SODA WORKS 2018

Fragments of written production
Machine of typing
Editing and some ideas are contributions from Kai Evans. Author: Alejandro Karasik
‘We will work for free’:
captured users in the digital social media net (essay)
Facebook exists only by virtue of the emotional bonds and drives of the people
using it. Without these bonds and drives and their digital manifestations, Facebook
would be reduced to empty white boxes on a screen. This movement of
transforming the “raw material” of the experience or self-definition into digital
representation not only implies the sharing of these experiences (at least the
representation of them) with others but, furthermore, this movement comprises
a commodification of personal experience, subject to be sold for targeted
advertising or other purposes. It then becomes clear that, while social media
companies employ several thousands of wage laborers to design and administrate
their websites, the unwaged laborers (i.e. the users) number billions.
(Oct. 2016)
“Learn as if you were to learn forever...”
Robots and Artificial Intelligences that
Learn Like Humans. (essay)
A new breed of robots and artificial intelligence systems (AI) is presently
touring the world. These robots and AI systems are, unlike their predecessors,
self-learning machines. The mechanisms by which they operate are based
on models of human cognitive development— In other words, humans are
recently creating robots and AI by applying models of human developmental
learning processes. The application of state of the art knowledge about human
cognition to robotics and AI constitutes a structural correspondence between
the human perception of itself and its “human-like” creations.
Robots and AIs with “embodied” intelligence is both paradoxical and consistent
with the current times. The paradoxical aspect is that while humans are
becoming more virtual, robots are becoming more “real”.
While humanity worries about continuously feeding a virtually constructed self
through social media and interaction in virtual spaces, and the whole financial
system lives in a cloud of virtual exchanges; robots are learning, observing,
interacting and actioning with real things in the real world. What represents
a consistency is that in creating robots and AI that are more human-like, we
shorten the distance between the human and the non-human, we ease and
soften the gradation, so that the exchange between human and artificial life
becomes more fluent. If the computer or robot thinks like you and acts like
you, it becomes much more familiar: The more the robots and the computers
become similar to the way humans see themselves, the easier the assimilation
between them becomes. Afterall, someone or something has to tend the food
on the stove while we are completely absorbed with uploading our last photos
onto instagram.
(Apr. 2017)
•Grace against the Machine. An authorial reflection
on the piece Machine of Grace. (Framing Statement)
I perform an animal, who has the distinctive characteristic that the computer’s
charger hangs from his penis like large testicles or a tail, tied with a BDSM
knot. Both scenes, the faun and the animal, appeal to a mythical and archaic
past which is intertwined with our technology through the presence of the
cable around my body and/or the computer. I feel that after every technological
breakthrough some part of humanity tends to perceive itself as conditioned
by technology, and to melancholically attempt to escape to times past. These
mythical past times—pretechnological times—are perceived as categorically
better: paradise, primitive origins, the communion with nature, the animalistic
archaic, etc. The fact that I evoke references to a mythical or primitive past
while entangled in technology is intentional. In the conception of the mythic or
primitive past, being in paradise or returning to an animalistic existence implies
having access to all pleasures one desires, without limitation or guilt. I think in
our neoliberal times, thanks to the abundant accessibility that digital devices
provide, these fabled conditions of the mythical past are already fearfully
reproduced in the present.
(Feb. 2018 )
photo: Marion Borriss
he numbers are numbers