Like a snake eating its tail, artificial intelligence exists in a circular relationship with its human creators.
What do the divinatory practices of Ancient Greece’s Oracle of Delphi, the Incan knotted quipu counting device, the I Ching, the nine billion names of God and Elizabethan mathematician John Dee have to do with artificial intelligence?
The Atlas of Anomalous AI is a compelling and surprising map of our complex relationship to intelligence, from ancient to emerging systems of knowledge. A wildly associative constellation of ideas, stories, artworks and historical materials, the Atlas draws on art historian Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas — an image map of the “afterlife of antiquity” — to approach the defining concepts of AI from an imaginative, artistic and revitalising perspective.
The Atlas presents a hyperdimensional view of the world, through a broad range of perspectives that explore the question of what AI has been and what it is becoming. Key texts on modelling, prediction and automation are brought together with stories of science fiction, dreams and human knowledge, set among visionary and surreal images by Emma Kunz, Pablo Amaringo, Carl Jung, Hilma af Klint, William Blake.The Atlas expands our common understanding of AI and raises new questions beyond a illusory fixation on linear progression, towards a new horizon of infinite play in the construction of artificial intelligence today.
Contributors: Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Ramon Amaro, Noelani Arista, Benjamin H. Bratton, Federico Campagna, Arthur C. Clarke, Rana Dasgupta, GPT-2, GPT-3, Yuk Hui, Nora N. Khan, Suzanne Kite, Jason Edward Lewis, Catherine Malabou, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Matteo Pasquinelli, Archer Pechawis, Noah Raford, Nisha Ramayya, Beth Singler and Hito Steyerl.
Artworks by: Refik Anadol, Pablo Amaringo, William Blake, Ian Cheng, Ithell Colquhoun, DeepDream, Susan Hiller, Hildegard of Bingen, Carl Jung, Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz, Paul Laffoley, Branko Petrović and Nikola Bojić, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Casey Reas, Jenna Sutela and Suzanne Treister.
