Atlas of Anomalous AI - 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

Atlas of Anomalous AI, Ed. by Ben Vickers & K

Allado-McDowell, Foreword by Bill Sherman

Like a snake eating its tail, artificial intelligence exists in a circular relationship with its human creators.

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

Contributions from writers, philosophers and curators including: Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Ramon Amaro, Noelani Arista, Jorge Luis Borges, Benjamin H. Bratton, Federico Campagna, Arthur C. Clarke, Rana Dasgupta, Eknath Easwaran, 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.

 The book is composed of a compelling and surprising map of our complex relationship to intelligence, from ancient to emerging systems of knowledge. It is divided into three sections that present a wildly associative constellation of ideas, stories, artworks and historical materials.

In particular, the third section of the book entitled MIND seeks to examine how we currently interpret AI in relation to deeply limited and incomplete understandings of the mind. These layouts offer a radical departure from contemporary western thought to explore the numinous flowering of consciousness, in response to new theories of neural plasticity.

The layouts schema was inspired by Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, a project to map the ‘afterlife of antiquity,’ and the way symbols re-appear in different forms throughout history and around the world. Warburg’s atlas works with an associative, atemporal logic that is highly intuitive and metaphorical—it draws complex connections between a symbolic order that traverses time. In Atlas of Anomalous AI we use similar associative, atemporal, symbolic, metaphorical methods to explore AI’s spiritual foundations. Though we are following Warburg’s footsteps, this is not an atlas of antiquity. This is an atlas of hyperdimensionality—of a

simultaneous past, present and future.

The atlas is not a narrative. It is a collection of myths, gathered together to describe a patchworked vision of AI. If, as Ursula K. Le Guin proposes in her The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, “one avoids the linear, progressive, Time’s-(killing)-arrow mode of the Techno-Heroic, and redefines technology and science as primarily cultural carrier bag rather than weapon of domination,” it may be possible to reshape and undo the dominant ideologies of AI’s current linear construction. This vision of AI we are in the process of assembling is not an argument. It is not a doctrine.

Atlas of Anomalous AI — CURA. (curamagazine.com)

Artworks by: Anni Albers, Pablo Amaringo, Refik Anadol, William Blake, Ian Cheng, Ithell Colquhoun, DeepDream, Federico Díaz, Susan Hiller, Hildegard of Bingen, Pierre Huyghe, C. G. Jung, Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz, Paul Laffoley, Lucy Siyao Liu, Branko Petrović and Nikola Bojić, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Casey Reas, Jenna Sutela and Suzanne Treister.