linguistic structures, and even quasi-mathematical approaches, as seen in the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, or Lacan's Seminar 2 on [ ]
While the four of us largely agree on the basic terms discussed in Digital Theory, a few specific points of disagreement remain. Dialectics is one of those points of disagreement. Handelman and Weatherby's chapter, titled "Digital Dialectics," argues that the two terms are intertwined. Meanwhile, my chapter insists that the digital is strictly incompatible with [ ]
I'm excited to announced that Digital Theory is now published in both book form and open access PDF. I haven't actually seen a physical copy yet.. but it's apparently out in the world. The four of us--Beatrice Fazi, Matthew Handelman, Leif Weatherby, and me--recently went on both the Disintegrator and Acid Horizon podcasts to discuss [ ]
So tired of "gen" in AI/computation/etc. Hoping for new horizons of degen in 2026.. full-stack permadeath.. crypto-erasing.. stunlock design patterns.. fractal death drive.. full-stack permadeath -- one and done. you babies. crypto-erasing -- asset forfeiture, guaranteed. like when the K Foundation burned a million quid. stunlock design patterns -- for (int i = 1; i [ ]
Recently I've been revisiting the cinema of cuckoldry. You know, those films where a roving Lothario colludes with a married woman to cuck-n-kill her husband before getting whacked himself. There's Double Indemnity (1944), of course, and The Postman Always Rings Twice (both 1946 and 1981 versions). There's the peerless Body Heat (1981), where the woman [ ]